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Dean Ween's solo debut is missing the sincerity and surrealism of Ween, but its bizarre chaos feels like you are in on a longstanding inside joke with an old friend. | Dean Ween's solo debut is missing the sincerity and surrealism of Ween, but its bizarre chaos feels like you are in on a longstanding inside joke with an old friend. | The Dean Ween Group: The Deaner Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22452-the-deaner-album/ | The Deaner Album | Ween famously broke up in 2012 after Aaron Freeman told Rolling Stone—but not his bandmate Mickey Melchiondo—that he needed time to convalesce after a drug-related breakdown. This marked the first time since 1984 that the two childhood friends would ostensibly retire their alter egos, Gene and Dean Ween, for their civilian names. While Freeman made it to the other side of that dark period with a baptismally purgative album, Melchiondo remained the same technically gifted clown in all his endeavors. Now, this consistent energy extends to his solo debut with the Dean Ween Group, the first invocation of his original band on an album since its dissolution and recent reinstatement. And in its ambitious genre hopping and sometimes-hilarious-sometimes-cringeworthy childishness, *The Deaner Album *is the closest thing to a proper Ween album in a decade.
Much like Ween’s early output—think God Ween Satan: The Oneness through Chocolate and Cheese—The Deaner Album is a collagist pursuit that simultaneously honors and apes the various styles it probes. “Mercedes Benz” experiments with the funky lurch of Parliament-Funkadelic, while “Shwartze Pete” celebrates Les Paul with the legend’s nasally, vintage guitar noodling. Lead track “Dickie Betts,” an instrumental highlight, is an improvisational southern rock tribute to the former Allman Brothers Band guitarist, and maybe even a self-referential nod to the guitarist’s leap from second to first in command.
Most noticeably, however, The Deaner Album intuitively echoes songs that have populated Ween’s variegated discography, something that seems inevitable given the band’s self-perpetuating mythology—their “brownness.” The arena-primed “Garry” sounds like if Chocolate and Cheese’s “A Tear for Eddie” was reconfigured as a Lynyrd Skynyrd ballad, while “Gum,” a truly grating listening experience during which Melchiondo lists kinds of gum, is a close cousin to “Candi” and borrows the disquieting triangle jabs of “Spinal Meningitis.” And of course, this wouldn’t be a Ween-peripheral record without a shit reference so “Doo Doo Chasers” checks that box and ends the record on a particularly brown note, much the way “Poop Ship Destroyer” concludes Pure Guava.
Puerile antics are seemingly foundational to what made Ween so great, but really it was the band’s delicate balance of sincerity and irreverent surrealism. This had everything to do with the dynamic between Gene and Dean, the former a more philosophically minded, if outlandish, songwriter, the latter the brash, instrumental wonk. So even though Dean’s album features guest appearances from the Meat Puppets’ Curt Kirkwood, and punk drummer Chuck Treece, The Deaner Album lacks a fundamental humaneness and veers toward uncouth, guitar face-inducing force.
This pays dividends for the bar-rock and instrumental tracks on this record, but a lot of the lyrics and imagery can be ham-fisted (“Charlie Brown” is a song about being unlucky, for example), and in one case, crudely misogynistic. “Tammy” is a seedy tale whose chorus details using the song’s namesake as a sexual object and then murdering her with a shotgun: “Tammy, bring me my Shammy/So I can clean my shotgun and bury you below.” Ween occasionally made forays into politically incorrect territory, but Deaner’s latest entry isn’t so much funny as it is straightforwardly unnerving.
The comedic and lyrical height of this record, however, belongs to “Exercise Man,” which paints a plainspoken portrait of a “fucking douchebag exercise man,” who works out every day even though he will “die at 57 of a heart attack.” It is a really quick, blunt song about the futility of constructive behavior and boasts the description: “He uses the weight room at the Motel 6,” which should have been a punchline about Drake’s softness three years ago. It’s aware that it’s aggro and is brutally funny. And perhaps that is the small magic of The Deaner Album: it makes you feel like you are in on a longstanding inside joke with an old friend. Even if the joke is super dumb and at times problematic, it is strangely comforting to know that the guy responsible hasn’t changed one iota. | 2016-11-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | November 5, 2016 | 6 | 68e0bd45-60c7-4ba5-9fbe-9cf750342278 | Matt Grosinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-grosinger/ | null |
Concentrating hours of freeform takes into the baggy shape of 11 songs, My Morning Jacket’s ninth LP achieves the dubious goal of nailing a “jam band album” on the first try. | Concentrating hours of freeform takes into the baggy shape of 11 songs, My Morning Jacket’s ninth LP achieves the dubious goal of nailing a “jam band album” on the first try. | My Morning Jacket: My Morning Jacket | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/my-morning-jacket-my-morning-jacket/ | My Morning Jacket | After nearly 15 years, what My Morning Jacket really needed was a vacation. Their glorious studio albums and transcendent live shows sustained a marathoner’s high, never showing signs of Jim James’ battered back, heart, and spirit until it all came pouring out on 2015’s dour The Waterfall. The promised quickie sequel finally arrived last July as a pandemic surprise amid solo projects and side gigs, doing little to quell speculation of a hiatus. But My Morning Jacket were saved by a relatively uneventful few years; they were ready to endure the treadmill of recording and touring, so long as they got to determine its pace and incline. A band that self-titles its ninth album has committed to some serious introspection and My Morning Jacket all but admits they had been living a lie: For two grueling decades, they thrived in the jam-band ecosystem without being a band that actually jams.
Upending their creative process and concentrating hours upon hours of freeform takes into the baggy shape of 11 songs, My Morning Jacket achieves the dubious goal of nailing a “jam band album” on the first try. At least in the way that fans of Phish, moe., or String Cheese Incident typically understand their faves’ studio LPs: existing in a netherworld between “songs” and “jams” until achieving actualization in a live setting. The ProTools cut-and-paste yields some interesting experiments; if the chopped-and-screwed coda of “Complex” doesn’t redeem a placeholder chorus in search of a melody or lyric (“Hey, you get what you pay for/Hey, what are you waiting for”), at least it’s novel. If the jarring key change and extended guitar wig-out during the midsection of “In Color” doesn’t feel earned, at least it’s a break from James’ going on for seven minutes about how prejudice and discrimination is actually quite bad. “There’s more to life than just black and white/So many shades in between…and I wish everyone could agree,” he sighs, belaboring a point with which nearly all his listeners likely already agree.
James is hardly alone as an artist writing with a greater sense of political urgency since 2016 while struggling to manifest good intentions as something worth singing. The sneaky humor, evocative phrasing, and peanut butter pudding surprises of the past have been swapped for deeply felt and completely superficial slogans he might just have easily spotted on a bumper sticker on the 101 on the way to the studio. At his most innocuous, the incessantly repeated hooks of “Lucky to Be Alive” and “Love Love Love” are Peloton for the soul: “The more you give, yeah/The more you get, yeah/Now tell it to the world!,” James belts over pedal-pushing funk-pop, completely in earnest. But while the anti-tech bromides of opener “Regularly Scheduled Programming” wouldn’t have been out of place on his 2018 solo album Uniform Distortion, its accusatory tone reads tone-deaf now. “Screen time addiction/Replacin’ real life and love,” James carps, but how many of us really had a choice these past two years?
In press releases and interviews, James discusses the societal ills in his lyrics with passion and sincerity; for example, he describes America’s malls as teen indoctrination camps for consumerism and colonialism. “It’s like this strange in-between place for when you can’t quite be part of the world yet—and on top of that there’s the horror of the mall and how much of what’s sold there is made through slave labor,” he explains. I’m not sure if anyone could successfully extrapolate those sentiments into a nine-minute prog odyssey without going full-on Muse, and James doesn’t help his cause by opening “The Devil’s in the Details” with a reference to the season finale of Stranger Things. Never once altering its inert melodic motif, the song unfolds a litany of clichés (“I practice what they preach/The apple don’t fall far from the tree”) that mostly fill up the margins, except for the one in the title, which contradicts the entire premise that the devil’s in the most obvious things: capitalism, war profiteering, and…uh, Sephora.
Say what you will about My Morning Jacket’s enduring commitment to seeing their most dubious and whimsical ideas to fruition—they definitely achieved what they set out to do. But “The Devil’s in the Details” isn’t a lark. It’s My Morning Jacket’s centerpiece, even its proof of concept, and lays bare the gap between the album’s ambition and execution. Despite working for the first time without an outside producer and replicating the same painstaking tape-editing process that Miles Davis and Can used to change the course of pop history, My Morning Jacket is their least adventurous album yet. When they riff, they’re squarely within a July 4th classic rock block; when they vamp, it’s the fog-lit, psychedelic soul that’s invigorated their most recent work. In either form, they occasionally hint at their soaring, festival-ready populism, heady instrumental exploration, or fluency with the American songbook, but never the fusion that once came so organically. Even James’ vocals feel siloed off from his bandmates, coated by a flange effect that gives the luscious guitar tones an aluminum aftertaste. For all its hype about a refreshed outlook, My Morning Jacket slouches towards its conclusion, leaving the all-too-familiar feeling of needing a vacation from a vacation.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | October 27, 2021 | 5 | 68e0d194-bac8-4409-9b49-432c3c69a2fb | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Brooklyn indie rock institution’s seventh album is as joyous and rousing as their best efforts. | The Brooklyn indie rock institution’s seventh album is as joyous and rousing as their best efforts. | The Hold Steady: Thrashing Thru the Passion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-hold-steady-thrashing-thru-the-passion/ | Thrashing Thru the Passion | At this point, new Hold Steady albums can no longer be taken for granted. After a proud run of six albums in 10 years, the one-time Brooklyn workhorses have settled into a more leisurely, part-time rhythm. Age has cut down their time on the road; they now prefer weekend residencies to touring (“More of our time together is spent playing and performing music than setting up and taking down gear, driving it to the next place, setting it up again,” they wrote in a Bandcamp post, sounding like parents newly aware of how precious their time is.) And as either a symptom or a cause of the band’s reduced availability, frontman Craig Finn has been dedicating more time than ever to his solo career. His latest effort, I Need a New War, dropped just this spring.
So Thrashing Thru the Passion is the first Hold Steady album in more than five years, which would have been cause for more ceremony if the band hadn’t deflated expectations by releasing most of it in advance. Half the songs on the album were released as digital singles over the last few years; a couple of others were shared after the LP was announced. The result is a new Hold Steady album that, at least for the band’s most dedicated fans, won’t feel very new.
And yet, despite coming from a band that seems to be winding down in many ways, Thrashing Thru The Passion is so alive and elated that, if not for Hold Steady’s well-documented track record, it could be mistaken for the work of a band just hitting its peak. It’s as joyous and rousing as the band’s best efforts, but also looser and utterly unforced. Unceasingly uplifting, it makes almost no effort to shake up the group’s usual triumph rock, yet short of a completely unexpected reinvention or some left-field new muse, it’s a best-case scenario for what a seventh Hold Steady record could have sounded like.
Passion is the band’s first LP with keyboardist Franz Nicolay since 2008’s Stay Positive, which could account for some of the renewed pep. But a just as likely explanation is the band’s relative absence. The Hold Steady’s act demands too much commitment and perspiration for them to keep cranking out full-length shots of it every 18 months without diminishing returns. And especially after the time away, it’s a treat being submerged in Finn’s snapshots of rock’n’roll’s underachieving outsiders once again. “Denver Haircut” introduces a guy who, even at new restaurants, always orders the usual just to see what they’ll bring him. On “Star 18,” it’s a dude who claims he used to play with Peter Tosh, but never mentions it again once Finn says, “Man, I don't believe you.” That track also includes one of Finn’s great state-of-the-band nuggets: “Hold Steady at the Comfort Inn/Mick Jagger’s at The Mandarin.”
Rest assured there are gems among the few unreleased tracks, too. “Blackout Sam,” with its Memphis horns, is the band’s take on Pleased to Meet Me-era Replacements, or the song equivalent of Lou Reed reassuringly drawing out the word “alright.” Those same horns drive “Traditional Village” to Blues Brothers revue-levels of razzle while Finn spitballs low-brow music theory: “Down at the rock’n’roll station they’re exhuming the bones/Maybe death’s just when you hang up the telephone? And the reason these people still listen to Zeppelin is it sounds really cool when you’re stoned.”
As always, Finn’s vision of rock’n’roll is at once an utterly unglamorous and completely romantic. The Hold Steady treat rock the way Penn & Teller treat magic: They deconstruct it, demystify it and expose it warts and all, but do so out of love and a belief that its behind-the-scenes machinations are every bit as beautiful and intriguing as the polished final product. Fifteen years after their debut, the Hold Steady are still passionately making the case that, while there may not be much dignity in rock’n’roll, that doesn’t make it any less noble of a pursuit.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Frenchkiss | August 21, 2019 | 8 | 68e135ab-50f5-4086-9b34-7a3aeabe94b5 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The London group dials up the psychedelia on its fourth album, swapping out retro-futurist tropes and avant-pop touchstones for uneasy atmospheres and narcotic languor. | The London group dials up the psychedelia on its fourth album, swapping out retro-futurist tropes and avant-pop touchstones for uneasy atmospheres and narcotic languor. | Vanishing Twin: Afternoon X | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vanishing-twin-afternoon-x/ | Afternoon X | In the Odyssey, the lotus eaters existed on a small island, stuck in a dreamy stupor. They subsisted off the daze-inducing lotus fruit and spent their days consumed with narcotic pleasure. Vanishing Twin embrace a similar sense of hypnotic fantasy on their fourth album, Afternoon X. Their enveloping soundscapes sprawl out like a labyrinth; singer Cathy Lucas’ voice floats like a petal on a tranquil pond. Vanishing Twin’s previous albums, The Age of Immunology and Ookii Gekkou, drew easy comparisons to Stereolab’s surreal avant-pop and Sun Ra’s jazz futurism. But on Afternoon X, the group—formerly a quintet, now a trio—takes its psychedelic prog pop in an ethereal new direction, pursuing a meandering path between leisurely acoustic dream worlds and denser electronic composites, searching for a quiet moment before the next storm hits.
In line with Stereolab’s referential tendencies, Vanishing Twin blend diverse influences, from French yé-yé pop to kosmische rock, into playful, shape-shifting jams, and Lucas’ nonchalant voice channels an air of art-house nostalgia. But their music doesn’t completely live in the past, pairing lyrics about looming ecological disasters with light-hearted guitar riffs. On previous records, atmospheric analog synths imbued their work with bright, splotchy colors, while Valentina Magaletti’s precise, metronomic drumming provided the music’s sleek pulse. With cryptic, imagistic lyrics, they framed existential questions with breezy charm. Many of those elements remain on Afternoon X, but in service of less accessible music, leaving the hooks of their previous work behind.
Vanishing Twin slow down on Afternoon X, swapping out Magaletti’s snappy drumming for rumbles bubbling to the surface. The otherworldly samples scattered across past records play a more prominent role; field recordings of quotidian sounds—boat motors, bicycle wheels, radio static—flesh out the songs’ textures and rhythms. “You know, there’s all sorts of stuff out there in reality,” Magaletti said in a 2022 Quietus interview. The irregularity of these sounds—a sweet vocal refrain cut off by metallic beeps, or eerie, looping electronics punctuating chilled-out harmonies—reinforces the music’s unsettling qualities. Vanishing Twin make the most of that sense of disorientation; they build up a frame just to tear it down a second later. But there’s great excitement in that instability, as though you were wandering through the noise to find the answers with them. These structural shifts are particularly apparent on “The Down Below,” which unravels in multiple acts. It darts from droning sitars to stinging organs, peppered with jolting beats. The sonic jumble lends a haunting quality to Afternoon X, but its strange disjointness is more thrilling than offputting.
Even in its most obscure moments, Afternoon X embodies a lively sense of exploratory wonder. Drawing from a deep catalog of inspirations, Vanishing Twin have long made music for sharp-eared listeners. But with this album’s unpredictable forms, the trio moves confidently beyond its acuity for cultural synthesis, stepping into stranger, more scintillating territory where unexpected shifts and mercurial sounds are the standard. The beauty of Afternoon X lies in its unusual balance of chaos and calm. | 2023-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire | October 19, 2023 | 7.2 | 68e45dd0-7bad-4139-b05f-8ce281403457 | Maria Eberhart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maria-eberhart/ | |
The smooth and hypnotic tracks on the Queens-based producer’s new album share a single tempo and palette—part tropical strut, part moonwalk. | The smooth and hypnotic tracks on the Queens-based producer’s new album share a single tempo and palette—part tropical strut, part moonwalk. | DJ Python : Mas Amable | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-python-mas-amable/ | Mas Amable | DJ Python calls his music “deep reggaeton”: a fusion of reggaeton’s dembow rhythm with the ethereal electronics of ambient and classic IDM. Python—aka Brian Piñeyro, a New Yorker of Ecuadorean and Argentine extraction—spent part of his adolescence in Miami, where the ubiquitous reggaeton beat soundtracked a growing interest in his own Latinx heritage. Once he learned that his friend Anthony Naples, who runs the Incienso and Proibito labels, was a south Florida native, Piñeyro decided to make a reggaeton record for him, but one rooted in underground house and techno. The result was Python’s 2017 debut album, Dulce Compañia, which paired loping dembow cadences with wistful, watery synths; last year’s Derretirse ventured deeper into his imagined subgenre. He’s gotten a remarkable amount of mileage out of the marriage of the two styles, and on Mas Amable he breaks new ground by slowing the tempo further.
By virtually any metric, this is Python’s simplest record yet. All eight tracks share a single tempo and palette—part tropical strut, part moonwalk—and they’ve been seamlessly mixed together in the manner of a DJ set or a live electronic performance. In fact, it’s debatable whether these could even be classified as distinct songs, or whether they simply constitute one very long composition. It feels in many ways like a 48-minute single, the kind of thing that used to seem so audacious in Ricardo Villalobos’ hands. But there’s nothing audacious about Mas Amable. It’s smooth. Python’s music has always been hypnotic, but Mas Amable is particularly spellbinding, interweaving contrasting synth parts and percussion patterns so subtly that you’re barely aware of the changes.
The record begins with a beatless ambient introduction of gentle synth pads and soft, rainy rustling noises; the scene might be a distant forest clearing or just a backyard in Queens. There’s something appealing about the placelessness; the open-ended setting doesn’t impose a mood so much as invite you to project your own state of mind onto the scene. With the second track, “Pia,” the pensive atmospheres persist even as the drums kick in, tough and unadorned. For a time, the fog burns off, and wistful synths give way to sterner textures: scratchy, insect-like shakers and buzzing, bit-crushed croaks, like robotic frogs. Minimalist synth melodies evoke melancholy ’90s worksrecordings by Autechre, Boards of Canada, and Disjecta. Every so often, a forlorn whistle streaks through the frame, like a freight train in the dead of night.
The album’s desolate centerpiece, “ADMSDP,” is even more evocative of witching-hour loneliness. Everything falls silent except for the drums, making room for a spooky monologue from the poet LA Warman. “Where was the place where you felt OK?” she murmurs, her voice slow and low, evoking an ASMR video. “Go to this place.” As guided meditations go, it is both bleak and empathic. It’s OK to sleep the entire day, she tells us—to cry on the train, to think life has no meaning but suffering. “It’s OK to feel hopeless, because the world is hopeless. It’s OK to think about dying.”
It’s a striking moment, a strange fusion of death-metal nihilism with new-age textures and tropical rhythms, though it doesn’t last long: Soon she is urging us to reconnect with our bodies—“to feel how soft you are, how warm you are, how smooth your surfaces are.” As if in response, the music warms, too: rosy new chords rise in the mix, and the rhythm slackens, as though a pinched nerve had suddenly been massaged away. The remainder of the album is a gentle denouement, a return to the ambient overtones of the record’s introduction. That full-circle journey makes for a curious record: It doesn’t do much, yet it covers a surprising amount of ground. By stripping away everything extraneous, Piñeyro has further refined the sound of his invented genre. Deep reggaeton has never sounded deeper. | 2020-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Incienso | April 14, 2020 | 7.4 | 68e81866-29da-4167-b474-87690f602157 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Heterocetera, the Berlin producer/DJ's third release in just over two years and his first for Tri Angle Records, is the clearest iteration of his phantasmagorical approach to techno. He takes disparate sounds and doesn’t tether so much as nudge them together, in a way that conveys an active mood. | Heterocetera, the Berlin producer/DJ's third release in just over two years and his first for Tri Angle Records, is the clearest iteration of his phantasmagorical approach to techno. He takes disparate sounds and doesn’t tether so much as nudge them together, in a way that conveys an active mood. | Lotic: Heterocetera EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20319-lotic-heterocetera-ep/ | Heterocetera EP | Last week, Cashmere Cat released an airy new track called "Adore", featuring Ariana Grande, that lifted some of the industrial clang and reverberation from the ballroom house anthem "The Ha Dance", by Masters at Work. It might be surprising to hear this piece of black, gay underground dance culture drift into Ariana Grande's sphere, but part of what draws major-label collaborators (Tinashe, Charli XCX and, now, Kanye West) into Cashmere Cat's orbit is his Tumblr-ready ear, which is where today’s aesthetic subcultures flourish.
"Ha" isn’t as immediately identifiable on the Cashmere Cat song as it is on Lotic’s "Heterocetera". On the title track from the Berlin-based producer/DJ, the source is more obvious (and maybe more expected, given that J’Kerian Morgan is black, gay and American) but also lovingly massaged, cajoled like Play-Doh, into something colorfully reverent. Lotic filets the iconic cascading modular synths, sending screaming wisps out onto the track before sinking slowly into a bubbling, steaming pit of sound. It’s pretty macabre except for a hollow dembow, which moves the scary story along at deceivingly pleasant pace.
Heterocetera might not be a happy recording, but that’s what makes the five-track collection so ambitious. This is Lotic’s third release in just over two years—his first for Tri Angle Records—and perhaps the clearest iteration of his phantasmagorical approach to clinical, after-hours techno. There are no overtures to pleasure, no simple hooks, entry points (save for the "Ha", if that does it for you) or clear parallels. The closest analogue to Lotic, at least energetically, might be fellow Texan Travi$ Scott, who makes a similar mess of genre—hip-hop, in Scott’s case—and also brings a gothic energy to club music.
So, imagine this: it's 4 a.m., and you're in a room lit by a single red light bulb in the corner, Lotic’s "Slay" lumbering to life on the system. There is no bassline anchoring the warm, atonal synth lines. Instead, patches of distortion rattle around the skeleton of the track, forming an indistinct textural scaffold of percussion. It sounds like something slowly moving closer to you, perhaps crying to itself. Suddenly, everything in the room—the sounds, the people, the red light—feel like they're closing in around you.
This is what Morgan does best: He takes disparate sounds and doesn’t tether so much as nudge them together, in a way that conveys an active mood. It's what so many other producers strive to do but can’t until they are far older than Morgan. A "Ha" sample might seem contrived to some, but he knows that, so he hacks away, letting its guts spill formlessly forth. His masterful way with configured elements provides the illusion of a story without dictating the narrative: Here, you decipher the tones and rhythms, and conjure your own ideas of good and evil. | 2015-03-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-03-13T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Tri Angle | March 13, 2015 | 8 | 68e92c48-3295-4ba5-9e17-37c518735715 | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | null |
After handling production for Kendrick Lamar, Terrace Martin’s work as a bandleader comes into focus with quiet storm, R&B, and deep grooves that show the composer and instrumentalist making strides. | After handling production for Kendrick Lamar, Terrace Martin’s work as a bandleader comes into focus with quiet storm, R&B, and deep grooves that show the composer and instrumentalist making strides. | Terrace Martin Presents the Pollyseeds: Sounds of Crenshaw, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/terrace-martin-presents-the-pollyseeds-sounds-of-crenshaw-vol-1/ | Sounds of Crenshaw, Vol. 1 | Terrace Martin’s work on multiple Kendrick Lamar albums made him a part of any serious discussion about the art of production in modern rap. In the parallel dimension of contemporary jazz, he hasn’t experienced the same kind of breakout stardom, though he has been creating new packages for funk and fusion gifts that otherwise might sound rote or expected. The saxophonist makes it easy to spot his influences—including vocoder hooks styled after Zapp & Roger party anthems, or keyboards that specialize in G-funk timbres. But Martin can also mix those tones with warmly synthesized strings, or sizzling rock accents.
On 2016’s Velvet Portraits—the first album on his own imprint, Sounds of Crenshaw—Martin occasionally seemed to be fast-forwarding through his collection of favored textures. The initial seconds of that album presented a yearning, sincere-sounding acoustic piano line that was immediately disrupted by a studio production effect. The producer’s eagerness and roving intelligence were sometimes in tension with the chilled-out aims of his writing. Co-billed to the Pollyseeds (a band that the producer assembled), Martin’s new album breathes a bit more and shows the composer and instrumentalist making real strides.
On “You and Me,” a track that features lead vocals from Pollyseeds member Rose Gold, you can hear a touch of acoustic piano at the outset. But the arrangement’s easygoing quality is established by Gold’s graceful voice, a guitar line, and Martin’s own work on a Korg synth and an MPC sequencer. Three minutes into the track, the synth and the guitar pull back, leaving Gold’s seductive performance in a melodic partnership with the piano. Without exaggerating the decibel-level, the pivot registers as surprising—not a quality typically associated with quiet storm jams. Martin’s ability to make it work speaks to his twin skills as a pop producer and as an instrumentalist.
He’s built a great band, here, too. Rapper Chachi—sometimes known as Problem—sounds deeply at home in the laid-back bounce of “Intentions.” The emcee doesn’t commit the mistake of trying to make the track sound harder than it needs to be; his sing-song interludes and casual ad-libs give credence to the suave persona sketched by the song’s lyrics. “Believe” features vocalist Wyann Vaughn, as well as a sax section of Martin (on alto) and Kamasi Washington (on tenor). But the track’s instrumental honors could just as easily go to bassist Brandon Eugene Owens, who puts resonant, acoustic funk into support playing that’s just too good to stay in the background.
Martin doesn’t take a lot of solos on his various saxes, but when he does, they’re memorable. His playing on a collaboration with Robert Glasper, “Funny How Time Flies,” creeps into its final poses of exultation with a sly, patient poise that is fascinating. On soprano sax, Martin provides tender lines of blues melody during “Wake Up,” while accompanying the noir-ish pianism of Kenneth Crouch.
The moods evoked by Sounds of Crenshaw, Vol. 1 can seem familiar: one track may conjure the body-moving funk of George Clinton, while the next brings to mind the vulnerable romance of a deserted bar room’s last call. But it’s still rare to hear those soulful comforts blended with this much ingenuity. Over time, the album’s subtle ambition becomes impossible to miss. When the emotional climax of “Feelings of the World” cuts off sharply, giving way to a reprise of the hook from an earlier track, Martin’s control of the overall structure starts to sound every bit as good as his beats and his solos. | 2017-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ropeadope / Sounds of Crenshaw | July 20, 2017 | 7.6 | 68ead64f-46d1-4a70-b9ff-e73ce15be81c | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
My Morning Jacket have refused to remain creatively static, a decision that's helped them map a clear and wonderful upward trajectory over their first decade, but does them few favors on their baffling new album. | My Morning Jacket have refused to remain creatively static, a decision that's helped them map a clear and wonderful upward trajectory over their first decade, but does them few favors on their baffling new album. | My Morning Jacket: Evil Urges | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11585-evil-urges/ | Evil Urges | In interviews, Jim James has said he doesn't want My Morning Jacket to remain creatively static, or become victim to the sort of bland-ification that befalls so many lesser groups that emerge through the jam and festival circuits. He's lived up to his end of the bargain: A clear and wonderful upward trajectory can be easily mapped over the band's first decade, as their fanbase and creative scope expanded with the crowds and lineups at Bonnaroo, a festival with which they'll forever be linked.
As they grew, they pared back indulgences (like the thick song lengths of It Still Moves) and allowed fresh ideas to infiltrate (the first third of Z) while retaining a sonic identity distinctive enough to influence legions of worthy followers. Their 2005 psych/prog wonder Z-- not so much their Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as their The Soft Bulletin-- broke sharply with the Muscle Shoals might of Moves, but 2006's wonderful live double-album Okonokos re-framed and affirmed My Morning Jacket as what fans and critics had been saying since At Dawn: This is one of America's preeminent contemporary rock bands.
My Morning Jacket's latest album, Evil Urges, ends the mean streak the band's been on since 2000, and threatens to squander some of the widespread goodwill they've been steadily building along the way. There are few fiery guitar freakouts, folk-influenced melodies, soaring space-rock bridges, or psychedelic flourishes here; instead, the empty space is mostly filled with serviceable falsetto funk and glassy-eyed soft rock. Worse still is the band's decision to ignore the perfect past incarnations of James' Orbisonian tenor-- easily MMJ's most appealing component and one of the more breathtaking instruments in modern rock. At best, his voice is sorely underutilized here; at worst, it's mangled beyond recognition. After listening to Urges, I wonder if My Morning Jacket might just be satisfied following in the footsteps of labelmates Dave Matthews Band: nestling into a comfortable niche and aiming for the Starbucks carousel with rootsy New Age romanticism.
Any discussion of this record has to start with the eye-poppingly annoying "Highly Suspicious", a loud thud ending any chance Urges had to match the group's previous records. An attempt to merge the band's penchant for live quirkiness with James' long-simmering Prince fixation, the track sounds like My Morning Jacket's version of a Phish novelty. The song reduces James' voice to a grating squeak, which cowers in the presence of the obnoxious, caricatured chorus. Its libertarian undertones ("Wasting all your time on drama/ Could be solving real crime") sound like they could stretch to resonate with the hydroponic crowd or those who fret about warrantless wiretapping, but I cringe thinking of an entire amphitheatre singing along to "peanut-butter pudding surprise" unless they're at a Ween show.
At the moment, even a not-very-political band like My Morning Jacket can't resist using their biggest stage yet for a bit of message-driven oratory. James has said, "Evil Urges is about how all of these things that you've been told are evil really aren't, unless they're actually hurting something or somebody." Cool, but the title track, a lighter version of "Suspicious", neuters a righteous sentiment by burying it underneath a jammy funk pastiche. The simultaneously effortless and calculated "I'm Amazed" is breezy and naïve enough to trigger the unconscious sing-along reflex, but the refrain ("Where's the justice?") is ambiguous. Similarly, "Look at You" wastes a perfectly good pedal-steel on a goofy hybrid of the sensual and civic, praising "a fine citizen" as "such a glowing example of peace and glory," as if James were a state senator awarding citations to volunteers. "Sec Walkin'"s refrain of "demon eyes are watchin' everywhere" may address his existential angst at omnipresent security, but the song's Quaalude-smooth soul vibe-- for real, it's a Grover Washington sax solo away from the PA system at Von Maur-- make it seem more like he's content to just keep on truckin'.
Soft rock isn't an irredeemable genre category, and there are some pretty good singles that have been tagged with it. James and his band have professed their affection for such sensitivity in the past, on tracks like "I Will Sing You Songs," which successfully filtered a timid emotional tone within the band's own style. Not so much here. In a live context, prefaced with an extended ironic monologue, "Make It With You" is fun. On record, several times over, from a singer more accustomed to disguising his elliptical, oft-nonsensical lyrics with grain-silos full of reverb, it's incongruous and awkward. "Thank You Too!", with syrupy strings courtesy of arranger-to-the-stars David Campbell, is readymade for the bride and groom's slow dance (save the line "you really brought out the naked part"). The strings trill, dramatically rising and falling on the loner's fantasy "Librarian", as James quietly crushes on, and quietly stalks, the female behind the desk, turned on by her listening to "Karen of the Carpenters" on AM radio. It sounds like a very well-produced Dan Fogelberg song, until James drops "interweb" on us like a sack of dirty socks. Thankfully, there's no couplet about him texting her on his "Crackberry" lol.
Still, James' tender side also leads to Urges' best moments, which bookend the album. Nicely sequenced after the title track at the start of the record, "Touch Me I'm Going to Scream, Pt. 1" is the perfect sequel to Z's sly "It Beats 4 U", down to the songs' similarly insistent, live/synthetic drum patter, and the way they isolate James' voice in a chilly emotional purgatory, only to be cracked with passion: "I need a human by my side, untied" is vulnerability done right. James is smart enough to know when he's got something good, and he ends Urges with an eight-and-a-half minute dark disco reprise of "Touch Me", slowly taking shape as the solemn, steady "Smokin' From Shootin'" fades out. With its patient, synthetic gleam slithering around James' lusty hoodoo, "Touch Me, Pt. 2" is My Morning Jacket's Moroder moment, bringing a highly frustrating record to a close with the line "Oh, this feeling is wonderful/ Don't turn it off." If it hadn't been such an exhausting ride to get there, I might not want to. | 2008-06-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-06-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | June 9, 2008 | 4.7 | 68ec9d7c-da97-4c72-a9e9-2c33c00c276f | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
For Horse Feathers' latest album, Justin Ringle brought in scores of Portland musicians to add flourishes of piano, reeds, banjo, and horns. He's expanding his band's palette, not necessarily its sound. | For Horse Feathers' latest album, Justin Ringle brought in scores of Portland musicians to add flourishes of piano, reeds, banjo, and horns. He's expanding his band's palette, not necessarily its sound. | Horse Feathers: Cynic's New Year | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16545-cynics-new-year/ | Cynic's New Year | Musically and geographically, Justin Ringle is far removed from the Appalachian region that birthed so many of his folk forebears. Born in Idaho, he moved even further west to Portland, Oregon, where he formed Horse Feathers in 2004. Embracing a somber sound that proved an ideal setting for his slightly androgynous vocals, he managed to conceive his own personal idea of string-band folk, one that disregarded the technical prowess and lively performance style of East Coast strains. Instead, he emphasized mood and texture over rhythm and melody, as though drawing primarily from the incidental music of soundtracks. His first albums under the Horse Feathers moniker sounded fresh and distinctive, and yet, as the project has aged, its limitations have grown clearer. The band has one mood: minor-key solemnity.
Cynic's New Year, the title of Horse Feathers' latest album, implies a new beginning, albeit one for the pessimist in Ringle. His lyrics have always documented the friction between hope and despair, entertaining a tentative optimism and a shrugging fatalism that both sound much bleaker for the band's downcast folk arrangements. For this album, he brought in scores of Portland musicians to add flourishes of piano, reeds, banjo, and horns-- all of which are gracefully absorbed into the band's signature sound. Staccato plucks and percussive strums paint "Better Company" as a kind of backwoods noir full of quiet foreboding, and on "Where I'll Be", the strings mimic a pedal steel, allowing the band to translate country music to the Pacific Northwest. But Ringle is expanding Horse Feathers' palette, not necessarily its sound. Even with a larger backing band, he's still retracing his own steps, careful to walk in his own footsteps.
In some part, the band's limitations spring from Ringle's voice, a distinctive instrument that's not particularly agile. He gives the impression of chilly distance, of someone singing to himself rather than an audience. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, especially considering Horse Feathers' chamber-folk aesthetic, and he shines on "Better Company" and "Pacific Bray". But that voice holds each song to the same funereal pace, rendering Cynic's New Year a trudging listen. Similarly, his songwriting is idiosyncratic yet strangely constrained. Ringle writes evocative lyrics that carry a great deal of ominous weight ("something wicked this way is bound to come," he warns on "Nearly Old Friends"), and his best songs are typically the most concrete. "Every night we all go to a house we'll never own," he sings on "Fit Against the Country". "Every night we are tired, we've been worked to the bone." Ringle doesn't work to connect the song to current economic woes; the narrator could be one of Steinbeck's itinerant workers or one of Kathryn Stockett's oppressed maids. Instead, he simply lets the implications speak for themselves, rendering the song both timely and timeless.
On the other hand, he tends to treat verses and choruses as unnatural and suspect, like strip malls that have displaced woodlands. His melodies can be so understated that they sound almost amelodic-- just another element contributing to the album's ambience. Ultimately, there's something passive and decorous about Cynic's New Year: Horse Feathers are quick to set a mood and diligent in sustaining it, but it's pretty much the same mood they've struck on all their albums. Would it be so cynical to expect them to work harder for our attention? | 2012-04-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-04-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars | April 25, 2012 | 6.3 | 68f04a16-c547-40a5-b175-8f64e1cd8df7 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
While revisiting a treasured childhood TV show, the amber-voiced songwriter reaches back for the psychedelic majesty of his work with the late Richard Swift. | While revisiting a treasured childhood TV show, the amber-voiced songwriter reaches back for the psychedelic majesty of his work with the late Richard Swift. | Damien Jurado: Reggae Film Star | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/damien-jurado-reggae-film-star/ | Reggae Film Star | Damien Jurado had been making records with assorted musicians for a dozen years before he made his first one with the producer Richard Swift, in 2010. They became instant creative foils and deep companions, cutting cover collections and bonding like brothers. Two essential things happened to Jurado’s music, too: First, Jurado—whose fragile tales of peripatetic loners and soft-spoken losers were sometimes decorated only by his murmured falsetto—began enjoying the process. “I just love being in the studio,” he said after finishing their fourth LP together. “Before I met Richard … I hated it.” That discovery, in turn, sparked one of the most staggering streaks of any American singer-songwriter during the previous decade. From 2010’s expansive but cozy Saint Bartlett to 2016’s dioramic Visions of Us on the Land, Jurado’s four collaborations with Swift framed the high stakes of his characters’ low situations with perfect psychedelic drapery. If Jurado’s earlier works felt like scenes from a curious movie written but not yet made, these records were the whole picture show, tenderly conceptualized and vividly rendered.
But in their final conversation before Swift died in July 2018, he cut Jurado loose, telling the songwriter he was now ready to helm his own records. That cut cord was a gift: Jurado’s self-produced The Horizon Just Laughed may well be a career acme, the joy he found alongside Swift now applied by a songwriter able to match music to his images. Jurado has since been recording at a feverish pace, releasing a new album each of the last five years, with seven more reportedly in the queue as of June 2021. The new Reggae Film Star, however, suggests an awkward oxbow in Jurado’s catalog, as though he’s uncertain about how to proceed with self-production. After a series of largely spare and ultimately resilient records following Swift’s death, he seems to be reaching back for the magic he found with his old friend Swift—and, kind of tragically, rarely connecting.
The writing, at least, is often remarkable. Jurado’s songs have often presented elliptical portraits of people trying to overcome dire circumstances—a lovelorn ode to a kidnapped kid trying to make it home to her mother in “Ohio,” an aging artist interrogating his life choices through “Fool Maria.” Likewise, Reggae Film Star threads together the unobserved indignities that often accompany a creative pursuit. Jurado has long talked about his enduring love of the B movies and daytime television of his childhood. “That was my mainline to whatever America is,” he has said, noting they were a constant companion while his family pinballed around the United States. These dozen vignettes stitch together bits of the lives that such characters lead offscreen: the mental toil of an actor doing endless takes of their own death, the tedious repetition of life on set, the creative partners trying to let one another go.
Jurado plucks liberally from the universe of the late-’70s sitcom Alice for these songs. The show—about a widow, Alice, who moves to Phoenix with her son, Tommy—must have resonated with the preteen on the move. The writers, characters, and circumstances have cameos, but you don’t need to know ’70s CBS programming to see pieces of your own puzzle here. Maybe you’ve been sad and shopping for groceries when a song plays overhead, suddenly crystallizing your whole emotional saga, as happens in opener “Roger.” Or maybe you’ve had to work some mindless job just to try and find time and money to pursue the creative passion that actually fulfills you, as with the actor doing commercials to earn a living during the heartrending “Whatever Happened to the Class of ’65.” Jurado is a master of opening a window on once-hidden difficulties, his ambered voice inviting you in to understand; the world he exposes during Reggae Film Star is strange and compelling, like a reality TV show filmed behind the scenes of a sitcom.
The accompaniment for these curious lyrical snapshots, though, never rises to meet their idiosyncrasy—it is often bland enough to distract from them. The piano runs throughout “Roger’s Audition” feel like mere plug-ins, never supporting the story of a man at the brink of madness. The faintly motorik rhythm section and chromatic keyboards of “Taped in Front of a Live Studio Audience” disrupt the mystery and danger in the exchange between former lovers. The severe self-doubt that pools inside of finale “Gork Meets the Desert Monster” is met by straightforward strings and predictable vocal effects; it’s almost impossible not to imagine the fun Swift would have had with this sad character study, animating these neuroses in broken pastel washes. Jurado and longtime multi-instrumental collaborator Josh Gordon can suggest that majesty, but never muster it.
It is callous, maybe even mean, to wonder how these songs would sound with Swift, to imagine him once again turning Jurado’s sketches into vivid dramas. You can hear his faded traces in the prismatic harmonies and piano flourishes; Swift’s musical ghost slinks through Reggae Film Star, here in spirit but unable to wield the controls. That’s OK: Despite his prolific pace, Jurado’s career has been a series of slow arcs. It is promising that he’s trying to reach for such arrangements again at all; he may eventually get there. That very scenario—the artistic survivor reaching across the void toward a trusted late collaborator—even seems like a scene from Reggae Film Star, a tender look into the lives of those who help give our own lives meaning. | 2022-07-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-05T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Maraqopa | July 5, 2022 | 6.4 | 68f6984a-3cfd-4393-80c2-0e8bffc54a02 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On her first full-length, the singer-songwriter navigates the trappings of young adulthood with subtle, poetic writing and a sardonically sunny indie-rock sound. | On her first full-length, the singer-songwriter navigates the trappings of young adulthood with subtle, poetic writing and a sardonically sunny indie-rock sound. | Samia : The Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/samia-the-baby/ | The Baby | Everyone and no one is “baby.” You call people “baby” when you love them, or when you’re infantilizing yourself via internet meme. For Gen Z, cutesy self-identification as “baby” softens a harsh reality of coming of age in a time where everything is too much or too little—too much pollution, too few jobs, too much debt. Twenty-three-year-old Samia Finnerty’s debut album The Baby deals with “too much” in elegant ways, navigating the trappings of young adulthood with subtle, reflective songwriting and poetic lyrical beauty.
The Baby is technically Samia’s first full-length project, but she’s been entrenched in the entertainment industry for a while. Her parents are the actors Kathy Najimy and Dan Finnerty, and Samia has been acting and pursuing music for most of her life. When she was 17 and living in New York, she made a fake manager’s email address to help her book shows. On the painful “Is There Something in the Movies?,” she observes the industry as if she’s somewhat removed from it, sing-shrieking “Everyone dies/But they shouldn’t die young/Anyway, you’re invited to set” over a plaintive acoustic guitar.
Like Grand Jury labelmates Hippo Campus and Twin Peaks, Samia favors a sardonically sunny indie rock sound, good for driving in circles around your old high school and thinking about how different you look now. But she sets herself apart with her voice, which is where the truly exciting things happen. It’s dark and smooth like a melted caramel, and she sets it at the forefront of her songs, which are sparse aside from a guitar, a drum set, and occasional airy synth or keyboard. The flexibility of her tone allows her to explore a wide range of feelings, from anger to sarcasm to wry optimism.
Her intimate lyrics often conjure bad feelings—betrayal, powerlessness, the gross human need to impress others. On the album’s first verse, Samia sings, “I said loving you is bigger than my head/And then you dove in/And then I said, ‘I’m afraid that I need men’/ You said, ‘Need me, then.’” It sounds overwhelming, giving yourself to someone like that, being taunted into it, and the conversational tone makes the verses feel both personal and perverse. She offers crystal clear images, like on “Does Not Heal,” where she recounts cutting her thigh after climbing a fence, remembering being “so scared I had tetanus/I checked on it every night/Purple and yellow/The pregnable skin was so coarse and tight.” The images she produces range from realistic to metaphysical, but they’re always evocative and sensory.
Samia often forgoes the practice of burying uncomfortable personal emotions with obscure lyrics, opting for diaristic clarity and precision. It’s unclear who the “baby” of her album title is, but still, the intimacy of the term speaks to the weird in-between space that Samia’s generation is occupying right now. As many people like to say of the Class of 2020, we were college freshmen when Trump was elected and graduated in a pandemic. With few job prospects and usually no health insurance, a lot of us have turned to living with our parents. It’s hard to become an adult at a time where everything is so dangerous, to stop seeing yourself as a baby when you’re still so vulnerable. But life still happens and it still hurts in all the typical ways—heartbreak, bad friends, confusion. Songwriters like Samia are still trying to make sense of it.
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. | 2020-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Grand Jury | September 3, 2020 | 7.9 | 68f767d8-d288-43d5-b63f-5520b0cb6bd0 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
As hip-hop’s elite ice him out, the Atlanta star tries to keep the good times rolling. These may sound like the catchy Gunna songs of the past, but they don’t feel like them. | As hip-hop’s elite ice him out, the Atlanta star tries to keep the good times rolling. These may sound like the catchy Gunna songs of the past, but they don’t feel like them. | Gunna: One of Wun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gunna-one-of-wun/ | One of Wun | Let’s be real: You knew what One of Wun sounded like before you pressed play. Gunna’s motor-mouthed tales of the high life here, his dreary piano ballads there. His last album a Gift & a Curse wasn’t a whole lot different; neither was the one before that. Glazed, melodic raps about clothes and girls and whatever jewelry he wore to the studio that day are Gunna’s bread and butter. That is the formula that has made him one of the biggest Atlanta rappers of the last decade. Though these days it feels like even Gunna is getting bored, spicing it up risks derailing the money train.
Despite his considerable success, in the last two years Gunna has been unofficially shunned from the inner circles of popular rap by hip-hop cornballs who have interpreted his plea deal in the YSL RICO case as “snitching.” (Kendrick recently made him the butt of the joke on his Drake diss “Euphoria” when he said, “I know some shit about niggas that make Gunna Wunna look like a saint.”) The situation hangs over One of Wun, clearly weighing on Gunna even as he tiptoes around those frustrations to keep the good vibes intact. He’s trying to have the best of both worlds: An ol’ fashioned light and fun Gunna flex-a-thon, sprinkled with a reflective bar or wistful tune every now and then. Tonally, it’s confusing. Nobody wants Gunna’s pain rap album or his Me Against the World, but I do want him to be real with us.
Back in the day, when Gunna sung about the way his “Fear of God pants match his Fear of God Vans” on Drip Season 3’s “Almighty,” or his “AP blacker than Akon” on WUNNA’s eponymous track, he sounded as if nothing else in the world mattered to him more. Now his boasts of having the sharpest outfit at the Met Gala (“One of Wun”) or a new Balenciaga crop top (“Prada Dem”) feel obligatory. I don’t doubt that he still gets fits off regularly, but we all know he has so much more at the top of his mind. It comes off as a deflection.
He’s making songs that sound like catchy Gunna songs of the past—he’s still able to float on these laid-back, skittering ATL trap variants while reading straight off his SSENSE receipt—but they don’t feel like them. He’s going through the motions. His rapidfire flow on “Hakuna Matata” is clean but the energy is flat (he should have saved it for the soundtrack of Barry Jenkins’ upcoming Mufasa movie). He’s made “On One Tonight,” with its humming beat and limp croons, a dozen times before. I do still get a kick out of his latest sexual escapades (at the gym, on a yacht, in an orgy) and luxury car purchases—the extremely chill “Back in the A” is a standout, especially when he says, “My car is a half million dollars/I came a long way from Impalas”—but he’s so checked out that a couple of vivid bars can’t hide that he’s wearing a mask.
Tucked away at the back of the 20-track album are some signs that Gunna is figuring out how to address his disenchantment without losing his spark. There you’ll find a few slower, piano-driven ballads (“Life’s Changing,” “Conscience,” and “Today I Did Good”) that probably won’t be chart-toppers but go deeper than surface level. The mood he captures is that of someone who has spent months on the couch devouring cheese puffs and binging sitcoms after a breakup until suddenly reaching an emotional breakthrough. The revelation comes in the form of lots of talk about self-care and working out (“I ain’t been eatin’ no bullshit/And fitness, I wake up, I feel fit,” he croons on “Today I Did Good”), which is admittedly not the easiest stuff to make interesting in a rap song, but it’s his way of acknowledging that public ostracization from hip-hop has beaten him down, and that he’s come out on the other side stronger. On “Collage,” he manages to work in his lifestyle changes in the most Gunna way possible: “I spend 50 racks on a trainer/My payroll ain’t missin’ a payment.” This all may turn into him sing-rapping about an Erewhon smoothie on his next album, but you know what, at least it will be honest. | 2024-05-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Young Stoner Life / 300 Entertainment | May 15, 2024 | 5.7 | 68fad94e-a341-4055-bbca-f7bea8c84d98 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Portland duo's second DFA album fuses a utopian concept with nervy, spastic electro-funk. | The Portland duo's second DFA album fuses a utopian concept with nervy, spastic electro-funk. | YACHT: Shangri-La | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15581-shangri-la/ | Shangri-La | YACHT's second album as a duo, their fifth overall, fuses a utopian concept with the brand of nervy, spastic electro-funk we've come to expect from the DFA label. As on 2009's See Mystery Lights, Portland laptop maestro Jona Bechtolt (formerly of the Blow) and singer Claire L. Evans enjoy their smoothest sailing when they fully submit to sweaty euphoria; Shangri-La offers more than enough frantic beats, fidgety bass lines, spiky guitar leads, soaring piano riffs, delirious vocal harmonies, and, yes, cowbells to fit in on any house-party playlist. Still, its idyllic theme can be a bit heavy-handed, and nothing here is quite as indelibly hooky as past single "Psychic City (Voodoo City)".
Shangri-La continues YACHT's trajectory from blips and bloops that suggest their computerized origins to a full-fledged band sound that should translate nicely to hedonistic live shows. But the duo's sense of, well, fun hasn't gone anywhere. See Mystery Lights' nods to T-Pain and Desmond Dekker gives way to an end-times synth workout "Dystopia (The Earth Is on Fire)", which shares a seven-minute video with the tropical-flavored disco-punk of album opener "Utopia". When the pace slows, as on the spacey "Love in the Dark", instant quotables jump out: "I love you like a small-town cop/ Yeah, I wanna smash your face in with a rock," Evans sings, in deadpan multi-track.
Still, the record tends to burden its good times with a few too many ideas that simply aren't that distinctive. Brass-boosted "Holy Roller", which starts as a finger-snapping cousin to Black Lips' religion-minded "Veni Vidi Vici" and ends closer to the doomed stomp of Modest Mouse's "Fly Trapped in a Jar" (by way of dubstep bass-wobble), recommends not worrying about a god. James Murphy-esque dance-rant "Paradise Engineering" finds holiness within.
The basic gist-- and despite its familiarity, it's a commendable one-- is that, as Belinda Carlisle once sang, heaven is a place on Earth. "If we build a utopia, will you come and stay?" asks Shangri-La's closing, title track, all catchy la-la-las and beatific afterglow. Paradise, the song suggests, can be California, Oregon, Texas, or anywhere we choose: an appealing and valuable notion. But it's worth remembering that when new-wave forebears Blondie found "Rapture", it was "toe to toe/ Dancing very close." | 2011-07-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2011-07-05T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | DFA | July 5, 2011 | 6.5 | 69000705-6259-478f-87be-9f7dc5dcfe40 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The young Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE collaborator makes deeply internal and contemplative rap. | The young Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE collaborator makes deeply internal and contemplative rap. | Medhane: Own Pace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/medhane-own-pace/ | Own Pace | Medhane repeats himself, making his unhurried way through his verses and remaining intent on humble pursuits—fiscal and spiritual comfort, avoiding distractions and vices, snakes or serpents, he might say. If he’s focused on his delivery, maybe then you’ll really hear and understand him. And so he repeats; that’s how Medhane works. The young Brooklyn rapper is a friend and collaborator of Earl Sweatshirt and MIKE, and, like his peers, he makes his voice heard by lowering it.
On his first solo full-length, he sounds stern but forgiving, his buttery flow gliding atop dampened soul samples. Medhane’s work is largely about determination, an attribute you can hear reflected in the amelodic nature of his rapping, where each line moves with a similar tempo, not too fast, not too slow. There’s also a softness to Medhane’s writing that complements the bluntness of his pacing. He writes in unsentimental broad strokes, making his lyrics feel like synecdoches for all living. “I know what I need,” he says on “On Me,” keeping the thought internal.
Interiority is everything to Medhane. His deepest insights arrive with the simplest combination of words. “Taking small steps/Trippin’, trippin’, I ain’t fall yet,” he says on “Smallsteps,” calmly, as if the utterance is itself part of his undetermined journey to somewhere, a place he can’t yet envision but will continue striving toward. He offers variations on progress, steady pacing, hope, and gratitude. “Changes and growth all I know,” goes another line, showing Medhane ready to embrace any turmoil or spoils ahead.
Medhane’s tone has changed just a bit since last year’s Ba Suba, Ak Jamm EP. On the brief, 13-minute release, Medhane spoke more about hard work and gain, like he couldn’t look up from the grind. The beats were more chaotic. The new project has a murmuring slickness, a mantric quality. “Remembering the times I couldn’t describe what’s inside,” he raps on “Affirmation #1.” Own Pace is Medhane’s non-stop constant trip to the center of his inner self, filled with the imperceptible detours and contours of the mind. | 2019-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | November 12, 2019 | 7.7 | 69013788-2594-4867-b5b6-b5b1314e9103 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
This collection of the Norwegian producer's best-loved 12" tracks succinctly demonstrates why both he and his epic space-disco sound have been among the most ubiquitous forces in modern dance music. | This collection of the Norwegian producer's best-loved 12" tracks succinctly demonstrates why both he and his epic space-disco sound have been among the most ubiquitous forces in modern dance music. | Lindstrøm: It's a Feedelity Affair | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9559-its-a-feedelity-affair/ | It's a Feedelity Affair | It would be difficult to argue that the Feedelity label remains a well-kept secret now that its founder and main artist Hans-Peter Lindstrøm has become such a ubiquitous presence in dance music. If anything, it's tempting to ask whether, in October 2006, it's too late to get excited about Lindstrøm's brand of epic disco revivalism. However, It's a Feedelity Affair is packed with tried-and-true musical strategies for putting on a spectacle, and this overdue round-up of some of the greater and lesser-known Lindstrøm tracks off his 10 or so vinyl releases from the past few years makes clear that the Norwegian artist's production style remains as invigorating as ever, despite many of these deeply familiar tunes now approaching half a decade in age. Can we chalk this resilience up to timelessness, or simply good timing?
Partly it's just that disco never goes out of fashion. In dance music the question is always "which disco?", and it's a feature of Lindstrøm's music that it would feel at home alongside so many of the responses to this question that have been offered in the past decade, from the classicist disco of Faze Action in the late 1990s, to Metro Area's italo-disco, to the (so hot right now) ramshackle "hippie" disco peddled by Rub'N'Tug and the like. If the narrative arc of this crate-digging strand of disco fetishism moves from precision and chops to bleary swirl and ecumenical unpredictability, the secret to Lindstrøm's music is how it manages to be all these things at once. Even at his briskest and most uptempo (see the efficient pump of the appropriately titled early single "Fast and Delirious"), Lindstrøm can't resist woozy synth effects, pompous chord changes, and atmospheric percussion; conversely, the collection's most hippy moment, the torpid dub-disco of "Music (In My Mind)" (complete with deliciously smacked-out female vocals) nonetheless retains a delicate, expensive muso sheen.
