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A$AP Mob’s latest group effort features RZA, Frank Ocean, Chief Keef, Quavo and more, but the Mob’s energy and skill are consistently eclipsed by that of their guests. | A$AP Mob’s latest group effort features RZA, Frank Ocean, Chief Keef, Quavo and more, but the Mob’s energy and skill are consistently eclipsed by that of their guests. | A$AP Mob: Cozy Tapes Vol. 2: Too Cozy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/asap-mob-cozy-tapes-vol-2-too-cozy/ | Cozy Tapes Vol. 2: Too Cozy | From the start, the members of the A$AP Mob have worn their influences and ambitions on their sleeves. They’ve name-dropped Dipset, No Limit, Ruff Ryders, and the Wu-Tang Clan, rap crews that managed to project unity while leveraging each member’s individual strengths. Initially, the A$AP Mob seemed poised to join those ranks, quickly establishing its two most charismatic members, A$AP Rocky and A$AP Ferg, as solo stars. However, they’ve since come up short during group outings, failing to expand their influence over rap culture at large. The first A$AP Mob mixtape, 2012’s Lord$ Never Worry, showed that most of its rappers were still unseasoned. By the release of Cozy Tapes Vol. 1: Friends in 2016, the Mob became far more compelling, leaning heavily on Rocky, Ferg, and a handful of guests, instead of shining a light on their lesser-known members.
Style remains a primary concern for the group. Like its predecessor, Vol. 2 opens with a fashion critique (this time by an Instagram meme guy). On the tracks that follow, the production is consistently on-trend, though much of it feels timid and generic compared that of earlier Mob releases. “Perry Aye” feels like a joyless retread of Rocky’s 2011 swag rap sound: a syrupy melody that evokes Future’s “March Madness” played at half speed, a pitched-down spoken-word chorus courtesy of Jaden Smith, unremarkable verses from A$AP Nast, Rocky, and Playboi Carti. On “Blowin’ Minds (Skateboard),” Pi’erre Bourne (the producer behind Carti’s breakout hit “Magnolia”) turns in a cookie-cutter flute-rap instrumental while Chief Keef sleepwalks his way through a marble-mouthed hook. The plunky, dismissive “Please Shut Up,” tries to clear space for the A$AP Mob. But what does Rocky have to tell us? “Living room full of way too many valuables.” At least Gucci Mane manages to get in a few punch lines (“Gucci Mane and A$AP Rocky, I got such a rocky wrist”), his newfound charm providing a bright spot during the tape’s dull first third.
Vol. 2 does fare a bit better as it progresses, with more interesting beats that coax stronger performances out of the Mob and their guests. “Bahamas” sounds like a spaceship struggling to lift off, a perfect match for Lil Yachty’s gleefully surreal lyrics (“I done count multiple commas/We brought in multiple llamas”). “Frat Rules” is as conceptually insufferable as it sounds, though it’s hard to deny Rocky and Big Sean’s chemistry as they trade conquest stories like two keg-pumping Casanovas. Rocky’s show-stopping staccato verse on “Get the Bag” is easily the tape's best and demonstrates that as a rapper, he still leads his pack. Enjoying a moment in the spotlight, A$AP Ant and A$AP Twelvyy do most of the heavy lifting on the crystalline “FYBR (First Year Being Rich),” while the latter gets to show off his breathless flow at length on the icy “Coziest.”
Also just like its predecessor, Vol. 2 closes with a star-studded posse cut. “RAF” drips with excess: Rocky appears alongside Quavo, Carti, Lil Uzi Vert, and not one but two Frank Ocean verses, while the video features the gang modeling runway clothes from Belgian designer Raf Simons’ archives. And yet, “RAF” never feels quite as dynamic as “What Happens,” a raunchy crew cut in the mold of Wu-Tang’s “Dog Shit.” Capturing the freewheeling energy of a cypher, “RAF” finds each rapper vying to bend the listener’s ear, by approaching the beat with a unique texture and flow. Notably, Rocky’s verse is among the least interesting here.
It’s hard not to wonder if the absence of Mob mastermind A$AP Yams, who died in 2015, has something to do with the lack of energy and focus on display throughout most of Cozy Tapes Vol. 2. Where A$AP Mob’s early releases were guided by a clear vision and unifying aesthetic, everyone here is content to follow rap’s reigning trends rather than lead them, a surprising capitulation from what was once New York’s most ambitious hip-hop crew. “I said, ‘I want all of y’all to get on this bus. And be passengers,” RZA told NPR in 2013, describing an early attempt to enlist his band members in Wu-Tang’s barnstorming of hip-hop radio. “And I’m the driver. And nobody can ask me where we going.” A$AP Mob’s bus has never had more passengers aboard: Mob members, magnetic guests, well-wishers and hangers on. And yet, the driver’s absence has never been more deeply felt. | 2017-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-30T21:48:00.000-04:00 | Rap | A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA | August 31, 2017 | 6 | 6c948c17-0fdb-42d1-a204-b2ade8994d07 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
Following in the path of his label-mates Skee Mask and the Zenker Brothers, the Italian producer’s debut album continues to provide a loose-limbed counterargument to more rigid strains of techno. | Following in the path of his label-mates Skee Mask and the Zenker Brothers, the Italian producer’s debut album continues to provide a loose-limbed counterargument to more rigid strains of techno. | Stenny: Upsurge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stenny-upsurge/ | Upsurge | The celebrated techno label Ilian Tape doesn’t actually release all that much techno—at least not in the traditional sense. Founded in 2007 by brothers Dario and Marco Zenker and centered on a small crew of producers, the Munich imprint has always been something of an outlier, a loose-limbed counterargument to the rigid industrial stomp that characterizes so much Berlin techno. For Ilian Tape, broken beats have long been the norm, and in recent years, the label’s path has diverged even further by embracing the sounds of the UK hardcore continuum. Swinging garage rhythms, dubstep bass weight, ’90s rave breaks, brain-rattling jungle—it’s all become part of the Ilian Tape formula.
Few artists have embodied this ethos more than Skee Mask, the longtime Ilian Tape contributor behind beloved, genre-melding albums Shred and Compro. Before last month, only he and the Zenker Brothers had released full-lengths on the label, but they’re now joined by Italian producer Stenny. Part of the Ilian Tape roster since 2012 and based in Munich since 2014, he has been sparing with his output, generally releasing no more than one EP per year.
In 2019, however, he’s upped his game. Back in May, he released Stress Test, an EP whose title track paired skippy 2-step garage with menacing synths and the same sort of thick, syrupy basslines that powered old DMZ records. It’s been one of the year’s biggest tunes. Now, he’s followed that up with Upsurge, his debut album, which includes some similarly sharp club heaters. With its crunchy electro rhythm and seriously brawny bassline, the insistent “Swordfish” is likely the toughest—and best—of the lot, while “BFRB” combines a nimble drum attack with a booming low end that hits like a sledgehammer to the chest. The moody “Psygraph” ramps up the tempo even further, unleashing a fervent jungle beat amid a lingering fog of diaphanous atmospherics, and the drum’n’bass calisthenics continue on “Fast Fade,” its slinky purple melodies shimmering like a sportscar on a moonlit night.
Yet despite this cluster of club-friendly fare, Upsurge frequently operates outside the strict confines of the dancefloor. After years of crafting jagged techno, Stenny has elected to showcase his softer side; large swaths of the record feel notably pensive. Album opener “Water Maze” is a wide-eyed ambient number, its lush environs and colorful synth blossoms tempered by the sound of light rain. Darker but similarly introspective is “Sensitive Habitat,” which keeps its head down as a melancholy drone hovers amid rapid-fire percussion. In contrast, the tranquil “Dew” looks skyward, its twinkling melodies and wafting woodwinds conjuring images of remote Asian monasteries.
There’s a wondrous quality to Upsurge that frequently harkens back to the clumsily named post-dubstep sound that redefined the UK’s electronic-music landscape a decade ago. With his predilection for dreamily glowing melodies and stuttering rhythms, Stenny does occasionally seem to be channeling the early work of artists like Joy Orbison and Mount Kimbie; a song like “Blind Corners” could easily have been released on Hotflush back in 2010. Yet it would be unfair to describe this warm, delicately textured album as a nostalgia exercise. A big part of what made post-dubstep so exciting was its willingness to experiment; producers raised on garage, dubstep, jungle, and other bass-centric sounds expanded their vision, pulling from house, techno, ambient, R&B, IDM, and whatever else they could find while crafting new, mutant forms of electronic music. Stenny, like the rest of his label-mates, has taken the same hybrid approach, only with techno as a starting point. Ilian Tape’s evolution has been gradual, but few outfits outside of the UK have so constructively engaged with the hardcore continuum without falling into shallow mimicry.
Techno has always been rooted in notions of futurism, yet the music itself has often proven to be rather rigid. As recently as a few years ago, the thought of an artist like Stenny dabbling in drum’n’bass would have seemed almost unthinkable, but now, songs like the playful “Whyrl” and the brooding “Cursed” feel like natural extensions of his sound. Things are changing, and Upsurge is an impressive document of Stenny’s ability to flout genre boundaries while delivering introspective and highly personal music. Slowly but surely, techno is moving into the future—even if it doesn’t necessarily sound like techno anymore. | 2019-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ilian Tape | December 18, 2019 | 7.4 | 6c954378-dd39-4243-9d71-6c83c31f9eb3 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
On his debut mixtape, the Interpol frontman doesn't sing or rap, and there's little to suggest his background in a post-punk band. Talib Kweli and El-P turn in a couple of legit verses, but in general, Everybody on My Dick feels intended to spark a brief moment of internet incredulity. | On his debut mixtape, the Interpol frontman doesn't sing or rap, and there's little to suggest his background in a post-punk band. Talib Kweli and El-P turn in a couple of legit verses, but in general, Everybody on My Dick feels intended to spark a brief moment of internet incredulity. | Paul Banks: Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17708-everybody-on-my-dick-like-they-supposed-to-be/ | Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be | This review began with me typing the words "Paul Banks" into the Datpiff search bar. If I got nothing else out of Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be, a rap mixtape from the lead singer of Interpol, I will always have that moment. Scrolling to the comments out of sheer curiosity, I came across one user’s eloquent plea: "stop gentrifying datpiff, white ppl." I sat with that a minute. Then I downloaded Paul Banks' mixtape anyway.
As I listened, the weariness of this tiny protest stuck with me; from its rib-jab of a title on down, Everybody on My Dick Like They Supposed to Be feels intended to spark a quick instance of internet incredulity: a ripple of WTFs in your timeline, a few dumb jokes in comments sections (a favorite being "Obstacle 1: Deez Nutz"). Whenever rock artists start fucking around with rap music, eyebrows raise, with good reason, and the prospect of Paul Banks rapping, with his dour, stentorian moan and deathlessly quotable lyrics, struck me as especially comical. Despite myself, I was nagged by faint curiosities: Would he dare to actually rap? If so, would his lyrics be as clumsy and clueless as this tape’s title? Would he drop mad science? And would any of this be remotely salvageable?
The answers to my low-stakes queries were all variations on "no." No, Banks doesn't sing or rap, and no, none of this is remotely salvageable. Everybody on My Dick mainly consists of Banks’ own beats and instrumentals, which are indistinguishable from most of the ones you hear on YouTube made by well-meaning college sophomores. They're littered with the canned synth pads and stock drum sounds of someone who hasn't spent much time or money on equipment, and the vocal samples strewn throughout lack imagination, to put it gently. "Iron Mike" samples the same old Tyson snippet ("I'm Alexander! He's no Alexander!") that's been used in more than one million rap songs to date (rough estimate). Clips from Miller's Crossing and Robocop float past, signifying zero. They aren't appealingly rudimentary, like Zaytoven or Young Chop; they're just rudimentary. Nowhere on this tape do you sense that Paul Banks actually has a feel for rap instrumentals, let alone a sense of how to make a good one.
And still, he managed to corral co-signs from two legit collaborators. Talib Kweli wanders in on "What's in the Box" (the title is, I'm guessing, a Se7en reference) and drops a hot line where no one is guaranteed to find it: "Fuck the opinion of these celebrities, including me/ They ain't doing me like Jane Fonda in the 70s." El-P also shows up on "Quite Enough" with a vivid, allusive, poorly recorded verse. To Banks’ credit, "Trace", with High Prizm, has a catchy, stabbing piano line, and there’s one pretty little synth sketch ("Show You My Footage") that doesn't sound like a rap song at all and which could almost be something. But there is no effort, vision, or craft in this music. The title and artwork were more than enough; the mp3s don’t even need to exist. | 2013-02-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-02-14T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | February 14, 2013 | 2 | 6c9bc21e-1040-4581-a77b-de6f91ab14bb | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Anchored by a punishing and timely take on Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” this unexpected covers collection finds the audacious Southern band cutting loose. | Anchored by a punishing and timely take on Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” this unexpected covers collection finds the audacious Southern band cutting loose. | Inter Arma: Garbers Days Revisited | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/inter-arma-garbers-days-revisited/ | Inter Arma: Garbers Days Revisited | Summer 2020 is just not the time for a new Inter Arma album. During the last decade, the proudly complicated metal-etcetera quintet have made increasingly sophisticated, even confounding records, turning Odyssean tales into hour-long sagas. Their 2013 breakthrough, Sky Burial, was a brilliant manifesto from Richmond dudes who seemed to embrace Emperor, Skynyrd, and Pink Floyd in equal measure. But last year’s dauntless Sulphur English beat those icons into submission, shaping an inverted symphony of menacingly psychedelic doom and death metal. Listening to Inter Arma’s later albums is like running some labyrinthine gauntlet that may never end—and loving the feeling of finding out. But how many more tests of will do you need right now?
Instead, right on time, Inter Arma have returned with a welcome jolt of largely carefree relief—Garbers Days Revisited, a reverent and riotous collection of eight covers that’s playfully named for a polarizing Metallica landmark and their own fabled Richmond practice space. Inter Arma’s enthusiasm for a good cover is an enduring, endearing feature. They’ve taken on “Fortunate Son” and “Creeping Death” for the hometown crowd, done surprise sets of punk standards, and often teased “Hot for Teacher.” Their records, after all, are testaments to musical erudition, gyres of splintered genres made possible by ecumenical listening. For Garbers Days Revisited (and unlike Metallica), they steer clear of the relatively obscure or rather recent, cutting a wide path through familiar territory—from Ministry to Tom Petty, from Nine Inch Nails to, yes, Prince.
Most of these takes are pure fun, gleeful selections from a collective jukebox. Inter Arma bound through Cro-Mags’ anti-conformity anthem “Hard Times” as if reciting secular scripture memorized as wild kids, shouting out the chorus like they’re singing to the stereo. They prowl through Venom’s “In League with Satan” with devilish relish, using sinister effects to suggest they’re still trolling parents after all these years. “Runnin’ Down a Dream” scans as the allegiant work of the world’s best bar band.
Even when they’re reinventing a song, this mutual esprit is clear. Hüsker Dü’s “The Girl Who Lives on Heaven Hill” is surprisingly apt fodder for their black metal churn. They race through Grant Hart’s youthful ode to the tatterdemalion he loves, smearing the narrative details until only the adolescent exuberance remains. It’s the same guileless feeling that will make you wish the guitar heroics of “Purple Rain,” the record’s loving and lumbering finale, lasted forever—or at least as long as other Inter Arma albums.
The scale of Inter Arma’s music has often subsumed their lyrical ambitions, crowding out the tales of conquest, reckoning, fear, and forgiveness that have anchored their last two records. The cri de cœur of 2016’s Paradise Gallows was to overthrow “those men who wish to exalt themselves/as gods,” though you’d be excused for overlooking it amid the glorious commotion. These covers let them clear up any lingering questions. Their faithful take on Ministry’s “Scarecrow” fortifies the original with a belligerent swing endemic to Southern metal; the opener, it feels like walk-up music for fending off what Al Jourgensen decried as the “rotting corpse of inhumanity.” Their breathless race through “March of the Pigs” picks a similar fight—that is, how to survive a world content to use you for spare parts. (Bonus: Hearing a band as meticulous as Inter Arma approximate these abrupt changes is a stark reminder of how deeply disorienting the Nine Inch Nails hit remains.)
But nothing here is as powerful, convincing, or urgent as Inter Arma’s cover of Neil Young’s “Southern Man,” a song released in 1970 after a feverish decade of civil rights struggles in the face of racist white obduracy. It begins as a country-rock ballad, all maudlin harmonies and strummed acoustics. That’s a feint for the doom and black metal surges that follow, with Mike Paparo screaming the lyrics over blast beats as if delivering Inter Arma’s final commandments.
Garbers Days Revisited transcends novelty status here, reconnecting not only to Inter Arma’s past but to our present. After Young and Lynyrd Skynyrd clashed over their respective regional diss tracks half a century ago, they played nice, becoming buddies who wore one other’s T-shirts and swapped demos. Inter Arma offer no such quarter. These are native Southern sons, railing against their kind with tragically current charges. As the cavalcade of Confederate statues in Inter Arma’s hometown come down, maybe “Southern change,” as Young put it so long ago, “is gonna come at last.” It would be wonderful to hear “Southern Man” someday as a relic and not, again, as contemporary rallying cry.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | July 25, 2020 | 7.5 | 6c9ed0b2-ba00-449a-825b-34026aeaa45d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
After abandoning leftfield disco for a more eclectic brand of weirdness a decade ago, the producer revisits the space disco sounds that made him one of Norway’s original house innovators. | After abandoning leftfield disco for a more eclectic brand of weirdness a decade ago, the producer revisits the space disco sounds that made him one of Norway’s original house innovators. | Bjørn Torske: Byen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bjorn-torske-byen/ | Byen | A 2012 single from the mischievous Scandinavian dance label Sex Tags Mania came packaged with a shout-out: A message on the label of the 12" read, “Dedicated to Erot and Torske for giving Norway a true HOUSE era!” It was no exaggeration. At the turn of the millennium, in a country with no dance music tradition to call its own, Tore Andreas “Erot” Kroknes and Bjørn Torske hit upon a disco-indebted sound that would influence a wide range of their countrymen, from Röyksopp to Cashmere Cat, Annie to Todd Terje. Erot, who produced Annie’s breakout single “The Greatest Hit,” might have become a household name had he not tragically passed away in 2001, at just 23. For the better part of this century, Torske has turned his attention from leftfield disco to plain ol’ leftfield weirdness, as evidenced by the catholic giddiness of 2010’s Kokning and alien gurgle of his 2013 KokEP.
After more than a decade up in the clouds, Torske has slowly come down to the dancefloor again with a string of bristling percussion workouts for Sex Tags as well as the Oslo label Smalltown Supersound. Byen marks his first solo album in eight years and his first record in ages to wholeheartedly embrace the space-disco sound he helped pioneer. But instead of crisp disco drums and claps that would immediately show his hand, what beguiles on Byen is Torske’s gentle way with other instruments. His keys shimmer on “First Movement,” drifting along with a walking bassline, then playfully flitting around the hand drums to give the track the feel of a spiritual jazz number until it slowly gives way to crashing waves and seagulls.
These mellow sounds usher in the contemplative opening of “Clean Air”; for a moment, it seems like Torske might be venturing even deeper into ambient territory. But a bass throb, a conga beat, and a hi-hat pattern perk up after about a minute, and the track struts towards the stratosphere. This is the kind of streamlined space-disco beauty that Torske helped to export in the early 2000s, but “Clean Air” ascends beyond even those heights, as slowly unfurling piano fills and electric keyboard solos cast a pensive mood over the groove. It’s a rare composition that’s suited for both the club and for wistful daydreaming.
Byen’s biggest surprise is not the range of sounds Torske brings in (fans of his previous efforts know eclecticism is his métier) so much as the fact that he remains firmly planted on the dancefloor throughout the whole album. Most of its tracks are DJ-friendly epics that hover around the eight-minute mark, perfect for unfurling slowly within a set. “Chord Control” offers some gentle deep house moments, and “Gata” harkens back to the heady early days of Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas, finding a sweet spot between prog, Italo, and moon-booted disco. But just when the track seems headed for deep space, Torske introduces some out-of-place chanting that starts to drag down the mood.
Recent singles like 2016’s “Fuglekongen” and this year’s “Kickrock” signaled that Torske was returning to dance music: Both featured meatier drums and psychedelic touches that imparted dancefloor dizziness. But Byen feels a little safe and complacent by comparison. Perhaps because he has spent the past decade upending his listeners’ expectations, this largely successful attempt to string together a cohesive set of nu-disco tracks has the odd effect of making him seem kind of predictable.
Although Byen came out of a recent burst of inspiration, with all seven tracks dating back to last year, its 11-minute centerpiece, “Night Call,” sounds like it could have been crafted at almost any point in Torske’s 20-year career. It’s a nimble disco number, full of relentless drums, rubber-band bass, spacey synths, clean guitar strokes, and jungle calls that resemble the cheeky disco and house edits that helped put Norway on the dance music map in the early aughts. Byen might be a decade removed from the form’s peak, and it might not break much new ground, but it does mark a welcome return to space disco for its creator. After years of wandering in the weeds, the idiosyncratic Torske has rediscovered his old path—yet he remains proudly out of step. | 2018-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound | July 11, 2018 | 6.9 | 6ca00b51-f8ae-489c-9955-f86b19c9b801 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Bobby Krlic (aka the Haxan Cloak) scores Ari Aster’s nightmarish new film Midsommar, and the result is transfixing, gorgeous, and terrifying at once. | Bobby Krlic (aka the Haxan Cloak) scores Ari Aster’s nightmarish new film Midsommar, and the result is transfixing, gorgeous, and terrifying at once. | Bobby Krlic: Midsommar (Original Score) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bobby-krlic-midsommar-original-score/ | Midsommar (Original Score) | Bobby Krlic has been crafting ominous, atmospheric work as the Haxan Cloak for ten years, so it’s no surprise his first stab at a horror-film score is so masterful. The director Ari Aster listened to Krlic’s music while writing the script for Midsommar, his follow-up to last year’s brilliant, slow-burning psychological horror breakout Hereditary. Aster decided who better to write the soundtrack than his muse, and the result is transfixing, gorgeous, and terrifying at once. Even without the film, Krlic’s revelatory work stands on its own.
The plot of Midsommar centers on a group of bros who visits remote Scandinavia for a variety of reasons: Pelle is visiting his home village; Josh wants to get some thesis research done; Mark wants to meet women, and Christian is just trying to figure his shit out. Christian has also invited his girlfriend Dani, who has recently suffered a horrible tragedy, in an attempt to repair their relationship, which is hanging by a thread. Whereas Hereditary began in relative mundanity before its plunge into hell, Midsommar throws us into a deranged folk tale within its first fifteen minutes and never lets up for the ensuing two-plus hours. Krlic’s score alternately offers the relief and turns the screws.
The film opens with colorful hand-drawn folkloric images coupled with Krlic’s cheery and romantic “Prophecy.” The piece is a breath of fresh air with cherubic vocals and harp strums—music straight from Disney version of Snow White. It’s the perfect tone for a film in which the hand-stitched floral costumes are just as bright and stunning as the blood that is ultimately shed. During “Gassed,” which accompanies one of the film’s most disturbing scenes, strings cry like nails on a chalkboard, sobs of agony collide with aching violins. Krlic’s drastic tone shifts map precisely onto Aster’s story, but they are just as dramatic on their own.
There’s a sinister aspect to Aster’s choice of setting during the midnight sun. Evil doesn’t come from the shadows; it walks out into the blazing light, rendering the ensuing murder and chaos no more comprehensible. Even though darkness can be terrifying, the routine of day and night provides its own comfort. At first, Krlic’s soundtrack captures the instinctive panic that comes with the upset of environmental and cultural norms. But as Aster’s characters grow acclimated to their new surroundings, he relieves us with symphonic moments of clarity (“The Blessing”) and triumph. “Fire Temple” is his exquisite farewell with strings that writhe with sorrow, with intensity, with relief. In life or death, none of these emotions are exclusive, and Krlic’s work continually reminds us that it’s all one tremendous grey area. | 2019-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Milan | July 10, 2019 | 7.6 | 6ca10fd5-492e-4f55-86dd-6bc980a15c0d | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
On its fifth, most-engaging album, the duo create biographical "sound portraits" of historically and culturally important gay figures, which incorporate details relevant to a particular person's life or practice. | On its fifth, most-engaging album, the duo create biographical "sound portraits" of historically and culturally important gay figures, which incorporate details relevant to a particular person's life or practice. | Matmos: The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5153-the-rose-has-teeth-in-the-mouth-of-a-beast/ | The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast | Matmos lugged a rat cage to a recent Whitney concert so they could play "For Felix (and all the Rats)". Afterward, Drew Daniel mentioned it increased shipping costs exponentially. So then, why bring it? Well, it's a lovely piece. Plus, people are almost as interested in how the San Francisco duo create its sound as what it sounds like: A bowed-cage as symphony offers a sumptuous visual. Using anything from a crayfish's nerve tissue to a cow's reproductive tract, Daniel (who is, we must add, a staff writer for this website) and M.C. Schmidt utilize digital-age musique concrète to create tunefully fractured electronic music.
After giving nose jobs on A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure and providing backbeats to the war between the States on The Civil War, Matmos returns with their fifth, most-engaging full-length, The Rose Has Teeth in the Mouth of a Beast. These 10 works are described as biographical "sound portraits" of historically and culturally important gay figures, which incorporate details relevant to a particular person's life or practice. Displaying a continued mastery of their craft, the songs not only live up to the concepts behind them, they could easily exist without them. But because the theme is there, elaborate packaging offers a different cover image for each icon: Visual portraits of the subjects drawn, sketched, constructed, or painted by Dan Clowes, Jason Mecier, graphic designer Rex Ray, Michael Bernard Loggins, and others.
How's it all work? Well, consider "Rag for William S. Burroughs". The author's family accrued its wealth from the Burroughs Adding Machine Company (later, the Burroughs Corporation), based around his grandfather's invention. After grandpa's death, the company introduced the Burroughs typewriter. Various machines also show up as a central image in Burroughs' work; most famously, typewriters in the nonlinear, hallucinogenic masterpiece, Naked Lunch. The track swivels on a percussive adding machine and the clickity-clack of typists. The ragtime vibe? Burroughs was born in St. Louis, where Scott Joplin, the "father of ragtime," wrote a few of his most famous compositions. At just under 14 minutes, its Mugwump stylings go from Futurist machinations to swingy, piano-based saloon ramble, and then psyched-out hand-drummed raga. A question remains: What are the typists spelling?
Each track is just as thematically tight-- scored and curated to the smallest detail. "Snails and Lasers for Patricia Highsmith" uses the mystery writer's snail obsession-- she supposedly kept hundreds of them as pets, and she wrote about them in works like the short story, "The Snail-Watcher"-- as the slimy composers of that piece. The technique: A laser was pointed at a light-sensitive theremin; snails were let loose within the theremin's range, fucking with its pitch. The result is an ominous, hard-boiled brushed jazz piece accented with what sounds like a harpsichord flourish. It eventually turns into a bleakly paranoid theremin landscape as the snails frolic in slow motion.
One of the poppier productions is "Solo Buttons For Joe Meek", a crisp 1960s surf-rock anthem on which the Kronos Quartet add a layer of melancholic strings to the song's space-age bachelor joyousness. By track's end, summertime fun recedes in favor of the elegantly funereal. Joe Meek? He was a tone deaf, dyslexic 60s British record producer known in part for his quirky, deftly produced instrumental works-- sometimes fleshed out with space-age effects. He killed his landlady and then himself in 1967; the track manages to score the entire trajectory of his too-brief life.
The scraping, mechanical "Roses and Teeth for Ludwig Wittgenstein" is the most traditional bit of musique concrète here. Perhaps the oddest (most obviously brainy) tracks on the album, it's offered up to the complex Austrian philosopher, focusing on a conundrum paragraph from his "Philosophical Investigations" read by Björk and the composers Laetitia Sonami and Marcus Schmickler, among others. Wittgenstein sets it up more elegantly, but after stating that "A new-born child has no teeth. A goose has no teeth. A rose has no teeth," he supposes what would happen if a cow shit on a rose. Fittingly, the percussion is played with roses. There's also a goose honk, cow sounds, and manure is incorporated (somehow), etc. The final noise blast is pure industrial spillage. Well, philosophy homework was never quite like this.
Another piece based primarily around a written text is "Tract For Valerie Solanas". The same way Sunn 0))) was nailed for recording Xasthur in a coffin, Matmos will get a lot of column space for playing a cow uterus and vagina as tribute to the woman best known for shooting Andy Warhol. Sunn 0))) was aiming for claustrophobia and positioning Xasthur as cryptic solo artist; in a similarly smart way, the moo parts are a great pun on both the cow's goods (its reproductive tract) and Solanas's S.C.U.M. Manifesto (a feminist tract). Score.
Other standouts include "Semen Song For James Bidgood", a haunting, trance-style piano-based ballad which features Zeena Parkins on harp and Antony on vocals, "Steam and Sequins for Larry Levan", a rump-shaking disco mutation in honor of the Paradise Garage DJ, and the funkified "Public Sex For Boyd McDonald", which incorporates whispery, quivvery recordings made at the San Francisco sex club Blow Buddies.
There are a few moments when the concept's cooler than the result, but in general The Rose Has Teeth's experiments result in frenetic dance tracks doubling as reading lists. Throughout, Matmos smartly mix high-culture icons, underground heroes, and cult legends, consuming objects and texts that transform everyday items (and lives) into something beautiful and strange. All said, the two are lucky the album doesn't stink: If it had, Wittgenstein's defecating cow would've offered a pretty great metaphorical diss. | 2006-05-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2006-05-09T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Matador | May 9, 2006 | 8 | 6ca690f3-437c-4084-9507-9171e328a7fa | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
A devotional prayer for ill relatives inspires some of the Baltimore ambient musician’s most engulfing and moving songs yet. | A devotional prayer for ill relatives inspires some of the Baltimore ambient musician’s most engulfing and moving songs yet. | Ami Dang: Meditations Mixtape, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ami-dang-meditations-mixtape-vol-1/ | Meditations Mixtape, Vol. 1 | On last year’s Parted Plains, Baltimore ambient musician Ami Dang used other people’s stories to express herself, looking to Indian and Middle Eastern folktales as inspiration for avant-garde, beat-driven sitar and synth soundscapes. The songs were admirably dynamic and ambitious—boisterous one moment and brooding the next—but also felt disorganized. The mesh of sounds never quite related to the texts they referenced, or coalesced into something greater than their sum. On her latest project, Meditations Mixtape Vol. 1, Dang slows down and turns inwards, making music inspired by the Sikh hymns her family listens to together.
A few months ago, Dang’s uncle and aunt became sick with coronavirus. Her mother asked her to perform a shabad, or a hymn, at their family’s online celebration of Vaisakhi, a Sikh holiday. After her performance, Dang was reminded of the power of her voice and of these prayers. Over about 10 days in April, while in isolation, she recorded the four songs that appear on this EP. Dang’s emotional connection to this music is evident; these are some of her most engulfing and moving songs yet.
Though devotional music often improvises from traditional song structures, most Hindustani classical music begins with a freeform introduction when the musician plays with melody and sets the mood but hasn’t yet introduced any meter. The second phase is marked by the introduction of a percussionist, and the third by an increase in tempo. With the exception of “Simplicity Mind Tool,” which uses an acidic synth line to establish a gnawing sense of propulsion, Dang’s songs linger in the exploratory phase. Each meanders and expands, filling the room like a pleasant fog. On “Satnam Waheguru” and “Tension, Tension, Release,” synth and sitar seem to intertwine on the atomic level. They create a droning cloud that cushions Dang’s chanted vocals, which sound richer and more mature than ever. “Ajooni” is wordless but similarly expansive, as a twangy sitar line ambles across starry synth.
Inspired by introductions, these songs do sound somewhat unfinished, like exercises rather than completed pieces. If they only unfurled a bit further, they would be even more immersive. As it is, each song on Meditations Mixtape Vol. 1 feels a bit like talking to a good friend on the phone and being forced to hang up just as you move beyond casual chit chat. The album title suggests future iterations, and you can’t help but think ahead, as if this first volume were a warm-up to something greater.
Though Meditations Mixtape Vol. 1 grew from personal experience, it is also intended to be of service. Whether Dang is chanting the Sikh meditative phrase “Satnam waheguru,” or simply singing the notes “ni” and “sa” (the Hindustani classical equivalent of “ti” and “do”), she encourages the listener to ruminate on unity and togetherness. The lyrics of “Simplicity Mind Tool”—“By meditating and vibrating on oneness with humanity, you will become steady and stable”—make this intention explicit. In liner notes accompanying “Tension, Tension, Release,” Dang encourages the listener to breathe in and out with the music, meditate, and “re-evaluate your relationship to the material goods around you and remember that the only thing that is going to get us through this is love, belief in humanity and lifting up everyone.” Though the song is certainly soothing, you’ll have to do the work of personal transformation yourself.
But for me, who doesn’t come to the album with particular spiritual intent, the power of these songs lies not so much in their utility as in the poignancy and specificity of Dang’s perspective. It can sometimes be hard to understand what unity and togetherness mean in the abstract, but it’s not difficult to empathize with someone who’s moved to pray for a family member. There’s a new focus to these songs, a confidence that’s blossomed as Dang strips back her sound and relays stories only she can tell. When you imagine her recording them in solitude, reaching out to someone unreachable, the already evocative vocal harmonizations transmit a gut-wrenching mixture of mourning and hope. | 2020-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Leaving | June 11, 2020 | 6.9 | 6ca7d30f-6852-4464-b000-e9c0ca69d336 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Joe Plummer has played with Black Heart Procession, Modest Mouse, the Shins, and more. His debut solo album Built In Sun, with Black Heart Procession’s Pall Jenkins on vocals, delivers exactly the kind of open, upfront Pacific Northwest indie rock you’d expect from a guy who’s long made a living playing it. | Joe Plummer has played with Black Heart Procession, Modest Mouse, the Shins, and more. His debut solo album Built In Sun, with Black Heart Procession’s Pall Jenkins on vocals, delivers exactly the kind of open, upfront Pacific Northwest indie rock you’d expect from a guy who’s long made a living playing it. | Joe Plummer: Built In Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20886-built-in-sun/ | Built In Sun | Every music scene has a few players who seem to be everywhere at once, always open to whatever opportunities comes their way. For the last decade, drummer Joe Plummer has been one of those guys, splitting his time between bands around the West Coast. Among his more notable gigs: He manned the kit for the Black Heart Procession, traveled with Modest Mouse during their boom years, replaced Jesse Sandoval after James Mercer rebooted the Shins, backed Michael Cera in Mister Heavenly, and, most recently, became the latest addition to the Cold War Kids. He may not be a big name, but he could probably write a pretty decent memoir one day.
Plummer carries over some lessons from all of those bands on his debut solo album Built In Sun, which delivers exactly the kind of open, upfront Pacific Northwest indie rock you'd expect from a guy who's long made a living playing it. The album wasn't originally intended to be such a direct reflection of his resume. Plummer had conceived it as a cinematic instrumental work, but began fishing the songs out to some of his singer pals once his focus shifted to more familiar territory. One of them responded so enthusiastically he became the project's designated voice: Black Heart Procession's Pall Jenkins, whose band had quietly gone on hiatus in 2013.
Compared to some of the singers in Plummer's circle, Jenkins isn't an especially glamorous recruit. He lacks the star power and dynamism of James Mercer or Isaac Brock, and Built In Sun probably would've been a more interesting album if Plummer had gone the rotating-vocalist route instead. But he and Jenkins have an easy chemistry that flatters his casual tunes, and Jenkins is a more versatile singer than Black Heart Procession's albums let on. That band usually confined Jenkins to the role of a sullen doomsayer, a part he played so convincingly it became difficult to imagine him as anything other than a buzzkill. Here Jenkins goes wherever the songs let him, relishing the chance to stretch out a bit.
Jenkins announces his gameness on opener "Honeybear", a hurried garage-rocker, crooning over Plummer's piping organ with gregarious abandon. David Bazan and Cody Votolato sit in on the woozy, Built to Spill-ish "Winters Fall" and he leads them through a merry sing-along chorus. And though Jenkins smuggles his share of macabre images into the album, with lyrics about arrow-pierced skin, broken bones, and abandoned dreams, he sings even the bleakest of them as if swinging a raised pint. Even "13 Souls", the closest Built In Sun comes to Black Heart territory (just look at that title), is bright and cheery, a lament that's played for a laugh. Only "Due to Rain", a detour into Public Image Ltd.'s claustrophobic dub-rock, teases the darker, more experimental turn these sessions could have taken.
Plummer has made an album like this before. His 2003 self-titled release with the Magic Magicians had a similar setup, pairing the drummer with another regional indie vet, 764-Hero's John Atkins, for some very low-stakes rock'n'roll. That album didn't make much of a splash at the time and it's barely remembered today, but it's still a pleasure to revisit, precisely because of the same casual attitude that made it so easy to overlook. Built In Sun will probably sound good a few years from now for the same reason. It's a likably modest work from a musician who has spent the bulk of his career backing distinctive songwriters with complicated visions, without forgetting the rewards of making carefree music just for the sake of it, too. | 2015-08-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-08-06T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | People In A Position To Know | August 6, 2015 | 6 | 6ca83899-0022-4d51-ad23-9fe1ffc49f55 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The Men retreat to their caustic roots with a raw and furious album that, while often predictable, is still a prime example of how well they rage. | The Men retreat to their caustic roots with a raw and furious album that, while often predictable, is still a prime example of how well they rage. | The Men: Devil Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22519-devil-music/ | Devil Music | The story of the Men goes something like this: In 2011, the Brooklyn four-piece, led by guitarists and singers Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi, release Leave Home on Sacred Bones, the band’s second and first widely-available LP. Its strangely inviting blend of post-hardcore, noise-metal and shoegaze is a shot in the arm to the genre. The band’s profile rises. And then—surprisingly, inexorably—the Men ditch the art-punk game for classic-rock traditionalism over the course of three short years, embracing Tom Petty, the Band, and Crazy Horse for three often-brilliant records.
By 2014, the end of that initial prolific run, the Men (by then a quintet) had charted a straight path from indie rock's outer reaches (Leave Home) to its catchier, college-rock middle ground (2012’s near-perfect Open Your Heart) to something approaching dad rock for drunks (2013’s New Moon, 2014’s underrated Tomorrow’s Hits). In that time, the Men drove steadily away from noise and bombast toward harmonies and hooks, without entirely scrubbing away the grime that first defined them.
Devil Music spins the car around 180 degrees and heads roaring back toward the psych-punk abandon of the Men’s early years. Released on the band’s own We Are the Men Records, and the crew’s first since parting ways with producer/multi-instrumentalist Ben Greenberg, the caustic, stubbornly lo-fi Devil Music sizzles like a hot coal—the Stooges, MC5, and Mudhoney compressed into an angry little ball.
On first listen, the album’s nine tracks can sound a little half-baked, like the band simply set up some recording gear in their practice room and ran through a few songs they had yet to entirely finish. Which is pretty much what they did: The quartet tracked nearly everything on Devil Music, including vocals, live to 1/2-inch tape in their basement practice space over the course of a single weekend. Some of the lyrics were improvised on the spot. While the feral recording quality is certainly an asset, the songwriting isn’t as nuanced or well-considered as it is on their best tracks—“Open Your Heart,” “Half Angel Half Light,” “Different Days.” Lead-single “Lion’s Den”—in many ways the record’s mission statement—is a stumbling panic attack of screeching guitar, crashing cymbals, and skronking sax.
So, yes, the melodies are harder to find. Though clearly that was the point: The Men weren’t trying to make a record you could sing along to. Devil Music is sweat, heat, and brute force above all. The song titles themselves suggest what the music does to your body: “Hit the Ground,” “Fire,” “Gun,” “Violate.” “Dreamer” is an amphetamine rush of Motörhead riffs and narcotized synths; the snarling, feedback-drenched guitars on “Violate” sound like they might rip through your chest, like Lou Reed’s paint-peeling solos on “I Heard Her Call My Name.” The Men sound exhausted by the urban grind, yet defiant. “I’m sick and tired of the city ’cause it gives me no place to hide,” Perro half-screams on “Fire.” On “Hit the Ground,” he vows to burn the whole place to the ground.
Ragers are in the Men’s wheelhouse, and they pull these songs off with savage aplomb. The addition of that skronking sax, which pops up throughout the record, is a welcome addition to the Men’s manic sound. Few other bands display such a giddy, almost childlike enthusiasm for rock ‘n’ roll catharsis. And Devil Music is an endearing testament to that passion.
Yet it’s disappointing that the Men felt compelled, for really the first time, to look backward. A band that built a legacy out of defying expectations and embracing a grab bag of genres for each new record—folk, classic rock, post-rock, noise, SST indie—returns to their scuzz-punk beginnings to make the most uniform album of their career. The Men are at their best when they’re testing the limits of their abilities, singing harmonies and writing hooks that wrench them out of their comfort zones. For all its wrath and fury, Devil Music feels safe and predictable. It’s a hell of a party, but it’s one we’ve been to before. | 2016-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | We Are The Men | November 12, 2016 | 6.8 | 6cb20554-1c4a-4014-889c-ecac95daf933 | John S.W. MacDonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-s.w. macdonald/ | null |
Aesop Rock teams up with NYC underground rapper Homeboy Sandman for a short EP. The two have a distinct chemistry that mirrors Rock's fellow Def Jux alum El-P's connection with Killer Mike. | Aesop Rock teams up with NYC underground rapper Homeboy Sandman for a short EP. The two have a distinct chemistry that mirrors Rock's fellow Def Jux alum El-P's connection with Killer Mike. | Aesop Rock / Homeboy Sandman: Lice EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21349-lice-ep/ | Lice EP | In the years following the decision to put Def Jux on what now seems like a permanent hiatus, Aesop Rock has found formidable creative partners in both Kimya Dawson as The Uncluded and fellow DJX alumnus Rob Sonic in the criminally underappreciated outfit Hail Mary Mallon. But there’s a kind of magic that happens between himself and fellow New York rapper Homeboy Sandman, a kinship in their respective approaches to the craft of rhyming that unites them despite their contrasting styles. Aesop has a penchant for gliding across the rooftops of beats while Sandman flows through them like a spirit, creating an off-kilter duality that updates the classic MC duo format. And both characteristics intersect one another with a surprising sense of fluidity on the duo’s debut EP Lice.
"On a tour of the wild frontier lying awake/I tell myself it’s all to broaden my societal take/And while I sorta still believe it I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’d like to curl up on Long Island and die," he confesses on "So Strange Here", preceded by Sandman, who opens the song lamenting on the shallow nature of today’s hip-hop fan: "Thought they loved me for my bars and my hooks/It turns out they love me cause of where I'm from and how I look." On closing track "Get A Dog", producer Charles Hamilton transforms a sample nicked from rap-metal has-beens Linkin Park into a genuine banger as Aes reels off devastating couplets: "Yapple Dapple, rappers like crabs in a barrel/Get trapped and blanched and snap crackled/I’m Ginsberg interning at the Magic Castle/I’m Bob Ross, happy accidents and rad afro." And then he tags out to Homeboy to hit the listener with this knockout punch in the fifth verse: "My skin is amber like a ripened bud/My adversaries tryna spill my capillaries full of Viking blood."
Within an all-too-brief span of five cuts and 17 minutes, Aesop Rock and Homeboy Sandman utilize the differences in their distinct abilities with a pad, pen and microphone to achieve a creative sense of oneness arguably on par with the connection enjoyed by El-P and Killer Mike. And like they did with the last two Run The Jewels records, the duo made this impressive extended player available for free right over here. Let’s just hope that the score to the upcoming Dave Bautista star vehicle Bushwick isn’t the only thing on Aesop Rock’s docket in 2016. Indeed, a proper full-length from this most formidable new tag team is only right and natural. | 2016-01-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 4, 2016 | 7.7 | 6cb7df44-04d1-4af1-a15e-5f80736db5dd | Ron Hart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ron-hart/ | null |
On their full-length debut, the New York duo of Praveen Sharma (Percussion Lab, Braille) and Travis Stewart (Machinedrum) nimbly incorporate current bass music trends and arrive at a sound that's familiar and rich. | On their full-length debut, the New York duo of Praveen Sharma (Percussion Lab, Braille) and Travis Stewart (Machinedrum) nimbly incorporate current bass music trends and arrive at a sound that's familiar and rich. | Sepalcure: Sepalcure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16062-sepalcure/ | Sepalcure | Bass producers tend to treat innovation like daily prayer: If not duly performed at regular intervals, some ill-defined Very Bad Thing will happen. The thirst for innovation is such that some scene-watchers have likened current bass music to post-punk, stratifying its sounds in search of growth. Previous British dance movements-- drum'n'bass and garage-- found such terrifying end-games that the bass scene has made a constant effort to never stop swimming. To brand an artist as someone who simply executes, however masterfully, is to damn him with faint praise. Increasingly, bass producers have looked backward (thumping, linear 4/4 bangers) or forward (mutated footwork fever-dreams), largely ignoring (as Pitchfork writer Philip Sherburne put it in discussion), the fertile terrain between Burial and Joy Orbison.
On their debut full-length for Scuba's Hotflush label, New York duo Sepalcure nimbly incorporate current trends but arrive at a sound-- politely mysterious rhythms put to life by haunted vocal samples-- that's familiar and rich. Sepalcure is a collaboration between two dance veterans, Praveen Sharma and Travis Stewart. That their album scans as a bit of a melting pot should not surprise. Sharma runs dance media hub Percussion Lab and records misty, retro-futuristic house as Braille. Stewart hops genres as Machinedrum, whose footwork-fusion album Room(s) is widely regarded as one of the year's best dance releases (I regret underrating its idiosyncrasies).
Admittedly influenced by the scores of talent massing on forward-thinking bass labels like Hotflush and Hessle Audio, their collaboration was the result of boredom and opportunity (Sharma's girlfriend, visual artist Sougwen Chung, was studying abroad; she handles all of the group's visuals). Some combination of serendipity and skill saw the duo's first tracks fall into the hands of Mary Anne Hobbs and Paul Rose (Scuba); two well-received EPs later, a short two-week recording session birthed Sepalcure.
That Sepalcure is so balanced and organized can be attributed to the experience and seeming calm of its principals; that it sounds so lively and inviting is the greater achievement. While syncopated rhythms-- pattering cymbals and kicks with now-familiar handclaps-- and probing bass sponge up dubstep's urban paranoia, Sharma and Stewart add plenty of more explicitly emotional touches to their work. How else to explain the Who's "See Me, Feel Me" stretched transparent over, um, "See Me Feel Me"? (And how the hell did that sample get cleared?) Or the hammy Italo-disco pianos that build up under the fingernails of "Hold On" and "Yuh Nuh See"? Sepalcure's moody haze and mid-song shifts prevent it from being dance-floor fodder ("The One" is a welcome exception), but neither is it music by which to lonesomely stare at rainstorms.
Vocals play a prominent role throughout. During their best moments, Sharma and Stewart subject rave-y house divas to dubstep's pinched nausea, turning the gospel-like fervor of their sources into grimy hymns. (Those new to the group should acquaint themselves with early single "Love Pressure".) "Breezin" is especially devoted, its tremulous refrain-- "Mountains high and low!"-- ascending above its buzzy synths. The duo recorded many of the instruments live, and there is a punch especially to the pianos (electric and acoustic) that their contemporaries frequently lack. They layer these instruments expertly, and tracks such as lead single "Pencil Pimp" and "Eternally Yrs" function as bass-y, house-y suspensions: discrete parts bound by weightless float. Tufts of melody chunk off "Yuh Nuh See", as its meticulous, six-note sequence snakes around a vocal hum and sprinkled, choral beauty.
Straightforward descriptions of Sepalcure-- a finely manicured mix of dubstep, house, UK funky, and footwork-- make it sound pedestrian, even contrived. The reality is anything but; Sharma and Stewart have found an alleyway that few other producers have traversed in 2011. Bass producers can treasure-hunt all they want, but increasingly it feels like someone should stay behind to stack the doubloons. Stewart is moving to Berlin, casting doubt on Sepalcure's future. If they never record again, their collaboration may mirror their achievement here: an evolutionary moment, familiar and brief enough to gloss over, rich enough to return to. | 2011-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hotflush | November 22, 2011 | 8.4 | 6cbf2037-849e-4c4c-be63-54bd3c299aa3 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The third album by Icelandic composer, Björk producer, and Bedroom Community founder Valgeir Sigurðsson is a score for a Stephen Petronio ballet that pits emotive chamber music (including piano from Nico Muhly) against furtive electronic frequencies. | The third album by Icelandic composer, Björk producer, and Bedroom Community founder Valgeir Sigurðsson is a score for a Stephen Petronio ballet that pits emotive chamber music (including piano from Nico Muhly) against furtive electronic frequencies. | Valgeir Sigurðsson: Architecture of Loss | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17107-architecture-of-loss/ | Architecture of Loss | I attend several contemporary dance performances a year and encounter a few more through recorded scores. Based on this limited sample, it seems almost mandatory for modern choreographers to power dancers with blends of acoustic classical instruments and electronic tones by the likes of Ben Frost or Gavin Bryars. The third full-length by Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson, a score for a ballet by Stephen Petronio, is a textbook case of this approach. Architecture of Loss pits gravely emotive chamber music against furtive electronic frequencies. Drawing from the ballet's concepts of loss and forgetting, it's like something sneaky by Anton Webern and something subliminal from Touch Music playing in synch: bold, yearning themes often break free, but feelings of occlusion and indeterminacy linger.
Except for his production and engineering work with Björk and many others, Sigurðsson is best-known for founding the influential Bedroom Community label, a lightning rod at the juncture where the ambition of classical music meets the aesthetics of indie music-- though it's reckless to breezily dispense with the purview of a label that launched the recording careers of people as individually diverse (yet collectively related) as Frost, Nico Muhly, and Sam Amidon. All of the label's different strands gather in Sigurðsson's music, which can be sweepingly neo-romantic and sweetened with folk melodies à la Bartók while remaining alert to the possibilities of microtonality, mechanization, and minimalism.
Muhly plays piano on Architecture of Loss, and his fans will find much to admire in Sigurðsson, whose piano writing treads the line between the "Moonlight Sonata" and "Mad Rush". His string writing is more astringent, full of naggingly prolonged notes and wrenched transitions. Using a small ensemble, a deliberately limited vocabulary, and electronic processing, Sigurðsson doggedly transforms minimal material, much of it focused on the viola, stepping out of its habitual niche below the violin and above the cello for a star turn. The viola's dominance speaks to the album's equivocal nature; the space it explores between high and low, violence and calm, melody and miasma. Baritone guitar and the occasional trombone ballast the low-end, while pianos, electronics, and even an aquaphone-- the coolest instrument ever, played by crack auxiliary man Shahzad Ismaily-- fill out the upper register.
In such a bright spotlight, it's a good thing that violist Nadia Sirota plays with such force and character. Very occasionally, the stridency of her tone overwhelms finer moods with a general buzzing anxiety. But mostly, Sigurðsson's cagey writing and Sirota's impetuous phrasing blend into music that appears to make sudden, inspired decisions of its own accord. Her playing is riveting on "World Without Ground", where long tones pulsing in different instruments surge over a thumping pizzicato groove. Sirota unleashes ghostly sheens and ivy-like lines that orbit the backbeat in widening arcs, adding a potent centrifugal force to the song rather than another linear one. And one of the best moments comes on "Between Monuments" when it unexpectedly bursts into a world-shaking homestretch with stomach-dropping portamentos in the viola. The recurrence of long, stuck notes feels thin by the time of "Big Reveal", but a rugged electronic scaffold and corkscrewing motivic material soon liven it up.
Not long ago, Sigurðsson was named one of NPR's "Top 100 Composers Under 40", and yet it still feels like we are only seeing the beginnings of what he can do. As a producer and engineer, he has spent a lot of time working in the background, using his technical expertise to help other people realize their visions. He even tends to play a contingent role in his own music. Of his three albums, two-- Architecture of Loss and Draumalandid-- are scores. Only his first and most ambient-influenced record, Ekvílibríum, contains unfettered original music, and even that one was partly worked around the voices of people such as Bonny "Prince" Billy. All these scores and collaborations are great, but with Sigurðsson's compositional talent proven, they can't help but feel a little like bided time. What I'm eager to hear is something with a title that isn't shared with a ballet or a film-- something more along the lines of Valgeir Sigurðsson, Op. 1. | 2012-09-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-09-28T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Bedroom Community | September 28, 2012 | 7 | 6cc06426-eea2-49bc-a0bc-a882e90ffebb | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
After the breakup of Japan, this reluctant star retreated into a series of four albums—including his masterpiece—built on noir balladry, instrumental abstraction, and an abiding sense of distance. | After the breakup of Japan, this reluctant star retreated into a series of four albums—including his masterpiece—built on noir balladry, instrumental abstraction, and an abiding sense of distance. | David Sylvian: Secrets of the Beehive / Brilliant Trees / Alchemy: An Index of Possibilities / Gone to Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-sylvian-secrets-of-the-beehive-brilliant-trees-alchemy-an-index-of-possibilities-gone-to-earth/ | Brilliant Trees / Alchemy: An Index of Possibilities / Gone to Earth / Secrets of the Beehive | David Sylvian’s first four solo albums, newly reissued on vinyl, exude an intense but ambiguous loneliness. “I wrestle with an outlook on life that shifts between darkness and shadowy light,” he sings during his most forthright song, “Orpheus.” Throughout these records, he does battle—with his outlook, with his past, with his expectations. As a singer, he seems to avert eye contact, his peculiar baritone formal and serious, classically beautiful but wary of sounding that way. As an arranger, accompanied by masters of ambiance like Ryuichi Sakamoto and Robert Fripp, he gives himself room to wander. “The kind of people who immediately turn on a television when they are alone don’t enjoy my music,” Sylvian once observed. “It makes them terribly uncomfortable.”
Before going solo, Sylvian found himself, like Scott Walker and Brian Wilson, playing the uncomfortable role of young pop icon. Commercially successful and critically loathed, Japan were a New Romantic group in which the inventive fretless bassist Mick Karn often outshone Sylvian, the dashing frontman. Japan formed while its members were classmates in South London, and their trajectory reflects the swiftly evolving taste of precocious teenagers. When they started in 1974, they sounded like the New York Dolls. (Born David Alan Batt, Sylvian chose a not-so-subtle pseudonym.) As they rose to prominence, they sounded like Roxy Music. Eventually, they discovered the avant-garde.
