alternativeHeadline
stringlengths 2
551
⌀ | description
stringlengths 2
700
⌀ | itemReviewed
stringlengths 6
199
| url
stringlengths 41
209
| headline
stringlengths 1
176
⌀ | reviewBody
stringlengths 1.29k
31.4k
| dateModified
stringlengths 29
29
| datePublished
stringlengths 29
29
| Genre
stringclasses 116
values | Label
stringlengths 1
64
⌀ | Reviewed
stringlengths 11
18
| score
float64 0
10
| id
stringlengths 36
36
| author_name
stringclasses 603
values | author_url
stringclasses 604
values | thumbnailUrl
stringlengths 90
347
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
On his second album, the Nigerian pop artist provides not just an integrated sound all his own but a clear vision for its future. It is a buoyant, unsinkable record, one of the genre’s finest ever. | On his second album, the Nigerian pop artist provides not just an integrated sound all his own but a clear vision for its future. It is a buoyant, unsinkable record, one of the genre’s finest ever. | Davido: A Good Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/davido-a-good-time/ | A Good Time | For the last several years, Davido has been reshaping the sound of Nigerian pop. As a prolific hitmaker and one of Africa’s biggest stars, he has pivoted away from global ambitions toward revamping the traditional sounds of his homeland. He released his debut album, Omo Baba Olowo, seven years ago and hasn’t released another until now. It feels like the stars aligned for it: Drake is still courting the sound, Burna Boy has a Grammy nom, UMG is moving into the region, and the music is crashing into our shores.
A Good Time is a nearly gapless immersion into his potent, wavy signature sound. Nigerian pop music—with its endorsement-based revenue structure and rejection of collaborative songwriting—isn’t really conducive to ideas like cohesion. Davido has championed the use of songwriters, and has as much of a unified vision for his music as any of his peers, but this is the first time he’s been able to translate that into anything resembling a complete album. “Everything I do is a lifestyle,” he sings on the intro. Over the next hour, that lifestyle can only be defined as lush and splendid.
Nigerian pop is a singles-focused genre with a hits-first infrastructure. From the Mo’ Hits era (2004-2012) led by D’banj and Don Jazzy to the Mavin Records stronghold established by Jazzy in its wake, labels have prioritized A-sides and roster-boosting compilations like 2007’s genre-defining Curriculum Vitae. Most of the digital revenue from Nigeria’s growing music industry comes from caller ringback tones (RBTs); streaming is on the rise but very slowly. (Most profits still go toward the country’s booming piracy market.) Making albums under these conditions is largely a secondary concern, if not a luxury. Davido, coming off a career-redefining singles run in 2017, knows a thing or two about luxury, and he has taken on the challenge. While his album isn’t thematic or self-contained, it feels comprehensive. Knowing the stakes, Davido curates a buoyant, unsinkable record, one of the genre’s finest ever.
His debut, Omo Baba Olowo—meaning “rich man’s son”—was a failure of imagination and ambition. Not only was it steeped in an already established Mo’ Hits sound but it was unsure about who it wanted Davido to be: the flexer boy-king or the down-on-his-luck hustler who worked his way into the music industry on his own terms. He was standing on his daddy’s money one minute then citing how no one loved him when he was broke the next, like Lagos’ own Mike Jones. He’s grown as an artist since and has had a lot of time to think about those mistakes, including the misadventure of his last EP, which he recently called “shit.” On A Good Time, he provides not just an integrated sound all his own but a clear vision for its future.
Davido’s overall theme here is a rich playboy who is embracing commitment. The songs are feel-good serenades, many with groovy dembow rhythms slowed to a gentle sashaying pace, and at least one dedicated directly to his fiancé Chioma Rowland (“Assurance”). “Fall” showers a lover with adoration and gifts as an apology. The writing is largely that of a smitten mogul, but occasionally he lets his guard down. “I just want to make history without my people back home missing me,” he sings on the Summer Walker duet “D & G,” exposing some anxiety beneath his often impenetrable pop star veneer.
Unlike some of his contemporaries, Davido has embraced the “Afrobeats” label in part because he and his team of producers have played such a big role in defining it. While artists like D’Banj and duo P-Square were pioneers of the streaking, synthy music that the genre was built upon, Davido (alongside rival WizKid) spearheaded what it has become: melodically subtler, gentler in tone, programmed drums evoking conventional and proven African rhythms. A Good Time sounds like an artist removing the bugs that prevent his songs from running at maximum efficiency. The R&B textures smooth down the sounds of Igbo highlife; the muted yet technicolor synth and guitar tones of songs like “1 Milli” and “Check AM” are perfectly devised for Davido’s sumptuous harmonies. As if seeking justice for the lost Popcaan version of Drake’s “Controlla,” Davido’s “Risky” uses similar skittering drums to a colorful dancehall hybrid with the Jamaican deejay in tow. At nearly every turn, Davido is upgrading.
Davido is one of the most charismatic performers in Afropop, but A Good Time’s polished and exquisite simplicity is owed to a crack team of Nigerian producers: Shizzi, Kiddominant, Speroach Beatz, and Tekno, in particular. Davido’s vocals drift sweetly just above the drums on “Green Light Riddim.” “If,” one of his vibrant 2017 hits, finds a home here among similarly sunlit productions. Over the layered rhythms of “Disturbance,” he’s beaming. Instead of trying to push the sound to its edge, it’s like he’s seeking a unified theory of the nebulous “Afrobeats” term.
As the already synthesized sound of Nigerian pop begins to transform into scenes and subgenres like alté and Fuji pop, and the future stars are mixing SoundCloud rap in with their more orthodox Naija pop, or bringing throwback Ja Rule duets into the sun, Davido is content to fine-tune his pristine songcraft. His songs aren’t experimenting with the form the way Rema’s, Odunsi’s, or wurLD’s are; he’s more concerned with making the most optimized Afropop possible. This extends to his streamlined album on the whole, which is a new benchmark for Afropop LPs. If Burna Boy is bringing the sounds of the diaspora back to the motherland, Davido is erecting a monument to his own status as a hometown hero. | 2019-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Davido Worldwide Entertainment / Sony / RCA | November 26, 2019 | 8.3 | 6e396c31-c217-4b5b-b91c-5942fa05c0f9 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Joey Burns and Jon Convertino have always surrounded themselves with an eclectic set of collaborators, and Edge of the Sun is filled with cameos, including Ben Bridwell, Neko Case, Carla Morrison, Sam Beam, and Gaby Moreno. | Joey Burns and Jon Convertino have always surrounded themselves with an eclectic set of collaborators, and Edge of the Sun is filled with cameos, including Ben Bridwell, Neko Case, Carla Morrison, Sam Beam, and Gaby Moreno. | Calexico: Edge of the Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20353-edge-of-the-sun/ | Edge of the Sun | A vintage synth belches out an insistent theme to open the noisy "Cumbia de Donde", a standout on Calexico’s new album. It’s one of the most striking moments on Edge of the Sun, a rusty tangle of staccato notes and syncopation atop a sinewy percussion groove. Not only does it chafe against the band’s default folk rock, but that central riff acts as a sort of code, as though the Tucson collective is offering coordinates for a northerly route connecting South and North, Sonora with San Francisco.
It’s a song about origins ("¿De dónde eres?") and destinations ("¿Adónde vas?"), punctuated by the dots and dashes of a conspiratorial horn section. "I’m not from here, I’m not from there," Joey Burns sings, imbuing this itinerancy with power and possibility. Taking over vocals at the bridge, the Spanish vocalist Amparo Sánchez reveals the song’s true destination. ¿Adónde vas? "A bailer cumbia." In this as in so many of Calexico’s songs, the characters can go anywhere and do anything. Perhaps it’s a quaint notion, but there is a certain freedom in rootlessness and restlessness.
This idea has been Calexico’s guiding principle since Burns and drummer Jon Convertino split from Giant Sand in the early 1990s and lit out for parts unknown. They have never stood still for long, working as a backing band for Neko Case and Amos Lee while expanding their drums-and-guitar soundtrack rock into something larger, more song-driven, and more cinematic. If the band have skirted accusations of cultural appropriation, that’s mainly due to the important fact that they do not deploy world music as a means to exoticize American folk rock. Rather, these various strains form the framework of their band’s songs, all the way down to the lyrics themselves. It wasn’t until 2012’s Algiers that they began to sound creatively staid, as though they had reached the ends of their inspiration in Latin American music, but Edge of the Sun sounds newly invigorated and inspired as Calexico reconsider their own past and find new music to explore.
Burns and Convertino have always surrounded themselves with an eclectic set of collaborators, and Edge of the Sun is filled with cameos, most of them lending their songs a distinctive sound. Case sounds like a mirage on "Tapping on the Line", and Ben Bridwell, on loan from Band of Horses, adds some 2000s indie-rock drama to opener "Falling from the Sky", making that central question resonate powerfully throughout the rest of the album: "Where do you go when you have nowhere to go?" With Sam Beam singing and playing guitar, "Bullets & Rocks" inevitably recalls their joint EP from 2005, In the Reins, only bolder and more resourceful as they set a Tinariwen guitar lick rolling through the Mojave.
As usual, however, the most compelling contributions come from artists less familiar to American ears. For this reason, Calexico place them prominently in the music, often building whole songs around their voices or instruments. Sánchez is as much a presence on "Cumbia de Donde" as frontman Burns is, and members of the Greek band Tikam lend "World Undone" its suspense, creating the impression of an unraveling groove. Mexican singer Carla Morrison dominates the dark reggae bump of "Moon Never Rises", ghosting Burns’ vocals before distorting her own delivery to make that central theme sound unsettling, uprooted, unplaceable. (Curious listeners should check out her excellent 2012 album, Déjenme Llorar.)
It’s tempting to praise Calexico simply for its globetrotting spirit, but corralling so many styles and sounds onto one album should not be an end in itself. Fortunately, the album’s musical diversity is a reflection of its lyrical themes. Named for a city that straddles Mexico and America, Calexico make music that is almost inevitably about borders both musical and national: finding them, crossing them, blurring them. Burns’ songwriting keeps that idea anchored in very personal and specific perspectives, which lends human proportions to the ambitiously cinematic arrangements. His characters are transient by circumstance, always striving for something better: a sense of security, a feeling of freedom, a place to dance without danger, sometimes just a dip in the ocean.
That’s the one wish of the main character in "Miles from the Sea", a landlocked laborer beaten down by "years of searing heat." He "dreams about swimming, miles away from the sea," Burns sings, his voice reaching deep to hit the low notes. The horns billow gently, the violin eddies wistfully, and Guatemalan singer Gaby Moreno draws those syllables out on the chorus to reinforce the sense of longing. The song fades in a roll of thunder, hinting that this dream of escape will go unrealized, but the music takes him and us right out among the waves. | 2015-04-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-04-22T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- / City Slang | April 22, 2015 | 7.6 | 6e44177d-ef34-4427-b2f3-1fa1a79e2223 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Melody A.M. came out quite a while ago, but if you were hoping this would be a catch-up rave ... | Melody A.M. came out quite a while ago, but if you were hoping this would be a catch-up rave ... | Röyksopp: Melody A.M. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6860-melody-am/ | Melody A.M. | Melody A.M. came out quite a while ago, but if you were hoping this would be a catch-up rave or a late-breaking pan we're going to have to disappoint: Röyksopp are, ultimately, too beautiful to hate and too harmless to really love.
You might already be familiar with this Norwegian pair from their appearance on every downtempo or electronic pop compilation ever made. These compilations, which have spread across the recent musical landscape like mellowed-out and occasionally groovy dandelions, are basically the result of a few people noticing that slick-and-dreamy trip-hop and records like Air's Moon Safari could be appreciated by practically anyone: embraced by clubbers during their daytime hours, yes, and appreciated by ostensibly clued-up rock hipsters, but just as appealing to someone who never cared about being clued-up in the first place. All across the Western world, it was discovered, happy thirty-something couples with business degrees and Jettas could pick up free downtempo samplers at Crate & Barrel and-- we might imagine-- enjoy Zero 7, Badly Drawn Boy, and housed-up Dido remixes while lighting candles and taking baths. People who find this horrible will recall Dirty Vegas' "Days Go By" and call it all "music for car commercials," but on a certain level they're just being condescending and mean-spirited: People like this stuff because it's pleasant and reasonably interesting.
Röyksopp, you should know, are the heirs to exactly this lineage, having picked up the crown Air once wore and set it on top of creamy, accessible house music. Their own tracks are languid but funky, occasionally revving up into a friendly house throb and occasionally laying back into sunny crooning very much like Moon Safari's-- I'm not completely convinced "Sparks" wasn't actually on that record. Röyksopp's many compilation appearances are based in part on that, but just as much on their stunningly consistent string of truly amazing remixes-- a string that culminated last year with their getting inside the dauntingly singular world of The Streets, turning "Weak Become Heroes" inside-out into an ecstatic gush Mike Skinner would likely never have dreamed of.
The quality of those remixes is no surprise, because here's the thing: Röyksopp are master pop craftsmen, the Brian Wilsons and Burt Bacharachs of downtempo house. They know their tracks inside and out, from the subtlest sonic details, to the interplay of melodies, to the Big Picture build and flow-- and it's the pretty remarkable evidence of this on Melody A.M. that's endeared them even to many of those who think of themselves as being above easy-to-like compilation-fodder. "Eple", for instance, reconstructs vintage funky-drummer beats up against an addictively twinkly synth, all so enjoyably that it takes a while to notice details like the odd, rewinding stutter they've worked across several instruments. Or take "In Space", where loving little string swells drop off into achingly pretty harping while the remarkably complex beatwork ticks away bashfully in a corner. Call it new age pretty, Enya pretty, but hey: pretty is pretty, my friends.
Melody A.M. is full of this stuff-- the stuff some people call "sophisticated" and "organic," the stuff others might rightly identify as "house for people who don't actually like house" or "ambient for people who don't actually like ambient." The best moments, oddly, seem to come both from Röyksopp's devoting themselves entirely to this accessibility and from dropping their guard on it. On "Röyksopp's Night Out" they allow themselves to break into a free-flowing and slightly less restrained darkness, just enough for you to wish they'd try their hands at a full-on rage; immediately afterward, though, they've erased that wish by assembling another shyly sunny patter for King of Convenience-turned-downtempo-crooner Erlend Øye to sing-song winsomely over. ("Poor Leno", the album's most successful single, has Øye voicing a lullaby hook over a rich, subtly mutating, and equally charming groove.) The worst moments, unsurprisingly, come when Röyksopp go generically downtempo and then miss the mark-- witness the vocals on "A Higher Place".
The total package is, by any measure, a flagship release: This is likely the most solid, confident, and generally pleasurable downtempo full-length you'll be hearing for a while. Whether that means it's a must-buy, more well-meaning nondescript bubbling, or end-of-the-world car-commercial music has to be left to you. My vote may not be the first of those options, but at times it comes reasonably close. | 2003-03-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2003-03-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Astralwerks | March 5, 2003 | 7.8 | 6e513c62-415f-4f61-b185-a6d4364307f9 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
This joint project between Madlib and drummer Karriem Riggins sounds like experimental jazz and feels like a beat tape. | This joint project between Madlib and drummer Karriem Riggins sounds like experimental jazz and feels like a beat tape. | Jahari Massamba Unit / Madlib / Karriem Riggins: Pardon My French | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jahari-massamba-unit-pardon-my-french/ | Pardon My French | Madlib is a blur of an artist, a perpetual motion machine who often seems more invested in process than product. As soon as he’s sculpted something discrete, he tends to put it down and move on. In that way, Madlib is forever onto the next one.
His latest album, a collaboration with the drummer Karriem Riggins, echoes that restless forward momentum. Madlib and Riggins have been producing music together for several years, but Pardon My French marks their official debut as a duo under the name Jahari Massamba Unit. Riggins, who has also played and produced alongside J Dilla and Robert Glasper, provides a barrage of expressive drums, while Madlib is credited with all other instruments. On its face Pardon My French is experimental jazz; in its execution it feels like a beat tape.
Throughout Pardon My French, Riggins gives Madlib a sandbox of percussion with which to experiment, and some tracks feel legitimately exploratory and free. The opening “Je Prendrai le Romanée-Conti (Putain De Leroy)” seems to stumble forward in the dark with random runs, hums, and interjections. “Les Jardins Esméraldins (Pour Caillard)” jogs briefly into and out of view, just over a one-minute swell of a crescendo.
In rare cases where we hear an extended solo voice, it is often fidgety and murmuring. “Trou Du Cul (Ode au Sommelier Arrogant)” rattles around like a top: Riggins’ tight shuffle of a breakbeat keeps the track spinning, Madlib’s off-kilter sounds—a weird whistle or kazoo here, a random cuckoo clock there—threatens to blow it over. Part of the thrill of freeform jazz is to hear a musician lob a note without a full view of where it will land, and listening to a record like this is to buy into that uncertainty and observe a sort of controlled chaos. Madlib is credited vaguely as responsible for all instruments besides drums on Pardon My French—whether or not he’s literally playing these instruments is both doubtful and beside the point—but his approach is grounded in pulling all the strings at once.
Unfortunately, there is also a chunk of the album that skids into indefensible noodling. “Inestimable Le Close” and “Du Morgon au Moulin-À-Vent (Pour Duke)” are longer explorations during which Madlib seems to get bored. Other tracks benefit from a more straightforward attack, like the jazz-funk romp “Hommage à la Vielle Garde (Pour Lafarge et Rinaldi),” whichocks into a pre-defined groove, a Madlibesque take on the theme to Idris Muhammad’s famous “Loran’s Dance.”
All of the song titles nod to Madlib’s fascination with wine. “Riesling Pour Robert,” named for a German wine guru with a cult following, takes a linear and precise attack with a random outburst of horns near the center. “Etude Montrachet,” an ode to one of Burgundy’s most famous Grand Cru vineyards, is appropriately luxurious, and a more traditional beat. But it’s exciting to hear a musician like Madlib untethered from the moment, and a testament to Riggins that he can create this type of space in the first place. Pardon My French is not always immediately gratifying, but it’s always moving towards something. | 2020-12-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Rap | Madlib Invazion | December 28, 2020 | 7 | 6e53598b-0a2c-411d-a43a-d7c7db284836 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
Grindcore band makes a strong pitch for the Metal Album of the Year honors with a record that's such a quantum leap even beyond Pig Destroyer's earlier, already pretty fuckin' awesome records that it might as well represent a quantum leap for the whole goddamn genre. | Grindcore band makes a strong pitch for the Metal Album of the Year honors with a record that's such a quantum leap even beyond Pig Destroyer's earlier, already pretty fuckin' awesome records that it might as well represent a quantum leap for the whole goddamn genre. | Pig Destroyer: Phantom Limb | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10322-phantom-limb/ | Phantom Limb | The amount of wiggle room in grindcore is, well, practically nil. You don't wake up one day and decide, as a modern day grindcore auteur, that you're going to add a string section or a New Orleans brass band or the Polyphonic Spree as backup vocalists. (Even if what I've described there is basically Mr. Bungle.) Grindcore is a genre with established borders-- tempo is beyond fast, length of song is short, guitar tunings are abrasive, vocal-style is either shriek-y high or growl-y low, and subject matter is dark, if not outright disgusting-- that butt up against other genres (death metal on the one end, noise on the other) but are nonetheless patrolled by vicious attack dogs. The fact that Pitchfork is even reviewing a grindcore band is probably a good sign to the faithful that said band is a crossover act or, you know, false metal.
Well, yes and no. Pig Destroyer is grindcore, through and through, and on its new album, Phantom Limb, some of the songs are slightly longer ("Loathsome" tops out at 4:04!) but many are well within the minute-and-a-half range. Singer J.R. Hayes still delivers his serial killer-chic lyrics ("Stench of solvent covers stench of rot/ I didn't even recognize her like a painting/ A masterpiece torn to pieces"; "Your rib cage is open like a great white's jaws/ Your legs look so sexy out of context") in an unintelligible, rasping shout that practically sprays you with acidic saliva. The guitars still feel like you're being pushed ear-first into a knife-grinder's stone, and the beats are often still more of a landslide of cymbal and snare than anything you can even bang your head to. The band still deploys shock-horror samples about bodies on fire and whatnot. But Phantom Limb is such a quantum leap even beyond Pig Destroyer's earlier, already pretty fuckin' awesome records that it might as well represent a quantum leap for the whole goddamn genre.
Pig Destroyer have always stood slightly outside grindcore's formal restrictions; for one thing, their sound is instantly recognizable, a plus when even fans sometimes have trouble telling one 30-second song from another. The band had no trouble distinguishing themselves at a performance a few weeks ago at the Maryland Deathfest, a three-day festival devoted to extreme metal and grindcore here in Baltimore: Whereas so many other bands that weekend had a rhythm section so tightly wound (and badly tuned) that their snare drums sounded like a guy whacking a hat box with a ballpoint pen, Pig Destroyer had a beefy low-end, a chest-punching, hefty bottom to its blurred blast beats. (All the more astounding considering there's no actual bass guitar involved.) And Hayes' vocals are ugly and shoved through a layer of distortion-- Pig Destroyer actually brought a noise dude, Blake Harrison, in to add, well, noise to Phantom Limb-- but they're never comical, his thick sneer-roar clamping your throat and giving you the evil-eye.
All of this carries over on record to Phantom Limb. But what really sets the album apart is riffs. It's still not "catchy," but the chewy bits of Southern-flavored rock'n'roll guitar that Pig Destroyer leaves like bloody gristle on otherwise bleached bones offers something for every rock fan to gnaw on. For a few seconds before the very end, "Lesser Animal" verily boogies until it tightens up into the dopesick bad vibes of Eyehategod. "Heathen Temple" shrieks like a Judas Priest solo hacked to fleshy chunks before Scott Hull's ZZ Top-meets-Kerry King riffing actually starts pogoing up and down like a lowrider. With another rubbery, bottom-heavy riff, "Loathsome" is the most mosh-worthy song of the year-- I know you don't see it much at Beirut shows, but people do still mosh-- and the breakdown is even kinda (eep!) funky. And guitar heroics aren't the only way Pig Destroyer fucks with grindcore orthodoxy on Phantom Limb. "Fourth Degree Burns" is a love song, and not one in which Haynes dismembers the object of his affection at the end: "Tomorrow she'll step on that plane and disappear/ But tonight her lips are real/ And kissing like a head-on collision." (I guess even romantic metaphors have to be violent in grindcore.)
After hearing Phantom Limb, a friend of mine noted that Pig Destroyer "only do the one thing, but dammit if it's not a fun thing." And true enough-- even with a palette that now includes veiny blues and sickly greens among the plasma reds and vomit ochres, Phantom Limb is not for everyone, especially if you have a low tolerance for music that delights in its own ugliness. But if you've ever remotely cared about heavy music-- whether you haven't bought a metal record since that last Megadeth LP in junior high or you're neck deep in one-man black metal bands from the ass-end of Tasmania-- buy the fuckin' thing already. | 2007-06-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-06-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | June 27, 2007 | 8.6 | 6e54e00e-fca0-42cb-b95f-7e590005cfb2 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The South African singer-songwriter’s artful pop is full of wit and revelation. His second EP is evidence of an artist blossoming into form. | The South African singer-songwriter’s artful pop is full of wit and revelation. His second EP is evidence of an artist blossoming into form. | M Field: Re: M Field | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/m-field-re-m-field/ | Re: M Field | Matthew Field has surveyed the state of the world and he’s got some news: We’re fucked. The South African guitarist and singer’s second solo project, Re: M Field, ruminates on the banal, devastating details of contemporary life: retail therapy, depleting attention spans, excess fossil-fuel emissions, depression without a discernible cause. Field paints these somber still lifes with a discerning eye, yet he never swerves into cynicism. More impressionistic than moralizing, his music carries a compelling sense of optimism, an abstracted hope that reconnection—with art, with intimacy, with nature—can lead us back to a path worth walking.