It's a Feedelity Affair largely foregoes the multi-hued fragrancy and soft-rock glide of Lindstrøm's recent work with Prins Thomas in favour of ostentatiously astral motifs (particularly roaming, noodly synth solos) and more pronounced dancefloor grooves, and it invites the conclusion that the producer's strongest solo efforts are also his most tunnel-visioned. The album's lofty peaks are the now instantly recognisable chill sci-fi sheen of "I Feel Space" and the stately, widescreen bleeps of new track "The Contemporary Fix", whose stereopanning percussion, shards of glistening dulcimer, and endlessly percolating 303 bass aspire to a majestic strain of minimalism that could go anywhere. It's difficult to know whether Lindstrøm would be better served pursuing this line of flight from plush disco, or to follow the path he's taken with Thomas, concocting ever-more sumptuous flights of multi-instrumentalist fancy, such as on their gorgeous, Henrik Schwarz-style remix of Tosca's "Zuri". Either way, it's probably a good idea for him to now steer clear of the warm space-disco which dominates It's a Feedelity Affair, if only because there's little point in attempting to top his past achievements.
Still, even during the most representative and unashamedly retro moments here-- such as on the voluptuous 10-minute suite "There's a Drink in My Bedroom and I Need a Hot Lady"-- Lindstrøm resists charges of being a one-trick pony, weaving together an unlikely assortment of elements in tracks that continually (if often subtly) change direction. The criticism is not entirely off-base: There is something almost gimmicky about his lush, organic instrumentation and overblown psych-out synth climaxes. But while Lindstrøm may be a showpony, his posturing is hard to resent when his tried-and-true strategies are deployed so decadently, almost carelessly, like stray crumbs escaping from a bottomless bag of tricks. | 2006-10-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-10-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Feedelity | October 25, 2006 | 8.4 | 69080a3c-1b02-4827-bd65-08a0b9f1297c | Tim Finney | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tim-finney/ | null |
The French duo resurface with their first album in 10 years, slamming together the Balearic reverie of Ibiza and the pop-chart tank-top vibe of California, not always to great effect. | The French duo resurface with their first album in 10 years, slamming together the Balearic reverie of Ibiza and the pop-chart tank-top vibe of California, not always to great effect. | Cassius: Ibifornia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22321-ibifornia/ | Ibifornia | On their last album, 2006’s 15 Again, the French duo Cassius found themselves faced with a not-uncommon problem for European dance acts in the 21st century. Here they were, in mid-career and on their third album, trapped beneath the overlapping shadows of Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx. The result was a mixed bag of funk and house and funky house, broken up by the occasional grab at pop’s brass ring. Naturally, there was a Pharrell cameo. It was a tough spot to be in for a duo with such an unassailable pedigree. Hubert Blanc-Fracard and Philippe Cerboneschi’s roots run deep in the French dance scene. In the early 1990s, they were architects of MC Solaar’s jazzy boom-bap sound, and their records for Mo Wax under an earlier alias, La Funk Mob, were trip-hoppy highlights of the label’s peak years. Cerboneschi, meanwhile, is a veteran of Motorbass, a pioneering French house duo that helped pave the way for Daft Punk’s filter-disco revolution.
For a while, Cassius remained central to a scene they’d helped mold. The duo’s debut album, 1999, was a smart, stylish amalgam of retro cues—disco loops, hip-hop scratches, moody Chicago house—that, aside from the Gwen McCrae-sampling single “Feeling for You,” made few overtures to pop. Instead, it put all its effort into building a sustained mood, translating the sound of hip Parisian discotheques to the album format. With their next two albums, 2002’s Au Rêve and 2006’s 15 Again, they expanded their horizons, determined to out-pastiche their peers. They managed a few memorable singles and some righteous curveballs—see, for instance, the Tom Zé-interpolating “Telephone Love”—but as they vacillated between impish pop, funk maximalism, and squirrelly electronic B-sides, they lost their footing.
Ibifornia is their first album in a decade, not counting 2010’s back-to-basics The Rawkers EP, for Ed Banger, and it suggests that Cassius still haven’t figured out quite who they want to be. Let it not be said that they are afraid to take risks, beginning with their coterie of collaborators: Beastie Boys’ Mike D, OneRepublic frontman and pop gun-for-hire Ryan Tedder, Parisian house vocalist JAW, Chan Marshall of Cat Power, and, once again, Pharrell. What, as another of Pharrell’s collaborators might put it, a time to be alive.
Sometimes, those risks pay off handsomely. “Action” builds to an extended climax of dubwise Afro-disco, and the lustrous Chan Marshall shines like the glint off thick velvet, impervious to Mike D’s yelps. The song might not need all nine minutes of its running time—nor a feinting fade-out and reprise—but it’s plenty hypnotic, with Laurent Bardainne’s saxophone and Arnold Moueza’s percussion keeping the energy at a rolling boil. On “Go Up,” another dramatic disco number, Pharrell is Pharrell, while Marshall is sadness incarnate, her descending refrain of “Jealousy” slumping like the shoulders of an inconsolable lover. Who knew that Cat Power would sound so terrific singing over house music? Someone needs to construct an entire album of club tracks around her.
But those standouts struggle to hold their own amid the album's more overwrought anthems and straight-up misfires. “Feel Like Me” puts Marshall ahead of an imaginary union of Spiritualized and M83, and it almost works; so does the opulent ballad “Blue Jean Smile,” sung by John Gourley (of indie rockers Portugal. The Man). But even the most immaculate mood-setting can’t save it from its ridiculous chorus: “Your blue jean smile says/Let’s have a child/Peruvian style/We’ll let it run wild.”
The Ryan Tedder songs simply feel like they're trying way too hard. “The Missing,” which opens the album, is a hiccuping, sighing, thrust-for-thrust remake of Robin Thicke et al.’s “Blurred Lines,” a maneuver that feels about three years too late (and given the legal brouhaha around that song, why would you even want to go there?), while the soaring, ’60s-flavored “Hey You!” panders shamelessly to the Coachella flower-crown crowd. Like a lot of Tedder’s work, it’s plenty catchy; it’s just too much. Gospel choirs, falsetto yips, bellowing baritone sax, and a chorus that runs, “And if you feel the same/Shadows turn into rain.” To call it bombastic would be putting it lightly.
And then there’s “Ibifornia,” a tongue-in-cheek paean to tropical house music—abuzz with roaring lions, screeching monkeys, trilling loons—that winks so hard it risks eyelid cramps. (Those incessant loons, a staple of Balearic dance music, are a dead giveaway that the song is nothing if not self-aware.) Narrated by the British voice actor Gary Martin, who spells out the letters of the title in a booming, Barry White-like baritone—“‘I’ is for ‘I love you,’ ‘B’ is for ‘brotherhood,’” etc.—it's gleefully ridiculous, and as it builds, it develops into a potent, throbbing, peak-time tribal-house jam. But it’s so over the top that it’s a little hard to take seriously, and therein lies the problem. Do clubbers whose pulses race to the sound of rat-a-tat 909 hi-hats really want to be distracted by goofy, lovey-dovey voiceovers? Do punters coming up on E really want what amounts to a comedy record? Like the portmanteau title, which joins Ibiza to California under the banner of balmy reverie, it’s torn between two things that really don’t have anything to do with each other. When presented with apples and oranges, instead of sangria they made Four Loko.
In an album that foregrounds voices, one of the best and most surprising cuts is “Ponce,” the record’s instrumental closer. It’s the only song credited to the duo alone, and as simple as it is—just a shuffling, barely-there drumbeat and a moody synth line—its emotional pull is undeniable. In its singular focus, it’s reminiscent of Motorbass, but it also sounds undeniably fresh; in its sound and mood and spirit of reinvention, it faintly recalls Mr. Fingers’ recent “Qwazars.” It’s a reminder that, at their best, Cassius remain among France’s most expressive house producers. It’s a shame that, in chasing palm trees from Hollywood to Vila d’Eivissa, they’ve lost sight of the splendors that lie closer to home. | 2016-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Love Supreme / Justice | August 26, 2016 | 5.9 | 690c4b81-0cbc-4fae-9622-f97af8191801 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
One of hip-hop’s brightest young minds finds himself in a state of deep reflection, maturing into adulthood in real time on his latest EP. | One of hip-hop’s brightest young minds finds himself in a state of deep reflection, maturing into adulthood in real time on his latest EP. | Mavi: End of the Earth EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mavi-end-of-the-earth-ep/ | End of the Earth EP | Mavi is an artist who speaks and raps with a wisdom well beyond his years. To listen to a record of his is to witness a scholar on a journey of discovery of both himself and the world around him. He’s a neuroscience student who makes soul music with personal statements that emerge as expressions of a rapidly forming ideology and whose sense of self is connected to communities—the physical communities where he lives and learns, but also the intellectual and artistic ones he’s joined with through his music and studies. These are the raps of a philosopher. And on his latest EP End of the Earth, Mavi finds himself standing on the precipice, turning around to gaze upon the path that led him here.
After the critical success of his full-length debut Let the Sun Talk, Mavi spent the subsequent months balancing the bars and the books, struggling to adjust to his new life as an artist at the vanguard of an underground rap scene alongside cerebral and soulful MCs like MIKE, Earl Sweatshirt, and Pink Siifu. For all its prescience, his debut was still the work of an awkward teen transitioning into adulthood, learning how to sustain himself in spite of his earthly desires. The EP reflects that maturation, exuding confidence without devolving into braggadocio. There’s a humility to his perspective, an acknowledgment that he carries a burden passed on to him from the scholars who preceded him. He borrows a famous Nas bar to open “Town Crier,” (“No idea is original, there’s nothing new under the sun,” he raps) then immediately acknowledges it, as if to prove the point. He sees through corporate brands looking to associate with him to “seem a little woke” (“Life We Live”) and questions even his own motives: “What are we supposed to do?/All my idols dead or they took the devil fully in they idle hands/And I am like the man/Imperfect and even selfish when they lie in prayer/I am not on brand.”
This wizened perspective is reflected in the production, draped in swirling soul samples and gentle piano, twinkling tones contrasting with sad strings. The vocal mix sounds cleaner and more balanced than it’s ever been, with Mavi’s baritone at the forefront, occasionally even keeping time in place of a rhythm section. While his vocals are clearer, his thoughts are often purposefully obfuscated, encrypted in a code not necessarily meant to be deciphered by everyone. A student of phenomenology—the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view—he writes verses that are carefully constructed ruminations on his own perspective and its connection to the world at large, beaming messages into the ether for like-minded souls. The specter of Black trauma haunts the record without being its focal point: “This shit in me, not on me,” he told Pitchfork in 2020.
It would be easy to view End of the Earth through a fatalist lens, the result of a journey that ventures far from home only to find the same suffering. “I could walk to the end of Earth/I get there, still hear the screams,” he raps on “Thousand Miles,” the lament of a wanderer carrying his pain wherever he roams. But rather than weigh him down, his accumulated knowledge seems to motivate him, and he balances the power it imbues him with the responsibility that comes with it.
If his tweets are to be believed, End of the Earth is a mere sample of what’s to follow on his forthcoming full-length Shango. On its own, the EP is a captivating snapshot of one of hip-hop’s brightest young minds in a state of deep reflection, maturing into adulthood in real time.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | New York Lab | March 11, 2021 | 7.7 | 690d16fc-9fab-4580-83f6-09702a68cb56 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
Upon its release Superunknown wasn’t just a highly anticipated album from a critically acclaimed rock band—it was Soundgarden’s long overdue turn to come out on top. The 1994 album's being reissued in two-and-five-disc sets; some 20 years later, the album represents the platonic ideal of what a mainstream hard rock record should be. | Upon its release Superunknown wasn’t just a highly anticipated album from a critically acclaimed rock band—it was Soundgarden’s long overdue turn to come out on top. The 1994 album's being reissued in two-and-five-disc sets; some 20 years later, the album represents the platonic ideal of what a mainstream hard rock record should be. | Soundgarden: Superunknown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19407-soundgarden-superunknown/ | Superunknown | Upon its release on March 8, 1994, Superunknown wasn’t just a highly anticipated album from a critically acclaimed rock band—its multi-platinum success and Grammy wins practically felt predestined. This was Soundgarden’s long overdue turn to come out on top. Though they were the first late-’80s Seattle-scene spawn to sign to a major label, and dutifully embarked upon traditional career-building exercises like opening stadium tours for Guns N' Roses, they would be soundly leapfrogged on the charts by their Emerald City peers in Nirvana and Pearl Jam; by comparison, Soundgarden’s metallic sonatas were seemingly too knotty (and naughty) to inspire the same magnitude of crossover success. Sure, 1991’s Badmotorfinger landed a bare-chested Chris Cornell on the cover of SPIN, and an MTV ban of the allegedly blasphemous “Jesus Christ Pose” video brought the band more attention than if the station had actually aired it, but Soundgarden appeared destined to be the perennial bronze medalists in the Grunger Games.
By early 1994, however, the playing field had changed considerably: Though Pearl Jam were still the most popular rock band in America, they were actively trying to be the least visible one, declaring a moratorium on videos and interviews in an orchestrated (and ultimately successful) campaign to kill their own hype. Nirvana, likewise, were in the midst of a similar retreat, and though their story had yet to reach its tragic conclusion, ominous warning signs were in the air. But as a band that enjoyed a steadier ascent than their flannelled friends—and whose records got progressively better after jumping to a major—Soundgarden didn’t seem so conflicted about success. Their response to the Seattle-scene media storm wasn’t to try to avoid it, but transcend it, and embrace the opportunity to, for a moment, become the biggest band in the land.
Usually, it’s a bad sign when the wild-child frontman of your favorite group cuts his hair and starts wearing shirts. But the clean-cut Cornell that emerged with Superunknown was emblematic of the album’s mission to deliver maximal effect with minimal histrionics. With its despairing worldview, gold-plated production, and CD-stuffing 71-minute running time, Superunknown is a quintessential ’90s artifact. But thanks to its still-formidable high-wire balance of hooks and heft, the album nonetheless represents, some 20 years later, the platonic ideal of what a mainstream hard rock record should be. And even if that’s an ideal to which few contemporary bands aspire (aside from, say, Queens of the Stone Age), Superunknown remains a useful model for any left-of-center artist hoping to achieve accessibility without sacrificing identity.
For Soundgarden, the push toward pop was the result of incremental evolutions rather than a spectacular leap. Where Badmotorfinger introduced flashes of psychedelia and paisley-patterned melody amid Kim Thayil’s pulverizing riffage, on Superunknown, these elements become featured attractions. The once-oblique John Lennon references gave way to unabashed homage—centerpiece power ballad “Black Hole Sun” is pretty much “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” turned upside down and dropped in a heap of soot and coal. That song counts as Superunknown’s most wanton act of subversion—setting its apocalyptic imagery to a tune so pretty, even Paul Anka can dig it—but if that element of surprise has been diluted by two decades of perpetual rock-radio rotation, the album boasts a wealth of less celebrated deep cuts (the queasy psych-folk of “Head Down,” the dread-ridden doom of “4th of July”) that retain a palpable sense of unease.
Even the album’s eternal fist-pump anthems—“The Day I Tried to Live”, “Fell on Black Days”, “My Wave”—are infected with misanthropy and malaise, making Superunknown the rare arena-rock album that makes just as much sense in blacked-out bedroom. (And yet, despite the junkie intimations of its title, “Spoonman” is really just about a man who plays with spoons.) That said, if you don’t hate the world now quite as much as did when you were 18, you may find yourself skipping over the leaden likes of “Mailman” and “Limo Wreck,” while developing a newfound appreciation for how bassist Ben Shepherd’s India-inspired oddity, “Half”, injects a welcome dose of absurdity into the mix.
By fortuitous coincidence, Superunknown hit stores the same day as Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, an album boasting a similarly expansive scope and thematic framework, albeit approached from a drastically different set of influences (’80s new wave, goth, and electro as opposed to ’60s classic rock). The connection between the two albums is strong enough that the two bands toured together in 1994 and—despite some shit-talkin’ in the interim—are reuniting once again this summer for a joint-20th-anniversary jaunt. For casual Soundgarden fans who still own the record, a concert ticket may ultimately be a more efficient way of celebrating Superunknown’s birthday than by shelling out for this reissue (available in two-and five-CD box set iterations), whose bonus material mostly amounts to demos and rehearsal tapes that cast this epic album in a more normalizing light. However, you do develop a greater appreciation for the final product when you hear the ideas that got scrapped along the away or relegated to B-sides, like the dirgey embryonic arrangement of “Fell on Black Days” (a.k.a. “Black Days III”), the free-form ambient stew of “Jerry Garcia’s Finger”, and a club-friendly industrial funk mix of “Spoonman” by Steve Fisk that sounds like a test run for his beat-driven project Pigeonhed.
You also get a glimpse of the band’s future course with a beautifully spare acoustic treatment of “Like Suicide” that points the way to 1996’s more temperate Down on the Upside, the album that effectively triggered Soundgarden’s subsequent 13-year break-up. But then the go-for-broke, peak-conquering triumphalism of Superunknown was itself a harbinger that the writing was on the wall for this band at the time. When Cornell sings, “Alive in the superunknown” on the album’s acid-swirled title track, it’s both a valorous testament to Soundgarden’s last-gang-in-town fortitude and a telling prophecy of the uncertainty to come, with grunge’s early ’90s stranglehold on alt-rock radio soon to be loosened by the emergence of pop-punk, Britpop, electronica, and nu-metal. But amid a musical landscape now splintered into infinite subgenres, Superunknown remains the very definition of no-qualifiers-required rock—a tombstone for a once-dominant aesthetic, perhaps, but also a solid, immovable mass that endures no matter how dramatically its surroundings have changed. | 2014-06-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-06-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | UMe | June 3, 2014 | 8.5 | 690d95e0-4015-4538-9146-5a80944d7718 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Justin Vernon of Bon Iver teams up with the post-rock outfit Collections of Colonies of Bees for a loose, weird, and rewarding album. | Justin Vernon of Bon Iver teams up with the post-rock outfit Collections of Colonies of Bees for a loose, weird, and rewarding album. | Volcano Choir: Unmap | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13506-unmap/ | Unmap | There's a moment in "The Wolves (Act I and II)", a song on Justin Vernon's debut album as Bon Iver, For Emma, Forever Ago, where you first suspect that there's more going on with this dude than meets the eye. Up until that point, the record is, as advertised, ascetic and stripped down, the product of a person alone in a cabin for months with only a guitar for company. The songs early on bring to mind snow, wood, creaky furniture, drawn breaths-- organic materials that could have been just as easily assembled 80 years ago. But as Vernon sings the "what might have been lost" refrain in "Wolves", you hear something strange creeping in: One of the many voices, which are layered and harmonized, both full and falsetto, is run through some kind of vocoder-like effect. It's subtle at first, added without drawing much attention to itself, but it even so it feels like the floor dropping out. Just like that, the song is broken wide open, and Vernon's music is infused with a sense of unexpected possibility.
That boundless feeling was confirmed on Bon Iver's Blood Bank EP, released at the beginning of this year. One if its songs, "Woods", was an a cappella number with every voice processed, as Vernon stretched and trilled the phrases like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and T-Pain. Yes, these effects became absurdly ubiquitous last year, and the mere fact that it was used was nothing special. But Vernon is operating in a milieu-- an emotionally driven singer-songwriter on a noted indie rock label-- where people don't usually do such things. Especially so early in a promising career, where you're not sure how your audience might react. My sense is that Vernon was able to put expectations aside; he had a sound in mind and he went for it, without worrying too much about what a "Bon Iver" song should be. And that in itself was exciting.
So after Emma's deserved success, the nifty stopgap EP, and Vernon's long stretch on the road winning new fans, his next move proves to be yet another welcome curveball: teaming with the post-rock outfit Collections of Colonies of Bees for a short album of experimental pop as Volcano Choir. Vernon's voice is one of the most distinctive going right now, so you can always hear him in this music. But at the same time, Unmap in no way feels like any sort of follow-up to Emma. This is partly because these tracks aren't really songs. Words mean very little, and there's not much in the way of verses or choruses. Instead, Vernon's voice becomes a texture, a tool for shading the tracks and bringing them into focus. Collections of Colonies of Bees, who have over the last couple of records proven to be the rare instrumental rock band with ideas about how to keep things both surprising and musical, bring Vernon into their world, which turns out to be a very good thing.
When it all comes together, the results are dazzling. "Seeplymouth" is one highlight. With its repeating guitar chimes and chanted voices, it begins with a loose, jazzy feel weirdly reminiscent of Peanuts composer Vince Guaraldi. But then, after a sung passage by Vernon, it continues to build in intensity until it's a huge, pumping mass of crashing drums and wailed voices, something apocalyptic and almost unbearably intense. Equally impressive, and much closer to a conventional song, is the following "Island, IS", with its hyper-repetitive keyboard pulse drawn from modern classical, loping drums, and Vernon singing mesmerizingly opaque phrases that sound like the product of automatic writing.
Heard back-to-back, these two tracks suggest a sort of fusion between the U.S. and UK versions of post-rock. There's definitely some Talk Talk here, in the way assumptions about sound and structure are re-thought from the ground up and used in service of a new kind of song. But there's also a sense of Tortoise's studiousness, the way existing genres are toyed with and then broken down for parts. But despite the looseness and the grab-bag approach, the best of the songs on Unmap-- the airy opener "Husks and Shells", with its plucked acoustic and Vernon multi-tracked into reverb-heavy choir, and "Still", which is a longer, better version of the EP's "Woods" augmented by droning keyboards and Steve Reich-like figures-- feel right as rain, like these weird mash-ups were there all along, just waiting to be discovered.
Some of the tracks are unformed explorations that weren't pursued as far as they could have been, but even these have something to recommend. "Dote" puts Vernon in an echoing cavern and stretches his voice out to a rich, gothic drone that sounds like something Kranky would have loved to put out in the late 1990s. But it lasts only for three minutes and feels like it's just getting rolling when it crashes sharply into "And Gather". But then, fortunately, the latter is another short, intriguing track, bringing to mind Animal Collective's Sung Tongs with its acoustic guitar figure, handclaps, and chants. So where half-formed ideas are found, sharp editing keeps the album moving along. The only track that doesn't work is "Mbira in the Morass", which finds Vernon straining for a kind of bent soul vibe over a shapeless background heavy on the titular instrument. Still, one skip on such a truly experimental record-- they're really trying stuff here, not totally sure if it's going to work-- is an impressive feat. And for Vernon, the possibilities now seem even more vast. | 2009-09-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-09-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Jagjaguwar | September 24, 2009 | 8.3 | 6917da45-dc78-440e-8efc-2749b9dee4a8 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The singer-songwriter’s ninth album arrives as a sweeping, sterling, often confounding work of self-mythology and psychoamericana: Lana’s in the zone. | The singer-songwriter’s ninth album arrives as a sweeping, sterling, often confounding work of self-mythology and psychoamericana: Lana’s in the zone. | Lana Del Rey: Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lana-del-rey-did-you-know-that-theres-a-tunnel-under-ocean-blvd/ | Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd | In 2014, Lana Del Rey told a journalist that she wished she was dead, and for what seemed like years after, scarcely an article was written about her that didn’t mention it. Back then, the singer was still miserable at the sour critical reception of her debut album. She was, perhaps, peddling its underlying fatalism, pushing back on allegations that her noirish Born to Die persona was fabricated. Almost certainly, she was harboring the sort of creative ambition that craved association with tragic geniuses like Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse.
Lana has lived many days since then and seemingly found some of them worthwhile. In due course, particularly since the release of her 2019 national pulse check Norman Fucking Rockwell!, her songwriting received the recognition she always knew it deserved. In conversation with Rolling Stone this month, Lana described a great unburdening in her psychic space. She is still talking—and singing—about death. But now, rather than an escape hatch, it’s a framing device through which to peer at her life. “The Grants,” which opens her ninth studio album, climbs to the metaphorical mountaintop, guided by John Denver’s sense of mystical wonderment, to receive wisdom from on high. “My pastor told me when you leave all you take is your memory,” goes the chorus, resolute like a hymn, wrapped up with gospel backing vocals and orchestral ribbons, “And I’m gonna take mine of you with me.” To whittle the raw material of life into meaning, worth preserving—this is the writer’s task.
It’s one that Lana takes up vigorously, even if that meaning is sometimes legible only to her. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd arrives as a sweeping, confounding work-in-process. It’s full of quiet ruminations and loud interruptions; of visible seams and unhemmed edges, from the choir rehearsal that runs through its opening moments to the sound of the piano’s sustain pedal releasing at its end. Beauty—long Lana’s virtue and her burden—fades or is forgotten, like that titular tunnel, its mosaic ceilings and painted tiles sealed up and abandoned. Here, Lana is after something more enduring, the matters “at the very heart of things”: family, love, healing, art, legacy, wisdom—and all the contradictions and consternation that come along with the pursuit.
Blue Banisters, Lana’s album from 2021, introduced many of the ideas that stand out here: revisiting old material with new relish, releasing pop’s conventional structures and polish, writing about loved ones with tender specificity. Lana, née Elizabeth Grant, opens Ocean Blvd with a track that bears her family name, and she holds her father, brother, and sister close throughout, as if bracing for loss. On one song, she exhales a prayer amid jazzy squiggles, calling on her grandfather’s spirit to protect her father, a maritime enthusiast, while he’s deep-sea fishing. She entreats her brother Charlie to quit smoking. The matter of bearing children—her sister’s daughter and Lana’s own hypothetical offspring—comes up repeatedly, on “The Grants” and “Sweet,” a tradwife fantasy tucked in a mid-century movie-musical score. “Fingertips” broaches the topic of motherhood with a devastating admission of self-doubt: “Will the baby be all right/Will I have one of mine?/Can I handle it even if I do?”
Such a sentiment could easily be extrapolated into a comment on millennial unease, but this feels more personal. It’s Lana, a self-made emblem of vulnerable womanhood—in her own words, “a modern-day woman with a weak constitution”—at her most genuinely unguarded. She was nervous to send early sketches to producer Drew Erickson, she said, and even in finished form, the material sounds like it’s for her ears only. With its solemn hush, meticulously rendered but opaque details, and lack of organizing logic, “Fingertips” seems disinterested in holding our attention. There’s no rhythm, no structure, only the strings and the Wurlitzer picking up Lana’s breadcrumbs as she wanders the misty forest of her own memory.
Elsewhere, Lana throws stones into these still waters, most memorably on “A&W.” She writes from the perspective of the other woman, a familiar figure in her discography—sometimes, a sympathetic lonely heart; here, a symbol of the ire that unorthodox women unleash. “Did you know that a singer can still be looking like a side piece at 33?” asks Lana—unmarried and child-free at 37, a subject of constant physical scrutiny. The title is a fit-to-print stand-in for “American Whore,” and Lana cycles through her many avatars: an embattled attention-seeker, an illicit lover, an imperfect victim (“Do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?”). Then, after a radical about-face that steers the song from voice-memo balladry into boom-bap playground rap, she is someone else entirely: a girlish brat tattling to someone’s mom. A critic, albeit a clumsy one, of empowerment feminism, Lana here embodies characters that point to just how little girlbossing has done to remedy societal malice toward women. They reflect an enduring taxonomy, reified in a post-Roe landscape: We are whores who deserve what we get, or else children to be saved from our own decisions.
Where do we go from here? To church, apparently. Lana follows “A&W” with a sermon on lust from Judah Smith, the Beverly Hills pastor and influencer who counts the Biebers (and Lana too) among his congregants. The four-and-a-half-minute homily, accompanied by melancholy piano, is presented with little comment beyond an occasional laugh or affirmation, possibly from Lana herself; given its placement, the track seems designed more to inflame than to enlighten. At the end, though, comes an interesting kernel: “I used to think my preaching was mostly about you,” Smith concedes, “...I’ve discovered that my preaching is mostly about me.”
Now more than ever, Lana’s preaching is mostly about her, reflecting a growing instinct to self-mythologize. On Ocean Blvd, she sings explicitly about being Lana Del Rey, with lyrics like “Some big man behind the scenes/Sewing Frankenstein black dreams into my song” pointing all the way back to the industry-plant allegations that surfaced around the time of her debut. That backward-looking gaze also settles on hip-hop, a longstanding presence in her work that was substantially dialed down after 2017’s Lust for Life. The trap beats are back, at least in the record’s final stretch, where they accompany some of Lana’s most willful provocations. Her lyrics flirt with transgressions that have previously landed her in hot water, within and beyond her music: casual Covid noncompliance, brownface. There’s a sense of doubling down, of insistence that her path is hers alone to forge. On “Taco Truck x VB,” the chimeric closer that is partially a trap remix of Norman Fucking Rockwell!’s “Venice Bitch,” Lana elbows her way in front of the criticism: “Before you talk let me stop what you say/I know, I know, I know that you hate me.” She is fresher yet out of fucks.
Lana is a postmodern collagist and a chronic cataloguer of her references: Take “Peppers,” which samples Tommy Genesis’ ribald 2015 track “Angelina,” name-checks the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and interpolates a surf-rock classic, all in the span of four minutes. At her best, Lana reinterprets others’ work with intention, percolating their meaning through a personal filter. The way that she now applies this same approach to her own past material—beyond the “Venice Bitch” remake, there’s a sliver of “Cinnamon Girl” in the Jon Batiste feature “Candy Necklace,” and chopped-up strings from “Norman Fucking Rockwell” on “A&W”—suggests an artist who is tracing her own evolution and also submitting her work, ripe for reimagining, for entry in the greater American songbook from which she so readily draws.
One of Ocean Blvd’s key takeaways is that perfection is not a requirement for inclusion in this canon. Part of the title track is spent extolling a sublime flaw—a specific beat in the 1974 Harry Nilsson song “Don’t Forget Me.” Lana cites, by timestamp (2:05), the moment when the singer-songwriter’s voice breaks, cracking open the track with raw emotion. As an indicator of Lana’s mindset, this embrace of imperfection may help explain some of Ocean Blvd’s excesses and experiments, which nobly pursue profundity and succeed only sometimes. Still, there are 2:05s to be found within the sprawl. | 2023-03-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-24T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | March 24, 2023 | 8.3 | 691f1c33-a249-4ff4-8f3f-b766d2877c71 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
On her compact debut, Lætitia Tamko’s inimitable take on DIY indie rock feels victorious. She explores ideas of home, community, and sharing space with others who don’t necessarily see eye to eye. | On her compact debut, Lætitia Tamko’s inimitable take on DIY indie rock feels victorious. She explores ideas of home, community, and sharing space with others who don’t necessarily see eye to eye. | Vagabon: Infinite Worlds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22921-vagabon-infinite-worlds/ | Infinite Worlds | Just about 20 minutes into Lætitia Tamko’s compact debut as Vagabon, Infinite Worlds, she sings a line so cutting that, upon first hearing it, I had to remove my headphones and take stock of my surroundings. “What about them scares you so much?/My standing there threatens your standing, too,” Tamko sings on “Cleaning House,” broadcasting a simple but eminently resonant message that defines why these eight songs feel so important, especially now. It should be no secret that Tamko’s thought runs through the minds of all those made marginal by prejudicial thinking—and actual executive action. It could be your skin color, the way you dress, who you worship or love, but nonetheless that question flashes through the minds of those made to feel less. A simple, evocative guitar plucking in the background guides this sentiment with precision into the ear of a listener, and down into their gut.
Yet, Tamko’s inimitable take on DIY indie rock is never downtrodden. It’s victorious—even when her feats feel pyrrhic. Her soaring, winsome, and mutable tenor is unlike any of her peers in the New York scene. She also shreds. More importantly, Tamko’s first proper album is a stunning document of what indie rock can look like from a viewpoint that isn’t necessarily widespread in the genre. Infinite Worlds is an album interested in grappling with seemingly intractable and very personal questions about sharing space, finding a home, and fostering community in a world that can be caustic to those very actions.
Some of the songs that appear on Infinite Worlds started as rougher drafts on 2014 EP Persian Garden. Listening to the earlier work, it’s clear how much Tamko has grown. She moved to New York as a teenager from Cameroon, and until she graduated from college in 2015, music was more or less a hobby. Her Bandcamp demos eventually led her to the Bushwick community art space Silent Barn, and a venerable DIY scene that includes artists like Frankie Cosmos and Crying (members of both bands contributed to Infinite Worlds).
“The Embers,” the album’s opener, was originally a song called “Sharks,” and it has transitioned from whispered confession to empowering paean. The song’s anthemic, steady guitars and booming drums recall the sound of Modest Mouse or Built to Spill, but her voice is the anchor to all these songs. It’s a powerful tool that can move from soft to loud, confrontational to relaxing, with an uncanny grace.
Tamko shows this in songs like “Fear & Force” and “Mal à L’aise.” On the former, she sings about a failed relationship, isolation, and the search for a sanctuary. “I’ve been hiding in the smallest space/I am dying to go/This is not my home,” Tamko sings, alternating between breathy harmonies and straightforward delivery (Greta Kline, aka Frankie Cosmos, provides backing vocals). The latter is one of the most interesting songs on the album: a piece of gauzy, ambient pop, not unlike the Cocteau Twins. Sung completely in French, “Mal à L’aise” is a sound collage made of a spectral chorus of voices, processed and multiplied (including sampled vocals from Julie Byrne/Makonnen collaborator Eric Littmann). These sounds shuffle around in an indistinct musical space, which is both haunted and relaxed. It’s almost close to new age, conjuring up the work of Harold Budd or Grouper, but Tamko gives the airy vibe of this song weight with lyrics that touch on accepting social discomfort and embracing oneself.
Throughout Infinite Worlds, Tamko interrogates what it means to occupy space with others who don’t necessarily see eye to eye, be it parents, peers, or strangers. Sometimes imagining that ideal world leads to bouts of doubt, or even magical realism (see “100 Days”). But Tamko keeps coming back to the same point: the community you want to live in is one you have to make. Guided by a more mature sound, Infinite Worlds is the rock music we need nowadays, when it seems like home, wherever it might be, is getting farther away. | 2017-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Father/Daughter | March 2, 2017 | 8.5 | 69218352-1f97-482f-b468-3eb698f39385 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Melina Duterte’s second album as Jay Som sounds exploratory and playful, like a jam session among friends that’s just hit its stride. | Melina Duterte’s second album as Jay Som sounds exploratory and playful, like a jam session among friends that’s just hit its stride. | Jay Som: Anak Ko | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jay-som-anak-ko/ | Anak Ko | Melina Duterte’s process has always been entirely self-contained. On her first two releases as Jay Som, she recorded, produced, and engineered everything herself. This “recorded alone in her room” quality has often resulted in her music being described as bedroom pop. The label is inevitable given that she works in a home studio, but it flattens the complexity of her work. Her excellent debut album, 2017’s Everybody Works, mashed together electronica, indie rock, and pop while retaining a gauziness that felt immediate and personal. Huge guitar hooks gave some songs the bright thrill of ’90s pop, while echoing, repeated vocals created moments of hypnotic drowsiness.
While Anak Ko—which means “my child” in Tagalog—is still very much a self-made release as Duterte recorded and produced the record herself, it also finds her opening up her process. She invited people including Vagabon’s Laetitia Tamko, Chastity Belt’s Annie Truscott, and Boy Scouts’ Taylor Vick to play and record many instruments on the record. The arrangements sound exploratory and playful, like a jam session among friends that’s just hit its stride. From the first few notes of opener “If You Want It” to the meandering guitar solo on “Crown,” the compact and punchy choruses found in Jay Som’s earlier work are replaced with inky, moody bass and guitar. Many of the songs on Anak Ko are longer than those on Everybody Works, as if unravelled and filled with instrumental passages.
It’s these interludes that bring Anak Ko to life. “If You Want It” begins with droning bass that builds and spirals into dizzying psychedelia, giving the song a sense of narrative progression. Similarly, the tension on “Nighttime Drive” comes from the way the guitars transform to a braided wash of violin, maracas, and drums at the end. The soaring arrangement evokes the thrill of whizzing through deserted streets with the windows down. Album highlight “Superbike” sounds most like a song from Everybody Works. Its introductory chords are inspired by Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life,” a reference that might sound jarring in the hands of a musician less skilled at seamlessly threading saccharine pop melodies through a haze of warped guitar and drums.
The guitar work on Anak Ko is especially mature, warping over and around words and adding embellishment as tactile as embroidery on a linen dress. But with such a heavy instrumental focus paired with distorted vocals, you’re sometimes left grasping for something more concrete. Most of the songs obliquely address heartache, repeating meditative phrases like “if you want it” and “somebody tell me” to gesture at grandiose feelings. Sometimes this repetition works to establish a nebulous confusion and longing, where the meaning and order of words is less important than the delivery. On “Tenderness,” Jay Som’s crooned, slinky repetition of the phrase “tenderness is all I’ve got” feels soothing and vulnerable. A line about “shoplifting at the Whole Foods” sticks out as one of the few moments of specific imagery.
The album could benefit from a few more details to ground the otherwise indirect songwriting. The lyrics’ pastiche of observations and fleeting memories isn’t always clear enough to be emotionally resonant, to cause you to ponder their meaning after the song stops playing. Instead, the appeal is in the temporary pleasure of listening. There is an unhurried joy in these arrangements; it’s clear that Duterte, an immensely skilled musician, gets a thrill from the mere act of playing each instrument on Anak Ko. She’s making this music for herself first; she’s showing us her world, not sharing it.
Buy: Rough Trade / Vinyl Me, Please
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | August 28, 2019 | 7.3 | 692ccdcc-2a85-4b9b-aab6-3a9433339e79 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
The Monochrome Set arose from the late '70s British punk scene, and their records helped inspire the Smiths. They have a remarkably low profile in the U.S., but this collection of delightful demos, a sequel to a first batch in the '80s, highlights their dry whimsy and melodic ingenuity. | The Monochrome Set arose from the late '70s British punk scene, and their records helped inspire the Smiths. They have a remarkably low profile in the U.S., but this collection of delightful demos, a sequel to a first batch in the '80s, highlights their dry whimsy and melodic ingenuity. | The Monochrome Set: Volume, Contrast, Brilliance... Unreleased & Rare Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21537-volume-contrast-brilliance-unreleased-rare-vol-2/ | Volume, Contrast, Brilliance... Unreleased & Rare Vol. 2 | For a band that came out of the late-'70s British punk scene and stuck around (with a few extended breaks) long enough to make a towering stack of records, the Monochrome Set still have a remarkably low profile in the U.S. One explanation might be that they're a very British act: songwriter and frontman Bid (born Ganesh Seshadri) has always loved ridiculing the class system, making puns about London landmarks, feigning embarrassment about sexuality, trilling when he's expected to snarl. He's a wit, but he rolls his eyes at clowns.
You could say the same about the Smiths, of course (and Morrissey and Johnny Marr initially bonded over their shared admiration for the Monochrome Set). But it's also true that the Set's early lineups, especially, tended to channel their instrumental muscle and cross-chattering guitar lines into pastiches of intensely uncool kinds of pre-punk music: easy listening, country, bossa nova. 1985's jaunty fuck-you-pay-me "Whoops! What a Palaver", on this collection, even flirts with Gilbert & Sullivan: "I quote in the vernacular/And edit speech oracular/To seek a phrase spectacular/Like 'piss off, you cunt'/Or 'I hate the queen'/Or 'I am one.'"
Still, the clearest reason that the Monochrome Set have never caught on over here is that their studio albums often overreach and under-deliver. The best record they released during their original incarnation was 1983's Volume, Contrast, Brilliance..., a cherry-picked miscellany of singles and radio sessions with a promising "Vol. 1" in its subtitle. Its 33-years-later sequel—shockingly, almost as good—is a set of demos recorded between 1978 and 1991. Some of them were abandoned, others reworked for more-finished records (although only "Black are the Flowers" substantially improved on the version here), and a couple were stripped for parts: the music and lyrics of "The Greatest Performance Artist in the World" ended up in two different songs more than a decade later.
Like the first one, Vol. 2 is a delightful mess. The casual recording quality of some of these demos serves them well: treble and wobble and drum machine play up the sense that even the minor ones have been rescued from the void, and highlight Bid's dry whimsy and melodic ingenuity. (One thing he picked up from his fondness for unfashionable music was a gift for croonable tunes.) "The Greatest Performance Artist," the liner notes claim, was initially dropped because "the band were unhappy with the lack of a real orchestra"; it's almost certainly better for sounding like it was whipped up in an afternoon.
The album's highlight, "I Want Your Skin," was originally intended to be a centerpiece of their 1990 album Dante's Casino, but not actually recorded for it. It's an elaborate and very clever joke, a headbanging riff-rocker with a lengthy, triumphant twin-guitar solo, in which Bid's lyrical persona feints first at being a macho Casanova who adores blue-eyed blondes, then at being a skin-collecting serial killer, and finally reveals the awful truth: the refrain we've been hearing as "I want your skin, honey" actually goes "I want your skin on Eve." (The song's stylistic allusions to Thin Lizzy underscore its punch line; Bid and Lizzy's Phil Lynott were both among the British Isles' very few nonwhite rock performers, and for that matter, the Monochrome Set's name could be a joke about race too.)
Maybe more than any of the band's other albums, this one focuses on their pop-as-commentary-on-pop songs. "Something About You" crouches on the opposite side of the room from the Monkees' "Pleasant Valley Sunday", exaggeratedly miming its every gesture; likewise, it took a certain kind of chutzpah for a punk band to write original songs called "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Fly Me to the Moon" in 1978. At times, Vol. 2 is even self-commentary: the opening riffs of "I Wanna Be Your Man" and "Cilla Black" are close variations on the ones from Vol. 1's "He's Frank (Slight Return)" and "The Jet Set Junta". The Monochrome Set has always thrived on combing the discarded past for jewels; it's only fair that they should find some in their own. | 2016-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Tapete | March 31, 2016 | 8.2 | 692ee786-1218-4463-bf88-6c9d4ac5227a | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
On her pristine third album, Hollie Cook, a UK singer and one-time Slits member, draws upon 1970s reggae in songs about love and resilience. | On her pristine third album, Hollie Cook, a UK singer and one-time Slits member, draws upon 1970s reggae in songs about love and resilience. | Hollie Cook: Vessel of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hollie-cook-vessel-of-love/ | Vessel of Love | Many women started playing music because of history’s first all-girl punk band, the Slits. But the British singer Hollie Cook launched her career as a reggae singer after being in the Slits. She was, in some sense, destined. Cook was born in 1987 to Jeni Cook, a backing singer for Culture Club, and Paul Cook, the drummer of the Sex Pistols who infamously helped steal all the gear that history-splitting band used to get started. Boy George is Cook’s godfather, and it is unlikely that Johnny Rotten has been in a photo more adorable than one, shared recently by Cook, of the pair backstage at a 1996 Sex Pistols reunion show. At 19, Cook was tapped by a family friend to sing at a recording session. It was Ari Up: the status-quo-annihilating, dreadlock-donning, firebrand Slits singer—a woman who, in her freedom of mind, was so controversial in punk’s early days that she was knifed on the streets of London; who not only fused punk with reggae, but subsequently moved to Jamaica and made a life there.
Cook eventually joined Ari in the reunited Slits lineup, touring the world with one of the most influential (if rarely recognized) groups in music history. And for the Slits’ 2009 album Trapped Animal, Cook wrote and sang her first song, “Cry Baby,” which also appeared on her self-titled 2011 debut, as “Cry.” Cook credits her Slits experience with turning her on to reggae and emboldening her to make music. In 2014, four years after Ari’s unexpected death from cancer, Cook opened her sophomore album with a heartfelt ode called “Ari Up.”
On her pristine third album, Vessel of Love, Cook sings her desire and pain into an exalted, beaming sway. Cook is influenced by singers like Janet Kay and Carroll Thompson, who helped define lover’s rock in the mid-1970s—the moment when rocksteady grew less political (and male) and more romantic. The producer Dennis Bovell has said “the theme of lover’s rock was to get young girls up front, singing,” and Cook’s work bears out that legacy. Lover’s rock subsisted on just as much yearning as 1960s girl groups, of which Cook is also a fan; she has herself covered the Shangri-Las. Vessel of Love, a collaboration with the producer Youth (of Killing Joke), adds more electronic flourishes to Cook’s mix of horns, strings, off-beats, and space. It incorporates drums from her former collaborator, Prince Fatty, inspired by the soundsystems of the early 1980s, and a few Vessel of Love songs are what Cook calls “Jah Wobble cast-offs that he didn’t end up using so I stole them and wrote music over them instead.”
For Cook, love and resilience are complementary forces. She fights for love and uses it as oxygen, rendering it a sustaining force. On “Together,” she practically turns it into a rallying cry: “Together we are one/Together we are powerful.” There is a thrill to the immediacy of Cook’s music—how the repetition becomes hypnotic, how the slow rhythms move your heart and bones. Cook’s voice is variously anchoring and featherlight, and she is equally compelling when singing of the complexities of heartache or offering a pure outpouring of adoration: “Your beautiful eyes have fallen from the sky,” Cook sings on “Survive.” She always sounds strong and self-possessed, and that is what most makes Vessel of Love sound like pure joy. She calls the highlight “Freefalling,” for example, a song about “being too free to love one person individually,” as she sings of “too much thunder in my heart/To hear you calling.” The title track is so squarely fit for a beach party—“I’m feeling low today/So I get myself high”—that it incorporates samples of crashing waves and squawking seagulls.
At the center of Vessel of Love is an enveloping daydream called “Lunar Addiction.” Its echoing, dubbed-out beats sparkle with a dizzied sensibility; it feels the way infatuation does, floating and unmoored. Cook sings of the moon and the ocean, “lucid and free,” losing her grip of reality: “I’m in a sphere of love/No sense of gravity/Take me away from it all/Transcending clarity.” She blissfully succumbs to its pull. It is perhaps ironic that an artist personally connected to both the Slits and the Sex Pistols by her teenage years would go on to make love songs as intoxicatingly beautiful as this. Those bands resented and rejected love, after all. But punk has always been enamored with reggae, and what Cook does is righteous in its own way: She is herself. By the end of Vessel of Love, it is apparent that an interest in reggae is far from the only thing Cook learned from Ari Up, or the most important thing. She learned to find her voice and make it heard. | 2018-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Merge | January 27, 2018 | 7.4 | 693016a0-090d-4920-b005-ec391605c300 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
A rediscovered gem from the prolific new age composer conjures the dreamy polyrhythms of Steve Reich to blissful and kinetic results. | A rediscovered gem from the prolific new age composer conjures the dreamy polyrhythms of Steve Reich to blissful and kinetic results. | Música Esporádica: Música Esporádica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/musica-esporadica-musica-esporadica/ | Música Esporádica | Unless you were a Steve Roach completist—an intimidating prospect, given his discography—you probably wouldn’t be familiar with the prolific new age composer’s ’90s collaborations with Spanish musician Suso Sáiz. Up until 2016, Sáiz’s music rarely landed outside his home country. But starting with the Amsterdam-based label Music from Memory’s handy introduction from that year, Odisea, Sáiz’s thoughtful work began to find new listeners. More music has followed, including a commissioned sound piece, a new album from earlier this year, and a retrospective of his new age band, Orquesta De Las Nubes. Each release showcases Sáiz’s contemplative nature as well as his openness as a collaborator, working with players ranging from Christian Fennesz to his own son.
Now comes the sterling sole release from the group Música Esporádica, Sáiz’s one-off with Nubes members María Villa and Pedro Estevan, Spanish guitarist Miguel Herrero, and American players Glen Velez and Layne Redmond. Esporádica is a bit of a “lost” album, but now it can take its place alongside rediscovered classics like Midori Takada’s Through the Looking Glass, Gigi Masin’s Wind, and Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music for Nine Post Cards. For what by all accounts was a spontaneous gathering in a nearby studio in 1985, the music feels telepathic, the six players moving as one to create something that feels kinetic and blissful at once.
As the relatively concise six minutes of “I Forgot the Shirts” makes clear, the group often conjures the dreamy polyrhythms of Steve Reich. This is no coincidence; Velez was an integral member of the ’70s and ’80s ensembles propelling Reich’s formidable early run, including Music for 18 Musicians, Tehillim, and Sextet/Six Marimbas. Velez met Sáiz on tour with Reich, and they bonded over their shared fondness for non-Western music. Velez’s specialities include the Egyptian riq, the Irish bodhran, and the North African tar, and his website dubs him “Father of the Modern Frame Drum Movement.”
Which is great if you are in search of an ayahuasca shaman or Burning Man buddy. But all received skepticism evaporates the moment Velez’s hands hit the animal skin at the start of the 12-minute title track. You can emerge hypnotized even after a dozen listens and still not retain much sense of what transpired. The atmosphere feels charged, as glints of guitar, additional percussion, and wordless harmonizing arise, the players roving in and out of focus. Velez’s pulse remains steady and imparts perpetual motion to everything, a train engine that blurs the landscape just enough to smudge the lines of reality.
“Meciendo El Engaño” is a similar length as “Música Esporádica,” but it moves more slowly. Sáiz takes the lead at the start, allowing his winding melody to swell upwards and fill the space. When Velez’s shakers emerge nearly three minutes in, the waters deepen imperceptibly. Instruments twinkle, voices turn into sirens, and everything turns hallucinatory.
If you skim through the album, many of the sounds here verge on “spa soundtrack,” but the group never falls back onto easy textures. Sáiz’s keyboard washes gather around those drums like storm clouds, at once massive, weightless, and dark. Velez’s frame drums are tribal, but each hit is made with intention, never just as an empty “world music” texture. Allow Música Esporádica to properly unfurl and it reveals itself to be immersive and celebratory, capturing an ecstatic meeting point between friends old and new.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Music From Memory | January 13, 2020 | 8 | 6940cec4-4f09-4b8e-ae61-bebc9d4cba2f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The largely anonymous London producer patten's ESTOILE NAIANT builds a satisfyingly awkward bridge between his inclinations to amble and to stick a fork in his machinery. On these tracks, room to breathe is as important as the restricted spaces of his earlier work. | The largely anonymous London producer patten's ESTOILE NAIANT builds a satisfyingly awkward bridge between his inclinations to amble and to stick a fork in his machinery. On these tracks, room to breathe is as important as the restricted spaces of his earlier work. | patten: ESTOILE NAIANT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19035-patten-estoile-naiant/ | ESTOILE NAIANT | patten's music is all sharp edges, cut from shapes that never sit easily alongside one another. The largely anonymous London-based producer has been around for a while, releasing music by others on his Kaleidoscope label, and making his first venture as patten with a CDR titled There Were Horizons back in 2007. His first official release, GLAQJO XAACSSO for No Pain in Pop, demonstrated his Warp fandom. This new collection, ESTOILE NAIANT, offers an alteration of the patten sound, picking up a thread from the more thought-out structures of last year's EOLIAN INSTATE EP, where room to breathe became as important as the restricted spaces of his prior work.
Throwing a veil of anonymity over proceedings rarely has the desired effect, often drawing attention to the personality behind the music instead of deflecting attention away from it. Just look at the endless questions that were raised in online discussions about Burial's pre-selfie identity, and the by-now quite tedious (and, at times, baffling) trove of misinformation trailing in his wake. "I wonder whether the focus could remain more fully on the materials produced without it being about the person, or people, who made it as such," patten said in an interview, on his desire to remain unidentified. Drawing such a big question mark, and making oblique Twitter posts and statements like "best and worst don't actually exist" (from the same interview), make it feel like he's craving attention, not shrinking from it. Besides, he doesn't appear to have much in his locker to differentiate himself from others who have chosen this path.
The net result of the half-thoughts that make up the patten mythos throw the music into a certain light, depending on how it's received. Certainly, if you buy into it, your expectations are likely to be raised. The ideas behind the music of ESTOILE NAIANT mostly work as a reflector of the energy he's using to construct a world outside the music, where tried-and-tested concepts are executed with a degree of precision, occasional inspiration, and a sizable volume of backward referencing to ground already covered elsewhere. It often skirts around junior Autechre mode, where jarring noises barely fit together and accelerate toward a place of further disharmony as the track progresses ("Drift", "Key Embedded"). In softer territory the spectre of Boards of Canada is undeniable ("23-45"). At times, on the better material here, patten builds a satisfyingly awkward bridge between his inclinations to amble and to stick a fork in his machinery ("Agen").
Bringing together strange juxtapositions produces some of the strongest work on ESTOILE NAIANT—the broken-down drum kit skittering over a faltering loop on "Gold Arc", the finicky beat set to a whistling motif on "Winter Strobing". But there's rarely a sense of direction, with tracks that build into turmoil often gaining superfluous extra layers, and works that fade into the shadows feeling oddly inconsequential. The overwhelming mood is one of ideas gathered, processed, and left to dangle in the air without much to frame them. "Maybe there's something interesting about finding methods of working where you can transcend your imagination so you’re not necessarily beginning with an end in sight," patten told Dummy, in a 2011 interview. On ESTOILE NAIANT it feel like that approach still informs what he does, but music that works effectively without end, that circles in place, still needs to find a strong position in the world. | 2014-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | March 4, 2014 | 6 | 6940ec4a-058b-43e5-839f-4e34f833995b | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Cordae’s latest album proves he doesn’t have an ethos or a sense of excitement that separates his music from other rappers with a working-class view. | Cordae’s latest album proves he doesn’t have an ethos or a sense of excitement that separates his music from other rappers with a working-class view. | Cordae: From a Bird’s Eye View | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cordae-from-a-birds-eye-view/ | From a Bird’s Eye View | Cordae has made a career off being a Gen Z artist influenced by the sounds of the ’90s. You expect to hear him extolling his hip-hop elders in songs like J. Cole or rapping about adolescent crushes unironically. Whereas many of his peers skew toward lyrics about drug use and subsequent torment, Cordae focuses on financial shortcomings and upward mobility. His 2019 debut The Lost Boy was ambitious, but he often sounds like a school kid who gets the best grades only because he’s the teacher’s pet.
From a Bird’s Eye View is hampered by these deficiencies. His production choices get more solid as the album goes on; he’s someone who’s studied the game extensively, and judging by the tales about his complex relationship with his father, he has a life story that can be emotionally affecting when told with gusto. But it’s easy to tune out Cordae’s music because he doesn’t have an ethos that separates his music from other rappers with a working-class worldview.
Although Cordae can be an engaging writer, on songs like “Momma’s Hood” his delivery is as dry as a teenager forced to read in class. “Jean-Michel” shows his competence as a rapper, but the song sounds like it’s reaching to be a classic ’90s rap interlude and landing at a Big Sean freestyle from L.A. Leakers. “Today” places Cordae with Atlanta rapper Gunna, and while the track isn’t embarrassing, it doesn’t extend beyond the median either. Gunna loves dropping peculiar phrases about shopping and trapping, and there isn’t any of that personality here.
Not every rapper has a sense of humor, but many of the best get by on wit. “Sinister” pits Cordae against Lil Wayne’s crassness, with nothing to show for it but lines like “Quitе nuclear/Amazing what fame could do to ya.” The standout “Chronicles” is an example of what Cordae could do if he took himself less seriously. The production hints at 2010s Jeremih, and H.E.R. turns in a great guest performance. Cordae does his best rapping on “Parables (Remix),” with the intensity of an underdog boxer. But just when you think he’s turned a corner, Eminem shows up at the end to sound like an NFT come to life.