That last touchstone was no phase; it has defined Sylvian’s career ever since. The sound that Sylvian explored as a solo artist—eerie, atmospheric, solitary—came into focus on Japan’s fifth and final album, 1981’s Tin Drum, and its sparse highlight, “Ghosts.” Where Sylvian’s best hooks had once come from pairing oblique phrases to new wave rhythms, he somehow found power now within the two syllables of the word “wilder,” melding them together with swelling vibrato. In a TV performance just before Japan broke up, he strips the song down to just acoustic guitar and voice, leaving long gaps of silence between each verse. “This whole year has been, like, drifting apart,” he tells the interviewer about Japan’s imminent dissolution. Speaking from the drift, he sounds confident.
All of Sylvian’s solo music has luxuriated in that space. Post-Japan, he began collaborating with Sakamoto on singles like “Forbidden Colours,” his lyrical accompaniment to Sakamoto’s exquisite theme for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. By the time Sylvian released his solo debut Brilliant Trees in 1984, his group of musicians included Sakamoto, members of Can and Pentangle, and atmospheric trumpeters Jon Hassell and Mark Isham. The album remains his most immediate work, featuring some of his most memorable melodies (“Red Guitar,” “The Ink in the Well”) and daring explorations like the nearly nine-minute title track. It’s a remarkable opening statement, indicative of the singular world Sylvian was able to establish, even when surrounded by such rich talent.
His next two releases—the entirely instrumental Alchemy: An Index of Possibilities and the double album Gone to Earth—are more transitional. The former is a strange hodgepodge of collaborations and soundtrack material. Still believing Sylvian’s appearance and cult of personality to be his biggest selling point, a video company asked him to participate in a documentary; Sylvian responded with an abstract collage filmed in Tokyo, soundtracked by new ambient compositions included here. The record is vivid and atmospheric (particularly Side B, the longform piece “Steel Cathedrals”), but it’s more like a blueprint for the collaborative work to come. This new edition—its first complete release on vinyl—makes this reissue series more comprehensive, but it remains an album more interesting in concept than practice.
Gone to Earth is more essential. Split into an LP of traditional compositions and an instrumental companion, its scope summarizes where Sylvian had been and foreshadows his next moves. “That album was put together piecemeal,” he later reflected. “I ended up with this… incohesive collection of material that I somehow had to make sense of.” It’s a marvel how coherent it feels. Some songs border on noir balladry, like the gorgeous “Silver Moon,” while others are almost gothic, including “Taking the Veil” and “Before the Bullfight.” You can sense Sylvian peeling away the dramatic flourishes that made Brilliant Trees so bold. The ambient side, featuring guitar contributions from Fripp and Bill Nelson, offers shadows where once there were songs.
If Gone to Earth feels like a labored portrait of the artist, then its follow-up was made on instinct. Released just a year later, Sylvian’s masterpiece, Secrets of the Beehive, arrived quickly. “Each track was written in one sitting,” he has noted. Sakamoto’s string arrangements appear mostly just to vanish, and Sylvian sings uncharacteristically from behind acoustic guitar or a piano. He is a kind of live vanishing act, a singer/songwriter dissolving into fog. “September” suggests a jazz standard until it’s abruptly snuffed out in less than two minutes. “The Boy With a Gun” and “The Devil’s Own” take on varied evils but resolve without a hint of redemption. Conceptually heavy but structurally light, Secrets of the Beehive seems to forecast a storm that lingers in the distance.
The album’s quick creation involved abandoning pieces that had once seemed central to the work as a whole, and it does feel like a statement with the core scooped out. This only adds to its mysterious pull. During the brightest moment, “Let the Happiness In,” Sylvian sings over lapping percussion and a brass section that mimics foghorns. Through the dusk, Sylvian prays for the “agony to stop” as the arrangement opens into something that sounds like peace. “As a listener,” he has said, “I prefer to be taken through the stages of doubt before being shown the way out.” Few albums suspend you so completely.
All of this, of course, can seem a bit bleak. This intensity subsequently pushed Sylvian to seek spiritual guidance and shake things up creatively. Following the release of Secrets of the Beehive and his first-ever solo tour, he focused more on collaborative work, from a pair of ambient albums with Holger Czukay and two excellent releases with Fripp to music with artists like Fennesz decades later. These four records, then, mark a distinct phase of his career—likely the last time his work would be received by a mass audience, establishing a path toward the reclusive future he dreamed of.
In Martin Power’s biography of Sylvian, The Last Romantic, early manager Simon Napier-Bell recalls the young artist confiding, “I want to be a minor rock star.” It’s a humble, self-deprecating remark that rings true so many years later: His music remains a glowing source of solitude, all driven by a desire to be hidden but sought after—a celebration of all things lost and unnamed. | 2019-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | February 23, 2019 | 9.1 | 6cc1206a-77eb-47cf-b459-d1585032978b | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Canadian producer takes steps toward stripping down his laid-back house sound, but the rosy glow of his previous releases remains. | The Canadian producer takes steps toward stripping down his laid-back house sound, but the rosy glow of his previous releases remains. | Project Pablo: There’s Always More at the Store EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/project-pablo-theres-always-more-at-the-store-ep/ | There’s Always More at the Store EP | The Canadian house producer Patrick Holland likely baffled more than a few heads when he admitted in a recent profile that one of his biggest youthful influences was not dance music but the Dave Matthews Band. But perhaps that’s not so strange. There’s no obvious through line from the jam band to Project Pablo, Holland’s primary production handle, but both share an inclination for breezy, melodic, jazz-inflected grooves. Though the Vancouver native now calls Montreal home, his aesthetic hews closely to the laid-back sound of West Coast labels like Mood Hut and Pacific Rhythms.
Since releasing a promising debut on the now-shuttered 1080p cassette label in 2015, Project Pablo has kept up a steady stream of singles on labels ranging from Brooklyn’s Let’s Play House to Lone’s Magicwire to Holland’s own Sounds of Beaubien Ouest. There’s Always More at the Store showcases a few new wrinkles to his sound while also reminding us that he can also easily bang out a cool beat, too. “Napoletana” is closest to his recent run: crisp snares and hi-hats, slinking bass, and zigzagging keyboard line, with some gorgeous, hazy chords behind it all. It’s catchy, but one gets the notion that Pablo has dozens of unreleased jams just like this.
Elsewhere he moves into new areas. “Remind Me Tomorrow” features a minimal-techno pulse echoing in a metallic corridor. It’s about as chilly as Pablo can get, but a warm glow soon suffuses it, thanks to a fuzzy synth wash and a winsome motif that arises midway through the track. “Last Day” is a pleasant enough ambient piece for piano and guitar, but rather than letting it develop, he treats it as a mere interlude. Maybe Holland will risk giving such ruminations a bit more space to evolve in the future.
Echoing pings and programmed drums ricochet around the EP’s headiest entry, “Less and Less.” The track playfully dances between tingling electro, the charming sound of the Canadian Riviera, and Basic Channel’s dubby minimalism; it’s all held together by a sidewinding, minor-key synth melody. The eight-minute closer “I Heard You Breathing” features Holland’s slipperiest beat here; paired with an eloquent melody, it’s a fine example of his increasingly streamlined productions. But throughout the track runs a nagging high frequency that squeals like the unoiled wheel on a shopping cart, or a whistling tea kettle left on the stove. It’s one of the lone instances in Project Pablo’s growing yet generally chill discography that actually feels a bit unnerving. | 2018-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Technicolour | April 10, 2018 | 6.7 | 6ccaf051-4862-43b0-9446-eba2ed4b0151 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
In addition to eight previously unreleased songs, this double LP remixes and remasters two early albums born from the macabre, witty, and wonderful mind of Sadie Dupuis. | In addition to eight previously unreleased songs, this double LP remixes and remasters two early albums born from the macabre, witty, and wonderful mind of Sadie Dupuis. | Speedy Ortiz: The Death of Speedy Ortiz & Cop Kicker...Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/speedy-ortiz-the-death-of-speedy-ortiz-and-cop-kickerforever/ | The Death of Speedy Ortiz & Cop Kicker...Forever | Blood, guts, and pus streak Sadie Dupuis’ songs like a biohazardous Pollock. Her band, Speedy Ortiz, celebrates the tenth anniversary of their debut LP (2011’s The Death of Speedy Ortiz) with The Death of Speedy Ortiz and Cop Kicker… Forever, a 22-song treatise on the trials and tribulations of the flesh. Dupuis’ songwriting has always been the beating, bleeding heart of Speedy Ortiz. Melodically capricious and lyrically eviscerating—one line refers to a “backseat seppuku, gutting more than the core”—Dupuis entices, threatens, and confesses with a glibness that belies her vulnerability. The grim and witty expressionism she brings to her songwriting has put Dupuis in a class of her own.
In addition to eight previously unreleased songs, this double LP remixes and remasters two early releases, The Death of Speedy Ortiz and Cop Kicker, which were both released by Dupuis in 2011. Back then, she had yet to tour with artists like Liz Phair and Foo Fighters; even as Speedy Ortiz blossomed from a solo project into a fledgling band, they had mostly played festivals and smaller venues alongside indie-rock contemporaries. Revisiting the ironic, acerbic charm of the band’s origins with a more mature, developed approach, the reissues clean up the bedroom-pop fuzz of Dupuis’ earlier home recordings while adding the heft and complexity of a full band.
Dupuis has a way of marrying the macabre with the earnest. Seconds after making a relatively cliché boast about being “a different breed,” she poses a stranger, more unguarded question: “Will you eat me when I die?” The specter of death flits through the Speedy Ortiz catalog, and Dupuis uses the body’s impermanence to illustrate her darkest, most unsettling thoughts. On new track and album closer “Son Of,” she describes lying under a bus where “18 wheels slash across me as penance for all my killings.” Even one of the more conventional indie-pop songs, the eponymous “Speedy Ortiz,” lingers on an image of “flies on the ceiling/Mating and molting.”
Previously, Speedy Ortiz sounded more muted, suspending Dupuis’ vocals over the band’s fuzzy instrumentals. And it worked: Her barbs, even when delivered gently, undercut the softness of the songs, drawing you in close to be cut by each and every one. On The Death of Speedy Ortiz and Cop Kicker… Forever, the sharper production allows the full force of Dupuis’ emotion to burst through. The sinister, vengeful confidence in lines like, “Ate the other children hatching from my mother/Baby, won’t you let me feed” ramps up as the guitar slides into a screech.
Speedy Ortiz’s more acoustic leanings also benefit from the remastering, as vocals become more intelligible and instrumentation more clean-cut. Throughout the twisted lullaby “Ken Ohki,” Dupuis’ voice becomes louder and less distorted, though still relatively tinny, while each strum of the guitar creeps with a twangy unease. It feels far more removed and distant, apt for lines like, “Not like I shaved you/Or drained you and sold all your organs o’erseas;” the sheer depravity of it all is a welcome foil to the soothing rhythm of the song. Each element of “Frankenweenie” feels amplified and somehow sharpened; each of Depuis’ minuscule, dissonant inflections seem to stick out over the eerie, congealed guitar.
The standout of the previously unreleased songs is “Let’s Get Evicted,” a lilting, craven love song where Dupuis murmurs her idea of sweet nothings to a lover who presumably shares her unconventional perspectives: “Let’s kiss off a cliff/Take a nap in a grave/Let’s get evicted and torture our enemies,” she croons sweetly. Suicidal tendencies and human rights violations aside, though, “Let’s Get Evicted” is Dupuis at her most hopeful: her most willing to throw bodily limitations to the wind and forge connections, fleeting as they are.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-17T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Carpark | November 17, 2021 | 7.4 | 6ccc2226-b7aa-42e9-847b-20ab40aacaf3 | Sue Park | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sue-park/ | |
Noel Heroux of Hooray for Earth enlists his wife, Jessica Zambri, for a bombastic, exhausting album that betrays a deep desire to emulate Funeral-era Arcade Fire. | Noel Heroux of Hooray for Earth enlists his wife, Jessica Zambri, for a bombastic, exhausting album that betrays a deep desire to emulate Funeral-era Arcade Fire. | Mass Gothic: I’ve Tortured You Long Enough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mass-gothic-ive-tortured-you-long-enough/ | I’ve Tortured You Long Enough | Mass Gothic’s second album begins and ends with a window. At first, the window is dark; by the end of the record, it’s merely big. Presumably the sun has come up. Between “Dark Window” and “Big Window,” this project from Hooray for Earth’s Noel Heroux exudes so much bombast as to become exhausting. While the first Mass Gothic record was essentially a Heroux solo outing, I’ve Tortured You Long Enough loops in his wife, Jessica Zambri, who co-wrote the album and sings throughout. The couple adopts a dynamic reminiscent of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne—at many points, I’ve Tortured You betrays its deep desire to be an early Arcade Fire release—but their songwriting choices don't support their incessant swings for the rafters.
The album introduces itself with a rhythmic figure pilfered from the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey,” an homage Heroux already paid on Hooray for Earth’s “Last Minute,” from 2011’s True Loves. The Scottish band has clearly colored his approach to songwriting and production: Their haze and grit can be heard throughout his projects, and with Zambri he continues to work in their retro mold. I’ve Tortured You has a delightfully textured production style that blurs guitars, drums, and synths together like a painted background, allowing the singers’ voices to vault to the top of the mix. But Psychocandy balanced its blunt fuzz with a light touch. “Just Like Honey” is both noisy and delicate. I’ve Tortured You loses that nuance, blowing out its engines at every turn.
Power ballads generally work because they couple their enthusiasm with a certain disarming strangeness. The enthusiasm has to be grounded in something new, something that justifies the excitement. Arcade Fire’s lyrics on Funeral and Neon Bible conjured up imagery of primitivist utopias, of love alchemizing the mind. More recently, Lorde’s compositional whirlwind “Green Light” swirled together great white sharks and light-up dance floors. The words earned their delivery. Heroux and Zambri use a similarly dramatic vocal style to Butler, Chassagne, and Lorde, but their lyrics weigh down their songs. Their couplets are either trite, like “While you lift me in the air/There’s time only to love you,” from “Call Me,” or baffling: “Undersea where the viper glows/And the tragedy isn’t one I know,” Zambri narrates on “The Goad.” So a snake bioluminesces and nothing happens.
I’ve Tortured You never lets up on its fist-in-the-air rock eruptions. No small acoustic numbers punctuate the record; there is no time to regroup. Even within songs, Heroux and Zambri follow safe, predictable progressions. Multiple tracks reiterate a single vocal melody for their entire duration: no verse, no chorus, just the same stanza over and over. By the end, the window imagery that frames the album feels like a self-conscious metaphor. “I am looking out there/Big window,” Zambri repeats on closer “Big Window.” She does not tell us what she sees. Over pounding drums and roiling electric guitar, she issues the record’s final lyric in a voice that sounds like it wants to rouse stadiums: “It never happened.” The “it” has no antecedent. Again, we’re left with a blank space where emotion should be. | 2018-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | September 4, 2018 | 5.1 | 6ccda571-627e-4d8a-85a6-9840b0b556cb | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
It's taken nearly a decade for L.A.'s Gaslamp Killer to release his debut album, though he's hardly been slacking in the interim. Breakthrough summarizes his recent creative mode pretty definitively, manifesting in a high-quality dose of doom-struck instrumental hip-hop. | It's taken nearly a decade for L.A.'s Gaslamp Killer to release his debut album, though he's hardly been slacking in the interim. Breakthrough summarizes his recent creative mode pretty definitively, manifesting in a high-quality dose of doom-struck instrumental hip-hop. | The Gaslamp Killer: Breakthrough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17038-breakthrough/ | Breakthrough | Gaslamp Killer has emerged as a producer who developed his charismatic notoriety by pushing his corner of bass music into a something resembling a close cousin of acid rock. His highest-profile production gig, Gonjasufi's 2010 album A Sufi and a Killer, was psychotropic hip-hop at its most elemental, stuff so gristly and eye-peeling-- and occasionally beautiful-- that it reset the parameters for what you could nod your head to (assuming you could still remember where it was located). Pick up that same year's Death Gate EP or jump back a year to his 2009 EP, My Troubled Mind, and you can hear that sound emerge from a mindstate reared on 1980s VHS horror, hippy-biker exploitation soundtracks and car-trunk g-funk, stuff that expanded on the Left Coast underground influence of '96-era Shadow and Automator into a red-lit grindhouse. And it becomes even clearer soaking on a mix like 2009's Hell and the Lake of Fire are Waiting for You!, one of the best documents of his persistent efforts as a DJ to turn clubland crate-digger culture into an altered-state travelogue worthy of his Low End Theory bonafides. Flipping Dungen, Can, and space-age 70s European production library music in the same set as Smif N Wessun and Organized Konfusion is exactly the kind of approach that makes running in the same crowed as Flying Lotus and Teebs sound like a natural destination in context.
Breakthrough is a record that fits Gaslamp Killer well as a rundown of everything he's been able to imprint on his career so far. It's a run of occasionally disorienting, sometimes frantic, usually unnerving trips into distinct corners of psychedelic and experimental influence that spark briefly to reveal vivid life and fade out just as quickly. And it succeeds, driven as it is by up-front, iron-fisted live drumming that's mixed up into the red. He builds around that neck-snap percussion in ways that dredge up an air of constant tension, ebbing and flowing through so many different forms so quickly that it creates this air of unknowable dread; once it seems like there might be a consistent method to it, it switches focus to some other angle. Pick a style, and he'll coax out the most nerve-twisting elements of its abrasive side-- synthesized dirges that snap a wire and start sparking off into something noisier ("Meat Guilt"); Morricone panic attacks that sound purpose-built to soundtrack a splattery low-budget drive-in movie death ("Critic"); organ-driven garage funk given a stoner-metal lurch ("Dead Vets").
But calling Breakthrough the most direct line into Gaslamp Killer's singularly unhinged vision would be a bit misleading: As befitting an artist who's as important for who he's hung out with and given opportunities to as he is for what he's done on his own, this is a record that leads him to filter his ideas through a number of like-minded collaborators. Sometimes it's just a matter of finding the right piece to plug in: Miguel Atwood-Ferguson's keening strings pierce through the wall of synth-hesher fuzz on "Flange Face", Gonjasufi is his usual otherworldly presence on the spiritual admonishment of "Veins" and the outreach of "Apparitions", Daedelus incorporates touches of 8-bit vertigo into "Impulse", and Shigeto helps steer the percussive rattle of "Keep it Simple Stupid" through an analog squall that makes the title's advice sound a bit beside the point. And sometimes it's the collaborative aspect that actually drives the song itself-- Gaslamp Killer's heritage-driven enthusiasm for Turkish music, previously heard in tracks like My Troubled Mind cut "Turk Mex", is fleshed out with live instrumentation supplied by Amir Yaghmai on "Nissim".
So GLK's found a communal niche, all right, but how far deep has he worked himself in there? Because Breakthrough-- which it is and isn't-- feels like the kind of record his adventurous precedent has made into a familiar signature. It's the album that gets at his recent creative mode most definitively, the one people might figure he had in him rather than the one that changed anybody's minds about him. Which is good news, really-- expecting a dose of high-quality doom-struck instrumental hip-hop and getting it is the kind of thing only jaded fad-hoppers get disappointed over. The idea that it might draw more fans to his stylistic strengths means the potential for a subsequent breakthrough of Cosmogramma advancement can wait a bit. This one offers plenty to wrap your head around in the meantime. | 2012-09-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-09-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Brainfeeder | September 19, 2012 | 7.7 | 6cd5c71b-0449-4ced-bb77-c19bbaa2bd1e | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
T.I.'s political tenth studio album presents itself as a warning to black Americans who find themselves labeled social disruptors for simply trying to live their lives harmoniously. | T.I.'s political tenth studio album presents itself as a warning to black Americans who find themselves labeled social disruptors for simply trying to live their lives harmoniously. | T.I.: Us or Else: Letter to the System | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22723-us-or-else-letter-to-the-system/ | Us or Else: Letter to the System | T.I.’s tenth studio album Us or Else: Letter to the System emerges from Us or Else, a six-track EP from September 2016 that found him in a revolutionary mood. The new LP, fleshed out with nine new tracks, is just the latest point on a timeline of the rapper's growing social consciousness. He has been a high-profile proponent of the Black Lives Matter movement; his album follows in the wake of his march in solidarity for Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, the firing of an appropriating protégée, and the calling out of a highly respected collaborator and friend who spoke irresponsibly against the movement. Most recently, he joined in the nationwide protests of Trump’s victory. Letter to the System presents itself as a warning to black Americans who find themselves labeled social disruptors for simply trying to live their lives harmoniously.
Frankly speaking, the album would have opened stronger with the third track “Black Man” instead of its actual mellowed out, preaching starter, “I Believe.” “Black Man,” a cinematic call-to-arms that includes an appropriately urgent Meek Mill feature, is one of the more unpredictable tracks on a LP that otherwise is a little too mundane and perfunctory. Quavo’s show-stealing performance on the hook—which questions the causes of police brutality, “Is it because of my people? Is it because of my sneakers?,” before surmising “It is because that I’m perfect?”—highlights T.I.’s biggest problem here. He has made himself the supporting character of his own album, placing himself towards the end of most songs, while his featured guests stand at the front lines. The decision proves costly; often, T.I.’s presence doesn’t feel significant, which is quite disappointing because he offers a polished flow throughout the project.
On the brighter side, the bevy of showcasing guest appearances—from Jacksonville-based Tokyo Jetz’s annihilating turn on “Lazy” to fellow Atlantian London Jae’s raspy flow on the backwoods baptism of “Pain”—embody two core principles of BLM: community and the advancement of future generations. With his generosity, the self-proclaimed “Grand Hustler” is repositioning himself in the vein of someone like Dr. Dre, who in 2015 introduced the wider world to Anderson .Paak on Compton. In a way, T.I.’s Us or Else: Letter to the System is his most selfless project; his exclusive partnership with and allegiance to the predominantly black-owned business Tidal, speaks louder, in some ways, than he does.
Ultimately, the album is a primer on BLM basics, something that we can tune into CNN to see Angela Rye breakdown to conservative pundits on a regular basis. The music is a little less distinguished; T.I. swings between recalling the hip-hop free-jazz stylings already perfected by Kendrick Lamar and falling back on the slicked-back southern-gentleman grit of 2014’s Paperwork. Towards the end, he offers a few stunners: “Picture Me Mobbin” is a floating, ego-boosting, cerebral bout of ecstasy assisted by the-Dream. The reflective closer “Take Da Wheel” offers a peek into his faith, as he pleads “God help me man, Lord knows I don’t want to go to jail again” over a hypnotically stifled beckoning call of “help me Jesus! Help me Jesus!” At this point, it’s not enough to take solo action, especially when you’re constantly battling on the wrong side of the system. As any black man knows, a united front is always needed for survival. | 2017-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Grand Hustle / Roc Nation | January 9, 2017 | 7 | 6cd9252d-a833-4086-aa19-02b52e923b5a | Da'Shan Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/da'shan- smith/ | null |
The San Francisco goth-pop band Wax Idols' second album Discipline & Desire is aloof and commanding, with an expertly honed sense of how far to take the tension it builds before offering relief. | The San Francisco goth-pop band Wax Idols' second album Discipline & Desire is aloof and commanding, with an expertly honed sense of how far to take the tension it builds before offering relief. | Wax Idols: Discipline + Desire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18072-wax-idols-discipline-desire/ | Discipline + Desire | Two of the more interesting punk rock records to surface this year come from female-dominated acts drawing heavily from Bauhaus’s taut, aggressive postpunk side and the chilly psychedelia of early Siouxsie and the Banshees: Savages’ Silence Yourself and Wax Idols’ Discipline & Desire. Whether that’s the manifestation of something rattling around pop’s mass subconscious, or just an indicator that right now is a good time in the retro cycle to revive the few years before and after goth’s initial emergence from the first wave of UK punk remains to be seen.
Silence Yourself has been attracting more attention, but Discipline & Desire should also be essential listening for anyone in a gothic mood. It’s the poppier of the two, which makes sense if you’re familiar with Wax Idols’ first LP, No Future, a collection that sounded a bit more like Wire than the typical album emanating from bubblegum-heavy San Francisco garage scene, though it fit right in otherwise.
In the two years since No Future was released, frontwoman Hether Fortune has switched over from playing with a pickup band to recruiting a solid lineup; it's given the project a new sound that’s sleeker, darker, and more distinctive. Where the first album bristled with edgy but outgoing hooks, Discipline & Desire plays it cool to the point of ice, holding the listener at arm’s length and dangling its melodic payoffs tantalizingly just out of reach. The catchiest parts of the album are surrounded by anxious chromatic harmonies and submerged in a cloud of frigid reverb, as if to underline its overall theme that you can’t enjoy pleasure without also enduring pain.
If that sounds like a sado-masochistic approach to making music, it probably is. Fortune has a day job as a dominatrix, and it seems that Wax Idols’ stylistic evolution was the result of taking lessons she learned in the dungeon and finding ways to express them aesthetically. Discipline & Desire-- the title’s a tip-off-- is aloof and commanding, with an expertly honed sense of how far to take the tension it builds before offering relief.
Listeners generally don’t enjoy being messed with in such an aggressive fashion, and it says a lot about where Fortune’s songwriting talents are at this point that she can pull off such a feat. The opening song, “Stare Back”, is not only one of the strongest on the album, but the one that best embodies the forcible arm’s-length thing, with the band riding an anxious two-note groove and Fortune giving her vocals a particularly assertive, clipped edge. The song eventually builds to a bridge that’s as close to a resolution as the band’s willing to give it (there’s still a dissonant guitar line keeping us from getting too comfortable), but it’s not the release at the bridge that keeps bringing me back to the song, it’s the creepy groove that I can feel crawling up and down my back in a strangely satisfying way.
About halfway through the album, Fortune and company take a break from the power play to deliver three and a half minutes of unalloyed pop compelling enough to stop chatter in a crowded room. “Dethrone” sounds like the Pretenders trying to sound like Siouxsie, and it’s exactly as amazing as you would imagine that scenario to be. It seems like the goth fashion trend of the past few years is also inspiring a new goth music revival. If so, they should consider using “Dethrone” as its anthem. | 2013-05-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-05-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Slumberland | May 3, 2013 | 6.8 | 6cdd5728-4127-4ccf-a077-40900dd3e881 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
The British singer and songwriter finds her niche, setting her voice at the center of modest, forthright songs that celebrate self-sufficiency and restraint. | The British singer and songwriter finds her niche, setting her voice at the center of modest, forthright songs that celebrate self-sufficiency and restraint. | Brooke Bentham: Everyday Nothing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brooke-bentham-everyday-nothing/ | Everyday Nothing | What happens when a precocious youth becomes just another adult? As a college student in London, Brooke Bentham’s early singles attracted buzz and earned her a deal with British indie label AllPoints. But when it came time to write a debut album post-graduation, she was burned out: “I was just lying in bed every day and just watching television,” she told NME. “I couldn’t write and I felt like a piece of shit.” She worked two retail jobs to make ends meet, drawing on the non-musical experience for lyrical inspiration. The eventual album, Everyday Nothing, is not exactly about finding beauty in the mundane; while the music is frequently beautiful, it doesn’t glorify stasis. If it celebrates anything, it’s self-sufficiency—fitting for an artist who, after spending her formative years settling on a sound, has found her niche.
To achieve this, Bentham trades art-pop producer Ben Baptie for singer-songwriter Bill-Ryder Jones. The production on Bentham’s early EPs often drowned her voice in psychedelic effects or heavy synths that didn’t necessarily complement her music, except to mirror the intoxication of her narrators on songs like “I Need Your Body.” Many lyrics on the new record are about not being intoxicated: “All my friends are drunk/I haven’t been wasted in months,” for example, or, “I don’t smoke, ’cause I dont wanna die anymore.” Ryder-Jones’ production reflects this newfound lucidity. Though there are experimental touches, like the drum machines and e-bow of opener “With Love,” Bentham’s voice is at the center. The tasteful restraint can be weirdly thrilling: “Telling Lies” combines the intimacy of a rehearsal session with what sounds like a My Bloody Valentine song playing in the background while Bentham was recording. Other reference points include ’90s indie rock staples Yo La Tengo and Sparklehorse; younger listeners might picture Phoebe Bridgers fronting Alvvays.
If the music has obvious ancestry, Bentham’s lyrics can be harder to trace. “Blue Light” concerns itself with keeping love alive, though a line like, “You brush your teeth more than me/I feel so ashamed” suggests a deeper, self-conscious kind of fear. On “Men I Don’t Know” and “Keep It Near,” Bentham reveals exhaustion at the idea of being a full-time musician, asking why she’s “burdended herself” doing what she loves when the rewards are few and far between. When she does get sentimental, she’s restrained, as on the unexpected late-album love song “Without,” which recalls the Jo March monologue from Greta Gerwig’s Little Women adaptation: Like Jo, Bentham asserts her love and independence while simultaneously admitting that she’s unhappy.
Because the album’s scale and ambitions are modest, some of its songs blend together. It’s easy to mentally segue from the verses of “All My Friends Are Drunk” to the chorus of “Blue Light,” or to conflate mid-tempo advance singles “Perform for You” and “Control.” Still, the individual songs are strong enough that obsessing over their similarity feels like nitpicking. It was never Bentham’s intention to laugh defiantly in the face of malaise, or to talk about her coming-of-age journey as an unqualified triumph. All she meant to do was find reasons to keep writing. | 2020-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | AllPoints | February 28, 2020 | 7.2 | 6ce73643-6634-4514-819a-52393121dd60 | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
The debut commercial mix CD from UK producer Harry Agius, aka Midland, transcends the typical function of a DJ mix. It’s one of the year’s best, with potential to resonate beyond dance-music diehards. | The debut commercial mix CD from UK producer Harry Agius, aka Midland, transcends the typical function of a DJ mix. It’s one of the year’s best, with potential to resonate beyond dance-music diehards. | Midland: Fabriclive 94 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/midland-fabriclive-94/ | Fabriclive 94 | Nothing says “peak content” like a DJ mix. Proliferating for free online, they’re a dime a terabyte. A kind of cognitive dissonance hangs over many: Suggesting club energy but far removed from actual nightclubs, they offer a simulacrum of nightlife. They also serve a more mercenary purpose: Many DJs’ mixes double as business cards; Fabric’s reasonably priced mix series is essentially an advertisement for the London nightclub, where cover and service charges might run you $38 or more. But every now and then, the elements align and something more transcendent results. That is the case with Midland’s debut commercial mix CD, one of the year’s best, and one with the potential to resonate far beyond dance-music diehards.
Midland—the UK’s Harry Agius—has been making records for seven years now, yet he’s hardly a household name. That might have something to do with the fact that he has never aligned himself with any one style. (It doesn’t help that he’s never released an album, only singles and EPs.) His early records hewed to the voluminous contours and syncopated grooves of early-2010s UK bass, but he’s also made tough, rattling techno and dreamy deep house; last year, he dipped his toe into new wave-flavored waters with the coolly melodic “Blush.” And his “Final Credits,” a sleek disco stepper that was caned for months before its official December release, unexpectedly became one of the year’s definitive anthems. Mixmag named it their No. 1 track of 2016. On YouTube, it has been played more than 547,000 times in the past nine months, and on Spotify, the song’s two mixes have netted well over a million plays.
The most immediate thing that Midland’s Fabriclive mix shares in common with his own productions is that it also covers a wide stretch of stylistic ground. Listeners who know Midland primarily from “Final Credits” may be surprised to find nary a lick of disco here. But to call it a techno mix doesn’t come close to capturing either the range or the nuance of his set. It favors muted tone colors, hypnotic grooves, and enveloping atmospheres; rattling breakbeats alternate with purring machine rhythms and extended beatless stretches, and brand-new records rub up against deep cuts from the 1990s. Emphasizing long, natural segues and subtly harmonic blends, it is intricate but never fussy, understated but never shy.
Unless you’re intimately familiar with the tracks in the mix—and, given their scattered provenance, it seems unlikely that many listeners will know more than a handful of them—it may not be immediately apparent how much of what you hear is a product of his active mixing. Listen to his selections on their own, then listen to the way they work in the context of the mix, and you can hear how he’s often layering two tracks across two, three, or four-minute stretches. Some DJs prefer to let tracks play out in full, crossfading only in the final bars, but Midland appears intent upon keeping any two given songs playing simultaneously as much as possible. At times, it seems like as soon as one record has left the turntable, he’s reaching for its successor’s replacement. Still, nothing here feels hurried or rushed. Tracks flow naturally from one to the next, their elements complementing each other the way two siblings might finish one another’s sentences. Even in the rare cases where he abruptly shifts gears—like when LFO’s dreamy ambient-techno cut “Ultra Schall” slips sideways into Kowton’s sharp-elbowed “Pea Soup”—the changes happen so naturally that you may not even notice them.
Not only does the mix progress effortlessly from one track to the next; the whole set follows a single, flowing arc, albeit one marked by a few unexpected gestural movements. Following a tentative, scene-setting introduction from the New York experimental duo Georgia, he proceeds through a series of progressively deeper tracks like Jaures’ clattering “Silence (Before Birth),” Juju & Jordash’s drifting, vibey “Monday Mellow,” and Leif’s chiming “Shoulders Back.” As talking drums strike up a kind of conversation with Leif’s bell tones, Roman Flügel’s “Warm and Dewy” marks the set’s second phase, which tumbles across a short sequence of wriggly drum tracks. Beatrice Dillon’s “Halfway” offers a rare moment of levity with a cartoon-reggae bassline that cuts through her dank, clanking drums.
Samo DJ & Pedrodollar’s bleepy, carefree “Track #3” makes a low-key setup for the set’s first big peak: Mannequin Lung’s “City Lights (Mr. Hazeltine Remix feat. Divine Styler),” a reworked 1998 tune from Los Angeles’ Plug Research label that imagines a galaxy of streetlights spreading out beneath a vantage point high in the Hollywood hills. It’s a stunning move—an obscure cut that even many techno heads may have forgotten, if they knew it at all, and used in a way that packs a real emotional punch.
From here, Midland uses Sugai Ken’s beatless “Mukashi” as a tonal palate cleanser before plunging into a long, immersive stretch of techno, much of it from the late ’90s. There are fewer stylistic surprises here than in the first half of the mix, but the selections are eye-opening and the mixing flawless. The rolling, spring-loaded techno of Santos Rodriguez’ “Road to Rio - B1”—a 1999 production by Arthur Smith, aka Artwork, of the dubstep supergroup Magnetic Man, of all things—layers in key with Slobban’s swirling “Amour!,” another unheralded 1999 production; the dubby, sci-fi atmospheres of Convextion’s “Distant Transmission” downshift into Shinichi Atobe’s nostalgic, jazz-tinged “Free Access Zone 2.”
Finally, Agius indulges in a warm-down session that he extends for nearly nine minutes: Vito Ricci’s droning “Deep Felt Music,” Jesper Dahlbäck and Mark O’Sullivan’s downbeat “When I Was Young,” and, last of all, Midland’s own deeply tranquil synth study “First Tube,” exclusive to the mix. It says something about his low-key nature that, unlike some grandstanding DJs, he’s made his own contribution to the mix the most unassuming of all; it says something about his commitment to mood-building that he serenades us out with three successive, complementary outros. As the music fades, we hear birdsong in the distance; it feels like stumbling out of the club into the morning—ears ringing, pulse slowing, the world aglow. Perhaps there’s a little bit of clubland fantasizing woven into Fabriclive 94, too; fortunately, its pleasures are as real as you could hope for. | 2017-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fabric | September 25, 2017 | 8 | 6ceb006a-9175-4fe5-a183-32a4e1b08a82 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The UK electronic musician used neural networks to wring synthetic voices into strange, unintelligible shapes. The results are by turns funny, poignant, and frightening. | The UK electronic musician used neural networks to wring synthetic voices into strange, unintelligible shapes. The results are by turns funny, poignant, and frightening. | Lee Gamble: Models | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lee-gamble-models/ | Models | Lee Gamble’s Models is a cold, sad, wispy album whose songs are like ghosts trying to communicate their unfinished business, unable to puncture the barrier between their plane of existence and ours. The seven tracks on the UK producer’s new album don’t just deconstruct pop music; they obliterate it, leaving unmoored vocal bits gasping and choking in dead air, as if separated from their parent songs and starving for oxygen. There’s something curiously touching about these twitching, disembodied songs; you almost want to pick them up and try to put them back together again.
There’s not a single actual human voice to be found across the record’s 32-minute runtime. Instead, Gamble assembled an arsenal of synthetic voices, which he then fed through neural networks that scrambled the syllables beyond recognition. At times, the results resemble human language, as when “She’s Not” repeats its title over and over like an overzealous trained parrot. Others are pure generative gibberish. Once you realize which pop song Gamble is atomizing on “XIth c. Spray”—hint: it’s an early hit by an American pop star whose last name rhymes with “spray”—the contrast between familiar melody and alien language becomes funny, poignant, and frightening. You almost feel sorry for the artificial voice as it performs the function it was created to perform, endlessly and unthinkingly, with no comprehension of how ridiculous it sounds.
Gamble’s production feels just as incorporeal as the voices. Composed of endlessly circling rave melodies and chord progressions that lead nowhere, it harkens back to the ambient jungle deconstructions on his 2012 album Diversions 1994-1996 and conjures the same feeling of cavernous emptiness. His productions may not be composed by AI, but they don’t exactly sound human either, with “Purple Orange” daringly disappearing into silence in its opening seconds. (Many listeners may find themselves checking their volume settings.) Even unmistakable nods to Hyperdub labelmate Burial on “Juice” and Boards of Canada on “Blurring” feel less like references and more like errant bits of cultural detritus that Gamble just happened to scoop up while digging, WALL-E-like, through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The album’s one moment of stunning beauty—a wash of Ashra-like guitars at the beginning of “She's Not”—seems totally divorced from the rest of the music here, which proceeds from such inhuman logic that the idea of “beauty” seems as foreign to it as it would be to a crocodile.
Yet there’s something reassuring about Gamble caressing AI for its flaws. The existential concern around AI stems largely from its potential to displace work and money from actual creatives; to a lesser extent, the technology raises questions about expressive authenticity: How much of an artist’s soul comes through in music generated by an intelligence beyond the artist’s control? Gamble deals with this problem by using AI in a deliberately inhuman, even ridiculous, way and calibrating his production to match it. He has compared the voices to Elizabeth Fraser, whose unintelligibility has become a meme, but even at her most inscrutable, you could usually suss out what the Cocteau Twins singer was feeling. With the strange quasi-intelligence that stares back out of this music, it’s anyone’s guess. | 2023-10-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-27T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | October 27, 2023 | 7.3 | 6cf019ab-5b53-44a5-9bf3-09d37ece7880 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
On her debut solo album, the Breeders’ original bassist blends her signature instrument with minimalist electronics and rippling pools of piano, Mellotron, and acoustic guitar. | On her debut solo album, the Breeders’ original bassist blends her signature instrument with minimalist electronics and rippling pools of piano, Mellotron, and acoustic guitar. | Josephine Wiggs: We Fall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/josephine-wiggs-we-fall/ | We Fall | It’s tempting to credit Josephine Wiggs for the Breeders’ breakthrough moment. With her iconic opening bass slide in “Cannonball,” Wiggs helped define not just one of the best songs of the ’90s, but the power of simple melodies for aspiring bassists everywhere. As the band’s original bassist, Wiggs was something of a secret weapon, imbuing records like Last Splash and All Nerve with her trademark honeyed gloom. It’s a style she’s maintained throughout her career, whether playing with influential British indie rock band the Perfect Disaster, downtempo duo Dusty Trails, or lo-fi experimental trio Ladies Who Lunch. Now she tries her hand at establishing this mood on her own. On her debut solo album, We Fall, Wiggs slows down and filters this brooding aura through the lens of minimalism and electronics, with a keen eye for emotive observationalism.
If Wiggs already climbed to the top of the alt-rock mountain, she’s now happily watching ambient minimalism bloom from between the rocks. Written, recorded, and mixed on the road by Wiggs herself, the mostly instrumental We Fall plays like a sweeping reassurance of nature’s slow growth. Softening her snappy bass tones, Wiggs blends her signature instrument with rippling pools of piano, Mellotron, and acoustic guitar. Occasionally she’s joined by longtime collaborator Jon Mattock of Spacemen 3, on Korg electribe and drums, but his fidgeting rhythms are more likely to fracture the album’s steady pace than coax it forward.
From the slow crescendo of opener “37 Words” onward, Wiggs’ first official foray into meditative experimentalism draws equally from the peaceful fluidity of Brian Eno and the modern classical fusion of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto. As warm and self-assured as her bass is here, it’s the way she toys with electronic effects that gives these songs their distinctive, sentient feeling. Synth stutters and sounds akin to vinyl pops flicker over everything, bringing to mind the gentle candor of the Books, especially in the cello-like bass of “We Fall” and “In a Yellow Mood.” On “Time Does Not Bring Relief,” she leans into these glitches, allowing the electronics to contribute as much to the ambience as the stringed instruments.
The most rewarding part of Wiggs’ debut is her willingness to let its strongest moments—the electric guitar in the background of “Turn to Moss,” the echoing droplets of double bass in “The Weeping of the Rain,” the stirring cello of “The Soft Stars That Shine”—uncoil on their own time. Scientists and hikers alike recognize the value of sitting still in nature to better see and understand its lifeforms—to wait for the worm or the bluebird, rather than hunting for it. Wiggs, who’s made a hobby of exploring while on tour, has mirrored the experience of getting lost and loving it. She didn’t bring a microphone to capture a field recording; instead, it’s as if she curled up on a rock and began taking mental notes, adjusting her own perspective to observe nature in real time. On We Fall, Wiggs replicates the continuous momentum of the environment through sound, and she leaves just enough room on the rock to join in her wonderment. | 2019-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | The Sound of Sinners | May 23, 2019 | 7.4 | 6cf02321-c213-4611-a76a-aac3d9a7327d | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Totalling a bulky 40 songs, Terius Nash’s latest project is purposefully and hilariously indulgent, but his marathon session reveals an R&B luminary still working at the top of his game. | Totalling a bulky 40 songs, Terius Nash’s latest project is purposefully and hilariously indulgent, but his marathon session reveals an R&B luminary still working at the top of his game. | The-Dream: Ménage à Trois: Sextape Vol. 1, 2, 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-dream-menage-a-trois-sextape-vol-1-2-3/ | Ménage à Trois: Sextape Vol. 1, 2, 3 | Much of The-Dream’s underappreciated body of work has been about eliminating distinctions between rap and R&B. He was a trailblazer that brought hardcore rap sensibilities to an edgeless R&B era. Now, as rappers have adapted soulful songcraft as cover for being selfish lovers, the longtime sensualist has become more interested in making a clear delineation between the two.
The whopping 40-song, triple album, Ménage à Trois: Sextape Vol. 1, 2, 3, is a full-on immersion into R&B, opening with “No Rappers Allowed,” where he declares: “I ain’t no rapper, I just fuck a lot.” On his first album since 2013’s IV Play, The-Dream re-establishes himself as a musical tour de force, all while separating himself from the rap pack. “I’m calling all bodies to the bedroom/I know all the trappers, I know all the rappers/They who you see in the club, and I’m who you fuck after,” he sings on “Bedroom.” This one’s for the bump n’ grind.
Longer than either volume of Lars von Trier’s 2013 erotic epic Nymphomaniac, Ménage à Trois isn’t a listening experience without its pitfalls. The three albums are inundating and unevenly sequenced, but they are also completely and utterly fixating. The-Dream does what he does best: make love songs that treat sex as intrinsic to romance. The key to any moment of true love, he argues, is desire, and he has a rare gift for emulating and exploring that hunger, not just in his writing but in his gently cooed melodies. “Ecstasy” is a word that comes up often on the album, and his never-ending search for it takes him through hotel lobbies, into the depths of tour buses, the backseats of convertibles, turning every sexual encounter into a pas de deux.
In his quest to capture the perfect sexual experience, The-Dream tends to get lost in the moment, and so he often writes songs during the hook-ups happening inside his songs. It’s a bit of songwriting Inception that has become his hallmark. “Nikki’s Dialogue,” which continues a long-running Prince homage featuring one of The-Dream’s most recurring characters, finds the singer forcing his estranged lover to eat crow, teasing her about a failed marriage and weaponizing the lost album Nikki: The Chronicles. On “Drop Some New Shit,” he’s coerced into making new music to incentivize a lover: “Not for them, not for her, not for him/But at least drop some new shit for me/You need somethin’ you can fuck to (I know)/Remind me why I loved you.”
For The-Dream and the women in his songs, there is often no distinction between the pleasures of intimacy and those of a perfectly articulated tune. Sometimes, the sex is so good it takes precedence. “And man, that shit’s so fat, I can see that shit from the back/I only wrote one verse and I already got off track,” he sings on “Ready,” as if literally penning his verse mid peep show. To him, pure satisfaction beats any lyric. Sometimes the pleasure is in the process and sometimes the pleasure is the process.
There’s as much dialogue as narration in The-Dream’s sexcapades, although he’s almost always paraphrasing. He gives the impression that there are conversations, personal exchanges, that his perspective isn’t the only one that matters here. On “The Paris of the West,” a casual fling comes with warnings about attachment (“I can be your everything until everything ain’t enough”). On other occasions, his words are clearly meant as commands to his partner. “I’ma send a picture of your pussy to my ex’s DM/And you gon’ send a picture of my pussy to your ex’s DM,” he sings on “Yours and Mine,” granting him a measure of control over all involved.
The-Dream always seems to exert control in his songs, sometimes for the worse. “You want it rough, nice and slow/The only time I hit a girl is from the back/And the only time I slap a bitch is on the ass,” he says on “Super Soaker,” undoubtedly referencing two separate arrests for domestic violence in 2013 and 2014, one on charges of felony assault and strangulation, reckless endangerment, and child endangerment. Here, he’s controlling his narrative, something he does well. His meta-writing can blur the lines between his ravishing world of song, his process, and real life; in a moment like this, he goes from seducer to manipulator. There is assertive and then there is domineering, and it’s a line he has sometimes found himself straddling.
Given all he’s done, as a genre-bending pioneer and a writer for himself and others, The-Dream has a case as the King of R&B’s last decade plus, and Ménage à Trois only strengthens his grip on the proverbial throne, especially with continued nods to kings of the past (Michael Jackson, Prince, etc.) as sex totems. He carefully studied the greats and continues to honor them; his work here runs the entire stylistic gamut. The seven-minute “On the Regular” turns new jack swing into a sludgy alt R&B jam by osmosis before it opens up to reveal a piano serenade. On “Gorgeous,” he captures the swing of throwback steppers R&B. “I Like” flips trap’n’b into snap music. “Everytime I Kill Her” embodies the post-fusion slickness of Dream acolytes like Trey Songz. Recently, R&B has begun to untangle itself from rap, reversing an integrative process to which The-Dream was instrumental. But Ménage à Trois proves he’s always right at home. | 2019-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Radiokilla | January 7, 2019 | 7.4 | 6cf2a138-4563-4de3-80d1-32ac8cace401 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
By keeping things mostly in-house, Glasper's Experiment band present their most realized album yet. | By keeping things mostly in-house, Glasper's Experiment band present their most realized album yet. | Robert Glasper Experiment: ArtScience | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22312-artscience/ | ArtScience | For almost a decade, Robert Glasper has been the standard-bearer for jazz music’s fusion with hip-hop, soul, and rock, turning songs like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Radiohead’s “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” into kinetic electro-funk mashups. With his Experiment band, Glasper, vocalist/saxophonist Casey Benjamin, drummer Mark Colenburg, and bassist Derrick Hodge tend to leapfrog different genres, making music that’s rooted in jazz and R&B and impossible to peg. “My people have given the world so many styles of music,” Glasper declares at the top of ArtScience, the Experiment’s new album. “So why should I just confine myself to one? We want to explore them all.”
ArtScience follows Black Radio 2, the band’s guest-heavy 2013 LP featuring rappers Common, Snoop Dogg and Lupe Fiasco, and singers Jill Scott and Norah Jones, among many others. On it and the band’s first Black Radio album, the Glasper Experiment mostly stayed in the background, giving room to their guests to shine atop the group’s instrumentals. The formula worked: Black Radio won the 2012 Grammy for Best R&B Album, and “Jesus Children”—a Stevie Wonder remake from Black Radio 2, featuring vocalist Lalah Hathaway and actor/poet Malcolm-Jamal Warner—won the 2014 Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance.
For ArtScience, the Experiment keeps things in-house, handling all the vocal work themselves. Glasper himself sings lead on “Thinkin Bout You” and Benjamin—the group’s de facto lead vocalist—is front and center on “Day to Day,” “Tell Me a Bedtime Story” and “Hurry Slowly.” ArtScience feels less restrained than the Black Radio series—which, after two releases and a separate remix EP—started to feel safe and redundant. So perhaps for that reason, ArtScience doesn’t play like an R&B or jazz record; it pulls in ’80s funk and ’90s soul without landing any place in particular. For the first time, we get to hear the Experiment let go for a full project, not just on a few songs here and there.
A romantic tone flows through the album, using lyrics that speak to different stages of affection. “Thinkin Bout You” is a sweet ode to puppy love, a reminder that no matter the circumstance, true devotion can withstand long distance and everyday doldrums. Glasper’s voice is washed in bright synths, bolstering the song’s sentimental aura. On “You and Me,” Benjamin recalls a time when he wasn’t so trusting, when his heart was broken and “locked tight.” But in comes a new love, making everything better: “Can’t explain, what you do/How ya do, some kinda mystery.” In years past, the Experiment was more beat-driven; tracks like “Festival” and “Open Mind” emphasized the band’s great instrumental arrangements.
The lyrics aren’t overly intricate, but they offer just enough nuance to let the soundtrack remain the focal point. Songs like “Find You” and “Let’s Fall In Love” strive for mainstream acceptance—the former is a hard-charging bounce beat; the latter uses an Auto-Tuned, trap-infused cadence to perhaps pull in younger fans. ArtScience is the Robert Glasper Experiment’s most realized effort, mainly because they’ve stopped relying on outside talent to get their point across. They’ve created their own vibe, one that needed their own voices to truly resonate. | 2016-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Blue Note | September 19, 2016 | 7.6 | 6cfcfc79-14ea-46f4-9a9c-f85f45ea296b | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
Featuring Yung Lean and Chloe Wise, the Swedish producer’s dark and personal record imbues ambient and gothic techno with oversized feelings that find their reflection in endlessly overcast skies. | Featuring Yung Lean and Chloe Wise, the Swedish producer’s dark and personal record imbues ambient and gothic techno with oversized feelings that find their reflection in endlessly overcast skies. | Varg2TM: Nordic Flora Series Pt. 3: Gore-Tex City | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23039-nordic-flora-series-pt-3-gore-tex-city/ | Nordic Flora Series Pt. 3: Gore-Tex City | A cursory search of Spotify turns up hundreds, if not thousands, of songs with the word “leather” in the title. The word “cotton” is not quite as popular, but it still turns up a bunch, and “silk” and “satin” are also in ample supply, while Pearl Jam, Beth Orton, and the Wedding Present have all paid tribute to the homely “corduroy.” But practically nobody makes records about Gore-Tex. Gore-Tex is not cool. It is functional, practical, preventative. It is the dad jeans of synthetic fibers.
The Swedish ambient-techno artist Varg clearly knows what he’s doing by citing the microporous membrane in the latest installment of what he’s called his “most honest and personal work to date.” The artist, born Jonas Rönnberg, loves mixing up conflicting signifiers. He makes records with titles like Misantropen, and his artist alias evokes the Scandinavian black metal of his roots, but he also peppers his Instagram with Gucci purchases, rolls of cash, and bottles of Moët. On last year’s Nordic Flora Series Pt.1: Heroine, he cribbed his song titles from the lyrics to Drake’s “Controlla.” (Some of this code-switching goes both ways: OVO’s PARTYNEXTDOOR sampled one of his bleakest dark ambient tracks on last year’s “High Hopes,” an example of gothic R&B at its most desolate.)
Look beyond the trickster antics, though, and Varg’s music belongs to a proud Romantic tradition where oversized feelings find their reflection in endlessly overcast skies. Early recordings presented a sound steeped in the loamy ambient drones of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project and the flotation-tank acid of Plastikman, as well as the chattering, insectoid techno of Donato Dozzy, and Gore-Tex City ventures even further, twisting up those influences into a brooding sound that is simply and unmistakably Varg.
“Champagne Ceremonies” opens the album with gothic dread, wrapping minor-key synths in sharp-edged handclaps like concertina wire; “Yamanote Line (原宿)” is an impressionistic snapshot of Tokyo’s public transit system, with muted television voices murmuring beneath electrical zaps and a steady, rolling pulse. Many of the album’s more rhythmic tracks seem inspired by the experience of rail travel: “Platforms Surrounded by Fences (EU)” flickers like metal grates glimpsed from a speeding train, though its mood is less suggestive of Kraftwerk’s optimism than it is of the socio-political anomie facing contemporary Europe. “Snake City / Maserati Music” is not so much a song as a steady gust of wind that buffets the listener in an unending volley of sixteenth-note toms and hi-hats, and “I Hope You Are Still There (新宿御苑)” channels the same thrumming technique into something closer to the melancholy style of Autechre’s Amber. One of the few beatless tracks here, “Fonus,” with Drew McDowall and Alessandro Cortini, sounds like a memory of ambient music that is being slowly erased by the built-up din of the city—a sorrow that has forgotten its own source.