In the indie-pop trio Beatenberg, Field and his bandmates Robin Brink and Ross Dorkin (who produces the entirety of Re: M Field) established themselves as a sort of Vampire Weekend-lite, mostly because Field’s relaxed, conversational voice so closely resembles Ezra Koenig’s. But the comparison can also be heard in the group’s sense of rhythm, their toddling guitars, and the sweet melodies that skitter and snake throughout the mix. Field committed these qualities to last year’s M Field EP while also daring to get weirder. The bright guitars and African-infused percussion remained, but Field stretched his voice further and brought buzzing bass and Mellotron into his arrangements, which bent his songs away from Beatenberg’s more straightforward pop structures and closer to an art-pop core that swelled with the unexpected.
Though Re: M Field is a companion piece to M Field, the songs here roil with renewed dynamism. Guitars amble and strings surge, the compositions never sitting still. “Hyenas” flaunts an intricate collage of guitar riffs and key plucks, and a fizzy sawtooth synth that stamps on the chorus’s upbeat. And the hook here is one of Field’s sharpest; he contrasts what Susan Sontag once called “the painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation” with freedoms found in nature. “They’ve got a lot of reasons/Got a lot of right words/Got a lot of rules,” he sings before dropping one of the most obscure precoital lines of all time: “Baby, I’m your forest/Baby, I’m your ozone.” Similarly, on “Fire on Campus,” amid organs and muted guitar strums, the narrator notes that, during a fire, “Some people are worried about all the archives/And some about birds.” There’s no takeaway here, just an image: people staring at a sea of flames, unsure of what they cherish most.
Insofar as Field offers any structural critique, it’s this: that we’ve lost something sacred on our road to progress. Nowhere is this perspective more apparent than on “House and Leisure,” perhaps the best song Field has ever made. While the arrangement slashes with buoyant fingerpicking, horn stabs, and pizzicato, he traces the contours of consumerist self-care: watering a plant purchased on Amazon Prime, drinking natural wine, fighting his “demons with spears of asparagus.” But when this speaker seeks intimacy with another, he can’t reach them; they are each fragments of themselves, their identities codified into product.
Even when Field’s sonic experimentation backfires—like on “Surely Years Ago,” where his Auto-Tune clashes with the lead vocal chop—Re: M Field feels like an artist blossoming into form, each syllable of his sound pored over and accounted for. And his songwriting, ever his forte, bounds with wit and revelation, like a comedian who never finishes a punchline but still finagles a response from his audience. “Block Universe,” for example, repeats a simple, biting line: “I can’t promise that I’ll always love you.” After each verse, the refrain takes on a new meaning—is this an admission to a lover? The universe admonishing him? Spending time in Field’s overflowing brain makes for charming company, even while he watches the world burn. | 2022-06-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Leafy Outlook | June 10, 2022 | 7.5 | 6e648206-ddc4-4f58-b7ff-d4025be4fc42 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
At barely 21, Sky Ferreira’s had a musical career burdened—and bolstered—by so many warring external forces that the sheer existence of her debut album is a minor miracle. It’s both a relief and a bit of a shock that Night Time, My Time is not only here, but that it’s one of the most pleasing pieces of pop-rock to come along this year. | At barely 21, Sky Ferreira’s had a musical career burdened—and bolstered—by so many warring external forces that the sheer existence of her debut album is a minor miracle. It’s both a relief and a bit of a shock that Night Time, My Time is not only here, but that it’s one of the most pleasing pieces of pop-rock to come along this year. | Sky Ferreira: Night Time, My Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18681-sky-ferreira-night-time-my-time/ | Night Time, My Time | About 17 and a half minutes into her debut album, Sky Ferreira prods you to consider how strange it is that you’re listening to it at all. “I just want you to realize I blame myself,” she sings, “for my reputation.” The last word there is the slippery one: It’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly Ferreira’s reputation is at this point, or whom she might be shifting blame from. Maybe she has in mind her young parents, who put her upbringing in the hands of her grandmother. Or perhaps she’s talking to the A&R team at Capitol Records, who signed her at age 15 in the hopes that she’d become the next Britney. The label orchestrated some minor singles for her (“One” and "Obsession”), only to let her planned full-length sputter and die along with her recording budget.
It’s also possible she’s addressing the horde of fashion-world supporters who helped her become a raccoon-eyed ingenue better known for looking cool on Terry Richardson’s Tumblr and modeling Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent pieces than making music. More plausible still, her followers at large for being seduced by the socialite component while failing to invest in her musical aspirations. And what of her boyfriend, Zachary Cole Smith of bedroom-rock band DIIV, the guy carrying a bunch of heroin when the two were arrested together in upstate New York this fall? At barely 21, Ferreira’s had a musical career burdened—and bolstered—by so many warring external forces and unconventional zig-zagging that the sheer existence of her debut album is a minor miracle.
So it’s both a relief and a bit of a shock that Night Time*, My Time* is not only here, but that it’s one of the most pleasingly conventional and cohesive pieces of pop-rock to come along this year. Particularly given last year’s uneven Ghost EP, which rode the success of “Everything Is Embarrassing” and used big-name collaborators to dabble in a sometimes-confusing assortment of styles—Shirley Manson-stamped grunge, singer-songwritery folk, electro-pop. Night Time*, My Time* finds Ferreira navigating her tastes more gracefully, bridging the gaps between 80s pop sparkle and full-bodied 90s grunge in a streamlined way. Her primary collaborator this time is producer Ariel Rechtshaid (Solange, Haim, Charli XCX, Vampire Weekend, Usher), a guy known for adding both big-league pop polish to smaller acts and fine-tuning to bigger ones.
Night Time, My Time resists the self-serious instinct to position Ferreira as an artist artist— which might have been an especially powerful temptation considering she's a young woman in the music industry who’s spoken about coming into her own sense of agency. She examines emotional neglect (“Nobody Asked Me (If I Was Okay)”) and self-loathing, but also sings clever songs about lifestyle posturing—“Stabbin’ pens in my hand/ But I’m never workin’, just spending/ A giant comedy with museums and shopping with Kristine,” she sings on “Kristine”, a giddily odd track with ska undertones. She’s does her glummest Chan Marshall impersonation (“Night Time, My Time”), but she also refers to the men in her life as simply boys and isn’t afraid to address them in a purposefully grade-school tone: “Boys, they’re a dime a dozen,” she mutters. “Boys, they just make me mad.” Night Time, My Time isn’t the reactionarily somber anti-pop drag it could have been—instead, it’s a smart Kelly Kapowski hair-whip and loud bubblegum-crack of a record that lends itself to compulsive listening.
All of which was made possible by the unlikely power of “Everything Is Embarrassing”, the subdued electro-pop gem that reoriented Ferreira’s career map altogether last year. (Ferreira is one of the rare artists for whom the word “crossover” has meant a foray into the indiesphere.) The only flashes of that song’s anthemic pop fizz are found on “I Blame Myself”, an uptempo beast that sparkles with the promise of a song destined to become some kind of hit. What’s especially remarkable is that the song achieves the impact of “Everything Is Embarrassing” without its seductive too-cool vacancy—Ferreira now sounds like she has her head held up high instead of glancing down at the floor, bored and ready to leave the party. For someone whose voice often registers at a depressive whisper, she also knows how to look listeners directly in the eye and get them to just listen to her. Finally. She's at the center of her music now, blissfully free of anyone else to blame. | 2013-10-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Capitol | October 29, 2013 | 8.1 | 6e67e1e9-e590-469d-bae9-47cf6d133e6f | Carrie Battan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/ | null |
Unfussy, bursting with confidence, and freshly energized, the 3 songs on Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's new EP return to the space-disco euphoria of his most-loved work. | Unfussy, bursting with confidence, and freshly energized, the 3 songs on Hans-Peter Lindstrøm's new EP return to the space-disco euphoria of his most-loved work. | Lindstrøm: Windings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22100-windings/ | Windings | We chastise artists for changing, and we chastise them for staying the same. Give us more of what we like, but do it differently. Try something new, but make sure it feels familiar. Follow your muse, but only so far. There is, of course, The Radiohead Exception, but Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is not its beneficiary, and he must have felt the pressure of this contradictory mandate over the last decade. After being critically crowned as the leader of Oslo’s new disco scene for the pace-setting It’s a Feedelity Affair and the effortlessly majestic Where You Go I Go Too, he has kept his arpeggiators humming through diverse mutations. They’ve had their ups and downs by any measure, but were almost uniformly disappointing if you just wanted more retro-futurist space disco, spooled off a roll like so much celestial butcher paper.
For more flexible fans, there have been plenty of bright spots, from the earthenware prog of Lindstrøm's work with Prins Thomas to the riveted chrome pop of his Christabelle collaboration. There have also been a couple of clunkers, such as the oddly clogged, joyless Six Cups of Rebel and the inscrutable Runddans, with Todd Rundgren. 2012’s safe-but-satisfying Smalhans was hailed as a return to form, but it felt cautious, the songs modest in length and restrained in momentum. In retrospect, it was like Lindstrøm hitting reset to make way for the new Windings EP. Unfussy, bursting with confidence, and freshly energized, its three songs—two of them stretching past eight minutes—do one thing, and do it fantastically: mete out euphoria like time-release capsules.
Flawless opener “Closing Shot” comes scudding out with immediately likable clarity. You know exactly where it’s going—heavenward—but you can’t wait to hear how it gets there, and the journey is far from prosaic. It takes off like a sleek multistage rocket, gaining velocity as parts peel off and propellants kick in. The first epiphany comes about two minutes in, when a harmonic plume burns off like fog, revealing the rubbery strut of an irresistible bass line. The track is hardy, vibrant, sexy, and cosmic, but with a view from terra firma, the constellations wheeling above a rock-solid groove.
The other two tracks, while more playful than anthemic, feel equally rejuvenated, and the whole EP is subtly shot through with recurring threads that make it feel like a coherent whole. The new syncopation that perks up around five minutes into “Closing Shot,” evoking bursts of electro-funk horns, develops in “Algorytme,” which begins with teasing sprays of delayed arpeggios but could pass for a Zapp track by the end. Likewise, the graceful shapes traced in lasers through “Algorytme” carry on through “Foehn,” after which it's easy to let the record wind back to the opening track for another spin.
Windings' concept is glaringly simple: It's about nailing the ace track, stuffing it full of keen details and songful, entwining melodies. Lindstrøm has admitted as much: “I wanted to go back to the fun part of making music,” he said. He needn’t have bothered spelling it out; the sentiment is evident within moments of pressing play. | 2016-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Feedelity | July 13, 2016 | 7.7 | 6e682485-f097-48f5-96a3-7ae4fe4a91d7 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
null | David Bowie is not a man one would expect to revel in the accidental. It is as much of a cliché to divine cold strategy in his every move as it is to pretend that strategy didn't exist for, say, Janis Joplin. For those preferring to see Bowie as a contortionist auto-Svengali, the main revelation of the reissued live albums *David Live* and *Stage* will be how unafraid of imperfections he could be. These panoramic snapshots of 1970s Bowie (*David Live* came out in 1974, with *Stage* following mere four years later) mostly sound-- surprise-- like a good rock band | David Bowie: David Live / Stage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11681-david-live-stage/ | David Live / Stage | David Bowie is not a man one would expect to revel in the accidental. It is as much of a cliché to divine cold strategy in his every move as it is to pretend that strategy didn't exist for, say, Janis Joplin. For those preferring to see Bowie as a contortionist auto-Svengali, the main revelation of the reissued live albums David Live and Stage will be how unafraid of imperfections he could be. These panoramic snapshots of 1970s Bowie (David Live came out in 1974, with Stage following mere four years later) mostly sound-- surprise-- like a good rock band at work, not a collection of virtuoso day laborers supplicating at the feet of the Artiste.
For one thing, the singing remains gloriously unsweetened, not by studio overdubs for the original release nor by digital trickery-- save a spit polish of the highs and fattening of the lows-- this time. Bowie's is not exactly a golden throat, but by the mid-70s he could will his untrained voice into a soulful squeal, a come-hither lounge croon, and so on; he misses some notes but never the dramatic pitch of the line. He also used to be one of those singers who need half a set to get entirely comfortable on stage, and, as a result, Disc Two of both David Live and Stage is the stronger one by far. If by the beginning of each concert, Bowie simply performs the songs, by the end he is twisting them into entirely new creatures. David Live contains arguably the all-time greatest display of Bowie's voice as he lets loose on an r&b; version of "Rock'n'Roll Suicide", festooned with James Brownian stops, croaks, pregnant pauses, and beat-chasing rephrasings, as well as a completely sudden detonation of a very, very high falsetto.
Both albums start, predictably, with some selections from albums Bowie was promoting at the time-- Diamond Dogs and Heroes, respectively, before launching into a great big chunk of Ziggy Stardust. Interestingly enough, there are no overlaps here (name another '70s rock act that produced two 22-song concert sets in four years without repeating a single number), but an almost-complete live version of Ziggy can be put together by combining the two, if desired. In the battle of the openers, Stage wins-- the damp gloom of "Warszawa" easily trumps the glam doom of "1984".
David Live is a more genial album, as its title indicates. It's loaded with Diamond Dogs material-- nobody's favorite Bowie album-- but works hard to ingratiate itself: there's "Space Oddity", "Changes", "Jean Genie", "All The Young Dudes". What a difference four years and a move to Berlin make: David of Stage doesn't appear to be the least bit concerned with what you'll think of it, or him. Recorded between Low and Lodger-- in the odd period that found the singer at his gauntest and most ashen-faced, listlessly flirting with Aryan imagery and ignoring the verse-chorus song form-- Stage is a challenging and idiosyncratic set. Some of the risks don't quite pay off: The cover of "Alabama Song" is just a bad idea through and through, its original Weillness matted with Jim Morrisson's greasy fingerprints. And some do-- the colossal trifecta of Station To Station's eponymous track, "Stay" and "TVC 15" comprise a powerful (and punishing) 20-minute concert-closing gambit. It's just like Bowie, of course, to make two mutually exclusive modes of engaging the arena-- as a party palace and as a horror-movie science lab-- fit together in a remarkably cohesive whole. | 2005-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | September 20, 2005 | 7.7 | 6e6c47a0-85c8-4974-8468-2be4a3642d8d | Pitchfork | null |
|
The English singer-songwriter takes a scuzzy, loud, and political left turn on her gutsy fourth album. It sounds like a departure but feels like a renaissance. | The English singer-songwriter takes a scuzzy, loud, and political left turn on her gutsy fourth album. It sounds like a departure but feels like a renaissance. | Corinne Bailey Rae: Black Rainbows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/corinne-bailey-rae-black-rainbows/ | Black Rainbows | Anyone in the vicinity of a radio around 2006 heard “Put Your Records On,” Corinne Bailey Rae’s warm ode to feeling relaxed and fulfilled in the moment. Since then, the song has become a staple of easy listening channels and kindred playlists, even spinning off one viral cover. The commercial success of the song—alongside Rae’s self-titled debut, which stayed on the Billboard 200 for nearly a year and a half—helped solidify jazz, soul, and R&B as the foundation for her breezy pop. Seventeen years later, Rae has taken a sharp and surprising turn toward unabashed rock music with her scuzzy, guitar-powered new album, Black Rainbows. She’s not whispering but roaring.
As a 15-year-old in her home city of Leeds, Rae was in an upstart, all-girl rock group called Helen, drawing inspiration from women-led bands like L7, Belly, and Veruca Salt. The young ensemble garnered attention from the alt-rock heavy hitter Roadrunner Records but the deal fell through, an industry heartbreak that nonetheless kept Rae pursuing music. For the first time in her solo catalog, Black Rainbows strikes directly at those formative tastes; Rae indulges the affections of her younger self without succumbing to cheap pastiche. With ferocious energy and clear-eyed confidence, it’s as though Rae is introducing herself all over again.
Rae has spoken about a personal metamorphosis inspired by a 2017 visit to the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, a sprawling archive of Black life piloted by multi-disciplinary artist Theaster Gates. There, she encountered a striking 1954 snapshot of Audrey Smaltz, then a 17-year-old pageant winner posing with a grin on the back of a fire truck. The photo sparked Rae’s imagination for “New York Transit Queen,” which hurtles forward with blistering momentum. Less than two minutes long, it feels like the project’s thematic banner even more than the electro-collage title track. Shout-singing about her young heroine amid peppy hand-claps, Rae sounds like a cheerleader for the types of girls who need one: “Beauty is in her possession,” she sings, “and she rides, rides, rides.” Smaltz herself went on to work at Ebony Fashion Fair and establish a lifetime presence in the fashion world: Like Rae, her story is one of gutsy self-determination.
Rae immersed herself further in Stony Island’s collection of “Negrobilia,” absorbing the harrowing narratives of abuse and indignity that she contemplates in “Erasure.” “They tried to eviscerate you/Hide behind the curtain/Make you forget your name,” she howls, wrapping imagery of censored photographs in barbed-wire guitar lines and a pummeling rhythm. It’s loud, intense, and raw, a memorial to the unhealed historical wrongs that sit in the background of daily life.
Though Rae had outfitted her previous record, 2016’s The Heart Speaks in Whispers, with some synthy touches, those songs still felt oriented around radio-friendly structures. Rae co-produced Black Rainbows with her husband, Steve Brown, and she seems more comfortable with letting her experimental inclinations lead the way. “Earthlings” chugs on a mechanical synth as Rae invites us to a new utopia, and warm ripples of jazz guitar ebb into the mix like distant radio waves. “Put It Down” is Black Rainbows’ most dynamic piece, opening with an elegant string intro and the sound of gasping, almost choking breath. From a churn of slow-moving synth layers, slasher-flick violin swipes meet Rae’s staccato voice. It tumbles into a club-adjacent beat, with Rae singing as though she were shouting over the din of the dancefloor. She vows to throw her troubles down rather than be thrown under them. In these songs, Rae races through a surprising range of emotions—glee, doubt, pride, anger, grief, and peace—but her nimble ushering prevents any whiplash.
The softer turns on Black Rainbows feel nearest to Rae’s earlier material, but those, too, subvert expectations. She purrs about the perils of beauty standards on “He Will Follow You With His Eyes” before she drops the dreamy façade and celebrates her Black skin, her favorite lipstick, and her kinky hair over an electronic morass. Later, Rae splits the difference between Eartha Kitt and Kate Bush in the smoky closing track “Before the Throne of the Invisible God,” with chimes ringing among soft woodwind curlicues. The stunning “Peach Velvet Sky,” meanwhile, is a sparkling and bittersweet ballad inspired by Harriet Jacobs, author of the 1861 book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. The song is Rae’s imagining of Jacobs hiding in an attic near the plantation from which she’d escaped, where she could watch her still-enslaved children in secret from a hole in the wall of her hiding place. In parallel with the themes of deliverance that Rae presents throughout the album, “Peach Velvet Sky” honors a life spent working toward freedom around challenges that never seem to sleep. In moments like these, Black Rainbows feels like far more than the result of a pivotal museum trip or old teenage dreams revisited. It sounds like a departure, but it feels like a renaissance. | 2023-09-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Thirty Tigers | September 15, 2023 | 8 | 6e716cbe-d182-4e2f-bdf7-41e1c43d1eda | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The Swedish duo continues to find new ways of mangling techno’s lexicon. | The Swedish duo continues to find new ways of mangling techno’s lexicon. | SHXCXCHCXSH: Kongestion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shxcxchcxsh-kongestion/ | Kongestion | Swedish duo SHXCXCHCXSH’s music is relentlessly focused. The two musicians are largely anonymous: They rarely give interviews and choose instead to hide behind codes, anagrams, and indecipherable patterns in their album names and track titles. Although techno at its roots, their music also carefully folds in elements of IDM and more experimental forms.
Since their debut EP, in 2012, SHXCXCHCXSH have generally been slotted alongside artists like Ancient Methods, Rrose, or their Avian labelmates Gunver Ryberg and Pris. They share with their peers a take on techno that is brooding, bleak, and sometimes sorrowful. But SHXCXCHCXSH’s work stands apart. In addition to their anonymity and code-like sequences, they seem to purposefully make themselves hard to decipher. The sound design is sprawling, temperamental, and alive. There are no unnecessary repetitions or generic motifs; their music may channel club culture’s hedonism, but it carries a carefully thought-out nucleus at its core.
On Kongestion, their signature textural depths accompany some of their heaviest productions to date. Their sounds are unusually harsh across the seven-song EP, frequently invoking the doomy sounds of Second Phase’s 1991 classic “Mentasm.” On opener “Kong,” jagged synths rain down over staggered, distorted kick drums, and the siren-like sound reappears on “Onge” and “Nges.” “Gest” is even more dystopian, streaked with grinding, buzzing sounds that are almost unpleasant to listen to, though the relentless drums balance out the synths’ erratic bursts, pulling you under the music’s spell.
Something about the way that Kongestion’s synth riffs tend to bubble under the surface, capped by frothing white noise, gives the impression of being underwater, which makes experiencing the record in a club context an intoxicating prospect. Yet despite this aquatic feel, the atmosphere remains heavily industrial: Their rhythms lurch like lumbering behemoths assembled from battered scraps, and many of their patterns feel like accidents caught on tape. The music’s deconstructed air extends to the fact that all seven tracks feel like remixes of the same source material.
Still, however brutal Kongestion may be, it’s consistently hypnotic, whether on juggernauts like “Tion” or the foggy “Stio.” The latter is the EP’s softest track, yet it still feels ready to crumble to pieces. On Kongestion, SHXCXCHCXSH consistently find new ways of mangling techno’s lexicon, stoking the tension between chaos and control. | 2022-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Avian | March 23, 2022 | 7 | 6e728693-e831-48ab-aa0a-8c549c134ba9 | Esme Bennett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/esme-bennett/ | |
Ritual in Repeat finds Tennis continuing to mature and highlight their strengths with the help of a prominent producer, Spoon’s Jim Eno. It's a nicely confident album, one that takes a simple formula to a few unexpected places. | Ritual in Repeat finds Tennis continuing to mature and highlight their strengths with the help of a prominent producer, Spoon’s Jim Eno. It's a nicely confident album, one that takes a simple formula to a few unexpected places. | Tennis: Ritual in Repeat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19788-tennis-ritual-in-repeat/ | Ritual in Repeat | Tennis are still a young band, but their career to date would make a great case study for those trying to understand the multi-faceted, oft-destructive power of narrative in the world of contemporary music coverage. Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore emerged as the summer of 2010 started to take on heat, armed with a handful of breezy, weightless singles and a story that seemed salvaged from a rousing game of Indie-Pop Mad Libs: a young couple (insert relationship) from Denver (city) bought a sailboat (unconventional vehicle) and recorded an album about a journey on said vehicle, working under the name Tennis (sport). That album, Cape Dory, was released in January 2011, and could’ve been knocked over by a stiff sea breeze: the melodies within were pleasant but thin, and the cute story that lay at the album’s core wasn’t enough to render the music it inspired particularly compelling. The band has had a hard time escaping that plot point in the years since Cape Dory was released; it’s hard to find an interview or piece of coverage that opens with something other than a mention of Tennis’ stint on the waters of the Eastern Seaboard.
It’s too bad, because the band has largely moved on from the sound and sensibility of their early career; in fact, much of their work since has felt like a reaction to the story that lit a spark under them in the first place. They added a drummer, James Barone, and embraced bittersweet, autumnal melodies that paired well with lyrical darkness and a touch of fuzz. Subsequent releases like 2012’s second full-length Young and Old and 2013’s fine Small Sound EP were brought to life with help from well-known producers like the Black Keys’ drummer Patrick Carney and indie rock vet Richard Swift, and their best moments (“Origins”, “Mean Streets”) hinted at a level of craftsmanship and depth their early material sorely lacked. Their new record, Ritual in Repeat, finds Tennis continuing to mature and highlight their strengths—Moore’s growing voice, an ear for melody—with the help of yet another prominent producer, Spoon’s Jim Eno.