From a Bird’s Eye View works best when Cordae taps into his more playful instincts, dissing detractors and making puns about NFL players along the way. It’s possible to be a pop rapper and be amusingly wild while still having an everyman quality. Cordae runs the risk of just fading into the background.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | ART@WAR / Atlantic | January 21, 2022 | 5 | 694a09fb-0d3d-4e73-91e0-2ddebb9d7f5c | Jayson Buford | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-buford/ | |
This sloppy 15-minute freebie reaffirms that, no matter how many names he takes or projects he starts, the former half of Hype Williams is always half-interesting. | This sloppy 15-minute freebie reaffirms that, no matter how many names he takes or projects he starts, the former half of Hype Williams is always half-interesting. | Dean Blunt: Soul on Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dean-blunt-soul-on-fire/ | Soul on Fire | Right now, any number of artists are working toward a Unified Theory of Pop, a synthesis of styles that’s able to appeal to hip-hop heads and indie rock fans alike while scoring Hollywood scenes and rendering cutting-edge club hits. Kanye may have gotten the closest, but you can hear the same quest through the likes of Dev Hynes, King Krule, and Mica Levi and the way their omnivorous musical interests converge. If he were capable of a cohesive statement, Dean Blunt might belong to that group, too.
Both as half of the hypnagogic pop obscurantists Hype Williams and across an array of releases under multiple names, Blunt has impressed, baffled, and underwhelmed, sometimes within a single song. At his ineffable best, he can connect the dots between Frank Ocean, A$AP Rocky, and Lauryn Hill, as he did while producing A$AP’s “Purity.” He’s been nearly impossible to keep tabs on lately, unless you’re able to click the WeTransfer links associated with a string of instant releases fast enough. In August, he issued an outlandish rock collection, Muggy Vol. 1. A few weeks ago, another YouTube link led to Inna, an experimental theater collaboration with Levi.
Now comes Soul on Fire, a mere quarter-hour of music that’s fragmented and unpolished, tossed off like a voice memo and hokey like a Mike Huckabee tweet. While it features the likes of A$AP Rocky, the rapper is relegated to hype-man role on opener “Chancer,” shouting about blunts against a backdrop made melodramatic by samples of swollen strings but deaded by Blunt’s somnambulant admission: “I ain’t even gonna try that hard.” At least he’s honest.
At almost every turn, Blunt half-heartedly mushes together aspects of hip-hop and lo-fi indie rock, making the earmarks of each genre sound ludicrous through juxtaposition. Tentative strums of untuned guitar and a primitive drum beat shroud “NBA” in a dour pall, while Blunt’s use of the most banal entries in the hip-hop lexicon (“all about the Benjamins” and “never broke again”) makes the song sound curiously daft. It’s as if Diddy hopped on an instrumental from Sebadoh’s Weed Forestin’.
Blunt might be taking shots at rap culture, with song titles alluding to the likes of YoungBoy Never Broke Again and Fetty Wap. But the chiming guitars and striding viola of “Petty Wap” are so unabashedly pretty that it’s hard not to hear it as a compliment. If only it lasted longer than 82 seconds.... On the other hand, the low-key Rhodes melody and smooth saxophone lines of “Ciao 2001,” which exist just long enough for Blunt to ask, “Are you sure that you wanna re-up,” make a minute feel like an eternity.
No matter Blunt’s number of albums, project names, or YouTube dumps, his hit-to-miss ratio hovers steadily around half-and-half. It’s as if he intentionally deflates expectations to keep away the casually curious. How else do you explain something as enthralling as Soul on Fire’s “A/X,” a nimble recasting of Gang of Four’s love song-as-chemical warfare “Anthrax,” amid such instantly forgettable surroundings? Despite the beguiling mix of Spanish guitar and breathless vocals that newcomer Poison Anna adds to “Beefa,” Blunt dashes the mood by stringing together lazy lines about Ibiza, Beamers, leaners, sneakers, and keepers. You don’t have to be a famous rapper or even fully awake to cook up a less-corny rhyme scheme. But, as always with Blunt, there is at least the suggestion of something wonderful. | 2018-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | self-released | October 3, 2018 | 5.3 | 6953ff65-6dd8-4bb5-95ba-854f00590783 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Millie & Andrea is the project of Andy Stott and Demdike Stare's Miles Whittaker. On their debut LP, the duo offer a mix of hollow dub techno, into-the-red noise, and breakbeats that hiss and spit with static, but the extra flourishes are what prove most surprising. | Millie & Andrea is the project of Andy Stott and Demdike Stare's Miles Whittaker. On their debut LP, the duo offer a mix of hollow dub techno, into-the-red noise, and breakbeats that hiss and spit with static, but the extra flourishes are what prove most surprising. | Millie & Andrea: Drop the Vowels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19147-millie-andrea-drop-the-vowels/ | Drop the Vowels | The primary players involved with Manchester's Modern Love label aren't known for their accessibility. As Demdike Stare, Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker have spent the last five years exploring techno's chillier, more obtuse corners, merging the library-music aesthetic of projects like BBC Radiophonic Workshop with the harsh, pounding dub of Basic Channel. On his own, Whittaker's explored a slightly more streamlined take on dance music—albeit a take that's prone to ear-blasting noise—while psychic brethren and fellow Mancunian Andy Stott's made a name for himself with his slow, bog-dipped dub techno, most recently perfected on 2012's astounding, vocal-heavy Luxury Problems.
The music coming out of this collective is often dark, ominous, and thrilling; that said, the abstractions the trio of artists work in are such that uninitiated listeners could ostensibly accuse this music of, well, not being much fun. That's where Stott and Whittaker's Millie & Andrea project comes in: back in 2008, the pair teamed up under their gender-bending aliases (Millie = Miles, Andrea = Andy) to release an impressive run of 12"s that, while staying true to their tunnel-beat outlook, were exploratory in nature, adding slinky basslines, bursts of melody, and aromatic vocal samples into their smoky cauldron. "Too many people are really too serious about what they're doing," Whittaker told FACT late last month. "And in the end a lot of music's just fun to make." That mission statement was best exemplified on "Stage 2", released at the top of this year and marking the first new music from the Millie & Andrea name in four years; the overwhelming track's clipped vocal samples, dizzying run of tones, and deeply felt bass suggested that, in returning, the pair were looking towards the hedonistic sounds of trap music for inspiration.
It will be a relief to some and a disappointment to others, then, that Drop the Vowels, the project's debut LP, is not a trap record, despite what its trend-baiting title suggests. Whittaker and Stott are still exploring familiar territory—hollow dub techno, into-the-red noise, breakbeats that hiss and spit with static—but they're still fond of coloring outside of the lines as they did on 2009's ecstatic "Ever Since You Came Down". "Stay Ugly" feeds a colorful synth line through distortion, as a drum break cyclically contracts and expands in nastiness; "Corrosive", the album's most easily apprehensible cut, takes clicking footwork patterns and slathers them in fog, arpeggiated tones rippling endlessly in the distance before another chaotic break crashes through to disrupt the proceedings. For those familiar with Whittaker and Stott's individual output, the firmament backing these sounds are unmistakably their creators'—but the extra flourishes are what prove most surprising.
Amidst Drop the Vowels' pleasing left-turns—the clipped vocal sample that kicks open "Spectral Source", a track originally released in Millie & Andrea's first run of 12"s, carries a sugared swing while also sounding like someone being slowly choked to death—Whittaker and Stott excel when zeroing in on texture. The layers of echo and frizzy static applied throughout are done to create a 3D effect—essentially, this is body music, in that the crashing noise feels so uncomfortably close-range that it can resemble someone scraping your eardrums with a knife. Whittaker and Stott possess a gentle side, too: the chaotic tumble of "Temper Tantrum" occasionally peels back to reveal a chipmunk'd vocal sample before emptying its cargo bay to reveal a lush backdrop of drone. Stick around until the track's very end, too, when Whittaker and Stott let loose a single, satisfying bass hit possessing a brown-sound subtlety.
Up to this point, Stott's Luxury Problems stood as the best entry point to his and Modern Love's harsh, uninviting world of razed sonics; while Drop the Vowels doesn't carry the game-changing nature of that album, the relative sonic variety it provides compared to Luxury Problems' expressively singular mindset makes for a solid introduction to one of contemporary techno's most consistently exciting collectives. When working together, Whittaker and Stott pull off an enviable trick of retaining specific stylistic tics they possess separately while creating something that sounds not quite like anything either of the artists have made before, and hopefully they won't wait so long to execute their collaborative talents again. | 2014-04-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-04-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | null | Modern Love | April 3, 2014 | 7.9 | 6954dc5b-487e-4713-9d48-522d2681590f | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
The underground rap vet caps a prolific mixtape run with a full-length DJ Muggs collaboration that’s loaded with the life experience to go with beats that bring to mind late-’90s Queens. | The underground rap vet caps a prolific mixtape run with a full-length DJ Muggs collaboration that’s loaded with the life experience to go with beats that bring to mind late-’90s Queens. | Raz Fresco / DJ Muggs: The Eternal Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/raz-fresco-dj-muggs-the-eternal-now/ | The Eternal Now | The thing about road trips is that I remember a lot more about the aux cord arguments and hot take debates along the way than I do snapping photos of the Grand Canyon. Admittedly, my biggest flaw as a rap fan is not taking that lesson to heart: I’m so caught up in what’s next that I forget that getting there is the best part. One rapper I wish I’d paid closer attention to is Raz Fresco, who got his start as a Brampton teenager in the early 2010s with a laid-back swag that resembled Wiz Khalifa if he were in the A$AP Mob. Eventually, he fell into the orbit of Atlanta’s DJ Holiday, and then Philly’s Don Cannon, releasing a string of solid, versatile mixtapes full of streetwise smoker’s anthems.
Somewhere in the middle of the decade, Raz Fresco fell off my radar. In that time he got deeper into his studies of the Five-Percent Nation, went to jail, had a near-death experience, and kept tinkering with his music. I wasn’t drawn back in until the pandemic, in the midst of his mixtape series Magneto Was Right, titled after an X-Men comic book fan theory that holds that the antihero Magneto’s idea for a violent revolution to free the mutants was more rational than Professor X’s philosophy of peace. In a little more than a year, Raz Fresco put out nine of these tapes, finding a real groove in the process. It wasn’t radically different from the music he’d released as a teenager, but it was headier and loaded with the life experience to go with beats that brought to mind late-’90s Queens. (I’d now place his music somewhere between the hard-nosed nostalgia of Griselda and the new age flyness of Mutant Academy.) He’s been prolific ever since, leading up to The Eternal Now, a satisfying joint project with reliable production OG DJ Muggs.
Over 15 slow-mo tracks, Raz Fresco uses his buttery flow to weave together hard-earned life lessons, five-percenter lingo, comic book references, and a sense of disillusionment with the commercialization of hip-hop. On “Smoke & Mirrors,” backdropped by Muggs at his dreamiest, Raz name-drops the creator of Spawn, calls someone a “pussy” and “a slave to the charts,” and reflects on his artistic morals: “You can’t get your soul back or reverse the hour hand/This is how it lasts.” Less thoughtful writing sometimes undercuts his message, veering into cliché with the repetition of “Who own the dollar own the country” on “Bloody Money” or repeating tired hip-hop talking points on “Fake Beef”: “Used to paint the walls, now it’s they fingernails.” Save those out-of-touch gripes for the old heads with a YouTube channel.
But I enjoy the way Raz’s raps sometimes feel like a period piece: If it weren’t for a couple of technological and pop culture references here and there, you would think he was living in 1995, not born in 1995. In an era when so many rappers under 30 sound like they all grew up on the same movies and television, he’s going on about Carl Sagan and Rocky IV, which isn’t digging that deep, but hey, at least it’s one less rapper talking about Paid in Full and Steph Curry. There’s a lot of twisty wordplay even if he never blows me away; his skill as a rapper is that he’s really easy to listen to no matter how ruminative he gets. On the horn-blaring “World Peace,” he threads together social critiques (political corruption, neighborhood violence) in a verbose way, but his flow is so smooth that you wouldn’t mind throwing on the track during a candlelight dinner.
As far as DJ Muggs’ beatmaking renaissance goes, nothing here will end up in his highlight reel. The last time a Muggs beat really caught me off guard was when he channeled Coke Wave on Jay Worthy’s “In New York.” His work on this album is by the books. No shame in that, because even basic Muggs is pretty sweet. The grimier, blunt-force instrumentals like “Blow the Spot Up” or “Fifty Bop” are on the duller side, while the standouts are so jazzy and breezy that they could soundtrack Gene Hackman cruising around New York in The French Connection (check out “Spooky”). But at this point, a joint project with Muggs is a right of passage: a victory lap for those who, like Raz Fresco, have survived the grind of the underground rap circuit and arrived at some sort of destination. | 2024-08-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-08-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Soul Assassins | August 1, 2024 | 7.1 | 6961f980-34f2-4cf2-b541-e2511a4dffb0 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The English producer’s full-length debut is full of cresting arpeggios and massive supersaws. It’s an ambitious ode to the ecstasy of trance music. | The English producer’s full-length debut is full of cresting arpeggios and massive supersaws. It’s an ambitious ode to the ecstasy of trance music. | Evian Christ: Revanchist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/evian-christ-revanchist/ | Revanchist | In the late 2000s and early 2010s, between dreamy cloud rap, the prog aspirations of Brainfeeder, and the commercial convergence of trap-EDM, the lines between hip-hop production and electronic experimentation were blurred like never before. Perhaps the most zeitgeisty example of that confluence was Kanye West’s Yeezus, which brought leftfield producers like Arca, Hudson Mohawke, and Evian Christ into the mainstream. Yeezus wasn’t startling only because of its abrasiveness; it was just so unexpected to hear the biggest rapper in the world entrusting his sound to a new generation of electronic beatmakers. Christ was a relative unknown before his contribution to album cut “I’m in It,” but even though that credit pushed him into the spotlight, the artist born Joshua Leary largely avoided a career as a more traditional producer-for-hire. Instead, he threw himself into the rave, honing his craft as a DJ by way of his long-running Trance Party club night.
Leary’s formal debut album, released a decade after that Kanye co-sign, still features the atmospheric layers that made his beats so bewitching back then. But you won’t find any trap hi-hats here; Revanchist is a ghostly love letter to the pure melodrama and overstimulating sensation of trance music. Opener “On Embers” hits you directly in the chest with massive supersaws, but Christ is just as captivated by moments of silence; indistinct gospel-house vocals hum, resembling shadowy figures silhouetted by smoke machines. “Yxguden” slowly builds with a cresting wave of synth arpeggios, before Bladee’s angelic falsetto and a thumping beat drop in tandem. “Free-free-free falling” are the first intelligible words on the album, evoking the unrestrained release that Christ nudges us toward.
Christ’s palette recalls the glittering stadium schmaltz of Y2K-era trance producers like ATB and Paul Van Dyk, but he amplifies the exhilaration by drawing everything out, letting the euphoric textures simmer. Like Burial did for hardcore breaks and junglism, Leary deconstructs familiar genre tropes and reverse engineers them into alien signals, extracting nuanced emotions from underneath the flashy exterior of pop music. Though tracks like “Yxguden” indulge in the outright ecstasy of vocal trance, Revanchist often denies us immediate catharsis to instead linger in the haze.
Thanks to his focus on live experience versus recorded music over the last few years, Christ’s work has grown slower and contemplative, more conducive to late-night comedowns than warming up the crowd. He approaches trance music less like a DJ weaving discrete tracks together, and more like the composer of a video game soundtrack conceptualizing sound as a spatial environment—Leary cites the iconic PlayStation 1 racing game WipeOut, which featured big beat tracks from the likes of Orbital and the Chemical Brothers, as a vital gateway to his love of dance music. The mammoth trap beats of 2014’s Waterfall EP were straightforward in their construction, where Revanchist is ambitious and structurally complex, trusting the listener enough to follow sounds that evolve in unexpected directions. “The Beach” is an endless swell with no way out, teasing a drop that never quite comes, as a distorted feminine voice bleeds into a rising tide of looping synth arpeggios and bass tones. The voices that Christ weaves in on tracks like “Silence” are lilting and warm, but strange too, mutated into misty choral chants; over the celestial piano of “With Me,” Swedish vocalist Merely stretches out her words, just like Leary’s synths reverberate with streaks of echo.
“Nobody Else” opens with a punishing four-on-the-floor rhythm: It’s like hearing the muted pounding of a rave in the distance and following the sound through the darkness. A chopped-up sample of Clairo’s “North” ebbs and flows before dissolving into pure feedback; at times, the beat disappears completely, nearly drowning in a whirlpool before Leary reels it back in. His sound is defined by its extreme peaks and valleys: On “Xkyrgios,” a raging jungle breakbeat unexpectedly breaks for moments of soothing clarity, like a clearing in a murky forest, only to thrust you back into the thick of the rave without warning.
While Christ has allegedly reunited with Kanye West in the studio, Revanchist positions him as more than just a producer working with a vocalist. Here, he’s an experiential sound designer, drawn to voices for their textural properties. In its heyday, trance music was often derided for its overt sentimentality, fueled by anonymous divas singing easily translatable lyrics about universal emotions. Although Leary flirts with that emotional sincerity, his vision of trance is like a fading memory that finds its own distinct beauty in the fuzzy edges. The “trance revival” has been promised for years, but Revanchist proves that the genre’s comeback isn’t just a phase; it takes this music as its own language rather than a nostalgic artifact, a living thing that can always be retranslated and redefined. | 2023-12-14T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-14T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | December 14, 2023 | 7.5 | 6967bcf1-fc61-42a3-8f1c-abe1a307b6f0 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Towkio is an associate of Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa, a part of their SaveMoney group, and on his debut, he attempts to follow in their path to success. Featuring Chance, Mensa, Donnie Trumpet, Kaytranada and others. | Towkio is an associate of Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa, a part of their SaveMoney group, and on his debut, he attempts to follow in their path to success. Featuring Chance, Mensa, Donnie Trumpet, Kaytranada and others. | Towkio: .Wav Theory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20536-wav-theory/ | .Wav Theory | Preston Oshita—who records as Towkio—does not want to settle for just good enough. Last year the 21-year-old acknowledged to the Chicago Tribune that following the respective successes of fellow SaveMoney members and childhood friends Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa, there are high expectations for him on his first full-length release. He addresses them directly on *.Wav Theory'*s Chance-featuring second track "Clean Up": "I get it get it, your friends did it, they famous/ And you rap, too, so when you gon' make it?" On his debut, he attempts to find a voice that is distinctly his own, to varying results.
Towkio's best trait is his ability to craft an effective pop track. He can flow nimbly, but the content of his lyrics often veers toward saccharine, rendering him more vocalist than rapper. "I Know You", for example, is a simple love song, but FKJ's smooth production and Towkio's catchy sample-aided chorus make up for less creative lines ("And I could take you there/ Like two shoes, girl, we make a pair"). On "Free Your Mind", Towkio rides a house beat, offering some basic uplifting words ("I can free your miiiiind!") alongside Donnie Trumpet's horn playing and breaking into short, catchy clips in the third verse. He knows how to keep the listener's attention, even if he has not yet figured out how best to provide substantial lyrical depth.
Towkio's attempts at wisdom tend to read as buzzwords or markers for profundity, rather than anything meaningful. The title track that opens the album features dial-up sounds and waves crashing, as well as the various connections among "The brain, [which] controls the heart/ The mind, [which] controls the brain/ The sun, [which] controls the moon/ [And] the moon, [which] controls the waves." Although admirably starry-eyed, the concept is generally lost on an album largely consisting of poppy, dancey love songs. Towkio finds his way to some genuine emotions on the Kaytranada-produced "Reflection", the story of a cocaine-addicted woman he still loves. The song digs deeper because of its tight narrative, attention to detail, and grounding in reality, in addition to Kaytranada's melancholically danceable beat.
As a pure bar-for-bar rapper, Towkio relies too heavily on backpack similes and punchlines to convey hackneyed ideas, as on "Clean Up": "I give them monkey bars, them bitches hold weight/ The game like 'Madden' in '08, I swear it's fucked up." On "God in Me", however, he compares himself playfully to an "infant or a puppy," not something you would catch more self-conscious rappers doing. Unfortunately, he ends up losing the beat—a reminder that he is anything but a finished product.
The Social Experiment's Peter Cottontale serves as the mixtape's executive producer, alongside Towkio himself, and the Chicago quartet's sound is apparent throughout, with official credits on five of the 12 songs. The songs on the tape strike as either "cool" ("RN", "Reflection", "Break You Off") or "happy" ("Clean Up", "Free Your Mind", "Heaven Only Knows"). Because Towkio deals in abstractions, there is little conflict or tension on the album, and the ideas with which he is grappling exist in the clouds. He admits as much on "Break You Off": "What we have in common is the conscious/ So I speak on the subjective 'cause the rest is nonsense." Towkio's nebulousness leaves .Wav Theory as an enjoyable album that asks few questions and gives few answers. | 2015-04-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-04-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | April 30, 2015 | 6.2 | 696e839b-7241-42b5-a3ab-6abfec0beaa8 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
Edward Droste follows his group's lo-fi debut Horn of Plenty by employing a fulltime band, moving to Warp, and expanding his ambition and sound. The result is a major step forward for the group, as well as one of the year's best records. | Edward Droste follows his group's lo-fi debut Horn of Plenty by employing a fulltime band, moving to Warp, and expanding his ambition and sound. The result is a major step forward for the group, as well as one of the year's best records. | Grizzly Bear: Yellow House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9365-yellow-house/ | Yellow House | Consider Grizzly Bear's cover of Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart", recorded some time ago and included on Sorry for the Delay, the mini-album collection of demos and early recordings released earlier this year. It finds leader Edward Droste struggling to meet the challenge of the song's strange angles and tricky construction with just an acoustic guitar, mostly by piling on intricately arranged vocal harmony. He slowed the song to half-speed, in part because half-speed is how Grizzly Bear like to do things, and in part because he needed the extra time to get the voices just so. Ten years ago such a cover may have seemed like an ironic appreciation of a corporate rock standard; that Grizzly Bear looked to the pop Yes back then is key, because it suggests that Droste is not afraid to get complicated and that he believes in the potential of widescreen sound.
This faith in something bigger is all over Yellow House, the band's second full-length and debut on Warp. It's not what you might expect from Grizzly Bear after hearing the apartment-recorded Horn of Plenty, the 2004 debut that was essentially a Droste solo record. Grizzly Bear seemed there like any number of post-Microphones indie bands stuck in the realm of lo-fi for lo-fi's sake, ready to let pinched, tinny sound create intimacy when the songs themselves couldn't quite manage. None of this early Grizzly Bear material is bad, but it has a tendency to drift away completely once the music stops, and after the remix companion to Horn of Plenty came out, people seemed to lose interest in the originals.
That's all behind us. Grizzly Bear are a full band now, Droste being joined again by Christopher Bear (on drums, the only holdover from Horn of Plenty), Chris Taylor (on electronics, woodwinds, and bass) and Daniel Rossen (who sings, contributes to songwriting, and plays guitar). They're still recording themselves, but they've grown more ambitious and seem to have acquired some decent gear. The studio this time was a living room in Droste's mother's place near Cape Cod; their own private Big Pink is, indeed, yellow, and they apparently had a lot of time to think about arrangement. No question this grander sonic space is where they belong. Opening track "Easier" lays it all out: flutes, a descending intro tapped out on a rickety upright, sustain pedal to the metal, a smear of fake strings (Mellotron?), and then the acoustic picking and Droste's voice, clear and full-spectrum for the first time and sounding, finally, like it should.
The following "Lullabye" is the album's calling card, the production this time supporting a meandering tune that skips up the side of a mountain. Grizzly Bear exhibit here a tendency that recurs throughout the record, of showing the seams in their songwriting and dividing the songs into mini-suites through jarring moments that signal a shift in emphasis. A discordant guitar tears "Lullabye" in half, separating the tuneful opening, which sounds like a lost Disney tune written to send a rosy-cheeked imp off to sleep, from the dark tower that looms behind. The second half's swirling harmonies and crashing drums evoke a Bob Ezrin-sized edifice that would leave a four-track recorder in a dozen pieces before the first brick was laid.
Such attention to detail and the larger well of resources improves Grizzly Bear at both ends of their range. The quieter songs sound better laced with effects and with the guitar and voice ringing true, and the climaxes carry greater weight. Another example of the latter is "Plans", which begins with a modest shuffle, picks up a chorus of whistling dwarves and some horns on loan from Tom Waits, and finally piles on some go-go nightclub percussion and laptop dissonance as it begins to buckle under its own weight. The imagination of its arrangement is impressive, as is the perfect 30-degree slope upward to its peak.
That's one end of the spectrum. But then they slip in something like the regal waltz "Marla", which was written by Droste's aunt in the 1930s and carries the sparkling dust of its vintage. Grizzly Bear infuse the song with a palpable atmosphere, the live instruments mixing with indistinct sounds courtesy of Chris Taylor's slippery electronics. He seems to be filling a role here similar to David Sitek in TV on the Radio, folding in odd noises at just the right moment to color the tunes in a very specific way. So "Marla", with its strings and accordion, suddenly opens up at the two-minute mark, when an echoing memory of a "sweet" big band 78 streams in for just a few seconds. "On a Neck, On a Spit" contains similar tweaks during its crashing instrumental break, with hard-to-peg wails that could be voices or could be strings but jack up the drama regardless.
Beyond production, Grizzly Bear have stepped up their songwriting in every way, assembling melodies that proceed in a logical fashion but never sound overused or overly familiar. Yellow House is a much better record than we could rightfully have expected from these guys, better, even, than we could have imagined them making. And I find myself wondering how much further they might go, whether another layer of sheen and more production possibilities would push them to even greater heights. There are still moments here where the sound isn't quite all it could be. More money, a better studio, and who knows what might happen. And hey-- what's Trevor Horn going for these days? Ah, a question for another day. For now, we have Yellow House, one of the year's best records. | 2006-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2006-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | September 6, 2006 | 8.7 | 69718261-92bf-4283-ba32-c600127869a5 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Leonard Cohen's 12th studio LP is a spare, low-key album rooted in blues and gospel-- maybe the closest thing he's made to "folk" music since the early 1970s. | Leonard Cohen's 12th studio LP is a spare, low-key album rooted in blues and gospel-- maybe the closest thing he's made to "folk" music since the early 1970s. | Leonard Cohen: Old Ideas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16228-leonard-cohen-old-ideas/ | Old Ideas | Old Ideas is, in its own tender, smirking, Leonard Cohen-y way, a clever title. In one sense, the ideas here are ones we've heard from Cohen before: Life is a nostalgic, sorrowful experience punctuated by the occasional joke; language can clarify as much as it can obscure; and lust is one of the highest forms of prayer. In another sense, Cohen is telling us that the ideas on this album-- home, healing, origins, and endings-- are ideas that take on a starker, more metaphorical weight as time goes on. We can trust Cohen to know: Over the past 77 years, he has, in a graceful but inevitable way, become old.
Cohen's voice has always sounded deep, flat, and naturalistic-- the kind of performance that attempts to sound like it's no performance at all. To describe the changes in it over the past 10 or 15 years, I defer in part to those little booklets that come around the necks of good Scotch: A powerful body of peat smoke with a briny finish. In essence, a whisper-- the voice of a voice whose center has been carved away. Old Ideas doesn't remind me of Bob Dylan as much it does of late Johnny Cash records, or even Charlie Louvin's Steps to Heaven: documents of voices so heavy and close that to hear them is to smell the singer's breath and see the gradient of yellow on their teeth.
It's easy to think of Cohen as a folksinger since "folksinger" is common shorthand for musicians who tend to privilege words over music. Cohen, though, tends to go where his musical collaborators and arrangers lead him, whether it's grimy dive-bar ballads, disco, bare-bones guitar blues, or orchestral elaborations. For a Zen monk who started his career as a poet, Leonard Cohen has used a lot of synth horns.
Old Ideas is a spare, low-key album rooted in blues and gospel-- maybe the closest thing he's made to "folk" music since the early 1970s. Backup singers sing passionate, wordless melodies; the bass sounds like the big, upright kind. I think it's his first studio album in 20 years to not rely exclusively on drum machines for percussion. The musical setting suits the state of his voice, which is meant as a mixed compliment: One of the great things about hearing his 1980s and 1990s albums was trying to reconcile his heroic presence with all the Casios. Some of the best moments on Old Ideas-- like the bizarre foregrounding of synthesizer during the album's first thirty seconds-- prove that Cohen and his collaborators have the wits to remind listeners that as soon as tape is rolling, nothing-- no croak, no wail, no plea-- is all-natural.
Cohen's voice alone, though, is a gorgeous, singular instrument. It carries in it a quality that is difficult to discuss without either becoming sentimental or appealing to the misguided idea that just because you play an acoustic guitar or sing close to the microphone, what you do is more honest than someone who attempts to create an experience of truth in some other way. It's a voice that mimics states of human yearning: The point at which we start to sound too tired or worn-down to speak, the point at which we start to cry, the way we whisper to people whom we are very, very close.
Maybe it's only context that makes me think that songs such as "Show Me the Place", where his voice becomes so weak it nearly falls silent in the middle of a line, is anything more than maudlin. Maybe the past 40-plus years of music serve as some kind of apology, as though to publicly reckon with the fact that according to the World Bank you are fast approaching life expectancy is something Cohen-- or any human being-- needs to earn their right to.
This is not the best album Cohen has put out. It is also not The Bucket List-- certainly not cheap or trivial or trading on his age alone. The songs are decent, the singing is stunning. He claims to be naked and filthy. He claims to be a lazy bastard. He claims to have been a slave for love. But he has claimed these things before. He is as old as he has ever been. | 2012-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | February 1, 2012 | 7.4 | 697f3580-3546-4a91-b1c5-aa182bfb63e5 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The South Florida rapper carves out his own lane within the genre known as SoundCloud rap, displaying considerable versatility as he channels the pain and confusion of youth. | The South Florida rapper carves out his own lane within the genre known as SoundCloud rap, displaying considerable versatility as he channels the pain and confusion of youth. | Denzel Curry: TA13OO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/denzel-curry-ta13oo/ | TA13OO | In the chaotic arena that is SoundCloud rap, Denzel Curry has etched out his own distinct realm. Presumably he doesn’t mind being tagged as a SoundCloud rapper, as murky and hard to define as that term is. It was just in May that Curry went to the mattresses to uphold his version of the genre’s history, using Twitter and interviews to torpedo Smokepurpp’s claim to have fathered the movement. “You Spelled RVIDXR KLVN Wrong,” Curry responded to a Complex tweet quoting Smokepurpp’s claim to have “birthed” the genre. (RVIDXR KLVN, for the uninitiated, is the collective formed and led by Spaceghostpurrp—no relation to Smoke—that Curry was once a member of.) The scramble to write the narrative of this odd corner of the internet is on, and it turns out hip-hop is no better at policing online than governments or large-scale social media platforms.
Smokepurpp, Ski Mask the Slump God, XXXTentacion; South Florida has been a colony of a style of rap that is at once extremely cursed, wrought of iron, played to the bone. SoundCloud rap as a genre—as opposed to rap music posted to SoundCloud—usually means scuzzy production, punchy bars, hooky choruses, anarchic shock tactics, and, more often than not, deeply troubled stars. Curry—straight out of Carol City, Miami Gardens—can tune his voice to a manic setting, spitting on devastating beats that sound just two degrees short of blasting out speakers. But he brings a level of emotional resonance and elegance to his writing that isn’t typically associated with the form. Curry’s music ripples with the kind of pain that liquifies the heart and chills the soul. The cover of his third full-length, TA1300 (which, for some reason, is “Taboo,” stylized) features Curry in menacing face paint, looking like he’s about to commit a heist in Dead Presidents or hunt humans in The Purge. But this is a 23-year-old kid who a few years ago hit the road in the aftermath of dealing with his brother’s death. He understands the need for masks.
Everything impressive about Curry’s burgeoning artistry is distilled into the song “Taboo.” Detailing his relationship with a young woman who grew up suffering horrible abuse, the rapper lays out the emotional distance that needs to be bridged between two damaged people. In his fractured state, Curry offers a shoulder to cry on, a partner to pray with, and unconvincingly plays with the idea of sex as a healer. Over bluesy guitar plucks, he veers from forceful rapping to soulful singing, showcasing a voice capable of conveying the full gamut of sentiment, while the vocal effects placed at the end of bars suggests the erosion of his spirit. And he positions this song as track number one! As a table setter, that’s a bold move.
The first third has the most surprises. Curry describes the album as being split into three sections: the light, the gray, and the dark side, though there isn’t a whole lot of brightness to the opening segment. Finatik N Zac’s production on “Black Balloons” might bounce like the kind of mid-1990s rap hit that would have gotten plenty of MTV rotation, but Curry spends his verse pondering suicide (“Soon black balloons pop/That’ll be the day the pain stops.”) The song plays as a reminder that pain often bubbles beneath a veneer of extraversion—the tears of a clown are often the most acidic. It’s a theme he frequently returns to. Take “Clout Cobain,” from the gray section: a reminder that Kurt resonates with kids too young to have copped In Utero first time around.
Away from the tracks with heavier themes, the battering “Sumo” fully immerses in SoundCloud rap’s core tenets, with Curry’s shit-talking one-liners extremely on point: Saying you’ve got pockets like a sumo is the hilarious long way round to describing the size of your money clip. Curry also finds a synonym for “bricks” in Shaq’s free throws before name-dropping wrestler Rikishi. “Sumo” even makes a sample of Lil Jon’s yells of “WHAT!” sound fresh 14 years after Dave Chappelle made it uncool.
Some ears will never adjust to songs like “Sumo” or the noisy, head-banging number “Black Metal Terrorist.” The dissonance of these tracks owes a debt to rap metal, Aphex Twin, and Yeezus, in no particular order. On top of the chaos, Curry’s voice is clean and youthful, carrying the kind of power once deployed by a 16-year-old Chief Keef. It’s the menace of guys who are young, dumb, and with precisely zero scruples.
There are moments when Curry’s dedication to the album’s core strengths slides away. On “Sirens,” the switch between fiery rapping and clean pop hook doesn’t quite mesh with the beat, making it a rare moment when his vocal instincts fail. It’s an all-in socially engaged number featuring, among other things, some stray shots fired at serpent-in-chief Donald Trump, which, though undoubtedly unfeigned, feels a little perfunctory in a world where rap music is frequently providing the most trenchant critiques of Trump’s America.
It’s when he sticks to the highly personal that Curry’s music is devoid of all cliché—the power of his performance, the veracity of his pen, and the color of his wordplay make him an expert at voicing the tribulations of this doomed condition we call being young. All of this makes him impossible to place in the broader SoundCloud rap domain. Signs point to an artist who will outlast any single distribution platform—or any of the genres named for them. | 2018-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Loma Vista | July 27, 2018 | 7.7 | 698bcdc8-769c-49e1-9870-139d6c92ebdf | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Van Morrison’s 37th album is a thorough exploration of the blues. It’s crisp, precise, and reveals his ability to inhabit classic songs while paying respect to their form. | Van Morrison’s 37th album is a thorough exploration of the blues. It’s crisp, precise, and reveals his ability to inhabit classic songs while paying respect to their form. | Van Morrison: Roll With the Punches | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/van-morrison-roll-with-the-punches/ | Roll With the Punches | There are traditionally three or four different Van Morrisons at any given time, depending on the album. His recordings in the ’00s and ’10s have attempted to reflect him from as many musical angles as can possibly fit within 70 minutes: R&B, folk, soul, and blues, sometimes interchangeably and sometimes in thoughtful combinations. It is often difficult to determine, in the course of these records, if Morrison’s relentless swerving between genres is part of a meaningful, collagist design, or if it is just him working through familiar modalities. But it’s rarely uninteresting to hear, situated next to each other, a song where Morrison sings as if he’s suspended in the slow-motion whirl of a snow globe, followed by a song where his voice chomps through the heave and shudder of the electric blues.
Roll With the Punches, Morrison’s 37th album, is his first full-length studio exploration of the blues, which is surprising if only for how much the blues has figured directly into Morrison’s life. On the album, he covers artists as stylistically diverse as Little Walter, who pushed the tonal possibilities of the harmonica into unknown, distorted regions in the 1950s, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who in the 1930s synthesized the blues into a pop-gospel idiom that prefigured rock‘n’roll. “The thing about the blues is you don't dissect it—you just do it,” Morrison said in a statement that accompanied the record’s announcement. The album does exhibit a kind of automatism, the concept seemingly born out of primal impulse. In its singular focus, Roll with the Punches resembles the only other studio album in his catalog where he unwaveringly pursued a tangent—2006’s Pay the Devil, on which he devoted himself to country standards, recording what was essentially a more gnomic version of Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.
But the territory here is more familiar and immediate to Morrison than the nostalgic and contemplative country-western vistas of Pay the Devil. On Roll with the Punches, Morrison doesn’t reach back through his own music or through the infrastructure of a genre so much as he reaches back and sifts through the texture of his own past. In this way, the album feels more autobiographical than any of Morrison’s more mystically-derived records; it’s a collection of songs that establish a narrative of Morrison’s personal relationship with music, of how he discovered the dimensions of his own voice through blues, early rock‘n’roll, and soul. Even at the age of 72, Morrison has some of that electricity he must have felt when he first started imitating these songs as a teenager, assembling his voice through listening to and simulating Lead Belly records until it began to sound harsh, percussive, slippery, tending to swim between notes instead of hitting them precisely, but also making every syllable sound as if they were drawn up from a great inner distance, like a stone rescued from the bottom of the ocean.
Morrison’s covers on Roll with the Punches express themselves primarily in the language of Chicago electric blues—that heavy Muddy Waters lurch, the guitar tones gnarled and internally knotted. It prioritizes the harmonica as an instrument; when Morrison merges T-Bone Walker’s blues standard “Stormy Monday” with “Lonely Avenue”—a Doc Pomus composition most famously recorded by Charles—he introduces a harmonica solo that achieves a near-industrial vibration, like the angry, metallic blur of sound issued by a neglected air conditioner.
Roll with the Punches also includes a new recording of Sam Cooke’s “Bring it on Home to Me,” a song Morrison’s performed with regularity throughout his career. Where a younger Morrison fills up the song with restless syllabic inventions (“If you ever...change your mind...about leaving-uh, leaving-uh me behind-uh!”), contemporary Morrison slides through the song with the unconscious ease and familiarity with which one might navigate through the furniture in the dark. “I gave you everything, everything I had in the bank,” he sings, his vocal ability considerably narrowed, but also still containing so much of the atomic instability that formed it in the first place. “Now it’s time for you, time for you to say thanks.” The lyric is a pocket of mental weather Morrison inhabits comfortably, to the point where it seems identical to the one that produces his innumerable songs about getting ripped off by the record industry, the air filled as much with conspiracy as fraternity.
But the most thrilling moment on the record is when its volume suddenly drops for “Goin’ to Chicago,” so that it sounds as if Morrison, Georgie Fame, and Chris Hill—who plucks the walking bassline which forms the song’s spine—are exchanging simple melodic ideas in the uncrowded air. Morrison sings, “Goin’ to Chicago/So sorry that I can’t take you,” and then Fame, his vocal a liquid counterpoint to Morrison’s more inflexible and geologic formations, sings, “I come from Chi-town, Chi-town is my town,” and the effect is lovely, two powerful vocalists tracing and retracing each other’s phrases just as they start to evaporate from the arrangement.
Roll with the Punches is a narrow portrait of Morrison, a chiaroscuro, Morrison surfacing in fragments through heavy shadows. There’s little sense of trajectory or transport, no string sections drawing golden light through the open space in his songs, where the coincidences of the physical world can be individual portals to the celestial. It’s crisp and precise. Morrison inhabits the songs, he delights in singing them, but he also respects them, living inside of their structures without disturbing them or re-envisioning them so that they extend elastically around him.
Of course, Astral Weeks, his consensus masterwork, is also a narrow portrait of Morrison, one in which he falls through a space so nonlinear and shapeless that there’s no sense of it beginning or ending—there’s just the falling. Roll with the Punches never falls, or even falters, exactly; it’s just a series of punches, whether of the clock or in the air, landing with consistency and specificity and only occasionally drifting into anonymity. To paraphrase Morrison himself, it doesn't pull any punches, but it doesn't push the river. | 2017-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exile | September 27, 2017 | 6.4 | 6990873d-6a8e-4a6b-909c-09f51f994a8f | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | |
On his third album as bandleader, the star saxophonist tries to balance his habitual gravitas with a newfound sense of fun. But party music doesn’t come to him as naturally as heroic high drama. | On his third album as bandleader, the star saxophonist tries to balance his habitual gravitas with a newfound sense of fun. But party music doesn’t come to him as naturally as heroic high drama. | Kamasi Washington: Fearless Movement | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kamasi-washington-fearless-movement/ | Fearless Movement | Kamasi Washington likes to go big. The star saxophonist and bandleader’s debut album was a 3xLP extravaganza appositely titled The Epic. The follow-up, Heaven and Earth, was a bit briefer—only two hours this time—but even more ambitious. Fearless Movement, the third full-length with his name on the spine, shows signs of scaling back and relaxing. Its runtime is a comparatively lean 86 minutes. The third track is a Zapp cover; George Clinton shows up a couple tunes later on a funk jam called “Get Lit.” There are guest verses from a few different rappers, little-known names who bring throwback block-party MC energy even when their subject matter gets heady. For the first time, Washington seems interested in conveying not just big feelings like joy, struggle, and transcendence, but also something like fun—just as important, no doubt, and perhaps even more difficult to get across.
Washington became jazz’s most recognizable new face in part through his conviction that jazz writ large is a pressing contemporary concern. Though he has collaborated with high-profile musicians from outside of jazz—Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly the greatest among them—his own music communicates a populist spirit not through concessions to mainstream styles, but grand scale and sheer musical urgency. With their large ensembles, thunderous climaxes, and marathon runtimes, his records present jazz as vitally important, worth paying attention to even if you’re not a connoisseur.
This heavy import can suffocate playful invention and human idiosyncrasy, two forces as central to jazz as the composerly ambition and spiritual yearning that characterize much of Washington’s work. In theory, the relative lightness of Fearless Movement is a natural and welcome next step after his pair of zeitgeist-grabbing epics. But too often, tunes that might prance, flex, and delight remain burdened by their own gravity. Fearless Movement’s first half is filled with guest vocalists delivering songs that attempt awkwardly to be soundtracks for both revelry and deep contemplation. The album gets better when it dispenses with its noncommittal relationship to party music, freeing Washington to pursue the heroic high drama that’s still his strong suit.
The players, all excellent musicians, are drawn largely from the same crew of friends that powered Washington’s earlier work. Their default mode is full-tilt shredding, which can be thrilling and stultifying. Accompanists tend to nip at the heels of soloists rather than hang back and let them cook, an approach that pushes both sides to greater excitement when it’s working well: When Brandon Coleman’s organ dogs Dontae Winslow’s trumpet on “The Garden Path,” Winslow bobs and weaves as if to evade its pursuit, and Coleman responds by digging in even more ferociously. But when they’re all going so hard all the time, it leaves little room for the surprise of an individual outburst or the sensuality of negative space. There are two drummers playing full kits, and several additional percussionists; when one starts to settle into a pocket that might get bodies moving, the other tends to take it as a cue to start up with busy fills.
Zapp’s “Computer Love,” in its original 1986 version, presented prescient social commentary with campy good humor and an irresistible groove. Washington’s cover takes out the dance beat, doubles the runtime, and adds a solemn horn intro, as if listeners need these signifiers of seriousness to understand that there’s a message about digitally mediated relationships entwined with Zapp’s pop appeal. “Get Lit” is more squarely aimed at setting off the good times, and it nearly succeeds with its swampy rhythm section and dose of freakiness from Clinton on the hook. But when rapper D Smoke, winner of the Netflix hip-hop competition show Rhythm + Flow, shows up to do a frothy Anderson .Paak impression on the verses, it gives that feeling of mandatory celebration you sometimes encounter at office parties. It’s hard to have fun when the host seems so thirsty to entertain.
The other guest rappers are Ras and Taj Austin, sons of West Coast lifer Ras Kass, who deliver Freestyle Fellowship-style conscious rhymes over the band’s electric churn on “Asha the First.” Given Washington’s contributions to one of the greatest jazz-rap fusion records ever made, it’s disappointing that he seems content to drop a couple of verses into the middle of a jam, without much consideration for how the pieces fit together. A jazz solo and a rap verse have a lot in common: Good ones balance individual flair with consideration for the context of the larger song. The Austin brothers come across as technically skilled but lacking the thematic grasp that might help them to convincingly inhabit the music around them. Like D Smoke, their appearances can’t help but feel like incursions, breaking the sense of a holistically unified musical world that Washington so deftly created on his previous albums.
Fearless Movement is much stronger in its second half, starting with “Dream State,” an exercise in hypnotic minimalism featuring André 3000 on flutes. He and Washington have an easy chemistry, with the sax’s long expressive phrases meandering pleasantly around the flute’s looped arpeggios. Perhaps the coolness of their playing inspired the rhythm section to chill out a little: Halfway through “Dream State,” they finally enter with the album’s slinkiest and sexiest groove, its laid-back swagger contrasting nicely with the meditative stillness of the winds.
“The Garden Path” has the album’s most exuberant melody, one that immediately felt familiar and right the first time I heard it. The band goes full tilt without getting in each other’s way, just rocketing together in the same direction. When they return to the theme after a searing solo, there’s an air of real triumph, like returning home from a great trial. This is the sort of stuff Washington does best. Though it may seem more serious or less accessible on its surface than a track like “Get Lit,” it’s actually far more inviting: Washington seems to believe completely in what he’s doing, where his attempt at a dancefloor banger rings hollow. That sense of conviction, coupled with Washington’s ability to deliver on his vision, reinforces the invitation to commune with the music. You don’t want to hear someone half-step; you want to hear them commit.
Another reason Washington has resonated with listeners outside of traditional jazz channels may be the way he elevates the album itself—the sum of its arrangements, production, sequencing, and so on—to a position of aesthetic significance equal to or greater than the improvising that those traditional channels tend to value. (He’s not the first jazz player to give his music this sort of presentation, which can also help to account for why Bitches Brew, for instance, is so much more popular among rock fans than Workin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet.) It may seem strange to barely mention the actual playing here, but Washington’s music is like that: For better or worse, his albums sweep you up with a force that can seem bigger than any individual soloist, bandleader included.
As with his career at large, Washington’s strongest moments as a saxophonist tend to involve emphasis rather than invention. He’s a skilled technician; when he plays fast lines, he can come dangerously close to sounding like he’s still in the practice room, running arpeggios and scales. But he’s a master of what’s sometimes called “the cry of jazz”: the pained, ecstatic expression that emerges from an instrument or voice at a climactic moment and seems to transcend theory and technique in favor of pure emotion.
It’s there in his solo on the album-opening “Lesanu,” and again on the album-closing “Prologue.” In the latter, the band steadily ascends through a series of long-held chords, growing more frenzied as they climb, each one seeming like the last, then yielding to a new plane of even greater intensity. Washington climbs with them, wailing and growling. Eventually, he lands on a single repeated note, playing it again and again with furious and desperate resolve, as if something precious and unnamable is on the line. It’s clear that those high stakes are real in his music. In these moments of Washington’s greatest power as a player—which, it must be said, arrive a little less often than usual on Fearless Movement—it’s easy for a listener to believe, too. | 2024-05-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-05-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Young | May 7, 2024 | 6.9 | 69a5e3ed-c8e2-497b-9c20-7cc92642ab97 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The Japanese DJ/producer Chee Shimizu curates a two-volume selection of obscure Japanese pop that runs the gamut from jazz fusion to New Age and prog rock. | The Japanese DJ/producer Chee Shimizu curates a two-volume selection of obscure Japanese pop that runs the gamut from jazz fusion to New Age and prog rock. | Various Artists: More Better Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22220-more-better-days/ | More Better Days | It looks as if Japanese music from the 1980s is finally garnering more attention in the west. The closest parallel to this moment might be to the mid ’90s, when German rock and electronic music beyond Kraftwerk and the Scorpions began to gain some traction in the States thanks to some timely reissues. This access in turn allowed kosmische music to be more readily woven into the musical fabric of a new generation, and it was easy to hear the influence of Can, Faust and Neu! on the likes of Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Stereolab, Radiohead, and more.
But navigating Japanese major label legalese has proven to be a stumbling block for enthusiasts hoping to bring much of this music back to light. Thankfully, last year’s reissue of Mariah’s final album Utakata No Hibi hinted that a thaw might finally be occurring. It didn’t hurt that it was an out-of-nowhere underground hit, selling out multiple pressings and landing on year-end lists, not bad for an album full of Japanese drums, skronking sax, ’80s studio slickness, and Armenian vocals. Part of Mariah’s buzz stemmed from the efforts of DJ/producer Chee Shimizu, known to pass copies onto his DJ friends in the west. His Obscure Sound book likely whetted appetites and added to numerous Discogs want lists searching for more of this stuff (the choicest albums on the label go for three-digit sums).
Now comes More Better Days, a two-disc set pulled from the short-lived Better Days label (which originally released the Mariah record) and curated by Shimizu. An offshoot of Nippon Columbia Co, Ltd. in the late ’70s, the sub-label focused on the then-popular jazz/ fusion scene cropping up in the country. Ever the meticulous selector, Shimizu deep-dives into the label’s catalog and divvies up the music along two axes: Avant-Wave and Funky & Mellow. No matter your knowledge of Japanese music, the sets at the very least showcase that country’s uncanny sense of fusion, juxtaposition and impeccable aesthetics that has enchanted and informed any number of western artists, from Bowie to Grace Jones to Björk. New Age abuts blocks of jazz saxophone, shredding prog-rock guitars meets koto drumming and/or early drum machine skitters, while the next song might be dubbed-out disco or what that scene in Lost in Translation might have been like had Bill Murray done a karaoke version of “Lowdown.”
The first disc, subtitled Avant-Wave, is the perfect entry for adventurous listeners, as almost every track presents bizarre musical connections as a matter of course. People thrilled by the manic style-mashing of Oneohtrix Point Never, Grimes, and Arca will find those artists' strange sensibilities rooted here. Saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu’s (the man behind Mariah and the similarly revered album Kakashi) “Semi Tori No Hi” is a gentle sound bath of chimes and flutes that gets punctuated by martial snares and wobbling feedback, at once serene and destabilized. Colored Music—the lone 1981 collaboration between Atsuo Fujimoto and Ichiko Hashimoto—anticipates techno on the furious “Heartbeat,” while “Ei Sei Raku” somehow combines spiky post-punk guitars, Miles’ “Rated X” organ drones, female coos and a drum break as bombastic as anything Phil Collins did in ’80s Genesis into something coherent and cool.
The furious polyrhythmic patterns of the Mkwaju Ensemble’s “Tira-Rin” and “Wood Dance” will no doubt register for a western listener as similar to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, a piece greatly influenced by Far East music systems like Balinese gamelan. So while it’s an exotic sound to our ears, it’s just as fascinating to hear that approach to ever-shifting rhythm and tonalities as just part of the pop fabric.
Inversely, More Better Days shows what it’s like when Japanese players obsess over the likes of Steely Dan, Bob Marley, and Lalo Schifrin. “Funk Fanky” by Arakawa Band sounds like a lost ’70s cop show theme, but one that charges on for over five minutes. “Huang Di” has the bass pop of “Let’s Hear It For the Boy” before taking a sax-laced hypnagogic detour. It’s not quite as charming as it sounds. The highlights include the sleek modern funk/AOR of vocalist Eri Ohno and the contributions from a conga player named Pecker, whose dead-on reggae cover of Bob Marley’s “Concrete Jungle” were abetted by bringing the likes of Sly & Robbie, Aston “Family Man” Barrett and Augustus Pablo in for the session.
One of the major stars to come out of the Better Days imprint was Ryuichi Sakamoto, one-time member of Yellow Magic Orchestra who went on to be an early electro icon and collaborate with the likes of Iggy Pop, David Sylvian, and Fennesz, co-starred with David Bowie on Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and most recently, collaborated with Bryce Dessner and Alva Noto on the soundtrack for The Revenant. Sakamoto’s nearly four-decade career is irreducible, and his chameleonic spirit might be the closest to that of Bowie. It’s this changeling quality of his music that informs More Better Days: Sakamoto contributes the effervescent synth-pop of “Plastic Bamboo” and then slides into the background as accompanist on other songs, adding George Duke licks one moment while dissolving into an ambient haze on another. Sakamoto’s sound can be both instantly identifiable and obscure at once, but his music is always surprising. So it goes for the majority of the music on More Better Days, even if the biggest surprise now is that this era of Japanese pop is readily available again. | 2016-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Better Days | August 15, 2016 | 8.3 | 69a9595c-8b63-41cf-98db-424aca937806 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Jay Reatard was the kingpin of Memphis garage rock, and his best and most powerful full-length work—the record that made him a standalone rock star—was his first solo album. | Jay Reatard was the kingpin of Memphis garage rock, and his best and most powerful full-length work—the record that made him a standalone rock star—was his first solo album. | Jay Reatard: Blood Visions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21714-blood-visions/ | Blood Visions | Jay Reatard’s reputation was to smash disco balls and get in on-stage fights—the kind of guy who tried to make people laugh by shooting bottle rockets out his ass. As wild and ridiculous as he was, he took his music seriously. He moved away from home when he was 16 and dropped out of high school, meaning most of his considerable free time was spent writing and recording music. He always had several bands going at once; he figured that if he played with each of his bands at least once a month, he’d make enough to get by. He was an excellent guitarist who got really good at recording; his collective discography was massive. It was his living, so the endless touring, huge pile of records, and even the provocations and live show destruction could be seen as business savvy. He played fast, he played loud, and in the early days of YouTube, his every move was documented.
By the time he died in early 2010, Jay Reatard had long usurped the Oblivians’ throne and ruled as the undisputed kingpin of Memphis garage rock. (He knew it, too—he quipped that getting thrown out of Gonerfest was like “kicking Jimi Hendrix out of Woodstock.”) He wasn’t just some local figurehead, either—he was the standard bearer for an entire genre. Obviously there were prolific punks before him, but Jay standardized the practice of putting out tons of music under several names in the internet age. He never seemed to oversaturate the market, either, since his audience kept coming back for more. That torch is carried today by guys like Ty Segall and Sick Thoughts’ Drew Owen. When Jay’s profile raised after he signed with Matador, he pulled artists like Hunx and His Punx and Nobunny into the spotlight with him by bringing them on tour. His absence is jarring, but his influence—both sonically and structurally—is still palpable in garage punk circles. That’s partially due to his work in the Reatards and Lost Sounds, but his best and most powerful full-length work—and the record that made him a standalone rock star—was his first solo album.
Blood Visions came together in the aftermath of the Lost Sounds’ dissolution. After Jay broke up with bandmate Alicja Trout, the band fell apart in short order. Their final tour in 2005 ended badly—there was a physical altercation between Jay and Alicja. He was in a "really, really bad place" when he temporarily decamped to Atlanta later that year. While staying in an apartment with Alix Brown and Black Lips’ Jared Swilley, he channeled everything into a murderous revenge album. (When asked if the record was about a particular girl, he revealed, “Yeah, a couple.”) He borrowed Carbonas’ practice space and knocked out most of the songs in one or two takes. Ten years later, the result is still a revelation.