This would all be enough to make for an engaging trip into the depths of Varg’s darkest moods, but, in keeping with what his label describes as “a smirking fuck off,” he can’t resist pulling out the rug every now and then. In “Red Line II (127 Sätra C) 4,” the cryptic Swedish rapper Yung Lean warbles despondently through Auto-Tune about suicide, Adderall, and wanting to kill his landlord. It’s just the kind of collision that delights Varg—Lean’s noxious swag-rap smeared like sticky syrup across techno’s brushed stainless-steel surfaces—but it’s also a lot to swallow for someone who isn’t already a fan of Lean’s adolescent nihilism. “Forever 21 / Valium” is far more successful. Here, over pitter-pat hi-hats and new age piano, the New York artist Chloe Wise intones a piece of text from her exhibition, “Cats not fighting is a horrible sound as well.” Over drones as broad and flat as a river delta, she addresses first a bouquet of plastic flowers and then a lover, her voice flat and without affect as she skips from non sequitur to non sequitur: “Would you bleed if I cut you? Do you ever have to pee? Do you have ears? Do potted plants hear? When will you realize I am a tourist?” The music’s ominous qualities only make the text seem that much stranger, as though the quotidian had been mashed up with the symbolic—like someone’s chat history projected against an apocalyptic sky, or a brightly colored Gore-Tex jacket dropped along the roadside somewhere in Sweden’s far north. | 2017-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Northern Electronics | April 10, 2017 | 7.2 | 6d064045-07c5-44ca-bfdf-badc0eb8a432 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Producer Joel Shanahan expands his palette, mingling shades of ’90s ambient techno with distant echoes of the Cocteau Twins. Even at the record’s mellowest, muted rhythms knock like a racing heart. | Producer Joel Shanahan expands his palette, mingling shades of ’90s ambient techno with distant echoes of the Cocteau Twins. Even at the record’s mellowest, muted rhythms knock like a racing heart. | Auscultation: III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/auscultation-iii/ | III | At the close of a lengthy podcast interview last year, the electronic musician Joel Shanahan was asked if he had anything to add. “Play from the heart,” he said, without missing a beat. “Treat people well.” Over the past eight years, Shanahan’s idiosyncratic techno has encompassed jazzy whimsy, cosmic drift, and moody ambience; what ties it together is its questing spirit. Even when it zigzags, it’s marked by a palpable sense of forward motion, a yen for progress. For a time, that merely meant finding his style and honing his chops. But those two dictates—to be real and to be good—underscore something essential to Shanahan’s music: the attempt to envision a better world.
Shanahan makes music under a variety of aliases, chief among them Golden Donna and Auscultation. He has roots in punk and DIY communities; in his early years performing and throwing parties in the electronic-music hinterlands of Madison, Wisconsin, he was instrumental in bridging the gap between rock kids and dance crowds. Today, in interviews and op-eds, Shanahan espouses the need for safe spaces for clubbers and fair compensation for artists.
He has also been candid about his depression, which worsened following Oakland, California’s Ghost Ship fire, where 36 people died, including several of his friends; he was on the bill that night and watched helplessly as the building went up in flames. But Shanahan has been remarkably prolific in the years since, relocating to Portland, Oregon, and putting out a steady stream of new material, much of it exclusive to Bandcamp. In March, he quietly released a new Golden Donna album that built upon his signature style of live-to-tape hardware techno in exciting ways. But III, his new album under his Auscultation alias, is something else. It sounds like a breakthrough.
Auscultation started out in 2014 as Shanahan’s ambient-house alter ego, the measured yin to Golden Donna’s ebullient yang. His self-titled debut under the alias was muted yet light-hearted, with a jazzy house lilt half-hidden beneath layers of tape hiss. The following year’s L’étreinte Imaginaire was equally hazy but more emotionally ambiguous, its chiming synths twinkling in the shadows like a Cheshire Cat smile. The first track on III, “Glowing Hearts in the Rainbow Room,” feels at first like a continuation of L’étreinte Imaginaire, wrapping ringing chords in endless reverb. But the new album boasts a more complex palette, mingling shades of ’90s ambient techno with distant echoes of the Cocteau Twins’ dream pop. All six tracks are clearly pieces of a larger whole, and a haunted air hangs over much of the album, even in moments of seeming calm: There are spectral voices and metallic shrieks, and the music teems with activity, innumerable tiny details rustling almost imperceptibly in the murk.
Shanahan seems to be testing one of ambient techno’s core assumptions, that dance music removed from the dancefloor must be soothing. Even at the record’s mellowest, muted rhythms knock like a racing heart, and the low end has the felt-but-not-heard presence of a neighbor’s house party. Shanahan’s basslines have always been his secret weapon, and here they are stealthier and more powerful than ever, cutting through the gloom like neon lights through heavy fog.
These songs are mercurial: moments of calm swiftly upended by anxious passages, and vice versa. By the album’s fourth track, “Turn Down These Voices,” it becomes clear just how complex Shanahan’s emotional terrain can be. Whimsical synth chords and swift, scratchy drum programming suggest the world’s largest, emptiest ice rink; the beat is surprisingly heavy. Plaintive, pitch-shifted voices gradually grow louder; the words are unintelligible, but the psychic pain is obvious, and despite the title’s plea, their wraithlike cries keep rising in volume until the very end.
“Fool” plays with similar contrasts, ribbons of synth twisting gently over a brisk, distorted drum pattern, the atmosphere thick and cloudy. As the drums rise in the mix, what at first felt placid turns turbulent, sneakily forceful. This is something new: ambient as a clenched fist, fingernails pressing painfully into one’s palm. The haze that has always permeated Auscultation’s music here feels like it has actual physical properties, like something to be pushed through. It suggests real bodily effort, as tangible as sweat and tears. By the time the album reaches its conclusion with the gentle, beatless “Exit,” the feeling of catharsis is unmistakable. In a medical context, auscultation is the diagnostic act of listening to sounds in the body, and on III, Shanahan makes the process of healing as palpable as the smoothness of a scar where blood once ran.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | 100% Silk | May 13, 2020 | 8 | 6d0a924e-72db-40f7-9907-6c3aa4f77768 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Robyn and Röyksopp's collaborative mini-album has the epic sweep of a proper album, with contemplative instrumental passages helping frame the more conventional songwriting. The freedom they've given themselves on Do It Again is both what makes the record refreshing and what keeps it from satisfying listeners as a more streamlined full-length would. | Robyn and Röyksopp's collaborative mini-album has the epic sweep of a proper album, with contemplative instrumental passages helping frame the more conventional songwriting. The freedom they've given themselves on Do It Again is both what makes the record refreshing and what keeps it from satisfying listeners as a more streamlined full-length would. | Röyksopp / Robyn: Do It Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19358-royksopp-robyn-do-it-again/ | Do It Again | The first studio snippet from Robyn and Röyksopp's collaborative mini-album Do It Again, shared stealthily in a trailer video for their joint tour, gave off an unfamiliar jolt of sex and circuitry. The Swedish pop upsetter and a Kraftwerk-worthy robotic voice, something like a filthy-minded Speak & Spell, plainly stated that they wanted each other. Surrounded by hard-driven electronic beats and billowing synths, you could almost imagine them in some fantastical dance club, about to slip away into the shadows.
But Do It Again is no chance encounter, as the singer born Robin Carlsson and the Norwegian duo of Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland have taken oddly related trajectories. She's the former teen-pop star who ditched her label and struck out on her own, sparking the spectacular career resurgence that led to 2010's Body Talk album trilogy; they're the early-2000s chillout-electronica guys who shrugged off easy categorization and increasingly worked more with vocalists, from Annie to the Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson. When Robyn and Röyksopp finally recorded together on a couple of tracks in 2009 and 2010, it was a meeting between two veteran acts with a gift for making broad appeal feel almost coincidental.
This Scandinavian electro-pop trio's most extensive studio team-up so far digs deeper into that shared affinity for stylistic exploration, patient offhandedness, and a communicative, dancefloor-friendly pop sensibility. Though technically an EP, the 35-minute Do It Again has the epic sweep of a proper album, with contemplative instrumental passages helping frame the more conventional songwriting. Still, the noodlier bits belie the project's origins in the respective artists' post-album creative hangovers: the freedom they've given themselves on Do It Again is both what makes the record refreshing and what keeps it from satisfying listeners as a more streamlined full-length would. Do It Again is an excellent mini-album, then, but it's easy to suspect that the masterpiece will be the tour, with Robyn and Röyksopp each performing a set and then all taking the stage together. There could be pink lasers.
Another way to approach Do It Again is as a maxi single. The title track lacks Robyn's usual knack for a strong, distinctive concept—just last year, Scotland's Camera Obscura had a charming single with the same name—but her ever-expressive, deeply felt vocals can make even strobe-lit "one more time" hedonism worth doing again. It's galloping, whooshing dance-pop, booming enough for festival EDM tents and melodic enough for spazzing out in front of laptop speakers, with an undercurrent of melancholy that makes it well worth pressing repeat. If the rest of the disc contained just remixes of "Do It Again", it'd still be some lustworthy vinyl.
But stopping at the title track would mean missing out on the rest that Do It Again has to offer. The relaxed format gives Robyn and Röyksopp space to sprawl out in some rewarding, if idiosyncratic, directions. Wordless finale "Inside the Idle Hour Club" is a moonlit synth-groove excursion that wouldn't have been out of place on Berge and Bruntland's 2010 LP Senior, and it's no slam to point out it would also be an ideal mellow interlude during a live show. "Every Little Thing" is something like a contemporary Italo-disco power ballad, as Robyn yearns in harmony with cyborg versions of herself. And the 10-minute "Monument" could turn out to be the set's most enduring track: Though the extended saxophone portion drags, Robyn's prophetic vision of the future here is unique in her catalog and deeply compelling. "When the moment comes," she intones weightily, "I can say I did all with love."
Which brings us back to "Sayit", the one with the dirty-talking gadget. Robyn serenaded a "Robotboy" on a slightly twee track from her masterful 2005 self-titled album. She was in love with a presumably metaphorical man-machine on her first Röyksopp collaboration, "The Girl and the Robot", from 2009's Junior (their other previous partnership came on "None of Dem", from Body Talk Pt. 1). When this uncanny yet euphoric, four-on-the-floor raver's Wall-E equivalent calls himself a "fuck mechanic," it's a rare moment of carnality in Robyn's discography, but it's also a silly joke. The more important phrase might be the one he utters right before: "Pleasure machine." If Do It Again is the physical artifact of Robyn and Röyksopp's union, it's extravagant and left of center, but it's above all generous. They did it all with love, for our pleasure. Or, as Robyn sings on "Do It Again", "It hurts so good." | 2014-05-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Interscope / Cherrytree | May 28, 2014 | 7.7 | 6d0ae38c-a7d2-46ac-8618-3a54eb641544 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
One of music's best qualities is its talent for escaping description. Critics, because we lack the vocabulary to verbally ... | One of music's best qualities is its talent for escaping description. Critics, because we lack the vocabulary to verbally ... | Plaid: Double Figure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6335-double-figure/ | Double Figure | One of music's best qualities is its talent for escaping description. Critics, because we lack the vocabulary to verbally illustrate what we hear, approximate our explanations with obtuse metaphors and imprecise comparisons. As a relative greenhorn in the Pitchfork camp, I don't have much experience crafting the sort of riddles reviewers always speak in, so maybe it's time I got some practice. And where better to start than with Plaid's latest musical conundrum, Double Figure-- an album whose ostensible theme is mystery, and an album for which few words are suited? So, if you'll permit me a moment of intellectual masturbation:
Plaid's first LP, Not for Threes, was to M.C. Escher as their second, Rest Proof Clockwork, was to Roy Lichtenstein. On Double Figure, intended as the final instalment of this IDM trilogy, Ed Handley and Andy Turner match the mind-bending intricacy and academic precision of Threes with the vibrant palettes and playful sensibility of Clockwork. The result is an aesthetically diverse gallery of songs that, in its finest moments, calls to mind the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and Rene Magritte-- immediately intriguing and immaculately produced, always with a cryptic sense of inexplicable urgency.
Where continuity is concerned, Double Figure reminds me of a salad made from candy bars, or a library where the books are actually ant farms-- neither of which I've actually encountered, but in literary circles, we call that poetic license. The disjointed juxtaposition of styles on this disc is so pronounced that it feels intentional; like The White Album or Jega's Spectrum, this record underscores its versatility at the expense of consistency.
While all of the tracks-- even the minute-long Tak snippets-- are autonomous, ambitiously complex entities, each of the 19 songs bear the duo's unifying, idiosyncratic stamp. And the absence of tangible themes lets listeners filter the gems from the garbage (the album doles out a healthy balance of both) without losing the plot.
When this album fails, it's not for want of trying. Handley and Turner seem to be pushing the envelope beyond their previous efforts, grafting more difficult harmonic arrangements onto the densely layered beat construction that characterized Not for Threes. But they often bite off more than they can chew. On "Light Rain," the melodies run amok and lose cohesion, and "Silversum" falls prey to the detached focus on percussive structure that plagued Plaid's debut.
Double Figure strikes gold, however, with songs like "Zala," a frenetic melange of off-kilter string synths and atmospheric melodies, punctuated by brisk snares and cymbals. "Eyen" kicks the album off in the right key, building steam from a flamenco guitar sample, wistful strings and a soft, flat bassline. Elements of chaos cautiously creep in on the instrumentation, then wash out the melodies entirely. The light drum breaks and Ennio Morricone leanings touch on the sound of "Pino Pomo" from the pair's last album, only with a less panicked and more tranquil outlook.
Plaid attempt the Funki Porcini sound with the onomatopoetically titled "Ti Bom." Jazzy breaks with clipped cymbal hits (bom-bom-ti-bom) keep the tempo while distorted horns flirt with airy hand drums in the song's upper registers. "Squance" reveals the duo's dancefloor viability with a disco-tinged drum-n-bass foray into the possibilities of stereo.
Handley and Turner flaunt their range all over this record, laying on the brooding gravity of "Sincetta" only moments before igniting the 8-bit electro of "Porn Coconut Co." But Double Figure suffers from an excess of ambition, and when Plaid aim too high, they miss the mark. This album features some of their best work to date, but also some of their greatest failures. Rest Proof Clockwork may not have tried as hard, but it worked brilliantly within its limits. Double Figure takes Plaid through a tract of uncharted territory, and their ship sometimes runs aground. | 2001-05-29T02:01:40.000-04:00 | 2001-05-29T02:01:40.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | May 29, 2001 | 7.6 | 6d0bdfd7-93b2-4468-85f4-bc95d2e5c7ce | Pitchfork | null |
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On Iceage's self-produced second album, they come off even younger, wilder, and more chaotic than on their 2011 debut, but also more experienced and nuanced. They've used their resources to hone what they already did well without abandoning their allure. | On Iceage's self-produced second album, they come off even younger, wilder, and more chaotic than on their 2011 debut, but also more experienced and nuanced. They've used their resources to hone what they already did well without abandoning their allure. | Iceage: You're Nothing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17623-iceage-youre-nothing/ | You're Nothing | When Iceage released their excellent 2011 debut, New Brigade, a large part of the discussion was dedicated to the nihilistic but crush-worthy Danish punk group's ages (at the time, ranging from 18 to 19), and the fact that they sounded much older than that. You also got stories about their bloody live shows and, later, online handwringing about them baiting controversy Joy Division-style by apparently flirting with fascist gestures at one of those shows. In the beginning, though, people were most interested in the part about four young dudes exploding out of "nowhere" (the Copenhagen DIY scene) fully formed and going on to release one of the best punk collections in recent memory. Their shows during that time were powerful in a very messy, very punk way. Two years later, they're a different band, one capable of more than shambling atmospherics and stage dives. Iceage write brilliant songs; on You're Nothing, they've found a way to clarify these compositional skills without stripping away their power.
Iceage's self-produced second album is even better than their debut. It's the quartet's first offering for the larger label Matador (the album's still being released by Escho in Denmark) and they come off even wilder and more chaotic than they did in 2011, but also more experienced and nuanced. They've honed the uncanny sense of classic punk songwriting-- the guitar sound's huge, the hooks more present, the charisma of dead-eyed, out-of-breath vocalist Elias Bender Rønnenfelt even greater. When you listen to the two records in tandem, you realize how brittle New Brigade was: "brittle" in an excellently fuzzed, rancid way, but You're Nothing is a heftier experience.
Unlike some groups who sign to a bigger label and beef up their sound in the wrong ways, Iceage used the new resources to hone what they already did well without abandoning what made them interesting in the first place. You can hear the shift on the industrial/ambient instrumental "Interlude", which helps to make Nothing darker and danker, and on "Morals", a mid-tempo piano-flecked track based on the 1960s Italian singer Mina's "L'Ultima Occasione". The odd reference fits here, building into a frenzy that finds Rønnenfelt hoarsely screaming "Where's your morals?" over militaristic rhythms. And, even with these slight tweaks, they don't fuck around: New Brigade offered 12 songs in 24 minutes, You're Nothing 12 songs in 28-and-a-half.
On the more typical Iceage songs, you get their mix of dirty punk and pulsing hardcore wrapped in an ink-black atmosphere, and Rønnenfelt's existential musings come in more powerful doses. The brilliant opener "Ecstasy", which sounds like a punk anthem mid-melt, strings together furious tempo changes, with, Rønnenfelt howling "I can't take this pressure" in the final implosion. "Coalition" is a classic rager, but you've never heard them doing doubled Sonic Youth guitar hooks like this. From "In Haze"'s clipped and twangy d-beat to the heavy bass of "Everything Drifts" to the spiraling anthemics of the title track, there are no weak spots. They chiseled things down for a reason: Great punk comes in spurts.
Rønnenfelt has said You're Nothing was inspired in part by his readings of Bataille, Genet, and the like. On these off-kilter anthems, you also imagine them reading Rimbaud, and get the sense that the group has taken Richard Hell and the Voidoids' "Blank Generation" to heart with lines like the title track's "Thats right, you're nothing/ Feel the void grow" and "Ecstasy"'s "But bliss is momentary anyhow/ Yet worth living for," along with the romantic surrealism of lines like "If I could/ Leave my body then I would/ Bleed into a lake/ Dashing away/ Disappear" from from "Morals". These are the sentiments of early 70s NYC punk made by kids who can look back on hardcore and post-punk to add fuel to it.
There was a moment at last year's Pitchfork Festival in Chicago that crystallized part of what makes Iceage fascinating: During their set, a bass head blew, then another, and then another. This is something that would usually cause a group to apologize, or blush, or throw a tantrum. But Iceage kept playing, didn't seem to sweat it, and calmly did their thing until someone else fixed the problem. Bassist Jakob Tvilling Pless looked around and shrugged it off. Rønnenfelt also kept going. In a way, it hardly registered. (Blank Generation, indeed.) It was my favorite moment of the weekend, and the most real: Iceage are a band who do these things honestly, and without thinking too much about it, and that's a big part of their power. That they back the attitude up with songs of this quality is what makes them unstoppable on You're Nothing. | 2013-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | February 18, 2013 | 8.6 | 6d0cc5ee-4c75-4fd5-98a9-e74d698a306e | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Popular Problems is Cohen's second album in the past two years. As with 2012's Old Ideas, its best songs feel naked and hymn-like but are restrained by an underlying mystery—he sounds like he's telling you everything but he never actually tips his hand. The flat airhorn of a voice he used throughout the '70s has become eerily bottomless, the husk of another voice now gone. | Popular Problems is Cohen's second album in the past two years. As with 2012's Old Ideas, its best songs feel naked and hymn-like but are restrained by an underlying mystery—he sounds like he's telling you everything but he never actually tips his hand. The flat airhorn of a voice he used throughout the '70s has become eerily bottomless, the husk of another voice now gone. | Leonard Cohen: Popular Problems | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19853-leonard-cohen-popular-problems/ | Popular Problems | The story of latter-day Leonard Cohen is one of wry acceptance. Fleeced by a manager of his retirement savings between the mid-1990s and mid-'00s, he returned to the stage in 2008, 73 years old and nearly broke after four decades of hard work. The shows he played were better than they needed to be in order to get people to pay for them. At one that I saw in late 2012, he reminded me of a cat, drawing the audience in by pulling away, rolling over and showing his softer, playful side only to snap back into cool focus. It was the first time I had ever seen anyone over 70 skip, and in dress pants, no less.
Come to think of it, it's the kind of story you might hear in a Leonard Cohen song: the aging entertainer forced into the spotlight one last time just to make they money he's already earned, a cog in the same machine that once made him a star. "It's their ways to detain, their ways to disgrace," goes a line from 1974's "A Singer Must Die". "Their knee in your balls and their fist in your face/ Yes, and long live the state, by whoever it's made/ Sir, I didn't see nothing, I was just getting home late." In other words, "broke" is all the thanks most singers get.
Popular Problems is Cohen's second album in the past two years. As with the 2012 LP Old Ideas, its best songs feel naked and hymn-like but are restrained by an underlying mystery—he sounds like he's telling you everything but he never actually tips his hand. The flat airhorn of a voice he used throughout the '70s has become eerily bottomless, the husk of another voice now gone.
Cohen is still an impossibly cool figure, singing about states of yearning and distress with the confidence of someone who knows that they—like everything—will pass. Even when he sings in the first person, he is heatless, as though watching his own failures from a distant star. "Did I ever love you?" he asks at one point. "Does it really matter?" The music behind him is a strange, sterile take on country—a form known for its certainty and wisdom, repurposed for a meditation on doubt.
Like all of Cohen's albums, Popular Problems sounds slick but slightly off-kilter, like someone trying to imitate music they've read about but never actually heard. Where an artist like Bob Dylan seemed to use music primarily as an excuse for words and Van Morrison seemed distinctly to be the leader of a band, Cohen occupies a stranger space. His music over the years has been even more exploratory than his writing, changing style with the detached irreverence of a teenager breezing through her closet, from folk to lounge to ersatz disco and cabaret. The reminder here is that no matter how close Cohen seems to the truth, what he does is just another cheap show to keep the crowd entertained. Even in its starkest, most naturalistic moments, Popular Problems cannot—and does not want to—spare you its arsenal of perfect background singers and trumpets made of computer sounds.
Cohen has always had a remarkable way of making sadness sound triumphant and triumph sound sad. In a 2002 interview with Spin, he related a lesson he learned during his years studying Zen. "Roshi said something nice to me one time," he started. "He said that the older you get, the lonelier you become, and the deeper the love you need. Which means that this hero that you're trying to maintain as the central figure in the drama of your life—this hero is not enjoying the life of a hero. You're exerting a tremendous maintenance to keep this heroic stance available to you, and the hero is suffering defeat after defeat. And they're not heroic defeats; they're ignoble defeats. Finally, one day you say, 'Let him die—I can't invest any more in this heroic position.'" The best songs here—"Samson in New Orleans," "Born in Chains"—occupy that space: weary but optimistic, suffering but renewed.
Because Cohen is a thoughtful person on the edge of his 80th birthday, everyone seems to want to ask him about dying. "Naturally those questions arise," he said in a 2012 press conference. "But, you know, I like to do it with a beat." Which implies that his answers might be simple, but they aren't. "There is no God in heaven/ And there is no Hell below" goes the last verse of a song on Popular Problems called "Almost Like the Blues". "So says the great professor of all there is to know/ But I've had the invitation that a sinner can't refuse/ And it's almost like salvation; it's almost like the blues."
The idea being that heaven and hell are the same thing and you don't even have to leave earth to get there. A compelling thought, but nothing to pray on. And yet the performance is so contemplative and so certain. Maybe it's the Zen, which posits that change is permanent and our only choice is to accept the moment or become just another tragedy trying to force our way uphill. Half the time, it doesn't even feel like Cohen is singing songs—he's too busy with notes. | 2014-09-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-09-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | September 24, 2014 | 7.6 | 6d0f75c5-65eb-4b4c-bf3f-d97e4ae53a8c | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The Australian dream-pop artist’s second album widens her sparkly shoegaze into a brasher, more ambitious sound, locating the edge between noise and melody. | The Australian dream-pop artist’s second album widens her sparkly shoegaze into a brasher, more ambitious sound, locating the edge between noise and melody. | Hatchie: Giving the World Away | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hatchie-giving-the-world-away/ | Giving the World Away | Harriette Pilbeam, who records under the name Hatchie, wants to make something clear: She writes more than just love songs. Don’t be fooled by the Australian dream-pop artist’s past work, which drifted in a gauzy haze of guitar and synths and relied on a revolving door of lyrical clichés—kissing the stars, staying true to your heart, etc. The pandemic caused Pilbeam to confront long-buried anxieties and insecurities, a process that made her question her future in music. Her second full-length album, Giving the World Away, explores these afflictions with an exacting, if not heavy-handed, touch, mushrooming her once sparkly shoegaze into a brasher, more ambitious sound.
With help from Dan Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo, Caroline Polachek), Jorge Elbrecht (Sky Ferreira, Japanese Breakfast), and Beach House drummer James Barone, Giving the World Away is a maze of fuzz and reverb, chugging guitars, airy synths, and delightfully weird percussion. The strongest moments on the album balance restraint and exaltation, like on “This Enchanted,” which takes house piano and slithering bass and builds it into a shoegaze anthem, its chorus drowning in distorted guitar and drums. Another standout, “Quicksand,” begins with a low-slung guitar riff that explodes into an ebullient electro pop hook. At its best, Giving the World Away locates the edge between noise and melody, carving out a pop core amid seemingly structureless arrangements.
The songwriting here is a stark improvement from past Hatchie projects, and compellingly surveys some of early adulthood’s most disorienting challenges: dependency issues, fear of commitment, the pain of seeing but not being seen. “Quicksand” offers a devastating insight into the loss of hope and optimism that comes with aging: “I used to think that this was something I could die for/I hate admitting to myself that I was never sure.” The giddy innocence of Pilbeam’s previous work feels like a distant dream; she’s nearing 30, staring at life with a more discerning eye, searching for meaning beyond a belief in soulmates and destiny.
Occasionally, the deluge of instrumentation grates. “Twin” ambles in sleepy melodies without release, while the album’s title track remains static from start to finish. The production is impressive, but it’s also a lot, and Pilbeam’s voice can get lost within the spacious set designs. And though the emotions are sophisticated, the lyrics tend toward on-the-nose observations that attenuate the tension: “Lost sight of who I’m supposed to be/But within the chaos I can see I’m not me,” she sings on “The Key.” The album hits harder when Pilbeam lets you feel the weight of her anxiety, but often she opts for a definitive tone that leaves little to the imagination.
Near the album’s end, on “Sunday Song,” Pilbeam’s gifts coalesce. The song breathes in a way few others on Giving the World Away do, a cathartic experience for a record obsessed with stuffing as many riffs and rhythms atop each other as possible. But here the production pares back and Pilbeam lands on a deftly complicated sentiment: “All the things you wish you hadn’t said/Sick of waiting for something heaven sent/Can’t you see all that I see in you?” Despite its flaws, Giving the World Away marks an exciting evolution for Hatchie—she still wants love, but now she also wants to dance, to feel, to find balance within life’s unending madness. | 2022-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | April 22, 2022 | 6.7 | 6d185378-3a36-4bce-9058-fb7801cd4e5a | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Thirty years after alt rock reshaped the mainstream, Evan Dando and co.’s major-label debut feels like the product of a bygone era—a snapshot of rock regionalism on its last legs. | Thirty years after alt rock reshaped the mainstream, Evan Dando and co.’s major-label debut feels like the product of a bygone era—a snapshot of rock regionalism on its last legs. | The Lemonheads: Lovey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-lemonheads-lovey/ | Lovey | Just as Evan Dando’s long relationship with substance abuse began in earnest, the Lemonheads were swept up in the major-label slog to distill and globalize grunge music en masse. Atlantic Records took a chance signing the frenetic Boston punk band with 1990’s Lovey, a risk predicated on some local buzz and the beguiling allure of Dando’s cleft chin. The album set the mold for the group’s jangly, hard-edged sound through the 1990s and beyond, but when weighed against the blitzed hardcore of their three preceding LPs, Lovey feels tentative, like a prototype alt-rock aggregate targeted at drunk BU kids unhip to the burgeoning sound of Seattle.
Lovey arrived at the precipice of Dando’s celebrity bullshit, preceding his entanglements with Kate Moss and Johnny Depp and a well-documented drug habit. For that reason, it occupies a unique position in the Lemonheads’ catalog as their most notable pivot. Falling at the crossroads of rowdy college rock and commercial slacker rock, the album is a vapid vessel null of concept or premise, the tempered segue between the rabid chaos of their first three releases and the polished radio rock yet to come. When you look at the tracklist and see a song called “Stove,” guess what? It’s about a stove. Dig into the album’s Bleach-esque opener, “Ballarat,” and you’ll find a teenager’s fascination with Charles Manson. The wah-pedal grunge of “Lil Seed” is a callow ode to weed. There’s no greater point to be gleaned from these songs, but their indifference is familiar and endearing, a testament to alternative rock at its most blithely inconsequential.
Fire Records’ 30th anniversary 2xLP/CD reissue supplements the remastered album with a collection of interviews, unseen photos, and an additional disc with a scrappy live performance from Live at the Wireless, recorded in Sydney and broadcast by Triple J in July 1991. The accompanying book weaves an oral history documenting the Lemonheads’ gradual emergence in Boston through the late ’80s and includes accounts from ex-bandmates Jesse Peretz, drummer David Ryan, guitarist Corey “Loog” Brennan, and producer Paul Q. Kolderie. Spliced with Dando’s press-circuit interviews, these insights offer a strikingly candid look into his ascent to fame: the lost chapters of an irresistibly problematic man ambling down a path of reckless abandon.
There are only two unifying themes, the more pungent of which is the olfactory nuance of Budweiser and half-smoked Marlboro Reds; the second is the gruff, unadulterated presence of its author, his gravelly croon at his most melodic yet. The absence of co-songwriter and second lead singer Ben Deily following 1989’s Lick permitted Dando the space to diversify, which he does by name-checking Jesus on the crawling “Ride With Me,” a master template for every post-grunge band sniffing out a slot on Buzz Ballads. Even with a hammy guitar-hero performance on the protracted album closer “[The] Door,” the band feels closer to the Pacific Northwest melodrama of Dirt than to fellow Boston scensters Bullet LaVolta and Big Dipper.
As gleaned from the book’s narrative, Dando’s split influences present themselves unadorned. Back-end songs like “Left for Dead”' and “Come Downstairs” stem from the Bob Mould school of three-minute songs with 50 chord changes. He showcases his reverence for California drug guys with an amiable cover of Gram Parsons’ “Brass Buttons”; Live at the Wireless yields a similarly warmhearted performance of Big Star’s “Nighttime.”
Most people don’t know this, but Boston was the best city to start a rock band in the 1980s, back before its soaring real estate market relegated punk rock to the catacombs of Jamaica Plain and Allston, a time when the dissolution of Mission of Burma inspired a generation of kids to fill the gaping void. As is true with many of their contemporaries at that time, the Lemonheads were a guileless snapshot of rock regionalism on its last legs. At heart, the deluxe reissue of Lovey is a spiffy vestige of a bygone era, and if Dando managed to make any sort of statement with it, it’s how beneficial it can be to fuck around in your hometown before selling out.
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. | 2020-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire | October 30, 2020 | 7.4 | 6d1857f4-611e-4911-9cde-131fb7f13f30 | Charley Ruddell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/charley-ruddell/ | |
California Nights layers the fuzz back on top of Bethany Cosentino's distinct voice for a radio-friendly take on '90s alt-rock—an attempt to stay part of the establishment as natural questions arise over the diminishing returns of the band’s core formula. | California Nights layers the fuzz back on top of Bethany Cosentino's distinct voice for a radio-friendly take on '90s alt-rock—an attempt to stay part of the establishment as natural questions arise over the diminishing returns of the band’s core formula. | Best Coast: California Nights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20554-california-nights/ | California Nights | As Voltaire said, if a Best Coast album named California Nights didn’t exist, it would be necessary to create one. This is the band’s third LP, following the Fade Away mini-album that aborted the attempt at repositioning Bethany Cosentino as a stripped-down singer-songwriter, as on 2012's The Only Place. Instead, California Nights layers the fuzz back on top of her distinct voice for a radio-friendly take on '90s alt-rock—an attempt to stay part of the establishment as natural questions arise over the diminishing returns of the band’s core formula.
Much was initially made about Cosentino's penchant for pot, even as much of the music on Crazy for You sounded relentlessly sunny in ways that being stoned often is not. Here, the tone is thicker. Producer Wally Gagel also helmed Fade Away, and California Nights is a natural extension; there are the familiar reference points of surf rock and garage rock, and the band occasionally heads in heavier directions. The title track and "Feeling Ok" find a midpoint between shoegaze and Sheryl Crow, the strangled reverb of "Sun Was High (So Was I)" taken to its well-produced conclusion. When she sings "I stay high all the time just to get by" on the former, the music envelops her thoughts like a bad trip. Meanwhile, she’s added faint notes of sophistication: There’s what passes for a bridge on the aggressively catchy "Heaven Sent", which is only one line repeated a few times as the music drops in and out in classic pop-punk stop-time, but enough to change up the verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure so ardently followed on previous records.
California Nights is a professional album: heavy-ish, filled with hooks, somewhere between "fast enough to dance" and "slow enough to sigh to while looking out of a window." There’s nothing with the ubiquitous charm of Crazy for You—no "Boyfriend" or "Our Deal"—but Cosentino's voice is bright, clear, and full of emotive sentimentality. As a lyricist, she remains a devout student of what Lester Bangs dubbed the Lou Reed "I walked to the chair/ Then I sat in it" school of lyrics; she expresses herself clearly. The nadir comes during "So Unaware", when she literally sings "What is life?/ What is love?"—the core question of many works of art, true, but usually they're explored rather than just stated. As usual with Cosentino, you'll either be infuriated by the simplicity or endeared by its earnestness.
Anyways, it's not like "She loves you, yeah yeah yeah" is featured on any AP English exams. It's easier to be annoyed when Cosentino lapses into rote sentiments, especially since her voice seems so sure of its rightness. "Jealousy" is addressed to those amorphous "haters," the bane of any successful person's existence, and offers the deeply uncomplicated observation that "girls will be girls and boys will be boys/ It's just the way it is." A warning sign goes up when you consider Cosentino is no longer a broke-ish slacker sitting on the couch with her cat and her bong. She's achieved a level of success that allows her to appear in whiskey ads and design her own Urban Outfitters clothing line, while ignoring the obvious political implications. And why shouldn't she? Anyone with a problem is only a hater.
At times, it seems her insistence on affectless slackerism is less a genuine expression than a cynical pose, aimed at ensuring she stays part of the establishment. As Drake will tell you, there's a lot of money in being fashionably moody. And yet for all the formal or ideological complaints, Cosentino remains remarkably capable of riffing on heartbreak, and the concomitant yearning. On "When Will I Change", she sings openly about what some would see as her self-absorption: "It's not that bad, and I have no reason to be sad/ But I find a way almost every day to stay this way." Well, it’s honest. If this is what Best Coast continues to give us after six years and three albums, you can either shrug it off or let the vibes carry you away. | 2015-05-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-05-06T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Harvest | May 6, 2015 | 6.4 | 6d19129b-2cdd-4c17-9881-5de420fbf14f | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
On her second album, the Los Angeles singer uses her bluesy, soulful contralto to express a deep, almost ecstatic sense of loneliness. | On her second album, the Los Angeles singer uses her bluesy, soulful contralto to express a deep, almost ecstatic sense of loneliness. | Baby Rose: Through and Through | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baby-rose-through-and-through/ | Through and Through | What does it mean to say that a piece of music sounds like it came from another time? That a ghost or an ancient soul created it? That it favors tradition over modernity? That it sounds not algorithmic but somehow authentic (whatever that might mean)?
All of these statements are true of Baby Rose’s psychedelic soul album Through and Through. Yet the Los Angeles-based musician’s second album doesn’t merely sound like a holdover from another time; it might have come from another timeline altogether. It lives in the swimmy non-existence of lost futures: lifetimes lived only in hope and projection, crushes that never manifested into relationships, loves that never materialized into babies.
The album’s opulent production and heard-through-the-wall thump—as doctored alongside co-producer Tim Maxey—is reminiscent of that dream of the 2010s when the fantasy of wandering an empty mall alone, the sound of a popular song from one’s childhood reverberating through the dead space, was considered the most sublime aesthetic experience imaginable.
On Through and Through, Rose reimagines those empty malls as empty hearts, revisiting past relationships as a solitary figure, willing them into evergreen survival from a place of deep, ecstatic loneliness. “Dance with me like the very first time,” she sings with pleading vibrato on the downtempo “Dance With Me,” her voice beginning front and center in the mix, before Maxey pans her to the left, adding a heavy layer of reverb and creating an effect of distance as she begs her lost lover: “Don’t look behind you.”
Rose’s throaty, bluesy contralto is obviously influenced by Nina Simone’s—an artist she has covered alongside Robert Glasper and the Roots—though there’s some airiness and buoyancy to Rose’s graveness. If Simone’s voice could be likened to the rumbling of an engine, Rose’s is more like the flapping of a propeller. And unlike Simone, who tends to summon doleful gravitas, Rose always seems to land on a lighter note. She lingers over the words as though humbled by the lessons embedded within them. At the end of each line, she seems to come to a place of newfound wisdom and clarity. “Only love can revive us,” she sings on “Go,” the words hanging in the air like an unmanned parachute, dancing in the sky before landing in a field of fluffy bulrush.
It’s a feat for any instrument to compete with a voice like that, one so lived in and prodigiously ancient. The relationship between voice and music on Through and Through manifests as a kind of battle. Light, psychedelic embellishments grounded by deep grooves threaten to wash Rose away, but her oar of a voice pushes against the tide. It’s a dynamic that endows greater urgency to Rose’s fight to live out a lost future—a struggle she eventually loses.
On “Stop the Bleeding”, the album’s outlier and singular moment of total groundedness, Rose sounds at one with the piano—this time sounding up close, and not a room away—as she cries out a series of self-directed questions: “How do I stop? Stop the bleeding? … Stop repeating/The cycle?” The ballad functions as a real-time lesson, a moment of naked self-confrontation before the cycle repeats itself.
Only on “Water,” the penultimate song, do Rose’s voice and the songs’ arrangements reach a kind of détente. Rose slowly loses her presence, the gravel of her voice carried away in the haze of chorused guitar and giddy bass. She relaxes into a peaceful state of acceptance, relinquishing her sense of control, giving her oar to the tide. “Let’s be water,” she sings, the sound of waves pushing her towards the future, and dragging her into another time. | 2023-05-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Secretly Canadian | May 3, 2023 | 7.6 | 6d1c21a5-8c83-464e-96ee-1f7d4b6b208d | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
The Weather Station’s splendid six-song EP finds Tamara Lindeman moving from abject loneliness to impending marriage without ever becoming loud, fast or bothered. She possesses the unwavering patience of Bill Callahan’s later records, delivering every word and worry like she’s pondered it all into acceptance. | The Weather Station’s splendid six-song EP finds Tamara Lindeman moving from abject loneliness to impending marriage without ever becoming loud, fast or bothered. She possesses the unwavering patience of Bill Callahan’s later records, delivering every word and worry like she’s pondered it all into acceptance. | The Weather Station: What Am I Going to Do With Everything I Know | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19825-weather-station-what-am-i-going-to-do-with-everything-i-know/ | What Am I Going to Do With Everything I Know | The climax comes so quickly and so quietly that you may never detect it at all. In the final minute of “Almost Careless”, the near-whispered lilt that closes The Weather Station’s splendid six-song EP, What Am I Going to Do with Everything I Know, Tamara Lindeman stumbles upon one of the most important questions she may ever ask, simply while walking to the park. During a momentary break in the gentle supporting rhythm, she remembers what she posed to the boy whose gloved hand she held: “‘What if we get married?’” she sings, her voice cracking into an audible smile as she climbs the final word’s syllabic slope. “I said it almost careless, as though it was nothing to me.” Lindeman, her sudden fiancé and the band behind her treat the peak with equitable nonchalance. He blushes and nods, she narrates, and they turn and walk, the pedal steel between her voice and the drums guiding the pair like a soft flashlight. Instead of Hallmark strings, Lindeman gives her tremendous moment the deference of restraint.
That same subtle and balanced approach defines all of What Am I Going to Do, a 17-minute record that finds Lindeman moving from abject loneliness to impending marriage without ever becoming loud, fast or bothered. The Weather Station’s terrific 2011 LP, *All of it Was Mine, *used similar understatement to offer an elliptical picture of love fracturing, with the changing seasons turning innocent sweetness into hard-won self-sovereignty. But these short and intertwined tunes portray the stepwise process into love. They seem, however, written and played from a distance, so that the butterflies and doubts have settled into a graceful, logical arc. Lindeman’s voice flits and cracks, peaks and valleys, comforts and cries, not unlike that of Joni Mitchell. But she possesses the unwavering patience of Bill Callahan’s later records, delivering every word and worry like she’s pondered it all into acceptance.
On opener “Don’t Understand”, she worries that she’s “irreversibly free,” or forever alone, as she tries to sleep on a stranger’s couch. But over drums brushed so softly and organ played so faintly you might mistake them for a ghost in the studio’s machines, she states the scene without mourning it—it’s only her reality. Only four tracks later, when things turn serious with the quiet boy who’s just moved in, Lindeman lists the worries that most young lovers encounter: Will it get boring? Will it get tough? Will it survive? Her perennially soft voice flirts with hardness here, a whiff of irritation coming through as he makes jokes when she wonders this stuff aloud. But still, she seems mollified by the relative stranger’s presence, her mind eased by his casual calm. In the last verse, two backup singers rise to meet Lindeman with country-soul harmonies, as if to say "everyone’s been here." Assured again, Lindeman lets the song fade into the resolve of a final, firm piano chord.
What Am I Going to Do actually stems from two sessions in separate countries, a testament to Lindeman’s consistent vision for these songs and her material at large. She cut “Don’t Understand” and “Seemed True,” the album’s romantic centerpiece, in North Carolina, with a crew that included members of Megafaun and Hiss Golden Messenger. The rest was made back in Ontario with Daniel Romano, the songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer who helmed All of it was Mine, too. But these tracks all feel uniform and effortless, like first takes captured in real-time by a band that has lived the story just like Lindeman. For songs so intimate, and performances so inward, such careful singularity feels like a remarkable feat.
Lindeman first came into the public eye as an actress, a biographical note that may help explain why her songs have always felt so filled with detail, like a perfectly planned shot in a meticulous production. On All of it was Mine, for instance, she surveyed her domain with a botanist’s eye—“muddy white petunias, lobelia trails blue-eyed”—and immortalized her grandmother’s virtues with one line: “It was good to sit together, on her couch of seafoam green.” But Lindeman’s earlier work felt like a life seen from some art-house distance, where questions about motivations and meanings remained in the spaces between shots. While What Am I Going to Do isn’t so obvious as to be pedantic or cloying, it embraces the familiar and linear in a way that Lindeman’s work never has. This time, she asks the questions for us, like why she’s fallen in love, if it’s moving too fast, or if this might end with rings and legal documents. And then she commits, for the first time on tape, to the unknown and ends the album with at least one answer—an accepted marriage proposal. “Then we turned across the park’s expanse, open fields of last year’s grass,” her voice confides, tracing her private joy, “heading back with one question less than we started out with.” It is, for now, The Weather Station’s very subtle peak. | 2014-10-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-10-17T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | You’ve Changed | October 17, 2014 | 8.1 | 6d2282a3-18c6-4b13-bc10-208444747080 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | 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 1995 album by the incalculably influential Florida death metal band, the most melodic and refined album of their career. | 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 1995 album by the incalculably influential Florida death metal band, the most melodic and refined album of their career. | Death: Symbolic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/death-symbolic/ | Symbolic | Like the horror section at the local video store, or the spot outside the mall where kids would cut class to smoke cigarettes, the music recorded by Chuck Schuldiner with Death between 1987 and 1998 exists as a safe haven. For those drawn to these seven studio albums by the pioneering death metal band, the music became a fortress to guard against the mainstream, a place where a lot of outcasts gathered to find their identity.
Because no two records featured the same lineup, and because each one built so steadily on the sound of the last, every era in Schuldiner’s brief career attracts its own set of devotees. There are those who stand by the early material, like 1987’s Scream Bloody Gore, with its weed- and beer-scented basement atmosphere. These were the songs Schuldiner wrote at his mother’s house in Florida after hearing the UK extreme metal band Venom and feeling “scared, blown away, amazed”—in that order. The music is bludgeoning and immediate. And the lyrics, from the moment they escaped his teenage mind, inspired death metal bands for eternity to summarize zombie attacks and the plots of slasher flicks in the goriest ways imaginable.
Others came on board with mid-era material like 1991’s Human, which traded violent thrills and thrashy riffs for more sophisticated interests. In these songs, Schuldiner, then in his mid-20s, took his first stabs at imagining what adulthood might look like beyond your general torture and zombie apocalypse. His lyrics explored more existential horrors, the everyday evil of emotional betrayal and misuse of power; he began playing with musicians like Cynic’s Sean Reinert and Paul Masvidal who took inspiration from jazz and progressive rock, accompanying the songs with spacier textures, in dazzling time signatures.
As the provocative, blunt-force metal that Death helped popularize in the ’80s was gaining an audience outside its loyal scene—with heavy bands signing to bigger labels, getting rotation on MTV, and, in the case of Cannibal Corpse, appearing in a blockbuster comedy—Schuldiner quickly lost interest. He was sensitive and soft-spoken, with a slight lisp and gentle Southern drawl, but he was also intense, impulsive, and unafraid to speak his mind—the kind of person you’d want on your side in an argument. He cycled through bandmates and bailed on tours, rallied against the media and burned bridges. Occasionally, his rebellion was more lighthearted. When he appeared at MTV’s Headbangers Ball in 1993 alongside peers donned in tees with pentagrams and illegible logos, he can be seen wearing a shirt with no text, just a few adorable kittens.
At the time of its release in 1995, it would have been difficult to predict the enduring, unifying appeal of Symbolic. To some fans, this melodic turn was a disappointment—neither as brutal as the early material nor as outwardly progressive as the recent stuff. To the world at large, it came and went, dwarfed by post-grunge and the oncoming wave of nu-metal, overshadowed by bigger sellers on Death’s new label, Roadrunner, like Machine Head and Sepultura. (Roadrunner attempted to promote the album alongside their other death metal releases in a blanket advertisement, which resulted in an angry phone call from Schuldiner, doing everything possible to avoid blending in with the scene.)
Schuldiner might have seemed confident, but he too struggled with what exactly this catchy, complicated music was supposed to be. Despite the tight structure and memorable refrain of a song like “Crystal Mountain,” the sound was too hard-edged to feel like straight rock music; and despite the dissonant riffs and vivid aggression of a song like “Misanthrope,” the band never stays in one place long enough to let you find the groove.
At this time, Schuldiner was growing frustrated with his singing voice—the element that bound together the disparate phases of his career and connects Symbolic most directly to other death metal bands at the time. Less guttural than what death metal vocals would become and more abrasive than the thrash metal that inspired him, Schuldiner’s instinctive voice is an inimitable texture against his music, with a whipping momentum, like fire tearing through piles of leaves. “I don’t know that he ever consciously thought to sing that way,” his mother, Jane Schuldiner, recalled of those early rehearsals in her basement after her son had dropped out of high school to pursue his dream of playing guitar in a metal band. “It just came naturally when he started singing and playing that kind of music.”
Schuldiner’s career is defined by the relationship between his ever-increasing skill as a musician and his unwavering vision. By Symbolic, he had become one of metal’s finest guitarists—someone whose playing summons a singular response, a feeling you can only get from hearing his records. So many of his riffs, like the one that arrives 45 seconds into the opening title track of Symbolic, seem to hurl themselves against the speakers, like someone backing up and repeatedly trying to kick down a door. He sought the same attack with his voice, and he often felt disappointed. “All the music is done,” he would announce to his bandmates, “now I have to ruin it with my vocals.”
Schuldiner spoke often about enlisting an actual singer for the band. His dream was Ronnie James Dio, whose operatic tenor helped elevate Black Sabbath and Dio classics into nightmarish hymnals. Schuldiner, in comparison, seemed to bark the lyrics, relying on repetition, echoing effects, and dramatic flourishes to mirror the growing dynamics of his writing. On Symbolic, he sometimes sounds more like the singer of a hardcore band, shouting through gritted teeth so you can register every word from deep within the thrashing crowd: “I don’t mean to dwell,” he screams in the opening lines, “but I can’t help myself.”
With Schuldiner’s vocals sanded down to skeletal bursts, the music on Symbolic was newly sprawling and surprising. He incorporates classical guitar into the ghostly outros of “Crystal Mountain” and “Perennial Quest,” giving the sense of a quiet, vulnerable landscape on the outer edges of these epics. Passing melodies from “Sacred Serenity” and “1,000 Eyes” have a sentimental pull like the score from an action film set in space. Without the clear verse-chorus structure of more traditional heavy music, even the most palatable death metal songs can feel like an amorphous revolving door of riffs: Schuldiner always took pleasure in finding new ways for his compositions to evolve, catching you off guard when you think you have them figured out.
His guitar solos often do what his vocals could not, acting as an extended hand to pull you into the complex thoughts and mixed emotions behind the words. In “1,000 Eyes” he describes “a newfound age of advanced observeillance” that sounds a little like life online in the 21st century, but his scorching leads are what makes you feel it: the paranoia, the instinct to burrow inside yourself, the dream of breaking free.
With every album, Schuldiner found a different group of musicians to complement his latest direction, and you can’t talk about Symbolic without talking about drummer Gene Hoglan. The Dark Angel virtuoso has jokingly credited himself with playing “lead drums” on the record, but it’s a testament to his gift as an accompanist that his playing—sometimes sounding as if he’s written a different part for each 15-second segment—never feels distracting or showy. Alongside bassist Kelly Conlon and guitarist Bobby Koelble, he finds a balance between technical skill and pure instinct that fits right within the world of Schuldiner’s songwriting.
“My hands are jazz, but my feet are metal,” Hoglan said at the time, speaking both to the thought behind his performances and the layers in Schuldiner’s songwriting. What Hoglan was literally referring to is the contrast between the blastbeats—a staple of extreme metal, with constant, undeterrable motion against the kick drum—and the cymbal work, which is lighter and trickier than what you might typically encounter in the genre. But you can also attribute his concept to Schuldiner’s songs themselves: an eruption below, a calm on the surface.
The concentration on this aspect of Schuldiner’s songwriting helps distinguish Symbolic from the rest of Death’s catalog and most death metal of its era. Plenty of bands have aspired to write riffs like the ones in “Zero Tolerance,” but few could dream of replicating the delicate, visceral thread connecting one part to the next. While classics from the era like Cannibal Corpse’s The Bleeding or Deicide’s Once Upon the Cross seem intentionally claustrophobic—relentless records that fill a small space with as much sound as possible—these songs constantly find ways to open themselves up. “I like to look my audience in the eyes,” Schuldiner once said of his live performances, how he tended to avoid the customary hair-in-the-face headbanging. On Symbolic, you can hear him gazing toward the crowd, trying, at every turn, to make a connection.
The sense of humanity is partially why Symbolic has endured as a death metal classic, an evergreen gateway to the genre Schuldiner was consciously trying to abandon. It is neither his most groundbreaking album nor his most technically impressive, but it is the one that makes the most room for newcomers, whose mysteries offer the most depth for repeated listens. In some ways, these songs trace a journey from the classic rock that Schuldiner grew up on toward the niche community he found himself leading as a young adult. When asked about the use of acoustic guitar throughout the record, he proudly cited inspiration from his childhood heroes Kiss—the band that first made him fall in love with the instrument.
Back then, music was a sanctuary for Schuldiner. His parents bought him a guitar as a coping mechanism after the death of his older brother, Frank, who was killed in a car accident. Chuck was 9 years old at the time, and, bored to tears at lessons trying to learn “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” found new inspiration once he plugged in. “The first time he played the electric guitar, it was as if a switch was turned on in him,” his mother recalled. “And it never turned off.” For much of his life, this intimate connection made the roadblocks he faced—bandmates who didn’t share his devotion, journalists who fed into rumors about his personal life, industry people glomming onto trends—feel unbearable, a grim corruption of something pure.
Schuldiner intended Symbolic to be the final album he released under the Death banner. He felt fed up with the genre, confined by its boundaries, and he saw this album as the culmination of his work to that point. The first step was to lose the band name, which now felt like an unfortunate tattoo from his youth. His next project would be called Control Denied, and he would finally enlist a vocalist who could sing melodic leads. Instead of following his instinct, however, Schuldiner was roped into making another Death album—the label was concerned it wouldn’t be able to market his music without the brand name—and his dream was put off a few years.
Before his death from brain cancer in 2002 at the age of 34, Schuldiner’s final releases were one last Death album—1998’s proggy, brilliant The Sound of Perseverance—and one album as Control Denied—1999’s underrated The Fragile Art of Existence. Each project built on aspects from Symbolic—its nuanced lyrics, sharper melodies, and refusal to be boxed in—and continued widening a path for other artists in the genre. To this day, Schuldiner remains a figurehead for heavy bands known for shapeshifting—from the totemic death metal of Philadelphia’s Horrendous to the astral projections of Denver’s Blood Incantation—while staying true to the genre’s initial mission of lawlessness, constantly challenging perceptions.
In the 2016 documentary Death by Metal, producer Jim Morris reveals that Schuldiner considered an alternate way forward during the sessions for Symbolic, which were longer and more elaborate than any of their previous albums. It was the first time they demoed material with an 8-track recorder, allowing the band to perfect their parts before heading to the studio. The goal was to refine each song, zeroing in on the most immediate qualities of Schuldiner’s writing. “How do you put more melody into his music? Well, you can’t do it with the guitars, he’s already really, really melodic,” Morris says. In response, Schuldiner tried a cleaner style with his vocals: “I’m like, ‘Oh my god, you can sing,’” Morris recalls. “You’re great!’”
With the timid excitement of brushing upon a friend’s secret, Morris suggests the two briefly imagined a different version of the album with Schuldiner singing in a more traditional style, but they never recorded any of it. It’s tantalizing food for thought, but in the end, their instinct was right. If Death’s previous work offered a blueprint for what the genre of death metal can be, then Symbolic offered a way to exist and evolve gracefully within its borders. There are plenty of albums where a band crosses the threshold: reaching for a wider audience and finding them, firing on all cylinders and ascending to the next level. Symbolic is something rarer: a visionary artist desperate to push forward, raging against his limitations until it sounds a little like celebration. | 2022-02-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-13T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Roadrunner | February 13, 2022 | 9.1 | 6d2be292-dfba-4b33-b68b-ef6e6040354f | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Atlanta icon releases another hour of music rendering tortured hedonism with painterly detail, meticulous production, and melancholy melody. | The Atlanta icon releases another hour of music rendering tortured hedonism with painterly detail, meticulous production, and melancholy melody. | Future: High Off Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/future-high-off-life/ | High Off Life | Future’s legacy is secure: as one of the most influential artists of the past decade, he’s managed to conquer the streets and the charts, crafting a sound that reshaped not just rap but pop music. All the while, he’s maintained a pace that few of his peers could match—depending on how you count, he’s released somewhere between two and three dozen full-lengths in the decade since he first started calling himself Future. In the years since his creative hot streak peaked with DS2, he’s continued releasing music at a steady clip. But where Future spent the first half of the 2010s relentlessly innovating, he’s been content to spend the latter half tinkering with his signature sound.
