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In its second release in one year, Ricked Wicky—the latest undertaking from ex-GBV frontman Robert Pollard—is starting to feel like a proper band. While King Heavy Metal isn't quite as front-to-back consistent as I Sell the Circus, its aims are higher: a surefire sign of a band getting comfortable with themselves. | In its second release in one year, Ricked Wicky—the latest undertaking from ex-GBV frontman Robert Pollard—is starting to feel like a proper band. While King Heavy Metal isn't quite as front-to-back consistent as I Sell the Circus, its aims are higher: a surefire sign of a band getting comfortable with themselves. | Ricked Wicky: King Heavy Metal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20820-king-heavy-metal/ | King Heavy Metal | It didn't take long, but Ricked Wicky—the latest undertaking from ex-GBV frontman Robert Pollard—is starting to feel like a proper band. Ricked Wicky, if you'll recall, is the so-called "sophisticated arena rock band" featuring Pollard, constant companion Todd Tobias, former GBV drummer Kevin March, and Dayton lifer (and relative newbie to the Pollard universe) Nick Mitchell; their latest, King Heavy Metal, follows their debut I Sell the Circus by a scant five months. The second LP from any post-GBV Pollard enterprise always feels a little like a dare: as the project starts to define its own borders, there's always the sense that the famously restless Pollard could abandon this one just as blithely as he has so many others. Still, Ricked Wicky feels different. Mitchell, for one, has clearly ingratiated himself to his new boss; after a few scene-stealing cameos on I Sell the Circus, he gets a strong supporting role throughout King Heavy Metal. And Pollard—content, presumably, with the way this latest venture is shaping up—turns in a weird, wide-ranging set.
Chiming opener "Jargon of Clones" could just be the out-and-out loveliest Pollard track of the decade, a swaying self-examination that finds our Uncle Bob deep in dialogue with himself. "This Has Been My Picture" is similarly lovely; after a lengthy buildup, its triumphal, harpsichord-ticked chorus makes for a well-earned payoff. And the svelte, surefooted "I'll Let You In" is a top-flight Pollardian rocker, a hard-charging, brain-sticking wonder in the grand tradition of "Motor Away".
Of late, the best Pollard records split the difference between spontaneity and craftsmanship; too much (or little) of either, and the whole thing starts to feel overworked, undercooked, or some combination thereof. The songs Pollard brings to Heavy Metal are smart—and occasionally downright elegant—without resorting to all the look-at-me bells and whistles that bogged down 2013's scatterbrained Blazing Gentlemen. Not that they're all winners; the dirgey "Walk Through Glass" takes a beat too long to get where it's going, and "Earth Among Men" lays a thick layer of Psychocandy fuzz atop one of the set's more threadbare melodies, in the hopes that no one notices.
And then there's "Come Into My Wig Shop", a surefire top-five contender for weirdest Pollard song. Slinky spy-movie keyboards? Check. A bizarro-world version of the "Thunderstruck" intro? Sure, why not. "Wig Shop" is more science project than song, its goofball verses grafted awkwardly into a sundazed chorus. It shouldn't work, and it doesn't; still, after so many years of Pollard padding out albums with gormless ballads, blandiose rockers, and barely-there sketches, the sheer chutzpah of "Wig Shop" is almost enough to redeem it. "Wig Shop" is a lot of—probably too many—things, but boring isn't one of them.
"Wig Shop" is a Pollard-Mitchell co-write, one of Mitchell's three writing credits on King Heavy Metal. His "Weekend Warriors" is either the Who song they never got around to writing or the shameless pint-hoister the art-damaged Pollard won't quite allow himself to pen. Either way, it's a hoot, a would-be anthem for every heavy-lidded 9-to-5er staring down another early Monday alarm call. To its credit, "Warriors" cuts to the quick and guzzles straight from the bottle; to its detriment, Mitchell's other contribution, "Imminent Fall From Grace", does much the same. The metaphor-eschewing "Grace" finds Mitchell doling out a stern warning to a high-flying character who's due for a fall. If Mitchell's "Warriors" is a better-than-average Roger Daltrey bite, "Grace" is sub-Eddie Money bar-rock. Ill-fitting and uninspired, it's the record's sore thumb, an unusually earnest, uncomfortably literal song floating in a sea of Pollardian abstractions.
Just two records in, it's only natural that Mitchell and Pollard are still feeling each other out; given how capably Mitchell's slotted himself in with Pollard—whose many idiosyncrasies long ago calcified into his distinctive style—elsewhere, this misfire seems easy to chalk up to growing pains. While King Heavy Metal isn't quite as front-to-back consistent as I Sell the Circus, its aims are higher: a surefire sign of a band getting comfortable with themselves. | 2015-07-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-07-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Guided by Voices Inc. | July 28, 2015 | 6.5 | 6aec7375-21d3-42ce-954c-2ba2d7306d1e | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Riding the E Street Band’s familiar uplift, Springsteen grapples with the complexities of nostalgia, a tension that animates his writing and manifests in the sound of the music itself. | Riding the E Street Band’s familiar uplift, Springsteen grapples with the complexities of nostalgia, a tension that animates his writing and manifests in the sound of the music itself. | Bruce Springsteen: Letter to You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-springsteen-letter-to-you/ | Letter to You | When the world first met him in the mid-’70s, Bruce Springsteen might have seemed like a throwback. He sang about first loves and teenage runaways; he dressed like a greaser and worshipped at the altar of jukeboxes and summer nights on the boardwalk. Many of his influences—Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Phil Spector—were at least a decade past the peak of their cultural impact. A glowing early review by Jon Landau claiming to have witnessed “rock and roll future” at a Springsteen concert helped define his mythology, but the opening words of the next sentence were just as crucial: “On a night when I needed to feel young....”
Springsteen has spent much of his career wrestling with this penchant for nostalgia. (“I hope when I get old I don’t sit around thinking about it—but I probably will,” he sang in “Glory Days,” 36 years ago.) Some artists evolve through reinvention and others through refinement, but Springsteen has often compared the span of his career to a long conversation: He can revisit certain themes, even repeat himself, but the idea is to keep it moving. Springsteen turned 71 last month, and his 20th studio album, Letter to You, indulges in his past like never before. Following the autobiographical thread of his memoir and Broadway show, it seems to feature Springsteen himself as the narrator, observing the ways that music can sustain us, with a tone pitched between deep reverence and loss.
That simple but elusive power forms the thematic heart of the record, and it also informs the sound. Last fall, Springsteen enlisted his longtime accompanists in the E Street Band to record the whole thing live in the studio during a snowy week in New Jersey. The goal was to approximate the untappable energy of their concerts and classic albums like Darkness on the Edge of Town. Working again with his 2010s collaborator Ron Aniello, the plan might have also been to avoid the obsessive tinkering that has distracted from his straightforward, earnest songwriting on recent records.
Flourished with organ and saxophone, music box piano and glockenspiel, surf guitar licks and driving rhythm, Letter to You is bold and self-referential, using the sound of Springsteen’s own catalog the way he once treated the entirety of rock history. The songs are occasionally great—“Ghosts” and “Burnin’ Train,” in particular—and sometimes they feel remarkable just due to their old-school presentation. It is a welcome return after two decades of E Street records that, even at their best, tended to downplay the band’s strengths.
Ironically, some of the strongest moments come from a time before Springsteen settled on those trademarks. A trio of original songs written in the early ’70s, while he was still an unsigned solo act, are given their first official studio outings, all enlivened with full-band arrangements that stretch out past the six-minute mark. My favorite is “Janey Needs a Shooter,” with a stunning coda and a Stevie Van Zandt-accompanied chorus, like a sea of fist pumps rising from a sweaty crowd. The other two songs—“If I Was the Priest” and “Song for Orphans”—aren’t quite as seamless, but it is fascinating hearing the band find their place behind Springsteen’s feverish word-association, a challenge that results in joyful chaos.
The lyrics to these older songs are filled with skepticism toward salvation and sentimentality, an undercurrent to the record’s more romantic moments. (“Forget about the old friends and the old times,” he shouts in “If I Was the Priest.”) He approaches the idea again in “Rainmaker,” a gravelly outlier about desperate people in dire times, putting their faith in false prophets. “Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad,” he sings, his voice full of fire and empathy. He claims to have written the song with political intent during the Bush years, but it gains resonance coming from an artist who has commanded so much loyalty and devotion on his own. Surrounded by songs about the life-affirming power of music, it poses a question: What happens if the people we turn to for answers, transcendence, and hope have none to offer? What happens when the show is over?
This darkness and self-doubt is the other side of his story: the bandleader in “Last Man Standing” leaving the stage alone, with “just the ringing in [his] ears.” These lyrics are frequently offset by the E Street Band’s cozy presence, like sonic pep talks, adding a new purpose to their familiar roles. The album begins quietly with “One Minute You’re Here,” a gorgeous fragment featuring Springsteen on acoustic guitar, singing in a low, helpless drawl over faint brushes of piano and twinkling synth. When it segues into the wistful, mid-tempo title track, he introduces his bandmates less as a triumphant return than a man fighting back tears before collapsing into a group hug.
In a black-and-white documentary accompanying the album, Springsteen’s home studio appears as a kind of interactive museum, filled with old guitars and faded pictures of past collaborators, including the Castiles, his teenage rock band. The 2018 death of George Theiss, the Castiles’ frontman, inspired Springsteen to start writing these songs. In “Ghosts,” he describes a welcome haunting—old friends passing through by surprise, in a world that can otherwise feel sad and empty. The best moments on the album have a similar effect. The closing track is called “I’ll See You in My Dreams,” and the verse melody shares a striking resemblance to the guitar riff from “Born to Run.” “We’ll meet and live and laugh again,” he sings hopefully. “For death is not the end.” The future has never been more uncertain; the past has never seemed further away. But as long as the band is playing, the dream is alive.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | October 22, 2020 | 7.4 | 6af13f49-435f-48e5-b007-248ad9ad1d0b | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Claire Boucher's early experimentations were a far cry from the music she makes today. Halfaxa, 15 ethereal tracks in which her vocals approached pure glossolalia, is Grimes at her most mystical. | Claire Boucher's early experimentations were a far cry from the music she makes today. Halfaxa, 15 ethereal tracks in which her vocals approached pure glossolalia, is Grimes at her most mystical. | Grimes: Halfaxa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21775-halfaxa/ | Halfaxa | Montreal, 2006: a young misfit from Vancouver enrolls at McGill University. In between studying neuroscience, philosophy, Russian, and electroacoustics, Claire Boucher started making freaky GarageBand songs under the name Grimes. She became a fixture at Lab Synthèse, a DIY loft space that encouraged collaboration among artists like Sean Nicholas Savage, Braids, Blue Hawaii, and Majical Cloudz. Boucher's early experimentations were a far cry from the sugary K-pop punches she makes today, instead leaning towards slow-building, dense, and jumbled productions. Her first proper release, 2010’s Geidi Primes, received unexpected praise beyond her local scene. Nine months later, she released Halfaxa, 15 ethereal tracks in which her vocals approached pure glossolalia.
Halfaxa is Grimes at her most mystical. Boucher has referred to it as her "medieval album" in terms of intent and subject matter. She once explained that the record is meant to be an electronic interpretation of Middle Age Christian reverence, an exploration of sensations beyond earthly experience: "I wanted to capture the beauty of being in a beautiful cathedral and hearing reverbed (naturally), devotional, vocal music and really believing in heaven and hell." Many of Boucher's theories for Halfaxa were inspired by her own "idol" at the time, Hildegard von Bingen, a 12th-century German saint without musical training whose music was inspired by divine visions she received starting at the age of three. As explained in von Bingen's theological text Liber Vitae Meritorum, after The Fall, music became a means of accessing a lost state of perfection. Boucher would later lament that her early musical ventures were recorded when she "didn’t really know what [she] was doing," but listeners discovering Halfaxa in 2016 are aware of her technical ascent, producing and engineering 2015’s Art Angels entirely on her own.
Accordingly, Halfaxa is not direct in the same manner as Visions or Art Angels, which are less enigmatic and perhaps more easily digestible. Lyrics are abstracted to the point of becoming unintelligible, but not in a way that is grating or guttural. Instead, Boucher channels her inner cherub; her singing evokes harps atop clouds. Vocally, Halfaxa finds Boucher inspired by Mariah Carey's soaring top notes and purity of tone. On "Intor / Flowers," Boucher’s voice stretches towards heavenly octaves before layering itself beneath soprano sighs. The most mysterious songs on Halfaxa rely solely on tone, elongation, and repetition so heavily that it is best to give up the search for linear movement completely. Her vocals reaches such high peaks throughout that by the end of the record the distinction between machine and musician blurs.
Offering a deeper sense of Grimes' world, Halfaxa's song titles reference Boucher's diverse intellectual interests. "Weregild," a jittering incantation of a dance track, takes its name from an archaic legal value placed on all beings and pieces of property, based on social rank. The latter half of "sagrad прекрасный" means "beautiful" in Russian, and "Dragvandil" is a Viking sword in Final Fantasy XI. With these titles, Boucher is teasing signifiers and then distorting meaning, ultimately keeping the personal to herself, underscoring her eccentricity. Referring to her ex-boyfriend, Majical Cloudz’s Devon Welsh, "Devon" is the closest thing to an explicit expression of devotion. Inside her syrupy murmurs, Boucher proclaims, "But you don’t love me anymore/ And I’ve never felt so broken up before." It’s a startlingly clear moment within an album that strives to limit direct interpretations.
Somewhere along the line, Boucher lost the rights to her early records. Six years after its original release, Halfaxa is being reissued by Arbutus, her first label. Boucher has made it clear that she has nothing to do with the reissue. Copies of the record sell for over $200 online, so reissuing it on vinyl is a convenient way for Arbutus to make Halfaxa more accessible while also making money. It's an unfortunate shadow to have attached to her early work, but nonetheless, Halfaxa foreshadows the musician Boucher is today: enigmatic, intimate, and uncompromising.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that Boucher receives no payment for sales of this reissue. | 2016-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Artbus Records | April 6, 2016 | 7.8 | 6b022f57-060c-4993-80f3-d8a1a608a5e6 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
On their debut LP, the Norwegian trio emboldens their customary celebration rock by adding emphatic stretches of post-rock and power-pop. | On their debut LP, the Norwegian trio emboldens their customary celebration rock by adding emphatic stretches of post-rock and power-pop. | Spielbergs: This Is Not the End | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spielbergs-this-is-not-the-end/ | This Is Not the End | Distant Star, the 2018 debut EP from Oslo’s Spielbergs, took less than a second to put its target market on notice. Throttling, distorted octaves and massive drum rolls moved in lockstep, instantly evoking decades worth of bands, both boyish and brawny, who most effectively communicated their feelings through “whoas.” This style of rock is perpetually deemed obsolescent, but it always seems to find an audience dealing with the same issues. Played with enough urgency, it doesn’t become relevant but simply asks, “Why do we waste so much time caring, anyway?” Spielbergs clearly understood those mechanics; their original band name, after all, was We Are All Going to Die, which doubles as the name of the first song they wrote. It’s the fourth tune on their debut LP, This Is Not the End, where it now serves as a weighty sentiment rather than a mission statement.
Spielbergs are a new band, but they are not necessarily a young one. All three members cut their teeth in the upper middle class of 2000s Norwegian indie rock—this means things like “playing shows with Yeasayer” and “making a music video starring a Boy Scout uniform.” This Is Not the End doesn’t directly reference any of this, but these are load-bearing biographical details. Sincerity is the most essential element in this style of rock, the counterbalance to its inherent lack of innovation or currency; even the slightest perceived lapse of good faith can make it seem pandering. Spielbergs formerly struggled with indie careerism, and this is now what they do for fun. The irony—that is, they achieved far greater and quicker success with Distant Star than with their past projects—simply reinforces Spielbergs’ spirit.
This Is Not the End includes two of the three singles from Distant Star, and the bulk lands within that celebration-rock mold—physical intensity, gooey emotions, devotionals that are joyous without being party music. While 85 percent of Spielbergs’ main influences trace back to the Replacements, they don’t have much use for the requisite self-deprecation and sabotage, veering instead toward glammier, bolder gestures. The late chorus of “Distant Star,” for instance, drops the guitars so Mads Baklien can lead the handclaps over the kick drum, while a climactic scream during “You All Look Like Giants” finally exposes the band’s old roots in esoteric post-hardcore. Their experience shows through making payoffs seem generous rather than gratuitous.
Distant Star could feel unbalanced, with excursions into shoegaze and synth-pop textures that didn’t feel like priorities. This Is Not the End is convincingly expansive. Spielbergs dabble with sturdier, shinier forms, the stuff that most bands of this sort don’t touch until subsequent albums. “Five on It” reintroduces Spielbergs as a propulsive power-pop project, though “Familiar” and “McDonald’s (Please Don’t Fuck Up My Order)” float in post-rock ether. Scratchy acoustic excerpts and instrumental interludes make This Is Not the End feel coherent, despite the substantial range.
Spielbergs don’t deal in complex subjects, and they sing plainly enough that any hook heard on the first chorus can be joined on the second: “You’re a bad friend! You’re a bad friend! You’re a bad friend to me!,” goes a song called, well, “Bad Friend.” But it’s harder to say what Spielbergs are about. This Is Not the End’s only real flaw is its proximity to bands that achieved transcendence precisely because their monomaniacal commitment risked embarrassment. Japandroids write almost exclusively about having your best girl under one arm and your best bro under the other, a beer in hand. And for about half an hour, seemingly anyone could get swept up in Beach Slang’s thrill of a 40-something singer pushing past fear of judgment.
Chalk up the comparatively low stakes here to the cozy production or the fact that Spielbergs were borne of an “adult youth club thing” rather than desperate artistic straits. “We could be soulmates,” Baklien screams during “Distant Star,” too hesitant to insist we will be soulmates. It’s the difference between a mid-afternoon daydream at your cubicle and a record that might actually make you quit your job, like Our Band Could Be Your Life for people who need a backup plan. | 2019-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | By The Time It Gets Dark | February 4, 2019 | 7.2 | 6b055865-eca0-415e-bb0f-f7ea9942826b | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The New Zealand band’s best songs are what one might call picnic disco: lazy in the best way, like stretching out under a hot sun with only the occasional drum loop to gently poke you awake. | The New Zealand band’s best songs are what one might call picnic disco: lazy in the best way, like stretching out under a hot sun with only the occasional drum loop to gently poke you awake. | Yumi Zouma: Truth or Consequences | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yumi-zouma-truth-or-consequences/ | Truth or Consequences | Some say that pretty isn’t everything, but isn’t it nice sometimes? Like charm bracelets, miniature pastries, or Timothée Chalamet—everyone loves those. New Zealand band Yumi Zouma have been making pretty, soothing dream pop since 2014, and their newest album and first release on Polyvinyl, Truth or Consequences, is no exception. Enveloped in gauzy synth and vocal harmonies, their music is as sweetly tart as a ripe raspberry. But for all the technical perfection, the winsome aesthetics prove too insubstantial to stick.
The highlights of Truth or Consequences are what one might call picnic disco: songs that feel lazy in the best way, like stretching out under a hot sun with only the occasional drum loop to gently poke you awake. On the bright “Right Track / Wrong Man,” vocalist Christie Simpson sings like she’s about to doze off, dreamily remembering a time when “we were bleeding sunset.” Simpson excels at this kind of sweet, sleepy delivery, which imbues her lines with heartache. When she sings the word “sad” on “Lie Like You Want Me Back,” it feels personal and specific. “I thought so hard about it,” she says of a lost relationship, turning the statement into an urgent plea for love to return.
Yumi Zouma are very good at building these wistful, fleeting moods. “I’m hoping that you’ll catch me/Text me when you’re heading out,” Simpson sings over the crystalline arpeggios of “Mirror to the Fire,” a song that shares its nostalgic synth-pop sound with bands like Alvvays and the 1975. The echoey synths and billowy vocal layering of “Cool for a Second” are as rich and soft as butter in a hot pan. Even the title of “My Palms Are Your Reference to Hold to Your Heart” is full of saccharine melodrama—specific without being specific, like the painfully earnest message you might send to a crush after much deliberation and re-writing. Truth or Consequences is prime teen romance soundtrack fodder: unblushingly indulgent and emotional, deeply invested in truth, love, and reverb.
But eventually, pure sentimentality wears thin. There can only be so much shimmering synth, ticking drum machine, and naptime vocals before it all begins to blend together. A truly great teen movie or 1975 track isn’t defined by an unwavering commitment to genre and form, but by the challenging of it. Even when an experiment comes up short, mistakes and failed attempts allow us to see others as the messy, raw, difficult humans we know ourselves to be. Truth or Consequences is more like a Valentine’s Day card—pleasantly sentimental, at times gratifying, and all too easy to forget.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polyvinyl | March 18, 2020 | 6.5 | 6b0be100-6b00-4f11-bcd4-2cd095490e7c | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
In the clubs of Tokyo, psych-rockers Kikagaku Moyo have always let noise and chaos linger on the edges of their songs. Stone Garden, however, rejects familiar structure in favor of improvisation. | In the clubs of Tokyo, psych-rockers Kikagaku Moyo have always let noise and chaos linger on the edges of their songs. Stone Garden, however, rejects familiar structure in favor of improvisation. | Kikagaku Moyo: Stone Garden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23286-stone-garden/ | Stone Garden | Japanese underground artists possess a flair for myth-making, from Les Rallizes Dénudés’ shrouded history to eventual Boredoms founder Yamantaka Eye driving a bulldozer on stage for a gig. Tokyo’s Kikagaku Moyo have their fair share of good yarns since forming in 2012. The first song on their debut album was supposedly “written over a night spent jamming on a suspended footbridge in remote mountains,” while drummer Go Kurosawa took a significant period of time before starting the group living out of a backpack in Central America. Stone Garden, the band’s latest release, was recorded in a Prague basement during several near-continuous days of improvising, and then pieced together back in their hometown. The real hook, though, is that the five-song album finds a band who’s attracted attention for a folk approach to psychedelic rock showing off their experimental and often messy side.
It’s a deliberate pivot by a quintet that has found attention well beyond the cramped clubs of Tokyo. Whereas many Japanese experimental artists are celebrated for their loudness, Kikagaku Moyo often let noise and chaos linger on the edges of their music. They aren’t shy about a feedback-loaded electric guitar solo or 20-minute-plus sitar drone session, but recent full-lengths Forest of Lost Children and particularly last year’s House in the Tall Grass stood out for their organization of sound.
Stone Garden rejects structure in favor of improvisation, or at least jamming for hours on end and piecing the results together afterward. Album opener “Backlash” delivers over six minutes of distorted guitar and drums. It’s a rumbling cut nodding to Krautrock, and one content to barrel forward with slight variations and not much else. That’s followed up by “Nobakitani,” revealing the other big change between Stone Garden and Kikagaku Moyo’s last couple of albums: Each song on Stone Garden occupies its own stylistic universe. “Nobakitani” is a slow moving guitar-and-sitar haze featuring scattered vocals breaking through the trance-like tempo. It sounds like a House in the Tall Grass castoff and feels far removed from the maelstrom preceding it.
This showcases Kikagaku Moyo’s stylistic variety and experimental tendencies, but highlighting the latter makes them feel jarringly unfocused. Despite an immediate and forceful chug, “Backlash” sounds sludgy in a way that adds little to the song, while “Trilobites” garbled quality makes one think they should have just recorded the jam session from the other side of the basement wall. It’s this constant feeling of good ideas settling rather than pushing forward that hurts Stone Garden the most. It’s filled with great sonic bits—“Backlash’s” driving guitars, “Nobakitani’s” meditative atmosphere—but Kikagaku Moyo rush them, every song falling into a groove and then fading out rather than go off in some new direction. They show their experimental merits in frames too small to really let them shine, even if a lot of these songs feel like teasers better suited for live settings.
The highlights from their last two albums tower over the sketches here, while their psych-rock bona fides should never be in question after something like 2014’s Mammatus Clouds EP, boasting a 28-minute-long opening track slowly shapeshifting as it went along. Stone Garden features good ideas ending prematurely, but album highlight “In a Coil” shows everything that has made them the next buzzed-about psych outfit from Japan—guitar and sitar wrap around each other, charging the song forward while voices lock together, everything building in intensity before reaching a crescendo. It’s a reminder of how compelling Kikagaku Moyo’s story can be, even if Stone Garden is only a minor chapter. | 2017-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Guruguru Brain | May 27, 2017 | 6 | 6b10a200-2807-474e-b505-ed88099e2270 | Patrick St. Michel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-st. michel/ | null |
After the tight, familiar turns of 2004's Antics and a major label deal, these dapper NYC rockers' lofty aspirations are finally kicking in. Horns, extended outros, strings, an oboe, and album art featuring more than three colors-- welcome to the new world of Interpol. | After the tight, familiar turns of 2004's Antics and a major label deal, these dapper NYC rockers' lofty aspirations are finally kicking in. Horns, extended outros, strings, an oboe, and album art featuring more than three colors-- welcome to the new world of Interpol. | Interpol: Our Love to Admire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10413-our-love-to-admire/ | Our Love to Admire | Despite its title, Interpol's 2002 debut Turn on the Bright Lights was marked by its seductive shadowiness. The product of a bygone New York City filled with dank alleys and smoke-choked dives, Interpol fed on their own mystery while translating cool kid record collections into sexy downtown paranoia. They received a few positive notices, too. In the glowing Pitchfork review of the LP, Eric Carr wrote, "Although it's no Closer or OK Computer, it's not unthinkable that this band might aspire to such heights." And now-- after the tight, familiar turns of 2004's Antics and a major label deal-- their lofty aspirations are finally kicking in.
Horns, extended outros, strings, an oboe, and album art featuring more than three colors-- welcome to the new world of Interpol. Our Love to Admire is the sound of a minted Madison Square Garden band seeking to freshen its damp atmospherics. It's not a terrible idea: On Antics, even Interpol seemed tired of Interpol, capping the disc's 10 tracks with a couple drawn-out duds. But, as anyone who's bought laundry detergent knows, "new and improved" does not always mean "new" or "improved." Admire's predictable adornments quickly prove fleeting and expose Interpol's nagging limitations rather than their potential.
With cleaner production and an arsenal of instruments at their disposal, the group indulges, and the songs often suffer. Tracks like six-minute opener "Pioneer to the Falls" and the limp lowlight "Scale" grate due to overly repetitive song structures that rely too heavily on choppy breakdowns and pointless solos. And the band's previously economical songwriting, built on quick, bursting hooks and seamless transitions, is now grand, stately, and bloated-- more like a depressing U2 than a poppy Joy Division.
While it would be easy (and probably accurate) to blame Admire's flaws on the group's heightened commercial ambitions, that's only part of the problem. With their first two LPs, Interpol vaulted over like-minded contemporaries thanks to their superior interplay between rhythm and melody. Instead of letting Banks and guitarist Daniel Kessler dominate songs with their trebly timbres, bassist Carlos D. and drummer Sam Fogarino provided perfect complements, at times overshadowing their bandmates altogether. (Just listen to the loping low-end of "Untitled" or the stutter-step snares on "Evil" for proof.) But Admire finds the band's balance shifting significantly; the rhythm players often seem more like glorified session men than integral components of a sleek post-punk machine. Gone are the death-disco grooves that made "Slow Hands" and "Obstacle 1" strangely danceable, and without those dynamic rhythmic counterpoints, the tempos slacken, songs drag, and the focus inevitably turns to Banks' increasingly frustrating word splatters.
Banks has always been a between-the-lines lyricist-- his default is somewhere between opaque and lazy free association. With each new song, though, it becomes less certain that there was ever anything worth searching for between the lines in the first place. On Admire, he's slightly more overt, but this time his gripes with the opposite sex sometimes take on a surreal 80s rock star quality. "No I in Threesome", ostensibly about convincing a girlfriend to invite her friend into bed, is either a hilarious parody of an embarrassingly self-serious Paul Banks song-- or just an embarrassingly self-serious ménage a blah. (It's not both.) "The Heinrich Maneuver" rails against a cold-hearted, phony, manipulative actress (shocking!) and "Rest My Chemistry" has the singer grappling with an eternal query: Can you ever be too worn out on drugs to have sex with a young groupie? (A young groupie subject to head-smacking lines like, "You look so young like a daisy in my lazy eye," no less.) More than ever, Banks tries to add some sympathy to his reedy robot croon and nearly succeeds on the wistful "Wrecking Ball". Still, when he monotones, "I've got this soul, it's all fired up," he sounds as thrilled as a sleepy Stephen Hawking.
On "Threesome", Banks suggests, "It's time we give something new a try." And his quest for a guilt-free three-way is as doomed as Interpol's dalliances with heavy-handed, big-budget gestures on Admire. Can they make an OK Computer or Closer? At this point, another Antics would suffice. | 2007-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2007-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | July 10, 2007 | 6 | 6b15bef4-7864-459a-8799-a43cd977f21c | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The second album from Tom Misch, the London-based musician and producer, is an expansive and fruitful collaboration with drummer Yussef Dayes, one that brings out the best in each other. | The second album from Tom Misch, the London-based musician and producer, is an expansive and fruitful collaboration with drummer Yussef Dayes, one that brings out the best in each other. | Tom Misch / Yussef Dayes: What Kinda Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tom-misch-yussef-dayes-what-kinda-music/ | What Kinda Music | After Tom Misch’s beige and overly polished 2018 debut, What Kinda Music, a collaboration with drummer Yussef Dayes, brings a flutter of hope. Yussef Kamaal, Dayes’ project with Henry Wu, was instrumental in bringing the South London jazz scene to the fore in the mid-2010s, and was championed by tastemaker Gilles Peterson’s Brownswood imprint. After the duo split in 2017, Dayes went quiet and Wu went on to perform as Kamaal Williams. As a fully collaborative album, What Kinda Music feels doubly heavy. For Dayes, it represents his first full-length release since the breakup of Yussef Kamaal; for Misch, it’s a proving ground for his musical chops. What Kinda Music is cosmic in scope; the reverb layered throughout the album makes it expansive, and you can hear both musicians stretching themselves to the outer limits
As a pair, Dayes and Misch bring out the best in each other. Where Geography was almost too clean, What Kinda Music is muddied with depth and darkness from Dayes’ rhythms, offsetting Misch’s pitch-perfect vocals. This is particularly true on “Tidal Wave,” where Dayes’ drum rolls and hollow wooden taps provide a counterpoint to Misch’s layered vocals. The mutual respect between the pair is tangible: From Misch’s admiring lyrics in “Nightrider” (“Mr. Dayes with the break of the drums/It’s icy cold”) to the tight interplay between the separate drum and guitar improvisations in “Kyiv,” the album bears both their signature imprints.
What Kinda Music also feels indebted to the collaborative nature of the South London jazz scene, as does the presence of saxophonist Kaidi Akinnibi and Dayes’ previous collaborator, bassist Rocco Palladino, as features on “Storm Before the Calm” and “Lift Off.” The interplay between the three different musicians on each track feels tightly coordinated, without necessarily requiring distinct sections for each player. Elsewhere, What Kinda Music is catchy without being insincere or vacuous. “I Did It For You” is just one repeated refrain, and Misch’s whispered vocals seem wistful over a multi-layered guitar riff and Dayes’ buzzing drumline. The pitched-up vocal sample on “The Real” plays against Misch’s brief and softly sung interlude, which has the effect of parting stage curtains for a well-delivered monologue.
Not only do Dayes and Misch offer an alluring marriage of virtuosity and pop, the album feels like the best recent example of Brian Eno’s theory of scenius as opposed to genius: the theory that it takes community and collaboration to spark something incredible, rather than the work of one gifted individual.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | April 28, 2020 | 6.9 | 6b19ea29-1bf1-4adf-8f68-4b5f7a91a81a | Jemima Skala | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jemima-skala/ | |
The band’s third album is their most complex and compelling to date. Robin Pecknold’s songwriting retreats inward while around him dense folk compositions rise and fall on a massive scale. | The band’s third album is their most complex and compelling to date. Robin Pecknold’s songwriting retreats inward while around him dense folk compositions rise and fall on a massive scale. | Fleet Foxes: Crack-Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fleet-foxes-crack-up/ | Crack-Up | In the six years since Fleet Foxes’ last album, their former drummer has eclipsed them in the public eye by embracing a flamboyant persona fluent in sex, drugs, self-awareness, and sarcasm, like a not-so-subtle referendum on his previous gig. None of Josh Tillman’s jokes have been crueler than the unmistakable alliteration embedded in the title of the first Father John Misty album: Fear Fun. Considering the lengths folkies like Tillman, Justin Vernon, and Marcus Mumford have gone to ensure their beards no longer speak on their behalf, it’s all the more amazing that Robin Pecknold hasn’t tried to counteract the earnest, unglamorous perception of him and Fleet Foxes. He has actually embraced it.
While Fleet Foxes’ music has grown increasingly more complex and less crowd-pleasing, Pecknold’s personal trajectory has strangely aged in reverse—the old-soul serenity of Fleet Foxes gave way to the post-grad anxieties of Helplessness Blues, and now we have Crack-Up, which does not present recent Columbia enrollee Robin Pecknold in the most flattering light. But there’s a textured humanity in place of the assumed and implacable scare-quotes authenticity that served as Fleet Foxes’ personality prior. Crack-Up contains his most compelling writing to date because it’s so damn relatable in 2017—reacting and retreating inwards as people and institutions fail to meet the standards set in one’s head.
Columbia University has been an unexpectedly major influencer of indie aesthetics in the past decade due to its inextricable association with Vampire Weekend, whose self-titled debut serves as the most convincing collegiate promotional material ever constructed. Through the lens of Vampire Weekend, Columbia came off like a finishing school for the attractive, socially curious, and culturally omnivorous—laying out the unlimited possibilities and blindingly bright futures of an Ivy League education and New York City at the same time. Pecknold signed up for the exact opposite experience, “I Am a Rock” to Ezra Koenig’s Graceland, “sitting outside Dodge Hall, smoking, being mad,” and presumably glowering at the kids milling about with their polo shirts, pop songs, and crushes.
In an uncharacteristically low and atonal register, Pecknold mutters, “I’m all that I need and I’ll be till I’m through,” on Crack-Up’s opening suite. Even more so than Helplessness Blues, Crack-Up obliterates the superficially genial and harmless image so easily projected onto Fleet Foxes. At times, Pecknold threatens to be the most misanthropic, nontraditional student to wander an Ivy League quad since a bearded Rivers Cuomo hobbled through Harvard. Though Pecknold’s mood is startlingly desultory throughout most of the album, his view turns outward from the library stacks, adopting a dim outlook on the military police state (“Cassius, - ”), the trajectory of the nation (“Crack-Up,” “If You Need To, Keep Time on Me”), and his fellow man (“- Naiads, Cassadies”). On “Helplessness Blues,” Pecknold resigned to not being a special snowflake—a line that has gone from being precious to uncomfortably prescient—and Crack-Up likewise takes a condemnatory tone towards men who think they’re special enough to upset the designs of Mother Nature (“Fire can’t doubt its heat/Water can’t doubt its power/You’re not a gift… You’re not a flower”).
Helplessness Blues remains one of the decade’s most resonant expressions of millennial tension, years before “millennial” became an oppressive buzzword. But Pecknold’s anxieties were contrasted by music that signified the exact opposite of what it felt like to be financially insecure and technologically dominated in 2011. Likewise, Crack-Up supports the heft of Pecknold’s concerns by working on a massive scale that no band is really attempting in 2017, let alone able to accomplish. Fleet Foxes are still a folk act, though one that’s absorbed far-flung versions of the term. By the penultimate “I Should See Memphis,” it’s more than likely that Pecknold is referring to the one in Egypt rather than Tennessee, as Fleet Foxes integrate Gnawa music, chamber orchestration, pastoral psychedelia, and jazz modalities without ever exceeding their reach. On “Cassius, -” alone, they toggle between krautrock synthesizers, Middle Eastern string melodies, and Appalachian stomp-and-clap rhythms without making it obvious how this was a heretofore unfathomable triangulation.
And while there are enough Civil War and ancient Roman namedrops to rival The Monitor, these aren’t barriers set up by Pecknold, but entry points on an album that proudly flaunts its sonic and thematic solidarity. Though Crack-Up lacks a set-piece single like “White Winter Hymnal” or “Battery Kinzie,” I dare anyone to speak in non-illusory terms as to what those songs are actually about. The unfailing beauty and depth of Crack-Up ensure it’s always welcoming. Fleet Foxes have always been dense—“we have four people singing and five people playing instruments, and Skye [Skjelset] playing a bass pedal while he plays the guitar. That’s 10 things happening all at once,” Pecknold noted back in 2008. Nearly a decade later, Fleet Foxes have learned how to leverage that force into their album that can actually knock you on your ass. The explosive dynamic shifts of “I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar” and “Third of May / Odaigahara” lend the album’s longer suites a seismic force of a latter-day Swans record.
Put aside the inclination to strip it for singles, and Crack-Up’s generosity can feel bottomless. Rather than a show of contempt for the confines and craft of a three-minute pop song, Crack-Up is one of trust, applying its harmonic and textural gifts with the same free-flowing intuition as Joanna Newsom’s Ys or Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House. As with those—or any of the albums Pecknold and Dave Longstreth praised in a predictably misinterpreted Instagram conversation about indie rock’s “progressive” heyday—Crack-Up is music that requires an immense amount of skill and patience to make, and it can be off-putting particularly at a time when newer artists have simultaneously embraced chart pop and a return to the sonic and social values of the ’90s. As with Dirty Projectors’ “Keep Your Name,” Fleet Foxes sample their earlier selves on Crack-Up—“I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar” features a snippet of a high school a cappella group covering “White Winter Hymnal,” a move that could hit a sour note, a dismissal of one of Fleet Foxes’ best and most-beloved songs by saying, “Hey, a high schooler could play this.”
This is the easiest explanation, but it doesn’t feel like the correct one; given the subject matter of ““I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar,” this meta exercise becomes one of Crack-Up’s most legible and devastating emotional moments, demonstrating the chasmic difference between the wide-eyed optimism of a decade prior and Pecknold’s political and personal disillusion. This becomes more apparent on the album’s second half, particularly “Fool’s Errand” and the closing title track. Not only are they the most conventionally pleasant songs here, but they hint at Pecknold recognizing the futility of self-reliance and learning to once again embrace friendship and Fleet Foxes.
It’s incredibly tempting to compare Crack-Up and Pure Comedy, and almost unavoidable—both records are long and lack the pure pop moments of each artist’s past. They are almost excessively pretty in their orchestration, and follow a general narrative arc from total cynicism to the realization that each other is all we’ve really got. But Pure Comedy makes the game feel rigged to Tillman’s delight, a lecture where we’re all reliant on the professor for the answer key. Fittingly, Crack-Up takes the more rewarding perspective of the overwhelmed, but exhilarated student of the world—unsure about their place in the big picture, about the answers to life’s grand mysteries, but damn sure of their willingness to figure it out. | 2017-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Nonesuch | June 15, 2017 | 8.7 | 6b205ee6-fbd1-4ddc-9f77-be464d21c799 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On their first album in 14 years, art-metal giants Maynard James Keenan and Billy Howerdel swerve unexpectedly toward gloomy adult-alternative. | On their first album in 14 years, art-metal giants Maynard James Keenan and Billy Howerdel swerve unexpectedly toward gloomy adult-alternative. | A Perfect Circle: Eat the Elephant | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-perfect-circle-eat-the-elephant/ | Eat the Elephant | Maynard James Keenan knows he’s kept you waiting, and he’s not sorry in the slightest. The singer crafted Eat the Elephant, A Perfect Circle’s first record in 14 years, according to the same principles as his self-run winery and restaurant in rural Arizona: time, investment, focus, presence. In a recent Revolver interview, Keenan compared himself to an Italian mother cooking up family dinner slowly and painstakingly, hungry children be damned. “When I start to dig into the content, the melodies, the words,” he explained, his chief feeling is “Get the fuck out. Dinner’s not ready, get out. Need the kids out of the kitchen!” The man’s philosophy as a winemaker offers a similar insight: “Rather than making Metallica or Slayer wines, we’re making Pink Floyd wines. You’re not gonna get ’em in 15 seconds.” A decade and a half—now that’s more like it.
If Keenan is A Perfect Circle’s public face, Billy Howerdel—the group’s co-founder, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist—is its true puppetmaster, presiding over the drama from on high. A former guitar tech for David Bowie, Smashing Pumpkins, and Guns N’ Roses, Howerdel met Keenan when a then-unknown Tool opened for the iconic ska group Fishbone’s 1992 European tour, which he was working. He’s said that he originally conceived A Perfect Circle as a foray into female-fronted dream-pop, a pitch-black Cocteau Twins. The band took on a heavier shape once Keenan hopped aboard, but the old primordial opulence remained in Howerdel’s bombastic riffs, symphonic arrangements, and dread-laden atmospherics. A rotating cast of all-star session musicians (Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha, Queens of the Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen, Paz Lenchantin) further buttressed the grandeur, elevating a two-man operation to supergroup status almost instantly on 2000’s hit debut Mer De Noms, one of the most stirring, successful albums in modern hard-rock history. Their 2003 follow-up, The Thirteenth Step, was a psychedelic-leaning concept set about addiction that confirmed A Perfect Circle as both hitmakers and experimental heavyweights. (Their third album, Emotive, a collection of covers and reinterpreted material released in 2004, has more or less fallen by the wayside—which is unfortunate, since its lead single, “Passive,” is one of the finest crushers they’ve got on the books.)
With Eat the Elephant, Keenan and Howerdel have gone back to basics once more, though not in the way you might expect. As the first A Perfect Circle album recorded without special guests—save semi-anonymous major-label rock lifer Dave Sardy, who produced the set, and the mysterious “APC drum orchestra” credited with percussion—it re-establishes the co-founders’ chemistry as the band’s distinguishing trait. But where their previous three albums translated that dynamic into emotionally-charged metal, Eat the Elephant assumes the form of a gloomy adult-alternative record flush with grand pianos, classical strings, and slackened tempos. Were it not for Keenan’s crooned politicking and the odd outburst, one could easily mistake it for the work of the British piano-rock outfit Keane.
Eat the Elephant’s fatal flaws don’t take long to reveal themselves. The titular opening track more or less amounts to a hearty “fuck you” to the acolytes who’ve spent the past 14 years anticipating another powerhouse like 2000’s “Judith” or 2003’s “Weak and Powerless.” If the treacly pianos and plodding tempos don’t dampen diehards’ spirits, then the chorus certainly will. Keenan rattles off motivational cliches in an unintended, hilariously low-energy Shia LaBeouf impression: “Just take the stand,” he mewls, “Just take the swing/Just take the bite/Just go all in.” Previously-released singles “Disillusioned” and “TalkTalk” are similarly listless, relying on the driving verses for all momentum, only to undermine them with gratuitous, heavy-handed screeds against selfie culture (“We have been overrun by our animal desire/Addicts of the immediate keep us obedient and unaware/Feeding this mutation, this Pavlovian despair”) and that one holier-than-thou asshole glutting your Facebook feed (“Try braving the rain/Try lifting the stone/Try extending a hand/Try walkin’ your talk or GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAAAAY!”). That the band have framed Eat the Elephant as a reflection on the importance of being present only makes the songs’ execution more befuddling: if A Perfect Circle wants listeners to walk away from the album vowing to “put the silicon obsession down” and reconnect with the world around them, then why top-load it with bloated ballads that are more likely to put them to sleep?
Eat the Elephant’s extended “Old Man Yells at iCloud” bit, however grating, isn’t without its silver lining. A quarter-century into his career, Keenan has yet to falter where vocal technique is concerned: The guy could read the tax code in that honeyed falsetto and it’d still sound like a whispered revelation. Between the hairpin melodic turns, deep-throated runs, and silky melismas, his showing on mid-album cut “By and Down the River” is downright Olympian. The effortless choir-boy harmonies coursing through “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”—a sardonic, power-pop pep-rally heralding the coming apocalypse—supply a much-needed sugar spike. And while the piano-driven palette demotes Howerdel’s epic guitar solos to a supporting role throughout most of the album, “Feathers” and “Delicious” are pleasant exceptions. In a wasteland like this, you take what you can get. | 2018-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG | April 23, 2018 | 4.9 | 6b211ae0-4d2b-4fd9-9e3e-27f8a717c9f9 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | |
CD/DVD set pairs dark and proggy new music from Plaid with videos from frequent collaborator Bob Jaroc. | CD/DVD set pairs dark and proggy new music from Plaid with videos from frequent collaborator Bob Jaroc. | Plaid: Greedy Baby | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9173-greedy-baby/ | Greedy Baby | It's a curious thing when electronic artists raised in 12-inch DJ culture opt for long-form composition. You can imagine, say, the force driving Goldie to create "Mother" had something to do with him wanting to be taken seriously as an artist and seeing how far the genre he was working with could be stretched. The same thoughts were surely running through Pete Townshend's head in the second half of the 60s. These impulses have led to some interesting music and boundaries being pushed a few feet; they've also led to large swaths of wasted time.
While Plaid's newest record Greedy Baby, a CD/DVD "AV Album" created in collaboration with video artist Bob Jaroc, isn't properly a single composition (there are gaps of silence between the nine tracks), it certainly feels like a long-form piece. It's partly how the music is presented and partly the uniform sound palette, but it has even more to do with tracks that don't want to stand on their own. All seem to exist in relation to one another, and nothing pops its head out to say, "I'm a single, listen to me first." This being the case, you have to judge Greedy Baby by how taking in its 51 minutes in a single sitting feels.
There's a marked prog vibe early on, evident on the second track "I Citizen the Loathesome". Twinkling synths that sound like a digital approximation of a harpsichord introduce a theme, which gradually builds in tempo until a faux-pipe organ and an actual chorus of wordless voices join in. The scales, chords, and tempo changes suggest widescreen pomp at every turn, building to a distorted guitar-like sound and the massed choir intoning apocalypse. Unfortunately, the grandiosity leads nowhere in particular, and when the music box intro of "The Launching of Big Face" comes next, we're back to the same low-level, vaguely anxious mood. That vibe continues with minor variations on "ZN Zero", which manages at least a neat Escheresqe trick whereby it seems to be constantly ascending.
"The Return of Super Barrio" is where the record finally takes off, as humor and playfulness seep in. Steel drums, a loping acoustic bass integrated with programmed beats, and a reasonably catchy tune combine to suggest a mariachi band performing on one of Jupiter's moons. From there we go to "E.M.R", which stretches on for 10 minutes but feels considerably longer, with its indistinct bells and electronic percussion echoing endlessly into space. It's here that you begin to suspect that that the music isn't necessarily meant to stand on its own, and that the video is an essential part of the work.
The visuals, then. "War Dialer" opens the DVD on a high note. The audio is a collage culled from a hacking program dialing random numbers in search of a vulnerable modem. As women answer and speak in puzzlement to the dialing machine, a circular array of graphics moves in time with the voices. There's nothing to it, really, but the piece is clever in its simplicity; same goes for the animated line drawing that accompanies "The Launching of Big Face", which dances and contorts itself into some beautiful shapes and makes the uninspired Philip Glassisms of the track seem worthwhile.
A couple uninspiring videos are little more than edited assemblages of cities at night, hoping to evoke a sense of dread in slow pans and quick montages among graffiti-covered alleys and traffic streaming beneath lit buildings. To sit through the entirely of "E.M.R.", a mostly dark screen with layers of dim light floating around, is to wish desperately for a temporary infusion of a heavily disorienting drug that might make it interesting.
So we're stuck with a few nice moments in a work that resists being pulled apart. The dull patches are particularly depressing when you realize how much work went into them for so little payoff. That's the risk with these big, long-form statements, with so much invested by both the artists and the audience. When you're sitting through them and they don't quite work, you become aware of how painfully short life really is. | 2006-07-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2006-07-10T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | July 10, 2006 | 5.8 | 6b21a7c1-2e0d-43a1-85ef-da722e5e193e | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Eno's new ambient piece readily slots along works like the dreamlike Thursday Afternoon and 2012’s stately Lux. It feels the most pensive of his ambient works, flowing across 54 unbroken minutes. | Eno's new ambient piece readily slots along works like the dreamlike Thursday Afternoon and 2012’s stately Lux. It feels the most pensive of his ambient works, flowing across 54 unbroken minutes. | Brian Eno: Reflection | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22714-reflection/ | Reflection | Ambient music is a funny thing. As innocuous as it may seem on the surface, it can often be seen as an intrusion, an irritant. Muzak annoyed as many people as it mellowed, to the point where Ted Nugent tried to buy the company just to shutter it. When Brian Eno teamed with guitarist Robert Fripp (planting the seeds that would lead to his epochal Ambient series), the duo played a concert in Paris in May of 1975 that eschewed their Roxy Music and King Crimson fame and was subsequently met with catcalls, whistles, walkouts and a near-riot.
Forty years later, Eno’s ambient works have drifted from misunderstood bane to canonical works. Eno’s long career has taken him from glam-rock demiurge to the upper stratospheres of stadium rock, from the gutters of no wave to the unclassifiable terrains of Another Green World, but every few years he gets pulled back into ambient’s creative orbit. And while last year’s entry The Ship suggested a new wrinkle, wherein Eno’s art songs inhabited and wandered the space of his ambient work like a viewer in an art gallery, Reflection retreats from that hybrid and more readily slots along works like the dreamlike Thursday Afternoon and 2012’s stately Lux.
Like those aforementioned albums, Reflection is a generative piece. Eno approaches it less like an capital-A Artist, exerting his will and ego on the music, and more like a scientist conducting an experiment. He establishes a set of rules, puts a few variables into motion and then logs the results. Reflection opens with a brief melodic figure and slowly evolves from there over the course of one 54-minute piece. It’s not unlike the opening notes of Music for Airport’s “1/1,” with Robert Wyatt’s piano replaced by what might be a xylophone resonating from underwater. Each note acts like a pebble dropped into a pond, sending out ever widening ripples that slowly decay, but not before certain tones linger and swell until they more closely resemble drones. Listen closer and certain small frequencies emerge and flutter higher like down feathers in a draft.
Around the 18-minute mark, one of those wafting frequencies increases in mass and the piece turns shrill for an instant before re-settling. Another brief blip occurs a half-hour in, like a siren on a distant horizon. Between these moments, the interplay of tones is sublime, reminiscent at times of famous jazz vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson’s weightless solos, time-stretched until they seem to be emanating from the moon rather than the earth. As smooth and unperturbed as Eno’s ambient pieces tend to be, these small events feel seismic in scale, even if they are short-lived.
Scale becomes the operative word for Reflection. While the physical editions of the album last just under an hour, Eno conceived of the piece to be the most realized version of his ambient music yet, one without parameters or end. Around 51 minutes in, the music starts to slowly recede from our ears, gradually returning to silence. But there’s a version of the piece for Apple TV and iOS that presents a visual component as well as a sonic version of Reflection that’s ever-changing and endless. As the lengthy press release the accompanied the album noted: “This music would unfold differently all the time–‘like sitting by a river’: it’s always the same river, but it’s always changing.” In this instance, reviewing the actual album feels like taking measure of that river from a ship window; you can sense more changes occurring just beyond its borders.
Eno’s ambient albums have never seemed utilitarian in the way of many other ambient and new age works, but naming the album Reflection indicates that he sees this as a functional release, in some manner. Eno himself calls it an album that “seems to create a psychological space that encourages internal conversation.” It feels the most pensive of his ambient works, darker than Thursday Afternoon. Playing it back while on holiday, it seemed to add a bit more gray clouds to otherwise sunny days. Maybe that’s just an aftereffect of looking back on the previous calendar year and perceiving a great amount of darkness, or else looking forward to 2017 and feeling full of dread at what’s still to come. | 2017-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | January 4, 2017 | 7.7 | 6b24fe3b-55fa-4223-b23b-ec57b58c7a6f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Chaz Bundick reached into his archives for this collection of singles written around the time of his debut, Causers of This. It allows you to think "big picture" not only about Bundick, but the role of production and atmosphere in general. | Chaz Bundick reached into his archives for this collection of singles written around the time of his debut, Causers of This. It allows you to think "big picture" not only about Bundick, but the role of production and atmosphere in general. | Toro y Moi: June 2009 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16520-toro-y-moi-june-2009/ | June 2009 | Chaz Bundick spent 2011 enduring a barrage of subliminal criticism, but other than that, he had a pretty good year. It just wasn't one that gave him much incentive to get retrospective: Whenever his excellent sophomore LP Underneath the Pine and the subsequent Freaking Out EP were deemed "progressions," it felt like backhanded praise for the artistic distance he was creating from Causers of This, an album that's become weirdly underrated as its chillaxed aesthetic is seemingly blamed for everything from the death of indie rock to LeBron James' laissez-faire attitude in crunch time. So, at the very least, you have to admire the audacity of Bundick dipping into his personal stash for June 2009, a collection of singles written around the same time as Causers of This.
While they're not the proverbial naked baby pictures, June 2009 doesn't dispute the idea of Bundick as someone who ultimately profited from our collective deadbeat summer at the outset. You sense that Bundick had a clear idea of the kind of songs he wanted to write, but there's also the enormous strides he was yet to make as a producer, as an arranger, as a full-blown artist. It's not too hard to view the propulsive, clean melodic lines of "Dead Pontoon" (his strongest early single) as a preview for Underneath the Pine rid of that record's newfound Eurocentric influences. But early on, Bundick used his immediate surroundings as topical inspiration for mundane songs: vehicles, geographic proper names, "Girl Problems". Considering the self-consciousness that's crept into his artistic process, it's impossible to imagine him ever being in a mindset where he'd write something like "Ektelon", an incredibly literal recollection of a river tubing expedition.
As expected, Ariel Pink is namedropped as the major influence, but when Bundick fails to hit some hilariously amateur falsetto notes on "Best Around" or "Take the L to Leave", it's more reminiscent of Rivers Cuomo's strangely fearless Alone tapes-- this isn't the work of a visionary weirdo but rather a guy who sees benefits in the mere archival and procedural aspects of creation. The immediacy and economy of Bundick's songwriting extended to his recording at the time as well. The songs are very short and structurally unfussy, while production values are basically nil, relying on the kinds of tricks familiar to anyone fucking around with their first four-track: doubling vocals in octaves, letting the entire mix submerge under the bass, the R&B and pop of one's youth channeled through Casio presets.
With that in mind, June 2009 almost has to be chronologically sequenced in light of just how jarring "Sad Sams" turns out to be. Up to that point, it's mostly hummable, punchy guitar music with some bubble-funk affectations, pleasant if not particularly unique amongst the scores of lo-fi artists doing the same thing. The roller-rink pop of "Drive South" hints at Bundick starting to get a grasp for rhythm and texture but "Sad Sams" sounds like the first clean break-- the drum machines are still crudely recorded and might be overcompensating in terms of volume, but you can hear in the slick harmonies and wobbly arrangement that it's where Toro Y Moi really started to take shape. Immediately thereafter, "Talamak" offers a means of direct comparison: Both the "First Version" and the one that appeared on Causers of This were subject to Dilla-esque warping and tape degradation, but the latter showed evidence of Bundick's incredible progress as a sound crafter. The pops and hisses sounded very intentional and smartly deployed, whereas here, "Talamak" just sounds like it was dubbed to an old cassette.