The album is a portrait of a moony-eyed murderer. As a boy, he starts attacking his own family. When he falls in love, he lurks in the shadows and watches her from afar. "I won't stop until you're dead,/ because of voices in my head," he sings on "Fading All Away." This is the stuff of horror movies—love that leads to obsession, graduates to stalking, and culminates in murder. It's a narrative framed perfectly by his performance. In "Death Is Forming," as he attempts to veer away from dark thoughts, the words "death is forming" rush in at an anxious rapid-fire. With some simple studio work, Jay makes himself the narrator and all the voices in the narrator's head—the tortured and the torturer. He also offsets some of the stalking menace with power-pop riffs and tambourines, which puts "Nightmares" in the same tradition as the Ramones' Nazi love song "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World." Both songs explore the cross-section of good and evil—of love and hate.
To call Blood Visions a classic isn't just to praise its fucked-up storytelling—it's to celebrate an album stuffed with amazing hooks. The palm-muted chug of "My Shadow," the breakneck backbone of the 56-second highlight "Greed, Money, Useless Children," the loud-to-quiet blues rock stomp of "Turning Blue"—the album pivots between several rock'n'roll comfort food modes across its 29 minutes. These hooks are punchy and extremely well done—the sort of stuff that sounded incredible when he'd play them live at practically double the recording's speed. And while of course he was an amazing guitarist, his drumming is also essential here. When the instantly recognizable clacking introduction of the title track plays, it's worth noting that Jay was playing that part cold. Drumming is where he'd start—he'd do the percussion in one take and build out the song from there.
Aside from some blood-red vinyl, the album's 10th anniversary Record Store Day reissue came with a 7" featuring four demos: the title track, "Turning Blue," "It's So Easy," and "Oh, It's Such a Shame." The bonus record is far from essential, but it's an interesting glimpse into Jay's process. The percussion is thinner, the tempo slower; the main guitar hook is performed on a keyboard, and the words "blood vision" are delivered in a demonic bark. Now that he's gone, the urge to collect every single recording he ever made is strong. In this case, the extras feel definitively extra: you buy Blood Visions to listen to Blood Visions, not the preliminary sketches.
When it came time to turn in Blood Visions, Jay considered going back to his old routine—forming a new band and releasing those songs under that band’s name. The label convinced him that it should be a solo album. "This was the first record I made as an adult, when I didn't have to answer to another collaborative member of the band, so it was supposed to be like I was a big fat baby," he said of his appearance on the cover. "Now I finally get to start my life at 24." It's the perfect illustration to accompany the violent, unsettling birth of a rock'n'roll icon. Even though the guy had already amassed an impressive and sizable discography of wide-eyed rippers, Blood Visions stands as the ideal introduction to Jay Reatard the songwriter, studio perfectionist, character, and (reluctant) star. | 2016-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | April 22, 2016 | 9.1 | 69ae2e49-c505-4752-b392-bd0ce4d080cf | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
null | For a second, forget everything extraneous about Eric B. & Rakim: Rakim’s G.O.A.T. status; the debate over who was actually responsible for their music; the rumor that Eric had to get a steel rod in his spine after the dookie ropes fucked his neck up. After a dozen changes of rap fashion, when kids born in 1987 are graduating from high school, do these records still hold up? Do they deserve your money when more new music than ever crowds the shelves?
Well, yes. Obviously. Especially since these new masters are retailing for a beyond-fair 10 bucks. (Whatever the quality of | Eric B. & Rakim: Paid in Full / Follow the Leader | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11734-paid-in-full-follow-the-leader/ | Paid in Full / Follow the Leader | For a second, forget everything extraneous about Eric B. & Rakim: Rakim’s G.O.A.T. status; the debate over who was actually responsible for their music; the rumor that Eric had to get a steel rod in his spine after the dookie ropes fucked his neck up. After a dozen changes of rap fashion, when kids born in 1987 are graduating from high school, do these records still hold up? Do they deserve your money when more new music than ever crowds the shelves?
Well, yes. Obviously. Especially since these new masters are retailing for a beyond-fair 10 bucks. (Whatever the quality of the material, charging nearly $20 for catalog items is robbery.) Unlike the bulked-up, slightly lardy Paid in Full reissue from 1999, this edition tacks on a few bonuses without making a big deal out of it. (Full disclosure: I am an original-sequencing purist.) And of course, the music is as essential as the James Brown whose skinny legs supported large chunks of their legacy.
It’s hard to believe, now that the Neptunes have made zen thrift signify in the nouveau-riche top 10, but these minimal and sometimes unfriendly (though never less than seductive and often galvanic) tracks represented an anti-pop move. You have to rewind back to the mid-80s—not a super time for “urban” music outside of a nascent rap scene still underground enough to need label addresses at the end of singles reviews. Luther Vandross. Anita Baker. Lionel Richie outselling all other black artists of 1984. Is it any wonder in this context that booming kickdrums, garden claw snares, bacteria-disrupting sub-bass, and tales (freaky, funny, raw, and true) seemed the only viable alternative?
Eric Barrier and William Griffin benefited by being in the right place (NYC) at the right time (just as rap began fumbling towards its own sense of importance). Their mentor, Marley Marl, had just begun to work with the digital sampler, a tentative step away from the fixed parameters of both drum machines and house bands, and towards open-ended creative theft. Marl, Schoolly D, Scott La Rock and others had defined mid-80s rap as a crash of stiff, hard, stupid (in the best sense) Linn drums and astounding B.S. rhymes. If it was hip-hop’s garage-rock—a street reaction against the first wave of crossover pop-rap—then it was all but waiting for the kind of intellectual vernacular so beloved of critics to “take it to the next level.”
Griffin threw his Kangol in the ring from the opening lines of Eric B & Rakim's debut single, “Eric B Is President”: “I came in the door/I said it before/I never let the mic magnetize me no more.” It is one of the 10 or so most famous verses in rap. Rakim’s innovation was applying a patina of intellectual detachment to rap’s most sacred cause: talking shit about how you’re a better rapper than everyone else. He was the supreme exponent of rapping-about-rapping, an almost lost art now that every MC carries a thousand pounds of crack-dealing backstory around with him.
Rakim immediately projected his self-belief—not so much messianic as matter-of-fact—that he was the best. He got away with it every time he opened his mouth and that voice came out: authoritative, burnished, possessing an unflappable sense of rhythm like a drumming prodigy. You only think of his restricted subject matter as a failing in the wake of Big, Pac, Cube, even Chuck D. You don’t go to Rakim for political insight, inner turmoil, or sex chat. You go to Rakim for an endless display of pure skill. He encourages the grading mindset. The big reason why Nas is runner-up is because he injected some pathos and fallibility into the preternatural control thing.
Skills, of course, can be their own reward, when put into the service of exciting people rather than showing off. (Okay, or a mix of the two.) And when the records are playing, it’s hard to begrudge them their 30-yard stare. Paid in Full, the debut, is more laidback and funky, though padded at seven vocals and three instrumentals. It reprised the debut single, a moody, atypical fusion full of stark dub-like dropouts, mod stutter effects, and flat production. It’s obvious why they stuck it at the end of the album; at that point, rap was moving so fast that records released six months prior were already old hat.
The second single, “My Melody,” is pre-“funky” hip-hop par excellence and a 2005 hit in waiting, with little more than a concrete cracking kickdrum and a blunt-edged bassthrob. (Of course, R’s flow would immediately mark him out as an old man amongst today’s shouters, growlers, and mumblers.) “I Know You Got Soul” let some human grit into the man-machine via JB, and momentarily fucked up everyone’s concept of the space-time continuum until cyborgizing old drummers became common enough to show up in Milli Vanilli records. “Paid in Full” was kind of light and fun, even if its subject matter was dead serious. Getting paid for studio work? Not the corner? Not the grind? The future was wide open.
Both of these albums contain too much filler to get a free “classic” pass, but the highs of Follow the Leader are as high as any rap group has gotten. The title track fleshes out Rakim’s metaphorical conceit via hellish high-speed-chase music. The beats rattle, the bass seethes, the flutes and strings screech like Blaxploitation crossed with the cheap urgency of an Italian zombie movie. But what’s scariest and most exhilarating is how, for all the track’s runaway train momentum, it feels inexorable, implacable, utterly in control of itself. Rakim’s delivery of the final verse may be the most exciting—at least in terms of breath control—slice of rap the genre has yet delivered. (And no, Twista doesn’t count.)
“Microphone Fiend” rattled sleigh bells harder than anyone until Pete Rock showed up, and the stabbing dynamics of the guitar sample harassed the ear something awful. The chopper blade beats of “Lyrics of Fury” almost render the genre it would help to inspire (jungle) redundant. In this era, when almost all rap was “fast rap,” tracks like these and “The R” were the roughneck alternative to a burgeoning hip-house, beats impacting your body as your mind swam at the density of words. Unfortunately, by the time they released Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em, an attempt to extend the deft simplicity of their debut, in 1990, they were already old news. (Perhaps best exemplified by the cover of 1992’s Don’t Sweat the Technique.) Deposed kings before they'd even hit their 30s, they’ve limped through the ensuing decade about which the most that can be said is that they didn’t scuff up their legacy too much.
These reissues add a handful of remixes (two on Paid, three on Leader), none essential. The only criminal inclusion is a truncated version of Coldcut’s remix of “Paid in Full” rather than the full seven minutes of madness. (But whatever, it’s overrated anyway.) The covers—with their gold anchor chains, manhole medallions, and customized Dapper Dan jackets—are a nice rebuke to anyone who thinks conspicuous consumption is a new-school disease. The contents are a reminder of a brief period where people thought they could become a millionaire on skills alone, where the reality of that was so far away that no one had to think about what being a millionaire would mean to the culture that nurtured those skills. | 2005-06-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-06-01T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | null | June 1, 2005 | 7.8 | 69b00207-16d4-4021-98a1-a898e9386dda | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Hip-O Select begins its Motown singles campaign with this six-disc archive of Hitsville USA's baby steps, which include the label's earliest contributions from Smokey Robinson, Brian and Eddie Holland, James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, the Temptations, the Supremes, Norman Whitfield, Barrett Strong, and Marvin Gaye. | Hip-O Select begins its Motown singles campaign with this six-disc archive of Hitsville USA's baby steps, which include the label's earliest contributions from Smokey Robinson, Brian and Eddie Holland, James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, the Temptations, the Supremes, Norman Whitfield, Barrett Strong, and Marvin Gaye. | Various Artists: The Complete Motown Singles, Vol. 1: 59-61 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2064-the-complete-motown-singles-vol-1-59-61/ | The Complete Motown Singles, Vol. 1: 59-61 | The building at 2648 West Grand Boulevard was like any other Detroit bungalow when Berry Gordy, backed by an $800 loan from his family, bought it and turned it into the offices for Tamla, his first record label. One can only speculate what the neighbors thought when he put up the sign that said "Hitsville, USA", but Gordy's optimism was backed by a strong business sense and proved to be well-founded: the Tamla name never became a household word, but his second label Motown did, and the rest is history. Motown grew quickly into a Motor City assembly line for hit songs, the label that put black music into white living rooms, and an institution that's taken for granted today as a part of the American cultural landscape.
Gordy wasn't exactly new to the music industry when he opened up shop; he had dabbled in management, owned a failed record store, and co-written several hits in the mid-50s for soul innovators Jackie Wilson and Etta James. It was an admittedly spotty record, but one that earned him respect amongst local musicians and performers. So Hitsville became a hangout for young musicians hoping to make it big, and the cast of characters that turned up in the label's first three years-- the period covered on Hip-O Select's new six-disc box The Complete Motown Singles, Vol. 1: 1959-61-- is incredible: Smokey Robinson, Brian and Eddie Holland (two thirds of Holland/Dozier/Holland), James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, the Temptations, the Supremes (née the Primes, or Primettes), Norman Whitfield, Barrett Strong, Marvin Gaye. These are names writ large across even a cursory knowledge of r&b; and classic pop, and all of them helped build the label into a legend.
As this set reveals, though, there were plenty of secondary players, one-offs, novelties, experiments, and trend-hopping tangents (not to mention a ton of gospel, Gordy shrewdly realizing that the audience for it was very stable) that helped shape the label as well-- and that's part of the reason these discs are so fascinating. Of course, you know the Miracles' "Shop Around" (just Motown's 20th single, but its first million-seller) and the Marvelettes' "Please Mr. Postman" (Motown's first #1 hit), but most of what's compiled here has been otherwise lost to history, leaving whole chapters out of one of popular music's most important stories. The Swinging Tigers, Eugene Remus, Gino Parks, the Equadors, the Valadiers, and Herman Griffin are anything but well-known, some having released just a one 45, but you can hear the Motown sound developing on their singles-- several of which are real gems.
Every A-Side, B-Side, and replacement side from every single released on Gordy's Tamla, Motown, and Miracle labels from 1959-61 amounts to more than 150 tracks and almost seven hours of music, and to explore it both as it's presented here, in strict chronological order, and to jump around comparing, say "Shop Around" with Debbie Dean's answer song "Don't Let Him Shop Around", is supremely rewarding. Marv Johnson's "Come to Me", originally released on Tamla, opens things triumphantly-- not only is it a fantastic song, it was also a hit, albeit only after Gordy licensed it to United Artists, who were far better equipped to promote it nationally than he was. Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)" gave the label a national hit on just the eighth try, and it's typical of the impromptu genius of Motown's early years; the song was written by Gordy and Hitsville receptionist Janie Bradford off the cuff and recorded on the spot as two local white high schoolers stopped in on their way past Hitsville to sit in on bass and guitar. To this day, no one can even speculate as to who those two kids were, and who knows if they have any clue what they contributed to?
Novelties abound on this set as well, including a half-dozen attempts to jump on the twist bandwagon that swept the nation on 1961. Of these, the most notable are "Ich-I-Bon #1", a surprisingly sharp surf instrumental by a band called Nick & the Jaguars, and the odd minor-key story-song of "Small Sad Sam" by Bob Kayli, actually Gordy's brother Robert performing under a pseudonym. The most mystifying of all the novelties, though, is Popcorn and the Mohawks' "Custer's Last Man" (incredibly, it's not even the only song about General Custer present here). "Last Man" is a totally bizarre, even mildly offensive radio play that stretches out to a ridiculous 4\xBD, and the single most glaring example of the fact that Motown hadn't yet established its famed Quality Control department.
Other oddities are more successful, like Ron and Bill's "It", an attempt to create another "Purple People Eater" while that song was still hot, and Gino Parks' hilarious "Blibberin' Blabbin' Blues", an obvious attempt to beat the Coasters at their own "Yakety Yak" game. Parks actually proves on his second release, "Same Thing" b/w "That's No Lie", that he deserved far more than a novelty hit; the A-Side drips with soul, while the flip is like Sam Cooke and James Brown rolled into one-- gravelly, soulful crooning punctuated by startling, ear-piercing yelps of joy. No obscure act from the early days of Motown deserved fame more than the Satintones, though. A brilliant doo-wop act, they recorded five singles for the label and none took off, though all were great. Their aching, gorgeous "Angel" is one of the best songs here, and its B-side, "My Kind of Love", features beautiful harmonies and a crazy, very unusual string arrangement.
String arrangements are something of a running theme throughout these six discs. Gordy became convinced early on that they were a signifier of class and a key to crossover success, hence several songs appear in two versions-- one with strings, and one without. Gordy would pull the original single and then reissue it with the same catalog number and the new arrangement, a tactic that did manage to produce some sales, but one that also understandably drives collectors nuts.
Yet hearing alternate versions gathered in one place is fascinating. Other do-overs include the slower, inferior regional version of "Shop Around", a take on the song in which the Miracles sound almost tentative. Gordy apparently sensed that, and gathered the house band-- an early incarnation of the legendary Funk Brothers-- and the Miracles in the middle of the night to re-cut the song for the reissue, which of course would go platinum.
As a musical journey, this set is nothing short of amazing, despite a handful of mediocre cuts and a few downright awful ones. By disc six, Motown is a well-oiled hit machine, and even a few of the twist knock-offs are pretty entertaining. It's huge fun to hear Marvin Gaye trying to position himself as a sensitive interpreter of showtunes (thank God that didn't last) or to check out the truly amazing house band-- has their ever been a pop bass/drums combo as outstanding as James Jamerson and Benny Benjamin?-- cutting loose on "Snake Walk" under the name Swinging Tigers.
Ultimately, the failures are as much a part of the early Motown story as the successes, and Hip-O has done about as good a job as humanly possible chronicling it, making this the kind of package you want to wash your hands before touching. Motown went on to much bigger things and had better years, to be detailed on future sets in this series, but there's no experience like hearing the label get on its feet and find itself; for that, this is truly essential. | 2005-03-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-03-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Motown / Hip-O Select | March 13, 2005 | 9 | 69b08b6e-bfa8-414e-9ff7-4256f3badf83 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
This world-weary garage-rock trio’s music is tailor-made for a pre-pandemic era of basement shows. | This world-weary garage-rock trio’s music is tailor-made for a pre-pandemic era of basement shows. | Country Westerns: Country Westerns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/country-westerns-country-westerns/ | Country Westerns | Almost everything that gets romanticized about crowded basement rock shows feels like a nightmare in a pandemic: sweating bodies pressed together, shouts, whoops, and spittle all trapped under a low-slung ceiling. Country Westerns were made for such an environment. Blending world-weariness into rambunctious, twangy rock, they’re a bar band for an era marked by a painful lack of both bars and bands. Despite the bum hand, though, they overthrow pessimism and head straight for a jolt to summon high spirits out of bedeviled circumstances.
Guitarist and singer Joel Plunkett made his name alongside acts like Gentleman Jesse and The Weight, while drummer Brian Kotzur counted himself among the revolving Silver Jews personnel. (David Berman was the sole witness to some of the earliest proto-Country Westerns rehearsals.) They recruited bassist Sabrina Rush from State Champion, and her melody-focused lines round out their energetic sound with a sense of groove.
Country Westerns called upon Matt Sweeney, who has brought his brawny guitar style to Run the Jewels, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and the cult-favorite chooglers Endless Boogie, to produce. With his abiding love of great riffs, he’s a natural fit, ensuring that the band’s crackling solos emerge in complement to their restless chugging. The band coasts between good-natured rowdiness, road-dog grit, and ascetic wisdom, projecting the kind of personality that might be good company for a beer or six on the porch. Plunkett weighs getting “caught losing on a lousy day” against his own obligation to keep picking himself up again with “It’s On Me,” his guitar solo shaking loose any sense of deep regret. It’s bittersweet but tentatively positive, with Plunkett promising to “take an extra step or two” to avoid repeating past mistakes.
On songs like “Gentle Soul,” “It’s Not Easy,” and “Times to Tunnels,” they keep things relatively subdued, but the trio are at their best when they’re hitting the gas. “Time don’t heal the way it used to,” Plunkett acknowledges in his weathered voice on “I’m Not Ready,” as Rush and Kotzur settle into a hum to launch his guitar vamp. It’s in moments like these that the band’s chemistry explodes, bottling the sort of energy that can only ever be fully experienced live.
The album’s final track, a cover of The Magnetic Fields’ “Two Characters in Search of a Country Song,” makes for a tidy closing argument for the trio’s strengths. The lyrics draw on genre signifiers like Jesse James, 18-wheelers, and Calamity Jane to sketch a doomed relationship, while the guitars convey pained resolve. Country Westerns touch on at familiar frameworks without clinging too hard to the specifics. Their debut feels ragged in all the right places, a testament from a band that shoulders the weight of disappointment, lost years, and heartbreak without allowing it to become a burden.
Correction: A previous version of this review did not mention that “Two Characters in Search of a Country Song” is a cover of a Magnetic Fields song. It has been updated to clarify this.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Fat Possum | July 1, 2020 | 7.3 | 69b25bc7-b267-445b-bb36-148c6f9cdc40 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The pop singer’s long-awaited debut is also a comeback and reintroduction. With her plush voice and slick production, she plays it cool and also plays it safe. | The pop singer’s long-awaited debut is also a comeback and reintroduction. With her plush voice and slick production, she plays it cool and also plays it safe. | Normani: DOPAMINE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/normani-dopamine/ | DOPAMINE | Whether they admit it or not, every former girl-group singer wants their solo debut to hit like “2003 Beyoncé performing ‘Crazy in Love.’” Four years ago, Normani came remarkably close with the sprightly R&B track “Motivation.” The single, and its Aaliyah-inspired follow-up “Wild Side,” capitalized on the pageantry that made her stand out in Fifth Harmony. After two unforgettable VMA performances—the handstand-into-a-split in 2019 and the steamy Janet Jackson homage in 2021—Normani laid low; both parents were battling cancer, and shifting management due to creative differences didn’t make anything easier. DOPAMINE, her highly anticipated debut-slash-comeback album, still can’t shake the anonymity of her ensemble days, but it lays the foundation for what Normani will be known for: her Southern roots and a voice as plush as a pair of fuzzy dice.
Rather than the bubbly pop of “Motivation,” which Normani has notably tried to distance herself from, DOPAMINE trades in the suave R&B of her childhood. “Lights On” is reminiscent of the sultry yet danceable croons of noughties Janet. “Insomnia,” co-written by none other than Brandy, could slot into the R&B star’s 2002 album Full Moon. The writing is solid and witty (“Don’t even address me unless you gon’ undress me”) but musically, the primary tasting notes are understated familiarity and reverence for the past. Normani’s smooth vocals are the only quality truly unique to her, and at times even that induces a highway hypnosis effect.
Normani is at her best when she is brash and animated, channeling sounds and flows from her Southern youth. She’s got ties to Atlanta, New Orleans, and Houston all over the album: “Bling-bling-blaow” she sings of her platinum records and iced-out jewelry over a funky bassline on horn-laden opener “Big Boy,” complemented by Starrah’s Auto-Tune’d flexes. “Candy Paint” has the potential to eclipse the braggadocious aura of “Big Boy” but Normani’s laid-back flow becomes monotonous even when her tempo quickens. She leans heavily into her Texas roots on the album highlight “Still,” when she flips a testosterone-filled Mike Jones sample into a strip-club anthem for the ladies kicking up their feet and making it rain hundreds.
DOPAMINE is a solid reintroduction to Normani’s sultrier side that, unfortunately, currently exists in a similar conundrum as Dua Lipa post-Future Nostalgia: Her mysteriously cool it-girl persona is thrilling in three-minute doses, but after a couple of tracks with big hooks, you come across some filler. On DOPAMINE, the house-lite of “Take My Time,” the Kelly Rowland’s “Commander” dupe “Little Secrets,” and the James Blake-assisted “Tantrums” feel obligated to demonstrate versatility through genre experimentation. At times it feels like a solo artist searching for an identity through sound, not always through songwriting.
Though she has writing credits on a majority of the album, Normani’s solo songs often feel plucked from a communal pile. As an alum of one of the biggest American girl groups, a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, and a person who has had to confront mortality and celebrity from a young age, Normani’s story seems ripe for an album format—once she’s ready to tell it. | 2024-06-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | June 18, 2024 | 7.4 | 69b2e08a-5dfa-4362-9032-c581b8ffc139 | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
The German electronic musician explores deep, fluid percussive grooves in the same vein as his work with the late drummer Jaki Liebezeit. | The German electronic musician explores deep, fluid percussive grooves in the same vein as his work with the late drummer Jaki Liebezeit. | Burnt Friedman: Dead Saints Chronicles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/burnt-friedman-dead-saints-chronicles/ | Dead Saints Chronicles | For many years, Burnt Friedman’s music concerned itself primarily with the play of surfaces. He made hyperreal jazz, postmodernist noir, simulacral dub. He called his label Nonplace, a nod to capitalism’s dead zones; one early album, Leisure Zones, was a 77-minute soundscape that resembled the dull hum of a nearby freeway. But somewhere around the turn of the millennium, once the German electronic musician met Can drummer and all-around polyrhythmic powerhouse Jaki Liebezeit, groove assumed a central place in his music. Friedman (real name Bernd Friedmann) and Liebezeit recorded five albums together between 2002 and 2013, and the thread running through them all is rhythm—twisting and turning, tactile as a knotted rope, boasting time signatures at once impossible to parse and easy to sink into.
Liebezeit died earlier this year at the age of 78, but his presence looms large over Friedman’s new mini-album, which brims with bubbling, percussive grooves. Despite the variety of instruments assembled here—serrated synths, stubby electric bass, and guitar and reeds played, respectively, by two long-time collaborators, Joseph Suchy and Hayden Chisholm—it is, at heart, a drummer’s record. Steel pans, bells, shakers, and deep, resonant toms yield an opulent spread of timbres and textures, and everything feels suspended in a state of permanent flux. In fact, there are few held tones at all.
Instead, the music is constructed in pointillistic fashion, from a rippling array of thumps and thwacks and pinpricks of tone. Friedman has long been interested in blurring the line between human hands and computer brains—“I’m surprised that it seems crucial for many people whether tracks on Con Ritmo or Just Landed were played or programmed,” he told The Wire in 2000—and Dead Saints Chronicles’ rhythms could easily be mistaken for the work of a crack drummer. Their fluid syncopations, shifting accents, and deep-in-the-pocket grooves are far more suggestive of muscle memory than MIDI clocks.
Several tracks utilize the kinds of time signatures that are rarely heard in grid-based electronic music. “Acroagnosis” lopes along in a convoluted 9/8 shuffle, its bells and shakers rolling like an overturned bucket of ball bearings on the deck of a small boat. “Grace,” whose ostinato bass-and-drums pulse recalls Australian improvisers the Necks’ horizontal sprawl, rides a pulse that’s difficult to parse: Eighth-note cymbal taps feel soothingly steady, but a nervous kick drum wanders all over the place, tripping up efforts to count out the beat. Even a nominally 4/4 track like “Near Life” steers clear of dance music’s straight-ahead pulse, favoring high-stepping upbeats, hiccupping accents, and glancing chords that seem barely to touch the ground. And in “Wentletrap,” a steady drip of triplets played out across synths and cymbal hits perpetually threatens to turn the groove inside out. (If you squint toward the end, when the synths turn thick and squelchy, it almost resembles Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” but rearranged in beads of amber.)
Friedman seems to be in a period of looking back right now. After 2014’s melancholy Cease to Matter, the project went quiet for more than two years, and when he returned, with The Pestle, he sequenced the archival collection like a trip back in time, beginning with tracks from 2011 and 2010 and ending up deep in the early 1990s. Dead Saints Chronicles similarly draws from previously unreleased tracks, though these are more recent, dating from between 2007 and 2016. The title is borrowed from a book about near-death experiences, in which part of the author’s research entailed sifting through thousands of hours’ worth of subjects’ recorded accounts. The press text relates that Herculean archival effort with Friedman’s own listen back through his archive of DATs, but it’s hard not to also read the title as a tribute to his own late colleague, the drummer whose name miraculously translated as “love time.” Dead Saints Chronicles is a record where rhythm reigns supreme, where even the faintest and smallest element finds its foothold in a vast and overarching constellation, where no sound is not connected to each and every other sound. It’s a record not so much about timekeeping as it is infinity. | 2017-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Marionette | July 21, 2017 | 7.8 | 69ba9467-4729-46fa-8325-997f9093e6d4 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The prominent electro group releases an avant-garde opera about the life of Charles Darwin that's at times impenetrable and rapturous. | The prominent electro group releases an avant-garde opera about the life of Charles Darwin that's at times impenetrable and rapturous. | The Knife / Planningtorock / Mt. Sims: Tomorrow, in a Year | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13974-tomorrow-in-a-year/ | Tomorrow, in a Year | Prominent electro group releases berserk and impenetrable avant-garde opera; blank stares ensue. Sadly, this will probably wind up being the epitaph for Tomorrow, in a Year. No matter which angle you approach it from, the Knife's latest project-- a 90-plus-minute longform work about the life of Charles Darwin-- can seem bewildering. However self-consciously arty and macabre the Knife have been in the past, they've always seemed like a pop group at heart. Here nothing even remotely approaching a steady beat shows up for more than half its length. Whether Knife fans will hang on through the album's formless, screeching opening, or whether opera aficionados will simply regard this as the dabbling of pop-music dilettantes, is hard to say. What does seem certain is, like many difficult, unclassifiable albums before it, Tomorrow, in a Year is fated to be discussed more than actually heard.
Part of Tomorrow, In a Year's dilemma is that it comes contextualized as an opera. For most listeners, opera has vague, mostly derogatory connotations: old, imposing, foreign, dead, faintly ridiculous. And once you invoke opera, the Knife aren't just trying to match their fans' expectations after Silent Shout; they're implicitly demanding to be measured by the same yardstick used to size up, say, Wagner's Ring Cycle. While the designation is, in some senses, accurate-- Tomorrow has a libretto and an operatic mezzo-soprano, and the whole thing was performed in September 2009 by the Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma, which commissioned it-- the tag is probably more off-putting than useful for listeners already struggling to locate entry points into this forbidding, oftentimes-alienating work.
Things don't get off to a flying start: Tomorrow, in a Year's first 10 minutes are a painstaking buildup of environmental noises-- a primordial soup of sound appropriate to a work about the origin of life. That's one way of putting it; another might be that it opens with the sounds of a drippy sink and a chain link fence buckling in heavy winds, followed by five minutes of patience-trying buzzing. Where you come down on this spectrum will probably depend on your level of investment, and, more crucially, your listening environment. Taking in the album in different settings gave me a little of both reactions. (At home, in front of massive speakers, following along with the lyrics: absorbing. On an iPod during a morning commute: maddening.) This is deeply un-portable music: It either demands your complete attention or invites you to shut it off.
Once through that opening stretch, your attention will frequently be rewarded. There is powerfully evocative, richly imagined music to be found here. Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer-Andersson's commitment to the Darwinian conceptual framework is complete, sometimes pushing the borders of sanity: Olof Dreijer spent time in the Amazon recording and observing different species while writing, and in "Letter to Henslow", one of the album's most supremely batshit moments, Dreijer and his sister whoop and ululate alongside actual field recordings of Amazonian birds. Dreijer's field research also turns up in his synth tones through the album, like the chittering, insectoid buzzing at the edges of "Variation of Birds".
Karin and Olof find all kinds of neat little ways to echo the unfolding drama as Darwin's observations move from geology and biology toward a unifying theory of all life. In "Geology" and "Minerals", mezzo-soprano Kristina Wahlin Momme delivers her lines in bursts of hurried singspiel as massive sheets of industrial noise grind and shudder beneath her, suggesting the shifting of the Earth's core. The disarmingly gorgeous "Ebb Tide Explorer" is a fragile collection of wisps and swells, Swedish singer/songwriter Jonathan Johansson singing in lilting two-note phrases that mimick the lazily swaying action of the seaweed he is describing.
As the story moves from Darwin's theories of all life into the details of his personal life, the relentless ominousness of the music finally lifts, and the album enters its most inviting stretch. "Annie's Box" is a spare, plangent ode to Darwin's daughter Annie, who died when she was only 10 years old. With its yawning open spaces, haunted by a single, mournful viola drone, it recalls the icy beauty of Nico's Marble Index. That's mere prologue for the one-two climax: "The Colouring of Pigeons" and "Seeds", 20 minutes of tingly alchemy that feel like the lightning-flash realization that the entire work has been struggling toward.
Anchored by a groaning cello and a rolling tribal beat, "The Colouring of Pigeons" unfolds in graceful layers, all in service to an aching, upward-arcing melody shared by Olof, Karin, and Momme. "Seeds" surges forward on a light four-on-the-floor pulse, surrounded a prismatic light show of bell sounds and a rubbery synth not far from current dubstep. At long last, it's a floor filler of sorts-- albeit one with harmonized mezzo-soprano overdubs and lyrics like, "Transoceanic pods and capsules/ Will old occupants allow for room and sustenance?"
The uninterrupted stretch of "Pigeons" into "Seeds" is the only moment on Tomorrow, in a Year where this is recognizably the work of the Knife, and not coincidentally it's the most thrilling and vital music on the record. Reconciling their boundless ambitions with their crowd-pleasing instincts, they hit upon a sweet spot that only Laurie Anderson and few others have managed to locate-- a clearing where pop and the avant-garde meet and make each other freshly strange and inviting. Who knows what kind of reception this will receive; if it's any kind of prologue to an epiphany that allows whole albums of music as inspired as "Pigeons" and "Seeds", however, maybe we'll look back at it in five years as the moment the Knife first went next level. | 2010-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Mute | March 1, 2010 | 6.9 | 69bc477a-fbd5-4416-8b12-841111130d10 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Remembrance is the first proper release by Suicideyear, the project of young Baton Rouge-based producer James Prudhomme, on Daniel Lopatin’s Software label. Drawing from the electronic/rap subgenre of trap and offering his own spin on the genre, the tracks on Remembrance possess chords and patterns that suggest tension, danger, and, ultimately, melancholy. | Remembrance is the first proper release by Suicideyear, the project of young Baton Rouge-based producer James Prudhomme, on Daniel Lopatin’s Software label. Drawing from the electronic/rap subgenre of trap and offering his own spin on the genre, the tracks on Remembrance possess chords and patterns that suggest tension, danger, and, ultimately, melancholy. | Suicideyear: Remembrance EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19687-suicideyear-remembrance-ep/ | Remembrance EP | The music released on Daniel Lopatin’s Software label is Internet native. The context for this music is the digital space—that’s where the inspiration comes from, where the audience is, and how the music finds people. That’s true for a whole lot of music these days, of course, but from the name on down Software makes it explicit. Remembrance is the first proper release by Suicideyear, the project of young Baton Rouge-based producer James Prudhomme, but he’s been around online for a couple of years, putting out mixtapes, remixes, and original productions for rappers. The most widely heard of these to date is his beat for “Hurt”, for Swedish teenager Yung Lean, and it was a characteristic production: slow-to-midtempo, the brittle, rapid-fire electronic percussion fills that have come to signal “trap,” and spacey, melancholic synth lines appropriate for Lean’s “sad boy” aesthetic. Whatever else you might say about it, Suicideyear makes Internet music, work that clearly draws from the online music world’s abundance; but Prudhomme manages to put his own spin on this cluster of signifiers, finding a way to channel feelings in a distinctive way.
A couple of years back, Pitchfork contributor David Drake wrote a piece for Complex called "Real Trap Sh*t? The Commodification of Southern Rap’s Drug-Fueled Subgenre"*. *Among other things, it grappled with how ”trap music,“ emerging from a place of violence and powerlessness, could be transformed into something safe and fashionable through the magic of cultural tourism. "...The trap isn’t a genre, but a real place as portrayed through art," he wrote. "A place with real consequences." I thought of this when listening to Remembrance not because I think it comes at certain styles of rap production from an irresponsible perspective (that ship has probably sailed, anyway), but rather because Prudhomme takes very specific elements of this production, zooms in, and amplifies them until they become something else, something he can call his own. The tracks on Remembrance don’t sound like they’d be improved with people spitting over them, but they do connect to the emotional world of a certain kind of rap production, with chords and patterns that suggest tension, danger, and, ultimately, melancholy.
Which is to say that Remembrance is haunted by mortality, with synth drones that sometimes sound like organs bringing to mind the darkly meditative contemplation of a wake. Suicideyear combines the clean melodic lines of late-1990s IDM with the slow-burn anxiety of Zaytoven. The emotional range here runs from the stately grandeur of “Caroline” to the yearning “Hope Building A” to the dubbed-out and lonesome “Savior”, with its ghosted digital voices to the chiming “U S”, which sounds like the sort of music Death Waltz would have rescued from an early-’80s horror film soundtrack. There’s plenty of silence, enough for each snare clap and hi-hat flicker to carve out its own space, and there’s also an appealing uniformity to the whole. Remembrance knows the kinds of feelings it wants to evoke and how to make that happen, making for a record that possesses a very particular mood.
It isn’t until the closing track that Prudhomme tips his hand, offering up a slow and gorgeous cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep”. This is a risky move because MBV covers can go wrong so easily, but Prudhomme finds something new in the song, an iciness and feeling of isolation that move in opposition to the warmth found on the most oceanic of albums. It’s a neat trick that also encapsulates what makes Remembrance such a modest but ultimately captivating record, a way of taking sounds and textures from one context and transforming them into something that feels personal and close. | 2014-09-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-09-23T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Software | September 23, 2014 | 7.3 | 69c6cd2a-06be-4721-97d6-982ded1b7890 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
For his first release on Warp, the batida and electronic musician puts forth his own meticulous, otherworldly sound and reconnects with the avant-dance spirit of the label’s early years. | For his first release on Warp, the batida and electronic musician puts forth his own meticulous, otherworldly sound and reconnects with the avant-dance spirit of the label’s early years. | DJ Nigga Fox: Crânio EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-nigga-fox-cranio-ep/ | Crânio EP | Last year, Lisbon’s DJ Nigga Fox (Rogério Brandão) released a 12" on Príncipe Discos that stepped far outside the boundaries of batida, the genre with which he is most closely associated. Batida, an invention of the Afro-Lusophone diaspora, delivers its explosive percussion in short, sharp shocks—just a few minutes per track and then on to the next head-spinning tangle of polyrhythms. Nigga Fox’s “15 Barras,” on the other hand, was a slowly building, multi-part epic: a quarter-hour of gurgling acid, spun-out playground noise, and stuttering, double-time beats. It was just one more sign of the way that the genre, along with Príncipe, the Lisbon label most responsible for nurturing it, is evolving.
Príncipe had already moved beyond Portugal’s borders when it signed Nídia, a then 18-year-old Bordeaux-based transplant with a bright, squelchy take on the sound. When Nídia turned up on Fever Ray’s Plunge last year, it marked the highest-profile moment yet for a member of batida’s founding generation. And Príncipe recently added another stamp to its passport with the debut record from P. Adrix, a young Portuguese beatmaker whose music reflects the industrial club sounds of his adopted hometown of Manchester. Nigga Fox’s latest EP, released on the UK’s Warp label, is still another step forward.
This isn’t the first time Warp has engaged with batida. In 2015, the label released the three-volume Cargaa EPs, which featured pretty much all the major artists from Príncipe’s circle, including DJ Marfox, Nídia, and Nigga Fox himself. But the Crânio EP is the first major solo work on Warp from anyone in the crew. The raised profile hasn’t changed Brandão’s style: There’s a clear line from these six frenetic songs back to Nigga Fox’s very earliest recordings. But his artistic development over the past five years is self-evident. Crânio boasts a fatter, richer sound and more complex arrangements; he has also added the Angolan percussionist Galiano Neto to the mix. The addition of a human drummer alters his sound in subtle but interesting ways, fleshing out all his snapping, synthetic textures with warm, leathery timbres and dynamic timekeeping.
It’s been years since Warp had anything like a definable sound, but Nigga Fox’s music reconnects with the avant-dance spirit of the label’s early years, when brain-rearranging grooves met coruscating electronic timbres. The opening “Sinistro” is a slow, deliberate showcase for Brandão’s slightly unsettling sensibility, with acid-tinged triplets punctuating gravelly synth sweeps and a wordless vocal loop. It gathers intensity as it builds, and by the end, rave stabs are raining down like slow-motion lightning bolts.
But it’s “Poder do Vento” that really drives home how otherworldly Nigga Fox can sound. The title translates as “Power of the Wind,” and its central riff hits like an air cannon. The synth blasts sound a little like Joey Beltram’s iconic “Mentasm” as if rearranged by the trance deconstructionist Lorenzo Senni. Brandão extends the strangeness when, two-thirds of the way through the song, he introduces a brand-new bassline and a 4/4 kick, as though determined to knock you off your feet at every possible opportunity.
“Maria Costa” and “KRK” offer similar takes on murky, swirling dissonance, and the record builds to a climax with “WAABA-JAH,” in which flute-like sounds ripple like streamers over rattling snares and hand percussion, and snippets of voice are smeared into queasy fun-fair refrains. It’s exhilarating and almost exhausting: By the one-minute mark, between all those sliding pitches and fractured grooves, you have absorbed more information than seems possible to parse, yet he keeps piling on more. Soon it’s a riot of whirly tubes; then a washing machine with a chunk of metal thrown inside, a vortex of barely contained kinetic energy. The closing “Karma” is the record’s coup de grace: Using a theremin-like whistling and ruminative piano melodies, he turns the energy inside out. The drums are as biting as ever, but the atmospheric tones are pensive, airy, weightless, while the competing keys tussle unsteadily between consonance and dissonance. It’s every bit as intense as what has come before, but this time it’s gentle—mesmerizing evidence of Brandão’s finely controlled touch. | 2018-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | March 13, 2018 | 8 | 69cdae95-9d8c-4114-bf70-7fae69bf3659 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On her second album about environmental catastrophes in her native Kazakhstan, the London-based composer turns her attention to the radioactive legacy of the Semipalatinsk Test Site. | On her second album about environmental catastrophes in her native Kazakhstan, the London-based composer turns her attention to the radioactive legacy of the Semipalatinsk Test Site. | Galya Bisengalieva: Polygon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/galya-bisengalieva-polygon/ | Polygon | Deep in the steppe of northeast Kazakhstan, at the foot of Degelen Mountain, stands a monument bearing an inscription in English, Kazakh, and Russian: “1996-2012. The world has become safer.” These words commemorate the successful containment of stores of plutonium and enriched uranium that had been abandoned in a maze of underground tunnels throughout the Semipalatinsk Test Site, the U.S.S.R.’s answer to Los Alamos. From 1949 to 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests in a region that came to be called the Polygon, exposing hundreds of thousands of nearby residents to fallout and irradiating the soil for miles around. After the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, Kazakhstan became the first country in the world to voluntarily surrender its nuclear capability. The secretive 17-year operation to secure the site is one of the most crucial projects since the Cold War to safeguard against nuclear proliferation.
Yet the decades-long story of the Polygon—now a destination on the dark tourism map—continues. Even today, the people of the region suffer from cancer, birth defects, learning disorders and other maladies—effects of radiation poisoning that can persist for generations. The issue remains largely unknown in the West, which lends an urgency to Galya Bisengalieva’s interpretation of the history of Semipalatinsk on Polygon. In her role as violinist and leader of the London Contemporary Orchestra, Bisengalieva has collaborated with Radiohead, Actress, Frank Ocean, and the National and appeared on the scores for Phantom Thread, You Were Never Really Here, and Suspiria. But on solo projects like 2020’s Aralkum, which focused on the shrinking of the Aral Sea due to Soviet irrigation projects, she has translated the geopolitical crises of her native Kazakhstan to a wider audience. Polygon portrays the grandeur and desolation of the Kazakh countryside, offering both an elegy and a protest for its forgotten victims of the nuclear age.
Having trained in rigorous Soviet schools from a young age, Bisengalieva has said that she wants “to reimagine the violin,” to vault her own boundaries and discover new sounds with the instrument. Though Polygon features few elements—mostly violin, voice, and traditional Kazakh instruments, along with slight electronic manipulation—she produces a vast array of effects that lend these tracks the depth of a fully realized film score. Their titles describe the setting: album opener “Alash-kala” refers to the name of Semipalatinsk from 1917 to 1920, when it was an autonomous region and Kazakhstan’s cultural center. Waves of gentle ambient sound recall wind rushing across the steppe as crystalline notes sweep overhead, suggesting the rugged beauty of the landscape. “Polygon” depicts the fate of this landscape with an insistent thrumming beat and tense layers of strings—she says that she multi-tracked as many as 40 detuned violin parts—leading inexorably to a chorus of haunting voices. Suddenly, they are cut off; after an anxious delay, a percussive boom sounds in the distance and the beat is replaced by shuddering trails of static.
The Chagan nuclear test of 1965 created Lake Chagan in an attempt to deploy nuclear explosions for large-scale construction, further poisoning the region. Bisengalieva’s “Chagan” showcases the range of her violin techniques: Digitally delayed pizzicato and sharp staccato attacks echo ominously until continuously descending glissando recreates the vertiginous fall of debris. “Balapan” immediately follows with an off-kilter groove that wobbles in and out of time. Busy electronics evoke the daily life of workers in the Balapan testing facility, creating an atmosphere far more tense and hurried than the airy string arrangements elsewhere on the album.
Polygon does not rely on the location recordings that give similar pieces, like Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Chernobyl score or Bisengalieva’s own Aralkum, a tangible connection to their subject matter. With little more than a violin, she creates more abstract connections to the Semipalatinsk region. Still, each track inspires visions as vivid as scenes in an imagined documentary, their titles clues to a dramatic and violent history. The recklessness of the U.S.S.R.’s nuclear testing and the consequent suffering of the Kazakh population defies description, but the cinematic scale of Polygon communicates something of its horrors. | 2023-10-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | One Little Independent | October 31, 2023 | 7.4 | 69cf14a2-4228-4e1a-b942-d5862765b3a0 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
On Trap or Die 3, Jeezy stops pretending to give a damn what listeners under 25 might be into, offering a back-to-basics statement despite never straying that far from the basics to begin with. | On Trap or Die 3, Jeezy stops pretending to give a damn what listeners under 25 might be into, offering a back-to-basics statement despite never straying that far from the basics to begin with. | Jeezy: Trap or Die 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22586-trap-or-die-3/ | Trap or Die 3 | Eventually every rapper hits the point where they stop keeping up with the trends, either because they’ve lost interest in them or they’ve been left behind by them. It’s hard to tell which is the case for Jeezy. Perhaps he felt burned by the commercial failure of last year’s hitless Church in These Streets, a kinda-sorta attempt to engage with the modernist sounds of new Atlanta, or perhaps his heart was never in it, but on Trap or Die 3 Jeezy stops pretending to give even the slightest damn what listeners under 25 might be into. An album in title but mixtape in spirit, it’s a back-to-basics statement from a rapper who, even at his most commercial, never really strayed all that far from the basics to begin with.
“Let’s take these bitches back to ’05,” Jeezy rapped on “Way Too Gone,” from 2011’s TM 103: Hustlerz Ambition. That was three albums and five years ago, so it’s not like he’s ever been one to put the past behind him. It used to be that all that distinguished a Jeezy album from a mixtape was the potential that from time to time you might hear his authoritative groan over something other than the same default synth presets and trap snares, but with a tracklist dominated by Jeezy’s old-guard producers Shawty Redd and D. Rich, Trap or Die 3 promises from the outset that won’t happen. Amid the barrage of battle-cry adlibs and synthesized clatter, opener “In the Air” ends with a rant about “this watered-down shit I keep hearing on radio,” affirming the old truism that rappers only complain about the radio when they aren’t on it.
So Trap or Die 3 casts Jeezy as a true defender of trap, a music style that isn’t remotely endangered, in his own way every bit as evangelical about the craft as Jurassic 5 used to be about conscious hip-hop. A less charitable read is that he’s just trying to take an easy W after a couple of under-performing projects. That’s not the worst strategy at this stage in Jeezy’s career—by playing it so safe, the project often can’t help but hit its mark. “So What” moves with the ruthless efficiency of a slasher movie score, and “Goldmine” is similarly pared down to just the essentials: taut pianos, a few stray string stabs, and a ruthless snap of a beat. Jeezy seems reinvigorated by the familiar terrain. “Run a Fortune 500 from a pre-paid,” he boasts on the trim Yo Gotti feature “Where It at.” “Like That” nonchalantly lands the album’s most random punchline: “Have a threesome with the money: just me, you and Oprah.” And on the kinetic “Let Em Know,” the old T. Rex moves with velociraptor dexterity, matching a twitchy club tempo with a springy, hooky flow. There’s always a thrill in hearing that colossal voice move with that kind of speed; it's like witnessing somebody dunk an anvil.
Trap or Die 3 offers real reminders of Jeezy’s greatness, then, something Church in These Streets couldn’t claim. But some of these songs just sound terrible. “It Is What It Is” suffocates under a trash heap of gaudy, circa-2006 modulated horn noises, and its drum machines hit with all the tact of firecrackers going off in a tin can. “Recipe” continues Jeezy’s trend of inheriting the dullest beats Mike WiLL Made-It will sign his name to. And though courtship has never been Jeezy’s most fruitful muse, “Sexé” finds him putting even less effort into his come-ons than usual (“Bitch you know you sexy with your sexy ass…girl you know you flexing with your flexing ass.”) That track also features the record’s most flabbergasting inclusion, a partially inaudible verse from Plies that, to judge from its helpless mastering, he apparently recorded into an iPhone 4 from a bathroom stall.
How does something like that even make it onto a major-label album? Def Jam couldn’t have shelled out a few bucks to have a Plies verse re-recorded? It’s clear that in the streaming age labels have begun rubber-stamping releases that they previously would have intervened with, figuring there’s little to lose if the budget’s low enough. That’s good news for rappers who used to struggle just to get an album released. But for all the flak that label A&R teams get, at their best they incentivize innovation, pushing rappers to become something greater than themselves and providing them the resources to make it happen. Jeezy is nearing 40, and the window to promote him not just as a trap star but an actual star is closing. Nobody’s giving him that push anymore. | 2016-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam / YJ | November 8, 2016 | 6 | 69dd4c46-e66f-44d0-874f-59242807fe9b | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Thom Yorke's solo album, his first since The Eraser, was released last Friday as a paid BitTorrent download. Here, the line between man and machine has blurred to the point of disappearing, as Yorke’s vocals blend seamlessly with glitchy textures and stuttering beats. | Thom Yorke's solo album, his first since The Eraser, was released last Friday as a paid BitTorrent download. Here, the line between man and machine has blurred to the point of disappearing, as Yorke’s vocals blend seamlessly with glitchy textures and stuttering beats. | Thom Yorke: Tomorrow's Modern Boxes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19894-thom-yorke-tomorrows-modern-boxes/ | Tomorrow's Modern Boxes | “As an experiment…” began last week’s letter from Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke and producer Nigel Godrich, announcing Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, Yorke’s first solo album in eight years. The “experiment” was designed to solve the same problem the music industry has been grappling with since the heyday of Shawn Fanning—how to convince the digital world to pay for music. And the means were, if not exactly original, unique for an artist of Yorke’s size: a payment system managed by a version of the file-sharing software BitTorrent, which relies on users sharing small pieces of a file in order to circulate a shared whole. “If it works well it could be an effective way of handing some control of internet commerce back to people who are creating the work,” Yorke and Godrich explained; it’s a very different sentiment from the one expressed by Radiohead’s management following In Rainbows in 2007, when they described the pay-what-you-want approach for that album as “a solution for Radiohead, not the industry.”
BitTorrent involvement aside, Yorke and Godrich have essentially released music for sale on short notice, something Radiohead did already with their 2011 album The King of Limbs. In 2013, Beyoncé’s surprise self-titled album-cum-multimedia extravaganza represented a generational shift six years after In Rainbows: the catchphrase "Pulling a Radiohead” was summarily replaced by “pulling a Beyoncé”. On the other end of the spectrum, recent model-busting approaches by Jay-Z and U2 were met with cynicism and disdain. Compared to these high-profile campaigns, the reception to Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes’ distribution gambit has been unremarkable, a collective shoulder-shrug.
Indeed, for a solo release from a member of one of the world’s biggest rock bands, nearly everything about the album feels slight: the title, which is ostensibly a commentary on digital commerce but sounds more like a corporate slogan for a shipping company; the sparse, forgettable artwork; the video for lead track “A Brain in a Bottle”, itself a herky-jerky update of the clip for The King of Limbs’ blooming “Lotus Flower” single; the price, a scant $6 for an eight-track album that would typically go for at least $3 more at most digital retailers; and the runtime, which just barely cracks a half-hour, the shortest non-Radiohead album the singer has been involved with. Yorke—and, by extension, Radiohead—has spent the last two decades making a virtue of evading celebrity, but even by that measure, the presentation of Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes comes across as quaint.
The same goes for the music, which represent Yorke’s strongest embrace of electronics to date. Radiohead once shattered the notion of what a rock band could be sonically, but even their most experimental albums had a beating heart, (not to mention a guitar or two); Yorke’s first solo album, 2006’s The Eraser, was chilly in its electronic explorations but it retained a sense of melody and pathos, while AMOK, last year’s forgettable debut effort from the Yorke-led Atoms for Peace supergroup, contrasted bleep-bloop tendencies with a distinct live-band feel. On Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, the line between man and machine has blurred to the point of disappearing, with Yorke’s vocals blending seamlessly with glitchy textures and stuttering beats. The result is in one sense the most challenging high-profile release of Yorke’s career—there’s precious little to grab on to in terms of melody and feeling, and you won’t find yourself humming along to anything here.
That said, certain elements of Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, if given the right amount of attention, can be enjoyable to luxuriate in. “Guess Again!” is possibly the most Radiohead-like track on the album, a mid-tempo traipse of decaying pianos and crunchy backbeats that anyone who’s listened to “Pyramid Song” on loop will find instantly recognizable; the six-minute sorta-centerpiece “The Mother Lode” unfurls with layered vocal-abstracted samples and a skipping rhythmic gait that congeals with Yorke’s delicate high register, climaxing mid-track with a beautiful wordless digression. “Pink Section” brings more deconstructed piano—the most notable non-synthetic sound that appears frequently on Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes—to the forefront amidst a low, whistling howl, and the track nicely segues into closer “Nose Grows Some”, a mix of winding tones and subtly forceful rhythmic backbone with Yorke projecting an exquisite vocal presence at the forefront.
Elsewhere, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes slips into tedium. The wavering motifs and squelchy low end of “A Brain in a Bottle”, along with the seven-minute rabbit-hole excursion “There Is No Ice (For My Drink)”, present rough, unappealing approaches to beat-building that call to mind Yorke’s dicey attempts at dance music; the piping tones of “Truth Ray” stand in place instead of building to any sort of resolution, and the largely beatless “Interference” represents a similar stasis. “I don’t have the right/ To interfere,” he sings in the song’s anti-chorus, underscoring the album’s general sense of passivity. As Yorke’s least satisfying work to date, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes can’t help but build anticipation for whatever Radiohead plans to do next—his need for a creative foil has never been more apparent. | 2014-10-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-10-01T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | self-released | October 1, 2014 | 6.3 | 69e14b0f-5184-45f9-95cf-e00f88778ab2 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Since disbanding his seminal post-metal act Isis, Aaron Turner has broadened the scope of his work with groups like Old Man Gloom and Mamiffer. The debut from his latest project, Sumac, which also features contributions from Russian Circles bassist Brian Cook, finds him at his most sonically aggressive in years. | Since disbanding his seminal post-metal act Isis, Aaron Turner has broadened the scope of his work with groups like Old Man Gloom and Mamiffer. The debut from his latest project, Sumac, which also features contributions from Russian Circles bassist Brian Cook, finds him at his most sonically aggressive in years. | Sumac: The Deal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20225-the-deal/ | The Deal | In the five years since disbanding the seminal post-metal act Isis, Aaron Turner has broadened the scope of his work, offering a variety of sounds in numerous projects that range from the sludge punk weirdness of Old Man Gloom to the more pensive ambience of Mamiffer. Amid this kind of experimentation, his tendency to manipulate the spaces his music inhabits has remained a given, and for all that the multi-instrumentalist has produced in the world of heavy music, his most profound contribution has been an innate sense of the balance between elegance and ugliness. While The Deal isn’t a reinvention of that formula, the debut from his latest project, Sumac, offers a new perspective, one that finds Turner at his most sonically aggressive in years.
The Deal capitalizes on an energy of unease, building from moments of fractured disquiet into a tumult of guitar tones and the disjointed rhythmic patterns of drummer Nick Yacyshyn (of Baptists). It’s not unfamiliar territory for Turner: much of what provided Isis with its distinctive sound came from the same move from dissonant ambience into volatile culminations. But The Deal isn’t an exercise in self-involved nostalgia; where his other projects largely homed in on carefully constructed frameworks, Sumac takes its strengths from a powerful fragmentation.