High Off Life doesn’t buck this trend in any significant way. It’s another hour of music that renders tortured hedonism with painterly detail, meticulous production, and melancholy melody. There are exotic cars painted in candy-colored hues, designer sandals worn casually, women treated as if they were disposable, drugs sold and consumed. There are songs that glitter like a suitcase full of diamonds, songs that could soundtrack a crime procedural, and songs that will sound great when reduced to basslines blaring out of passing cars. Except for the previously released singles that pad the end of the record in keeping with industry norms, High Off Life is better-paced and sequenced than most of Future’s recent releases—the whole thing seems to glide by frictionlessly.
In interviews, Future spoke about his previous album, The Wizrd, as a capstone for his career up to that point, setting the stage for a coming pivot. Sadly, High Off Life does not represent this major shift, though we do get a few new ideas. The errant guitar strums and saloon piano on “Too Comfortable” draw out Future’s inner bluesman, while on the Bezos-baiting “Trillionaire,” he goes bar-for-bar with YoungBoy Never Broke Again, discovering the sort of chemistry with his offspring that normally eludes him. On “All Bad,” Future visits the cartoony world of Lil Uzi Vert’s Eternal Atake, and it’s genuinely refreshing hearing the normally morose rapper have this much fun.
That said, Future is still at his best when mining the depths of inner turmoil. On the Travis Scott-featuring “Solitaires,” Future adopts an unhinged flow and jokes about needing a psychiatrist. On “Ridin Strikers,” he owns up to his reputation as a dirtbag, admitting he “won’t enjoy life if it ain’t toxic.” But at the album’s end, we finally hear what sounds like a breakthrough. “Accepting My Flaws” comes spilling out of Future in one long verse, like a confession. Over a spectral choir sample, he acknowledges struggles with addiction, tries to shake off a worldview shaped by the streets, and stands in awe of a partner willing to accept him, flaws and all. "I’ve been suffering withdrawals, missing out on real love,” he admits. It sounds like he’s done running from himself.
During a deadly pandemic that has much of the world on lockdown, the title High Off Life can feel a bit flippant. It could have been worse: Future apparently scrapped plans to title the album “Life Is Good,” after the Drake collaboration that finds a home here as a tacked-on single. To his credit, Future has provided some context around the title (“So many tragedies and catastrophes and everything is going on in the world. And you want to enjoy life, as long as you have it,” he recently told XXL) but even so, his tone-deafness is unsurprising. His appeal has always lay in an ability to craft a world that’s not just self-contained, but airtight. Might Future still dramatically reinvent himself? He’s certainly pulled it off before. But as High Off Life suggests, perhaps the more impressive feat would be reckoning with what he’s already become. | 2020-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | May 23, 2020 | 7.1 | 6d2c3971-bd08-45a2-ab13-76c0d34da670 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
The Pittsburgh noise-pop experimentalists come into their own on a short yet richly textured album full of fuzzy melodic hooks and beguiling left turns. | The Pittsburgh noise-pop experimentalists come into their own on a short yet richly textured album full of fuzzy melodic hooks and beguiling left turns. | Feeble Little Horse: Girl With Fish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/feeble-little-horse-girl-with-fish/ | Girl With Fish | Half a decade or so ago, the electric guitar received a wellness check. As sales plummeted and legacy manufacturers slogged through financial straits, concerned parties blamed the popularity of pop, hip-hop, and electronic music, genres more often built from synthesizers and drum machines. Even Paul McCartney chimed in, telling The Washington Post in 2017 that young people lacked “guitar heroes.”
Safe to say that the four members of Feeble Little Horse, most of whom were still in high school at that point, were not tuned into this conversation. The Pittsburgh noise-pop band’s second record, Girl With Fish, speaks to the idea that a younger generation of musicians would recognize the confluence of guitar music and digital sounds as a doorway rather than a death knell. It’s a familiar story, but Feeble Little Horse’s wall of influences—textured shoegaze guitars, exacting pop hooks, idiosyncratic production flourishes—has been wheat-pasted with such vim that it feels fresh and, just as importantly, emotionally resonant.
Feeble Little Horse began as a collaboration between guitarists Ryan Walchonski and Sebastian Kinsler while both were students at the University of Pittsburgh. Jake Kelley joined on drums for 2021’s Modern Tourism EP and Lydia Slocum rounded out the band later that year, signing on as a bassist and lyricist during the hasty recording sessions for the band’s full-length debut, Hayday. Built around sticky melodies and samples both homemade and borrowed—though many of these have since been removed for copyright reasons—the record gleefully jumped from idea to idea.
Hayday’s nimble shapeshifting was prompted in part by a shrinking window of opportunity: With graduation day looming for some of its members, the band imagined there wouldn’t be another chance. But instead of becoming a brief blip in the annals of equine rock, Feeble Little Horse acquired word-of-mouth buzz that encouraged them to stick together. (A deal with Saddle Creek, home to experimentally ambitious contemporaries like Palm and Spirit of the Beehive, couldn’t have hurt either.) Girl With Fish solidifies the notion that Feeble Little Horse’s creative alchemy, born in college dorm rooms and nurtured at DIY basement shows, is a force deserving of further exploration. Remotely self-recorded and produced across various Pittsburgh apartments, its 11 songs are oddball bursts of imagination, whimsy, and discord.
The early minutes of Girl With Fish work overtime to establish the band’s flair for fuzzy pop hooks. The spiky adrenaline of “Tin Man” is especially satisfying, a poetic takedown of emotionally impaired manipulators driven by Kelley’s metallic percussion and a freaky little riff. “I gotta go ’cause you flash sadness,” Slocum sings, a guttural “huh” punctuating the breath between verses. “I found you all rusted and leaky/Took him apart and I found nobody.” The tight opening gallop spotlights the lyrics, abstract fragments from which the band launches equally beguiling arrangements. One of her most delicious lines arrives early on “Freak,” a fuzzy appeal to a crush’s physique: “How can you be satisfied/She’s 5'1" and you’re 6'5".”
While Slocum’s lyrical contributions to Hayday arrived at the eleventh hour, on Girl With Fish she now writes with greater confidence, pondering depression, lust, and most strikingly, religion. “Wet bed sheets she bled from the pressure/Plastic Catholic priest watched from the dresser,” goes one haunting verse of “Steamroller.” There’s a grungy charm to her scenes, complemented by the deadpan sweetness of her singing voice. The contrast works particularly well on “Station,” an eloquent, if simplistic, snapshot of loneliness that unfolds atop delicate harmonies and a sound that begins as if cranked out of a haunted music box and expands into a lush revelation. Similarly intriguing is “Sweet,” which opens with a roundhouse kick of blown-out guitars and crashing drums before recoiling into a tightly interlocking riff. Alternating lines, Kinsler and Slocum sketch out a scene that walks the line between innocent and ominous: “I’m only down the street/Can’t keep him out of me/Inviting me to leave/See it in everything.”
At just under a half-hour, Girl With Fish goes for the sprint without ever feeling rushed or overstuffed. Part of this balance is due to Kinsler’s deft digital finagling, which ties together the band’s more eccentric impulses with their melodic foundations. One highlight is “Heaven,” which begins as a downcast lullaby before mutating into avant-alien, as if the band were slurped up mid-song by a psychedelic toad. “Paces” takes the opposite approach, opening with jagged pitched-and-chopped guitars that gradually loosen into dreamy bliss with shades of Duster. Kinsler has cited “overproduced indie rock” artists like Sorry and Spirit of the Beehive as influences, but his style is equally indebted to pie-in-the-sky producers like Pi’erre Bourne, whose tag was sampled in the original version of Hayday’s “Termites.”
But whatever wizardry is happening with the electronics is secondary to the collective intuition that guides Feeble Little Horse’s most mischievous instincts. Girl With Fish hits its apex on “Pocket,” a dynamic late-album highlight that recalls the freewheeling jangle of Swirlies. “All my kisses and hugs/Are burning a hole/In my pocket,” Slocum sings with a brittle sweetness. “Do I make you cringe?” But just as the twee insinuations suggested by the band’s name—that of a dopey, knock-kneed pony—appear to come to fruition, “Pocket” slips into delicate psychedelia and warped tape experimentation. Midway through, around where Slocum sings about using her “imagination to sin” and being metaphorically fucked by “a dead man,” “Pocket” does a 180. Suddenly, Slocum is screaming, the band pulls the pin out of the grenade, and just like that it’s gone: one of many magic tricks on an album that leaves you mesmerized and wanting more. | 2023-06-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | June 15, 2023 | 8.2 | 6d2ca52f-999c-4394-a3ed-35b1fe3458df | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
A new comp from a band whose stature has only grown in its absence finds Blur reshaping their identity and favoring the artier end of their catalog. | A new comp from a band whose stature has only grown in its absence finds Blur reshaping their identity and favoring the artier end of their catalog. | Blur: Midlife: A Beginner's Guide to Blur | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13168-midlife-a-beginners-guide-to-blur/ | Midlife: A Beginner's Guide to Blur | At first glance, Midlife seems like one of those hilariously ambitious compilation titles that bands use when they don't want to admit the game is up-- think every group in its commercial and/or creative decline that calls a best-of "volume one." In Blur's case, the band's four original members have recorded exactly three new songs together this decade, and despite a recent run of successful reunion shows in the UK, they announced last week that they'd not be making new music as a quartet anytime soon.
And judging by the tracklisting, they could have called this Midlife Crisis, as the compilation-- which eschews many of the group's biggest hits and best-known songs for album tracks-- finds them attempting to reshape their identity, reaching for the dronier, artier end of their catalog. As a bonus then, this comp actually serves a pair of actual purposes: To give new listeners interested in the group as an artistic rather than commercial force a nice, career-spanning entry point, and to give those only familiar with the band through its hits (as collected on 2000's Best of Blur or, if you're in Europe, heard on the radio throughout the 1990s) a deeper and wider look at its work.
Still, the first thing any fan will notice is what's missing: Eight of the 18 songs from Best Of have been axed, including key singles "Country House", "There's No Other Way", "On Your Own", "End of a Century", and "To the End"-- the latter two most likely so the 25-song set doesn't repeat too much of Blur's biggest album, Parklife. Chirpy third-tier singles "Charmless Man", "Bang", and "Sunday Sunday" are also absent but unmissed.
So this compilation can be seen as a more Americentric look at Blur's career, which makes some sense as they still have a lot of fanbase growth potential in the States. Few bands from the 90s increased their stature this decade among America's self-identifying indie set as much as Blur-- and this at a time when, thanks to globalization and the internet, the caché of romanticizing other nations as exotic or different largely dwindled. Anglophilia in the States was once the province of those willing to take the time and effort to look outside their immediate surroundings, and with that came the attendant feelings of acting or thinking differently from one's peers that often fuels cultural choices, especially in indie circles. Nowadays, the UK feels and acts a hell of a lot more like, well, the U.S., and the internet has made the practice of looking in on a band from Britain the same as checking out one from Brooklyn. So while it's no surprise that Blur have become more central to American indie listeners' lives this decade, it's not due to intensifying their position wthin niches and subcultures but simply drawing in larger numbers of people.
Blur leader Damon Albarn certainly embraced his Anglo nature at a few junctures in his career-- particularly after a 44-date, morale-sapping 1992 trek around America supporting the warmed-over Madchester of their debut LP, Leisure. The tour left the group frayed and, above all, determined to reject the dour earnestness of grunge. At the same time, Suede became the darlings of London indie by exaggerating many of the basic tenants of British guitar pop-- wit, glamour, artifice. In short, everything grunge wasn't.
With their distaste for America sharpened, Blur played along, going all in on what was soon to be called Britpop, starting with their second full-length, Modern Life Is Rubbish-- the first of three albums in a so-called British trilogy that also included 1994's Parklife and 1995's The Great Escape. Fully embracing the UK's art-pop history, Blur's London- and UK-centric records made them superstars. Less celebratory than they at first seem, these records are teeming with despair and dripping with disdain. From Phil Daniels' title-track monologue to discouraging traffic reports to suicidal thoughts on the Cliffs of Dover, all was not well.
Parklife's low point is also the band's artistic peak: The tempestuous, atmospheric "This Is a Low", with Albarn's reading of the English shipping report over Coxon's backward guitar was an admission that this once-dominant island nation was increasingly sheltered and inward. There is a sort of spectral finisterre quality to the song's tracing the outline of England by boat, and because those shipping reports-- news from the end of the world-- used to sign off the BBC's nightly radio broadcasts, the song almost sounds as if it could be the nation's lullaby. The sun once never set on the British Empire; this song seems to indicate that it now did so nightly-- in a haze of depression and doubt.
It's fitting then that Midlife includes not only the celebratory ("For Tomorrow"), the heavily Anglo-coded ("Parklife"), and the snarky ("Girls & Boys"), but also "This Is a Low" and other nods to the diversity of these albums, chief among them The Great Escape's "He Thought of Cars" (arguably their most underrated song), Modern Life's "Blue Jeans" (a paean to mundanity) and "Advert" (like "Girls & Boys", a riff on consumer and leisure culture), and Parklife's "Badhead" (an odd substitute here for the record's more well-known relationship-splitting soundtrack, "To the End").
Despite the cravenness with which it seemed Blur-- Albarn and bassist Alex James, in particular-- sought and reveled in fame, this portion of their career is dominated by songs about pre-millennial tension, the dangers of conspicuous consumption, and social changes regarding shifts in technology and communication. In retrospect these prescient sentiments are the strongest and most compelling threads of their mid-90s work; rather than celebrate Britain with knees-up Mockneyisms, they often painted real warnings about a nation quickly being engulfed in obsessions with consumer and celebrity culture. In the years after World War II, America's exportation of such culture was seen as powerful, endearing, the sign of an emergent nation that would dominate the second half of the century as Britain once did. By the 90s, however, Blur had correctly identified the U.S./UK axis as perpetually spoiled and distracted and these themes often dominated their songs. But without the moaning and brooding of peers like Radiohead, Tricky, or Pulp, the messages were often glossed over.
Stardom, it turned out, left Blur fractured, with Coxon-- a riot grrrl devotee and dyed-in-the-wool indie kid-- particularly adrift. His torment was poked at by his more jovial bandmate Alex James, who offered jokes like, "What's 50 ft. long and has no pubic hair? The front row of a Blur concert." By the time the group needed to film a video for late 1995 single "The Universal" (also included here), the promo couldn't even hide Coxon's dissatisfaction-- in almost every shot he is absent, sitting on the ground, or barely participating.
Rather than split the group, Coxon's sensibilities instead found root in the band's music, and their next two albums-- 1997's Blur and 1999's 13-- ironically displayed an increased interest in lo-fi and other strands of American indie music, as well as totems of 1970s art-pop such as dub, krautrock, even free jazz and prog. And it was during these years that Blur's fame and reputation in the U.S. swelled, thanks to the endearing "Coffee & TV" video and the arena sports-ready "Song 2". (Mythbuster: Despite Blur being commonly called U.S. one-hit wonders, "Song 2" was the third-highest charting single of their career here, behind "There's No Other Way" and "Girls & Boys".)
Those LPs are sparsely represented here, however. The two big moments listed above, the gospel-tinged global hit "Tender", and UK No. 1 "Beetlebum" are present as expected, but beyond that group only two additional songs from each album are included-- the best of which are "Trimm Trabb", an excellent example of 13's engaging sprawl, and Blur's "Death of a Party", which now sounds like a proto-Gorillaz song.
Early in the recording of 2003 LP Think Tank, Coxon finally left the band. The resulting record finds Blur in a strange space-- neutered without their primary instrumental force, caught between their pop impulses and Albarn's growing embrace of non-Western sounds, and generally disturbed over the Bush/Blair administrations' failures. Three songs here make the cut, highlighted-- not surprisingly-- by Coxon's sole contribution, "Battery in Your Leg".
With hindsight, it's no surprise that Blur's star has shone so brightly again this decade in their absence. Despite the cries about careerism, they rarely settled into one spot for long, and even when they were correctly perceived to have done so-- about one half of The Great Escape really is a Parklife retread-- they were still spreading their collective wings on album tracks and B-sides. (Indeed, the great irony of Blur's second decade is that Albarn, once the prince of Britpop, has spent the past 10 years becoming a 21st century David Byrne, a sharp, respectful pan-global figure through which many U.S. and UK listeners have stepped into multiple strains of African music, Arabic music, Jamaican music-- even Chinese opera.) Whether or not they continue to tour, record again, or really are calling it quits this time, the distance between their years of tabloid fame (and sometimes punchable ubiquity in the UK) and today has stripped away a lot of preening and the press and left their legacy enriched only by their music. Unlike a lot of rock's image-conscious genre-hoppers that music is sturdy, sometimes whipsmart, and endowed with more cracks and crevices and corners in which listeners can become lost than they're often given credit. | 2009-07-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-07-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | EMI | July 30, 2009 | 9.4 | 6d3b4326-aa16-403a-913e-7dfc9fe5d130 | Pitchfork | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pitchfork/ | null |
One of indie's best post-Animal Collective bands enlists the Field, Justin Broadrick, High Places, and others to remix the songs from their 2009 LP. | One of indie's best post-Animal Collective bands enlists the Field, Justin Broadrick, High Places, and others to remix the songs from their 2009 LP. | Bear in Heaven: Beast Rest Forth Mouth Remixed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14653-beast-rest-forth-mouth-remixed/ | Beast Rest Forth Mouth Remixed | Of all the bajillions of post-Animal Collective Brooklyn synth-rock bands, Bear in Heaven are maybe the simplest, the most economical. Like all the other bands in that scene, they traffic in hazy, faraway memories and languid longing. Unlike all those other bands, they do it in as few notes as possible, getting in and getting out, leaving you with their basslines reverberating around in your head. Melodically, they keep things as direct as possible: big choruses, propulsive beats, very few wasted moments. In a way, they belong to this whole zoned-out landscape the same way the Cars were a new-wave band. They're classic-pop types happy to dress their shameless, timeless hooks up in the flavor of the day. And in a lot of ways, that makes them ideal remix material.
At this point, we almost don't have to mention how ridiculous it is for these indie rock remix albums to exist. When you round up 10 remixers to play around with one band's output, you're putting together a full-length that, by nature, is going to lack a sense of flow or cohesion. And when you insist that these remixers take on every song on the original album, you're further ensuring a mediocre product. Not every song on Bear in Heaven's great 2009 album Beast Rest Forth Mouth, after all, is on that "Lovesick Teenagers" level; virtually every album ever made has a filler track or five. The best we can hope for from these records is a reasonable, well-curated dance-music compilation with a few unifying threads, and that's basically what we have here.
This particular remix album can claim better existence-justification than most, since it's being sold as a bonus disc on a Beast Rest Forth Mouth reissue rather than as a standalone. It's also a curious little artifact: The rare remix album where the net result is, by and large, less dancefloor-ready than the original album being remixed. Beast Rest isn't exactly a dance album, but it does boast some big, physical grooves; the band has enough disco pedigree that its been covering Lindstrøm and Christabelle's "Lovesick" live lately. But on this remix album, they've recruited a roster of remixers who don't seem particularly interested in housing these tracks up much. Arty club types like the Field and the Hundred in the Hands do show up, but they share equal time with leftfield picks like diffuse exoticists High Places and space-metal mind-expander Justin K. Broadrick. So while it's as spotty as any other remix record, it's at least spotty in interesting ways.
There are some severe lowlights here, like Epstein's smudgy, aimless ruination of "Casual Goodbye" and Brahms' obnoxiously blippy, unimaginative pillage of "Fake Out". But the better remixers here seem to realize that they're dealing with something special. Bear frontman Jon Philpot's voice is a keening, otherworldly tenor that reminds me of Barry Gibb at times, and only the shittiest remixers here bury that voice in effects. Most of them know better. Even the Field, who loves to chop his samples up into unrecognizeable shards only to reveal them at track's end, leaves Philpot relatively intact, letting him flit through the usual slow pulse and keyboard fogbanks. It was bold of Bear to entrust "Dust Cloud", one of their prettiest songs, to a denizen of darkness like Broadrick, but his take works because he treats it like the tenderest moment of a Jesu track, piling on the layers of stretched-out guitars without obscuring the central melody.
But the best remix here is the one that might be even more straightforward than the original track. Pink Skull build on the wounded-kid romanticism of "Wholehearted Mess" by creating a towering synth-disco jam underneath it. The thudding bassline and rippling keyboards and relentless hi-hats interlock perfectly, building and building into a moment of catharsis that disappears too soon. Nine more like this and we'd have a real album on our hands. | 2010-09-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-09-24T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Hometapes | September 24, 2010 | 6.1 | 6d3c17ae-ddff-45e3-b894-11577b5697bd | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
The Hotelier's debut, written when the band members were between the age of 16 and 18, proves that even in their earliest days, they were an unusually theatrical and ambitious punk rock band—these are songs you want to act out while singing. | The Hotelier's debut, written when the band members were between the age of 16 and 18, proves that even in their earliest days, they were an unusually theatrical and ambitious punk rock band—these are songs you want to act out while singing. | The Hotelier: It Never Goes Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20322-it-never-goes-out/ | It Never Goes Out | When Christian Holden sang, "My younger years were something, but that isn’t my life" on the Hotelier’s Home Like NoPlace Is There, most listeners had little reason to think that the line was autobiography. By the time Holden arrives to that line on "Housebroken", he’s shifted perspectives from a quizzical, concerned narrator to a dog that’s actually a person that’s actually a metaphor for the part of ourselves that legitimizes societal complacency. More importantly, a good number of people who heard the Hotelier’s breakthrough LP had no idea its predecessor, It Never Goes Out, even existed. And, "My younger years were something, but that isn’t my life" more or less sums up the fraught relationship the Hotelier have with their debut—while it’s a strong record whose songs are still included in their live sets, they’re just barely able to recognize the people who made it.
In a literal sense, the Hotelier did not make It Never Goes Out. The Hotel Year did. Moreover, the record was written when the band members were between the age of 16 and 18, living at home and struggling to be heard. After digitally self-releasing the record, the band signed to Mightier Than Sword, a punk label which Holden has maligned as predatory and underhanded at worst and defunct at best. While it’s reasonable to see the reissue of a four-year old album as a victory lap after HLNPIT’s out-of-nowhere success, Tiny Engines is also ensuring that people can actually own a physical copy of It Never Goes Out for the first time.
Heard again, It Never Goes Out does sound like the product of its environment, and those arriving to this record in 2015 will likely be startled by the youth of its creators—the word "buttface" is used in two different songs. Thematically, It Never Goes Out is guided by the most teenaged, punk perspective in existence: rejecting the expectations of middle-class suburbia and realizing the capacity for your own disillusion and disapproval. Holden’s tools are rudimentary here: not just Beatles ("Lonely Hearts Club") and the Smiths ("Title Track (There is a Light)") references, but some of the most common ones. Walmart and Hallmark are castigated for co-opting love. Volumes of Nietszche and Thoreau are namechecked. Holden sneers, "We’re all actors" and the opener states "Our Lives Would Make A Sad, Boring Movie". Earnest, blowtorch-intense convictions like these are something of an occupational hazard for a young punk band, and when It Never Goes Out isn't skirting cliche, it's embracing it with a bear hug.
But these songs power through any sophomoric tendencies because even in their earliest days, the Hotelier were an unusually theatrical and ambitious punk rock band—these are songs you want to act out while singing. "An Ode to the Nite Ratz Club" and "Title Track (There Is a Light)" in particular are fully-formed Hotelier compositions that allow Holden’s rangy, expressive vocals free rein. They have already figured out how group chants and guitar solos can help "anti-bro" sentiments play well in a gym, a trait that distinguishes the band as the only mosh-pit/group-hug facilitators to rival Titus Andronicus and Japandroids over the last few years.
That said, It Never Goes Out is a debut that registers more deeply in retrospect knowing what it leads to, particularly when it hints at what might have inspired HLPNIT’s most cathartic moments. During "An Ode to the Nite Ratz Club", Holden and a friend bond while committing petty, destructive acts around a construction site, "Until the night when it got way too serious/ And you showed me your damaged wrists...And if I had only known that it would be the last time we'd be on that level with one another/ I would have never let you go." It was a startling revelation then; three years later, it’s a possible connection to the suicides explored on "Dendron" and "Your Deep Rest". The album rides out on a glorious, call-and-response blaze, and it conveys a sweetness the Hotelier may never recapture. Four years later, it will always stand as the best album of the Hotel Year, the promising, awkward and strident band who labeled their music the work of "devotional kids". | 2015-03-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-03-20T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | March 20, 2015 | 7.7 | 6d406de3-2843-449d-b7c2-18c2b89fa021 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Five albums in, Future Islands are beyond reinvention. Instead, they tap into the emotion that runs deep under their synth-pop, and the results are more cathartic and devastating than ever. | Five albums in, Future Islands are beyond reinvention. Instead, they tap into the emotion that runs deep under their synth-pop, and the results are more cathartic and devastating than ever. | Future Islands: The Far Field | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23015-future-islands-the-far-field/ | The Far Field | Three years later, everyone is still talking about Samuel T. Herring’s dancing. If the details of indie rock’s most beloved fairytale have somehow escaped you, in March 2014, Future Islands performed their song “Seasons (Waiting on You)” on “Letterman.” Vibrating with intensity, Herring beat his chest, growled, and bobbed like the sneakiest featherweight in a heartfelt display that went viral and minted the Baltimore trio’s fortunes. The cult band became a fiercely in-demand live act—they played their 1000th show while on the Singles tour, and recently said that they could still be touring that record if they wanted to. The accidental origins of Herring’s dance came in 2004, when a car ran over his foot before a show. By taking this glorious accident primetime, you can’t help but wonder if he’s slightly shot himself in it, too.
Becoming public property on your fifth album is a tricky proposition—harder, possibly, than the so-called difficult second album after a breakthrough debut. By Singles, much of Future Islands’ fundamental development was behind them. The jittery mania of their 2008 debut Wave Like Home had smoothed into starry-eyed synth-pop melodrama, where New Order’s bass lines met the pop fantasias of OMD and A-Ha. As Future Islands reached maturity, their fanbase ballooned on the back of a caricature and a single. How do you move on from that? Do you stay warm in the relatively secure spotlight? Or do you twist away and risk losing the more fair-weather elements? How many bands even take creative leaps 14 years after hopping in a van together, as they first did as Art Lord & the Self - Portraits? The Far Field, Future Islands’ fifth album, skews towards the former.
If Singles stepped up to meet the world, The Far Field mostly shrinks at its gaze. Future Islands have talked about the exhaustion and doubts that arose on their long tour, and this record’s insular focus plays like a protective shield. The scaffolding remains, but the upholstery is threadbare. Though the sound is familiar, the structures are less bombastic and their former gleam is somewhat muted. And as he agonizes over the legacy of two failed relationships—one recent, one canonical—Herring sounds utterly defeated. Although their circumstances are different, his forlorn performance recalls that of Nick Cave on Skeleton Tree and the unbearable sadness of diminished titans. While it doesn’t break much new musical ground, and plays against Future Islands’ reputation for excess, The Far Field’s breathtaking sorrow is transformative.
The album takes more than its name from a poem by American writer Theodore Roethke. (Future Islands’ 2010 record In Evening Air is also named after one of his works.) Herring has replaced his simple lyrical scheme—sun/moon, day/night—with knottier, more poetic lines. Sometimes they’re too much. “No lack of ‘wouldn’t’ could be my undoing/No lack of trying/No lack of sighing, ‘loo,’” he rasps on the despondent “Aladdin,” kind of proving his point. Yet his grandiose phrasing conveys the desperation he feels as he grapples with lost relationships—and more so, with what it means to live with longing and regret at his core. “Is this a desperate wish for dying, or a wish that dying cease?” he asks no one in particular on “Cave,” letting Gerrit Welmers’ synth wash over his question. “The fear that keeps me going and going and going/Is the same fear that brings me to my knees.” Simply put, on the hurtling “Ran,” “What’s a song without you/When every song I write is about you?”
Herring grieves, loses faith, and flounders across The Far Field, and nowhere more so than on “Through the Roses,” the album’s emotional peak. He has candidly referred to it as “a suicide song,” written on a long drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains. “It just hit me in that moment,” he told Mojo, “this great sense of loneliness. I’d reached all my goals but all I found was the same loneliness.” He plots the distance between his joyous public persona and private sorrow, and exposes the sadness behind the spectacle: “I’m scared,” he sings, his voice cracking. “That I can’t pull through.” As “the clutch of nothing, the curse of wanting takes me whole,” he contemplates cutting his wrists. Herring has always lucidly understood the band’s appeal—that his unabashed exuberance allows their audiences to let out their repressed emotions, too. The naked pain of “Through the Roses” is both a beautiful song, and a profound gesture of trust and generosity from Herring. “But we can pull through together, together, together,” he insists at the end, and you believe him.
The mood lightens in The Far Field’s second half as Herring does his best to move on. A impish, glassy rhythm peps up “North Star,” and on “Candles,” Future Islands try something totally different—a dubby yacht rock number that sounds almost comically seductive, but finds Herring serving up one of his quintessentially moony tributes. It works perfectly. “Baby I know,” he croons like a regular lounge lizard, “a little candle like you don’t deserve the hurt you’re going through.” And while it’s sort of a shame that Future Islands didn’t fill The Far Field with 12 songs as gorgeous and immediate as “Shadows,” the sadness that came before only makes Herring’s duet with Debbie Harry all the more wonderful. Hearing his voice age and tremble throughout the record gives it gravitas. Hearing Harry, at 71, sound wise and saucy and full of promise makes its hopefulness seem real. “These old shadows parade you like a fool!” she exclaims, trying to lure him back into the light.
Future Islands could easily have become single-trick jesters after “Seasons,” but The Far Field finds salvation in tragedy. Speaking with The New York Times recently, Herring said that he hadn’t yet worked out dance moves for this album. “It’s been difficult,” he said. “Hopefully people aren’t bummed out, like, ‘Where’s the new thing?’” You’d hope, for an album this tender, that this time their presence alone will be enough. | 2017-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | April 10, 2017 | 7.6 | 6d4903ed-aa36-4f07-8f5d-31bc2e6c763d | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
On II, the Toronto band Metz still draw most of their inspiration from turn-of-the-'90s post-hardcore and the Nirvana albums on either side of Nevermind, and they still believe three-and-a-half minutes is about as long as any song has the right to be. | On II, the Toronto band Metz still draw most of their inspiration from turn-of-the-'90s post-hardcore and the Nirvana albums on either side of Nevermind, and they still believe three-and-a-half minutes is about as long as any song has the right to be. | Metz: II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20439-ii/ | II | In the run-up to II—the sophomore set from Toronto noisemakers Metz—frontman Alex Edkins promised three things: "We are not going to clean up our sound, we are not going to hire a big producer, we are not going to try to write a radio song." True to his word, II is another snarling beast of a record, 10 more all-lunging, all-screaming anti-anthems crammed into another chaotic, cloistered half-hour, every inch as grotty and combustible and unfriendly as its predecessor. Once again produced by Holy Fuck's Graham Walsh and engineered by Alex Bonefant, II is a refinement, not a reinvention: if you liked Metz, well, have another.
Metz spent five years honing their considerable strengths—Edkins' caustic fretwork and vocal agita, Hayden Menzies and Chris Slorach's stampeding low-end—before unleashing their self-titled debut. And, on II, they seem to feel no particular need to tinker around with what got them here. They still draw most of their inspiration from turn-of-the-'90s post-hardcore and the Nirvana albums on either side of Nevermind, and they still believe three-and-a-half minutes is about as long as any song has the right to be. The terse II comes in a smidge less rigid than its predecessor, a shade or two darker, a touch more physical. Not that you'll notice; once the bassline of opener "Acetate" takes hold, for 30 short minutes, your thoughts become a smear of white. These songs are not "catchy" by any traditional metric; they don't so much get stuck in your head as get lodged in your skin.
Metz take great pains to avoid your standard verse-chorus-verse structures, and II, even more than the debut, downplays the traditionally "songier" aspects of these songs for a series of weaponized strikes. Still, beyond a few drop-outs and punch-ins, these songs all seem to gnash about in a fairly similar fashion. Hayden Menzies' bull-in-a-China-shop drums are unrelenting, but they rarely push too far past their original tempo; Edkins talks his way through a few of these verses, but he's every bit as likely to start off in a full-on wail, and his riffs, while bludgeoning from the get-go, never seem quite sure how to up their own antes.
All of this makes the first 20 or so seconds of any Metz song roughly as thrilling as the last 20, which gives II the feeling of falling down the same set of stairs ten times in a row. There is not, as Edkins promised, anything for the radio on II, but neither is there much attempt to chart new territory, no ambitious gambits or radical tempo-shifts, nothing they haven't already proven themselves capable of in the past. These songs barely give themselves space to meander or develop; they pull the cord, and off they go. By and large, they perform their seethe-pummel-repeat routine with an almost mechanized precision. This one thing, they do incredibly well. Then they do it nine more times.
In fact, II is often more compelling on the rare occasions when Metz pulls back on the brontosaurus riffage and focuses on the connective tissue, the strands of sinew that surround many of these songs. The windchime-scrape at the tail end of "Spit You Out", the frizzy intro lick to "I.O.U.", the whinnying strum at the top of "Kicking a Can of Worms": all these strange, static-y interludes, brief though they may be, build the kind of tension Metz are all too game to release. It's a shame they couldn't find a little more space for it. Fleeting though they are, these little interstitials provide a few much-needed valleys to II's overabundance of peaks.
Throughout II, just about anything is prone to set Edkins off: crass commercialism, self-loathing, painkillers and—horror of horror—waiting in lines. These are angry-sounding songs, no question there. But when a typical chorus goes something like "painkiller, painkiller/ that's why I feel unreal/ painkiller, painkiller/ that's one hell of a deal," you start to wonder if Edkins is really screaming out of some deep-seated passion, or if this is just the kind of music you scream over.
In interviews, Metz claim to be a punk band largely because it's the one genre the three of them could agree on. They're not claiming to be anything they're not, but—after two records far more similar than different—one can't help but wonder what else they could be. Were they willing to risk more, to stretch out further, to try a few more new things on for size, II might've sailed right past its beloved predecessor. But by sticking so closely to the script laid out by their debut, II is the one thing punk rock should never be: careful. | 2015-05-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-05-07T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | May 7, 2015 | 6.7 | 6d4f15c4-04ca-4d61-bdc4-d84b262ea316 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The Los Angeles ambient musician returns to the new-age sounds of last year’s Music for Living Spaces, but some of the richness and whimsy of past releases is missing. | The Los Angeles ambient musician returns to the new-age sounds of last year’s Music for Living Spaces, but some of the richness and whimsy of past releases is missing. | Green-House: Solar Editions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/green-house-solar-editions/ | Solar Editions | New-age music has practically gone through a complete life cycle since re-entering the cultural conversation a little over a decade ago. First came the reclamatory noise acts of the late 2000s, like Emeralds, James Ferraro, and Oneohtrix Point Never, who twisted new-age tropes into darkly transcendental walls of sound. Then followed Light in the Attic’s popular I Am the Center compilation, which investigated artists like Iasos and Laraaji, who spent years making hypnotic, heavenly works long before new age was considered a punchline. Ever since that reappraisal of more overtly peaceful new-age music, a whole cottage industry has sprouted up around it—especially in Los Angeles. Labels like Leaving Records have cultivated an entire scene around reframing new age for the modern experimental world, smoothing the music’s edges out even further.
Out of this new wave of sage-toting zoners, Olive Ardizoni’s music as Green-House has stood out. Inspired by ’80s Japanese environmental music and ’70s lounge records, Ardizoni’s music plays like an ethereal update on Mort Garson’s Mother Earth’s Plantasia—organic-seeming, swelling patches of sound meant to sit in the background of living rooms, making everything just a little more colorful. On their Six Songs for Invisible Gardens debut, they blended lilting synthesizers and field recordings to radiant effect, bathing the listener in a gradual, lucid glow. Music for Living Spaces followed this up with a more childlike turn, with Ardizoni trading out their lush soundscapes for a delightfully quirky palette, like something a garden gnome might listen to while sweeping up leaves in their mushroom house. On both of these releases, Ardizoni maintained a refreshing playfulness in their work, embracing the lighter, cheesier side of ambient and drone music without sacrificing the melodic inventiveness to pull it off.
But on their Solar Editions EP, Ardizoni demonstrates the limits of new-age music designed purely for comfort. Its four tracks lack both the deep richness of Six Songs for Invisible Gardens and the silly whimsicality of Music for Living Spaces. In its wafting haze, Solar Editions feels closer to that original incarnation of mainstream new age that drew so much critical ire, now coated in just enough analog sheen to justify its inclusion on credible experimental-electronic playlists. Ardizoni shows flashes of their typical textural cleverness, but more often than not, these songs are overtaken by an encroaching numbness, their aesthetic gestures masking how simplistic this approach to synth music has become.
Where Ardizoni’s previous releases demonstrated careful attention to detail, here their approach rarely adds up to much more than casual knob twiddling. “Mycorrhizae Dreams” drifts along on gentle krautrock-y arpeggios that, while soothing, never find a real sense of place or direction. Rather than homing in on one perfectly executed tonal mood, Ardizoni piles breathy flutes and kitschy sci-fi synths on top of one another, even throwing in some of their usual running-water sounds for good measure. The results may be easy on the ears, but that doesn’t make them any less tame. Worse is “Flora Urbana Absumpto,” whose flat pianos literally feel like a balmy waiting room soundtrack purely meant to be ignored. Even late in the track when Ardizoni’s cloudy synths seem like they might finally come into focus, they merely resign to floating about in an anesthetic middle zone until the song ends as inconspicuously as it began.
There has always been an undercurrent of elevator-music easiness to Green-House’s output, but as the songs become less exciting, one wonders what ostensibly makes Solar Editions more profound than actual elevator music. Take “Produce Aisle,” whose tongue-in-cheek title alludes to the fact that the song sounds like something that would play in the corporate shopping mall in Stardew Valley. The chintzy pianos and vaporwavey sway are pleasant, but they don’t really go anywhere, and none of it pushes the concept far enough to be particularly mind-opening. It begs the question that haunts the current new-age scene: If the effect of the art is the same as that which it claims to critically reinvent (placating, bougie lifestyle music), why should we attribute so much experimental importance to it?
If there’s one moment on Solar Editions that serves as a reminder of why Green-House has emerged at the forefront of the new-age revival, it’s in the wonderfully whirling sonata of “Morning Glory Waltz.” With its winkingly baroque melody, the song gracefully layers one unfurling idea upon another, building to a bouncing chorus of Isao Tomita-esque synths that dance about like fanciful guests at an interstellar ball. It proves how creative and fun Ardizoni’s music can be when they nurture their sounds to their fullest potential. Sadly, most of Solar Editions comes off like a return toward a more arid era of new age, only now with tasteful reference points. These songs, as agreeably inoffensive as they may be, end up feeling like wellness fodder, more sedentary than spurring. For a project dedicated to the beauty of sprawling vegetation, the worst thing about Solar Editions is that it just feels a bit lifeless. | 2022-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Leaving | April 25, 2022 | 6.2 | 6d510f37-0958-4c39-be17-7e02eb300f0a | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Part of the appeal of Melbourne bedroom-pop artist Katie Dey’s latest is the voyeuristic thrill of hearing knotty music made to satisfy nobody but its author, sometimes at the audience’s exclusion. | Part of the appeal of Melbourne bedroom-pop artist Katie Dey’s latest is the voyeuristic thrill of hearing knotty music made to satisfy nobody but its author, sometimes at the audience’s exclusion. | Katie Dey: Flood Network | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22151-flood-network/ | Flood Network | Depending on the listener, the tone of asdfasdf—the debut EP from Melbourne bedroom-pop artist Katie Dey—could be described as anarchic joy, or blissful insanity, or uncontainable anxiety. Broadly speaking, you could make do with “uncontainable.” While formally indie-pop, asdfasdf loosened the genre with inquisitive psychedelia and fidgety freak-folk. The result was an emotional canvas of unusual breadth. The brushstrokes were Dey’s startling vocal contortions: She sang fast, throttled melodies way up in the nosebleed frequencies, as if to avoid contamination by the music. The record had a complicated beauty—nervy and messy, but intricately so. On “don’t be scared,” the ambient detail was practically molecular, suggesting a desire to craft a perfect microcosm of a faulty universe. In the eyes of Dey’s quiet, enraptured cult, she may have succeeded.
Flood Network, the name of asdfasdf’s follow-up and Dey’s debut album, refers to a formative set of personal crises: “flash floods,” she calls them here, in a tetchy song called “Fleas.” Inverted to “network flood,” the title could also suggest a type of cyberattack, an idea present in the the digital commotion behind songs like “Fleas” and “Only to Trip and Fall Down Again.” What defines Flood Network is the manic energy of both interpretations. Helpfully, the 17-song record includes eight interstitials to ease the intensity, though admittedly they’re more useful in the first half, which is frantic and sparkly, than the sleepier second. Part of the appeal is the voyeuristic thrill of hearing emotionally knotty music made to satisfy nobody but its author, sometimes at the audience’s exclusion.
One quality Dey shares with her comrades at Orchid Tapes, the Toronto/New York label that reissued asdfasdf—as well as at her new home, Joy Void—is a penchant for solipsism. It’s the kind of record that properly justifies the “bedroom-pop” tag, not just in the sense of where it’s made but the conflicted serenity to be found there, where our identities reconfigure in private, away from the distorting outside world. On “Fake Health,” as acoustic guitar stabs leak into stereo, Dey’s production captures the warm embrace of a sudden synaptic overload—the network floods that carry you away—while pouring out her heart: “I hate what I can’t make attainable,” she sings mournfully, not with indie-pop petulance but resignation. “I’ll scrape my wooden rake in the pits of hell,” she sighs later in the song.
The obvious change from asdfasdf is Dey’s voice. On the EP, she sang with sweet grotesquerie, like an asphyxiated mother desperately cooing lullabies, despite having had her mouth filled with glue. Now, on songs like “Fleas,” her deformed, wistful croak creeps into legibility, an alien sound that blends of Montreal’s playful sincerity with Xiu Xiu’s wounded nudity, even a little Karen Dalton. “You have my soul/You gained it when I gave up on me,” Dey sings on “Fear o’ the Light,” to which she adds an epilogue: “So I sit around/Making animal sounds out of cutlery.” A deliciously bizarre image, loaded with inexplicable melancholy, it’s Katie Dey in a nutshell. | 2016-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Joy Void | August 10, 2016 | 7.8 | 6d511665-b79f-478a-8528-6db850bfc726 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
In self-imposed exile from the international club scene, Marie Davidson teams with two close collaborators for a self-consciously odd collection of Lynchian lounge music and digitized funk. | In self-imposed exile from the international club scene, Marie Davidson teams with two close collaborators for a self-consciously odd collection of Lynchian lounge music and digitized funk. | Marie Davidson & L’Œil Nu: Renegade Breakdown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marie-davidson-and-loeil-nu-renegade-breakdown/ | Renegade Breakdown | Always ahead of a trend, Montreal musician and producer Marie Davidson quit touring in September 2019, six months before everyone else did. Years of vigorous, largely solo travel behind 2016’s Adieux au Dancefloor and 2018’s Working Class Woman left her depleted and addicted to the sleeping pills she used to cope with insomnia, she told the CBC. Plus, she was tired of club music. “I want to make chansons, you know?” she said. “I want to tell stories and sing.”
Marie Davidson & L’Œil Nu, Davidson’s first project since stepping back, features her vocals and synth against backdrops she constructed with two close collaborators: Pierre Guerineau, her husband and partner in the synth-pop duo Essaie Pas, and Asaël Robitaille, who helped to produce songs on Working Class Woman and Essaie Pas’s 2018 album New Path. Renegade Breakdown, their debut release, is a self-consciously odd and varied collection of classical pop songwriting, lounge music, ’80s-inspired synth-funk, and moody chanson.
Not that you’d know it from the opener, where a heavy four-on-the-floor beat animates one of Davidson’s signature, biting, voiceover-like spoken performances. “By the way, there are no money makers on this record/This time I’m exploring the loser’s point of view,” she quips. “The uglier I feel, the better my lyrics get.” Think of this as the “old” Marie Davidson—the one we’re used to—introducing a new version, who rejects aesthetic posturing and thinks the dance music industry can keep it, all of it: “Your science is a poison I can no longer ingest/Take your prescription and shove it up your ass…Your party sucks anyway.”
Guerineau and Robitaille match her commitment to being unfashionable. They fill the album with rhythms and textures that feel dated and chintzy to contemporary ears, like the digital MIDI-funk and cheaply gated drums of “C’est parce que j’m’en fous,” or else dated and spooky, as on “La Ronde,” where a tuneful, saccharine chanson is overtaken by screeches and tolling bells. As Renegade Breakdown cycles through styles, the only constant lies in lyrical nods to the anxiety and dislocation of solo travel and the effort required to steady oneself. “I keep my fingers crossed as the plane is taking off/I’m feeling kind of lost/Today I’m back to rock,” Davidson intones on “Back to Rock,” the album’s second track: seven and a half dirge-like minutes of AC/DC guitars and “Mad World” interpolation beneath thick synthetic smog. While the title and placement imply a formal disavowal of electronic music, the sheer unearned indulgence presents its own critique. “Drive me somewhere nice/Give me loads of ice/I love my drink real cool,” Davidson demands in the intro, as if riffing on a tour rider. In classic Marie Davidson style, the outright criticism of one thing is also a silent, tacit criticism of everything not mentioned.
Renegade Breakdown isn’t the sound of solitary days and nights on the road; it’s the noises and voices filling the empty space, a reckoning with the ironies and tragedies of life as a musician. “Just in My Head” confronts the dissociative feeling of showing up to the club and hating every minute: “Sitting in a corner waiting for the show to be over … Is it that something is changed? Why the music feels lame? Why do I feel so blue?/Or am I going strange?” The song itself sounds more like the forlorn jazz of a vacant hotel lounge, or Angelo Baldamenti’s skulking “Audrey’s Dance” from the Twin Peaks score. On “Lead Sister,” Davidson laments Karen Carpenter’s fatal struggle with anorexia, singing ominously in French about an “angel voice” who becomes “overexposed” and then consumed by the “somber idea of perfection.”
As a downcast lounge performer with an edge of sing-talk in her voice, Davidson is remarkably convincing, and as a series of experiments, Renegade Breakdown never fails to be interesting. What it lacks is the urgency and stylishness of Davidson’s past albums, which is almost certainly the point. Not every fan of her dedicated club output will appreciate a song like “Sentiment,” the twinkling French-language closer that evokes the overture to a ’60s art film, complete with the gentle whirr of a projector. Nor, I suspect, does she want them to. Even as its musical forms and source material remain familiar, Renegade Breakdown is a work of knowing misdirection, a way of staking out new creative territory that’s challenging, idiosyncratic, and proudly uncool.
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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. | 2020-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Ninja Tune | September 25, 2020 | 7.2 | 6d54f798-936a-498b-8fe3-b59ca738ae32 | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
New York’s most anxious punk delivers hook after hook on an album that deals with evergreen sociopolitical concerns yet sounds like it could’ve been written 30 minutes ago. | New York’s most anxious punk delivers hook after hook on an album that deals with evergreen sociopolitical concerns yet sounds like it could’ve been written 30 minutes ago. | Jeff Rosenstock: NO DREAM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-rosenstock-no-dream/ | NO DREAM | Does Jeff Rosenstock ever get tired of seeing the future? Basically every musical and ethical component that his previous band Bomb the Music Industry! stood for in 2005 still remain. Bigger labels have allowed him to maintain a pay-what-you-want model that predated Radiohead’s famous method of sale for their 2007 album In Rainbows and predicted the current outright reliance on tip jars and shareware. Rosenstock’s side projects variously embrace ska, folk-punk, and Long Island pop-punk, long before these profoundly uncool offshoots were finally given their due as gateways to deeper DIY engagement.
But his mainstream breakthrough didn’t arrive until 2016’s WORRY., when the election of Donald Trump accelerated America’s degradation to the point where the country started to look exactly like the worst fears of New York’s most anxious punk. After 2018’s POST- emerged to audit year one of the #Resistance, NO DREAM asks: When retail therapy, mindfulness apps, and pyrrhic political engagement all fail to provide anything more than a distraction, how do we live with ourselves? It’s quintessential Jeff Rosenstock—an album formulated around evergreen sociopolitical concerns yet sounds like it could’ve been written 30 minutes ago.
Once again releasing an album with no advance warning, Rosenstock gets to the point in less than a minute with “NO TIME,” a welcome reacclimation to his hardcore roots delivered with frothing intensity. It’s a different kind of urgency than the one lent to POST-, which began with a chant of “we’re tired and bored” and ended with “we’re not gonna let them win,” less an expression of defiance than exhaustion. With meaningful, large-scale political change seeming further out of reach, the only conceivable path to serenity is having the wisdom to know what internal changes are possible. “Did you turn into a person that you really want to be?” Rosenstock yells throughout “NO TIME,” at you, at the mirror, rhetorically. Perhaps other artists have expressed more high-minded or effective anger at late capitalism’s human cost, but no one is more adept at validating the helplessness that comes from being constantly activated and totally powerless.
Rosenstock’s solo career almost functions as a treatise about the lie of American industrialization. Once machines relieved humans of backbreaking physical and mental labor, surely we’d have more time to dedicate to personal improvement, community organizing, arts, and culture. Instead, the distractions just became shinier and more inescapable, the ostensible freedom of working from home revealed as being your own browbeating boss 24/7. And now that the economy has cratered and many people have nothing but time for all those New Year’s resolutions and long-shelved self-improvement projects, there’s even less incentive to take them on.
The righteous aims of NO DREAM are true, even if they’re at broad targets—consumerism rebranded as morality; toxic online forums; one side of the political spectrum offering increasingly emboldened cruelty while the other is “weaponizing what’s left of your empathy.” “I’ve been told most my life, ‘Try and see the other side’/By people who have never tried to see the other side,” Rosenstock mocks during “Scram!,” giving them the half-a-bar they deserve. A few months ago, “Scram!”’s central hook (“Don’t you wanna go away?”) might’ve meant signing out of Twitter or Facebook, getting more involved in a local election, or finding solace in a marathon Death Rosenstock gig. The shoutalongs of NO DREAM are potent enough for individual use, but their communal impact is now sadly theoretical. Where does anyone go now when going off the grid means almost total disconnection from society?
Two years ago, Rosenstock simply bemoaned the existence of “All This Useless Energy,” and NO DREAM tries to figure out where it eventually ends up. Fittingly, it’s far more spiteful and aggressive than his recent endeavors into power-pop, Billy Joel piano balladry, and Neil Young covers would’ve predicted. Pretty much every song on NO DREAM ends up veering towards the raw materials of Rosenstock’s less critically revered days. “Scram!” takes a midsong trip to the House of Blues for a metalcore breakdown, while the actual skramz pop up on the title track, which spends its first two minutes lost in the dual drones of college rock jangle and an endless scroll of atrocity. In the past, this kind of genre flipping could be used as a flex; on NO DREAM, it’s the sound of the walls closing in.
The second half of NO DREAM narrows its scope to Rosenstock’s life as a musician and the self-doubt, heightened expectations, and precarity that results from spending decades dedicating one’s life to something that, at most, might provide enough success to justify carrying on. Yet, it also features some of the most expansive, rich writing of his career. “Be an aging tourist/Hustle like a tortoise,” he half-jokes during “f a m e,” a jerky dance-punk throwback to a time when it was a lot easier for acts at the upper echelons of indie rock to make ends meet. From that point forward, Rosenstock can only remember the good old days in the most unromantic terms: “Pictures of toilets across the planet,” increasingly short phone calls back home, a pyramid of beer cans in a flophouse that he’s embarrassed to have made and too proud to knock down.
These would be worthwhile even just as bitterly funny snapshots of a band successful enough to play to arms-crossed crowds in Germany. But as he did with WORRY.’s “Festival Song,” Rosenstock can zoom out just enough to see the bigger picture, specifically, his complicity in the compromises everyone needs to make in order to make late capitalism work. The verses of “***BNB” would be hilarious Airbnb host reviews if they weren’t so heartbreaking—the first is dedicated to a stranger named Sam, stuck in a dead-end job and a terrible marriage, her house secretly being rented out by her mother so guys like Rosenstock can save a few bucks on tour. Delivered in a sing-song cadence, “I used the shower sponge when you went to Spain alone” should live on as the most devastating encapsulation of the pathetic intimacy generated by platform business.
Rosenstock’s previous two albums ended on notes of bleak solidarity: Perfection doesn’t exist, so let’s enjoy each other’s humanity; they’re probably going to win but we won’t just let them. NO DREAM closer “Ohio Tpke” is dedicated to “the only person I ever wanted to like me,” and it starts out like so many other love letters from the road—counting the dashes in the median on the ride home, songs shared on a summer night, a simple connection on FaceTime easing loneliness better than a room full of fans. “Ohio Tpke” morphs to embody any number of quintessentially American rock bands—Bruce Springsteen, Against Me!, Wilco, Built to Spill—and the mood shifts just as quickly, as Rosenstock recognizes how everything required to make a life on the road work at his age gets less resilient. The phone calls get shorter, the reunions get more awkward, agitated, more desperate, more definitive: “I hate coming home/I hate leaving home.” If it was written by someone who showed even the slightest bit less commitment to their craft and cause than Jeff Rosenstock, I’d take “Ohio Tpke” as a retirement announcement.