Ritual in Repeat is a nicely confident album, one that takes a simple formula—play Moore’s sweet, thin voice against sour, brooding arrangements, and eventually break open into sticky, yearning choruses laden with harmony—to a few unexpected places. The influence of the complex, emotionally ambiguous pop music of the late ‘60s and ‘70s (a period that casts a shadow over much of the band’s work) is still present, but there’s also tendrils of slinky funk (“I’m Callin’”), contemporary dream-pop (“Viv Without the N”), and spectral thesaurus-folk (“Wounded Heart”) snaking their way through the album. Almost every song has a muscle and weight to its arrangement that complements Moore’s vocal work. She’ll never have the power or gravitas of some of her contemporaries, but she’s gotten much better at writing material that suits her skill set, namely agility and an ease with harmony.
The agility comes in handy, because Ritual in Repeat occasionally sounds a little too cluttered and dense for its own good. The band and producers pile fragments of melody and instrumentation on top of each other, and it can become tough to pick out the most rewarding musical thread. It’s a record that could benefit from the application of what could be termed the Chanel principle, an adaptation of the designer’s famous quote about getting dressed: before you leave the studio, look in the mirror and take one thing out of your song.
Tennis has matured on the lyrical front in recent years, too: Ritual in Repeat focuses on complicated relationships and self-examination, rather than the vagaries of travel or the various meteorological events that marked the band's early work. The album's characters are always looking for validation, whether from a partner or some higher power; they look to their lovers, in the mirror, and to the heavens for some sort of sign that they're doing things right and moving forward. Sighing opener "Night Vision" finds Moore ably setting the scene for the latter kind of search—you can see her sitting on a wooded porch, staring in vain into the middle distance, thinking about mistakes she's made and people she's left behind. Her voice hangs with the quiet, private dissatisfaction of people who seem to have everything they could ever want, and it imbues the band's songs with a nuanced, compelling sadness. This very specific feeling is only occasionally obfuscated by her diction, which is showy to a fault; songs like "Needle and a Knife" and "Wounded Heart" are literate to the point of distraction, stuffed with ten dollar words where they could be simple and sharp.
Tennis are clearly capable of that level of acute writing, because they use it to succinctly sum up their band's appeal on back-half highlight "This Isn't My Song": "Only simple melodies/ Find their way into your memory...It's nothing profound/ Just a sweet sound." It's a smart reading of their strengths, and even a little cheeky when taken alongside Ritual in Repeat's cover and larger subject matter: if you're inclined to Tennis negatively, they look like a group of blank people offering bland sweetness devoid of deeper meaning. While the band might've fit that description at one point, they've since grown past it, so if you're one of the listeners who dismissed their earlier work as banal and bourgeois, know that Tennis has since earned another chance. | 2014-09-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-09-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Communion | September 11, 2014 | 7 | 6e752dca-e963-4ced-be1f-f6b91a61aa32 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
The Syrian dabke icon’s latest album is slicker and less varied than his earlier releases, but its breakneck rhythms and euphoric synths still pack a joyful punch. | The Syrian dabke icon’s latest album is slicker and less varied than his earlier releases, but its breakneck rhythms and euphoric synths still pack a joyful punch. | Omar Souleyman: Erbil | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/omar-souleyman-erbil/ | Erbil | It’s been a turbulent few years for dabke-techno king Omar Souleyman. In 2021 the Syrian singer was arrested in Urfa, the city in southeastern Turkey where he had been living and running a bakery since escaping Syria’s civil war in 2011. Accused of being a member of the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) militia, which authorities in Ankara consider a terrorist organization and an extension of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Souleyman was held for a little over 24 hours before being released without charges.
Aside from touching on themes of exile on recent albums, Souleyman’s music has never been overtly political (a choice that has sometimes drawn criticism from fellow Syrians). But growing up as a Sunni Arab in Syria’s culturally diverse al-Hasakah region, he absorbed Kurdish, Assyrian, and even Turkish and Iraqi influences, often singing in Kurdish and collaborating with Kurdish artists, such as his former longtime keyboard player Rizan Sa’id. Since leaving Turkey after his arrest, Souleyman has found a new home in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish Region, and it is to this ancient city—which, in contrast to the repressive regime in Turkey, offered him solace amid its diverse cultural milieu—that he dedicates his fifth studio album.
Erbil, his third full-length for Diplo’s Mad Decent (and one of over 500 albums overall, if you believe the lore), celebrates the new experiences and friendships that Souleyman encountered there. For non-Arabic speakers that’s hard to know, because the label supplies no lyrics or translations—a notable omission, considering Souleyman’s international audience. But in a way this follows the same patterns that have characterized his trajectory since he was first plucked from relative obscurity in Syria and presented to the rest of the world. For many, Souleyman may be the only dabke artist they ever come across. Decontextualized and inscrutable behind his dark sunglasses, he projects an aura of unknowability and distance.
Since Souleyman’s international breakthrough in 2007 with Sublime Frequencies’ compilation Highway to Hassake, he’s amassed hundreds of millions of YouTube views and become the face of dabke in the Western world, collaborating with a varied bunch of artists, from Björk to Gorillaz and Four Tet. On Erbil, he sticks to the time-tested formula that has propelled him thus far: his emotion-filled baritone gliding over a cascade of whirling saz lines, (mostly) electronic simulations of instruments such as oud, mijwiz, and arghul, and rock-solid, trance-inducing beats.
If anything, since his first “official” studio album, Wenu Wenu—recorded in a Brooklyn studio and produced by Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden—his sound has been repackaged in ever more polished, homogeneous ways, losing some of the overdriven, distorted energy of the early days. Make no mistake, this is still very fun music. Just about every one of the eight tracks on Erbil could be a standalone hit, their breakneck rhythms and euphoric synths more than capable of whipping up a festival crowd. The fierce saz, propulsive handclaps, and synthesized mijwiz of “Mahad Yadri” and the dizzying polyrhythms of “Maet Ala Shoftha” are potent catalysts that transform Souleyman’s emotional intensity into the ultimate party music.
But taken as a whole the album feels repetitive rather than hypnotic, a monochromatic kick drum thudding its way through almost every track, keeping Souleyman’s psychedelic tendencies anchored to the club floor, when they could be reaching for other dimensions. Propelled by clean, sharply defined drums, each track follows a well-trodden structure—a torrent of traditional melodic riffs and dabke rhythms, electrifying leads, build-ups, and drops. “Rahat Al Chant Ymme,” with its heart-pounding riff and massive reverb claps, is perhaps the epitome of this EDM-ified Souleyman. Here he again teams up with keyboard player Hasan Jamo Alo, who adds a recurring squelchy synth bass to heavily filtered keys that seamlessly intertwine with the electrified timbres of traditional instruments. Leaning into the gaudiness with hedonistic abandon, the song is laser focused on its purpose: to get people dancing.
Erbil doesn’t leave any space for the slower, more emotional interludes that supplied previous albums with a moment of respite, nor does it muster quite the same freewheeling energy of his earlier work. But it does offer the same unbridled joy, the same soul-stirring and body-moving power that helped him transcend borders in the first place. And right now, maybe that’s enough. | 2024-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Mad Decent | April 6, 2024 | 6.7 | 6e7bf711-8f7a-4260-a44e-4b8997efb885 | Megan Iacobini de Fazio | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-iacobini de fazio/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a tense, beautiful, lo-fi landmark from the second wave of black metal. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a tense, beautiful, lo-fi landmark from the second wave of black metal. | Darkthrone: A Blaze in the Northern Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/darkthrone-a-blaze-in-the-northern-sky/ | A Blaze in the Northern Sky | In the fall of 1971, a child is born in a remote village in Norway. He will one day rechristen himself Fenriz, after the Earth-swallowing wolf, Fenrir, who appears in Norse mythology and the Satanic Bible. But for now, he is Gylve Nagell, being raised by his grandmother, spending inordinate amounts of time alone. The pivotal moments of his childhood occur while listening to records, music introduced to him by an eccentric uncle named Stein. Pink Floyd catches his ear; a few songs by the Doors hold his attention; but it’s the English progressive rock band Uriah Heep that blows his mind. He’s entranced by the heavy organ sound, the cryptic lyrics, and the mysterious men with long hair who appear on the album’s cover. He cherishes the triple-fold LP like an heirloom from a past life, spending entire days in front of the record player. Soon, Uncle Stein is no longer invited to the house.
When he starts elementary school, Gylve quickly falls in with the older kids, the class clowns, and discovers the magnetic pull of having a good sense of humor. As the ’70s draw to a close, a new genre of music is exploding, giving wild, communal voice to his young outlaw mentality. There’s a band in America whose members wear makeup and stick their tongues out on stages lit by flames; there’s another group from Australia penning youthful odes to breaking the rules. The guitars are loud, the lyrics are filthy, and the teachers don’t get it. “It’s like the dreams you had when you dreamt you were in a candy store and could take all that you wanted,” Fenriz will later reflect. “But metal was real, it was there.”
It becomes his entire life. Eventually, his love for Kiss and AC/DC gives way to Iron Maiden and Slayer. At 15, he decides to start his own band. Gylve acquires a drum set, like all the crucial things in his childhood, through his Uncle Stein, and he invites his friends to record some songs under the name Black Death. Their music is sloppy and ridiculous. (Example lyric: “I was sitting in the living room watching the telly/Then something evil formed in my belly/Pizza, pizza, pizza monsters are bad.”) Reviews in the underground zines show no mercy. A writeup in Slayer Magazine—written by one of his most trusted penpals, no less—is mostly comprised of laughter and insistences to burn the tape in a garbage can.
It does not deter him. Instead, the young metalhead learns a valuable lesson. In the not-so-distant future, he will proudly refer to Darkthrone as “The Most Hated Band in the World.” He’ll use interviews as opportunities to namedrop his favorite bands lost to obscurity, besmirching the tenets of modern, commercial metal. As a teenager, he is slowly falling into those ideologies; in his forties, this is what he’ll mostly write songs about. But for now, his primary drive is just to make more music and get better as quickly as possible.
Gylve finds his match in 1988 when mutual friends introduce him to a guitarist from Oslo named Ted Skjellum, a misanthropic teen who will eventually call himself Nocturno Culto. They talk about music on the phone for an hour and decide to meet up at the train station afterward. Gylve tells Ted to “look for a strange bloke with rattail hair and a scarf.” He looks a bit like a pale, sickly, Scandinavian Slash. “It was not very difficult to point him out when I arrived,” remembered Ted, who, with his long blond hair and a chilling voice, would take on vocal duties in the band.
The first great song they make together is called “Snowfall.” By this point, Black Death have changed their name to Darkthrone—based on a song title by Celtic Frost, the brilliantly inventive Swiss band who would serve as their most lasting source of inspiration. The group consists of Gylve and Ted, as well as guitarist Ivar “Zephyrous” Enger and bassist Dag Nilsen. They have an illegible logo that looks like a tangled pile of twigs coated in ice and dripping blood—among the first in a style that would become the standard for extreme metal. At the center, near the top, is a pentagram.
The sound of the band is eerie and intense and fairly derivative. They find their voice as a death metal band, a style of music that’s popular in Florida and Sweden, defined by low, growling vocals and dissonant melodies that require a substantial amount of technical proficiency. Even without vocals, “Snowfall” shows the potential of the genre, winding through its movements like a compact showcase of the chemistry that would define Nocturno and Fenriz’s music together, conjuring images of barren landscapes and wind through shaking branches. They sound serious because they are serious. Upon completing the recording, Fenriz drops out of high school to devote himself to music, as if he had been simply waiting for the right song to convince him.
Off the strength of their demo, Darkthrone start attracting attention. They accept a deal with an English label called Peaceville—because they want to share a label with their favorite death metal band, Autopsy—and set off to record their debut full-length at Stockholm’s Sunlight Studio—because they want it to sound like their favorite death metal album, Entombed’s Left Hand Path, which was recorded there. The album they make, 1991’s Soulside Journey, is a thrilling if uneven record. As soon as they’re finished with it, they start recording a more ambitious sophomore album, which they plan to call Goatlord. The music on Soulside Journey is gaining traction—far more than any other metal out of Norway at the time—but the band is changing their interests.
“We hate that LP. It’s a silly, trendy death metal record,” Fenriz says in one of the few interviews he granted during the band’s early days. “Our first album is called A Blaze in the Northern Sky and it’s out before ’92. It’s gonna be one of the most evil and darkened albums ever! You’re all gonna hate it!”
This is the moment when Darkthrone decide to become a black metal band. Where death metal is a labyrinth littered with quicksand pits that suck you under, black metal is an icy wind that pulls you heavenward. Death metal sounds like the plumbing of some hollowed-out lurching machinery; black metal is sheets of glass fed through a wood chipper. Death metal bands sound like they practice; black metal is a ritual. Death metal riffs are burbling and low; black metal riffs are played on the highest strings, quickly like staccato notes during the tensest part of a slasher film. If you squint, it’s kind of beautiful.
It’s difficult to pinpoint what exactly changed between Soulside Journey and A Blaze in the Northern Sky, pushing Darkthrone to embrace black metal completely. They downgraded their gear and sanded their riffs down into simpler, gnarlier shapes. And unlike Soulside Journey, A Blaze in the Northern Sky was recorded close to home, in a studio in the back of a shopping mall in Kolboton, Norway. Half of its songs were revised ideas from their death metal days (“Paragon Belial,” “A Blaze in the Northern Sky,” “The Pagan Winter”), while the stronger half comprised brand new compositions in the black metal style (“Kathaarian Life Code,” “In the Shadow of the Horns,” “Where Cold Winds Blow”).
The album’s wide range of material makes it all the more compelling. Fenriz’s drumming is simplified and sharpened—no more rolling toms, no jazzy flourishes. He recorded all his drum and a few vocal parts (some gurgled incantations, a shoutout to his bandmate in the second track) in just a few days and then passed out drunk while Nocturno did his vocals in a room filled with black candles. According to at least one report, they wore corpse paint while recording.
While A Blaze in the Northern Sky lacks the intensity of its follow-ups—the masterful Under a Funeral Moon and the snowed-out hypnosis of Transilvanian Hunger—it is no less of a revelation. At this point, Darkthrone sounds less like their eventual peers—Mayhem, Burzum, Emperor—and more like a nightmarish collage of all the things they love. There are old-school riffs, gurgling spoken-word interludes, noisy solos that grind up against the infernal blast beats in a kind of sonic battlefield. “In the Shadow of the Horns,” their single greatest song, is replete with a devilish sound effect—created by Fenriz stuffing a cowbell with toilet paper—and a guitar part that sounds like Motörhead speeding down the side of a cliff on a motorcycle falling apart. Their brand of black metal had yet to be codified; on A Blaze in the Northern Sky, it is merely a feeling.
Peaceville had no idea what to do with it. It’s late 1991, death metal had never been more popular, and these abstract blasts of noise might not appeal to the growing audience that was still just discovering Soulside Journey. The label suggested a remix; the band threatened to leave. The label conceded. Before the album was released, Peaceville included “In the Shadow of the Horns” on a sampler titled Vile Vibes II. Among songs by contemporary death metal bands like Impaler and Baphomet, Darkthrone sounded even more alien. Rob Curry, aka Death Dealer of the Australian metal band Vomitor, tells a story of hearing the tape on a tour bus and listening to Darkthrone’s song on repeat for the entire four-hour ride.
This would be Darkthrone’s initial legacy: a well-kept secret among touring bands, zines, and extreme metal enthusiasts. In the United States and Europe, black metal wouldn’t make the rounds until later in the decade when gruesome circumstances brought it to people’s attention. A scene had situated around a Norwegian record store called Helvete, founded by Euronymous, the guitarist of Mayhem. Frequented by members of all the notable black metal bands, it became a toxic social circle where the tenets of white nationalism and Nazism spread, largely due to the increasingly radicalized Varg Vikernes of the one-man band Burzum. In 1993, after spearheading a series of church burnings in Norway, he murders Euronymous, goes to jail, and becomes a dark figurehead for metal’s most hateful tendencies.
In the liner notes, Darkthrone dedicate A Blaze in the Northern Sky to Euronymous, “The king of black/death metal underground.” The scene was splintering. Nilson and Nocturno move deep into the wilderness, due to a growing disillusionment with what they describe, somewhat diplomatically, as a boys club. As the decade wears on, Fenriz’s rhetoric begins sounding a good deal like Varg’s, using the word “Aryan” to promote his music and “Jewish” as a pejorative. In 1994, Peaceville refuse to promote Darkthrone’s latest album and their relationship with the label—which they once dreamed of being on—ends unceremoniously.
In a famous Kerrang! article that helped bring black metal to American audiences, Cronos, frontman of Venom, distanced himself from the Norwegian black metal movement that cited him as a primary influence. “When you talk about Satanism relating to Venom, it’s about worshipping yourself, giving yourself freedom of choice of love and hate, good and evil,” he explained. “It’s not about being beholden to a deity. It’s about being the best you can be. All of this is very sad.” By the turn of the century, Fenriz found himself creatively stagnant, falling into depression and isolation.
If the story ended there, Darkthrone’s first decade of music might feel like an artifact of a troubled time and place. But eventually, they found their voice again, reborn as a duo of just Fenriz and Nocturno. After taking a defensive stance through the ’90s, Fenriz eventually apologized and disowned his behavior both in his words and his actions throughout the 2000s. He tore down the mystery and antagonism that once defined him and the second wave of black metal he ushered in. He granted every interview requested of him and used his platform to spread the word for good new bands. In the liner notes of a career retrospective box set Black Death and Beyond, he acknowledged his regret over the language he used in the ’90s. “There is no excuse,” he wrote.
Nocturno still lives in the woods and has a day job teaching; Fenriz works in the postal industry and exhibits his passion for Norway’s wilderness by taking long hikes, going on camping trips and, briefly, holding local office. The 2010s have been among their most consistent decades, touching on all the subgenres of metal they hold dear, with the notable exception of black metal. Some fans aren’t into it. Darkthrone accepts that. “We change as all on this planet changes,” Fenriz explained. “In a natural way.”
When you listen to A Blaze in the Northern Sky, it’s impossible to ignore all the violence that followed. But deep in its foggy, impressionist landscape, you can also hear the excitement, the inspiration. You can see kids in corpse paint in a recording studio in the back of a shopping mall crowded around the speakers playing a Black Sabbath album for reference as they try to bring a vision to life. You can imagine misfits traveling in vans dreaming about where on earth this sound was coming from. And you can envision a lonely kid somewhere with an entire world opening from the speakers, who might bask in its silence after the record ends, look out the window and see something bright and strange and burning somewhere far away. | 2019-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Peaceville | September 22, 2019 | 9.2 | 6e85bf22-d4fb-4082-a24d-4d27515b9b64 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The "doom wop" project of Nick Thorburn (Islands/Unicorns), Ryan Kattner (Man Man), and Joe Plummer (Modest Mouse) offers a focused, engaging debut. Rather than serve as an outlet for their well-documented eccentric streaks, Thorburn and Kattner's good-cop/bad-cop dynamic yields some of the most tightly focused songs either principal has produced. | The "doom wop" project of Nick Thorburn (Islands/Unicorns), Ryan Kattner (Man Man), and Joe Plummer (Modest Mouse) offers a focused, engaging debut. Rather than serve as an outlet for their well-documented eccentric streaks, Thorburn and Kattner's good-cop/bad-cop dynamic yields some of the most tightly focused songs either principal has produced. | Mister Heavenly: Out of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15746-out-of-love/ | Out of Love | Eight years ago, the smart money would've bet against Nick Thorburn becoming one of the more industrious alumni to emerge from the early-2000s Canadian indie-rock uprising-- his endearingly unstable former band, the Unicorns, could barely make it through a set without experiencing some sort of breakdown (be it technical or psychological). But while he has since emerged as the autonomous creative force behind the prog-pop ensemble Islands (tellingly, it was his face alone that graced the cover of 2009's Vapours) and recently released a low key solo album under the name Nick Diamonds (I Am an Attic), Thorburn has not forgotten what made the Unicorns so special: the alternately cheeky and tense dynamic between himself and ex-bandmate Alden Penner. As such, Thorburn has never shied away from the opportunity to match wits with a creative foil, teaming up with Jim Guthrie for the countrified Human Highway detour and, now, squaring off against Ryan Kattner-- aka Honus Honus of Philly carnival barkers Man Man-- in Mister Heavenly.
Thorburn, of course, is no stranger to high-concept side projects (namely, his flirtations with hip-hop in Th' Corn Gangg and Reefer) and, on paper, Mister Heavenly initially reads like a similarly orchestrated lark. The band-- rounded out by Modest Mouse drummer Joe Plummer-- was reportedly devised around a self-explanatory sub-genre they dubbed "doom wop." The stunt-casting of actor Michael Cera as the band's bassist during their spring 2011 tour reinforced the assumption that Mister Heavenly would be a casual, low-stakes endeavor with which Thorburn and Kattner could amuse themselves before returning to their main gigs. But Mister Heavenly's Sub Pop debut proves to be something far more lasting and rewarding: Rather than serve as an outlet for their well-documented eccentric streaks, Thorburn and Kattner's good-cop/bad-cop dynamic yields some of the most tightly focused, immediately engaging songs either principal has produced.
Ironically, it's Plummer's band that seems to wield the most influence on the outset, with Thorburn's ominously quiet verses on the opening "Bronx Sniper" yielding to an immodest, un-mousey grunge crunch and an especially Isaac Brock-ian howl from Kattner. But, as bracing an introduction as it is, the song's angst-rock ballast does not provide the best showcase of Mister Heavenly's charms. These are more readily revealed when the band settle down and put their modernist spin on early, pre-Beatles rock'n'roll balladry and 1960s tropical pop. Parallel-universe golden-oldies like "I Am a Hologram", "Diddy Eyes", and "Hold My Hand" may not fully live up to the transgressive promise of the "doom wop" descriptor but, like fellow 1950s-rock enthusiasts Black Lips and King Khan in their gentler moments, Mister Heavenly approach their AM-radio inspirations with just the right balance of devotion and deviance. (To wit, on the winsome title-track-cum-band-mission-statement "Mister Heavenly", Thorburn is not so much claiming to be the man of your dreams as resigning himself to the impossibility of living up to the matinee-idol ideal.)
Out of Love's playful spirit sometimes crosses the line into unnecessary indulgence-- the rocksteady rhythm of "Reggae Pie" sounds like it'd be fun to groove on in the practice space, but probably didn't need to be featured as the album's longest track (complete with false ending), while the 98-second song that actually bears the title "Doom Wop" doesn't even attempt to honor either half of the equation. (Oddly, its sludgy slop-rock sounds uncannily like a tossed-off Ty Segall demo.) However, at no point does it feel like the players are simply using Mister Heavenly as a dumping ground for leftover song scraps they couldn't work into their primary projects: Every song here comes off like a true, collaborative union of the singers' singular personalities, with Thorburn's calm, childlike voice and Kattner's wizened old-soul rasp trading verses and choruses in surprisingly complementary fashion. The effect is mutually corrupting-- by the time we reach the wonderfully warped pen-pal exchange "Pineapple Girl", Thorburn sounds like the creepy one while Kattner acts as the stabilizing force. Really, no one would ever accuse Islands or Man Man of lacking character and presence, but once Thorburn and Kattner return to their bands after this dalliance, you'll be excused for thinking they'll sound a little bit incomplete without one another. | 2011-08-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-08-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | August 24, 2011 | 7.5 | 6e8d01d1-403f-4404-bbad-e20c1c550fd4 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Even with its imposing length and deep roster of collaborators, the ecstatic new album from Thurston Moore is arguably the most accessible entry point into his boundless experimental canon. | Even with its imposing length and deep roster of collaborators, the ecstatic new album from Thurston Moore is arguably the most accessible entry point into his boundless experimental canon. | Thurston Moore: Spirit Counsel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thurston-moore-spirit-counsel/ | Spirit Counsel | For 40 years now, Thurston Moore has maintained dual citizenship in the worlds of rock and the avant-garde. But where he spent his three decades in Sonic Youth straddling the line between those discrete realms, he’s spent much of his solo career jumping from one side to the other. For every tuneful acoustic collection he’s issued under his own name and every searing set of guitar jams he’s kicked out with his Thurston Moore Group, there are literally over a hundred small-run micro-label releases and one-off collaborations where Moore has indulged his unabating loves of improvised noise, free jazz, spoken-word poetry, and black metal without interfering with his official indie-rock discography.