Though listed as an "auxiliary" member, bassist Brian Cook provides a point of reference for the music’s hollowed-out qualities. Cook’s playing with Russian Circles, in addition to his past work with These Arms Are Snakes and Botch, has seen him at his most commanding when manipulating the lower end of the sound’s spectrum. That bone-rattling distinction for Cook works so well with the other two members here that it’s almost surprising Sumac is a new band and hasn’t been around for years.
The music here employs both hardcore and post-metal with careful, but unhinged abandon. The outstanding "Hollow King", for instance, is a 12-minute rendering of Turner’s former ornate proclivities turned into something unpredictable and ruptured. That bellicosity is The Deal’s underpinning, giving the album a common thread to ground its otherwise improvisational focus.
Venturing into free form is a bold move, especially given that with few exceptions, the other projects for the band's members are built around directed compositional frameworks. There are certainly moments where the music struggles under the weight of its own improvised technique. But by and large, the risk pays off, the approach offering a sound familiar enough to speak to the individual members’ strengths, and vulnerable enough to see those singular characteristics take on something darker and more ferocious. | 2015-02-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-02-12T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | February 12, 2015 | 7.4 | 69e16c69-0712-4019-8917-0d3f4116074a | Jonathan K. Dick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-k. dick/ | null |
Founding member of avant-rock band Peeesseye recalls everything from Crazy Horse to Glenn Branca to jam bands on this exploratory LP. | Founding member of avant-rock band Peeesseye recalls everything from Crazy Horse to Glenn Branca to jam bands on this exploratory LP. | Chris Forsyth: Paranoid Cat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15278-paranoid-cat/ | Paranoid Cat | "I want to tour with Phish because the kind of music we make is more in tune with their aesthetic," said Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore in 1998. "We deserve each other." Moore might've been kidding, but he was onto something. If "jam band" means what Wikipedia says-- "extended musical improvisation over rhythmic grooves and chord patterns"-- then it's not a stretch to say Sonic Youth belong to a lineage of underground jam bands. Start with the guitar forays of Velvet Underground and Television, move through the krautrock of Can and Faust, then dive into droners Spacemen 3 and Acid Mothers Temple and feedback hounds Bardo Pond and Dead Meadow. All are more inclined toward punk edge and avant-garde dissonance than Phish, of course. But it's undeniable that they all like to jam.
If you buy this idea even a little, you'll probably dig Chris Forsyth's Paranoid Cat. It begins with a title track that's essentially 21 minutes of jamming, albeit a thoughtful, well-planned kind. Forsyth has always put care into even the most chaotic music by his other band, the unclassifiable Peeesseye, and he maintains that approach here. Interlocking his roaming guitar with the pedal steel of Marc Orleans and piano of Hans Chew, Forsyth unfurls the winding three-part opener in ways that evoke all the acts mentioned above. But there's also a folk twang that brings to mind early-1970s Neil Young, and a symphonic repetition that recalls Glenn Branca's Lesson No. 1. Imagine Branca's ensemble covering "Down by the River", and you have some idea of this track's particular magic.
The rest of Paranoid Cat maintains that vibe pretty well. "New Pharmacist Boogie" is garage rock with the drums erased, evoking a beat-less take on jammy Velvet Underground tracks like "Booker T." and "Melody Laughter". Closer "Anniversary Day" starts out like Galaxie 500 covering "Heroin", then floats into more Young-style pastoral drift. But don't let all these comparisons mislead you-- Paranoid Cat is by no means derivative. It's more like historical musical commentary, an amalgam of time-tested sounds that adds new insights to what it echoes. Besides, even if Paranoid Cat belongs to some underground jam-band canon, it's rather unparalleled today. Jim O'Rourke's longer-form pieces swim in the same water; some of what MV & EE do when chasing Neil Young comes close; and Bardo Pond are still valiantly taking hits off of this kind of loose expansion. But as tempting as it is to keep searching for influences in Paranoid Cat's stretched-out essays, zoning out to its thoughtful strains is even more fun. | 2011-04-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-04-06T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Family Vineyard | April 6, 2011 | 7.1 | 69e4b2b4-1794-4dff-bcab-43b15db4d9f1 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The former One Direction member’s solo debut is just another pop star flailing to find his identity amid trend-hopping production and half-baked lyrics. | The former One Direction member’s solo debut is just another pop star flailing to find his identity amid trend-hopping production and half-baked lyrics. | Liam Payne: LP1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liam-payne-lp1/ | LP1 | One Direction was famously assembled because Simon Cowell and his fellow X-Factor judges didn’t have much faith in the boys’ potential as solo artists. If Liam Payne’s debut, released more than a decade after the band’s televised genesis, is any indication, Cowell was right. Payne is, at best, competent. His voice is pleasant but not especially charismatic. His choices are safe but uninspired. A couple of years after launching his career, his musical identity remains wholly unremarkable. (Cowell has since criticized Payne in the press for signing with Capitol, and not his own pop-pipeline label.) LP1’s 17 songs, including a 2018 Rita Ora collab from the 50 Shades Freed soundtrack and a Christmas number tacked on at the end, have the ambiance and trend-scraping of a Zara fitting room.
The journey from boy band to solo act has broken many aspiring pop stars. But what it requires most—gesturing at a distinct, compelling identity—is Payne’s biggest question mark. Despite being a UK tabloid fixture, he’s been unable to convey a discernible personality—or any personality at all. Even with a built-in global audience of millions, it’s unclear who this collection of middling songs could possibly resonate with. Former Directioners clamoring for a solo Liam album? New fans seeking nondescript, paint-by-numbers pop? And yet, improbably, Payne has been among the band’s most successful solo members, metrics-wise.
“Strip That Down,” a 2017 love song premised on his freedom from One Direction and featuring a bloodless verse from Quavo, has amassed billions of plays. Other singles, like “Familiar” with J Balvin and “Get Low” with Zedd, despite being completely unmemorable, have proved adequate enough to satisfy the low bar of a generic pop playlist. Throwing spaghetti at a Spotify algorithm and seeing what sticks appears to be Payne’s strategy with the rest of LP1. The single “Stack It Up,” featuring A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, further betrays his ambition of an Ed Sheeran-style metabolism of the current pop sounds. There are layered R&B harmonies, vaguely Latin rhythms, and compressed synths as melody, but even with two songs written by Sheeran himself, Payne only gasps at his radio-ready effectiveness.
In recent press, Payne has hinted at the complexity of his life post-One Direction, including fatherhood, brushes with substance abuse, and frustration with accepting his role as the band’s most-boring member. But he draws little inspiration from that wealth of real-life experience. Instead, he relies on inane songwriting concepts, rote misogyny, and feelingless flexing. The lyrics are puerile and half-baked. It’s hardly worth laying them all out on the page, but the worst offender must be from (the nerve!) “Hips Don’t Lie”: “Don’t be giving me the eye/Unless you got what I need/I hope your hips don’t lie/Unless they’re lying with me,” he sings.
One song, “Both Ways,” takes the trope of hetero objectification of bisexual women to gross new lows: “No, no, I don’t discriminate/Bring it back to my place/Yeah, she like it both ways.” In addition to being offensive, it’s not even convincing as an expression of desire. If you can’t effectively use a pop song to communicate horniness, the most basic of human emotions, then what do you have? Listening to LP1, you almost feel sorry for Payne. It’s maybe more pathetic to have failed not for risking too much, but after seeming to have tried so little.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | December 16, 2019 | 4.3 | 69e86f17-d1cb-403b-b1d2-e867856bedd5 | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
Born of impromptu DJ sets broadcast from a forest clearing in New Hampshire, Drew’s latest album distills decades of dance-music history into an hour of joyous new standards. | Born of impromptu DJ sets broadcast from a forest clearing in New Hampshire, Drew’s latest album distills decades of dance-music history into an hour of joyous new standards. | Eris Drew: Quivering in Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eris-drew-quivering-in-time/ | Quivering in Time | Last year, when COVID-19 shut down the record stores and clubs and raves, along with the rest of the Western world, Eris Drew went to the woods. The past few years had been an epic come-up. In the 1990s, Drew found her footing in the vast DIY network of Midwestern raves, which amalgamated the West Coast scene’s psychedelia and the East Coast’s need for speed into a hearty, industrious underground. She began mixing records as a teenager, eventually developing an ecstatic style full of turntable tricks and fueled by the pleasure principle. An occult encounter driving home after a rave gave her access to the “motherbeat,” a feminine pressure which her exuberant DJ skills translated into blends of breaks, hardcore, house, and techno for the ravers.
In 2012, at Chicago’s legendary Smart Bar, Drew and some friends started Hugo Ball, a party she later called a “polysexual, oppositional surrealist happening.” It was a hit. She transitioned and renamed herself Eris, after the Greek goddess of chaos, and met her partner in love and life and work, Octo Octa. The two began DJing B2B sets around the world, turntables up on cinder blocks, testing the limits of themselves and their soundsystems. They started a label, T4T LUV NRG, to control their own destiny. Drew put out 2019’s gloriously self-explanatory Raving Disco Breaks Vol. 1 and 2020’s Fluids of Emotion EP, a demonstration of breaks as emotional breakthroughs. The pair offered a jubilant mix for the Fabric series that freshened up styles of progressive house and hardcore the techno intelligencia had long dismissed as passé but dancers knew still worked. And then the pandemic arrived. Drew and Octo Octa and their loving partner Q found a cabin in New Hampshire, rigged up a studio in it, and built a life of love and occasional DJ sets transmitted in a clearing via YouTube. Quivering in Time came from those forest moments. Anticipated for decades, apparently made in just a few months, the album is an instant party-starter and a statement of intent. It threads together the last 40 years of dance music into a solid hour of new standards.
“Time to Move Close” kicks things off like an affectionate pat on the back that pushes you onto the floor. The beat shuffles, the bass thumps, and as it settles into itself, Drew begins lacing in samples of cut-up vocals and sound effects that glint like confetti caught in strobe lights. “Loving Clav” deepens the hypnotism with runs on the titular keyboard tumbling over fat acid basslines and clarion melodies like trumpets on arrival. And from there, Quivering really takes off, blurring genres and bringing delight with each backspin, each breakdown, each moment where a track almost trainwrecks upon itself and, instead, takes flight. The decades Drew spent deep in the mix inform the breadth of samples she deploys: Moments of “Pick ‘Em Up” suggest that she’s queued up a dozen amazing record stores’ stock and is cutting like a maniac between it all. The music sounds like it was as much fun to make as it is to dance to. But it’s really about showing up, not showing off. Album highlight “Show U Love” is also chockablock with sampled classics, but the feeling is like bumping into one old friend after the other in the club—and the ones you don’t recognize become treasured, too. The title track is similarly, consciously amiable, too, an invocation of tenuous bliss.
Other tracks feel especially present through a kind of time travel. “Sensation” begins as a rosy, mid-tempo chugger; after a quick swell that teases the onset of a piano-house banger, Drew instead drops the tempo as if drawing back a record from 45 to 33 rpm to reveal a foggy, after-hours chiller. Seconds later, the track is back up and running for another funky minute or two. It’s an entire set, a full night in four and half minutes, and it ends with a triumphant holler.
Drew’s most audacious move might be recasting one of the most beloved bits of dialogue in rave history: Frank Maxwell and Peter Fonda’s hedonistic vow, “We wanna be free to do what we want to do… and we wanna get loaded!,” from the film The Wild Angels, immortalized by Primal Scream and the late, great Andrew Weatherall for their anthem “Loaded.” Her “Ride Free” distills the festival-sized Madchester classic into something human-scaled, powered by simple, church-y organ and a faithful drum loop or two. It’s a reminder that rave, like any world-changing movement, is rooted in just being in a room together at the same time. Drew tempers Fonda’s infectious, macho bluster with a female voice that spells out a mission: “Somehow, individually we have to reclaim our experience… the primacy of direct experience, that as people the real universe is within your reach always.” For Eris Drew, the time is now.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | null | October 29, 2021 | 7.8 | 69ebe1a2-d6cd-4ec8-b4a3-93149ff0f47a | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
On its debut EP, the Los Angeles duo pulls from favorite sounds of the 1990s to create effortless, widescreen dream pop that’s serene without being sentimental. | On its debut EP, the Los Angeles duo pulls from favorite sounds of the 1990s to create effortless, widescreen dream pop that’s serene without being sentimental. | Crushed: extra life EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/crushed-extra-life-ep/ | extra life EP | crushed make music as cliché as that first morning when you wake up next to someone new. Stupid. Excited. Hungover. Phone battery at 10 percent. But then the light hits your face. Was the sun always this bright? Did you always look this good wearing someone else’s sweater? Yes! You’re so lucky! You have a reason to exist. crushed’s debut EP, extra life, is like this: sexy, woozy, familiar yet alive with fresh possibility.
crushed is the brainchild of Shaun Durkan and Bre Morell. Both are seasoned musicians: Durkan is a producer and member of San Francisco shoegaze band Weekend, while Morell is the vocalist in Temple of Angels. They started collaborating long distance—Morell in Los Angeles, Durkan in Portland—thanks to a mutual affinity for trip hop and Natalie Imbruglia. On their first release as crushed, that shared taste manifests as effortless, widescreen dream pop with all the right touches. extra life is not particularly ambitious—crushed are more interested in faithfully replicating their favorite sounds than subverting them—but it’s a really nice way to spend 26 minutes. On opener “waterlily,” drum machines and a loop of distorted vocals flow into a rush of guitar reverb, the sound of a crackling fire, and a slack-jawed synth line. It’s a little Boards of Canada, a little Souvlaki, a little of that one Clams Casino song with Imogen Heap.
The EP’s fluid architecture means that individual songs don’t always feel especially distinct. But they don’t really have to: extra life is more about cruising on a vibe. On “bedside,” Morell sings about “the best days of our life,” sounding melancholy over big guitars and a bright bubble of synth. It collapses into “respawn,” full of sunny, radiant bass, the lilt of a drum machine, and field recordings of passing cars. Morell’s vocals are languid, moody, lovely as she sings about what’s going on outside of her window, the excitement of a new romance, and the pain of separation.
extra life is serene without being remotely sentimental. It’s refreshing. Where the vague emotional haze of dream pop can become monotonous, extra life is full of moving parts. The EP feels propulsive, even if the basic template behind each song is pretty straightforward. Much of this has to do with the production bricolage: subtle field recordings and samples (the duo counts nearly 200 across the record), a drum machine that switches on at just the right time, reverb that’s turned all the way up. It’s cavernous, and Morell’s vocals sound huge. extra life does what the best dream pop should, and crushed wisely understand that anything beyond that could overcomplicate this brief moment of bliss. | 2023-02-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Funeral Party | February 22, 2023 | 7.3 | 69f133a9-c3cb-4b5e-9aaa-9947c31c242b | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
The native Kentuckian shows a flair for rough-hewn honky-tonk and piercing details on his latest release, produced by Sturgill Simpson. | The native Kentuckian shows a flair for rough-hewn honky-tonk and piercing details on his latest release, produced by Sturgill Simpson. | Tyler Childers: Country Squire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyler-childers-country-squire/ | Country Squire | If you’ve ever caught a whiff of a paper mill, you know it’s a sticky, acrid smell, mostly chemical with a bit of death mixed in, like sour milk churned with ammonia. And you know it’s inescapable, seeping into your car or house. So when Tyler Childers sings about being downwind from a paper mill on the first line of the first song on his new album, you know he’s in a woeful spot. Country music thrives on down-and-out characters in tough situations, and Childers, a native Kentuckian who sings with a scuffed-up twang, takes what might sound like a mundane detail and finds a new and wholly unromanticized way to sound hard up. The song, “Country Squire,” is about playing gigs and saving money to refurbish a trailer for himself and his wife, and the introductory detail adds a desperate dimension to his mission: Childers wants his country version of a castle, but also some walls and a roof to try to keep the stench of the world out.
He has a remarkable facility with telling details, which pepper Country Squire as vividly they did his 2017 breakout Purgatory. When he remembers getting forcefully rejected by a classmate on “Bus Route,” he ends up lying “face down in the gum on the floor,” and there’s a smirk in his voice, as though he’s relishing the tactile quality of the memory. And who else would start a song about touring and missing home with a line like, “They got my favorite lotion here, something in a hotel I admire.” On the jumpy, jangly “Everlovin’ Hand”—which may be the most bittersweet song about masturbation ever written—Childers takes you right to that Red Roof Inn.
Perhaps that’s why he’s become such a prominent figure in roots country in such a short time. Not two years ago, he was another unknown, one of a wave of excellent country artists coming out of the hollers of Kentucky. Born in Lawrence County and raised in Paintsville, he gigged around the area for years, eventually roping Johnny Cash’s engineer David Ferguson and friend/fellow Kentuckian Sturgill Simpson to produce Purgatory. That album found an immediate fanbase, racked up startling streaming numbers, and soon Childers was opening for John Prine on the road and Margo Price at the Ryman.
Country Squire doesn’t stray too far from the modified honky-tonk sound (or the butt-ugly cover art) of Purgatory. In fact, he’s been road-testing most of these nine songs for a few years now, sharpening their hooks with each performance. Again he rustles up Ferguson and Simpson to produce, and again he leads a rough-and-tumble band of veteran session players, most of whom are schooled in bluegrass. Rather than going for a high lonesome sound, they sound more like a grizzled house band at a cinderblock bar off some county road. They give “All Your’n” a ramshackle majesty and “Creeker” a wary tension, and Stuart Duncan’s fiddle reinforces the small-town details of “Matthew,” about simply trying to make ends meet while enjoying a little bit of joy in between the trials. That’s a theme common to country and folk music, yet on Country Squire Childers invests it with enough insight and immediacy to make those hardships sound perfectly present tense.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Hickman Holler / RCA | August 5, 2019 | 7.8 | 69f763f7-40ed-4be8-84df-687ef42a5df6 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
A newly discovered live document from 1973 finds the bassist emerging from a hiatus and negotiating a tradition he helped build with the “new thing” he helped inspire but often doubted. | A newly discovered live document from 1973 finds the bassist emerging from a hiatus and negotiating a tradition he helped build with the “new thing” he helped inspire but often doubted. | Charles Mingus: Jazz in Detroit / Strata Concert Gallery / 46 Selden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/charles-mingus-jazz-in-detroit-strata-concert-gallery-46-selden/ | Jazz in Detroit / Strata Concert Gallery / 46 Selden | By all accounts, including his own, Charles Mingus was a difficult man. Over a four-decade career that tracked and helped precipitate jazz’s evolution from swing through bebop and the avant-garde toward a broadly defined and omnivorous form, the virtuoso bassist and legendary bandleader talked a volatile game, played it like he walked it, and composed with an emotional immediacy that reflected no one else. Mingus transcended the simplistic timelines of popular jazz history, not only because their definitions of his role are restrictive but also because his rhetoric and sound often contradicted one another. Of all the storylines that Jazz in Detroit, a newly discovered document of a February 1973 gig, offers, how Mingus’ internal creative conflicts produced gloriously oversized music is the mightiest.
The context of this multi-set evening—recorded by Detroit’s public-radio station WDET at Strata Gallery, a short-lived and artist-owned Mecca—is essential. The club date happened a year after the pair of star-studded Lincoln Center gigs that ended Mingus’ six-year near-disappearance from the stage, illustrious affairs that mostly presented his music in a traditional big-band setting. Influenced by the death of collaborator Eric Dolphy and a decline in his mental, physical, and financial wellbeing, Mingus stayed away from making music during that span. His withdrawal coincided with (and, some say, was partly caused by) the change in jazz’s place in American society. The music’s traditional lineage was declining in commercial draw and artistic influence, making the kind of big bands Mingus often required fiscally impossible.
A more extreme modernism was overtaking the music, with its latest cutting edge—the avant-garde “new thing” epitomized by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane’s post-1964 explorations—creating a schism. Mingus was almost always of two minds about Coleman’s innovations, saying as early as 1960 that Ornette’s music was “like organized disorganization, or playing wrong right… [but] it gets to you emotionally.” Around the time of this Detroit show, he questioned the emotionally charged improvisations of Albert Ayler: “[He] can’t enjoy that,” he told John Goodman. “It’s impossible to enjoy that.”
Yet this was the Mingus who never tired of citing Dolphy’s genius despite his involvement in seminal “out” Coleman sessions, the Mingus whose compositions had been integrating the “organized disorganization” of dissonant collective improvisation since at least 1956, and the Mingus who consistently employed young musicians like Dolphy or Paul Bley who pushed jazz away from simplicity and melodicism. After the Lincoln Center concerts and the comeback of Let My Children Hear Music, Mingus integrated jazz’s rebel faction more and more into his outlook.
Jazz in Detroit exposes this process of integration. Mingus and the members of his young, focused, experimental quintet are relatively unfamiliar with one another, adding an interpretive dimension to works that span his career. Trumpeter Joe Gardner gigged with Mingus throughout this period; tenor saxophonist John Stubblefield did not last long in the group but soon popped up on Miles Davis’ volcanic Get Up With It before becoming central to the Mingus Big Band two decades later. The sidemen who find the most possibilities in this chaos are Detroit drummer Roy Brooks and pianist Don Pullen, who’d done his share of deep “bullshitting” (the bandleader’s occasional description of avant-garde habits) with drummer Milford Graves in the late 1960s and was now launching a wildly successful stint with Mingus. They bring the juxtapositions of tradition and vanguard to life in breathtaking fashion.
All the musicians stretch for meaningful periods here, both in lead roles and combinations. Part of Mingus’ grand design was to create moments where the melodic beauty of the composition turns into a set of reference chords, so the unchained energy of re-atomization becomes the main thrill. These are certainly the instants likeliest to attract one kind of contemporary listener.
Take the set-opening, 25-minute take on “Pithecanthropus Erectus,” a classic 1956 tone poem that’s an early hallmark of Mingus writing. In this interpretation, there are explosive sections where all the musicians interlock their lines into a culmination before a more customary hard-bop lead appears. Brooks and Pullen pull each other in all directions, the pianist moving directly from Ellingtonian elegance to Cecil Taylor clusters. An exhilarating rhythm-section-only passage encompasses an entire conversation between jazz’s different directions, with Stubblefield and Gardner only resurfacing as a grounding force. This is not late-period Coltrane using “My Favorite Things” as a shell for sonic structures, so much as a whole new reading of “Erectus” by individuals who attack the piece on their own terms. Such moments appear throughout Jazz in Detroit, though one during an extended reading of Duke’s “C Jam Blues” feels especially poignant. Brooks adds sound effects and Mingus bows his bass as Pullen takes a solo piano turn, reducing the Mount Rushmore of swinging blue instrumentals into a minimalist statue, updating the classic form for current needs without destroying the original.
If there’s one canonical performance on Jazz in Detroit, it is “Noddin’ Ya Head Blues,” a 26-minute mournful number that resembles its studio-recorded version only in form. There’s a wonderful opening fanfare by Gardner before Pullen takes the piano for a ride out toward Otis Spann’s purview. Stubblefield’s circular, eminently likable lines push the register higher as the choruses pile up. When Mingus finally takes over, with only Pullen left to accompany him softly, the bass and piano fade to the background for Brooks and his musical saw. The crowd becomes alive to the moment. The saw’s melodic, breath-drawn sound is eerie when it’s playing the blues, but as Brooks enters a call-and-response with Pullen, the instrument transcends the context, invoking the circus tent and graveyard in equal measure. The ethereal moment evokes Ayler, a free jazz totem who began his career as a teenager backing the blues harmonica legend Little Walter before pushing untethered freedom and timeless folk melodies toward one another. When the band reconvenes for a free-for-all ending, with Brooks back on drums, the energy is in a different place. Or in many places at once, a decent epigraph for Mingus’ work.
“I feel sorry about jazz. The truth has been lost in the music,” Mingus told the New Yorker in 1971 during another anti-avant-garde aside. “All the different styles and factions went to war with each other, and it hasn’t done any good.” After Detroit, when Stubblefield was replaced by full-fledged avant-garde member Hamiet Bluiett, the ways that Mingus looked to affect jazz continued to stretch and recede. He even got over his intense dislike of electric instruments long enough to record with them. Jazz in Detroit feels like a document where you start hearing the lion push winter back, not just acknowledging the “war” and his part in it but imagining what peace may sound like. | 2018-11-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | BBE Music / 180 Proof / Strata | November 17, 2018 | 8.6 | 6a08ba14-f904-4a36-a7bd-cd89bf745c6f | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
The Detroit producer and Slum Village alum makes house music that’s true to his hometown’s diverse, deeply rooted legacy, with elements of R&B, funk, and soul informing its four-to-the-floor bounce. | The Detroit producer and Slum Village alum makes house music that’s true to his hometown’s diverse, deeply rooted legacy, with elements of R&B, funk, and soul informing its four-to-the-floor bounce. | Waajeed: From the Dirt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/waajeed-from-the-dirt/ | From the Dirt | Hip-hop and house are the Gallagher brothers of club music: They share the same roots, are both hugely successful, yet find themselves largely at odds in 2018, despite many years in which they got along famously. Detroit producer Waajeed might just be the person to broker a truce. His resumé reads like a Hands-Across-America-style initiative to ease the discord between these two musical descendants of funk and disco: He DJed and produced for legendary Detroit hip-hop crew Slum Village in their early years before pivoting towards house and techno in the 2010s, notably working with Motor City house icon Theo Parrish on 2016’s “Warrior Code.”
From the Dirt, which follows a recent run of 12”s for Waajeed’s own Dirt Tech Reck, is similarly primed to bridge the divide. The album’s 10 tracks borrow liberally from R&B, hip-hop, funk, disco, and soul, the elements jostling for attention under the watchful eye of house music’s four-to-the-floor pulse. The drums on “My Father's Rhythm” have the shuffling hip-hop swing that fellow Slum Village alumnus J Dilla brought to his beats, while the P-funk synth and corporeal bass throb on “I Ain’t Safe” bring R&B’s musical palette to house.
The spirit of crossover is also apparent in the album’s vocal tracks. The deliciously laconic vocal lines of “I Ain’t Safe” and “Things About You” (courtesy featured singers Ideeyah and Asante and Zo!, respectively) would sit well on a zoned-out R&B jam but also work at house tempo. The results are so elegantly lush you can almost smell the sandalwood wafting from their grooves. It helps that Waajeed writes cultivated, jazz-influenced chord sequences, which elevate the album’s simpler songs, like the title track, into something altogether more beguiling.
Elsewhere you can see the footprints of producers like Theo Parrish and Moodymann loping across From the Dirt. “After You Left” borrows the Moodymann tactic (admittedly, one he borrowed from Marvin Gaye) of looping excited party chatter in the background, making it sound like you’re privy to the greatest night out ever, while “Power in Numbers” uses a rumbling acidic riff to drive the song forward, a little like Parrish’s own “Synthetic Flemm.” “Power in Numbers” is particularly noteworthy as a showcase for the type of propulsive rhythmic collage that Waajeed does so well. There’s very little to the song beyond the central riff—just shuffling house beat and brief vocal samples—but Waajeed manipulates these elements like a master builder working on a stone wall, setting each component in precisely the right place for the song’s greater good.
Where From the Dirt differs from its antecedents—and, indeed, from the album title—is in its exceptionally clean sound, with nothing of Moodymann’s textured fuzz or the dank, Auto-Tuned smoke that envelops much modern hip-hop. It makes the album sound almost anachronistically bright in these darkened days, the record’s pristine surface contributing—perhaps unfairly—to a feeling of slightness on a run of under-realized tracks towards the album’s end.
From the Dirt may not be the home-run smash that would inspire the next generation of rappers to pick up the 3 Chairs discography to file alongside their Gucci Mane records. But at a time when house music is largely defined in the public imagination by V-necked Swedes, Waajeed’s album feels important: a reminder of house music’s African-American roots in the face of its EDM-saturated present—and, perhaps, the beginnings of a bridge away from dance-music monoculture back toward the hip-hop and R&B that share so much of house music’s DNA. | 2018-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Dirt Tech Reck | December 5, 2018 | 7.4 | 6a08d673-1663-455c-aba7-48fd81dce9f4 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
On her debut album, the Brooklyn folk singer writes vividly detailed songs about the peculiarities of human emotion, turning existential questions into playful country romps and homey campfire songs. | On her debut album, the Brooklyn folk singer writes vividly detailed songs about the peculiarities of human emotion, turning existential questions into playful country romps and homey campfire songs. | Pearla: *Oh Glistening Onion, the Nighttime Is Coming * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pearla-oh-glistening-onion-the-nighttime-is-coming/ | Oh Glistening Onion, the Nighttime Is Coming | Nicole Rodriguez is a detective of uncertainty. The Brooklyn-based folk singer who records as Pearla says that although she may write music in order to “solve a mystery,” after completing a song, questions typically outweigh answers: “The mystery remains, no matter how many words are dancing around it.” On her full-length debut, Oh Glistening Onion, The Nighttime Is Coming, Rodriguez folds together boundless curiosity with heady reflection; her record is as captivated by modern life’s intricacies as it is curious about what exists beyond them.
Produced by Tyler Postiglione—who also worked on Rodriguez’ 2019 EP Quilting & Other Activities—Oh Glistening Onion spins the peculiarities of our emotions into playful country romps and homey campfire songs. Rodriguez details the world around her with sharp clarity, and her lyrics sometimes sound taken from a children’s book or an old, forgotten fable, her hearty voice a guide to existential questions about death, doubt, and dreams. Album opener “Strong” begins with an air of whimsy—Rodriguez sings offhandedly of the theft of a credit card with a laid-back country twang—but quickly turns into a lonely cry for help: “Suddenly I feel like I don’t have time left,” she yells as a brass section accents her fear of death. Likewise, on “Ming the Clam,” she uses the real-life tale of a centuries-old mollusk to question a loved one’s mortality and her own role in a relationship. She ponders “the mystery of the sea who lived beyond her time,” backed by a toy piano and a small yet vibrant-sounding orchestra to create a mystical, even naive soundscape. But the questions she asks are charged with gravitas: “Reminder of the grand creation/How did she keep on fighting? How do you keep on fighting?”
Rodriguez’ introspective lyrics occasionally resemble journal entries from someone intent upon finding her inner child, but just as often she pokes gentle fun at such therapy-speak. In “Effort,” she runs down a bullet-pointed list of coping strategies— “Watch dumb TV/Go for a walk/Write in a journal”—before finally confessing, “I am spent/I am spent/I am spent,” over swelling strings. It’s an admission of defeat set to a paradoxically climactic finale. She does her best to balance the record’s self-help themes with a welcome levity in sound and structure, though it doesn’t always work: On “With,” her picture of a calm, unbothered life sounds a little too lullaby-like to take seriously. But for the most part, she keeps the mawkishness at bay. A song like the lackadaisical “Funny in Dreams” could scan as too facile—who’d have thought that strange things happen in our dreams!—but she deftly uses it as an opportunity for vivid introspection. Reflecting on the appearance of a previous bandmate in her dream, Rodriguez recalls, “I let him touch me with his hand/There are parts of me that I will never really understand,” her voice turning to a breathy, bewildered sigh.
Throughout, dreamy synths, Rhodes and Wurlitzer keys, and a robust brass and string section balance out the folk and country textures, joyously filling out the imaginative spaces of Pearla’s songs and mirroring the emotional terrain mapped in her lyrics. In the early standout “Effort,” an antsy guitar follows Rodriguez as she quietly doubts herself: “I’m small and I feel that way in the morning.” As the song builds, lush strings and brass paint a picture of all-consuming despair. In “The Glistening Onion,” she puts the fullness of her arrangements to opposite ends: First waltzing alone and gradually encircled by her band’s Stax-like soul, she sounds as if she’s twirling under the moonlight, arms outstretched. In the spare, hushed “Flicker,” she makes do with just an acoustic guitar, a knowing voice, and a simple melody: “Every life is a flicker, every body a bridge/Every song like a morning sun/It’s not the old train leaving/Or the new coming in/It’s the promise of getting on one.” Even at her most elemental, Rodriguez is more interested in questions than answers. | 2023-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Spacebomb | February 10, 2023 | 6.9 | 6a092018-9713-46a2-92cf-06af46f6923c | Rachel Saywitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachel-saywitz/ | |
The unconventional rap group Young Fathers have always counfounded categories, and their newest effort is a rock record, almost a pop record. It’s raucous, messy, and marked by a profound sense of urgency, intended to uplift and discomfit. | The unconventional rap group Young Fathers have always counfounded categories, and their newest effort is a rock record, almost a pop record. It’s raucous, messy, and marked by a profound sense of urgency, intended to uplift and discomfit. | Young Fathers: White Men Are Black Men Too | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20391-white-men-are-black-men-too/ | White Men Are Black Men Too | The Edinburgh trio Young Fathers have always confounded categories—Tape One and Tape Two, the EPs they released in 2011 and 2013, were often called rap, but always trailing qualifiers—"alt-," "art-," "psych-". Then, as their Shabazz-on-uppers verses ("I Heard") and grimy Yeezus shrieks ("Effigy") faded, they shifted again: their Mercury Prize-winning debut full-length Dead landed somewhere close to what people thought of as "hip-hop," if similarly prefaced—"experimental," "alternative," or just "Scottish."
You don’t call your record White Men Are Black Men Too unless you’re looking to stir up some questions about classification, and with their new album, Young Fathers double down on the confusion they inspired with their earliest releases. Their label bio even leads with the statement that the group has "no ancestors," which is a funny thing to say about three men calling themselves Young Fathers because they all inherited their dads’ names. But their lineage is important, and audible: Graham "G" Hastings was born in Edinburgh; Alloysious Massaquoi hails from Liberia via Ghana, and Kayus Bankole was raised in the US by Nigerian parents. Young Fathers not only have ancestors but draw an enormous amount of energy from them, as White Men Are Black Men Too makes obvious: The record is a direct descendent of TV on the Radio, a grandson of krautrock, a distant relative of the earnest Streets, a grungy nephew of Arcade Fire. And, though it might change by the next time around, they’ve hit an unqualified category, for the first time: this is a rock record, almost a pop record. It’s raucous, messy, marked by a profound sense of urgency, intended to uplift and discomfit.
Remarkably, White Men Are Black Men Too also addresses the questions posed by its name. The lyrics begin the conversation, but only get so far: "Old Rock N Roll" starts with "I’m tired of playing the good black/ I’m tired of having to hold back/ I’m tired of wearing this hallmark for some evils that happened way back." Then, the speaker flips his loyalty—"I’m tired of blaming the white men/ His indiscretion don’t betray him"-—and reverses the album title: "A black man can play him." Then it flips back: "Some white men are black men too, nigga to them, a gentleman to you."
The idea is jumbled, a little hollow, mostly a venting of frustration. More to the point is this simple line on "Rain or Shine": "I ain’t strange enough." And the most honest moment on the album, the moment where Young Fathers delineate their worldview the most clearly, is on the album’s standout (and most overtly TV on the Radio-soundalike) single "Shame", which begins with a dusty, drum-machine twinkle and rises up into a big, ragged, radio-ready melody. The chorus, self-flagellating and triumphant, switches between cries of "It ain’t right, baby" and "What you do to feel better! What you do to feel good!"
But at any rate, the words are just the address on the envelope; the music is the letter itself. There is an appealing coherence in the album’s composition. Most of the tracks are built on juxtaposition between the low and high register: a vamping bass riff against a shrill glockenspiel, a dark guitar loop beneath a top cacophony of horns, synths, vocal wails. It’s a simple framework and a strong mirror to Young Fathers’ submerged cultural project: delineating a foundational reality (race, genre) and then mounting a tantrum against it. And, in the midst of this dissonance, the album’s sound is all tied together by shreds of surefooted, strong pop melody: "27" sounds almost like pitch-warped Passion Pit by way of the Avalanches, and "Dare Me" seems like a sweet little organ-backed ballad until it throws up a middle finger and breaks into an atonal, menacing shuffle.
It’s not all coherent or wholly successful. Young Fathers’ people’s-mic earnestness can combine with their penchant for major-chord toplines to produce a funky but unmistakable cheese, as in "Sirens". Their fractious energy slants unfocused at times, too, and though the group does answer the question provoked by their album title, they do so by throwing their hands up—compacting the past like so much garbage and charging ahead. The sound of White Men Are Black Men Too is telling enough. It’s triumphant music for the hyperactive, plural city; it’s confrontational as a means to achieving communality, with no particular loyalties except to an anonymous, shifting collective of people who all want the same thing as Young Fathers—to be one thing, then the next, then the next. | 2015-04-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic / Pop/R&B | Big Dada | April 9, 2015 | 6.8 | 6a0e6775-0205-4618-b087-e957091d0c3e | Jia Tolentino | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jia-tolentino/ | null |
Josh Tillman is still self-absorbed. But his fourth full-length as Father John Misty exhibits a new sense of empathy and vulnerability while losing none of his wit. | Josh Tillman is still self-absorbed. But his fourth full-length as Father John Misty exhibits a new sense of empathy and vulnerability while losing none of his wit. | Father John Misty: God’s Favorite Customer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/father-john-misty-gods-favorite-customer/ | God’s Favorite Customer | The magnificent ego of Father John Misty makes his music seem really important. The music is not really that important, of course, but when you hear that smooth and gentle soft-rock with his olden croon centered so perfectly on every pitch, it seems like it is, in the way that narcissists or the canon of classic rock seem important. This outsized persona bursting forth from singer-songwriter Josh Tillman is full of self-mythology descended straight from Bob Dylan, dripping with a painted-on significance: His greatest passion is his thoughts. The autofiction of his songwriting imparts its own patina of truth, something that seems unassailable if you subscribe to the man, the voice, the facial hair. He strolls through his own songs like a melancholy king finding every opportunity to catch his reflection.
His ego may keep some folks at arm’s length, but it is also precisely what makes his music fascinating. If the maxim is “write what you know,” then it is certain that Tillman knows himself a little too well. All this helps build a kind of lore around him, the Misty mythos: He is the former drummer for the sylvan Fleet Foxes, the rogue at house parties, the online satirist, the ham at live shows, the scamp who writes generic pop songs as a lark or as a hired gun, the ingester of mushrooms, the beefer with Ryan Adams, and of course the husband to his wife, Emma, to whom his cosmic romance was detailed with great overture on his 2015 album I Love You, Honeybear. This is only part of the vast Father John Misty universe Tillman has created, with its many footnotes and appendices. His fourth album, God’s Favorite Customer, is Tillman trying to destroy it all.
The record is comparatively small and vulnerable, as hook-filled as it is heartrending, the kind of back-to-basics turn that almost seems a bit too calculated after the density of last year’s Pure Comedy. Written over a period of two emotionally fraught months holed up in a New York hotel room, Tillman sounds more wise than clever. Instead of the romantic bombast of I Love You, Honeybear, now it’s love songs without ornaments, written from the perspective of someone looking up at the world, not down on it. Finally, the real lessons of his psychedelic trips of the past are taking hold: Father John Misty wants to destroy his ego, get out of his head, and be here for someone else.
Which is not easily done. Tillman sometimes handles naked sentiment as if holding a screaming infant, but witnessing his arduous journey from a louche cynic to a man stripped absolutely bare makes for rapt listening. It’s his own modern-day Orpheus myth, where hell is a lonely penthouse strewn with empty bottles and unremembered evenings. Lead single “Mr. Tillman” imagines as much, a genuinely hilarious back-and-forth between a blacked-out Tillman and an incredibly patient hotel concierge. Still in the darkness of the hotel, the bathrobed piano ballad “Palace” contains a line delivered with such melodrama that it still makes me laugh dozens of times in: “Last night I wrote a poem/Man, I must’ve been in the poem zone.”
Outside of his hotel room, the snide commentary slowly melts away. Part of Tillman’s humble quest is guided by the record’s charmingly lysergic California studio sound. Sometimes there’s a flourish of sax or glockenspiel, sometimes they swell into a big glam-pop sound, and sometimes they feature Mark Ronson playing bass. But mostly, Tillman uses simple arrangements and a muted drum kit sound which could only be described as “tasteful,” keeping things to a lean and tuneful 38 minutes. It’s a risky move because, now more than ever, the songs rely heavily on Tillman’s voice and narrative to see them through.
Present within these songs are grace and generosity—two words I could not imagine summoning to describe Father John Misty’s music a year ago. It knocks you off balance. He has the ear of Jeff Lynne and the vowels of Elton John as he casts his words into the sky and lets them hang there to be marveled at, plainspoken and myth-free. There are no Misty prerequisites required in order to be shot through the heart with the ballads of “Please Don’t Die” and closer “We’re Only People (And There’s Not Much Anyone Can Do About That).” They are lonesome songs, honest because of their nature not because of their pretext.
Tillman used to write what he knew; now it’s as though he’s writing what he’s just learned, racing to capture a newborn emotion before it curdles into self-conscious drek. And while God’s Favorite Customer tips slightly into self-pity at times, it’s a passing feeling on an album that peeks behind the many cynical shields of Josh Tillman. Through the wringer and reborn on the other side, the world he sketches seems brighter now, bigger, and more sensitive to the touch. It brings his songs forward out of the warrens of his head and into the sacred space between listener and writer. He’s still writing about himself, but now his songs are interrogations, apologies, and discoveries: On the gorgeous and spacious track called “The Songwriter,” he sings slowly to his wife Emma, something incorrigibly selfish and selfless at the same time:
What would it sound like if you were the songwriter
And you made your living off of me?
Would you detail your near constant consternation
With the way my very presence makes your muses up and flee?
That is the crux of Father John Misty, this tension, between believing in himself and believing in others. God’s Favorite Customer is ultimately about trust, what you can afford to lose to be fully there for someone else—and just how difficult and terrifying that can be. You wonder, though, whether or not this too will all be folded into part of the Misty universe. The Hotel Album. The One Where He Got Real. Can you really trust someone like this? Retreating to a hotel room to write an album assisted by a cocktail of drugs and heartbreak is not exactly an original rock’n’roll proposition. But even that cliché seems to be part of his desire to forego a too-clever concept. Instead, he basks in something more universal, trying to seek that one marble of truth about love we all process as individuals but possess as a collective. As Brian Wilson once advised: “Hang on to your ego... but I know that you’re going to lose the fight.” It’s a joy to watch Tillman get in the ring for a bit. | 2018-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop / Bella Union | June 1, 2018 | 8.5 | 6a1057e3-6e65-46f6-9e5b-1da5d3037a4a | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
Pals from Vampire Weekend's Class of '08, the similarly preppy band returns with a sophomore album that pushes their stylistic range at the cost of hooks. | Pals from Vampire Weekend's Class of '08, the similarly preppy band returns with a sophomore album that pushes their stylistic range at the cost of hooks. | Ra Ra Riot: The Orchard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14574-the-orchard/ | The Orchard | Being friends with Vampire Weekend would've helped any band in 2008, but it was particularly beneficial to Ra Ra Riot and their relentlessly charming debut, The Rhumb Line, whose college rock came in similarly preppy tailoring. Plenty of this genre's practitioners have attended ritzy private schools, but these two bands sounded like it: melodically nimble and compact songs bedecked with chamber-pop sweetener and nods to 1980s art-rock. Of course, Ra Ra Riot never faced the same accusations of cultural appropriation or privilege (maybe because Syracuse isn't in the Ivy League?), but oddly enough, their detractors denounced them as even less edgy and more buttoned-up. Perhaps The Orchard is a reaction to that criticism; it pushes their stylistic range at the cost of hooks.
The record's up-tempo singles rehash the band's previous sound to slighter effect. The intentionally offbeat bass on "Boy" distracts, while "Too Dramatic" is anything but, its awkward rhymes sounding like parts of a melodic chain that's missing a couple of links. The Orchard is best when Ra Ra Riot integrate plusher production into more natural arrangements. While the rangy, chugging motorik of "Massachusetts" and "You and I Know"'s dusky balladry (sung by cellist Alexandra Lawn) meander, they at least try something new, hinting that The Orchard might be something of a grower. But as soon as they build momentum with The Orchard's most typically triumphant hook ("Shadowcasting"), the ironically titled "Do You Remember" kicks off a final third that fails to leave any impression.
Any band with a successful debut is tempted to make its next album reactionary, but if Ra Ra Riot were set on doing so, they could've learned something from VW's Contra, a sonically rich and fearless comeback that sounded like the work of a band who, as our Mike Powell said, had "fallen in love with what they started and are hugging it tight without shame or apology." Instead, Ra Ra Riot sound overly self-conscious, the rural environs of their recording space failing to provide the warmth, empathy, or exuberance of The Rhumb Line. They've survived worse things than a bum album (between their self-titled EP and The Rhumb Line, drummer John Pike passed away), so it would be foolish to write them off, but The Orchard at the very least can prove that making something as effortlessly amiable as The Rhumb Line isn't as easy at it seems. | 2010-08-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-08-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Barsuk | August 24, 2010 | 5.7 | 6a1e1ff8-c603-4b13-bc5d-dff5f80d4c36 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Detroit rapper tears into his creative partner’s thick beats like beef jerky, but a few self-righteous complaints taint some of his fiercest verses yet. | The Detroit rapper tears into his creative partner’s thick beats like beef jerky, but a few self-righteous complaints taint some of his fiercest verses yet. | Elzhi / Oh No: Heavy Vibrato | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elzhi-oh-no-heavy-vibrato/ | Heavy Vibrato | For Elzhi, every new song is an opportunity to prove just how much sharper his pen is than yours. The Detroit emcee means it in the true-school sense—after all, he comes from an era where the terms “pen” and “emcee” were sacred totems. Whether he’s rhyming about failed relationships or paying tribute to Nas’ Illmatic in the form of an entire LP, he relishes his status as a hypertechnical rapper with conceptual albums and a knack for cerebral storytelling.
Elzhi’s style is rich and rigid, but its effectiveness hinges upon the beats he’s working with. Over the last five years, he’s gravitated toward albums helmed by a single producer. On 2018’s Jericho Jackson, Jamla Records producer Khrysis offered up stately boom-bap that shrouded Elzhi’s raps in a muted sepia tone; Brooklyn producer JR Swiftz gave 2020’s Seven Times Down Eight Times Up a lush, pulpy feel; and the soulful live embellishments on 2022’s Zhigeist recast the Detroit rapper and collaborator Georgia Anne Muldrow as Afrofuturistic jetsetters. With Heavy Vibrato, he joins forces with Oxnard producer Oh No, who offers up a feast of thick beats that Elzhi tears into like beef jerky.
Oh No—best known as Madlib’s brother and half of the duo Gangrene with the Alchemist—is cut from the same traditionalist cloth as Elzhi. His love for sampling pulls him in strange directions; to keep his grimy sound fresh, he culls from obscure Swedish psychedelic rock records and Nintendo 64 video games. There’s a hazy ambience to his work, as if every beat emerged from the cracks of a sauna bench, but Heavy Vibrato cuts through the fog with sharp, jazzy arrangements. On “Say It Don’t Spray It,” the snare drums are enveloping, almost dubby next to clanging bells and synths; they softly rattle behind swirling piano and xylophone tones on “RIP (Radio International Programming)” and snap with a live player’s feel on “Fireballs.” These are among the eeriest—and cleanest—beats Oh No has ever created, throbbing and lurching with cartoonish flair.
Vibrato is colorful and vibrant, and Elzhi matches that aura with nimble bars that don’t stray far from his lyrical comfort zone. There’s still concepts at play here, but the album-length theme of 2016’s Lead Poison has fizzled out; since then, he’s leaned on vignettes and looser motifs. Proper opening track “Trick Dice” is classic rap calisthenics, a space for Elzhi to shame lesser rappers and unfurl intricate bars for kicks: “Those who put they money where they chief were/Pushed outta Mother Earth before Father Time could bury them beneath her.” He goes a step further on late-album highlight “Fireballs,” offering haters nuclear-missile levels of wordplay over an expansive swirl of scuzzy bass and keys. There’s a buzz to the way his words connect and flow into each other when he’s just searching for a way to figuratively clear his throat—he could make even a run-on sentence sound good.
Although he’s usually cool and collected, Elzhi sounds angrier than he’s ever been on Vibrato. The emotion occasionally trips him up: “RIP (Radio International Programming)” is nearly four-and-a-half minutes of Real Hip-Hop grousing, filled with valid points about cultural literacy, changing consumer habits, and the rapper death toll—only they’re buried under thinly veiled misogyny and bad OnlyFans jokes. It’s the one moment where Vibrato grinds to a halt, a little too high off its own exhaust fumes (Fellow Detroiter Guilty Simpson’s guest verse is more tactful but no less potent). Closer “Last Nerve” widens the scope to everyday issues that aggravate Elzhi: from racism to stubbing his toe after hearing a shooting outside his window to not being able to afford studio time. It’s not as theatrical a display as the way he chronicled a tragic teenage love story on “Two 16s,” but he’s never sounded this aggrieved before. Oh No’s cacophony of organs, cymbals, and chunky bass only adds to the chaos. In this instance, the duo’s frustration gels into something tactile: two talented everymen going beyond mere rap props by splitting the difference between pointed critique and deeper human connection. | 2023-12-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-12-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Nature Sounds | December 12, 2023 | 7.1 | 6a2e4acb-7532-472e-97ac-9ddd82450a1f | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The solo debut from the xx vocalist is a quiet work of personal exploration. Rife with growing pains, it occasionally hints at real beauty. | The solo debut from the xx vocalist is a quiet work of personal exploration. Rife with growing pains, it occasionally hints at real beauty. | Oliver Sim: Hideous Bastard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oliver-sim-hideous-bastard/ | Hideous Bastard | Oliver Sim has never been known for his vocal range. Expressionless, and clad in all-black, the xx vocalist swapped soft-spoken, deadpan lyrics about “words unspoken” and “silent devotion” with Romy Madley Croft, an equally laconic singer who has proven to be slightly more versatile. Accordingly, it may not be a coincidence that Sim is the last member of the group to go solo, and his debut album, Hideous Bastard, is produced entirely by bandmate Jamie xx. For the first time, Sim’s voice is front and center, lending the music a subtle, and sometimes frustrating, emotional palette.
Compared to his work in the xx, where the group foregrounds the textures of the songs ahead of the lyrics, Hideous Bastard takes a more personal approach. Upon announcing the album, the 33-year-old songwriter shared a statement revealing he has been living with HIV since 17. The project, as stated by Sim, was an explicit attempt to, as he wrote, “free myself of some of the shame and fear that I’ve felt for a long time.” These themes, compounded by the helplessness of youth, appear starkly throughout Hideous Bastard: navigating queer relationships, the expectations of his family and peers, a love so strong it’s debilitating. “I thought I could survive without letting anyone near... The moment I got that taste I felt naked and afraid,” he sings on “Saccharine,” meditating on a love more complicated than any featured on an xx track.
Hideous Bastard is at its best when Sim raises his voice and leaves his comfort zone, ditching impressionistic lyrics for something more concrete. Standout track “Never Here” features a chugging bassline, toe-tapping drum programming, and a propulsive synth. Sim’s vocal, beginning in a sleepy lower register, grows increasingly desperate as the music reaches its apex, transforming an otherwise imaginative lyric—“I was never really here”—into a rallying cry for anyone who’s ever felt like they could disappear at a party without anybody noticing. “Fruit” harnesses a similar intensity, marrying the album’s catchiest hook with one of its most explicitly queer and conflicted lyrics: “What would my father do?/Do I take a bite of the fruit? I’ve heard other people say it can’t be right if it causes you shame.” During the second chorus, Jamie xx ups the ante, harmonizing a siren synth with Bronski Beat’s Jimmy Sommerville’s gorgeous, wordless backing vocals.
Too often, the album is marred by a sense of vagueness. At worst, it feels underdeveloped: Sim’s lyrics end at confession, just short of an actual message or direction. These songs are full of deeply human feelings, but they lack identifiable human moments. The album as therapy is a tricky concept—one that lives and dies in the details, and as of yet, Sim’s songwriting is not up to the challenge. “Run the Credits,” which caps off the album, makes a swing for a radio single but comes up thematically short. “Psycho killer in a romantic comedy/Closing scenes of a decade-long trilogy,” Sim pines over soft piano on the hooky pre-chorus, setting the scene for the song’s big takeaway: Real love is nothing like it is in Disney movies. We’ve heard this before.
Sonically, the album also mines familiar territory. For the most part, it’s all stylish, dour synth presets and moody piano set to gentle electronic beats: You could easily mistake these for outtakes from a Thom Yorke solo album. Occasionally, Jamie xx interjects something that feels new, like the breakbeats on “Sensitive Child” or the choral arrangement in “GMT.” Like his work with the xx, these touches elevate, complicate, and refine the material, and Hideous Bastard’s middle section—made up of “Confident Man,” “Saccharine,” and “Unreliable Narrator,” all written by Sim without a co-lyricist—noticeably drags. As is typical in periods of self-discovery, Hideous Bastard is rife with growing pains. But surrounded by a trusted community, and in a few sparing moments of clarity, it hints at real beauty. | 2022-09-13T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-13T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Young | September 13, 2022 | 6.5 | 6a309fe0-bc91-46da-9e7b-c2be73535911 | P.J. McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/p.j.-mccormick/ | |
More than a dozen years after breaking up following the departure of bassist G.C. Green, Justin Broadrick's Godflesh returns. The Decline and Fall EP finds them picking up where they left off, alternating crudely recorded blasts of noise with the crunchy industrial rock of their prime. | More than a dozen years after breaking up following the departure of bassist G.C. Green, Justin Broadrick's Godflesh returns. The Decline and Fall EP finds them picking up where they left off, alternating crudely recorded blasts of noise with the crunchy industrial rock of their prime. | Godflesh: Decline and Fall EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19482-godflesh-decline-and-fall-ep/ | Decline and Fall EP | If Trent Reznor can win an Oscar for scoring a movie about Facebook and Ministry’s Al Jourgensen can read the five-day Los Angeles forecast for thousands of perplexed viewers in El Paso, there’s no reason to be surprised by the rebirth of Godflesh. When the band broke up in 2002 following the departure of bassist G.C. Green, its death seemed final. Justin Broadrick fell into a depression, canceling their tour and rarely leaving the house, ultimately solidifying the group's passing in a promotional poster for his next project that proclaimed : “Godflesh is dead. Long live Jesu.” But here comes Broadrick more than a dozen years later, wizened by his years spent making post-rock and, with Green back in tow, promising an LP and an EP from Godflesh in 2014. They return with Decline and Fall, a four-track show of force that laughs off any notions that they've fallen off.
Godflesh’s metal machine music resurfaces at a time where satellites and fiber optics networks muffle the once-unchallenged roars of factory machines. The production of Decline and Fall could be heard as band’s protest against the sanitization of these industrial sounds. Godflesh remain fiercely loyal to lo-fi, treating songs like as caustic exercises in overstimulation. “Ringer” stirs up shivers by way of a direct confrontation with mechanical chaos: the drums lock into a dull, arrythmic throb picked up by the grizzled bass, leaving Broadrick to embellish the din with a combination of throaty growls and slightly soured singing. In turn, “Playing With Fire” welds these rotting melodies together into grating harmonies that attract and repel in equal measure.