Still, there's no getting around the fact that June 2009 acquires most of its value, if not all of it, in context with Causers of This and Underneath the Pine. But it allows you to think "big picture" not only about Bundick, but the role of production and atmosphere in general. The most common criticism of Toro Y Moi is that it's more "vibes" than "songs," which assumes a false binary. Don't get me wrong, I love me a raw and dead-sober Steve Albini production, but it would completely negate the effect of "Blessa", where Bundick's woozy, almost drunken ambience coincided with that song's bittersweet resignation-- you could easily envision someone in a humid South Carolina apartment, beer in hand, shirt untucked, at the end of a long day in the office. By the same token, I wouldn't want to hear a Toro Y Moi remix of a Bill Callahan song. The bustling anti-chillwave cottage industry could certainly look at June 2009 as a "gotcha" moment for Bundick-- as far as typical "songwriting" metrics go, it's pretty thin. But I say that's bullshit, and June 2009 in its own way makes an even better case for Toro Y Moi as a band that may have initially benefited from good timing, but also has the ambition and learning curve to keep improving on an already impressive catalog. | 2012-04-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-04-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Carpark | April 24, 2012 | 6 | 6b2a3a44-fb46-4f6a-981f-7b70f69af3a3 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The disco-punk trio’s new record leans more heavily on synthesizers and drum pads, but stops just shy of redefining the group as a synth-pop band. | The disco-punk trio’s new record leans more heavily on synthesizers and drum pads, but stops just shy of redefining the group as a synth-pop band. | Shopping: All or Nothing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shopping-all-or-nothing/ | All or Nothing | The members of Shopping would be ideal candidates for fitness instructors. On their three albums to date, the U.K. disco-punk trio have proven themselves more than qualified for the job: Their music is all sweat and swagger, a breathless regimen of pulse-pounding rhythm and hectoring directives that both berate you into thinking you’re not doing enough while inspiring you to do better. And after subtly upgrading their scrappy sound on 2018’s The Official Body—and graduating from the DIY circuit to international festival stages—Shopping are more vigorously shaking up their program. But while the group’s fourth album, All of Nothing, bears all the surface sparkle and smooth contours of a brand new elliptical apparatus, the workout is every bit as demanding as before.
Shopping have reached the same crossroads many of their post-punk forbears hit around the mid-’80s—i.e., the choice between wrapping their polemical discourse in more pop-friendly packaging to win over the masses, or resigning themselves to a life on the fringes spent preaching to the choir. All or Nothing attempts to have it both ways, amplifying and revelling in the perennial tension between escapist pleasure and anti-capitalist critique at the core of so much classic post-punk. The new record leans more heavily on synthesizers and drum pads than any previous Shopping album, but stops just shy of redefining them as a synth-pop band. After all, this group has always functioned as a pure musical democracy, its constituent parts—Andrew Milk’s piston-like drumming, Billy Easter’s deep, juddering bass, Rachel Aggs’ wonderfully squiggly guitar—locking together like a jigsaw puzzle, with no single component overwhelming the others. But the added textures invest the group’s invectives with heightened drama. When Aggs demands, “Why don’t you show some initiative?” on the prickly “Initiative,” she seems to implicate herself—so the group puts her words into action and redirects the song skyward on a synth-powered motorik thrust.
A big reason why Shopping adapt so easily to their new surroundings is that they’ve never been an angry, confrontational sort of post-punk band. For all their wiry energy and staccato sloganeering, Shopping have always embraced pop melody and absurdist humor, and All or Nothing’s more polished production pushes those qualities to the fore: On “Follow Me,” Aggs combats surveillance culture by cheekily seducing a CCTV camera (“Follow me/I’ll make it worth it!”), while the consumerist blues of “For Your Pleasure” imagines an alternate ’80s where the B-52’s steered clear of the Love Shack. But even in the absence of electronic embellishments, Shopping remain a marvel of human technology: Layering no fewer than three different competing chorus lines atop its hand-clapped punk-funk beat, “Expert Advice” is both an emblem of information-overload culture and a model of spartan efficiency. And on the equally lean and propulsive “Body Clock,” the band approach peak intensity while addressing the sheer exhaustion of staying alive in 2020: “I need something to calm my nerves,” Aggs sings, “I’ve just got to keep up the pace.” It’s the sort of admission that suggests the onset of a panic attack, or a full-on nervous breakdown. But as the song’s incessant rhythm affirms, relief is just a dancefloor away.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | FatCat | February 10, 2020 | 7.8 | 6b2b952e-e93e-4b1c-aa32-17e571b1a153 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Bob Mould was an angry young man in Hüsker Dü, and anger abounds on the empty spaces and meandering melodies of his 1989 solo LP Workbook. This expanded reissue includes a live set recorded in Chicago in 1989. | Bob Mould was an angry young man in Hüsker Dü, and anger abounds on the empty spaces and meandering melodies of his 1989 solo LP Workbook. This expanded reissue includes a live set recorded in Chicago in 1989. | Bob Mould: Workbook 25 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19051-bob-mould-workbook-25/ | Workbook 25 | “Sunspots”—the gentle, two-minute instrumental that opens Bob Mould’s 1989 solo debut Workbook—may be the softest, saddest “fuck you” in recorded history. Still stinging from the acrimonious breakup Hüsker Dü in 1988, the singer/guitarist formed a new trio to replace the old, this one with bassist Tony Maimone and drummer Anton Fier (who, among other accomplishments, served together briefly in Pere Ubu). That caliber of rhythm section had the potential to be at least as loud as Hüsker Dü’s. Instead, Mould turned down and turn his back on punk. “I sensed there was a part of the punk audience that would feel betrayed,” Mould writes unapologetically in his autobiography See a Little Light, “but it was important to move beyond the sound of the past eight years.” At the time, Mould was living in rural Minnesota, not far from an Amish settlement. Workbook isn’t exactly a work of entrenched technophobia—come the new millennium, Mould would even go so far as to dabble in electronica—but its hushed tone and introspective air reflects a sense of isolation that’s bucolic if not exactly idyllic.
Mould was an angry young man in Hüsker Dü, and anger abounds on Workbook (which is getting an expanded reissue in honor of its 25th anniversary, Workbook 25). Here, though, it’s dispersed among empty spaces and meandering melodies. There’s a honeycombed hollowness to tracks like “Heartbreak a Stranger” and “Sinners and Their Repentances", both of them overlaid with languid jangle and Mould’s newly naked moan. After years of straining to be heard over Hüsker’s din, he sounds almost startled by the potency and range of his own voice; the same goes for the themes of his lyrics, which don’t shy away from an encroaching spirituality that would eventuality lead to Mould’s religious awakening years later. But for every folky, free-flowing rumination is a song such as “Dreaming, I Am", which veers between a driving beat, delicate guitar, and a deceptively corrosive mood.
“See a Little Light,” the song after which Mould named his book, was Workbook’s lead single. Accordingly, it’s the album’s brimming cup of pop hooks. Still, it’s far more drifting and complex than it seems at first, pivoting around tangles of chords while gliding frictionlessly across the glassy playing of cellist Jane Scarpantoni (who’d appeared on R.E.M.’s Green and would go on to play with everyone from Nirvana to Bruce Springsteen to Swans). The widespread use of cello throughout Workbook is one of its more striking tonal choices; Mould originally wrote those parts for synthesizer, and their translation into chamber instrument threads the album with a haunting, melancholy warmth—especially on “Sinners", where Scarpantoni duels with Mould like a demonic temptation.
Hüsker Dü was, in many ways, a massively distorted folk band—but Workbook isn’t just acoustic Mould like “Too Far Down”, Candy Apple Grey with the gunk scraped off. “Brasilia Crossed with Trenton”, which Mould says came to him one morning as a “full realized dreamsong," is seven minutes of imagistic, shanty-like folk-rock, but it’s hard to imagine its soul-spilling excess and sprawl ever fitting onto a Hüsker album, even one as ambitious as Zen Arcade. The problem is, Mould takes catharsis to a new dimension on Workbook, but that leaves subtle cuts like “Brasilia” and “Lonely Afternoon” undefended by Mould’s most formidable weapon: a walloping chorus. He still wields them on “See a Little Light”—which boasts one of most searing choruses of his career—as well as on “Poison Years”, which crams tender twang, roiling angst, anthemic stamina, and squealing showmanship into a single song. All the elements of Mould’s songwriting are on parade on “Poison Years”, but they’re lumped together in odd, lopsided combinations.
“Poison Years” also shows that Mould wasn’t entirely ready to strum gentle into that good night. Along with Workbook’s darkest track, the venom-dripping “Wishing Well”, it vengefully kicks on the distortion pedal as if it were an old toy that triggered memories of a troubled childhood. The shift is more than simply sonic, as Mould himself seems equally electrified when he lets his amps to scream. One of the bonus tracks of Workbook 25 is the bouncy, catchy “All Those People Know,” the B-side of the “See a Little Light Single”—and it makes perfect sense that it was omitted from the original album release, seeing as how it could easily pass for latter-day Hüsker Dü.
The rest of Workbook 25’s bonus tracks comprise a live set recorded at the Metro in Chicago in 1989. The live version of “Sunspots” is echoing and effected, sounding in that regard almost like a John Martyn song. Mould’s affinity for vintage English folk-rock is also evident in his faithful yet fiery rendition of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “Shoot Out the Lights.” (He would eventually record Richard Thompson’s “Turning of the Tide” for the 1994 tribute album Beat the Retreat). But it’s “If You’re True” that’s the hidden gem of Workbook 25. A song that Mould has admitted to being a swipe at his former Hüsker Dü bandmates Grant Hart and Greg Norton—“No more friends that lie and hide / No more games to play to get to know the answer,” he rages—the Metro version of “If You’re True” is unleashed with riotous righteousness plus a clutch of country-rock licks that come together to sound uncannily like the formula Uncle Tupelo was about to make famous. It’s far more spirited than the drum-machine-backed 1988 demo version, but Mould’s grudges didn’t fully carry over to his previous group’s music. He opens those fresh wounds long to encore with three Hüsker Dü songs: “Hardly Getting Over It”, “Celebrated Summer”, and “Makes No Sense at All”. As Mould states in See a Little Light, when Workbook came out “there was a concerted effort not only to divorce myself from my past, but also not to live off of my past accomplishments”. Yet he performs his Hüsker set reverently, intimately, almost in awe of the life they’ve taken on.
While Mould seems liberated by his newfound quietude, he also strains at it. In the video for “See a Little Light” he thrashes and hammers at his strings; at one point, spit flies from his lips. It’s as though he alone can hear the noise behind his clean-toned, cello-swaddled songs, that theoretical roar that his old group would have brought to them. The pent-up force finally breaks free on Workbook’s final track, “Whichever Way the Wind Blows", a lurching, churning, borderline grungy rager full of haywire guitar and Mould’s most unhinged vocal performance since his SST days. Sure enough, Mould, Maimone, and Fier would quickly crank themselves up to paint-peeling levels on Black Sheets of Rain, their 1990 follow-up to Workbook; from there, Mould’s 90s group Sugar would return Mould triumphantly to his punchy, distorted roots. But the urgency and vigor he packs into the unplugged punk of Workbook—the frequent knuckle-scraping attack of his strumming, his refusal to whisper or withhold—are what make the album a testament to tension rather than hesitance. | 2014-02-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-02-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Omnivore | February 27, 2014 | 8 | 6b341f8d-8be2-45ff-835e-f9b9eea3838c | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
The experimental trumpeter Nate Wooley is known for disassembling his instrument and making music from its various parts. Here, he pays homage to one of his mentors with epic, rock-infused tumult. | The experimental trumpeter Nate Wooley is known for disassembling his instrument and making music from its various parts. Here, he pays homage to one of his mentors with epic, rock-infused tumult. | Nate Wooley: Argonautica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22002-argonautica/ | Argonautica | After learning that Nate Wooley is a trumpeter-composer given to disassembling his horn and then blowing through its various parts, you might peg him as an avant-garde jazz instrumentalist with a fondness for John Cage. But charting his influences doesn’t pin down Wooley’s sound—or, rather, his collection of sounds. Wooley’s toolkit includes a raging, pitch-free thrum that has an ambient quality, even as his instrument is vibrating madly. Sometimes the music is driven by the clanking of his trumpet’s valves, which creates a percussive quality. And he also strings together “regular” notes with authority; recent albums of original tunes and mainstream jazz covers have found the musician merging conceptual experiments with more traditional forms. In the space of the same song, he can provide memorable lines of melody over a swinging beat, then charge off into innovations that expand your understanding of his instrument.
Argonautica capitalizes on both these strengths. Its format–a single track that plays out over 43 minutes—allows Wooley to indulge his many influences within a compositional structure that feels expertly designed. Here, after a brief intro, we find a freewheeling opening section, followed by a meditative middle portion that toys with drone, balladry, and stray interjections of electronic noise. An energetic group finale adds psych-rock tumult. Each major subsection lasts about 15 minutes, and the overall fast/slow/fast construction flows like a more traditional three-movement piece.
Inside each movement, Wooley’s potent group splits into duos and trios, teasing out new dynamics. The band he’s brought together is stacked with proven names from the contemporary scene: Devin Gray and Rudy Royston share drum duties; Cory Smythe handles piano while Jozef Dumoulin works the Fender Rhodes. (Smythe and Wooley have worked together previously as part of an orchestra led by Anthony Braxton.)
One measure of Wooley’s confidence in his writing is that he doesn’t insist on being the first brass player heard on the album. That would be veteran cornet player Ron Miles, a mentor of Wooley’s. (This piece is also dedicated to him.) Miles favors a more consistently lyrical sound than Wooley, but he also serves up some high-intensity exclamations during Argonautica’s opening. Wooley’s first feature on trumpet climaxes during the album’s 10th minute, in gales of howling, scraping tones that overtake the ensemble’s sound. The contrast between the keyboardists is consistently inspired, with Smythe’s acoustic piano often pounding like a third drum. During the closing section, Wooley’s trumpet and Miles’ cornet fuse in harmonies that soar over the minimalist groove of the drummers.
Wooley swiped his album title from the ancient Greek poem of the same name. And while the trumpeter doesn’t state an explicit narrative to go along with the music, it’s easy to think of the Argonauts sailing off course, buffeted by the final section’s dreamy melodic drift and harsh rhythmic thrust. Argonautica covers an epic amount of ground without seeming to labor too hard, with an impressive amount of abandon and plenty of poise. | 2016-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Firehouse 12 | June 14, 2016 | 7.7 | 6b3ff2df-b47c-4473-98ad-10ebcd61aada | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
On Snoop Dogg’s 14th studio album Coolaid, he returns to hip-hop as both a resident and a tourist. | On Snoop Dogg’s 14th studio album Coolaid, he returns to hip-hop as both a resident and a tourist. | Snoop Dogg: Coolaid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22167-coolaid/ | Coolaid | Over the decades, we’ve watched Snoop Dogg go through nearly as many costume changes as Madonna. Gangbanger Snoop, No Limit Southern-rap Snoop, pop star Snoop, “Drop It Like It’s Hot” Snoop, “Sensual Seduction” Snoop, “Snoop Lion”—sometimes those sonic and aesthetic remixes have worked, other times not so much. With Coolaid, arguably Snoop’s first *real *hip-hop album in half a decade, we find his reinvention back into “Rapper Snoop” to be a bit wobbly.
On 2011’s Doggumentary, it sounded like Snoop was losing steam; much of it felt like a rehashing of previous bad ideas. “Snoop Lion” emerged shortly thereafter. By 2014, he reverted back from “Lion” to “Dogg” and dropped the plush party-funk of Bush, which toed the line of hip-hop without actually crossing it. Here on *Coolaid *we return to the Snoop D-O-Double-G, the hard, cold rhymer we met on “Deep Cover.” He hinted at this return to ferocity on the track “One Shot One Kill” with Jon Connor, from Dr. Dre’s 2015 Compton project. That song was like a turning point-turned-duel between the old Snoop and the new Snoop, and thankfully the old Snoop won.
With Coolaid, though, we reach another crossroads. A lot has changed since Rapper Snoop was at the forefront, so there is much more for him to prove here. Before he can let his skills speak for themselves, he has to first declare his status on the aptly titled opener “Legend.” Producer Bongo brings a trappish sort of beat, the kind of thing might have served another current rapper better; it’s perfect to recite three or four garbled words over. But Snoop opts instead to recite a very clear and dull laundry list of ways he's legendary. He shows us rather than tells us that on “Ten Toes Down,” where we get classic Snoop in rare form over a West Coast-leaning beat by Los. Just Blaze makes some odd production choices on “Super Crip,” which sounds like Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” at the top before erupting into quintessential Blaze by the middle. Snoop rides those waves fairly adeptly.
Pseudo title track “Coolaid Man” targets all the neophyte soundalike rappers, and at certain points you can almost hear the greys growing in Snoop’s goatee. It’s not that he’s *lying *about the extent of his influence, but for a legend who is so technically capable at seamlessly switching styles, the finger-wagging isn’t necessary. Junior partner Wiz Khalifa pops up twice: on the lukewarm “Oh Na Na” and the marginally better “Kush Ups,” where the two play perfectly well off each other’s energy. “Double Tap” carries a classic tune with E-40 and Jazze Pha, but lines like “slide off in yo DMs” make it the dadbod anthem of the year. “What If” saves the #TBT day, as fellow elder Suga Free and Snoop both bless the track with immaculate convertible-ride music.
Then, when you least expect it, “Revolution” comes, and it's almost as if the rest of the 19 indifferent tracks on the excessively long Coolaid don’t even matter. Just Blaze brings a soaring, immaculate beat (on par with Beyoncé’s “Freedom”) and lo and behold, fiery Snoop arrives. The lyrics, the cadence, the anger, the pure and convincing “fuck you I'm a legend” energy. It all sounds so believable, so why did it take so long for Coolaid to get there? An entire project full of Snoop chanting that he's the greatest, and all it took was one isolated track to prove it. | 2016-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Entertainment One / Doggy Style | July 25, 2016 | 5.8 | 6b43c2c4-a0b5-4388-bbe4-de217d22ce01 | Kathy Iandoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kathy-iandoli/ | null |
Two archival releases highlight the range of John Coltrane’s late-period drummer: one a fiery free jazz duo album, the other a newly unearthed concert recording that captures him in a more relaxed mode. | Two archival releases highlight the range of John Coltrane’s late-period drummer: one a fiery free jazz duo album, the other a newly unearthed concert recording that captures him in a more relaxed mode. | Rashied Ali / Frank Lowe / Rashied Ali Quintet: Duo Exchange: Complete Sessions / First Time Out: Live at Slugs 1967 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rashied-ali-quintet-rashied-ali-fran-first-time-out-live-at-slugs-1967-duo-exchange-complete-sessions/ | First Time Out: Live at Slugs 1967 / Duo Exchange: Complete Sessions | When Elvin Jones left the John Coltrane Quartet in March 1966, signaling the end of the postwar era’s most formidable jazz band, Rashied Ali found himself in an enviable position, as Coltrane’s sole drummer. Ali was a 32-year-old with strong avant-garde credentials but little mainstream name recognition when Coltrane brought him into the fold for the Meditations sessions the year prior, as a second drummer to deepen the foundation for the saxophone titan’s late-career explorations in free rhythm and tonality. “I can really choose just about any direction at just about any time in the confidence that it will be compatible with what he’s doing,” Coltrane said of the young drummer, who favored a non-linear approach to time-keeping. If Jones was as dynamic and powerful as a freight train, Ali roved at will like a forcefield, protean and ever-shifting.
One day in February 1967, just 5 months before Coltrane’s death, the saxophonist took Ali to New Jersey’s storied Van Gelder Studio to record, without any other members of the band. The stark horn-and-drums-only format was all but unimaginable at the time, and the resulting album, Interstellar Space, sat on the shelf for seven years before its first release in 1974. But the dizzying and intense music the duo recorded that day would prove highly influential in the decades to come, inspiring the next generation of free jazz musicians to turn the duo into a sort of standard format for the genre. When the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff asked free jazz pianist Borah Bergman why this duo format became so prevalent over the years, he deliberated over his answer for days, then responded via fax with one word: “economics.”
The economics of jazz shifted as the ‘60s neared its end, as the music was beset on all sides by popular genres like rock and soul, and a club culture that didn’t always support musically progressive artists. Ali saw the tide turning, understanding that jazz artists would need to be self-reliant if they were to survive. He established his own infrastructure for the lean years to come, including a venue, Ali’s Alley in New York, and a label, tellingly called Survival Records. The imprint’s first release was Duo Exchange, an incandescent session between Ali and tenor saxophonist Frank Lowe, recorded after Interstellar Space but released a year before. After shuttering in 2009 and relaunching last year, Survival is reissuing Duo Exchange with an hour of additional material from the original session, and a heretofore unknown recording of Ali performing live with an ad hoc group in 1967.
Duo Exchange’s status as one of the most caustic free jazz albums was assured well before Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore put it in his personal top ten for Grand Royal magazine in 1996. Lowe might have been new on the scene in the early ‘70s, but his afterburner of a horn on recording sessions for Alice Coltrane and Don Cherry showed he was a formidable sparring partner. For long stretches of the set, Ali and Lowe burn like a dragon dueling with a flamethrower. When Lowe’s needling high frequencies strafe across an alternate take of “Movement III,” it suggests a durational outpouring of fury. But the reissue also reveals moments of quiet and nuance from the sessions, presented here in their entirety.
Amid his piercing overtones, Lowe’s reed playing sometimes brings to mind Coltrane’s famous “sheets of sound,” working to exhaust every possibility in his cascading runs. He seems to reach for a pure sound beyond notes per se, reflecting the squalor of early-‘70s New York through his horn. His tone is piercing, jarring, wearying, like the brakes on a train, an overheated tea kettle, a feverish baby. Ali is there with Lowe’s every breath, shattering the rhythm around him and propelling him to even greater extremes.
Work your way past the shrieks and squeals and other qualities come to the fore—like Lowe’s hushed, vibrato-heavy tone midway through “Movement I,” or his fluttering against Ali’s shaken bells on the tranquil “Movement IV,” an oasis from the onslaught. Lowe even does his best ballad playing on the subtle “Movement V,” with Ali slipping in and around him, elbowing the drum skin to elicit strange new tones. After all the searing music that has come before, it makes for a sweet finale.
Ali worked at the physical boundaries of the music, as he once told the Jazz Times: “Say we play a standard...we try to exhaust the tune. It's like all of a sudden gravity don't work no more.” Duo Exchange is a study in exhaustion, of that last two miles of the New York marathon, the 12th round of a heavyweight fight. It’s intense and cathartic, with little to diminish its harshness some forty years on. But it also has a sense of reverence: the sound of two men fighting against the city around them and pushing toward something new.
The exhaustive quality of Duo Exchange also comes into play with First Time Out: Live at Slugs 1967. Found on two 7” reels of tape in Ali’s archive, it’s the lone evidence of a May 1967 performance at a notorious downtown Manhattan jazz dive. The liner notes suggest it was a last-minute booking, perhaps even unrehearsed. There’s no photo of the quintet that convened that night, and nothing to suggest they ever played together again. Live at Slugs is only the third known recording of Dewey Johnson, who played trumpet, in existence anywhere. Saxophonist Ramon Morris would later record a jazz-funk album, but here he is in Coltrane mode, taking long, winding solos.
If you’re familiar with Ali in the context of iconoclastic giants like Coltrane or Keiji Haino, hearing him in a more relaxed and supportive role on Live at Slugs is startling. His cymbal work skitters and creates waves around the tunes, and he lays back frequently. Rather than the breathless sprints of Duo, the group exhausts each tune at a flâneur’s pace, offering only brief glimpses of the incandescence of Duo Sessions. The drunken meander of “Ballade” would remain in Ali’s repertoire for decades to come, while “Study For As-Salaam Alikum” would reappear in a tighter, transfigured form on another Ali album from the early ‘70s. But most of the other music would not be heard again. The tapes suggest that the recorder was set near Ali’s kit, as there’s times when the pianist Stanley Cowell and bassist Reggie Johnson can scarcely be made out.
Murkiness aside, Live at Slugs is a fascinating snapshot of what turned out to be an idyllic moment in jazz history. The brutal race riots of Newark and Detroit and the “Long, Hot Summer” were still two months away, a string of cataclysmic events in urban epicenters that would undermine black communities and hasten “white flight.” Coltrane was still alive, as was his fellow free jazz firebrand Albert Ayler. It would be another 5 years before Lee Morgan was shot to death inside of Slugs’ Saloon. These two reissues capture that hard shift in economics: a quintet in the summer of ‘67 exploring at its own pace and a lean, snarling jazz duo just five years on, fighting for survival.
Buy: First Time Out: Live at Slugs 1967 - Rough Trade, Duo Exchange: Complete Sessions - Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Jazz | null | February 20, 2020 | 8 | 6b43e786-e2e7-41df-ba8b-b72f1d6d0512 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Chicago band motors through big emotions with clear-eyed sincerity, bubblegum hooks, and mellow arrangements that feel like a warm embrace. | The Chicago band motors through big emotions with clear-eyed sincerity, bubblegum hooks, and mellow arrangements that feel like a warm embrace. | Slow Pulp: Yard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/slow-pulp-yard/ | Yard | Slow Pulp know how to ground extreme emotion. Their shoegaze-tinged country rock can transform euphoria into a mellow CBD gummy high, anchor combustible bursts of rage, and buoy depression. Their self-produced 2020 debut, Moveys, was a knot of self-deprecating lyricism beneath a weighted blanket of droopy guitars and shiny glimmers of violin and piano. When they weren’t questioning the point of it all, it seemed the Chicago-based quartet—Emily Massey, Henry Stoehr, Alex Leeds, and Teddy Mathews—was just trying to get by. On their follow-up, Yard, Slow Pulp still cozy up to the introspective, sometimes dark, side of life. But instead of succumbing to the depressive haze, they find the momentum to move forward.
With Yard, Slow Pulp solidify their laid-back sound. It’s a fine balance of ’90s alt-rock grit and melody, with the introspective, detail-driven storytelling of folk music. As on Moveys, doubt still creeps in. But this time, the sensation gets its own bubblegum pop song: “Take me out/Put me down,” Massey sings on the chorus of “Doubt,” turning the title into a stuttering, one-word refrain. On the combustible “Cramps,” Massey longs to inhabit someone else’s personality. The most captivating moment is when her vocals begin to split apart, like the force of her desire could consume her whole.
On the album’s anchor “Yard,” Massey swings at a punching bag dressed in her own image: “I’m a bitch/I’ve been a bitch,” she sighs. It’s Yard’s sparsest and most compelling track, as Massey takes us on a time-traveling tour of her past and present mistakes. “The neighbors hear my singing/I don’t care cause I’m much too baked/Their dogs are barking at the water/I yelled they messed up my take,” she sings over a sparse piano melody. These lighthearted reflections on the creative process eventually spiral into thorny self-realizations as she comes to terms with saying goodbye to her childhood home: “Didn’t know that I cared that much,” she says upon noticing the “for sale” sign. Often, Slow Pulp pair these diaristic reflections with lush arrangements, but here the thought is laid bare.
Thematically, Yard is concerned with the way people can drift into each other’s lives, for better or worse; sometimes they’re a one-hit wonder arriving unannounced, and sometimes they’re the classic we turn to at our lowest. “What if I tell you that/You keep playing in my head/Cause you’re a summer hit,” Massey muses on the candy-sweet love song “Slugs.” The softness of the arrangements—a patchwork of fuzzy power chords, perky piano keys, and easygoing drums—is like a breeze through the car window in mid-June. “Carina Phone 1000” describes the serendipitous magic of a long-lost friend who reaches out at just the right moment. Slow Pulp excel in this pared-back country-folk mode, with a sigh of pedal steel or a hug of harmonica, and vocals that feel like a secure embrace rather than a distant cry. When the pressure of life threatens to pop you like a tire, their clear-eyed sincerity keeps on rolling. | 2023-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | October 5, 2023 | 7.5 | 6b4cbba7-1543-432a-93c7-a5ce457f1bf2 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
The synth-pop act’s third album, a rumination on loneliness in L.A., is its cleanest and most melodic, uncovering a previously obscured accessibility. | The synth-pop act’s third album, a rumination on loneliness in L.A., is its cleanest and most melodic, uncovering a previously obscured accessibility. | Black Marble: Bigger Than Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-marble-bigger-than-life/ | Bigger Than Life | The synth-pop grammar that dictates Black Marble’s music is strict and specific. The project formed as a duo in 2012 but eventually pared down to lone member Chris Stewart; throughout, its output has been uniformly composed of the same carefully curated elements. The instruments are hulking hardware synths and drum machines that hum when they power up. Fluid, melodic bass lines immediately recall New Order, but only the dour churn of Movement, and nothing as bouncy as Power, Corruption and Lies or later albums. Hints of the Cure are limited to the floating whispers of Seventeen Seconds. The crumbling production values are inspired by obscure ’80s minimal-wave artists like Iron Curtain; a detached romanticism can be traced from choice moments in the early OMD catalog. Applying this rigid aesthetic to Stewart’s pop-minded songwriting makes Black Marble one of the more disarmingly catchy bands to bear the coldwave tag.
Each subsequent release has gradually stripped away a layer of lo-fi filth, and Bigger Than Life, Black Marble’s third album, is easily the cleanest, uncovering a previously buried accessibility. The understated percussion, plucked guitar leads, and bright chorus of “Grey Eyeliner” are given room to interact dynamically, while the anxiously buzzing arrangement of “One Eye Open” makes space for layers of twitchy hooks. Most strikingly, Stewart’s deadpan vocals rise out of their normally garbled catacombs, making for discernibly pretty harmonies and intelligible lyrics. Where earlier albums waded in ugly murk and occasionally broke out in tantrums of noise, Bigger Than Life sounds composed, almost polite in contrast.
Ascending from dungeon-grade fidelity doesn’t always work. The reverb coating 2016’s excellent It’s Immaterial submerged detail but also flattened potentially clashing countermelodies and curbed tangential ideas. Without tape hiss to hide behind, the competing synths of “Never Tell” feel cluttered, and meandering intros drag on. And while Stewart has a gift for crafting obtuse melodies, he also has a tendency to recycle bits of his best tracks. “Private Show” calls on variants of the insistent bass progression and elementary drum fills that drove It’s Immaterial high point “Iron Lung,” and familiar rudiments reappear throughout. The sound is less broken and several shades lighter, but the demo-like quality of earlier albums smoothed over crowded arrangements and forgave repetition.
The newly audible vocals also offer a better view of Stewart’s ambiguous, impressionistic lyrics. Inspired during the writing process by a car-less existence in his high-traffic home of Los Angeles, Stewart positions many of his characters as passengers observing the city from the window of a crosstown bus, freaky classmates keeping bones under their bed, or lonely introverts looking for salvation in consumerism.
The album’s strongest song, “Feels,” marks its most human moment. Hesitantly optimistic synth tones support a wash of memories from an imagined past: volunteering at a blood drive, waiting for summer to bring happier days, a late-night slot at a college radio station. Though vague, “Feels” succinctly communicates the soft isolation that the rest of the album reaches for but only delivers in fragments. Its friendly melancholy zeroes in on an unremarkable everyday loneliness, the kind felt by introverted DJs in stuffy basements and glimpsed on the silent faces of strangers on the bus.
Dialing down the gloom and upping production values is a logical step forward, and when these changes gel, Stewart’s studied goth-pop evolves. Bigger Than Life takes Black Marble aboveground, where some songs bloom, while others struggle to adjust to the daylight after so long in the shadows.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | October 24, 2019 | 6.6 | 6b51dffb-ee87-445d-b2fe-d49cd3b74457 | Fred Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/fred-thomas/ | |
A new mixtape from Wyclef Jean finds him reinterpreting the sound of 2017, track by track. There are endearing bits of serendipity here, but the project’s purpose is unclear. | A new mixtape from Wyclef Jean finds him reinterpreting the sound of 2017, track by track. There are endearing bits of serendipity here, but the project’s purpose is unclear. | Wyclef Jean: Wyclef Jean Inspired By... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wyclef-jean-wyclef-jean-inspired-by/ | Wyclef Jean Inspired By... | Wyclef Jean has never lacked for confidence, having evolved from “one of the guys in Fugees” to legitimate household name out of sheer will—a producer, singer, rapper, cultural ambassador, and probably the best rapper-guitarist of all-time. But his hits were the result of a pop enthusiasm that often gleefully veered towards the heretical; stupendously overexposed freshman dorm staples like “Staying Alive,” “Wish You Were Here,” and “No Woman No Cry” were all fair game as source material.
Early on his new mixtape, Inspired By—in which Jean attempts to reinterpret the sound of 2017, track by track—he takes on a more volatile sacred text: Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.” While pondering the challenge, Clef explained, “[Kendrick’s] gonna want to hear that 1996 Wyclef. He's going to want to hear that mind, that ‘Ready or Not,’ that guy.” Jean does his damnedest to honor Kendrick’s flow over the instrumental and he’s actually not half bad at it. And when he’s done, he plays a guitar solo.
A good portion of Inspired By is in the “DNA.” model of having Jean rap over familiar contemporary beats (Giggs’ “Ultimate Gangsta,” A$AP Ferg’s “Plain Jane”). This approach has fallen out of favor in recent years, but it served as the ultimate heat check a decade ago for guys like Jadakiss, Lil Wayne, and Clipse in Best Rapper Alive mode. Conversely, Jean is out here trying to reiterate that he’s a rapper and currently alive. “Inspired by” mostly means Jean is jackin’ for flows, letting the teens who might otherwise be listening to Lil Pump or “Wild Thoughts” know that he can kinda-sorta rap like Future. He also does a passable imitation of Young Thug—yes, he does indeed rap over a Thugger song named “Wyclef Jean”; yes, the first line is indeed, “I was the grand marshall at the NASCAR race.”
When taken in small doses, Inspired By can provide goofy and endearing bits of serendipity like these, and reminders of why Jean is an interesting human being in 2017. He did run for president of Haiti, after all, and his experience growing up as an immigrant in the slums of New Jersey serves as the emotional anchor of Inspired By. Still, a track like “Inspired by DJ Khaled and Carlos Santana” exists primarily for Clef to remind people that he’s done songs with Rihanna and Shakira, and that those two names can rhyme if you try hard enough. “Inspired by Whitney Houston” exists to remind people he did a song with Houston. “Inspired by Drake” exists to prove he can pronounce “controlla” in patois with more authenticity than Drake and that he can play Guitar Center blues riffs guitar like John Mayer while doing so.
And so, like watching an actor’s sizzle reel or reading a journalist’s sample clips for an hour straight, Inspired By is nearly impossible to complete in one sitting. He doesn’t embarrass himself because it’s kind of impossible: despite his intentions to “bar up” and bring it back to his days of battle rapping, stringing together pop culture namedrops in a self-deprecating sing-rap cadence is a de facto style for MCs, and one that he pioneered long before Kanye or Drake. And despite the family-friendly image Clef has cultivated for himself, the bulk of the production on 1996’s The Score and even 1997’s The Carnival was dark and muggy, with grit. Even if typical Clef-isms still pop up and clash badly with the domineering synth production (“J. Edgar Hoover hit me with a tranquilizer,” “She call me a black belt in the evening/Sexual kung fu fighting”), it’s at least a reminder of who you’re listening to.
But what exactly is the endgame of Inspired By? Could anyone listen to perfectly competent and anonymous trap-rap like “Camel to Ferraris” and think this is the best use of Jean’s skills? Why hear Jean rap like Young Thug when only the most dedicated listeners have consumed the entirety of Thugger’s own output? The irony here is that Jean’s older work has granted him more recent relevancy than any rapper pushing 50 could hope to have. “Gone Till November” is immortalized as long as people rap about drug dealing. Jean also served as a spiritual guide and guest spitter on Young Thug’s JEFFERY. And one of 2017’s biggest hits is built on “Maria Maria,” his collaboration with Santana, i.e., the thinking person’s “Smooth.”
One can imagine how frustrating it must have felt when The Carnival III dropped about three months ago and did little other than let the public know there was actually a Carnival II at some point. (It really had Paul Simon, Shakira, Serj Tankian, and Chamillionaire on it, albeit in 2007.) Of all the Fugees, Wyclef’s had the most commercially prolific 21st century, but perhaps the least dignified, and Inspired By ultimately feels like a desperate measure in a desperate time. While it’s not Jean’s first attempt to flex as someone nearly half his age, it’s certainly not his most embarrassing. | 2017-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | December 16, 2017 | 5 | 6b5b2337-8bf1-43f5-899c-88823d06ab85 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
At his best—as on this third installment of his Slimeball series—Nudy can distill the influence of Atlanta’s integral artists into his a world of his own. | At his best—as on this third installment of his Slimeball series—Nudy can distill the influence of Atlanta’s integral artists into his a world of his own. | Young Nudy: Slimeball 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/young-nudy-slimeball-3/ | Slimeball 3 | Nudy’s career thus far has been an elegant re-hashing of traditional Atlanta rap tropes. His strongest release to date, last year’s Nudy Land, slowly moved away from this comfort zone and into something more original, a concept he’s built upon with Slimeball 3. It’s the most confident iteration of the three installments, and when Nudy’s at his best, he can distill the influence of Atlanta’s integral artists into a world of his own, infusing the fairly limited tapestry of his lyrical territory with an expansive range of delivery styles.
Comparing Nudy to a set of rappers from his hometown may seem reductive, but the similarities have more to do with the unrelenting influence of the Young Thug-Gucci Mane-Future triumvirate than any lack of originality on Nudy’s part. Thinking about or listening to Nudy’s work outside of this context strips the artist of his place within rap’s current power structure, and over the course of two Slimeball mixtapes and one LP, Nudy’s hinted at being worthy of a seat at the next table over; or, at least, on the waitlist in case of any cancellations.
On Slimeball 3, Young Nudy’s expressly interested in anointing his voice as a definitive, weighty addition to Atlanta’s already-dense scene. He’s deeply feeling himself on the record, putting up zero features over the course of its 14 tracks. After a sluggish opening two songs, this feels like a grave miscalculation of skills, but by "Middle Fingers," he’s returned to his role as the sort of effortlessly engaging regional stylist he fully rounded out on Nudy Land.
The color palette on Slimeball 3 has shifted dramatically from the first two editions, with Nudy’s deadpan dialect giving way to a more confident drawl, one that recalls the Auto-Tune blues rap of Los Angeles hero 03 Greedo as much as it does any Atlanta stars. "Middle Fingers" is a swaggering ode to Nudy’s hood, a half-sung lull of a rap that woozily narcotizes the emcee’s sentiments towards his haters. While Nudy never has much of an interest in existing outside of the money, fame, drugs paradigm, his voice imbues these songs with enough of an emotional impact that tones and quirks pack as much of a punch as words do.
Album highlight "InDaStreet" finds Nudy employing a yearning, almost desperate flow, an exasperation in his voice that lends a great assist to his rapid-fire, breathy lines dissecting the softness of today’s hustlers (“And I ain’t no fuckin’ wannabe/All you pussy niggas wanna be”). “Do That” takes an otherworldly synth—floating delicately above the thick slap of the snare drum—highlighting the rhythm section while Nudy works the triplet-style flow pioneered by fellow ATLiens Migos.
Young Nudy’s ability to be a synthesis of his city’s scene is the greatest advantage he holds, and one that’s improved and sharpened over the course of his career. While Nudy Land may edge out Slimeball 3 in terms of cohesion, the new mixtape is a significant leap forward in terms of songwriting skill when compared with the first two editions of the Slimeball series. Nudy’s ability to land earworm hooks comes with great ease here, and, in retrospect, he was wise to lay off the big name collaborators in favor of a more personal and identifiable sound. Young Nudy continues to force his name into the Atlanta rap conversation. | 2018-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Paradise East | August 18, 2018 | 7.2 | 6b5f3a63-17f7-4067-b4c2-695244f0f96d | Will Schube | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-schube/ | |
Assisted by pianist Craig Taborn, the New York saxophonist’s longstanding trio balances minimalist stillness with post-bop freneticism, and covers Autechre and Jeff “Tain” Watts along the way. | Assisted by pianist Craig Taborn, the New York saxophonist’s longstanding trio balances minimalist stillness with post-bop freneticism, and covers Autechre and Jeff “Tain” Watts along the way. | Steve Lehman: The People I Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-lehman-the-people-i-love/ | The People I Love | When the saxophonist and composer Steve Lehman posted a list of his favorite MCs on Twitter this summer, he wasn’t just playing along with a popular social-media pastime. He was also expressing something about his own history. In citing Ka and Buckshot, Lehman produced a list deep with New York underground talent—fitting for a player who has worked in the city’s most adventurous jazz clubs alongside names like Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey. And by including Antipop Consortium and the Senegalese rapper Gaston Bandimic, the saxophonist was shouting out his sometime collaborators (most notably, on 2016’s Sélébéyone).
Lehman’s new album, The People I Love, offers a further glimpse of his listening habits, without anything approaching caginess or irony. The covers here include tunes from Autechre and onetime Wynton Marsalis drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts as well as new versions of a couple of Lehman’s own compositions, previously recorded with other groups. The songs from his own back pages don’t seem like a form of self-love, though. Instead, they suggest an air of reinvestigation. They raise questions. As in: What made those bands—full of collaborators that Lehman clearly admires—click? And how might those effects be reproduced by other hands?
Some of those other hands belong to the pianist Craig Taborn—another New York heavyweight, but one who hasn’t appeared on a Lehman recording before. Here, he joins Lehman’s longstanding trio (including bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Damion Reid) to tackle a few new compositions, plus those covers.
It makes for a stirring set, if not a full-throttle mind-meld between two of the best player-composers on the contemporary jazz scene. Lehman and Taborn share joint writing credits on three tracks: the “Prelude,” “Interlude,” and a “Postlude.” They’re well-wrought miniatures, but not the main event. It’s in the other songs where you get a sense of two individualists getting to know one another better. “Ih Calam and Ynnus,” a Lehman original, ably showcases both artists’ respective aesthetics. The performance starts out with some of the minimalist stillness of Taborn’s own compositions, while Lehman’s entrance introduces some of the updated post-bop freneticism for which he is justly admired.
There’s a tension building here: Taborn keeps laboring over a few chords while Lehman crafts increasingly heated figures—until the pianist breaks his form open. Or does he? When Taborn’s solo turn comes, he matches Lehman for burning energy in the higher register of his instrument. But check out his other hand; it is still obsessing over some of the same droning chords from earlier in his performance.
Instead of picking one mode, Taborn’s doing two things at once—slyly, and without any evidence of strain. This is a trait common to some of his own bands, in which an Olympian dexterity winds up feeling like the output of someone playing casually, on the corner. While it’s no surprise that Taborn can make himself at home in Lehman’s complex, fiery music, it’s still thrilling to hear. (“Ynnus” is worth the price of admission, all on its own.)
Elsewhere, Taborn reimagines some of the sound of the saxophonist’s past groups—most memorably in his work on a tune like “Beyond All Limits,” where his vaulting intervals stand in for some of the more thickly orchestrated material from Lehman’s octet. And he also knows when to pull back, as on “qPlay,” the Autechre cover. After establishing some of the harmony from the original track, the pianist hangs in the background, allowing the song to become a feature for Brewer and Reid, who jointly adapt Autechre’s unpredictably pulsing electronic sound for jazz-quartet context.
All that’s missing here is a sense of Lehman’s immersion into Taborn’s compositional mold. It would be fascinating to hear the saxophonist’s sound lingering inside the slow-boil style of the pianist’s working groups. Happily, the results of this first recorded meeting make an ample case for future encounters. | 2019-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Pi Recordings | September 10, 2019 | 7.4 | 6b623437-fe60-437d-b849-65c50deab0f1 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
With David Fridmann producing, the latest Mogwai album contains the same bratty conviction that defined their greatest records, like there’s something truly at stake. | With David Fridmann producing, the latest Mogwai album contains the same bratty conviction that defined their greatest records, like there’s something truly at stake. | Mogwai: Every Country’s Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mogwai-every-countrys-sun/ | Every Country’s Sun | Over the last decade-plus, Mogwai’s album-length scores and soundtracks have threatened to overshadow their official studio releases. The former—particularly Mogwai’s haunting contributions to both the BBC documentary “Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise” and the spooky French television drama “Les Revenants”—have managed to distill the Scottish band’s brute sonic force with surprising subtlety and grace. Increasingly, writing music as part of a collaborative project seems to suit these guys: Freed from the pressure to make big stand-alone album statements, Mogwai are able to relax and let over 20 years of post-rocking naturally guide their hand in the studio.
With the exception of 2011’s excellent, exploratory Hardcore Will Never Die, but You Will, Mogwai’s proper albums of late have lacked this deftness of touch. Spinning from the loud-quite-loud dirges of their early days to krautrock histrionics and brittle, analog electronics—missing the mark nearly as often as they hit it—the band has struggled to find a steady path forward. On Every Country’s Sun, their ninth LP, Mogwai find their center of gravity. Finally, these Glaswegians are having fun again, loosening up and dirtying up, but with purpose and fire.
You wouldn’t know this from the record’s lead singles. “Coolverine” and the rare vocal track “Party in the Dark” reprise many of the same themes from Mogwai’s recent records: chilly, midtempo electronics and New Order art-rock, respectively. “Party in the Dark,” however, is a raging success—an indie pop gem that fulfills the promise of the similarly shoegazey “Teenage Exorcists,” from the 2014 EP Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. Guitarist Stuart Braithwaite’s vocals have never sounded more nakedly melodic.
But ultimately these tracks are textbook late-period Mogwai: distant, pensive, electro-curious but noncommittal. And this is true of much of the album’s first third. “Brain Sweeties” plods ambivalently through waves of scorched-earth synths and pounding drums, while “aka 47” bleeps and bloops its way into dystopian oblivion. Elsewhere, however, Mogwai sound like a new band, and in a sense they are: Now a quartet after the 2015 departure of longtime guitarist John Cummings, the band is leaner and meaner. “Battered at a Scramble” devolves into a pitched dogfight between a screeching organ, a fuzzed-out bass, and a rambling guitar solo, everything shoved far into the red—Mogwai’s version of the Velvet’s “Sister Ray.” “Old Poisons,” meanwhile, is a white-hot slab of pummeling noise-rock that recalls Mogwai at their most youthful and insouciant.
It’s tempting to chalk up this newfound band-in-the-room energy to the return of an old friend behind the boards. Dave Fridmann produced and mixed Every Country’s Sun, the first time he’s worked with Mogwai since 2001’s Rock Action. And like that record, Sun is rich and warm and huge. “20 Size” is a single, shimmering hunk of resonant sound: Its electric guitars are close and real enough to touch, and the drums, too, are massive (this is a Fridmann record after all). Drummer Martin Bulloch is a guiding force throughout, pushing the pulsing title track to one of the most toweringly mournful conclusions in Mogwai’s recorded career.
Over the last decade, Mogwai have been dogged by the same essential questions: Have they managed, in any meaningful way, to move beyond the genre-defining guitarmageddons that defined their first records? And if so, have they said anything genuinely interesting? The answers are yes and yes, generally speaking. But the real question for any band two decades into their career—certainly one so closely associated with a singular sound—isn’t what they play but how they play it. And for at least half of their new record, Mogwai play—for the first time in years—with the same bratty conviction that defined their greatest records, like there’s something truly at stake. At its best, Every Country’s Sun is brash, gritty, unpretentious, and thrillingly claustrophobic—a work of volume and violence in tight spaces. | 2017-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | September 5, 2017 | 7.6 | 6b644a25-8ab4-4b4d-82db-a8a9cbda799c | John S.W. MacDonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-s.w. macdonald/ | null |
Liz Harris (Grouper) and Jesy Fortino (Tiny Vipers) collaborated on this collection that effectively and purposefully combines their respective sounds. | Liz Harris (Grouper) and Jesy Fortino (Tiny Vipers) collaborated on this collection that effectively and purposefully combines their respective sounds. | Mirrorring: Foreign Body | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16420-foreign-body/ | Foreign Body | At what point do we distinguish sound art from song? Liz Harris and Jesy Fortino are musicians based in the Pacific Northwest who have each spent several records exploring this question. Harris, who records as Grouper, crafts ambient works that range from muted, narcotic guitar pop to more characteristic drone pieces, all haunted by vocals that can be alien or angelic. Fortino, meanwhile, leans toward black-hearted folk in her work as Tiny Vipers. Using primitively spare guitar lines, she etches full-bodied and evocative works characterized by silence and space, with expressive lyrics that convey feelings of isolation through form more than storytelling. In at least one interview, Fortino referenced the mystic, orchestral minimalism of Arvo Pärt's sacred music, and recently in conversation with Pitchfork, she noted her and Harris' shared roots in metal. Fortino almost certainly alluded to the similarly brutal Swans on her 2009 track "Young God". These are imaginative parameters, and both artists have been individually responsible for albums that provide consistently therapeutic listening.
Foreign Body is the pair's collaborative record as Mirrorring, and it effectively and purposefully combines their respective sounds. Tension is the driving force for these six compositions, as each builds from electro-acoustic whispers to landscapes that range from paralyzing paranoia to a glistening sense of subliminal bliss. The recordings feel realized and complete, but never too dense, and while listening I feel placed distinctly between either musician, their sounds tearing from various angles.
Some of these works would make sense on a Grouper or Tiny Vipers record, marked foremost by the aesthetic of the track's leader, but the foil Fortino and Harris offer one another is crucial. The trudging opener "Fell Sound" is reminiscent of Grouper's album Way Their Crept with an eerie and overwhelming sense of drowning in lightness. But Fortino's subtle, suspended guitar work begins to pull from an elevated place, and you never fall too far. The sheer immensity of Grouper's drones on "Fell Sound" makes Fortino's following "Silent From Above" all the more stark, crushing, and cathartic. It's the record's most tuneful and formally structured song, and an immediate highlight, led by acoustic fingerpicks that sound nearly identical to "Development" from her 2009 album Life on Earth. And "Drowning the Call" is a nuanced and idyllic drone-scape centered on the sunlit side of Grouper's aesthetic, but radiating with a new, mood-altering clarity that brings to mind a kind of healing, utopian dream state.
The most affecting tracks on Foreign Body achieve something transcendent, making use of the full range of the duo's instrumental toolbox as well as Fortino's deep warble. At the center is "Cliffs", a nearly 10-minute track that begins with slow and artfully minimal guitar notes, reminiscent of a downcast and zoned-out remake of Nick Drake's "Horn". Acoustic notes crawl and unfurl in a hypnotic, circular fashion, using broad strokes to foreshadow an undercurrent of anxiousness. Listening, for me, evokes the feeling of climbing a cliff and facing the absolute terror of an ocean, past its mist and dew. The piece eventually towers over into a collage of dissolving weather sounds, with Fortino's earthy guitar tones and Harris' oceanic electronics expanding a pronounced, pastoral picture. It's an experiment in the emotional possibilities of space, and seemingly designed to make you feel very small.
"Mine" grows to a similar climax, but instead ends with the noisiest and most expansive drone sounds on the record, with skull-mining capabilities that leave a rattling sense of dread. Whether intentional or not, the song's title reminds me that Foreign Body, and indeed the whole of both artists' catalogs, makes the most sense when heard in solitude. I have gravitated toward albums by Harris and Fortino during the most difficult points of my life, and, despite its high-floating potential to incite escapism, I imagine Foreign Body will likewise help bring many a lost listener down to earth.
"Meditative" is one of a handful of the most common terms pinned to Grouper and Tiny Vipers, but with these tracks it's worth pausing to consider why it is so important to engage with things like repetition and drone. The sound of "Drowning the Call", and much of Foreign Body, offers a sense of hyper-presence; of being acutely aware of yourself as the music's recipient, which counters our disengaged, techno-distracted worlds of Elsewhere and offers a moment of mindfulness.
There is a tendency among music critics to create sub-stories with records and impose narratives. We might identify with a hardcore punk group this year because we are a restless generation, or with a work of hyperactive pop because the internet has made us incapable of concentrating, and so on. But sometimes we take a record for what it is: a resistant piece of art, existing as a singular entity. In a world that is newly full of "content" at every turn, it can be refreshing to find an uncompromising record that exists so honestly on its own. | 2012-03-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-03-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kranky | March 22, 2012 | 7.9 | 6b669d3e-14b4-4d01-b05c-68b2072102da | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
The Australian folk-turned-pop singer revisits her eccentric, romantically unfulfilled teen years on an album that reaches for the coming-of-age immediacy of artists like Lorde and Taylor Swift. | The Australian folk-turned-pop singer revisits her eccentric, romantically unfulfilled teen years on an album that reaches for the coming-of-age immediacy of artists like Lorde and Taylor Swift. | Laura Jean: Devotion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/laura-jean-devotion/ | Devotion | Laura Jean opens her fifth album, Devotion, with a spectacular orchestral flourish—the kind that might signal the beginning of a dream sequence in an old movie musical. She sings as if in a daze about stolen glances and trepid desire, her words lifted skyward by synthetic strings and weightless, arpeggiating piano. The transportive song, “Press Play,” signals that listeners should rid themselves of any assumptions regarding the record’s grounding in Jean’s current reality.
The 36-year-old Australian folk-turned-pop singer long ago reached an age at which the episodes recounted in “Press Play,” involving “popular girls” and watching crushes stare out of school bus windows, faded from her day-to-day life. But Jean wrote Devotion as a tribute to her teenage years, a time when she was, by her own description, “eccentric” and “romantically-unfulfilled.” Throughout the album, she revisits her nascent sexuality and formative obsessions without glossing over her younger self’s complex emotional life, the way adult artists often do when depicting teens. Devotion is nostalgic by its very nature—yet, at its best, the album captures the experiences of first love and lust with remarkable immediacy, rather than the fuzzed-out romanticism of hindsight.
Jean’s retrospective gaze is especially sharp on “Girls on the TV,” which narrates a childhood friendship with a girl she calls “Ricky.” In adolescence, Ricky weathered her share of storms—bullying, drugs, sexual harassment—and Jean recounts them with both anguish and fierce optimism. Other songs on the album lack such robust narratives, but the vibrance of Jean’s storytelling is consistent; she has a way of surfacing small, unexpected details that often say more about a moment than endless exposition can. It’s a skill she shares with some of the best chroniclers of teen romance. When she sings, “I smell the humidity of the concrete,” while describing a budding dalliance on “Northerly,” she taps into the same sensory bliss that makes the opening lines of Taylor Swift’s “Fearless” so captivating. Lorde has praised Devotion’s lead single, “Touchstone,” for its eloquent “communication of the spooky, all-consuming nature of feminine love”—a subject the track shares with some of Lorde’s own songs, like “Writer in the Dark.”
Swift and Lorde documented their respective comings-of-age from different corners of the youth-obsessed pop space, and it’s fitting that Jean’s embrace of this same subject matter finds her straying from her folk roots, in favor of more pop-oriented sounds. When it comes to instrumentation, the transition feels natural: Jean’s voice is light enough to blend in with the pillowy synths she introduces and nimble enough to keep pace with upshifted percussion.
There are moments, however, when pop magic proves elusive. The success of songs like the ones on Devotion (and Fearless, and Melodrama) is often determined by the strength of their hooks. Pushed to write slicker, stickier tracks than ever before, Jean sometimes comes up short. At times, her attempts at lyrical simplicity yield extreme reductiveness: On “Which One Are You?,” she splits humanity into a series of binaries, then dreamily wonders which group her paramour falls into. Reaching for universal resonance, she grasps clichéd language instead.