NO DREAM is about what really goes on when you take enough time to think about whether you’ve turned into the person that you really wanted to be. Maybe there will be freedom from having to repeat the same cycle of releasing an album and trying to find just enough income away from home to do the same thing over again, two years older than you were before. Maybe Rosenstock writes a batch of songs about slowing down just enough to find glimmers of inner peace, or the collective disbelief when someone else is president, or the disorientating euphoria of being able to leave our houses again. But if history’s any indication, even if all of that happens, Jeff Rosenstock will write about how nothing really changed on the most prophetic album of 2022. | 2020-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | May 27, 2020 | 8 | 6d5b1784-f267-4750-9dab-7d02577c2233 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg teams up with the duo Cross Record on a slowcore-influenced album enlivened by a surprising musical chemistry. | Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg teams up with the duo Cross Record on a slowcore-influenced album enlivened by a surprising musical chemistry. | Loma: Loma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/loma-loma/ | Loma | On paper, the creative marriage of Shearwater and Cross Record doesn’t necessarily sound like the most productive union. Shearwater, the indie-rock band led by Jonathan Meiburg over the last two decades, favor big moments and dramatic sweeps where Meiburg’s expressive voice can leap and pirouette from chord to chord. Cross Record prefer subtler execution, letting singer Emily Cross’ voice glide along minimal melodies while multi-instrumentalist Dan Duszynski cooks up an eerie instrumental miasma. But when the two bands toured together in 2016, something clicked. Impressed by the duo’s performances, Meiburg pitched a collaboration, and the three musicians convened as Loma, a joint project that heightens each member’s individual strengths and shows off their surprising musical chemistry.
Together, Loma play with space and momentum in a way that recalls the glacial patience of slowcore trio Low, only shrouded in Grouper’s earthy grain. Their self-titled debut marks the first time Meiburg has ever written lyrics for a voice other than his own, a practice he’s called a “relief” after spending years in a more traditional singer-songwriter role. And while Cross has usually applied her voice to simple, staggered melodies with Cross Record, here she gets to dance along Meiburg’s dynamic compositions. The lengths they go to meet in the middle, aided by Duszynski’s skillful engineering, lead them up some disarmingly emotional alleys. What could have been just an experiment in form becomes an exercise in getting under another person’s skin: Meiburg pens lyrics he wouldn’t sing himself and Cross adopts a persona slightly divergent from her own.
Much of the album lingers in a dreamlike, reflective space. Even its most excitable numbers, “Dark Oscillations” and “Relay Runner,” seem to be sung from a liminal place, on the border between one state of being and the next. Over driving percussion, Cross strives to crawl out of stagnation by looking deep into herself, her voice swelling behind her like a chorus of past selves. The album’s chilling centerpiece “I Don’t Want Children,” powered by the kind of melody you’d hear lilting from a music box, looks to future potentials that are just as lost. Cross ruminates on absent figures as powerfully as if they were standing in front of her. She’s “wondering what could be—who could be,” her voice heavy with the kind of melancholy that only surfaces when you’re staring down a path not taken. That song’s slow tension builds throughout the album, rippling through the rich, acoustic tones of “Sundogs” and “Shadow Relief,” only to break with the pummeling closer “Black Willow,” a lurching, gorgeous, and terrifying song that finds Loma at the peak of their powers. Cross’ voice is multi-tracked to the point where it sounds like every possible incarnation of herself is singing at once. It’s overwhelming, that simultaneity, like coming unstuck in time, like understanding the totality of your choices as you’re making them.
Duszynski and Cross were married when they began making Loma. At some point during the recording process, they decided to divorce. The album isn’t about their breakup
(Meiburg wrote all but one song, “Shadow Relief,” before he even knew the couple intended to split), but it can be read in part as a cross-section of the states of mind that might lead to such a schism. Despite the collaboration behind its making, it’s rife with loneliness; Cross tends to sing as though she’s in an infinitely empty room, and Duszynski’s production amplifies the effect. But from that alienation arises a way forward. If she’s alone, she’s not stuck there. She finds a way to move. | 2018-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | February 22, 2018 | 7.8 | 6d5bc51a-3891-4f85-989d-7b2f6476519e | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The British producer’s bubbly, refreshing latest record is a celebration writ small, music for a barnburner in a dollhouse. | The British producer’s bubbly, refreshing latest record is a celebration writ small, music for a barnburner in a dollhouse. | K-LONE: Cape Cira | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/k-lone-cape-cira/ | Cape Cira | There’s something undeniably entrancing about the little donk that happens when you smack a xylophone. Same with the rubbery thwack of the conga. They are instant little dopamine-release mechanisms, and thus the bar is low for pleasing instrumental percussion records: Record yourself with moderate skill for a half an hour and, chances are, you’ve got something hypnotic enough to find an audience. In some ways, this describes K-Lone’s Cape Cira. It’s a record of small and bubbly percussion, featuring an added array of digital embellishments. But Cape Cira is a lush piece of music, one that uses familiar tools to create something fresh and vibrant.
K-Lone, a young British producer named Josiah Gladwell, brings a kitchen-sink approach to the instrumentation. Yes, he relies on the lovely resonance of the marimba, but there’s also what sounds like pots and pans, Coke bottles, timpani, bells, castanets, and toy pianos. Gladwell claims to use both digital and analog sounds, but it’s impossible to tell what’s what. Listen closely and you’ll hear some bird chirps that are clearly digitized. Listen not so closely and you’ll swear you heard a nightingale out your window. Put it on in the background and you’ll experience bliss by association; pay close attention and you’ll likely be genuinely touched by its depth.
Cape Cira is equally sprawling in its tone. The underlying drums on “In the Pines” are accompanied by a wordless chorus, and something that sounds like a guitar solo played underwater at half speed. “Honey” uses an almost hip-hop backbeat; through K-Lone’s lens, though, it sounds like a more zen version of the bouncy rhythms you often hear bucket drummers pounding out on subway platforms. The main rhythm of “Palmas” is undergirded with the sound of someone hammering tin. “Bluefin” is perhaps the album’s loveliest moment, with slowly building pan drums undergirded by Eno-esque long tones. Shards of noise jump in and out. At one point, a raygun noise shoots across the landscape. The song is not greater than the sum of its parts; it just uses its parts very innovatively. The whole album is a celebration writ small, music for a barnburner in a dollhouse.
This is the first time K-Lone’s made music anywhere near this sumptuous. His 2017 song “Old Fashioned” hinted in this direction, beginning with a spare synth line and some bird calls (it seems he really likes birds) before breaking into heavy dub, like it couldn’t quite sustain its subdued ambitions. With Cape Cira, he’s largely dropped any desire for propulsion in favor of an outward creep, like a stain slowly spreading in all directions at once.
In discussing this album, K-Lone has cited the Fourth World movement, which takes its name from a 1980 album by Brian Eno and trumpeter Jon Hassell. Hassell has emerged as a key influence on today’s composers and electronic producers, each with their own way of blending percussive music with digital effects. K-Lone’s one-time collaborator, producer Don’t DJ, has been tongue-in-cheek with his liberal use of Balinese gamelan music, even releasing an EP called Authentic Exoticism. Another K-Lone touchstone, Visible Cloaks, have been more than upfront about their love of Japanese New Age and ’80s ambient music. Cape Cira touches on all these styles and more. If he wasn’t so skilled at blending everything seamlessly, it might come off as naive. If anything, that’s Cape Cira’s major fault; it’s almost too meticulous. If you found it cloying, I wouldn’t blame you. But there is something sweet about K-Lone’s wholesale embrace of sound, like he couldn’t choose an allegiance to any one idea, so he had to find a way to make them all work. | 2020-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Wisdom Teeth | May 1, 2020 | 8 | 6d5c6695-9826-4d32-8d1d-a7fe0a217465 | Matthew Schnipper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-schnipper/ | |
Fascinated by the psychology behind human connection, the Swedish pop singer celebrates all varieties of romantic vulnerability on her exuberant third album. | Fascinated by the psychology behind human connection, the Swedish pop singer celebrates all varieties of romantic vulnerability on her exuberant third album. | Tove Styrke: Sway | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tove-styrke-sway/ | Sway | It’s been nearly a decade since Tove Styrke planted her feet firmly on planet Pop, graduating from “Swedish Idol” in 2009 to release her self-titled debut album the next year, at just 17 years old. Now 25, the singer and songwriter brings the confidence of a seasoned pro to her third album, Sway. Released on the heels of her stint with Lorde’s Melodrama tour and just weeks in advance of her opening slot on Katy Perry’s Witness tour, Sway is a half-hour romantic romp that positions Styrke at the forefront of contemporary pop.
For the past year and a half, the Umeå, Sweden native has been crafting what she calls “a little collection of love stories.” Sticky and sweet, these new songs revel in intense emotions like desire, tenderness, anxiety, and lust. From the thrill of a secret crush to the shame of alcohol-stained temptation, Styrke embraces all varieties of romantic vulnerability.
That boldness is evident in Sway’s expanded range of vocal styles, from the shredded whispers of “On the Low” to the warped Auto-Tune taunts of “I Lied.” (The vocal effects on the album are used for fun rather than deception; Styrke’s voice is the clearest and strongest it’s ever been.) More importantly, her newfound audacity gives the songs a sense of playfulness. The title track is a woozy, seductive overture, with Styrke pausing to catch her breath between vowels as her voice maneuvers around come-ons like an ice cube melting through hot fingers. But “Sway” is a nervous stream of consciousness more than a mating call, capturing the anxiety of being forced to read a vibe: “So if you’re into me I got the energy/Why are you on your phone?” Amid pounding drums and hand-claps, she imagines a variety of possible outcomes.
Styrke defines a successful pop song as one that is a “shortcut to your heart. It triggers emotion just like that.” Working mainly with Katy Perry and Icona Pop collaborator Elof Loelv, as well as Joe Janiak, a co-writer of Britney Spears’ “Make Me…,” she satisfies that requirement with bangers that are sure to provoke a wide range of strong feelings. During the bridge of Tilt-a-Whirling dancehall gem “Changed My Mind,” vocoder makes her voice bleed and blur like she’s wiggling her tongue as she coos, “Pull me closer.” Styrke even reinvents Lorde’s “Liability,” with an album-closing cover that transforms the bruised ballad into a scoffing, eye-rolling assault on the haters.
The pleasure of Sway is in the witty, unexpected details. Beneath the layers of rubber-band bass and cinematic drum rolls, a sample of a zipper illustrates lyrics about dropping trow on “Mistakes.” Paired with the line, “Can’t deny we got a real vibe,” on the same track, the sound of a vibrating phone becomes an aural joke. The subtle echo toward the end of “On the Low” gives way to bird calls, transforming Styrke’s lonely cave into her very own Garden of Eden, where temptation isn’t taboo. Each sound is a metaphor for a different type of desire.
Sway is a pure Top 40 pop album, jammed with breathy whispers, earth-shaking sex anthems, and bedazzled, Charli XCX-style melodies. But no matter how loud they get, the songs play like inner monologues. They’re not confessional, but they are intimate in the sense that they find Styrke asking herself (and often her friends) highly personal questions: Why do we love or hate or want to sleep with this one particular person? How are my brain and my body reacting to this touch? This joie de vivre and curiosity about the psychology behind human connection make Sway Tove Styrke’s most cohesive work to date—and one of the most exuberant albums in recent memory. | 2018-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony | May 2, 2018 | 7.5 | 6d5ddc21-370d-4bdf-9301-8cfa7305f0f6 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Three years into their return from the majors, the Orrall brothers have finally blossomed into a proper rock band—on an album that deconstructs the idea of what a proper rock band should sound like. | Three years into their return from the majors, the Orrall brothers have finally blossomed into a proper rock band—on an album that deconstructs the idea of what a proper rock band should sound like. | JEFF the Brotherhood: Magick Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-the-brotherhood-magick-songs/ | Magick Songs | For most indie-rock bands, signing to a major label hardly presents the moral quandary it did, say, 25 years ago. In fact, these days, you barely even notice when it happens. (“I’m so bummed the War on Drugs signed to Atlantic,” said no one ever.) However, the destabilizing effects of getting dropped by a major label are as acute as they ever were. Back in the 1990s, even the most hardened and savvy indie-rock insurrectionists—be it the Jesus Lizard or Archers of Loaf—were never really the same after they got demoted from the big leagues. And in the more recent case of JEFF the Brotherhood, even an act that openly celebrated its dismissal from a major label can’t help but emerge from the experience a changed band.
For brothers-in-rock Jake and Jamin Orrall, signing to Warner Bros. in 2012 seemed like the natural next-level move after a prolific decade-long run that saw them harness their distortion-caked racket into radio-ready power pop. Alas, their warm ‘n’ fuzzy Warner debut, Hypnotic Nights, barely cracked the Billboard Top 200, proving that a Dan Auerbach production credit isn’t enough to turn your band into the next Black Keys. With 2015’s Wasted on the Dream, JEFF the Brotherhood took another crack at selling themselves as the world’s most sanguine stoner-rock band, but Warner opted to drop the Bros mere weeks before the album was set to be released. (The band’s own Infinity Cat imprint stepped in to rush-release it.) Since then, JEFF the Brotherhood have seemingly been torn between going back to garage-greased brass tacks (2016’s Zone) or stepping more forcefully on the motorik gas pedal (2015’s Global Chakra Rhythms). But with Magick Songs, we feel the true aftershocks of their ill-fated Warner experience. Having made a concerted effort to court the mainstream only to have their advances rebuffed, the Orralls have come to the conclusion that there’s really no reason for JEFF the Brotherhood to sound anything like JEFF the Brotherhood anymore.
It’s a rare thing for a rock band to genuinely surprise you on its 13th album, so credit the group—a two-piece outfit that once limited itself to three-string guitars—for completely blowing up any pre-existing notions you may have had of their band or their music. On Magick Songs, the Brotherhood function more like an extended family, thanks to the official recruitment of Raconteurs/Dead Weather bassist Jack Lawrence and multi-instrumentalist Kunal Prakash, along with guest vocals from Jenna Moynihan (of Nashville indie-pop trio Daddy Issues) and crucial contributions from Bully bassist Reece Lazarus—on clarinet. Ironically, JEFF the Brotherhood have finally blossomed into a proper rock band on an album that thoroughly deconstructs the idea of what a proper rock band should sound like.
At the height of their commercial aspirations, JEFF the Brotherhood effectively retooled krautrock for Camaros, rendering classic-rock chug with Autobahn precision. But on Magick Songs, krautrock is merely the jumping-off point: On the album’s spell-casting introduction, “Focus on the Magick,” the band rides a gentle Jaki Liebezeit beat through an oceanic fog, with Moynihan’s angelic vocals serving as the siren’s call luring them into the murkier depths. From there, JEFF the Brotherhood only become further untethered from their roots. Magick Songs is reportedly a dystopian sci-fi concept album inspired by everything from Isaac Asimov novels to the apocalyptic visions Jamin experienced in his dreams, and while the narrative thread can be difficult to parse through the omnipresent haze, the album effectively functions as a soundtrack to JEFF the Brotherhood’s own atomization. As they drift through Japanese new-age instrumentals (“Singing Garden”) and gamelan oscillations (“Locator”)—with Lazarus’ dissonant clarinet serving as their fog-horn guide—the band manages to suppress all traces of its old identity while reinforcing Magick Songs’ ominous, claustrophobic vibe. To that end, the album’s greatest act of debasement—and thus, greatest triumph—is “Relish,” which sounds like Jamie xx’s “Gosh” stripped of its clattering rhythm track and left to stew in its weightless, brown-note synth drones.
Many of these tracks are actually edits of extended jams, but Magick Songs is more than just a series of experiments in globe-trotting psychedelia. With the Pavementine rumble of “Camel Swallowed Whole” and the misty, cymbal-tapped post-rock surges of “Parachute,” JEFF the Brotherhood successfully indulge their growing fetish for off-kilter sonics while producing effortlessly tuneful, emotionally resonant songs. So it’s a bit disappointing that, in the album’s home stretch, Magick Songs’ amorphous, unpredictable aesthetic hardens into the lumbering doom-metal of “The Mother” and “Magick Man,” as if the band were overcompensating for the deficit of brawny rock elsewhere on the record. But even as they momentarily revert back to delivering slabs of sludge, it’s clear that JEFF the Brotherhood are not the band they once were. The closing “Farewell to the Sun” may lurch forth on a bong-bubbling groove, but the song’s queasy, string-swept breakdown and creepy subliminal voices soundly reassert Magick Songs’ rejuvenating mission: For JEFF the Brotherhood, a bitchin’ riff is no longer the end goal, but a bulldozer that allows them to bust open new worlds to explore. | 2018-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dine Alone | September 4, 2018 | 7.5 | 6d61ab9b-ead3-48cd-877c-94277bfc5055 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Across the South African rap duo's fourth album, their iconoclastic rave-rap fades into shallow humor and belabored production. | Across the South African rap duo's fourth album, their iconoclastic rave-rap fades into shallow humor and belabored production. | Die Antwoord: Mount Ninji and Da Nice Time Kid | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22421-mount-ninji-and-da-nice-time-kid/ | Mount Ninji and Da Nice Time Kid | From their inception, Die Antwoord have taken an audacious stance against political correctness. The fact that Die Antwoord are two South African satirists who’ve gone all-in to fabricate their campy street personas made the whole idea rather rich. In the past, frontman Ninja has asserted, however ironically, that we can’t expect hip-hop in other parts of the world to fall in line with American PC fervor. But much how Sasha Baron Cohen lost the thread somewhere between Borat and Brüno, on Mount Ninji and Da Nice Time Kid, Die Antwoord’s sharp satire has gone from a bit messy to making dick jokes at a middle school level—literally.
When child rapper Lil Tommy Terror guests on two back-to-back tunes early on, he doesn’t even make you laugh as much as your seventh-grade class clown once did. “Will I ever stop drawing penises?” Terror squeaks. “Never!” The next song he guests on is titled “U Like Boobies?” Likewise, “Banana Brain” is pretty much a euphemism for “Dick Brain,” while modern burlesque icon Dita Von Teese and Die Antwoord frontwoman Yolandi take the lead on “Gucci Coochie,” a song that may as well have been titled “Expensive Pussy.”
What does it mean that two women at Yolandi and Von Teese’s level of fame succumb to rap’s materialist-maneater trope in an intensifying gender-conscious climate? Or when Yolandi appeals to salacious father-daughter sex fantasies on “Daddy?” It's hard to say if it means something transgressive—or if it means anything at all—but by this point, it’s getting less and less credible to give Die Antwoord the benefit of the doubt. “She bounce around da club like a psycho little cartoon,” raps Yolandi—an unintended irony given that Die Antwoord are on the verge of turning into cartoons themselves.
Like most of the tunes on Mount Ninji, “Gucci Coochie” is most engaging when you turn your brain off. Like a more aggressive answer to ’90s electro outfit Prodigy, Die Antwoord manage to get as far as they do on sheer attitude and energy alone. Now under the mentorship of Cypress Hill/Soul Assassins anchor DJ Muggs (credited here as the Black Goat), Die Antwoord have grown more focused when it comes to crafting whole albums.
But even with Muggs and Chicago rapper God on hand as producers, Die Antwoord haven’t quite become the legit hip-hop they believe they’ve become. On the press release for this album—typically entertaining but tellingly devoid of actual information—Ninja declares that Muggs taught Die Antwoord to “unlock their hidden powers and rip the rap game a new asshole.” If that was the goal, there was really no way to prevent Mount Ninji from falling short.
Viewed through more modest expectations, though, Mount Ninji is not without its charms. The rapid-fire wordplay is crammed with tongue-in-cheek moments where Yolandi and Ninja switch on a dime between absurd braggadocio and clever self-deprecation. But even if you think that they’re getting better at their delivery, cleverness is not new territory for the pair who proved their mettle as performance artists well before they invented the characters they now play for a living.
Some of the album’s more out-there moments veer towards a demented form of cabaret where hip-hop serves more as a means to an end. It makes you wonder whether Die Antwoord would do better to market themselves as art-rap rather than the “real gangsta shit” that Cypress Hill’s Sen Dog rhymes about on “Shit Just Got Real.” In fact, almost the entire second half of *Mount Ninji—*eight tracks in a row—simply plods along in a downtempo void that barely raises a pulse. Jack Black’s hammy presence, for example, does nothing to add spice to the circus organ-driven “Rats Rule,” and the skeletal “Stoopid Rich” and “Fat Faded Fuck Face” could’ve benefited from more layering. As Die Antwoord's energy level putters out, so too does Mount Ninji, an album too faded and immature to make a lasting dent on the face of hip-hop, much less rip the rap game a new asshole. If nothing else, though, Die Antwoord still have a fair amount of entertainment value left in the tank, even if that tank is starting to dip below half-empty. | 2016-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | ZEF | September 22, 2016 | 6.1 | 6d66d770-d6f1-4e65-81e5-a44e0767bc33 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Though an interesting showcase of her powerful and newfound voice, the Canadian pop star’s comeback too often lapses into the rote, the stale, or the uninspired. | Though an interesting showcase of her powerful and newfound voice, the Canadian pop star’s comeback too often lapses into the rote, the stale, or the uninspired. | Avril Lavigne: Head Above Water | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/avril-lavigne-head-above-water/ | Head Above Water | The word “yeah” is a noncommittal affirmation, the preferred response of huffy teens across the English-speaking world. But on the lips of Avril Lavigne, “yeah” is a powerful tool: On 2007’s “When You’re Gone,” it’s a plea for reconciliation; 2011’s “What the Hell” uses them as a makeshift Greek chorus. The “yeahs” from her 2002 track “I’m With You” were so brightly evocative, Rihanna sampled them. Beyond their utility as emotional beacons, Avril Lavigne’s “yeahs” belied her faux-punk affectations. They were a conduit for diva-level high notes and a platform for the voice that got her a record deal with L.A. Reid at 15. Seventeen years after her 2002 debut Let Go defined her as the enfant terrible of the Radio Disney crowd, Head Above Water is the pared-back, serious record that she’s been hinting at in her years of belted affirmations.
It is striking to hear her new album open somewhat maturely with sparse piano and Lavigne’s throaty roar. After all, Lavigne seemed to be on a Peter Pan trajectory: “Here’s to never growing up,” she cheered on her 2013 self-titled record. But her health had other plans. In the middle of a worldwide tour, she began to feel exhausted, so weak she could barely stand. After months of quiet suffering, Lavigne was diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2014. She spent the next two years bed-ridden, recovering.
In those intervening years, her voice seemed to grow stronger, and Lavigne saw it as a divine signal: “God was like, ‘Nope, you’re going to keep doing music,” she said in one interview. Head Above Water, then, is an album about resilience, one that explores the range of her vocal chords, with little time for the scream-singing that once defined her sound.
On the title track, her voice cuts above swooning strings, while the lyrics attribute healing qualities to her singing: “And my voice becomes the driving force/I won’t let this pull me overboard.” Then, right before the chorus hits, the background cuts out, and Lavigne’s mezzo bursts into a booming prayer: “God keep my head above water.” The result is a ballad that is larger-than-life, but stops short of maudlin sentimentality. Its plainly religious message also helped Lavigne discover a surprising new audience—the song quickly climbed to the No. 2 spot on the Christian songs chart.
Throughout the record, Lavigne freely explores her past as a choir girl and Canadian folk singer. “Tell Me It’s Over” is a brassy retelling of a swinging-door relationship, complete with a horn section and gospel choir, while “Crush” is a warm ode to the more fluid moments of early love. At its best, Head Above Water is a vehicle for rediscovering Lavigne’s own voice. On “It Was in Me,” she echoes the quiet-loud pattern of “Head Above Water,” letting her voice crack on the verses before breaking out the high notes. She wields her verses and choruses like a Swiss Army knife, at times using them to boldly make a point, at others letting them unspool, like on the sun-drenched love song “Souvenir.”
Unfortunately, many of the statements she makes are, by contrast, stale and uninspired. Even in its strongest moments, there is nothing revelatory in the lyrics, which have a tendency to run out of steam. The worst offender might be “I Fell in Love With the Devil,” which recounts the story of a wayward lover with metaphors that seem plucked from a LiveJournal entry: “Got me playing with fire/Baby hand me the lighter/Tastes just like danger.” Equally mind-numbing and featuring Nicki Minaj is “Dumb Blonde,” which haplessly reinforces the stereotypes it attempts to subvert. Lavigne crafted these songs with a team of at least nine writers, but most seem comfortable writing to the most generic form of an emotion rather than giving it specificity. Musically, Lavigne hits the same notes over and over again; her belting is impressive, but by the final song, her depth-defying wail loses its charm and becomes desperate and exhausting.
Lavigne could be forgiven for producing a conflicted record, one that displays potential but falls short of the statement it hoped to achieve. She said that she felt restricted from making the records she really wanted due to pressures from her record labels; the five years in recovery forced her out of the industry cycle that had gripped her entire adult life. It is unsurprising that when given full access to her own creative desires, she stumbles, lost in her newfound musical freedom and a second lease on a career. Head Above Water marks a new chapter in the singer’s lengthy body of work; it’s a shame that Lavigne thinks her high notes are all she has to give. | 2019-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | BMG | February 19, 2019 | 5.5 | 6d724143-7dca-4458-ad8d-e8f6295240a1 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The second volume in Rashad Becker’s series is redolent of Smithsonian Folkways’ field recordings, with nods to early musique concrète and intercepted extraterrestrial transmissions. | The second volume in Rashad Becker’s series is redolent of Smithsonian Folkways’ field recordings, with nods to early musique concrète and intercepted extraterrestrial transmissions. | Rashad Becker: Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22701-traditional-music-of-notional-species-vol-ii/ | Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. II | The phrase “mastered by Rashad Becker” in an album’s liner notes confers a seal of approval that can't be equaled. As engineer at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, Becker’s name can be found on almost any noteworthy techno or experimental release of the past twenty years. His own music came as a pleasant surprise when he released his debut album for PAN with 2013’s Traditional Music of Notional Species, Vol. 1. At that time, he already had 1200 titles with his credit on them. With Vol. 2, a look at his Discogs page reveals that tally is now nearing 1600 releases. That Becker even has time to contemplate his own music seems impossible, like the leader of a country also having spare time to executive produce a television show.
Much like his first album, he breaks the sides (none of which pass the 4:45 mark) into “Themes” and “Dances,” though one would be hard-pressed to determine the concepts underpinning one side, much less figure out just what moves and steps would comprise the latter. As the title suggests, it’s an album redolent of Smithsonian Folkways’ field recordings from Africa and Indonesia, with nods to early musique concrète and intercepted extraterrestrial transmissions. So maybe it’s closest comparison is to the ritualistic sounds of alien tribes as overheard by a curious visitor.
“Themes VII” wheezes and lurches and bumps into things, while “Themes VI” rattles like a china cabinet loaded into a UFO. The near-vocal quality of his sounds and their cartoonish weirdness brings to mind Hans Reichel’s self-made daxophone, a bizarre wooden instrument that you bow to elicit sounds. “Dances V” stretches and purrs like some space-age polymer while Becker gets an especially nougat-y bass tone for “Dances VI.”
Whenever Becker conjures a familiar sound, he quickly husks history, meaning and expectations from it so that it might quiver in space all on its own, like a cell under a microscope. A mental picture that forms at the beginning of a piece will lose its meaning by the end. So yes, “Themes V” has frequencies suggesting struck metal and the rhythms of a gamelan ensemble. But what to make of the worming frequencies, shortwave static and what sounds like a thrummed comb that then intrude upon the track? His tracks bring sounds, descriptors, and language itself into question.
“Notional” becomes the operative word here, as each piece feels conjectural, possible but unreal. There is, again, a folkloric tinge, an echo of music from peoples in other parts of the world never previously encountered by the West. Much like early electronic music and musique concrète anticipated the means that lies behind most modern music-making—even though it seemed to merely be noise and gibberish at the time—there’s an aspect of Becker’s work that sounds like nonsense, yet also hints at what we might deem music in another half-century. | 2016-12-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Pan | December 23, 2016 | 6.8 | 6d742c3a-c9af-4ea3-8ddb-c4d0cfe7cf6f | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Natasha Khan's latest is a synth-pop love letter to the ’80s sci-fi and fantasy films of her youth. | Natasha Khan's latest is a synth-pop love letter to the ’80s sci-fi and fantasy films of her youth. | Bat for Lashes: Lost Girls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bat-for-lashes-lost-girls/ | Lost Girls | Natasha Khan writes songs that sound not quite of this earth. She spun strange fairy tales on 2006’s Fur and Gold, summoned celestial grandeur on 2009’s Two Suns, invoked intimate magic on 2012’s The Haunted Man. And 2016’s The Bride had the candlelit chill of an old M.R. James story, with Khan singing from the perspective of a woman whose fiancé, killed in a car crash on the way to their wedding, would not rest quietly.
Lost Girls is no less fantastical. Loosely centered around a new character (Nikki Pink) and a gang of biker women who roam the sunset streets of an eerie, make-believe vision of LA, it’s essentially a love letter to the ’80s sci-fi and fantasy films of her youth. She wrote the songs while working on a script of her own, and the starry-eyed, big-screen synth-pop of “Kids in the Dark” sounds like the soundtrack to the big romantic clinch in her own coming-of-age flick.
Otherworldly flourishes are everywhere—but they’re also steeped in nostalgia. Familiar scenes flash by like a supercut of worn-out Blockbuster VHS tapes: vampires jumping off of bridges a la The Lost Boys, an ET-inspired nighttime bike ride, a glimpse of the infamous Hollywood Forever Cemetery that hosted the undead frights in One Dark Night. Dark electronics flicker with the mystery of John Carpenter or swell with the euphoria of John Williams. On standout “The Hunger,” Khan lusts for blood over the throb of a haunted church organ, while a creepy saxophone slithers around what sounds like the bones of a lost Cure song on the gothy instrumental “Vampires.”
It’s a vivid world, although less singular or startling than Khan’s previous creations; these touchstones have become so deeply embedded in the cultural fabric that they offer the same comforting glow as an episode of “Stranger Things” rather than the shock of the new. Lost Girls is richest when Khan puts her own devilish spin on those sacred texts, like the beats that boil and bubble under the shimmering disco of “Feel For You” or the mutated and masochistic Giorgio Moroder banger “So Good.” She has a deliciously macabre ball on “Jasmine,” using her incongruously clipped British accent to narrate a very American horror story in the Hollywood hills. “Little girl cracks your heart in two/Sucks the juice,” she whispers, keyboards pulsing eerily as she revels in the spilled guts and grisly details.
“I know it’s the real thing,” sings Khan longingly on “Kids in the Dark.” It’s a reminder that her magically theatrical songs are most powerful when rooted in simple, stark human needs, from the desperate desire that floods “Peach Sky” to the heartbreak that propels “Mountains” into its crushing coda. It’s far from the most explicit homage here, but in those fraught moments when she’s struggling to get to grips with something huge and scary and thrilling, she sounds just like the overwhelmed kids from her beloved ’80s films—the ones who also got in too deep and had to somehow make sense of the inexplicable, however daunting it seemed.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | AWAL | September 6, 2019 | 7.2 | 6d75cd50-6f6c-4ace-ada8-0ad65a5257eb | Ben Hewitt | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-hewitt/ | |
The Canadian duo cuts out drums and vocals from long stretches of their first album in six years. That it feels of a piece with their past work is a testament to the solid foundation of their music. | The Canadian duo cuts out drums and vocals from long stretches of their first album in six years. That it feels of a piece with their past work is a testament to the solid foundation of their music. | Junior Boys: *Waiting Game * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/junior-boys-waiting-game/ | Waiting Game | Junior Boys open Waiting Game, their first album in six years, on an airless, pristinely recorded drone that only gradually fills out into a chord. A fretless bass murmurs and moans; knowing Jeremy Greenspan, we expect him to slick his hair back and indulge in some David Sylvian suavity. But nope: After almost four minutes of weightless, watery atmosphere, he sings the song’s titular phrase, “Must be all the wrong things,” exactly once. The echo on his voice cuts like a contrail through the otherwise static arrangement, and soon enough, we’re back to silence.
If this seems like a curveball, imagine how shocking it would’ve been in the mid-2000s, after the Canadians dropped their 2004 debut, Last Exit. That record was descended from urbane, rock-averse bands like Pet Shop Boys and the Human League but decked out with all the post-Y2K rhythmic trickery of UK garage, microhouse, drum’n’bass, and the stripped-back productions of Timbaland and the Neptunes. Since then, Greenspan and co-producer Matt Didemus have absorbed more styles from across the dance-music spectrum into their sound, climaxing with the grand disco throb and Prince-ly avant-pop experiments of 2016’s Big Black Coat. Through all this omnivorousness, Greenspan’s voice keeps everything rooted in the exquisite, silk-sheets melancholy that makes their music so absorbing.
Because ambient music often conjures the same sort of wistfulness—particularly the jazzy, neo-Balearic type they seem to be going for here, redolent of Gigi Masin and Suzanne Kraft—the excision of drums from large stretches of Waiting Game doesn’t radically change the experience of listening to their music. It has the Junior Boys feel, but Greenspan needs fewer words to bring it into being. “It Never Occurred to Me” consists mostly of small pops and fizzles of vocoder over a hint of a techno beat, and the lyric sheet reads “lyrics are incomprehensible.” “Dum Audio” is sung in Latin—not that you’d know, given how many effects are slathered on Greenspan’s voice. “Fidget” is just a pearly synth lead and a low-end gurgle; it’s to this album what “Mermaid” was to Sade’s Love Deluxe, an instrumental that proves the band can conjure its trademark vibe even without anyone at the mic.
In creating a Junior Boys album that suggests more than it delivers, Greenspan applies some of the tricks from Oh No, the fantastic album he co-produced with Jessy Lanza not long after the release of Big Black Coat. “Dum Audio” is full of the same playful, spooky synth stabs and dissonant chords he used to bring tension to Lanza’s “It Means I Love You” as it built to the mind-melting drum freakout at its climax. Hollow-sounding vintage drum machines putter in the background, and anyone who’s heard “In the Air Tonight” can tell you how foreboding a Roland CR-78 left unattended can be. The only time the album’s impressionistic palette works against it is on “Thinking About You Calms Me Down,” whose big pop hook would hit a lot harder if the duo had set it to a beat instead of simply hinting at one.
Even in the absence of many of their trademarks, Waiting Game feels of a piece with what Greenspan and Didemus have done before, but it’s hard to shake how small it feels. Junior Boys usually keep their albums around 50 minutes, long enough to let their ideas develop along the x-axis of their beats but short enough to be digestible in one sitting. Waiting Game, meanwhile, sits at 37 minutes. It’s as if Greenspan and Didemus started with a standard Junior Boys album and snipped away at whatever they found worth cutting—a drumbeat here, a lyric here, a song there. The result is an album defined largely by what it lacks compared to the band’s past work: a reduction rather than an expansion. Waiting Game proves the duo can conjure their trademark atmosphere without many of their usual tools, but it’s harder to identify what their music gains from losing them.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this review erroneously stated that Jeremy Greenspan produced Jessy Lanza’s 2016 album Oh No. In fact, Greenspan co-produced the album with Lanza. | 2022-10-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | City Slang | October 28, 2022 | 7 | 6d80c2f9-1a28-427c-8679-7379b6af164e | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
When the Texas quartet Explosions in the Sky released their last album, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those ... | When the Texas quartet Explosions in the Sky released their last album, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those ... | Explosions in the Sky: The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2879-the-earth-is-not-a-cold-dead-place/ | The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place | When the Texas quartet Explosions in the Sky released their last album, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell the Truth Shall Live Forever, it was unfairly plagued by coincidence. The record was a fragile triumph effectively mixing brooding melodrama and frantic rock bombast, but while the album's music was inspiring, it was no match for the ensuing mythology. Yes, a band named Explosions in the Sky did release a record the day before there were, quite literally, explosions in the sky on September 11th. Yes, the album did have a track called "This Plane Will Crash Tomorrow". However, it also came as a devastating obstacle for Explosion's music, as even music-snob bastards like myself needed something a little more "upbeat" to listen to as the world came apart at its seams.
It's in this gloomy context that Explosions in the Sky's sophomore record, The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place, comes as quite a revelation. While the album still exhibits the ominous melodrama of Those Who Tell the Truth, The Earth is a much warmer affair. Even the title, with its emphasis on the word "not," seems laced with an intense yearning for optimism in the face of horrific circumstance. The inside sleeve of the outstanding album art depicts a sketch of lifeless autumnal leaf wistfully tumbling in the air, only to transform into the body of a fluttering dove. In other words, this is about as close as indie rock gets to an intentionally "post-9/11" album.
One of the most impressive aspects of The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place is that it feels constantly in flux, growing and transforming with every note. While this achievement would be notable in any genre, in the ceaselessly masturbatory realm of post/indie/prog-rock (really folks, let's just call it "music"), where bands either take far too long to arrive anywhere (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), or just don't have anyplace special to go (Mogwai), bands that avoid both seem increasingly rare finds.
The record's opening track, the aptly titled "First Breath After Coma", serves as the perfect testament to this art-rock mastery. It begins with a single lilting electric guitar note, miming the incessant nerve-wracking electrical beeps of a hospital heart monitor. As the shimmering guitar note settles into a steady groove, the echoing thump of a bass drum organically rises out of the shadowy mix, playing the pensive "lub-dub" rhythm of a human heart. Each rhythmic line of the guitar and the drums gently coerce one another, cautiously teasing and intertwining until each one explodes into their own new forms; the electric guitar note gives birth to an incessant army of sparkling guitar melodies, while the calming bass drum motif morphs into the rollicking snare attack of a traditional marching beat; and this is all within the first four minutes!
The only disappointing aspect of The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place is its lack of more diversified instrumentation. While each of the record's five tracks is given its own title, trying to pick one out from another can be difficult. The tumbling meditative guitar melody that opens "Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean", for instance, seems so reliant upon the feverish guitar freakout that closes "The Only Moment We Were Alone" that any track separation would spoil the spotless evolutionary vibe. The band themselves had to have realized this fact, as they list the tracks on the back of the album buried within a blurry din of verbiage having their lengthy album title spelled out ad-nauseum. In this context, by its tail end, Explosion's limiting bass, drums, and double guitar line-up becomes an increasing hindrance.
With this album, Explosions in the Sky have constructed a sweetly melodic, inspirationally hopeful album for a genre whose trademark is tragedy. For the astute listener, under the CD tray, amongst the illustrated scattered leaves, lies the answer to the album's desperately optimistic title; it reads "Because You Are Listening." It serves as a poignant parting sentiment from a band whose music is as dramatic as finding hope. | 2003-11-30T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2003-11-30T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | November 30, 2003 | 7.7 | 6d8814a6-67df-464b-b779-3f5ef999f911 | Hartley Goldstein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hartley-goldstein/ | null |
The Toronto death metal band returns with its best album yet: an ambitious and deeply human suite that touches the sublime. | The Toronto death metal band returns with its best album yet: an ambitious and deeply human suite that touches the sublime. | Tomb Mold: The Enduring Spirit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tomb-mold-the-enduring-spirit/ | The Enduring Spirit | The first 10 minutes of Tomb Mold’s triumphant The Enduring Spirit make it obvious why they’re one of the most beloved death metal bands of the past decade. The Toronto trio emerged in 2015 amid the same death metal wave that launched old-school revivalists Gatecreeper and outer-space voyagers Blood Incantation, and their sound fell somewhere in the middle: brutal enough to satisfy the base urges of the death-metal lizard brain, but with a heady virtuosity that gestured toward the cosmos. They were also prolific, releasing three records in three consecutive years, climaxing with 2019’s stellar Planetary Clairvoyance. In the years since, the band has mostly been on ice, so it’s a thrill to press play on The Enduring Spirit and hear them roaring back to life, showing off the same tangled riffs, nimble drums, and inhuman growls they perfected across their first three records.
As great as “The Perfect Memory (Phantasm of Aura)” and “Angelic Fabrications” are, those first two tracks serve as a canny bit of misdirection. The third track, “Will of Whispers,” kicks off with a drum fill from drummer/vocalist Max Klebanoff then drops into a gentle, open-hearted chord, ringing out over a wordless vocal from Klebanoff that sounds more like a yogic om than his typical growl. For the next 40 seconds, guitarists Derrick Vella and Payson Power exchange flickering jazz licks and clean, echoey progressions, while Vella’s freewheeling bass roams the open spaces. Only after this sunlit reverie does the heavy riff come in, ferrying the song through a whirring fantasia of muscular death metal and dreamy atmospherics. For the rest of the album, Tomb Mold play fast and loose with the boundaries between death metal and their myriad other interests—jazz fusion,’70s prog, 4AD-style dream-pop. But crucially, they never sound bored with death metal. However far afield their explorations take them, they remain enthralled by the genre’s awesome potential.
There are precursors to their approach. Death, by many measures the very first death metal band, quickly made their way from the malformed thrash of Scream Bloody Gore to something far stranger. (With screechier vocals, Spirit highlight “Servants of Possibility” could be a Symbolic outtake.) Atheist’s mutant prog-death looms large here, and the gonzo weirdness of Demilich and the cavernous doom-death of Incantation still lurk in the corners. But the classic band Tomb Mold most resembles at this point is Cynic, whose synth-and-vocoder-heavy sound and fixation on Zen Buddhism made them one of death metal’s most glorious oddities in the early ’90s. Like Cynic, Tomb Mold are seekers, fascinated by metal’s transcendental potential as much as its flesh-and-blood physicality. On The Enduring Spirit, they frequently sound ecstatic, as though they’re a riff away from discovering the music of the spheres. Trollish black metal kids in Scandinavia used to take the piss out of death metal bands by calling their music “life metal.” For Tomb Mold, that epithet would likely come as a compliment.
Klebanoff’s lyrics echo the spiritual bent of the music, shedding the cosmic horror and science fiction of the band’s past work in favor of investigations of philosophy and metaphysics. Many of Klebanoff’s most striking lines take the form of self-interrogation: “Is power for its own sake what we desire?”; “How will I see my life until I have left it behind?”; “Why do we change?” On the late-album scorcher “Flesh as Armour,” he sings, “Let us be gentle when questioning ourselves.” Klebanoff knows that the key to enlightenment lies within, but that it must be nurtured. His deathly groans are still largely indecipherable without following the lyric sheet, but more than ever before, his words make it worth the effort.
It’s not just the lyrics that embody the band’s evolution. Vella and Power’s guitars hum with an almost devotional intensity, whether they’re working through tricky, tech-y riffs or ripping through expressive, lyrical solos. The hooks on The Enduring Spirit aren’t vocal lines—they’re lead guitar parts, powered by Vella and Power’s memorable phrasing and clean articulation. Even when the band whips into a densely layered frenzy, every note has room to breathe. (Metal superproducer Arthur Rizk’s mix has plenty to do with that.) Vella’s bass playing is every bit as impressive. With his bouncy mid-tune solo from “Angelic Fabrications” and the melodic, Geddy Lee-like licks from “Will of Whispers” alone, he’s earned entry to the death-metal bass Hall of Fame alongside pioneers like Tony Choy and Steve DiGiorgio. Not bad for a guitarist.
The closing “The Enduring Spirit of Calamity” is the hard-won culmination of the band’s evolution, and the song that cements The Enduring Spirit as their best album yet. At 11 and a half minutes, it’s also the longest, most ambitious Tomb Mold song to date. Its blistering opening movement returns the band to their death-metal blitz mode, delivering some of the toughest riffs and gnarliest vocals on the album. But it touches the sublime about four minutes in, when the furious riffing dissipates. For the next five minutes, the band builds to a strange crescendo, peaking not in volume or intensity but in sheer beauty. Vella and Power trade soaring solos and languorous chords over a bed of shuffling drums, borrowing from the vocabulary of Vella’s “dream-doom” band Dream Unending. When the death metal finally does kick back in, for a coda as invigorating as anything on the album, it feels less like the end of the journey than the opening of another pathway. | 2023-09-19T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-19T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Metal | 20 Buck Spin | September 19, 2023 | 8.6 | 6d8a7f4a-c401-4bde-9aef-883297b08e16 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
The latest in Springsteen’s vinyl reissue series provides a few lost gems for record collectors and completists. But for these odd years, even for the uninitiated, there’s plenty of gold to discover. | The latest in Springsteen’s vinyl reissue series provides a few lost gems for record collectors and completists. But for these odd years, even for the uninitiated, there’s plenty of gold to discover. | Bruce Springsteen / The E Street Band: The Rising / Devils & Dust / Live in New York City / Live in Dublin / 18 Tracks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-springsteen-the-e-street-band-the-rising-devils-and-dust-live-in-new-york-city-live-in-dublin-18-tracks/ | The Rising / Devils & Dust / Live in New York City / Live in Dublin / 18 Tracks | At the end of the ’90s, as he entered his fourth decade as a recording artist, Bruce Springsteen was thinking about resurrections. The first order of business was returning to New Jersey with his wife and bandmate Patti Scialfa, and their three children, after a few years in Los Angeles. He also reunited the E Street Band, the loyal crew he’d disassembled following his commercial peak in the ’80s, which had left him feeling, as he put it, “Bruced out.” His best work as a solo artist in the ’90s (“The Ghost of Tom Joad,” “Streets of Philadelphia”) found inspiration in understated outsider stories that he delivered like eulogies, miles away from the arena catharsis that audiences had come to expect from him.
With his most famous band reunited, Springsteen began writing for the masses again. The first new song he premiered during 1999’s reunion tour was “Land of Hope and Dreams.” To a steady, relaxed drumbeat, his bandmates reintroduced themselves—a glorious saxophone solo from Clarence Clemons, a sweeping mandolin refrain by Steve Van Zandt—while Springsteen conducted a spiritual roll call to kickstart this new era. “You’ll need a good companion,” he sang, “For this part of the ride.” Less optimistic but equally pivotal was “American Skin (41 Shots),” a ballad written for Amadou Diallo, a 23-year-old who was brutally killed by New York City police officers. In its lyrics, Springsteen juggled feelings of hopelessness, fear, and complicity; in live performances, he requested silence so that you could hear every word.
Although he later attempted both in the studio, the definitive versions of these songs appear on 2001’s Live in New York City, recorded during the final nights of the E Street Band’s reunion tour. (Compiled from various shows, it is a triumphant but inessential collection: for the full experience, hit the bootlegs.) That album is among five new installments in Springsteen’s ongoing vinyl reissue series. This time around, he’s highlighting a series of recent albums that have become nearly impossible to find on vinyl, with one of them (2007’s Live in Dublin) making its first appearance on the format. Compared to the first run of reissues, which highlighted his iconic run from his 1973 debut Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. through 1984’s Born in the U.S.A., and a second that collected his mid-career wilderness period, these reissues serve a more functional role. For record collectors and completists, it might be your first opportunity to own any of them. For the uninitiated, there’s plenty of gold to discover.
Without a new album to promote, Springsteen prefaced the 1999 reunion tour by releasing Tracks, a fascinating box set that unloaded a quarter-century of studio outtakes and offered an alternate route through his history as a songwriter. A few months after its release came 18 Tracks, the abridged collection included in this set that acts as a sort of anti-greatest hits. In the streaming era, I’d recommend spending time with the complete edition, where you can hear the full range of his experiments and skip around based on what period of his career interests you most. Epics like “Thundercrack” and “Frankie” are among its classics, and both are excluded from this set, I imagine, for purposes of brevity. Still, 18 Tracks provides a solid-enough representation of his strengths, and this edition marks a good opportunity to revisit his lost gems (at least until Tracks gets a vinyl reissue).
Similar to Tracks, the music on Springsteen’s 2005 solo album Devils & Dust was salvaged from abandoned studio recordings. After 1995’s stripped-down The Ghost of Tom Joad and its resulting tour—his first time performing live without a band—Springsteen felt inspired to continue in this acoustic, folk setting. The hushed songs of Devils & Dust tell stories of men and women that range from biblical (“Jesus Was an Only Son”) to pornographic (“Reno,” which almost single-handedly earned this album his first Parental Advisory sticker) and personal (“Long Time Comin’,” one of the best songs of this era). Springsteen initially shelved the project in favor of the E Street reunion tour, but he returned to it a few years later after writing a mournful protest song about the Iraq War. Bringing to mind the darker songs he had left behind, it became this album’s title track and introduces one of the most challenging and detailed albums in Springsteen’s catalog, one more akin to moodier sets like Nebraska and Tunnel of Love than his more electric work through the rest of the 2000s.
He followed Devils & Dust with another left-turn, recording centuries-old folk songs with a group of musicians he dubbed the Sessions Band. We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, from 2006, was a pleasant surprise, and its resulting tour was even better. Their opening night in New Orleans is often remembered as their peak, delivered as a tribute to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, but revisiting Live in Dublin has proven it to be an equally thrilling document. For starters, it is one of Springsteen’s most pristine-sounding live albums, capturing his energy as a frontman but also showcasing the dynamic among his band—their banjos and fiddles, horns and strings, all arranged in joyful chaos. The material itself is equally wide-ranging. An almost unrecognizable rendition of “Atlantic City” opens the set, and the traditional folk music (“How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live,” “O Mary Don’t You Weep”) rings just as true as his own deep cuts. Time has been good to this era of Springsteen’s career, and Live in Dublin captures its peak.
Part of the reason why We Shall Overcome felt like such a breakthrough upon release in 2006 was its loose, live-sounding production. A common complaint about Springsteen’s records in the 21st century has been their sound, and while they all fare better on vinyl, the issue was beginning to show its head here. In his 2016 memoir, Springsteen discusses his attempts to self-produce the E Street Band’s comeback album after their reunion tour. (“WE WERE DULL,” he laments of the sessions, in all-caps.) And so he hired Brendan O’Brien, a producer who worked with grunge bands like Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots. His signature trick for Springsteen involved compressing the music and backing him with low drones: cellos, hurdy-gurdy, layers of tinny, distorted electric guitar. The goal might have been to summon the epic swell of his live shows, but it often muddied the sound of his band. Still, when the material sang, the production was easy to forgive.
Such was the case on 2002’s The Rising, a pivotal record often generalized as Springsteen’s response to 9/11. Stories have since circulated about him making phone calls to survivors shortly after the attacks to help find a sense of community, to understand the quieter stories behind the big, looming one. Many of these songs serve similar purposes for him as a writer, as he fills the album’s 70-plus minute runtime with choruses that sound like prayers and love songs that double as long goodbyes. It spanned material that directly referenced the tragedy (“The Rising,” “Empty Sky”) and others that dated back to the ’90s (“Nothing Man,” “Waitin’ on a Sunny Day”). Near The Rising’s completion, O’Brien suggested Springsteen cut down the tracklist to help clarify the message. No, he responded, the sprawl is the point.
An early song he wrote for the album is its closing track, “My City of Ruins.” While this era of Springsteen’s career collects several of his most heartbreaking songs—Devils & Dust’s “Matamoras Bank,” The Rising’s “Paradise”—this one feels especially personal. He began writing it at the end of 2000 about the economic decline in his hometown of Asbury Park. The setting that provided the magic and electricity in so much of his early work now appeared in bleak fragments, with Springsteen’s own history folded into its faded scenery. To a soulful melody, he acts as a tour guide before bringing it back home: “There’s tears on the pillow, darling, where we slept/You took my heart when you left.” Just before the final chorus, he asks, “Tell me how do I begin again?” In the same place where he started, finding his footing in the community that both inspired and boxed him in, he was posing a new challenge to himself, coming to terms with those things that die and don’t come back. But for now, he felt inspired and alive. So he got back to work.
Buy:
The Rising - Rough Trade / Devils & Dust - Rough Trade / Live in New York City - Rough Trade / Live in Dublin - Rough Trade / 18 Tracks - Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | February 24, 2020 | 8.2 | 6d8b9dd0-2a0b-427a-8213-347bf96fea83 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Brooklyn rapper makes good on the promise of “Welcome to the Party” with a debut full of the hardest, dirtiest tracks he can manage. | The Brooklyn rapper makes good on the promise of “Welcome to the Party” with a debut full of the hardest, dirtiest tracks he can manage. | Pop Smoke: Meet the Woo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pop-smoke-meet-the-woo/ | Meet the Woo | When Pop Smoke emerged late last year from the outskirts of Brooklyn, the first thing you noticed was his deep and raspy voice. Rapping entirely in ad-libs, hooks, and Instagram-ready one-liners, he sounded like a kid raised on a strict diet of Get Rich or Die Tryin’, Finally Rich, and Newports. His production, mostly from UK drill beat wizard 808Melo, mixed grimy, fast-paced drums with vocal samples ripped from UK garage and melodies that could score an anime. This stew of influences could only come from an artist raised on the internet, but Pop Smoke’s smooth arrogance and West Indian lingo remains distinctly Brooklyn. Now that “Welcome to the Party” is his borough’s current summer anthem, he capitalizes on the momentum with his debut mixtape, Meet the Woo.
Meet the Woo arrives at a pivotal moment for Brooklyn’s still-growing drill scene. Ever since 22Gz’s “Suburban” and Sheff G’s “No Suburban,” Brooklyn drill has lingered in the shadows of its Chicago and UK counterparts. Even as 22Gz signed to Kodak Black’s Sniper Gang and Sheff G became a phenomenon in New York City high schools, the prevailing theory was that these guys would never break out of the Northeast unless they switched up their style. Meet the Woo doesn’t overthink this dilemma; it’s just Pop Smoke taking nine swings at making the hardest, dirtiest shit he possibly can.
Previous singles “Meet the Woo” and “Welcome to the Party” lead off the mixtape and set its sinister tone. Of the new tracks, “Scenario” comes closest to recreating their magic: Pop Smoke’s voice is harrowing and Marvel-supervillain-worthy, the beat a haunted amusement park. He doesn’t show a lot of lyrical creativity, but he can catch you off guard with his delivery: On “Better Have Your Gun,” he goes from ignorant bravado—“Shoot a nigga, go to jail for it/’Cause I know I got the bail for it”—to demented and playful, whispering designer brands with a nightmarish echo on his voice. His limitations as a writer are exposed on “Dior”—outside of the mesmerizing hook, which doubles as an Amiri Jeans ad, he sounds stuck, repurposing lines like “Bitch, I’ma thot, get me lit” and throwing in a lazy and unnecessary and homophobic one-liner.