Elsewhere, Godflesh reach for the crunchy industrial rock of their prime: half of the EP remains entrenched in rhythmic, bass-heavy metal that some listeners have preemptively dubbed “Kornflesh.” This pejorative, of course, ignores the appropriation of the band’s hybridized sound by more palatable commercial artists such as Faith No More (whose invitation to join Broadrick turned down), Fear Factory, and yes, Korn. At the same time, it captures what makes gnarled jams like “Dogbite” so compelling: namely, that Godflesh can return from a 12-year absence—long after the demise of nu-metal, for that matter—having perfected and refined the style of their co-opters. Such a reclamation manifests itself in “Dog Bite” in the form of a thick, sludgy guitar hook that stomps along to form a rowdy groove, an approach they take again on the title track, this time with a greater emphasis on the drum machine for an unexpected hit of hip-hop.
Avant and yet strangely accessible, industrially-minded but all-embracing, Decline and Fall confirms that a decade-plus-long absence has dulled neither Godflesh’s industrial spirit, nor their devotion to experimentation. Will they be able to sustain that line of energy for an entire album? That question must go unanswered until the release of A World Lit Only By Fire, the band's first full-length since 2001. | 2014-07-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-07-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Avalanche | July 2, 2014 | 7.9 | 6a34b175-dd3a-4ffd-ba16-e7fe704bde38 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
L.A. punk band completes the transformation into goth and cold wave, with an emotive, dramatic record that still unmistakably sounds like their work. | L.A. punk band completes the transformation into goth and cold wave, with an emotive, dramatic record that still unmistakably sounds like their work. | Abe Vigoda: Crush | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14647-crush/ | Crush | If you dug Abe Vigoda's last album, Skeleton, but slept on the follow-up EP Reviver, Crush might come as a bit of a shock. Where Skeleton solidified their rep as "tropical-punk" workaholics, spitting out blasts of chiming guitar and gnarled beats, Crush indulges their love of goth and coldwave, with synths often louder than guitars. Reviver nudged things in that direction, sounding more emotive and less claustrophobic (there was even a maudlin remake of Skeleton's "Endless Sleeper" that did away drums entirely), but here they go full-bore, evoking the drama of Psychedelic Furs or Echo and the Bunnymen.
It was a big risk to take, and it's paid off: The songs may sound more conventional, but they're no less complex. The music is hard-wired and overflowing with activity, even in the record's sparsest moments. For me, Abe Vigoda's trademark is tightly-wound songs that spill into chaos, and that's here in spades-- the heightened accessibility never comes at a compromise. Being into Abe Vigoda still means being an adrenaline-junkie, and much of Crush is as frenetic and engagingly exhausting as anything on Skeleton.
Where the latter slammed quickly into that frenzy, Crush takes more time to crest into its darker waves. Early tracks are marked more by Dane Chadwick's sharp drumming and Michael Vidal's smoldering voice (recalling Richard Butler and Peter Murphy) than any of the sounds in between. But midway through, Crush really flames up. "November", "Pure Violence", and the title track all weave spiraling structures that constantly ride curves and turn corners. It's easy to hear echoes of Skeleton in the cascading guitars, but the increased prominence of Vidal's singing gives it all an aching, moody edge, as if the band's tropical locale has become shrouded in sun-blocking clouds.
At times those clouds can be oppressive. Vidal's moan on the Simple Minds-ish "Repeating Angel" becomes a bit of a mope, and closer "We Have to Mask" feels slightly lethargic, its canned beats and strained emoting bearing the feel of an outtake. But even if those tracks aren't great on their own, they don't nearly break the spell of Crush, whose combination of hard-charging energy and world-weary moods is less an unexpected curveball than a well-earned step forward. | 2010-09-17T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-09-17T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Bella Union / Post Present Medium | September 17, 2010 | 7.8 | 6a38ffd6-8e4c-46b7-a45f-dca391cd2dfc | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The Brooklyn electronic musician’s punch-drunk and disquieting debut subverts genre tropes to laugh in your face. | The Brooklyn electronic musician’s punch-drunk and disquieting debut subverts genre tropes to laugh in your face. | Otto: Clam Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/otto-clam-day/ | Clam Day | At the turn of the century, around the same time as the rise of the Shibuya-kei movement, Japanese producer Nobukazu Takemura was spearheading the development of a style that writer and musician Nick Currie (Momus) would later dub “cute formalism:” an aesthetic that adheres to the prescribed notions of a subgenre while imbuing it with a sense of lightness and playfulness. Clam Day, the debut album from Brooklyn native Otto Benson a.k.a. OTTO, fits neatly into this lineage, offering a chipper take on electronica that is exhilarating and disquieting all at once.
Clam Day’s palette is well-defined: Digital filters garble voices while vintage drum machines push up against bright squiggles and chirps to provide a pulse. There’s a distinct “island of misfit toys” approach to the way Benson flings around samples. The cheekily titled “Sprained My Ankle in Gristedes Juice Aisle” feels like Aphex Twin’s manic “Afx237 v.7” on mood stabilizers, while early highlight “Crystal Hole” imagines Animal Collective’s Sung Tongs as digested by a lo-fi house producer.
In addition to Benson, two friends—credited only as Max B and Ronnie P—sang and co-wrote songs for the album. Each of the vocal tracks were inspired by “corporate sprites,” Benson’s term for the colorful cartoon mascots deployed by big brands to interface with consumers. As he brings their world to life, he imbues his songs with a subtle unease. “Waiting to pay all the medical bills for you and me and everyone we know,” Max B sings on the chorus of “Guess My Crush,” his voice made child-like with pitch-shifting. The result is something akin to the wickedly funny web series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, with its brightly colored cloth puppets pondering the myriad horrors of existence under the guise of children’s television programming.
Benson’s arrangements flip back and forth between minimalism and maximalism—simple pads and shuffling drums in one moment, blown-out percussion sequences the next. By the end of the record, he’s dreaming up music for fictional characters (“Kwop Kwop Theme”) and dabbling with murky ambient synth textures (“Microplastics In My Bloodstream”). Still, some of the tracks run out of ideas after establishing an initial vibe; the aptly named “Forest Ritual” would make great incidental music for a video game, but quickly becomes set dressing in an album context.
The most memorable songs on Clam Day take advantage of genre tropes to subvert your expectations and laugh in your face. “Valentino Couture Crusty Crayon” turns indie rock jangles and Boards of Canada synths into a cacophony of tape distortion. It’s immediately followed by “Wash Your Hands,” which is both a public health announcement and a heartfelt song about being peed on. This punch-drunk atmosphere is the most endearing charm of OTTO’s debut; it evokes an uncanny other world, where simple melodies and unrefined sounds can collide with the intricacy of IDM with reckless abandon.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | PLZ Make It Ruins | October 2, 2020 | 7.3 | 6a39d9fd-8bea-4972-82ef-ee7aa446a316 | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
The latest convoluted concept album from Cursive is based on "twin brothers separated at birth" and "a classic struggle for the soul," but the real struggle is trying to make it all the way through. | The latest convoluted concept album from Cursive is based on "twin brothers separated at birth" and "a classic struggle for the soul," but the real struggle is trying to make it all the way through. | Cursive: I Am Gemini | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16291-i-am-gemini/ | I Am Gemini | Credit where due: I Am Gemini is Cursive's weakest record by a disheartening margin, but its lyrics sheet sets a remarkably high standard for anti-piracy measures. I'm sorry, lyric sheet is something of a misnomer, this is a full-on libretto. Knowing the concept behind I Am Gemini is the easy part-- by now, you should know that every Cursive record is organized by some conceptual framework, and Tim Kasher has been more than happy to do the heavy lifting for us. Here, it's "twin brothers separated at birth, one good and one evil, their unexpected reunion in a house that is not a home ignites a classic struggle for the soul." Got all that? Now just try to imagine some misguided fool who downloaded this without the 13-page booklet laying out all the characters (which include twin sisters conjoined at the head), indicating "stage direction," and generally letting you know what the hell is going on. But if that sounds a little too Mars Volta for comfort, there's good reason. Kasher similarly leaves you impressed by his dedication to this project even as you have no way to meaningfully interact with it.
And that inability to connect is troubling. Because even while Cursive's Domestica and The Ugly Organ remain some of the most purposefully narcissistic albums to ever bear the emo tag, their lyrical acts of emotional martyrdom understandably inspired an intense cult. The feelings behind "The Recluse" and "The Night I Lost the Will to Fight" aren't exactly healthy, but they're human and worthy of being expressed where they could be related to rather than projected outwards. But lest you think Kasher was simply a breakup opportunist, the Good Life's Album of the Year proved he could make a compelling, fictional couples record. And though uneven, Happy Hollow and Mama, I'm Swollen had plenty of expressive moments where Kasher got outside of himself in order to make the same withering points about religion and consumerism as he did about relationships.
But here, Kasher's intent is less clear. Is it some sort of morality play, a grotesquerie exposing greed, ambition, and exploitation? You get some clues in songs that hint at underlying substance abuse, sibling rivalry, and schizophrenia, but the themes are cruelly underdeveloped, hinting at a prequel Kasher forgot to inform us about. If you zoom out far enough, you can ascertain the major plot points easily enough, and Kasher pads things out with references to homemade elixirs, amateur surgery, avian metaphors, Greek mythology, the book of Genesis, Frankenstein, and Freaks. But none of it's in service of establishing any sort of wider resonance or universality of the story, instead just spiking the punch with false potency as cadences bulge with overripe penmanship.
Conceptual tomfoolery aside, the music aligns with Kasher's increasing tendency to sand off the edges of his prickly attitude and serrated vocals, and I Am Gemini is by far Cursive's most playful record and almost fun at points. But it isn't necessarily catchier than their previous work, lacking the abrasion and unnerving over-sharing. Cursive were never the place to go for hooks, so how are Kasher's strengths transferrable? While Gemini gets off to an auspicious start with "This House Alive" and the new wave-ish "The Sun and Moon", unlike the "singles" from a similarly linear record like the Streets' A Grand Don't Come For Free, they're all but meaningless as vignettes. And soon thereafter, Gemini loses itself in its plot turns with an undifferentiated mash of rambling, almost randomly pitched vocal melodies, goofy keyboards, buzzing riffs, sarcastic harmonies, and a mocking delivery that sees its subject material as beneath him.
At one point on "Wowowow", Kasher sings in puns taken from Cursive titles, and this kind of meta exercise makes a sad kind of sense within the context of I Am Gemini's impenetrability. After all, main characters like Cassius, Pollock, Young Cassius, Young Pollock, and the Narrator are all voiced by the same guy the same exact way, a more concrete way of essentially pointing out that the whole of I Am Gemini is Kasher talking to himself. | 2012-02-20T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-02-20T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | February 20, 2012 | 4.7 | 6a4322d9-4111-48a3-ba48-43dfde4f0256 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The 19-year-old singer’s debut exudes confidence and experience. Her style of R&B is mystical and moody, lavishing in wonky, washed-out guitar, sticky basslines, and fuzzy background vocals. | The 19-year-old singer’s debut exudes confidence and experience. Her style of R&B is mystical and moody, lavishing in wonky, washed-out guitar, sticky basslines, and fuzzy background vocals. | Ambar Lucid: Garden of Lucid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ambar-lucid-garden-of-lucid/ | Garden of Lucid | Ambar Lucid is 19, but she’s already lived through her father’s deportation, the naysayer who told her no one would listen to her music if it was in Spanish, and the move to Los Angeles to pursue that music anyway. Garden of Lucid, her defiant debut album, exudes confidence and experience. Her style of R&B is mystical and moody, a supernatural dream for anyone seeking to better understand the world and their place in it. It all builds to an image of a young woman who understands who she is and wants everyone else to understand, too.
Because it’s tricky being a teenage girl. You’re either too much like a woman or too much like a child, always making other people uncomfortable or feeling uncomfortable yourself. As a teen in charge of her own art, Lucid shares her life without shame. “I belong to the universe/I don’t belong to anyone else,” she sings on “Universe,” a glittery, groovy song with a bassline like Tame Impala for girls who own tarot cards. Such trite lyrical moments serve as reminders that Lucid is a new adult—or put differently, they’re testaments to her earnestness. On “Story to Tell,” she sings plainly, “My art was awkward for you to tell,” and then, “Farewell.”
On “Garden,” she adopts the same kind of droopy guitar loop you might hear in emo rap, with an indulgent, sinister vocal delivery to match. “Welcome to the garden,” Lucid sings, like she’s the ringleader of a weird dreamland circus. But then she says something unexpectedly sympathetic: “Please don’t be disheartened/Once you perceive insincerity,” dipping in and out of Spanish from there. Her voice is decadent, forming crystalline falsettos on “Cuando” and cutting through piano on “Shades of Blue.” She goes low and high, a vocal acrobat.
It’s easy to hear the imprint of Odd Future associates like Kali Uchis and Steve Lacy on this album; Lucid has named both as influences. She shares their sense of darkness, lavishing in wonky, washed-out guitar, sticky basslines, and fuzzy background vocals. It’s alternative R&B with a wink, something always left a little strange. Yet Lucid’s lush, sweeping vocal performances and the assertive, spiritual self-compassion in her lyrics stand out from the rest of Odd Future’s disciples. She translates the anxious beauty of an artist like Lil Peep into a focused pain. You don’t often hear Spanish in the lyrics of an American artist making this sort of grungy R&B, which reaffirms that Lucid is no one’s token anything.
For a generation of immigrants’ children, hearing Lucid, a 19-year-old girl with a Dominican mother and Mexican father, so easily integrate her culture with her musical identity feels like a personal homecoming. When I was younger, I never knew exactly how I felt about my own immigrant parents. I envied other neighborhood kids, the ones whose families were all-white, all-American, and uncomplicated. High school friends told me that I was white, even though my dad was from Bangladesh. Eventually, I stopped protesting—sure, I was white, too. Not until I was older did I realize how much denying my background severed me from my identity.
On Garden of Lucid, the multifaceted teenage girl has control of her own narrative. Lucid is a burgeoning Latinx American pop star; her music is strange and luminous, sometimes in English and sometimes in Spanish, and almost always about herself. It tells everyone that immigrant kids are complicated and idiosyncratic, never conforming to the image that others (our parents, our neighbors) want to project on us. There’s no attempt to pander, to sing the kind of story about the tragedy or triumph of immigration that white Americans love to hear. Everyone is always telling teenagers what to do, but Lucid isn’t looking for help. She’s just waiting for everyone else to catch up. | 2020-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | April 17, 2020 | 7.4 | 6a4a51a9-f105-49d8-8fda-9597ecd6946f | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel's quietest and most austere offering could be one of the year's best-sounding records, but it'll also keep many of the band's pop fans at arm's length. | Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel's quietest and most austere offering could be one of the year's best-sounding records, but it'll also keep many of the band's pop fans at arm's length. | Air: Pocket Symphony | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9975-pocket-symphony/ | Pocket Symphony | Air like to let you know what kind of album you're in for with the first couple of bars of their opening tracks. Moon Safari faded up with bongos on "La Femme D'Argent", setting the stage for a loose and hep journey into space-age atmospherics. The "do-do-thWACK" S&M whip of the drum machine opening to "Electronic Performers", on the other hand, thrust us into the stiffer, shinier, more adventurous world of 10,000 Hz Legend, wherein Nicolas Godin and Jean-Benoît Dunckel sounded as if they'd been inhaling some of Dean and Gene Ween's Scotchgard. Talkie Walkie broke the percussion-only trend by pairing its opening beat with a strummed acoustic guitar and a stately piano refrain, introducing their warmest, brightest, and most song-oriented album. And on Pocket Symphony, the opening message is equally clear: The fluttering percussion on "Space Maker", hovering all alone, sounds like it's bouncing off hard, cold surfaces. Which would seem to suggest that this will be Air's quietest and most austere offering.
And so it is. There's a remarkable confidence on display here, that Air would choose to have their first album in three years be so spacious and moody, and so much less pop. They must know that they'll lose a few come-lately fans with music this relaxed and, well, sleepy. But the more you listen to Pocket Symphony, the more it becomes clear that it's remote by design. As they demonstrated throughout Talkie Walkie and on a few tracks per record on the previous two, Air can very capably write terrifically catchy songs when so inclined; here, they'd rather create finely-wrought furniture music. And they're good at it. Working again with Nigel Godrich, they've crafted what might be one of the year's best-sounding records, every lone piano note hanging improbably long in space and aloud to decay in what must be some unimaginably beautiful room.
My first instinct was that Pocket Symphony was the return to Moon Safari territory fans wanted so desperately when 10,000 Hz Legend first hit the shelves, but upon returning to their debut for the first time in a good while, that seems off. Yes, there's a quality to Godin's heavenly basslines that occasionally puts this record in a similar groovy headspace, but Air are light years from the earlier work's cheeky retro-futurisms. In the formal world of Pocket Symphony, a squelchy Moog would be considered vulgar, the unpredictability of its aged circuits no substitute for the absolute control of a grand piano, a finely brushed acoustic guitar, or the Japanese koto. Air are ready to unplug here at a moment's notice, and the space in which these acoustic instruments was recorded counts as an instrument in itself.
Four of these dozen tracks are purely instrumental, but the ratio feels higher-- many of the poppier songs seem to be about arrangement and shading first. Jarvis Cocker chips in on "One Hell of a Party", his husky, downcast voice suiting the song's metaphor (relationship as hedonistic soiree to be reckoned with the morning after), and yet the frame of the song is so skeletal that the sentiment never gathers weight. This might seem to mirror the bombed-out nature of the lyric, but that's an intellectualization; it's ultimately just an OK, verging-on-dull song. Neil Hannon of the Divine Comedy sings lead on "Somewhere Between Walking and Sleeping" and the result-- muted, vaguely bland-- is again just serviceable.
The pop songs that Dunckel sings are better suited to the album's frame of mind, serving more as sketches, the sort of half-written catchphrases that exist, in the "Kelly Watch the Stars" sense, mostly to build a chord structure around. The creamy layers of voice during the "without you" chorus in "Left Bank", along with the upbeat "Mer du Japon"-- one of the best songs they've written and the album's best track-- are as close as Air get to Talkie Walkie-level hooks. Elsewhere, it's more subtle hints and raised eyebrows than fleshed-out songs, whether the prickly synth and robotic swing of "Napalm Love" with its three-note melody or the crisp, lightly echoed spaciousness of "Photograph", which clicks along like patent leather boots down a dark marble hallway.
On every pass through the record, it seems clearer that the sound of Pocket Symphony is the album's real content. And that sound, no question, is exquisite. But it's also hard to hold in your head after the record stops playing, so Pocket Symphony winds up feeling strangely transient, accomplished and genuinely likeable but also forgettable. | 2007-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2007-03-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | March 7, 2007 | 6.6 | 6a50c835-e1b8-4598-8e18-e10ad0ded717 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Newcastle singer-songwriter Richard Dawson twists his compositions into gruesome shapes at the exact moment you start to get comfortable—but Peasant contains his most accessible music to date. | Newcastle singer-songwriter Richard Dawson twists his compositions into gruesome shapes at the exact moment you start to get comfortable—but Peasant contains his most accessible music to date. | Richard Dawson: Peasant | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/richard-dawson-peasant/ | Peasant | Richard Dawson’s records are not easy listens. His nightmarish spin on British folk music has spanned six heady LPs, somewhere between John Frusciante’s whacked-out guitar work on Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt and Scott Walker’s brutal avant-garde epics on Bish Bosch. Dawson’s last album, 2014’s Nothing Important, consisted of two lengthy compositions bookended by two noisy instrumentals. While his guitar playing is a fascinating thing—precise and chaotic, strings plucked with a dangerous physicality—the real power of the album was in Dawson’s writing. The title track seamlessly slipped between autobiography and eulogy, and “The Vile Stuff” wrung apocalyptic drama from a drunken adolescent field trip. These were songs designed to be scoured for meaning, with enough plot development and cosmic payoff to earn spoiler alerts. If he would have included more than two of them on the album, it would have been impenetrable.
On Peasant, Dawson refines that album’s scope into his most accessible and elusive music to date, focussing on more conventional song structures while further developing his voice as a storyteller. According to Dawson, Peasant is a concept album, taking place “somewhere between [the years] 500 and 700, after the slow withdrawal of the Roman Empire from the north east.” Over 11 tracks that are mostly named after the profession of their narrators, Peasant presents the most primal and hideous aspects of the distant past. There are “houses cast with clay and sheepdung”; there are “pummelled gall-nuts afloat in urine.” There are miscreants, malingerers, dastards, and knaves. In “Weaver,” the narrator notices a crab caught in a woman’s hair as he holds a newborn baby, “still dangling from a string.” Discussing his medieval inspiration, Dawson has said, “Certainly, I don’t have an interest in writing a ‘Game of Thrones’ album,” and he’s succeeded in avoiding that categorization. The images here are far too graphic to appear on HBO.
Yet this is also the most beautiful music Dawson has ever recorded. The arrangements are period-appropriate, all Renaissance Faire flutes and choirs chanting in unison like an angry mob. The production is both visceral and lush, its gentle instrumentation punctuated with jarring bursts of percussion and horns. In “Soldier,” Dawson plays acoustic guitar with a deft musicality, akin to Dave Longstreth’s knotty riffs in Bitte Orca’s “Temecula Sunrise.” As the melody evolves into something smoother and simpler, Dawson’s lyrics also find a sense of peace. On an album that features enough archaic diction to warrant a glossary, “Soldier”’s plainspoken lyrics are its most effective ones. It’s heartbreaking when Dawson simplifies the narrator’s anxiety into an artless phrase: “I’m really scared of going.” It’s equally stirring when, upon imagining a future with his family, Dawson bellows the closing lyric, “My heart is full of hope,” his voice rising to a triumphant howl.
Dawson grows as a singer throughout these songs, sometimes with humorous results. He finds his lowest reaches in the chorus of “Weaver” and strains for his highest falsetto in “Beggar.” Right before the rousing finale of “Ogre,” he stretches out the syllables of the word “morning,” groaning in pain like a goose kicked in the gut. Other moments illustrate how pleasant a musician Dawson has become. The sprightly melody in “Beggar” is downright gorgeous, accompanying a tragic story of a homeless man and his beloved collie. But Dawson knows when his music approaches anything resembling convention; he twists his compositions into gruesome shapes at the exact moment you start getting comfortable. This quality helps maintain Peasant’s masterful pace and keeps things invigorating when his tales of toadsong and dogshide start erring on the side of parody.
In a deeply moving track called “Prostitute,” the titular character ponders her existence and dreams of a better life for her hypothetical children. It ends with her standing over a man as he chokes on vomit, when she decides to steal his horse and flee “this country of demons made flesh.” Like all of Dawson’s best work, there’s a glint of horror to it (are these demons literal or figurative?) and a shocking sense of real-world application. “It’s hard to explain, but it happens again and again,” Dawson sings, hinting that these songs are as much ancient archetypes as they are modern cautionary tales. In moments like these, Peasant becomes a breakthrough for Dawson: an overwhelming, vulgar, and deeply rewarding record. His only limitation is the world he lives in. Here, he begins to transcend it. | 2017-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Weird World | June 13, 2017 | 8 | 6a5d6868-a291-43dd-8103-0b01528a4dc4 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The best album of the Philadelphia band’s deep and underappreciated catalog dares to ask what comes after indie rock. | The best album of the Philadelphia band’s deep and underappreciated catalog dares to ask what comes after indie rock. | Strange Ranger: Remembering the Rockets | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/strange-ranger-remembering-the-rockets/ | Remembering the Rockets | For Strange Ranger, indie rock isn’t just a genre; it’s an actual lifestyle, the prism through which every aspect of adulthood can be projected and understood. The 2016 album Rot Forever, by an earlier incarnation of the band, started its 72 minutes of Up Records fanfic with the line “She played rock guitar” and peaked with “Won’t you come see Pile with me?” Going by the name Sioux Falls at the time, core members Isaac Eiger and Fred Nixon were kids in Bozeman, Montana, who were prone to let one or two ideas stretch out for six minutes because that’s what their heroes Built to Spill and Modest Mouse would do. They moved to Portland for the followup, Daymoon, and it felt like a higher education, going deeper into the Pac NW canon and local scene politics (key song: “House Show”). They’re now in Philadelphia, and Remembering the Rockets is everything one might expect from an ambitious, reverent band moving to the epicenter of American indie rock: It’s sharper and more purposeful, forged by the pressure of real expectations. The best album of their deep and underappreciated catalog, it also imagines a life after indie rock.
Eiger’s in no hurry to get there just yet. Remembering the Rockets operates from a mid-twenties contemplation stage, having enough distance from the crippling insecurities and dependencies of youth to start formulating an adult identity through jobs, relationships, and homeownership—but not to the point where the impending financial and familial obligations aren’t something to recoil from reflexively. Strange Ranger may present as a scrappy indie-rock quartet, but the emotional pitch of their songs honors this liminal stage of adulthood by operating at the excitable internal frequencies of teen pop.
Strange Ranger songs still emulate Buzz Bin bands of yore, though Remembering the Rockets tends to aim higher than the band used to, evoking the headliners of Lollapaloozas past rather than indie rock’s ragtag insurgents. More provocatively, the album often makes the case that both camps were playing the same game: Opener “Leona” sees no reason “Pictures of You,” “Semi Charmed Life,” and “Carry the Zero” couldn’t have coexisted on a Winamp playlist to commemorate a new crush or a fresh heartbreak. The most effortlessly anthemic Strange Ranger song to date, “Leona” volleys two chords and two states of being, giddy anticipation and paralyzing doubt. The lyrics are littered with the potentialities that get people up in the morning—the arrival of Friday night, a ticket for a trip abroad, a new love that leaves room for nothing else—yet Eiger sighs, “Not to say these things fix everything,” as though still distrustful of the idea that things could ever be this good forever. It ends with a symphonic burst of gratuitously overdubbed infinity guitars, a vision of endless uplift that’s at stark odds with the next song, “Sunday,” where Eiger is jobless, aimless, and washing the dishes just for a sense of purpose. “What if I just went away?/I’m alone in the world,” he sighs.
Throughout, Eiger and Fiona Woodman vacillate between blind optimism and a nihilism that feels more justified with each passing year. The fear of apocalypse is ever-present on the Woodman-led “Message to You” and “Living Free,” synths shimmering like pink mist, while Eiger ends “Beneath the Lights” melting into a puddle of Auto-Tuned isotopic waste. These are the tracks that give credence to Eiger’s Yves Tumor and Oneohtrix Point Never namedrops, even if those are clearly inspirations and not models—the loops on “Nothing Left to Think About” and “Planes in Front of the Sky” are more in line with the Eiger-endorsed “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand,” watching time slip away, one lazy summer night after another.
But Strange Ranger still leave open the possibility for indie rock to swoop in and save the day. On the piano pounding yowler “Ranch Style Home,” Nixon yelps requests for sex and “French fried potatoes” in a caricatured cowpoke accent. But in a moment of true candor—“I need my gal holding my hand/I need my pals packed in my van”—“Ranch Style Home” makes a silent point: Is that kind of itinerant indie-rock lifestyle the only sensible one when nothing feels permanent anymore? “Awkward angels in the snow/What if I just want a family,” he wonders during “Living Free,” putting a fine point on a question hinted at throughout: Is it morally justifiable to bring children into a planet that’s going to be irreversibly worse for every successive generation? Eiger is on the verge of drifting through another morning on “Planes in Front of Sky” before everything snaps into focus: “I walk to work in fading light/Daddies with their kids/I still want that.” On Remembering the Rockets, Eiger is trying to create a legacy as a musician and a person; given the way the ice caps, indie rockers’ economic future, and maybe even human decency itself are all eroding, his hope isn’t just inspiring, it feels downright rebellious. | 2019-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | July 30, 2019 | 7.8 | 6a618848-78af-44be-b323-f995074dd1c4 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The Detroit rapper and the Dallas producer team up for another satin-smooth album of street hustler stories. | The Detroit rapper and the Dallas producer team up for another satin-smooth album of street hustler stories. | Payroll Giovanni / Cardo: Big Bossin Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/payroll-giovanni-cardo-big-bossin-vol-2/ | Big Bossin Vol. 2 | Two years ago, Big Bossin Vol. 1 was a revelation: a luxurious gangster rap album made by a producer living in exurban North Texas and a rapper from hollowed-out, post-industrial Detroit. Cardo and Payroll Giovanni transcended geography for something sun-kissed and glowing with rude, vibrant health. They weren’t hand in glove, they were convertible on Pacific Coast Highway, or silk on skin. Vaguely coastal and entirely sumptuous, their sound was exciting enough to bring about a deal with Def Jam for the next edition of the world’s most extravagant leadership seminar.
As with the first iteration of Big Bossin, Cardo—whose name should be written in turquoise velour, amethyst neon, or maroon suede—is greatly responsible for the second volume’s indefatigable glamour. As always, his beats are unhurried, lush, and somewhat placeless. Cardo’s core influences are the golden triangle of the East Bay, Los Angeles County, and Houston. He synthesizes the menace and bounce of mobb music, the “Funky Worm”-style wail and whine of G-funk, and the slow, mellow churn of mid-late ’90s Houston rap into a sound that’s simultaneously reverent and refreshing. The guitar sample on “5’s and 6’s” belongs on the television menu of a Hawaiian hotel. His “So Young” instrumental could’ve backed ’80s R&B ballads by Dennis Edwards or the Whispers. The saxophone on “Rapped My Way” belongs in the too-orange sun of Biscayne Bay or Newport Beach. Like palm trees in cool ocean breezes, Cardo’s beats bop and sway.
If Cardo’s instrumentals are an unbuttoned, eleven-color Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirt, then Payroll Giovanni’s rapping is the inevitable glowing sunburn. On Vol. 2, he shows little outward interest in, say, presidential elections, police brutality or gender inequality—topics which typically garner other rappers serious critical consideration. Rather, he keys in on a solitary concern: the realpolitik of drug sales and its material and social rewards. From a scholarly remove, it’s well-trodden territory, but, honestly, fuck scholarly remove. Or, as Payroll raps on “In Me, Not on Me,” “Bloggers be like, ‘He talked about the drugs almost the whole song’/But you ain’t from where I’m from, so get the fuck on.” What Raymond Chandler was to steely-eyed bombshells or Denis Johnson to sodden burnouts, Payroll is to Detroit hustlers. He has a relish for quick cash, an intimacy with the metric system and an affinity for Cartier frames, and that’s a rich enough palette.
Big Bossin Vol. 2’s particular splendor brings to mind an oxymoronic aphorism: There’s hardness in softness. More specifically, it takes overwhelming self-confidence to project oneself as a tough guy while also appearing vulnerable, often by enjoying styles or sounds considered feminine. (Some examples: pimps with flowing, permed locks and glowing manicures; Rick James’ flamboyant outfits and sometimes violent behavior; Ice Cube’s Jheri curl; rappers’ enduring affinity for Sade.) For Cardo and Payroll, that means the contrast of lyrics about gangster derring-do and selling pounds of opiates, set to pastel-hued beats that aren’t far removed from boogie and R&B.
Ultimately, Cardo and Payroll Giovanni’s mastery of their self-defined genre is Big Bossin Vol. 2’s greatest artistic strength and its biggest potential weakness. On its own merits, it’s excellent, even if it doesn’t significantly expand the duo’s oeuvre. If you enjoyed Vol. 1, then you’ll surely enjoy Vol. 2. It isn’t meat-and-potatoes rap, but surf ‘n’ turf rap. It’s rap that’ll make your wheezing subcompact feel like a fine-tuned German coupe. It’s the sound of sipping palomas poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, or shucking oysters beside the silvery crash and hiss of the Pacific, or yachting on crystalline waters. | 2018-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | January 30, 2018 | 7.8 | 6a63b0cd-68bc-4429-ba20-571f65694e98 | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
For the past decade, Sandro Perri has followed his muse across dance, avant-garde, and roots-rock boundaries. The Toronto musician/producer's new album is his first to truly synthesize these musical interests. | For the past decade, Sandro Perri has followed his muse across dance, avant-garde, and roots-rock boundaries. The Toronto musician/producer's new album is his first to truly synthesize these musical interests. | Sandro Perri: Impossible Spaces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15940-sandro-perri/ | Impossible Spaces | Sandro Perri has never shied away from expressing his admiration for Arthur Russell; among the highlights of the Toronto musician/producer's decade-plus-long career was a distended, 21-minute reinterpretation of Russell's already lengthy Dinosaur disco classic "Kiss Me Again". But as Perri's discography has pluralized and diversified in unexpected ways, Russell has become less of a direct musical influence than an inspirational model of following one's muse across dance, avant-garde, and roots-rock boundaries, and marking those stylistic shifts with different, highly evocative aliases. Since first establishing himself in the early 2000s as a producer of aquatic, cerebral techno under the Polmo Polpo moniker, Perri has variously indulged his interest in Nigerian juju and shantytown funk with one-album wonders Glissandro 70 and dubby disco as Dot Wiggin. But since 2007, he's been releasing albums under his own name, signaling a singer-songwriterly shift that foregrounds Perri's considerable talents as a pedal-steel guitarist and fondness for 1970s AM-radio pop, even going so far as to faithfully cover Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" and Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'".
Scanning the tracklist on Perri's new album, Impossible Spaces, you're first greeted with another familiar title: "Changes". But while the song that bears its name turns out not to be a version of either the David Bowie classic or the Black Sabbath piano ballad, Perri at the very least embraces the root sentiment behind that well-worn title. Though "Changes" picks up where 2007's tropically tranquil Tiny Mirrors left off, there are some immediately noticeable developments: Perri's plainspoken voice is several inches higher in the mix, and the sound has been thickened considerably by warm organ tones and more scabrous electric-guitar lines, while drummer Dan Gaucher sounds like he's itching to kick into a more robust backbeat. But then after three and a half minutes of stop-start teases, "Changes" does just that, by shifting into a glorious instrumental coda-- powered by a chugging Afro-funk groove and analog-synth starbursts-- that feels like an ecstatic, out-of-body-experience answer to the more tentative passage that preceded it.
"Changes" effectively confirms Impossible Spaces as the first Sandro Perri release to truly synthesize his myriad musical interests and place equal emphasis on rhythm, texture, and melody. With Perri backed once again by a coterie of Toronto improv-scene all stars-- who provide him with all the queasy-listening sophistication of a more inebriated Sea and Cake or a less spastic Dirty Projectors-- the album strikes an uncanny balance between sounding ambitiously executed and completely off-the-cuff; an epic of both accident and design. Perri isn't afraid to push his song lengths past the seven-minute mark (or thematically link shorter tracks into two-part suites), but Impossible Spaces never feels taxing or overwrought. Rather, extended and exceedingly patient pieces like the woodwind-powered "How Will I?" and the exquisite 10-minute beast "Wolfman" yield a sustained thrill of discovery as, with each new verse, they wind and wander into an ever-dislocating swirl of brass, flutes, electric guitar, strings, and synth drones.
Throughout it all, Perri's invariably calm tenor assumes the reassuring presence of a tour guide who won't tell you where you're going but ensures you pass through safely: He rarely sings his verse melodies in any kind of formalized cadence but always returns to a familiar chorus refrain at just the right time to help you get reoriented. In that sense, Impossible Spaces isn't simply the most accessible and immediately rewarding album to bear Sandro Perri's name, it also serves as a handy musical roadmap to its maker's sinuous creative course. | 2011-10-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-10-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Folk/Country | Constellation | October 21, 2011 | 8.3 | 6a64586f-02cd-43b7-9bc2-c8ed163b95b9 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
With a concussive sound and a deceptively lean setup, the doom duo returns to terrifying basics on a macabre and strangely exhilarating album about anguish. | With a concussive sound and a deceptively lean setup, the doom duo returns to terrifying basics on a macabre and strangely exhilarating album about anguish. | The Body: I’ve Seen All I Need to See | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-body-ive-seen-all-i-need-to-see/ | I’ve Seen All I Need to See | The doom-metal duo the Body have rarely been only those things. Sure, for the past decade, guitarist Chip King and drummer Lee Buford have practically oozed plangent distortion and martial rhythms, doom criteria as conclusive as any. Glance, though, beneath their hostile surface or inside their loaded rests, where they stuff eerie choirs and corrosive electronics, grinding samples and unnerving jump cuts. This is doom as mutilated by Merzbow, then reassembled into a beast so uncanny it makes Eyehategod sound like modern rock. King and Buford are ardent collaborators, too, as much a symptom of their stylistic catholicism as its cause. They’ve made albums with belligerent grinders Full of Hell, sludge punks Thou, and shadowy producer the Haxan Cloak, then turned their catalog over to artists like Moor Mother. For King and Buford, the Body is a post-everything permission slip.
King and Buford put that restlessness on temporary hold for I’ve Seen All I Need to See, their first album as a pair in three years. It is a harrowing meditation on death and despondence, ruthlessly delivered by the Body’s core duo. A few old friends show up to add jagged piano here, robotic narration there. But it’s mostly King’s low-strung guitar, so massive and mean it conjures an army of bassists frying amplifiers, and his high-strung voice, as piercing as the melting Wicked Witch. Buford is an indomitable powerhouse, swiping at his drums as though his sticks were battering rams. The results are harsh but exhilarating, loud enough to make you worry about your speakers and anguished enough to make you worry about your sanity.
I’ve Seen All I Need to See begins like a short horror film. A stoic reading of Douglas Dunn’s “The Kaleidoscope”—written after the early death of the Scottish poet’s wife, Lesley, in 1981—unspools beneath curdled chords and foreboding drum knocks. Dunn’s poem is about the Groundhog Day-like torture of wanting to care for someone who is no longer there, of being forced to relive their death daily. The Body spend the next 37 minutes considering this grim scene from every angle, from the loneliness of the end to the dour acceptance of the living.
Still, the sounds hurt more than their underpinnings. During “The City Is Shelled,” the Body quake like a once-mighty band trying to fight through actual rubble. For almost four minutes, “The Handle/The Blade” rumbles beneath a bed of ricocheting noise, like the soundtrack to chronic pain. It’s almost impossible to decipher King’s words; the music makes it unnecessary.
These two-piece blasts are not some nativist retreat, as if King and Buford were out to prove the Body remain unchanged. Instead, they weave a decade of collaborative lessons into these songs. Opener “A Lament” uses the dramatic hip-hop cuts they’ve embraced (and sometimes overindulged) just enough to make you uneasy. The triumphant lift at song’s end, meanwhile, recalls Thou, who often offer a glimmer of relief just to revel in pulling it away. During the finale, “Path of Failure,” they lurch into a skittering instrumental section that suggests the Mahavishnu Orchestra abandoning its spirituality. This small format forces King and Buford to fold their strangest impulses into their most basic setup, meaning I’ve Seen All I Need to See gets more intense the more you listen.
There’s another reason it’s never seemed correct to call the Body a duo: For a decade, Buford and King have worked largely with one producer—Seth Manchester, at Rhode Island’s Machines with Magnets. He’s steadily learned to harness the Body’s high-volume spectral madness, becoming a de facto member. For I’ve Seen All I Need to See, he manages dual tricks that seem paradoxical. The Body sound live here, with crackling distortion and concussive tones imitating the middle-ear torment you feel when they’ve loaded into a club. “Tied Up and Locked In” thunders and shivers, as if the loudest band in the world were in town and you were grabbing pizza next door. Yet these recordings have such texture and depth they resemble topographic maps, perfectly preserving every peak, valley, and crevice. Never mind the shrieking—the back half of “They Are Coming” is almost delicate, the drones and drums moving in a mad waltz. The Body often seem like a mess on the surface; perhaps for the first time, Manchester has managed to capture the control they lord over this supposed chaos, the sophistication among these mangled layers.
Arriving at a moment when staggering death tolls come with the morning news, these eight diatribes plunge you into a pit of despair and demand that you take in the inevitability of our end. Can you muster a musical idea bleaker than a man howling, “The screaming of children/The fog of smoldering” like a stuck pig while he and his buddy maul your speakers? But this music is so bluntly fatalistic—in idea and execution—that it feels life-affirming to experience, as cleansing as scalding water. The Body have embraced that sensation since finding it on their 2010 breakthrough, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood. On I’ve Seen All I Need to See, it is mercilessly distilled and efficient, reminding us there’s no time to waste.
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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. | 2021-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | February 3, 2021 | 8 | 6a69aafc-a727-42e4-b9ae-c9900392f00c | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On a thrilling slab of punk-jazz noise, the D.C. duo argues for the centrality of black American culture in the fight for the nation’s soul. | On a thrilling slab of punk-jazz noise, the D.C. duo argues for the centrality of black American culture in the fight for the nation’s soul. | Blacks’ Myths : Blacks’ Myths II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blacks-myths-blacks-myths-ii/ | Blacks’ Myths II | Armed with a pulpit, an amp, and impeccable timing, Blacks’ Myths II rolls up to the intersection of two contemporary cultural storylines—one thematic and one musical. There, where history and sound meet, the Washington, D.C.-based duo, bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Warren Crudup III, cobbles together an unlikely, thorny recording: a slab of punk jazz that is outside of genre and era but can also be heard as an auspicious fight for the soul and sound of a nation—noisy minimalist improvisation as a present-day language communicating timeless truths.
The broader narrative that Blacks’ Myths’ sophomore album embraces is America’s current reappraisal of blackness as central to the country’s meaning—which in the eyes and ears of Stewart (of Irreversible Entanglements and Heroes Are Gang Leaders) and Crudup (stickman for James Brandon Lewis, among others) is taking place too late for the entire planet’s health. The album’s core narration comes in the form of four monologues courtesy of Dr. Thomas Stanley, whose polymath resume (poet, black studies professor, astral jazz and (P-)funk scholar, DIY concert producer) makes him a uniquely qualified collaborator. His noetic visions not only feed into the resonance of the band’s name; they are also a counterpart to recent journalistic works like Hannah Nikole-Jones’ “The 1619 Project.” Instead of wanting to fix America’s manifest history, Stanley and Blacks’ Myths are looking to wipe its slate clean for whatever comes next.
This plot is underpinned by music only slightly less grand—and engages a pair of debates being waged inside the jazz and noise/punk communities these two musicians call home. The central questions here are “What is it?” and “Who is it for?” One springs from a new generation of players reassessing jazz’s structure, language, and storied place within the African American tradition. The other is forcing punk to figure out how to embrace its black roots and ascertain its musical purpose in a Trump-era cauldron. On the evidence of the album’s messy lo-fi textures, pervasive rock dynamics, and two-player intricacy (Stewart’s electric bass and electronics and Crudup’s kit account for all the sounds), bolstered by Dr. Stanley’s inquests, Blacks’ Myths are eager to partake in all these and any other discourses America may want to throw at them.
II’s conversations actually continue the ones Stewart and Crudup kicked off on Blacks’ Myths self-titled 2018 debut, even as they also lurch into the unknown. The first album’s atmosphere had traces of ferocity but was more occupied by hypnotic revolution—minimalist dub notes and figures, or slow-developing tides of sound, wrapping around rhythm and reflecting back upon themselves, only occasionally coming to a boil. It was wordless and musically potent, sketching a great migratory movement and a past that came alive in symbiotic bass-drums interactions. Filled with worried notes of Stewart’s distorted upright, first-take-best-take slurred lines, and low-frequency electronics, its sound remains unlike any album in recent memory, a perfect addition to the gathering storm of improvisational oddities charging the atmosphere in all corners of so-called “jazz.”
The follow-up is cut from a familiar heady cloth but powered by a distinct energy. If Stewart and Crudup’s communication was previously built on groove telepathy, here the objectives are more specific, feral, primordial. It’s a prehistoric creation of post-history power sources: cascading feedback, barbed electronics, and oversized drums. Stanley’s own words seize upon the environmental theme, describing the “goo” covering much of the planet as “the source of history… carry[ing] forward the stark relationship of matter to itself.” The world-building scope is boundless, on the scale of Stanley Kubrick or Octavia Butler, as living sound, fed through one of Crazy Horse’s Marshall stacks from Rust Never Sleeps but emanating music from Arc.
Over half the tracks are short, rising bursts with distinct roles to play. Some are vehicles for the album’s themes, with Stanley’s words—on the heroism of “non-violent warriors empowered by myth science” fighting “the triumph of white supremacy gentrified as American exceptionalism”—gliding over Stewart’s unnerving electrical currents, or amplified by Crudup’s volcanic thrashing. Others are here to keep punk’s loud-fast rules at the center of a conversation that can admittedly turn bookish and didactic. Only a moment with the strumming thrash of “Rapture” or the martial power of “Northern Confederate” is needed to once more quicken the pulse.
Yet it is the longer pieces that push Blacks’ Myths II beyond mere post-hardcore prophecy toward something approaching transcendence. Carrying titles weighted with meaning for black America (“Stand Your Ground,” “The Bluff,” “Mammy’s Revenge”), they bring together composition and improvisation as pursued through a playful, masterly push-and-pull between technology, electricity, and rhythm; by design, it is only tenuously controlled. Take “Free Land,” the album’s centerpiece and vessel of its most distinct melodic figures: Stewart’s stately motif, played on a deeply distorted electric bass, sounds capable of being swallowed up at any given moment, even as its echoes begin to reverberate in a kind of elegy. Or take “Redbone,” on which Crudup digs out an elastic pocket while Stewart whimsically messes about with a set of fuzzed-out, organ-like textures, moving from a heavy-metal Jackie Mittoo vibe to approximating the sound of steel-drum dub. The acoustic mis-recognition and contextual confusion provide a rare kind of delight.
These exercises in structured freedom and interrogation of form, amid a historic pool of boundless blackness, bring to mind a compliment that the artist/filmmaker Arthur Jafa paid black America a few years ago: “We create culture in freefall.” Imagine the hope in that statement. Stewart and Crudup soundtrack a version of that engagement with American gravity, one existing at an intersection that, though specific to our recent times, also has lineage and precedents. As their band’s name makes clear, these sounds did not arrive here by chance.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the name of one of Warren Crudup III’s collaborators; it is James Brandon Lewis, not James Branford Lewis. | 2019-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Atlantic Rhythms | September 16, 2019 | 8 | 6a6b76bb-9d8a-46f9-939a-743b1591d4a2 | Piotr Orlov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/piotr-orlov/ | |
On her band's second album, it can feel like Florence Welch is simply holding out a single note at top volume for an hour. Instead of Lungs' charming, discombobulating diversity, Ceremonials suffers from repetitiveness. The few tracks that do deviate from the heaven's-crescendo formula hardly curb frustrations. | On her band's second album, it can feel like Florence Welch is simply holding out a single note at top volume for an hour. Instead of Lungs' charming, discombobulating diversity, Ceremonials suffers from repetitiveness. The few tracks that do deviate from the heaven's-crescendo formula hardly curb frustrations. | Florence and the Machine: Ceremonials | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16004-ceremonials/ | Ceremonials | When I first saw Florence and the Machine two years ago at New York's cozy and beloved Bowery Ballroom, leader Florence Welch's voice was simply too loud for the room. She sounded massive, but shrill. Overpowering. If the show took place in an X-Men movie, the wind gushing from Welch's lungs would have propelled several patrons smashing through the Bowery's back window onto Delancey Street. The next time I encountered That Voice, it was five months later, in the relatively gigantic Terminal 5 on Manhattan's far west side. And while that venue is often knocked for its booming, detail-abolishing acoustics, and concrete-slab atmosphere, it was a much better fit for Welch, who hopped, ran, and wailed while 3,000 giddy fans looked on, awestruck. For this band and this singer, nothing could be too big. Or so it seemed.
Growing up, Welch was met with stern eyes when she was caught singing her favorite hymns with a bit too much verve. Her unbridled talent is the type of thing producers of TV singing contests fantasize about. It's soulful. It's instant. It's blaring. On "American Idol", contestants like Welch are invariably deemed "quirky" and doomed to runner-up status. And though Welch is a more convincing Artist than even the best "Idol" has to offer, make no mistake that her voice-first delivery is perfectly tailored for a generation who grew up judging singers as much as they listened to them. Even the hopelessly hip crowd that showed up to see Welch at Vice's Creators Project event last month saved one of their biggest ovations for the moment when she held out one piercing note for an exaggerated period of time-- a primal sign of skill that banks on nothing less than sheer audacity.
The same can be said of Florence and the Machine's second album, Ceremonials, which can feel like Welch simply holding out a single note at top volume for an hour. On paper, the album takes a wise path. After trying out a few different producers and styles-- garage-pop; vampy twinkle-pop; and tribal, mystic-pop-- on her debut, Lungs, Welch settles almost exclusively on the latter for Ceremonials, bringing along producer Paul Epworth, who was so good at the mystic stuff on the first record, to oversee the whole thing. So what we get is Florence trying very hard to top the gargantuan drums and cascading harps and chest-thumping choruses of Lungs hits like "Cosmic Love" and "Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)" on damn near every song. Instead of Lungs' largely charming yet discombobulating diversity, Ceremonials suffers from a repetitiveness that's akin to looking at a skyline filled with 100-story behemoths lined-up one after the other, blocking out everything but their own size.
Some of these world wonders stand tall despite their surroundings. First single "Shake It Out", a stadium-willing anthem about getting past one's troubles, sets a new high for this group. As does the similarly barreling "No Light, No Light", which is one of the few tracks where Welch sets aside her usual flighty, dreamy, goth-y lyrical go-to's-- ghosts, graveyards, devils, angels, myths, drowning-- for something a bit more personal. "Would you leave me, if I told you what I'd become," she sings during the track's magisterial bridge, "'Cause it's so easy to sing it to a crowd/ But it's so hard, my love/ To say it to you out loud." The lines double as a snippet of self-criticism; perhaps Welch finds it "so easy" to sing her tunes to thousands because they often lack an individual touch that could send them even further skyward-- the same touch that comes so naturally to fellow UK chart queen Adele. But by the midway point of the LP, its endless crescendos start bleeding into each other, and the loudness soon tires itself out.
The few tracks that deviate from the heavens-broken-open formula hardly curb frustrations. The haughty "Breaking Down" could be an outtake from MGMT's career-stalling Congratulations, dirge-y "Seven Devils" aims for Beelzebub but is about as haunting as a toddler with a pitchfork. In what's becoming an increasingly annoying problem in this era of iTunes bonus tracks and myriad deluxe editions, it's the extras not included on the proper album that offer reasonable outs for Florence's Big issues. "Remain Nameless" replaces the record's corporate-rock drums and overzealous whoosh with an electronic minimalism similar to Welch's pals the xx. The song's allowed to breathe, and is all the better for it. Other bonuses include a few demos of some of the record's huger cuts (and the term "demo" is relative here-- these stripped-back tracks are still pristine). Backed by only acoustic instrumentation, we finally hear the creases in Welch's voice that the album whitewashes at every turn.
"I don't want your future, don't need your past/ One bright moment, is all I ask," sings Welch on choir-aided closer "Leave My Body". Ceremonials is so hell-bent on providing such "bright moments"-- that flash of overwhelming emotion resulting from ramped-up strings or a frantic harp or a particularly audacious vocal run-- that it never zooms out to consider its own listenability. Welch is 25, and she's likely chuffed at the thought of bringing these massive songs to equally immense crowds at festivals all over the world for the next two years. And that's where many of these tracks will have the greatest chance to thrive-- in the open, with heads as far as one can see. On record, though, too much is crushed by blind ambition. | 2011-11-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-11-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Universal Republic | November 3, 2011 | 6 | 6a75e32c-03bf-4f22-94b8-1943bdad4654 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
David Grellier returns with a collection of filmic mood pieces that work well as a sound package but begs for some kind of visual accompaniment. | David Grellier returns with a collection of filmic mood pieces that work well as a sound package but begs for some kind of visual accompaniment. | College: Shanghai | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23188-shanghai/ | Shanghai | When the French electronic musician David Grellier landed one of his songs on the soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive, it must have felt a little like a prophecy fulfilled. Grellier, better known as College, has been taking cues from Hollywood aesthetics since the beginning of his career. The sleeve of 2008’s Teenage Color EP could pass for a knocked-off John Hughes poster; the cover of his debut album, Secret Diary, echoes imagery from Risky Business, Body Double, and Flashdance. The sound of those early recordings is no less faithful to silver-screen staples like John Carpenter (particularly his Assault on Precinct 13 score), Tangerine Dream (specifically, their sultry Risky Business contributions), and zapping and squelching synth-poppers Yaz.
But once you’re known for a filmic style, those associations can be difficult to shed. Grellier has let moving images—or at least the imaginary stills from the neon-tinted mood board in his mind—do much of the heavy lifting on his music. On 2011’s Northern Council and 2013’s Heritage, his two-minute sketches often came off frustratingly half-finished. It was easy to wonder if he was resting on his laurels—or even getting tangled up in them. Just as Drive’s “A Real Hero” was inspired in part by Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who wrangled US Airways Flight 1549 to a water landing on the Hudson River, *Northern Council *features a track titled “TWA Flight 450”—which, coincidentally or not, is also the number of another flight rescued from the brink of disaster.
In its mood and its discipline, Shanghai is the most focused work that Grellier has done. Where previous albums often felt like collections of excerpts scooped up from the cutting-room floor, Shanghai’s 15 tracks fit together so snugly that they could easily be repurposed for an actual film score. He has largely jettisoned the percolating synth-pop of earlier albums, instead favoring slow-moving synthesizer bass, airy pads, and plenty of empty space. A less-is-more approach prevails: There are rarely more than three discrete elements in play at any given moment, and few tracks stretch beyond two-and-a-half minutes. With the exception of “Hotel Theme Part I” and “Hotel Theme Part II,” two organ variations that lend a sense of déjà vu to repeat plays of the album, tracks don’t necessarily repeat themes or even specific synthesizer patches, but in their muted colors and economical gestures, they all feel like parts of a greater whole. Like a roomful of minimalist canvasses, each one feeds off the others.
At their best, his patient miniatures waver between wistful and distant, leaving plenty of room project your own emotional states. Album opener “A Strange Guide” has sunrise chords and scene-setting crickets; “Bloody Palms” lingers on bittersweet major sevenths, lilting and understated; the regal “Hotel Theme Part I” evokes Philip Glass’ organ thrum. Only the album’s lone vocal cut, “Love Peas,” featuring a singer named Hama, breaks the mold: A soft-focus swirl of plucked strings and hushed legato. It’s pretty, almost cloying, and its wide-eyed sparkle comes closer to the work of M83, another Frenchman with a penchant for ‘80s blockbusters.
The only problem is that none of it is quite enough; there just aren’t enough musical ideas here to sustain an entire album—at least not if Grellier wants to aim for anything more than background listening. Take “Briefcase,” a single coldwave arpeggio extended for two minutes, or “Mansion Road,” a brooding bit of keyboard noodling: These aren’t songs, they’re cues in search of a scene. The album is meant as an homage to 1920s Shanghai—a tribute to “a fantasized and blurry period of time,” as the press release puts it. But that is barely the kernel of an idea, and the music doesn’t develop it beyond the level of an elevator pitch. There’s nothing specific to China, or the 1920s, in his synths or tentative melodies, and the ill-advised album cover—a pastiche of the old movie-poster trope where the male protagonist clutches a woman to his chest—doesn’t do the project any favors. Whatever he was going for, it comes off instead as an Orientalist cliché. Next time, instead of looking abroad for inspiration, Grellier might do better to start closer to home—to find his own story to tell, one that doesn’t require moving pictures in a darkened room to bring it to life. | 2017-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Lakeshore / Invada | April 28, 2017 | 5.9 | 6a7993d8-06c1-47df-8d8b-7f3d892a709c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
In a departure from its typically cutting-edge electronics, the Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes unearths vintage recordings of an mbira master whose lo-fi sonics are every bit as arresting. | In a departure from its typically cutting-edge electronics, the Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes unearths vintage recordings of an mbira master whose lo-fi sonics are every bit as arresting. | Ekuka Morris Sirikiti: Ekuka | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ekuka-moriss-sirikiti-ekuka/ | Ekuka | If you’ve ever thumbed a metal comb, flicked the tab atop a Coke can, or run a stick along a wrought-iron fence, you know the visceral pleasures of making metal sing. It’s a sound that has long fascinated musicians, children on playgrounds, and even our ancestors: Early metal-tined lamellophones found in Africa can date back 1,300 years. The buzz of those instruments, and its inharmonic overtones, carry an especially hypnotic charge. You can hear thumb pianos, mbiras, or kalimbas—the name varies, but the principles are the same—plink and twinkle through the music of Björk, Earth, Wind & Fire, Pharoah Sanders, Konono No°1, and Four Tet, to name a few.