By contrast, Moore’s songs in recent years have hewed more conventionally classic rock, while his sideline pursuits have turned more extreme. But even though Moore is following up his most straight-up rockin’ album to date—2017’s Rock n Roll Consciousness—with a three-disc box set consisting of three mammoth instrumental movements that collectively run for over two and a half hours, he’s using the opportunity to build a bridge across the avant/rock divide instead of a wall. Even with its imposing length, Spirit Counsel is arguably the most accessible entry point into Moore’s boundless experimental canon.
The three works that comprise Spirit Counsel showcase vastly different methodologies, but each pays impressionistic tribute to influential figures in his life and art. The first, “Alice Moki Jayne,” is named for spiritual-jazz master Alice Coltrane, Swedish visual artist/musician Moki Cherry, and political poet Jayne Cortez, three women who, perhaps not coincidentally, established singular artistic identities outside the long shadows cast by their famous husbands (John Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Ornette Coleman, respectively). But unlike Moore’s more explicit tributes to the female avant-guardians of yore, “Alice Moki Jayne” channels their radical spirit implicitly into a work that’s perpetually reaching for a higher level of consciousness while embodying the struggle to achieve it amid the disorder and distractions of modern life.
“Alice Moki Jayne” is a rarity among Moore’s improvised releases, in that its personnel—namely, guitarist James Sedwards and My Bloody Valentine bassist Deb Googe—overlaps with his regular rock-band formation, and it feels like an extension of sounds and themes mined on Rock n Roll Consciousness. Here, we’re treated to a supersized version of the Thurston Moore Group with third guitarist Jen Chochinov and electronics wizard Jon Liedecker, a.k.a. Matmos/Negativland associate Wobbly, while the band’s usual drummer, Steve Shelley, is replaced by Róisín Murphy’s touring drummer Jem Doulton. But where it’s not uncommon for Thurston Moore Group to zone out past the 10-minute mark, here he employs his players in service of a monumental work that feels like nothing less than the eternal psychic tug-of-war between hope and despair rendered as a 63-minute, 12-string guitour de force.
Following a few minutes of ominous, cymbal-washed ambient haze, “Alice Moki Jayne” starts to take shape through a shimmering refrain that provides a distant echo of Pink Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond” in both its repeated four-note melody and willingness to let it slowly evaporate into the late-night air for a seeming eternity. But from there, the work acquires a step-like structure, answering its psych-rock ascensions with meditative plateaus. One-third of the way in, after a steady build, the group locks into a hypnotic, warmly lit melody and lingers on it for several minutes, providing the track with the closest thing it has to a chorus. But half an hour later, the tension between the group’s rock formalism and lawless exploration has turned to all-out war: following a free-form, drum-less passage of flatulent guitar spasms and electronic indigestion, the group drops some truly startling blasts of distortion that trigger a heavy-metal meltdown. All of which is to say, “Alice Moki Jayne” demands a lot of your time, and rewards your patience handsomely.
Spirit Counsel’s second work is as intimate as its predecessor is expansive, with a relatively lean 29-minute runtime. “8 Spring Street” is named for the former address of Moore’s mentor and spirit guide into avant-underworld, the composer Glenn Branca. As the missing link between punk rock and Steve Reich, Branca’s densely layered guitar symphonies were foundational to the Sonic Youth sound. But instead of paying overt tribute to his late friend by attempting to replicate Branca’s heart-racing grandeur, “8 Spring Street” is a solo guitar piece that’s seemingly more interested in recapturing their moments of personal and musical connection in that SoHo apartment.
As Moore recently revealed, when hanging at Branca’s apartment, the two “would listen to the rotary fan in his window in the summertime. We would listen to the overtones, and he would say, ‘that’s what we need to sound like.” Tellingly, Moore spends much of “8 Spring Street” furiously strumming and jabbing at his instrument, conjuring the choppy rhythm and blurring motion of fan blades cutting through air—though when he activates the distortion pedal around eight minutes in, the effect is more like exploding warplanes crashing into an ocean. But “8 Spring Street” navigates its way through periodic stormy sections to arrive at a transfixing ambient-drone conclusion that functions not only as a somber farewell to a transformative figure in Moore’s life, but also a fading memory of a bohemian Manhattan that no longer exists.
If “8 Spring Street” finds Moore communing with his past, and “Alice Moki Jayne” showcases his band at full strength in the present, then Spirit Counsel’s final act points to his possible future. Recorded at London’s Barbican theater in April 2018, “Galaxies (Sky)” finds Moore leading an ensemble of 12 players on 12-string guitars for a cosmically themed composition inspired by a Sun Ra poem. The roster includes, among others, some familiar faces (Googe, Sedwards), old friends (Susan Stenger of Band of Susans, Alex Ward of N.E.W.), more recent road-mates (Rachel Aggs of Shopping/Sacred Paws, Jonah Falco of Fucked Up), the esteemed musicologist David Toop, and, perhaps most improbably, singer/songwriter James McCartney (son of you-know-who).
Clocking in at 55 minutes, “Galaxies (Sky)” is the most demanding of Spirit Counsel’s pieces, and the one positioned furthest away from Moore’s rock vernacular. Prior to the performance, Moore admitted that he had never met some of the players before; as such, he gives his charges a little extra time to get to know each other in an extended opening free-for-all where the guitars plink and plonk like mangled kalimbas, purr like a sleeping wildebeests, and clang like cast-iron wind chimes. But at the 11:30 mark, all those random noises coalesce into an ecstatic, 144-stringed drone that clears a path for a vibrant, “Street Hassle”-style pulse to take hold.
Compared to the more sectional construction of “Alice Moki Jayne,“ “Galaxies (Sky)” evolves through a more fluid, organic process, where the subtlest changes eventually have profound effects on the course of the piece. Over its second half, the psychedelic, trance-inducing qualities gradually give way to doomy dissonance, reaching particularly nauseous extremes around the 37th minute. But fitting for a release intended to coincide with International Peace Day (Sept. 21), Moore steers his troupe toward a calming come-down, harnessing the squall into a hypnotic feedback hum with lion-tamer poise. And, in the piece’s dying moments, all the guitars start ringing out like a thousand alarm clocks going off at once, a finale that feels less like self-implosion than a celebration—as if the seated players were giving themselves a string-strangled standing ovation. As the full-circle conclusion to a box set that mirrors Moore’s personal journey from avant-garde acolyte to rock-band ringleader and back again, “Galaxies (Sky)” reaffirms that, after all these years, he’s still traveling down the expressway to yr skull—it’s just expanded to a 12-lane superhighway.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Daydream Library Series | September 21, 2019 | 7.8 | 6e8f95d8-1e34-45f2-8a32-0424697c3361 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
If anyone out there is still wondering just how Ryan Adams can be so prolific, maybe it's because the ... | If anyone out there is still wondering just how Ryan Adams can be so prolific, maybe it's because the ... | Ryan Adams: Love Is Hell, Pts. 1 & 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/41-love-is-hell-pts-1-2/ | Love Is Hell, Pts. 1 & 2 | If anyone out there is still wondering just how Ryan Adams can be so prolific, maybe it's because the urgency of his situation compels him to strike while the iron is hot. It took his former band, Whiskeytown, seven years to release a trio of critically revered albums, and his first solo record, 2000's Heartbreaker, was in the works for half that. But when Heartbreaker saw release, and was promptly met with virtually unanimous critical praise, Adams clearly became inspired and quickly turned out sixteen new tracks for a sophomore record-- the rushed, overproduced Gold-- which came with a bonus disc sporting five tracks in the more stripped vein of the album's predecessor. And when that album scored Adams a commercial alternative radio hit in the well-timed "New York, New York", he descended into a recording fervor that continues, unabated, to this day.
Irrational outbursts and public meltdowns aside, Adams is, at heart, an extremely gifted songwriter who just doesn't realize that what he really needs is to take a deep breath and slow the fuck down. During the course of the past two years, he's released a collection of demos (Demolition), and a 21-track side project called The Finger with ex-D Generation frontman Jesse Malin (the "double-album" We Are Fuck You/Punk's Dead Let's Fuck). He's currently planning a box set titled Career Ender, which will be crammed with five discs of the songs he's discarded since Gold dropped two years ago. And that's not even taking into account the four-tracked blues version of The Strokes' album Is This It that he's said to have recorded. Did I mention his collaborations with Beth Orton and Emmylou Harris? How about the track he co-wrote for the Counting Crows? His session work with Lucinda Williams and Alejandro Escovedo? His production work on Jesse Malin's solo album? I think you get the point. The question is: why doesn't he?
Adams originally intended Love Is Hell as his official third full-length, but his label, Lost Highway, scoffed when he handed in the tapes. Initially, he planned to rework it, but then agreed to dashing off a glossy, radio-friendlier full-length (the disasterous Rock N Roll), provided the label would also make room on their release schedule for a secondary release for Love Is Hell. It's easy to see why Lost Highway balked: an insincere, smugly posturing Ryan Adams who lives up to his stage persona by creating an album like Rock N Roll simply had to have been preferable to the miserable, slobbering woe-is-me shtick he plays up here. At least when he was wearing the proverbial alt-country tag, his balancing act of conceitedness and overemoting was halfway convincing. Unfortunately, just as the caricature-laden excesses of Rock N Roll aped garage-rockers and postmortem Rock Hall of Famers, Love Is Hell reaches for the dripping, maudlin sentimentality of Rufus Wainwright or a mock Jeff Buckley.
It's a shock, given that the press surrounding the Love Is Hell sessions had pegged the record as Adams' return to the sparse, two-in-the-morning flair of his debut-- and when Lost Highway postponed the recordings, calling them "too dark," it only heightened the expectations of optimistic fans hoping for a stark, brooding future classic. Of course, it did seem something of an enigma as well: Adams' music, after all, had always faired best with pared-down arrangements making room for his own brand of confessional singer/songwriter groveling (e.g. Heartbreaker standouts "Call Me on Your Way Back Home" and "Come Pick Me Up"); shelving Ryan Adams for being too dark seemed to make about as much sense as shelving Kraftwerk for being too German.
But while it's safe to say that these EPs are certainly dark-- at least in contrast to Rock N Roll and even parts of Gold-- they fail to capture the striking imagery and confident vocals of which Adams seemed a master on Heartbreaker. For example, Love Is Hell's opening, piano-led "Political Scientist", replaces Adams' confessional, first-person narratives with a third-person tale that indicts the government for supplying cocaine, and candy factories for poisoning the environment. Conspiracy theories aside, playing Greenpeace spokesman is not Adams' strong suit; he attempts the political profundity of a Thom Yorke and comes off like a diet Chris Martin.
And if Adams fails to adopt Yorke's political relevance, he'll settle for the Radiohead frontman's melismatics-- Love Is Hell is riddled with Adams' unabashed aping of Yorke's signature fragmented lyrical style. On the lethargic lite-country stomp of "This House Is Not for Sale", Adams repeatedly pleads, "Calm down/ Just calm down," the emotional resonance of which verges on laughable. Meanwhile, the sleepy, acoustic blather of "Afraid Not Scared" has Adams repeatedly confessing that he is "really dying in here," and just wants to be "let down," sounding about as genuinely distraught as Ja Rule sounds genuinely "gangsta."
The eight songs that constitute Love Is Hell, Pt. 1 seem intentionally built around a studio version of Adams' infamous live staple, a cover of the Oasis hit "Wonderwall". Acclaimed Smiths producer John Porter unfortunately buries Adams beneath a sobering wall of reverb, which drains the song of its spirited pop ingenuity and transforms its nonsensical lyrics into some sort of momentous, self-important dirge. Consequently, "Wonderwall" seems emblematic of the rest of the disc, a collection of preposterously cheerless (and charmless) songs that try much too hard to achieve a poignancy-- or anything, really-- that might hide their complete insignificance.
As Love Is Hell, Pt. 1 resoundingly proves, Adams is at his finest when he sticks to the subject matter he knows best: broken hearts and bar fights. Given this, it's no shock that the highlight of this entire project comes with the Dylanesque Beth Orton kiss-off "English Girls Approximately". Appearing halfway into Love Is Hell, Pt. 2, the song is classic Adams, brimming with his smug wit (sample lyric: "You said you didn't love me, it was right on time/ I was just about to tell you, but ok, alright") and unabashed, acoustic guitar-driven ecstasy. As Marianne Faithful lends her austere vocal harmonies to the chorus, it serves as a breathtaking reminder of the chemistry Adams shared with Emmylou Harris on Heartbreaker's divine ballad, "Oh, My Sweet Carolina".
Another highlight of Love Is Hell, Pt. 2 is its closing R&B; vamp, "Chelsea Nights". Over a bed of radiating Wurlitzer chords and bluesy guitar fills, Adams narrates a night spent aimlessly wandering New York City's unfeeling winter streets, searching for the love he always manages to lose. The track, which peaks with Adams' plaintive confession, "I played your song/ I got the melody all wrong," is filled with the self-awareness, irony, and despondency that's made Adams' best work so moving, all the way back to his Whiskeytown days; it's a shame he forces his listeners to wade through a glut of unsalvageable crap-rock to arrive at it.
Indeed, these two tracks are anomalies-- happy accidents, or moments of clarity-- amongst the overbearing melodrama of the bulk of material contained on Love Is Hell, Pt. 2. "Thank You Louise" serves as the harrowing antithesis to these diamonds in the rough, an atrocious slice of sloppy sentimentality in which Adams sings, over an unnecessarily bloated string section, of a mother receiving news of her son's death. For a guy who's attained uncommon levels of infamy by simply being a sarcastic fucking prick all the time, he pours on the schmaltz here like he studied under Air Supply. The Joy Division rip-off "City Rain, City Streets" is so bereft of any humor that its megalomania challenges even Conor Oberst: Adams crams nearly four minutes of distorted new-wave guitars and gratuitous reverb into this shudder-inducing display of shamelessness, proudly spouting disasters like, "I fucked you over a million times," and, "You died, you died, you really died."
Listening to these discs, one can only imagine the myriad reasons Lost Highway decided to release the Love Is Hell sessions not as one spiraling, abysmal full-length, but as a pair of EPs (let alone why they shelved it to make way for Rock N Roll instead). The obvious, cynical answer is that it wouldn't detract from the publicity they were expecting Rock N Roll to receive. But it's also easy to envision the label's creative heads considering how spreading the material out might help conceal the songs' alarmingly empty sentiments. The sad fact is, no marketing strategy, no matter how savvy, could conceal this collection's bathetic, overwrought travesties and gruesome failures. In the midst of this mess, both Adams and Lost Highway come out losers: one critical car-wreck might have been manageable, but they may not recover from two. | 2004-01-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2004-01-07T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Lost Highway | January 7, 2004 | 3.1 | 6e8fcd25-ca49-4b25-93d0-62842b7d4aa7 | Hartley Goldstein | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hartley-goldstein/ | null |
The Delta-tinged garage band's latest record-- created with producer Danger Mouse-- was originally conceived as a collaboration with the late Ike Turner. What remained following Turner's death became the foundation of their fifth and most adventurous album to date. | The Delta-tinged garage band's latest record-- created with producer Danger Mouse-- was originally conceived as a collaboration with the late Ike Turner. What remained following Turner's death became the foundation of their fifth and most adventurous album to date. | The Black Keys: Attack & Release | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11358-attack-release/ | Attack & Release | The Black Keys seemed doomed to linger in the long, black-and-red shadow of the White Stripes. That's perhaps unfair: Akron's Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney have perfected their own brand of Delta-tinged, garage minimalism. But after four albums, even they seemed to realize they had hit a creative wall. Luckily, in 2007, they were tapped by producer Danger Mouse for a collaboration with Ike Turner, though when he passed away last December, the project left the duo with a host of material. This became the foundation of their fifth and most adventurous album to date. Maneuvering between the King of Rhythm's joie de vivre and their crestfallen, crossroads-blues heritage, Attack and Release subtly expands the Black Keys sound.
An auteur raised on hip-hop, DM keeps the record from staying overly loyal to the Creedence or Free templates. This is a small but crucial difference from 2006's Magic Potion. He colors the band's no-frills narratives with futuristic accents or, on the opposite end, rural flourishes of psychedelia and folk. On each track they add a bolt of surprise that amplifies the pitch-black mood and message. Take the flutes and feedback of "Same Old Thing", which in combination suggest a childlike innocence peeled away by a cold, indifferent world. Likewise, a tension opens between the peppy xylophone and world-weary, Waitsian tremolo on "So He Won't Break". Longtime Waits and Elvis Costello guitarist Marc Ribot lends his powers to this song and to the anguished 6/8 masterpiece "Lies". Here (and elsewhere: "Psychotic Girl", "I Got Mine", "Strange Times") Danger Mouse's layer of backing vocals imbue these earthly stories with a beyond-the-grave air, taking lost-love themes to an eerily literal but quintessentially blues-y level. The unexpected organ line of "All You Ever Wanted" feels like a police ambush on this jilted-John ballad. We almost forget that, in light of the band's uniformly lo-fi discography, nearly every fresh sound on Attack & Release should strike us as alien.
A sequence of slow burns, the record's tempos allow you to relish the details and the textures. "Remember When (Side A)", with its eddies of reverb, envisions nostalgia as something dim and meticulously crafted, with a touch of the fantastic. Speaking of the past, the raw, amplified wallop of the Black Keys' old days is still here, too. Given that Ike Turner was partly responsible for rock'n'roll's love affair with distortion, it would have been wrong for Attack & Release to discard fuzzy riffs. The other side of "Remember When" will sooth anyone longing for their sinewy Nuggets rave-ups. Fans of previous BK records will find this song and the first single, "Strange Times", the bluntest weapons here.
"Things Ain't Like They Used to Be" leads the album to a grim finish. Auerbach's sluggish, hung-over melodies, echoed by teenage protégé Jessica Lea Mayfield's distant singing, carry an air of defeat. Addressed to an old lover, the lyrics describe a happier past, overgrown yards, a man blindly walking into battles, and other ingredients of lament. Yet Carney and Auerbach know that there's more to the blues than bad news. These men are stoics to the fingertips. "It doesn't mean a thing to me," Auerbach repeats on the chorus. The jaded ex of "Same Old Thing" speaks the same language: "It don't matter where you been." We know better. | 2008-04-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-04-01T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | April 1, 2008 | 7.5 | 6e921998-2335-4933-8067-eecb1b510717 | Pitchfork | null |
|
Lana Del Rey’s second album of the year is a sweeping survey of her talent as a songwriter, stripped of the aesthetic borders she often places around her work. | Lana Del Rey’s second album of the year is a sweeping survey of her talent as a songwriter, stripped of the aesthetic borders she often places around her work. | Lana Del Rey: Blue Banisters | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lana-del-rey-blue-banisters/ | Blue Banisters | In the decade since her major-label debut Born to Die, Lana Del Rey has worked so quickly and consistently, navigating so many passing controversies and thorny conversations, that it has been easy to take for granted her steady evolution as an artist. The 36-year-old musician recently took a break from social media, allowing herself an uncharacteristically quiet press cycle, and there she sits on the cover of her second album of 2021, Blue Banisters, nestled between two German shepherds, serene and pastoral, removed from the world. Things, for the moment, seem peaceful.
So let’s take this opportunity to check in on the state of her art with a standout track called “Black Bathing Suit.” The subject matter remains in her wheelhouse. She admits to being complicated. She self-identifies as a “bad girl,” someone with a price on her head, living on borrowed time. She writes with a casual sense of fatalism about loneliness (“If this is the end, I want a boyfriend”) and ennui (“When I’m being honest, I’m tired of this shit”), drawing our attention to the titular item of clothing with a sense of focus that, when applied in horror films, generally leads us to believe this object will later be used to identify a body. This is all Lana 101.
But there are crucial updates. Unlike the Great Gatsby roleplay of her early work, all the action takes place in the present day—which we recognize instantly because the opening line goes, “Grenadine, quarantine, I like you a lot/It’s LA, ‘Hey’ on Zoom, Target parking lot.” And while it was once easy to label Lana a pop artist—someone whose songwriting worked with tight structures and hooks, accompanied by fancy videos and dance remixes—“Black Bathing Suit” breaks from any confines. As she moves from verse to pre-chorus to chorus, she lets the seams show, each section finding its own distinct atmosphere with ghostly harmonies, off-time cymbal taps, and, near the end, a hoarse, Fetch the Bolt Cutters wail. Eventually, you start to feel like you’re in the studio alongside her, listening past the fade out as she tweaks and ornaments the music to keep herself interested.
There is a sense of playfulness, unguardedness, and freedom to Blue Banisters. If its predecessor, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, was Lana’s most traditional singer-songwriter affair—a somewhat monochromatic collection of mid-tempo songs played on piano and acoustic guitar—then these 15 tracks share a more boundless vision. One of its highlights, the closing “Sweet Carolina,” pairs a stunning, delicate vocal performance with a set of lyrics possibly dedicated to her sister. And then, out of nowhere, there’s a verse that goes like this:
You name your babe Lilac Heaven
After your iPhone 11
‘Crypto forever,’ screams your stupid boyfriend
Fuck you, Kevin
It’s funny and real, a reminder that the people we love most aren’t just the ones to whom we dedicate our earnest love songs—they’re often the recipients of our dumbest jokes.
This freewheeling tone also informs the structure of the album. Placed among modern transmissions like “Black Bathing Suit,” “Sweet Carolina,” and “Text Book” (“There we were, screaming, ‘Black Lives Matter,’” she reflects) are songs like “Living Legend” and “Cherry Blossom,” titles that have circulated among her fanbase in unofficial form for years. These recordings, which date back as far as the sessions for 2014’s Ultraviolence, constitute about a third of the tracklist, stretching the runtime past an hour and making the whole thing feel slightly unwieldy, off-balance, lacking the cohesion of her best albums.
And yet, these qualities also make the record stand out: a survey of Lana’s gifts, stripped of the aesthetic borders she often places around her work. It’s an approach that aligns her with the legacy artists she has always drawn from—Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen, craftsmen constantly digging through the archives to recontextualize their mythology. But there is also pop precedent. Were Lana less obsessive about her body of work, she might have sequenced the newer songs onto a deluxe edition of Chemtrails; were she more savvy, she might have issued them as an interlinked companion release to close out the year.
Fortunately, Blue Banisters stands on its own, encompassing the many styles she has by now mastered: The edgy Miles Kane collaboration “Dealer” returns to the psych-rock hypnosis of Ultraviolence, while the spare “Beautiful” draws from the same well of aspirational standards as 2017’s “Love.” Her collaborators include familiar names (Rick Nowels, Zachary Dawes) and literal family members (her father and sister, co-writers on “Sweet Carolina”), alongside ex-boyfriends and producers like Mike Dean. Still, the whole thing flows with a breezy, self-contained hum. For those unfamiliar with the pivots and scenery changes from album to album, you might not even notice the time-jumps.