It might be occasionally unimaginative, but overall Meet the Woo injects life into a Brooklyn drill scene that was running on fumes. Pop Smoke just wants to cause chaos and dominate the playlists of every party before the NYPD inevitably shuts them down. He’s already accomplished this feat with “Welcome to the Party,” and something on this mixtape will follow in its footsteps soon. Maybe a Brooklyn drill rapper can break through without changing, after all. | 2019-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Victor Victor Worldwide / Republic | July 31, 2019 | 7.6 | 6d8c9d4f-4d91-4627-9c1c-884f619a12f8 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
A detailed, patient grower in an era of overstuffed instant pleasures, the sound and tonal quality on Andrew Bird's latest album is often as important as the notes he plays or the words he sings. | A detailed, patient grower in an era of overstuffed instant pleasures, the sound and tonal quality on Andrew Bird's latest album is often as important as the notes he plays or the words he sings. | Andrew Bird: Noble Beast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12605-noble-beast/ | Noble Beast | A long hike through the folds in Andrew Bird's brain is what you sign up for when you play one of his albums. He's been wandering that path since 2003's Weather Systems, when he retired his former band, the Bowl of Fire, and moved to Western Illinois to live with his thoughts on an old farm. On his new album, Noble Beast, Bird can sometimes seem too far inside his own head. And he also appears aware of it, addressing that solitude on "Effigy": "When one has spent too much time alone..." He doesn't answer with another lyric-- perhaps he doesn't have an answer. Instead, he lets you fill in the blank while he reels off a pretty, rustic violin figure.
Noble Beast is, in many ways, a record that asks you to forget the way you currently approach the album. It didn't click for me on early listens. The sometimes drifting song structures, frequent tonal shifts, odd lyrics, and interludes presented a stuffed canvas full of interesting sounds that didn't seem to have a focal point, didn't seem to have a place where you were supposed to enter the composition. Eventually, however, everything fell into place. Marinating in an album in this way is old-fashioned in the overloaded peer-to-peer era, but it's a fitting approach from Bird, a guy who often wrestles with the implications of modern technology and communications.
The sound of the album is as important as the notes Bird plays, and this extends to the lyrics, where he's gradually gone from word-play to syllable-play, often choosing lines for their sounds and tonal quality more than for their meaning. Nevertheless, Bird's music is still emotionally powerful-- he gives uncommon weight to odd phrases, sometimes backing off pronouncing a word fully. His diction comes and goes similar to the way Thom Yorke's does. Some of the phrases don't mean anything; others jump out oddly, like the way he follows a free-association game on "Masterswarm" with the startlingly cogent, even harrowing line, "They took me to the hospital and they put me through a scan." Bird injects the music with similar contrasts, opening "Effigy" with a spooky bed of looping, processed violins before shifting into one of the album's most traditional-sounding moments, with finger-picked acoustic guitar playing a simple, straightforward melody.
Despite early listens, I quickly found myself returning to the record even as I corresponded about it with some nonplussed colleagues. And it revealed itself to be fantastically detailed, from the woodwinds that spice the electronic pulse of "Not a Robot, But a Ghost" to the bassline that comes out of nowhere at the finale of "The Privateers". More broadly, it takes you even further into the canyons of Bird's mind, and it does so with an organic, unhurried flow that's ultimately an improvement on 2007's Armchair Apochrypha, a record I felt was sometimes too fussy and mannered. Even the bonus disc that comes with the deluxe edition, Useless Creatures, has a captivating looseness that finally brings some of the high-wire energy of his unpredictable live shows into the studio.
Noble Beast is has its weak spots-- "Nomenclature" in particular takes the repurposing of language purely for its sound a step too far, not least of which because Bird chose a cumbersome, ugly word-- but one of the benefits of working so far in your own sphere is that your mistakes will always be interesting, and better than that, you get to learn from them. I have no idea what Bird will learn from making this record, but he seems to have taught himself plenty about what his music can be during his time alone-- and now he's reminding us about the value of patiently engaging with music as well. | 2009-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2009-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | January 22, 2009 | 7.5 | 6d92ff1a-bb5a-4c6f-b7ee-477a8604cf91 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The South African 23-year-old follows up his scene-sketching debut with this taut eight-track collection of luxurious amapiano designed for the genre’s growing mainstream audience. | The South African 23-year-old follows up his scene-sketching debut with this taut eight-track collection of luxurious amapiano designed for the genre’s growing mainstream audience. | Teno Afrika: Where You Are | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/teno-afrika-where-you-are/ | Where You Are | Amapiano translates, from the Zulu, to “the pianos.” But it’s the log drum—or, more specifically, the thick-thumping, springy pluck of a bass sound that the Fruity Loops DX10 synthesizer calls a log drum—that’s come to define this vibrant strain of South African house music. Teno Afrika, aka 23-year-old Lutendo Raduvha from Pretoria, situated in the country’s densely populated and fervently creative Gauteng province, is one of the scene’s most visible proponents. He bends amapiano’s stocky percussive trademark into something tinged with acid technicolor stretch marks. Where You Are, the follow-up to 2020’s scene-sketching Amapiano Selections, is a taut eight-track collection that lays down a marker of where this fast-mutating sound is at right now.
Teno’s take on amapiano is in many ways typical of the sound’s current cresting iteration: at once gully, rude, and luxuriously slick. He plies a minimal take on the already-svelte sound, hefting emphasis onto his log bass, rolled snare cracks, and deftly hypnotic synth flicks and stabs. This is particularly the case on “Bells,” a gut-busting five-and-a-half-minutes of pacy dips and curls, its log sound pushed to a deliriously tweaking distortion. “Gomora Groove” and “Halaal Flavour” are similarly potent, their pulsing basslines like Semtex: firm, yet flexible, and concealing an explosive core. These are party tracks, with cousins in UK funky, and elder uncles in Pretoria’s melange of kwaito, diBacardi, gqom, and stateless hybrids like Mujava’s “Township Funk” or “Saka Saka.”
On occasion, Teno dips into the more luxurious, soulful strains of what’s become known as Harvard Amapiano. The sub-genre is slicker, smoother and more indebted to the self-indulgent, self-aware cool of deep house and Afrotech. Tracks like the hazy, Leyla-featuring “Where You Are” lean into this aspirational, penthouse aesthetic—its drifty pads conjure perfume ads more than sweat-dripped dances. The introduction of (mostly female, often singing) vocalists is a relatively new turn within the scene’s near-decade span to date, and one that’s grown consistently since the genre broke onto mainstream SA radio and out into modern metropolises like London, Tokyo, and Los Angeles over the summers of 2020 and 2021. These are songs destined, if not designed, to attract a more mainstream, radio-friendly audience. Teno’s nod to the trend reflects the sound’s evolution to meet the constraints of search engines and radio playlists, but doesn’t go so far as to pour concrete into the amapiano mold. On the KayCee-featuring “Fall In Love,” he flips vocals into pops and trills, with dashes of distortion for good measure; and on “Duma ICU,” with regular collaborator Stylo MusiQ, those plush synths take on an icier temperature, paired with a warbling synth that sounds like a cartoon UFO landing. So it is that with each fork, a gap forms and something fresh fills it—spreading and sprawling with the same energy and human ingenuity as the fizzing townships from where the sound originated. | 2022-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-10T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Awesome Tapes From Africa | February 10, 2022 | 7.1 | 6d951e11-9f71-4a2d-a4dd-e90ec6c10ff4 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Pairing her simple, unaffected vocal style with carefully synthesized arrangements, the Chicago-based musician departs from her indie-rock foundations in search of musical and personal freedom. | Pairing her simple, unaffected vocal style with carefully synthesized arrangements, the Chicago-based musician departs from her indie-rock foundations in search of musical and personal freedom. | Lala Lala : I Want the Door to Open | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lala-lala-i-want-the-door-to-open/ | I Want the Door to Open | Lillie West wants to capture an impossible feeling in her music: being so present in the moment that time doesn’t exist. On I Want the Door to Open, her third album as Lala Lala, the London-born, Chicago-based musician embraces the possibilities afforded by digital recording as a means of conjuring her own impossible utopia.
On 2018’s The Lamb, West recorded songs about her sobriety with a three-piece rock combo, playing many of the parts herself to prove that she could. But for I Want the Door to Open, she sought a new sound to serve her more cryptic and less confessional lyrics, and to help break her out of what she called “the indie rock box”. She wrote for instruments less familiar to her, like piano and bass, in order to rely on her melodic intuition. Working alongside co-producer Yoni Wolf, of WHY?, and an array of musician friends, West creates expansive synthesized environments to fill with her earnest, intimate voice.
I Want the Door to Open slips into new grooves on each track, like a mind in a perfect state of creative flow. The shuffling feel of “Color of the Pool” is accentuated by a synthesized bass line West wrote after listening to a loop of the track for 30 minutes straight. “Castle Life” begins as a four-on-the-floor beat but shifts into more intricate guitar and drum interplay once West insists “I do, I do/I move, I move” in the first chorus. West’s lyrics are oblique but rooted in natural imagery like rabbits crossing a road through settling fog.
The shapelessness of the album can sometimes feel indecisive, but “DIVER” has an irresistible chorus, with West joyously “swimming out towards my new life” over swelling strings and propulsive drumming by Nnamdi Ogbonnaya. Even if she’s caught in the tides, she’s free from impenetrable screens and faces distorted in windows, a life spent refreshing a never-ending feed. The narrator compares herself to Sisyphus, the mythological Greek king doomed to roll a stone uphill forever as punishment for cheating Death, but here the effort that accompanies eternal struggle turns out to be its own exhilarating reward.
West searches for freedom in each song, a pursuit that feels particularly universal after months of pandemic-induced repetition. On “Lava,” she wants to look right into the camera, breaking the imaginary boundary between surveyor and subject. She swallows a bird and exhales a tangerine on “Straight & Narrow,” defying natural laws like an alchemist. She wants to be the see-through “Color of the Pool” and wants to touch the heat of a fuel source without getting burned. She frequently writes about breaking boundaries, as if recognizing the impossibility of her imagined utopia. In West’s simple, unaffected vocal style, these lyrics feel like a dare to herself and the listener. And when she plainly sings, “You’re living like you’re on a screen,” on “Prove It,” it sounds like gentle advice from a friend.
The freedom West seeks isn’t isolation but its opposite: to understand and to be understood by a community with perfect clarity. Her musician friends help bring the songs to life, and the best guests are the singers that emphasize the emotion in West’s performance like actors sharing a scene. Ben Gibbard’s clear delivery on “Plates” is a foil to West’s comfortable mumble, while on “Straight & Narrow” Kara Jackson stretches her voice to add flourishes to West’s melody. “Photo Photo” is a brief round featuring Macie Stewart and Sima Cunningham of Ohmme, sung with the intimacy of a vocal warm-up.
The penultimate song, “Utopia Planet,” concludes with West’s grandma Beth affectionately describing one of West’s painted self-portraits as someone from another world. It’s a touching example of mutual understanding, spontaneous but rich in interpersonal history, swaddled in layers of Sen Morimoto’s saxophone. The album ends with a brief coda in the form of “GB,” a recording of her grandmother singing a verse from a song from the 1930s. Midway through the song, she stumbles on a lyric, then chuckles as she catches herself. It’s an unexpected and heartwarming moment: a fleeting reminder of the passage of time that makes being present in the moment feel all the more real.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | October 14, 2021 | 7.5 | 6d96e1f0-a3e3-4b2b-a6a3-0dae4051b7ff | Jack Riedy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jack-riedy/ | |
The Chicago rapper has earned his role as a leader of rap. His latest album recalls the best records of the ’00s graced with a singular kind of songwriting that sounds inarguably like the present. | The Chicago rapper has earned his role as a leader of rap. His latest album recalls the best records of the ’00s graced with a singular kind of songwriting that sounds inarguably like the present. | G Herbo: Humble Beast | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/humble-beast/ | Humble Beast | Like many new rappers, what makes G Herbo interesting is his relationship to the present: how he makes his art speak to both his reality and his generation. But what defines Humble Beast is how he weaves the past to the present, tying forgotten threads of hip-hop tradition to his firm hold on the zeitgeist. It’s not a project consumed with looking backward, trying to recapture some past glory. Rather, it’s a young artist pushing himself, exploring the genre’s history to find pathways relevant to him now. Crucially, his pivot towards narratives and soul samples is a necessary bit of reframing, a signal of “maturity” and moral responsibility forced upon drill artists who’ve been unfairly typecast and pathologized as one-dimensional purveyors of violence.
G Herbo’s first major record was 2012’s “Kill Shit” alongside frequent collaborator Lil Bibby. It was the song that launched a thousand songs, the primary blueprint for much of the New York and UK drill scenes. The core of his sound, though—the part that makes him one of the genre’s most relevant new stars, and pushes the genre’s sound well past those imitators—is not riding this one approach until the wheels fall off, as others are wont to do. Instead, his strength is a particular sense of songcraft, a skill which proved itself again on his 2015 Chicago summer smash “I’m Rollin,” and extends here to its twin singles, “I Like” and “Everything.” These are records which chart new waters not just for drill artists, but for rap music broadly by tapping into his core audience and pushing new styles in response. Here is where he earns his role as a leader.
A common denominator of these bigger hits is a sensation of taking up space. His vocals fill the canvas, a maximalist rap style which prefers bold gestures to subtle ones. While most artists would be tempted to use an Uzi Vert feature for his heralded songwriting skills, “Everything” is a Herbo record through-and-through. Brash rapping bulldozes through equally tough production, a clenched fist crashing through a brick-wall beat. The song’s concept, while not especially creative on the surface, is executed with a subtle musicality that operates as one gripping hook after another.
On “I Like,” he takes a slightly more relaxed approach—this is, after all, a “for the ladies”-type record, albeit the most aggressive-sounding one in recent memory. Yet this shift to a semi-casual tone is what gives his in-your-face intensity the ability to surprise, zigging when you expect it to zag. “I Like”’s sexual politics may be fairly retrograde, but part of its appeal is its no-nonsense bluntness, a sense of getting to the honest point. Its hooks, cacophonous production, and memorable phraseology (“My name’s G Herbo/I like nasty bitches!” is an unforgettable introduction) are compositional tools, not just “beats” or “lyrics” but the animating force of coherence at the heart of his work.
His compositional skills on these album highlights—alongside lyrical exercises like “Bi Polar,” and pleasantly unexpected left-turns like the spare curiosity “This n That” with Lil Yachty and Jeremih—suggest that his best songs help redefine the boundaries and borders of the genre’s current moment. Yet Humble Beast as a whole is more ambitious than this—it has to be. His similarity to New York rappers always suggested a lineage descended from the Lox, rather than the southern influence of Gucci Mane. The above singles aside, a bulk of the tracks on Humble Beast rely on a post-Kanye/Just Blaze/Bink-style soul sampling, giving it the feel of a lost major label album of the mid-aughts. Its best moments, like the riveting storytelling cut “Malcolm,” feel like a rediscovery of hip-hop’s forgotten narrative possibilities, especially when coming from an artist whose fanbase is young enough not to remember who the Lox is in the first place. Far from a cynical marketing pivot, moments like this suggest an organic curiosity in the traditions of his art.
Lyrically, his style throughout Humble Beast is more blues-inflected than the archetypal East Coast rap record, sticking to personal stories, the names of friends and streets, burrowing into his conflicted emotions, and veering away from punchlines and wordplay. His vocals still power through the production, his brawny verses like purposefully rough outlines of a pencil drawing. In some ways, his writing is still developing; the effortless, artful sophistication of Chicago legend Bump J’s standout verse on “Crown” is a master class, and it’s no slight to G Herbo to say he stands in his shadow.
Humble Beast feels musically bifurcated between its street and soul segments; a street-soul production synthesis could give his sound some cohesion, and giving his reflective moments a contemporary canvas could only increase their urgency. Likewise, the same compositional talent he brings to records like “I Like” and “Everything” doesn’t gleam as brightly when the songs tilt lyrical and autobiographical, though his emergent narrative style still carries a strong emotive power. One gets the sense he’s still working out his comfort level in these moments. With some exceptions (“Malcolm,” “Man Now”), those songs lack the seductive qualities of his best songwriting, where his undeniable, muscular intensity demands attention, and sets him apart among the best young rappers currently working. | 2017-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Machine Entertainment Group / 150 Dream Team | October 20, 2017 | 7.8 | 6d994853-4b47-448d-ba2c-333cfc371350 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | |
The Russian electronic musician offers a mind-melting and hypnotic take on techno. | The Russian electronic musician offers a mind-melting and hypnotic take on techno. | Nina Kraviz: stranno stranno. neobjatno. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nina-kraviz-stranno-stranno-neobjatno/ | stranno stranno. neobjatno. | Earlier this year, Nina Kraviz looked like she might be at a turning point in her career. The Russian electronic musician has spent the past decade using a two-pronged attack to establish herself as one of contemporary techno’s prime movers. On the one hand there are her take-no-prisoners DJ sets—a mixture of rave anthems, vintage IDM, and mind-melting experiments in rhythmic abstraction. On the other there’s her label трип (Trip), a showcase for a new generation of underground producers from places like Russia, Finland, and Iceland—and, often, the source of the very freakiest cuts in her sets. But premiering a new audiovisual live show at Coachella this past April, she took a strikingly different tack, blending theatrical staging and even acting—at the outset, she poured herself a cup of tea before staring deeply into a full-length mirror—with a new focus on her vocals.
It wasn’t entirely successful, though Kraviz’ search for new frontiers in live electronic music was, at the very least, provocative. But on her new EP on трип, Kraviz is back in her wheelhouse, revisiting the stripped-back style that has been a staple of her work since early tracks like “Ghetto Kraviz.” That single, the most successful of her career, came out on Radio Slave’s REKIDS label, and “Dream Machine,” the first of the EP’s three tracks, suggests Radio Slave’s influence, at least at first: Hypnotic and slow-burning, it plays pumping synthesizer chords off a restrained drum-machine groove and fills in the empty spaces with Kraviz’ distant whispers and an occasional flash of dissonance reminiscent of a freight train’s mournful whistle. But four minutes through the six-and-a-half-minute track, she flips the script: “I think I’m falling for you,” she intones, and the track is flooded with trembling organs. It’s a little bit eerie, a little bit sexy, and a little bit over the top, despite its studied restraint.
“I Want You” is harder-edged and much better, with a sound more in keeping with Kraviz’ DJ sets. Rigid toms hammer away, the claps and hi-hats distorted and raw; Kraviz chops her vocals up into ribbons and weaves them through the jagged beats, scraps of speech (“I started to worry”) disappearing behind overlapping layers of pure, satiny tone.
“Stranno Neobjatno” is the best of the bunch. It’s even faster than “I Want You,” but the smoothness of the groove belies its breakneck tempo. Gurgling synths and dial-tone chirps curl around a bare-bones kick/clap rhythm; in the background, shimmering bell tones flash back to Jeff Mills’ steely minimal techno. “Stranno neobjatno,” murmurs Kraviz, over and over, and while that might not mean much to you (the Russian phrase means something like “weirdly immense,” or the sublime), the effect is seductive, her sing-song tone pulling you deeper into the swirl even as subtle electronic effects steadily distort everything around. It’s more funhouse mirror than full-length mirror, and it offers a convincing look at Kraviz’ talent for low-key psychedelia. | 2019-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Trip | July 23, 2019 | 7.1 | 6d9c0847-7c2f-49f6-b2b9-524393f63675 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Australia-born, Iceland-based composer returns with his best album yet. Unlike his past work, there are no guitars, piano, or stringed instruments; instead, the 41-minute collection focuses on synthesizers and the heavy percussion of ex-Liturgy drummer and current Guardian Alien leader Greg Fox and Swans’ Thorr Harris. | The Australia-born, Iceland-based composer returns with his best album yet. Unlike his past work, there are no guitars, piano, or stringed instruments; instead, the 41-minute collection focuses on synthesizers and the heavy percussion of ex-Liturgy drummer and current Guardian Alien leader Greg Fox and Swans’ Thorr Harris. | Ben Frost: A U R O R A | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19302-ben-frost-a-u-r-o-r-a/ | A U R O R A | Ben Frost’s interests are vast, and that includes the way he approaches his music. The Australia-born, Iceland-based composer has written scores for dance companies, soundtracked films, and collaborated with visual artists and poets. He cast himself as a kind of endurance artist on the cover of his 2007 album Theory of Machines and, in 2013, directed his own theatrical adaption of Iain Banks’ novel The Wasp Factory. Frost also co-produced experimental saxophonist Colin Stetson’s New History Warfare, Volume 3 in 2013, played “fire” on Swans’ The Seer a year earlier, and is an important collaborator for Tim Hecker. Outside the studio, he’s articulate when discussing what he’s doing, loading comments about his work with heavy concepts and meaning: his interviews fold in references to biology, astronomy, literature, nature, art, professional basketball. For all this, his music is equally fascinating when you strip away the context and simply let the sounds he’s making overtake you.
Frost’s latest album, A U R O R A, offers his best example yet of this sort of aural suffocation. The uptick could partly be due to a new approach: Unlike his past work, there are no guitars, piano, or stringed instruments; instead, the 41-minute collection focuses on synthesizers and the heavy percussion of ex-Liturgy drummer and current Guardian Alien leader Greg Fox, Swans’ Thorr Harris, and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily. A U R O R A is, in a sense, the proper companion to 2009’s excellent By the Throat, but it’s shaggier and more intense. Still, Frost is able to maintain a sense of spaciousness amid the feedback.
That feeling of distance coincides with the facts of A U R O R A’s creation: Frost wrote most of the collection on a laptop while working with photographer/filmmaker Richard Mosse in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. (Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten, in turn, made a series of grainy films—explosions, volcanoes, bullets through bodies—as a rollout to A U R O R A, as well as the album’s cover art). He also recorded in Empac, New York, and Reykjavik—where he mixed the record with Valgeir Sigurdsson—and somewhere along the way, Tim Hecker provided sound design and post-production work.
Despite its scattered creation, I tend to listen to A U R O R A as one long piece, letting the different modes congeal into a whole. You hear minimalism buried in the fuzz, and it’s also easy to tell that Frost is fond of industrial, punk, and metal. Instead of the noisy, meditative openers of past outings, A U R O R A's first track, “Flex”, sounds like an airplane taking off; the steady, escalating synthesizer gives way to frantic jazz drumming partially consumed the crackling, loose wires around it. This bleeds into “Nolan”, a track that would fit easily on Tim Hecker’s Harmony in Ultraviolet, featuring a percussive thump—sticks rattling, synthesizers lapping. Like much of A U R O R A, it feels like a battle between the human and the digital, Frost’s cold synthesizers and laptops vs. his collaborators’ sweaty percussion.
But the album is not all violent stoicism; there’s dark humor here as well. “Diphenyl Oxalate”, a track named for the chemical used in glowsticks, hits like a black metal rave, and it’s one of a few places where Frost seems to be creating dance music, or at least music that makes your innards move. In this mode, he fits in line with producers like Container, Sandwell District, Demdike Stare, and Vatican Shadow, but he never stays in one place, and the album is filled with variety and a great sense of dynamics. The previously mentioned “Nolan” takes an Eastern turn, and mixes in wind chimes beneath a gale force surge. “No Sorrowing” is a hazy, restful drift. The warping “Sola Fide” sounds like loose wires and firecrackers, but maintains a melodic side. (In the liner notes, Eddi the Bomb is credited with “explosives.”)
If the album has a center, it’s “Venter”, which has a little of everything Frost does well. It opens with a blend of clean and distorted hand drums, which are joined by a distant, crystalline synthesizer that grows stronger over the first two minutes before practically being buried by the sound of bells and chimes. For the remaining four and a half minutes, these strands fluctuate, growing more intense, but also more refined. Then, at the four-minute mark, almost like offering some kind of introverted, experimental take on an EDM drop, the track gains a new kind of force and momentum on the back of whiplashing electronics. It’s an epic track, the kind of song that fills up a room.
Frost named "Venter" after biologist Craig Venter, the first person to create a cell containing a synthetic genome. In an interview with Pitchfork, he said the scientist would be his dream collaborator: “It would be about getting some face time with the guy who literally synthesized life—he made life. It just makes me feel so small and insignificant.” A U R O R A can be heard as Frost’s attempt to create something physical, and it stands above the rest of his discography. | 2014-05-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-30T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Mute / Bedroom Community | May 30, 2014 | 8.5 | 6da09455-0acb-48d8-b750-d0e6b0e7bfa8 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
A captivating solo performance at Manhattan’s most haunted showroom, the latest release in Neil Young’s ongoing archival project showcases a fascinating pivot point in the young songwriter’s career. | A captivating solo performance at Manhattan’s most haunted showroom, the latest release in Neil Young’s ongoing archival project showcases a fascinating pivot point in the young songwriter’s career. | Neil Young: Carnegie Hall 1970 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-carnegie-hall-1970/ | Carnegie Hall 1970 | By December 1970, Neil Young was America’s bizarro sweetheart. Over the course of three LPs with Buffalo Springfield and three acclaimed solo albums, he had mastered folk and rock idioms and alchemized them into something utterly sui generis. He could be churlish or tender like Dylan, he could rock like the Stones, he could harmonize like the Beatles and wax philosophical like the Dead. He was intensely cool with a side of creepy. Carnegie Hall 1970, the most recent entry into Young’s ambitious, ongoing archival project, reveals the emergent superstar accompanied only by acoustic guitar and piano, playing a stately survey of his early material before a rapturous audience of devotees. Like so much of his work, the concert feels oddly fraught with the portent of history: an icon-in-progress’ pilgrimage to Manhattan’s most haunted showroom, another journey through the past.
The year prior to Carnegie Hall, Young became a late addition to the commercial juggernaut Crosby, Stills & Nash, who were riding high on the universal acclaim and massive sales of their 1969 self-titled debut. Stephen Stills felt the need for a second guitar player and recommended his frenemy and former Buffalo Springfield bandmate; Graham Nash objected but Young was allowed to join, and he promptly made the group stranger, sadder, and more interesting on 1970’s follow-up Deja Vu. That album went on to sell a staggering eight million copies and made each of the performers household names, and yet Young improbably maintained an air of mystery. By the time he took the stage at Carnegie Hall, the 25-year-old artist had semi-miraculously threaded the needle between full-scale ambition and cult-figure credibility.
Consolidating these gains, the set contains a judicious and even generous survey of Young highlights from his Buffalo Springfield, solo, and CSN&Y days. Acoustic reworkings of guitar-freakout favorites like “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Cinnamon Girl” verge on cordial while still retaining the patina of outlaw charm. The solo piano version of the Buffalo Springfield nugget “Nowadays Clancy Can’t Even Sing” strips the original of its psychedelic armor and arrives at the painful core of its existential striving. And a rueful version of “Ohio,” a recently issued response to the Kent State University shooting of four student Vietnam protesters, vibrates with rage. The concert transpired only seven months after the shooting occurred.
The overall mood is strangely collectivist for a performer so frequently inclined to build tension between himself and his audience. In an odd bit of abortive showmanship, he asks the crowd to sing along with a lilting take on “Sugar Mountain,” before stopping mid-song to encourage them to do better, and eventually giving up the gambit entirely. “See what happens when we try to please you?” he jokes with palpable exasperation.
Even within the show’s relatively sedate setting, there are hints of the artist whose future hallmarks would include aggressively raising the bar for in-concert sonic abuse and antagonism. A stunning version of “See the Sky About to Rain” previews a song that wouldn’t officially surface until 1974’s Ditch Trilogy linchpin On the Beach, and the brilliantly doleful bummer ride of “Bad Fog of Loneliness” hints at the shifting tradewinds of the hippie dream. Cast into bold relief alongside a surfeit of crowd-pleasing hits, these stark compositions suggest all the nervous, groundbreaking places Young was headed. In the years ahead, he would relish both his command of an audience and his license to confuse. He would leverage CSN&Y into a shockingly successful two-front war on the charts. He would pivot impulsively between ragtag country, manicured folk, and abrasive drunk-tank boogie. He would emerge from a deep and competitive field as the weirdest rock star ever. Warm, engaging, and magnetically solicitous, the Carnegie Hall show is a fascinating pivot point, showcasing Young at his most engaging and vulnerable, nailing one door shut and prying open another: It’s a last look back at the old folkie days and a tentative first reckoning with the wooly neurosis of a new decade.
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. | 2022-01-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Reprise | January 8, 2022 | 8 | 6da5ee20-09e0-4b18-b613-7483387009f3 | Elizabeth Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/elizabeth-nelson/ | |
After three safe and predictable records, the Weezer leader goes the opposite route, collecting demos of all sorts of goofy and indulgent ideas, and reminding us why we fell for dorks with horn-rimmed glasses and flying-V guitars in the first place. | After three safe and predictable records, the Weezer leader goes the opposite route, collecting demos of all sorts of goofy and indulgent ideas, and reminding us why we fell for dorks with horn-rimmed glasses and flying-V guitars in the first place. | Rivers Cuomo: Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10981-alone-the-home-recordings-of-rivers-cuomo/ | Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo | Somewhere along the way, someone told Rivers Cuomo that he needed to rein it in. To the world's dismay, he listened, and made three records of faceless, predictable approximations of what the public supposedly wanted his band Weezer to be. Demo collection Alone does the opposite, collecting all sorts of goofy and indulgent ideas-- robot voices, barbershop-quartet harmonies, over-emoting, an Ice Cube cover-- reminding us why we fell for dorks with horn-rimmed glasses and flying-V guitars in the first place.
Casual fans and/or haters might wonder what, after three records that were stagnant at best, could be possibly left in the vaults; the superfans know exactly what he's holding back. The inside cover shows off a crammed collection of cassette tapes, their spines promising untold treasures-- Songs From the Black Hole is there, as well as previously unheard of titles and bandnames-waiting-to-happen like Psoriasis Babies and Angst Muffins. As far as basement tapes go, Alone ranges wildly in fidelity and style while still hanging together as a surprisingly cohesive whole. Its liner notes have detailed histories and inspirations for each song-- with lyrics, even-- and photos that exhibit a disconcerting lack of shame. (Bearded Basoon-playing Rivers, Despondent Glam Rivers, collect 'em all!) Best of all: More than two-thirds of the material here was recorded before 1996. As for the rest... we'll get to that.
A lost Weezer record it isn't, even if fans have been waiting on one. Songs From the Black Hole was reportedly a full concept album meant to follow the "Blue Album" that was scrapped completely before recording what would become Pinkerton. Its story arc follows a five-person (plus one mechanoid) crew of a spaceship on an important mission, our noble protagonist Jonas (hmm...) is given a meaty role while crewmates Wuan and Dondo (seriously, it's in the liners) are one-dimensional avatars for womanizing and partying. That only sort of matters in "Blast Off!", the collection's crown jewel and such a fleeting rush of distortion-driven joy that the edges of the supposed dialogue are entirely blurred, and are hardly essential to enjoy it.
Not so when it segues directly into "Who You Callin' Bitch?", the lament of the unfairly maligned female spaceship cook, whom Cuomo brings to life with some fairly operatic solo vocal moments. More narrative confusion and dick references follow in the cheery a cappella "Dude, We're Finally Landing" and the twee-cranked-to-11 of "Superfriend", which is at least on par with Pinkerton's stellar B-sides (many of which would have made up this "lost" album). If it sounds silly on paper, go over the lyrics to your favorite Weezer song in your mind for a moment, and then take into account that these were written with the help of painkillers as Cuomo healed from leg surgery. These hopelessly corny, irrepressibly infectious songs are the stuff that Weezer freaks are forged in.
The rest of the songs come from more familiar territory. "Lemonade" borrows its paunchy low-end straight from the Blue Album, while more introspective tracks like the would-be teen-flick soundtrack cut "Wanda (You're My Only Love)" and piano ballad "Longtime Sunshine" will satisfy the Pinkerton lover on your Christmas list. There's only one previously released Weezer song in the bunch, however. While its plodding tempo nearly turns it into a dirge, "Buddy Holly" still sounds pretty great in any incarnation, but doesn't reveal much in demo form besides some silly keyboard presets; it's not as if a Weezer song has ever been ruined by over-production. It does show that Cuomo has his compositions nearly finalized before they get to the band, right down to the falsetto harmonies and lightning-quick licks tucked into the verses.
There are more unexpected pleasures as well, like hearing Cuomo moonlighting as frontman for the band Sloan on a strutting cover of oldie "Little Diane". Even the compilation's rough spots reveal something: The choked angst of "The World We Love So Much" is intimate enough to cause embarrassment by proxy, but it's worth noting that it's a Gregg Alexander cover (yes, the guy from the New Radicals). It divulges an unexpectedly modern influence, and from a relative peer of Cuomo's at that; either could have switched career trajectories if the cards had fallen just a bit differently. And yet, the biggest surprise is that Weezer's latest material is not the bottom of the barrel, and that crossover smash "Beverly Hills" only hinted at the depths Cuomo has yet to plumb. Recorded in 2007, "This Is the Way" is a stab at MOR urban pop, with what are likely his least inspired lyrics yet. He rhymes "love" with "heaven above" over a track that, even for a demo, makes old Jon Secada look like old Timbaland, finally indulging in the supposed funk influence he once so studiously avoided. The chorus: "This is the way a man loves his lady." It's as if "Beverly Hills" was a black hole, and this was the extra-dimensional hell on the other end.
But more than being adrift in an unfamiliar genre, "This Is the Way" is crippled by the same thing that drags down "I Was Made for You", a 2004 demo that closes the compilation. The mostly chronological track list of Alone exposes the same drawbacks of Weezer's later records by the end: By chasing down broad notions of universality in his lyrics and melodies, Cuomo's songs have become increasingly impersonal and vacuous, even when they're as pretty as "I Was Made For You". There's nothing about angst-ridden singer-songwriters, forgotten power-poppers, or rappers that we can't all relate to; nor do songs that draw inspirations from science fiction or Madame Butterfly necessarily appeal to a niche audience. It's frustrating that Cuomo has sidelined these weirder, often endearing influences. If nothing else, Alone reminds us that a lot of those over-ambitious, silly-on-paper ideas often blossomed in Cuomo's hands, and there was more to Weezer in their early days than just crisp power-pop and cute videos. | 2007-12-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2007-12-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Geffen | December 13, 2007 | 7.2 | 6da7dcd4-faa8-442a-9de1-da71700b07c9 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Splitting the difference between War on Drugs and Death Cab for Cutie, the latest from the Brooklyn band offers indie rock at its most familiar and instantly gratifying. | Splitting the difference between War on Drugs and Death Cab for Cutie, the latest from the Brooklyn band offers indie rock at its most familiar and instantly gratifying. | Wild Pink: A Billion Little Lights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wild-pink-a-billion-little-lights/ | A Billion Little Lights | Wild Pink’s A Billion Little Lights was born from the seeds of a more sprawling project, a double album about the American West that frontman John Ross eventually dialed back. Even in its abridged final form, though, the sense of sweep remains. Everything about the album’s synth-heightened heartland rock is wired for maximum impact, from the production, which frames Ross’ songs like aerial shots of the Grand Canyon, to keyboards that sparkle and glisten as if queued to a light show that for now exists only in Ross’ head. A bid for the big time from a band that has so far largely fallen under the radar, A Billion Little Lights is indie rock at its most instantly gratifying and undemanding.
Ross had been teasing that he had an album like this in him for a while. Splitting the difference between War on Drugs’ pastoral Americana and Death Cab for Cutie’s sensitive guitar rock, Wild Pink's first two albums were so stacked with warm arrangements and amiable melodies that seemingly every critic who heard them wondered why the band hadn’t found a wider audience. But neither of those albums conjure the scale of A Billion Little Lights. Recorded with producer David Greenbaum, who engineered Beck's glossiest projects (Morning Phase, Colors, Hyperspace) the album builds out the American dioramas of its predecessors into full Hollywood sets. “The Shining But Tropical” is majestically maximalist, filtering the rousing synths of Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. anthems though the delirious, fog-machine haze of M83’s Saturdays = Youth.
Ross' greatest limitation remains his voice, which could charitably be called soft-spoken. Mostly he finds ways to make it work for him. Ratboys singer Julia Steiner accompanies him on much of the album, and her vocals brighten the songs even as they usually scan a shade sadder than Ross’. His modest vocals help keep the focus on those rippling arrangements, although occasionally, when his songs brush against Tom Petty’s working-class country rock, the effect is like a Super Bowl pickup truck commercial voiced over by a “This American Life” contributor. Ross’ small, sweet voice also disguises how barbed his lyrics can be. On paper, the chorus of the peppy “You Can Have It Back” basically amounts to “take your love and shove it,” but his voice is so polite it sounds like he’s wishing his ex well. His amiable delivery similarly tempers the album’s sharpest dig on “Oversharers Anonymous,” where he sings “You’re a fucking baby but your pain is valid, too.”
Ross frequently turns to daydreaming, and many songs contain elements of fantasy; he spends an entire verse of “Oversharers Anonymous” imagining buffalo hunters in the Old West. Yet much as it longs for an earlier era of America, A Billion Little Lights’ greatest nostalgia is for a more recent past, the indie-rock boom years of the late ’00s and early ’10s, when the genre looked as if it could still be a big tent. “Track Mud” opens with images of the Pacific Coast and the Rockies, but mostly it sounds like a postcard from Bon Iver’s Bon Iver. Elsewhere there are shades of the comforting hush of Iron & Wine and the hand-crocheted folk of Sufjan Stevens, alongside the expected generous pinches of War on Drugs. None of these sounds are past their expiration date, of course, and at their best Wild Pink demonstrate how inspired they can still be. But if A Billion Little Lights doesn't always awe quite like it should, given its considerable zeal and craftsmanship, it's because of that familiarity. The album has a big heart and big ambitions to match. The only thing missing is the very thing these songs long for the most: the thrill of discovery.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Royal Mountain | February 22, 2021 | 7.6 | 6da91300-4034-4d5c-8c13-d87d4a56da54 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
A Fleetwood Mac album in all but name, the two esteemed songwriters bring their signature tics and genius songwriting, though the rush wears thin as the album progresses. | A Fleetwood Mac album in all but name, the two esteemed songwriters bring their signature tics and genius songwriting, though the rush wears thin as the album progresses. | Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie: Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23221-lindsey-buckingham-christine-mcvie/ | Lindsey Buckingham / Christine McVie | A good chorus can put a whole lot of questions to bed—about a song, about a band, about a reason to get up in the morning, you name it. Fleetwood Mac, whose catalog is so festooned with world-bestriding hits that they can do a best-of reunion tour and leave “Sara” and “Hold Me” off the setlist, know this better than just about any other band. Their colossal pop collaborations kept them together through years of intense interpersonal turmoil and full decades of cordial détente. Like, in the grand scheme of things, is it really that big a deal if you left your bass-player husband for the light guy if the result is “You Make Loving Fun”?
Which brings us to the curious case of Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie, a Fleetwood Mac album in all but name—and the conspicuous absence of the third member of the band’s songwriting trinity. Ending what seemed like a permanent departure from the band, keyboardist and vocalist McVie returned to the fold in 2014 for a massive tour. After it wrapped, she and guitarist/vocalist/production whiz Buckingham headed back to the studio together for the first time in well over a decade, with drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie joining them. As for Stevie Nicks, well: “What we do is go on the road, do a ton of shows and make lots of money. We have a lot of fun. Making a record isn’t all that much fun.”
Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie feels like a retort to Nicks’ statement. For McVie, the return to the band has been creatively invigorating as well as financially lucrative (Nicks herself gets that, facetiously describing McVie’s only other alternative to heading back to the studio: “‘Now I’m just gonna go back to London and sit in my castle for two years?’ She wanted to keep working”); Buckingham’s a born striver who kills time between tours by adding guitar texture to Nine Inch Nails records. Going on the road and making money is “what we do”? The pair’s collaboration feels like a “speak for yourself” in album form. To paraphrase a Rumours classic, they’ll make recording fun!
Their self-titled album is front-loaded with jams, with the kind of choruses that dissolve doubt on first listen. “Sleeping Around the Corner,” the album’s opener, sees Buckingham all but race through the first verse, just a couple of lines sung in an affected rasp, before unleashing a big and bouncy bass-driven chorus that springs into being like an inflatable castle at a kid’s birthday party. “Lord, I don’t wanna bring you down/No, I never meant to give you a frown” he and his multi-tracked army croon. Does it matter that he could have just sang “make you frown,” which is something that people actually say, instead of “give you a frown,” which is awkward and goofy and almost childlike? Yes, but only in the sense that it’s better this way. Keep in mind, this is a dude who kicked off his band’s bestselling record with a song that invited its subject to “lay me down in the tall grass and let me do my stuff.” His line, “We made sweet love over and over,” is refined to the point of esotericism by comparison.
McVie takes point on the following song, “Feel About You.” No songwriter in rock does infatuation better than McVie—“Feel” may not join that august company of her immortally swoony “Everywhere,” but it’s love-struck smiley fun nonetheless. Its crunchy beat and marimba hook that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Haim album, and its almost doo-woppy chorus is just a “tell me more, tell me more” away from *Grease-*level crowd-pleasing territory.
After the strong, finger-picked Buckingham solo feature of “In My World,” however, the rush of hearing these two pop-rock titans team up starts to wear off. You hate to play armchair-psychiatrist with a group dynamic as complex as this, but it’s hard to resist the suspicion that the easy-going, Nicks-free composition and recording process left ideas unsharpened or undeveloped. McVie’s piano ballad “Game of Pretend” opens with a gorgeous melody that evokes Roxy Music’s “Sunset,” but its lush build-up leads to a verbose chorus that lacks the economic punch and power of her own “Songbird.” Buckingham’s “On With the Show,” an ostensible paean to “stand[ing] with my band,” closes with the phrase “let’s get it on” repeated approximately 36 times in a minute and a half, making you wonder why you wouldn’t just sit back down. And Mick’s big drums on “Too Far Gone” can’t disguise the pro forma nature of its boogie-woogie rock-by-numbers. “Goin’ underground,” McVie sings in the chorus—to what, the wine cellar?
Granted, successful moments are sprinkled throughout the whole album. As writers and performers, Buckingham and McVie are simply too talented, too engaging, too endearing for it to be any other way. To be a Fleetwood Mac fan is to feel like you’ve received teary text messages from its vocalists, like estranged friends turning to you in their hour of need. The ache in McVie’s voice when she opens the mid-tempo mid-album “Red Sun” with, “I wonder where you are as I fall upon my bed” is as tangible as a late-night mattress. Buckingham concludes “Love Is Here to Stay” with a melodic cascade that’ll have you skipping down the nearest mountainside at your earliest convenience. Just hearing their vocal tics—the way McVie pronounces “night” as “nigh-eeet,” or the catlike meow vowel twist Buckingham adds everytime he sings the word “down”—is enough to delight. Lindsey Buckingham/Christine McVie really does make listening fun—just not fundamental. | 2017-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | Atlantic | June 12, 2017 | 6.2 | 6daae766-f696-436a-b081-43316a38c823 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | null |
Even given the tongue-in-cheek hyperbole of the title, this six-track live EP fails to live up the former Talking Heads frontman’s former heights. | Even given the tongue-in-cheek hyperbole of the title, this six-track live EP fails to live up the former Talking Heads frontman’s former heights. | David Byrne: “…The Best Live Show of All Time” — NME EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-byrne-the-best-live-show-of-all-time-nme-ep/ | “…The Best Live Show of All Time” — NME EP | Viva Brother, Terris, Mansun, the Twang, Joe Lean & the Jing Jang Jong—all decidedly non-legacy acts that the NME has historically (and hysterically) hyperbolized during its nearly seven decade run. So leave it to the ever-clever David Byrne to grab a Niagara-Falls-of-a-gusher pull-quote from an NME live review and emblazon it on his new EP, complete with attribution. Byrne’s long legacy means he’s already responsible for one of the great live albums of the punk era as well as one of the best concert films of all time, and even the concert bootlegs are rightly revered. But Byrne is that rare legacy artist careful not to cash in on his longevity, avoiding all talk of Talking Heads reunions and constantly challenging himself with collaborations—be it St. Vincent or Fatboy Slim—while continuing to chase passions both old and new down unlikely rabbit holes.
Last year’s American Utopia, his first solo album in 14 years, might not have been his most formidable work, but it gave him impetus to stage his most lavish touring production since the era of Stop Making Sense. A dervish of 12 performers and percussionists, this tour drew from Byrne’s formidable songbook along with his most recent effort, accentuating his at times oddly optimistic outlook at our current predicament. As yet another NME post put it, the show “captured 2018’s zeitgeist of inclusivity, diversity, positivity, alienation and paranoia... redefin[ing] the concept of a live musical performance.” No doubt Byrne’s love of color-guard performances rubbed off on his own live presentation. This particular recording gathers six selections from a show at Kings Theatre in Brooklyn.
If only there were a way for “...The Best Live Show of All Time” —NME to properly capture that zesty event. There’s no doubt that any experience of the ecstatic Dada garble of Talking Heads’ funk bomb “I Zimbra” is awesome. But without the barefoot synchronized moves and matching silver suits that accompanied this presentation, the song’s manic energy isn’t quite captured on tape. The twitchy, mid-1980s minor hit “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”—part country, part township jive—fares better here, its lilt kept intact.
While on the surface they display the same rhythmic buoyancy as the classic material, Byrne’s more recent songs suffer in comparison. The zouk-y, dancehall-lite of Utopia’s “Every Day Is a Miracle” bears the kind of aslant yet catchy chorus of latter-day Heads, while the lyrics (“The brain of a chicken/And the dick of a donkey/A pig in a blanket/And that’s why you want me”) remain cringeworthy. At a time when doubt, disillusionment, climate catastrophe, and the pall of nuclear annihilation can consume our every waking day, it’s worth remembering that few lyricists captured the dystopian dread and cognitive dissonance of the Cold War ’80s better than Byrne on Remain in Light. But in 2018 Byrne’s song involving the president and a state “where reality is fiction” instead finds him waxing about “doggy dancers doing doody” instead. Much like that NME tag itself, it feels ludicrously ahistorical. | 2019-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | January 11, 2019 | 5.5 | 6db3c6da-d844-4eed-a977-8d4b0f56e274 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The Seattle band U-Men released only one full-length during their eight-year run in the 1980s, but their legend loomed large over a generation. A new Sub Pop reissue collects their crucial catalog. | The Seattle band U-Men released only one full-length during their eight-year run in the 1980s, but their legend loomed large over a generation. A new Sub Pop reissue collects their crucial catalog. | U-Men: U-Men | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/u-men-u-men/ | U-Men | If Jonathan Poneman and Bruce Pavitt had had their way, this would not be the first U-Men release on Sub Pop Records. According to U-Men drummer and co-founder Charlie Ryan, the label did nothing less than beg his group to join their roster. “They’d say, ‘You guys gotta get on our label!” Ryan recalls in the 2011 grunge oral history Everybody Loves Our Town. “And we’d say, “No, I don’t think so.’ Because they wanted it so bad, it was just more fun saying no.”
Such was the reverence that the U-Men cultivated during their eight-year run in the 1980s, and the reason for all the buzz surrounding this 2xCD retrospective, which gathers together everything the band recorded. The quartet was, at the time, considered the first best hope to put Seattle’s punk and underground rock scene on the national map. Their legend has only grown since with Ryan, vocalist John Bigley, guitarist Tom Price, and bassist Jim Tillman representing a crucial link between the untethered garage assault of Seattle’s early rock scene (the Sonics, the Wailers) and the commercial explosion that happened there in the early 1990s.
In any case, the hype was and is warranted. The music compiled on this set is taken from the group’s sole full-length—1988’s Step on a Bug—and a handful of EPs, singles, and compilation appearances. It is brash and serpentine, a quick burning conflagration fueled by the group’s collective love of adversarial punk and post-punk (they named themselves after the title of a Pere Ubu bootleg), and a tendency toward self-sabotage. There isn’t much growth to be found within the U-Men’s discography. The band that recorded a viscous four-song EP for Pavitt’s short-lived record label Bomb Shelter in 1984 sounds pretty much the same as one that hit the studio four years later for a 7” released on Amphetamine Reptile. But then again, there doesn’t need to be. Once the classic U-Men lineup was in place, the four hit on a perfect formula that allowed them to set things to a boil or a steady simmer as needed.
Within U-Men’s chosen framework, the band found plenty of variation and ways to rip at their own seams. Price, especially, proved to be the molten core of the band. The guitarist could sound just as sinister jangling through a slow dance number like “Green Trumpet” or hitting the clean, tolling chords of “A Three Year Old Could Do That” as he did slashing through “Last Lunch” or adding a gushing discordance to “Whistlin’ Pete.” The influence of players like Poison Ivy of the Cramps and Pere Ubu’s Tom Herman is evident, but he bends their ideas to his will rather than simply aping them.
What truly helped fuel the U-Men’s infamy was the presence of its vocalist, Bigley. The band were often compared to the equally unhinged and blazing Birthday Party and much of that was due to his vocal performances. Like Nick Cave, Bigley could slip into an almost soothing croon, but that was often just a splash of color added to his Pollock-like canvas. He preferred to howl, spit, stutter, and wail like a feral animal finally let loose from its cage. Even a song as comparatively straightforward as the stop-start noise-rock grind of “Dig It a Hole”—released on a 1987 single by Black Label, another Pavitt-helmed imprint run out of Seattle shop Fallout Records—is given an even more confrontational edge via Bigley’s growling vocal attack.
For as large as their shadow looms among a generation of musicians in Seattle, there’s not much in the U-Men’s sound that feels too connected to the grunge aesthetic. Outside of the crunch and gush of Price’s guitar, there was far too much swing in their rhythms that more metal-inspired groups like Nirvana and Soundgarden would dare. What the U-Men and their contemporaries like Green River and Skin Yard did was offer a promise beyond the simple three-chord attack of punk.
They also proved a somewhat cautionary tale about how to survive as independent musicians. Though the U-Men’s live shows within Seattle were memorable—like the infamous appearance at the Bumbershoot Arts Festival in 1985 where they set fire to a small moat in front of their stage using lighter fluid—their few tours outside the Northwest were hampered by multiple canceled dates and a lot of drink and drugs. If you were going to make it as a band, you’d better have your shit together even just a little bit more than these guys did.
There’s no denying, though, how foundational the U-Men were. Their music stands now as both a crucial piece in the roiling Seattle scene and as part of a noise-rock continuum that includes like-minded outfits such as Scratch Acid and Butthole Surfers. Some of U-Men’s members did carry on after the band split in 1989, with Price starting the more rockabilly/garage-influenced Gas Huffer and Tillman playing bass with psych rockers Love Battery. But their work in the U-Men, as this essential document bears out, was a spark that helped their hometown emerge into a landmark on the international music atlas. | 2017-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | November 11, 2017 | 8.2 | 6db5e0fd-f876-4423-bb2c-70a32f0e096e | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
The debut album from the UK's unique Wild Beasts is essentially a morality play as cabaret show as rollicking indie rock record. | The debut album from the UK's unique Wild Beasts is essentially a morality play as cabaret show as rollicking indie rock record. | Wild Beasts: Limbo, Panto | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12450-limbo-panto/ | Limbo, Panto | Wild Beasts' name comes from the 20th century French art movement Les Fauves (also the inspiration for Les Savy Fav), so maybe the French term "belle laide"-- a woman who is attractive but not conventionally beautiful-- best describes singer Hayden Thorpe's voice. Thorpe's voice howls and thrashes, other times it actually sings or simpers or sighs, but only when he stretches it to the ceiling does it come into its own. His voice feels close in temperament to Antony Hegarty or Baby Dee's, but its mix of pointed sexuality and ambiguous gender points back to Boy George or David Bowie.
That indeterminate quality is the central theme of Limbo, Panto. Vocally, Thorpe plays with what idealized masculinity sounds like; lyrically, the band wants to know what masculinity feels like. "Men to be men, must love and pity," Thorpe announces on opener "Vigil For a Fuddy Duddy". By Limbo, Panto's end he's cursed Aristotle, gone for "casual sex with a hard up thug," and sworn on his "own cock and balls." If there's a central character across these tracks, it's vice itself. Limbo, Panto is essentially a morality play as cabaret show as rollicking indie rock record. The Sunset Rubdown-like full-bodied pomp of "The Club of Fathomless Love" also runs down a series of rhetorical questions: "I've sheened...have I not?/ I've Brylcreemed, have I not?/ I've length of loinly manliness, have I not?" That speech oddity would sound appropriate in a camp, old-timey staging of Hamlet.
The funny thing is that Wild Beasts pull it all off with grinning, chirping enjoyment. True, lots of the tracks on Limbo, Panto use minor chords to enhance the casual depravity of its characters, but nearly all the guitars chime and sparkle. And others, like "Woebegone Wanderers", take on melodramatic halts and cabaret flourishes that render its subject matter comical. "Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants", originally recorded in 2006, still shows this. The band sound more aggressive on the re-recorded LP version: the beat more danceable, the title line shakier and more seductive. It's also Thorpe's most impressive vocal performance.
Underneath these filmy and seductive layers is not a band in limbo. This may be Wild Beasts' first album, but they've got a fully developed aesthetic, one that is thematically and vocally alien, but sonically, pop and conventional. Maybe a voice that bizarre needs something pretty to curl up on, but each song, whether a ballad or a romper (mostly the latter), generates enough turbulence to float with pockmarked elegance. | 2008-11-26T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2008-11-26T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | November 26, 2008 | 8.2 | 6db84387-aa60-4126-8c4e-a49a0e6d2172 | Jessica Suarez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-suarez/ | null |
The Finnish producer continues his streak of luminous electronic releases with an ecstatic, body-moving, and curiously serene collection of techno bangers. | The Finnish producer continues his streak of luminous electronic releases with an ecstatic, body-moving, and curiously serene collection of techno bangers. | Aleksi Perälä: Resonance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aleksi-perala-resonance/ | Resonance | Aleksi Perälä started out in the late ’90s recording ambient electronica under the names Ovuca and Astrobotnia, but the Finnish producer has hit a particularly rich seam of late, and he owes it all to Colundi. What is Colundi? Well, it’s kind of hard to say. At its simplest, its advocates explain, it’s an alternative tuning system—“the Colundi Sequence”—that rejects conventional Western tuning in favor of a number of unusual resonant frequencies. Dig through the web pages and internet groups dedicated to its existence, though, and the story rapidly becomes more tangled and unlikely, taking in numerology, mysticism, sacred geometry, and various flavors of woo.
It’s probably sensible to take the rhetoric surrounding Colundi with a big pinch of salt, but it’s undeniable that for Perälä, the idea has been galvanizing. In the last year or two, he’s released a startling brace of music through Bandcamp and on a string of friendly labels—and Resonance, his second release for Nina Kraviz’s трип, is a giddy joy. There are echoes of the music that Perälä made for his friend Aphex Twin’s Rephlex Records in the ’00s—obscure IDM releases guided by a misty sense of melody. If those early albums often had a muted or dreamy quality, though, Resonance feels bold and upfront: a journey through beatific techno modes defined by its heady propulsion.