In chronicling teen romance, Jean has taken on one of pop culture’s most commodified, trope-laden subjects. But it’s only when she leans into specificity and idiosyncrasy, rather than single-mindedly courting wide appeal, that she captures the spectacular novelty that makes young love worth revisiting in the first place. | 2018-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Chapter Music | June 15, 2018 | 6.8 | 6b66a640-1292-4781-bfc5-3839eaf611c9 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
After four Barsuk albums of often stately, melodic indie pop, Death Cab for Cutie become the first of the "O.C."-boosted indie bands to make the leap to the majors. | After four Barsuk albums of often stately, melodic indie pop, Death Cab for Cutie become the first of the "O.C."-boosted indie bands to make the leap to the majors. | Death Cab for Cutie: Plans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2233-plans/ | Plans | Death Cab for Cutie once released an EP called Stability, the irony being that it was one of their few releases that branches away from their core sound. That's fine, to a point. Their stately, melodic indie pop gives them a big enough palette with which to paint albums that don't lose their flavor on the bedpost overnight, but it also means that their records can feel interchangeable.
On Plans, the band's fifth album, Death Cab made the jump from the friendly confines of Barsuk Records to the storied halls of Atlantic, a move that makes a lot of sense. The band is ready for the large, diverse audience a major can provide, and they make the transition seamlessly, in large part due to the underrated production of guitarist Chris Walla, who has a way of making even the weirder flourishes (and the band tries a few to mixed success here) feel totally natural.
Despite Walla's consistently cozy production, Ben Gibbard's lyrics continue to move from critiques of middle-class life to tackling Big Themes, here the relationship between death and love. On "What Sarah Said" he claims, "Love is watching someone die." On "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" it's the title sentiment, and on "Soul Meets Body" he says, "If the silence takes you, then I hope it takes me too."
"I Will Follow You..." is the album's quiet centerpiece, just Gibbard on acoustic guitar, his fragile, almost falsetto tenor, simple delivery, and unexpected turns of phrase turning an well-worn lyrical road, the fear of losing a lover, into something affecting. The way he personalizes the afterlife and draws in childhood Catholic school experiences is impressive, to say the least. All this and it's sequenced directly after the album's most musically ambitious track, "Different Names for the Same Thing", an overly melodramatic track that heads off on a ponderous, M83-aping electronic odyssey.
The band's other, better experiment is lead single "Soul Meets Body", a sleek pop track that excels except for when the drums drop dead, the textures get all smooshy, and Gibbard goes up the scale to sing the title-- it's such a weird blunder that it's hard to tell at first if it derails the song or just nudges it a bit. Several listens in, the song works on the strength of its catchy "ba da ba da ba ba" passages and the incredible verse melody, but that one little passage is awkward, like the song has something stuck in its teeth. Death Cab opens the album strongly with "Marching Bands of Manhattan", a song that feels like it's constantly in the process of taking off, with pensive drumming and big, sweeping vocals singing about sorrow seeping into your heart as if through a pin-hole.
For its peaks, the album also has its share of valleys, like "Summer Skin", notable mostly for its nifty bassline, and "Your Heart Is an Empty Room", a song that never breaks out of its musical holding pattern. The band suffers from the infliction: Death Cab still sounds basically the same as ever in the post-"O.C." world. In a way, it's comforting to know what you're getting: Four or five songs you'll treasure, four or five you'll tolerate, and a pretty good band sticking to their guns. In another sense, it would be nice if a band reaching for a larger audience had a sound that matched that sense of ambition. | 2005-08-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-08-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic | August 29, 2005 | 6.5 | 6b6aa5c7-a4ba-4a65-9eca-7c6061429604 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The second installation of this Light in the Attic-compiled collection features tracks from Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, JJ Cale, and others. If Vol. 1 was about mapping the country funk trend via trucker GPS to show how widespread these sounds were, Vol. 2 is more about showing just how high up the ladder these ideas went. | The second installation of this Light in the Attic-compiled collection features tracks from Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, JJ Cale, and others. If Vol. 1 was about mapping the country funk trend via trucker GPS to show how widespread these sounds were, Vol. 2 is more about showing just how high up the ladder these ideas went. | Various Artists: Country Funk Volume II 1967-1974 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19604-various-artists-country-funk-volume-ii-1967-1974/ | Country Funk Volume II 1967-1974 | The term “country” was first applied to music in the 1940s as a substitute for the pejorative label “hillbilly,” and it has since been used to describe everything from the Carter Family’s mountain hymnal to Florida Georgia Line’s hip-hop-inflected radio hits. “Funk” has a similarly long history in pop music—a piece of Jazz Age slang that would eventually describe Parliament/Funkadelic’s mothership jams, Death Grips’ industrial beats, and nearly everything in between. Even among broad genre tags, both “country” and “funk” are incredibly elastic terms. Put them together and somehow they stretch even further. Never a set scene and not quite a movement, country funk was just something in the air during the late '60s and early '70s, when the give and take between what is generally considered “white” music and what is generally deemed “black” music was at its most open and open-minded.
That unlikely marriage inspired Light in the Attic’s first Country Funk collection in 2012, which sounded revelatory because it reveled in the slippery quality of its own premise. In 16 songs, the comp showed how artists from different locations, backgrounds, and genres combined these two seemingly disparate traditions in new and often surprising ways, as though there were infinite variations of country funk. So it’s startling—and even a bit dismaying—that the label’s second volume stretches those two terms until they almost snap. Most everything on Country Funk Vol. 2 is self-evidently funky, although a few songs sound more like country tunes with a prominent drum track. When it’s Jackie DeShannon butchering “The Weight”, it’s a problem. But when Dillard & Clark covers the Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down” or JJ Cale waxes romantic about the “Cajun Moon”, who’s complaining about semantics?
If Vol. 1 was about mapping the country funk trend via trucker GPS to show how widespread these sounds were, Vol. 2 is more about showing just how high up the ladder these ideas went. The new tracklist is peppered with familiar names, like Townes Van Zandt and Kenny Rogers. Dolly Parton’s “Getting Happy” boasts a ridiculously effervescent chorus and a runaway snare drum that flirts with country disco, and she sells the tune by virtue of her light vocal touch. When she recorded it in 1974, Parton had recently ended her long partnership with Porter Wagoner and had barely established herself as a solo artist. Released the same year as “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You”, “Getting Happy” reveals just how musically omnivorous Parton was at this point in her career.
At times Vol. 2 is driven as much by its performers’ personalities as by the songs’ syncopated backbeats. Just a few years before Red-Headed Stranger and Wanted! The Outlaws made him the most popular man in country music, Willie Nelson was still tinkering with his redneck-hippie sound on “Shotgun Willie”, the title track to his 1973 album. It’s a trip hearing Nelson in this setting: As the rhythm section struts and the Memphis Horns punctuate the groove, his nylon-string guitar zigs and zags effortlessly around the beat, as though taunting his band. In his signature stoned cadence, Nelson sings about the misperceptions of country life, and you can hear both the mischievous humor and cold derision in his voice when he gets to the verse about the KKK wizard selling sheets on the family plan.
Funk, it turns out, was a way to loosen country up a bit, to move it away from its stodgy conservatism. “Shotgun Willie” is only one of several songs on Vol. 2 that confronts and sometimes satirizes the cultural divide between the establishment and the counterculture. Bob Darin’s “Me and Mr. Hohner” describes a hippie’s run-in with cops in South Philly, and the relentless harmonica stomps evokes the danger of the situation. (He’s the unlikely hero of both volumes, and hopefully it’s only a matter of time before Light in the Attic reissues his 1969 album Commitment.)
Kenny Rogers’ encounter with the law is much less fraught on the First Edition’s “Tulsa Turnaround”, which may be the highlight of Vol. 2. Opening with the narrator on the run after getting the mayor’s daughter stoned, the song was widely covered in the early '70s, with recordings by Three Dog Night, Goose Creek Symphony, and weirdly enough Helen “I Am Woman Hear Me Roar” Reddy. But this may be the ultimate version of the song, thanks to the rhythm section’s narcotized groove and the gritty chagrin in Rogers’ voice as he dispenses outlaw wisdom: “If a man’s gonna eat fried chicken, he’s gotta get greasy.”
Vol. 2 may lack the sense of purpose and discovery that defined Vol. 1, which remains one of the best reissue comps of the 2010s. But credit Light in the Attic for digging deep, for avoiding the obvious, and for rescuing obscurities like Jim Ford’s bizarre b-side “Rising Sign” and Willis Alan Ramsey’s “Northeast Texas Women”, a wry dose of back-porch funk that closes the album. Similar series, including Country Got Soul and Dirty Laundry: The Soul of Black Country, stopped after just two volumes, but the label’s adventurous approach may give Country Funk a much longer life. Vol. 2 proves there’s more than enough country funk out there to fill a good Vol. 3. | 2014-07-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-07-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Light in the Attic | July 24, 2014 | 7.6 | 6b6ccc09-fe0e-4588-a398-fb05ea4acad3 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The wounded love songs on the Mexican singer-songwriter Carla Morrison’s new album, Amor Supremo, evoke great wellings of despair and desire. Featuring a grand sound that includes disembodied drums, shimmery synths, cathedral organs, Middle Eastern strings, Lynchian guitar, and her distinctive vocals, it's one of the most genuinely moving pop records of 2015. | The wounded love songs on the Mexican singer-songwriter Carla Morrison’s new album, Amor Supremo, evoke great wellings of despair and desire. Featuring a grand sound that includes disembodied drums, shimmery synths, cathedral organs, Middle Eastern strings, Lynchian guitar, and her distinctive vocals, it's one of the most genuinely moving pop records of 2015. | Carla Morrison: Amor Supremo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21243-amor-supremo/ | Amor Supremo | A towering standout on Carla Morrison’s new album, *Amor Supremo, "*No Vuelvo Jamás" is a pining anthem that opens with the Mexican singer-songwriter delivering a cascade of wordless syllables that sound less like a human voice than a wind instrument. Her overture is punctuated by an emphatic drumbeat and ominous piano chords, then an electric guitar crashes down around her. Yet, she remains unfazed by the commotion, as she half-whispers lyrics about losing herself in lovelorn madness ("locura desmedida") and succumbing to a yearning that hurt worse ("más dolor") than physical wounds. Morrison’s voice wavers and twirls, suggesting a less forceful Florence Welch or a more grounded Jeff Buckley. This is pop music with a healthy sense of grandeur.
The song itself is one long, careful, patient crescendo, and by the halfway point, it seems to have reached its climax. But then something unexpected happens: Rather than let the momentum subside, Morrison and her band coast on that cresting wave for several more minutes, maintaining that tension without sacrificing any nuance in her vocals or resorting to ostentatious melodrama. It’s a big moment on an album full of big moments—on an album that is, in fact, all about big moments. These wounded love songs evoke great wellings of despair and desire, amplifying and ennobling those emotions in a way that ought to be comprehensible and relatable even to those listeners who don’t speak Spanish.
A native of the Baja California region of Mexico, Morrison has been a central figure in the extremely tight-knit and defiantly independent Mexican pop community for just six years, releasing a steady stream of EPs and LPs and winning two Latin Grammys for her 2012 album Déjenme Llorar. Although she has recorded with a range of Mexican artists—including the singer-songwriter Natalia LaFourcade, the Monterrey band Kinky, and Tijuana producer Alejandro Jiménez, better known as Jandro—Morrison may be best known to American listeners from her cameo on Calexico’s Edge of the Sun earlier this year or from the 2012 documentary Hecho en México, about the Mexican indie scene. Both showcased her distinctive vocals, but neither suggested Morrison was capable of something as impressive as Amor Supremo.
In fact, nothing in her catalog sounds anything like this album. Her previous work has generally adhered to acoustic instruments and mixed new rock and pop sounds with older Mexican bolero and ballad traditions. With each subsequent release, however, Morrison has grown bolder and more adventurous, and the title of her 2013 EP—Jugando en Serio—sums up her approach perfectly. That sense of playing seriously culminates on Amor Supremo. As she explained to Billboard in September, she recorded the album over eight months in a house near the beach in Playas de Tijuana, "where we could hear the ocean all day." There she worked with producers Jandro and Demian Jiménez as well as a rotating group of musicians to find a new sound—one rooted in Mexico but embracing international trends and ideas.
First single "Un Beso", released in September, heralded a dramatic change and introduced the elements that color Amor Supremo: the disembodied drums, the shimmery synths, the cathedral organ, and the stabs of Lynchian guitar. What’s remarkable is how much mileage she gets from these few instruments. They provide the foundation for every song, but there’s always a twist, always some new combination that prevents the music from becoming repetitive or tired: the Middle Eastern strings on "Cercanía", the prismatic synth theme on "Mi Secreto", the weightless rhythms of "Tú Atacas", even the crackle of guitar on "Azúcar Morena", which sounds like a fuse being lit. Even when the production becomes gauzy and blurred around the edges, it’s usually to emphasize the emotional specificity of her vocals, which are forceful but not overpowering, wounded yet strong, pleading but never whiny. Even the way she sings a simple word like "tí" can stop you short.
Morrison commands these songs, cuts across the language barrier, makes you understand something beyond the words. And the words are important here. In shedding her old musical palette, she embraces trends and traditions that sound more international in scope, and these songs draw from a range of influences, including American soul and European pop. And yet, she continues to sing exclusively in Spanish, even when an English-language album might have more commercial potential. It’s a crucial decision, one that implies there are certain emotions and ideas—certain big moments—that are specific to Mexico and expressible only in her native language, whether it’s the particular sugar she tastes on her lover’s skin ("Azúcar Morena es tu piel") or a personal struggle she knows she must overcome ("Esta lucha es solo contra mi"). All moments are big moments, and that epiphany makes Amor Supremo one of the most rewarding and genuinely moving pop albums of 2015. | 2015-11-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Cosmica | November 5, 2015 | 8 | 6b6fb4a5-c1b6-4dcb-9ab4-ca2cfb31722b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The L.A. psych-soul artist’s first album in more than 40 years is a plodding, overdriven blues-jazz odyssey that feels like a chore. | The L.A. psych-soul artist’s first album in more than 40 years is a plodding, overdriven blues-jazz odyssey that feels like a chore. | Shuggie Otis: Inter-Fusion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shuggie-otis-inter-fusion/ | Inter-Fusion | Cut Shuggie Otis some slack. After decades in the wilderness, the L.A. native is finally enjoying the acclaim and attention that eluded him the first time around. His second act started in 2001 with an acclaimed Luaka Bop reissue of his haunted ’70s psych-soul classic Inspiration Information, and kept going with re-releases of his other studio albums from that era. The man who was once a small mystery, known only to hip-hop producers and anyone who looked up the writing credits for the Brothers Johnson’s hit cover of his “Strawberry Letter 23,” is now able to play stages around the world. It’s an appealing story of redemption—which in some ways makes it even more disappointing that Otis’ first collection of new music in over 40 years is such a chore to listen to.
Inter-Fusion is the kind of plodding, overdriven blues-jazz odyssey that Otis has occasionally hinted at during his recent run of live performances. He shows no interest here in touching on the zonked-out brilliance of Inspiration Information highlight “Happy House” or the deep funk of his 1970 debut, Here Comes Shuggie Otis. Instead, he calls back to his early days backing up his father, ’50s R&B pioneer Johnny Otis, and perhaps previews a future showing off his instrumental virtuosity in bars.
That facility with a guitar is the one element that Otis really has going for him on Inter-Fusion. He attacks each song ferociously, peeling off solos that are just showy enough to prove why he was qualified to jump in the fire as Frank Zappa’s bassist on “Peaches En Regalia” at age 16. His fuzzed-out breakdowns on a meaty re-recording of “Ice Cold Daydream” (originally found on his 1971 album Freedom Flight) crack through the light funk groove nicely, kicking out a subtle nod to Jimi Hendrix’s “Third Stone From the Sun” for good measure. And each song is anchored by his sturdy yet flexible rhythm work.
What Otis needed was a creative partner who could help him plot a course between the extremes of his past achievements and whatever he’s attempting here. Instead, he hitches his star to Kyle Hamood, a member of L.A. rock nobodies Them Guns, who buffs and polishes every last inch of Inter-Fusion until you can practically see your reflection. Otis cedes almost all control to the producer and the rhythm section—drummer Carmine Appice and bassist Tony Franklin, both studio lifers—letting them write all the songs and clutter them up with showy fills and sickly synth tones. It’s enough to make you wish someone had given him Dan Auerbach’s number instead, or Daptone Records leader Bosco Mann’s.
There’s no getting around the fact that Inter-Fusion is a missed opportunity. For all its failings, though, at least Otis sounds engaged with the material—he’s having fun, even if no one else is. This isn’t the leap forward fans might have hoped for, but if it gives him the momentum to keep writing and recording, that’s better than nothing. | 2018-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Cleopatra | April 21, 2018 | 4.6 | 6b77370c-abf7-46c2-a99b-3dbe1e8f41e4 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
Julia Brown is the lo-fi indie pop project of Maryland-based musician Sam Ray, and An Abundance of Strawberries is their first and possibly final full album. It is a dense and varied collection of homemade pop that pushes against lo-fi limitations at every turn, and it feels like being surrounded by a group of your most creative friends. | Julia Brown is the lo-fi indie pop project of Maryland-based musician Sam Ray, and An Abundance of Strawberries is their first and possibly final full album. It is a dense and varied collection of homemade pop that pushes against lo-fi limitations at every turn, and it feels like being surrounded by a group of your most creative friends. | Julia Brown: An Abundance of Strawberries | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21399-an-abundance-of-strawberries/ | An Abundance of Strawberries | An Abundance of Strawberries both is and isn’t a Julia Brown album. While the Maryland-based indie pop outfit intended to record an album in 2014, the band stalled and effectively dissolved, leading frontman Sam Ray to take the reins, recording an album by himself and bringing in past members and anyone who was willing to help finish the job.
Ironically, for an album that was shaped largely by one person, An Abundance of Strawberries exceends the band’s sole demo and single in ambition. Ray pushes past the conventional limitations of "lo-fi indie pop" at every turn: The opening title track begins with Ray's soft singing and a strummed acoustic guitar, before giving way to cymbal crashes and a cavalcade of voices as the song expands and blossoms. Likewise, "The Body Descends" is a near-epic at five minutes, growing from quiet piano chords to Infinity Crush's Caroline White singing along with Ray, her voice melding with his as as viola swells with the drums to create a pristine piece of ballroom pop.
On the surface, An Abundance of Strawberries feels like a continuation of Julia Brown’s old, home-taped sound. "Procession (full)" is full of choppy guitar strums and has a ramshackle quality meant to hide how well put together it is. "All Alone in Bed," with lines like "Does your mother know/ That you’re skin and bones/ Does your mother know/ Those things you do when you’re all alone in bed" over plinked xylophone captures the intimacy, playfulness, and quiet melancholy of To Be Close to You.
But then something like "Snow Day," which is built around an off-kilter drum machine and near-random keyboard notes, draws just as much from the production work Ray does under his Ricky Eat Acid moniker. This quiet experimental runs throughout the album and binds everything together, even at its extremes. "You Can Always Hear the Birds" opens with an out-of-nowhere jungle freak-out before giving way to looping drum crashes and Ray’s Vocoder-masked vocals, yet the album ends on "Bloom," the album’s simplest track: Just Ray and his guitar, reminding everyone the true essence of his work.
An Abundance of Strawberries is a dense collection, but it coheres thanks to Ray's ability to twist a connective melody out of the most unlikely of places. It feels indebted to the Elephant 6 creative model, where albums express the vision of one artist through a whole host of close collaborators. It has a similar communal feel, like being surrounded by a group of creative friends. If this is indeed the last work of Julia Brown, it’s heartening to know that the band was able to end on such a grand statement. | 2016-01-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-01-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Joy Void | January 11, 2016 | 7.9 | 6b780a61-5e00-4919-983c-2d14fa35be46 | David Glickman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-glickman/ | null |
The Bronx rapper’s second solo album grapples with questions of faith over jazz and gospel production. | The Bronx rapper’s second solo album grapples with questions of faith over jazz and gospel production. | Caleb Giles: There Will Be Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caleb-giles-there-will-be-rain/ | There Will Be Rain | On “The Flood,” the opening track from 20-year-old Bronx musician Caleb Giles’ second solo album, There Will Be Rain, a voice sings about the weather through heavy digital distortion: “It’s gonna rain/You better get ready and bear this in mind.” Delivered as a statement of fact, the line is less a visionary prophecy than a child’s repetition of a familiar story handed down by an elder. In fact, “The Flood” is a cover of “It’s Gonna Rain Again,” an early-1970s song from the traditional gospel quartet the Sensational Nightingales. Giles, like the Nightingales before him, is seeking truth in the Book of Genesis. But there’s an implicit admission in this cover—sung by his Standing on the Corner bandmate Gio Escobar—that he may never find the meaning of the rain. The story of the flood raises impossible questions about humanity’s relationship with God that date back to Biblical times, and Giles revives that conversation without offering an answer.
Giles, who plays saxophone in Standing on the Corner, made his solo debut last year with Tower, an album that aimed to showcase his lyrical ability as a rapper. On this eight-track follow-up, he’s still working toward a distinct identity. A line like “We write style, all with the stroke of a pen” could be delivered by nearly any young MC, but it suggests an awareness on Giles’ part that he is still developing as an artist. And while Rain is only obliquely autobiographical, setting tones more than scenes, when Giles does get specific (“Had me a block swallow up niggas mad fast/Tags and them black masks, I seen it all”), he suggests a well of untold stories waiting for their time.
That undefined quality can enhance the power of Giles’ frequent Biblical allusions. On the plaintive highlight “Wondering,” he raps, “Feel fire approaching/For the things that I’ve done/For the things that I’m holding.” The image of retributive fire calls back to the opening track, but once again, he leaves the details unmentioned. Later on the same song, Escobar sings, “Looked into my father’s eyes/And I realize, I realize/Why I was wondering.” There’s a lot of wondering on this album, and little moral certainty, which feels right for a work of art about faith.
In under 20 minutes, There Will Be Rain offers a lovely melange of jazz, hip-hop, gospel, and soul. There are no grand experiments, but just enough variance within that spectrum. Giles’ rapping, likewise, is perfectly competent, a steady vessel. On “Impatient,” the album’s best song, his flow is metronomic as he connects his own experiences of moving around as a kid to a larger antsiness. “Feel sick of waiting and missing payments,” he raps, “And missing love/Why niggas hating?” The music pulls back with violin stammers and pushes forward with a piano melody. There’s a deep longing to know in the song—to know what he’s growing toward, or to know what he wants at all. | 2018-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Grand Closing | February 7, 2018 | 7 | 6b78be9f-3f38-493a-8be4-ee2eca285c9e | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
The latest entry in Bob Dylan’s frequently brilliant Bootleg Series focuses on previously unreleased music recorded around the time of the savagely reviewed 1970 double album Self Portrait. Included among the alternate takes, demos, stripped-down mixes, and live cuts are songs that wound up on New Morning and Nashville Skyline. | The latest entry in Bob Dylan’s frequently brilliant Bootleg Series focuses on previously unreleased music recorded around the time of the savagely reviewed 1970 double album Self Portrait. Included among the alternate takes, demos, stripped-down mixes, and live cuts are songs that wound up on New Morning and Nashville Skyline. | Bob Dylan: Bootleg Series, Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18402-bob-dylan-bootleg-series-vol-10-another-self-portrait-1969-1971/ | Bootleg Series, Vol. 10: Another Self Portrait (1969-1971) | It’s a little hard for those of us who weren’t there to understand the critical reaction to Bob Dylan’s 10th album, 1970‘s Self Portrait. First, let’s pause a moment to reflect on the fact that there was a 10th album already at that point, only eight years and a few months after Dylan released his self-titled debut. It was a busy time: he wrote and performed, culture was churning ahead and changing at what was then an unprecedented pace, and some people in the music world thought of him as a sort of leader of a new consciousness. Into this world he released an album called Self Portrait. One imagines seeing that title and expecting something deeper, heavier, some kind of reckoning with what has gone before. But what the listening public got instead was a mish-mash-- a few original songs, a few live cuts, lots of covers, and a generally disjointed sound. It seemed slapdash. And it caused Greil Marcus, Dylan’s best critic, to begin his review of the double album in Rolling Stone with the words “What is this shit?”
The latest entry in Dylan’s Bootleg Series provides a new opportunity to evaluate the music of this period. Calling this volume Another Self Portrait, including liner notes by Marcus, and offering up a new painting by Bob Dylan as a cover image, is a sly and gutsy move. By most accounts, Dylan was hurt by the initial savaging of Self Portrait, and rushed out its 1970 follow-up, New Morning, to put the album in the rearview as quickly as possible. Later, there was a sense that he wanted to scrub it from his own history. In interviews, Dylan sometimes suggested that Self Portrait was deliberately bad, thrown together as a way to confuse his audience or provoke the media into moving on to someone else so that he could have more privacy in raising his family.
Though we’ll never know exactly what he was thinking, the idea of Dylan making a poor album on purpose never made sense. He worked with too many top-shelf musicians that he cared about, and had friends and colleagues investing too much time, to make something that would embarrass them. It seems more likely that the “intentionally bad” storyline was a defense mechanism for a mysterious artist who did, after all, have a pretty hefty ego and was deeply aware of his own talent. So it’s reasonable to conclude that Self Portrait was a strange and all-over-the-place album because, for one reason or another, that’s the kind of album Dylan wanted to make at that time.
Another Self Portrait complicates the narrative. Considering the strength of these alternate takes, demos, stripped-down mixes, and live cuts, it's a little hard to believe that these were the cast-offs from what was perceived to be an artist’s worst album. Many of the songs come from the sessions for New Morning, but there were no clear lines between Self Portrait and New Morning sessions in 1969 and 1970. Akin to Neil Young’s later method, Dylan at the end of the 60s seems to have been about recording songs first, lots of them, and figuring out how they fit into an album later.
There was a marked shift in Dylan's music at the end of the 60s. “For sure my lyrics had struck nerves that had never been struck before,” he wrote of this time in Chronicles Volume One, “but if my songs were just about the words, then what was Duane Eddy, the great rock'n'roll guitarist, doing recording an album full of instrumental melodies of my songs? Musicians have always known that my songs were more than just words, but most people are not musicians.” This passage provides a good framework for understanding the music here. After the word-drunk work he’d created in the mid-60s, and following the mysterious motorcycle accident that laid him up in 1966, his music became simpler and more tuneful. Drawing on his longstanding interest in country music, standards, and any well-constructed song, he began to write and perform songs that felt universal.
That is where the deep and immense pleasure of this set resides: hearing melodies-- some new, some old, some borrowed-- performed by a distinctive singer at the height of his powers. The two discs are arranged for flow, with songs roughly split along two lines. Disc one is mostly songs recorded prior to Self Portrait, and is heavy on alternate versions of Dylan tunes and renditions of traditional songs. This “Time Passes Slowly” and the demo of “Went to See the Gypsy” don’t supplant better-known takes, but they’re different enough in feel and arrangement to make the songs sound new. Other differences, like the alternate version of Nashville Skyline’s “I Threw It All Away”, are more subtle, and the appeal is in hearing the song tinted by a new setting.
But the real revelations on the first disc are the unreleased versions of songs from the public domain. It’s now accepted that Dylan returned to relevance late in his career when he released two albums of traditional songs, 1992‘s Good as I Been to You and 1993‘s World Gone Wrong. The idea being that, in times of trouble, when he’s not sure where else to go, the songs Dylan grew up with and studied were there for him. The versions here of “Railroad Bill”, “Little Sadie”, “Pretty Saro”, and the especially powerful “This Evening So Soon” are brilliant showcases of his ability to inhabit old material and make it his own. And they benefit from the generally spare and acoustic sound. Dylan started his career singing traditional folk songs, but his understanding of them eight years later was far richer.
The second disc is heavier on versions of Dylan originals, with roughly equal smatterings of alternate takes from Self Portrait, New Morning, and Nashville Skyline and live cuts from Dylan and the Band’s 1969 Isle of Wight Festival performance. Some of the differences in these versions are striking. The radically altered take of “If Not For You” is performed by Dylan with piano and violin, making the song sound even more tender and vulnerable. There’s an alternate version of the funky Nashville Skyline trifle “Country Pie” that, when it breaks down, shows just how in-the-pocket his session pros were when playing live in the studio. There’s a version of “New Morning” with a shimmering horn section, giving it an even more buoyant and joyous cast. “Wigwam”, the instrumental that was given a bombastic treatment on the Self Portrait album, is heard without orchestration, revealing it as an effortlessly tuneful cowboy tune (the countrypolitan near-instrumental “All the Tired Horses” is heard in a similarly lean version).
Most of the music is heard in versions with minimal instrumentation: Dylan’s guitar, a second guitar adding fills, sometimes piano. Which makes the set oddly cohesive and album-like, ironically more so than the Self Portrait album itself. The outliers in this regard were also some of the stranger inclusions on the original album-- the in-concert tracks with the Band. Given that neither Dylan nor the Band played live during this period, the fact that they came together for a massive festival was surely big news, so the set is obviously of historical importance. That is doubly true since by this time the recordings they made together in Woodstock were leaking out on bootlegs like The Great White Wonder, so the desire for Dylan/Band collaborations was high. But plucking random numbers from that Isle of Wight set didn’t make much sense on the original album, and it doesn’t make much sense on Another Self Portrait either. The deluxe version of this set includes a disc with the full set, which is welcome-- it has a ragtag charm, Dylan mostly sings in his Nashville Skyline voice, and the song selection is ace. But there’s still a weird distance to it all, a lack of intensity that is hard to put a finger on, with laid back versions of familiar tunes that don’t really probe for any new meanings.
The deluxe version also includes a remastered version of the Self Portrait album proper. Returning to it, it’s hard for those of us a generation or two younger to understand the reaction to it not because it paled in comparison to the greatness that came before, because it obviously did. If you’ve spent any time listening to Bob Dylan’s 1960s catalog, you are still trying to wrap your head around the thought that one person wrote the 56 songs on Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, and Nashville Skyline between 1965 and 1969. Self Portrait, next to these records, in that moment, must have seemed like a joke. But later generations hear it differently. We’ve discovered Self Portrait in the used bins, torrent downloads, and streaming services alongside records like Street Legal, Saved, Empire Burlesque, Down in the Groove, and Under the Red Sky. And in this broader context, it sounds quite good, another weird and sloppy record from a guy who released a lot of them. And hearing it again with all the fantastic music that surrounded it, music that further cements Dylan’s Bootleg Series as one of the most important archival projects in modern pop history, it remains a beguiling artifact. | 2013-08-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-08-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | August 30, 2013 | 8.7 | 6b7b0443-264b-4451-8343-1e7a710e6f11 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The young Jamaican singer shows off her versatility on her debut EP, slipping between rapid-fire ragga grit and conscious reggae styles, and maintaining an unwavering focus on memorable melodic hooks. | The young Jamaican singer shows off her versatility on her debut EP, slipping between rapid-fire ragga grit and conscious reggae styles, and maintaining an unwavering focus on memorable melodic hooks. | Koffee: Rapture EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/koffee-rapture-ep/ | Rapture EP | The opening strains of the ultra-infectious “Toast,” the first single from Jamaican teenage upstart Mikayla “Koffee” Simpson, demand a repeat. It’s the perfect tune to “lick back”—to pull back and rewind to the start—as is the practice of the mobile discotheque soundsystems on the island, building the anticipation for the beat to drop.
Koffee, who initially drew attention with an acoustic tribute to Usain Bolt, has a crisp delivery that moves back and forth between rapid-fire ragga grit and one drop conscious reggae, a style referred to as the portmanteau “singjay” (combining “singer” and “deejay,” the Jamaican term for MC). There’s been a great deal of talk about up-and-coming women in Jamaican music—Shenseea and HoodCelebrityy, to name only a couple—but this five-song EP indicates that Koffee can, like many of the singjays who made their mark in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Sizzla, Capleton, Buju Banton), navigate between dancehall and reggae with ease.
Production on the EP reflects multiple genres and seems to travel in and out of Jamaica as well. “Toast” might be called near-Naija in its styling—and no surprise, given that Walshy Fire was involved. As a member of Major Lazer, the outfit known for its constant (and sometimes controversial) international search for rhythms, Walshy is no stranger to Afrobeats, that genre with a woefully vague name. And then there’s the much more reggaefied “Throne”: It oscillates between plaintive chorus and sharp verse, showing off Koffee’s ability to shift from “alto to baritone,” as she sings. The thump of “Blazin” provides adequate backing for Koffee’s rapid-fire delivery; fellow newcomer Jane McGizmo’s soprano chorus floats and echoes above.
Given that this is a woman whose initial career goal was to be a pharmacist, it’s hard not to think about her as mixing up some seriously original medicine, because some of these tunes just tower over a whole lot of what’s being released these days. A one-minute performance of “Rapture” on a bespoke riddim by the UK’s Toddla T led to a breathless Twitter reaction. The longer version here is a touch moodier, but the boastful chorus, “Koffee come in like a rapture, and everybody get capture,” is sticky, sticky, sticky. What is clearly constant throughout each of the strong five songs here is a focus on hooks—it’s another thing that sets her apart.
Maybe she gets it from Chronixx. The breakout reggae-revival superstar has a penchant for perfect hooks that has rubbed off on this young woman; she’s obviously been paying attention to how important memorability is where melodies are concerned. It’s hard to come away from listening to a song like “Raggamuffin” and not be humming the chorus. When she performed it live at the legendary Tuff Gong studios as part of BBC Radio 1xtra’s 2018 visit to the island, Chronixx added bits and pieces to the chorus. Watching the video, there are a couple moments where the Grammy nominee breaks out in a huge smile as Koffee casually spits lyrics over the classic real rock riddim. He knows that he’s hearing something special. The Rapture EP is further proof of her talents, and its mix of rhythms and reggae seem likely to be but the first taste of what’s yet to come. | 2019-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia / Promised Land Recordings | March 18, 2019 | 7.8 | 6b7e39d9-eba0-448f-93be-66fe04cd9284 | Erin MacLeod | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-macleod/ | |
The peripatetic electronic artist takes inspiration from her Tunisian Berber heritage with her new alias. Full of yawning spaces and dembow-like rhythms, the music explores a space where body music and head music become one. | The peripatetic electronic artist takes inspiration from her Tunisian Berber heritage with her new alias. Full of yawning spaces and dembow-like rhythms, the music explores a space where body music and head music become one. | Azu Tiwaline: Draw Me a Silence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/azu-tiwaline-draw-me-a-silence/ | Draw Me a Silence | Azu Tiwaline has spent a lifetime wandering. She grew up in the West African nation of Côte d'Ivoire, the child of a Tunisian Berber mother and Cambodian father, but moved to France as a teenager. As an adult, she began spending extended stretches on the road, touching down in India, Senegal, Mongolia, and Réunion, seeking out “places in the world where I felt the same energy, the same gentleness as in Côte d'Ivoire.” She has been equally peripatetic in her music. In France in the mid-1990s, she discovered the rave scene—and along with it, the mind-bending techno of artists like Cristian Vogel, sending her down the path she would pursue for the next two decades as Loan. (Her first name is Donia, though she chooses not to share her surname.) Since the late ’90s, her own productions and live sets have wound through hard techno, dubstep, UK garage, hip-hop, IDM, and, frequently, fusions of several of those styles.
In 2017, Donia moved to the el-Djerid region in southwestern Tunisia to tend to a small plot of land left to her by her late mother, and the landscape seems to have done something to her music. A menacing palette of jagged synths and concussive drums had connected her previous stylistic shifts, but as Azu Tiwaline—Berber for “Eyes of the Wind”—those hard edges have melted away. Her debut album under the alias takes inspiration from her Berber heritage and the expanse of the desert, where date palms outnumber people 15 to one.
As with Loan, a unique palette holds together Draw Me a Silence, rather than any single musical style. The record is practically all percussion; almost everything Donia plays is evocative of objects being struck or shaken. She draws from a deep well of stock samples, homemade recordings, and synthesized drums: leathery thwacks and timpani-grade booms, tinkling bells and rustling brushes, thunderclaps and bullroarers. Crickets and village noise offer a vivid sense of place, and melodies are scarce. Instead, she uses dub delay to fill the yawning spaces between all these elements: Lines of resonant feedback stretch out, glistening, like furrows irrigating the arid surroundings.
A few songs incorporate traditional North African rhythms, scales, and instruments. The metallic splashing of iron qraqeb (also known in Tunisia as wonderfully onomatopoeic chkachek or shqashiq) drives “Berbeka,” and a mournful reed-like melody infuses “Izen Zaren” with a predawn chill. But Draw Me a Silence is just as deeply rooted in contemporary UK bass music. “Until the End” opens the album with a 4/4 kick reminiscent of Andy Stott; the influence of Shackleton echoes throughout the album; and the resonant textures and syncopated beats of “Luz Azul” recall artists like Parris and Batu. (Fittingly, Azu Tiwaline’s Magnetic Service EP appeared last year on Livity Sound, a Bristol label whose shadowy kinetics helped shape the development of both those musicians.) Like them, Donia is motivated by the meditative aspects of bass weight, and she uses slowed-down tempos and dembow-like rhythms to emphasize her drums’ depth. The Berber signifiers make her music unique; what makes it compelling is her exploration of a space where body music and head music become one.
Draw Me a Silence originally appeared last year as a pair of successive EPs, but a new, extended version of the album adds a new closing track, “Eyes of the Wind,” that offers a fresh perspective. Where the other 11 songs foreground percussion, “Eyes of the Wind” is mostly ambient, cradling a brief passage of languid hand drumming inside a shimmering expanse of drone and bleep. If the downbeat “Izen Zaren,” the album’s previous closing track, served as a denouement, the spacious “Eyes of the Wind” provides passage to another world. Perhaps it took a move to the desert for Donia to absorb the Slits’ maxim, “Silence is a rhythm too.” For all the album’s earthy textures, it is ultimately guided by the movements of the desert air and the sprawl of the heavens above.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | I.O.T | April 22, 2021 | 7.3 | 6b830c31-b291-404a-a2d9-168db2591087 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On his new new seven-song EP, dropped on short notice, YG is back on full throttle, racing ahead and sounding more nimble than ever. | On his new new seven-song EP, dropped on short notice, YG is back on full throttle, racing ahead and sounding more nimble than ever. | YG: Red Friday | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22670-red-friday/ | Red Friday | If you’ve gone outside in Los Angeles County since November 8, you’ve heard “FDT.” YG and Nipsey Hussle’s skeletal protest song—the one that made the Secret Service come knocking all the way back in April—had a brief run during the primaries, but became an anthem shortly after the election was called for The Donald. “I like white folks, but I don’t like you”: Within 24 hours of the election results, there were effigies burning at City Hall and protesters choking off the 110. “I’m ‘bout to turn Black Panther”; across Temple and down Figueroa, through South Central and over to the Beaches, the song rattled from Priuses and pickup trucks and seventh-story windows. “And if your ass do win, you gon’ probably get smoked.”
The overtly political is nothing new for YG. He’s been handing out groceries and school supplies with Compton mayor Aja Brown; he ended his sophomore album, Still Brazy with a three-song suite that tackled gross, race-based injustice. The first was “FDT,” but the next two (“Blacks and Brown” and “Police Get Away Wit Murder”) take aim at a state that can be murderous no matter who’s at the helm. And so with Red Friday, the new seven-song EP dropped on short notice, YG is back on the throttle, rushing ahead, nearly unbothered.
Red Friday finds him darting across the Pro Tools sessions, more nimble than he’s ever been before. Sonic landmarks of L.A. rap come and go over the course of the record, but the tempo is constantly being pushed. Some of that comes courtesy of DJ Mustard, YG’s longtime creative partner who was completely absent from Still Brazy after the two had a personal falling out. “Get Out Yo Feelin’s” in particular is a testament to their rediscovered chemistry: Mustard’s eerie undertones and breathless drums make YG and RJ’s wisecracks from the club sounds sinister, even unhinged. And “Down Bitch,” which should be a pretty rote song about loyal girlfriends, comes out sounding like a Christmas carol that took too much ketamine.
There’s no songwriting on Red Friday as instantly quotable as “Twist My Fingaz” or as sneakily brilliant as “Bool, Balm, & Bollective,” but what YG ends up rapping is tight and economical—and occasionally vivid. “I Be On,” an unfeeling rebuff to main girls and side girls alike is delivered gleefully, then qualified by acknowledging the drink in his hand. On “I Know,” he opens his verse with a three-bar riff on Houston one-hit wonder Mike Jones’ existence, then doubles down on his taunts to those rappers who need handholding to make the transition from grassroots fame to national stardom.
But without question, the crown jewel of Red Friday is “One Time Comin’,” a frenzied blur of guns and paranoia. YG gets pulled over by a police officer, presumably because someone with his complexion shouldn’t be driving a Maybach; his mind darts to the last moments he was able to spend with his baby daughter. It ends with a bridge that couldn’t be more unambiguous, a complete rebuke of the Los Angeles Police Department and those who support it. That YG decided to deliver it over such an urgent beat—and on such short notice that his label might have fumbled the release—is simply a nod to the days we live in. There’s not much time to waste. | 2016-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | December 1, 2016 | 7.2 | 6b83d090-7fb5-47f6-9c47-1963b8ca9bf7 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
The Bay Area quintet's first record for Matador feels a long way from its powerviolence beginnings, with a cleaned-up sound and a focus on garage-rock hooks. | The Bay Area quintet's first record for Matador feels a long way from its powerviolence beginnings, with a cleaned-up sound and a focus on garage-rock hooks. | Ceremony: Zoo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16374-zoo/ | Zoo | The first 7" I bought, when I was 13 or 14, was Minor Threat's "Salad Days". This was in 8th grade, or my first year in high school, so we're talking the late 1980s/early 1990s, though the record came out earlier, in 1985. The three-song EP was Minor Threat's last 7", the one that featured slower songs, an acoustic guitar, church chimes (or, at least that's what I thought of them as), and a cover of the Standells' "Sometimes Good Guys (Don't Wear White)". I was too young to realize Ian MacKaye and company were fucking with the hardcore template and looking beyond the genre's horizon, but they were: Those songs worked as a bridge to "Waiting Room" and the rest of Fugazi's self-titled 1988 EP and onward. All to say: Hardcore bands deciding to stop doing hardcore is not a new thing.
The Bay Area quintet Ceremony formed in 2004, playing especially raw, noisy, super-fast hardcore, something people tag "powerviolence." It's worth knowing that Violence Violence, their 13-song debut LP (right, right), lasted just over 13 minutes. (The CD version appended a re-tooled take on the 2005, 7-song Ruined EP.) Early on, though, they'd mentioned Joy Division, Suicidal Tendencies, Pink Floyd, Negative Approach, and Tom Waits as influences, and by the time they released their third album, Rohnert Park, in 2010, they were doing something very different, essentially making good on the promise of their eclectic record collections. Ceremony slowed things down, got sludgier and noisier in a Siltbreeze sense, discovered some British post-punk roots, and reminded me at times of the Shadow Ring covering the Fall.
On Rohnert Park's opening track, "Into the Wayside Part I / Sick", vocalist Ross Farrar lists a bunch of things he's sick of, including Black Flag and the Cro-Mags. Fair enough. For a band who named itself after a Joy Division song, that's not necessarily surprising. It's especially unsurprising in 2010-- like saying you're sick of the records your father grew up listening to. If that wasn't enough, they finished out their time on the hardcore/punk label Bridge 9 with Ceremony 6 Cover Songs, an EP that found them tackling Pixies, Wire, and L7's version of "American Society".
Given their history, the stylistic shifts on Zoo, their fourth album (and first album for Matador), shouldn't be all that surprising. At least not for the reasons you might think. Yes, they've changed things up again and they've cleaned and clarified their sound, but we already knew they had a Wire homage in them. Plenty of bands have shed genre constraints to arrive at a successful second act, though even more have fallen flat on their faces. Those disasters can be interesting, at least. In Ceremony's case, they don't wipe out; worse than a colossal flop, they sound exceedingly mediocre, and this is their least compelling album by far.
Zoo features a couple of good songs, including opener "Hysteria", a true group punk sing-a-long. But too much of it drifts into generic 1960s-nodding garage-rock territory. It's their best sounding record: the dense atmosphere is charged and fuzzed-out in the right ways, creating an ambiance I can get sucked into even when the songwriting falters. Kudos to producer John Goodmanson here, though people focusing on the indie rock portions of his resume should remember he has plenty of experience with punk via those old Team Dresch albums, Bikini Kill's Reject All American, a couple of Unwound classics, and Sleater-Kinney's Dig Me Out and All Hands on the Bad One, among others. Here, he makes the band sound sturdier and more colorful than they've ever sounded. But it doesn't matter when the songwriting itself is monochromatic, mid-tempo Troggs rock.
All said, Zoo makes for a very long 36 minutes. By the time you get to the drifting feedback that ends the third track, "Repeating the Circle", they already sound bored. "Quarantine" would be a late-period Social Distortion song that didn't make it onto a late-period Social Distortion album. They nod to the Cramps on "Hotel" but by the end, you'll be nodding off. The more punked-up raver "Ordinary People"? Very ordinary. They do offer an interesting look, and taste, on downcast closer "Video", the longest song on the collection: Here we see them stretching things out like they did on the more experimental Rohnert Park, controlling a pent-up intensity-- and pleasingly bleak atmosphere-- that they're able to maintain for the low-key, slow-burn track's four minutes and change. It's a great finale.
Ceremony will be inevitably be compared to Fucked Up because they, too, are playing more ambitiously pop music than when they started, and for the same label. But Fucked Up pushed themselves in ways that paid big dividends: The multi-tracked operatics were as exciting for the listener as they were for the out-of-breath band. Here, it feels like a downgrade to go from the early frenetic madness or the rickety, exhilarating post-punk of Rohnert Park to these decent, very safe punk nods. There's not much on Zoo that you won't find on dozens of garage-rock albums released by smaller labels this year. It's hard to say why things went wrong, but on another of the better tracks, "Adult", Farrar sings that, as we get older, "we have to give up the things we love sometimes," a line that doesn't ring true. Even with a family and a new set of responsibilities, you can easily hold onto what got you into punk in the first place, and growing old shouldn't mean growing boring. | 2012-03-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-03-09T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | March 9, 2012 | 5.4 | 6b845e5f-5dbf-41fe-9da7-5f4099cb9132 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Los Campesinos! haven't changed much on their fourth album, their darkest yet. The band's serrated twee is not exactly in fashion, though, and if LC! are the last men and women left holding the flag for an antiquated era of indie rock, it has only intensified their vitality. | Los Campesinos! haven't changed much on their fourth album, their darkest yet. The band's serrated twee is not exactly in fashion, though, and if LC! are the last men and women left holding the flag for an antiquated era of indie rock, it has only intensified their vitality. | Los Campesinos!: Hello Sadness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16036-hello-sadness/ | Hello Sadness | The music of Los Campesinos! has always been about straddling the line between sincerity and irony. It's a tough game to play, but thanks to songwriter Gareth Campesinos' wry humor and self-deprecation, the band has been able to make a career out of writing songs where breakups literally equal death. The music is intensely personal, but it's equally as inclusive-- Gareth paints himself as having it worse than anyone, but the unspoken acknowledgment that makes the band churn is that he really just has it as bad as everyone else.
Hello Sadness is the band's fourth album, and though not much has changed with the band itself, the ground underneath which LC! stand has shifted. Gareth's style of writing-- naked oversharing that goes far past the margins of his pad-- used to feel like a natural outgrowth of the type of discourse found at places like LiveJournal and Blogger, but those mediums are dinosaurs now, replaced by the opacity of Tumblr and the short, controlled blasts of Twitter. Likewise, the band's serrated twee is not exactly in fashion in the world of indie rock right now, a truth that's an undercurrent of their announcement late last year that they would be distributing a quarterly fanzine. But, if LC! are the last men and women left holding the flag for an antiquated era of indie rock, it has only intensified their vitality to those looking for more than chillwave's call to tune in, turn on, and drop out.
Though the album is arguably the band's darkest yet, it starts off with both the album's peppiest song and one of LC!'s best singles to date. "By Your Hand" finds Gareth at the very infancy of a budding romance, and it casts him as a sort of lovable hero, a role that he inhabits when he's not, say, fantasizing about burning the skin off his hands before going to a palmist. Gareth narrates himself initiating another round of dirty texting before breaking into one of the more memorable passages he's penned: his fooling around with "fate"-- "a cruel mistress, girl"-- who suggests that the two go back to her place, where "fate" then, naturally, vomits on him. He does this with gusto, which is accentuated by the chorus, wherein the entire band shouts, "By your hand is the only end that I foresee." The exuberance, not just for the romance itself but for his eventual end at the hand of his lover, is crucial to Gareth's ability to write songs about what happens when the relationship is at the other end of the spectrum. We know that he's always coming back for more, even when the rest of us can't stomach it.
Otherwise Hello Sadness is an album largely obsessed with themes of despair and images of death, but Gareth is an able gallows humorist. On the album's final track he enters a slaughterhouse where he sees his guts strung up, only for him to be turned away because "his sad eyes are too much to bear." On "Baby, I Got the Death Rattle" he gets frostbite from scribbling dicks in the snow for every girl that wouldn't sleep with him before watching a halo slip from the top of his lover's head and, presumably, decapitate her. And then there is "Every Defeat a Divorce (Three Lions)", Gareth's long-coming ode to the English soccer team, wherein crosses on the pitch become crucifixes and the team's crest nearly claws him to death. It is the album's centerpiece, if only because for Gareth, and for a lot of us, the one thing more wrenching than romance is sports.
These songs are genuinely affecting, though, both because they explore the darkest depths of a romantic's psyche and because LC! have transitioned rather seamlessly into maturity. The fizzy, excitable songwriting of their early output is far in the past, and they've learned to write songs that build and swell to moments that can knock you off your feet ("To Tundra" is the killer here). Gareth also explores his range as a vocalist to great success, stretching himself to sing melodically and in a strikingly deeper voice. His vocals have long been a breaking point for many non-converts, and while Gareth hasn't morphed into King Krule, his impressive singing here bodes well for the future of a band whose music largely revolves around him.
The buzz has long worn off of Los Campesinos!, but Hello Sadness is their fourth straight great album, and each of them is close enough in quality that you'd likely get split numbers if you conducted a straw poll at one of the band's shows. Even if there is no breakthrough moment for them, there is something to be said for a band that is this young, this consistent, and this committed to both carrying the torch for and freshening up a style of indie rock that has, for the moment at least, been left behind. | 2011-11-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-11-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts / Wichita | November 16, 2011 | 8 | 6b880c69-aa7a-4e17-baa4-81baaf22a929 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
On her debut, this Japanese 20-year-old takes inspiration from indie rock to craft lonely, glowing bedroom pop that relishes in the ecstatic possibilities of sound. | On her debut, this Japanese 20-year-old takes inspiration from indie rock to craft lonely, glowing bedroom pop that relishes in the ecstatic possibilities of sound. | Nana Yamato: Before Sunrise | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nana-yamato-before-sunrise/ | Before Sunrise | At 16, Nana Yamato fell in love with her first indie record. Among the bins of central Tokyo’s Big Love, a record store specializing in independent music from the U.S., UK, and EU—where J-Pop and Japanese artists run scarce—she discovered a Danish punk rock band named Iceage. For years after, she spent after-school evenings flicking through the shelves, doodling and doing homework alongside the new sounds before retreating back home to make her own music in her bedroom, where she began experimenting with guitar, layered vocals, and MIDI beats. Yamato’s story came full circle a few years later, when she was discovered by Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts.
Now, with the release of Yamato’s debut LP Before Sunrise via Savage’s label Dull Tools, the record store she still frequents looks out toward the Japan National Stadium which looms, unoccupied. Originally built for the 1964 Tokyo Summer Olympic Games, the 68,000-capacity stadium spent years in renovation for the 2020 Summer Games, only to go wasted and unused. Where the construction site once held a great, globalized fantasy—“a piece of time” where “the rope of the blue crane” reached out for “the hope of the balling crane,” as Nana sings in Japanese on album highlight “Gaito”—it now functions as little more than a dead monument in a city largely devoid of statues and visual history. Twice ravaged by war, Tokyo has a record for rebuilding itself with remarkable speed, leaving behind scant reminders of destruction and lost futures. Nana’s music is a whimsical expression of the city’s peculiar urban psycho-geography; a metropolis in which collective memories have been made to replace concrete monuments.
Written during lockdown in Tokyo, Before Sunrise considers the entangled relationship between the self and the city. The lyrics emulate an act of disappearing into the streets. “I don’t want to see,” she sings on “If”; “I kill my voice” on “Gaito”; “The only thing left, my desires” on “Under the Cherry Moon,” before segueing into a field recording of rushing and chatter on a busy Shibuyan street. Closer “The Day Song” is overwhelmed by a haze of synths and nostalgia, as adult Yamato imagines herself walking down the streets where she played as a child, knowing that time and age only serve to estrange her from these memories.
While Beyond Sunrise is somewhat indebted to the Western indie rock Yamato forged her musical identity on—the exuberant horns recall some of Iceage’s grander moments; the zigzagged synths occasionally sound Johnny Jewel-adjacent —her sharp ear for melody and dynamic transitions transcend her cumulative influences. On “Burning Desire,” she subjects her layers of grooves to a pendulum ride between ebullience and urgency. One moment, it feels fanciful; the next it sounds as though the world’s going down on a sinking ship. There’s a sheer joy to it, though. Yamato almost makes music the way kids play with toys, relishing in the ecstatic possibilities of sound.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Dull Tools | February 8, 2021 | 7.6 | 6b92f688-078d-44e5-a176-fdf6e4f22f1d | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Sufjan’s masterful new album recalls his intimate singer-songwriter days. But it also draws on his entire catalog, his dazzling musicality, and his lifelong inquiries about love and devotion. | Sufjan’s masterful new album recalls his intimate singer-songwriter days. But it also draws on his entire catalog, his dazzling musicality, and his lifelong inquiries about love and devotion. | Sufjan Stevens: Javelin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sufjan-stevens-javelin/ | Javelin | Once when Sufjan Stevens was in college, he brought an injured crow to the biology lab to help save its life. “You are doing the universe a great favor,” a woman who ran an animal sanctuary told him once he called her to the scene. This is one of several stories Stevens tells in his 10-part essay included in the elaborate physical edition of his latest album, Javelin, all in service of exploring his ever-expanding definition of “love.” He writes in an inquisitive and self-aware tone, joking about how that experience with the crow provided “endless fodder” for his collegiate creative writing: “So much meaning, so little time,” he reflects. But if a young Sufjan once sought these encounters for their symbolic potential, the present-day writer of this essay, and of these songs, tells a more pressing story: even more meaning, even less time.
Over and over again on Javelin, Stevens contemplates the end. Sometimes his language, along with the hushed longing of his voice and the romantic sweep of his largely acoustic instrumentation, points toward the demise of a very long relationship. “I will always love you/But I cannot look at you,” he explains, tracing the broken logic governing the loss. “It’s a terrible thought to have and hold,” he admits after wishing ill to someone he once held dear. “Will anybody ever love me?” he asks in the aftermath.
Instantly, the songwriting feels as raw and direct as ever. And indeed, Javelin is Stevens’ first proper album in a long time that seems designed with no grand concept to unify the material or inspire theatrical adaptations; no autobiographical insight to make you reconsider everything you thought you knew about him; no jarring musical change-ups to remind you he is a proud member of the Beyhive. Running under 45 minutes, Javelin begins with a deliberate inhale and ends with a cover of a deep cut from Neil Young’s best-selling album—a track that Stevens manages to make sound even sweeter and more hopeful than the 1972 original.