Despite the wide range of moods—the unbridled howl of “I don’t wanna live” in “Dealer,” her old Hollywood quiver returning for “Nectar of the Gods”—the clearest evolution is in the writing. Sometime around 2019’s high-water mark Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Lana made a shift from character studies and archetypes (best exemplified here in the classic-sounding “Thunder”) to first-person musings on celebrity, inextricable from her own life in the public eye. On Chemtrails, she sang about “coverin’ Joni and dancin’ with Joan,” and now she writes about her family, her creative process, and her personal struggles, most directly in “Text Book.” For all the sadness and desperation across her songbook, an early lyric in the song, “I didn’t even like myself,” feels like her barest, most wounded confession.
When Lana released the piano ballad “Arcadia” this summer, she instructed her fans, “Listen to it like you listened to ‘Video Games.’” On one hand, she might have been trying to game the system, encouraging listeners to boost the streaming numbers to match those of her past work. (Born to Die remains her only album to spawn a Top 10 hit.) But maybe she was asking for something more personal. After all, her debut single was likely the last time that Lana could release music to zero expectations, introducing herself to the world on her own terms. Like a lot of people who feel misunderstood, she is a chronic over-explainer, and Blue Banisters sprawls and elaborates past the point where we can place our own projections onto it. We know too much. But at its best, this music offers an even more rewarding thrill: It manages to entertain, enrapture, and even surprise because of how well we know Lana Del Rey—and how much there is still to learn.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polydor | October 22, 2021 | 7.7 | 6e9263e0-5ef6-4668-89b8-71061632e098 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Kentucky folksinger’s fifth solo album strips down to acoustic instrumentation and her softly luminous voice, carving out a refuge where love and nature find solace in each other. | The Kentucky folksinger’s fifth solo album strips down to acoustic instrumentation and her softly luminous voice, carving out a refuge where love and nature find solace in each other. | Joan Shelley: Like the River Loves the Sea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joan-shelley-like-the-river-loves-the-sea/ | Like the River Loves the Sea | The fifth solo album from Joan Shelley, the Kentucky folk singer-songwriter, arrives with the promise of sanctuary. Like the River Loves the Sea is a 12-track dispatch from a carefully cultivated microclimate in which the worlds of nature and love coexist and co-depend, each offered a fighting chance to blossom away from the persistent clamor of the everyday. On paper, perhaps, it reads like a retreat. (Shelley calls it “a haven for overstimulated heads in uncertain times.”) In practice, it sounds like a bolstering of defenses—strong and unapologetic.
Over the past five years, Shelley has subjected her music to a process of rewilding. The noisier post-rock terrain of earlier albums, notably Electric Ursa, has been grassed over to create something naturalistic and unadorned. Aided by her core collaborators, James Elkington and Nathan Salsburg, she has pared down her songs to the base elements of acoustic instrumentation and her softly luminous voice: cool, unshowy, conversational. Now and then there are drums, marking time rather than disturbing it.
Yet with each step she adds a new flavor. On her last album, 2017’s Joan Shelley, the surprise ingredient turned out to be a wholesome pinch of Jeff Tweedy, who added bass and guitar and produced Shelley at his Loft studio in Chicago. This time Shelley and her bandmates recorded in Reykjavik, and although the sound is fashioned from an intricate blend of guitar, piano, and keyboard, the emphasis has changed once again, primarily due to the violin and cello orchestrations of Icelandic sisters Þórdís Gerður Jónsdóttir and Sigrún Kristbjörg Jónsdóttir. Their contributions lend these songs their wings. On “Cycle” and “Stay All Night,” the tensile shimmer recalls the high-wire tumble of strings at the climax of Van Morrison’s “Astral Weeks.”
Large parts of the album are almost overwhelmingly beautiful. On “Teal” and “High on the Mountain,” the melodies tumble down like mountain water, at once fresh and familiar. These are summery, late-1960s folk-pop songs left to meander in the meadows. Other tracks are tougher than tree trunks. “Coming Down for You,” a rigid, crackling, minor-key bluegrass tune with vocals shared between Shelley and her fellow Kentuckian Will Oldham, firmly rebuffs any whiff of the bucolic.
On a record where the smallest movements matter, both musically and lyrically, Shelley proves hyper-attuned to the twitch of the moment. On “Teal,” she recalls the instant when “the bones of my neck lifted.” On “When What It Is,” a distant rattle of harmonium somehow conjures the precarious nature of commitment. Several songs track shifting romantic fortunes via the changing seasons, recognizing that change is hard-wired. “The Fading,” where she is again joined by Oldham, links broken-down love to the inevitable churn of harrow and harvest, drought and flood. On “The Sway”—a sepia country-blues, reminiscent of Cowboy Junkies—fences fall and rivers turn to mud, just as the many forms of love investigated here are similarly buffeted by outside forces. All that’s left to hold on to is the certainty that what has changed now will in time change again.
In the flux, coupling becomes a matter of sacred communion. On “High on the Mountain,” Shelley recalls a time “when the bed wasn’t mine but ours.” On “The Fading,” the outline of a lover’s form remains after they are gone, both comfort and curse. “Tell Me Something” makes explicit the raw carnality underpinning many of these songs: “Take me to the bed, shake me to my knees,” she sings, as a lone viola slices through the pheromones, “where I can find a piece of you, and you can have a piece of me.”
There are other moments where the animating spark is less present, when the simple nursery-rhyme cadences of Shelley’s melodies feel a little too homespun. “Awake” is almost cutesy, “Any Day Now” a routine jog. Mostly, Like the River Loves the Sea succeeds in elevating Shelley’s ruminations on “the ground I am bound to” and “the tender things around me” to matters of universal resonance.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | September 4, 2019 | 8.1 | 6ea25a0e-a567-46ad-b5c8-7fbdd45ba72f | Graeme Thomson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/graeme-thomson/ | |
Singer-songwriter recruits members of 31Knots and Norfolk & Western to help her mold this intelligent and devastatingly downbeat "relationship" album, released on Mark Kozelek's label. | Singer-songwriter recruits members of 31Knots and Norfolk & Western to help her mold this intelligent and devastatingly downbeat "relationship" album, released on Mark Kozelek's label. | Corrina Repp: The Absent and the Distant | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9633-the-absent-and-the-distant/ | The Absent and the Distant | Holy "Hans Christian Andersen's original represssed-homosexuality version of The Little Mermaid in which Ariel feels like she's dancing on knives," Pitchfork does not pay me enough to listen to this album one more time. Corrina Repp went and recruited members of 31Knots and Norfolk & Western to help make one of the most intelligent and devastatingly downbeat "relationship" albums of this herky-jerk decade, for Mark "Professionally Sad" Kozelek's all-but private label. I planned a half-dozen detached ways to navigate this review. I considered typing about this one time at the beach when females were suddenly honest about the peanut butter & canine cunnlingus urban legend (admitting "girls are sick fucks"), which hopefully would have tapped into this album's "wouldn't-you-like-to-know" Virgin Suicides mystique. Or maybe about how one of this album's most why-people-cut-themselves anthems, "All", is named after the most grandiose of the whole insane range of grandiose names for laundry detergent. But The Absent and the Distant will not let me dodge its "emo"-- okay, rebuke cutesyness, I mean "emotional"-- tractor beam.
Every song on this album, even (perhaps especially) the instrumentals, is a magic, killer, killer bullet that might only work on a small percentage of the shopster populazzi. You have to be prayerfully anticipating the last time that you fail someone. You have to have recently been accused of masturbating with a towel lying atop your computer even though it was for navelgazer tears and snot. You have to have imagined that corpse-bog from Lord of the Rings filled with your exes. You have to be so consumed with a decision about a partner that all other decisions got left unmade; you have to have once felt so "fixed" by a significant other that all else in your life fell into disrepair, even as your brain scrambled "disrepair" to spell "diaper, sir."
I've used the weak, unvivid verb combo "has/have" eight times so far in this review, but only because Corrina Repp uses it so sharply, in re: not being able to be "had" or to "have" someone else. She recklessly examines the point at which wanting to "have" another person lapses into a tyrannical ownership fantasy, which then lapses into an existential realization about how we barely have ourselves. Repp also menacingly abuses the pronoun "it" without letting it modify anything in particular. She does so most violently during the monogamy-shuffling "Anyone's It," which I can't continue to talk about.
Repp's recipe involves a churchy minimalist piano pattern overlaid with cold-chill trilling at the chorus from either a mandolin or another piano track or epically reverbed percussion. Her directness is disarming during this cultural moment that places such a high premium on gimmicks and obfuscation. Her huge vocals take up so much space in the mix that they'll remind you of the days when horror movies weren't about the body. Repp's a better balladeer than many of the bearded boys imagined to own the mode, and the songs often opt out of an easy sad/happy dynamic to shoot for double-edged truthiness: "What if that safe place has secrets no one understands?" "You hurt because you love someone." Friends of a new couple "wonder why we're both a little gone." Every conventionally sweet moment collides with a line measuring the loneliness love causes: "Wait for me/ I'll wait for you/ O the things that we have lost." The stately pose of Repp's used-to-be-human delivery prevents the lyrical sincerity from embarrassing itself, perhaps too often.
Again, you probably have to doff your savvy consumer-armor and sit around in your sentimental fishnets to truly experience this album's captivating stillness, its relaxing sense of risk, its Broadcast-and-Patsy-Cline-make-a-folk-album-with-This-Mortal-Coil scope, and its portraits of lovers who anchor each more deeply in direct proportion to their insistence on remaining adrift. If you already sit around in sentimental fishnets all day, trust that you will not be able to handle The Absent And The Distant; it will have dismantled you long before the hymnic "That Which Has No Remorse" visits pews kept warm by 1970s Bob Dylan and 1990s Daniel Johnston. As a distraction from this disc's power, maybe shout "deez nuts" once per track, and keep CSS or something similarly silly-assed handy on your iTunes playlist. | 2006-11-30T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2006-11-30T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Caldo Verde | November 30, 2006 | 8 | 6ea464e2-66a4-43dc-8f6a-688f58d88c40 | William Bowers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/william-bowers/ | null |
This gospel set covers a wide range of approaches: from contented to contemptuous, sessions to field recordings, fevered shouts to ruminative moans. | This gospel set covers a wide range of approaches: from contented to contemptuous, sessions to field recordings, fevered shouts to ruminative moans. | Various Artists: Fire in My Bones: Raw + Rare + Otherworldly African-American Gospel, 1944-2007 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13759-fire-in-my-bones-raw-rare-otherworldly-african-american-gospel-1944-2007/ | Fire in My Bones: Raw + Rare + Otherworldly African-American Gospel, 1944-2007 | Fire in My Bones makes its intentions known within its first three songs. This 3xCD gospel collection opens with the spry, graceful instrumental performance of the traditional hymn "Peace in the Valley", recorded in 1963 by ace lap steel player Rev. Lonnie Farris. It's not the obvious choice for an opener, but serves as a kind of overture. Immediately following is "Rock and Roll Sermon", in which Mobile, Alabama's Elder Beck enumerates the evils of secular music and its degenerative effect on good Christian society. Amazingly, the song itself rocks hard, as Beck improvises on Bill Halley's "Rock Around the Clock" and an unknown guitar player fires off ferocious hellfire licks. After that Spirit-fueled sermon comes "If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again", a professional recording by Rev. Anderson Johnson that manages to be both restrained and massively moving, his smoothly expressive voice effortlessly conveying his orphan angst.
In just three songs, Fire in My Bones covers a range of musical approaches and emotional expressions: from contented to contemptuous, from professional sessions to field recordings, from fevered shouts to ruminative moans. Gospel, this collection insists, is not one thing but many. The term itself constitutes such a wide umbrella that it may have more to do with the performers and their intentions than with the noises they make. That mission explains some of the curious aspects of the collection, which was curated by writer, archivist, and Pitchfork contributor Mike McGonigal. First, there's that unhelpfully long time frame, which spans the height of World War II through the last days of the Bush II era. What can you say about gospel and its development throughout the 20th century if you're painting with such broad strokes? As a history of the form, Fire in My Bones offers little insight into how it developed across these 63 years. To be fair, though, McGonigal is after more than a simple chronicle of the genre. He eschews the post-war heyday th [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| at many compilers and historians emphasize, setting his sights on the margins of the gospel mainstream.
Those margins are lively and rambunctious, which makes Fire in My Bones an often mind-blowing listening experience-- a Nuggets-style mix from a guy with a deep knowledge of the subject. Disparity is the key theme: On "Wasn't That a Mystery", the Madison County Senior Center Singers deliver a mighty call and response, while Rev. G.W. Killens and the Mt. Calvary Congregation achieve a full upswell of wordless sounds-- a truly joyful noise, but also one filled with dark warning. The Abraham Brothers' "Spirit of the Lord" possesses a gravitational sway that isn't too far removed from the rockabilly rhythms of the Radio Four's "How Much I Owe". Not so much in their subject matter but in the quality of their performances, these recordings make clear these are first and foremost worship songs, but there are many ways to praise God: extolling His power to others, recounting personal experiences and commitments, and deploying a brand of scare tactics that might seem ugly if not set to such rollicking and urgent music.
The musical and emotional diversity of this collection speaks to the range of circumstances under which these songs were performed and recorded, as well as to the variety of African-American experience throughout the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st. These artists made music using whatever resources were available, for whoever was devoted enough to hear them: a professional studio, an archivist's reel-to-reel, a congregation that can double as an instrument, or just a beat-up harmonica. As Tennessee singer Joe Townsend exclaims, "If I could not say a word, I would just raise my hand." For showing the many different ways people can raise their hands, Fire in My Bones is an invaluable introduction to the power and breadth of gospel, as wide and disparate as "rock'n'roll" or "hip-hop." But that lesson isn't this collection's greatest quality. Rather, its true selling point is the intense power of these individual testimonies, which rock, roll, and revel with passion and real fire. | 2009-12-11T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2009-12-11T01:00:04.000-05:00 | null | Tompkins Square | December 11, 2009 | 8.4 | 6eacc7ce-36ac-4dc6-a558-d5e6a5193bfe | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Steve Gunn is a sometime-guitarist in Kurt Vile's Violators, and one half of the Gunn-Truscinski Duo. Time Off is a collection of six loose, spiraling guitar songs that give more than they ask: generous compositions, gently presented, recalling the Grateful Dead, JJ Cale, and Bert Jansch. | Steve Gunn is a sometime-guitarist in Kurt Vile's Violators, and one half of the Gunn-Truscinski Duo. Time Off is a collection of six loose, spiraling guitar songs that give more than they ask: generous compositions, gently presented, recalling the Grateful Dead, JJ Cale, and Bert Jansch. | Steve Gunn: Time Off | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18176-steve-gunn-time-off/ | Time Off | Over the last decade, a spate of pastiche-fiends have been mining previously dormant genres for inspiration-- and as a result, dudes like Bruce Hornsby and Nile Rodgers are now serving unexpected, late-career stints as alt-touchstones. “Jam bands,” though-- long the presumed terrain of white people in dreadlocks and homemade pants-- stay largely unsung; maybe there’s something too dopey about the contemporary scene, or something too ambitious about the virtuosity high-caliber jams require. The Grateful Dead remain the grand exception, a band that’s somehow both an embodiment of and an outlier within their field. The Dead’s best live jams are emotional, melodically dizzying romps, rightly treasured for their ability to insulate a listener from whatever shitty things might be transpiring elsewhere. There’s safety in those songs. Getting close to it can feel euphoric.
Steve Gunn, a sometime-guitarist in Kurt Vile’s Violators and one half of the Gunn-Truscinski Duo, is offering the same kind of shelter on Time Off, a collection of six loose, spiraling guitar songs that give more than they ask: These are generous compositions, gently presented. Gunn’s a descendent of the Dead, but also of J.J. Cale and La Monte Young and Bert Jansch and Frank Hutchinson, and his guitar playing has a mesmeric quality, a tender circling that feels almost like being swaddled. Which is not to belittle their potency, or Gunn’s craft: he’s a nimble, expressive guitarist and a pleasantly lackadaisical vocalist, singing, as he does, about his Brooklyn neighborhood, or water bumping a waterwheel into motion, or taking a certain path through a field. There’s an unrefined, organic quality to Gunn’s work that occasionally recalls Chicago stalwarts Califone or early Red Red Meat-- a reinterpretation of “Americana” that allows for plenty of ingenuity (and requires no costuming).
Gunn’s voice is rambling and soft, but he’s a welcome guide wherever and whenever he shows up-- like a third of the way into “Street Keeper”, when his vocals hitch onto a sweet guitar refrain, or on “Water Wheel”, where he sounds, momentarily, like the late Shannon Hoon, mewing placidly about a river. There are bits here that feel improvised-- or at least slack enough to suggest improvisation-- but Gunn’s songs still rely on patterns and interactions that were clearly composed with care. It helps that his backers (John Truscinski on drums and Justin Tripp on bass) are as comfortable with a groove (see “New Decline”, especially) as they are with hoisting up Gunn’s guitar.
Like all acoustic guitarists with extensive record collections, Gunn has endured plenty of comparisons to John Fahey, but the association feels almost too facile to perpetuate: While Gunn’s produced some more explicitly cerebral work (for a time, he was into manipulating tapes of field recordings), Time Off’s biggest asset is its ease. There’s a real sense, listening to these tracks, that everything could be a little simpler if we all stopped trying so hard. It is deeply mellow in a way that the famously cantankerous Fahey would have likely found confounding.
It’s also a record that happens to make tremendous sense right now, on the precipice of summer, when we’re all anxious to uncurl a little. On “Lurker”, Gunn sings repeatedly about finding “a spot to kill time and look around,” and while it’s ostensibly an innocent observation of a neighborhood drifter, it ends up feeling more like a directive-- advice to heed. Find a spot, kill some time. Look around. | 2013-07-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-07-12T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | July 12, 2013 | 7.9 | 6eaf5d13-8fcf-4156-8160-ff9e19de9d3b | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | null |
Working alongside her partner Damon Reece, the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser delivers her most substantial musical statement in a quarter century. | Working alongside her partner Damon Reece, the Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser delivers her most substantial musical statement in a quarter century. | Sun’s Signature: Sun’s Signature | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suns-signature-suns-signature/ | Sun’s Signature | In the quarter century since the Cocteau Twins broke up, Elizabeth Fraser’s career has resembled that of an athlete whose natural talent throws off their decision-making. Fraser’s voice, a heavenly glissando swoop that could charm a butterfly from its chrysalis, is so exquisite that her irregular guest appearances (notably on Massive Attack’s “Teardrop”) and one-off songs have rarely disappointed. But her solo work has lacked focus, with no definitive statement to lift her out of the Cocteau Twins’ lengthy shadow. Sun’s Signature, an eponymous five-track EP from Fraser’s duo with percussionist and romantic partner Damon Reece, is her most substantial undertaking since the Cocteau Twins. It proves worth the wait: a display of rarefied skill scaled to surprisingly human proportions.
The origins of Sun’s Signature lie in the ANOHNI-curated London Meltdown Festival in 2012, where Fraser and Reece debuted embryonic versions of four of the five songs on the EP. (“Underwater,” the trip-hop-adjacent and slightly pat opening track, was originally released in 2000 as a Fraser solo single, although the Sun’s Signature version has been fleshed out with new elements, remixed, and remastered). Over the following decade, the perfectionist duo painstakingly worked up their material, re-editing and refining every element to create a work of incredibly rich—and often unexpected—detail. Reece cites Bernard Herrmann and John Barry’s soundtracks as inspiration for Sun’s Signature’s intricate sound, and there is a widescreen element to the duo’s music, which takes in vibraphone, mellotron, Moog, cimbalom, and more, sounding in places almost like Moon Safari.
Added to this is a healthy and rather unexpected dose of prog rock, with former Genesis member Steve Hackett providing crackling sustained guitar to “Underwater” and standout “Golden Air”; his work sets psychedelic fire to “Golden Air” like John Lennon and George Harrison’s overdriven solos on the Beatles’ “It’s All Too Much.” Hackett also contributes Spanish guitar to the beatific closing track “Make Lovely the Day,” while Reece opts for some interesting percussive choices. “Bluedusk” starts with stately timpani, and a rolling, millipede-like tom-tom line on “Golden Air” adds an unexpected rhythmic twist.
The result—the underwhelming “Underwater” aside—is an atypical and richly baroque musical bed that is, finally, worthy of Fraser’s singular talent. The Scottish singer’s voice is so richly alluring that it can feel like a cheat code for producers, a way of bolting ready-made elegance to any structure, from Oneohtrix Point Never’s collapsing electronics to Sam Lee’s orchestral folk. But Reece’s sparkling productions feel specifically tailored to her voice, which finds its reflection in the swoon of a Moog or the gentle touch of an acoustic guitar, music and voice amplifying each other’s considerable charms.
Fraser is in predictably fine form. Her voice has matured considerably from the slightly jagged tones of her Cocteau Twins debut, when the band sailed close to punk rock and goth; here, she lands on a tone that is higher, fuller, and more recognizably human in register. Her lyrics, often indecipherable at the Cocteau Twins’ peak, are recognizable and even relatable on Sun’s Signature, speaking of love, nature, and the passing of the seasons. To write the lyrics, Fraser made collages of words borrowed from various literary sources, which might explain esoteric phrases like “Sing-ho, Oriole/Tretemolo, Empemblon/Skyliblong” (from “Apples”). But other lines—“Summer is gone/The autumn of my life”; “Daughter, I kiss you/Always hold you”; “See him rise and make lovely the day”—suggest profound and poetic universal truths. This combination of personable voice, discernible lyrics, and grown-up themes suffuses the EP in a warm maturity that Cocteau Twins fans will recognize from the band’s penultimate album, Four-Calendar Café, although Sun’s Signature take a more adventurous approach than Cocteau Twins did on their excellent, if rather meat-and-potatoes, major-label debut.
The crowning glory of Sun’s Signature is the songwriting, a skill that was often eclipsed by Cocteau Twins’ impeccable sonics. The vocal melodies of “Golden Air” and “Apples,” in particular, tumble with acrobatic grace, while the duo’s off-center arrangements explore unpredictable peaks and troughs. When the two combine, as on the rapturous climax of “Golden Air,” the result is ecstatic.
Comparisons to the Cocteau Twins are inevitable. But whereas Fraser’s iconic group brought an otherworldly, almost incomprehensible beauty to much of their music, Sun’s Signature’s charm is surprisingly empathetic. It feels hospitable and lived in, binding earthly emotion with musical grace. That’s not to say the album is humdrum or common: Fraser’s voice remains an extraordinary instrument, while the production is impressively diverse. But this is the mortal magic of a smile as opposed to the astral wonder of the stars: Sun’s Signature is among Fraser’s most illuminating and eloquent music to date, the work of a flesh-and-blood person rather than the chimerical Cocteau Twin of myth. | 2022-07-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | July 28, 2022 | 8 | 6eb38c46-7ea9-4f49-bbd3-39b23743c60c | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
On his new trap- and hyphy-inflected mixtape, Ty Dolla $ign stumps for Hillary—and he's pretty psyched on Jack Johnson, too. | On his new trap- and hyphy-inflected mixtape, Ty Dolla $ign stumps for Hillary—and he's pretty psyched on Jack Johnson, too. | Ty Dolla $ign: Campaign | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22443-campaign/ | Campaign | This election season has been dystopian enough to force YG into touring the country with a Trump piñata. Now the Compton rapper’s day-one bro and producer Ty Dolla $ign—an artist not usually known for his politics on anything beyond “these hoes”—offers his own pro-Clinton statement in a new mixtape, Campaign. In its skits, distorted vocals argue in favor of voting as damage control. “She gotta fix these jail policies and everything…but…If all votes count, I’m voting for Hillary. Fuck it,” an uncredited YG declares at the end of “Hello.”