A familiar characteristic of IDM is a certain rhythmic fussiness— intricately filleted breakbeats, head-scratching time signatures, disorienting glitches. No such tactics are on display on Resonance. On the contrary, you often get the sense that Perälä is searching for the path of least resistance, hoping to unlock some sort of ecstatic yogic flow. The bulk of the record’s 46 minutes is dominated by a thumping four-on-the-floor kick, but the unrelenting drums are a framework through which Perälä drapes dazzling electronic progressions—glimmering stargazer melodies, growling acid lines, or ringing tones that evoke the holy calm of wind chimes in a rural temple. The result is curiously multifarious: You can easily imagine these tracks dropped deep in the mix at Berghain or Tresor, but they feel equally suited to meditation or contemplation.
There are very few dull spots, although the 10 tracks feel very much of a piece, or like variations on a theme. The identikit titling—“UKMH51900039” through to “UKMH51900048”—gives the impression Perälä might have made them in a single sitting, molding them to his secret formula. In interviews, Perälä talks about Colundi as if it holds the answer to life, the universe, and everything in between. But you don’t necessarily have to swallow Colundi to appreciate what he’s doing. The best electronic dance music stirs the soul as well as the body, and Resonance—sparkling, ecstatic, slightly enigmatic—does just that. | 2020-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Trip | January 8, 2020 | 7.7 | 6dba2255-4e82-4167-aeb9-9a775d1ff39d | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
Oakland band featuring one of Hunx's Punkettes offers its sophomore album of sonically diverse garage rock. | Oakland band featuring one of Hunx's Punkettes offers its sophomore album of sonically diverse garage rock. | Shannon and the Clams: Sleep Talk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15336-sleep-talk/ | Sleep Talk | San Francisco's cup has long runneth over with very good garage bands, so the outpour into neighboring Oakland should have been expected. One of that city's most notable garage albums of late, Hunx and his Punx's Too Young to Be in Love, serves as a nice introduction to Shannon Shaw. She provides quite a few of the album's best moments with her brassy, impassioned alto, possessing loads of singing ability and an irresistible charisma. As one of Hunx's "Punkettes," Shaw proved a talented enough roleplayer to convince you she deserved her own band. Luckily, she's actually had one for a while now.
On Shannon and the Clams' debut, 2009's I Wanna Go Home, Shaw and co-songwriter and guitarist Cody Blanchard added a rockabilly punch to the loosey-goosey garage-punk of the Growlers and early Black Lips records. Though the album was an all-around solid exhibit of Shaw's charms as a frontwoman and her chemistry with Blanchard, Sleep Talk is a refinement, a streamlining, an improvement in every way.
That spike in quality begins with the band's heightened versatility. While I Wanna Go Home split the difference between rumbling, rousing rock tunes and sultry slow jams, Sleep Talk is impressively diverse. Shaw wails and shouts her way through the dark proto-punk of "Toxic Revenge", conjuring the leather jackets of Max's Kansas City, punctuated with a cacophony of saxophones. Album highlight "Tired of Being Bad" combines Shaw's captivating, emotive vocals with Apollo Theater soul, an unexpected but welcome match.
In addition to Shaw's ability as a singer and her infectious vocal tics-- she whoops and yelps all over "Old Man Winter", and her raspy growl on "Done With You" could strip the bark off of trees-- Sleep Talk benefits from some unique songwriting. "The Woodsman" serves as a striking R&B murder ballad, while the production on the record-- which could accurately be described as "dusky"-- will likely be mistaken as "lo-fi" when it's simply vintage, a common misconception for modern music recorded without the assistance of computers.
Elsewhere on Sleep Talk, Blanchard exists as Shaw's equal counterpart. His guitar licks sound untrained but impressive, understated and effective but eager to cede the spotlight to the band's frontwoman. As a backing vocalist, Blanchard is arguably even better, adding a classic R&B vibe to both "Tired of Being Bad" and the album's title track while bolstering "Oh Louie" with a cascading 1950s rock'n'roll baritone.
"Half Rat" tests the band's use of dynamics by switching from diaphanous to rough-hewn and back, providing a stirring crescendo and fierce climax for the album-- replete with drum rolls, a galloping chorus, and everything coming apart at the seams by the song's finish. It's a kind of overview of Sleep Talk's strengths, showing how productively Shannon and the Clams can combine grit and prettiness, how effortlessly they mix the salt with the sugar. | 2011-04-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2011-04-20T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | 1-2-3-4 Go! | April 20, 2011 | 7.7 | 6dbc08ea-dbc6-4fa3-8e70-ebad3880a540 | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
The steward of the almost bulletproof Hotflush label, home to nominally dubstep breakouts by Mount Kimbie and Joy Orbison, issues his excellent second LP. | The steward of the almost bulletproof Hotflush label, home to nominally dubstep breakouts by Mount Kimbie and Joy Orbison, issues his excellent second LP. | Scuba: Triangulation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14076-triangulation/ | Triangulation | When the numerous permutations of dubstep are discussed, Paul Rose (Scuba) is usually credited with steering the genre toward softer, more musical arrangements. Scuba has done this both through his own work and through his stewardship of the almost bulletproof Hotflush label, home to 2009's nominally dubstep breakouts by Mount Kimbie and Joy Orbison. On Triangulation, Scuba continues his label's thrilling run with a proper full-length of fluid, melodic dubstep that sounds beautiful and aggressive in equal measure.
If Scuba's name doesn't resonate quite like those of his labelmates, it's likely because through one full-length (2008's A Mutual Antipathy) and an armful of singles, Scuba has yet to stumble into one breakout track (his remix of his own "Hard Boiled", under his SCB moniker, came closest). Scuba tracks tend to fall into one of two camps: bass-heavy thumpers or slow, melodic cut-ups that often sound like dubstep's version of a ballad. Scuba's dance numbers have a tendency to lie in the weeds and lurk; where a song like "Hyph Mngo" sounds like a siren, Scuba's are the glue that hold a mix together. (See: DJ /rupture subtly weaving Scuba's "Braille Diving" into the second half of Uproot.)
This seamless construction defines Triangulation. What Scuba lacks as a dance hit-maker he makes up for with careful pacing and an ever-present tension between dark, tech-y sounds and inviting melodicism. These sorts of daring sleight-of-hand tricks are Scuba's specialty. "Before" sounds like Boards of Canada covering modern R&B, and it leads into "Tracers", a pounding, industrial-strength romp. "So You Think You're Special" plasters an echoing, hopeful loop ("Here you'll find the one/ Here in the sun") over ominous, pulsing bass. It's not a comedown so much as club music for those who never make it out of the apartment.
Had "dubstep" never entered the lexicon, it would be easy enough to label Triangulation house music, but without the implied build-ups or ecstasy. Triangulation ultimately falls into the dubstep camp because of its mood and temperament. By expertly juxtaposing the dark with the romantic, the hectic with the serene, Scuba's produced a triumphant, balanced album. It's also one that can feel too well adjusted. It's easy to hear parts of Triangulation as clay for bridging DJ sets or potent source material for remixers. But Triangulation is also worthy of attention in its own right, a cohesive record whose complications lurk just under its surface. | 2010-04-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2010-04-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hotflush | April 2, 2010 | 8.2 | 6dbfe3ac-3d69-46e9-b451-2328432f1fe4 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The fashionable UK punk-rap frontman has been made into an icon, but his second album is too often a pale and rote imitation of rebellion. | The fashionable UK punk-rap frontman has been made into an icon, but his second album is too often a pale and rote imitation of rebellion. | Rat Boy: Internationally Unknown | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rat-boy-internationally-unknown/ | Internationally Unknown | Long before Jordan Cardy became known as the punk-rap miscreant Rat Boy, the other kids on the playground likened the Essex native’s physical appearance to that of a rodent. His severe dyslexia, coupled with his proclivities for skateboarding and art over academia, resulted in chronic absences from school. He was fired from his job working the dreaded night shift at the Wetherspoons, a British pub chain catering mostly to chavs and suits; McDonald’s flat-out turned him down. Through it all, Cardy kept as relentless as his namesake critter, uploading his punk-flavored hip-hop tracks to SoundCloud en masse, and fearlessly pitching anyone and everyone on the platform in hopes that someone was listening.
As it turns out, people were listening: namely bassist Drew McConnell of the post-punk band Babyshambles. Intrigued, he took a then-17-year-old Cardy under his wing and introduced him to various music-industry types in the UK, including the folks at Parlophone Records, who added Rat Boy to their roster in 2015. Less than five years later, Rat Boy has grown his scumbaggery into not only a full-fledged project (sampled by Kendrick Lamar, no less) and an international streetwear line (called Scum, obviously) but a walking flashpoint for UK youth culture as a whole. This success stems mostly from Cardy’s timely, intersectional sound—a self-made mélange of hardcore punk, ’90s hip-hop, second-wave ska, and big-beat funk à la Fatboy Slim, set to familiar accounts of wasted youth and generational ennui—but also from how he’s a Supreme-sporting skate-rat who’s really fucking cool. (“[His style], that’s what got me into him,” said Liam Gallagher’s 16-year-old son Gene.”)
Rat Boy’s second full-length album, Internationally Unknown, doesn’t resemble an album so much as an AirPods-friendly, watered-down distillation of each and every soundtrack to “Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater.” The riffs skew crunchy and distorted, the drums airtight and boom-bap inspired, the arrangements snotty and brash, and the lyrics perfunctorily rebellious, filled with one-dimensional portraits of dithering cops, dead-end jobs, and lazy afternoons at the skatepark. The crisp, dubby production, courtesy of Rancid’s Tim Armstrong, deepens the record’s nostalgic focus even further. Their ska-lite sheen and skater-kid swagger across many songs including “No Peace No Justice”—featuring the seasoned punk on guest vocals—could easily pass for Transplants, Armstrong’s rap-leaning side project from the early aughts.
The strongest moments on Internationally Unknown come when Cardy abandons those rote Dogtown set pieces for something a little closer to home. “Don’t Hesitate,” far and away the album’s highlight, puts an endearingly goofy spin on Cornershop’s beat-heavy Britpop. “Young gun hustler made his moves/Glock against the clock, have you heard the news?” Cardy chirps, exaggeratedly mean-mugging from atop the rubbery sub-bass, wholly well-aware that he can’t play the tough guy to save his life, but giving zero fucks nonetheless. The standout “So What,” a cynical, call-and-response laundry-list of all the shit that can go wrong in a young person’s life, ranging from losing their job to being shaken down by the cops, has similar comedic merit but applies those jokes to more universal ends.
“When I was a kid, I did feel like there were not, like, people that were into the same stuff,” Cardy said of his obsession with ’90s culture in a recent New York Times profile. This boilerplate sentiment is arguably why young people find Rat Boy so appealing to begin with: Cardy holds a familiar mirror to the clusterfuck of growing up. He hopes it'll make the existential boogiemen a little more cartoonish, a little more conquerable. A little bit of retrospective absurdity goes a long way—if only the rest of Internationally Unknown wasn’t so pale and redundant. | 2019-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Rap | Hellcat / Epitaph | February 2, 2019 | 5.5 | 6dc24e88-2e60-4509-b0df-917da666ab08 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | |
Duster’s debut was barely a blip on the radar—and then, like a comet, they reappeared. A comprehensive box set from Numero Group revisits the spacey, unassuming band with new perspective. | Duster’s debut was barely a blip on the radar—and then, like a comet, they reappeared. A comprehensive box set from Numero Group revisits the spacey, unassuming band with new perspective. | Duster: Capsule Losing Contact | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duster-capsule-losing-contact/ | Capsule Losing Contact | Until very recently, being a Duster fan felt much like listening to their records: being lost in a memory. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, the San Jose, California trio crafted downcast lo-fi that lent itself to introspection. They’ve been called slowcore, the deliberately paced style pioneered by Codeine, Low, and Bedhead; space rock, a genre of psychedelic textual experimentations; and sadcore, the nebulous scene that celebrated nothing. “Experimental depressive music” is how multi-instrumentalist Clay Parton once described his band. Duster fed a sense of mystery by shying away from press and avoiding contextualizing their music with biography. When they began a hiatus in 2001, it seemed inevitable that their faint star would fade to black.
But much to their surprise, Duster’s music resurfaced. Thanks to some combination of the internet and crate-digging music culture, Duster became an unexpected cult favorite. Copies of their debut album, Stratosphere, barely a blip on the radar when it was first released in 1998, began to command as much as $200 on Discogs. Younger bands like Girlpool and Snail Mail cited Duster as an influence. Finally, in April 2018, Duster began showing signs of life. A new Instagram page teased new music, and a few months later, the band announced their first concert in 18 years. With the Duster Renaissance in full swing, Numero Group has released the retrospective Capsule Losing Contact, which compiles Duster’s two full-length releases, three EPs, various compilation tracks, and unreleased loosies into a sleepy box set.
Duster have never been self-mythologizing, and Capsule Losing Contact does little to illuminate their biography beyond presenting the band’s progression. Barring the whirly 1996 single “East Reed,” and other lost recordings, Duster’s proper output begins with 1997’s Transmission, Flux 7". Its five songs are turbulent, fuzzy 4-track experimentations that plant the thematic seeds for Duster’s fascination with the cosmos (see “Orbitron” and “My Friends Are Cosmonauts”). “Light Years,” taken from the following year’s Apex, Trance-Like 7", furthers the lunar motif, while on its companion piece “Four Hours,” Duster push through their melancholy to express an intense desire for human connection. That silently floating figure was a human all along.
On their 1998 opus Stratosphere, Duster further explored the depths of the astronaut’s melancholia. Like the atmospheric layer from which it takes its name, the band’s debut full-length is a vast expanse that encourages the mind to unravel in endless contemplation. Using simplistic, cyclical guitar melodies and thickly woven electronic textures, the songs spiral into a state of sublimity. About half of these 17 tracks are atmospheric instrumentals; when Parton or bandmate Canaan Dove Amber do manage to murmur some cryptically poetic verses about disconnect and anxiety, their voices are muffled as if by thick gauze. Only near the end of the staggering “Earth Moon Transit” does a clear emotional point emerge: “I wonder if you think about me like I do of you/At night.” Recorded largely on 4-track cassette machines with production assistance from Pacific Northwest indie rock legend Phil Ek, Stratosphere radiates intimacy even in its starkest moments. The overall effect is like that of resting beneath a weighted blanket, cocooned from the intrusions of the outside world.
From the opening track, Stratosphere establishes a tempo that waxes and wanes from droning gloom to dreamy bliss. Duster take off with “Moon Age,” a blippy synth instrumental that conveys the cosmic innocence of Major Tom, floating in that “most peculiar way.” Its detached tranquility is immediately countered by Stratosphere’s most upbeat songs, “Heading for the Door” and “Gold Dust.” On a record full of heady introspection, this is the closest Duster come to approximating what was happening elsewhere in 1998 indie rock; the latter riff sounds like the wistful earworm cooked up by Pavement a few years earlier. Slow-building standout “Echo, Bravo,” begins with a frenzy of strung-out tape distortion that bursts into a sludgy meltdown before fading into quivering drone, an effect immediately countered by the listless “Constellations.” So Stratosphere goes, undulating between soft and harsh, often within one song, climaxing with the seven-minute title track. Beginning with a haze of rippling feedback, “Stratosphere” builds layer upon layer of dissonance until the abstraction fizzles out of its own accord. It’s less momentous than other tracks, declining to arrive at any emotional destination, instead embracing the inexplicable.
Near the end of the recording of Stratosphere, Parton and Amber brought in drummer Jason Albertini (an original Queens of the Stone Age member), who ended up joining Duster full-time. In 1999, the band recorded the 1975 EP, which bridges Stratosphere’s hushed lethargy with accessibility. (In between, the three bandmates quietly worked on an even spacier side project, the short-lived Valium Aggelein, not included here). Some songs on the EP (“Memphis Sophisticate,” “And Things (Are Mostly Ghosts)”) are unexpectedly lucid, while others (“The Motion Picture,” “August Relativity”) disappear back into Stratosphere’s cloudy embrace. Closing track “Want No Light to Shine” begins with a delicate reverie of synthesizers and strings that gives way to meandering piano melody. Whispers of San Jose traffic rumble in the background, as if the door of the recording space was propped open to let in some light.
On their last full-length record, 2000’s Contemporary Movement, Duster return to earth. Though it compresses Stratosphere’s atmospheric sprawl into a tight, song-oriented package, Contemporary Movement retains its predecessor’s escapism. The tone is heavier, almost grungy at times, but the overall cadence remains slow, allowing songs to unspool patiently. While the vocals are still considerably buried beneath washes of heavy guitars and analog squall, the songwriting is given more of a spotlight—albeit a dim one. Unlike Stratosphere, which orbited so high that true contact seemed unlikely, Contemporary Movement’s longing for emotional connection feels hopeful. “Goddamn, I wish I was a little bit smarter,” goes one humoursly earnest line of “The Breakup Suite”; in that moment, Parton and Amber’s gravelly warbles echo the nasally self-deprecation of their former label-mates Modest Mouse. Early droners “Operations” and “Diamond” trudge along, all blurry guitar friction and brooding drums that never quite lift off the ground. “Cooking” picks the mood up a bit, a swirling bit of sunshine amidst the clouds. The euphoria is never as freewheeling as on Stratosphere, but here it feels firmly tethered to earth.
Though Duster went on an extended hiatus after Contemporary Movement, the bandmates never stopped collaborating. Both Amber and Parton have played on Albertini’s project Helvetia, and Parton founded a label, the Static Cult, to release Helvetia records (and his own, under the name Eiafuawn). As the bandmates moved on, their music as Duster retained its ineffable quality, one the band themselves sought to define at the time. Contemporary Movement concludes with an expression of that uncertainty: “The audience finds their feet/Clap and scream/But what does it mean?” At a Duster reunion concert in December 2018, the line felt eerily salient. It’s strange to hear such intensely private and personal music in a crowd, and at the end of each song, there was almost an awkward uncertainty: Do we clap? In the end we did, and some people screamed, but something unspeakable lingered long after the band left the stage. Capsule Losing Contact is a welcome survey of Duster’s legacy, and an opportunity to appreciate a modest band that means something different to everyone. | 2019-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Numero Group | March 27, 2019 | 8.5 | 6dc37104-deaa-4b5e-bd75-5f5c50eea98b | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
On Morning Phase, Beck returns to the style and form of his 2002 singer-songwriter record Sea Change. Instead of a much-needed daring comeback statement, it feels more like a pointed exhale. | On Morning Phase, Beck returns to the style and form of his 2002 singer-songwriter record Sea Change. Instead of a much-needed daring comeback statement, it feels more like a pointed exhale. | Beck: Morning Phase | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18959-beck-morning-phase/ | Morning Phase | “I won’t be long,” sang Beck last year, over and over, on a song he quietly self-released. Lyrically, the track was clouded by some of the songwriter’s favorite themes: apocalypse, disconnection, death. But musically, “I Won’t Be Long” couldn’t be more alive. Across 15 minutes, it casually segued between alien synth oscillations, atmospheric funk, queasy reverb rock, and squished punk, effectively updating the post-modern glories of his 18-year-old Odelay. It was a fine piece of evidence showing that Beck was back—that the previous six years of producing excellent albums for Charlotte Gainsbourg and Stephen Malkmus, covering the likes of INXS and Yanni with playful abandon, and tossing out stunning one-offs like his 20-minute Philip Glass remix revived him after a string of less-than-great albums. But “I Won’t Be Long” was a red herring. While he’s apparently working on another genre-jumping LP, his new album, Morning Phase, is not that record. Instead of a much-needed daring comeback statement, it’s more like a pointed exhale. It feels safe.
Beck’s music didn’t used to be comfortable. Early on, if he wasn’t putting a modern twist on the blues tradition, he was splicing styles that had never met before, or paying tribute to his R&B heroes with unabashed glee. His entire ethos involved challenges: to history, to authenticity, to cliche. So when 2002’s Sea Change came along with its heartbroken callbacks to Serge Gainsbourg, Nick Drake, and Gordon Lightfoot, it was surprising because it was so straightforward—and emotive. It had the poster boy of irony looking straight into the camera and confessing his bitterness and desolation following a breakup. Morning Phase marks the first time since then that Beck has returned to this more forthright style, partly due to the fact that a batch of tapes containing Sea Change–style demos were tragically lost in the years following that album. But while the new record is unequivocally related to its forebear—it features most of the same players and a strikingly similar sonic palette—there are differences that set it apart, and bring it down.
Rather than focusing on a resigned anger or ambiguous darkness, Morning Phase is plagued by a frustrating in-between-ness that can also come off as flat and neutral. Many of the lyrics read like vague zen koans that perilously walk a tightrope above meaninglessness: wheels turn, hearts beat, skies fall. Without many concrete details to anchor the songs, they can become too ethereal for their own good. Part of the idea behind Morning Phase involves renewal and maturation: If you live to be a married 43-year-old father of two, Beck may be saying, the peaks and valleys of youth eventually even out. The sense of loss on the album is more internalized and indirect, which is interesting in theory, but in practice it can dull things into oblivion. “Say Goodbye” strings together breakup scenes with Beck as the narrator who’s seen it all before but can only muster sidelined commentary. “These are the words we use to say goodbye,” he shrugs. You get an overall sense of wisdom from the lines on this album, though that wisdom too rarely coalesces into something truly affecting.
All of which is even more vexing due to the fact that most of Morning Phase sounds stunning; as the producer of the album, Beck matches Sea Change studio guru Nigel Godrich tweak for tweak. But that raises another issue: While Beck’s technical chops have grown impressively, Morning Phase only proves that he can tackle Sea Change–style production, like he’s trying to redraw a masterpiece. Even so, his singing has never felt stronger, adding to the voice-of-god vibe (which plays through to his practically disembodied head on the album’s cover). And every guitar pluck and string swipe is rendered with a warmth that backs up Beck’s analog evangelicalism; on the gorgeous proper opener “Morning,” you can practically see the rays of California sun peek through the blinds before the light comes through full-force on the hook. “Unforgiven,” another highlight, very well may be Beck’s finest technical vocal performance as he milks every syllable while his composer father David Campbell provides a swirling symphony behind him. The similarly epic “Wave,” however, falls into melodrama and ends up sounding like a lesser version of Radiohead’s Godrich-produced “Pyramid Song.” So while Morning Phase is remarkably easy to listen to, the distinction isn’t completely praiseworthy.
Recalling his 1990s emergence in a Pitchfork interview from 2011, Beck said, “Back then I had a feeling that we weren’t quite measuring up to the music that had come before, or it just wasn’t as important somehow.” Of course, for a generation of adventurous music fans who sang along with “The New Pollution” in the backseat, artists like Beck and Pavement and Sonic Youth were indeed more important than the classic rockers who came before them, even if it didn’t seem so at the time. And the way that those artists dismantled the known canon and morphed new shapes from it made them exciting. Based on some of his recent work—a 30-minute track here, a songbook album there—Beck does not seem through with trying to rearrange our musical synapses, which is why Morning Phase ultimately is a disappointment. Not only does it uphold the myths of baby boomer greats like the Byrds, Neil Young, and Simon & Garfunkel with a staid type of reverence, but it also piggybacks on the legacy of one of Beck’s best records. It’s the sound of a rule-breaker dutifully coloring inside the lines. | 2014-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol | February 25, 2014 | 6.8 | 6dc4d634-2a66-478a-82fe-1c2f1e8c409d | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
On her solo debut, the L.A.-based singer and songwriter taps members of the War on Drugs and Warpaint for winning songs about finding delight in despair. | On her solo debut, the L.A.-based singer and songwriter taps members of the War on Drugs and Warpaint for winning songs about finding delight in despair. | Jess Cornelius: Distance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jess-cornelius-distance/ | Distance | Jess Cornelius prefers to remain in motion. Born and raised in New Zealand, the singer decamped to Australia in her late teens, launching the promising Melbourne rock band Teeth & Tongue several years later. Across four albums, Teeth & Tongue pivoted constantly, from snarling Bad Seeds blues to the velvet-gloved rock of Feist to synth-pop so cloying it seemed like a last cynical bid on careerism. After a decade stuck at the precipice of a breakthrough, Cornelius stepped away from Teeth & Tongue in 2017 to record five solo songs, all spare electric strums and soaring vibrato. That EP, Nothing Is Lost, felt at last like Cornelius’ real breakthrough—arching psalms of sadness and disappointment, rendered with the quiver and clarity of Angel Olsen. Her debut LP, the arresting Distance, suggests it was not another phase.
Cornelius left Australia in 2018 for Los Angeles, where she began recording Distance in a series of studios with session bands that included members of the War on Drugs, Warpaint, and Woods. She brought her restlessness with her, and it animates these 10 songs, from the way she treats musical inspirations and reference points like quick trysts to her lyrical disinterest in monogamy or the mores of adulthood. In recent years, the tension between being a footloose touring musician and the social pressure to grow up compelled Cornelius to grapple with age and expectation. On Distance, she details difficult situations—miscarriages, breakups, affairs, pep talks for one—with tragicomic candor, looking less for sympathy than a way to work through the mess. “You’re lonely,” she sings at one point. “Oh, but ain’t you livin’?”
Slipping in and out of musical guises with preternatural ease, Cornelius remains a chameleonic bandleader, as she was with Teeth & Tongue. She jabs back at some selfish prick with the punchy garage-rock of “Banging My Head” and floats through a languid R&B haze for “Easy for No One,” an ode to not finding some great meaning or purpose in growing up. The muted doo-wop of “Palm Trees” moves on a similar California breeze as Best Coast, a mode tailormade for Cornelius’ questions about what a new state of residence may do for her state of mind.
Much of Distance hinges on some version of a rock band—even “Love and Low Self Esteem,” a barbed codependence critique that served as the centerpiece of Cornelius’ EP, gets fitted with walloping drums and howling organs. But Distance’s quiet, spare outlier is one of its most stunning moments. A duet for her wistful nylon-stringed guitar and Mary Lattimore’s pensive harp, “Born Again” conjures the candlelit majesty of Marissa Nadler or even Sandy Denny. Cornelius’ bracing voice suddenly sounds ancient and fading, rendering snapshots of her youth against a backdrop of feeling tired and worn by time. “One of these days, I’m going to be born again,” she briefly taunts, as though ready to maraud in search of lost youth.
For the most part, though, Cornelius handles heaviness with an enviable lightness, finding new resiliency in every rebound. She’s funny, self-effacing, and honest, wry enough to half-apologize for any trouble she’s caused by having an affair while also hoping it resumes soon. Even “Body Memory,” where she mentions a miscarriage and surveys the damage it did to her relationship and sense of self, somehow feels ebullient. Harmonies lift her above each hurdle. Cornelius’ credo during all this is the brilliant “No Difference,” an anthem for finding happiness on whatever terms and in whatever way you deem reasonable. It’s the kind of song you might sing to yourself after any hard day.
A curious thing happened to Cornelius in California before she could finish Distance: She met someone and, in late June, had a baby, Tui, exactly a month before releasing the record. She sighs at the very thought of having children during “Easy for No One,” as if it’s a possibility that’s simply passed her by. But in the jubilant music video for “Kitchen Floor,” a song about bailing on another one-night stand, she dances across the stars on Hollywood Boulevard in last night’s leopard-print dress while also very pregnant. That’s the delight of remaining in motion: You never know exactly what you’re going to find.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loantaka | August 5, 2020 | 7.6 | 6dd55c33-6818-4a03-b550-eb29e8186582 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The classic 1971 LP, a landmark for Gaye and pop music at large, is reissued in a deluxe package including an early mix and demos. | The classic 1971 LP, a landmark for Gaye and pop music at large, is reissued in a deluxe package including an early mix and demos. | Marvin Gaye: What's Going On [40th Anniversary Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15679-whats-going-on-40th-anniversary-edition/ | What's Going On [40th Anniversary Edition] | Marvin Gaye submitted a version of the most important single of his career, "What's Going On", to Motown Records in the summer of 1970. Over the previous seven years, the relationship between the singer and his label was contentious yet fruitful; gritty uptempo songs like "Stubborn Kind of Fellow" and "Hitch Hike" were hits, but they undermined Gaye's dream to be a balladeer in the mold of Nat King Cole. Those lusty trifles also roused the internal conflict between the artist's gospel upbringing and his endless desire for carnal pleasure. And while Gaye aspired to be more than just a singer within Motown's assembly-line chug, his boss, brother-in-law, and fellow hard-headed egoist Berry Gordy Jr. wasn't so crazy about the idea. So when Gordy heard that original "What's Going On" mix-- which is included in this box set for the first time-- he rejected the song, reportedly calling it "the worst thing I've ever heard in my life."
Instead of releasing "What's Going On" that fall, Motown put out the Gaye compilation Super Hits, which depicts its clean-shaven star as a cartoon superhero flying through the air and fixing a radio tower as a buxom damsel perilously hangs from his shoulder. But Gaye wanted nothing more than to blow up that gleaming image of himself-- now in his early 30s, he would accept nothing but complete control over his art. And if Motown wasn't going to release his first self-produced song, he wasn't going to make music for Motown. Gaye sat idle for months until his label, desperate to put out something-- anything-- from its biggest solo star, finally eked the single out under Gordy's nose on January 21, 1971. It was an instant success, hitting No. 2 on the pop charts and, perhaps more importantly for Gaye, giving him a win in his constant battle with Gordy, who couldn't deny a smash. Five months later, Marvin Gaye released his full-grown symphony to God, What's Going On, with little resistance.
Forty years of ubiquity have made the title track commonplace, so it's easy to forget that the song was the "most avant-garde hit Motown ever had," according to Ben Edmonds' thorough album history What's Going On: Marvin Gaye and the Last Days of the Motown Sound. With this album, Gaye wished to sidestep the sound that made him and others famous during Motown's untouchable 60s run, trading in that trademark big, bright beat for laid-back grooves inspired by Duke Ellington, Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, and Santana. And not only was the album a coming-out party for Gaye as a producer and songwriter, he found his signature voice-- soft, floating, airy-- on What's Going On, too. "I felt like I'd finally learned to sing," he told biographer David Ritz. "I'd been studying the microphone for a dozen years, and I suddenly saw what I'd been doing wrong. I'd been singing too loud." The record and its creative revelations led to his stunning 70s auteur period, which birthed three more classics: 1973's Let's Get It On, 1976's I Want You, and 1978's Here, My Dear. Yet What's Going On still stands tallest, making this 40th anniversary, 2CD/LP edition more of a welcome reminder than just another eulogy to baby-boomer culture.
Much has been made of What's Going On's political bent, and it's true that the music was partially inspired by Marvin's brother Frankie, who had come back from a three-year tour of Vietnam, along with troublingly violent episodes like the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Kent State shootings that saw four students killed by national guardsmen. Songs like peace-espousing title track and "What's Happening Brother", which finds Gaye expressing a war veteran's helplessness upon returning home, show Marvin's dismay toward his country and government. But this album isn't just a protest time capsule. Far from it. Gaye's disappointment isn't just societal, it's personal as well. During this period, the singer had lost his duet partner and dear friend, Tammi Terrell, and his marriage to Gordy's sister Anna was violently breaking down, and he was being tailed by the IRS for unpaid back taxes. His resulting depression is evident throughout; What's Going On isn't a fiery album filled with timely sloganeering. Part of its long-lasting appeal involves an element of true-to-life resignation. "Who's willing to try to save a world/ That's destined to die," he sings on "Save the Children", pinpointing an American melancholia-- a mix of world-saving power and funereal inevitability-- that endures today.
But the album doesn't wallow, either. It hums and glides on the effortless, multi-tracked Marvins that swoop through the stereo spectrum like ghosts. Gaye's signature vocal ad libs started here and have endured through R&B and hip-hop ever since. His marijuana-soaked delivery, along with the album's mutating, percussion-fueled rhythms, majestic strings, and jazzy horns, give the affair levity. Perhaps this smooth front also has to do with the fact that Gaye was "hardly an activist in the traditional sense," according to Edmonds. While his Vietnam-battered brother was an emotional catalyst, Gaye had neglected to send him one letter during his army stint. And though he was certainly aware of the Detroit race riot that left 43 people dead in 1967, he viewed the sad display on TV from his cushy home on the outskirts of town. Not to say Gaye didn't wholeheartedly believe in the progressive observations found on What's Going On, but his relative distance from his subjects allows him to fly over top of them, providing a healing pulse to the disarray below.
For an album as timeless as this one, reissue bonus material can provide worthy footnotes to the main article. Probably thanks to the last decade's vinyl resurgence, this 40th anniversary edition immediately sets itself apart from 2001's 30th anniversary release by presenting its iconic cover in a glorious 12"x12" square. The package's lone LP features the more straightforward, early Detroit mix of the album, while the final, L.A. mix is relegated to a CD. For die-hards, the most alluring part of the package may be the second compact disc, which features 18 mostly instrumental demos recorded in Gaye's post-What's Going On honeymoon period, when his vast artistic ambitions and abilities were being embraced by the greater public. These somewhat experimental demos-- deep, in-the-pocket funk in the vein of Sly Stone, George Clinton, and Jimi Hendrix-- clearly laid the groundwork for much of his subsequent 70s material. Though he doesn't sing on most of these tracks, it's exciting to hear him get loose as keyboardist and band leader.
Just as What's Going On marked the emergence of Marvin Gaye as an all-in-one talent, it also signaled the decline of Motown's reign. It's tempting to simply side with Gaye in his battles with the label that raised him and play into the auteur myth. But it's more complicated than that. Without his tutelage at Motown, first as a session player then as a singer, Gaye wouldn't have been able to conceive a work like this. The help of Motown backing band the Funk Brothers-- credited in the What's Going On liner notes after years of anonymity-- was also essential. Before he was shot and killed by his own father at age 44 in 1984, Gaye was afforded the schooling of America's finest pop academy and then the freedom to flourish and act on his own whims afterward. His 70s brilliance is unfathomable without his 60s pop triumphs. And What's Going On is the turning point, the moment when he was able to bypass his selfishness and self-destructiveness in the name of God, peace, love. It's a nice dream. One that he knew was too good to last. "Mercy, mercy me," he pleaded calmly, desperately. | 2011-07-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-07-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope / Motown | July 28, 2011 | 9.5 | 6ddf4d9d-7cfe-4053-b85e-fdbfc7c6041e | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
On her supposedly final mixtape before she issues her full-length debut, the “urban jazz” rapper and singer adds intrigue with bits of her backstory and elliptical flourishes. | On her supposedly final mixtape before she issues her full-length debut, the “urban jazz” rapper and singer adds intrigue with bits of her backstory and elliptical flourishes. | IAMDDB: Swervvvvv.5 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/iamddb-swervvvvv5/ | Swervvvvv.5 | The Manchester rapper and singer IAMDDB began earning attention in 2016 thanks to a sequence of mixtapes that hinged as much on her brash, stoned personality as their jazzy perspective on hip-hop and R&B hybrids. Swinging from honeyed pop-soul to menacing trap, the freewheeling mixtapes secured IAMDDB an opening spot on Lauryn Hill’s British comeback tour, a choice co-sign ahead of the final part of IAMDDB’s mixtape series, Swervvvvv.5. A hazy, laid-back set of jazz-trap that lets her talk her shit while tinkering with structures suitable for an imminent full-length, it is easily her best effort yet.
Clouded by weed smoke and rattled by punch-drunk production from London’s Drae Da Skimask, Swervvvvv.5 is cheerful and reckless, dripping with unruffled charisma. On the glitchy “Urban Jazz,” named for the tag she’s given her sound, she scoffs “Paradise is what I am/But I gotta have a spliff before” with a nonchalant flow over background vocals that seem to echo through smoke. Such harmonies take on a crucial role across Swervvvvv.5, reaching high points on the velvety, introspective R&B cut “Give Me Something” and the neo-soul-indebted “Diary Entries.” Adding atmosphere, they reveal an experimental touch beneath IAMDDB’s warm, mellifluous vocal tics and production choices—a suggestion of what may be to come.
Toward the middle, Swervvvvv.5 turns to the club with “Asss$,” a sloshed version of pop-trap with a rote, Cardi B-lite chorus that feels like a hangover headache by the third time around. The song lingers in the shadow of “Sweg,” the bloodshot, grimily superior kiss-off that precedes it. Under a thick blanket of deep bass and ominous keys, IAMDDB cuts men down to size: “You broke niggas make me sick/Sloppy toppy for the kid,” she spits with an audible sneer. “Miss your magnificent dick/No more talking, straight licks/Lower that shit, never miss.”
For the first time in this mixtape series, IAMDDB splits the sequence with an intro, outro, and two interludes, some of which call to mind the flat, navel-gazing intermissions on Ella Mai’s debut. But IAMDDB’s waggish personality is more engaging. She’s funny and unbothered throughout, sounding like Jorja Smith on a peppy sativa as she runs through an endearing laundry list of thank-yous during “Introlude” or inexplicably bickers with an automaton on the futurist-minded “Space Break Interlude.”
The freeform, smoky vibe and percussive thrust of Swervvvvv.5 owe in part to a six-month period when IAMDDB studied jazz in Angola alongside her touring musician father, an influence she touts with pride. She references her Angolan-Portuguese ancestry on “Space Break Interlude” and raps in fluent Portuguese during “Urban Jazz” and the balmy “I’m Home.” These surprises dot the mixtape with dynamic new displays of her personality and past. The move makes her assurance on the outro—that she’s now in album mode—even more enticing. Based on the woozily accomplished Swervvvvv.5, IAMDDB is only getting sharper. | 2019-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Union IV | February 28, 2019 | 7.3 | 6de02f92-0340-42ba-a93a-d49f26a46213 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
A louder, thicker album from New Zealand-based outfit known for combining live instruments and samples in a swirl of psychedelic color. | A louder, thicker album from New Zealand-based outfit known for combining live instruments and samples in a swirl of psychedelic color. | The Ruby Suns: Fight Softly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13969-fight-softly/ | Fight Softly | Pop music success requires good timing-- no local or unsigned band will debate this-- and the Ruby Suns have shitty timing. Their breakthrough album, Sea Lion, dropped in the early spring of 2008; it was a fun, loose take on Panda Bear's seaside psychedelia. Last summer, many indie fans fell hard for a smattering of artists-- Washed Out, Neon Indian-- that echoed the same big-wave aesthetic as the Suns. Justice would see head Sun Ryan McPhun return to claim a spot at the picnic table, but Fight Softly mostly abandons the gentle soufulness and playful strums of Sea Lion in favor of stale electronics and busy loops.
The departure from Sea Lion is apparent immediately: Twinkling ambience and dollops of synthesizer open Fight Softly. The rhythms remain bouncy and ebullient, but simple, slapping drum machines weigh them down. The Suns used to sneak in bits of odd percussion and puns on world music ("Kenya Dig It?"), but McPhun's sound design is unable to harness that kind of nuance and adventure. The resulting compositions seem full of color but lacking in depth or space: drum thwacks and buzzing keyboards caulk every track.
McPhun has taken to singing with melisma, twisting simple lyrics into meandering phrasings. He takes almost 30 seconds to sing the album's first line: "It's my turn in the front seat" (many of his lyrics address this sort of innocence and alienation). At his best, like on "Closet Astrologer", he recalls Arthur Russell's awkward, thrilling navigation, but McPhun often lacks Russell's coy balance.
McPhun's voice seems incongruous with his songwriting. He seems languid and relaxed over "Cinco"'s aggressive shifts. On album closer "Olympics on Pot", he idles over sweet, furtive drumming. (For those of you who cried foul about Animal Collective lyrics like those in "My Girls": sharpen your knives.) "How Kids Fail" is almost oppressively anthemic, its huge keyboard stabs weighing down one of the album's better verses. "Cranberry" inexplicably shifts from a charging, abstract march to a plodding pop song to a rummy party jam. Fight Softly constantly jars and pivots, but with little purpose.
Animal Collective remain the obvious sonic touchstone for the Ruby Suns-- damn if "Dusty Fruit" doesn't sound like a diet version of "Brother Sport"-- but McPhun's best work exhibits a surprisingly formalist synth-pop streak. "Haunted House"'s bouncing pads and treated vocal samples sound like a pillowy Cut Copy. The penultimate "Two Humans" is a delicate love ballad-- "When are you leaving?/ And will you stay the night"-- that sounds like the Junior Boys on vacation. "Closet Astrologer" is a paean to introverts that tries to parse young adulthood ("I'll find time to do what I want/ Whatever that is").
These moments aren't indicative of Fight Softly's general tenor, though. The album sits heavily, uneasily, even when its mood is light. It's a true departure in sound and method; this is not a lazy or complacent record. McPhun, though, never settles into these new sounds, and Fight Softly retains very little of the ease and abandon that, to date, had marked the Ruby Suns. | 2010-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | March 5, 2010 | 6.1 | 6de508be-d44b-4959-8b11-6f7750972033 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Kate Bush's second album of original material in the last 17 years is haunting and gorgeous. Like so much of her best music, it's filled with deep story-songs that have the effect of putting one in the kind of treasured, child-like space-- not so much innocent as open to imagination-- that never gets old. | Kate Bush's second album of original material in the last 17 years is haunting and gorgeous. Like so much of her best music, it's filled with deep story-songs that have the effect of putting one in the kind of treasured, child-like space-- not so much innocent as open to imagination-- that never gets old. | Kate Bush: 50 Words for Snow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16067-50-words-for-snow/ | 50 Words for Snow | On "Wild Man", the first single from Kate Bush's winterized 10th album, the singer tells of an expedition searching for the elusive Abominable Snowman. "They want to know you," she coos, "They will hunt you down, then they will kill you/ Run away, run away, run away." Of course, when it comes to modern popular figures-- who often court fame and adulation with an obsessiveness that can be fascinating or just plain sad-- Bush herself is something of a mythical beast. 50 Words for Snow is only her second album of original material in the last 17 years, and she hasn't performed a full concert since her groundbreaking and theatrical Tour of Life wrapped up its six-week run in 1979. So it's no surprise that she readily sympathizes with the misunderstood monster at the center of "Wild Man": "Lying in my tent, I can hear your cry echoing round the mountainside/ You sound lonely."
50 Words for Snow is teeming with classic Bush-ian characterizations and stories-- fantasies, personifications, ghosts, mysteries, angels, immortals. As quoted in Graeme Thomson's thorough, thoughtful recent biography Under the Ivy, she explained her attraction to such songwriting: "[Songs] are just like a little story: you are in a situation, you are this character. This is what happens. End. That's what human beings want desperately. We all love being read stories, and none of us get it anymore." She's onto something; in our postmodern era, the idea of a tale can seem quaint and simple.
But Bush continues to infuse her narratives with a beguiling complexity while retaining some old-school directness. Because while most of this album's songs can be easily summarized-- "Snowflake" chronicles the journey of a piece of snow falling to the ground; "Lake Tahoe" tells of a watery spirit searching for her dog; "Misty" is the one about the woman who sleeps with a lusty snowman (!)-- they contain wondrous multitudes thanks to the singer's still-expressive voice and knack for uncanny arrangements. And mood. There's an appealing creepiness that runs through this album, one that recalls the atmospheric and conceptual back half of her 1985 masterpiece Hounds of Love. Indeed, when considering this singular artist in 2011, it's difficult to think of worthy points of reference aside from Bush herself; her onetime art-rock compatriots David Bowie and Peter Gabriel are currently MIA and in rehash mode, respectively. And while current acts including Florence and the Machine are heavily inspired by Bush's early career and spiritual preoccupations, none are quite able to match their idol's particular brand of heart-on-sleeve mysticism. In an interview earlier this year, the 53-year-old Bush told me she doesn't listen to much new music, and after listening to the stunningly subtle and understated sounds on Snow, it's easy to believe her.
The album's shortest song, the gorgeous closing piano ballad "Among Angels", clocks in at almost seven minutes. "Misty" rolls out its brilliant, funny, and bizarrely touching tale across nearly a quarter of an hour. It's not one second too long. During the 12-year gap between 1993's The Red Shoes and 2005's Aerial when she was raising her son Bertie, Bush gained a new level of compositional patience. She's now allowing her songs to breathe more than ever-- a fact reinforced by this year's Director's Cut, which found her classing-up and often stretching out songs from 1989's The Sensual World and The Red Shoes via re-recordings. So while "Misty" is an eyebrow-raiser about getting very intimate with a cold and white being with a "crooked mouth full of dead leaves," it hardly calls attention to its own eccentricities. Propelled by Bush's languid piano and the jazzy, pitter-pattering drums of veteran stick man (but relatively new Bush recruit) Steve Gadd, the song is about as appealingly grown-up as a song about having sex with a snowman can possibly be. In her early career, Bush sometimes let her zaniness get the better of her, highlighting her tales of sexual taboo and bizarre yarns with look-at-me musical accompaniment and videos. Those days are long gone. And her heightened sophistication works wonders here. So when the song's titular being is nowhere to be found the following morning-- "the sheets are soaking," she sings-- there is nothing gimmicky about her desperation: "Oh please, can you help me?/ He must be somewhere."
The ending of that song brings up another common thread through Snow, aside from its blizzard-y climate. This is an album about trying, oftentimes futilely, to find connections-- between Bush and her characters, reality and surreality, love and death. "Snowflake" is a duet with her 13-year-old son, where he plays the small fleck of white falling down from the sky, his high-pitched, choir-boy voice hitting the kind of notes his mom was originally famous for. On the track, Bush encourages her son-- "The world is so loud/ Keep falling/ I'll find you"-- and yet the plaintive piano that steers things is seemingly aware that, once the flake arrives, it'll either melt or disappear among millions of other icy bits. Similarly, while the lake-bound ghost of "Lake Tahoe" is overjoyed to find her long-lost dog-- coincidentally named Snowflake-- at the end of the song, the reunion comes with its own specter of bittersweet afterlife. The same sort of disconnect defines "Snowed in at Wheeler Street", an eerie duet with Bush's teenage idol Elton John about a star-crossed pair who have "been in love forever"-- literally. The time-traveling track finds its leads going from ancient Rome to World War II to 9/11, always losing each other along the way. It acts as something of a sequel to Bush's "Running Up that Hill", another tale of pained co-dependence. There's no happy ending. "When we got to the top of the hill/ We saw Rome burning," sings Elton.
While much of 50 Words for Snow conjures a whited-out, dream-like state of disbelief, it's important to note that Bush does everything in her power to make all the shadowy phantoms here feel real. Her best music, this album included, has the effect of putting one in the kind of treasured, child-like space-- not so much innocent as open to imagination-- that never gets old. "I have a theory that there are parts of our mental worlds that are still based around the age between five and eight, and we just kind of pretend to be grown-up," she recently told The Independent. "Our essence is there in a much more powerful way when we're children, and if you're lucky enough to... hang onto who you are, you do have that at your core for the rest of your life." Snow isn't a blissful retreat to simpler times, though. It's fraught with endings, loss, quiet-- adult things. This is more than pure fantasy. When faced with her unlikely guest on "Misty", Bush pinches herself: "Should be a dream, but I'm not sleepy." | 2011-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Anti- / Fish People | November 21, 2011 | 8.5 | 6de558d1-b270-4b74-b1f9-080562babddd | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Known for housing a famous Beastie Boys sample, the reissue of this 1975 funk and fusion classic brings peerless Polish and American players together for a groovy, eccentric journey. | Known for housing a famous Beastie Boys sample, the reissue of this 1975 funk and fusion classic brings peerless Polish and American players together for a groovy, eccentric journey. | Funk Factory: Funk Factory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22271-funk-factory/ | Funk Factory | For Polish jazz great Michael Urbaniak, pinpointing a phase in his career as “noteworthy” is basically an act of omission. Hone in on his work as a composer, and it overlooks his genre-bending work as a player, particularly a violinist. Play up his time as a bandleader, and you understate his work as a sideman piercing through the gloss of Miles Davis’ electro-dub *Tutu *oddity “Don’t Lose Your Mind.” Emphasize his ’70s-and-onward contributions to fusion, and you downplay his role in helping give European jazz its own distinct style, including his time spent in the early ’60s playing saxophone for Krzysztof Komeda’s Quintet. But hailing Urbaniak would also be impossible without mentioning his collaborator and wife Urszula Dudziak, whose voice could go from the most velvety thing you’ve ever heard to a vocal run more warped than any analog synthesizer could make.
Urbaniak and Dudziak’s stretch of albums in the ’70s and early ’80s, especially once they moved from Poland to New York in 1973, remain favorites among the more adventurous jazz heads and beat-diggers haunting the vinyl depths. (Urbaniak’s 1974 *Fusion *and Dudziak’s 1979 *Future Talk *are good places for the uninitiated to start.) But it was an album cut from a one-off LP that captured a particular corner of the music-geek imagination for more than 40 years: “Rien Ne Va Plus,” from the self-titled 1975 album by a sextet Urbaniak called Funk Factory, had its reckoning with the canon when the Dust Brothers sampled major chunks of it for Beastie Boys’ “Car Thief.” Even separated from that hip-hop context, where it clicked seamlessly with a guitar loop from the Jackson 5’s version of Funkadelic’s “I’ll Bet You,” “Rien Ne Va Plus” is a banger, all post-Head Hunters springy synth-bass and Dudziak lending her range to a sweet and untethered performance.
As for the rest of the album, the Soul Jazz label tries to make a case for its place in the Urbaniak/Dudziak discography. “As Sampled By...” can make a record popular, but the rest of the album is far more eccentric than its most notorious cut could hint at. There’s a certain push-pull between the fusion of Urbaniak and his Poland-sourced players—including Bernard Kafka of the Komeda-contemporary vocal ensemble Novi Singers, along with synth player Wlodek Gulgowski—and the rotating American session-player rhythm section. Calling that latter contingent a who’s who of studio workhorses is an understatement: Anthony Jackson was at that point best known for the bassline to the O’Jays’ “For the Love of Money,” Steve Gadd’s other notable circa-1975 gigs include the rhythms for Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” and Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” Gerry Brown would be the drummer on Stanley Clarke’s electric jazz-bass-redefining School Days, and Tony Levin would Chapman-Stick his way into prominent roles in Peter Gabriel’s band and the early ’80s post-hiatus King Crimson.
But while the rhythm section holds it down—unobtrusively on ballads like the slightly-too-saccharine “The Music in Me,” or with flare on the uptempo “Horsing Around” and “Sinkin’ Low”—it’s the compositional flourishes of the Polish contingent that both mess with and build on fusion’s more upbeat side. The melodies push songs close to the fusion equivalent of sunshine pop, especially on cuts like “Watusi Dance” and “Next Please” where Dudziak and Kafka trade mostly-wordless voices, at which point they’re subsumed into Urbaniak’s electric violin and Gulgowski’s synths to create some spectacular mutant harmonies.
*Funk Factory *can stray pretty far into the cheerier excesses of prog-jazz, but in a year where Thundercat can find sincere beauty in Fisher-Price Steely Dan, it’s hardly a dealbreaker. It emphasizes the alluring strangeness of its more experimental moments, like the hallucinogenic haunted-house tour of “Lilliput” or the banshee James Brown vocal riffs on “Horsing Around.” “Rien Ne Va Plus” remains the top highlight, every bit the equal as the best cut on any contemporaneous LaBelle album. But Funk Factory is more than just a notch in the belt of Paul’s Boutique—it’s proof that a core of musicians schooled in jazz but culturally steeped in the folk and classical traditions of Eastern Europe could, at least once, put out something that fit well with the crossover sound of the times while being unafraid to dive into freeform weirdness. | 2016-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Be With | September 1, 2016 | 7.3 | 6de609de-888c-4895-8d96-173ba0f8c20f | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The former Smith Westerns member’s second album represents a return to his core strengths: crystalline, cosmically ornate melodies and wryly clear-eyed lyrics. | The former Smith Westerns member’s second album represents a return to his core strengths: crystalline, cosmically ornate melodies and wryly clear-eyed lyrics. | Cullen Omori: The Diet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cullen-omori-the-diet/ | The Diet | Cullen Omori figured his shit out quickly. The difference between those first two Smith Westerns albums—the no-fi garage-pop slop of 2009’s self-titled effort versus with the widescreen glam of 2011’s Dye It Blonde—felt like more than a just a typical case of a young band making a dramatic leap to avoid the sophomore slump. It was more a like a detuned TV suddenly being kicked into sharp focus: The surface fuzz fell away, revealing the craft and confidence that was always there.
On Dye It Blonde, we caught our first glimpse of Omori in his natural habitat: a never-ending summer of ’73 soundtracked by Marc Bolan’s saddest songs and George Harrison’s sweetest licks. And as we’ve seen in everything he’s released since, it’s a place he’s never wanted to leave. Sure, the Smith Westerns’ 2013 swan song, Soft Will, upped the prog factor, while Omori’s 2016 solo debut, New Misery, added some modernist pop touches, but he’s remained comfortably floating at the same cruising altitude.
These days, Omori is seemingly drawn to albums like All Things Must Pass and The Slider for more than just their magical melodies and tasty guitar tones. In the early 1970s, those records formed the collective soundtrack to the post-hippie hangover, their dreamily strung-out quality reflecting the mindset of a new generation that felt like it had missed the party and was left to clean up the mess. It’s a deeply disillusioned feeling to which Omori could no doubt relate in the wake of the Smith Westerns’ unceremonious demise: In interviews, the singer-guitarist has been more candid than most about the indignities of being a former indie-rock darling forced to return to day-job drudgery.
But he’s also been able to make the most of his mundane circumstances—he claims New Misery was inspired by the Top 40 pop music he heard piped into the hospital where he spent his days cleaning medical supplies. Hospitals also factor into The Diet’s origin story, in which Omori found himself seeking medical attention—for getting clean, if not for the subsequent existential crisis. “I was sitting in a hospital detox center facing out on Lake Michigan in Chicago,” he recounts, “and literally just a few miles south, Lollapalooza, an event I’ve played twice and had many peers at, was happening without me.” The Diet isn’t the sort of world-beating, over-the-top comeback effort that’s going to transform Omori into the king of Grant Park (especially at a time when even Jack White is struggling to justify his headliner status). But it’s the most consistently satisfying front-to-back record Omori’s been a part of since Dye It Blonde, a reset that realigns him with his core strengths—namely, his flair for crafting songs that are cosmically ornate yet humbly down-to-earth.