Like much of his defining work, Stevens wrote, recorded, and produced Javelin almost entirely alone, minus a few key appearances: some guitar from the National’s Bryce Dessner in the dazzling eight-minute “Shit Talk,” and frequent vocal accompaniment from a small choir that includes Megan Lui, Hannah Cohen, Pauline Delassus, Nedelle Torrisi, and the activist and writer adrienne maree brown. It’s got at least one song that instantly joins the ranks of his very best (“Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”) and plenty that draw direct lines to previous high-water marks, both thematically and musically. Centering the devotional melodies and heart-tugging intimacy that characterized his early masterpieces, it’s the type of record, two decades into an artist’s career, that tends to be called a “return-to-form,” suggesting an embrace of his strengths and a diminished instinct to surprise or provoke.
But is anything ever so easy? The intricacy of Javelin is central to the essays and art accompanying the album: collages that overflow with faces of friends and family and heroes, paintings whose colors seem intended to combat Seasonal Affective Disorder. Many songs follow the path of these maximalist projects, beginning with gentle fingerpicking or piano before fireworking into electronic symphonies, orchestral crescendos, and choral rounds. The cumulative effect suggests that, while each story might begin as a stark, personal inquiry, Stevens strives to lead us somewhere divine, an altitude where our lives might appear more beautiful and still.
It is through these trajectories that Javelin, despite its tone of endless searching, becomes one of Stevens’ most uplifting records. In “Should Have Known Better,” a sudden burst of Casio keyboards accompanied an optimistic glance to the next generation—a rare bright spot on 2015’s grief-stricken Carrie & Lowell; Javelin is filled with these kinds of turns. With the notable exception of “Shit Talk,” which dissolves into a long ambient coda that lingers like fog after heavy rain, each song ends somewhere brighter, fuller, and lusher than it began. “So You Are Tired,” which includes Stevens’ most heartbreaking set of lyrics since Carrie & Lowell, climaxes with a lapping wordless refrain from the choir. As his words zoom in closer to a separation (“So you are tired… of even my kiss”), the soothing, major-key resolution suggests an elemental sense of peace, leading to a blend of emotions that feels entirely new within his songbook.
If there is anything Stevens learned from his last proper solo album, 2020’s pared-down synth-opus The Ascension, it is to tell these complex stories in simple ways. Take, for example, “My Red Little Fox,” a love song cast in waltz time, where Stevens uses one of his most classically beautiful melodies to express a series of escalating refrains: “Kiss me with the fire of gods,” he sings, then, “Kiss me like the wind,” and eventually, “Kiss me from within.” Here is the story of Javelin in miniature: The first two are seductions, spoken from person to person; the last is more like a prayer. If the lyrics on Javelin lack the proper-noun touchstones of Stevens’ story-songs, these ones gain authority from an intrinsic sense of self and place. They are approachable like pop songs, but delivered with the same precision as his folk confessionals. They break our hearts from within.
“I know I’ve often been the poster child of pain, loss, and loneliness,” Stevens recently wrote to his fans. “But the past month has renewed my hope in humanity.” He was referring to his ongoing treatment for Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare auto-immune disorder that left him learning to walk again after losing feeling and mobility in his hands, arms, and legs. In the lead-up to Javelin, he has taken to Tumblr—long his preferred method of communication—to give frequent updates on his recovery. Sometimes he finds humor in the situation—a post about his dream wheels, the “Porsche 911 of wheelchairs”—and sometimes his words are more troubling (“Woke up feeling trapped”). But nearly every post ends with a positive affirmation, or at least a sign-off with a series of X’s and O’s.
This is the tone that Stevens now favors, something familiar and close, where the stakes are high and his sense of empathy is pervasive. This tenderness is partially how “Will Anybody Ever Love Me?,” with its Morrissey-level self-deprecation and whispered instructions to “pledge allegiance to my burning heart,” manages to feel less like a breakdown and more like time-lapse footage of a flower turning toward the sun. Throughout his career, Stevens has used the language of love songs to express religious devotion, and vice versa. Across Javelin, he seems intent on understanding and being understood, with the purpose of exposing the common thread between his pet subjects: raising the endless questions that lead us to seek meaning in one another, and rejoicing in the euphoria of sometimes finding it. And if it sounds like he is occasionally singing to us from rock bottom, it’s only so we can witness the steady ascent onward. | 2023-10-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-05T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Asthmatic Kitty | October 5, 2023 | 8.6 | 6b941e34-88f9-4c24-b4f5-94a455d823dd | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
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 Nick Cave’s early punk band and their pulpy, lurid, and legendary 1982 album. | 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 Nick Cave’s early punk band and their pulpy, lurid, and legendary 1982 album. | The Birthday Party: Junkyard | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-birthday-party-junkyard/ | Junkyard | To be a Birthday Party fan was and is to understand in one’s bones how much damage and electricity can be conducted through a truly spectacular new wave hairdo. “Thank you,” Nick Cave says at the end of the live version of Junkyard’s “The Dim Locator,” found on the raucous and essential Live 1981-82 compilation, “I love your haircut as well.” And hairdos, even metaphorically, the Birthday Party had in spades. The image of bassist Tracy Pew, practically shirtless and throbbing beneath an oversized cowboy hat, is as iconic a part of the Birthday Party’s mythos as the subway grate is to Marilyn Monroe’s. Whether it was Cave or guitarist Rowland S. Howard who popularized the long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned to the belly, that every frontman of every noise gothic cow-punk outfit has adopted since the early ’80s, the lineage of scrawny come-hither-ness that began in the Birthday Party’s camp is undeniable. They were the exemplar of having great hair as both aesthetic and ethos. There’s a reason that the Great Plains’ song “Letter to a Fanzine,” a 1987 nerd-punk anthem of scene-hierarchy jealousy, begins with the lines, “Isn’t my haircut really intense/Isn’t Nick Cave a genius in a sense?” In a sense, they all were.
By the time of Junkyard’s release in 1982, the Birthday Party (along with co-songwriter Anita Lane) had been in England for two years. Left behind in Australia was the band’s old name—the ironic and aptly teen-dreamy the Boys Next Door—and that old version of the band’s core influences: Roxy Music, the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, and more Roxy Music. “We became a bunch of sniveling little poofs,” bassist Tracy Pew said in a 1981 NME interview. Cave added, only slightly less problematically, “I used to wear frilly shirts and pigtails before any of this English shit. We committed the unpardonable error of playing to the thinkers rather than the drinkers.”
Complicating the shift is the fact that the Boys Next Door’s second album—1980’s The Birthday Party—was also the Birthday Party’s first album. While released under the original name, that album was written and recorded after the band heard the first convention-warping records made by the Pop Group and Pere Ubu, and were transformed. Though newly inspired, the Boys Next Door/Birthday Party album sounded like a near-complete transition into what Nick Cave, Tracy Pew, Rowland S. Howard, Mick Harvey, and Phill Calvert would become. With Howard’s mutant mosquito guitar and Cave’s yowl still changing from plaintively put-upon to predatory put-upon-er, the record utilizes the same jerking rhythms of the Fall, another band that inspired the decampment from Melbourne, but the Birthday Party’s sound is swampier, more soulful even, with horns and high-guitar squall giving a threatening silliness to the proceedings. It’s like the band was already driving the Ed Roth hot rod depicted on Junkyard’s cover, but drunkenly and underneath a circus tent.
Initially, the UK press embraced the Birthday Party with open arms. While plenty of post-punk bands like PIL and the Pop Group sounded like the ghosts of the free market, and there was already a few vampiric seducers like Bauhaus on the baritone scene, only the Australian transplants sounded like the wolfman, Frankenstein monster, and all the other underrepresented creatures of the collective unconscious. The mythmaking started early: That same 1981 profile in NME made an unintentional case for poptimism by using the avant-garde French dramatist Antonin Artaud as a point of reference and contrasting the Birthday Party’s violent realness against the “fools and phonies” music of Fleetwood Mac.
This high, dumb praise came just a few months after the release of the Birthday Party’s second long player, 1981’s Prayers on Fire, a near-perfect representation of the band’s delirious rhythm’n’skronk. Howard’s scabrous guitars slashed over Pew’s lurching yet lithe basslines. Both served as vehicles for Cave’s hiccups of desire and disdain. Whether the band’s bottom-fed frenzy was a more affecting ode to self-abnegation than the only slightly more subtle Fleetwood Mac is a judgment best left to the individual listener.
Less than a year later, another equally effusive NME review hinted at the English press’ shifting opinion of the band, saying, “the Birthday Party are awful. Subversively awful. Awesomely great. Awesomely brilliant.” Like many bands of the time, the young men played their own part in their complicated relationship with the press. They performed annoyed disinterest in interviews, bad-mouthed their peers, and seemed distinctly ambivalent about anyone liking them at all. “When we went back to Australia last year we were greeted with such acclaim and adulation it made what we were doing pointless,” Howard complained not long before the band’s breakup in 1983. “The whole life of the group had been based on reacting against what was around us and turning it into some kind of positive force. So once everything was positive towards us it defeated the purpose. We loathed it for the main part.” When the band was breaking up, Cave dismissed the Birthday Party as “trash” and “utter rubbish.”
The initial adulation is understandable. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to misremember the early ’80s as a sparkling parade of post-punk innovation and joy. But for every Joy Division or Slits, there were a hundred tuneless strivers who had the new boots and signed contracts but not much else. What the Birthday Party brought to the table was absent even among the actually good post-punk bands. If Echo and the Bunnymen and Teardrop Explodes (Cave hated these bands: “They were horrible,” he told NME in 1981) were digging through the ’60s for a psychedelic profundity and the whole of punk looked to the ’50s for rock’n’roll “realness,” Nick Cave and co. looked at the same decades only for backwoods pulp and Hollywood detritus. They found Peggy Lee, Robert Mitchum chewing up the scenery, mafia-era Sinatra and his Rat Pack’s overblown love/hate relationship with the opposite sex, the Addams Family, and even the oeuvre of Mr. Sinatra’s daughter (the Boys Next Door covered “These Boots” and Rowland S. Howard and Lydia Lunch would, concurrent the release of Junkyard, do a version of “Some Velvet Morning”). Punk had perhaps correctly loathed the plasticine nature of showbiz, but the Birthday Party took the spectacle and blew it up, exposing and embracing the violence underneath. With, really, only the equally knowing Cramps and the utterly po-faced Misfits as peers, they approached pop culture like a comic strip sharing column space with the obits.
It didn’t hurt that the band managed to make a cohesively outré inversion of blues-rock that, while indebted to Captain Beefheart and the Stooges as everyone said, was equally within the traditions of absurdist, sophisticatedly wacky mid-century composers such as Carl Stalling, Raymond Scott, and Spike Jones. Sex and death abounded, but they were combined with lounge-funk vamps, eye-bulging awooga horns (and guitars played like horns), and a singer taking Mark E. Smith’s promise of a truly “hip priest” to its illogical conclusion. Cartoonish, yes, but a cartoon world where the holes Wile E. Coyote draws on the sides of mountains were both overtly Freudian and actual working tunnels that lead somewhere very dark and very hot.
Junkyard—its title, surprise surprise, a reference to heroin—was produced in part by Tony Cohen, who had produced the last Boys Next Door/first Birthday Party album, and Richard Mazda, who had worked on some early Fall tracks. On the surface, most of the songs on Junkyard are about killing girls, killing boys, killing someone of indeterminate gender, and getting into something disreputable while either driving or living in a trashcan in Texas. And doing a lot of heroin.
I won’t argue that the songs on Junkyard are not about the above topics. Without taking away from the smarts of its 5/4 time signature, the lyrics of “6" Gold Blade” (“I stuck a six-inch gold blade in the head of a girl”) don’t exactly lend themselves to a variety of interpretations. Nor am I insisting that the songs on Junkyard are necessarily about any specific thing. Howard’s “Dim Locator” (“Intriquintomitry treads on my trail/Entriggering traps for a gross gang of ghost types/Who later are packed in a cast iron trunk/These things have been known, to get out of their wraps”) is so enjoyably ludicrous that it’d be a shame to pester its mystery with presumptions of specific meaning.
But fun as it is to ponder how delightfully hairbrained gothic cowboy culture was before goth’s aesthetic shifted from “rhinestone cowboy junkie” to “steampunk Lestat in pleather,” the Birthday Party’s commitment to a theatrical bump’n’grind was not merely some internal fixation on homicide and hogwash. In the rich tradition of razzle-dazzle—whether freak show, creature feature, or Lennie killing all those lil’ mice and nice ladies—how the Birthday Party sang their song was arguably more important than the text of the song itself. They were, at the end of the day, putting on a show.
Throughout Nick Cave’s career, the most often referenced tentpole of his lyrics is his love of Southern gothic literature. He’s never been shy about drawing from the doom-pervert protagonist of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, or the polyamorous revelators of countless blues songs. Seeing The Johnny Cash Show on TV as a child, he’s said, gave young Cave his first indication that “rock’n’roll could be evil.” And certainly some of Cave’s ’80s and ’90s blues workouts (particularly with the Bad Seeds on Kicking Against the Pricks and The Firstborn Is Dead) are smothered and covered with enough Southern gothic signifiers to make Jonah Hex blush. But, somewhere along the way, the application of “Southern gothic” to Cave’s concerns has become a trope unto itself. It discounts the gonzo noir of a song like Junkyard’s “Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow),” the Iggy-in-reverse come-on of “She’s Hit,” and even the influence of the cold, weirdo existentialism of another Cave favorite, Philip Larkin, in favor of reading all Cave’s lyrics as an ode to a murderous, hayseed-savant’s hand-scrawled bible.
The death drive of the Birthday Party has been well covered. Reasonably so, as that drive is apparent from the most casual perusal of the song titles, album art, or publicity photos. The band’s version of “kick out the jams, motherfucker” was, after all, Cave howling, at the start of their 1983 EP, The Bad Seed, “Hands up! Who wants to die!” But if the band was solely an exercise in violence and transgression, their appeal would mostly be contained to anhedonic edgelords, crime scene fetishists, men who dress like warlocks and bring their pet snakes to the bar, and other assorted transgression hobbyists. No, the Birthday Party’s flagrant sensuality must not be ignored.
Of all the bands that fit loosely under the umbrella of early-’80s “post-punk” bands, the Birthday Party was easily the sexiest. This is both obvious and the faintest of praise. As far as primal concerns went, being sexy wasn’t a big one for, say, Gang of Four. Only Bauhaus, fellow princelings in the “Don’t call us goth!” boyband olympics, came close. But Peter Murphy’s glam quartet was practically obsessed with being sexy, and even the most performatively minded sex-haver will tell you that too much effort can be a real turn-off. Couple Bauhaus’ preening with Peter Murphy’s somewhat ooky lifelong oedipal relationship with David Bowie, and the field for sallow-cheeked hip thrusters really opens up. Without discounting the Birthday Party’s reputation for being scary, their (anti-)religiosity, or the body count that came with all that intravenous drug use, what shines brightly about the music, in conjunction with its loony tunosity, is its sheer, feral horniness.
Junkyard, for its part, is a profoundly sexy record. It is sexy in Tracy Pew’s lumbering bass. It’s sexy in Phill Calvert’s stuttering snare. It’s sexy in Howard and Harvey’s transmogrification of Voivod-esque guitar stab back into the serpentine funk that birthed the sound. And, of course, Junkyard is sexy in Cave’s utilization of every trick in the James Brown/Don Van Vliet playbook to fully inhabit a drooling, yowling Elvis Presley-infected beast. Good sex can be a transcendent communion between two loving souls. Good sex can also be an unholy mess, a phantasmagoria of bodies and dark, ravenous need, akin to a sexy soccer team crashing into a sexy mountain range.
The Birthday Party, disaster reenactors onstage and off, performed the latter. Both Cave and Howard were in the throes of a substance dependency that would thread in and out of their lives for at least the next decade (Cave would eventually get straight after the sixth try at rehab; Howard would die at age 50). Harvey was generally dissatisfied with the band’s direction, or lack thereof. In ’82, Pew was arrested for drunk driving for the third time and served two and half months in a Victoria prison, necessitating Harvey and future Bad Seed Barry Adamson to play bass on “Kewpie Doll” and “Kiss Me Black,” respectively. And Calvert, while still drumming on the majority of Junkyard, was on the way out, soon to be slandered in interviews by his former friends as an all-around unimaginative musician. The men and women who made up the Birthday Party’s social milieu (the sick boys themselves, Anita Lane, Jim Thirlwell, Blixa, Lydia Lunch, Genevieve McGuckin) were of the age and disposition that mental health issues were both taken for granted and actively disregarded. Asked if Cave was depressed during this time, Lydia Lunch has said, “He was a heroin addict—of course he was fucking depressive.”
For Harvey’s part, in a 2012 Quietus interview, the multi-instrumentalist was agnostic on the topic of how much any internal or external hardships came into play, saying, “It’s impossible to appraise how much of the music was down to living in harsh circumstances and reaction to them.” That said, the overarching psychodrama of Birthday Party was probably part of what pushed the band’s previous tropes of rockabilly maximalism and Night of the Hunter rural noir even further on Junkyard. The producer Nick Launay, who recorded “Blast Off” and “Release the Bats”—two songs that were not on the initial album but were included on a reissued CD version—described to the Quietus how Harvey and Rowland tormented their singer by making him redo a particularly arduous verse over and over, less to get it right than to get off on his distress. On Junkyard’s sole moment of quietude, “Several Sins,” a pensive, boom-swagger-boom blues walk penned by Howard and his brother, the band gives Cave a breather. Though Cave would later express discomfort at singing any lyrics not his own, he doesn’t sound detached from the abstractly murderous apologia of “Several Sins.” He sounds like he’s sad, and exhausted by everything.
Or maybe not. The Birthday Party were of the post-punk school that eschewed straight confessionalism in their lyrics. Cave’s strength has always been the ability to convey lyrics as abstract as “Dim Locator,” as elliptical as “She’s Hit,” and as straight-ahead murder fantastical as “6" Gold Blade” as though he were telling the truest stories ever told from the pulpit, a Broadway stage, or the gallows. The stories may be too grotesque to take at face value. Threaded as they are to the rest of the band’s dramatic instincts, the stories also can’t be reduced to just abstract, elliptical, murder-fantastical ways of saying, “heroin, amirite?”
Even if punk made a big to-do about no gods, no masters, no heroes; even if the UK press briefly turned on the Birthday Party for not being as tasteful as the Jam’s Paul Weller; even if, after two decades, the American press wouldn’t truly embrace Nick Cave till enough terrible things happened to him that he dropped the hoodoo jive of “archetypes” and “metaphors” and gave critics the transcriptions of trauma which is the only art that many American critics understand; even with all that, the Birthday Party have become a myth. Not hugely, mind you, like Jesus or the Velvet Underground. But big enough that it’s hard to think of them without a pack of vampires showing up at one’s mental doorstep, clutching a hypodermic needle in one hand and the Collected Stories of William Faulkner in the other, scratching at the screen, begging for an invitation to enter.
This mythology was achieved partially because of goth-rock loving its own past as much as any subculture. It was achieved partially from the gravitational pull of Cave’s career. And it was achieved partially from the band’s own vision; the dragging of white blues into different territories of urban muck, the violent spectacle of their live shows, the music’s sheer insistence that it’s within the traditions of murder balladry, post-Stooges glam, and neo-deconstructed rockabilly. In a 1982 NME interview, Andrew Eldritch, the singer of Sisters of Mercy, said, “There was one great heavy metal group and that was the Stooges, and there’s only two bands around that can touch them and they’re Motörhead and the Birthday Party.”
The Birthday Party would, having kicked out Calvert, put out two more EPs as a four-piece. Both would be works of astounding beauty and both would be torn apart by the British press. By 1984, Cave would be, in a cosmic nod to early hyperbole, well on his way to becoming his own naughty version of Stevie Nicks, then Leonard Cohen, then Nick Cave again, and eventually he would take on his current role as Man with Some Important Things to Say. Mick Harvey would co-form the Bad Seeds and make a bunch of frankly delicious Serge Gainsbourg tribute records. Anita Lane would make a couple lovely solo albums but be misogynistically discounted as a muse. Pew would die of an epileptic seizure in 1986, Calvert would play the blues, and Rowland S. Howard would make a rich and devastating body of work with Lydia Lunch, These Immortal Souls, and finally solo, that few would pay attention to until after his death.
As of this writing, everyone involved’s hair is, in either this world or the next, still terrific. | 2022-02-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-06T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | February 6, 2022 | 8.7 | 6b963cd5-2cb9-4554-871a-611a51a47a1a | Zachary Lipez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zachary-lipez/ | |
A double LP and CD box set collect the irascible English rockers’ studio recordings, B-sides, and live cuts. Though new material is limited, the band’s commitment to legacy is perfectly in character. | A double LP and CD box set collect the irascible English rockers’ studio recordings, B-sides, and live cuts. Though new material is limited, the band’s commitment to legacy is perfectly in character. | Art Brut: A Record Collection, Reduced to a Mixtape / And Yes, This Is My Singing Voice! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/art-brut-a-record-collection-reduced-to-a-mixtape-and-yes-this-is-my-singing-voice/ | A Record Collection, Reduced to a Mixtape / And Yes, This Is My Singing Voice! | In the Rebel Alliance to resurrect Real Rock’n’Roll, Art Brut frontman Eddie Argos viewed himself as Luke Skywalker. How else are we meant to interpret one particular live version of the band’s 2007 single “Pump Up the Volume,” which opens with John Williams’ Star Wars title theme before the horns crash into the song’s swaggering first notes?
When Art Brut first met in 2002, at a party hosted by short-lived London indie darlings Ciccone, NME’s number-one ranked album was Coldplay’s A Rush of Blood to the Head. The early aughts post-punk revival was bursting at the seams (Interpol’s Turn on the Bright Lights came out the same year), but the pop charts could barely manage a distortion pedal. British music media was similarly fractured—BBC’s Top of the Pops was sprinting towards its swan song, while NME and Kerrang! struggled to adapt to the velocity of new online-only publications. Armed with Argos’, well, brute sprechgesang and wielding their guitars like battle axes, Art Brut painted themselves as the saviors of a dying scene. On two new compilations titled after lyrics, the 2xLP A Record Collection, Reduced to a Mixtape and the 5xCD box set And Yes, This Is My Singing Voice!, Art Brut assemble their studio recordings, B-sides, and a handful of electrifying live cuts that argue that the scene, in turn, saved them.
In the nearly 20 years since the band’s debut, 2005’s Bang Bang Rock & Roll, it seems painfully clear that Argos has failed to write “the song that makes Israel and Palestine get along,” or to pen the next “Happy Birthday,” as he declared on “Formed a Band.” But Art Brut’s influence on contemporary indie rock has only grown since their last album, 2018’s Wham! Bang! Pow! Let’s Rock Out!. The echo of Argos’ cocksure yet self-aware monotone can be heard in Joe Casey’s tortured soliloquies for Protomartyr, the deadpan nonsequiturs of Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw, or the fever-pitch rants of Idles’ Joe Talbot. And while the band’s lyrical themes—falling in love with girls, starting a band to make out with girls, loving music more than making out—appear provincial compared to their politically minded disciples, Argos’ contemptuous streak has resurfaced in a recent crop of British bands like Yard Act and Squid. These newer groups might couch their music in the alienation of late capitalism, but fundamentally, they’re asking the same question that Argos barked back in 2005: “Why don’t our parents worry about us?”
This isn’t the first time Art Brut have revisited their past. In 2013, they released a “best of” collection, Top of the Pops, named after both the band’s 2004 song and the show on which they’d never have the chance to perform. For the casual Art Brut fan, there isn’t much added value on these new releases. The first few songs on both the LP and CD sets mirror the Top of the Pops tracklist almost exactly, opening with “Formed a Band,” “My Little Brother,” and “Emily Kane.” Instead, this collection is both an introduction for potential new fans who were still in primary school during the band’s peak, and on the other end, an overdue celebration for Art Brut obsessives, who will doubtlessly appreciate the frenetic live recordings included here. At the time of its release, Argos used Top of the Pops to prematurely anoint Art Brut a “CLASSIC ROCK BAND” (they had been on the front cover of German Rolling Stone, after all), and projected that their “Next phase is HERITAGE ROCK BAND. See you in 10 years for a Second Volume.” It took a little longer, but Art Brut have returned to cement their status: being a Heritage Rock Band usually requires leaving some sort of lasting physical legacy.
For Argos’ teeth-gnashing musical protagonist, discovering rock’n’roll was the first step in a futile quest—electric guitars evoked a world of declining relevance and unfulfilled potential. But it was hard to tell how much of the band was an act. Was their bassist’s name really Freddy Feedback? What about first guitarist Chris Chinchilla? How serious was Argos when he sang “popular culture no longer applies to me,” and how much was a deflection from his own insecurities as a songwriter? These box sets suggest that both can be true: Art Brut sound at the peak of their powers performing live, darting frantically across the fretboard and drumkit at the French festival Eurockéennes in 2006. At that show’s rendition of “Bad Weekend,” Argos justified his anger as he begged his audience to write books and make films: “You can’t complain about it unless you’re doing something about it!” Without the band behind him, he seemed to say, he’d be just another guy whining about art after one too many lagers.
The outlandish confidence of Art Brut’s debut, which seemed to demand critical success by sheer force of will, wasn’t born in a vacuum. On these box sets, we hear Argos’ journey to overcompensatory arrogance: On an early version of “Formed a Band,” one of several “Brutleg” demo tapes, he sounds almost bashful as he dryly explains, “And yes, this is my singing voice—it’s not irony, it’s not rock and roll.” All the pieces are there on the first take of “Modern Art”—guitars that build like a structure fire, wild screams that echo behind Argos as he screams, “Modern art makes me want to rock OUT!”—but he hadn’t quite mastered the authoritarian sneer he wields on the final version. The demos, though skippable for the average post-punk fan, are both humbling and humanizing, a crack in the assertive facade the band projected onto its albums and live shows.
When Argos sang “We make pop music,” on a song by the same name, he wasn’t describing the sound of the mainstream charts. He meant pop as in “popular,” and he wanted Art Brut to be the biggest band on Earth. These proclamations feel misaligned to the current pop landscape, where cult-like fanbases persist in the absence of actual hits (and even a smash doesn’t guarantee loyal customers). Art Brut came to life in an ecosystem that felt, comparatively, diverse: more blogs, more labels, more DIY venues—more access to music than ever before. It only makes Art Brut’s trajectory feel more tragic, their later albums supplanting delusions of grandeur with petty scene squabbles (“He dresses like he came free with the NME,” he sneered on 2011’s “Bad Comedian”) hidden behind a veil of sarcasm. These reissues recall a recent past that felt more meritocratic, where one glowing blog post or energetic late-night TV performance could break a band. In our tangled post-streaming landscape, Art Brut’s dogged belief in their own greatness seems like a balm against entrenched pop hierarchies. “No more songs about sex and drugs and rock and roll, it’s boring,” Argos sang on the debut album’s title track. If only he’d known how much worse it could get. | 2024-07-09T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-09T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | July 9, 2024 | 7 | 6ba7c271-2881-4941-b490-ef5a7ea51bff | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The LA quartet’s second album is more musically focused and emotionally unsettled, its once shaggy sound sculpted into post-punk precision. | The LA quartet’s second album is more musically focused and emotionally unsettled, its once shaggy sound sculpted into post-punk precision. | FEELS: Post Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/feels-post-earth/ | Post Earth | Judging by the response on Twitter, the New England Patriots–L.A. Rams game earlier this month deserves to go down as the Worst Super Bowl Ever. But in between all the shit-posting about Tom Brady and Adam Levine’s tattoos, we were treated to perhaps the greatest post-game soundbite in NFL history. When asked about his team’s 13–3 loss to the Patriots, Rams offensive tackle Andrew Whitworth indulged in some unexpected locker-room existentialism: “I don’t give a crap if you have a Hall of Fame bust, if you’ve been a Pro Bowler, or win 20 Super Bowls. At the end of the day, you’re all gonna die.”
There’s something heartening in knowing that the despair we’re all feeling has trickled up to even handsomely paid athletes playing in the most popular sporting event in America. And while FEELS are the product of a very different LA, located far beyond the glare of stadium lights and militaristic spectacle of the NFL, they share a certain fatalist worldview with their hometown’s resident gridiron philosopher. On their second album, Post Earth, the band is consumed by the idea that our days here are numbered, and that the same assholes doing the lion’s share of destroying the planet are the only ones who’ll be able to afford to a rocket-ship escape from it. To FEELS, expressing deep concern for the state of the world means not giving a fuck about decorum and civility.
On their 2016 self-titled debut, FEELS didn’t sound like a band overly fixated with the fate of civilization, with producer Ty Segall wrapping their tunefully tattered garage-psych in cotton-candy fuzz and wiggy reverb. But over the past three years, it sometimes seems as if we’ve all aged about three decades, and the FEELS we hear on Post Earth sound more musically focused and emotionally unsettled, with producer Tim Green (ex-Nation of Ulysses) helping sculpt the playfully shaggy sound of their debut into taut post-punk precision. Segall’s mischievous spirit lingers in the opening dirty boogie of “Car” (right down to Laena Geronimo’s leering, Emotional Mugger-esque invitations to “come with me to candyland”), but it kicks open the garage doors to eulogize “the land of the free/One nation under fraud.”
The record is occasionally haunted by the specter of another of Green’s past production clients, Sleater-Kinney, whose prickly propulsion, do-or-die intensity, and chant-and-response interplay course through the album’s rabble-rousing mission statement “Find a Way.” But the most important lesson FEELS have heeded from their Olympia forbears is that polemical discourse and rock’n’roll fun are not mutually exclusive—and, if anything, they should encourage one another. “Sour” unleashes an acidic attack on VIP rooms and the self-absorbed posers who inhabit them, but it invites you to shimmy to an extended B-52’s-style rave-up before crashing the party. The title track eats the rich with even more animalistic bloodlust, its fusion of grunge sludge and beaming harmonies harking back to that brief moment when Veruca Salt teamed up with Steve Albini. And while “Awful Need” and “W.F.L.” (not a Happy Mondays cover) examine our omnipresent insecurities, Geronimo and fellow singer/guitarist Shannon Lay deliver their diagnoses with sun-smeared psychedelic melodies that suggest Magical Mystery Tour by way of Kill Rock Stars.
But if Post Earth is built from familiar reference points, it reassembles them in novel ways. The album’s brisk, 35-minute momentum is further accelerated by shapeshifting songs rigged with trap doors that lead to unlikely destinations, like the hardcore blitzkrieg that upends the slowcore lurch of “Tollbooth,” or the ominous, Sonic Youth-like breakdown that brings the simmering tension of “Find a Way” to a boil. Even an 82-second circle-pit stomper like “Deconstructed” is emblematic of Post Earth’s more considered approach: Lay and Geronimo’s overlapping rapid-fire rants twist like the strands of a double helix before their voices come together to announce their temporary cure for unrelenting frustration and anxiety: “Just give me a cigarette/Just give me a fucking cigarette!” Post Earth may not allay your fears of our impending apocalypse, but at least the advice is sound: Smoke ’em if you got ’em. | 2019-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Wichita | February 22, 2019 | 8 | 6baae6cf-33c6-4a22-8925-36d25a749e8a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Parquet Courts' third album is a bracing snapshot of a band on a roll. Their music is not explicitly political, but Parquet Courts are definitely a thinking band, and a critical one. | Parquet Courts' third album is a bracing snapshot of a band on a roll. Their music is not explicitly political, but Parquet Courts are definitely a thinking band, and a critical one. | Parquet Courts: Human Performance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21597-human-performance/ | Human Performance | When Parquet Courts debuted in 2011 with the supremely bratty American Specialties cassette—its Dada-esque cover art a repurposed Chinese takeout menu—Andrew Savage, who is also a visual artist, presented the facts unsentimentally. "Facebook pages/ Boring boring!/ Rock'n'roll has got me snoring," he gasped over a skeleton of atonal guitar-noise, ultimately landing upon the most sacred of conclusions: "Music! Matters! More than ever! Free your brain and conform never!" Lucky for us, Parquet Courts have spent the past five years heeding their own call.
With Human Performance, their third proper album and first for London's legendary Rough Trade Records, Parquet Courts offer a fine testament to rock's continued power and relevance. They might mine the past for feedback and eccentricities, but their astute lyrics tackle the present head-on—co-songwriters Savage and Austin Brown write as if their songs might have real-world consequences. Parquet Courts emerged at a good time, when we yearn for something slightly more intellectual and aware and less about vibe—a longing that has spread into all areas of music culture. While not explicitly political, Parquet Courts are definitely a thinking band, and a critical one, which is equally important when the world is falling apart. Perhaps some of this sharpness comes from their roots in the DIY punk and hardcore underground with their previous bands, including Wiccans and the criminally overlooked Teenage Cool Kids.
At its best, Human Performance is Parquet Courts in a mellower, heart-stopping Velvet Underground mode, but it is also at turns upbeat and funny, sensitive and odd. Compositionally, these are the most dynamic Parquet Courts songs yet. You could no longer brush these guys off as mere Modern Lovers rip-offs, as you might have around 2012's clangoring, whip-smart Light Up Gold. Human Performance presents a more earnest, emotional side of the band. The record's bare, stunning closer "It's Gonna Happen," penned by bassist Sean Yeaton and sung by Savage, recalls the heart-wrenching minimalism of Lou Reed's starry 2000 ballad "Turning Time Around." And it's kind of touching to hear Brown—author of such genius dispatches as "Socrates died in the fucking gutter!"—sing a simple, open love song like the wistful road ballad "Steady On My Mind."
As ever, the fever-pitch of New York life is alive and fast-walking within these songs—zig-zagging the concrete to blaze past all the downward-gazing multitaskers too busy texting to get on where they're going. Human Performance captures the humor and horror of New York in 2016, alive with post-Cagean street noise, with a faster-louder Ramonic ideal, with the erratic rhythm of train delays, a bus that never shows up, or the "skull-shaking cadence of the J train rolls." Something about Parquet Courts' intense-yet-witty existential energy reminds me of the legendary NYC tour-guide-cum-philosopher Speed Levitch (immortalized in '90s doc The Cruise), who has long approached New York as if the city itself were an epic poem.
The sour rattle of Human Performance's absurd and charmingly cartoonish opener "Dust" juxtaposes so many elements—jaunty piano riffs, discordant car honks, sweet organs—that you could imagine it soundtracking the opening sequence to a demented musical. "Dust is everywhere/ Sweep," Brown taunts on loop, and it is not a stretch to hear the decrepitude as a metaphor for the finely-ground wreckage of Western civilization that we have all inherited. There is dread implied, but "Dust" mostly makes you laugh. Parquet Courts' take on New York life grows legitimately and rightfully severe on "Two Dead Cops," a sobering and compact punk song that is literally about two cops who were murdered in Savage's Bed-Stuy neighborhood.
There are songs on Human Performance that defy logic; they should not work and yet somehow, they do. On the trudging, visceral centerpiece "Captive of the Sun," the Beaumont, Tx.-bred Brown's rhythmic delivery is basically rapping. (He has written at length about his intense personal connection to the "outsider art" that is Houston rap.) Earlier, Sean Yeaton voices some city-fueled discontent with the stream-of-conscious curiosity "I Was Just Here." It takes on a classic New York dilemma—a jarring elegy for a Chinese restaurant that has recently closed much to his surprise and chagrin. "You look so nice/ Chinese fried rice/ Wouldn't you know/ That place just closed," the band laments with an alien Devo affect, in turn evoking the beloved underground punk-band-of-the-moment, Indiana's Coneheads.
The latent weirdness of "I Was Just Here" reminds me of the time Savage wearily shouted-out the true freaks of Zappa's backing band, the Mothers of Invention, in a cheeky Teenage Cool Kids song called "Beg to Differ." In fact, there are several moments on Human Performance that recall Teenage Cool Kids' 2011 cult hit Denton After Sunset (in which Savage romanticized Texas in a way to rival John Darnielle). In some of Human Performance's best songs—like "Berlin Got Blurry," with its winding Spaghetti Western riff and wandering spirit—there's a bright directness he hasn't shown since back then. Denton After Sunset was a love letter of sorts to the place Savage came from; it showed his adept understanding of the evocative power of geography, something he's carried into his New York songbook.
Alongside the likes of Courtney Barnett and Sadie Dupuis, Savage remains one of the best rock lyricists of his generation. In the past, he has written philosophical punk songs about cats, candy, and existence; about Stalinist art and opera. Here, he cuts inward, clawing further into his own soul. It's in the arresting one-two punch of "Human Performance" and "Outside" that Savage's writing shines most elegantly. These are break-up songs, for sure, but sometimes it's hard to tell if Savage is breaking up with a lover or with himself. At the core of the soulful "Human Performance" is a difficult, messy question: Am I good person, or am I fooling everyone, including myself? Savage's tender ruminations on love and loneliness are deeply self-critical: "I told you I loved you/ Did I even deserve it? When you returned it," he croons, sounding like Dylan circa Nashville Skyline. The layered feel of the track's chorus reminds me of the "multi-latch gating" technique that Tony Visconti used to produce "Heroes"—each time Savage screams, the echoes sound further away, more unhinged and desperate, tempered by lovely organ lines and jazzy drum patterns.
The sub-two-minute "Outside" follows, and it is the sunniest, snappiest Parquet Courts tune ever—a song about admission, about accepting your flaws and finding peace. For such a short song it is impossibly beautiful. "Dear everything I've harmed/ My fault lies on my tongue/ And I take it holy as a last rite," Savage sings, his voice shining with palpable abandon and relief, a kind you only get from telling the truth. "Outside" is ultimately about turning honesty and imperfection into virtues, and that purity is doubled by its indelible melody. Little details, like a lopsided beat and an endearing note sung flat, only serve to deepen it.
Human Performance is a bracing snapshot of a band on a roll. As punk turns 40 on both sides of the Atlantic this year, it's fitting that this record is out on Rough Trade—that era's arty, leftist wing of outsiders-among-outsiders. You'd be hard pressed to find a contemporary rock band honoring the classic Rough Trade legacy as well as Parquet Courts, in both sound and spirit, while doing something audacious and new. In a sense, they even revive Rough Trade's O.G. connection to eccentric Texas psych-rock, from back when conceptual artist Mayo Thompson of the Red Krayola was the label's heady spokesperson, producing crucial records by the Raincoats and the Fall, and collaborating with members of Pere Ubu and Swell Maps. Parquet Courts deserve to be discussed within this lineage. Intelligence is addictive, and there is accordingly a quiet mania to Parquet Courts fandom that matches that of their forebears. On Human Performance, Parquet Courts send a generation-skewing message that avails not, time nor place: it is cool to really think. | 2016-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | April 8, 2016 | 8.4 | 6bac6a7a-5f63-401e-b564-9a66cfa31bcc | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
The Broken Social Scene frontman confronts loss, survival, and addiction on a set of brooding dispatches from middle age. | The Broken Social Scene frontman confronts loss, survival, and addiction on a set of brooding dispatches from middle age. | Kevin Drew: Aging | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-drew-aging/ | Aging | Every album anniversary tour is also about the march towards death. Ben Gibbard is no longer the baby-faced up-and-comer who made Transatlanticism and Liz Phair is no longer the romantically frustrated 25-year-old who made Exile in Guyville, but they’re still bringing these milestone albums on tour, inviting us to reflect on how they’ve changed and we’ve changed and everything’s decayed in the years since we first heard them. We’re all getting closer to the grave, but at least “Fuck and Run” still bangs.
Kevin Drew, of Broken Social Scene fame, has spent the past year negotiating the same nostalgic mindfuck, performing 2002’s You Forgot It in People in full to audiences for whom “Anthems for a Seventeen Year-Old Girl” and “Lover’s Spit” were as formative as Sgt. Pepper’s. If that record’s 20th trip around the sun made you feel old, how do you think Drew feels? Now, after revisiting the creative output of his twenties, he returns to the unsettled present on a short, grayscale solo record that’s literally titled Aging.
If Drew’s 2007 debut, Spirit If…, was a solo album in name only—billed as “Broken Social Scene Presents,” with swelling arrangements featuring many of Drew’s bandmates—Aging is the real thing. Shorn of the communal spirit that courses through BSS’s records, these are brooding, synth-heavy dispatches from middle age. “My skin is cold/I’m not aging right,” the 47-year-old croons on “Awful Lightning,” a six-minute centerpiece that wrings slow-burning drama from Hauschka-like piano arpeggios.
Drew has long excelled at writing emotionally resonant songs even when you don’t have a clue what he’s singing about. (SongMeanings.com commenters will crack “Shampoo Suicide” as soon as the cops find Jimmy Hoffa’s body.) But Aging was written as Drew grappled with the loss of friends and mentors, and death has a way of nudging songwriters towards the blunt and direct. At times, it’s disarming to hear him singing to us so plainly about his troubles.
On the burbling, melancholy “Elevators,” his deepening baritone sounds uncannily like Matt Berninger as he puts a cosmic spin on grief: “Elevator please change your name/Because they’re coming for me tonight/And my friend died.” “Party Oven” summons the nocturnal musings of a guy wondering if a lifetime of debauchery was all worth it. The stirring song captures a lot of feeling in few words; when Drew sings, “We partied into your grave/Was that okay?” you can detect grief and guilt mingling together.
These are evocative late-night brooders, but the record’s sense of loss and vulnerability is too often neutralized by its bland MIDI-piano sheen. Drew flirts with synth pop on “All Your Fails” and “Fixing the Again,” but the arrangements are simultaneously too plain and too fussy: groaning synth pads and film-score piano that mush together without any real tension or drama. If those tracks are nondescript, “Don't Be Afraid of the Dark” is dismaying, a cloying attempt at Auto-Tune balladry that functions as the album’s nadir. The dour production forms an unflattering contrast with the eccentric instrumentation and dynamic bursts of those early BSS classics Drew has been revisiting on tour.
For an album as self-consciously downbeat and reflective as this one, Aging ends on an optimistic note. On “You’re Gonna Get Better,” Drew emerges from the storm and seems to be offering counsel to a friend mired in addiction or depression: “No matter how hard you fell there/I know you can get back soon,” he sings over downcast synths. It’s a song that makes explicit the purpose people find in getting older and living through rough times. You can look someone in the eye and say: I survived, and you can too. | 2023-11-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Arts & Crafts | November 9, 2023 | 6.5 | 6baea1ba-cdf7-48f5-ac09-56faa4c10d20 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
If pop is auto mechanics, then over the past few years, Deerhoof have completely unassembled the Benz. Deerhoof's excitement ... | If pop is auto mechanics, then over the past few years, Deerhoof have completely unassembled the Benz. Deerhoof's excitement ... | Deerhoof: Milk Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2253-milk-man/ | Milk Man | If pop is auto mechanics, then over the past few years, Deerhoof have completely unassembled the Benz. Deerhoof's excitement in toying with the building blocks of pop songwriting-- and their characteristically short, almost infantile attention span-- energized Reveille and Apple O' to near-unparalleled levels of melodic potency, while the music's lack of any discernable patterns kept listeners continually stimulated, wondering what might come next. By the time of Apple O's release last year, it was clear that the San Francisco quartet had come to understand the mechanics of melody-making, and, more importantly, that pop, when too saccharine, eats itself. But Deerhoof never compromised their melodies to avoid potential schmaltz; rather, they kept their lines short and to the point, coating the songs with well-placed sheets of noise and fragmented melody. And yet, Deerhoof have never come off calculated or bookish. In fact, they seem to stumble upon their ideas: Their songs are strings of perfectly fortunate accidents, explosive and radioactive, but also instable and always on the verge of self-collapse.
At least with automobiles, there's a practical endpoint to mechanical deconstruction, but even with endless possibilities for combination (I wonder what happens when I hook the steering wheel up to the CD player?), one can only tinker for so long before the ideas become elaborate enough that the car must be rebuilt to support them. Deerhoof have reached a similar point in their career. With the exception of Holdy Paws, the band's songs have never seemed to aspire to "song status"; they were basically well-assembled sequences of simple and powerful ideas-- even one-minute tracks like "Holy Night Fever" covered a tremendous amount of musical ground.
On Milk Man, Deerhoof harness all they've learned from their previous experiments, and written what may be their first truly conventional songs. Here, they've focused their maniacal energy into seriously dense and carefully considered songwriting; even the cleaner and deeper production betrays Deerhoof's commitment to letting the songs speak for themselves, and to keeping individual parts as precise and undistracting as possible. Greg Saunier's drumming is the most restrained I've ever heard it, while Chris Cohen and John Dieterich-- who are of such one (brilliant) mind that in concert they can play in perfect tandem without ever looking at each other-- find themselves more concerned with static harmonies and more dominant of their precious miasmatic outbursts. Satomi Matsuzaki, meanwhile, has improved considerably as a singer, and is now capable of delivering remarkably complex vocal melodies. And with more developed vocal melodies comes Deerhoof's first crack at meaningful lyrics: Over the course of this record's 11 tracks, Satomi narrates a coherent (if somewhat disturbing) story about a milk man who kidnaps children and hides them in the clouds.
So is this Deerhoof's best? Is Milk Man, as SPIN remarked, "a perfect album?" It isn't, unfortunately, but the album plays host to what are easily some of Deerhoof's best songs, conventional or otherwise. Four-minute opener "Milk Man"-- longer than nearly every other song Deerhoof has recorded-- is as much a statement of the album's overall tenor as it is of the band's change of pace: Unaccompanied guitar lines interact confidently, building sparse but lush harmonies that together function as the song's recurring theme. The keyboard, which was noticeably absent from Apple O', returns here with remarkable subtlety, a respondent to Satomi's pristine melody. The internal interactions within the song-- as opposed to the external reactions of the band members-- are the focal point of "Milk Man", possibly Deerhoof's finest moment.
"Desaparecere" may be as good as the title track. Set to a drum machine, the quiet song boasts Milk Man's most complex harmonies, built entirely from keyboard sounds and Satomi's razor-sharp Spanish delivery and glissandi. Not a note is out of place. The song marks the first time Deerhoof have indulged so openly in the clicks-and-cuts of minimalist beatmaking, and it's done to beautiful effect. "C", originally released on seven-inch in 2002, finds a place on the album perhaps for its similar degree of restraint; here, Deerhoof experiment with slow, static harmony composition and phaseshifted white noise, as Satomi squeaks out a poignant minor-key melody and Greg taps out frantic snare rolls. What's most noteworthy about "C" is its terrifying use of space, particularly in the moment before a tense guitar chord is resolved by Satomi restating her melody on keyboard.
The three songs I mention above-- and to a lesser extent "Giga Dance" and "Milking"-- are simply fantastic; the rest of Milk Man, however, performs at a frustratingly lower level. The instrumental "Rainbow Silhouette of the Milky Rain" boasts a brilliant, spidery guitar duet in 3/4 time, but is otherwise an incongruous, ill-conceived medley of mediocre riffs and uninteresting drumming, while "Dog on the Sidewalk" seems completely pointless, an unusual misstep for Deerhoof. And the album's last four tracks, while hardly offensive, sound somehow unfinished in comparison to the album's high points.
Milk Man is certainly not some point of no return for Deerhoof-- they certainly aren't locked into writing in this more conventional style, just as they weren't locked in after the similarly song-oriented Holdypaws. The band is too committed to growing as musicians and writing better songs not to revisit the rambunctious Reveille and Apple O' woodsheds for inspiration. Milk Man not only testifies to how potent those sessions proved, but also to how successfully the band can step back and craft those rabid ideas into impressive songs without devitalizing them. | 2004-03-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-03-09T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental | Kill Rock Stars | March 9, 2004 | 7.6 | 6bbc2502-e010-4819-a470-f991d99eeff4 | Nick Sylvester | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-sylvester/ | null |
This new 10-song collection, Fellow Travelers, finds Shearwater covering Xiu Xiu, Coldplay, Clinic, St. Vincent, Folk Implosion, and others. Interestingly, the title seems to let you know who Jonathan Meiburg and company see as their role models and their peers. | This new 10-song collection, Fellow Travelers, finds Shearwater covering Xiu Xiu, Coldplay, Clinic, St. Vincent, Folk Implosion, and others. Interestingly, the title seems to let you know who Jonathan Meiburg and company see as their role models and their peers. | Shearwater: Fellow Travelers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18785-shearwater-fellow-travelers/ | Fellow Travelers | The wholeness of Shearwater’s aesthetic is an admirable quality, and one that lets people know right off the bat if the band's “not their thing.” Even before you hear Jonathan Meiburg’s operatic vocals, the ornate, orchestral arrangements give you the suspicion that his concerns are birds, snow leopards, horses, and golden archipelagos. This makes a Shearwater covers album an intriguing proposition and also a risky one: can anyone else’s songwriting survive in these conditions? So it’s even more interesting that this collection is called Fellow Travelers; sure, it’s taken from Trotsky, but all the same, it lets you know who Shearwater see as not only their role models, but also their peers. Coldplay and St. Vincent? Sure. Xiu Xiu? Well, Meiburg has collaborated with Jamie Stewart in Blue Water White Death. Folk Implosion? Um.
But any discussion of Fellow Travelers needs to begin with “I Luv The Valley OH!” It’s not only the definitive Xiu Xiu because it’s the best song Jamie Stewart has written. It’s also a song that couldn’t be written or performed by anyone besides Jamie Stewart, at least not effectively. Even beyond the music itself, a perverse mocking of glimmering, hopeful alt-rock, the vocals are sui generis Xiu Xiu where you can’t tell if it’s a legitimate cry for help or Stewart prank calling the suicide hotline. If you don’t have his track record, it’s a lot tougher to pull off lines like “there’s a razor, make a million billion threats” and “my behind is a beehive/ there's a buzz in my backside,” while slipping into incorrect French. Shearwater’s take is over-the-top in its own way—it just turns “I Luv The Valley OH!” into a goddamn stadium anthem with swooping bass and a constant, reverbed kick drum replacing the erratic, mortar rounds that punctuated the original. Sheared and watered down, the palpable danger of Stewart’s performance is replaced with cocksure pomp—while the exclamatory cry of the title in the original is one of the most harrowing, cathartic yells ever caught on tape, Meiburg’s haughty, oratorial style makes it sound like high school Shakespeare or just any old “oh”. I think Meiburg’s heart is in the right place here, but you take Jamie Stewart out of “I Luv The Valley OH!” and you’re just left with a song that has a nice melody.
As it turns out, Shearwater can somehow take the edge off a Coldplay song as well. “Hurts Like Heaven” was indicative of Coldplay’s pure-pop ambitions on Mylo Xyloto, giving Chris Martin’s vocals Autotune tweaks and the rhythm section a blinding sheen. Here, it’s a pretty, weightless piano ballad that’s closer to the stereotyped "Coldplay" that gets played for cheap laughs in major motion pictures. On the other hand, St. Vincent’s “Cheerleader” and Folk Implosion’s “Natural One” are given straight, respectful covers, but once again make a great case for the necessity of character. “Cheerleader” loses its lyrical bite without the context Annie Clark had created throughout her body of work, and while “Natural One” was included in the most absurdly grim movie about teenage sex ever made, Lou Barlow managed to capture the occasional fumbling and pure lust behind it all. A key line is “when mama’s not around, there’s no telling what we’ll do when we’re free.” Meiburg’s imperious vocals can evoke the mating rituals of majestic condors, but not that.
When Shearwater don’t have to compete with an original's familiarity or strong personality, Fellow Travelers succeeds by doing a service for overlooked artists. In its original form, David Thomas Broughton’s “Ambiguity” was the sort of thing that typically becomes an artist-beloved lost treasure, a gut-wrenching sentiment wrapped up in a six-minute, static-laced avant-folk song. It benefits from Shearwater’s immaculate, harp-led arrangement, which foregrounds the melody and lyrics. The same goes for Baptist Generals’ “Fucked Up Life”; Shearwater’s fellow Dentonites list a litany of relatable punishments and while it’s not that far off in subject matter from “I Luv The Valley OH!”, Meiburg’s performance is much more suited to the source material.
Most revelatory of all is “Tomorrow”. It was the second single from Clinic’s 2008 LP Do It!, which found the band well into a stage of their career that Shearwater is just entering: where you’re perceived to have a “thing” and that thing is kinda taken for granted. If you didn’t recognize “Tomorrow”, it’s much easier to spot its Clinic tics after the fact—the circular bassline, the pinch melody. The cover here gives a mutual benefit, opening up Shearwater’s sound in subtle ways while putting a focus on Ade Blackburn’s actual songwriting acumen, which is rarely given a close reading.
Shearwater never sound like a band that does things for the hell of it, though you can understand how they’d benefit from Fellow Travelers regardless of the outcome. Last year's Animal Joy showed a band trying to let loose, just a little, even if they can’t truly sound like anyone else as long as Meiburg is at the lead. But it did at least show the group trying to rock, trying to groove. Fellow Travelers can be seen as Shearwater showing their scratch work, and while great cover albums can be a revelation or an embarrassment, most end up right around here: which is to say, admirable and flawed. Few things can be tougher for an artist than to purely express themselves. Expressing what they like about another artist is often one of them. | 2013-11-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-11-27T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | November 27, 2013 | 5.8 | 6bbdec8f-c248-4e89-ac9c-f565fe8f2e01 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Bear1Boss has been a breath of fresh air with his bright, melodic take on Atlanta rap. His latest and best project yet focuses purely on fun. | Bear1Boss has been a breath of fresh air with his bright, melodic take on Atlanta rap. His latest and best project yet focuses purely on fun. | Bear1Boss: America’s Sweetheart 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bear1boss-americas-sweetheart-2/ | America’s Sweetheart 2 | Back in the late ’00s and early 2010s, an often underappreciated wave of Atlanta rap came after the rise of trap led by T.I., Jeezy, and Gucci Mane, and before Young Thug, Migos, and Future turned into megastars. They were young, flashy, had bad haircuts, never seemed to be in a sour mood, used AutoTune in a way that made their voices resemble cyborgs, and sung-rapped over sweet-sounding pop-rap beats that might make you want to lay on your stomach and kick your feet in the air. These were rappers like Travis Porter, Roscoe Dash, and the Rich Kidz, who for a brief moment in time churned out giddy party anthems. Now, the Buffalo-born, Eastside Atlanta-raised Bear1Boss is reigniting this torch.
For some time, Bear1Boss loomed in the background of Atlanta’s underground, but in the last 10 months behind a prolific run of seven mixtapes and EPs, his bright, optimistic, and melodic take on Atlanta rap has been a breath of fresh air—especially with the boom of YoungBoy pain rap and Whole Lotta Red raging rockstar vibes. “Do not listen to me unless you want to have fun, I don’t do depressing music,” Bear said in an interview, and it’s become an unofficial mantra. That’s pretty much the mood of his latest and best project yet, America’s Sweetheart 2, which feels like he put on a blindfold and dragged and dropped songs from his hard drive into a folder and called it a mixtape.
Over the course of 21 structureless tracks that barely crack the two-minute mark, Bear1Boss, along with a squadron of producers—Popstar Benny, 14 Golds, Ziti, and many more—expand on that turn of the decade pop-rap foundation. On “New Panoramic,” despite lyrics that could have been spit out by an AI, Bear’s nasally melodies have this mesmerizing nature to them that might bring to mind Skooly, and the production blends lush keys with effects that sound like buttons being smashed in a cartoon spaceship. The same could be said for “Girl,” which pays homage to Bear’s infatuation with Atlanta’s mixtape era by weaving gunshots, sirens, and air horns in between his sugary croons and the cutesy beat. “Mojo” is probably the deepest Bear will get: “I was in that club, and I think I seen my old ho/Thousand racks in the club, yeah, I think I got to let it go,” he lilts as if he just poured his heart out, and even though he clearly hasn’t, it feels like he did.