Despite the PSAs, Campaign doesn’t represent a major overhaul of Ty Dolla $ign’s talking points—or the L.A. singer/songwriter/producer’s sound, for that matter. Tracks like “Zaddy” represent the comfort zone of the mixtape: mid-tempo, trap- and hyphy-inflected tunes about responding to booty calls while faded on pills. While Ty’s debut studio album from last year, Free TC**, was overrun with enormously catchy, even pestilential hooks, Campaign’s sordid refrains are more of the first-thought-best-thought variety.
Still, Campaign’s most acerbic songs are rewarding after an acclimation period; Ty remains obsessed with bending grating and unlikely sounds to his will, as he has been since his breakout days. The Travis-Scott-featuring “3 Wayz” features some of the most oddly detailed synth layering you’ll hear in hip-hop this year against a backfiring electronic drum loop that never quite springs into action. Much like TC’s Hot 100 hit “Blase,” it scans like a flair-less dirge on first listen but gradually takes on a creeping, narcotic appeal.
Elsewhere, against all odds, Ty continues to sell unlikely pop/R&B Jack Johnson posturing, as he perfected on TC’s lascivious, Tish Hyman-penned guitar ballad “Horses in the Stable” (“That I-I can ride/Anytime”). On “Campaign,” he makes a garden-variety Future hook—a retread of his “wicked, wicked, wicked” cadence—shine by juxtaposing even more prurient interruptions. And, most notably, as he did on the TC highlight “Miracle / Whenever,” Ty arranges an a cappella track by his brother TC, who is incarcerated on a life sentence: “No Justice” hits hard, a testimonial to the long-term effects of police discrimination.
It’s nice to see Ty continue to complicate the Mustard-wave script, but also rewarding to revisit the elements that made those songs—even with their collar-tuggingly softcore content—undeniable in the first place. Coming in Campaign’s third act, “Pu$$y” has the satisfying quality of a desperate, last-call room service order. It incorporates all the key ingredients of the original, wiry, subs-busting Dolla/Mustard/YG-originated recipe, with an expected vintage of chorus: “At the end of the day, it’s still my pussy, my pussy, my pussy...” (ad infinitum). Performing his most impressive trick, Ty somehow gets the temperature just right for his frequent collaborator and label head Wiz Khalifa to be bearable—even welcome—in his cameo.
By 2016, pop’s biggest names are no longer hesitating to acknowledge their underground benefactors: Ty is getting features on Top 10 singles as well as songwriting checks. This gives him leverage; Ty is clearly making the music he wants to make, even if the stakes for it remain low. (Free TC debuted to little fanfare at No. 14 on the Billboard Top 200.) Campaign outpaces his recent efforts like $ign Language and Airplane Mode but, still, mostly just preserve Ty’s musical bottom line. At moments, its political truisms seem to reflect back on that persistence: “It get hard for all of us, but we campaign,” he murmurs on the intro. “It’s easy to quit, or say no, turn the other cheek…nah, we campaignin’ though.” | 2016-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | September 28, 2016 | 6.9 | 6eb3d05e-4525-4d8d-a182-8d7dec1e0de1 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
One half of Super_Collider reinvents himself as a 21st century soulboy, capturing the spirit of classic Motown and Stax. | One half of Super_Collider reinvents himself as a 21st century soulboy, capturing the spirit of classic Motown and Stax. | Jamie Lidell: Multiply | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4777-multiply/ | Multiply | I first heard Multiply a few months ago, via mp3, without any accompanying press releases or literature to help contextualize it. A significant break from Jamie Lidell's prior work both as a solo laptop artist on Warp and as one half of Super_Collider (Chilean techno terrorist Christian Vogel carries the other half of that amulet), its breezy soul had me dreaming up back stories. Maybe these were all guest vocalists. Maybe Warp's promobot purposely mislabelled some old Stax record to put me off the scent. Maybe Lidell did some Logic voodoo on a vault of old soul reels and repurposed a bunch of lesser-heard Motown gems to fit a glitchier, Warp-friendly palette.
The real answer was simpler than that. Nearly five years in the making, Multiply represents Lidell's dramatic transformation from a knob-twiddling laptopper to a red-blooded soul singer. Where Lidell's prior solo work enjoyed a well-earned reputation for being difficult and forbidding, Multiply is among the most accessible records Warp has ever released. Backed by instrumentation from the likes of Berlinite squatters such as Mocky and Gonzales, and fleshed out by Lidell's robust, full-bodied voice, Multiply has the spirit of classic Motown and Stax. Whether in the breezy, sun-drenched title track, the soulful creep of "This Time" or the closing ballad "Game For Fools", it's obvious that Lidell isn't afraid of channeling (or repeating) history.
But while the song structures and Lidell's vocal style owe boatloads to the 60s and 70s, there's also a modern programming style at work here that separates him from modern day revivalists like, say, Sharon Jones. Listen to Multiply once and you'll be struck by how reverent it is; listen to it three times and you'll start to notice the microscopic digital artifacts and subtle tweaks that give it personality and pop. For all the talk about it being a throwback record, it's also true that a handful of these tracks probably couldn't have been made in 1995, much less '65. The wet funk of first single "When I Come Around" takes glitchy liberties with its percussion track and includes a stunning middle-8 where Lidell's vocal gets chopped, sliced and sprinkled over a merry-go-round; the goofy "A Little Bit More" sounds like nu-soul run through a slapstick plugin; the delirious funk of "Newme" is a nine-layer cake of boom-bap, Rhodes and horns, about six levels of which had to have been built after the fact, in the studio, on a computer.
Anyway, if the Maximo Park record wasn't enough to signify the end of days for the Warp of old, this should do the trick. Not just because it's one of the label's most commercially viable releases in forever, but because it goes to great lengths to lovingly namecheck the very strands of soul (i.e. Otis Redding, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, etc.) that the old Warp very fastidiously avoided. While I'm not sure that people have as strong a sense of brand loyalty to Warp anymore, this is probably still going to go down in electronic music circles as one of the year's most polarizing records. But don't let the naysayers keep you from hearing this before the winter rolls around; boasting 10 gorgeous songs over a trim 40 minutes, this is exactly the kind of record you need in your summer. | 2005-07-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-07-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warp | July 4, 2005 | 8.5 | 6eb4a929-0def-4844-9d9d-fdd99e24224b | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
Techno producer Ricardo Villalobos and longtime experimentalist Max Loderbauer were given full access to Munich jazz/out label ECM's vast catalog. The resulting two-disc, two-hour offering is not a remix collection, but rather a rich, complex suite of compositions that converse with ECM's history. | Techno producer Ricardo Villalobos and longtime experimentalist Max Loderbauer were given full access to Munich jazz/out label ECM's vast catalog. The resulting two-disc, two-hour offering is not a remix collection, but rather a rich, complex suite of compositions that converse with ECM's history. | Ricardo Villalobos / Max Loderbauer: Re: ECM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15797-re-ecm/ | Re: ECM | Ricardo Villalobos is the undisputed winner of the last decade's minimal techno movement. He released two of the period's finest long players (Alcachofa and the still underrated Thè au Harem d'Archiméde) but also established himself as an in-demand festival-packing DJ. Unlike his incredible run between 2004 and 2006 (when Ricardomania was so obvious that Philip Sherburne made note of it, mid-review), his releases these days are thin on the ground, limited to a single here, a remix there. His work has grown more historical as it's grown scarcer. It's not his own history he's concerned with, but the varying strands of musical DNA comprising his ropey, winking techno. "Enfants (Chants)" featured communal chanting, while this year's excellent Joli Chat EP was conversational and punchdrunk. His last "album" was a pre-mixed LP of his own productions. He's collaborating more. It's as if, having found his perfect beat, he's seeking its perfect context.
Re: ECM sees Villalobos reach out to longtime experimentalist Max Loderbauer (who has a host of credits to his name; recently and notably he has played in the Moritz Von Oswald Trio). At issue is the varied output of fabled Munich jazz/out music label ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music). The two artists were given full access to ECM's vast catalog, and label founder Manfred Eicher oversaw the mastering process. The "Re:" ("regarding") in the work's title is important: These are not remixes but rather compositions that suggest and converse with ECM's history. Villalobos and Loderbauer make no attempt to tie the works to beat-driven techno. The catalog is a quarry of sounds from which the duo extract loops and beats that range from ornament to animal.
It's not necessary to be intimately familiar with ECM's catalog to enjoy Re: ECM (your reviewer is not); suffice to say that the label has housed most permutations of jazz and improvisational music since its inception in the late 1960s. Jazz and electronic music make natural partners; it's a pairing that many have explored previously, from Moodymann's dusty Black Mahogani releases to Four Tet's work with drummer Steve Reid. Both styles fascinate themselves with sustained textures and place a premium on sublimating the artist to the form (both also lack rock music's obscene physicality, which has allowed jazz musicians and electronic producers to stay creative late into their careers).
Villalobos and Loderbauer don't seem interested in jazz's harmonic infrastructure so much as the vast array of tones used to produce it. Hissing hi-hats, voluminous stand-up bass, and damp woodwinds are placed decoratively next to one another. If I'm feeling cynical I start to think of Re: ECM as aural feng shui, its 2xCD, two-hour structure better suited for inattentive mood-setting than true exploration. But there's nothing easy or simple here; the artists' restraint provides plenty of airy space, but between that air are sounds that are almost uniformly rich and complex. It feels minimal but unbalanced. If Re: ECM were to soundtrack a dinner party, it would have to be of the newfangled, slightly sadistic variety in which the chefs have lots of tattoos and serve mostly foie gras and bone marrow.
Re: ECM stands out not just for its depth but for its variety, for the sheer number of musics it incorporates. Jazz is the primary focus-- it has been for the label-- but the duo also touches on tribal blues ("Reannounce"), choral ("Rekondakion"), Eastern drone ("Requote"), and lounge ("Recat"). If Villalobos has ported over one element from his techno work, it's an uncanny ability to fashion rhythms that are both crisp and deep; the sounds here will buzz and twitch with his unmistakable style, but they'll do so less predictably.
Applaud ECM for letting Villalobos and Loderbauer run amok; this album is a symptom of a process that has allowed ECM to remain relevant since its inception. For Villalobos, it's another tie, however oblique, to the musics that birthed his style. As a new generation of electronic producers-- notably Nicolas Jaar-- takes cues from his seminal works, Villalobos continues to reach backward. If he makes the past seem half as thrilling and rewarding as he once made the future seem, the next generation won't be the only one that owes him a debt. | 2011-09-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-09-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | ECM | September 9, 2011 | 7.9 | 6eb717d1-cfb1-4ab8-b56f-76470842f14a | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Mogwai's soundtrack to the French drama of the same name rarely comes off overly dramatic or leading. While the musical structures are often simple, continually recasting the central motif with xylophone, piano, and guitar, they push individual sounds to disquieting levels. | Mogwai's soundtrack to the French drama of the same name rarely comes off overly dramatic or leading. While the musical structures are often simple, continually recasting the central motif with xylophone, piano, and guitar, they push individual sounds to disquieting levels. | Mogwai: Les Revenants | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17764-les-revenants/ | Les Revenants | "Les Revenants" ("the ones who came back"), a French TV program for which Mogwai provides the soundtrack, is a gorgeously subtle, harrowing drama that explores the reality of loved ones returning from the grave. These "zombies" aren't grisly maniacs hungry for flesh, but humans in their pre-death state who return to their tiny community, a twin town to Twin Peaks nestled in the crook of some mountains and swaddled in perpetual night, as if they'd just popped out for air. The soundtrack album Les Revenants contains not a shred of the terror Mogwai is capable of wreaking, and it works terrifically-- it rarely comes off overly dramatic or leading, and matches the unsettling feel of the show.
Mogwai had only seen a few English scripts for the drama before they started on the music. "We were aware of trying to keep it not as a typical soundtrack, more just music that doesn't necessarily do anything that has a bit of presence," guitarist John Cummings told the Quietus. That's underselling it a bit; there's no need to see the TV show (though I'd highly recommend it) to appreciate the subtlety of Mogwai's score. While the musical structures are often simple, continually recasting the motif featured in "Whisky Time"-- which plays as a coach-load of school children crashes over the edge of a winding cliff road in the first episode-- in xylophone, piano, and guitar, they push individual sounds to disquieting levels; the xylophone nursery rhyme-like tinkling that opens "Hungry Face" is so concentrated and piercing that it's quite painful to listen to, trilling at an unholy pitch, and again on "Fridge Magic", where slab-like bass shifts act as the foil to the xylophone's wandering curiosity. The way the repeated motifs falter matches how the presence of the undead in "Les Revenants" makes the electricity fizzle and splutter.
Rather than any of their previous soundtracks, or the highly visual, macabre work of one time Rock Action artist Umberto, Les Revenants often sounds like Clint Mansell's haunting soundtrack to Duncan Jones' (son of David Bowie) existential sci-fi film, Moon-- on the heavy piano and clipped pulse of "Jaguar" in particular. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Mansell said that his soundtrack work was initially heavily influenced by Mogwai, and emphasizes that, when he started, "post-rock and film scoring were almost becoming interchangeable."
In the past couple of years, post-rock has been usurped in the film sync stakes by arpeggiated synthesizer jams with an eye on the past; Kavinsky and Chromatics' work in Drive was a bellwether for the shift. The synthesizers on Les Revenants dominate like monoliths rather than dynamic forces or stylistic turns-- on "This Messiah Needs Watching", a heavy grind anchors the piano's skyward ascent, which reaches a hilt on the only shlocky track, the syrupy "Special N" with its annoyingly tentative, celestial optimism.
Closer "Wizard Motor" is the only point where Mogwai even remotely approach their trademark crusty textures: It plays over the titles of "Les Revenants", where a butterfly pinned inside a case starts to tremble, breaks free of its stake, then smashes the glass, escaping with no clearly indicated destination. That question of what the returned undead do next is key to "Les Revenants"; when a young girl who apparently died in the coach crash returns home, unmarked, her mother tries not to let on that they thought she was dead, and calls the girl's father, who's in the middle of a meeting to plan a memorial for the children.
The only vocal number is a cover of Washington Phillips' gospel standard "What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?" that was originally intended for a tribute album to Jack Rose. The cover has a slightly awkward, hymnal air, as if the words were sung by a secular community given rare cause to sing together. Stuart Braithwaite leads the chorus: "What are they doing in heaven today/ Where sin and sorrow are all done away?" Nobody knows what happens on the other side, but, Mogwai's uneasy, affecting soundtrack implies, what happens when they come back is an even more unnerving prospect. Hardcore will never die, and apparently you might not, either. | 2013-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rock Action | February 28, 2013 | 7.6 | 6eb7808e-128a-4652-b09a-53cd22ad10d7 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
I’m Your Man reinvented Leonard Cohen at age 53. It is the most fun you can have while being told that life is a terrible joke. | I’m Your Man reinvented Leonard Cohen at age 53. It is the most fun you can have while being told that life is a terrible joke. | Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22642-im-your-man/ | I’m Your Man | Leonard Cohen appeared on seven of his album covers before 1988, always looking cooler and wiser than his listeners: he was the saturnine poet, the seductive man of the world. On the cover of I’m Your Man he looks better than ever, with his sunglasses and impeccable pinstripe suit—except that he’s eating a banana, the slapstick fruit. James Dean would not have looked cool eating a banana. Gandhi would not have looked wise. Cohen’s publicist Sharon Weisz snapped the picture at the video shoot for Jennifer Warnes’ version of “First We Take Manhattan” and thought nothing of it, but Cohen thought it summed up everything the album was saying about himself and the human condition: Just when you think you’ve got it all worked out, life hands you a banana.
Cohen was 53 when he released the album that reinvented him musically, vocally, linguistically, temperamentally and philosophically. It quickly became his most successful record since his 1967 debut and many people’s favorite. In Sylvie Simmons’ Cohen biography, also called I’m Your Man, Black Francis says: “Everything that’s sexy about him was extra sexy, anything funny about him extra funny, anything heavy was extra heavy.” Triple-espresso Cohen. Six of these eight songs were career highlights that featured on “The Essential Leonard Cohen” and his 2008 comeback tour. Over the years, they have been consistently covered and quoted and folded into popular culture. Not a bad strike rate for an album that, according to Cohen, “broke down three or four times in the making of it.”
Cohen was on his knees when he made I’m Your Man. His 1984 album Various Positions had revitalized his songwriting with his embrace of cheap synthesizers and contained “Hallelujah,” destined to become a modern standard, but it had been rejected by Columbia Records in the U.S. He was running out of money. Songwriting, never easy, had become “hard labor”—he had been struggling with “Anthem” and “Waiting for the Miracle” for years and wouldn’t nail them until his 1992 album The Future. Above (or below) all, he was poleaxed by depression, unable at one stage to get out of bed or answer the phone. He considered retiring and withdrawing to a monastery but he didn’t feel he had the spiritual mettle. He felt that the personality he had sustained for so many years—as an artist, lover, friend—was disintegrating. “My own situation was so disagreeable that most forms of failure hardly touched me,” he said. “That allowed me to take a lot of chances.”
Cohen clawed back his self-respect by telling the truth. His account of writing “I Can’t Forget” reminds me of Hemingway’s solution to creative block: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” Originally, the song was about the Jews’ exodus from Egypt but Cohen felt he lacked the religious conviction to sing it. “I couldn’t get the words out of my throat,” he said. So he sat down at the kitchen table, abandoned any pretense to wisdom and began to write one true verse, a twist on Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”: “I stumbled out of bed/I got ready for the struggle/I smoked a cigarette/And I tightened up my gut.”
The actress Rebecca De Mornay, who began dating Cohen after I’m Your Man, summarized his attitude at the time: “Let’s get down to the truth here. Let’s not kid ourselves.” The truth, as Cohen saw it, was bleak. He had reached the end of a period of spiritual inquiry. His investigations would resume during the ‘90s when he spent years studying with the Zen master Roshi on California’s Mount Baldy, but on I’m Your Man he had reached a conclusion about how the world worked, and it gives the album a wry fatalism. His capacity for action is circumscribed by forces beyond his control. He is chained to music (“Tower of Song”), or a woman (“I’m Your Man”) or the memory of a woman (“Ain’t No Cure for Love”) and there’s nothing he can do about it. Bob Dylan said that with *Various Positions *Cohen’s songs were becoming like prayers—“Hallelujah,” “If It Be Your Will”—but there are no prayers here, and nobody to answer them.
To the extent that I’m Your Man is political—with its allusions to racism, inequality and the Shoah—it is the opposite of protest, because protest is futile here. The bomb has already dropped. The flood has occurred. The plague has arrived. The language of politics or religion or romance has lost its power to console or inspire. All that Cohen can do is describe the blasted terrain without flinching and find a way to inhabit it with some modicum of dignity. “I got some sense that the thing has been destroyed and is lost and that this world doesn’t exist, and this is the shadow of something, this is the fallout, the residue, the dust of some catastrophe, and there’s nothing to grasp onto,” said Cohen, demonstrating his ability to deliver an answer in an interview that’s as finely turned as a poem. The album describes the aftermath—a state beyond pessimism or anxiety or hope. “A pessimist is somebody who is waiting for the rain,” he said. “Me, I’m already wet.”
I’m Your Man is the most fun you can have while being told that life is a terrible joke. Because Cohen is a published poet and novelist and a limited musician, his grasp of pop music is often underrated, but he was enough of an entertainer to realize that this lyrical pill would require a lot of sweetening in the studio. The album began to take shape when Jeff Fisher, a keyboardist whom he had met in Montreal, arranged “First We Take Manhattan.” Cohen felt that if these words were couched in “serious Leonard Cohen music,” then they would be intolerable for both him and the listener. The song needed cinematic scope (Fisher’s version reminded him of Ennio Morricone’s work with Sergio Leone) and a beat you could dance to. The synthesizer enabled him to write to rhythms he couldn’t play on the guitar but it also connected him to cities, modernity, the tempo of the street. Fisher’s version, which resembles a militarized Pet Shop Boys, convinced Cohen the album was possible.
Then there’s the voice, which had acquired a morbid gravitas ideally suited to delivering hard truths but was not yet a midnight croak. Cohen shows considerable range here, executing each syllable with deadly precision on “First We Take Manhattan”; as intimate as a late-night phone call on the title track; a more ravaged version of his younger self on “Take This Waltz”; jaded and urbane on “Tower of Song.” His backing singers Jennifer Warnes and Anjani Thomas serve as confidants, accomplices, angels and hecklers, encircling that voice like garlands on a statue. Finally, and most importantly, there are jokes. It may be the humor of the gulag or the cancer ward—the black comedy of low expectations—but no less funny for that. “When things get truly desperate,” said Cohen, “you start laughing.”
The only man of action on the record, the only optimist, is the deranged narrator of “First We Take Manhattan.” Cohen had become fascinated by extremist rhetoric, from the KKK to Hezbollah, because its “beautiful world of certainty of action” stood in exotic contrast to his own sense that the human condition is defeat and failure. (“Anthem,” which he attempted during the *I’m Your Man *sessions, would articulate the consolation embedded in his anti-utopian philosophy—“Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in”—but not for another four years). The fanatic believes he knows exactly what needs to be done. The fanatic can always get out of bed. Obviously, Cohen didn’t endorse any of these ideologies, so he imagined a movement of one, leaving it unclear whether the narrator is an impotent fantasist or a genuine threat. The understanding of the mindset is chilling but, Cohen reasoned, “I’d rather do that with an appetite for extremism than blow up a bus full of schoolchildren.” Zack Snyder, in a rare instance of good taste and humor, deployed it at the end of Watchmen, where it speaks for the deranged utopianism of Ozymandias.
I’m Your Man, which Cohen produced himself, has a reputation as Cohen’s synthesizer album, but each lyric demands a different setting. There’s a country song, a Casio blues number, a waltz, a Quiet Storm ballad and whatever the hell “Jazz Police” thinks it is. A friend of mine calls any near-masterpiece flawed by one outright howler a case of “Jazz Police Syndrome” and it’s hard to disagree, even if you accept Cohen’s intention to make “something quite wild and irresponsible,” inspired by hip-hop and the theme of a Pynchonesque “superagency” that secretly controls the world. Frenzied abandon isn’t one of Cohen’s natural modes, especially when it’s expressed through the medium of slap bass and stumbling drum machines. The joke fails to land.
“Jazz Police” is the most extreme manifestation of Cohen’s dedication to the sound and the language of “the street.” He made the album in fragments, in Paris, Montreal and Los Angeles, a city that he felt was “really, truly an apocalyptic landscape.” I’m Your Man is his least spiritual, least poetic, least romantic album. It has no patience for beautiful abstractions. “Ain’t No Cure for Love” (its title inspired by L.A.’s AIDS crisis) and the title track take sentimental clichés—I’m addicted to love, I’ll do anything for love—to brutal extremes. Love is the monkey on his back and he’ll go to any lengths to appease it, even if it means erasing his identity. “I’m Your Man” fades out with Cohen still singing, as if he’s going to keep prostrating himself at the feet of the object of his desire until he gets an answer. There’s a very good chance she’s not listening.
Cohen leaves the street just once, diverting all of his poetic energies into “Take This Waltz,” his lush version of Lorca’s 1930 poem “Little Viennese Waltz” that first came out in 1986 on the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death. He said that translating his favorite poet took him 150 hours and a nervous breakdown, which may not be hyperbole because it must have been a mammoth task to honor Lorca’s sinister dreamscape while thoroughly Cohenizing the language. Lorca’s striking image of a forest of dried pigeons becomes “a tree where the doves go to die”; the melancholy hallway becomes “the hallways where love’s never been.” Lorca wrote it during the year he spent in New York, and Cohen’s song retains that dance between the old world and the new as well as the one between love and death.