The instrument can be heard in most field recordings made in Uganda spanning the 1950s through the 1970s, but this collection of radio sessions from Ekuka Morris Sirikiti, a legendary griot in Northern Uganda, presents his mbira in far scruffier yet mirthful settings. Originally broadcast on Ugandan radio circa 1978-2006, Ekuka is a rare vinyl release from the upstart Nyege Nyege Tapes, which has so far released just over a half-dozen tapes documenting the modern scene in Kampala, and it also marks the label’s first archival release. Just what connects the gabber-speed frenzy of their Sounds of Sisso compilation and the Spartan synth tessellations of Jako Maron to these mbira performances might not be evident at first, but Ekuka is a paterfamilias to the new wave of rappers and producers hailing from Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya.
With the reign of General Idi Amin in the ’70s and the civil unrest that has erupted in the country in the decades since (most recently with the brutal beating of parliament member and musician Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine), that Ekuka didn’t have access to proper recording studios isn’t so surprising. While the set says the recordings are taken from radio broadcasts, that’s not quite true; the tapes don’t originate from any station’s archives but rather from recordings made by listeners at home. Which means that the cycling rhythms and percolating twangs of Ekuka drift through an array of radio static, lo-fi hiss, and distortion. “Pwan En Obalo Gum Waa” arrives submerged in sludge: Ekuka’s growls disintegrating in the red, the wind brushes against the mic like white noise gauze, yet his nimble mbira lines bob up like quicksilver in pea soup. Same goes for the melodic distortion of “Pwoc Bot Lira Dpi Miyo Pikipiki,” Ekuka’s voice muffled and the mbira galloping, blurry as a watercolor.
Distorted thumb piano is nothing new, as the mighty Konono No°1 and their audience well know, but this set doesn’t quite belong in that category. If anything, it feels of a piece with the other artists on Nyege Nyege Tapes, who utilize whatever gear they have at hand to push the sound somewhere new and undetermined, rolling with the grit and the glitches. Another important aspect of Ekuka’s performances sets them apart from contemporary releases on the label with a more heavily electronic bent. As the liner notes explain, Ekuka’s nonstop patter could cover an array of topics: Be a good husband, take your kids to school, and whatever you do, don’t upset your son’s wife. He also set government PSAs to music, whether they be about preventing the spread of venereal diseases, not drinking alcohol to excess, or paying taxes. The metallic flutters of “In Balonyo for Ayinet” are dizzying enough; then, near the song’s end, Ekuka’s punchlines land, setting off a crowd that bursts into wild laughter—a sound that adds yet another visceral thrill to the music. | 2018-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Nyege Nyege Tapes | August 24, 2018 | 7.3 | 6a7dea05-1bdb-4ac8-b971-7917506bca51 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Canadian noise-pop duo’s music conjures a psychotic slumber party, or a Second Life rave, but remains grounded in the bittersweet beauty of lifelong friendship. | The Canadian noise-pop duo’s music conjures a psychotic slumber party, or a Second Life rave, but remains grounded in the bittersweet beauty of lifelong friendship. | Black Dresses: Peaceful as Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-dresses-peaceful-as-hell/ | Peaceful as Hell | On April 12th, Black Dresses hosted a livestream listening party for Peaceful as Hell that doubled as a two-year anniversary celebration of their debut album, Wasteisolation. In a blue and purple-lit room, Devi McCallion and Ada Rook, the duo who make up this Canadian noise-pop project, were grinning and headbanging and throwing up the sign of the horns as their fervid fans (the kind that inspire Sauron memes) wrote messages like “go off microbiology queen,” “TRANS RIGHTS BABY,” and “this is the cutest thing that’s ever happened” in the sidebar. It’s all very fitting: Devi and Rook’s collaboration started via Twitter DM, sending loops and beats back and forth from Vancouver and Toronto; they live in the same city now, but the Black Dresses origin story, and their intimate online connection with fans, is something of a beacon in this hyper-isolated time. As Devi put it in a 2018 interview, “It’s very friend-oriented music, even though it’s about isolation.” (Their music is a reminder of the ways in which people have always been marginalized and alienated from each other—even pre-pandemic.)
Peaceful as Hell is softer and more accessible than Black Dresses’ previous output, but "accessible” is relative: The music still teems with metallic riffs, industrial noise, pop-punk that got stuffed into garbage disposal, and a good amount of digital caterwauling. It’s fun and loud as hell, as per usual; a psychotic slumber party, a Second Life rave. But the crackly, jabbing sounds are toned down here, and you can hear Devi and Rook more clearly than ever.
In this new space, they stretch and shapeshift, making the most of their hybrid angel-demon powers. “CREEP U,” a coolly anthemic track which imagines a body as a haunted house, is not only the most straightforward pop song Devi and Rook have ever written, it might be one of their best (it’s also their longest to date). It’s filled with their characteristic questions about self-knowledge, and singular humor: “Empty windows shine so strange/Like there's someone behind the pain/Of glass,” Devi sings, over a simple guitar line before saying, “That's my idea of a joke, did it make you laugh?” “MAYBE THIS WORLD IS ANOTHER PLANETS HELL?” a track about making the best of a shitty situation (Earth, society), wouldn’t sound too out of place on Miss Anthropocene—that’s new for them, and the languidness is welcome.
As always, even when they’re imagining themselves as angels, like on the fiery “SHARP HALO,” or as a “bloody worm goddess” on “SCARED 2 DEATH,” it’s all so human. It is decidedly music about being trans; it is music about being alive. It is music about the ways in which pain and joy swim together, the frustrations of trying to connect with others when even self-knowledge is elusive and chaotic. There is so much packed into Peaceful as Hell—complexity of inner life, dissociation, climate disaster, biblical imagery, the future—and yet it ultimately feels simple and unmistakable, as though it has fallen out of Devi and Rook. “So once again/Here we go again/It’s all we have/Okay,” Rook mutters on “BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP” before Devi joins her in shouting: “Beautiful friendship/Burning up in this/Tiny little moment of time/We will always try our best/To shine bright!” Especially with the world’s hellishness currently blaring at us, every social disparity spotlighted and exacerbated, loneliness and doubt deepened to an extreme degree, Peaceful as Hell is perfect medicine. | 2020-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | blacksquares | April 24, 2020 | 7.6 | 6a8613b9-da88-44ec-9887-50a99275412a | Leah Mandel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/leah-mandel / | |
Nineteen years after their last album, the Jesus and Mary Chain pick up where they left off, offering their usual mix of feedback-spiked rockers and stoned ballads. | Nineteen years after their last album, the Jesus and Mary Chain pick up where they left off, offering their usual mix of feedback-spiked rockers and stoned ballads. | The Jesus and Mary Chain: Damage and Joy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23002-damage-and-joy/ | Damage and Joy | Whether they’re playing 15-minute gigs or taking 19 years between albums, the Jesus and Mary Chain have always put a lot of care into the appearance of not giving a fuck. Ever since they first erected their wall of squall on 1985’s Psychocandy, brothers Jim and William Reid have remained permanent residents of a world where sunglasses never come off, cigarette smoke doubles as dry ice, and the only illumination is provided by strobe light. None of the albums they’ve released since has sounded quite the same, but they all invariably feel the same. As the Mary Chain’s first full-length since the late ’90s proves, it will take more than a nearly two-decade recording hiatus to diminish the band’s intrinsic ultraviolet vibe.
Despite the epic lag between releases, Damage and Joy feels very much like a logical extension of its predecessor, 1998’s seeming swan song Munki, because the Reids had been unwittingly leaving a breadcrumb trail between the two records this whole time. Half of its 14 tracks are re-recordings of songs that were previously released in some form—as Jim Reid solo releases or as part of their sister Linda’s Sister Vanilla venture. In the case, of “All Things Pass,” it’s a revved-up revamp of the lone song the Mary Chain have officially released since the Reids buried the hatchet back in 2007 (because, presumably, leaving it for dead on the “Heroes” soundtrack seemed too ignoble a fate). Jim recently told Pitchfork that all those castaway tracks “really should have been Mary Chain songs,” if only the brothers’ notoriously combative relationship hadn’t deep-sixed the band after Munki.
By that time, the Reids had eagerly accepted their destiny as cranky old men. Where Psychocandy used harsh noise to conceal tender feelings, Munki’s streamlined motorik’n’roll laid the middle-aged Mary Chain’s hilariously hateful lyrics bare. (It’s hard to pick a favorite from “Commercial”: “McDonald’s is shit!” or “Children are fools!”) They were always an insolent band, but Munki marked the first time the Reids seemed to be having fun with being assholes. And on Damage and Joy, that regression continues apace, with the Reids acting like 50-going-on-15, giddily riffing on drugs, guns, erections, girls with curls, and “fly”/“high” rhymes you can spot from miles away.
Beyond the blatant nods to the group’s past (“Song for a Secret”—one of two duets with Isobel Campbell—manages to sound like “Sometimes Always” and “Just Like Honey” simultaneously), some of the brothers’ lyrics sound here like they were actually salvaged from an early ’90s scrapbook. The puerile robo-blues romp “Get on Home” finds Jim spending a night with a “blow-up girl,” “some LSD,” and “the MTV”; William’s ridiculous “Simian Split” rehashes a hoary old Kurt Cobain murder conspiracy as if the song was written after watching the El Duce interview in Nick Broomfield’s Kurt and Courtney. And then there’s “Facing Up To the Facts,” on which Jim unleashes a corker that could’ve easily materialized at any point in the Mary Chain’s history: “I hate my brother and he hates me/That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
But it’s easy for the Reids to milk that line for laughs, because Damage and Joy sounds bereft of any conflict or tension. The brothers made the record with producer/bassist Youth (with support from touring drummer Brian Young and Lush bassist Phil King), and it feels more like an intimate recording project than a live band document, mostly splitting the difference between routine electro-Stones rave-ups and strung-out ballads. The Reids score most consistently in the latter category, likely because it forces them to keep their adolescent id in check and deal with more adult emotions. The illicit-affair account “Black and Blues” is gilded gospel Americana dressed up in Velvet-y “ba ba bas” and a winsome guest vocal from Sky Ferreira, who’s thus far batting 1.000 in duets with Scottish rock institutions. And the Spacemen 3-style stoner jangle of “War on Peace” grapples with every aging rebel’s existential crisis—“What if I run?/Where would I run to?”—before issuing a proverbial “fuck it” and stomping on the pedal for an adrenalized, fuzz-powered finale.
But the biggest eye opener is album centerpiece “Los Feliz (Blues and Greens).” This luminous, orchestral acoustic lullaby plays like a misanthropic answer to Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” its idyllic California scenery—topped with a chorus of “God bless America!”—undercut by a deep-seated despair (“In the land of the free/Wishing they were dead”). Where they were once defined by a collision of face-melting feedback and soothing melody, the modern-day Mary Chain are governed by a different set of extremes: the pent-up desire to act like goofy, hormonal teenagers and the sobering knowledge those days are long gone. But as the brothers recruit their sister/mediator Linda for a closing reboot of Sister Vanilla’s “Can’t Stop the Rock,” the song’s cheery rallying cry—“I’m falling, and I’m happy!”—carries the reassurance that now, more than ever, the Jesus and Mary Chain are united in holy acrimony. | 2017-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ADA Worldwide / Warner Music Group | March 20, 2017 | 6.7 | 6a935cb9-03f4-43b0-991f-2eb1a94cb734 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
After losing a member, one of K-pop’s most consistent and internationally appealing groups returns as a quartet for their fourth album. Casual listeners don’t need to be heavily invested in the K-pop world to get the appeal of f(x)’s music, and 4 Walls is an enjoyable listen even for those not looking to broach the language gap. | After losing a member, one of K-pop’s most consistent and internationally appealing groups returns as a quartet for their fourth album. Casual listeners don’t need to be heavily invested in the K-pop world to get the appeal of f(x)’s music, and 4 Walls is an enjoyable listen even for those not looking to broach the language gap. | f(x): 4 Walls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21285-4-walls/ | 4 Walls | Over the last couple of years, f(x) have become one of the few K-pop groups with real international appeal and a sizable fan base in the States. The group's sophomore album, 2013’s Pink Tape, was a pop collage of ambitious sounds and ideas that tinkered with K-pop formulas, and it still stands as one of the best records the genre has ever produced. Last year’s Red Light offered a decidedly edgier synthpop sound that leaned more toward the club, though it didn’t quite meet the standard set by its predecessor. And during the promo for Red Light, group member Sulli, an actress and star for the conglomerate S.M. Entertainment, was noticeably absent from scheduled media events. After talk of mental exhaustion and a temporary f(x) hiatus, Sulli officially withdrew from the group in August, leaving K-pop’s most consistent act in a state of flux.
4 Walls is f(x)'s fourth album and first with four members—hence the name—and it lands right where Pink Tape and Red Light intersect, creating a sleek electropop fun-house filled with an eclectic group of generation-spanning pop singles that fit together as a long-playing piece. It’s also the first K-pop comeback to fully acknowledge a lineup change—going as far as incorporating it into the album's marketing and lyrics—but it doesn't change much about the group’s sound. This is a superficial rebirth; though the album’s lead single and title track has veiled references to changing and becoming new, f(x)’s synthpop bounce remains steadfast and uncompromised. And though Sulli was undoubtedly a standout among the group, her departure allows others to grab the spotlight: Now, not only does rapper Amber have the opportunity to rap more, she also gets the chance to use her alto range to flesh out harmonies and bring greater balance to records like "Rude Love", an ambitious, hook-heavy tune that rivals the group's most infectious songs.
Many tracks on 4 Walls are sourced through Jam Factory, a music publisher that uses American musicians to create lyrics and melodies for Asian markets. The company’s strength lies in penning sounds without borders, and some of 4 Walls’ strongest collaborations involve producer LDN Noise, who creates pop songs with bridges that function as hooks and transitions that overlap to keep songs stimulating. Album closer "When I’m Alone", meanwhile, was originally co-written by Carly Rae Jepsen for her recent E•MO•TION album. But the real X-factor is longtime f(x) collaborator, writer, and K-pop superproducer Kenzie, who wrote two of the album's most curious songs: "Papi" and "Cash Me Out". A Berklee School of Music grad, Kenzie navigates the cultural divide better than anyone.
Listening to any K-pop record (or any foreign language record, really) can prove to be a challenging experience for casual listeners simply due to the added communication barrier. You can also lose some key information in translation—even when you know what's being said, there's a layer of context missing. Still, just like any other type of music, a listener has the opportunity to fill in some of that context on their own; stripping Korean of its code is no different than reinterpreting a really dense English lyric. 4 Walls is even more accessible because f(x) songs tend to have a lot of Western cues: Many of the melodies recall songs from the American pop canon and, as with many K-pop songs, there are English lyrics spliced in throughout (at one point, Amber raps, "I was low key/ That’s the old me/ Now there’s Top 10 honeys tryna phone me").
Western pop fans don’t need to be heavily invested in the K-pop world to get the appeal of f(x)’s music, and 4 Walls is an enjoyable listen even for those not looking to broach the language gap. Korean is a beautiful language with long multi-syllabic words that unspool in clumps and it carries American-stylized pop melodies fluently, breaking up long vowel sounds to fit into sonic phrases. There are few better introductions to K-pop than f(x), and 4 Walls is a strong introduction to f(x) 2.0. | 2015-11-18T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-18T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | S.M. | November 18, 2015 | 7.3 | 6a93f2e2-9132-47b2-b770-cf1e0de36ad3 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Now a roaring, technically adept band rather than Dylan Baldi's bedroom solo project, Cloud Nothings undergo a total overhaul on their bracing Steve Albini-recorded second LP. | Now a roaring, technically adept band rather than Dylan Baldi's bedroom solo project, Cloud Nothings undergo a total overhaul on their bracing Steve Albini-recorded second LP. | Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16158-attack-on-memory/ | Attack on Memory | About a year ago, it seemed easy to predict what Dylan Baldi's first great album would probably sound like. After the release of the Turning On, a self-recorded collection of CD-Rs filled with tuneful alt-punk songs wrapped in tinfoil and steel wool that was released by the tiny California imprint Bridgetown Records, Cloud Nothings' self-titled debut on Carpark was an identifiable point on a familiar trajectory. The clarity afforded even by its modest budget made sweet and airy singles like "Forget You All the Time" and "Should Have" sound revelatory, while more overtly aggro tracks like "Rock" and "Not Important" felt thin and regressive, unnecessary vestiges of lo-fi provocation that didn't do Baldi many favors.
And then "No Future/No Past" arrived as the first single from Attack on Memory. It was brightly produced but tonally dark with a queasy anti-melody-- a confrontational act that suggested that Baldi was going off script. Turns out "No Future/No Past" is the least representative track on Attack on Memory, but it opens the album with a necessary slate-clearing. While a full record of fizzy pop-punk would've been welcome, Cloud Nothings are trying for more. As an accidental concept album affirming the enduring power and purity of early emo (as defined by Dischord, Deep Elm, and especially Jade Tree), Attack on Memory feels above all necessary, a corrective for indie rock making allowances for everything except music that actually rocks.
The overhaul is radical: It's literally a different band from the one that made Cloud Nothings. For one thing, Cloud Nothings is actually a band now rather than Baldi's solo project, retaining the lineup that toured with Fucked Up and likely learned a lot from them. While the freedom and ease of being a bedroom artist has its advantages, you can't make your own Sunny Day Real Estate and Wipers records without a beastly rhythm section. Even beyond the short window of time that passed between Cloud Nothings and Attack on Memory, this is a record that crackles with "let's get this on tape now" immediacy-- eight tracks, about half an hour, blunt lyrics, big choruses, lots of screaming. Fussing over these songs would've sapped their urgency.
"No Future/No Past" is the first gauntlet Baldi throws down but it's not the most daunting. At more than nine minutes, "Wasted Days" is far longer than anything on Cloud Nothings. As a radio edit, it could be something like Cloud Nothings' answer to Foo Fighters' "Everlong", a fanged beauty of barbed chords, torrential drum rolls, and impassioned emoting. But as it rolls on, "Wasted Days" becomes simultaneously forbidding, disorienting, and psychedelic, something like a black-and-grey kaleidoscope. As the band hurtles to the finish, Baldi repeatedly yells, "I thought! I would! Be more! Than this!" in a high-voltage scree as a painful paradox after such an ambitious display of more.
Baldi has always been a hooks guy*,* and Attack is every bit as catchy as the more rigid and user-friendly Cloud Nothings, and the spaciousness of Steve Albini's recording gives plenty of room for these hooks to careen into each other: "Stay Useless" is an anthemic tantrum that shifts rhythm without warning, the bludgeoning riffs of "No Sentiment" give way to the plaintive vocals and jittery snare runs on "Our Plans", while "Cut You" fades out the record on a gracefully arcing chant that's equally vengeful, self-loathing, and hopeful.
There's the temptation to give too much of the credit to Albini, whose open-door policy has attracted an endless number of cred-deficient bands. Attack on Memory is unmistakably his work-- Baldi's vocals are close-mic'd and raw, the drums are loud as hell, the guitars are economically panned and almost entirely free of effects processing, and there's actual space in between of all of them. But here's Baldi explaining Albini's role to Pitchfork's Jenn Pelly: "Steve Albini played Scrabble on Facebook almost the entire time [we were recording]. I don't even know if he remembers what our album sounds like." It was meant as a compliment, but the lesson is clear: A lot of producers would be better off stepping back and doing nothing. Attack on Memory isn't what typically gets classified as a "headphones record," but that's the best way to first experience how alive it sounds, aggressively leaping out at you with real dynamics. Check the giddy explosions out of the pockets of silence punctuating "Stay Useless", the offbeat harmonies and rhythmic stumble that sound like happy accidents on "Fall In", or Baldi's serrated bark shredding the uneasy full-band détente following the solo of "No Sentiment".
That's where you'll find Attack on Memory's key lyric, "No nostalgia and no sentiment/ We're over it now and we were over it then," making the title's implications clear: If you enjoy this as a work of art, there's an invitation to adopt it as cultural critique. Baldi shares stages and a label with Toro Y Moi and joked about "Forget You All the Time" being "our most chillwave song" at a Los Angeles show, so the title is more of a call to be heard in the current climate rather than a total negation of it. But the last Fugazi album came out when Baldi was 10, and it's easy to see "memory" as a stand-in for indie's stylistic pervasiveness: de-emphasis of guitars and live performance, passivity over aggression, past over presence, singing like you don't care if you get understood or even heard. That just doesn't cut it for a lot of people his age who wonder if they'll ever witness "The Argument"'s kind of life-affirming vitality firsthand.
There's a fundamental irony in how a record titled Attack on Memory is such a sonic throwback, while Baldi's lyrics obsess over arrested development and missed opportunities. But like the best of indie's recent guitar bands that dare to skew retro-- Yuck, the Men, WU LYF, to name a few-- Attack on Memory is too visceral to feel like escapism, too vital to feel like cheap revival. Not when this sound's death was the wrongful diagnosis of trendwatchers: Those of us who grew up on Drive Like Jehu, Braid, and Jawbreaker can listen to Attack on Memory and sense their artistic legacy is in good hands, but there will inevitably be teenagers for whom Attack on Memory stands to be that kind of record to call their own. And hopefully we'll all meet up in the mosh pit. | 2012-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Carpark | January 23, 2012 | 8.6 | 6a93f882-4abb-43df-8563-2927f0c064d6 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a blockbuster R&B comeback record from 2005, an unofficial marker of a more self-actualized Mary J. Blige. | 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 blockbuster R&B comeback record from 2005, an unofficial marker of a more self-actualized Mary J. Blige. | Mary J. Blige: The Breakthrough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-j-blige-the-breakthrough/ | The Breakthrough | Mary J. Blige wasn’t ready for a greatest hits moment just yet. By 2005, she was coming off her sixth studio album, Love & Life, an exuberant but untruthful Diddy-helmed affair that Blige later called a misstep. Within two years, her label Geffen had started prepping a legacy project in its wake titled Reminisce, which seemed like a career bow-out for Blige, then 34. She didn’t feel finished and had just, in fact, spent her past three projects introducing the world to a new and freer Mary. She felt confident enough to scrap the greatest hits set and fast-track her next album for a December 2005 release.
At the time, Blige was awash in bliss, two years into a marriage with her manager, Kendu Isaacs, and ready to sing it to the heavens. Though the press described her seventh album, The Breakthrough, as a love letter to him, Blige insisted it was deeper than that. “It’s not just about choosing to be in love with him—it’s about choosing to be in love with myself,” she told Newsweek in 2005. The album reads less as a tribute to him and more like a sermon between Blige and the congregation of women who’ve seen themselves in her over the years. “I’m freeing myself,” she said to NPR in 2006, defining her breakthrough as not just one epiphany but an endless series of revelations. “I don’t think any of us will be free completely. It’s gonna take a lifetime to really get to that point.”
What separates Blige from many other artists is that she is a believable work-in-progress. Every Mary J. Blige album is a chance for her to decompress, reboot, and present a stronger but softer version of herself. And yet, the dominant narrative is that Blige sings better when she’s in despair. Everybody wants her to stay sad for them. “I can make twenty more really depressed albums, but I choose to do something different,” Blige told NPR in 2006, echoing the classic text Sex and the City when a Paris-bound Carrie tells Miranda, “I cannot stay in New York and be single for you.”
After 30 years of being trapped in heartbreak and misery, Blige deserved her redemption arc. Geffen positioned The Breakthrough for success, releasing it eight months after Mariah Carey’s own comeback effort, The Emancipation of Mimi, which proved how much a veteran R&B star could dominate pop with a resilient narrative if they also had a No. 1 hit like the Jermaine Dupri-produced “We Belong Together.” Jimmy Iovine, then chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M, commissioned producer Bryan-Michael Cox, who’d co-written Carey’s smash, to replicate a hit for Blige’s album. Relishing the opportunity to prove himself a legit hitmaker outside of working with Dupri, Cox composed the simple, rapturous piano melody behind The Breakthrough’s lead single “Be Without You” in under 15 minutes, then called in his frequent collaborator Johnta Austin, who’d won his first Grammy for writing “We Belong Together.” In a 2007 interview, Austin recalled nearly scrapping the hook for “Be Without You” at first (“We’ve been too strong for too long...”) because he said he’d “never really heard Mary sing a straight-up love song.”
In reality, Blige had a track record of romantic hits—What’s the 411?’s sweet missive “Real Love,” Share My World’s fizzy “Love Is All We Need”—but many of them are more about searching for the right love than finding it. On “Be Without You,” she’s practically levitating. It’s a stunning vocal showcase amid a litany of lyrical vows that capture the ecstasy of the honeymoon phase. The song secured Blige her comeback and spent 15 weeks atop Billboard’s Hip-Hop/R&B Songs chart, a streak broken only recently this past May by SZA’s “Kill Bill.” The Breakthrough became Blige’s third No. 1 album and sold 727,000 U.S. copies off the bat, giving her the biggest first-week debut for a woman solo R&B star to date. She scored eight Grammy nominations, winning three, and the album stands as a fitting midpoint in her catalog, an unofficial marker of a more self-actualized Mary, post-No More Drama. That she’s since divorced the “con artist” who inspired some of the album’s cheerier tracks after 13 years of marriage makes the experience all the more rich.
The album opens with a vivid portrait of matrimony and the tender, sped-up wails of a 1976 O’Jays record on “I Swear, I Love No One But You,” set over the J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League’s smooth, glistening production. Blige is slick and swooning, praising a new love who’s “just above the best, I must confess the best love that I ever had” and offering gushing metaphors. “About You” is a similarly euphoric ode where will.i.am boldly chops and syncs Nina Simone’s classic, swaggering “Feeling Good” vocals with Blige’s own, turning the song into a stomping, if relatively flat, declaration of loyalty to a partner.
Blige often communicates with her past selves in her music. Here, her use of first, second, and third person in songs feels more prominent. The 9th Wonder production, “Good Woman Down,” addresses listeners directly, extending a hand to the women who remind Blige of a young tragic Mary. The song is a plainspoken survival story about escaping a childhood of abuse only having it spill into her adult relationships: “When I used to see my daddy beat my mother down, down to her feet/I used to say that ain’t gonna never be me,” Blige recounts, her vocals, as always, scratched with disillusion. The reflective gaze is pretty and clearest on tracks like the plaintive ballad “Take Me As I Am” and the standout “Baggage,” where Blige sings about recognizing patterns, over a sprinkling of synths that sound like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis throwing a fistful of glitter over the track: “Don’t wanna make you pay for what somebody else has done to me/I don’t know what to do.”
Blige has described the challenge of being raised by a single mother with tragic clarity. In her self-produced 2021 documentary My Life, she talks about hearing her father’s soul music in the house while growing up in Yonkers, New York, and being particularly intrigued and haunted by the “my life in the sunshine” refrain on Roy Ayers Ubiquity’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine.” Blige recalls, “That record made me feel like I could have something, but I couldn’t get my hands on it.”
The doc is a somber retelling of Blige’s origin story, beginning with the trauma of her dad leaving when she was 4. About three years later, once she moved to the Schlobohm projects with her mom and sister, the violence in the environment started to change Blige profoundly. “I never smiled when I was a teenager… You turn to anything that can numb you from feeling the sadness,” she says later on in the doc, before describing her spiral into alcohol. Her only therapy as a young child was singing into a brush in the mirror.
Then, in 1989, she recorded a demo tape of Anita Baker’s “Caught Up In the Rapture” at a local mall and handed it to her stepdad, Jeff Redd, who routed it to Uptown Records’ late founder and CEO Andre Harrell. He took a trip to the Yonkers project where Blige lived and signed her to his imprint on the spot. It was kismet that Diddy, then an Uptown A&R looking to make a name for himself as Puff Daddy, partnered with Blige and gave her an unofficial title as the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, heralding a new flavorful ’90s subgenre. At the time, only Blige could weave the slickness of rap with the emotion of blues so seamlessly.
There’s always been a hint of resentment in Blige’s vocals, and The Breakthrough exorcises that lifelong suffering. On the thumping, Rodney Jerkins-produced “Enough Cryin” and “Ain’t Really Love,” Blige leans into the independence she’s earned, rapping on the former track, even if the flow isn’t as smooth as on What’s the 411? That alter ego also takes over “MJB Da MVP,” a mixtape-esque take on The Game’s breakthrough 2005 single “Hate It or Love It” that was originally intended as a teaser for Blige’s greatest hits album. The song is Blige’s round of applause to herself, reminding listeners of how long she’s been facilitating other people’s breakthroughs. The record could’ve come across as simple rehashing or boasting, but there’s something charming about Blige’s ownership of her influence, knowing how much she rejected it before. When she duplicates Ayers’ “my life, my life, my life” line in the bridge, it’s a touching full-circle nod to her own album, the music she loves, and a young Blige who absorbed the original as an earworm growing up.
The Breakthrough is so self-referential that it almost does function like a greatest-hits record the label wanted. Blige acknowledges the criticism from fans expecting sadness from her, but ultimately she enters a space of self-acceptance that’s carried throughout the latter half of her career. You can hear it in moments like the opening keys of the lavish dance floor cut “Gonna Breakthrough,” which sounds like sunrise breaking through a morning window. Jay-Z plays hypeman on “Can’t Hide From Luv,” a record about mastering and unlearning the art of self-sabotage. And “Can’t Get Enough” is another clear-headed ballad about finding commitment, though it still finds Blige looking for a type of idealistic love that’s like an organ she can’t live without.
Two standout tracks highlight Blige’s imperfect blues voice. The power ballad “I Found My Everything” is one of her strongest vocal performances, a soft, transcendent duet with Raphael Saadiq where his buttery background vocals shine next to Blige, who cheekily sings, “You’ve given me a reason to smile, baby.” Another blockbuster moment comes on the closer “One,” Blige’s searing takeover of U2’s stadium anthem and an example of her ability to personalize a universal record with shades of triumph and torture. Bono steps out and wisely relinquishes the moment to Blige, who sings lines like, “You act like you never had love/And you want me to go without,” with an intensity that suggests she’s feeling the sentiment deeply and adding her backstory on top.
Nearly two decades after its release, “Be Without You” is still listed on streaming services with the parenthetical “(Kendu’s Mix),” a credit to the person who facilitated both the making of the song behind the scenes and Blige’s broader breakthrough. Blige filed for divorce in 2016 and accused Kendu of being unfaithful, demeaning, and greedy in their relationship. She’d experienced alcohol and substance abuse, but she said it was divorce proceedings that left her feeling the most emotionally naked and humiliated. Again, in interviews, she spoke about not loving herself enough. When Blige returned to NPR for a 2017 interview for her album, Strength of a Woman, still in the thick of divorce, she confessed, “I don’t mind the pain. I don’t mind it all because it hurts so good. It hurts so good.” Once that good pain goes away, there can be moments like The Breakthrough, a testament to the self-love Blige has curated for herself and a rejection of the old love she once knew. | 2023-10-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Geffen | October 1, 2023 | 8.8 | 6a9899b9-88a8-4d37-a1cc-38d7b1fa3421 | Clover Hope | https://pitchfork.com/staff/clover-hope/ | |
R.A.P. Ferreira (formerly milo) makes his most free-spirited project yet, rapping gleefully over lively and wayward production. | R.A.P. Ferreira (formerly milo) makes his most free-spirited project yet, rapping gleefully over lively and wayward production. | R.A.P. Ferreira: Purple Moonlight Pages | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rap-ferreira-purple-moonlight-pages/ | Purple Moonlight Pages | Rory Allen Philip Ferreira retired his milo alias in 2018, emerging in 2019 as R.A.P. Ferreira, a play on his name. Under the new moniker, he’s emphasized rapping as independence in action. His Biddeford, Maine storefront and his record label, Ruby Yacht, embody that ideal in structural ways, but his music has always been the proof of concept. On Purple Moonlight Pages he fully embraces his blueprint, rapping with an irresistible freedom and joy so that others may follow.
He’s been a rigorous technician since his earliest releases, but as Ferreira he’s more free spirit than showboat. Produced by the Jefferson Park Boys, a Cali jazz trio comprised of producers Kenny Segal, Mike Parvizi, and Aaron Carmack, the record’s mood is beckoning and whimsical. Purple Moonlight Pages is an obstacle course of shifty rhythms, twinkly brass and keys, and gales of noise that Ferreira waltzes, bops, and struts through. Instead of loops, the Jefferson Park Boys provide lively dynamos that lurch and sway like Howl’s Moving Castle. Ferreira has worked closely with Segal for half a decade, and the Jefferson Park Boys provided a beat on his last album as milo, but the production here is wayward, more frayed.
Ferreira tackles the implicit challenge with poise, dueling with horns, humming to chords, springing off the downbeat. There's always been a dexterity to his writing, which is intricately syllabic and layered, but here even the knottiest schemes feel casual and loose. “This beat sound like a long walk to the dumpster/Funk like nostrils of muenster/Made myself an apostle of wonder,” he raps on “OMENS & TOTEMS.” On “NONCIPHER,” he ties references to Aquemini and The Wire into a Dadaist bow: “Tell yo’self that ain’t odious, ock/It’s only obvious/That’s bogus whoadie, I’m Bodie Broadus/Singin’ Spottie Otie.” His rhymes have the zip of epiphanies, off-the-cuff yet fully composed.
Ferreira’s raps feel built for private delight as much as public spectacle. When he raps something like “Mister lime rickey, tickin’ off beat/Parseltongue-like feet” or “In Tim Hortons, dressed like a Transformer/Talking ’bout Jacob Lawrence portraits,” his word choices are appreciable for both their meaning and their mouthfeel. He lacks the quantum unpredictability of Young Thug, but he feels equally unbothered, prioritizing fun and caprice over structure. “Ambiguity defeat the pattern recognition,” he says on “RO TALK.” and it’s the closest he comes to spelling out his strategy.
One of the starkest shifts here is Ferreira’s warm and puckish demeanor. “LAUNDRY” is a bouncy ode to chores. Instead of the wife-guy strain of J. Cole’s “Folding Clothes,” Ferreira leans into the endearing corniness of domestic bliss: “I’m just humming in the kitchen/My son listening/He’s staring at me with them wide ole eyes.” On “LEAVING HELL,” he ambles out of meter to share an anecdote about a time he pooped at a gas station and read a two-part exchange about the purpose of life that was carved on the stall. As milo, he favored a cold deadpan that lent itself to searing humor and heady metaphysics but lacked the whimsy and joy on display here. His newfound warmth makes his sermonizing feel informal and intimate, like he’s sharing advice while cutting your hair.
Purple Moonlight Pages follows in the footsteps of recent records like Some Rap Songs, Red Burns, and When I Get Home, which, to different ends, used jazz’s esoteric rhythms in service of fostering community and self-recognition. Jazz has long been an easy refuge for artists seeking to mine a sense of black authenticity or to signal a “refined” palette, but these records don't feel born of posturing. Instead, they are attempts to unspool and unlearn, to map the future by probing the past.
What’s missing from the record is a sense of interaction with the larger world. Ferreira’s self-possession and nimbleness play out in his performances, but his acrobatics rarely engage with rap outside his indie sphere, in lingo or in form. Compared to JPEGMAFIA’s web trawling or even the anthropological noir of fellow Kenny Segal collaborator billy woods, Ferreira feels like he’s on an island. While he never claims himself the GOAT and has repeatedly said he’s happy to be underground, his freedom feels conditional. Purple Moonlight Pages shows him at ease. What does he sound like under pressure? | 2020-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Ruby Yacht | March 13, 2020 | 7.7 | 6aa517eb-e433-4362-be3d-5e3ed9170dae | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
A wildly diverse range of house and techno artists bring rich colors and unexpected energies to this bail reform fundraising compilation. | A wildly diverse range of house and techno artists bring rich colors and unexpected energies to this bail reform fundraising compilation. | Various Artists: Physically Sick 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-physically-sick-2/ | Physically Sick 2 | One year ago, the Brooklyn-based feminist dance music collective Discwoman protested President Trump’s election by shining a light on some of electronic music’s most vital and underrepresented artists. Together with Berlin producer Physical Therapy’s Allergy Season imprint, they assembled an expansive collection of avant-garde house and techno titled Physically Sick, releasing it day the before the inauguration. The “full strength protest compilation” benefited the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and other organizations, and was billed as “a middle finger from the underground to the future powers-that-be.” Their passion was admirable, but their mission was broad—too broad, perhaps, to achieve the impact they wanted. For their 2018 follow-up, Physically Sick 2, they’ve kept the music far-reaching but focused their fundraising efforts to a single cause: bail reform. By donating proceeds to the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, they aim to draw attention to the deeply broken American prison system and its racist, classist effects on society.
Discwoman’s very existence is a form of protest. The DJ booking agency exclusively represents artists outside the dance music industry’s white, male, cisgender default. And although a few men are included on the new compilation (Anthony Parasole, Matrixxman, Le1f), the vast majority of its 44 tracks are produced by women pushing the envelope. There are only two repeat artists from last year—UMFANG and Physical Therapy, who curated the project with Discwoman co-founder Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson—which keeps the focus on new, gutsy talent, flooding the tracklist with rich colors, intricate textures, unexpected energies, and challenging arrangements.
Some of the compilation’s most exciting works are its most abstract. Album opener “pre-extinction (incompatibility),” by Fatima Al Qadiri, sets a dramatic tone with ambient synths over what sound like the controlled throat-singing of Tibetan monks. On the other end of the BPM spectrum, Berlin producer Ziúr’s frantic “Damage-Relate” refuses to commit to a groove or tempo, bursting and zipping with ecstatic polyrhythms that feel turbulent and deliberate.
There’s a striking diversity of sound to Physically Sick 2: Some tracks delight in less-is-more minimalism (Nikita Zabelin’s ticklish “Four Gents,” the space disco frost of Kiki Kudo’s “Freakey Ke Ke”), while others, like M.E.S.H.’s “Gov Patrol,” seem to flex every muscle. Foozool & 8ULENTINA—co-founders of Club Chai, Oakland’s answer to Discwoman—present their first official collaboration with the frenetic and mechanical “Plasma,” which feels like peeking behind the plate into a computer’s frantic motherboard.
The strongest tracks here imply a sense of order in the chaos; when that’s lost, it can be easy to lose the plot. “pre-copy,” credited to the virtually unknown alias Oprah Goldberg, makes you wonder if there’s been a caching error or if you’re missing the metaphor. And the constant hiccups of silence in Xexexe’s “Air For One” are brow-furrowing and interruptive, like static chop on FM radio right when you’ve snagged a good song.
Kerrie Ann Murphy, the DJ/producer known as BEARCAT, delivers the most dance-friendly selection with “VIVA,” a dusty hip-shaker with staccato acid pricks and a Middle Eastern-tinged synth line. Lauren Flax’s “Earthquake” is a close second, with Tigga Calore spitting breakneck rap verses over yips, howls, and tightly wound riffs that swirl in the distance like a looming tornado. Si Begg’s “Sick and Tired of the Bullshit” and Lady Blacktronika’s “Crazy Bantu Boy” are full-throttle electro cuts, and when the latter erupts into a soulful house break, it’s the collection’s most climactic moment.
Tygapaw’s psychedelic “BLACK WOMXN EXPERIENCE” is the one that lingers the longest. A hazy blend of shimmering chimes and spoken word poetry about black American resilience, it’s disorienting and breathtaking, like you’re floating outside yourself. (A subtle but excruciating touch: the voices are often drowned out by an atmosphere of white noise.) Several artists on last year’s compilation have since emerged as rising stars on the wider circuit, including Octo Octa, Yaeji, and Jayda G. This year, Tygapaw and BEARCAT are ones to watch.
This compilation is ultimately vast and hard to define, but that’s the point. Discwoman and the thriving underground it serves are founded on inclusivity, experimentation, and free expression. The artists here represent the broad range of voices—new and established, international and domestic, male and female and nonbinary—echoing through warehouses and clubs around the world where people are coming together to connect and resist. | 2018-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Allergy Season / Discwoman | March 15, 2018 | 7.2 | 6aa6d31d-0b07-48fa-9395-48e74773097c | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
This 17-track compilation on XL Recordings offers a snapshot of the new generation of London’s rappers, singers, and dancehall kings. | This 17-track compilation on XL Recordings offers a snapshot of the new generation of London’s rappers, singers, and dancehall kings. | Various Artists: New Gen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22873-new-gen/ | New Gen | You can find the beating heart of the U.K. rap underground online, somewhere among the thousands of kids desperately spitting bars on YouTube in hopes of getting noticed. On channels like SBTV, Link Up TV, and GRM Daily, no-name rappers spit (mostly written) rhymes for “freestyle” competitions, battling for relevance in a digital Hunger Games for the chance to be anointed as the next Stormzy or Skepta.
It’s from this pool of hopefuls that New Gen was born; at first, as a showcase for promising talent stymied by London police’s aggressive targeting of rap shows, and later as an Sunday afternoon radio show on Radar Radio. The latest incarnation is a compilation of original songs on XL Recordings, a 17-track album meant to be a snapshot of the new generation of London’s rappers, singers, and dancehall kings. Grime is still the city’s most famous urban musical export, but the youngest members of the U.K. scene seem less concerned with subgenre—on New Gen, you’ll hear garage, dancehall, reggae, and R&B singers alongside the grime and hip-hop MCs, the lines bleeding between each without regard for the old guard’s gatekeeping.
New Gen is the brainchild of Caroline SM, a GRM Daily editor that had found success breaking rappers on the site’s YouTube channel. Barely in her 20s, she's worn many hats: editor (GRM Daily), host (NewGenRadio), A&R (XL Recordings), executive producer (the New Gen LP), and artist manager (Bonkaz and J Hus, who each signed to Sony in 2015 and 2016, respectively). As much as any of the New Gen rappers, she’s carving her own role in the industry, with each gig feeding exposure and opportunity to the other, vertically integrating A&R, production, management and publicity under one brand. Though her sole appearance on the comp is to intro Kojey Radical’s “Fuck Your Feelings,” in effect, New Gen is her debut album.
But it’s the producers that keep New Gen from simply being a collection of hard YouTube bars. Seeking to mimic the creative energy of production camps like Rick Rubin’s Malibu retreat or Kanye’s Hawaii sessions for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Caroline SM and her fellow executive producer, the MC Renz, recruited Jevon, Nyge, and Soul to handle all the production duties, with artists popping in and out of different rooms at Red Bull’s studios in London. The three manage to weave a handful of styles from hungry artists with varying dialects into a cohesive statement, from the sinister synths on the opening track (Avelino & Bonkaz’s “Welcome to the New Gen”) to bouncy R&B (Ray BLK’s “Busy”), to a tasteful sample of Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” (“Man of the Hour”), somber King Krule-ish guitar tones (“Life Support”), or a dancehall spin on the Atlanta strip club sound (“Money Haffi Mek”). It’s no small feat.
Like a lot of U.K. hip-hop, New Gen may require a bit of lyrical decoding for an American audience; even if you’re familiar with the various Caribbean patois and know that “Money Haffi Mek” means “money to be made,” there’s plenty of British slang that requires translation. Despite this, you might be able to deduce what AJ Tracey means when brags that he’s “still got these yatties up in my gaf,” or the “skengs in the rides” on 67’s “Jackets” are weapons meant for nefarious purposes. The dialect may be different, but the tried-and-true topics of sex, haters, and violence are apparently universal.
Among all the artists featured on the compilation, Avelino & Bonkaz stand out as the most polished talents. Avelino, a 23-year-old from Tottenham, has three mixtapes and the EP F.Y.O. under his belt, while Bonkaz, the latest MC out of the South London town of Croydon (Krept and Konan, Stormzy, A2, Section Boys), is in the second year of a deal with Sony Music. Their tag-team on the LP’s first track is an opening salvo, a two-minute barrage of lyrical punches that never quite gets topped: “A: Welcome to the New Gen/B: Funny how sometimes the new friends can be the real friends/A: You should mind your business, I know dragons in a few dens/B: It's like a whole family camping, them niggas too tense.”
New Gen feels like a proof of concept—that given the means and opportunity, these YouTube warriors can create work worthy of coming back to. For curious Americans who’ve only just heard of Skepta and Stormzy, it’s a preview of the artists in the London underground most likely to break through, cheesing at future MOBO Awards, taking down trophies (New Gen artists WSTRN & Abra Cadabra were already honored at the 2016 edition in November). And while a cynic might see New Gen as merely a reflection of Caroline SM and Renz’s taste and grassroots network; an optimist might say it’s an underground scene collectivizing for its mutual benefit. Nevertheless, it’s one of the more impressive collections of underground talent of late. | 2017-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | XL | February 4, 2017 | 7.9 | 6aab2ec7-9257-47dd-af7d-d9dd1564b5bd | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | null |
The 21-year-old songwriter’s latest album is irritating enough to activate the mildest allergy to sincerity. | The 21-year-old songwriter’s latest album is irritating enough to activate the mildest allergy to sincerity. | Rex Orange County: Pony | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rex-orange-county-pony/ | Pony | Alex O’Connor self-released bcos u will never b free, his first modest bedroom project as Rex Orange County, in 2015. It’s not hard to hear the appeal of that first tape: The songs were imperfect and angsty, with an amateur production style that fit Rex’s creaky nasal voice. “Pizza box/Wedding ring left amongst the crust,” he drawled, sketching a banal, absurd image of a crumbling relationship. “Don’t miss me when I’m dead,” he pleaded, and then followed up with an earnest rap verse about rejecting peer pressure.
His sound also appealed to Tyler, the Creator, who recruited the English singer and songwriter for his 2017 album Flower Boy. It became Rex’s breakout moment. After meeting Tyler, he rushed out another album, Apricot Princess, so that people who learned about him from Flower Boy would have something to listen to. This week, he released Pony, his first album for Sony and the third entry in Rex’s slim, sentimental catalog.
Rex’s distinctive voice has earned him the epithet “old soul,” but his newest music is relentlessly juvenile. When he landed a Spotify deal that offered the opportunity to work with an established artist on a cover song, he picked Randy Newman and “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” On Pony, a collection of 10 new songs irritating enough to activate the mildest allergy to sincerity, he sings about being young and in love; about getting a little older but not yet old enough; about feeling like a comic-book superhero and getting “Stressed Out.” “When we have to speak I usually shoe gaze,” he admits on “Laser Lights,” with a delivery style equally indebted to Chance the Rapper’s singing and Ed Sheeran’s rapping.
Pony employs a more childlike musical palette than Rex’s earlier projects—bubbly synths, electric piano, programmed beats, bells, strings, and bird chirps—and though there’s still a waxy haze surrounding them, the intensity is dialed up. There’s always something jumping out of the mix to compete for attention—sometimes a pop of cartoonish horns, but more often Rex’s quavery voice, a limiting factor Pony tries every possible way to work around: chipmunk squeaks (“Stressed Out”), Vocoder (“Never Had the Balls”), digital barbershop quartet (“Face to Face”), distant-sounding piped-in vocals set to strings (“Pluto Projector”) or a disco beat (“It Gets Better”). The lyrics to “Never Had the Balls” feel extra crude because the setting is so immature; the treacly piano love song “Every Way” would be more believable from Mr. Rogers.
None of this straining supports an interesting idea. “Four years later/Look where we really are/Look how far we’ve come,” Rex sings on “It Gets Better,” over tinny, melodramatic electric strings. He’s not talking about graduating, or growing up in general—he’s talking about a girl who’s transformed his world in ways apparently not worth itemizing. You won’t find a wedding ring in a pizza box here. The album’s most salient detail is when Rex recalls a particular house where he once vomited.
Pony’s best line comes at the opening of “Pluto Projector,” a slow, Frank Ocean-esque ballad. “The great protector/Is that what I’m supposed to be?” Rex asks. “What if all this counts for nothin’/Everything I thought I’d be?/What if by the time I realize/It’s too far behind to see?” Toward the end, the song takes a weird turn: a pitched-down vocal coda that makes Rex sound like he’s drop-shipping counterfeit “Nikes.”
But Rex Orange County isn’t Frank Ocean; he stacks vast emotional weight on predictable, inoffensive songs until they buckle like wire shelving. Pony is simplistic, clueless, subtlety-free. “Didn’t understand until the age of 18/Even then I was blind,” he sings on “It Gets Better.” Over and over again, Rex sounds like he hasn’t begun to realize how much he doesn’t know. | 2019-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony | October 25, 2019 | 5 | 6aad44aa-1ffe-4131-b130-78356660b09b | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
The second solo album from ex-Moloko frontwoman Roísín Murphy is a superb collection of 21st century disco that will sadly, inexplicably struggle in the pop marketplace. | The second solo album from ex-Moloko frontwoman Roísín Murphy is a superb collection of 21st century disco that will sadly, inexplicably struggle in the pop marketplace. | Róisín Murphy: Overpowered | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10794-overpowered/ | Overpowered | Roísín Murphy casts a wide net: Avant-pop aesthetes fell for Moloko's screwball trip-hop; Ibizan disco bunnies made "Sing It Back" a pop anthem; nightcrawlers found a postergirl in the booze-hound sleeve of Statues; style-mag fantasists never tire of her covers. Even Sky Sports succumbed, making "The Time Is Now" the unofficial anthem of 21st century soccer.
So why isn't she a huge star? It's a question that has likely been taxing the minds of EMI, who, to their credit, have taken a punt on Murphy after her 2005 solo debut tanked. Recorded with tech-jazz savant Matthew Herbert, Ruby Blue was a brilliantly inventive collection of cut-up pop that confounded her label and failed to find an audience. According to her new bosses, Murphy has got all that self-indulgence out of her system, and is now stepping up to the plate to make a "career record." She has the potential, they claim, to be a kind of beloved entertainer on the level of another investment of theirs, Robbie Williams.
In truth, Murphy is closer in spirit to the late Associates singer Billy Mackenzie, another maverick celtic diva torn between the arthouse, the punk club, and the disco. Mackenzie could never quite knuckle down to the career frequently promised him; one suspects Murphy won't fare any better. Her position is perfectly illustrated in Scott King's artwork for the album and singles, setting Murphy on the streets of east London, having evidently just beamed down from the planet Gaultier-- a pop peacock out of place and time in the mundane Kate Nash-ville of British pop 2007.
The record itself finds Murphy on her best behaviour, however-- wearing its natural wildness and eccentricity lightly, Overpowered is focused solely on the dancefloor. Her collaborators, from Bugz in the Attic and Groove Armada, have constructed a gleaming shrine to the spirit of Bobby O and Giorgio Moroder: The lead single and title track borrows a primordial bassline squelch from the dawn of cosmic disco-- La Bionda's "I Wanna Be Your Lover"-- and the follow-up, "Let Me Know", shamelessly plunders the chorus of Tracy Weber's 1981 classic "Sure Shot".
Murphy is the singer that the mid-00s British nu-pop of Richard X and Xenomania has so dearly missed: A dramatic yet unshowy singer, versatile enough to take in the regal hauteur of "Primitive", the cerebral chill of "Dear Miami", the randy glee of "Footprints", the chutzpah and grace of "You Know Me Better". She's funny, clever, heartbreaking, and strident, the kind of disco singer Dusty Springfield never quite had the abandon to become. At times, however, she's almost too willing to play it straight. "Movie Star" laces itself a little too tighly into Alison Goldfrapp's glam pop corset, while "Cry Baby" is stuffed to the gills with syndrums and cowhorns to the exclusion of much else. And the dubby song for her dad, "Scarlet Ribbons", is sweet but feels a little out of place. But these are quibbles. In a year of low-stakes disappointment for European pop, Overpowered is a triumph. | 2007-10-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-10-18T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | EMI | October 18, 2007 | 8 | 6aad5586-1af3-4ed0-91b8-1e20810eeb6a | Pitchfork | null |
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Nelly’s 2000 debut brought the life and sound of St. Louis to the world. It’s a syntactical maze of local culture that doubled as a flier for the greatest party you could ever imagine. | Nelly’s 2000 debut brought the life and sound of St. Louis to the world. It’s a syntactical maze of local culture that doubled as a flier for the greatest party you could ever imagine. | Nelly: Country Grammar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nelly-country-grammar/ | Country Grammar | It was April 1999, and Nelly was driving his close friend City Spud to a St. Louis police station. The pair were so inseparable and looked so much alike that they were often mistaken for brothers. They liked that, though Nelly and City would eventually dispell the notion. When Nelly dropped City at the precinct, it was the last time they would see each other before their lives split off into wildly different trajectories.
Days earlier, City, born Lavell Webb, was party to a botched robbery. He’d just quit his job at a North County McDonald’s and was relying on small-to medium-time weed deals to keep the lights on. On April 15, he was supposed to meet a potential customer for a $1,500 transaction. Customer gets off work, calls the pager, money and product change hands. Simple. The problem? Webb doesn’t have a car. The only person he found to drive him had proposed a new plan: instead of the arranged handoff, they’d rob the buyer, netting a grand for the driver and $500 for Webb, who could simply stay in the car.
Webb reluctantly agreed and waited in a parking lot near the mark’s home while the driver, masked and armed, headed out on foot. Minutes ticked by. Then: gunshots. Webb turned his head and saw his accomplice running back to the car; when he slumped into the driver’s seat, he was holding only $30. “Man, I had to pop him,” he said.
Police found the victim wounded but alive. He told the cops that his assailant knew about the $1,500 in his pocket, information that could have come from only one source: Lavell Webb.
Word trickled out that the cops were looking for him. Webb’s grandmother and her husband, who had been visited by detectives, urged him to have someone take him down to talk to the police. The husband told the Riverfront Times in 2001 that he feared what would happen if Webb laid low: “These trigger-happy cops—a young black man fleeing—were going to kill him.”
Barely more than a year after the robbery gone wrong, Webb would have four production credits and a show-stealing guest verse on Country Grammar, one of the best-selling rap albums of all time. But his royalties would only be topping off commissary accounts. Despite turning himself in, aiding with the investigation, and even helping to search for the gunman, Webb was arrested and charged. He eventually plead guilty to first-degree robbery and one count of armed criminal action, and was sentenced to ten years on the former, three years on latter, to be served concurrently. (Missouri’s mandatory minimum sentencing laws required that he serve 85 percent of his time before the possibility of parole.) Without his confession, the only evidence police had was circumstantial.
Just after City was locked up, Nelly would become a global superstar in commercial tugs-of-war with N’SYNC and Britney Spears. He and City’s work with the St. Lunatics—a tight-knit group of friends they met in high school and on youth sports teams—would define rap in St. Louis for years to come and net them millions upon millions of dollars. Kids across the country learned to wrap their tongues around “It’s all good—Range Rover, all wood” all while the man who rapped that sat in a jail cell because he didn’t actually have a car. Two friends diverged because the criminal justice system, and life itself, can be cruel and arbitrary. But Country Grammar was different: Country Grammar was a statement of purpose that gave order to the corner of the world Nelly and his friends inhabited, a syntactical maze of local culture that doubled as a flier for the greatest party you could ever imagine.