But, of course, given that Bear’s approach to mixtapes is so uncut, there are records scattered across the project that are unlistenable. I can’t tell if “New Ferrari” is purposely trying to capture the low-quality feel of a leak or if he just didn’t care enough. “Fatality” sounds like a throwaway from Uzi’s Luv Is Rage era. And because the lyrics are so minimal when the production takes a step down like it does on “Personal,” the song immediately falls flat. These issues plagued Bear’s previous mixtapes like Super Fancy 2 and Lil Hotsauce Vert more than they do America’s Sweetheart 2. The consistency has caught up with the experimentation, and given that the songs are so short, they only need one standout moment to justify their replayability, whether it’s the glitchiness of “Me + U” that has traces of digicore or the opening seconds of “Nan B!tch,” which sounds a bit like he’s warbling over a jungle track. Or “Bottom,” which has these hypnotic high-pitched screeching raps that sound like they belong on a mixtape hosted by DJ Scream. It’s fun and flawed and doesn’t give a shit, just like all of the music that inspires him.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | DOTWAV | August 25, 2021 | 7.5 | 6bbe3813-af64-4632-8a3d-f54dafe52e62 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Suffused in romantic piano flourishes, winsome synth leads, and drums that race like a teenaged heart, these seven tracks pursue pure, unadulterated delight. | Suffused in romantic piano flourishes, winsome synth leads, and drums that race like a teenaged heart, these seven tracks pursue pure, unadulterated delight. | Andras: Joyful | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andras-joyful/ | Joyful | Halfway through the opening track on Andras’ Joyful, a pipsqueak voice pops up over a squirrelly acid line and giddily rolling snare, repeating a single spoken word: “Honeybird.” It makes for a strange collision of sensations: On the one hand, nods to classic rave and ’90s trance; on the other, a term of endearment rendered as a cartoonish chirp, stripped of all context. Whatever the word is supposed to mean, if anything, is never made clear, but the effect of that Rosebud-like refrain is unmistakably tender and carefree. The Australian producer couldn’t have picked a better title for his album: Suffused in romantic piano flourishes, winsome synth leads, and drums that race like a teenaged heart, Joyful’s seven tracks pursue pure, unadulterated delight.
Andras, aka Melbourne’s Andrew Wilson, is a clever manipulator of both codes and emotions. Though he got his start making sample-based hip-hop, since 2012 he has teased the outlines of deep house, lo-fi electro-funk, and new-age ambient, using aliases like Andras Fox, A.R.T. Wilson, and House of Dad, and as part of the duo Wilson Tanner. His output has gotten increasingly cheeky and occasionally arcane: 2016’s House of Dad, a tribute to his plumber father, sampled the sound of a flushing toilet; 2018’s Help generated ambient sketches from YouTube bloopers and shock videos; last year’s Boom Boom was a bongo-driven critique of the way that portable audio colonizes public space.
Joyful is a simpler project. There are no big concepts, no grand themes beyond nostalgia for some of Wilson’s earliest epiphanies as a listener: Thirteen years old, listening to trance music in the backseat of his parents’ car as it crests a hill and the ocean appears in the distance. The keys are mostly major, the riffs fetching, the sense of possibility nearly boundless. Occasionally Wilson, a seasoned crate-digger, surfaces a scrap of something vintage—a warbly aria or keening violin—and works it into the mix, sprinkling on the crackle of worn vinyl like fairy dust. When there are voices, they are digitally sped up or otherwise manipulated, mantra-like repetitions familiar from motivational posters and Instagram captions, like “live forever” or “what I feel.” Somehow, he delivers these in a way that’s guileless, unironic; he could probably get away with “Hang in there, baby” without batting an eye.
Wilson being Wilson, he can’t resist a little mischief. In “Saga of Sweetheart,” the synthesizer is an uncanny hybrid of Roland keys and Appalachian banjo; the acid line in “River Red” sounds at first like an homage to Larry Heard’s “Sun Can’t Compare,” but it turns out also to have rural origins: In a fascinating interview in Record Culture magazine, Wilson reveals it to be a note-for-note rework of John Fahey’s “Sligo River Blues,” transposed to the TB-303. This kind of tomfoolery shouldn’t work—and yet it does; nothing about Joyful scans as gimmickry. Thanks to standouts like “Harf Green” and “Goggles,” Wilson’s wistful sentimentalism and bright-eyed cheer carry the day, taking the edge off his loopier instincts.
The latter is one of the most affecting pieces of dance music I’ve heard in a long while. Never mind the vestiges of dubstep squelch or the pitch-bent echoes of Eurodance; those restless tics are folded into a whole so sumptuous, so swoon-inducing, their kitsch quotient barely registers. The core of the song is a long, melancholy organ melody that feels strangely familiar, almost like a hymn; the tempo is several clicks faster than is customary for a song so bittersweet, which lends a welcome oomph to a track that might otherwise brood. Where most of Wilson’s ode to joy sinks into simple pleasures—a catchy acid line, a reassuring syllable—“Goggles” embraces the kind of grandeur that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever gazed in awe at the view from a moving vehicle, headphones tugging on their heartstrings.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Beats in Space | January 27, 2020 | 7.4 | 6bbf1671-98c1-4e84-9c19-d4e1d0be7983 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The California duo Wreck and Reference strip away the basics of metal, redefining the genre even as they sit outside it. On their new album, their songcraft catches up to their uncompromising gloom. | The California duo Wreck and Reference strip away the basics of metal, redefining the genre even as they sit outside it. On their new album, their songcraft catches up to their uncompromising gloom. | Wreck and Reference: Indifferent Rivers Romance End | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22127-indifferent-rivers-romance-end/ | Indifferent Rivers Romance End | W**ant, the previous record from California duo Wreck and Reference, was a metal record at war with metal’s allergies to adaptation. Felix Skinner’s sampler and Ignat Frege’s drumming made bare piano as sharp as any HM-2-blasted riff, and Skinner weaponized existential dread with his commanding vocal performance. By stripping away the most sacred of basics, they opened up new avenues for extreme music. They fit into the modern metal landscape that seeks to redefine itself, even if they don't necessarily see themselves as metal. If Want was a blueprint for a metal world without guitar, its followup Indifferent Rivers Romance End is that world with developed architecture and landscaping, their songcraft finally catching up to their uncompromising gloom.
Wreck and Reference are nowhere near synth-pop, but Indifferent shows that they think like a smart synth-pop group: using electronic layers as tools to advance compositions, not textural ends in and of themselves. This isn’t an uplifting record by any means, but it also feels less dim, illuminating Skinner and Frege’s mutual anxieties and uncovering diversity in the process. At the end of “Flight but Not Metaphor,” there's a thudding bass drum, like your heartsickness is the most exclusive club in town. It’s a small and sly incorporation of dance music, unburdened by the try-hard aesthetics of, say, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix grafting electronic and hip-hop onto metal. Increased attention to detail translates in even in their most aggressive songs, with “Ascend” given a goth funeral via huge synth horns and “Languish” driven by flickering strings.
Skinner has come into his own as a vocalist, relying more on his croon than his scream throughout Indifferent. His voice hasn’t changed much, but his confidence in expressing the lack thereof has never been better. Skinner's growth is none more apparent than on opener “Powders,” Wreck and Reference’s take on a confessional piano ballad that just might be their defining song. It’s more of an argument ballad, really—he narrates a bickering couple’s ongoing resentments, a cycle of seemingly mundane but ultimately serious questions without answers: “And you said what about the powders? And I said what about the fluids? And you said what about the cowards? And I said what about me, what are you trying to say?” Frege’s snare roll after the first verse triggers Skinner into full-on hysteria, and even with a noisy buildup in the background, he’s the dominating presence. (Like on Want, Frege’s nimble drumming is the duo's secret weapon.) He ends by yelling “That's fine” over and over, blurring the line between empowering battle cry and admission of defeat.
“Apollo Beneath the Whip,” from Want, aimed for similar heights, and “Powders” hits the bullseye with a smart combination of focus and expansion. That it comes first is indicative of their black humor (their Twitter puts most sadboyploitation to shame)—they’re smirking a bit by clobbering you with their heaviest song from the jump. More than any metal song in particular, it’s reminiscent of Future Islands’ smash “Seasons (Waiting on You),” and while it’s more volatile, the futility of trying to reason with someone when they have no intention of agreeing with you still stings.
Alan Vega’s passing reminds us that there will never be another band like Suicide, but Wreck and Reference are perhaps the closest to a contemporary inheritors we’ll see. It’s not just the minimalism that begats catchiness, or the confrontation-yet-cool attitude, or the fuck-you to traditional rock/metal instrumentation, but the overall sense that grime and rot, whether it originates in ’70s NYC streets or in the chattering mind, can bloom beautiful music. Suicide defined punk and overcame it at the same time; Indifference comes long after metal’s formation, and despite that, Wreck and Reference are paving the way for a new language that may go beyond metal. | 2016-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | The Flenser | July 20, 2016 | 8 | 6bc5cf92-fcc2-45ac-9c8c-bdfcc0a4999f | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The Brooklyn rapper’s first new studio album in five years puts a plush Bad Boy veneer over corner-bred rhyme schemes. Wide-ranging production makes it easy to ignore the rough spots. | The Brooklyn rapper’s first new studio album in five years puts a plush Bad Boy veneer over corner-bred rhyme schemes. Wide-ranging production makes it easy to ignore the rough spots. | Joey Bada$$: 2000 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joey-badass-2000/ | 2000 | Joey Bada$$ was just 17 when he released his landmark 2012 mixtape 1999, and he was simultaneously looking to the past and the future. Hip-hop’s blog era had its fair share of revivalists, but this was a Brooklyn kid who worshipped at the altar of luminaries like Wu-Tang Clan and MF DOOM and opened his debut single “Waves” with an ode to one of his borough’s most celebrated rappers. There was an urgency to Joey’s words, rhyme schemes, and flows that split the difference between the fresh and the familiar. When he raps about wanting to meet JAY-Z, buy his mother a Range Rover, and take over the world over a swelling Freddie Joachim sample, you believe him. He was taking a similar stance to Nas on his 1994 debut Illmatic: an old soul with a young face, unstuck in time like a multiversal traveler.
By honing the vintage aesthetic and skill, Joey and the Pro Era collective granted their movement some edge, the kind that leads the children of former presidents to rock your gear. But as his ambition and profile began to grow, he often struggled to reconcile his love for the golden era with distinctive, modern sounds. All-Amerikkkan Bada$$, his 2017 album, mixed lush live-band production and political consciousness with roughneck flows and the bland platitudes of his platinum-certified single “Devastated”—a pleasant but messy shot at being all things to all people. Joey’s been in the spotlight long enough to see the old-school ethos he made his name on experience a revival in both the underground and mainstream and even star in an Oscar-winning short film. But though his rap fundamentals are as solid as ever, that middle ground has become a niche, breeding enjoyable but unchallenging music.
To its credit, 2000, his third studio album and first in five years, tries to move past those growing pains. On intro “The Baddest,” Joey looks back on his first decade in music, placing himself among the likes of Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole with an unfazed chill, amplified by the lush piano interpolation of DeBarge’s “I Like It”: “You niggas thought I was finished? I’m offended/I’m just getting replenished/MCs gettin’ diminished when I’m in attendance.” You’ve heard Joey rap like this before, but the scope is plusher, a Bad Boy veneer slathered over corner-bred rhyme schemes. “Baddest” sets the stage for 2000 which, as a whole, blends in with the posh New York rap zeitgeist. He’s jogging in place in the flashiest tracksuit he could find.
Joey thrives when he stops overthinking and just floors the gas. The surface-level social justice polemics of All-Amerikkkan dragged down that project’s best moments, and they’re thankfully absent from 2000. Much of what makes the album exciting on a technical level has been retrofitted from 1999, which soared on personal stories and thesaurus-stretching feats of rhyme. A song like “Brand New 911” is pure flow, the snap and tone of bars like “They resent me ’cause I’m counting all these blessings heaven sent me” harmonizing with producer Chuck Strangers’ harsh snares and flailing trumpet. His words cut deeper when he dips back into autobiography, recalling his cousin writing his first rap for him on “Where I Belong” or talking about passing down good traits to his daughter on “Written in the Stars.” When the flow and feelings combine, as they do on the gut-wrenching Capital STEEZ ode “Survivors Guilt,” it’s easy to root for Joey.
But some of those old habits gnaw away at his songwriting, too. Neither 1999 nor his 2015 studio debut B4.Da.$$ were above leaning on cliché, and 2000 sometimes does this with moneyed swag rap. “Cruise Control” and “Zipcodes” are filled with flavorless boasts that any rapper could’ve spitballed in the booth. On “One of Us,” Joey’s bare-bones flexing is upstaged quickly by guest Larry June, who’s the gold standard for rappers making luxury sound as attainable as logging in with Face ID. When a skit from “One of Us” involving a man calling Joey to ask him to stop sleeping with his soon-to-be fiancée bleeds over into the love song “Welcome Back,” he just…raps about sleeping with this poor guy’s soon-to-be fiancée. It’s uncomfortable even before Chris Brown starts cooing “Blow your back out like I should” on the hook. And that’s separate from the just plain bad bars sprinkled across the album—“Swimming mainstream like a hip-hop-potomus” from “Eulogy” and “My stock like a teenage cock, it stay up” from “Written in the Stars” are tortured metaphors that should’ve never left his Notes app.
The wide-ranging production often makes it easy to ignore the rough spots. Classy instrumental interpolations (Chris McClenney and Erick the Architect’s piano-led strut on “The Baddest,” every Statik Selektah beat here) sit next to glossy boom-bap (Chuck Strangers’ “Wanna Be Loved”) and crossover beats (Mike WiLL Made-It’s “Cruise Control,” BBEARDED’s “Welcome Back”). It’s a testament to Joey’s growing ear that he sounds good on all of them.
But it’s not surprising Joey knows how to ride this kind of material—many of these beats aren’t appreciably different from the ones that dominated the Pro Era/Flatbush Zombies/Underachievers supergroup Beast Coast’s 2019 album Escape From New York. Familiarity isn’t a bad thing, but it’s underwhelming considering the hype behind Joey’s first album in half a decade. Not only is 2000 the first album he’s released since fully committing to acting on shows like Mr. Robot and Wu-Tang: An American Saga, but it’s also directly tied to the 10th anniversary of 1999. It’s a considerable amount of buildup considering that Joey is doing the bare minimum: meeting his standard for rapping and expanding his horizons just far enough to properly integrate into the modern hip-hop rat race. | 2022-07-22T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-22T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | July 22, 2022 | 6.8 | 6bc7bfd9-f322-417c-a901-93314407b4a9 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Two institutions of electronic music, braininess, and design-- Brian Eno and Warp Records-- come together for their first-ever co-release. | Two institutions of electronic music, braininess, and design-- Brian Eno and Warp Records-- come together for their first-ever co-release. | Brian Eno: Small Craft on a Milk Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14828-small-craft-on-a-milk-sea/ | Small Craft on a Milk Sea | A Google search for "Small Craft on a Milk Sea", the title of Brian Eno's new album, turns up several sites focused on the record's next-level packaging. As phrases like "signed and numbered," "copper plate," and "lithographic" gave way to descriptors like "birch paper-covered slipcase," "crimson stock," and "foil blocked credit sheet," my first thought was whether the relentless fetishization of the physical product does the content within any favors.
My second thought was, of course it's going to be lavish. This is, after all, Brian Eno and Warp, two institutions of electronic music, braininess, and design, coming together for their first-ever co-release. The union is so forehead-slappingly perfect that one wonders how the two have managed to co-exist independently for so long. But if lavish is the language here, it's for more than celebratory reasons. Constructed partly out of rejects from Eno's soundtrack work for Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones and partly from original studio sessions held in 2009 and 2010, Small Craft on a Milk Sea is being pitched as a loose homage to the very concept of soundtrack music.
This concept is not a new one, not even for Eno, whose 1978 album Music for Films and its 1983 sequel were borne from identical insight. If not for the sheer amount of time that's passed, or his new collaborators-- electronic music composer Jon Hopkins and guitarist Leo Abrahams-- he might easily have christened this Music for Films 4. And the truth is that, although much has been made of the trio's working process and how it relied equally on improvization and computer editing, Small Craft on a Milk Sea sits surprisingly comfortably alongside the records from Eno's ambient and experimental golden era. Others might argue that fit is a little too comfortable.
With few exceptions, Small Craft on a Milk Sea's 15 songs fall roughly into one of two categories: 'ambient' and 'active.' The [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| former contains some predictably transcendent moments, such as the gently climbing opener "Emerald and Lime" and its later-appearing sister "Emerald and Stone", both of which conjure up the sort of meandering, piano-led beauty that Angelo Badalamenti specializes in. Elsewhere, another twin set, "Complex Heaven" and "Lesser Heaven", offer barely moving soundscapes that are respectively foreboding and serene, and "Calcium Needles" invokes an ambient frost that's as chilly as Biosphere's most glacial work.
The 'active' category yields mixed results, occasionally sounding overindulged or dated. "Horse" is a hyperactive mix of mewling guitars and shuddering snares, while "Paleosonic" and "Dust Shuffle" go down as aimless proto-industrial electronica. "2 Forms of Anger" fares far better, sounding like a fractured triangulation of Skinny Puppy, Joy Division, and Tin Machine (that's a good thing, right?), while "Bone Jump"'s dorky arpeggios and haunted house synths mostly just manage to charm.
As Small Craft on a Milk Sea oscillates between these familiar poles of serenity and disarray, it becomes evident that the Warp connection isn't indicative of any drastic modernization of Eno's sound. And yet, in an interview with Pitchfork earlier this week, Eno spoke about how some of these tracks began with conceptual briefs in which he instructed his collaborators to replicate popular music from the near future. If that's the case, perhaps Eno's version of the future isn't forged by sonic innovation but rather by recombinence and fashion's unpredictable finger. Given enough time, the fresh will be re-born as stale, the wonky will become cool, the cliché will become transcendent, and the freak will become a salaryman. When taken as little slivers of a larger poem, Small Craft on a Milk Sea's song titles present the listener with a notion of the past, present, and future existing as one holistic entity. With Brian Eno, you have a man who sounds uncompromisingly like all three. | 2010-11-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-11-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | November 4, 2010 | 7.4 | 6bcfd21f-ce0b-4478-bb28-f6869951d3a0 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
The unclassifiable Spanish duo span 1990s-inspired alternative rock, glitching electronic percussion, mournful Andalusian flamenco, and the dread empty spaces of post-punk. | The unclassifiable Spanish duo span 1990s-inspired alternative rock, glitching electronic percussion, mournful Andalusian flamenco, and the dread empty spaces of post-punk. | Crudo Pimento: Pantame | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/crudo-pimento-pantame/ | Pantame | Murcia, a city of half a million in the south of Spain, lies amid an expanse of arid scrubland, so it’s not entirely surprising that a homegrown variant of desert rock might flourish. Crudo Pimento—the duo of Raúl Frutos and Inma Gómez—have made that music for a while now, recording unconventional takes on psychedelia and blues and Mexican son jarocho on homemade instruments, singing in Spanish and English and sometimes French, howling as often as they sing—sounding sometimes like an Andalusian Tom Waits or an Iberian Beefheart—with all the hardscrabble panache of a pair of frontier outlaws.
Pantame, which the group recorded in the Brooklyn studio of Marco Buccelli, a drummer and producer who has worked extensively with the New York singer-songwriter Xenia Rubinos, marks a shift. It’s not quite desert rock, though it’s hard to define exactly. A chance brush with the album’s lead single, “Hollow Body,” might suggest an industrial act with a knowing, though hardly tongue-in-cheek, approach to the genre: The throbbing drum machine and breaking-glass samples are dead ringers for vintage Wax Trax, and Frutos’ larynx-shredding snarl summons the perfect mixture of Trent Reznor and Peter Murphy. It’s a giddy spin on evil that’s fitting of his graying beard and wild-eyed mien.
But even as a first encounter with Crudo Pimento, the song’s Lynchian ambient bookends—soft strings, keening voices—indicate that there is more to this duo. Whizzing through 13 tracks in 29 minutes, Pantame takes in 1990s-inspired alternative rock, glitching electronic percussion, the dread empty spaces of post-punk, and an overdriven blast of live jazz improv that sounds as if it were recorded on a waterlogged Dictaphone in a blast-cratered nightclub. Frequently, the mournful vocal melodies of Andalusian flamenco take the reins, bending heavy-metal malice and hip-hop swagger to haunting contours forged in centuries of drought and melancholy.
The album flows in a single, meandering stream of music, a tenacious creek in a cracked riverbed. If the satisfying crunch of guitar rock is the unifying element, the really interesting stuff happens in the interstices, as pigfuck rave-ups collide with steel-guitar reveries, analog synth squiggles, and stuttering fantasias that sound like Oval going to town on a scratched-out Swans CD. The lyrics, mostly in Spanish, mix the sacred and the profane with a surrealist’s acid-tipped brush (“I promise to water your streets/With the blood of those who offended you/Don’t think that money/Will free you from death”). “D.E.L.A.S.,” a blissed-out funk-rock jam that resembles Red Hot Chili Peppers on MDMA, cribs its chorus from a poem by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Jump cuts and jarring movements are bedrock principles of these supersaturated collages.
That the pieces of Pantame don’t seem as though they should fit together naturally is part of the point. That they do, and so neatly, is a testament to the rapport between Crudo Pimento and Buccelli, who gigged with the band in Spain and subsequently invited them to record in Brooklyn. His array of synths and samplers helps achieve something new: a flickering hybrid that brokers an uneasy truce between dirt and silicon. But Buccelli’s MPC workouts—a technique that gives a song like “Ventana” its ungainly shudder—are just part of the equation. The alien power of Crudo Pimento is baked in, no plug-ins required.
“Pantame,” which features Rubinos, might be the album’s strangest cut, precisely because it sounds so normal: It’s straight-up roots reggae, unadulterated and unhybridized (save for that mid-song free-jazz freakout). “No hay tiempo para droga en New York City/No hay tiempo para droga en Barcelona,” Frutos croaks, a grizzled sage: There’s no time for drugs in New York City, there’s no time for drugs in Barcelona. Whatever it’s supposed to mean, I hear it as a lament for the pace of modern life, a rejection of global capitalism, a recognition that recreational drugs are first and foremost about having time to burn—a resource nobody seems to have enough of in big, expensive metropolises.
I visited Murcia once; the hash was strong and the evenings were aimless in a way that would be inconceivable in the world’s rat-race capitals. Pantame feels like alternative rock in its truest, most idealistic sense: rock music in search of an alternative, better way of living. That search, too, is fundamentally about time—time to pursue one’s craft, time to build one’s instruments, time to wander into the desert and get properly lost. | 2019-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Everlasting | April 10, 2019 | 7.4 | 6bd48d6a-7c5a-40c2-af0a-927ca81e22a3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Washington, D.C. rapper burrows further into his subdued sound, creating a vivid panorama of his existence with each deadpan bar. | The Washington, D.C. rapper burrows further into his subdued sound, creating a vivid panorama of his existence with each deadpan bar. | Sideshow : Wegahta Tapes Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sideshow-wegahta-tapes-vol-1/ | Wegahta Tapes Vol. 1 | Few rappers employ vignettes like Sideshow. He’s an unflinchingly personal rapper—which is saying something, considering he keeps company with MIKE, Mavi, and Navy Blue—but he delivers his narrative through piecemeal snapshots. The Washington, D.C.-via-Ethiopia rapper has favored this approach since his 2020 debut Farley and hasn’t veered far from it since, choosing to render his visage a little less blurry each time he refines his craft. On his latest project Wegahta Tapes Vol. 1., Sideshow burrows further into his sound, searching for clarity in the stories and regrets that cloud his mind.
On the opener “Wegahta’s Brother,” he floats from existential anguish to memories of moving drugs to pay rent, spinning the block where his cousin was gunned down, and buying Japanese denim. Though these moments aren’t directly connected, they don’t feel like non-sequiturs. These fragments of memory bleed into each other, creating a panorama of Sideshow’s life in all its melancholy splendor. Sideshow’s raps aren’t overly flowery or poetic, sticking strictly to the brand of dead-eyed reporting of rappers like Vince Staples. But unlike Vince, who changes his flow and energy levels on a dime, Sideshow delivers every bar with a muted deadpan sincerity.
Drugs are on the periphery of nearly every song, and he treats the selling of them as a numbing but necessary means to an end. Near the end of the Evidence-produced “Henrik Clarke Kent,” he goes from bragging about profit margins with his partner to solemnly recounting a time when he served drugs to his auntie. Paranoia from dealing seeps into even his most trusted relationships. On “S95-Bound,” he raps, “Half my niggas robbers, half ’em scammers; all of them killers/All my brothers scholars, some in college and prison/But I can’t tell who solid, who gon’ rob me or switch.” Sideshow pulls in so close that you can smell the rubber bands wrapped around stacks of money and hear the cars idling outside his block.
Sideshow’s voice may not fluctuate often, but his ear for beats keeps the sounds of Wegahta Tapes fresh and eclectic. Loops and percussion–courtesy of MIKE (“Wegahta’s Brother”), Grimm Doza (“Lunchin”), and Roper Williams (“Rhodes to Rox,” “HP Sport”)–rotate and simmer like a rotisserie chicken on a spit. The beats for closing tracks “Sneeky Steps” and “SALT KILLS SNAILS” are outliers that embrace candy-colored keyboards and faster drum programming, but they are mixed low enough to match the rest of the album’s subdued palette. Sideshow catches flows over all of them effortlessly, his musical wanderlust offering as much adventure and danger as the dilapidated D.C. streets he walks down.
No matter what beat he’s rapping over or what memory he’s unearthing, Sideshow remains a grounded and sobering storyteller. It takes a certain level of conviction to start an album by refuting the existence of heaven while still holding out hope for a better tomorrow, and that’s the hat trick he pulls off. There’s no doubt that he’s more content to be touring the country and featuring on Alchemist records instead of being caught up in the streets, but as long as these images linger in his head, he’s willing to use them to exorcize his demons. | 2022-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 10k | May 27, 2022 | 7.4 | 6bd6d57b-0cf4-45ea-896f-c23d4470cb34 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Samantha, a free mixtape that piles together recordings from as far back as 2012 and as recent as last month, including collaborations with Washed Out, Rome Fortune, Kool A.D., and more, ably tracks Chaz Bundick’s evolution as a producer and songwriter. | Samantha, a free mixtape that piles together recordings from as far back as 2012 and as recent as last month, including collaborations with Washed Out, Rome Fortune, Kool A.D., and more, ably tracks Chaz Bundick’s evolution as a producer and songwriter. | Toro y Moi: Samantha | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21059-samantha/ | Samantha | Part of the fun in following Chaz Bundick’s musical trajectory is hearing how he changes up his style from one project to the next. From Causers of This on, each Toro Y Moi release has been a subtle shakeup: 2011’s stellar Underneath the Pine laser-cut the corners of chillwave down to a fine point; 2013’s Anything in Return turned his songwriterly impulses into disco and pop gems; and, most recently, he channeled early experiments with garage and indie rock into this past April’s What For? But each project somehow sounds distinctly like Toro Y Moi, bound by Bundick’s unflagging production chops. The latest Toro Y Moi project, Samantha, is a free mixtape that piles together recordings from as far back as 2012 and as recent as last month. It serves as a neat way of tracking Bundick’s progression as a musician while prominently highlighting his talent for both beat-driven and atmospheric production.
Samantha is filled with unexpected turns. Sparse one- and two-minute instrumental sketches serve as interludes, creating a sense of flow with soul and R&B samples ("Stoned at the MoMA", "Prayer Hands", the Ciara-quoting "Boo Boo Mobile"). Bundick ventures into ambient on glitchy, sedate closer "welp, tour’s over" and "ambient Rainbow", with the latter layering choral vocals and soothing washes of sound to mesmerizing ends. It’s a testament to Bundick’s innovation that he’s still finding ways to contort his signature sound into new shapes. Even when songs do call back to his previous work, as on "Us 2", which pairs a churning hip-hop beat with sugary synth pads that sound lifted from his 2011 cover of Cherrelle’s "Saturday Love", they still put a fresh spin on the approach.
The songs on Samantha are about the ups and downs of relationships, placing most emphasis on the downs. Bundick even goes so far as to tack an extended sample of The Notebook onto the end of creeping, Washed Out-assisted "Want", a move that very narrowly evades tipping over into schmaltz. On the trap-influenced "The Usual", he laments the frustrations of being a workaholic in a relationship, an unusually frank moment from Bundick. Elsewhere, Kool A.D. spins off into woozy, emotionally conflicted verses ("I got problems acting like a fuckin’ grown up," he grouses in Auto-Tune on "Real Love"), while rising Atlanta rapper Rome Fortune relays relationship fallouts on two of the tape’s best tracks, "Pitch Black" and Puff Daddy-sampling "Benjiminz". Samantha lightens up by the end, as on the sweetly jittery "Enough of You", but the main theme seems to be that relationships are complicated messes that can lead to comfort and love as easily as pain and heartbreak.
That Samantha comes in the wake of the guitar-driven What For? makes the mixtape particularly welcome, like a palette cleanser to prepare us for wherever Bundick goes next. Even if he's purging his hard drive of one-offs that didn’t fit anywhere else, with a free-form structure, winning collabs, and appealingly nocturnal ambience, Samantha is a welcome addition to Bundick’s catalog. | 2015-09-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-24T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | self-released | September 24, 2015 | 7.5 | 6bddf971-f87f-466f-b501-ed079548e384 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | null |
This unstable amalgam of kazoo squeal, vacuum cleaner whine, and defenestrated drums from the prolific Spanish producer mines a joyous sense of play and surrealistic wonder. | This unstable amalgam of kazoo squeal, vacuum cleaner whine, and defenestrated drums from the prolific Spanish producer mines a joyous sense of play and surrealistic wonder. | RRUCCULLA: SHuSH | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rrucculla-shush/ | SHuSH | On the surface, the Spanish drummer and electronic musician who calls herself RRUCCULLA isn’t a “mystery producer,” at least not in the ways typically fetishized in dance music. Her real name is Izaskun González. She is 24 years old, a cheerful user of social media, and from Bilbao, a picturesque port city in Spain’s Basque Country. Her alias is a playful variation on the Spanish word for arugula. Onstage, she eschews visuals, encouraging audiences to let her heavily abstracted electronica spark their own imaginations. Still, there she is, front and center, tapping at sampler pads before sitting behind a full drum kit and laying into muscular rhythms in odd time signatures. In a video of her 2016 live debut, she tells the crowd through a voice processor so creepy it could scare even Karin Dreijer, “This is the first time I’ve come out of my cave.”
But once you focus your attention on her sounds, all certainties fall apart. What kind of music is this, and how on earth has she made it? On Bandcamp, she has a rapidly growing catalog of self-released albums. What began as an exploratory take on L.A. beat music—it’s easy to hear the influence of Flying Lotus and Brainfeeder on 2015’s Yesterday is Tomorrow’s wtv and Tactile Emotion—has become increasingly idiosyncratic. Last year’s Istripuak collected improvised drum solos that she subsequently manipulated. SHuSH, which she occasionally spells as the more fittingly onomatopoeic SHo͝oSH, is her most alien excursion yet, a kind of splattercore drum ‘n’ bass riddled with acoustic drums and slathered with elastic synths and pitch-shifting effects. An unstable amalgam of kazoo squeal, vacuum cleaner whine, and defenestrated drum kit, it is chaotic. Trap beats perforate whoopie cushions. Bright tendrils of synth flick across the fizz of bubbling water. Prepared-piano plunks dot concussive breaks and helicopter pulses. High-pitched voices darting across the upper register imply that medically inadvisable quantities of helium have been huffed.
Her titles suggest outlandish images—“Vestido de Párpados” (“Dress of Eyelids”), “Menta Fútil” (“Futile Mint”), “Cicatriz de Chocolate” (“Chocolate Scar”)—that play out in synesthetic eruptions of color, texture, and unpredictable movement. There are echoes of Arca, SOPHIE, Drexciya, Aphex Twin, Raymond Scott, John Zorn, Mr. Bungle—sometimes all in the same song. She says she began working on “Cicatriz de Chocolate,” for instance, in her hotel room while waiting to see the jazz pianist Brad Mehldau; the track itself is inspired by Chinese and Japanese math-rock. Jazz is a major influence. Opener “Intro coma 绿茶” is a showdown between blocky piano chords and her own livewire drumming, while “Té de Cabello Blanco” liberally samples a skronk solo. The whole album was inspired, she says, by a kind of thought experiment: What would free jazz sound like if played by children?
Still, for all that gonzo overload, she knows when to pull back, making SHuSH a more balanced listen than this shock and awe might suggest. That happens across the full record, as when “Menta Fútil” offers a quasi-ambient breather during the jittery first half, and within individual songs. Halfway through the stuttering breaks and atonal topline of “Té de Caballo Blanco,” piano chords and a reassuring bassline take the edge off the agitation. The effect is a bit like watching the video of an explosion in reverse, scraps of shrapnel fitting themselves back together. Most of RRUCCULLA’s songs are short, just a few minutes apiece, which is probably for the best; human consciousness ca. 2018 can take only so many bewildering switchbacks before going numb. That said, the seven-minute “Vestido de Párpados” is one of the album’s most engaging cuts.
If Alfonso Cuarón were filming Children of Men today, the seasick “Miel Oscura” would make a great choice of “zen music” for Michael Caine’s character: RRUCCULLA’s atomized trance stabs and undulating shrieks seem beamed back from a future in which notions of musical pleasure have morphed and mutated so thoroughly, it’s hard to recognize them as such. This may not sound much like free jazz, per se, but her album is an expression of unfettered play at its purest. Children love squishy things: Play-Doh, magic sand, homemade slime. SHuSH translates that tug of war between form and formlessness into exhilarating electronic music. | 2018-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | BIIPBIIP | November 10, 2018 | 7.6 | 6be3b799-51c5-4540-954f-1d91a6d54619 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Across four pieces, including a cover of Ace Frehley's "Fractured Mirror", it feels like the Australian multi-instrumentalist is listening harder than ever to feel out new ways to move forward. | Across four pieces, including a cover of Ace Frehley's "Fractured Mirror", it feels like the Australian multi-instrumentalist is listening harder than ever to feel out new ways to move forward. | Oren Ambarchi: Audience of One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16320-audience-of-one/ | Audience of One | It's a strange kind of fate that has caused Australian multi-instrumentalist Oren Ambarchi to spend most of his career making records that demonstrated his singular guitar sound, only to gain greater notice for an album that barely shows it off at all. But that's the way Audience of One, released by his longtime label Touch, is panning out. Ambarchi is also known for his collaborative work with Sunn O))), with whom he's recorded and played live, complementing his extensive solo releases and further alliances with musicians including Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, and Christian Fennesz. Other guests emerge on Audience of One's four pieces. Among them are impressive contributions from Warm Ghost's Paul Duncan, providing vocals on the opening "Salt"; and Eyvind Kang, filling out a chamber arrangement on the expansive "Knots".
There's a sense of new life forming, of Ambarchi's re-contextualizing his place in the world. His music has taken in vast stylistic shifts in the past, but here he forges deeper into the unknown, loosening control over his work to allow his collaborators to leave a more indelible footprint and pushing many of the shapes he forms into a tighter framework. Those shapes on the opening "Salt" mirror the glass-like ambience of Markus Popp's Oval, sifting a stilled beauty into the track as Duncan's keening vocal echoes softly over them. When a hushed swell of strings momentarily enters the frame it scrapes close to the kind of work Jason Pierce was experimenting with circa Pure Phase, where a chilly tone-drift provides a simple backdrop for raw, unhampered emotion.
That may be a surprising comparison for longstanding fans of Ambarchi's work, but on Audience of One he's clearly happy to buck a few expectations. On the 33-minute centerpiece "Knots", there's a greater widening of his vision, bringing in the pitter-patter of drummer Joe Talia's metronomic ride-cymbal playing, initially counterbalanced by shards of abstract noise, ranging from barely extant slivers of sound to a blackened, all-encompassing bedlam. It's strung up in an unusual space, full of gaps for the musicians to move around in but also striding forward with purpose and goal, ricocheting back and forth between the known and the unknown. It's reminiscent of Thomas Fehlmann's work with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra on "DFM", where all the players are intuitively aware of how to expand into spaces without overwhelming the track's fragile fabric.
"Knots" is intricate and fascinating, the kind of piece that's impossible to digest in one or two hearings, always holding back secrets to reveal on further plays. There's a lightness and a density to it, with Ambarchi's black-hole soloing at the midway point falling back into near-quiet in the final third before a series of forceful, metallic clangs push and pull it to a barbed close. The only way out after that is to return to the buttoned-up euphoria of what came before, with singer Jessika Kenney cooing over "Passage" while Ambarchi caresses out ambient noise by kneading the rims of a series of wine glasses. It's a necessary climb-down from "Knots", an escape hatch that stops the mind from reeling on what came before.
To complete the picture, and to continue the strain of reinvention that runs throughout Audience of One, the album closes with a cover of Ace Frehley's "Fractured Mirror". It's a marginal lift in tone after "Passage", with the plush march of a drum machine providing a steady pulse for glass-cut guitar playing to echo around. In 2004, Pitchfork's Brandon Stosuy reviewed Ambarchi's Grapes from the Estate, wondering what the guitarist could do with Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher". "Fractured Mirror" may be the closest we get to an answer, with the overabundant guitar playing of Frehley's version sucked out and replaced with a downplayed beauty that's just about perceptible if you listen closely to the original. But that's typical of Ambarchi's approach on Audience of One, which feels like he's listening harder than ever to feel out new ways to move forward, causing him to quietly cleanse his vision in ever more compelling ways. | 2012-02-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-02-24T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Experimental | Touch | February 24, 2012 | 7 | 6be5e3ff-c35a-4db4-9f86-840072c19d58 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Chicago singer and songwriter Maria Jacobson ambles into notes from unexpected angles, emboldening the question marks behind interrogative, introspective lyrics. | Chicago singer and songwriter Maria Jacobson ambles into notes from unexpected angles, emboldening the question marks behind interrogative, introspective lyrics. | Fran: A Private Picture | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fran-a-private-picture/ | A Private Picture | Fran frontwoman Maria Jacobson had been deeply involved with musical theater her whole life, but became fed up with it while working as an actor for a small Indiana theater after college—where she’d given a commencement speech urging her class not to wait for perfect circumstances to start creating things. Jacobson moved to Mexico, where she taught English when she wasn’t pouring thoughts into a notebook, and then into a guitar. She returned home to Chicago and started an indie rock band. In a music video for a song from Fran’s 2017 EP, More Enough, Jacobson walks across the city carrying a tray of coffees to a recipient that never appears, then finally sits down by the river and enjoys them herself. Fran songs often sound like they’re straight from the brain of someone doing exactly this.
Jacobson’s musical-theater background will surprise precisely no one who hears her voice for more than a few seconds. But she doesn’t rely on it to bear the weight of Fran’s debut full-length, A Private Picture; instead, she likes to offset it with grungy foundations, creating a crunchy/smooth interplay that weaves through the album. She applies jazzy twists and ambles into notes from unexpected angles, emboldening the question marks behind interrogative, introspective lyrics that try to pin down uncertainties—about ambition, about direction, about which people to keep around.
When discussing her writing process, Jacobson has spoken about the challenge of navigating between “crazy and cool-sounding” and “really simple” chord patterns. That struggle is audible at times, like she’s not entirely sure which would serve her idea better. Her choices make for some intriguingly weird moments on A Private Picture. “(I Don’t Want You to Think) I’ve Moved On” sounds like an unsent email to a not-quite ex sung aloud from a sleepy ragtime saloon. The title track goes rogue in the third verse, spiraling past its allotted time as Jacobson’s doubts burn on and her band fires up: “I’m a blur, a peripheral illusion that you use for inspiration when the inkwell’s running empty/And now I’m scared of my reflection.”
Still, A Private Picture’s most profound moments are its simplest, including two or three when Jacobson nails notes so high it’s almost a shame to hear them anywhere but in a cathedral. “In My Own Time” attests to the virtue of patience in both its lyrics and strolling tempo, while “Desert Wanderer” closes the album at its peak with a languid but lucid slow burn. It stretches out over seven minutes and could have easily gotten away with another five.
On “Time and Place,” Jacobson calmly repeats a koan: “I can’t feel it, but I have it/And I can’t see it, but it’s there.” Similar wording has been used to describe religious faith, but the type of faith Jacobson seems to address on A Private Picture is more personal: faith in her intuition, faith that taking one good step now will eventually reveal another right step after that. These songs move together like a collection of personal vignettes, united in their conviction to keep that faith alive. If it doesn’t always sound effortless, it’s thoughtful, authentic, and occasionally fantastic.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fire Talk | November 26, 2019 | 6.7 | 6be7b6e1-98b2-44d0-8c08-5b977821066c | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Menace Beach are a Leeds-based band steeped in '90s alt-rock. Over the last few years, the same intersection of early '90s alternative and indie-rock has inspired vital releases from Speedy Ortiz, Swearin’, and Joanna Gruesome, but Menace Beach are even more committed to their specific set of influences than those groups. | Menace Beach are a Leeds-based band steeped in '90s alt-rock. Over the last few years, the same intersection of early '90s alternative and indie-rock has inspired vital releases from Speedy Ortiz, Swearin’, and Joanna Gruesome, but Menace Beach are even more committed to their specific set of influences than those groups. | Menace Beach: Ratworld | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20157-ratworld/ | Ratworld | The most celebrated figures of early 1990s alternative rock were enigmas and iconoclasts, tortured souls or wayward poets raging against machines that weren’t always clearly defined. Not every member of the Alternative Nation bled for their art, however. Behind the genre’s complicated stars were bands less interested in challenging the establishment than in just making cool noises with their guitars, acts like Superchunk, Elastica, and the Breeders. What these bands lacked in mystique, they made up for through sheer sonic abundance, amusing themselves with unfettered hooks, giddy tempos, and stylized riffing. With their fuzz-kicking guitars and modest attention spans, those bands serve as the guiding inspiration for the young Leeds group Menace Beach, whose full-length debut Ratworld bottles and concentrates the exuberance of that era's alterna-pop.
Menace Beach are in good company mining these sounds. Over the last few years the same intersection of early '90s alternative and indie-rock has inspired vital releases from Speedy Ortiz, Swearin’, and Joanna Gruesome, but Menace Beach are even more committed to their specific set of influences than those groups. Their closest peers, in that sense, are Yuck, another band that's so fully internalized their record collection that their music becomes a form of roleplay. When singer/guitarist Ryan Needham merrily sings "Fuck everything you ever wanted to be" on Ratworld opener "Come On Give Up"—flanked on backing vocals, as he almost always is, by his eager co-lead Liza Violet—he’s channeling every unassuming alt-rock singer who ever softened a barbed lyric with a chipper, slightly dweeby delivery. Casual self-loathing was just as much a part of the fabric of '90s alternative as whimsical tonal juxtapositions, and Menace Beach don’t shy from either.
Like many of Leeds’ buzziest rock bands, Menace Beach have ties to Hookworms leader Matthew "MJ" Johnson, who produced their album at his increasingly busy Suburban Home Studios. Johnson also serves as a sometimes member of the band, but little of Hookworms’ psychedelic menace carries through Ratworld. The only hints come from the warped organs piped into "Dig It Up" and "Fortune Teller", and even those songs are so bombastically poppy that they go down easier than anything in Hookworms’ playbook. Johnson is smart to stay in the background, rather than risk interrupting the simple, sugary chemistry between Needham and Violet. They co-wrote the album together, and Ratworld reaches puppyish levels of excitement every time one of its choruses unites them. Theirs is the rare lead vocalist/backing vocalist dynamic that feels like an equal partnership, with Violet’s injections propelling these songs nearly as much as their rubbery bass lines or pogoing guitars.
Violet takes just one solo lead on Ratworld, and it’s the album’s biggest departure, a song so personal she confided to Rookie its working title was "This Is My Song", because she didn’t want anybody else to hear it. It's the record’s one moment of true vulnerability, but like every song Menace Beach write, it’s also an homage, in this case to the smoldering, reverb-saddened ballads of Galaxie 500. Here the familiarity that usually works in the band's favor cuts against them. When the song’s dreamy haze breaks into a shower of corroded guitars, there’s no surprise; that’s how these kinds of Galaxie 500 appropriations always play out. On an album that otherwise so joyfully captures the exhilaration of alternative's recent past, it's one of the rare moments where Menace Beach's borrowed sounds don't deliver the same charge they did the first time around. | 2015-01-23T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2015-01-23T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | January 23, 2015 | 7.1 | 6bead40a-c518-4609-b953-0d0948e19586 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The second studio LP from this austere project finds the Basic Channel producer continuing to work with Sasu Ripatti (aka Vladislav Delay) and adding guests. | The second studio LP from this austere project finds the Basic Channel producer continuing to work with Sasu Ripatti (aka Vladislav Delay) and adding guests. | Moritz Von Oswald Trio: Horizontal Structures | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15226-horizontal-structures/ | Horizontal Structures | As a member of pioneering minimal/dub/techno outfits Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound, Moritz Von Oswald has spent more than a decade imbuing machine music with human warmth. More recently, he's doing the opposite-- making warm bodies sound like machines.
Moritz Von Oswald Trio is his group of living, breathing musicians-- an all-star ensemble that also includes Max Loderbauer (NSI, Sun Electric) and percussionist Sasu Ripatti (Vladislav Delay). It's a unique concept: a live band that performs minimalist dance music-- well dressed, clean-shaven, and ready to jam.
Horizontal Structures is the group's second studio LP, following a debut, Vertical Ascent, and a live album recorded during an appearance at New York's Le Poisson Rouge. As with the trio's previous output, the compositions on Horizontal Structures are entirely improvised. The record's four long, languid tracks all stretch more than 10 minutes. But the group uses that freedom sparingly. The music has no solos and no dramatic shifts in tempo. A steady pulse-- typically a drum machine or sequenced pattern-- is introduced, then embellished upon using live instrumentation and effects. It's tonal, but never directly melodic. In fact, individual expression of any sort is extraordinarily disciplined-- limited to modest knob tweaks and percussion fills. Like Von Oswald's work with Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound, the music makes heavy use of extended repetition. The tracks may be jammed out on the fly, but the results are tightly governed by the trio's shared affinity for minimalism.
But reserved and mechanical as it is, Horizontal Structures is a very warm record. Von Oswald and his regulars soak the music in reverb and atmosphere. This time around, additional musicians augment the trio-- Paul St. Hilaire (aka Tikiman) on guitar and Marc Muellbauer on double bass. Both toss a few swatches of dubby riffage and jazzy rumbling into the mix, as on "Structure 2", which pours glassy drones atop a percussive sequencer pattern and Rhodes piano tinkles. The mood is similar to electric-era Miles Davis, minus the fury. "Structure 3" and "Structure 4" make use of more traditional dub-techno elements-- burbling echo, reverb spikes, and phased hi-hat chatter-- but keep the pulse relaxed. "Structure 1" is an anomaly-- a loose, surprisingly abstract meditation that only gradually congeals into a rhythmic form. Though it's music is deeply informed by the club, Moritz Von Oswald Trio steers clear of hard kicks and bass. Where most live bands strive to deliver physical intensity, these guys headed down a different, more zoned-out path. | 2011-03-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-03-18T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Honest Jon’s | March 18, 2011 | 7 | 6beed0f8-84c7-4869-8c9f-988c4f008f80 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
The South East London rapper carves out a lane between grime and UK rap on an EP marked by industrial-strength 808s and her own playful bark. | The South East London rapper carves out a lane between grime and UK rap on an EP marked by industrial-strength 808s and her own playful bark. | FLOHIO: Wild Yout EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flohio-wild-yout-ep/ | Wild Yout EP | The video for Flohio’s “Wild Yout” makes for a disorienting backdrop to the title track of the young UK rapper’s second EP. The drab, claustrophobic corridors of housing estates give way to images of a camo-clad Flohio in an overgrown London heath, posing and bopping among forests and purple flowers, crosscut with grainy close-ups of her crowd-surfing. The distant cranes and skyscrapers revealed at the end complete the picture of an urban jungle. It’s a visual approximation of the wildness fueling Flohio’s music—specifically, the untamed creativity that makes her one of the city’s most exciting young MCs. It’s easy to find her sound thrilling—if also sometimes tiring in its relentless, pounding delivery.
The EP’s four tracks are all produced by 808-sliding HLMNSRA, who injects his own brand of the industrial trap sound that Flohio tends toward: thickening and thinning hyper-electronica with binding coherence and clear consideration for the accented flows laid on top. Only one song, “Toxic,” takes a step back from the broader intensity, aligning mellow vocals with ethereal instrumentation and stirring in mature contemplation about people and relationships, rather than lashing out or seeking to prove something, her default mode. It shows a new and more complex side of the London rapper, and it’s the standout moment on the EP. More of this would be welcome, and would frankly serve to offset the stressful, jarring synths of “Breeze,” the weak link in an otherwise neat effort to showcase the talent of an artist still figuring things out.
Part of what makes this EP so interesting as a mile marker in Flohio’s explosive rise is how it helps to place her within the spectrum of London’s music scene. Born in Nigeria, Flohio has lived since she was a small child in Bermondsey, in South East London—SE16, to be precise, a postcode she chanted over production duo God Colony’s industrial thwack back in 2016. In terms of geographical proximity and a refusal to be boxed in, she shares traits with the fellow proud SE London local Octavian: She’s a product of transnational upbringing; an embracer of hope and grit in the harsh inner-city cold; a sudden regenerator of the eclectic sonic influences filling the postcolonial capital’s streets right now.
It would be incorrect to simply label Flohio’s music here grime or trap. She takes from and transcends both in equal measure: spitting one minute, rapping the next. “Bop Thru” has the same catchy, anthemic feel as “Wild Yout,” and the punchy lyrics and cadences of both will inspire sing-alongs from raucous crowds. Flohio has continued to adapt to her producers’ tempos, flowing with deliberate boldness and flair, and channeling the mind’s-eye image of a gun-finger-filled warehouse rave, rather than a pirate-radio set. Her fearless, booming voice recalls the soulful yelp of grime veteran Shystie on her 2004 classic “One Wish,” employing a tone of rugged, unforgiving aggression as a weapon to smash through the glass ceiling of a male-dominated scene.
Flohio’s outrageous and even intimidating confidence here is enough to suggest we’re listening to someone who’s both learning and having fun, exploring her identity while tearing up dance floors across the nation. The hype is real, and justified. It’s an exciting way to end a year of sizzling building-block growth. | 2018-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Alpha | November 8, 2018 | 6.8 | 6beede24-a58c-4a54-8821-080920c471aa | Ciaran Thapar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ciaran-thapar/ | |
** | ** | Fiona Apple: Extraordinary Machine [Jon Brion version] / Extraordinary Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11639-extraordinary-machine-jon-brion-version-extraordinary-machine/ | Extraordinary Machine [Jon Brion version] / Extraordinary Machine | If you're particularly web savvy, you may have seen the previous version of this review up on the site before its replacement with the edition you're reading right now. Here's the story: I crafted the original to be my most ambitious yet-- epic in scope, embellished with the richest prose I could possibly summon. But alas, the powers that be were not, as they say, feeling it, and sent me back to the drawing board to craft a review less eccentric and more crowd-friendly. Or actually, maybe I had second thoughts about the original review myself, choosing to self-regulate and take a mulligan. I don't know, it's very confusing; but know that all this vacillation was never for publicity's sake, no, never that.
So I can empathize with Fiona Apple, who has gone through a similarly arduous journey on the road to releasing her first album in six years. Earlier this year, Extraordinary Machine appeared destined for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot status, as the nearly-finished album Apple made with longtime collaborator Jon Brion was shelved, then surreptitiously leaked to the world's music thieves. But rather than graciously accepting a starring role in Fuck the Man Rock N' Roll Myth #67, Apple did a do-over, this time working with Mike Elizondo, best known as right-hand man to the good Dr. Dre.
Unfortunately for Apple and Elizondo, that Brion version isn't going away quietly. And now, upon the release of the official retail version, it only makes sense to compare the two-- a sort of musical Pepsi challenge-- given that they share 11 of 12 songs. The differences are far from subtle: For all but two songs, the title track and "Waltz (Better Than Fine)", Elizondo overhauled the original takes-- or maybe underhauled is the more appropriate term in this case, given the addition-by-subtraction philosophy applied throughout.
Apple is a songwriter who can turn every relationship hiccup into a calamitous tragedy, and Brion fittingly applied his production talents with the intent of blowing up her songs to 2.35:1 aspect ratio. On "Not About Love" and "O' Sailor", Brion scored Apple's compositions no less extravagantly than his soundtracking work for the indie-film elite, applying dollops of lush orchestration to place her piano and throwback vocals in an epic frame. Though the material wasn't always Apple's best-- "Oh Well" and "Window" in particular, sounding a bit through-the-motions-- the symphonic presentation kept it interesting and gave the LP a cohesive flavor.
Elizondo's approach is more eclectic: Rather than applying copious amounts of strings, he employs bits of organ, backwards loops, and busier drumming to flesh out Fiona's sound. But the fleshing out is kept skeletal, so as not to distract from the central elements of Apple's voice and piano. Though the Brion version was likely unmastered, it's still striking how much the emphasis has shifted from a broader sound to Apple's contributions alone, like demos in reverse. You can also pour a 40 out for fallen countermelodies, as Elizondo hacks away Brion's embellishments upon "Not About Love" and "Window" in his efforts to keep the spotlight fixed solely on the star.
Not to say that there aren't moments where Elizondo either improves or offers a valid alternative to the Brion takes, as "Tymps (The Sick in the Head Song)" remakes the routine "Used to Love Him" with twitchy synth-bass and "Oh Well" benefits from a stronger vocal take. The dreamy "O' Sailor", meanwhile, refuses to be ruined, though the new version knocks the original out of its cosmic moody-blue orbit by insultingly replacing actual strings with the synthesized variety. Not so tamper-proof are the triplets "Red Red Red" and "Please Please Please", the former losing most of its drama thanks to a dull ambient backdrop, the latter ironically softening its single-ready punch on what's supposed to be the more traditionally commercial album.
The officially released version of Extraordinary Machine remains a decent-to-good album, one that showcases Apple's considerable vocal and key-pounding talents. In its new clothes, the album fits alongside her prior two albums, with only the slightly less consistent material bringing it down a peg. The shame of it all is that Apple, after six years of silence, could've made a more definitive, progressive statement rather than something familiar and similar-- and we've got the bootlegs to prove it. | 2005-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-10-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | October 4, 2005 | 7.8 | 6bef028b-a6eb-425e-a539-048ddaaaa23e | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | |
Mississauga-born singer and producer Jahron Brathwaite's second album as PARTYNEXTDOOR matches the Drake affiliate's self-assured cockiness with an increased benevolent streak. It functions something like Toronto's answer to ratch&B, replacing the dirtbag charm (or ugliness, as some argue) of someone like Ty Dolla $ign with a more benign disposition. | Mississauga-born singer and producer Jahron Brathwaite's second album as PARTYNEXTDOOR matches the Drake affiliate's self-assured cockiness with an increased benevolent streak. It functions something like Toronto's answer to ratch&B, replacing the dirtbag charm (or ugliness, as some argue) of someone like Ty Dolla $ign with a more benign disposition. | PARTYNEXTDOOR: PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19705-partynextdoor-partynextdoor-two/ | PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO | Last year's self-titled debut from PARTYNEXTDOOR saw the Mississauga-born singer and producer refashion himself as something of a narcotics-fueled lech, a persona that has, in 2014, hardened into an archetype familiar to anyone with a remote interest in R&B over the last half-decade. The beats were shadier than those he sang over when he was making music under his own name, Jahron Brathwaite, and so was his character. "You got wild bitches telling you lies" he sang on "Wild Bitches", a line so Weeknd-esque that it's kind of shocking Abel Tesfaye didn't get to it first; elsewhere, he boasted of ejaculating on a lover. While his voice sounded great in the dingier digs, the sleaziness felt grafted onto his personality in a way that always felt artificial, and it clashed with his more genuine—and compelling—loverman tendencies.