If you had to boil I’m Your Man’s worldview down to just two songs, one would be “Everybody Knows,” a grim litany of human cruelty and injustice with a chorus like a Balkan wake. “It pushes things very, very far just to get a laugh,” he said. It’s been serially abused by posturing self-styled mavericks who miss the humor, from Christian Slater’s character in the 1990 teensploitation flick Pump Up the Volume to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, but that’s not Cohen’s fault. He doesn’t valorize his cynicism or claim that it requires special insight. Everybody knows this stuff deep down, he’s saying. Let’s not kid ourselves. At a press conference in 2013, Cohen was asked by one earnest journalist what he thought about the state of the world. He paused and smiled and said: “Everybody knows.” Of course.
The other keystone is “Tower of Song,” which suggests Beckett’s famous line, “I can’t go on; I’ll go on,” reworked as a stand-up comedy routine. “I was born like this/I had no choice/I was born with the gift of a golden voice” is the most famous of a string of very good jokes. Cohen laughed when he wrote that line: “a laugh that comes with the release of truth.” Elsewhere, he holds out the possibility that, despite all we’ve been told, things might not be as bad as he imagined: “There’s a mighty judgement coming but I may be wrong/You see you hear these funny voices/In the Tower of Song.” Even the music is comical, with its rinky-dink keyboard rhythm and faltering one-finger keyboard solo. On his comeback tour it functioned as both light relief and the key to his whole career—he recited the lyric when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008. Here, its droll resignation steers the album away from futility at the last moment. This is Cohen climbing out of his depression by accepting his lot as a singer and writer—a lifelong resident in the tower he described as a combination of factory and bordello. Songwriting is how he makes himself useful. It’s not much, but perhaps it is enough.
Right up until his death on November 7, at the age of 82, Cohen was a great believer in useful songs. He once told a story about a conversation that helped him summon the conviction to finish the album when he was in a trough of despair. A friend told him that her father, who also suffered from chronic depression, had recently had a dream that made him feel better. It was a dream about Cohen. “I don’t have to worry because Leonard is picking up the stones,” he told her, smiling.
I’m Your Man gives the impression that Cohen took this responsibility very seriously. It’s not an uplifting album, but it’s a strangely reassuring one, because you feel that Cohen is working like a dog on the listener’s behalf to make the intolerable tolerable. Leonard is picking up the stones. | 2016-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia | November 20, 2016 | 9.5 | 6ebd7c72-3624-43ef-b56e-c57871c61a75 | Dorian Lynskey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dorian- lynskey/ | null |
The Los Angeles electronic musician rebounds from a rare brain disease—and the temporary loss of her ability to speak and hear music—by confidently streamlining her pop impulses. | The Los Angeles electronic musician rebounds from a rare brain disease—and the temporary loss of her ability to speak and hear music—by confidently streamlining her pop impulses. | TOKiMONSTA: Lune Rouge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tokimonsta-lune-rouge/ | Lune Rouge | In the first weeks of 2016, the Los Angeles producer Jennifer Lee, who performs as TOKiMONSTA, quietly underwent a pair of surgeries to treat the rare brain disease Moyamoya. In the months following the procedure, she lost, for stretches, her ability to produce language and to hear music—traumatic, to be sure, for a person whose identity and livelihood are inextricable from sound.
Lune Rouge, Lee’s third studio album, was written following her recovery, but doesn’t attempt to directly narrativize her illness or posit anything so dramatic as a reinvention of sound or self. Rather, it serves an affirmation: The songs here have a pleasantly everyday quality, folding the eclectic—but sometimes grating—glitchiness of Lee’s older work into streamlined pop compositions. Featuring vocals from a number of artists including MNDR, Selah Sue, and Isaiah Rashad, the record remains something of a grab bag of influences; still, it feels like Lee’s most unified work to date.
The album opens somewhat gravely with a cinematic pair of tracks: its primary nod to the context in which it was written. “Lune” builds an orchestra of pretty strings and woodwinds before relaxing to make way for a post-rock guitar line; “Rouge” picks up that guitar and introduces a more familiar beat. Its lyrics sketch around something that never comes into focus: “I see the light/In your feeling,” she sings. Such is the emotional timbre of Lune Rouge: charged, to be sure, but vague enough for listeners to project a range of feeling onto its songs.
As is often the case with this sort of smartly-made EDM-lite, the glossy melancholy that introduces the album is quite effective in hooking in the listener. “Rouge” gives way to the somewhat blander “Thief,” an R&B track about romantic ambivalence featuring vocals from SAINTS; even as things get less interesting, Lee’s production has a narcotizing effect that invites tuning out. Citing a generational shift in the dominant modes of arranging and consuming music, Lee described Lune Rouge in a recent interview as “a playlist of songs for one person.” It’s funny to think of this collection of songs as a playlist, rather than an album proper—the distinction suggests it as a set better suited to affect management than expression.
In any event, being affect-managed can feel good, and the album’s high points are warm reminders of how music can smooth over hardship and sweep us into an easier mood. The danceable “We Love,” with vocals from frequent collaborator MNDR, is bouncy and spacious. Featuring Joey Purp, Isaiah Rashad, and Ambré, “NO WAY” exemplifies the generally relaxed disposition of this collection of songs, even as collaborators bring in lyrics about breakups and rejection. On “Don’t Call Me,” a kiss-off delivered with a sort of pastel dreaminess, Lee’s orchestral electro provides gently icy ground for Yuna’s vocals. The producer skillfully folds in oddball details (acoustic clattering and rounded abstract vocals form a beat on “Bibimbap”; sharp-edged strings give the otherwise conventional choral ballad “Estrange” satisfying texture) without superseding her familiar pop structures.
Lune Rouge doesn’t push hard stylistically, but it’s a comforting and confident album. It entertains life’s ups and downs while remaining faithful in our ability to ultimately have a good time. Things might be more complicated when the song is over, but it’s hard to turn down an offer of such soft-focus solidity. | 2017-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Young Art | October 17, 2017 | 6.8 | 6ed0267b-bb78-4f0c-97a8-ae24a19ccd71 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | |
The Nashville singer-songwriter looks backwards to move forward on an album that filters contemporary desires and sorrows through the timeless vernacular of country. | The Nashville singer-songwriter looks backwards to move forward on an album that filters contemporary desires and sorrows through the timeless vernacular of country. | Ashley Monroe: Sparrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ashley-monroe-sparrow/ | Sparrow | Orphans and sparrows fill the pages of the Great American Songbook, with standards like “His Eye Is on the Sparrow” and “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” evoking the lowliness of humankind and the redemptive compassion of God. In opening her new album, Sparrow, with a song called “Orphan,” Ashley Monroe aligns herself with that tradition. “How does the sparrow know more than I? When a mother is gone it learns how to fly,” she sings. “How does an orphan find its way home?” As she poses these questions to herself and to the listener, she is also engaging with the immense catalog of country, gospel, and folk that inspired her even before she moved to Nashville as a teenager.
On “Orphan,” she achieves flight, a string section supplying the gust of wind that holds her aloft and pushes the chorus toward the sky. The song is anthemic but never overpowering, beautifully restrained and alive to the nuances of melody and phrasing. It’s one of the most moving moments in her small but solid oeuvre, with Monroe embracing country conventions not as elements to be mimicked or revived, but as means of communicating her own confusion, anguish, and desire. She looks backwards to move forward.
Monroe recorded Sparrow after what she described to NPR as an “intense therapy-athon,” which allowed her to confront milestones as crushing as the death of her father and as joyous as the birth of her first child. The songs feel more personal than her previous work, but Monroe also understands that country music can balance such particulars with universals. Though tracks like the spryly melancholic “Mother’s Daughter” and the valedictory “Keys to the Kingdom” seem to derive from real situations, she pinpoints the emotions and sentiments we might all recognize and share. She sings not to confess but to connect.
Monroe worked on the album with Dave Cobb, who has produced records for Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, John Prine, Jason Isbell, and just about everyone else who has been described in Nashville as a new outlaw. After the rambling roots music of 2013’s Like a Rose and the countrypolitan sheen of 2015’s The Blade, both produced with Vince Gill, Sparrow whittles her sound down to guitars, bass, and drums, then glazes the songs with strings that flutter on “Rita,” swell on “Paying Attention,” and climb on “Hard on a Heart.” It’s not an unusual or unexpected sound, but the arrangements are so finely tuned and pair so perfectly with Monroe’s patient phrasing that they sound every bit as adventurous as the disco beats on Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour.
At its heart, Sparrow is an album about pining and yearning, two stock themes in country music. On “Orphan,” she searches for stability and direction; on “Mother’s Daughter,” she longs for something like home. Some of the most powerful songs are about carnal desires. Drawing on examples set by Loretta Lynn and Bobbie Gentry, Lee Ann Womack and Lucinda Williams, Monroe writes frankly about sex, especially on “Wild Love” (“Pull my hair and call my name”) and “This Heaven.” “I wish I woulda laid my hands on you,” she sings on “Hands on You,” letting those first syllables hang in the air like a series of bedroom sighs. The “you” in the song doesn’t even matter. What’s important is the desire itself and her regret over not acting on it.
The bluntness of Monroe’s lyrics lends depth to the self-portrait she sculpts in these songs, revealing just how much she longs for and cherishes human connection. When she sings about that haunted guitar she inherited from her heroes on closing track “Keys to the Kingdom,” she’s suggesting that music in general, and country music in particular, lets us voice our desires or at least accept that they’ll never be satisfied. It’s a fitting coda to the album’s emotional highpoint, “Daddy I Told You.” In a croon lightened by the peacefulness and confidence of an artist who’s spent her entire career building up to this moment, Monroe sings, “Daddy I told you I was gonna fly,” and the orphan becomes a sparrow, figuring out her wings on the way down. | 2018-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Warner Music Nashville | April 26, 2018 | 7.7 | 6ed26e24-2bd9-4d73-bebc-963478823f14 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Angus Finlayson’s first LP is shot through with concussive kicks, writhing basslines, and finely tooled drum work. But even at their most powerful, these songs are remarkably nimble. | Angus Finlayson’s first LP is shot through with concussive kicks, writhing basslines, and finely tooled drum work. But even at their most powerful, these songs are remarkably nimble. | Minor Science: Second Language | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/minor-science-second-language/ | Second Language | When Angus Finlayson began making dance music under the name Minor Science in the early 2010s, dirt was in vogue. Distortion was omnipresent; drum machines often sounded like they’d been dredged out of a canal, their circuits caked with rust. Finlayson’s debut EP, for London label the Trilogy Tapes, followed suit, slathering slow, sullen house beats in grit. But one song, “Hapless,” felt different. The bulk of the track, with its skulking drums and ominous spoken loop, was in keeping with the era’s lo-fi aesthetics. But at the center was a strange, slippery synthesizer pattern with a distinctly hi-def signature, its liquid textures and unsteady rhythms flickering like a coded message beamed across space and time.
Finlayson, a former Pitchfork contributor, has spent the years since trying to catch up with that signal, with each successive release pushing a little further into unknown territory. By 2017’s “Volumes”/“Another Moon,” the third of a trio of annual 12"s for London’s Whities label, he had reached his destination. Gone were the blunted moods and busted sonics of his early work; in their place, glistening timbres and exhilaratingly precise programming whose swiveling movements were reminiscent of robotic arms. That record remains among the most futuristic-sounding dispatches from the past decade of electronic music. On his debut album, Finlayson keeps moving further outward, fashioning a distinctive take on club music that seems determined to wriggle free of linear structure.
The first thing you notice about Second Language is its iridescent finish—on track after track, the synths have a vivid, shimmering quality—and the next is the force of its punch. The heaviest tracks hit harder than Minor Science ever has, shot through with concussive kicks, writhing basslines, and finely tooled drum work. But even at their most powerful, these songs are remarkably nimble. “Balconies” wraps footwork rhythms in a cushion of empty space, accentuating the springiness of the drums’ attack; “Gone Rouge,” another 170-BPM standout, takes earthbound rave tropes (dub sirens, Korg M1 organ basslines) and sends them darting through midair, deft as dragonflies.
Like Jlin and Objekt, Finlayson is a masterful sound designer. His targeted use of reverb, delay, and, crucially, the absence of those often ubiquitous effects, paired with filter sweeps and sudden moments of silence, suggests wild, artificial spaces where the laws of the universe no longer hold sway. And his shape-shifting arrangements, full of fake-outs and hard lefts, contribute to the sense of being strapped into a four-dimensional roller coaster.
It’s a short album, blazing through 10 tracks in 36 minutes. Even the club anthems, like “Polyglottal” and “For Want of Gelt,” don’t go much over four minutes; the tempos throughout are mostly breathtakingly fast, as though Finlayson felt he didn’t have a moment to waste. But the record has a unified palette, held together by bright synth melodies that occasionally hark back to Autechre’s wistful early albums. (Along with footwork, electro, and drum’n’bass, IDM is a major influence here.) Thanks to smart sequencing that balances bangers with pensive interludes, it feels less like a collection of club tracks than a suite broken into 10 interlocking movements.
Occasionally, Finlayson’s fidgety tendencies get the better of him. He has a habit of building up to a drop, deploying a heart-in-mouth cue that things are about to kick off in earnest, and then abruptly changing course, leaving all that tension unresolved. Doubtless this is on purpose, though sometimes it feels like he’s deliberately moving two steps forward, one step back, and one giant pole vault back to the starting line. But his playful qualities are commendable: There’s an explosion of percussion at the climax of “For Want of Gelt” that sounds like an entire rack of drum machines jolted to life by a power surge. It’s so over the top that it’s almost laugh-out-loud funny, which is a nice change in a genre that can be awfully self-serious.
The most exciting moments happen when Finlayson’s restlessness yields entirely new sounds, like the major chord that flashes out just once toward the end of “Balconies”; Finlayson seems to understand that repeating it even one more time would diminish its uniqueness exponentially. I’m particularly fond of a Durutti Column-like guitar that calls out and falls silent in the closing “Voiced and Unvoiced,” or the lo-fi, tape-warped guitar that pokes gingerly through the opening “Second Language (Intro).” That one’s even got a little distortion on it, a detail that stands out all the more vividly against the rest of the track’s pristine sonics. Perhaps, having mastered spotlessness, he’s ready to let a little dirt in again. | 2020-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Whities | April 6, 2020 | 7.6 | 6eeefcde-3814-428f-bb9e-505d4a1e5e82 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Self-proclaimed prehistoric royalty Queens of the Stone Age are back from the desert wastes of California,\n\ and they're ... | Self-proclaimed prehistoric royalty Queens of the Stone Age are back from the desert wastes of California,\n\ and they're ... | Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6606-songs-for-the-deaf/ | Songs for the Deaf | Self-proclaimed prehistoric royalty Queens of the Stone Age are back from the desert wastes of California, and they're putting the 'rock' back in 'blowing shit up' (in a healthy, non-terrorist kind of way). Now, it's no secret that, when it comes to rock's metal edge, these Queens want badly to be kings; you need look no further for proof than 2000's blistering, thuggish Rated R, on which frontman Josh Homme's searing guitars and theatrical vocals brought the band close enough to their goal to sniff the fleurs de lis. That, however, is history, and with Songs for the Deaf, the Queens have hit a new peak in their development: the sound is more massive, the chaos is more calculated, and with hired gun Dave Grohl at the kit, the band has an unprecedented drive that leaves them poised for their strongest bid for power yet.
"You Think I Ain't Worth a Dollar, But I Feel Like a Millionaire" embodies the greatest strengths of rock at its hardest-- stunning riffs, breakneck speed, and guitars that churn and spit like a threshing machine. It's riddled with decades-old metal cliches, but the Queens know what their audience expects, and they use this knowledge to continually twist rock stereotypes into a vicious full-nelson until they beg for mercy. It's fantastic, and this is just the first track.
"No One Knows" changes Songs for the Deaf's pace by sliding into an easy groove, sleazing its way across a dimly-lit bar, half-drunk and reeking of cheap cologne, to put the moves on your girlfriend (or, you know, you, depending). This is four-to-the-floor slime of the highest quality, folks, and it's the second installment in this album's triad of genius, completed subsequently by the next track, "First It Giveth". "Giveth" brings the drama like a champ, with Homme singing in pained falsetto over punishing riffs during the verses, and opening up into aggro-overdrive for the appropriately apocalyptic chorus.
But along the path to greatness, there are pitfalls, and one Homme often falls into here is the old "chamber of lost souls" effect (made popular by Alice in Chains on some of their later albums), which he uses to fill out the backgrounds of some of these songs. The multitracked Hommes aaah'ing melodramatically in undead unison make slogging through "Hanging Tree" and "Go with the Flow" a pretty grim endeavor. It doesn't help that these songs churn along interminably long after their riffs have run dry, either. And worse still, the band has quit winking at their metal excesses entirely, toeing the line between mindless fun and xFC-metal gothery. Fortunately, this is only a temporary decline, but that these two tracks hit back-to-back in the dead center of the record makes for a much steeper dropoff than if they'd been sequenced farther apart.
There's also the issue of the between-song skits. As skits go, these are pretty tame, but that doesn't make them any less obtrusive. The album even opens with one: the sign-on of KLON (that's "clone") radio, "the station that sounds more like everybody else than anybody else." It's a broad parody of the Clear Channel wavelength empire, and while admittedly pretty fucking funny, the target is a bit obvious-- especially given that PS2's "Grand Theft Auto III" beat them to the punch two years ago and pulled it off expertly. My biggest problem with these interruptions, though, is that they do little for the aggregate effect of the album-- after a couple playthroughs, they only serve to stifle the momentum QOTSA manage to develop.
Yet, this same biting cleverness also pervades many of the songs, lending an air of spontaneity and plain good times-- there's a fake stop in one of the early tracks that's so ludicrous I laughed out loud. And there are even better moments to be had elsewhere: the wavering surf guitar on "Another Love Song", or the good old-fashioned brain-sickness of "Six Shooter" and "Mosquito Song," the latter played lovingly by what sounds like the orchestra of the damned.
When these guys are on, it truly is the wrath of the righteous. However, Songs for the Deaf vacillates constantly between soaring heights and mind-numbing lows, making for a true hit-or-miss affair. But even if they can't have it all, the guys do offer as real a showcase of metal-tinged panache and stellar songwriting as anyone might hope for from a band labeled 'stoner-rock.' Besides, if the entire album was as strong as the first three tracks, it'd probably burn you alive. As it stands, Queens of the Stone Age settle for attempted murder. And that ain't bad at all. | 2002-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | September 10, 2002 | 7.9 | 6ef04f90-1b9d-408d-b4ff-fa07628be1bd | Eric Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/ | null |
The Mississippi punk four-piece celebrate slugs, butter, lard, chewing gum—the important things. | The Mississippi punk four-piece celebrate slugs, butter, lard, chewing gum—the important things. | Judy and the Jerks: Music for Donuts EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/judy-and-the-jerks-music-for-donuts-ep/ | Music for Donuts EP | Judy and the Jerks make food-fight music. This isn’t just because the punk four-piece have dubbed their latest EP Music for Donuts—although there is plenty of butter, lard, and other substances that would be a pain in the ass to get out of your hair. Their music splatters like mashed potatoes against concrete walls; it squirts like a flattened plastic ketchup bottle. There are brief pauses where a bassline flutters alone, as if reloading a spork and preparing for further warfare.
The Hattiesburg, Mississippi group has been a part of the local punk scene for nearly three years, and from the beginning, they have championed the grimy and grotesque. “She’s greedy, she’s a goblin/Be careful or she’ll put you in your coffin,” Gore sings on “Greedy Goblin.” On “Slugarama” there’s no room for disagreement on why slugs are simply the best. “When you’re a slug you can do anything that you want/Everyone thinks your gross/And you are/And it rocks.” The weirder the creature, the greasier the substance, the deeper Judy and the Jerks’ admiration.
On Music for Donuts, they continue to celebrate slippery objects for their authority-defying properties. The opening “Butter” is an anthem for the clumsy and reckless, and the adjacent “Lard” is a parent-taunting anthem: “I don’t care about anything/ I don’t care about you,” Gore jeers. “I’m a lard girl and I want to have fun.” If mushy substances divide us, then chewy ones offer unity: “Chewing gum is what we can all agree one/Chewing gum is heaven sent,” Gore sings on “Friends.”
Beneath this surreal cocktail of humor and absurdity lies real defiance. She describes her gaggle of friends as one not to be fucked with: “Don’t talk to me ‘cause I’ll bite you,” she snarls. “We’ve got big butts and we do it our way.” She celebrates the vicious attitude of geese while also frightening her harassers on "Goosey Girls." Throughout, Gore is never alone in her rebellion; Judy's jerks always have her back in a brawl. “We bark, we bite, we fight,” Gore shouts on “Friends.” There’s no doubt that she means it. | 2019-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Thrilling Living | May 2, 2019 | 7.7 | 6efb743f-5616-471f-8558-26d3bf4e32b3 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
USA/Mexico are sludgy, nasty, and unclassifiable, meaning they fit perfectly into Austin's coterie of noise-rock misfits. | USA/Mexico are sludgy, nasty, and unclassifiable, meaning they fit perfectly into Austin's coterie of noise-rock misfits. | USA/Mexico: Matamoros | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/usamexico-matamoros/ | Matamoros | Austin’s USA/Mexico aren’t quite sludge or doom or death metal. Instead, they lurch somewhere in between the down-tuned pummel of bands like Buzzov•en and Eyehategod and the ultraviolent spazzes of Burmese or Brainbombs. A trio of Austin experimental rock veterans, they are led by Shit and Shine’s Craig Clouse on guitar and vocals and rounded out with Butthole Surfers drummer King Coffey and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth’s Nate Cross on bass. Their debut Laredo was a bent-out sunstroke of processed vocals and noise-laden riffs, and its followup Matamoros is slower, freakier, and somehow louder.
“Matamoros” rolls out slathered in feedback and erupts into what sounds like rubble coming to life. Clouse has an ear for crushing doom riffs, yet he prefers to take them on long marches to nowhere. “Matamoros” keeps rumbling on, gaining more feedback until it breaks apart. Closer “Anxious Whitey” takes this approach and stretches it over 17 minutes. It might madden some, but there’s a perverse satisfaction to hearing Clouse tease a sick riff only to let it bleed back out into nothingness.
Shit and Shine and Butthole Surfers dressed up experimental music in humor and absurdity, and USA/Mexico subtly maintain that tradition. “Eric Carr T-Shirt” is such a hammering trudge that it’s easy to overlook the fact that it’s named for KISS’s hair metal-era drummer; the result feels as appropriate for fans of this megamix of Paul Stanley’s stage banter as Steve Reich’s “It’s Gonna Rain.”