You can hear the rebirth process kick in during the opening seconds of “Four Years,” where the song’s melancholic guitar chime bubbles up from an oceanic swirl to face the bright rays of the sun, as if Omori were emerging from some sort of soul-cleansing ritual. It also feels like an effort to shake off the glossy embellishments that proved to be distractions on New Misery. Under the guidance of LA-based producer Taylor Locke, “Four Years,” and the 11 songs that follow, place the focus where it should be: on the tension between Omori’s crystalline, clear-eyed melodies and his stinging, self-effacing lyricism. As it coasts to its swooning chorus, “Four Years” reveals itself to be an ebullient declaration of devotion from someone easily driven to distraction: “You do so many things, and I love you for it,” Omori sings in helium harmony with himself, before adding: “but I usually forget.”
Ten years into the game, Omori has essentially graduated from the garage to the kitchen, playing fly-on-the-wall to domestic lives, or dreaming of the one he could’ve had: “All by Yourself” is a wistful acoustic requiem for the one who got away—and the new baby in her life that all but extinguishes any possibility of future rekindling. But even the album’s purest expressions of contentment are laced with a sardonic aftertaste—“Happiness Reigns” might be the most joyful, carefree pop song in the Omori canon since Dye It Blonde’s “Weekend,” but it’s still one where the giddy kids he imagines for himself and his partner frolic among “flowers of uranium.”
The Diet would benefit from more breezily subversive sing-alongs like that—as the album rolls on, Omori’s predilection for mid-tempo, mid-period Oasis starts to take over, and a certain uniformity of style, scale, and seriousness sets in. (One great exception is “Millennial Geishas,” which finds the half-Japanese Omori cheekily riffing on Asian stereotypes—“I want to enter your dragon/Want to jump on your bandwagon”—en route to a disarming, stargazing chorus.) But on the closing “A Real You,” Omori liberates himself from any obvious idolatry to fashion a winsome baroque-folk lullaby that achieves liftoff without shooting for the cheap seats. Fittingly, it’s a love song about not needing all that much to get by: “I choose the simple things with you, both of us only use cable or pay-per-view,” Omori sings, making The Diet a rallying point for analog romantics in a Netflix ‘n’ chill kinda world. | 2018-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | August 17, 2018 | 7 | 6decfbd4-5f21-48db-8de8-8dda6990c08b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Amplifying the scope of his rave-nostalgia project, Paul Woolford expands his ambitions but loses sight of the spontaneity that made the music so thrilling in the first place. | Amplifying the scope of his rave-nostalgia project, Paul Woolford expands his ambitions but loses sight of the spontaneity that made the music so thrilling in the first place. | Special Request: Belief System | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/special-request-belief-system/ | Belief System | Four years ago, Paul Woolford painted himself into a corner. Under one of his many aliases, Special Request, the British producer released a striking debut album that captured the golden age of UK pirate radio and rave culture as though preserving it in amber. Soul Music pilfered the drum breaks, bass weight, and manic energy of jungle wholesale, folding each component into new yet strangely familiar shapes. As much an homage as a high-definition update, Soul Music helped revitalize that beloved music for contemporary dancefloors. And in doing so, it defined the sound of Special Request in no uncertain terms.
The years after Soul Music saw its influence proliferate, but Woolford became more interested in poking at the walls of the box he had built around the project. On 2015’s Modern Warfare EP trilogy, outsized piano house began to color the music’s edges. Those tracks still centered on booming low end and half-remembered ecstasy peaks, but something about Soul Music’s single-mindedness had felt more genuine, purer. The dilution only continued. Earlier this year, the Stairfoot Lane Bunker EP shifted Special Request’s agenda, aligning it with classic electro and experimental ambient alongside the usual rave sounds. More recently, the Curtain Twitcher 12” saw Woolford’s encroaching acid tendencies steal the spotlight in lieu of jungle references.
Belief System, Special Request’s second studio album, completes the process that began not long after the release of Soul Music. It’s a record crammed full of contrasting ideas and mish-mashed nostalgia; it’s also absurdly long, with 23 tracks clocking over 100 minutes. If Soul Music and Modern Warfare were quaint in the way they got straight to the point and then relentlessly hammered it home, Belief System’s prolonged, shapeshifting arc could be taken as another tweak to the project’s formula. But the the individual tracks often don’t measure up to the album’s inflated ambitions.
Three distinct movements comprise Belief System, and if you blur your eyes a bit, they take on a conceptual slant. In its first third, the album digs into acid house, breakbeat, techno, and IDM, seamlessly interconnecting each style. The midsection is Special Request at its rudest, rowdiest best: a tear of jungle permutations on par with Soul Music’s strongest tunes. The final stretch, which takes up nearly half the album's length, is full of garish incidental music and beatless sound manipulation. Taking the album’s title into consideration, these three parts seem to represent a sort of holy trinity for the UK hardcore continuum—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Sure enough, the latter manifestation is the least substantial. “Carex Vesicaria” is undoubtedly an affecting elegy for the death of rave, as is the angelic euphoria of “Witness.” But tracks like “Transmission” and “Reckoning” are bombastic and painfully linear, better for a summer blockbuster trailer than any album of throwback dance music.
In addition to their unflattering bloat, the last nine tracks are a symptom of a larger issue: pacing. The warning signs come early with “Chrysalis,” a needless, sentimental intro that foreshadows the lack of editing to come. Woolford stays in warm-up mode until the seventh track, when the Aphex-inspired “Curtain Twitcher” launches an excellent run of 130-plus BPM bangers. The bin-busting “Scrambled in LS1” stands among Belief System’s best, though it’s practically unrecognizable as Special Request, sounding more in line with the menacing electro of Gesloten Cirkel’s Submit X. When “Make It Real” kicks the rave into high gear with a cheeky backspin and some of Special Request’s signature MC chat, the record finally reveals its beating heart. The Vangelis-like emotional climax of “Light in the Darkest Hour” feels like the record’s natural end. That it takes over an hour to get to this point, and that it’s followed by 30 minutes of aimless (albeit well-crafted) sound design, is emblematic of Belief System’s shortcomings.
In March, Woolford released his first commercial mix as Special Request. Fabriclive 91 was a skillful and stylistic tour de force spread across 30 tracks spanning from Drexciyan mainstay DJ Stingray and Richard D. James’ Polygon Window alias to drum ’n’ bass legend Dillinja and classic junglists the Rood Project. Six new Special Request tracks were peppered across the mix, linking the project’s expanding aims to the intertwined old-school threads. The approach made for a mix that felt equally cumulative and cohesive. Belief System attempts something similar with its slick blend of genres, seamless transitions, and gradual escalation, but it overshoots the mark. Part of what made Fabriclive 91 such an engrossing listen was its agility and streamlined energy. By drawing out the minutiae of Belief System’s rigid conceptual framework, Woolford loses the spontaneity and audacity that made this music so thrilling in the first place. | 2017-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Houndstooth | October 9, 2017 | 6.4 | 6df75d55-3e93-4e14-9e0a-92c791885c20 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | |
The Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist improvised alongside his partner while she illustrated on paper; together, they’ve created an audiovisual album bursting with bold lines and vivid colors. | The Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist improvised alongside his partner while she illustrated on paper; together, they’ve created an audiovisual album bursting with bold lines and vivid colors. | Sam Gendel / Marcella Cytrynowicz: AUDIOBOOK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-gendel-marcella-cytrynowicz-audiobook/ | AUDIOBOOK | Sam Gendel seems determined never to walk the same path twice. In little over a year’s time, the Los Angeles-based composer and multi-instrumentalist has released a sprawling collection of hybrid jazz and hip-hop experiments, an assemblage of plaintive Japanese-inspired fusion, and a cover album of molecularly disassembled R&B classics. In his quest to aggressively remake himself, Gendel has also become a prolific collaborator with musicians running the gamut from accomplished record producers to his partner’s 11-year-old sister. When Gendel works with others, it’s typically his creative vision that guides the project’s shape, but on his latest album, he’s surrendered to the imagination of his partner, visual artist and filmmaker Marcella Cytrynowicz.
AUDIOBOOK was devised as an audiovisual collaboration: Cytrynowicz drew the project’s illustrations while Gendel improvised alongside her in real time on a Suzuki Waraku III, a decades-old electronic koto instrument. Cytrynowicz’s art acts as a graphical score for his spontaneous compositions, lending them a scattered quality as Gendel’s eyes follow along the images’ labyrinthine contours. The basic building blocks of each piece are textural rather than musical. On the opening “AB,” a percussive puff skitters erratically over a swell of synthesizer, as if repeatedly slamming into a wall and rerouting its path. As it transitions into “CD,” the outline retains its shape but slowly expands as bite-sized blasts cut in. Each track is titled alphabetically in pairs from A to Z, and they flow as smoothly from one to the next as a memorized run through your ABC’s.
Cytrynowicz’s drawings, which have been compiled in a book accompanying the vinyl release, as well as a downloadable PDF and online multimedia presentation, make use of bold colors and tight curves, and Gendel leans into the elemental energies they evoke. You can almost feel the heat of his breath on “KL” as streams of air blown across his reed weave into the fabric of the track. “GH,” in contrast, is draped in muffled echo, as if the sound waves were traveling along the ocean floor. On “EF,” twinkling synth tones glint like beams of light hitting stalactites in an icy cavern. Plucky percussion and a noise like flowing liquid punctuate “QR,” bringing to mind a rushing white river. Gendel adds an additional dimension to his partner’s imaginary landscapes, lending them a powerful sense of place.
Some moments feel more underdeveloped. There are interesting wrinkles in the wobbly synth and washboard percussion of “WX,” but it never quite coalesces into the evocative imagery found elsewhere. “IJ,” a cover of saxophone virtuoso Wayne Shorter’s “Deluge,” strips the piece down to its essentials and leaves it barely recognizable. Gendel’s at his strongest when layering up melodic phrases and letting them play off one another, as on standout “UV.” He plays as if he’s trying to charm a snake, nimbly running up and down scales while a cavernous, shuffling beat keeps time. He paints expressive strokes with his synthesizer, matching the lively peaks and valleys of the artworks that Cytrynowicz was creating by his side. Gendel has long displayed a restlessness that can’t be contained within the constraints of conventional musical formats; led by Cytrynowicz, on AUDIOBOOK he extends his playing into new realms. | 2023-10-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | Psychic Hotline | October 24, 2023 | 7.3 | 6dfd9d7a-bef0-4d49-a59c-3af9d77ee418 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
Toronto musician Seth Nyquist’s versatile voice soars on every track of an inviting debut that spans a surprising array of genres and techniques. | Toronto musician Seth Nyquist’s versatile voice soars on every track of an inviting debut that spans a surprising array of genres and techniques. | MorMor: Heaven’s Only Wishful EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mormor-heavens-only-wishful-ep/ | Heaven’s Only Wishful EP | MorMor begins his debut EP with a well-worn lyric: “I’m just a poor boy,” he sings lightly, between clipped guitar chords, immediately recalling one of the most histrionic moments in Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” While the Toronto musician, born Seth Nyquist, doesn’t aspire to that band’s theatrics or camp, he does share with Freddie Mercury a certain fondness for inhabiting multifaceted characters. Heaven’s Only Wishful contains a surprising array of genres and techniques within its five tracks. Nyquist has a crystalline ear for hooks, but he doesn’t coast on his catchy refrains. He’s also something of a perfectionist; the production on his record is so crisp that vocal ad-libs and slightly delayed notes in guitar solos sound less like mistakes than like deliberate glimpses of the human process behind the craftsmanship on display.
Nyquist’s voice rises to the top of the mix on Heaven’s Only Wishful, soaring over airy synth pads, taut drum patterns, and warm guitar chords. Unlike Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, who also constructs indelible choruses within a psych-pop framework, Nyquist positions the human voice as the center of his music, not as a burden to be sublimated into waves of reverb and distortion. His instrumental toolkit might be standard for rock and pop, but his singing tends to roam free above it. On the languid ballad “Whatever Comes to Mind,” he’s all croon and falsetto, completing a dreamy palette with vocal textures siphoned from R&B. Standout track “Waiting on the Warmth” sees him alternately sing-speaking and scuffing up his tenor with the controlled scream of a hard-rock frontman. He’s soft and adorned in reverb on the EP’s title track—until the coda, when he cracks a whisper open into a yelp. A distorted guitar solo spurs him on to that extreme as he repeats, “Some say/You’re the reason I feel this way,” like he’s just realized whom to blame for his pain and is gearing up for a confrontation.
A darkness lurks beneath MorMor’s sunny veneer, occasionally revealing itself by way of disjointed lyrics. “Heaven’s Only Wishful” conjures up an image of vultures circling their victim right after Nyquist muses on “life and its horrors,” concluding, “There’s no getting out.” “Lost” contrasts playful, carefree visions with apocalyptic ones: “Blow kisses to the sky ‘til it comes down.” It’s hard to piece together narratives across Nyquist’s compositions; his lyrics tend toward the dreamy and free-associative, like they’re orbiting the music’s themes instead of pinning them down. That leaves space for the listener to inhabit MorMor’s songs, to fill their vacancies with personalized expectations and predispositions. It makes the music inviting.
“I find color/I hope you find color,” Nyquist repeats in falsetto on the EP’s final track, “Find Colour,” while dizzying guitars and synths swirl around him. It’s the closest thing he offers to an explicit connection between artist and listener, and it closes the record with a reassuring gesture. If you’re coming to his music for comfort, he’s got plenty to offer. If you’re hungry for anger or excitement, he delivers those emotions, too. Heaven’s Only Wishful acknowledges the anguish that saturates its present-day, North American setting, but it doesn’t dwell there. It radiates a tempered optimism. MorMor knows that even the most dejected sentiments can be expressed in an upturned vocal melody, against lush, beautiful instrumentation. Sometimes music is enough of an escape. | 2018-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Don’t Guess | June 25, 2018 | 8 | 6e04f3ae-c25a-4a9e-902c-7d071edf6763 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The 23-year-old Chicago singer’s long-awaited debut makes a close study of R&B history, floating through weightless vocal arrangements with uncommon poise. | The 23-year-old Chicago singer’s long-awaited debut makes a close study of R&B history, floating through weightless vocal arrangements with uncommon poise. | Ravyn Lenae: HYPNOS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ravyn-lenae-hypnos/ | HYPNOS | When Ravyn Lenae emerged on Chicago’s R&B scene in 2015, she was a sensory architect. Her vocals were eclectic: a unique neo-soul style that channeled Erykah Badu’s nasal coolness and a falsetto that carried whispers of FKA twigs. Between 2015 and 2017, Lenae released two EPs, exploring a mode of alternative R&B that incorporated elements of dream pop, bounce, and soul. Between opening tours for Noname and SZA, Lenae seemingly found her groove on 2018’s Steve Lacy-produced EP Crush, a collection of daring electro-funk bedroom bangers. She seemed unstoppable, releasing so much in a short time period that it was exhilarating to see what she had lined up next. Aside from a few teases, however, Lenae went radio silent for the better part of four years.
Her debut full-length, HYPNOS, arrives as a mature reintroduction, a love-stained, moody transport that flies through Lenae’s world with a featherlight cadence. Lenae surveys the recent history of soul, alternative R&B, and even Afrobeats with precision. But most importantly, her debut showcases her ascendant vocal prowess as she moves across her wide range with ease. Lenae’s transcendental poise establishes her as a resonant voice in R&B.
The immediate appeal of HYPNOS is just how tantalizing Lenae’s arrangements are amid familiar soundscapes. On previous songs like “Sticky” or “Free Room,” Lenae tapped into her higher register, but here Lenae’s soprano has become a gravitational force. On the Kaytranada-produced “Xtasy,” Lenae’s sultry and blithe singing washes over the beat like water beading off a car. “Lullabye,” a kiss-off to a former lover, moves through melismatic harmonies like clockwork. “I hope she keeps you warm at night/This is our lullabye,” she croons, but you know she’s going to be OK just by her composure.
For someone already lauded for her singing, Lenae’s vocal technique on HYPNOS is the work of a perfectionist. Her sound has blossomed into a potpourri of the R&B female icons of the last three decades, but especially of the ’90s and early ’00s. The most obvious comparison here is Aaliyah, but Lenae’s vocal composition honors many on HYPNOS, pulling from Brandy’s “vocal bible” riffs and Solange’s visionary harmonies, Kelela’s outré artistry, and Destiny’s Child’s lullabying melodies. “Venom,” a seething funkadelic synth-led track, feels caught between something off OutKast’s Stankonia and Brandy’s “What About Us?”. “Why do you play me for a fool?” Lenae asks, before descending into harmonies that unravel like those on Solange’s “Rise.” On “Cameo,” Lenae brings back Lacy and frequent collaborator Luke Titus for a funky opener that recalls the synth bass sound of Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon.” The influences are never distracting so much as they are twinkling, fun, and carefully blended.
Sounding like someone else is by no means the limit to Lenae’s creative yield; she is as self-assured as she is exploratory. Rather than replicating a nostalgia that’s become commonplace, she has earnestly studied these forebears and applied their techniques to her own brand of soft and intense music. “Light Me Up,” the album’s sexy, slow-burning centerpiece, creates a moodboard of R&B references, and digs deep into the excitement of sexual exploration: “Come inside/Show me you’re the leader/Switchin’ sides/Make me a believer,” she begs. Lenae’s weightless falsetto and stimulated writing make it a female contemporary to D’Angelo’s “Untitled (How Does It Feel).”
The way Lenae seems to examine and deliberate her decisions in real time makes her a magnetic narrator. On “M.I.A.,” she takes stock of her life and goes full escapist mode in ways that commit to her shapeshifting tendencies. Taking notes from the Afrobeats artist Amaarae, the song is slick and coolheaded, cheekily rhyming about the freedom to sneak away at a moment’s notice. On “3D,” Lenae reunites with Zero Fatigue’s Monte Booker and Smino for a wobbly groove that puts Lenae in the driver’s seat of a relationship moving too fast. “I’m asking you to keep it light/Things are better movin’ slow,” she cautions, raising her pitch with each word of warning. In her earlier work with Booker and Smino, Lenae sounded like a gorgeous vocalist, but as HYPNOS emphasizes, she can be all of those things and the star of her own story.
While the majority of HYPNOS’ themes are commonplace to early twentysomething experience—heartbreak, growing apart, trifling men, finding your footing—Lenae makes them feel easily digestible and less existential. On “Skin Tight,” she ponders the kinetic energy of a past relationship with grace and respect beyond her years. The scornful acoustic number “Mercury,” with “Deep End” singer Fousheé, initially comes off as a minor song on the album. But Lenae’s airy, level-minded approach is captivating—making this a bold and bittersweet highlight. Even as she whispers “I fucking hate you/Don’t ever speak my name” it never sounds all that painful, more like pity in the face of disgust.
Even when heartache leaves her distraught, Lenae is laser-focused on reaching for spiritual affirmation and aggrandizement. The album ends on the feather touch of heartfelt closer “Wish,” which brings together Lenae’s dizzying expression and limitless execution as a vocalist. “Every night you close your eyes, make a little wish,” Lenae sings, tip-toeing down the words. It could lift you out of the deepest hole. Even as she touches on trends and familiar themes, it’s Lenae’s delivery, confidence, and alluring presence that makes HYPNOS stand apart. As she considers her anxieties, hopes, and doubts, she reveres the musical icons before her in ways that show just how ready she is for her own turn. | 2022-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | May 25, 2022 | 8.5 | 6e0ad35d-09d3-4a6c-907e-18ed596a8dc0 | Gio Santiago | https://pitchfork.com/staff/gio-santiago/ | |
Cleveland producer Warren Harris pushes the deep house sound into rhythmical challenges and brilliantly gothic alcoves with the apparent nonchalance of someone barely breaking a sweat. | Cleveland producer Warren Harris pushes the deep house sound into rhythmical challenges and brilliantly gothic alcoves with the apparent nonchalance of someone barely breaking a sweat. | Hanna: Demur EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hanna-demur-ep/ | Demur EP | House music lyrics, with the odd notable exception, tend to be light, functional affairs, full of incitements to dance and enjoy the good times. “Game of Tragic,” the final track on Cleveland house producer Warren Harris’ Demur EP, is talking about suicide. “Take away, the smell is foul/Put the flesh in the ground/Suicide,” Harris sings, his untampered, soulful voice duetting with a separate vocal line that is sandpaper rough and reeks of desperation.
Harris, who records as Hanna and under his own name, does admittedly have a history of producing deep house that mixes the stately smooth with the immaculately melancholy. His 2017 EP The Never End housed one of the most moving summer laments in electronic music in “July”, while “Wayfaring Man,” from the inappropriately named Bounce EP, sounded like the work of someone who wanted to get well away from the troubles of the world.
All the same, “Game of Tragic” goes further than Harris—or pretty much anyone else in house music—has gone before in its embrace of mortality, the contrast between the skipping house beat and morbid lyrics both eye-opening and brave. Harris has explained that the song is about a person who lives with the body of their best friend after they have killed themselves and there is something rather punk in the way “Game of Tragic” rejects what house music should be about in favor of following its own emotional instincts. This would mean little, though, were the lyrics not backed by Harris’ poignant songwriting, the winding chords, meandering bass line and mournful vocal melody proving one in the eye for those who feel that electronic music can only deal with shallow emotions.
The other four tracks on Demur see Harris swap lyrical experimentation for musical exposition, as he loosens his rhythmical swing to a point where his productions feel on the verge of falling apart. “Finger of Love,” for example, features a disco-influenced pattern of bass drum, hi-hat, and snare that, on the face of it, sounds fairly standard. But each instrument hits in a way that feels a fraction away from going out of time, like a jazz drummer playing around the beat rather than square on the four. The effect, for an audience raised on the rhythmical perfection of electronic music, is of unease, fascination, and frenetic excitement. “The Sacred” takes things even further by threatening to pull the whole fabric of the song out of time. The bass drum only just connects with the hi-hat, which is on nodding terms with the piano, while a vocal loop pulls fractionally behind the rest of the song as the ensemble hangs on by the skin of its teeth.
Experimentation in electronic music is full of flash and bluster. But Harris favors progression by stealth, his productions on Demur pushing the deep house sound into rhythmical challenges and brilliantly gothic alcoves with the apparent nonchalance of someone barely breaking a sweat. You have to lean in to discover the wonders of Demur. But the reward is one of the most quietly brilliant, viscerally exciting and humanly funky house records of 2018. | 2018-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Flumo | July 24, 2018 | 7.7 | 6e19177b-9210-4cde-9876-a5b60bb2d6c6 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Band of Horses' fourth album moves further into the realm of radio-conscious pop staked out by its 2010 predecessor, Infinite Arms. Befitting its name, Mirage Rock is so lightweight and inconsequential that it truly does seem more like an illusion than a record. | Band of Horses' fourth album moves further into the realm of radio-conscious pop staked out by its 2010 predecessor, Infinite Arms. Befitting its name, Mirage Rock is so lightweight and inconsequential that it truly does seem more like an illusion than a record. | Band of Horses: Mirage Rock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17042-mirage-rock/ | Mirage Rock | In a year of adjective-rock album titles, Mirage Rock is as telling of a descriptor as Celebration Rock. The difference is that Japandroids' intentions matched their achievements-- Celebration Rock was a winning testament to good times and good rock music at its most life-affirming. Mirage Rock, on the other hand, evokes an emptiness that couldn't have been intentional. Like an actual mirage, there is no there there on Mirage Rock. All the elements for a typical Band of Horses album appear in their right places-- Ben Bridwell's honeyed whine, the straightforward thrust of the guitars, the earnest hippie-dippiness of the lyrics-- and yet the music dissipates instantly upon impact. Mirage Rock is so lightweight and inconsequential that it really does seem more like an illusion than a record; it's wispy and indiscernible, as if the people who made it had no vision for what it should be.
Band of Horses themselves have become something of an apparition-- what they appear to be aren't what they really are. With 2007's Cease to Begin, Bridwell unveiled a version of Band of Horses that was not the Band of Horses of the group's beloved 2006 debut, Everything All the Time. The original members-- including Mat Brooke, who had been a bandmate of Bridwell's since their days together in the Seattle indie rock band Carissa's Wierd-- had quietly departed. By 2010's Infinite Arms, which found the band signing to Columbia, Bridwell had shed another member and added two more. Frontmen retaining a group identities despite losing their backing musicians is nothing new, of course, and Bridwell made sure to publicly declare Infinite Arms a very different beast from the first two BoH records. But if you cared about this group at all, it was difficult to hear that album and not try to pick out the things that made Band of Horses what it used to be, even if most of those things had been systematically removed by Bridwell and replaced by a flatter, shinier, more overtly southern rock sound.
If Infinite Arms marked a significant turn away from the starry-eyed, backwoods indie rock of the band's early sound, Mirage Rock moves boldly forward into the realm of radio-conscious pop that its predecessor only toyed with-- although "bold" may be too strong a word for a record this mellow and inoffensive. The rush of emotions Band of Horses channeled on its first two albums has slowed to an intermittent trickle, collecting into a very shallow and sad-looking puddle of a record containing nothing and reflecting nothing.
Band of Horses was never the hardest riffing band in the world, but it's disheartening to see just how far they've moved away from actual rock music here. Much of the album falls into the mold of "Slow Cruel Hands of Time", a hazy folk-pop tune that aspires to the soft-focus comfort of 1970s AM radio staples like Dan Fogelberg and John Denver. And Bridwell has neither the lyrical insight nor the vocal gravitas to go any deeper than its superficial veneer allows.
Going deep was never Bridwell's specialty, even on Band of Horses' good records. But he used to make up for it by pushing his music out as wide as it would go, until it wrapped you up like the warmest of bear hugs. Mirage Rock, in comparison, seems shrunken and cold. Lead single "Knock Knock" is strangely gutted, hinting at an emotional catharsis that never arrives. "How to Live" moves along on a snappy start-stop drum beat, but only reaches a peak courtesy of a stinging guitar solo cribbed from Neil Young.
Bridwell's gift for assembling catchy melodies and big, relatable sentiments into neat and clean three-minute packages-- typified by the band's irresistibly heart-tugging breakout song "The Funeral"-- is obvious and not without merit. But over and over again on Mirage Rock, this talent is used to serve up Americana-flavored junk food devoid of substance. The back-porch shuffler "Long Vows" and the annoyingly repetitive "Shut-In Tourist" are essentially placeholders for better classic-rock songs by Bread and Crosby, Stills & Nash, lazily flashing soft-rock signifiers without adding any depth of their own.
But it's the terrible protest song "Dumpster World" that truly exposes Bridwell as a well-meaning but hapless dude who's lost his course. "Break out everybody in the jails/ Let's get it on," he sings, like a callow bro confusing Bane for Noam Chomsky. The line elicits a moment of embarrassment so shudderingly profound, it makes one question any allegiance to the band’s past successes. Disastrously, Mirage Rock seems to have been conceived, consciously or not, as a photo negative of what this band once was, emphasizing Bridwell's weaknesses and negating his strengths. It's not a pretty picture, to say the least. Perhaps it's best to just squint your eyes and hope it disappears altogether. | 2012-09-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | September 19, 2012 | 4 | 6e1bc598-cafc-4432-acf7-04d00eb0348e | Steven Hyden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-hyden/ | null |
Power Trip embody a platonic ideal of heavy metal escapism. With more focus on detail, the Dallas thrashers push their second LP over the edge, balancing modern intricacy and old-school aggression. | Power Trip embody a platonic ideal of heavy metal escapism. With more focus on detail, the Dallas thrashers push their second LP over the edge, balancing modern intricacy and old-school aggression. | Power Trip: Nightmare Logic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22891-power-trip-nightmare-logic/ | Nightmare Logic | No one throws a party like Power Trip. In the years since their 2008 inception, the Dallas crossover quintet has come to embody the platonic ideal of heavy metal escapism, in person and on record. Genre boundaries get blown to smithereens during their rambunctious, pretension-free concerts; they’ll play with anyone who’s willing to get noisy, be it New Orleans bounce queen Big Freedia, moody post-punk outfit Merchandise, or black metal darlings Deafheaven. Power Trip’s excellent debut album, 2013’s Manifest Decimation, further solidified this reputation by translating their live ferocity to wax. One album on, nine years in, Power Trip have mastered the rager. They now turn their focus to widespread revelry with Nightmare Logic—a mission that goes off with a big, beautiful bang.
Nightmare Logic doesn’t find Power Trip making any significant shifts to the no-holds-barred approach they showcased so powerfully on their debut. It’s an LP crafted in its predecessor’s literal spitting image, from the proliferative gang vocals and thrash beatdowns right down to the eight-track runtime and gory old-school artwork. Frontman Riley Gale still huffs, puffs, and howls like a rabid wolf, a feral intermediary through which the band issues blistering, occasionally loony indictments of corrupt politicians (“Ruination”) and greedy, polluting CEOs (“If Not Us Then Who”). Gale’s bandmates match these screeds with litanies of their own: particularly guitarist Blake Ibanez, a hardcore titan (and occasional shoegazer) whose slithering riffs incessantly run amok. Even the audience can’t escape Power Trip’s leaden censure. On “Waiting Around to Die,” Gale delivers this sputtering, incendiary pep talk with a rage so palpable you can almost feel it shaking you by the shoulders: “You’re waiting around to die, how can you live with it?/Just waiting around to die, AND I CAN’T FUCKING STAND IT!!!”
Thrash has always been a goofy genre with a morbid sense of humor: a direct consequence of the genre’s primordial days in the Reagan era, when trolling the silent majority doubled as a pre-eminent past-time and a form of protest. Like their peers Iron Reagan and Skeletonwitch, Power Trip view the impending apocalypse as a cause for celebration, powered by schadenfreude. Evangelical Christians are treated to particularly hilarious roastings. “Executioner’s Tax (Swing of the Axe),” the album’s best song, sees Gale calling the bluff of all those Bible-Belters who’d so passionately pleaded for the arrival of the man upstairs, only to come face-to-face with the titular killer-for-hire when the End of Days finally arrives. “You’ve prayed for so long, and now you have your chance/The executioner’s here, and he’s sharpening his axe!”
Power Trip’s new attention to detail pushes Nightmare Logic over the edge. It’s abundantly clear that they’ve spent hours at the dissection table with Manifest Decimation, amplifying—but not recycling—its best hooks and theatrics, trimming off the static scar tissue. They’ve chopped a few seconds of extraneous riffing here, a repeated breakdown there; it’s an impressive operation, considering their debut was plenty lean and mean. The nit-picking pays off, as Nightmare Logic outmatches the preceding LP across all verticals, from cohesion and catchiness to impact and atmosphere.
The band’s secret weapon remains producer and Sumerlands guitarist Arthur Rizk, or as I like to call him, the Ariel Rechtshaid of heavy music; Code Orange’s Forever and Prurient’s Frozen Niagara Falls are just two of the bevy of ambitious records he’s worked on. A master of dynamic contrast and sonic feints, Rizk’s the textbook definition of a board-wizard. Under his command, Ibanez’s already-huge tremolo riffs on “Executioner’s Tax”, “Firing Squad,” and the title track become hulking, like a stampede of hellish racehorses against the thundering backbeat. Meanwhile, in the back of the mix, the rhythm section ebbs and flows to accommodate the axework, ensuring sustained impact and easy passage from one ripper to the next. Rizk again runs Gale’s yelps through a heap of effects, rendering every syllable an echo-laden boom from on high. And in spite of its sheer heft, Rizk makes Nightmare Logic a crisp, nuanced listen; like the band themselves, he strikes a rare balance between modern intricacy and old-school aggression, nodding to tradition without over-relying on tropes.
You don’t need to be a metalhead to have a blast with Nightmare Logic. Screamed sardonics, persistent chug, and apocalyptic melodrama are all acquired tastes, sure. But Power Trip’s fist-pumping choruses, ricocheting grooves, and ample charm are so animated that they leave us with something addictive and, well, fun. Just like Metallica, the Texans pitch a big tent, where the only prerequisite for entry is a willingness to splash around in the bloodbath for half an hour. With Nightmare Logic, there’s a good chance you’ll stick around for a good, long soak. | 2017-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Southern Lord | March 1, 2017 | 8.4 | 6e1c04d0-cae6-4054-9d09-006ad4938934 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
In four years, New Zealand rock'n'roll revisionists the Dead C will celebrate their 30th anniversary, and they're currently making some of their most vital, urgent, and completely cutting-edge music. The two-song haymaker Armed Courage is the mightiest work they’ve made since leaving the Siltbreeze imprint in the mid-90s. | In four years, New Zealand rock'n'roll revisionists the Dead C will celebrate their 30th anniversary, and they're currently making some of their most vital, urgent, and completely cutting-edge music. The two-song haymaker Armed Courage is the mightiest work they’ve made since leaving the Siltbreeze imprint in the mid-90s. | The Dead C: Armed Courage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18449-the-dead-c-armed-courage/ | Armed Courage | In four years, New Zealand rock'n'roll revisionists the Dead C will celebrate their 30th anniversary, a rare milestone for any band whose members have never changed. Rarer still, though, is the sense that the Dead C are making some of their most vital, urgent, and completely cutting-edge music right now, after more than a quarter century of persistent exploration. Armed Courage-- their fourth record in six years for New York label Ba Da Bing-- is the mightiest work they’ve made since leaving the Siltbreeze imprint in the mid-90s. A two-track haymaker for dual cranky guitars and irrascible drums, with vocals and piano scattered throughout like an explosion’s neglected debris, Armed Courage pairs restraint with force, subtlety with volume and magnetism with aggression. During the last decade, the Dead C have tinkered with electronics, explored more conventional song lengths, and even released 2010’s relatively approachable Patience. But Armed Courage reaches back to their 90s noise squall and revitalizes it in toto. In turn, the Dead C deliver one of the year’s most essential rock records by ripping apart most expectations of exactly what that means.
The Dead C’s clangorous, demanding music could never be called casual. The fitful, almost desultory nature of the Dead C’s process, however, seems essential to the band’s success on Armed Courage. Michael Morley, Bruce Russell, and Robbie Yeats formed the band at the apogee of the Dunedin Sound, where their pals and peers created jangly, fuzzy pop songs, as though the 60s had been refracted through bad electronics and given a strange new accent. But the Dead C didn’t aim for a similar version of pop perfection. In large part, they could not. They were not polished and practiced instrumentalists; indeed, as the band near the three-decade mark, the members still profess to a certain technical incompetence, while generally avoiding tags such as “rock band” or “professional musicians.” (Russell's daughter, Olive, recently finished a charming little documentary about this disparity.) They’ve toured very rarely and, aside from the release of a new album every year or two, the trio has avoided the general promotional timesucks of the music industry. For most of their career, they’ve completely foregone all scripts, too, choosing to improvise the contents of their records in sporadic sessions of old friends and electing not to recreate those pieces when they do climb on a stage. It might be hard to believe that while listening to Armed Courage, a record whose pieces cohere so well that you expect them to be mapped out on a practice-room wall. Then again, this band’s been speaking its own rewritten rock language for nearly three decades. They shout it here with the sort of extemporaneous enthusiasm that comes with a shared past, not weekly band practice.
“Armed” bubbles up from a molten swirl, drums tracing patterns atop two guitars searching for their shape. Morley and Russell eventually reach and sustain a dynamic equilibrium with their instruments and amplifiers, with blurs of notes and the buzz of circuits cultivating a web of claustrophobia. In on-again, off-again bursts, Yeats fights against that entrapment. Sometimes, he lashes out like he’s just joined a grindcore act or trots ahead as if he’s rehearsing for a marching band. Other times, though, he disappears completely. The move epitomizes the patience of three people who’ve been playing together for so long and allows every move the band makes across these 22 minutes to have maximum impact. Yes, the Dead C play workaday rock instruments, but they improvise with the sort of communication you’d expect from top-of-the-line free jazz. You hear each member cede space to the others, massage a new element into the gyre and shift into sequences unexpected to everyone, themselves included. “Armed” sounds like a composition, but it feels entirely of the moment.
If “Armed” is about peaking early and finding ways to make that plateau interesting for more than 20 minutes, “Courage” is a slipstream of oscillating ideas and fragments. After staying silent for Patience, Morley moans occasionally throughout the track, his narcotized voice seeping perfectly into the Thorazine shuffle. At one point, the Dead C even march like a proper rock band, Yeats pounding ahead beneath sheets of screech and wail, making their influence on Sonic Youth and the mass of noise-rock that followed painfully clear. Minutes later, though, they play as if underwater, any percussiveness relegated to a subaquatic thump and the guitars gasping for a lifeline. The trio surfaces once again, just before it fades forever into the middle distance. The Dead C have built their reputation on racket, but “Courage” proclaims they’re also very good at getting very small, or at creating music from the sounds most rock might dismiss as the ghosts living within their old equipment. “My amp makes a storm of noise even at rest. People mistake that for a hissy recording,” Russell told Perfect Sound Forever in 2000. “No, it’s a very clear recording of a very hissy sound, and that’s something people have trouble grasping.” Armed Courage leaves no room for misinterpretation.
The cover of Armed Courage features a newspaper photograph from 1968, when Russia invaded Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring. A Russian tank burns, while two Czech nationals march ahead in street clothes. “As ‘a band,’ the Dead C have used images of civil unrest, illegal warfare, and destruction of civilizations for the better part of 27 years,” Morley recently told Impose. This glimpse of active revolutionaries quarreling with total power feels forever appropriate for the Dead C. After all, rock'n'roll, the new converts are told, is a trapdoor for absolute liberation. Grab a guitar and an amplifier, plug yourself, and tell the world how you feel for a change. You can be the shirtless Iggy, sweating and slithering across the stage, or the unhinged Keith, unfurling the coolest riff you’ve ever heard as a cigarette dangles from your mouth. But have you seen all these decades-old rock bands, touring the songs or, at the very least, the formulas and molds and sounds they constructed decades ago? That’s its own form of glorified servitude. But after 27 years, the Dead C remain a fully liberated and aware band, capable of turning rock'n'roll’s basics into incredibly unpredictable music. The Dead C are lifers, then, who are too in control of their own sound to be detained by expectations-- of their own music, of rock'n'roll, of their legacy at large. Armed Courage proves the longterm vitality of that sadly rare strategy. | 2013-09-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-09-18T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Ba Da Bing | September 18, 2013 | 8.4 | 6e1d3c7d-ff73-4529-bbe4-6e80a9ba3482 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The pop music icon spends too much time looking back on a seemingly rushed, mostly forgettable collection of tracks. | The pop music icon spends too much time looking back on a seemingly rushed, mostly forgettable collection of tracks. | Missy Elliott: Iconology EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/missy-elliott-iconology-ep/ | Iconology | In the decade-plus since her last album, Missy Elliott has been trapped in a cycle of returns and retreats. Albums have been teased, then coming soon, then renamed, and later scrapped. Singles have been released and choreographed but then left at sea, never followed-up or built upon. Though Missy has remained an active producer, songwriter, and guest artist, it’s hard not to think of those efforts as busywork. When she rapped, “Thought I fell off, I ain’t quite finished,” on 2012’s single “9th Inning,” it felt like a Freudian slip more than a threat. Released the weekend before her receipt of the VMAs’ Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award, Iconology confirms what’s long been implied by these recurring starts and stops: Missy Elliott is no longer the future.
There is nothing rapped or sung on this EP that is not beholden to Missy’s past. “Throw It Back” is a tepid nostalgia trip that does little to hide its lack of inspiration. Retracing her steps, Missy recycles tired rhyme schemes and stuffs her verses with dry nods to her hits. Her allusions to her glory days are so artless and undercooked that they could be Genius annotations: “Missy still got ’em losing control/And every night is still ladies’ night.”
The production, courtesy of Timbaland, Missy, and Atlanta producers Wili Hendrix and Michael Aristotle, is a toss-up. The drum programming on “Throw It Back” and “Cool Off” is shifty and colorful, but painfully quantized. As Missy raps in staccato lockstep with the beats, the lack of bounce becomes grating. The doo-wop sway of “Why I Still Love You” fits Missy’s vocals well, but it’s damning that the a capella sounds better than the full song. The sole outlier, “DripDemeanor,” is groovy and indulgent; at one point background coos bleed into a guitar and harmonica melody that’s peppered with what sounds like hiccups. Paired with Sum1’s sultry crooning, the result is weird and charming and sensuous—but then Missy starts rapping.
There’s nothing insightful or fun about Missy looking back rather than ahead, especially when she’s already released two compilation records during her hiatus. The focus on iconography is frustrating in its neglect of Missy’s extensive influence throughout the past decade (Missy’s genes can be found in Tierra Whack, Tyler, the Creator, Azealia Banks, M.I.A., FKA twigs, J. Cole, among many others) and her lauded accomplishments (earlier this year she was the first woman rapper inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and the third rapper, period). Missy invited listeners to view her body on her terms; she condensed emotions into the perfect onomatopoeia; she befriended and supported the artists around her. Iconology could have tapped into all these dimensions. Instead, it settles for the safe and familiar. Throw it back. | 2019-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Goldmind | August 31, 2019 | 4.6 | 6e2183ab-b68d-4e90-a619-d7e77b97caaa | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
On his fascinating debut album, the D.C.-based musician moves freely through many different styles—arena-rock, folk, rap—creating an album about that freedom as a Black artist and so much more. | On his fascinating debut album, the D.C.-based musician moves freely through many different styles—arena-rock, folk, rap—creating an album about that freedom as a Black artist and so much more. | Bartees Strange: Live Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bartees-strange-live-forever/ | Live Forever | Mustang, Oklahoma is about 85 percent white and was only slightly less so a couple of decades ago, when, as a young child, Bartees Cox Jr. traveled around the state with his family, singing in operas and churches. On his debut album, Live Forever, Bartees Strange pays slight homage to his past with “Mustang,” with that feeling of needing to flee your hometown—cosmic synths, a hook yelped with scrunched eyelids, an outro that drives like a Charger on a clear highway. It’s a paradox that Bartees can’t escape whiteness in the music he creates as a Black man. It’s already part of whatever artistic turn Bartees makes, whether it’s the erasure of Black artists' contributions to indie rock, or the existential crisis Black rappers face when they must entertain largely white crowds. It’s a lot to work through on a 35-minute album, which is just a part of what makes this one of the most fascinating and affecting debuts of the year.
Most of Live Forever’s magic, however, is in how it doesn't seek to explicitly subvert whiteness. Bartees is not necessarily a boundary-breaker: He presents every bit of sound he collects as a natural part of his experience. From a childhood spent bouncing from base to base as an Army brat or shying away from becoming the frontman in the bands he shuffled through as an adult, the struggle to root his voice is a running theme. Yet every influence he pulls from—TV on the Radio’s world-weary poetry, Hot 100 hip-hop cadence, industrial punk—is marked by his personable, intimate presence. “Mustang” flexes its biceps, but doesn’t lose its humanity (“Last night I got so fucked up, near lost my job/It’s nice to think that folks are near, waking up was hard this year”). For all its arena-sized gesturing, the song is really a heart-to-heart.
Bartees’ introduction to the wider public was directly informed by his otherness. His breakthrough—March’s Say Goodbye to Pretty Boy, an EP of National covers—was inspired by being the only person of color at one of the band’s concerts in Washington D.C. Bartees’ interpretation of “Lemonworld”—which flips singer Matt Berninger’s sullen brokenness to a world-beating howl—speaks to the cathartic mode he sticks to for much of the album’s first half. The run is a pristine technicolor whir, where the seasick horns of “In a Cab” swing briskly into “Stone Meadows,” whose harmonic guitar interplay and bleak melodrama (“If I died in a meadow/If I died I don’t think they’d ever find me at all”) recall Silent Alarm-era Bloc Party. But the thrills mainly sprout from Bartees’ powerfully layered vocal performances.
“Boomer,” centered on Bartees’ formative years after he moved from Oklahoma to Brooklyn, has your basic ’00s pop-punk formula, let-’em-say-what-they-wanna-say-because-we’re-gonna-do-us-and-it’s-time-to-dance hook included. Bartees serves us Young Thug-meets-Fall Out Boy, rapping with vocal tics that accent his small joys (“We on track, woo!/I’ve relapsed, woo!/I told my girl that I was working, that’s a lie I’m in the trap”) and express the bliss of self-actualization. The cerebral drum patterns of highlight “Flagey God” create a dewy club sweat on the hook, and Bartees rides it with a bounce that carries the ghosts of gospel and house music. He’s spoken about struggling to find cohorts who knew what to do with his Black voice. But alongside mixing engineer/bassist Brian DiMeglio and mastering engineer/emo-whisperer Will Yip, Bartees places himself at the center of nearly every element in Live Forever. Regardless of how disparate its shifts may seem, his voice is the connective force.
Bartees reserves his lone screed against the compartmentalization of Black voices for “Mossblerd.” There are plenty of musicians who resist the industry gatekeepers who pigeonhole them into being a certain “type” of artist. But Bartees is specific in how this is not just an artistic frustration but something that jails you inside your own body. In a sharp piece of songwriting, he describes the way it spoils his Brooklyn paradise: “Pull up on these white folks, Park Slope abandoned/Used to hate my body, they tried to kill my spirit.” It lays bare what drives the album’s urgency: a generations-old form of strife.
The idea of Black mobility—from Oklahoma to Brooklyn, from punk to folk—that threads through Live Forever never feels like it’s about escaping yourself, but about staking out an identity in unfamiliar places. The album’s final minutes begin with “Far” and “Fallen for You,” sparser, campfire-ready love songs that lean on Bartees’ falsetto at its most quavering. Then, in the final moments, Bartees feigns transcendence. Amid the ascending synths of “Ghostly,” our protagonist finds himself yearning and alone. Instead of pointing outward, the narrative circles in on itself, calling back to the existential frustration of “Mustang:” “Most folks would say that I seem fine/But each morning I don’t feel worth it/Pull up to my job almost on time.” Live Forever argues that life is not some march toward a peak, but a closed loop—one that’s tighter if you’re Black. The brilliance of Bartees’ debut is in how it carves out an expansive space within that loop. Why escape when you can create a new place entirely?
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Memory Music | October 6, 2020 | 8.2 | 6e242a3f-79b1-4b27-bd80-e9b0e318bf20 | Brian Josephs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-josephs/ | |
Relapse Records’ recent signee, the Philadelphia band Nothing, are fronted by ex-Horror Show vocalist Dominic Palermo. Their debut*, Guilty of Everything*, might be unusually heavy dream-pop, billowy alt-rock, or blustery shoegaze, but it is definitely not metal. | Relapse Records’ recent signee, the Philadelphia band Nothing, are fronted by ex-Horror Show vocalist Dominic Palermo. Their debut*, Guilty of Everything*, might be unusually heavy dream-pop, billowy alt-rock, or blustery shoegaze, but it is definitely not metal. | Nothing: Guilty of Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19071-nothing-guilty-of-everything/ | Guilty of Everything | Relapse Records is a metal label. You know that. I know that. I only bring it up because it’s going to frame a great deal of the discussion surrounding recent signee Nothing’s debut LP Guilty of Everything, which might be unusually heavy dream-pop, billowy alt-rock, or blustery shoegaze, but it is definitely not metal. There’s probably never been a time when wimp panic wasn’t a pressing concern in the metal community, but these are more fraught times than ever judging by the two most controversial records of recent months—countless hours in 2013 were spent debating whether Deafheaven were too soft to be “real metal,” while doomgaze progenitors Alcest dropped the “doom” part entirely on the antiseptic Shelter. Situated almost exactly between the sound of those two records, Guilty of Everything walks right into the ongoing crossfire, which might actually make it the ballsiest metal album in recent memory.
Whatever guff they get from headbangers, this kind of projected audacity certainly works in favor of a record that doesn’t really have much itself. Guilty of Everything is loud, it’s distorted and it’s heavy, but it’s not aggressive. It’s actually quite comforting. No matter how softly Domenic Palermo sings during the first minute of “Hymn to the Pillory” and no matter how pretty those clean, 8th-note guitar chords are, you’re conditioned to know the tidal crash is coming. And when it does, it’s warm and enveloping, soothing almost. Even the moments of dissonance on Guilty of Everything have an aqueous rather than an abrasive feel; on the stirring single “Dig”, Palermo’s vocals have a steadying effect amidst the seasick, melodic leads while “Endlessly” swoons in the manner of a wave pool, contained, just immersive enough and somewhat menacing if you let your attention slip.
Of course, Guilty of Everything is comforting because it’s familiar as well—25 years of indie rock have been supported by the idea that bludgeoning guitars and vaporous vocals are somehow incompatible and for the first 15 minutes or so, having the opposite once again confirmed can even be kinda thrilling. But after that point, Nothing have pretty much told you all they have to say. That’s in a figurative sense, as Guilty on Everything seems to fold back on itself, its second half repeating certain modes on the first—the “uptempo one”, the “quasi-ambient” one, the waltz. The guitars remain gorgeous throughout, though lacking tonal or dynamic variety and Palermo’s vocals start to take the effect of stale taffy, soft and still retaining its sweetness, but inflexible.
But in a literal sense, you haven’t really heard anything Palermo has to say. Even when pitted against the quietest moments of Guilty of Everything, Palermo’s words are nearly impossible to make out. To be fair, this applies to 99% of all vocalists in this realm. But otherwise, it actually made the lack of specificity even more frustrating. Because you sense there is some kind of personality Nothing can’t quite convey in their music just yet.
I listened to Guilty of Everything without the lyrics sheet and not much more was revealed after listening with it. Same goes for finding out that the songs were inspired by Palermo’s coming of age in Philadelphia’s extremely shitty Kensington section and serving a two-year bid for aggravated assault and attempted murder. It gives some kind of perspective to typically generalized lyrics like “I’m on my knees...I’m guilty of everything,” and can make this record something of a conceptual piece about the will to live and a death wish somehow converging. But otherwise, a solid debut can’t help but feel just a little disappointing after realizing you could’ve had the doomgaze answer to The B. Coming. | 2014-03-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-03-06T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Relapse | March 6, 2014 | 6.9 | 6e25eaf7-914c-4f26-8f0a-b1a31a19a661 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
With an exceptional collaborative spirit and a highly refined sound, Kaytranada blesses this woeful decade with one last great dance record. | With an exceptional collaborative spirit and a highly refined sound, Kaytranada blesses this woeful decade with one last great dance record. | Kaytranada: Bubba | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kaytranada-bubba/ | Bubba | For Kaytranada, everything starts with the drums. The Canadian producer builds tracks from percussion outward, perhaps opening with a hi-hat, then adding a bassline and kick drums and only afterward seeking chords that may suit the foundation. His terrific new album Bubba opens with one second of drumming before the beat switches and his signature synths arrive. On a more conventional pop record, this might be interpreted as an arbitrary gesture given how quickly it passes. But nothing on Bubba is accidental. The album capitalizes on the promise of Kaytranada’s 2016 debut, 99.9% and blesses this woeful decade with one last great dance record.
With 99.9%, Kaytranada established himself as a producer with a well-defined and influential sensibility. It was sample-heavy and for all of Kay’s digital chops, the production still felt analog: The synths shook and the drums swung. It was also collaborative in the best possible sense. Kaytranada’s sense of purpose was strong enough to yoke the other artists to his intent. In one of the few interviews he gave in the run-up to Bubba’s release, he described how he cajoles potential features. “Some people just want the usual, basic stuff they’re comfortable with,” he said. “You have to work to push them out of their comfort zone.”
Nevertheless, Bubba sounds very comfortable. It’s a dance album front-to-back, fun, confident, always keeping you in perpetual motion, no matter what might be happening around you (train delay, being mugged, the heat death of the universe). Take “Taste,” whose snapping beat is complicated by an uncooperative bass. Only two other instruments are necessary: topaz synths and the voice of VanJess, the Nigerian-American duo with businesslike vocals. It’s perhaps the simplest song here and like almost all the others, an undeniable dancefloor summons. (Kaytranada frequently uses the voices of his collaborators to reference the sounds of the early 2000s; When TDE’s SiR isn’t pitching his voice Anderson .Paak style, his layered voice recalls the songs of 112 or Jagged Edge, both because of the harmonies that end his bars on “Go DJ” and the fact that he sings the lyric, “Where the party at.”)
It does the record a small disservice to pull songs out at random like this. Both “Taste” and “Go DJ” are followed by tracks that lead out naturally like the flow of a DJ set. But that exceptional flow leaves room for punctuation marks, and several come when Kaytranada feels perfectly in tune with his collaborators. The first of these is “10%” with Kali Uchis. Three different beats, piled high like sedimentary layers, herald her alto, and she spends the remainder of the song surfing atop the beat. Kaytranada has similar chemistry with GoldLink on the song “Vex Oh,” and a cameo from Estelle on “Oh No” delivers the same promise that the Craig David feature “Got It Good,” did on the previous album.
The superficial outro “Midsection” featuring Pharrell and his falsetto might be the only track on which Kaytranada’s collaborator overrides him to the song’s detriment. But that only emphasizes how strong the other tracks are. Kaytranada uses vocalists as an additional instrument. (Lyrics have always seemed to function more as pure sound for him than anything else; he values the textures of words above their meanings.) So it’s particularly fun to see what he does when that tool isn’t available, as on the standout instrumental “Scared to Death.” Here, Kay stacks those strobing synths he favors on top of bass and on top of that, places a melodic build—a minute in, he pulls the bass out momentarily to let things ride for a moment. The room continues to rotate. A mournful airhorn sounds. And then the beat comes back, with all the impact you’d hope for, the sound of a party catching its second wind.
Twice now has Kaytranada demonstrated the vision required to carry a long-player, working subtle structures into his songs that allow him to keep the momentum up without losing the feeling that those songs are complete in their own right. Bubba is another set of coherent, well-sequenced set of tracks without any major drop-offs, all the more impressive as the album runs more than 50 minutes. It’s flexible, ever-moving, a dance record that could have come from no one else. It’s an old-fashioned skill, his ability to create albums that function as albums, especially for an artist so rooted in the progressive genres of hip-hop and dance. But it makes sense that Kaytranada is so good at it. Bubba thrives on pacing, sequencing, the placing of details that drive you to listen to all of its songs every time you put it on. Which is to say, building an album like this just requires a more advanced form of rhythm. | 2019-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | December 17, 2019 | 8.1 | 6e3702b5-f0a3-4244-abbd-8aacaa537a53 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ |
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