Brathwaite has scrubbed this occasional creepiness from his sophomore effort, as PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO matches his self-assured cockiness with an increased benevolent streak. He spends the majority of the album in awe of the women he sings about: "East Liberty" teems with talk of sunset-watching and proclamations of "forever"; in less capable hands, a line like "the ocean's calling your name" would be an eye-roller, but Brathwaite's puppy-dog earnestness—not to mention the track's woozy, dense throb—prevents it from inducing gag reflexes. Brathwaite does open-minded sincerity much more convincingly than he does charming asshole: "I want you to turn up every night on me when I see you," he urges on the Drake-assisted "Recognize" while acknowledging upfront that both he and the woman he's singing to have other lovers. There's a refreshing lack of jealousy and possessiveness on PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO, even as Brathwaite argues that he's in a league far above his competition on almost every song here.
Dropping his defenses helps turn PARTYNEXTDOOR into a project that feels more like Brathwaite's own creation rather than one that primarily (and cynically) reconfigures of-the-moment sounds, but it's still very much a project in perpetual conversation with the rest of today's R&B and rap landscapes. Brathwaite inhabits the same world as his boss, Drake, a place where it's difficult to tell exactly where singing becomes rapping and rapping becomes singing. This time around, he unapologetically swipes Young Thug's higher-and-higher-and-higher delivery and the relentless triplet cadence that Migos has breathed life into, both of which are employed on more than one occasion.
Brathwaite isn't afraid to look into the past, either. He takes Dru Hill's "Share My World" and slow-roasts it overnight for the sweltering "SLS", and the moment the track finally takes off is one of the album's biggest thrills. "Muse" finds PARTYNEXTDOOR submerging Ginuwine's "Only When Ur Lonely" in a vat of ink, thickening it up into a viscous sludge. Not all sample choices turn out so well, though—specifically, an egregious sample of Disclosure's "Latch" on horndog anthem "Sex on a Beach" feels like a play for borrowed interest rather than an inspired recontextualization of a recent hit. Someone will flip "Latch" in an intriguing way, it just won't be PARTYNEXTDOOR.
But PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO succeeds, much like its predecessor, largely thanks to Brathwaite's aptitude for mood. His molasses-thick production continues to get weirder in subtle ways; tracks that recall early-'90s R&B suspended in amber ("Grown Woman") sit next to tracks that sound like they come from an alternate universe where Vangelis has become the go-to producer for decaying bangers. Lyrically, PARTYNEXTDOOR TWO doesn't have its eyes on anything original, and its back half suffers from a turgid sameness that eventually numbs, but Brathwaite's second album functions something like Toronto's answer to ratch&B, replacing the dirtbag charm (or ugliness, as some argue) of someone like Ty Dolla $ign with a more benign disposition. | 2014-08-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-08-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner Bros. / OVO Sound | August 8, 2014 | 6.8 | 6bf12245-331d-4289-b75b-7616d972fc25 | Renato Pagnani | https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/ | null |
With his fifth album, the North Carolina rapper aims for righteousness but often ends up sounding self-righteous instead. | With his fifth album, the North Carolina rapper aims for righteousness but often ends up sounding self-righteous instead. | J. Cole: KOD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/j-cole-kod/ | KOD | Listening to a J. Cole album can feel like listening to a very intense young lawyer attempt to win a difficult case. Throughout his career, Cole’s raps have often been self-serious and polemical, with their success depending on the overall strength of his argumentation above all else. And while many of his individual claims can be convincing, you often get to the end of a song and think something like: Wait, did he really just argue that corporations take taxes and use them to buy and spread guns? Few artists stake so much on their ability to persuade an audience of their worldview, particularly when that worldview is so absolutist. You do not listen to J. Cole to enjoy his wit or his stories, but to partake in his wisdom, which often involves an element of moral panic: On his new addiction-themed album, KOD, he loves to suggest that people should abstain from things—smoking, drinking, online dating. Sometimes, he’s persuasive, but just as often, he simply seems self-righteous.
For a talented technical rapper with reverence for hip-hop’s history, Cole has never really been playful. (His previous album, 4 Your Eyez Only, was all about death.) Aside from his weakness for corny punchlines, his verses are frequently free of the word games that his top-tier peers revel in. But even so, Cole is capable of making a strong case for his beliefs. When he does, it’s thanks to the emotional appeals he embeds in certain songs. On “FRIENDS,” he confesses to his dependence on weed before calling out specific friends who abuse drugs; in asking them to stop, he mostly ditches his sanctimony. On another standout, “Kevin’s Heart,” Cole uses the pint-sized comedian’s very public infidelities to reflect on the challenge of monogamy: “My phone be blowing up/Temptations on my line/I stare at the screen a while before I press decline.” Cole is most effective when he keeps things personal rather than turning up his nose at the choices of others.
Other songs work because of the North Carolina rapper’s technical ability and skill behind the boards. Previously, when Cole has wanted to make a statement, he’s asked all collaborators to leave the room. The new album, like his would-be magnum opus, 2014 Forest Hills Drive, is absent of other artists (save kiLL edward, a mysterious guest whose voice, when sped up, sounds like J. Cole’s), and Cole produced much of it himself. “ATM” and the title track are potent reminders of the way he can rip up a song with his flow alone. Cole is friends with Kendrick Lamar, and KOD, with its stripped-down production, snare-drum flows, and focus on virtue and vice, can feel like a pale shadow of DAMN. Unlike the Pulitzer winner, Cole is far more predictable and accessible.
Cole simplifies lust on “Photograph,” where he again reminds us that his ideal woman is a holy Madonna who is sexy but never shows too much skin. He’s thoughtlessly proud on “The Cut Off,” in which he commends himself for his generosity after talking about how tempted he is to become violent. And on “BRACKETS,” he boils down a complicated topic in order to make a difficult argument work. The song ends with the story of a mother who loses her son. On the day of her son’s funeral, she remembers she has to pay her taxes, which she believes indirectly funded his death. Much like DAMN., the song uses the cyclical nature of time to make a point—that taxes are evil. But unlike Kendrick, Cole jury-rigs the narrative to make his case. Specious as they may be, songs like “BRACKETS” help us understand Cole’s appeal: He unites his audience against bogeymen like taxes, or the government, or white teachers in black schools, or a new generation of rappers. If you agree that those things are unequivocally Bad, you might be willing to listen when he tells you what not to do.
The most personal song on KOD is about his mother, Kay, and it combines the emotional appeal and evocative detail of the album’s best tracks with the selfishness of its worst. On “Once an Addict (Interlude),” Cole recalls his mom drinking too much after his stepfather had a child by another woman—even pinpointing the Marvin Gaye and Al Green songs she was listening to at the time—as he regrets his own callous reaction (“Why she always using me for a crutch?”). But while those elements make the song powerful, Cole expresses a surprising lack of empathy for his mother’s troubles, even with the benefit of hindsight, and is hamstrung by clumsy lines (“Maybe things get better with time, I heard it heals”). Listeners are asked to think about the rapper’s pain, rather than his mother’s.
Kay has encouraged her younger son to use her struggles as a warning to others, which he has done in the past. But there’s more to her story. She worked hard raising two sons by herself, working as a mail carrier to the point where her feet ached. One of those sons became a successful rapper, bought her a house, granted her the opportunity to stop carrying mail and to pursue acting, to meet Barack Obama and Afeni Shakur. In its haste to show the ugliness of her addiction KOD’s portrait of her glosses over any and all explanatory or redemptive details. It misses many other things too, when it conflates healthy and abusive self-medication, or refuses to make a distinction between marijuana, alcohol, and harder drugs. Because Cole is so often trying to convince us, he frequently only tells one side of the story, concealing the full picture in order to win an argument that nobody started. | 2018-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Dreamville | April 24, 2018 | 6.3 | 6bf27e46-e1f9-46db-a39f-e4df200c0d96 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
On the follow-up to her debut solo album, the former iamamiwhoami member tilts her off-kilter electro pop toward compellingly dystopian visions. | On the follow-up to her debut solo album, the former iamamiwhoami member tilts her off-kilter electro pop toward compellingly dystopian visions. | ionnalee: REMEMBER THE FUTURE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ionnalee-remember-the-future/ | REMEMBER THE FUTURE | Jonna Lee, aka ionnalee, moors cavernous electronic pop with regularly discomfiting theatrics. Her three audiovisual albums with producer Claes Björklund as iamamiwhoami were mysterious, occasionally sinister curios driven by tensile electronics and dance pop, paving the way for creative collaborations with Comme des Garçons and Röyksopp, with whom she was a touring member. The Swedish artist turned inward last year with her debut solo album as ionnalee, Everyone Afraid to Be Forgotten, assembled following a cancer scare and diagnosis of a thyroid disorder that threatened Lee’s ability to sing. The discovery spurred her to a leaner vision of iamamiwhoami’s mannered electronic pop, with candid lyrics, front-and-center vocals, and warlike drums and electronics forming some of her strongest music yet. Follow-up REMEMBER THE FUTURE maintains Lee’s off-kilter, spare approach to pop music while adding a broader one to her themes, homing in on a murky vision of dystopia, sci-fi retrofuturism, and the hope that lies beyond whatever misfortune may lie ahead.
REMEMBER THE FUTURE joins rank with other contemporary electronic-pop albums with similar future-shock leitmotifs, most memorably from the Knife and Austra. Lee’s approach is more tactile, reflected in the tin robot she built for the album art, a “retro space-age symbol” expressing idealized and wide-eyed space-race ambition. As a result, the frozen-over REMEMBER THE FUTURE feels like watching an arthouse disaster movie with a bittersweet ending, tracing the expressive outlines of a downfall, its aftermath, and the inevitable path to an optimistic ending. Whether it’s about literal ecological destruction or interpersonal turmoil seems to be beside the point, as the two become interchangeable in Lee’s hands: She is often ornate and in distress, walking among “the shatters at the bottom of our ocean” and icing over into “crystal in the mouth of your river.”
Lee’s seesawing melodrama is tempered by new shades of disco and darkwave. “WIPE IT OFF” frets over “meds wearing off” on top of a manic, fleet-footed dance track with bright, vigorous synths. Lee is loose and unencumbered, like she’s enjoying the upshot of delirium, wiling away the night at some snowed-in club. The inevitable crash comes on “MATTERS”: Zola Jesus arrives like a serene angel of death among muffled drums imitating the hammer of a heartbeat while Lee laments the indelible image of a “thin blue line” across a “fatal sky.” Atmospheric and stretching to nearly seven minutes, “MATTERS” is the album’s pulsing core, a gloomy intimation of the dangers of tunnel vision before an impending disaster. Yet Lee remains generous, offering up confidence in a pacifying, crystalline tone: “We matter/Raise our voices/Hum until their walls shatter.”
Occasionally Lee conveys her sci-fi themes a little too obviously. On the ascendant title track, she processes her voice through a hammy vocoder, as if giving voice to her ersatz robot, and she relies on alien synthesizers on the meandering “RACE AGAINST.” She adds similar processing to better effect on the propulsive highlight “SOME BODY,” throwing shapes over a rubbery synth line and pressurized drums. Toward the end of REMEMBER THE FUTURE, however, Lee finds a new apex, recruiting Röyksopp for a cover of Angelo Badalamenti’s “Mysteries of Love,” from the soundtrack to David Lynch’s nightmarish 1986 film Blue Velvet. Cocooned in slow-moving, Vangelis-sized synths and steered by Lee’s reverberating voice, it feels like a beaming, natural progression for her fabulist style of music. Here, Lee honors a direct forebear of her unearthly visuals in her own devoted, unique way, revealing the best sides of her music with a dreamy flourish. | 2019-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | To whom it may concern. | May 31, 2019 | 7.2 | 6bf417a8-dbc4-4716-9857-75d8e95e05cd | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The stylistic touches on London indie rockers the Proper Ornaments' debut LP Wooden Head are extraordinarily ordinary ones: Next to those sweet Beach Boys vocal counterpoints sit Byrds-buzzing guitar interplay and some-Velvet Underground-morning detachment. | The stylistic touches on London indie rockers the Proper Ornaments' debut LP Wooden Head are extraordinarily ordinary ones: Next to those sweet Beach Boys vocal counterpoints sit Byrds-buzzing guitar interplay and some-Velvet Underground-morning detachment. | The Proper Ornaments: Wooden Head | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19550-the-proper-ornaments-wooden-head/ | Wooden Head | In 2010, Argentinian songwriter Max Claps and James Hoare, of UK indie-poppers Veronica Falls, started a London band named after a song by so-square-they're-psychedelic 1960s baroque-poppers the Free Design. What the Proper Ornaments have in common with "The Proper Ornaments", from 1967 opus Kites Are Fun, isn't immediately obvious, but it starts with a penchant for hypnotic harmonies and continues with an insistence on the right decorations. Where those sunshine-y forebears quasi-ironically skewered "Mad Men"-era superficiality—"brand new car," "hat and gloves," "pretty wife who you almost love"—the '10s model proudly accessorizes itself with scruffy neo-psych.
The stylistic touches on Wooden Head—billed as the Proper Ornaments' proper debut LP after last year's promisingly ramshackle Waiting for the Summer, which collected previously released singles and EPs—are extraordinarily ordinary ones for an indie band. Next to those sweet Beach Boys vocal counterpoints sit Byrds-buzzing guitar interplay and some-Velvet Underground-morning detachment. With its rickety eight-track recording, you'd be hard-pressed to guess whether the album was influenced more by the O.G.s or their offshoots: the British C86 scene, California's Paisley Underground movement, New Zealand's Flying Nun label. In woolier moments, throw in the Beta Band. In shoegazier, throw in Ride or even early the Verve. There's a song called "Stereolab"; it actually sounds a bit like a Stereolab.
As that list of comparisons probably suggests, the Proper Ornaments mix and match these related yet distinct sonic accoutrements well enough that they might one day become a reference point themselves—which you might expect, considering they've shared bills with fellow magpie-connoisseurs such as Crystal Stilts, Woods, and Real Estate. As with those bands' efforts, though, Wooden Head is strongest when it leaves you remembering smart hooks rather than a clever aesthetic. Check out "Magazine," maybe the breeziest song ever from the point of view of ammunition, or elegiac finale "You'll See". Weather, a recurring theme since the previous record, is beside the point on the gentle "Summer's Gone", which applies the sepia softness of the Clientele to being "old enough to lose your own mind."
For every band like Deerhunter or Los Campesinos!, who turn their indie-inclined record collections into something appealing of their own, music history is littered with others who mine the clerk-approved past without adding much to those halcyon days at all. Claps and Hoare, joined here by bassist Daniel Nellis and drummer Robert Syme, certainly skirt that risk—the guitar chimes on "What Am I to Do?" bring to mind "Dear Prudence" by the Beatles, whose enshrined-in-marble likeness rarely flatters anybody. But the Proper Ornaments may have been just as shrewd in naming their album as in naming their band: Wooden Head was the title of a 1969 odds and ends compilation by the Turtles, released after the "Happy Together" group split. As humble, tastefully appointed psych-pop goes, the Proper Ornaments surely have their hearts—and heads, wooden or not—in the right place. | 2014-07-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-07-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland / Fortuna Pop! | July 8, 2014 | 7 | 6bfb9e9b-27b7-47f0-b1d9-86cc81d74ec5 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Houston compiles songs Mark Lanegan recorded and then shelved during the period between 2001’s solemn Field Songs and 2003’s scabrous Here Comes That Weird Chill, but it doesn’t so much capture the metamorphosis as reinforce the abruptness of his about-face. | Houston compiles songs Mark Lanegan recorded and then shelved during the period between 2001’s solemn Field Songs and 2003’s scabrous Here Comes That Weird Chill, but it doesn’t so much capture the metamorphosis as reinforce the abruptness of his about-face. | Mark Lanegan: Houston | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20933-houston/ | Houston | By 2002, Mark Lanegan was already five albums deep into a solo discography that had uprooted the former Screaming Tree from his grungy groundwater into more rustic, earthier realms. But that year would mark a significant turning point in his career. You can hear it in the jarring contrast between 2001’s solemn, sepia-toned Field Songs and 2003’s scabrous Here Comes That Weird Chill, where Lanegan's brooding balladry gave way to clanging industrial funk, lecherous electric-guitar grinds, and CB-radio squawks. There are a couple of ways to account for the dramatic shift. It’s possible that, with the Screaming Trees officially on ice as of 2000, Lanegan no longer felt the need to present his solo work as the sobering counterpoint to his main band’s amped-up overdrive. Or maybe Weird Chill (and its 2004 counterpart Bubblegum) bore the corrupting influence of becoming an official member of Queens of the Stone Age for 2002’s colossal Songs for the Deaf (a move that would spur Lanegan’s transformation into rock’s most promiscuous collaborator).
Houston compiles songs Lanegan recorded and then shelved during this transitory period, but it doesn’t so much capture the metamorphosis in action as reinforce the abruptness of his about-face. Rather than serve as a bridge between Field Songs and Weird Chill, it suggests the cul-de-sac Lanegan may have hit had he continued down the former album’s footpath into more arid terrain (as emphasized by Mekon Jon Langford’s creepy cover art). That’s not to say Houston is a retread of Field Songs. Thanks to the atmospheric accordion haze provided by Bukka Allen, the sitar accents of Ian Moore, and controlled feedback bursts of long-time collaborator/ex-Dinosaur Jr. member Mike Johnson, the album gently blurs the edges of Lanegan’s sturdy roots rock template with subtle lysergic touches, like mirage vapors rising from the desert sands. But, presumably, Houston wasn’t the bold statement Lanegan needed to deliver at a time when, post-Screaming Trees, his solo work had been promoted from sideline activity to full-time endeavor. The album’s procedural subtitle—Publishing Demos 2002—hints at the career crossroads he was facing at the time.
However, 13 years removed from that context, Houston is a means to revisit Lanegan in his natural habitat, following a decade of increasingly eclectic pursuits both within and without his own discography. Rooted in timeless musical forms—folk, blues, country rock, spaghetti-western soundtracks, eastern-infused psychedelia—Houston never feels stylistically tethered to its moment of origin; it’s the sort of album that could’ve conceivably been released at any point in Lanegan’s career. Adding to the sense of temporal disorder is the fact a handful of its songs actually first surfaced on the soundtrack to Cook County, a 2009 indie drama about meth addicts in Texas that provided a suitably despairing backdrop for "When It’s in You", an early, radically different arrangement of Weird Chill’s howling opening salvo "Methamphetamine Blues". But its wobbly-kneed, light-headed lurch bears none of the nasty, scuzz-covered choogle that powers the later version, nor does it contain the song’s now-familiar chorus line. Perhaps Lanegan only later realized that staying the course to Houston would amount to "rollin’ just to keep on rollin'".
"When It’s in You" isn’t the only scrap material here salvaged for future use; the hypnotic guitar refrain of "Two Horses" would get recycled no fewer than two times on future releases. But like last year’s judiciously curated Has God Seen My Shadow? box set (which showcased two of these songs), Houston ultimately serves to illuminate a more sanguine side to Lanegan that’s often obscured by the imposing, wraithlike persona he’s projected in his later work. Even at his most dejected, there’s a perceptible smirk forming at the edges of his grimace; on the lilting acoustic serenade "Nothing Much to Mention", he surveys the wreckage of a doomed relationship at a wedding reception gone wrong, but is still game to take advantage of the open bar ("pack up that crystal chandelier/ but leave some pink champagne on ice"). And on Houston’s burning-embered highlight—the cantina slow dance "Halcyon Days"—Lanegan optimistically raises a toast to the good times before wryly admitting, "I’ll do my suffering tomorrow." It’s a sweet, self-deprecating moment of levity undiminished by the fact that—as the grimy, guttural Weird Chill would soon prove—Lanegan wasn’t joking. | 2015-08-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-08-13T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Ipecac | August 13, 2015 | 7 | 6bfca5b7-acb9-4b44-b7c5-418718c28481 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The rising star’s effortlessly sexy new album offers a startlingly modern take on the R&B coming out of Nigeria. | The rising star’s effortlessly sexy new album offers a startlingly modern take on the R&B coming out of Nigeria. | Odunsi (The Engine): EVERYTHING YOU HEARD IS TRUE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/odunsi-the-engine-everything-you-heard-is-true/ | EVERYTHING YOU HEARD IS TRUE | From the first moments of opening track “luv in a mosh pit,” EVERYTHING YOU HEARD IS TRUE—the effortlessly sexy new album from burgeoning Nigerian alt-pop artist/producer Odunsi (The Engine)—sweeps you up in bygone visions of nightlife partying and youthful indiscretions. The music conjures sweaty basement parties, awash in red neon lights and the heat of strangers all around, where life is only as important as the moment you’re in. It might seem cruel to reminisce over tightly packed clubs in the middle of a pandemic, but the crush of quarantine only enhances the album’s rosy, nostalgic glow.
The artist, born Bowofoluwa Olufisayo Odunsi in Lagos, Nigeria, first came onto the scene with his 2016 EP TIME OF OUR LIVES. On EVERYTHING YOU HEARD IS TRUE, the follow-up to his debut, 2018’s rare, he continues to distill his eclectic influences into something all his own. Mashing the singing voice of Ralph Tresvant or Frank Ocean with light Afrobeat influences and the sensibilities of Prince if he were a Soundcloud rapper, he has tapped into a startlingly modern take on the R&B coming out of Nigeria.
Odunsi sings with irresistible magnetism and confidence, and his lines have a repetitive, nursery-rhyme cadence. On “airplane mode,” he harmonizes in a gentle near-whisper, hopscotching through sweet club nothings like “Shawty don’t talk like I know ya/ Shawty don’t talk like I owe ya.” On “PDA!,” he borrows from Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” shouting “freaky Margiela ela ela eh eh” over bouncy synths. The record captures early love’s sweetness even as Odunsi’s lyrics veer explicitly into cynical machismo (on “airplane mode,” he sings: “You be playing games that I taught you, had to get money had to stunt on you”). The bitterness is leavened by the sweetness of the music, and by the overall mood of love-drunk melancholy. To play on a famous Straylight Run song, the theme seems to be Existentialism on Club Night.
At only seven short tracks, there’s very little wasted space or energy. The brevity contributes to the cohesion, allowing Odunsi to hold tightly onto the specific mood he sets. It’s a complete thought, and the vibe it conjures is vivid and glamorous enough to induce pangs. With such a short runtime, it leaves you wanting more, but at least it leaves you wanting. | 2020-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Kimani Moore Entertainment | May 29, 2020 | 7.3 | 6bfdc01e-e99e-45c5-bec5-032541f6cb41 | Israel Daramola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/israel-daramola/ | |
With a production assist by LA producer Alchemist, Boldy James' new My 1st Chemistry Set reveals an artist who has been steadily deepening, as a writer and rapper. Guests like Action Bronson, Earl Sweatshirt and Freeway breeze through, but none overshadow Boldy. | With a production assist by LA producer Alchemist, Boldy James' new My 1st Chemistry Set reveals an artist who has been steadily deepening, as a writer and rapper. Guests like Action Bronson, Earl Sweatshirt and Freeway breeze through, but none overshadow Boldy. | Boldy James / The Alchemist: My 1st Chemistry Set | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18647-boldy-james-the-alchemist-my-1st-chemistry-set/ | My 1st Chemistry Set | Rapper Boldy James was born in Atlanta, hails from Detroit, and sounds like he's never stepped outside of Queensbridge. The producer Alchemist is from Beverly Hills, but has produced some of gangsta rap's bleakest East Coast rap, for Mobb Deep and others. The two of them together makes perfect sense: For them, Queensbridge is a state of mind, a place to visit within the world of records. On My 1st Chemistry Set, they key into that thick atmosphere like a couple of virtuosos.
The obvious out of the way first: Boldy's voice is a dead ringer for Mobb Deep's Prodigy. The resemblance is so strong it raises hackles the first time he opens his mouth. But like Action Bronson, who has ambled past his constant Ghostface comparisons to his own persona, Boldy sneaks a unique sensibility under the cover of a very familiar sound. He's a dead-eyed tough guy, a position that starts at "unamused" and goes darker from there, but beneath the pose, his words leap eagerly around, betraying his dirty secret: enthusiasm. "I used to write raps off of my spelling words, so I could learn the meaning of them and how to spell them," he told David Drake back in 2012. "Because if you use a word in a sentence, and don’t know the meaning, you can use the words around it to get the definition of the word you were looking for." Respectfully, this isn't the most intimidating sentiment in the world, and it positions Boldy closer to someone like Black Hippy's resident word-nerd Ab-Soul.
On "Moochie," he gives a slang lesson that isn't a lesson at all, but a chance to render you glassy-eyed: "My dank Mary Jane and my big chain Julie/A deuce is a split, a baby is a stoolie/A kilo is a brick, a quarter is a cutie/If you tellin you a snitch/county is the skidooski." Got that? On "Rappies," he mutters "Slow rolling them snow bunnies in Clinton Township/Them bastards trying to give me about sixty/For transacting them Graham crackers of that brown shit" and the syntax—*transacting them Graham crackers of that brown shit—*blooms and lingers. Oh, and he's got a deadpan sense of humor: "Life is Precious/a fat ugly bitch that'll get you whacked," he cracks on "What's the Word". On "Traction," he slyly quotes Redman's "Time 4 Sum Aksion", and while Boldy isn't exactly a straitjacket-straining wildcard like Red, their rhyme pads could definitely be friends.
Alchemist, for his part, brings his most muted and sensually gloomy side to the project. Boldy has a lot to say, and Alc, though the bigger name of the pair by far, settles back, each beat just present enough to give the exact right cotton-mouth coating to Boldy's verses. "You Know" loops a busy bass line and almost nothing else—some wisps of strings, a clipped vocal like a red sock in the dryer. "Moochie" is just a shiver of violin tremolos, scratches, and some highly unsettling music-box chimes. The drums don't knock, and in fact barely rise above a cough.
There are guests that breeze through. Freeway continues his murderously intense lap of the mixtape circuit's lower rung; when he raps, it's impossible not to want him to be back on top, at least for that moment. Action Bronson trades bars with Boldy on "Traction." Earl Sweatshirt delivers a thicket of quotables—you need to hear what he does with the rich rhyming possibilities of "Tan Cressida", which he lays out and then attacks like a juicy steak. But none of them eclipse Boldy, who makes the most of this opportunity and delivers some of the best verses of his career. He has been steadily deepening, as a writer and rapper, and by now, the lousy emotional weather of QB rap is his own, a personal storm cloud he generates wherever he goes. | 2013-11-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2013-11-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Decon | November 6, 2013 | 7.4 | 6c010bf7-aa72-4138-b089-2907b255f269 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
This unlikely pairing turns out to be Freeway's best solo project in at least four years. And Girl Talk's production is legit: he has the sound and feel of early Roc-A-Fella releases internalized, and he spits it out convincingly. | This unlikely pairing turns out to be Freeway's best solo project in at least four years. And Girl Talk's production is legit: he has the sound and feel of early Roc-A-Fella releases internalized, and he spits it out convincingly. | Girl Talk / Freeway: Broken Ankles EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19250-girl-talk-freeway-broken-ankles-ep/ | Broken Ankles EP | There should be a German word for the mixture of joy and sadness felt in watching the giants of 2000s Roc-A-Fella navigate the nostalgia circuit. Cam'ron? He has embraced his role as Internet hero, selling capes, dancing the meringue in Vines, and occasionally releasing mixtapes with moments of low-rent greatness on them. Right now, he's collaborating with A-Trak on an EP, Federal Reserve, which places him lovingly back in the chirpy '03 soul-rap that defined his peak. "To me, the intersection between my world and Cam’s world is very much tied to that New York, downtown, street wear kind of movement," A-Trak told Complex. "It’s kids that are happy to hear his music and also jump around to electronic music and hear some Atlanta stuff and some new rap."
This sounds an awful lot like a Girl Talk show, where the above scenario would take place in three minutes. In many ways, Girl Talk's music is the gushing id of dilettante culture, a glutinous ball of disparate pop songs mashed together so you only taste the sugar. Now, Gregg Gillis has found himself working with Freeway and the partnership has the same bittersweet tang to it. Since departing officially from Roc-A-Fella after 2007's Free at Last, Freeway has been in search of a cultural foothold; his attempted rebrand as a Rhymesayers artist was too slippery to stick, and then he drifted momentarily to Babygrande. Throughout, he's never lost his fire, but without a larger context or a new story to tell, he was stuck in an uncomfortable limbo.
Collaborating with Girl Talk doesn't exactly free him from said limbo. But it does give him something more temporary and invigorating—a shot in the arm, a needed jolt of energy that his last two releases have lacked entirely. Girl Talk's production is legit: he has the sound and feel of those early Roc-A-Fella releases internalized, and he spits it out convincingly. "Tolerated" gets things off to a rickety start; the big faux-Just Blaze beat Girl Talk provides is too top-heavy and cluttered to move effectively and Waka Flocka Flame raps at about 12-percent energy. The chorus is awkward and strained, all elbows.
But from there, things take off. "I Can Hear Sweat" has a strafing arpeggiated synth and a heavy-breathing Biggie sample from "Who Shot Ya" that is so tailor-made for a Jadakiss guest verse that you almost hallucinate him rapping on it before he appears. He is murderously intense on it, as is Free. "Suicide" fits a lot of little events into the beat without getting too distracting—eerie childlike vocal effects, spaghetti-western whistles, KRS-One vocal snippets. The taffy-pulled strings on "Tell Me Yeah", a bald-faced appeal to "Oh Boy" nostalgists, are stretched out just right. There are one or two "Oh come on, why is THIS happening now?!" switch-ups in the beats, which feel like Girl Talk elbowing his way to the fore. But they are rare, and there is a palpable love in the details in Gillis's production. The highest compliment you could pay his work is that it's easy to forget he's involved at all while it's playing. What Gillis has given Free is his best solo project in at least four years. | 2014-04-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rap | self-released | April 11, 2014 | 7.4 | 6c0cab95-43ff-4bb8-8936-4afe68abfdd2 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The Guatemalan musician’s second album explores the friction between interiority and exteriority; blooming with ecstatic synth riffs and spirited cello, the record captures the sound of a mind abuzz. | The Guatemalan musician’s second album explores the friction between interiority and exteriority; blooming with ecstatic synth riffs and spirited cello, the record captures the sound of a mind abuzz. | Mabe Fratti: Será que ahora podremos entendernos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mabe-fratti-sera-que-ahora-podremos-entendernos/ | Será que ahora podremos entendernos | Mabe Fratti’s debut album, 2019’s Pies Sobre la Tierra, focused on the distance between the physical world and the world inside one’s head. Her second, Será que ahora podremos entendernos, does too, delving even further into the friction between interiority and exteriority. With Fratti’s quaking cello as their ground, the record’s nine tracks flicker in the discontinuity between a thought and its outward expression, oscillating between feelings of hope and apprehension. But just because it’s pensive doesn’t mean it’s restrained; the record blooms with ecstatic synth riffs and unselfconscious bowing, capturing the sound of a mind buzzing at the threshold of some great vision.
In an interview around the release of her first album, the Guatemalan-born, Mexico City-based cellist cited the ambulatory, multilayered narrative of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as a source of inspiration. Like the narrator of Sebald’s novel, Fratti wanders through Será que ahora podremos entendernos, building each song from improvisations between fixed start and end points—a practice she calls “diagramación.” A form of surrender, it’s audible in the shifting layers of guitar, cello, and synths that collapse in on themselves, like the walls of a burned-out house, on the psychedelic instrumental “Inicio Vínculo Final,” or in the second half of “Aire,” as a wave of frantic sawing envelops Fratti’s war-cry falsetto. On “Cuerpo de Agua,” she articulates the fear that underlies the album: “Como sabes si lo que sientes es lo que dices” (“How do you know if what you feel is what you say”). Her experimentation proposes that maybe it’s OK not to know.
Again and again Fratti wonders, almost as a thought experiment, what it would be like to be understood absolutely. She is an economical writer and as a singer tends to repeat words and draw out syllables until her lyrics transform into abstract tones. Every song, barring the record’s three instrumental tracks, depicts just a single introspective moment or passing encounter with an imagined other. She rarely references the world outside of those moments of communion; when she does, it’s only to tether them to an elemental image like the sea, the moon, or the air. The effect is that of someone who is trying to pin down the act of communication like a specimen under glass—to turn it into an object she can turn over with her hands, inspect, and manipulate.
At times, Fratti seems to imply that by choosing her words carefully and alchemizing the right combination of voice, strings, synths, and birdsong, she can erase all barriers in communication. At the center of “Mil Formas de Decirlo,” the album’s second song, is the repeated word “balbuceo”—“babbling.” As Fratti sings about her fear of speaking without being comprehended, the word’s four syllables mold to a four-note cello phrase that loops, unimpeded and funereal, for the length of the track, laying bare its natural melody. It’s a moment of precise alignment between lyric and instrumentation that captures the incantatory power of Fratti’s music; you can feel her trying to conjure the truest form of herself through sound.
“Hacia el Vacío” features Texan percussionist and composer Claire Rousay, whose artistic practice revolves around field recordings of everyday clatter and the flashes of the sublime accessible within them. Her recordings of trickling water and indistinct chatter anchor Fratti back to the tangible world, one that her lyrics barely interact with, and allow her a moment of clarity: Understanding can’t be achieved by yourself. Birds sing in the background while Fratti asks, “¿Puedes tomar mi mano al vacío?” (“Can you take my hand as we go into the void?”). Her voice is like a piece of gauze draped over the song, supported by a strummed phrase on her cello but threatening to slide off and disappear at any moment. She keeps it aloft long enough to properly steel herself against her fear of the unknown, accepting that the gap between feeling and speaking only narrows when you put trust in someone else.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Unheard of Hope | July 7, 2021 | 7.6 | 6c0ec8c0-6088-4759-ba73-10e684ae99a9 | Colin Lodewick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-lodewick/ | |
After the fantastical Age Of, Daniel Lopatin plays it relatively straight on this four-track EP, though reworks from Ryuichi Sakamoto and (Sandy) Alex G take his material in intriguing new directions. | After the fantastical Age Of, Daniel Lopatin plays it relatively straight on this four-track EP, though reworks from Ryuichi Sakamoto and (Sandy) Alex G take his material in intriguing new directions. | Oneohtrix Point Never: Love in the Time of Lexapro EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oneohtrix-point-never-love-in-the-time-of-lexapro-ep/ | Love in the Time of Lexapro EP | Daniel Lopatin’s Oneohtrix Point Never project is a study in futuristic doom told with a smirk and a pair of very small Neo sunglasses. For the past 11 years, his music has dealt both seriously and playfully with the advent of AI, posthumanism, the dream of befriending extra-terrestrials, the idea that robots will one day rule us all, and now, the notion that Lexapro and other SSRIs are messing with the fabric of human sexuality, partially culpable for a sex recession among millennials. Or at least it would seem his work is headed in that direction, given the cheeky title of his latest EP, Love in the Time of Lexapro. A brief EP of exclusives and reworks, it’s Lopatin’s second release in this style to follow his lush, conceptually inclined Age Of.
There is no overarching theme that binds this record together. What Lopatin shares with us are four songs of varying viscosities, each well executed in its own right, but all more or less entrails left on the cutting-room floor, most likely to appeal to people who think going to MYRIAD is a good first-date idea. The album’s title track is pure ambience that goes from surface dive to Mariana Trench belly crawl in a smartly paced four-minute descent. Unlike some of his recent work, it’s immediately accessible. No gears are being grinded; there is no harsh noise to drill through to get to the sweet stuff. You could almost hear this play in the background of a movie where the two main characters kiss for the first time. But then, if we take the title at face value, this song is supposed to be about Lexapro. Perhaps the cool bass tones and distant drum-machine thuds are supposed to be a metaphor for, like, how we are all anesthetized.
Lopatin’s underwater nose dive continues with the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto's rework of “Last Known Image of a Song,” Age Of’s final track. OPN’s original was warm and fleshy, with upright bass and bursts of television static that gave off the vibe of a deep-space supernova. Sakamoto takes the song and flattens it, removing any naturalistic elements from the original and wringing them out into a dense cloud of ticking clocks and motherboard exhaust. Sakamoto and Lopatin make a formidable team, and listening to this version leaves you hoping that the two will continue to work together in larger capacities.
The record’s B-side is less inspiring. On “Thank God I’m a Country Girl,” the song’s provocative title doesn’t really amount to much. The synth warbles are repetitive and quickly grow stale; the processed piano is more likely to induce napping than trance states. (Sandy) Alex G’s appearance on a new version of the Age Of ambient-country curio “Babylon” is the EP’s most outré endeavor, albeit not in the way you’d expect. With its plain acoustic guitar and stripped-down vocals, the track’s first two minutes could easily cosplay as any song off of Rocket, effortlessly evoking crisp fall days and Philly basements. But then Lopatin bruises it up, adding a string section that collapses into pitch-shifted heartbeats and oozing gusts of noise. Hearing Alex G cover an OPN song might make you roll your eyes. But then, this is essentially an EP of bonus material. If Lopatin’s going to experiment with indie, this is the space for him to try it out.
But it’s hard not to wish his experimentation had ventured a little further. Love in the Time of Lexapro could have been a searing critique of Big Pharma. One of Lopatin’s most compelling traits is the mystery he’s capable of evoking with his vividly detailed tableaux. After the maze-like worlds conjured by Age Of and Garden of Delete, Love in the Time of Lexapro plays it disappointingly straight. | 2018-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Warp | November 26, 2018 | 6.5 | 6c108b9f-960d-4e87-8f88-dae41199bafd | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
The latest solo project from Michigan guitarist Shelley Salant feels like a travelogue that uses simple lines of electric guitar to craft engaging tunes that say a lot without needing any words. | The latest solo project from Michigan guitarist Shelley Salant feels like a travelogue that uses simple lines of electric guitar to craft engaging tunes that say a lot without needing any words. | Shells: Shells 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shells-shells-2/ | Shells 2 | In the world of instrumental solo guitar, where John Fahey and his finger-picking descendants still loom large, there is so much acoustic-based music that it’s practically taboo to play electric. But there are always some reminders around that amplified strings can be as versatile and expressive as their acoustic counterparts. In 2016, Willie Lane spun mesmerizing electric avant-blues on his album A Pine Tree Shilling's Worth of Willie Lane, while last year Bill Orcutt made perhaps his best record yet by attacking American standards with his buzzing electric guitar.
The music of Shells, the solo project of guitarist Shelley Salant, is not as openly experimental as that of Lane or Orcutt. But in her own assured way, she creates just as compelling proof of the infinite possibilities of instrumental electric guitar. On her second album, Shells 2, she uses pretty basic rock tools—simple lines, repetitive strums, shimmering overdubs—to craft engaging tunes that say a lot without needing any words. A veteran of the Michigan rock underground and current member of Tyvek, Shells naturally infuses her songs with garage energy. But each of the 14 tracks on Shells 2 feels like its own little world, where a new idea is launched and explored to the fullest.
The exploration in Salant’s songs comes in part from their constant motion. That’s reflected in her titles, which conjure a travelogue across roads, lakes, fields, and shores—all part of, as one song calls it, “Passing Through.” Shells 2 starts with “Driveway,” a prime-pumping rev-up, and ends with “Field,” a thoughtful denouement in which a rare bit of acoustic strings mixes with electric chords. In between, Salant winds through many byways and cul-de-sacs—sometimes wrangling her sounds into abstract noise, sometimes stretching into beatific contemplation, sometimes simply rocking forward like a one-person band.
In its best moments, Shells 2 is all of the above and more. Slower tracks such as “North Shore” and “Break” are deceptively mellow, as Salant takes time pealing out her chords, but layers and counterpoints them so that they poke and prod rather than float. On songs where she adds drums, like “Nacimiento Road” and “Out There,” she switches gears without letting up on the gas, continually ascending by leaning harder and harder into her riffs. She can add noisy edges—rippling glitch, fried distortion—without falling into dissonance for its own sake. There’s an open universality to her music, too, so Salant naturally evokes some worthy fellow travelers. The patient lines of “Recollection” echo David Pajo’s pastoral instrumentals as Papa M, while “Sandy” evokes the abstracted rock of Steven Smith’s work under the monikers Ulaan Khol and Ulaan Markhor.
It’d be unfair to go very far into comparisons when attempting to describe the music on Shells 2, though. Salant’s sound is firmly steeped in rock and roll, and she’s a natural at turning a couple of chords into a solidly-structured, carefully-unfolding tune. But her formula sounds distinct because of her confident choices. She knows when to turn up the heat, when to ride the curves, and when to break against the grain. The result is music that moves and vibrates until it seems to spill out of the speakers. Just like her chords that sound like mantras, Shells 2 is built to be repeated. It’s a journey that only gets stronger the more you join her on it. | 2018-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Ginkgo | January 8, 2018 | 7.6 | 6c1586b7-ce42-4129-adfe-563097e1e9b7 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
Diplo, Sia, and Labrinth combine forces for an album of truly forgettable pop music that is too tired to be wired. | Diplo, Sia, and Labrinth combine forces for an album of truly forgettable pop music that is too tired to be wired. | Labrinth / Sia / Diplo: LSD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/labrinth-sia-diplo-lsd/ | LSD | Pop is dead; here is its corpse; here is Diplo attempting to make the corpse dance. Diplo, for whatever reason, is centered as the main attraction of Labrinth, Sia, and Diplo’s insane trio, whose initials just happen to spell out LSD. The first track on their self-titled album ends with a blaring announcer voice welcoming “people of earth, boys and girls, people of ages” to “the wonderful world of Labrinth, Sia, and Diploooooooooooo.” The vowel stretches for a solid six seconds. It’s the first of many grating miscalculations in an album conspicuously calibrated for radio play and sweaty basements. Who loves Diplo so much that they’re not annoyed by this shout? Who loves Diplo so much at all?
Enough people, apparently: LSD is Spotify’s 151st most-listened-to band in the world and they have even snagged a spot on Now That’s What I Call Music! 69, a nice fact until you realize that not even LSD themselves call this music. One of their lead singles is “Audio,” a cloying tangle of onomatopoeia, booze, and droopy synths. “Make the bomb bomb beat, I’ll give you melody,” is a refrain that only gets worse as it scrapes your speakers nine times in three minutes; “We got audio,” Sia breathes as Diplo Diploes on. Audio is the only metric of success here, the only box that needs checking, and they are, at least, loud.
Labrinth, Sia, and Diplo seem to only exist together for the listener to go, “Oh! Huh...” and press play. Instead of complementing each other, they cram every space of a song with noise. Labrinth, a UK singer and rapper who’s remained relatively unknown despite appearing on Nicki Minaj and Rihanna albums, oscillates between bland, soft vocals and self-important rasping. Diplo wedges thumps and loops into songs that would be better off without them, giving texture without substance. The tragedy of this odd mix is that we lose Sia. This isn’t the jagged vocals, the hidden eyes, the Sia that felt like something close to original. This is Diplo bastardizing female vocals until they’re barely distinctive, and then they just exist to fulfill the “woman crooning something in a pop song” part of the equation.
LSD sound like an algorithmic midden of pop music. There are melodramatic orchestra swells. There are gaudy basslines. There’s something suspiciously close to a xylophone. Honest-to-god handclaps speckle a track. The words “da dum dum dum” are intoned. LSD’s lyrics are asinine—repetition is what they’re after, as the songs whittle down your critical receptors and blanket you in great errors of language. Some choice snippets: “I’mma be the angel to your snow,” “You put the running into run,” “We got our champagne dreams in an endless drought.”
If LSD were really trying to capitalize on popular music trends and lean into its “how do you do, fellow kids” core, their sound would be sadder. Sia would hurl some line about Xanax. Labrinth would adopt a Post Malone slur-croon. Diplo would let his synths slink instead of clunk. Pop music isn’t fun anymore, not without at least a little nuance, and it’s jarring to go from LSD’s “Today’s Top Hits” neighbors—Billie Eilish, Juice WRLD, Twenty One Pilots—to inane lyrics about getting high and “love” without context or emotion.
More than anything, this album is both tired and wired, like drinking Red Bull after a fifth Red Bull. Not even a Lil Wayne remix can yank it to life. He hops on gamely and recites nonsense like, “Molest you with intellectual,” and, “My love is so ambidextrous.” This is an obviously calculated album that comes across as thoughtless, a thrashing neon garble. Frat boys might enjoy chanting “ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-genius” at each other, but for everyone else just hit next on whatever playlist these songs end up on. | 2019-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Columbia | April 17, 2019 | 3.2 | 6c166a71-8b85-4283-9dd4-550ce47bf80f | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
"Cameras or guns, one of y'all gonna shoot me to death..."
Aesop Rock is having trouble adjusting to fame ... | "Cameras or guns, one of y'all gonna shoot me to death..."
Aesop Rock is having trouble adjusting to fame ... | Aesop Rock: Bazooka Tooth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/66-bazooka-tooth/ | Bazooka Tooth | "Cameras or guns, one of y'all gonna shoot me to death..."
Aesop Rock is having trouble adjusting to fame. Just a few short years ago, Ian Bavitz was still selling his own handmade CD-Rs on the streets of New York, but it didn't take long for him to find his way into the spotlight: his groundbreaking Def Jux album Labor Days was an instant underground smash. Now, in the face of label inconsistency and heightened expectations, his new album, Bazooka Tooth, shows him struggling with the pressures of the media and a rapidly growing fanbase.
Aesop Rock's abstract lyricism and gravel throat have earned him critical acclaim and a rabid following, but he's no longer just a Long Island poet-cum-cipher slayer, and some of the changes he's made to his style on Bazooka Tooth are drawing attention. Bavitz spent the early part of his career tied to a sluggish, steady delivery, but here, he's upgraded his style from a nicotine-tinged calm to a more natural, accessible flow. Now attacking his beats with a mix of nervous energy and raw confidence, the new Aesop Rock cracks, lisps, bends his pitch, and most importantly, confronts his listeners rather than choosing to subtly persuade them.
His delivery isn't all that's changed; there's been a shift in subject matter, too, as this album sees Bavitz branching out from the singular topic of Labor Days to a variety of subjects, including the emergence of young killers ("Babies with Guns"), fondness for his home state ("N.Y. Electric", "No Jumper Cables"), and disillusionment with the media ("Bazooka Tooth", "Easy")-- and all while offering his usual mix of hard-edged rhyme schemes ("Park your bets, sharks or jets/ It's bark marked targets where the barnacles nest") and clever idioms ("They burrow deep under the carnivore's flesh, without a trace/ Carnival games, like try to shoot the star out of his space").
The track with the most buzz so far is also the one that has the least to do with Aesop's personal life: "We're Famous" features Def Jux CEO El-P in what serves as a company mission statement, Demigodz diss, and subterranean "Grindin'" response all in one. Cycling through harsh jackhammer synth stabs, toy gun alien abduction crescendos, and a crunk funk handclap-assisted drum line, El-Producto lambasts critics claiming "hip-hop's over," disses Esoteric ("You ain't a vet, you're just old"; "Some of these faggots used to send me their demos/ Breeding their puppy styles in the Company Flow kennels") and closes the verse with, "I'll slap the shit out of you to continue my nerd rap/ I'm making this money fist over fist, fuck what you heard." Aesop doesn't let the topic drop, claiming, "The revolution will not be apologized for," and, "B-boy, feed that to the needy/ Check your liquor hole, fuck you in 3-D, easy." The one-two combination makes for one of the most addictive diss tracks this side of Jay-Z's classic "The Takeover".
Most of the early disappointment regarding Bazooka Tooth came as a result of Aesop's decision to self-produce the record. While the Blockhead and El-P compositions stand out as the work of professional, time-tested beatmakers, Aesop's production style has a loose, raw intensity of electronic emotion that hearkens back to Company Flow and early Tricky. From the windy stadium synth-wave rocker "No Jumper Cables" to the city-stomping drum march and twisted gypsy vocal sample pan of "Frijoles" to the boogie synth, clanging staircase sample and (in the second movement) Atlanta hi-hat crunch of "Mars Attacks", Bavitz evolves from the one-dimensional sample work in which he once dabbled, and makes the step into the realm of mentionable producer.
The transition, however, isn't completely smooth, with some of the interludes adding dead weight, a couple of songs failing to stand out among the pack ("Super Fluke", "N.Y. Electric"), some unremarkable beats, and a few unrealized conceptual possibilities limiting the total ascension of neo-Rock. Fortunately, the album has more than enough solid material to keep heads coming back again and again. No big surprise: Bazooka Tooth is another strong outing from one of underground hip-hop's most talented, thanks in no small part to its unprecedented wealth of lyrical depth and individual production style. | 2003-10-22T01:00:05.000-04:00 | 2003-10-22T01:00:05.000-04:00 | Rap | Definitive Jux | October 22, 2003 | 8.2 | 6c21282d-46fb-4e61-91e4-d014e340b8c6 | Rollie Pemberton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rollie-pemberton/ | null |
The buzzed-out San Jose rapper, who says thrash metal and Biohazard were the music of his youth, has rapped over Suzanne Vega and Goldfrapp samples. On his debut for Das Racist member Heems' Greedhead label, his personality is ahead of his artistry. | The buzzed-out San Jose rapper, who says thrash metal and Biohazard were the music of his youth, has rapped over Suzanne Vega and Goldfrapp samples. On his debut for Das Racist member Heems' Greedhead label, his personality is ahead of his artistry. | Antwon: In Dark Denim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17838-antwon-in-dark-denim/ | In Dark Denim | A little background on Antwon: the San Jose rapper reps thrash and Biohazard as the music of his youth, while his clips for "Helicopter" and "Living Every Dream" are rife with 90s-baby cinematography that suggests an equal amount of time given to "Yo! MTV Raps" and "Saved By The Bell." His buzzed-about mixtapes Fantasy Beds and End of Earth featured production from Salem and Pictureplane, and he’s rapped over Suzanne Vega and Goldfrapp samples. In short, he's a perfect fit on Heems' Greedhead label; between himself, Le1f, Big Baby Gandhi, and others, it crosses nearly every racial, sexual, cultural, and aesthetic barrier and presents the most comprehensive picture of hip-hop’s reach in terms of both fans and performers. But while In Dark Denim is certainly heartening in how it shows Antwon's various eccentricities to have currency and mass appeal on the whole, like too many of his peers, his multifaceted personality strains to compensate for his deficiencies as an actual recording artist.
Though he slots into whatever internet-rap zeitgeist of 2013 you can think of, when Antwon makes multiple namechecks of Sex Style, it's worth remembering how much Kool Keith in his various guises appealed to the kids who were otherwise into punk rock. This is true in regards to prolificity and especially true in regards to scatology. If you're gonna be turned off on general principle by lyrics such as "sexiest nigga/ lesbian couples wanna solo/ tongue inside her pussy now she send me naked photos" or "I'll send you love letters when I fuck you on your period," you probably won't last five minutes.
Much to his credit, Antwon never strikes you as being needlessly repulsive; at best, he considers sexual congress as something of a quid pro quo and considering he'll throw in a goofy, heartfelt line like "and them titties are like the highlight of my weekend" during "3rd World Grrl", In Dark Denim comes off as wish fulfillment, more like a teen's giddy recount of his first time at a strip club rather than a jaded misogynist that sees it as a confirmation of a proper gender relations. Moreover, Antown's facility with hooks make "Werk 4 Me", "3rd World Grrl", and "Boomerang" sound like all-ages party starters even though they'd require chanting "three rounds in a row she gon' work for me/ pussy all wet, let it squirt for me" and "I bet that coochie tastes real good/ tight real nice for the boys in the summer."
While his various appetites have earned him comparisons to a multitude of overweight lovers, Antwon's hardcore past is very much evident in his vocals, an effective, one-note attack that’s half playground bully, half class clown. Or, within the context of *In Dark Denim'*s musty, Thrasher VHS production, something like Death Grips if they showered up and decided to write the vast majority of their songs about oral sex. There are times when Antwon gets into bleak sociopolitics and warrants similarities to his fellow Bay Area noise terrorists, but make no mistake, In Dark Denim is for the most part absolutely filthy, turning its title in an uncomfortable double entendre.
With that in mind, it’s not surprising that guys like Cities Aviv and B L A C K I E lend their production efforts, as they share a similar, unshakeable conviction about the compatibility of punk-rock aesthetics with twerk-rap lyricism. But much like Aviv's most recent tape Black Pleasure, In Dark Denim appears to be the work of someone who values ideas at the expense of execution. Or, on a more mundane level, the actual listening experience of In Dark Denim is inexcusably flawed for Antwon's most high-profile release to date. For one thing, the mixing is atrociously muffled and off-balance, and rarely in a way that enhances the experience. Something like the volatile, Afrocentric "Burn Away" benefits from the clatter, but otherwise "1MillSnippet" and "Boomerang" sound like poor YouTube rips and gain nothing from the bouncing reverb and complete lack of bass. Meanwhile, Antwon's flow on "Still Guarded" is barely on speaking terms with its beat, an unfortunately fitting closer for a mixtape that simply sounds rushed as opposed to urgent.
Curiously enough, the tracks that delve into Antwon's darker past are the most underdeveloped. "Burn Away", "1MillSnippet", and "Rare 2000s" contain intriguing details-- talking shit to his parole officer, friends dying of meth addictions, nights at the local park-- but either cut off short or rely on outside sources to drive their point home. All things told, Antwon has the inverse problem of most rappers-- his persona is fully formed and he has a gift for choruses, it's every other part of the songwriting process that tends to get shortchanged. These are fixable problems, though. So while In Dark Denim is an occasionally fascinating look at an intriguing talent, that doesn't mean it’s a success on its own terms. | 2013-03-06T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-03-06T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Greedhead | March 6, 2013 | 6.2 | 6c25e9f6-cb49-4973-b088-a5473d5b7b3d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This six-track EP sees Sam Beam go electric. Recorded with producer Brian Deck, Woman King inches Beam away from his scratchy lo-fi origins without sacrificing any of the microphone-eating intimacy that made his work so appealing to begin with. | This six-track EP sees Sam Beam go electric. Recorded with producer Brian Deck, Woman King inches Beam away from his scratchy lo-fi origins without sacrificing any of the microphone-eating intimacy that made his work so appealing to begin with. | Iron & Wine: Woman King EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4128-woman-king-ep/ | Woman King EP | There are a lot of ways to describe Iron & Wine's dark, woozy folk songs: writers and fans scramble to find the appropriate modifiers, the correct verbs, the variations on "hushed." We make references to babies and jokes about his beard, launching sweeping comparisons to bedroom poets past, yapping happily about Beam's "quietude" and "grace." And now, for the very first time, "loud" can be added to that arsenal of adjectives: the six-song Woman King EP, a follow-up to 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days, opens with relentlessly click-clacking pieces of wood and a brash slide riff, booming out in all directions. And we haven't even gotten to the electric guitar yet-- or the distortion.