It almost never happened. Born in the fall of 1974 in Austin as the son of an Air Force man and a mother who worked mostly in fast-food restaurants, Nelly bounced from city to city. His parents divorced before he was ten years old; he was kicked out of a handful of schools, often for fighting other students. “There was a point in time when my mother couldn’t afford to keep me, and my father couldn’t afford to keep me, so I lived with friends, grandparents,” he told Rolling Stone in 2000. “When you a kid, that type of shit affects you. You don’t see that it’s not because they can’t afford you, you just feel that they don’t want you.”
He eventually settled with his mother in University City, a suburb on St. Louis’s West side. Nelly was an exceptional athlete, a shortstop who wore #1 and did backflips like Ozzie Smith, who was good enough to be invited to prospect camps for the Atlanta Braves, Pittsburgh Pirates, Milwaukee Brewers, and even the Cardinals. He also played wide receiver and led his high school team—the same high school that Tennessee Williams went to—in catches. But his time was divided between sports and another kind of extracurricular: “Nelly was going to either be a number-one rapper or a number-one drug dealer,” Murphy Lee, a friend and member of the St. Lunatics, told Rolling Stone. “One or the other.”
And so the legal perils, grave and petty, that plagued so many kids in University City were a constant threat. On “Greed, Hate, Envy,” one of the first songs on Country Grammar, Nelly says he “opened up shop at 13”— dimes, dubs, quarter-sacks, and o-zs. Later on the song, he dedicates a whole verse to an imagined traffic stop, where he taunts the officer, brandishes a squeaky-clean glove box, then laments as he drives off: “You could tell he was pissed ‘cause the black man in the black Range/Doing black things with his black change/Doing the right thing—driving his ass insane.” (”Greed, Hate, Envy” was produced by City Spud.) On the album’s emotional closer, “Luven Me,” Nelly credits his mom for echoing City’s grandparents. Quoting her: “Ain’t nothing I can do when them laws get they hands on you.”
By 1993, Nelly had teamed up with City Spud, Ali, Kyjuan, and Kyjuan’s little brother, Murphy Lee, to form the St. Lunatics. Save for Murphy, the ‘Tics were finishing up or already graduated from high school. (When Country Grammar came out in 2000, Nelly was 25, but shaved four years off his age for the press, a discrepancy that was quietly corrected later in his career.) A sixth member, the perpetually masked Slo’ Down, was subsequently added to and then dropped from the group, though he was functionally a hype man and had little creative input. The group had some early success in 1996, scoring a serious local hit “Gimme What U Got” that sampled Le Pamplemousse and Tom Tom Club and buried vocals from “La Di Da Di” deep in the mix. In the video, the ‘Tics stood in a line and danced; they quoted Rakim; they skipped through comically calm barbershops. It was fun, it was summery.
On record, Ali was the group’s de facto leader: gruffer and more guttural than the other members, clearer and more commanding. That’s him in the Brett Favre jersey, heading straight to the bar for Henny and Coke. But the last verse belongs to Nelly. There’s a rambunctious verve to his delivery—maybe a little too freewheeling for the track—and a magnetism that cuts through even the goofiest camera work.
Despite the considerable buzz that the single generated around St. Louis, labels wouldn’t bite. “We were shopping the Lunatics at the time,” Nelly told Complex in 2015. “And nobody was tripping off our sound or giving us a shot.” Eventually, the group settled on a strategy: pitch one artist as a solo act to get a foot in the door and come back for the rest as soon as possible.
A CD made its way to one of Mase’s managers, and Nelly flew to New Jersey to flesh out a demo. He landed on four songs: “E.I.,” “Ride wit Me,” “Batter Up,” and “Hot Shit,” which would later be retitled “Country Grammar.” When he finally secured a contract, it was with a young A&R at Universal named Kevin Law, who had never before signed a new artist. (The Lunatics also landed a group deal, but it was contingent on Nelly’s record hitting certain sales thresholds.)
Universal agreed that Nelly was a better bet on his own, but his record was still far from a priority. The ten songs not included on the demo tape were finished in New York in “three weeks in a little shithole studio and a little-bitty-ass budget,” as Nelly characterized the situation to Rolling Stone. The album was slated for a summer 2000 release.
At first, the label was reticent to go with “Country Grammar” as the lead single, despite its popularity in St. Louis. They set aside $150,000 for the video—a sizable budget by today’s standards, but practically a vote of no-confidence at the turn of the century. Law came up with the now-famous radio edit (the percussive boom-boom in place of “street-sweeper” in the chorus) and sent it out to DJs before Nelly had even heard it.
With the benefit of hindsight, the song and its video seem like Nelly distilled. It opens with him tapping on the camera to get your attention: there’s Nelly, shirtless under a blue sky and the Gateway Arch, a red Cardinals cap laid backwards over a white durag, chain dangling. More accurately, it was a codification of the most interesting elements in the early St. Lunatics work, a fledgling style isolated and carried to its radical end. The bounce and swing that had served as undercurrents on “Gimme What U Got” became “Country Grammar”’s driving force; the chaos of Nelly’s early raps was quieted, the energy channeled into a sing-song delivery that made drive-by shootings sound whimsical.
It’s difficult to think of a music video that puts on more aggressively for its city. The block party scenes were shot a block away from Nelly’s Labadie Avenue home; there are Cardinals jerseys, Blues practice sweaters, Orlando Pace Rams jerseys worn backwards in the thick of the Greatest Show On Turf era. “Country Grammar” was so irresistible that Michael Jackson called Nelly personally to express his love for the song, then gave the Lunatics tickets to his show, where they were seated beside a pre-“Apprentice” Donald Trump. Trump, like Michael, was a fan, and particularly appreciated the shout-out Nelly gave him in the song’s third verse. (Both Jackson and Trump caught barbs elsewhere on Country Grammar: on “Tho Dem Wrappas,” Nelly says he’ll have “SoundScan like Thriller without changing my face,” and on “E.I.,” he raps about booking “a room at Trump Towers just to hit for three hours.”)
Country Grammar often feels like a Trojan Horse for the St. Lunatics. “Steal the Show,” “Batter Up,” “Wrap Sumden,” and “Thicky Thick Girl” feature members in various combinations. The diction—as Cedric The Entertainer, who invited the ‘Tics to perform at his shows when they were starting out, puts it on the album’s intro, “Puttin’ them two capital Rs in everything”—gives it a thoroughly regional air. The syntax has the same effect: girls are thicky thick girls, everybody’s “Mo.” At points, the album finds crevices in St. Louis’s underbelly or in Nelly’s psyche, but its natural habitat is a weekend afternoon, when friends lazily assemble, roll up, make liquor store runs, and try to conjure the perfect plan for later. It’s right there in “E.I.”’s operative question: “What’s poppin’ tonight?”
Nelly brings the parties to life with a charming specificity. In the verse from “E.I.” that ends in a Trump Towers suite, Nelly makes a shower and outfit change sound like a carefully executed heist. And the house party on “Steal the Show” spills out where it doesn’t belong: “Neighbors on the lawn, like, ‘Nelly, why right here?’” (”Here,” of course, is “hurr.”) The production, handled principally by Jay E and City Spud, often sounds like it could have been lifted from Hot Boys sessions, but benefits from bits of country flair and from the Midwest swing that Nelly brings to the mix.
St. Louis is rendered mostly in glimpses and fragments: the corner of Natural Bridge Avenue and Kingshighway Boulevard is pinpointed without elaboration, and the Plaza Frontenac, an upscale mall, is made to sound like the Taj Mahal. We hear about basketball hoops fashioned from milk crates and illicit monopolies in North County. There’s little hand-holding for outsiders, but plenty of hints at the gloss or horror that’s lurking six blocks in any direction.
The singles aside, Country Grammar’s two most thoughtfully written songs are also its best. “Utha Side” is like a reimagination of Masta Ace and Marley Marl’s “The Other Side of Town” for the dot-com boom, with crack swapped out for speed of all varieties. The song ends with a verse that manages to sound poised, even cool, while urging kids to stay in school—which makes Nelly’s eventual beef with a pious KRS-One all the more amusing. And “Luven Me” is endlessly touching: Nelly remembers his mother scraping together money to buy him name-brand clothing, only for him to turn around and sell dope on her front lawn and wreck two of her cars.
Cars are Country Grammar’s prevailing motif. Navigator, black sedan DeVille, red Expedition, a hooptie with insurance, the Mercedes, Cutlasses on the riverfront, the Range Rover the cops pull over. So maybe it’s unsurprising that the album’s highest-charting single is about driving. “Ride Wit Me” was issued to radio in April 2001—ten months after Country Grammar came out, and exactly two years after City Spud was arrested and charged. It’s an absurdly catchy song, full of slick guitar and feigned frustration and cash-couched call-and-response. It’s propulsive. Nelly talks with sheer, unmitigated joy about washing his hands of cocaine or about putting cars in his own name now, without his mom’s co-signature; he raps, “Damn, shit done changed now/Running credit checks with no shame now.” City’s verse is unveiled after a huge, climactic crescendo, as if he were an A-list guest, not a kid from the Midwest who got caught up because he caught a ride with the wrong person.
By the time Nelly’s second album came out, in 2002, he was wearing a band-aid on his cheek as a tribute to City; the St. Lunatics album, which Universal did release after all, was named Free City. City was finally freed in 2008. There was certainly plenty of money to go around—Country Grammar would eventually be certified Diamond—but any realistic hope of breaking City as a mainstream star had passed. Nelly’s album from 2008, Brass Knuckles, debuted at No. 3, but was buoyed by bankable guest stars like Usher, Rick Ross, T.I., Nate Dogg, LL Cool J, and Snoop Dogg. (That list is from the first four songs.) What’s more, the instantly identifiable St. Louis sound that the Lunatics forged had been largely abandoned in favor of neo-G-Funk and aping T-Pain.
So the moment was gone, and with it the industry’s brief fascination with St. Louis (see: Chingy, J-Kwon). A singular, irrepressibly fun record that serves, at least in part, to honor friends and makeshift family became a sensation while one of those family members was locked away. And when they were reunited, Nelly no longer had the muscle or magic to turn every camera in the country to him, to St. Louis. His creative peak, though, was captured at exactly the right time. No matter how the sands shift around him, Nelly’s still there on the album cover, staring down, head cocked to the side, the Arch looping back behind him. | 2017-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Universal | September 3, 2017 | 8.1 | 6aadcb1e-760c-41c6-9d0b-56d4099041e0 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
Recorded outdoors during the pandemic with bassist Anna Butterss and guitarist Jeff Parker, the Chicago percussionist’s sunny, vibey jazz record brings back a distinct era of rediscovery and anti-nostalgia. | Recorded outdoors during the pandemic with bassist Anna Butterss and guitarist Jeff Parker, the Chicago percussionist’s sunny, vibey jazz record brings back a distinct era of rediscovery and anti-nostalgia. | Daniel Villarreal: Lados B | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-villareal-lados-b/ | Lados B | If it sounds like Daniel Villarreal is rediscovering his drum set in real time in the opening moments of Lados B, that’s because—in a way—he is. He creates a groove one thwack at a time, poking gingerly at his cowbells and woodblocks as if to make sure they still work, building a curtain of percussion for nearly a minute on “Traveling With” before bassist Anna Butterss and guitarist Jeff Parker come in. The sessions of “high-level spontaneous music” documented on Lados B were recorded in October 2020 and represent the first time any of the three participants collaborated with another living musician after the beginning of the COVID pandemic––an arrangement possible thanks to International Anthem founder Scottie McNiece, who allowed the three to record in his backyard in L.A. There are no bird chirps or distant lawnmowers to let you know they’re recording outside, but there’s a lot of sunshine on this low-slung funk record—and a bit of bittersweet anti-nostalgia for the generator shows, street-corner open mics, and outdoor jams that defined the first stirrings of live music on the other side of lockdown.
Some of these recordings ended up on Panamá 77, Villarreal’s debut from last year, but Lados B zooms into the raw material recorded during their two-day jaunt in McNiece’s garden. Panamá was fierce and fiery, with Villarreal seemingly hell-bent on meeting the high stakes hanging over any debut album. Lados B is looser, and the tempo rarely exceeds a mid-tempo lope; on “Things Can Be Calm,” he ditches his kit entirely to play kalimba through a ghostly patina of metallic echo. Rather than a clattering virtuoso attacking his drums, it’s easier to imagine Villarreal as a sturdy and sedentary presence—the bole of a mighty tree, with his arms as the branches and the continuous wall of percussion as the rustling of the leaves. Butterss’ basslines are spare and precise, resting atop Villarreal’s beds of percussion. Parker borrows some tricks from his great 2021 album Forfolks, including using a looping pedal to elongate single notes and create lustrous ambient drones that free him from the obligation of playing chords.
The overall vibe is less reminiscent of Panamá 77 than Butterss and Parker’s last collaboration: the sumptuous live album Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, which is a thousand times more fun and front-porch-friendly than an improvised double album named for a David Foster Wallace reference has any right to be. That album folded hip-hop beats and ambient textures into its stately tribute to cool West Coast jazz, and so does Lados B, which has fewer tracks than Panamá but is slightly longer despite advertising itself as an album of B-sides (the literal translation of its title). The band nicknamed the garden in which they recorded “Chicali Outpost,” a reference to its California locale and to Parker and Villarreal’s roots in the fertile Chicago jazz scene International Anthem has been documenting for almost a decade. On top of sounding like the kind of place Hemingway might’ve sipped cool rum cocktails and pecked out a novella, it’s a name true to the record’s spirit: the restlessness and open-mindedness of the Chicago scene, pitched at the woozy tempo of G-funk and Palm Desert stoner rock.
International Anthem likes to follow up its tentpole releases with albums that serve as prequels, hyperlinks, or featurettes. A few months ago, UK saxophonist/poet Alabaster DePlume followed up his spoken-word epic Gold with an album called Come With Fierce Grace that documented the sessions from which the record emerged. Lados B serves a similar function to Fierce Grace and likewise inhabits a completely different sound and mood than its predecessor. The jams on Lados B sound slightly tentative at times; Parker never quite figures out what to do on opener “Traveling With,” and nearly all the songs begin with one musician introducing an idea and the others following, betraying the songs’ roots as essentially warm-ups. But it’s a testament to the trio’s formidable skills that Lados B hangs together despite the circumstances of its creation. On top of its bona-fides as a warm-weather album, Lados B provides the pleasure of hearing three top-tier players rediscover the joys of playing with each other in real time. | 2023-11-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | International Anthem | November 13, 2023 | 7.4 | 6abf267d-3078-42f6-9cf4-ae42515c6119 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Bob Mould is at his best when he’s articulating anger at a high volume. His newest solo album, Patch the Sky, succeeds largely because these furious songs sound as if they're hardwired to raw nerves. | Bob Mould is at his best when he’s articulating anger at a high volume. His newest solo album, Patch the Sky, succeeds largely because these furious songs sound as if they're hardwired to raw nerves. | Bob Mould: Patch the Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21776-patch-the-sky/ | Patch the Sky | If ever there was a case to be made for the late career hot streak, Bob Mould is making it. After spending much of the 2000s lost in a fog of self-examination that didn’t always make for compelling music, Mould roared back in 2012 with Silver Age, a record on which he once again embraced the loud guitars of his storied Hüsker Dü youth. He also appeared to stop fighting against one of his greatest talents: the ability to write perfect pop-punk songs that feel and sound like getting punched in the face (in the best possible way). 2014’s Beauty & Ruin mined similar sonic territory, furthering the rip and roar of Silver Age without necessarily bettering it.
On Patch the Sky Mould seems to be at peace, if not with the world at large, at least in regards to the way he can best address it. He may always be one of rock and roll’s great contrarians—angry, angsty, and loud—but after nearly 35 years of making records, he no longer seems determined to be kicking against his own strengths. In fact, he's finally embracing them. “I’m a really good rhythm guitar player, a fair vocalist, and a pretty simple songwriter,” Mould recently told the New York Times. “Now that I’ve come to accept that, it’s much easier to work with.” To that end, Patch the Sky has a remarkable sense of clarity—playing like a record that is less concerned with reinventing the wheel as opposed to simply refining it.
“Can I find some truth within the noise?” Mould asks on opening track “Voices in My Head.” It’s a question that the rest of Patch the Sky answers with a resounding yes. The best tracks on the record are the most furiously full-throttled, many of which threaten to drown out Mould’s voice entirely. “The End of Things” lets fly with one of the best riffs Mould has written in a decade, bashed out with the kind of stupid raw enthusiasm that brings to mind the best of his Sugar output back in the ’90s. Similarly, tracks like “Daddy’s Favorite,” “Pray For Rain,” and “Hands Are tied” (a punked out rave up that revs up and explodes in under two minutes) all provide the gleeful no-nonsense squall of the world’s most amped garage band.
Joined by drummer Jon Wurster and bassist Jason Narducy, Mould seems to be having a genuinely good time here, even when the subject matter veers directly (and somewhat predictably, for Mould) into apocalyptic territory (“Lucifer and God”) or tries to unpack frazzled relationships (“You Say You”). Mould still sounds best when he’s articulating anger at a high volume, and Patch the Sky succeeds largely because these songs sound as if they were hardwired to raw nerves. It’s only when the songs slow down slightly (“Hold On," “Black Confetti”) that they start to feel like a generic slog.
While he might never be able to duplicate the desperate urgency of his iconic punk rock past, Mould more than makes up with it in terms of sheer intensity. At 55, Mould has managed to do a bit of everything, his career having come full circle several times over. His voice—an odd, atonal yelp—still sounds the most absolutely right when paired with overdriven guitars. “I keep searching, hoping, waiting for the sun that always shines so bright on everyone,” he sings on album closer “Monument” providing a little light amid the dissonance. The songs here aren't necessarily breaking new ground stylistically, but that really isn't what matters. At this point, Mould clearly has nothing left to prove. | 2016-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | April 5, 2016 | 7 | 6abf964f-f348-4da5-afe6-68533e810505 | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
On her first album in five years, the goth-rock guitar virtuoso abandons her typically detached perspective to ruminate on gender, sexuality, and identity with newfound urgency. | On her first album in five years, the goth-rock guitar virtuoso abandons her typically detached perspective to ruminate on gender, sexuality, and identity with newfound urgency. | Anna Calvi: Hunter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anna-calvi-hunter/ | Hunter | In the seven years since she released her self-titled debut album, British singer-songwriter Anna Calvi has reached a rarefied level of critical acclaim. Her haunting, operatic voice and complex guitar playing, rough and gentle at once, have made her the darling of the UK press. Calvi’s songs get heavy rotation on BBC Radio 6, and she has two Mercury Prize nominations to her name. But virtuosity doesn’t always yield inspiration. While 2013’s One Breath and the 2014 EP Strange Weather continued to showcase her considerable talent for lovelorn, gothic rock, they also felt a bit too familiar, as though Calvi had reached the peak of her impressive abilities too soon.
So it feels like there is a lot riding on Hunter, Calvi’s third full-length album and her first in five years. Musically, it’s on par with much of her earlier work, from the sparsity of the guitars to the way her lush, cavernous contralto swells between the searing riffs. But while she used to have the distant air of a demigoddess singing about how us mortals experience love, her perspective on Hunter feels looser, wilder, more intimate. Opener “As a Man” slinks along with finger-snaps and muted guitar licks, as Calvi whispers, “If I was a man in all but my body/Oh would I now understand you completely.” It’s ear-catching and eye-opening, this previously unseen aspect of a persona usually shrouded in theatrical pomp and romance.
“I believe that gender is a spectrum,” Calvi wrote on Instagram recently, in the same post where she announced Hunter. “I believe that if we were allowed to be somewhere in the middle, not pushed to the extremes of performed masculinity and femininity, we would all be more free.” That message—and more of Calvi’s ruminations on gender, sexuality, and identity—burst forth in every song on the album, giving her tried-and-true musical prowess a renewed sense of purpose. Her lyrics have often dealt with mysterious women, beginning with her debut single “Jezebel” and “Suzanne and I,” a sweeping track from her first album. On One Breath, she sang of “Eliza,” a woman who bewitched Calvi with her charm. But the sexuality on Hunter feels more frenzied, more carnal. The album’s cover art adds a visual element to this aesthetic: Head thrown back, slicked with sweat, Calvi looks dazed but powerful.
Hunter’s lead single, “Don’t Beat the Girl Out of My Boy,” is the perfect encapsulation of Calvi’s new songwriting focus. In her sustained notes and androgynous vibrato, she channels the patron saint of rock‘n’roll gender benders, David Bowie. The song has a sexy swagger, its beat heavy and swaying, until the bridge, when she lets out a long, fierce primal wail, the culmination of her pent-up patriarchal angst. For an artist so controlled, it’s a thrilling moment of abandon, and you wonder if this reckless version of Calvi has always existed under the placid surface.
Calvi’s sound is recognizable enough here to please her loyal listeners: “Hunter” uses her trademark blossoming chord progressions to craft an epic ballad; her fingerwork makes a genuine lullaby of the dreamlike “Swimming Pool.” But her remarkable evolution on Hunter pushes her artistry to another level. To say that Anna Calvi has found her voice with her third album would be reductive; both literally and figuratively, her voice has always been crystal clear. Yet she’s certainly found a new way of speaking, one that uses her musical mastery to communicate something truly urgent. | 2018-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | September 4, 2018 | 7.8 | 6ac0a139-93c5-4f90-8788-9b6127d29492 | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
The deluxe reissue of the heartland songwriter’s 1985 album reinforces its stature as the platonic ideal of a traditional American rock’n’roll record: It is direct, unfussy, and unpretentious. | The deluxe reissue of the heartland songwriter’s 1985 album reinforces its stature as the platonic ideal of a traditional American rock’n’roll record: It is direct, unfussy, and unpretentious. | John Mellencamp: Scarecrow (Deluxe Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-mellencamp-scarecrow-deluxe-edition/ | John Mellencamp: Scarecrow (Deluxe) | Scarecrow captures the moment when John Cougar Mellencamp, the rocker who once declared “Nothin’ Matters and What If It Did,” came to the conclusion, “You’ve Gotta Stand for Somethin’.” Mellencamp decided his somethin’ was the people who lived, loved, and lost in the small towns scattered across the United States, the Americans suffering from the suffocating consequences of the Reagan Revolution creeping across the country in the mid-1980s.
Smalltown America is a milieu that treated John Mellencamp well in the past, providing the backdrop for both the rousing “Jack & Diane” and the biting “Pink Houses,” a pair of hits whose popularity helped obscure the grim cynicism lingering at their core. A fatalist by nature, Mellencamp chose to battle his instincts when composing the songs for 1985’s Scarecrow, tempering his Midwestern gloom with notes of inspiration and solidarity. Take “Lonely Ol’ Night,” a cathartic rocker that served as the album’s first single: After singing it’s “a sad, sad, sad, sad feelin’ when you’re livin’ on those in-betweens,” he offers an offhand reassurance “but it’s OK,” deflating pitch black loneliness lurking in the song’s verses. Similarly, after offering a litany of anxieties on “Rumbleseat,” he ends the song on a note of self-help triumphalism that seems at odds with the roiling paranoia delivered in the previous stanzas.
All this is a deliberate choice, part of Mellencamp positioning himself as an advocate for the everyday American on Scarecrow. He was fighting for their hopes and dreams, mourning the disappearing downtown drags, and preserving the memories of the good times. There are storm clouds gathering on the horizon, peeking through on the deceptively bouncy “The Face of the Nation” and swirling on the ominous opener “Rain on the Scarecrow,” a vivid portrait of the wreckage left behind when all the farms in a town shut down. Mellencamp took this issue to heart, organizing the Farm Aid charity with Willie Nelson and Neil Young just after completing Scarecrow. The near-simultaneous release of the album and the staging of the concert created an illusion that Scarecrow had a political bent, which isn’t quite true. Save the pointed “Rain on the Scarecrow,” Mellencamp avoids antagonistic politics—despite its stirring title, “You’ve Got to Stand for Somethin’” is a stroll down Boomer memory lane that functions as a proto-“We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Throughout the album, he traffics in stories and nostalgia, painting a picture of a middle America so romantic that it could’ve served as the soundtrack for a Reagan campaign advertisement if it wasn’t for the pugnacious presentation of these songs.
Mellencamp married his vignettes of middle America with the music he associated with the heartland: the hit singles pumping on the AM airwaves throughout the 1960s. As much as he treated Bob Dylan as his spiritual guide, Mellencamp didn’t rely on earnest folk-rock for Scarecrow, nor did he indulge in baroque pop or trippy journeys to the center of your mind. He concentrated on the ravers that served as a soundtrack at frat parties, shindigs, and clambakes, the kind of hits he celebrates on “R.O.C.K. in the U.S.A. (A Salute to 60s Rock).” Mellencamp even put his longtime backing band in a boot camp of sorts, marching them through a hundred oldies prior to cutting a note of his new songs. Some of those cover versions show up on the 2022 deluxe edition of Scarecrow. Mellencamp croons sweetly on an acoustic revision of the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk” and his band approximates a good JB’s groove on their take on James Brown’s “Cold Sweat,” two tracks among the 11 pleasant, enjoyable tunes on the reissue’s bonus CD. More importantly, that woodshedding is felt within the marrow of Scarecrow. Larry Crane and Mike Wanchic intertwine to make one massive guitar roar while drummer Kenny Aronoff plays like a Charlie Watts with no patience for jazz. It’s impassioned, defiant rock’n’roll that serves as a retort to stylish, synthesized glamor being peddled by MTV in the mid-1980s.
Mellencamp was hardly the only rocker to recoil from the glossier sounds of the 1980s. College rock radio overflowed with cowpunks and Paisley Underground revivalists, not to mention the Byrdsian jangle of R.E.M. and their legion of disciples. The connection did not go unnoticed on the part of those seminal college rockers. R.E.M. would hire producer Don Gehman in the wake of his work on Scarecrow, recording their 1986 album Lifes Rich Pageant in Mellencamp’s studio. Peter Buck explained at the time, “I just like the sound of his records… the drum sound and the way the guitars intermesh. It’s a real good rock’n’roll sound without being overly slick.”
Buck’s simple assessment of Scarecrow is key to its endurance: The thing just leaps out of the speakers. The cool, natural efficiency of Mellencamp’s band combined with Gehman’s clean, muscular production adds up to a platonic ideal of a rock’n’roll record: It’s direct, unfussy, and unpretentious, barreling forward on the strength of a mammoth backbeat. Such simple pleasures are the core virtue of Scarecrow. Mellencamp’s growing social consciousness places him at the precipice of enlightenment yet he still can’t resist all of his instincts to create a joyful noise. | 2022-11-14T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mercury / UMe | November 14, 2022 | 8.1 | 6ac93612-eb31-4149-8212-5e8eb3867bb0 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Remastered for its 10th anniversary, the debut album from the cult Boston DIY trio is the sound of racing thoughts spiraling into numbness—and the restorative power of connection. | Remastered for its 10th anniversary, the debut album from the cult Boston DIY trio is the sound of racing thoughts spiraling into numbness—and the restorative power of connection. | Krill: Alam No Hris (10th Anniversary Reissue) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/krill-alam-no-hris-10th-anniversary-reissue/ | Alam No Hris (10th Anniversary Reissue) | When then-defunct Boston rock trio Krill formed the new band Knot in 2020, singer-bassist Jonah Furman was afforded the space to reflect on what differentiated the two projects. In doing so, he set the record straight on his beloved band after years of misinterpretation as weird, cheese-addled slacker rock. “When I was 20, I thought that making art was an important part of making a better world,” he said. “[Krill] was very much about ethics and morality. One’s moral responsibilities to oneself and to other people, and trying to be in conversation with other ethical art or moral art.” It’s a serious theme for an often playful band: Krill wrote songs about poop and squirrels and peanut butter. But if two rocks with googly eyes made you cry in a movie theater, then hearing a twig have a philosophical conversation with a blade of grass probably will, too.
Krill songs were so emotionally invested and logically overwrought that they became detached, a songwriting style introduced on Alam No Hris, their 2012 debut. Recorded in the band’s Somerville basement over two years and newly remastered by Julian Fader to celebrate its 10th anniversary, Alam No Hris is the sound of a muggy house show spilling over capacity. It’s scuzzy grunge pop tracked live and sprinkled with mistakes (a guitar unplugs during the bridge of “I Am the Cherry,” the metal riff on “Slug” occasionally lags) that capture the thrill of watching Krill in person. There’s personality in the way each member of the original lineup performs here: Furman uses a pitch-shift pedal passed down from his college video art professor to give his bass a rubbery, wobbling effect, like slime being stretched; guitarist Aaron Ratoff strums with a wiry, discordant tone, whether he’s playing chords or picking out melodies; Luke Pyenson drums hard enough to make heads bob, but works in deft fills that lighten the overall sound.
If Krill was a way to knead out ethical quandaries, then Alam No Hris marks the band’s loosest, most ecstatic approach to the subject. Later albums Lucky Leaves and A Distant Fist Unclenching contemplated what we owe to our community, to those we love, and to ourselves; Alam No Hris peers through the ingenuous lens of young adulthood to understand how to be a decent human in the first place. This often takes the form of actions: shaking off problems (“Wet Dog”), admitting first-love butterflies (“Piranha Girl”), and returning acts of tenderness (“Kissipaw”). Furman’s strongest lyrical moments come when he wades into his own mind in a private push for self-improvement. On “Coolant,” he runs in circles trying to determine who, if anyone, he’s beholden to: his parents, his own choices, God, the sun? During “Self-Hate Will Be the Death of Youth Culture,” he laments how misanthropy feeds into conceit, repeating the titular phrase as equal parts declaration and warning. As if he’s nervous and three beers deep at karaoke, Furman’s voice is routinely off-key and anxious, wavering between a mumble and a shout—a performance style he heard legitimized in Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Two-Headed Boy.” The combined effect makes it seem like he’s only just remembering the words at the moment they’re sung. In his hands, what should sound grating or unprofessional becomes urgent and sincere.
These are the meaningful trivialities that helped Krill amass a cult following before their dissolution in 2015. Arguably no song from Alam No Hris drove home that intricate simplicity as succinctly as “Solitaire.” Reflecting on the end of a relationship, Furman narrates his loneliness and all the shapes it takes: playing games alone, romanticizing past conversations, cringing so hard at himself that he falls in love all over again. Even writing “Solitaire” is “just a distraction,” he admits, criticizing himself as a “weakness, doofus, champion of nothing, just colossal time-waster.” Likening his soul to an apple core (a recurring motif in Krill’s music), Furman finally unearths a vulnerable reprieve and sinks the hook: “Put on some Arthur Russell, see how fast I change/It’s embarrassing.” Ratoff and Pyenson crash into the frame with synchronized downbeats, delivering a breakdown that emphasizes the intensity of Furman’s revelation. It’s an ode to burrowing so deep inside your own depression that you start to feel okay again—the song where Krill fans find the same relief that Furman does in the music of Arthur Russell.
Perhaps most impressively, Alam No Hris presents Krill as a band committed to everyday philosophy and ethics without navel-gazing. With no producer or high-tech recording equipment, it’s raw and loud, the sound of racing thoughts spiraling into numbness only to dip back into the moments—dropping the needle on a favorite album, finding a strand of your partner’s hair, letting a dog lick your palm—that make you feel like you’re actually living again. Furman once described songwriting as “kind of like we’re playing a board game, and you just keep playing, but it’s not even clear what you’re trying to win.” Alam No Hris may not offer tidy endings, but the process of searching earnestly, without preaching or pedantry, is its own much-needed answer. | 2022-08-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-12T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sipsman / Sren | August 12, 2022 | 7.5 | 6acaeaf5-ee40-4f62-824c-d1d1506ac71d | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The third 100-song vault-clearing contains unheard demos from Guided by Voices' classic mid-90s era. | The third 100-song vault-clearing contains unheard demos from Guided by Voices' classic mid-90s era. | Guided by Voices: Suitcase 3: Up We Go Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13681-suitcase-3-up-we-go-now/ | Suitcase 3: Up We Go Now | There are just some bands whose output is so staggering in terms of both quantity and quality-- the Mountain Goats, say-- that sometimes you just want to load up the catalogue, close your eyes, hit shuffle, and let somebody else decide for you. Then, of course, there's Robert Pollard. With his Boston Spaceships and at least one fine solo offering, Bob's been having a kickass 2009. But you're forgiven if you're still poring over his even more kickass 1993; there's simply so much to listen to, and more all the time.
Take, for instance, Suitcase 3, Pollard's latest 100-song foray into the mythical valise-cum-vault that contains Pollard's unreleased material. These Suitcase sets, obviously, have been mixed bags, flitting between fidelities and vintages and bit players with little rhyme or reason and with even less consistency than your typical Pollard 28-songer. The third time out's much the same, with 75 cuts seemingly chosen and arranged at random (credited, in trademark Pollard style, to fake bands with names like Kelsey Boo Flip, Heartthrob Johnson Firestone, Erotic Zip Codes and the like) followed by an off-the-cuff demo session from the particulary fertile Bee Thousand/Alien Lanes era. It's a neat trick, really, doing it this way; though the first three-quarters of the set will almost instantly be relegated into every Bob fan's random shuffle, the last disc's total fanperson catnip, the basement of Indie Rock Valhalla, that sort of thing. At least on paper.
It's true that going through the first three discs of Suitcase 3 front-to-back isn't too far off from typing Guided by Voices into the search bar in iTunes and just letting it fly, for a couple reasons: jumping from a filthy Vampire on Titus track to a frothy Do the Collapse and almost everything changes: sonics, approach to hooks, song length, and personnel. There's no organizing principle that I can discern in Suitcase 3; a beat-up little banger from the early days sits next to stately late-era sweep, and back-and-forth it goes. There's an emphasis on the gnarly yet hooky mid-90s stuff, and even a few all-too-fleeting nods to the era; "Coastal Town" shares a few moves with Alien Lanes' "Closer You Are" and "Old Engine Driver" is a slightly different spin on "Hey Aardvark" from the sorta-classic Static Airplane Jive EP. You get drunken, silly Pollard ("You Gotta Lotta Nerve"), stoner metalworker Pollard ("Psychlophobia"), not-taking-more-time-to-record-this-than-it-did-to-write Pollard ("Take Me Back", among so many others); all the Pollards, really.
But even if one focuses on the good stuff, the sheer volume of this thing means that these first three discs to overwhelm. Something like "Janet Wait", a ruddy, barely-hanging-on ballad, is as fucking sad and gorgeous a drunk's lament as this guy's ever given us (no, really). It's just a shame it'd be so easy to miss, floating in a sea of middling half-sketches and neural misfires here. I mean, were the suitcase being used for its intended purpose, at this point we'd be down to black socks and sandals, and maybe that emergency bathing suit.
Which I reckon goes some way toward explaining why the fourth disc falls far short of expectations. The very existence of a bunch of unheard demos from the pinnacle of one of indie rock's greatest bands seems the equivalent of a Gary Young version of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain or something. What if there's another "Echos Myron" waiting in the wings? But Bob's been through this stuff a few times already, so if it was really something to hear, we probably would've heard it. And, as it turns out, these sessions really couldn't be more off-the-cuff. Everybody seems a little drunk and a lot worn out, several songs don't even attempt an ending, and at one point someone wanders down to the basement to chatter as the tape rolls.
Sure, there's at least one great scrap of Pollardiania to be had-- the acoustic intro to "Tractor Rape Chain" is here, in full, as "South Rat Observatory"-- but there's also more than enough long stretches of random strumming and Bob grasping for lyrical straws. The last bit of Suitcase does offer some insights into Pollard's process-- turns out, for all the jokes, the guy's not exactly shitting gold, nor was he ever-- but once the voyeuristic glee of being a fly on the wall while a bunch of cool dudes get loaded and write some rock songs wear off, you're not left with a whole lot.
That is, until you start moving things around. The first three discs of Suitcase suffer from a lack of cohesion; the fourth, from far too much of it. Mix it up a little bit more, though, and you've got playlist padding and mixtape fodder and shuffly stuff for days. That relatively little of it could stand next to Bob's best isn't really the point; this is the bottom of the baggage, so to speak, and its far-flung nature and relative lack of quality control make it one just for the superfans. But that lot's hardly going to mind 100 new and newish GBV jams to have and hold in their own vaults. When you really need it, it's good to have a little extra on hand. | 2009-11-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2009-11-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Guided by Voices Inc. | November 16, 2009 | 5.3 | 6acd5bea-e138-49b3-8ef8-210eeb0b8114 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Alejandro G. Iñárritu's new film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is a meditation on the unholy perserverance of the human soul. Yet its soundtrack—co-created by Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, German electronic musician Alva Noto, and multi-instrumentalist Bryce Dessner of The National—wisely opts to complement that savagery rather than illustrate it. | Alejandro G. Iñárritu's new film The Revenant, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is a meditation on the unholy perserverance of the human soul. Yet its soundtrack—co-created by Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, German electronic musician Alva Noto, and multi-instrumentalist Bryce Dessner of The National—wisely opts to complement that savagery rather than illustrate it. | Ryuichi Sakamoto / Alva Noto / Bryce Dessner: The Revenant OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21352-the-revenant-ost/ | *The Revenant* OST | In Alejandro G. Iñárritu's new film The Revenant, Leonardo DiCaprio plays frontiersman Hugh Glass as he, his son, and his hunting team raid Native American land in 1832. After DiCaprio is unexpectedly mauled by a bear, the crew buries him, murders his son, and abandons their bodies, continuing the journey unaware that DiCaprio escaped the grave to seek revenge. Calling The Revenant "intense" doesn't begin to do it justice; among other things, it's a meditation on the unholy perseverance of the human soul. Yet its soundtrack—co-created by Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, German electronic musician Alva Noto, and multi-instrumentalist Bryce Dessner of The National—wisely opts to complement that savagery rather than illustrate it.
Iñárritu’s Birdman, the 2015 Academy Awards' Best Picture winner, stuttered its way through an unconventional drum score by Antonio Sánchez. Here, things get even more minimalist. The Revenant trades in sixteenth notes on hi-hats for minute-long fermatas, or held notes, on cellos. Throughout all 23 tracks, the score straddles the line between weariness and wonder, like someone constantly recalling the danger this stunning planet is capable of unleashing. Under conductor André de Ridder, Berlin-based orchestra s t a r g a z e plays expansively and with great care, its 25 players sporting a serious side compared to their work with artists like Deerhoof and Arcade Fire's Richard Reed Parry.
That organic swelling matches the dramatics beneath the film. Iñárritu fought to keep CGI out of The Revenant. He fought to use natural light on set. He fought to film so deep within nature that 40% of the day was spent traveling there. Each of the three contributors uphold this commitment to naturalism, even with Alva Noto's electronica. Sakamoto favors simplicity and clarity; as DiCaprio crosses frozen rivers and sleeps in animal carcasses, the brevity of Sakamoto's "Killing Hawk" illustrates the strength of Sakamoto's tight focus. On the minute-long "Arriving At Fort Kiowa", a single cello is joined by trotting string support, the group leaning forward in rhythm as a unified organism.
Noto brings three different dream sequences to the table—"First Dream", "Church Dream", and "Second Dream"—where electronic bass thuds in the background like a mattress falling to the floor of an empty room. It's eerie without offering obvious indicators as to why. In that, Noto's a pro. His use of electronics mimics the eldritch stares of a stalker, especially on "Goodbye to Hawk", creating the kind of anxiety heard in films like Drive and Under the Skin. Familiarity with the film's graphic scenes or the brutal landscapes of southern Argentina isn't required. Noto's written work acts as the terrified heartbeat fueling Iñárritu's violent winter all on its own.
Bryce Dessner is the least involved of the three songwriters, but when he contributes, he creates a world overwhelmingly rich with life – the very thing DiCaprio's character clings to. The most emotional number on the album, "Imagining Buffalo", introduces one violinist to another and another, stitching them together so they form a single note stretching into the infinite and spilling joy over into illusory insanity. "Looking For Glass" rides a similar crescendo. When all three men join forces again, songs like "Cat and Mouse" use handclaps and violin tremors to communicate the indefatigability of cheating death. Sometimes, the soundtrack traces the film’s woes without coloring them in, but it’s still successful in creating the sound of mental exhaustion choosing life over death, no matter how torturous and unforgiving it — and we — may be. | 2016-01-04T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-04T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Milan | January 4, 2016 | 7.3 | 6ad444f1-bd03-405b-84d6-279a2cf47a20 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | null |
Stax Records’ historic 1972 soul festival finally gets its due with a new 12-disc box set, presenting a pop label at its imperial peak and an unmediated vision of Blackness for a rapt audience. | Stax Records’ historic 1972 soul festival finally gets its due with a new 12-disc box set, presenting a pop label at its imperial peak and an unmediated vision of Blackness for a rapt audience. | Various Artists: Soul’d Out: The Complete Wattstax Collection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-sould-out-the-complete-wattstax-collection/ | Soul’d Out: The Complete Wattstax Collection | From their plane back to Memphis, the Astors could see the fires. Four days earlier, you could’ve caught the group performing their hit record “Candy” on the syndicated Los Angeles television show Shivaree. The appearance was part of a media blitz devised by Stax Records co-founder Estelle Axton and popular local DJ Nathaniel “Magnificent” Montague. In August 1965, the label dispatched a large portion of its roster to the West Coast; the Stax Revue was capped by a two-day stand at the 5/4 Ballroom in the South L.A. neighborhood of Watts.
After the Saturday show, a teenage fan named Jacqui Jacquette invited Stax star Carla Thomas to her house for dinner, then a tour of Watts. During the tour, she told Thomas about people killed by the LAPD, then brought her to a community meeting led by her cousin, Tommy Jacquette, who was teaching passive resistance as a lifesaving measure to teens. The following Wednesday, a violent LAPD traffic stop sparked a full-scale revolt; 34 people would die during the six-day Watts Uprising. Whatever cultural impact Stax hoped to make dissipated with its jet exhaust. On the ground, the people of Watts were chanting the Magnificent Montague’s catchphrase: Burn, baby, burn!
When Stax returned to Los Angeles, it wasn’t as a guest, but as a transplant. Newly independent and riding high under the leadership of label president Al Bell—plus an astonishing star turn from staff writer/producer Isaac Hayes—Stax opened a West Coast branch in 1972 and started looking to expand into motion pictures. A back-of-the-napkin pitch (“Black Woodstock”) quickly ballooned into an audacious event: Wattstax ’72, the cornerstone of the Watts Summer Festival. (The festival was intended to commemorate the uprising; Tommy Jacquette served as its executive director from 1966 until his death in 2009.) The one-day concert featured more than two dozen acts from the Stax roster, capped by a performance by Hayes. Tickets were priced at one dollar when they weren’t given away; the organizers would proudly note that the estimated 112,000 attendees represented the second-largest gathering of Black Americans in history, after the March on Washington. It was an utter triumph, and Stax commemorated it by issuing the Wattstax film and two soundtracks the following year.
Even taken all together, though, these releases told an incomplete—and at times misleading—story. Stax added crowd noise to studio cuts by the Staple Singers and Eddie Floyd, then included them on Wattstax: The Living Word as “live” singles. The film had to drop Hayes’ opening performance of “Theme From Shaft” after MGM raised a contractual point; director Mel Stuart responded by filming Hayes and band performing a new song on a Hollywood soundstage, then splicing the footage into the final edit. A slew of hitmakers including Johnnie Taylor and the Emotions were dropped from the lineup due to time constraints; the ever-industrious Stax booked them makeup dates at L.A.’s Summit Club in the fall, then seeded select performances into the second soundtrack. Over the next few decades, Stax released portions of select Wattstax and Summit sets piecemeal; in 2003, a recut Wattstax with restored Hayes performances (including “Shaft”) dropped alongside an expanded soundtrack that boasted a CD’s worth of unreleased material.
At last, we have the final word. Soul’d Out: The Complete Wattstax Collection presents Wattstax ’72 in its entirety and in correct sequence: every song, every introduction, every plea to get off the grass. (The festival was held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, in the middle of the Rams’ preseason schedule, and the organizers had to obtain field insurance. Various artists and emcees cajoling people back to the stands forms a massive subplot on this recording.) Crucial sets from the Staple Singers and Isaac Hayes are now whole, and Hayes’ set-opening “Theme From Shaft” (which had to be performed twice due to a filming issue) is available for the first time, all fibrous wah and off-mic shouts of yeah!
Half a dozen Summit sets appear in their entirety, as well as a bonus disc of Wattstax-related tracks. Wattstax wasn’t strictly a concert film; in order to display the fullness of the Black American experience, its performances were interspersed with on-the-street segments featuring local actors riffing on various topics, as well as bits from future Stax signee Richard Pryor. (Pryor’s routines are present in full.) Craft Recordings and Stax have also released a box that’s just the Wattstax concert, as well as a single disc of highlights. But Soul’d Out is the real deal: a portrait of a pop label at its imperial peak, presenting its unmediated vision of Blackness for a rapt audience.
Even at a third of the length, the scope and presentation of Soul’d Out begs comparison to Rhino’s 38xCD Woodstock: Back to the Garden set. Each box goes for total immersion, preserving every stray stage announcement while restoring excised artists and performances to their proper context. Wattstax kicked off with the world premiere of Stax producer/arranger Dale Warren’s “Salvation Symphony,” a kind of fourth-stream music melding soul propulsion and classical motifs. Only an eight-minute excerpt had previously been issued; in full form, it’s the triumphant counterpart to Warren’s bleaker work with the prog-soul act 24-Carat Black. Tommy Tate’s set is a triptych of deep soul in the Dave Godin vein: wistful and melodically rich. It’s capped with “School of Life,” a teen-pregnancy power ballad that, in its tenderness and lyrical detail if not its bombast, is a cousin to Big Star’s “Thirteen” (originally released on a Stax subsidiary).
The majority of the unreleased material, though, comes from the Summit Club dates. They’re valuable enough as newly restored chapters in the Wattstax story. But as Stax historian Rob Bowman notes in a Soul’d Out essay, live nightclub R&B (official or bootlegged) from this era is all too rare, especially from second- and third-tier acts. If there are undiscovered soundboard recordings that approach the deranged energy of Chicago’s Sons of Slum—who handle Otis Redding’s “Respect” like a frat-rock band paid in amphetamines—we could use them.
Still, we can marvel at what’s here. There’s an audacious medley from pop-soul cousin act Mel & Tim of their jangly pre-Stax hit “Good Guys Only Win in the Movies” and “Ain’t No Sunshine” that uses an instrumental excerpt from Isaac Hayes’ “Walk on By” as a sort of step-down transformer. It’s even more astonishing considering that a month earlier, the duo withdrew from Wattstax at the last minute due to Tim McPherson’s acute pain revealing itself as pancreatic cancer. The Emotions were bumped from the concert itself but scored a documentary highlight with their dramatic and finely wrought rendition of the gospel standard “Peace Be Still” in a sweltering storefront church. Even so, they weren’t a gospel act, and their Summit set shows the trio flexing the same sense of pace and ecstasy on their magisterial Supremes homage from 1972, “I Could Never Be Happy.”
In the final accounting, Wattstax may have been the success that sunk Stax. Al Bell’s ability to execute his ambitions impressed Columbia enough that the label agreed to become Stax’s distributor. But Stax was producing more product—R&B, gospel, comedy, rock—than Columbia knew what to do with, and within two years, the companies’ competing priorities would bring them to war. At the same time, Stax’s elevated profile drew federal attention to its complex (yet, for the time, largely standard) financial relationships with promoters and DJs. On top of all that, its overextended lenders were crunched by the 1973 recession. By the end of 1974, Isaac Hayes and Richard Pryor had left Stax due to nonpayment. By the end of 1975, the Stax offices had closed under court order. It was an infuriating end for one of the country’s great labels.
Introducing Stax in his opening remarks, the Reverend Jesse Jackson invoked “liberation through music and lyrics.” It may have been true that Stax offered that possibility, and that this possibility was deliberately forestalled by the existing power structures. It may have been true that actual liberation was achievable not by the organization headlining the Watts Summer Festival, but by the energies of the uprising the festival commemorated. For the musicians involved, the energy of Wattstax was enough to arouse awe for the rest of their lives. On that day, anything seemed possible. | 2023-03-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Craft | March 4, 2023 | 9.1 | 6ae59637-e307-4312-9684-8635a1ab9e2b | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
Durk’s latest offers some of the best and most honest crooning bars over smooth piano lines, but the formula is starting to wear thin. | Durk’s latest offers some of the best and most honest crooning bars over smooth piano lines, but the formula is starting to wear thin. | Lil Durk: 7220 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-durk-7220/ | 7220 | Equipped with a melody bathed in AutoTune, melancholy piano-backed instrumentals, and a willingness to embrace his vulnerable side, Lil Durk has completed his rebrand as the voice of the voiceless. It’s as if he was chosen by a higher power to speak for everyone who has been through some shit. His stories—sometimes centered on a poverty-stricken upbringing that led to a life full of death and addiction, other times focused on self-inflicted heartbreak—are personal but tend to be universal. Yeah, there are a lot of singing rappers in a similar lane, but Durk stands out because of his bruised wailing and lyrics so specific that they have to be based on some truth.
His latest album, 7220, is more of the same. Working within a framework isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are cracks in the formula. Mostly on the production side, which is incredibly played out. Since 2018’s Signed to the Streets 3, Durk has leaned into the trend of mushy keys with a ’90s R&B ballad feel. It’s not that good albums haven’t been made with this production style as the foundation (see: Polo G’s Die a Legend) but there is a uniform cheapness to them that doesn’t work when you use them time after time.
Still, even with the stale sound of the album, Durk is such a complex and colorful writer that it’s worth it to stick it out. The appeal is in his details. My criticism of a few of the other hugely popular rappers who croon about their pain is that they tell us they’re hurting without actually describing why. Durk doesn’t have that issue. He can flesh out an entire scene with one bar. On “Headtaps,” what’s getting him down is more than being in jail, it’s missing out on small moments with his kids like watching Peppa Pig. Or on “Started From,” in which he remembers being so broke that he went over to his neighbors with a water jug to keep the bill manageable.
But unlike, say, a Rod Wave album, Durk’s 7220 isn’t all gut punches. Since 2017’s Love Songs For the Streets, he’s been a part-time toxic relationship guru. It’s a mess every time, but on occasion, the over-the-top melodrama of it all is pretty fun. Just check out “Blocklist” where he’s pretty much on his knees coming up with bullshit reasons for his ex to keep in touch with him: She made him cry once, he gives her an allowance, he answers the phone whenever she calls. Not very convincing! The same can be said for his duet with Summer Walker—which has a few of the album’s more interesting vocal refrains (too often he coasts on one note)—even though I was disturbed by him setting the mood with Justin Bieber’s “Yummy.”
It’s worth it to note that these two tracks aren’t really intended to be fun; conversely, the two sleazy duets that are meant to be fun I find less so. “Petty Too” continues this tiring viral-chasing run of Future features. Then the Morgan Wallen two-hander is forced, with Durk attempting to widen the appeal of his lyrics with references to riding bulls and horses and P!nk and Ed Sheeran name-drops. C’mon now, that’s not him. Lil Durk has become a huge star because of lyrics that focus in, instead of zoom out. For the most part, 7220 gets that. | 2022-03-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | March 16, 2022 | 6.3 | 6ae749d1-218b-40f0-a3a3-d07aed24e9df | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Again working with producer Jim O’Rourke, the Japanese singer/songwriter explores a peculiar family history in songs that pull her own musical past into the present. | Again working with producer Jim O’Rourke, the Japanese singer/songwriter explores a peculiar family history in songs that pull her own musical past into the present. | Eiko Ishibashi: The Dream My Bones Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eiko-ishibashi-the-dream-my-bones-dream/ | The Dream My Bones Dream | Memories of a distant place and time haunt The Dream My Bones Dream, the sixth full-length album from Japanese singer/songwriter Eiko Ishibashi. These songs began taking shape after her father died two years ago, prompting Ishibashi to investigate a period of his life spent in Manchukuo, a puppet state created by Imperial Japan before the start of World War II. “It was just an abstract concept, like something that happened in a faraway land,” Ishibashi said in a recent interview with The Wire. Talking with relatives and finding photos from the era made it real, inspiring her to connect this foggy family past to her present life. This set not only became an experiment in bringing memory to bear on this moment but also a nine-song summary of Ishibashi’s oeuvre.
Since Ishibashi launched her solo career in 2006, each of her albums has represented another stylistic upheaval. She moved from the instrumental maximalism of 2008’s Drifting Devil to spacious, piano-based songs on Carapace only three years later. She has since pivoted to smoky jazz and even burrowed into the space between Merzbow’s static blasts. U.S. expatriate and producer Jim O’Rourke has been a constant in her recordings this decade, although he steps back a bit for Dream, leaving all the musical ideas to Ishibashi. (“I kind of decided to be almost invisible,” he told The Wire.) Many of Ishibashi’s contemporary interests reappear during Dream, from the upright-bass-assisted jazz of the title track to the piano sparseness of the saccharine “To the East.” New electronic elements afford these familiar approaches a dreamlike atmosphere.
Though Ishibashi has gravitated toward keyboards recently, she played drums in Panicsmile, a noisy rock band that incorporated complex rhythms into their whirlwind. She places a renewed interest on rhythm here, a surprising turn that gives these songs an anxious urgency not found on other recent releases. The beat of “A Ghost in a Train, Thinking” subtly mutates from a militaristic march into fragmented meters, pulling listeners deeper into its slow motion. Twin drums disrupt “Agloe.” Sudden kicks and snare hits that lurk deep in the mix add tension by taking unexpected shots at the lush keyboards and vocals at the song’s center.
Drumming contributes to the album’s exploration of a part-reflected, part-imagined past, too. The rhythms across Dream often recall trains, connecting the numbers to Ishibashi’s original inspiration to explore another newly revealed fold of her family history—that her grandfather worked on the Manchurian railroad, a vital transit line running through the Japanese puppet state. On “Tunnels to Nowhere,” Dream’s most aggressive song, the beat pounds beneath lurching keyboard bursts and swelling strings, arranged to enhance the claustrophobic feel. It’s unnerving, a fitting reminder that nostalgia often hides something ugly. By comparison, the weakest moment here, “Silent Scrapbook,” lacks the ballast of drums and feels vaporous.
The past fades in and out of these songs. Using transistor radio snippets of speeches and musical performances, “Agloe” becomes a collage of uneasy atmosphere draped around the bones of a soft pop song. (September’s After the Smoke plays with similar ideas and, in retrospect, is an experimental prelude for Dream). She occasionally accents its lyrics in Mandarin with chants of “remember,” the effect again reconnecting the past and present.
During “Iron Veil,” someone speaking Mandarin announces train station names as the drums rumble on. This is Ishibashi’s most direct attempt to place this release in a geographical and historical context, but the setting seems just out of reach, not actually there but imagined. Rather than offer answers, The Dream My Bones Dream grapples with memories that aren’t one’s own and tries to find some kernel of wisdom within them. It’s a multilayered, foggy work and one of Ishibashi’s fullest collections to date, showing us how the past can propel us forward. | 2018-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Drag City | November 29, 2018 | 7.5 | 6aea8299-52c8-4e15-be1e-80236dcb2b6c | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ |
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