Over the course of two full-lengths (and their accompanying EPs), Sam Beam has tweaked and re-imagined Iron & Wine's whisper-folk imprint to include a much broader palette of sound-- anxious and intense, Woman King inches Beam even farther away from his scratchy lo-fi origins without sacrificing any of the microphone-eating intimacy that made his work so appealing to begin with. Woman King was recorded at producer Brian Deck's Engine Music Studios in Chicago (under identical circumstances, but separate from the Our Endless Numbered Days sessions) and features Deck's trademark mix of grainy, untreated percussion and spare-but-layered production (not atypically, Deck is also credited as a band member). Somehow, each step Beam takes feels organic, proper, true-- Woman King (much like Our Endless Numbered Days) is different, but fundamentally linked to its predecessors.
Iron & Wine's album titles are almost always prophetic (2002's The Creek Drank the Cradle dealt with fizzled innocence, 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days tackled human mortality) and Woman King is, for the most part, about girls-- fallen, absent, beloved, virginal, and nefarious.
Thwarted religion has always provided prime lyric fodder for Beam, and the stunning "Jezebel" recounts the rise and fall of the Bible's most infamous Phoenician princess, a pagan follower who becomes involved in a political marriage to Ahab, the crown prince of Israel. According to the Bible, Jezebel caused loads of trouble for Israel until Jehu, the head of a company formed to overthrow the house of Ahab, has her snatched and tossed from a window. Her blood splatters the palace wall; Jehu, on horse and chariot, charges across the body. Later, when palace servants return to recover Jezebel's corpse for burial, all that's left is her skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands. Jehu announces that Jezebel was chewed up by a pack of dogs, fulfilling the divine prophet Elijah's earlier prediction that "the dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel."
Beam gently acknowledges Jezebel's brutal end ("The window was wide/ She could see the dogs come running"), but doesn't necessarily swallow the Bible's cautionary bent: Jezebel is typically read as villainous (with decent reason: she falsely accuses citizens of blasphemy and treason, and orders them stoned to death), but recent feminist re-interpretations of her story have questioned whether or not that vilification can simply be chalked up to the threat she posed to ancient patriarchal orders. Beam plays with his words (a glance at the lyric sheet reveals that he's actually singing "wholly Jezebel," but, you know, say it out loud), and laments how Jezebel was "gone" before he ever got to say "Lay here my love/ You're the only shape I'll pray to, Jezebel." Ultimately, Beam casts Jezebel as more of a heroine (or an object of worship, even) than a righteously fallen pagan, turning "Jezebel" into a perfectly chilling ode to potentially misunderstood women.
A stripped-down version of "Jezebel" can be heard on the officially unreleased (but slipped under many pillows) bootleg 9/20/02 Home Recordings, a collection of demos largely believed to be the Iron & Wine songs Sub Pop opted not to use for Beam's debut. Still, the studio take of "Jezebel" is far fleshier, with Beam's classic guitar and banjo strums backed up by tinkling piano and tiny dulcimer swats-- a dizzying, wispy haze of strings and high, falsetto-coos that hold up well against Beam's very best work.
"Freedom Hangs Like Heaven", while no less religiously charged ("Ain't nobody knows what the newborn holds/ But his mama says he'll walk on water and wander back home"), is a boisterous, slide-fueled throwdown, perfectly acceptable for barn-dancing or open-armed room stomping. "Gray Stables" shows off Beam's knack for harmony (while singing with sister Sarah), "My Lady's House" is vintage Iron & Wine, all acoustic guitar, slight piano, and lovelorn laments, while closer "Evening on the Ground (Lilith's Song)" is a tense, distorted ode to dark garden trysts (interpret "We were born to fuck each other/ One way or another" however you like), complete with spider bites and broken locks and urgent, throaty vocals.
Woman King will provide eager Iron & Wine fans a welcome holdover between proper albums, but the EP also serves a larger developmental purpose, marking one more evolutionary hop for Sam Beam, and christening a new genre-- post-basement. | 2005-02-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-02-20T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Sub Pop | February 20, 2005 | 8.5 | 6c2800c5-b0ca-40d3-a3b9-85eb025a4def | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
On his third album created primarily with modular synthesizers, the longtime Sea and Cake frontman makes fascinatingly abstracted music about the act of listening itself. | On his third album created primarily with modular synthesizers, the longtime Sea and Cake frontman makes fascinatingly abstracted music about the act of listening itself. | Sam Prekop: Comma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-prekop-comma/ | Comma | The best thing about Sam Prekop’s solo electronic music is the way that it leaves space for the listener. Across three albums—2010’s Old Punch Card, 2015’s The Republic, and now Comma—the Sea and Cake frontman has used modular synthesizers to make pieces that don’t fit neatly into any one category; nor do they tell you how to feel or suggest what the music might be good for. Prekop gives you a handful of carefully chosen sounds and then bends, stretches, and arranges them into beguiling shapes until they sink back into nothingness. Seemingly by design, the particular “meaning” of a given track—not just in terms of genre, but the emotional content—is entirely up to you. By listening to Prekop’s creations—taking in the array of sounds, noting placements and proportions, and mapping the result onto our own memories and associations—we also complete them.
Compared to its two predecessors, Comma has rhythms and melodies that suggest pop, if never quite embracing the verse/chorus form. In a recent interview with Chicago Magazine, Prekop admitted he allowed the music to drift in a more song-oriented direction when assembling this record, and he also mentioned adding new hardware alongside his modular synth rig, including a Roland SH-101 (a favorite of Boards of Canada) and a drum machine. The continuous pulse, marking the passage of time, is one of the record’s core elements, but there’s nothing like a dance beat here. We often equate “space” with silence, and there’s not a lot of it on Comma—Prekop fills the sound field at all times, which is partly why Comma demands attention, even though it’s occasionally quiet. This isn’t background music.
The synth textures, generally clean and clear, so that your ear can pry one layer apart from another if you wish, evoke the last few decades of the 20th century, when it was still possible for electronic technology to convey hope. The drifting “September Remember,” which begins with a gentle drone and a steady click that’s bathed in dubby artificial reverb, is as close as the record comes to ambient music proper, and there’s something uncanny about it. It’s not especially “warm” in the way we think of modular synth music by, say, Emily Sprague or Cool Maritime, nor does it have the chilly distance of digital, more overtly ’80s-flavored synth music. It hangs between these poles, floating back and forth, a chime pushed by the wind.
Elsewhere, Comma embraces beauty unreservedly, though still with characteristic subtlety. “Approaching” is particularly gorgeous, with its throbs of static and hiss, metallic shimmer of percussion, and a music-box synth melody. It offers the kind of tech-aided path to the sublime that Kraftwerk sometimes laid out in their earliest work, though Prekop goes easy on the drama. “Wax Wing” begins with the sort of eerie synth Brian Eno favored on Apollo, and then Prekop subjects it to weird processing, turning it into a high-pitched squiggle that allows you to picture what happens when one harnesses electricity but just barely controls it.
Comma is an unusually immersive record, with evident foregrounds and backgrounds, and sometimes you can feel the music moving past you as it unfolds. At one point during “Never Met,” an acid-inflected synth pattern seems to appear in the distance, gradually inch closer, and then brush by you before proceeding on to somewhere else. Prekop makes choices, placing elements in the stereo field according to his sense of design, but the individual affective response to his choices could go any number of ways. Once again, it’s possible to imagine the music as open-ended, a series of intriguing possibilities not pointing anywhere in particular. We, the audience, do half the work, simply by being engaged as the music unfolds.
It’s tricky to praise music so clearly based on form and balance. Comma isn’t filled with a mind-warping atmosphere you’ve heard nowhere else, it’s not an invitation to meditate or do yoga, and it probably won’t make you cry. It offers something ineffable that I can best call a “presence,” and its ability to center you in the here and now is, in its own low-key and meticulous way, overwhelming.
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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. | 2020-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | September 12, 2020 | 8 | 6c2d245b-22cf-4d9e-b346-a4491eb4787a | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | |
A set of recently unearthed studio recordings sheds light on the country icon’s remarkable comeback in the early 1990s. | A set of recently unearthed studio recordings sheds light on the country icon’s remarkable comeback in the early 1990s. | Johnny Cash: Songwriter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/johnny-cash-songwriter/ | Songwriter | When Johnny Cash teamed up with Rick Rubin for 1994’s American Recordings, their partnership launched one of the great final acts in 20th-century American music. Yet such a comeback would have seemed vanishingly unlikely at the dawn of the ’90s. Left without a major label for the first time since 1958, Cash had resigned himself to the ignominious depths of Branson, Missouri, the Ozark town known for tacky theaters housing fading stars from yesteryear. The country icon couldn’t even get that right. His financial backing went belly up prior to the launch of the Johnny Cash Theatre in the summer of 1992. When he did finally play the venue a year later, he was stuck filling in for its new headline attraction: the notorious lounge lizard Wayne Newton.
The previously unheard demos on Songwriter, a posthumous new album, shed light on that comeback, a narrative so immutable that it today seems etched in stone. They’re drawn from sessions at Nashville’s LSI Studios, where Cash set up at some point in the early ’90s to record a clutch of newly written songs. John Carter Cash—the only child of Johnny and June Carter Cash—recently discovered the recordings, but the artist’s intentions for them remain unclear. Cash’s decision to record at LSI may have been partially altruistic, as it was the joint property of his stepdaughter Rosie and her then-husband Mike Daniel, and thus an easy way to funnel some funds their way. It’s also possible that the demos were meant to persuade another label to sign the country veteran—a goal that was met by other means once Cash met Rubin in 1993.
Two of the tunes on Songwriter, “Drive On” and “Like a Soldier,” also appear on American Recordings, and their simultaneous presence illuminates the distance between the two projects. They’re two of the lighter moments on the spare, stoic American Recordings and two of the weightier songs on Songwriter, a record that finds plenty of room for Cash’s humor and sentimentality, character traits Rubin staunchly avoided. The two qualities combine on “I Love You Tonite,” a love letter to June Carter Cash in which he marvels that they’ve made it through the decades and wonders if they’ll last until the new millennium.
Some big concerns nag at Cash—he ponders the fate of the planet on “Hello Out There”—yet he generally spends Songwriter operating at a smaller scale, penning character sketches of single mothers sustained by their love of James Taylor, flirting with a woman at the laundromat (“Well Alright”), and writing an ode to all the pretty girls from Little Rock. There’s no sense of foreboding here; it’s as light and rambling as any of the LPs he cut during his waning days at Columbia in the early 1980s or the unjustly maligned Mercury platters from later that decade.
Songwriter distinguishes itself through its posthumous production. Working with longtime engineer David Ferguson, John Carter Cash labored to break these dated LSI demos away from their origins, stripping down the recordings—and adding new parts from players like Vince Gill and Dan Auerbach—so they feature little more than voice, a little guitar, and, in two cases, harmony vocals from Waylon Jennings. The presence of his fellow Highwayman illustrates that these original LSI recordings were no solitary affair. At least 10 session players are thanked in the liner notes, including Marty Stuart, who was among the many musicians enlisted by Carter Cash and Ferguson to transform the tapes into a record that feels closer to American Recordings than Boom Chicka Boom, to name one of those final Mercury records. Their work is so nuanced and sympathetic to Cash’s idiosyncrasies that Gill’s vocal harmonies on “Poor Valley Girl” and Auerbach’s guitar on the after-hours blues “Spotlight” barely register: The focus remains solely on Cash.
That John Carter Cash and David Ferguson succeed in freeing these tunes from their period trappings, creating a record that’s conceivably a cousin to the sepia-toned traditionalism of American Recordings, is no small feat. It can be difficult to hear Cash’s charms through the bright, digital clang that plagues his ’80s recordings. The refurbished warmth of Songwriter makes it easier to concentrate on the clever turns of phrase and solid construction of these excavated tunes. As pleasurable as they are—and they’re quite endearing, particularly for listeners who enjoy the silly and tender sides of the Man in Black—it’s also clear that if they’d been released as an album in 1993, these songs wouldn’t have altered the course of Cash’s career the way American Recordings did. That album demonstrated a real understanding of Cash’s mythos; Songwriter is mostly a testament to the sturdiness of his craft. | 2024-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Mercury Nashville / UMe | June 29, 2024 | 6.5 | 6c2d98d1-3da9-4b2c-bc01-ebf4ed218bf3 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
The jazz trio’s follow-up to 2021’s Uneasy is irresistibly listenable, an immersive 66 minutes that exhales a particular aesthetic history even as it pulls on the pain and anxiety of our present. | The jazz trio’s follow-up to 2021’s Uneasy is irresistibly listenable, an immersive 66 minutes that exhales a particular aesthetic history even as it pulls on the pain and anxiety of our present. | Vijay Iyer / Linda May Han Oh / Tyshawn Sorey: Compassion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vijay-iyer-linda-may-han-oh-tyshawn-sorey-compassion/ | Compassion | Few pianists vary a theme better than Vijay Iyer, whose new album Compassion, with bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, flows with the smooth, pathfinding quality of shallow water in a rocky stream. The 52-year-old’s fingers worry over melody: He reconsiders, restates, and repeats phrases as though he hasn’t quite made himself clear. What does Iyer need to tell us so urgently? Motion itself is the message, how life barrels forth during periods of unimaginable struggle.
Iyer’s overpowering voice on the piano means that he takes center stage even when he tries not to—such as on his searing, topical post-9/11 collaboration with experimental rapper Mike Ladd, In What Language? The gravitational pull of his keys sometimes evokes Keith Jarrett, who similarly occupies the spotlight while sharing billing with fellow musical titans. And both pianists have track records with ECM, a long-time hub for jazz and contemporary classical marked by a fluid, pristine, often fusion-friendly aesthetic. Compassion is Iyer’s most characteristic release since he started recording for the German label more than a decade ago: The album is irresistibly listenable, an immersive 66 minutes that exhales a particular aesthetic history even as it pulls on the pain and anxiety of our present.
The album eschews the electronics of his phenomenal ECM debut as leader, 2013’s Mutations, and the tabla that lifted the deft interplay of 20ll’s Tirtha beyond blinkered American custom. Working with just three instruments, Compassion feels like the most sweeping outing of his oeuvre, stretching the hookier moments of this combo’s much-lauded 2021 inauguration Uneasy into extended meditations and relentless workouts. The trio’s take on Geri Allen’s “Drummer’s Song” reappears here as not only a fantastic closer, but also a barometer for their ongoing growth. Uneasy stripped the cheeky maximalism of the late pianist’s initial arrangement to essentials, while Compassion blurs the song at its edges, letting it bleed into the band’s take on a composition by beloved saxophonist John Stubblefield. Compassion is widescreen in both emotion and concept. Uneasy poked at news stories of the day, notably the Flint water crisis. The group’s latest paints its thematic tableau in broad strokes of sanguinity: “It Goes,” “Overjoyed,” and “Panegyric” suggest expansive, resilient sentiments that burn on in spite of the claustrophobia of moment-to-moment fear.
The songs on Compassion had different genesises, but they’re in conversation, like answers to questions that Iyer has posed since his career’s start. Several of the numbers were written for an event honoring COVID victims, while others took shape as part of a project saluting poet and scholar Eve Ewing, whose nonfiction has most famously explored the bigoted legacy of school closures in Chicago. “It Goes,” a ballad with a dreamy, singular cadence that raises a potentially slow stretch to profundity, was originally penned as a setting for lyrics that imagined Emmett Till had lived a long life—instead of being kidnapped, tortured, and lynched by Mississippi racists at the age of 14.
Compassion shivers with the horror of these roots, but its relentless sense of pacing means that the album never feels like a compilation of works written on commission. “Panegyric” slows the disc down after several numbers glide and ripple, while the Roscoe Mitchell cover “Nonaah” forms a dissonant scar in the LP’s center, beautifully disfiguring an otherwise tuneful mood. Compassion’s brushes with social history are hardly uncharted for Iyer, even when he holds himself solely to instrumentals, as he does here. Still, the casually-worn expertise and inlaid sorrow that he brings to the task seem like the culmination of a life pursuit.
On the level of performance, Iyer operates in his heroic strain—how Coltrane sounds on “My Favorite Things,” as though despair and giddy optimism are always just a note away. On the electrifying “Maelstrom,” his arpeggios sound like a chorus of voices, circling each other in a canon. His static harmonies and slippery refrains, though, float along thanks to the life raft offered by Oh and Sorey.
The double bassist, whose The Glass Hours was an excellent, overlooked jazz release from last year, approaches her instrument with a melodic facility that refuses flashiness. Oh often solos on the lower register of her upright, as Iyer points out in the liner notes—capturing ghost images that are faint but alter their surroundings dramatically. Elsewhere, she subsumes and redefines the pianist’s lead lines, taking over the head of the gorgeous “Arch” so that it thrums like a fading memory. Stately “Where I Am” is a roomier opportunity for her to rove, while her interplay with Sorey on the final cut fosters the record’s busy apex, an exhibition of each player’s individuality that serves a sprawling scape of collective feeling—grief for the dead, like admiration for the living, is layered with a knowledge of life’s immense and terrible possibility. Compassion flourishes in this furrow between awe and hardened forbearance.
Sorey can feel restrained with this three-piece, in comparison to his often prickly, uncompromising work as a bandleader. He plays with fewer frills than he did on Uneasy—but his fantastic instincts make the consistency of his beats another motor behind the record’s forward locomotion. The serpentine “Ghostrumental” emerges from his boom-bap constancy, before a stutter-step snare enables the track’s genius climax. He knows how to accent and echo Iyer’s piano on the limited tonal palette of a drumset, and his supple touch on the cymbals and toms, a surprising quality from a percussionist who can thrash with his wildest peers, gives the record a palpable sense of texture.
Compassion never puts us face-to-face with current events. Instead, it builds an imaginative space within the real world, a reverie that begins when you stop cogitating and allow minutes to embark on their unstoppable march. Listening to Compassion at home, on headphones, my mind drifted to Emmett Till, and after to the thousands of children in Gaza who have been slaughtered in recent months. Such lives would have taken countless different directions had they continued, and perhaps the only assured commonality is that each of these hypothetical adults would have had to navigate a shifting relationship with time as they aged—decades, memories, and experiences that accrue to bend and kink duration. Getting older is a human right too often denied, perhaps why Compassion feels inescapably political. To hear the seconds elapse alongside Iyer, Oh, and Sorey—as they braid motifs into something so lifelike that it can outlast hopelessness and cynicism—is a gift, a tool, and a reality check, served up in the hopes that one day all people will have the luxury to sink into their dreaming. | 2024-02-05T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-05T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | ECM | February 5, 2024 | 8.1 | 6c311d23-be0f-4284-b2b3-35f8efe82c0a | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
On her first album in a decade, the New York guitarist returns to her pyrotechnic displays of virtuosity. The pace is fast, the tone raw, the mood appropriately triumphant. | On her first album in a decade, the New York guitarist returns to her pyrotechnic displays of virtuosity. The pace is fast, the tone raw, the mood appropriately triumphant. | Marnie Stern: The Comeback Kid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marnie-stern-the-comeback-kid/ | The Comeback Kid | In the decade since her last LP, New York City lifer Marnie Stern stepped back from her solo career at the edge of math rock to focus on domestic life. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, she was at the forefront of the new millennium’s wave of noisy, kinetic rock acts, showing off a gymnast’s flexibility on a string of high-energy records. In a twist on a day job, Stern has spent much of the last 10 years playing guitar in Seth Meyers’ late-night backing band—a gig more conducive to raising kids than the interminable grind of touring. But, she says, she never lost sight of the guitar as a “blank canvas.”
Stern reclaims her place among the era’s most commanding guitarists on her polished fifth LP, The Comeback Kid, a densely packed showcase of her distinctive style. The latest set is noisy at the core and fuzzy at the edges, heavy on fingertapping and busy melodic displays that snap together elements of punk, grunge, and surf rock. Re-sharpening the rounded edges that shaped much of 2013’s The Chronicles of Marnia, Stern flaunts a reinvigorated spirit in searing songs that live up to the playfully celebratory mood she establishes in the album’s title.
In press materials, Stern described making the new LP as an exercise in learning to “start being myself again.” Any time she wondered whether a choice was too strange, she’d remind herself that this was her project: “I’m allowed to do whatever I want!” In that spirit, “Plain Speak” opens the album with bright, bristly, major-key riffs that she tempers with layered vocal harmonies. “I can’t keep on moving backwards,” she barks, standing firm at the center of the song’s dizzying tilt-a-whirl spin.
She leans further into her idiosyncrasies on “Believing Is Seeing,” unleashing a creepy, almost cartoonish cry—“This place is cold! I can’t hear you!”—over icy ostinato guitar before stepping sideways into a series of riff-heavy passages. “What if I add this? And this?” she asks as she heaps layers of guitar onto the mix, playing up the self-referential humor. The churning energy of “The Natural” and the short bursts of “Oh Are They” both channel classic elements of ’80s and ’90s underground rock; her repeated yelps have the feeling of a rallying cry.
Like the oaky notes of aged bourbon, the particulars of Stern’s technique have only gotten richer since The Chronicles of Marnia. Her dives feel more dramatic, as when she approaches power-metal poses in “Forward” or shreds up a storm in “Working Memory,” and she reaches piercing vocal highs that land between a ’70s psychedelic shriek and a winged mythical beast. Drummer Jeremy Hara is Stern’s reliable companion throughout, complementing her breakneck fretwork with powerful percussive blasts.
After the gleeful pirouettes of the A-side, the album’s back half becomes more reflective. Even when she pursues a more linear path, Stern moves with surprising intensity. She grapples with the blues in the striving “Get It Good,” and “Earth Eater” fizzes with nervous energy as Stern contemplates lingering pain. The ragged, grungy sound of “Til It’s Over” gives it an even darker cast. Hara’s drumming pushes the song relentlessly forward, as if hitting the gas on a long stretch of open road at night.
The Comeback Kid blasts by in under half an hour, and Stern’s impulses to chase her weirdest muses serve her well throughout. She lands her adventurous leaps with breathless energy. Aglow with her triumphant shredding, Stern’s howling return is a neon-haloed song of herself. | 2023-11-08T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-06T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Joyful Noise | November 8, 2023 | 8 | 6c332d2e-bed2-4595-8230-8d7d6083af14 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The UK band’s overstuffed debut melds indie-prog, rock, folk electronica, and post-punk into an expansive new sound. | The UK band’s overstuffed debut melds indie-prog, rock, folk electronica, and post-punk into an expansive new sound. | English Teacher: This Could Be Texas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/english-teacher-this-could-be-texas/ | This Could Be Texas | On This Could Be Texas, English Teacher outline a landscape burdened by prejudice, the cost-of-living crisis, mental health issues. The band’s name couldn’t be more apt—it’s here to school us in 50 minutes. They sweep up myriad literary and cultural references and dabble in several genres to dole out endlessly twisting melodies. If a synth flutters into mellow guitar rock, into wandering piano, into drums, out of drums, into layered vocals, with a squeaky guitar on top, you’ve about covered the dextrous three minutes of track one.
This Could Be Texas takes a wider angle than English Teacher’s more personal 2022 EP Polyawkward and 2021 song “R&B,” which gained significant traction online (and is reimagined here). “R&B” harnesses singer Lily Fontaine’s experience as a frontwoman of color (“Despite appearances, I haven’t got the voice for R&B/Even though I’ve seen more Colour Shows than KEXPs”) in service of a larger message. Bouncing between disdain and rage, many of the debut album’s best moments adapt those small, personal pieces that defined Polyawkward and blow them up to fill out a long-player.
English Teacher can’t leave a song alone: Not a track goes by without a twist or complication, whether a time-signature change, an instrumental flourish, or a sudden wall of sound. Those quirks are most effective on “Broken Biscuits,” where Fontaine’s dry tone makes things like government negligence and societal breakdown appear droll rather than devastating. But the energy starts to pick up, and she becomes more insistent. The move between meandering, Jon Brion-esque runs with spots of bright, plunking keys to sudden sped-up sections, where the vocals struggle to keep up, are propulsive: She spits out complaints, places blame, and explodes with anger at uncaring rulers.
Most promising, and core to This Could Be Texas, is the band’s interest in melding indie-prog, rock, folk electronica, and post-punk into a new package. It’s something akin to Black Country, New Road’s Live at Bush Hall: an attempt at massive, epic-scale work, a post-rock entrée with the wingspan of the genre’s greats. And like Bush Hall, it’s a first step in the band’s imagination, hinting toward something more explosive to come.
Take “Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space.” Evoking some Elon Musk-type figure, offhand jokes like “If everybody got to go to space/All of its bars would have a line” seem to fall flat. But as the song progresses to those who did make it to space, the music shifts from spare drums and bass to a rollicking backbeat, pulling in another voice and building into an echoey, bassline-built chasm with overlaid vocals and a persistent melody, blanketed by Fontaine’s shaky yelling. The re-recorded “R&B” is also significantly more intense. As the backing instrumentation ramps up with a stronger bassline and chunkier feel, Fontaine is more forward, too. Separating just the slightest bit from the impulse to speak-sing, she sounds more in control of the song. Like much of the album, it’s full of “I ams” and “I’m nots,” culminating in a question: “If I have stuff to write, then why don’t I just write it for me?”
The idea of ownership makes for some of This Could Be Texas’ strongest moments. The keening of “You Blister My Paint” intensifies the song’s post-breakup anguish, striking the album’s most personal tone. Notably sung and not spoken—sometimes airy and at others almost jazzy—the gentle piano and vocal distortions are a heart-wrenching package. The grandness is baked in, rather than applied: Every choice rings out with intention, hinting at an even more compelling story waiting in the wings. | 2024-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Island | April 25, 2024 | 7.4 | 6c3c0032-28c1-4f9c-ba98-ee1cc5f7fb8e | Caitlin Wolper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/caitlin-wolper/ | |
Though he recruits Tegan and Sara and a member of Protomartyr here, the producer’s voice emerges as the real star of these darkly funny, magnetic songs. | Though he recruits Tegan and Sara and a member of Protomartyr here, the producer’s voice emerges as the real star of these darkly funny, magnetic songs. | Matthew Dear: Bunny | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/matthew-dear-bunny/ | Bunny | Imagine an octopus: agile, stealthy, colors in flux. Now imagine the ink spreading out, the black fog of the disappearing act. Over the past 19 years, Matthew Dear has been a little like that cephalopod, flitting between aliases and sounds—bristly minimal house, thundering peak-time techno, shape-shifting electronic pop. On 2007’s Asa Breed, he reinvented himself as an unconventional singer-songwriter and black-hearted crooner; his voice has been his ink ever since. It has never been thicker than it is on Bunny.
Dear has always been a trickster. He likes slow-motion house grooves designed to wrongfoot would-be dancers—slick with grease, the rhythms kinked, synth tones distended and dissonant. In his early years, his music was notable for its brittleness; his beats sounded like they’d been frozen and smashed into a million pieces. But his music has gradually gotten more and more viscous. On Bunny, that starts deep in his throat. His voice is Bunny’s focal point, allowing him to stay hidden and slip the bonds of the confessional singer.
Mixing blurry bits of new wave, disco, and indie rock, his productions are plenty interesting, but that voice lends the essential element of intrigue, helping blur the contrast between Dear and the subjects of his songs—between the family man of his biography and the narrator of “Bad Ones,” who admits, “I played a role in all your tears/Hate flowers but they seem to work on you my dear.” He growls, purrs, and bellows, diving down to the depths of his lower register and dredging it up like silt. His voice is less a manifestation of his being than his being is a manifestation of his voice. All that artifice—the lung-scraping vowels, the charred vocal fry, the cartoon-villain sneer—becomes its own reality.
Dear has long relied on a fairly simple set of tricks to manipulate his voice. He’s especially fond of doubling it, so that a quavering falsetto hovers like a halo over his gravelly baritone—a fitting split, given his propensity for angels-and-devils dichotomies in tales of love and self-loathing. He’s still using the same techniques here, but more than ever, he’s exploring the sheer physicality of his instrument by reveling in the grain, the flesh, and the phlegm. And in the process, his voice is becoming more his own. On previous albums, he sometimes felt like he was trying on his best Bowie impersonation. Traces of that linger—“Modafinil Blues,” one of Bunny’s highlights, sounds like it was written in Blackstar’s shadow—but he’s casting a wider net for inspirations here. He draws in bits of Gary Numan, Peter Murphy, Leonard Cohen, and even Johnny Cash, distilling them into his own distinctive strain.
Bunny doesn’t break in any real stylistic way from its predecessors. Dear’s beats still shuffle and drag, relishing the friction of heavy objects on sticky floors; his palette still brims with dark streaks of synth, dubbed-out effects, daubed-on funk. The occasional novelty helps this material feel fresh. Protomartyr’s Greg Ahee lends a Vini Reilly-like guitar touch to the opening “Bunny’s Dream.” On two songs, Tegan and Sara make good on Dear’s longstanding but largely sublimated desire to make actual pop. His music has never sounded more forceful than it does on songs like “Can You Rush Them,” a slow, woozy anthem in which the layers are fused together until they suggest a cyborg take on Tuvan throat singing. “I was a bad man/Until I found God—asleep,” Dear begins. The way the song builds from this opening, with its playful inversion of classic redemption narratives, is thrilling. It all comes down like a mudslide.
In mood and tone, Bunny marks a subtle shift from its predecessors. (Just compare the pink sleeve with that of Beams or Black City.) On the sex-slathered Black City, Dear’s obsessions took the form of charged images (“little red nightgown”) chanted in a leaden voice. But here, on the greasy slab of dissonant disco, “Electricity,” he’s got a manic glint in his eye, even if he sounds perpetually at war with his worst instincts. On “Bad Ones,” when he pleads, “I haven’t told you lies this year,” there’s little doubt that the wounded Lothario’s plea for sympathy is itself the biggest joke.
There are no great revelations in the lyric sheet. Most of these lines wouldn’t survive more than a few minutes without the oxygen he gives them. Instead, the album’s pleasure is in its gooey matrix of conflicting sensations: the slapback delay on his vocals during the swampy “What You Don’t Know” or the gloopy tangle of “Duke of Dens,” an instrumental whose layers resist teasing out. In “Modafinil Blues,” a silky new-wave-disco song about desperation, the breakdown shows how careful Dear’s touch is. He fleshes out an unusual groove, then strips it back to leave room for a single synth, shining like a silver dollar in the gutter. The album drags a little in the middle, and its Ricardo Villalobos-sampling conclusion feels anticlimactic. But at Bunny’s best, Dear is as slippery as ever. Following in his purple wake and soaking in his twisted tragicomedy is a chase to be savored. | 2018-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | October 17, 2018 | 7.5 | 6c3c108f-1339-46b0-8387-f7c8a1360b34 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The short-lived but powerful Texas band Mineral have reunited and are playing shows and they've also reissued their two proper full-lengths with bonus material. These two records find them roughly comparable to era peers like Sunny Day Real Estate, but with a darker tint and more jagged edges. | The short-lived but powerful Texas band Mineral have reunited and are playing shows and they've also reissued their two proper full-lengths with bonus material. These two records find them roughly comparable to era peers like Sunny Day Real Estate, but with a darker tint and more jagged edges. | Mineral: The Power of Failing/EndSerenading | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19688-mineral-the-power-of-failingendserenading/ | The Power of Failing/EndSerenading | Mineral always felt private somehow. The Austin-via-Houston group wasn't together all that long—they released two full-lengths and some singles, and by the time of that second album, they'd already broken up. Their short run may have contributed to a feeling of anonymity. To me, they were different from relative peers like Promise Ring or Lifetime, groups that seemed communal; Mineral weren't a guilty pleasure, more like a prized secret. They've been described as a Sunny Day Real Estate rip-off, but that never seemed quite right to me—there was more lo-fi jangle and hiss to Mineral's songs, and the production wasn't as big. In a way, Mineral were more aligned to the darker pop of mid-1990s indie-rock groups like fellow Texans Bedhead, and they didn't strike me as quite so "hardcore." The connection with SDRE that did exist, though, was in the angsty, acrobatic vocals of Chris Simpson, which were in the same vein as Jeremy Enigk's, but rougher.
Take, for instance, "MD", the B-side to 1996's "February" 7", included on this new retrospective, 1994-1998 - The Complete Collection. On it, Simpson is about to visit his older brother ("It's good to know we haven't outgrown the love we shared as children"), and meet the woman that brother plans to marry. He talks about the secret language they shared at a young age, when they dressed up as Batman and Robin for Halloween ("Everybody laughed at us and said we had it wrong 'cause you were the taller one"), and ends the track with all the force he can muster: "She's beautiful/ And I know that you'll be happy/ So take this as my blessing/ Wrapped up with all the love that I can send/ 'Cause you are my brother/ My friend/ And my superior/ Till the end." On paper it reads like a note you'd send to a sibling; in song, it's towering.
The emotions here are emo, no doubt. This is the kind of music where people yell "I stand on a building and throw up my arms to the sky/ I swallow my pride" and "This is the last song that I should ever sing/ Just one more time and I'll shut my mouth forever" amid huge crashing guitars. Simpson sings about coming of age, feeling unloved and embarrassed ("I bring it on myself/ I know I bring it on myself"), and also the innocence of youth, being in love, loving your family, and what those connections and relationships mean. There are stabs at '90s DIY politics, and he articulates being human and lost in great detail: "When I'm finally naked and standing in the sunlight/ I'll look back at all of this selfishness and foolish pride/ And laugh at myself." The melodrama, in general, is great, and the music around it rises to the occasion. The songs are intense, catchy, over-loaded with feedback and beauty, and meant to be yelled.
Though they didn't release much, their two proper albums are markedly different. The sound of 1998's EndSerenading was softer, and more glistening than 1997's Power of Failing. It hinted at what Simpson would do with bassist Jeremy Gomez in their next band, the Gloria Record, and perhaps, in retrospect, suggests why the group went in two different directions: guitarist Scott McCarver and drummer Gabriel Wiley formed Imbroco then went on to found other projects separately. EndSerenading album was a pop, and not a lo-fi or punk gesture, and it's just not as compelling as Failing. It has plenty of good moments, but it can also feel overthought and staid. Part of what makes The Power of Failing a classic is that its raw feel and execution matches its emotions.
Mineral formed in 1994, and released some singles and toured like crazy, so Failing felt like a culmination. Conversely, EndSerenading, which they recorded with producer Mark Trombino (Blink-182, Jimmy Eat World), felt, at times, like a lukewarm new beginning. They were supposed to do a third album for Interscope, but, of course, it never happened. Which, honestly, is probably for the best. There's momentum on Failing that was already getting hemmed in on End, not to mention the addition of labored song titles like "LoveLetterTypewriter", "TheLastWordIsRejoice", and "&Serenading". It's easy to imagine them becoming even shinier and more staid on a major label debut.
Not to say End is a failure. Title aside, "LoveLetterTypewriter" is an excellent, moving opening track, and one of their best. Simpson sings the words patiently, and with more refinement than in the past (and, honestly, more like Enigk): "Summer unfolded like a tapestry/ And you were there as you have always been/ There glowing where the sky meets with the trees/ Air softly crowing, singing fears to sleep/ Will you ever know how much I love you for that?" It's a constant build that crashes into the next track, "Palisade", a song that serves as climax and release before moving into another direction. It's an exciting one-two: these pieces pick up where Failing left off; the formula is updated, but not abandoned. The same goes for the group-singing of the next song, "Gjs". But then, they take it down a few notches, often ending up too mid-tempo and over-long. The music remains pretty, and even knottier, but feels less life-affirming.
For instance, the spacious, ultimately clamoring "&Serenading" would be a good closer ("When I was a boy I saw things/ That no one else could see/ So why am I so blind at 22?"), but instead of the gorgeously repeated finale ("the sound of the driving snow that drives me home to you"), it's the downtempo, shimmering acoustics and humming vocals of the pretty-but-slight "TheLastWordIsRejoice" that serve as our exit. Like the forced titling, it's inoffensive, but feels unnecessary, as do other grown-up touches on End. That line from "&Serenading" quoted above reminds you just how young these guys were, though, and why they might feel the need to ratchet it up on their sophomore record, considering the attention given to the first.
Not that it mattered, of course. They ended and then, as bands do now, they reunited; this remastered two-disc compilation is a good way to hear it all in one sitting (the reissues are also available, without the bonus tracks, on vinyl). None of the alternate take bonus tracks here are especially riveting, and the covers of the Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way" and Willie Nelson's "Crazy" are mostly forgettable (the latter's actually pretty bad), but it's great to have the relative lo-fi "Rubber Legs", from the 1997 (Don't Forget To) Breathe compilation, the punked-up "Sadder Star", which appears on the 1997 First Crush compilation, and, most importantly, the 1996 "February" b/w "M.D." single, which includes a couple of their best songs.
When I listened to the Power of Failing in real time back then, it was often on a cassette that I'd dubbed from the vinyl, for when I was traveling. Because of that, I always thought "February" and "M.D." were part of the proper record, and was surprised to realize they weren't. That's just one example of how music becomes personal, and shifts according to your own relationship with it. It's something you're faced with when the music of your youth keeps resurfacing, and it can be weird, but also somehow touching. For instance, it's been good going back to these records so many years later, and realizing I find myself moved more by the songs about family than the ones about wondering on roofs alone. | 2014-10-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-10-29T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | null | October 29, 2014 | 8.5 | 6c3f6525-b085-42a4-a6fa-3129047ad74d | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
French duo the Blaze are better known for their powerful short films, in which music—their slow, mournful take on house—allows for profound catharsis. But the tracks lack nuance without the visuals. | French duo the Blaze are better known for their powerful short films, in which music—their slow, mournful take on house—allows for profound catharsis. But the tracks lack nuance without the visuals. | The Blaze: Territory EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23177-territory-ep/ | Territory EP | The Blaze’s debut single, “Virile,” originally appeared on the Bromance label’s Homieland Vol. 2 compilation last year, but if you have come across the French duo’s work, there’s a good chance that it has been in their capacity as filmmakers. The video for “Virile” has logged 1.4 million views in the space of just over a year; their second, “Territory,” has racked up 1.6 million plays in just the past month, and along the way they have earned accolades from Romain Gavras, who directed M.I.A.’s “Born Free” video, and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, who called their “Territory” clip “THE best piece of art I’ve seen in 2017.”
Both videos, which the artists directed themselves, are visually and conceptually provocative. “Virile” features two men listening to music late into the night in a bare-bones apartment in an urban tower block. They are presumably of North African descent (an impression reinforced by the Arabic titles at the beginning of the clip). Over the course of the video, they smoke spliffs, spar, and—possibly under the influence of MDMA—exhibit a tenderness that’s rare to see between two men on screen, including a will-they-or-won’t-they moment leading up to the edge of a kiss. “Territory” is more straightforward: Here, an emigré returns home to Algiers, where he is tearfully reunited with his family. Like “Virile,” it is a meditative mood piece sumptuously arrayed in shadows and slow motion, and it climaxes with a daybreak dance party on a rooftop overlooking the Mediterranean. In both, music—specifically, the duo’s slow, mournful take on house—serves as the vehicle for the most profound kind of catharsis.
Aside from the videos’ warm portrayal of Arab masculinity, a topic rarely broached in Western media, what is notable about both is what goes unanswered. Are the men in “Virile” lovers, straight men swept up in the moment, or something else? What is the link between tenderness and aggression? Unfortunately, presented without visuals, the Blaze’s music doesn’t display the same degree of nuance. All four songs on their debut EP—“Territory,” “Virile,” and two new tracks, plus two interludes—are cut from the same cloth, with minor-key pianos pooling tearfully around crisp machine rhythms. They represent perfectly capable takes on the style sometimes called UK bass, but they rarely soar in the way that the music so clearly wants to. The perfunctory boom-tick rhythms drag, even with an added push from syncopated 808 toms; the four-bar chord changes feel pat, and the details—a plucked kalimba in “Sparks & Ashes,” a percussive synth counterpoint in “Territory”—aren’t enough to break gravity’s spell. The lone exception is “Virile,” in which rising and falling synthesizers contribute to a state of tension that’s genuinely moving.
The main sticking point is the vocals. It’s not so much that English isn’t the duo’s strong suit; they get the basic ideas across just fine, despite the occasional clunker (“They light me up your flying clouds/They ever get me high like a cool blunt smoke”). But, whether compensating for their accents or their untutored voices, they’ve aggressively pitched down the vocals on all four tracks, rendering dancehall-inspired cadences thick and gelatinous. Processed vocals are par for the course in this strain of bassy house music, but they simply don’t work here. Instead of coming off as druggy and suggestive, they sound mannered, lugubrious, gloopy. The backing tracks might have held up better with a stronger vocal performance; instead, both beats and vocals feel like scratch tracks in search of a final take. The good news is that, once you’ve seen the videos, the visuals are so strong that the music is likely to function mainly to trigger memories of the visuals. Club tracks like these are a dime a dozen, but the vision the Blaze display is far more rare; whatever they do next, you can bet that it will be worth watching. | 2017-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Animal 63 | April 21, 2017 | 5.8 | 6c41c81e-548e-41b5-ab0f-44b20951e39b | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
In 1981, Rush fully transformed from a prog-rock trio to a mainstay of classic rock. A 40th-anniversary reissue of Moving Pictures captures the band at their absolute peak. | In 1981, Rush fully transformed from a prog-rock trio to a mainstay of classic rock. A 40th-anniversary reissue of Moving Pictures captures the band at their absolute peak. | Rush: Moving Pictures (40th Anniversary) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rush-moving-pictures-40th-anniversary/ | Moving Pictures (40th Anniversary) | Dismissed by critics as Led Zeppelin wannabes, the Canadian prog-rock trio Rush spent the ’70s converting adolescents to bookish fancies with Alex Lifeson’s six-string runs, Neil Peart’s percussive kinetics, and a dexterousness on bass by Geddy Lee that complemented a vocal approach best described as a legible shriek. It awed kids who grew up with Rush. In 1997, Stephen Malkmus devoted a stanza to Lee in Pavement’s “Stereo.” So the Canadian trio and Zeppelin had similarities after all: Like Robert Plant, Lee sang as if he were a second guitar. Differences too: Where Zep stank of sex, Rush smelled of bookshelf dust.
Gauche enough (i.e. young enough) to laud the “genius of Ayn Rand” in the liner notes to 2112 (1976), Rush flitted through the decade setting their influences to music. Now that no one younger than 50 gives a damn about why punk recoiled from prog, those albums before 1980 offer solid, stolid musical elongations on the addled fiction familiar to, say, fans of Genesis’ 1973 album Selling England by the Pound. With Rush, though, there was a turbulence, an aversion to the ornamental. When they discovered they could sound pretty on A Farewell to Kings’ “Closer to the Heart,” it was a glass of wine after years of grape juice.
Touring had taught Rush the interior design of their own material. Moving Pictures is the result. Released in 1981, their eighth studio album—reissued in honor of its 40th anniversary in a sumptuous multidisc/multi-LP set—mastered concision. Instead of three- and four-minute things like “Fly By Night,” “The Trees,” and “Closer to the Heart” acting like smoke breaks between epics, the ten-minute “The Camera Eye” is the anomaly amid a suite of often severe tunes with choruses and middle-eights. Taking seriously the notions of progress espoused by their lyrics, Rush must have noticed these bright, shiny tunes on the FM dial mostly recorded by younger men whose brevity matched their hair length.
And rhythms too! Not quite mystic ones, but Rush’s instrumental chops and charming, gawky futurism produced a supple incorporation of dub and reggae. Someone in the Rush dressing room must have loved the Police who were, at the time, three albums into a career that would turn them into the world’s biggest band and most fractious trio. To absorb Black rhythms through the filter of another white trio works as insurance: It’s less fraught to get blamed for borrowing from people who look like you. Rush experimented with a slight skank on Permanent Waves’ “The Spirit of Radio,” which might explain why it became an actual hit in reggae-drenched England than in an America that went through the trouble of keeping Black disco-tinged acts off the air. With Lifeson playing up- and downstrokes, Moving Pictures’ “Vital Signs” shows the most obvious signs of Police work, but the sequencer may bear the influence of Peart’s beloved Ultravox. After all, to quote him, “Everybody got to deviate/From the norm.”
To write a manifesto is folly; songs become manifestos. Such is the case with “Tom Sawyer.” Rush’s signature song embraces technology without succumbing to its dazzle. 1981’s version of Mark Twain’s 19th-century warrior with a mean, mean stride does many things that make sense only in Peart and co-lyricist Pye DuBois’ notebook, but the enthusiasm of Lifeson’s guitar fills and Peart’s nervous triplets are matched by Lee’s Oberheim-OBX solo. The simultaneous lateral and forward motion of their music matched the positivity of the lyrics. As proof they were regular dudes who like the cars that go vroom, Rush offered “Red Barchetta,” an ode to the Italian roadster that idles and revs like one; Lifeson goes from pinched intro to an interlude that cracks the song in half.
As Rush matured into their Moving Pictures era, their instrumental flourishes matched their newfound plainspokeness. An inspiration for bucketloads of maudlin crap, the touring life didn’t affect a muse that had shown to this point little interest in the larger world. “Limelight” presents no complaints—advice not wisdom, remarks not pronouncements. Bands who envy Rush’s gilded cage “must get on with the fascination/The real relation, the underlying theme.” Before anyone can say, “Speak for yourselves, dorks,” the trio builds toward a break less impressive for how Lifeson outdoes David Gilmour in guitar dive-bombing than in Lee’s bass licks. That’s why they’re Rush and you’re not.
And sometimes words are crap. After Hemispheres’ rather ponderous “La Villa Strangiato,” Rush present “YYZ,” an instrumental ready for new wave on which Lifeson and Lee circle each other, back off, and let Peart offer a series of rolls that are the stuff of which fanzines are made.
Thanks to its tautness, conceptual integrity, and the fortuitous manner in which their career ambitions and radio programmer taste intersected, Moving Pictures functioned as much a harbinger of a new artistic era as David Bowie’s Young Americans. It peaked at No. 3 in America, their best chart position to date; the RIAA would certify it five-times platinum. “Tom Sawyer” brushed against the Top 40 gates without gaining entry. Best, Rush was constitutionally incapable of cynicism. “Alienation is the craze,” sang the Cars two years earlier, sounding neither crazy nor alienated but arch; “Put aside the alienation,” Neil Peart countered on “Limelight.” Optimism without sentimentality? In this biz? For a couple of hours, this Moving Pictures package envisages a world of love and light. | 2022-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | UMe / Mercury / Anthem | April 16, 2022 | 9.2 | 6c523db7-1c78-448c-bf4a-3b6f0ddcd61e | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
The astonishing Innervisions is suffused in the sound and politics of 1973, a conceptually ambitious and sonically innovative pillar of Stevie Wonder’s classic years. | The astonishing Innervisions is suffused in the sound and politics of 1973, a conceptually ambitious and sonically innovative pillar of Stevie Wonder’s classic years. | Stevie Wonder: Innervisions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stevie-wonder-innervisions/ | Innervisions | Stevie Wonder was pretty shaken up in 1972. It was the year that his marriage to musical and romantic partner Syreeta Wright came to an end, and the year he opened for the Rolling Stones on the debauched American leg of their Exile on Main St. tour—a trek remembered for hard drugs, bombings, and arrests. By 1973, he was fixated on death.
It was a fantastic era to be spooked: Stock prices tanked while oil prices soared, all amid a steady trickle of news about a scandal revolving around the reelection of President Nixon. In New York City, a 10-year-old Black boy named Clifford Glover was killed while walking with his stepfather to a South Jamaica junkyard when an undercover cop jumped out of a Buick and shot the boy. (“A policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and a voice said ‘Die you little motherfucker’ and there are tapes to prove it,” Audre Lorde recalled in her poem “Power.”) The optimism of the ’60s had washed away in the blood of murdered Black leaders, revolutionaries, and innocents like Glover. Wonder sang at the young boy’s funeral, stressing to Jet afterward that his outlook was grim, and fast action was imperative: “I hope Black people realize how serious things are and do something serious about it.”
Since 1971, Wonder had been composing in almost daily sessions alongside the artists and engineers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. The unlikely but successful partnership birthed 1972’s Music of My Mind and Talking Book, two genre-busting, head-to-toe classics where the two musicians offered an outside perspective, helping Stevie to challenge Motown convention and experiment with synthesizers and overdubs rather than working quickly with a team of writers and session players. The feat boosted Stevie, a reliable hitmaker up until then, into a different milieu, establishing him as a master of the album format while launching back-to-back chart-toppers in “Superstition” and “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.” Touring with the Stones provided access to rock audiences. And Cecil and Margouleff were pushing hard on lyrics, getting Stevie to touch on the political and metaphysical issues he fixated on in private, to sing less about romance and more about the state of the world. “I’d encourage him to write more songs that had bite,” Cecil recalled in author Mark Ribowsky’s 2010 biography Signed, Sealed, and Delivered: The Soulful Journey of Stevie Wonder. “Whenever Stevie came in with a song, I’d twit him, ‘Oh, another bloody love song, huh Stevie?’” He teased what he’d worked on in the studio that summer with the first single, “Higher Ground,” which doubled down on the synth-laced funk and spiritual concerns of “Superstition” as Wonder imagined a better life at the end of the toils of this one. The tragedy of Clifford Glover colored the second single, “Living for the City,” the centerpiece of Wonder’s 1973 classic Innervisions.
“Living for the City” is the key to understanding the many intersecting tensions upon which the greatness of Innervisions rests, the push and pull between the engineers and the artist, the technical innovations, the conceptual bombast, the bond between man and machine, and the roiling sociopolitical outrage. The narrative traces the plight of a Black man from the South devoured by cruelty and systemic racism in the North. Like a Greek tragedy where the protagonist’s fatal flaw is thinking he could escape bigotry, the tale of the boy from Mississippi mirrors experiences of Black American workers since the Great Migration, when redlining, biased policing, and judicial system jank enforced a second-class citizenhood. Wonder sings insistently over a driving funk rhythm—Cecil would interrupt vocal takes in order to rile him up—and coaxes the groove to a climax with atmospheric sounds from stacks of keyboards and synthesizers, chiefly Cecil and Margouleff’s room-sized polyphonic synth, called “The Original New Timbral Orchestra,” or TONTO.
When Wonder first arrived in the ‘60s, he shocked audiences as a young unsighted singer-songwriter, and then wowed them again with a revealing and killer drum solo at 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival, which was recently resurfaced by Questlove’s Summer of Soul. He later impressed a television audience with his ease with machines in a memorable 1972 appearance on The David Frost Show, where he demoed the ARP 2600 synthesizer and showed his talkbox off in a stunning medley of the Carpenters’ “Close to You” and the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye.” (Creators of these instruments loved the promotion. They put Stevie in the adverts.) He was an autodidact without the benefit of sight, and Innervisions was a wide-ranging display of his talents and interests. Wonder plays every sound on the record, save for some electric and acoustic guitar and bass parts and bits of the percussion, and gives a virtuosic performance, speaking to a universal audience while centering the prideful perseverance of a Black America failed by its own country.
The ’70s were boom times for groundbreaking work with synths, following ‘60s innovations at America’s Moog Music, the UK’s Electronic Music Studios, and elsewhere. In 1971 and 1972, synthetic, sequenced sounds swept into art-rock and jazz, trickling down into popular music. Caped keyboardist Rick Wakeman joined English prog group Yes and played the Minimoog on 1971’s Fragile. Todd Rundgren used EMS’s portable VCS3 synth on his early solo records. It’s the mess of knobs to the right of the singer-songwriter in the studio pic in the liner notes of 1972’s Something/Anything?, a crucial ingredient in the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and the instrument Brian Eno played in Roxy Music. Wonder pushed the envelope not just by playing most of Innervisions by himself at a time when popular Black artists could not all count on enjoying such freedoms, but also in his commitment to tones and textures still new to mainstream music. When summarizing he appeal of synthesizers to the presenter David Frost, Wonder said,“The whole point of the instrument, being that you can do so many beautiful things with it, [is to] make sounds that are bigger than life.” Stevie reveled in the funky possibilities of the clavinet on “Higher Ground.” In “Golden Lady,” a Moog bass stood in for the fretwork of a gifted session bassist, to say nothing of Wonder’s ease with the mercurial TONTO, innovation borne out of the artist’s insistence on recording with a skeleton crew.
Innervisions is a tricky album, very much a soul thing with direct ties to records in its Motown lineage like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, whose social consciousness Stevie tried to channel on 1971’s Where I’m Coming From, although it is best remembered for “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer” and “If You Really Love Me,” notable detours from its political messaging. Innervisions surveys scenes outside of Motown. The anti-drug anthem “Too High” gestures to the technical, intricate grooves of jazz-fusion; “Living for the City” is as much art-rock epic as funk/soul masterpiece. Wonder traveled around the world in nine songs, matching the proggy experiments in contemporary rock gems like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star; the playful synthesizer parts in the funk bombs from Birds of Fire by Mahavishnu Orchestra and Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters; the nervous hope of Donny Hathaway’s Extension of a Man; the acoustic jazz of Baden Powell’s Solitude on Guitar; and the horn-filled salsa of Willie Colón and Héctor LaVoe’s Lo Mato. Innervisions collapsed the spaces between avant-garde and mainstream, rock and soul, and jazz and pop music. They had all been playing the same instruments.
Like What’s Going On, Innervisions lays out a problem, then offers solutions: The stresses of the modern age are many, but with truth, goodness, love, and faithfulness, we can beat back the darkness. Wonder’s albums had never been this concise or cohesive in message. Innervisions was his first full-length without any co-writers or covers, a monumental endeavor for both Motown—a hit factory betting against its history again by letting an artist write his own songs—and Stevie, who was pulling thematically consistent pieces out of thin air. The album doesn’t judge or sell easy answers. It nudges you in the direction of a more mindful stewardship of our world and then lets you know that the task will be difficult. (“Jesus Children of America” is fascinatingly slippery. It implores you to place less stock in physical gratification and more in the edification of the mind and soul. It reminds you that this path is riddled with grifters and conmen. And it’s way too hyped about transcendental meditation to qualify as run-of-the-mill church proselytizing. Innervisions is a potpourri of ideas from Eastern and Western philosophies, but its call to inspire change through personal and cultural reckoning is grounded, less pie in the sky and more mutual aid and good vibes. It’s a very ’70s outlook, a specific response to the reverberations in modern bohemian culture as the counterculture grew more fractured and paranoid, but it still rings true in its questing for peace and love in the shadows of systemic racism and widespread political corruption.
Three days after Innervisions was released, Stevie Wonder was traveling through North Carolina on the way to a benefit concert for an independent Black radio station when his driver bumped a flatbed truck packed with wood logs, sending one careening through the windshield into Wonder’s forehead, causing a brain contusion. (It is said that upon hearing “Higher Ground” while in a coma, Stevie moved his fingers.) Perhaps he was right to be terrified in 1973. He was right that America was in dire straits. Nixon resigned in 1974 with Innervisions’s “He’s Misstra Know-It-All”—“He’s a man with a plan/Got a counterfeit dollar in his hand”—still rattling around as Stevie’s latest single. The album’s strides in exploring a wider palette of instruments for Black funk music were met and matched in the brilliance of Parliament-Funkadelic and Prince in later years. (The LinnDrum, American designer Roger Linn’s matter-of-factly titled drum machine, is as crucial to Prince’s ’80s as TONTO is to Stevie’s ’70s.) Innervisions endures as a touchstone for young auteurs crafting expansive, orchestral music and songwriters tackling big issues without overwhelming listeners.
Genius shines in any setting. This is music pliable enough to have been reworked by Barbra Streisand, who had a hit in 1974 recasting Wonder’s conciliatory breakup tune “All Is Fair in Love” as an orchestral ballad; Madlib, whose side project Yesterday’s New Quintet turned “Visions” into a Brazilian jazz workout on the 2004 covers album Stevie; and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose rendition of “Higher Ground” on 1989’s Mother’s Milk added screaming guitars and gang vocals. When R&B group Troop sang “Living for the City” in Mario Van Peebles’s 1991 crime flick New Jack City, it highlighted how little in the character of New York had changed since Stevie sang about the city destroying young Black men almost two decades earlier, a truth reinforced in hundreds more accounts of horrific police killings and brutality stretching out into the 21st century. Innervisions addressed the musical tastes and political jitters of 1973, but foresight keeps it relevant. It implores us to keep striving. | 2022-02-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Tamla | February 27, 2022 | 10 | 6c534f2a-daa8-42f7-b3b0-06338254ad77 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | |
With seven excellent albums and over a decade of experience under their belt, the esteemed Oregon doom outfit YOB have long since established themselves as one of the most progressive acts of their generation. Their latest album reshapes the traditionally-forlorn moans and groans of doom into an amorphous roar that, however hellish, shimmers with something resembling hope. | With seven excellent albums and over a decade of experience under their belt, the esteemed Oregon doom outfit YOB have long since established themselves as one of the most progressive acts of their generation. Their latest album reshapes the traditionally-forlorn moans and groans of doom into an amorphous roar that, however hellish, shimmers with something resembling hope. | YOB: Clearing the Path to Ascend | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19617-yob-clearing-the-path-to-ascend/ | Clearing the Path to Ascend | It’s been over forty years since Black Sabbath, Pentagram, and their kin founded the Church of Doom, one of metal’s oldest and most enduring houses of blasphemy. These days, metal’s gnarled family tree has blossomed into a dizzying number of subgenres, but almost all of it comes back to doom, regardless of tempo or texture. Doom may center itself around stoned stupor, Satanic camp, and sick riffage, but it also possesses a meditative musical mode buried deep inside it, a glassy-eyed glance into life’s grimmest mysteries.
Earlier this summer, Arkansas's Pallbearer provided a winning example of this approach with their esoteric, genre-ignorant Foundations of Burden, and now the always-crushing YOB have returned with a similarly-striving epic called Clearing the Path to Ascend. With seven excellent albums and over a decade of experience under their belt, the esteemed Oregon outfit have long since established themselves as one of the most progressive acts of their generation. Psychedelic rock, stoner rock, stoner metal, blues metal, ambient: all reside comfortably in YOB’s wheelhouse, coalescing and collapsing on a path that stretches as far as the listener’s imagination. The band's most recent effort, 2011’s Atma, took its inspiration from the Eastern concept of “the higher self”—a theme they fleshed out with droning, circular mantras and monolithic instrumentation. YOB take similarly transcendent strides on Clearing the Path to Ascend, reshaping the traditionally-forlorn moans and groans of doom into an amorphous roar that, however hellish, shimmers with something resembling hope.
As is typical with YOB (and doom in general), enlightenment doesn’t come easy. Clearing the Path to Ascend contains only four tracks, each surpassing the ten-minute mark and the heaviness of a black hole. On opener “In Our Blood", philosopher Alan Watts offers some soothing instructions—“Time to wake up”—before gingerly stepping aside for a rude awakening: Mike Scheidt’s banshee-like wail, accompanied by swooping, sullen guitars. Bassist Aaron Rieseberg and drummer Travis Foster handle the majority of the heavy lifting, but it’s Scheidt’s singing that drives the band’s metamorphic energy. He’s not a singer so much as he’s a shaman, using his diverse range of grotesque death growls and plaintive melodies to toy with the listener’s preconceptions, especially where identity is concerned.
Such is the queasy fun of "In Our Blood", Scheidt's sixteen-minute trip to hell and back. His thin, feeble tenor coasts along smoothly for the first several minutes, but before long, something wicked reaches beyond the void and snatches up the melody, leaving in its place the sound of utter ruin. Scheidt's chameleonic vocals present the band with an ever-replenishing resource from which they derive some of the album's most lasting material: the unfurling, feminine "Unmask the Spectre", which is situated alongside "Marrow", the album's defiant death knell of a closer.
YOB’s latest record stands as one of their densest, so it's good that the band's greatest asset, their impeccable pacing, remains intact. “Unmask the Spectre” plays out as a masterclass in dramatic tension, its punishing core buffered on both sides by moody, barren sludge. At last, Scheidt finally unleashes his thunderous yell, a solo nipping at its heels—and before long, he's whispering again, dragging everything back into the gloaming. The power of darkness depends on contrast, so by spacing out their otherworldly confrontations, the Oregonians ensure that the true path lay ever in sight. | 2014-09-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-09-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Neurot | September 4, 2014 | 8.2 | 6c56f8f7-a8d2-4317-8bf9-4e6a27788bef | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
On the slinky follow-up to their carefree debut, the R&B sisters take greater risks with their production and their writing. | On the slinky follow-up to their carefree debut, the R&B sisters take greater risks with their production and their writing. | Chloe x Halle: Ungodly Hour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chloe-x-halle-ungodly-hour/ | Ungodly Hour | In the two years since Chloe x Halle released their lighthearted coming-of-age debut The Kids Are Alright, the Bailey sisters have kept busy. They starred in three seasons of the sitcom Grown-ish, snagged two Grammy nominations, opened for JAY-Z and Beyoncé’s joint tour, sang at the Super Bowl—oh, and Halle was cast as Princess Ariel in Disney’s upcoming live-action The Little Mermaid. In whatever free time they had, the Atlanta duo also managed to write, perform, and contribute production for their second album, Ungodly Hour. Just the normal course of life for a 22- and 20-year-old, right?
But Chloe x Halle also want to curse and talk about sex and make drunk mistakes and deal with the aftermath of unsolicited dick pics. They want to be somewhat normal twenty-somethings, in other words, a feat that seemed impossible on their debut album, where they were protecting their squeaky-clean images. But now they’re over that: “It’s four o’clock/You sendin’ me too many pictures of your…(oh),” the duo sing with a Destiny’s Child-invoking rhythm on “Busy Boy,” every line delivered with an audible smirk. But this isn’t the album equivalent of former teen stars making scandalous headlines; Chloe x Halle shed their innocence with grace, as they do with everything else.
Frequently the sharpest Chloe x Halle songs are the ones where the sisters are the most hands-on. “Baby Girl” immediately jumps out, with danceable and warm Chloe production reminiscent of a Kelela album. On “Tipsy,” Chloe’s pulsing instrumental elevates the duo seamlessly weaving between rapping and singing, a moment that should make their mentor, Beyoncé, proud.
Even when everything isn’t clicking, Chloe x Halle’s presence is enough to bring a track to life. The Mike WiLL Made-It-produced and Swae Lee-assisted “Catch Up” sounds like a pop song produced via algorithm, redeemed only by their sweet harmonizing. “Wonder What She Thinks of Me” is nearly brought down by Disney-musical-soundtrack vocals, but the the production (provided by both sisters) and colorful songwriting saves it—the lyrics sound like a dramatized version of conversations had in a stressful relationship: “I wonder what she thinks of me/When you’re coming home/I know that she smells my perfume under your cologne.”
But if “Wonder What She Thinks of Me” is a rare moment where Chloe x Halle could’ve used more direction, typically their decisions go well: They flip a sleek and sexy Scott Storch rhythm into a night-out anthem on “Do It” and deliver sugar-coated melodies over a blissful Disclosure groove on “Ungodly Hour.” Their riskiest songwriting pans out, too: “You must got me fucked up/You must got me fucked up/I think I had enough,” they wail on “Forgive Me,” potentially alienating some of their fanbase. Though most should understand that Chloe x Halle aren’t just television characters or former YouTube stars or proteges of the world’s biggest pop icon, but real grown women with layers, flaws, and emotions. With Ungodly Hour, Chloe x Halle take a quick moment to reflect on that growth, before they ultimately return to their grind.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Parkwood Entertainment / Columbia | July 2, 2020 | 7.7 | 6c5aadfe-ecc9-435d-b976-cbaafc82fce5 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Blu & Exile finally offer a worthy spiritual successor to their seismic 2007 debut with a sprawling double album about the cultural forces that shape us. | Blu & Exile finally offer a worthy spiritual successor to their seismic 2007 debut with a sprawling double album about the cultural forces that shape us. | Blu & Exile: Miles: From an Interlude Called Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blu-and-exile-miles-from-an-interlude-called-life/ | Miles: From an Interlude Called Life | Despite some initial drama—a botched release, a shuttered label—Blu & Exile’s 2007 album Below the Heavens quickly became a cult classic. Years later, it was hailed as a “magic album” and a tectonic shift that changed West Coast rap. The Los Angeles backpack rapper and Dirty Science producer have each had their own successes since, but they’ve never quite been able to escape the shadow of their massive collaborative achievement. The follow-up, Give Me My Flowers While I Can Still Smell Them, was delayed five years, its name hinted at looming fatigue, and it sought to replicate the BtH palette outright. In the eight years that followed they continued to work together, producing shelved trap and electronic albums, but they were never able to “answer the call,” as Blu put it. That is, until Miles: From An Interlude Called Life, the worthy successor to their seismic debut.
Named, in part, for jazz titan Miles Davis (and dedicated to Miles Elijah Barnes), the album is about closing loops (musical, personal, historical), the pair’s long, exhaustive journeys through the underground, and tracking their roots in the process. “It felt like we had been miles away from where we started, and it felt like we had a lot to say about all those miles that we’ve traveled since we’ve begun,” Blu told Bandcamp. In many ways, Miles is like a bookend, not just measuring the distance traveled since Below the Heavens but also finding some semblance of closure. As a rhymer, Blu uncovers the contexts associated with words and finds where different shades of meaning overlap, especially with his name, and here he goes to the next level. He is optimistic amid adversity and adept at managing complex ideas, summed up by this lyric from the opener: “I don’t see the glass half full, I see the whole pitcher.”
Miles: From An Interlude Called Life finds a great rap bluesman, laborer, and journeyman thinking about what produced him and the nature of connection. In an interview with the Grammy website, Blu shared that Davis was his grandfather’s favorite artist, that despite always being around the songs, those vibrations didn’t reach him until he was in his 20s, and that getting into jazz through Davis opened his eyes. On “All the Blues,” he raps about naming his son Miles in tribute. The album features Blu’s childhood friend turned R&B star Miguel and Exile’s longtime partner Aloe Blacc, who introduced Ex and Blu in ‘03. In a clever bit of stitching, “Miles Away,” a song about going from city to city on the road, samples the Mos Def verse from “Travellin’ Man.” Many of the early verses are autobiographical, raw, and full of detail as he charts his path to rap through the people and places that molded him, and he shows how BtH helped open a gateway for rappers like Kendrick Lamar and Earl Sweatshirt. He has never been more approachable than he is on “The Feeling” and “You Ain’t Never Been Blue,” songs that navigate the emotional and financial woes of a working-class rapper.
The second half of the double album digs deeper into ancestry and shared history. It is a bit like Terrence Malick’s 2011 film The Tree of Life in its pursuit of an existential throughline; both weigh the experiences of the person against the larger forces that shape identity, exploring the relationship between the singular and the collective. Blu’s raps about growth and struggle lace into accounts dating back to antiquity—of soul music, freedom fighting, and self-discovery. Each of these threads is carried by Exile’s stunning, rich sample work, patching together themes about being Black and blue, searching, and learning from your pilgrimage. Miles doesn’t stray too far from the formula of their first two albums, but they feel more like diarists than classicists.
The nine-minute epic “Roots of Blue” is a generational survey of the Black civilizations that sprung forth from the cradle of life and how their descendants came to occupy America. The verses are dense yet rapped gracefully as Blu traces the diaspora back to the source; each verse unpacks a royal, spiritual, political, or musical Black legacy. He doesn’t just sound like he’s rattling off names or reciting facts; it’s as if he’s connecting dots. “African Dream” and “The American Dream” are like halves of a whole—the motherland fantasy against a capitalist fairy tale. Both are feats of imagination.
Miles is the rare 20-track, 95-minute album that mostly justifies its length. The scope is broad, and Blu weaves with skill between macro and micro. Some of his attempts to zoom out don’t cohere. On “To the Fall, But Not Forgotten,” an homage to the lost becomes a random roll call for celebrities as disparate as Kimbo Slice and Paul Walker. “Dear Lord” is like a COEXIST bumper sticker in song form. And on “The End,” he compares his album’s grand finale to famous assassinations, the 9/11 attacks, and the extinction of the dinosaurs.
But Blu is usually deft at pinpointing himself inside the larger narrative. The nostalgic “Music is My Everything” unfurls his own personal history of hip-hop—his cousin teaches him about basslines, his aunt dates Eazy-E, and his mother’s new reverend husband bans secular music from the house. His flows are fluid, his thoughts lucid, recalling memories as his route to rap runs parallel with the boom of the California scene. As with most of Miles, the firsthand experiences of its creators are presented as tiny pieces in a much grander mosaic, one spanning generations.
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. | 2020-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Dirty Science | July 30, 2020 | 7.7 | 6c5c52a7-9213-401f-a278-73c346d1d215 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Elbow's latest deepens their formula—rich, sweeping rock songs about melancholy and love—with a dreamy sense of loss and time passing. | Elbow's latest deepens their formula—rich, sweeping rock songs about melancholy and love—with a dreamy sense of loss and time passing. | Elbow: Little Fictions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22839-little-fictions/ | Little Fictions | Ever since 2008’s Mercury Prize-winning The Seldom Seen Kid, Elbow have offered slight tweaks on a reliable formula: meditative, dramatic rock songs, studded with sweeping orchestration and boasting subtly idiosyncratic songwriting. At this point, they may not win many more new fans stateside (or elsewhere), but as they age, they are settling into this groove, one that deepens slowly with more years passed and miles traveled.
Their last album, 2014’s The Take Off and Landing of Everything, catalogued the mixture of life changes that come with adulthood, but was specifically shaped by the end of frontman Guy Garvey’s long-term relationship with the writer Emma Jane Unsworth. An album blurred between places and times, it found Garvey writing from a place of increasingly crowded memory. Their new album Little Fictions picks up those threads, with a few more years behind them as touring musicians. Living that way has a certain effect: other people’s live drift out of yours and seem to settle into place, while yours keeps rushing forward but also remains static in its own way, with you simply replacing old characters with new ones. Much of the album outlines love lost, love percolating, love maturing. And, as always, Garvey is a skilled chronicler of human interaction, offering a manifesto for the album in its penultimate title track: “We protect our little fictions/Like it’s all we are.”
Unlike its predecessor—where the weight of the past sometimes bogged down the tempos, too—Little Fictions moves. Lead single and opening track “Magnificent (She Says)” rides on a nimble guitar figure and string arrangement. The drum pattern in “Gentle Storm” wouldn’t feel out of place in a club, were it not for the beautifully ruminative song that surrounds it. Though at their most insistent Elbow still mostly operate at “purposeful stride,” a song like “Firebrand & Angel” combines off-kilter elements to achieve a forward-momentum lurch.
Even at their most emotionally bombastic—in huge orchestral sweeps like “One Day Like This” or the slow-intensifying koan of “The Take Off and Landing of Everything”—Elbow write songs with a careful architecture. And now, perhaps more so than ever, the affecting moments of their new material are rooted in very precise decisions, like the interplay of piano and percussion in “Gentle Storm.” One of the most striking examples here is the vocal layering in “All Disco” and “K2.” Abstracted, ghostly background vocals bubble in the background throughout “All Disco” until they finally boil over and mingle with Garvey’s, a manifestation of memory overtaking and reshaping your perception of the present. “K2,” the album’s highlight, pulls a similar trick. One long unhurried tumble (its verses and chorus elide together), it finds Garvey in a reverie, eager to unspool but doing so in many directions at once; the moments and places listed are far-flung. Throughout, his vocals echo themselves in the distance, slightly out-of-step with the main vocal performance. It’s a watercolor representation of life passing and the experiences you collect, making the clarity of repeated lines like “Opens the fist just enough for a hand/To slip into the hand” hit harder.
Little Fictions is full of moments like this, where discrete flourishes yield quietly resounding payoffs. Sometimes it’s easy to wish Elbow would let a different kind of intensity in—that the storm wasn’t always so gentle. But that's not really what Elbow do, and this many albums in, they know what they do well. They still excel in melancholic music about loss and love. But these days, wide-eyed wonder is always around the corner. “Then my telephone shakes into life I see your name,” Garvey sings towards the end of closer “Kindling” (a song that plays like U2 in their lowest-key), before the repetition of “Then the wheat fields explode into gold either side of the train,” as the final lines of the album. In a different group’s hands, it’d all be too mawkish. But as Elbow settle into middle age, the additional wrinkles and whiskey stains only deepen the gravity of their stories. | 2017-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polydor | February 9, 2017 | 7.1 | 6c6630a7-2612-4315-9f80-f7f69787cbb3 | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | null |
This Estonian band’s debut album sounds like a long, lonely drive on a moonlit night, with plenty of guitar reverb. | This Estonian band’s debut album sounds like a long, lonely drive on a moonlit night, with plenty of guitar reverb. | Holy Motors: Slow Sundown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/holy-motors-slow-sundown/ | Slow Sundown | Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, has some of the shortest, darkest days in the world: Thanks to cloud cover and haze, an average one includes less than five hours of sunlight. On their debut album, Slow Sundown, Tallinn’s Holy Motors waste no time trying to hide the way that feels for them. In this band’s slow, chilly songs, you’re always being watched, and the moon might be your only friend. “Hold me like the moon/Through night time,” singer Eliann Tulve sighs in a rare moment of warm, major-key respite. “I’m planning to drive until my heavenly place arrives,” she adds moments later, as the band cruises on at an unhurried pace behind her.
Those lines, from “Silently for Me” and the subsequent “Signs,” respectively, embody both of Holy Motors’ favorite images. The first, of course, is the moon, which looms over this album from the opening track, “Honeymooning,” onward. That song’s tone couldn’t be further from honeymoon-esque, unless your idea of one takes place at the bottom of a swamp. Yet this is Holy Motors’ comfort zone: Tulve sounds at ease as the lights go down and her bandmates gradually rise up in the mix. Their lineup features three guitarists, less to create a sense of volume or power than to maintain some peripherally detectable presence that’s always over your shoulder, never in your face.
The album’s other core motif is the lonely night drive. “I am alone in the valley/Looking for a girl I’d like to marry,” Tulve sings to introduce the desolate, country-tinged “Valley.” Spooky, empty highways crop up several more times, including quite literally in the video for “Sleeprydr,” the crescendo moment of the album and the band’s most evocative exploration of the theme. The guitarists, meanwhile, keep croaking out clunky, echoing thuds, like the sound of a stone skipping across ice, but pitched several octaves lower—ice on the highway to hell, maybe.
Tulve’s peacefully resigned voice and the guitarists’ infinity-pool-style shimmer court easy comparisons to Mazzy Star and Slowdive. But Holy Motors shade towards the darker side of that sound, and they’re a little too eager to let the world know it. The lyrics on Slow Sundown are regularly, astoundingly on-the-nose. One minute into the album, Tulve informs us that “Behind the gloom/We’re drowning/In our own tears.” Some things go without saying, but that doesn’t always stop Tulve and the band from saying it.
If Holy Motors are limited in range, they show genuine skill at bringing their one mood to vivid life. We’re all alone at the end of the day, Slow Sundown suggests. It’s only fair to wonder if they’ll ever dare to show us what their world looks like when the sun comes up. | 2018-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Wharf Cat | February 14, 2018 | 6.1 | 6c6805c8-7990-42b3-8aa2-4e4b42e43c6d | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
On his sometimes-hilarious, seat-of-the-pants live concert album, Arcade Fire's Will Butler shows the good and bad sides of winging it and hoping your audience follows. | On his sometimes-hilarious, seat-of-the-pants live concert album, Arcade Fire's Will Butler shows the good and bad sides of winging it and hoping your audience follows. | Will Butler: Friday Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22011-friday-night/ | Friday Night | Friday Night begins with an encore, and that’s not even the weirdest thing about this unlikely live album. It follows Will Butler’s solo debut, last year’s Policy, an eight-track, one-man rumination on his place in the world and possibly in the Arcade Fire. Those songs mimicked the scale of that band’s biggest anthems, yet kept the stakes aggressively personal, as Butler revealed his dire worries over his family, his country, even his eternal soul. He called out God Himself, demanding that the Big Man account for His actions.After that, he spent a week writing and recording a song a day based on headlines from the Guardian, then he released a new version of Policy containing them. It’s clear the guy likes a risk.
From anyone else a record like Friday Night might be a bit suspect, an easy way to milk a few songs or get a little closer to the end of a record contract. But Butler has always been a compelling performer, a guy who claims—in song, no less—“I have never been drunk and I have never been stoned” but seems to lose himself on stage. So he’s much more comfortable in front of the crowd at Lincoln Hall in Chicago than he ever was in Electric Lady Studios, which might explain why the live album is nearly twice as long as the studio album. Even with comedian Jo Firestone acting as his hypewoman and the great Abbi Jacobson providing Magic Marker artwork, much of the show has a you-had-to-be-there vibe. But there are also moments when Butler’s music sounds more jagged, more hapless, more violent, more paranoid than it has in years.
Now, about that encore. Butler opens the track by giving a shoutout to the sound guy, which is a nice gesture but not a “This is the first song off our new album!” kind of moment. Then he explains that they’ve never played “Tell Me We’re All Right” before. “I mean that literally,” he clarifies, right as he’s launching into some piano chords practically quoted from Queen’s “You’re My Best Friend.” Butler forgets the lyrics at one point, cajoles the audience to sing along (which they don’t seem to do), adds a lengthy bridge during which he rap-introduces his backing band, and finally plays the song right into ground. What makes the performance so remarkable—and probably the entire reason it’s at the beginning of the show rather the end—is its by-the-seat-of-their-pants momentum, the feeling that the whole thing might just fly apart at any moment, leaving the band defeated and exposed up on that stage.
Butler obviously lives for those moments of musical risk, when he can either fall on his face or subsume himself into something larger. He prizes spontaneity both in writing and playing, which adds a rambunctious energy to “Son of God” and punk abandon to “II”. It gives him license to explore every style and genre that comes into his head, and the new songs point in some directions Butler might go in the future: the raw heavy metal riffing of “Public Defender,” which is simultaneously bracing and ridiculous; the homemade ‘80s soundtrack rock of “Sun Comes Up,” which sounds like a Moroder sequencer held together by duct tape.
But that quest for pure spontaneity can reveal the cracks in Butler’s craft. Penned for the Guardian, “Madonna Can’t Save Me Now” meanders for four and a half minutes with no memorable hook and only a smug sense of its own cleverness to sustain it. It’s an indie-rock song as hastily typed Facebook post, which can’t be what Butler intended, and it shows just how ugly the results can be when his seat-of-the-pants approach actually fails him. | 2016-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | June 20, 2016 | 6.7 | 6c768a6a-66a8-4dce-891a-cb450c116172 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
On his debut full-length, the Brooklyn producer invites a wide range of guests over for a genre-spanning studio party. 21 Savage, Hudson Mohawke, DJ Rashad and the Deftones’ Chino Moreno feature. | On his debut full-length, the Brooklyn producer invites a wide range of guests over for a genre-spanning studio party. 21 Savage, Hudson Mohawke, DJ Rashad and the Deftones’ Chino Moreno feature. | Nick Hook: Relationships | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22683-relationships/ | Relationships | The cover art for Relationships features a photo of an entryway, nearly every inch of its canary yellow walls covered in signatures, writing and drawings. The photo was taken inside of Nick Hook’s studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where the producer has recorded and worked with a laundry list of hip-hop and electronic artists over the years, including Run the Jewels, Young Thug, and Action Bronson. Relationships, his debut album, feels a lot like that studio must: a place where Hook endlessly tinkers as a constant stream of guests passes through, each leaving behind bits of their sound. In keeping with Hook’s penchant for collaboration, Relationships enlists an impressive roster of artists: the freshly Drake-co-signed 21 Savage, the Deftones’ Chino Moreno, electro wunderkind Hudson Mohawke and even the late DJ Rashad. To hear him tell it, Hook didn’t pay for any of these features, relying instead on the goodwill accrued through years of production and engineering work.
Given the diverse company he keeps, it should come as no surprise that Hook’s debut is an eclectic listen. That said, Relationships manages to hang together surprisingly well, anchored in large part by Hook’s rhythmic and melodic sensibilities. Hook is a collector of vintage studio equipment and it shows: The sounds of analog synths suffuse these songs with warmth, while much of the drum programming has a tactile, human feel. Also old-fashioned is the manner in which Relationships was constructed: all of these collaborations were recorded in person at Hook’s studio, rather than cobbled together from emailed files.
Clearly, Hook is a big believer in chemistry, and this collaborative spirit tends to bring out his best. Over the course of Relationships, Hook allows his guests to pull his sound in a number of different directions, ultimately showcasing his own versatility. “Gucci’s” pitches up emerging Atlanta rapper 24hrs’ vocals into cartoon-character territory, the end result sounding like a trap banger crossbred with early Kanye’s chipmunk soul. “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” a bleak grime number featuring 19-year old London rapper Novelist, colorfully evokes London’s wet streets: Hook’s synths alternately patter like raindrops and howl like sirens as Novelist raps with hungry-upstart fury. “Another Way” arrives at funky body music by way of cosmic synths, while “All Alone” matches Makonnen’s late night tomcat croon with the proper shade of noir. Given 21 Savage’s involvement and its title, you can probably guess what “Head” is about; more surprising is how exuberant the song feels—bass drum hits that pop like confetti-filled balloons, skittering hi-hats, glimmering synth lines. It’s a genuinely fun song, one where Savage sounds delightfully out-of-place, like a dead-eyed hustler at a child’s birthday party.
Relationships is bookended by two collaborations with the footwork pioneer DJ Rashad, culled from sessions Hook recorded with Rashad before his untimely death. Opening track “+ 3,” which also features DJ Paypal, has Rashad’s fingerprints all over it: classic house synths, a tug-of-war between a thudding low-end and rapid-fire hi-hats and a mantra-like chant, provided by Nasty Nigel: “Pull up/Back door/ID/Plus three.” Album closer “The Infinite Loop,” meanwhile, ends the record on a very different note. Good luck finding Rashad’s contribution in the folds of the impressionistic track, which builds up slowly over the course of eighteen minutes, guided primarily by washes of chiming, delayed guitar provided by Chino Moreno. Nasty Nigel returns here, with a brief, nostalgic verse that steers into the track’s dreamy atmospherics: “Copping 40s at the Wawa outside of Philly/I was only 14, kinda high, my uncle with me.” Even if it hardly sounds like a DJ Rashad song, “The Infinite Loop” feels like a fitting tribute, a contemplative remembrance of a relationship that animated Hook’s work, like so many of those on display here. | 2016-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Fool’s Gold | December 8, 2016 | 7 | 6c78a8f7-7539-40f4-adcb-53db8516e4bd | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
Seattle vocalist/guitarist Julie Byrne's Rooms With Walls & Windows feels like a secret she's keeping from you, even when it is safely in your headphones. Her version of folk, a whisper bordering on an ambient hum, will be familiar to fans of early Cat Power, or Grouper's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill. | Seattle vocalist/guitarist Julie Byrne's Rooms With Walls & Windows feels like a secret she's keeping from you, even when it is safely in your headphones. Her version of folk, a whisper bordering on an ambient hum, will be familiar to fans of early Cat Power, or Grouper's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill. | Julie Byrne: Rooms With Walls and Windows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18928-julie-byrne-rooms-with-walls-and-windows/ | Rooms With Walls and Windows | Julie Byrne doesn't sing her ice-crusted songs so much as murmur them beneath her breath. And "finger-picking," while accurate, feels far too percussive a word for her guitar playing; it's more like she brushes the strings with her fingertips, like wisps of hair obscuring her vision. Live clips show Byrne performing to reverent groups of three or four in cafes, where she barely rises above the sound of milk steamers and muffled coughing. Her album, Rooms With Walls & Windows, feels like a secret she's keeping from you, even when it is safely in your headphones. If you are listening while walking the streets of a city or while commuting, I recommend noise-cancellation; someone briskly turning the pages of their magazine next to you could drown her out.
Byrne currently lives in Seattle, but she skipped there like a stone across the country—first Buffalo, then Chicago. On "Marmalade", she describes what she's searching for: "All I want is a brick house with a porch that wraps around/ All I want is land enough for my child to roam." The language in her lyrics, once it emerges into your awareness, is strikingly conversational, but not like any one kind of conversation. She alternates between vividly dark imagery—"I lean back like a woman baptized in the River of Styx," on "Wisdom Teeth Song"—to the breathlessly naïve: "The Museum of Natural History in its snow, blood, and fur and ivory/ It left me wanting to know so much more about this world" (from the same song). Her delivery doesn't make clear if these sentiments belong to her, or if they are bits of life she's picked up listening to others.
She sings everything in the same cloaked, low voice, and over the same skeletal arrangements, which gives even the mundane sentiments a portentous ring. Her version of folk, a whisper bordering on an ambient hum, will be familiar to fans of early Cat Power, or Grouper's Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill, as will her ability to mine the uncanny from the everyday stuff lying around. Byrne occasionally tests your personal boundaries for what constitutes "enough" happening in a song: Many of her songs are not only two chords, like "Marmalade", but two notes, hitting like alternate condensation drops on your forehead while her lyrics follows drowsily afterward.
Some of the most memorable and indelible moments on her album are when she leaves off of words and hums into the ether—at the end of "Holiday", after she has sung "And I do travel alone, but yours is not a number I can call on the phone," she follows it with a wordless melody that seems to put a full stop on the enigmatic thought. You can hear it again on "Prism Song", which follows up the hypothetical scenarios of the lyrics ("If you were a prism with the light passing through") with nothing but a wordless sigh. Sometimes we locate more meaning in sound than in sense, and Byrne's album sits at the nexus where one melts gorgeously into the other. The album concludes with a few glowing rays of synth, an arpeggiated tonalization that sits in place for about four minutes and dies away. The sounds are distant, foggy, and alluring, like echoes of echoes, the original sounding long gone. | 2014-01-31T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2014-01-31T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Orindal | January 31, 2014 | 7.4 | 6c7b76be-ae38-49a5-9ffe-918e2a65af06 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Alex Zhang Hungtai takes a sense of displacement and an ear for eerie, stylized noirish sounds and creates something unique and refreshing. | Alex Zhang Hungtai takes a sense of displacement and an ear for eerie, stylized noirish sounds and creates something unique and refreshing. | Dirty Beaches: Badlands | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15281-badlands/ | Badlands | Dirty Beaches is Alex Zhang Hungtai, a Taiwan-born Canadian immigrant who spent a good chunk of his life feeling unmoored and adrift. "I don't really have a place where I can say I was born and raised," he told us last month. "For me, home is a collage of all these fractured landscapes that I try to piece together." This sense of displacement, combined with an ear for cinematic sounds-- particularly the eerie, stylized noir of David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, and Wong Kar Wai-- fuels his work, which squeezes the sounds of early rock'n'roll and 1950s music through a lo-fi, distortion-drenched filter.
This set of influences, which extends to the minimal thrust of Suicide and the Cramps' manic rockabilly, feels unique, simply because it's been largely untouched by indie music during the past decade or so. Sure, there's been some casual dalliance between garage-pop and doo-wop, but we haven't really seen a lo-fi artist reach past the 60s to fully drape himself in such a dusty, road-weary atmosphere. Of course, mining a cool set of inspirations doesn't itself make for a good record. What Hungtai excels at, in addition to building evocative mood and atmosphere, is a sort of conceptual, film-like storytelling shot through the lens of these bygone eras of music.
Talking about Badlands in this clip, Hungtai said the album's songs explore "repeating themes, reoccurring characters being in exile or just away from home." So on each of the these tracks, which alternate between rumbling motorcycle punk and more plaintive ballads, you get this sense of man-on-the-road drama, a drifter going from town to town, dive bar to dive bar. The songs work in part because Hungtai has great command of his voice, moving easily from a hushed sing-speak to a throatier purr. A good example is the throbbing Lolita anthem "Sweet 17", where he shrieks and coos over a blown-out drumbeat and scraping reverb, making the track feel equally threatening and sexy.
Because the record relies quite a bit on aesthetic, it could start to feel same-y without tonal shifts, which is why Hungtai is wise to include the slower numbers. "True Blue" and "Lord Knows Best", a pair toward the end of the album, offer a druggy, somber counterpoint to the punchier stuff earlier on. Something like Everly Brothers-style solemn crooning recorded in a closet, both have this great death-prom vibe-- romantic and even pretty but with a healthy dose of evil. Two instrumental pieces that close out the record don't hold up quite as well, but ultimately what you get here is a refreshing take on the well-worn tropes of lo-fi-- raunchy, old-fashioned, and pompadoured, there's nothing else that sounds like this right now. | 2011-04-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-04-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Zoo | April 4, 2011 | 8.2 | 6c812583-c18b-456f-bd5f-08877226cc97 | Joe Colly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-colly/ | 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 the influential New Zealand band’s 1992 masterpiece, a rambling double-disc totem of noise rock that expertly balances tight songs and long improvisations. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the influential New Zealand band’s 1992 masterpiece, a rambling double-disc totem of noise rock that expertly balances tight songs and long improvisations. | The Dead C: Harsh 70s Reality | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-dead-c-harsh-70s-reality/ | Harsh 70s Reality | In spring 1997, when the increasingly obtuse New Zealand trio the Dead C had been releasing records and tapes for about 10 years, Pavement appeared on the cover of Pulse!, formerly the in-house promotional arm of Tower Records. Pavement were promoting Brighten the Corners, an album that seemed designed to reengage a more mainstream crowd that had hopped on with the “Cut Your Hair” video in ’94 and hopped extremely off after Wowee Zowee. Inside the magazine, each member of Pavement provided a list of their 10 favorite albums. Steve Malkmus opened with the Groundhogs’ Thank Christ for the Bomb, a very necessary hunk of oddball British blues-rock. Right below it was the Dead C’s 1992 noisy, rambling masterpiece Harsh 70s Reality.
The early Pavement records pulled apart traditional songcraft and stapled it back together, covering hooks in gunk and fuzz, eschewing studio slickness for a looser sound and vibe. For a while there, the Dead C—the trio of guitarist Bruce Russell, guitarist Michael Morley, and drummer Robbie Yeats—did pretty much the same thing, often at even lower fidelity. And Pavement’s onetime label Drag City released records from Dead C’s first label, Xpressway, which took its own name from the Sonic Youth staple “Expressway to Yr Skull.” The bands seemed like distant cousins, as if the New Zealanders might get the younger act drunk at a family reunion and show them the magic of open tunings on a beat-to-hell acoustic guitar.
While Pavement quickly moved into more traditional studios and more traditional acceptance, the Dead C continued to mess with fans’ ears, their perception of time, and often their patience. The relative fidelity of the Dead C’s work seemed exactly matched to their aural goals, be it a rehearsal captured on a Sony Walkman WM-77, two-track, four-track or otherwise. The Dead C took the line between “live” and “studio,” sometimes a very formal division in the rock fan’s mind, and smudged it beyond recognition (their “live album” Clyma Est Mort, something of a companion piece to Harsh 70s Reality, was recorded live in front of one person). For longtime Dead C listeners, Malkmus’ appreciation for Harsh was understandable, laudable, and perfect.
From their start floating around the grotty 1980s New Zealand underground alongside Peter Jefferies, the incredible Plagal Grind, Alastair Galbraith, Dadamah, the Renderers, and many more, the trio took ideas from progressive and psychedelic rock, avant-garde improvisers such as AMM, minimalist composition, punk’s fuck-it stance, and Sonic Youth’s artier end. They made it into a collage and xeroxed it, zooming in and distorting the details with each pass. If fellow islanders the Clean lived inside the third Velvet Underground album, the Dead C built a summer shack in “Sister Ray” and stayed there year round.
From 1987 until about 1990, the period covered by such collections as the DR503 LP (released on Flying Nun and about as “out” as they got), the Perform DR503b cassette (alternate takes of the former), the EUSA Kills LP, the monstrous cassette-turned-CD Trapdoor Fucking Exit, and a few EPs, the band’s discography could charitably be called “annoying.” Various takes of key songs appear here and there on various tapes and albums, obliterating any notion of a definitive version. Albums appeared in the U.S. years after they appeared in NZ, with songs added and subtracted. Even devout fans got a little tired.
Harsh 70s Reality was the third Dead C recording to be released on Philadelphia’s Siltbreeze Records. Label owner Tom Lax first released the glorious 12" EP “Helen Said This”/“Bury.” The first song scans as one of the few breakup songs that actually sound like the time-as-molasses moments of internal chaos and distortion that accompany the end of a relationship; the flip side is a dignified rumble. Next, the mesmerizing single “Hell Is Now Love”/“Bone.” Then, Harsh 70s Reality, an old-school double album.
The CD version eliminated two songs, which, in retrospect, was both totally understandable and probably a mistake. It got hard to imagine in the 72-minute CD era that was the 1990s, but the double LP—by which I mean four sides running between slightly over an hour to 100 minutes—was once a major statement of purpose, an epic gesture, the moment a band expressed a worldview in as much detail as it saw fit. The stacks of guitars, horns, and keyboards on Exile on Main Street took the Stones as deep into the heart of American blues as they cared to go, even if they cut it in France. The White Album found various combinations of Beatles putting everything from rock and folk to blues and avant-garde together in thrilling ways. Nobody has ever completely understood what is going on with the fractured tape experiments on Royal Trux’s Twin Infinitives, released two years before Harsh 70s Reality, but it remains a little scary to ingest.
Harsh 70s Reality was a double album in this same tradition, a massive dose of the muzzier songcraft mixed with the free-rock improvisation one usually associated with extremely high Germans in the ’70s, if one associated it with anything at all. It wasn't “noise rock”—that designation belonged to more structured acts releasing on labels like Touch and Go, AmRep, or Noiseville. This was something hazier, more mysterious, and far less aggressive.
Even for deep and nerdy fans, the Dead C’s first American tour in 1995 was a revelation, song form and improvisation jousting endlessly. Morley stood upright, every inch the guy who was charged with holding it all together, his vocal an occasional moan floating out of the chaos. Yeats’ beats were reasonably steady when it was called for, obtuse and skittering when it was not. But it was Russell everyone stared at. He treated his guitar almost like a nuisance: bending over into it, holding it by the body and waving it at the amp, pawing at the strings, doing everything other than play it conventionally.
The trick to Harsh 70s Reality is balance—between the rockers and the almighty zone-outs, between the tuneful bits and the parts that sound like a concrete saw. At the time, the Dead C could go in any direction, and after this record, they went in all of them, testing the limits of even their own audience. Their next few albums for Siltbreeze were increasingly “out there” but still occasionally engaged in the idea of writing songs. In 2000, the crew self-released The Dead C, a 128-minute double CD full of looped samples, restless electronic improvisations, a general sense of formlessness, and a 33-minute track called “SpeederBot.” As the band put it, “This is the hinge around which our career pivots…the Tascam porta-studio ceased to be our main technical mainstay, much of this was direct to open-reel two-track or digital video camera.”
I submit that the actual hinge in the Dead C’s career is Harsh 70s Reality. Russell has said the band stopped writing conventional songs around 1995. “We don’t have a theoretical rationale, we just do [it],” he said in a 2016 interview. “This dialectic is hard-wired into the trio. It is a product of our characters and our capabilities. Without that tension, there is no Dead C.” The album’s side-long opener, “Driver U.F.O.,” mixes a distant wind tunnel drone, clanging guitars, an oddly calming keyboard riff, voices perhaps, and tape scramble. It’s the sound of long-form confusion, a taste of where they were headed mixed with bits of where they’d been.
Kicking off side two is “Sky,” as conventional a rocker as appears on the record: driving strum und klang, one guitar a rusty screen door in the wind, another holding down some heavy buzz as Yeats bashes away, not so much holding a beat as smashing it into submission. Various voices wail “...to see the sky” and “I’ve got more important things to worry about.” This is the nature of the album: riffs (or, rather, repeated note-clusters) generally in the shape of songs. Yeats lays fractured triples on “Love” while the guitars technically sound clean but are also caked in gunk of varying flavors. “Suffer Bomb Damage,” with its acoustic intro, queasy keyboard, and giant-sounding distorted guitar, plays like the folk music of Tolkien-scale trolls, slightly intimidating for its simplicity.
The Dead C remain your favorite noise nerd’s favorite noise nerds. In 2009, TV on the Radio’s Kyp Malone told NPR that Trapdoor Fuckin Exit, itself a more semi-conventional song-album than not, was an all-time favorite. “They seemed so broken and messy to me when I first heard them,” he said. “But then early on when I was experimenting with psychedelics, one of their records was on heavy rotation at the apartment I was in… and I remember listening to it and having my mind really blown.” (Malone has been a member of the band Iran, which certainly owes a thing or two to the early Dead C.)
Harsh 70s Reality is one of the great psychedelic albums of its time in that it goes way out but it also lets you come down, the riffs akin to a guide talking you through a trip. In the 21st century, the band has abandoned songs for fully improvised pieces more akin to free jazz sessions than rock records. A generation of fans has grown up knowing them for full-on abstraction. “The process remains the same: We bottle the lightning as it strikes,” Russell has said. “You can’t plan that; you can only prepare.” On Harsh 70s, the Dead C balanced structure and lightning exactly right, as if they were throwing the bolts themselves. | 2023-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Siltbreeze | May 14, 2023 | 8.7 | 6c87a5f2-1f8f-414a-b6a0-d3422e78e75d | Joe Gross | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-gross/ | |
A varied group of remixers tackles the Japanese composer’s 2017 album async, but despite a few standouts, the collection lacks the stark force of the original. | A varied group of remixers tackles the Japanese composer’s 2017 album async, but despite a few standouts, the collection lacks the stark force of the original. | Ryuichi Sakamoto: async remodels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ryuichi-sakamoto-async-remodels/ | async remodels | Remix albums have a spotty track record. They are frequently promotional gambits aimed at illuminating the original artist in flattering light bounced off the hired talent. In the case of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s async remodels, the bar is set significantly higher. Sakamoto is one of electronic music’s living legends, a relentless innovator whose oeuvre winds through the synth pop of Yellow Magic Orchestra, glitching ambient experiments for Raster-Noton, Hollywood film scores, and music for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona. The original async followed a period of radiology treatment for throat cancer, and the album feels infused with the penetrating urgency of an artist facing his own mortality. remodels responds to this weightiness by assembling a multi-generational collection of composers, synth artists, and underground renegades, each of whom owes a debt to Sakamoto’s work. The musicians salute their forebear and the listeners survey the scope of his influence; the effect is not unlike a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars. And, as with such awards, the async remodels glitters with aspiration and emotion, and yet rings slightly hollow.
Let’s start with the good stuff: There are some excellent remixes on this album. The best are split between Sakamoto’s collaborators and younger artists with fresh perspectives. Alva Noto’s reimagining of “disintegration” bathes the original’s bristing severity in the spectral, hovering atmospherics and turn-of-the-millenium digital palette the duo is known for. Compared to their Satie-inflected 2002 outing Vrioon, this remix lunges with aggression. Similarly, Fennesz’s take on “solari” infuses the original with unabashed romanticism and gives it a ghostly, emptied out ending. Get yourself a nice pair of headphones and crank the volume—the insectoid water droplet pings at 2:20 move the track’s central theme from a roaring summit view to the depths of the sewers.
Elsewhere, Arca’s “async” is a lurching cyberpunk opera in which he sounds entirely at home. The original is barely perceptible in the fray of smeared vocals, ephemeral sound effects, and clipped trap drums. Yves Tumor, on the other hand, retains key elements of “ZURE” while framing it as an invocation. A woman’s voice, just out of earshot, whispers in the background: “You’re so much stronger than you think you are right now.” Many of these remixes aim for haunting, but only Tumor’s sounds properly haunted.
S U R V I V E’s contribution is the lone dud: a half-baked wash of synth textures and unearned bombast. The rest simply struggle to cohere, or cohere a little too much. Across these mixes there’s a surprising uniformity of tone and timbre, a kind of austere grandeur with lots of high end reverb trails, big percussion hits, and a sense of frozen futurism. Sakamoto glided across genres and eras with an ease rarely seen in artists not named Brian Eno, yet only Electric Youth’s gently driving remix of “andata” nods to Sakamoto’s pop side. Another quality the duo’s track doesn’t share with the rest: It’s the sole entry to feature a woman in a producer’s chair. In 2018’s musical landscape, surely Laurel Halo, Holly Herndon, Suzanne Ciani, Fatima Al Qadiri, Elysia Crampton, Nkisi, Pan Daijing, Pharmakon, Jlin, and Stellar OM Source—just a few of the women operating prominently at the forefront of experimental electronic music whose signatures dovetail with the styles explored here—weren’t all unavailable.
Toggling between async and remodels, it’s hard to miss the contrast between the stark force of the original and the restrained reverence of its follow-up. Sakamoto is one of the greats. Here he’s surrounded by an exemplary cast, including many artists groundbreaking in their own right. But remodels isn’t an album made by a master confronting life’s most unfathomable inevitability. And without that, it’s not quite sure what it wants to be. Though worthy, at times enjoyable, and well-intentioned, as a standalone work it’s uneven and hemmed in. Its greatest tribute will be to lead listeners back to the source. | 2018-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Milan | February 27, 2018 | 6.3 | 6c909d58-e467-4a99-bacf-cffb74e58b78 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
Five albums in and another awesome, absolutely pummeling record of tough, fast stoner metal from Matt Pike and co. | Five albums in and another awesome, absolutely pummeling record of tough, fast stoner metal from Matt Pike and co. | High on Fire: Snakes for the Divine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13966-snakes-for-the-divine/ | Snakes for the Divine | High on Fire make burly music; that's the only thing you can really call it. The Oakland power trio's thundering roar isn't dumb; there's a clear technical virtuosity on display in Matt Pike's squiddling solos, and the songs move confidently through multiple riffs and movements without ever relying on time-tested verse-chorus-verse formatting or compromising their brutality. But there is something elemental about their assault. While peers like Mastodon construct overthought concept albums, High on Fire do one thing, and they do it very well. They pummel. Matt Pike growls out his badass nonsense lyrics like a more gnarled Lemmy, if that's even possible, and rips out one gut-busting riff and shattering solo after another. His rhythm section does their best to imitate an elephant stampede. Their basic format might vary a bit over the course of an album; they're not averse to floridly acoustic intros or eastern-tinged psych moments. But their fundamental mission won't ever change. They make tough, fast, snarly stoner metal. It's just what they do.
Snakes for the Divine is the band's fifth album. For this one, they've decamped from the venerable metal indie Relapse to the way-less-venerable indie E1. On their previous two efforts, the band worked with legendary scuzz-rock producers (Steve Albini on 2005's Blessed Black Wings, Jack Endino on 2007's Death Is This Communion). On this one, they switch things up a bit, working with Greg Fidelman, who produced Slayer's 2009 comeback album, World Painted Blood, and worked on a whole mess of recent Rick Rubin projects. Fidelman's not as natural a fit for High on Fire as Albini or Endino, and the very, very slight sheen he brings to the proceedings doesn't do them any favors. The drums don't wallop quite as hard, and Pike's guitar doesn't sound quite as much like the sound of a swamp demon bellowing. But Fidelman's smart enough to keep his tweaks from interfering much, and the band's apocalyptic fury sounds undiminished even after the last masterful two albums.
And High on Fire aren't in any danger of losing their punch. They've gone through a few bassists now, but over the years they've developed the sort of telepathic alchemy that defines a great power trio. When one of their eight-minute tracks pauses for a split second, your heart leaps because you just know they're about to rip into yet another totally flattening new riff. Their songs don't really bother much with earthly concerns. "Ghost Neck", which I think is about some sort of junkie, contains the following unparseable line: "Overdosing on the mutual garbage/ Skeleton in the end unfolds". If I had to guess, I'd say the awesomely named "Frost Hammer" was about some sort of invasion of winter gods, but the song's highlight comes when Pike just screams the title four times. High on Fire are the sort of band who put devils or skulls or snake-demon ladies on their album covers just because those things are awesome, not because they illustrate any larger cultural point. And five albums in, they're very, very good at generating awesome on demand.
A couple of songs here, "Bastard Samurai" and "How Dark We Pray", do awesome better than the rest by slowing down the band's galloping tempo and letting their riffs breathe. Pike already did slow to perfection in his previous band, doom-metal legends Sleep, and these two songs don't sound much like Sleep. They pull all the same tricks as the fastest HOF ragers; they just pull them slower. "Bastard Samurai" locks into a brontosaurus stomp, letting Pike actually sing on the verses, building up to a climactic roar instead of just hitting with that roar straight in. (And when he does finally roar, the lyric is this: "Son of a bitch will bleed a whiiiiiiile!" It's so badass.) On "How Dark We Pray", bassist Jeff Matz gets enough room to add some melodic flourishes instead of just crunch, and the song builds up a serious head of steam over its eight minutes.
But even though those two tracks may be highlights, the album really has no weak moments. Like the other HOF full-lengths before it, Snakes for the Divine shows that metal, in its most basic and elemental forms, still has plenty of visceral thrill left in it-- as long as it's done right. And High on Fire do it right. | 2010-03-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2010-03-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Metal | E1 | March 1, 2010 | 8 | 6c9203e3-e685-427a-83d8-a5e7e8527b08 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
The Bronx-born pop star expands his musical empire on Golden. But for the all the album’s myriad sounds, its roots are firmly planted in bachata, the sounds of the campo. | The Bronx-born pop star expands his musical empire on Golden. But for the all the album’s myriad sounds, its roots are firmly planted in bachata, the sounds of the campo. | Romeo Santos: Golden | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/romeo-santos-golden/ | Golden | The concept of a crossover star in the “Latin” music industry is more than just a bit icky. Whenever a Spanish-speaking crooner or pop star rises to the point of ubiquity in Latin America, they’re expected—mostly by ravenous music executives with pesos in their eyes—to crossover into the Anglo music market with an English-speaking album. It’s a model that proved wildly successful for a handful of artists in the late ’90s/early ’00s, with breakout hit records from Ricky Martin, Shakira, and Marc Anthony recorded in English with Anglo producers.
Romeo Santos’ path to becoming arguably the biggest Latin pop star of the moment is not without precedent. The Bronx-born son of Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants first made a name for himself fusing bachata with pop music as the lead singer of Aventura, not unlike Martin’s rise fronting the boy band Menudo. Anthony (who himself got his start singing backup on Menudo records) had dabbled in fusing salsa, hip-hop, and house music with Little Louie Vega before fully embracing his salsa roots.
But this is where their paths diverge. Though it’s still quite early in his solo career, Santos has shown no signs of crossing over in the traditional sense. His latest album, Golden, is a bachata record that fuses various styles and sounds, from bossa nova (“El Papel, Pt. 1 (Versión Amante)”) to hip-hop, doo-wop (“Un Vuelo A LA”), and even Puerto Rican reggaetón (“Bella y Sensual”) and jibaro. Even when he makes a nod to new English-speaking fans (“I’ve been doing this a while/Put in work and traveling miles”) with a hip-pop intro co-written by Ne-Yo, he closes it out with a verse in Spanish. The pan-Latin Spanglish vibes of Santos’ work feels representative of his home borough of the Bronx, where all of these sounds co-exist, where Dominican dembow lives next to Colombian reggaetón, and your tio’s salsa shares space with abuelo’s merengue. But for the all the myriad sounds Golden pulls from, its roots are firmly planted in bachata, the sounds of the campo.
Bachata, an oft-maligned genre born in the Dominican Republic, has long been associated with the country’s poor rural classes. Rooted in romance, early bachata evolved from the slower Cuban bolero style, a raw, personal counterpart to the longstanding tradition of merengue orchestras. The sound is defined by a requinto lead (a smaller acoustic guitar with a higher pitch), and a segunda rhythm guitar, with a rhythm section dominated by the bass guitar and high-pitched drums like bongos or a tambora, and maracas or a guira. Los blanquitos, the Dominican Republic’s white upper class, looked down on the music—and the parties where it would be played—a sentiment not improved by the evolution of bachata into dance music, which often strayed from romance to raunch, both on the floor and in the lyrics. But even as Dominican radio and television ignored emerging bachata stars in the homeland, its popularity exploded across Latin America and the barrios across the U.S.: Look no further than the runaway success of Aventura in the early aughts.
Latin stars have often been used to spice up otherwise staid pop tracks, exploitative relationships that often serve the interests of the English-speaking star more than anything else. Santos hasn’t shied away from collaborations with such artists, but there’s a big difference: They come to him. When Santos and Usher go toe-to-toe with dueling falsettos on his solo debut Fórmula, Vol. 1, it’s on a bachata song (“Promise”); when Drake courted him on Nothing Was the Same with his line “Spanish girls love me like I’m Aventura,” the resulting collaboration saw Drake singing—in Spanish!—on Fórmula, Vol. 2’s “Odio”. And while the dogshit guest verses that Lil Wayne (“All Aboard”) and Nicki Minaj (“Animales”) contributed to early records may have been throwaways, it’s telling that they were the features, and not the other way around. On Golden, the two Americans featured strictly play the background; Swizz drops some Beatz on “Premio,” Santos’ ballad to his skills of seduction, and while Ne-Yo’s fingerprints are all over the “Golden Intro,” his voice is not. Such is the gravity of Santos’ orbit that when he collaborates with English-speaking artists, they’re the ones doing the assimilating.
Even Spanish-speaking stars are drawn in. Golden features Juan Luis Guerra (“Carmín”), the Dominican superstar who dabbled in several genres but is credited with helping bring bachata to the mainstream, and Julio Iglesias, the Spanish croon-quistador who unwittingly collaborated on Golden’s ode to a man’s best friend…his penis (“El Amigo”). Instant classics like “Ay Bendito” are the kind of jams that bring both adolescents and octogenarians out to the dancefloor at the quinceñera. If Santos is doing any sort of crossing over, this is what it looks like; bridging generations and the various cultures of the Latin diaspora, getting los blanquitos in Santo Domingo to shell out fat stacks of cash to see and hear the music of the campo, and selling out Madison Square Garden and Yankee Stadium.
Santos recently told Rolling Stone that the idea that a Latin star needs to cut an English-speaking record to crossover is a “misconception,” one proved wrong by the runaway success of Luis Fonsi & Daddy Yankee’s summer smash “Despacito” (a remix saw Justin Beiber try on one of Fonsi’s Spanish verses on for size). “I sold out two Yankee Stadiums and all of my hits are in Spanish, and they’re bachata,” he said. “That's a sign that you don’t have to do that. The number one song in the world is a reggaetón called ‘Despacito’ and that’s beautiful.”
“Despacito” proves that Spanish language music is palatable for the mainstream, but we’ve yet to see a global superstar singing in Spanish be fully embraced by the mainstream as anything other than a novelty. Santos’ considerable vocal talents are often tempered by his undeniably corny “Romeo” persona, but the artifice only seems to endear him to his fans even more. On Golden, we see the embodiment of what makes him special; un bachatero with a healthy respect for the working-class roots of the genre, unafraid to pull in influences from across Latinidad. And while Ricky Martin-levels of crossover success might not be realistic for Santos (or bachata), when Santos can flirt with selling a million copies (Formula, Vol. 2) and sell out stadiums throughout the Americas, all while staying true to himself and the fans that propelled him to stardom—does it even matter? | 2017-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony | August 2, 2017 | 7.6 | 6c921344-889c-4546-ad4e-790591f70edc | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | null |
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