Matamoros also recognizes the city’s fringe noise-rock past and present. Not only do they cover Cherubs’ “Shoofly,” they also get Cherubs’ Kevin Whitley to guest on vocals. Spray Paint’s George Dishner lays on even more hellish guitar onto the title track. Austin still feels like a mid-sized college town in some ways, meaning that if you’re into heavy and/or weird music, you’re bound to see the same folks frequently. “Vaporwave Headache” breaks through with rapid-fire sheets of abrasive guitar static, and it’s as indebted to Total Abuse’s scathing, bitter hardcore as it is Scratch Acid’s ur-noise rock. It has a punk tempo, but like everything else about USA/Mexico, it is too defiantly weird and alien for pigeonholing. That’s how they fit inside Austin’s storied noise rock and experimental music scenes: by refusing to fit exactly in anywhere. | 2019-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 12XU | March 23, 2019 | 7.3 | 6eff5b6a-f9ef-458c-a6d8-78d3026fa58c | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
On their proper debut, Speedy Ortiz join a small club of young indie rock bands writing lyrics that are actually worth poring over, but the charms here extend beyond frontwoman Sadie Dupuis’ clever and biting wordplay. The 1990s-indebted guitar crunch and quaking rhythms are a perfect match for her dark wit. | On their proper debut, Speedy Ortiz join a small club of young indie rock bands writing lyrics that are actually worth poring over, but the charms here extend beyond frontwoman Sadie Dupuis’ clever and biting wordplay. The 1990s-indebted guitar crunch and quaking rhythms are a perfect match for her dark wit. | Speedy Ortiz: Major Arcana | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18245-speedy-ortiz-major-arcana/ | Major Arcana | God bless middle school bullies: Without the torment they’ve reliably inflicted on generation after generation of brooding, musically-inclined creative types, would there even be indie rock? At the very least there wouldn’t be “No Below,” one of the most striking songs on Northampton, Massachusetts, noise-pop quartet Speedy Ortiz’s proper debut, Major Arcana. “I didn’t know you when I broke my knee,” frontwoman Sadie Dupuis murmurs during the song’s wounded, palm-muted intro, “Spent the summer on crutches, and everybody teased.” Gnarled yet stingingly heartfelt, “No Below” blooms into a portrait of the artist as a friendless tween: death-obsessed, ditched by the one person at school who gets her, and left “freezing alone with [her] thoughts.” You know, the kind of early-onset trauma from which great, off-kilter bedroom-pop eventually springs.
The first album to bear Speedy Ortiz’s name (which itself is a nod to a doomed character in the beloved alt-comic Love and Rockets) was a solo affair. Dupuis’ self-recorded 2011 release, The Death of Speedy Ortiz, was a patchy, sardonic (sample titles: “Hexxy Sadie”, “Kinda Blew”) lo-fi gem in the tradition of early Sebadoh or Liz Phair’s legendary Girlysound tapes. But like the heroine of “No Below” (who later finds a companion to compare scars with: “Everything fucked up we both felt before/I’m glad for it all if it got us where we are”), Dupuis eventually found strength in numbers. By the time Speedy Ortiz’s promising Sports EP came out last year, she’d brought in some new recruits—bassist Darl Ferm, guitarist Matt Robidoux, and drummer Mike Falcone—to kick the firepower up a notch. It worked wonders: A Speedy Ortiz song used to sound like a personally gummed, exactingly aimed spitball, but the best ones on the explosive, earthquaking Major Arcana land like grenades.
Still, even as their songs have grown louder, gnarlier, and more compositionally ambitious, Speedy Ortiz have managed to preserve the intimacy and idiosyncrasy that made Dupuis’ early home recordings so compelling. Which is a testament not just to producer Justin Pizzoferrato (Dinosaur Jr., Chelsea Light Moving) but also to how receptively and thoughtfully all four members play off each other: Ferm and Falcone keep Major Arcana’s rhythms feeling fluid and adventurous but never sloppy, while the ongoing conversation between Dupuis’ vocals and Robidoux’s trebly, agile riffs is particularly essential to Speedy’s charm. As it does on “No Below”’s caustic, catchy chorus (“And though I once said/I was better off just being dead”), Robidoux’s guitar usually mirrors or embroiders Dupuis’ vocal melody, underscoring her words rather than drowning them out.
And thank goodness—because Major Arcana finds Speedy Ortiz joining a depressingly small club of young indie rock bands (maybe the first new members since Parquet Courts’ Light Up Gold) writing lyrics that are actually worth poring over. “My mouth is a factory for every toxic part of speech I spew,” Dupuis quivers on the Mascis-indebted sludgefest “Tiger Tank,” and the rest of the record makes good on that promise. Like her hero Stephen Malkmus (she was once the frontwoman of an all-female Pavement cover band called—wait for it—Babement) Dupuis sings like someone palpably fascinated with the way words sound. Check, for one example, the way she scales the line, “criminally twisted puny little villain” in the opening moments of “Fun,” delighting in the texture of every vowel. Her lines strike a tricky balance between feeling loose and meticulously crafted—another trick she must have learned from memorizing Malkmus quotables. On highlights like “Pioneer Spine” or the hellraising “Cash Cab,” Dupuis has a knack for turning seemingly dribbled-out mouthfuls into catchy hooks; in a lot of cases you won’t stop to marvel at the ingenuity of her lines until you’re already singing along.
Speedy Ortiz wear their love of the 1990s on their torn, flannel sleeves, which makes this particular round of Spot the Influence about as challenging as a game of tee-ball: there’s the squalling, guitar-on-guitar carnage of Archers of Loaf, the grungy mysticism of Helium (Dupuis lifted the title Major Arcana from a book she was reading on black magic), and of course the deadpan wit of vintage Phair (“I was never the witch that you made me to be,” Dupuis tells a burnt-out old flame on “Plough,” “Still you picked a virgin over me”). But don’t let any of that lead you to think that Speedy Ortiz are your garden variety nostalgists. Even at its most distortion-caked, there’s a melodic confidence and a gimlet-eyed clarity about Major Arcana that’s a rare find in a debut. They’ve got reverence for their forebears, sure, but unlike a lot of recent bands exhuming the ghosts of indie rock past, Speedy Ortiz also have faith in the peculiar personality traits that set them apart from their heroes. With its quaking rhythms, twisted riffage, and jet-black wit, Major Arcana is a redemptive ode to the broken bones that grew back together a little crooked—the ones that taught Dupuis how to walk in her own weird way. | 2013-07-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-07-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | July 12, 2013 | 8.4 | 6f007790-5095-455b-a42a-4e162237feb3 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | |
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 explore Aretha Franklin’s immensely personal 1970 album Spirit in the Dark. | 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 explore Aretha Franklin’s immensely personal 1970 album Spirit in the Dark. | Aretha Franklin: Spirit in the Dark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aretha-franklin-spirit-in-the-dark/ | Spirit in the Dark | Professionally speaking, Aretha Franklin had nothing left to prove. She’d shaken off a slow start in the music business after squandering years of her prime singing schlocky jazz on Columbia Records for a producer who once said, with a straight face, “My vision for Aretha had nothing to do with rhythm and blues.” She’d cemented her legend with “Respect,” a minor Otis Redding track that she elevated to a social-justice masterpiece. She’d established her voice as one of the 20th Century’s most distinctive instruments, right up there with Louis Armstrong’s trumpet.
On a personal level, it was another story. She had sung two years prior at the funeral of her family friend Martin Luther King Jr., and his assassination had left her shaken. She had recently separated from her husband and manager, Ted White, a volatile svengali who’d transitioned into the music business after a stint as a pimp. And she was already carrying another man’s child—her fourth, having become pregnant the first time at age 12, just two years after her own mother dropped dead of a heart attack.
Through this trauma came Spirit, a cathartic 1970 testimonial documenting the fusion of house-wrecking gospel and gut-wrenching soul that made Aretha Franklin Aretha Franklin. It is not her most famous record. It is not her top-selling record. What it is is her truest record, the one that best captures her essential ache—the pain of a black woman clamoring for freedom from the domineering men who suffocated her childhood, manipulated her career, mangled her personal life, and more broadly speaking oppressed her race and robbed her dignity. It’s an assertion of personhood, a monument to resilience in the face of pain. As if to make all this explicit she closes the album with a cover of B.B. King’s “Why I Sing the Blues,” though when it finally arrives the song is redundant. If you’ve been listening, you already know why.
Franklin grew up in Detroit playing piano and singing in church for her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, a powerful Baptist preacher so charismatic that nurses carried smelling salts to revive parishioners overcome by his word. The reverend’s sanctuary sat on Hastings Street, which at the time was Detroit’s black entertainment district, home to the bars where blues legend John Lee Hooker used to gig. The Franklin home was itself a kind of private club, a place for musicians like Nat Cole and Dinah Washington to relax after hours. Knowing he had a prodigy in the house, Franklin’s father used to wake her in the middle of the night and trot her out to perform for his tipsy guests.
The parties gave young Franklin an early lesson in the ways sacred and secular life commingled. At age 18, Franklin turned pro and embarked on a quest to integrate the passions and inflections—the blackness—of gospel music with the bourgeois politesse of the white pop charts. Columbia thought she could compete with Barbra Streisand. Franklin agreed, as did her new husband and manager.
Ted White was a man with a huge square head, a taste for custom suits, and a temper. Etta James once compared his relationship with Franklin to Ike Turner’s with Tina. White insisted that his young bride tour and record constantly; between 1961 and 1970, she released 19 studio albums. After years without a breakthrough on Columbia, White did manage to orchestrate Franklin’s 1966 move to the R&B-minded Atlantic Records, where she began her torrential creative streak with 1967’s I Never Loved a Man, but by then their relationship had frayed. In 1969, the two divorced. Restraining orders were filed. At one point, enraged that Sam Cooke’s brother Charles had visited Franklin at home, White pulled a gun and shot him in the crotch.
The outside world provided no safe haven. Violence rained all around her. King was murdered in Memphis in the spring of 1968. A few months later, Franklin performed the national anthem at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, only to see it engulfed in riots. A few months after that, almost 150 people were arrested and one police officer killed during a black-power congregation at her father’s Detroit church.
Released after this period of profound turmoil for her country, her career, her race, and her family, Spirit in the Dark stands as a statement of triumph for having come through, survived, gotten over. Franklin doesn’t make it look easy; she reminds us that it’s difficult. The LP’s very first cut, “Don’t Play That Song,” is all about trying and failing to forget old hurt. The grainy black-and-blue cover photo resembles nothing more than a bruise.
She recorded most of the album in Florida, and still today it sounds so steamy you have to crack a window. Most artists start their careers rough and eventually smooth out; Franklin went the other direction, rasping her voice, heading from slick cosmopolitan Detroit all the way down below the Mason-Dixon line. In an exquisite North-meets-South anecdote that became music-industry lore, at one point during the Spirit sessions, Franklin spilled a bag of pig’s feet in the lobby of Miami’s posh Fontainebleau hotel and refused to pick it up.
Her band hailed from across the region. On electric guitar: Duane Allman, the virtuoso longhair just a year away from fatally crashing his motorcycle back home in Georgia. On organ, bass, and drums: the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section, a squad of Alabama ringers who’d cut their teeth with Wilson Pickett and Percy Sledge. Singing backup: Almeda Lattimore, Margaret Branch, and Franklin’s cousin Brenda Bryant, a trio that could mimic a Mississippi tent-revival choir. And then on piano: the 27-year-old soul queen herself.
It’s easy to forget—because her voice makes us forget—that Franklin has always been a formidable pianist. But she could hang with anybody. “Don’t Play That Song” opens with her at the keys, thumping out chords. The second track, “The Thrill Is Gone (From Yesterday’s Kiss),” begins exactly the same way. In all, seven of the album’s dozen songs start with the sound of her piano summoning a divine vibration, making her seem like both the bandleader and minister of her own personal tabernacle.
In contrast with Sam Cooke, who left faith music in the dust when he crossed over to pop, Franklin found ways to bring the genres together. Spirit in the Dark embodies the synthesis. “You and Me” is either an ode to monogamy or a devotional to the Lord. The ecstatic title track is either a paean to the holy ghost or a first-person account of a rafter-shaking orgasm. If you’re not paying attention, “Try Matty’s” sounds like it could be a joyful hymn. It’s a hymn alright—to a barbecue joint. The effect isn’t so much about ambiguity, making us guess which thing she really means. Aretha Franklin is more about duality, making us believe both things at the same time.
Three-and-a-half minutes into “The Thrill Is Gone,” as Franklin contemplates emancipation from a soured relationship, her choir kicks in to “thank God almighty, I’m free at last.” Suddenly the song is enlarged. And yet somehow exhuming MLK doesn’t make “Thrill” any less of a breakup song. If anything it becomes more of one, equating the emotional wreckage of failed romance with a nation’s collective grief over a national tragedy. Intimate loss can be all-encompassing, the song suggests, and all-encompassing loss can be acutely intimate.
The goodbyes don’t stop there. “Like the dew on the mountain,” Franklin sings, “like the foam way out on the sea, like the bubbles on the fountain—you’re gone forever from me.” That’s a little number called “One Way Ticket,” and it’s supposed to be one of the happy songs.
When decoding so much material about regret and liberation, it’s impossible not to read into Franklin’s personal life. And yet at a certain point, her music—like all music—is less about the specific content and more about the general feeling. It’s the relief we all get when finally moving on from something bad, the exhaustion and exaltation. It’s the masochism of being glad for the pain, because pain is how we know what we had was real. It’s the euphoria Franklin conveys in “Pullin’,” co-written by her sister Carolyn before she died of cancer at age 43. The words come off as an open letter to an ex-lover. The music comes off as a jamboree.
Again the tune opens with Franklin’s piano. Again she sings a gospel melody, climbing and dipping and wailing. Again she calls to her backup singers and they respond to her, and again, and again, and soon the tempo is racing so fast that the song lifts off its foundation to become a kind of divine dialogue we don’t so much listen to as a witness.
“Pulling,” she sings. “Harder. Higher. Harder. Higher. Pulling. Moving. Pulling. Harder! Pulling. Higher! Moving. Higher! Higher! Higher! Higher? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. Go ahead! Higher!”
The woman will not quit. She’s broken free now, free of the earth and its chains. She’s ascending to heaven, pulling harder, lifting higher until she levitates in a state of transcendence, still singing, still wailing, crying out to God and man alike in a joyful noise borne of suffering. She continues like this until her formidable band, by now apparently crippled with fatigue, stumbles to a halt.
A hi-hat shimmers, a kick-drum thuds, and then in one of the great mic drops of all time, the diva Aretha Franklin, returned to earth now in a state of grace, turns to her sidemen—or maybe directly to us—and utters a single word: “Well?” | 2018-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | May 20, 2018 | 9 | 6f029003-853e-4bfc-b118-7c752ef8c818 | Nick Marino | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-marino/ | |
Though widely disregarded at the time of its release, The Kinks' 1968 apex, The Village Green Preservation Society, has had a profound impact on the present state of indie rock. Now, Sanctuary reissues the album in an expanded 3xCD box edition, compiling every song recorded during its sessions, restoring the original artwork, and fattening the package with extensive new liner notes. | Though widely disregarded at the time of its release, The Kinks' 1968 apex, The Village Green Preservation Society, has had a profound impact on the present state of indie rock. Now, Sanctuary reissues the album in an expanded 3xCD box edition, compiling every song recorded during its sessions, restoring the original artwork, and fattening the package with extensive new liner notes. | The Kinks: The Village Green Preservation Society | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4457-the-village-green-preservation-society/ | The Village Green Preservation Society | It takes a Village Green Preservation Society to love The Kinks.
The problem facing The Kinks when they released The Village Green Preservation Society in late November 1968 wasn't merely the competition-- Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland, Led Zeppelin's debut, and the Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet offered plenty-- but that this subtle, funny, surreal, and at times almost tender record could have been recorded on another planet. During the summer of 1968, stateside fans were hooked on a high-intensity diet that had them jonesing for aggressive, overstated fare like "Street Fighting Man" and "You Shook Me" and "Communication Breakdown". The disconnect between The Kinks and the rock world's rapidly narrowing palette could hardly have been more pronounced. Compare the Stones' bombastic, urban "Sympathy for the Devil" with understated work like "Village Green", bouncing along like a horse and buggy as Ray Davies paints the landscape: "Out in the country, far from all the soot and noise of the city..."
Critics praised the album, the public ignored it, and Davies-- surveying the scene-- asserted that it wasn't created for public consumption. Intentions aside, The Kinks simply moved on, leaving small knots of fans to pledge secret allegiance to Village Green. However, as years passed and the weather changed, its following grew, and finally, one day, the verdict reversed and the album was touted as a masterpiece. Ironically, it might have happened sooner had the band not been so prolific up through the late 80s.
Intricately sketched and brimming with unusual arrangements, The Village Green Preservation Society was the first clear look at an iconoclastic, imaginative and sometimes brilliant artist as he came into his own. Audiences used to sizing up work on a scale created for rock gods and counter-culture icons were forced to consider this album as a piece of conceptual art. The Lennon-McCartney/Jagger-Richards duos towered over and shaped the sensibilities of a vast army; Davies explored a deeply personal world that confounded fans even as it provoked their curiosity.
There's a clue to who he was in the song "Animal Farm", which opens with a cascade of chords played on a warm, acoustic 12-string, the folk music staple once used on songs like the Rooftop Singers' 1963 hit "Walk Right In". Davies' opening lines, forced to share space with the tongue filling his cheek, are a mouthful. "This world is big and wild and half insane/ Take me where the animals are playing," he sings, raising the Union Jack, while looking back through the chaos of the day to find a simpler, safer world.
The peculiar sensibility that first raised its head on 1965's Kinkdom with the hit singles "Dedicated Follower and Fashion" and "A Well Respected Man" looks different in light of The Village Green Preservation Society. Before the latter album was released, those songs seemed like parody or blue-collar humor; in retrospect, Davies was showing a quirky, iconoclastic hand that would soon be more relevant to his music than the hard-rocking "You Really Got Me". It's also interesting to consider Village Green as a carefully sculpted product of Ray Davies' singular artistic vision. The album is commonly regarded as having the feel of solo work, and if this is a matter of opinion, the songs are singular enough as to probably make collaboration difficult. More than that, at a time when rock instrumentalists were beginning to stretch out, The Kinks' playing here always serves the songs, and Davies' vocals in particular.
By 1968, as the prevailing rock idiom tended to position music as an armored vehicle ready for battle, Davies did his best work with a quiet, ironic smile. The album-opening title cut begins with a simple groove built around acoustic guitars, over which Davies offers a bend pledge of allegiance to the mundane curiosities of modern life; in "Do You Remember Walter", he reminisces, perhaps as a geriatric adult; and on "Last of the Steam Powered Trains", he borrows and bends the first few bars of Willie Dixon's "Spoonful"-- an ode to the miseries of heroin.
The Village Green Preservation Society has been declared the band's masterwork in some quarters, and I'll agree-- if only because my favorite Kinks album, built around "You Really Got Me", "All Day and All of the Night" and "Tired of Waiting for You", has never been released. Even so, the album had received proper recognition long before the release of this three-disc set, which repackages the original album and adds a slew of extras: Bonus tracks are here in spades, along with a collection of period studio noodlings and a separate mono version of the entire LP.
Of course, while the special presentation does include a few interesting pieces-- looser non-album tracks like the humorous "Mich Avery's Underpants", "King Kong" and "Wonderboy", while hardly worth the price of this set, offer added insight into the album's sessions-- it's mostly padded by mono mixes that would be of little interest to anyone but the staunchest archivists. As such, disc one, the original album expanded with four bonus tracks (including a knockout version of "Days") provides the real meat: 36 years after its first release, The Village Green Preservation Society, loaded with so much imagination and possibility, stands more than ever as a vital work, and as one of rock's first classic, one-of-a-kind albums. | 2004-07-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-07-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Pye | July 26, 2004 | 9.5 | 6f06f9f4-bf44-4cec-af7e-538038bb2429 | J.H. Tompkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/j.h.-tompkins/ | null |
The collaboration between members of Broadcast and Focus Group creates lovingly rendered ambiance born of library music and musique concrète, steeped in eeriness and sweetened with wonder. | The collaboration between members of Broadcast and Focus Group creates lovingly rendered ambiance born of library music and musique concrète, steeped in eeriness and sweetened with wonder. | Children of Alice: Children of Alice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22981-children-of-alice/ | Children of Alice | For those attuned to Broadcast and the Focus Group’s wavelength, the 2009 collaborative album Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age was a hallowed union. Throughout the 2000s, Broadcast had reimagined psych-rock in a way that mirrored the Focus Group’s adventures in library music and musique concrète—both artists’ warped nostalgia and movie-music mania dealt in temporal freefall, with spectral production that exhumed ghosts from radio static. On Witch Cults, these hauntological peas in a pod simultaneously peaked: In Trish Keenan’s daydream deadpan, the Focus Group’s Julian House found an anchor for his abstractions, while Broadcast’s oneiric detail flourished anew, unmoored once and for all from rock’s retro swing.
Six years after Keenan’s death, it’s the spirit of Witch Cults that pervades Children of Alice, James Cargill’s new post-Broadcast project with Julian House and Broadcast keyboardist Roj Stevens. Their debut ventures further into sonic wormholes—the structures are byzantine, melodies vanishingly sparse—but has the same buzz of eccentric minds dialing into a familiar frequency.
The trio, named in honor of Keenan’s beloved Alice in Wonderland, make music steeped in eeriness and sweetened with wonder. Children of Alice opens with “The Harbinger of Spring,” in which a strangled hum mingles with birdsong and children’s laughter. Beneath it all looms a three-note bass pulse, sounding faintly ominous, but it’s soon reborn in a palatable key. The record never settles into its unease. When a cuckoo clock heralds the hour, you notice the “boing” of its spring, a perfectly innocent technology. Jump-cuts splice the scenes into disjointed vignettes, but it feels less like psychic overload than the beguiling minutiae overheard by a baby between naps.
The album’s intrigue lies in its prelinguistic response to a hyperactive world. “Invocation of a Midsummer Reverie” collages a furious scurry of warped raga drones, distressed whistling, and erratic tabla. It ought to overwhelm, but the music, often aglow with Cargill’s warm synths, seems determined to witness mayhem with wide eyes rather than bloodlust. Even the faintly erotic skin-slapping sequence—with yelps and maniacal laughter—takes on a dreamy, aqueous quality, as if it were part of an arcane meditative ritual.
Between the field recordings and concrète collage, moments of grand beauty waft out of the ether. Eleven minutes into “The Harbinger of Spring,” an uneasy silence settles, then bursts into a celestial F-major 7th, scattering melodies like sunlight through cracked glass. More tamely rendered, the movement could transmit epic yearning, but its purpose here seems spiritual, admitting a sublime moment into the chaos. The group proceeds with irreverence—groaning brass, whirring static-gusts, murmuring speech—but can’t disguise the air of sanctity.
Throughout Children of Alice, intermittent flute lines evoke the alien, swannee-whistle voices of “The Clangers,” the strangely poignant late-’60s TV show that encouraged kids to imagine “less fortunate stars” than Earth, where life “might be very different, very bleak and dull.” Our fond nostalgia for the show feels somehow bound to its creepiness—slightly too-long silences, eerily calm narration—which is the hauntologist’s bread and butter. But Children of Alice is different from its predecessors. Its nostalgia feels less escapist than therapeutic, and its composure amid the mundane and deranged is more of a promotion for mindfulness. Unlike Broadcast, there’s no friction here between their daydreams and our reality; those worlds collapse into one, harmoniously intertwined. From its soundworld of small terrors rises something unterrifying, a mis-en-scène too lovingly rendered to haunt. | 2017-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | March 13, 2017 | 7.3 | 6f07a6b3-c5d3-4620-b936-e9dede2241a5 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
The inside cover of Philip Jeck's seventh solo album (typically great Jon Wozencroft design) contains a nice quote from ... | The inside cover of Philip Jeck's seventh solo album (typically great Jon Wozencroft design) contains a nice quote from ... | Philip Jeck: 7 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4227-7/ | 7 | The inside cover of Philip Jeck's seventh solo album (typically great Jon Wozencroft design) contains a nice quote from critic Mort Goode: "Johnny Mathis advances the art of remembering." I don't hear Mathis on 7 (though he could be here somewhere-- with Jeck you never know) but I imagine these words appear because The Art of Remembering would be a great title for a Philip Jeck album. For most of the 20th Century, the phonograph record was the primary time-based storage medium. You could buy pre-made 8mm and 16mm reels, but home films never had the market penetration of recorded sound. Music, speeches, plays, sound effects, sporting events, even film storylines were preserved and sold on records.
The vinyl record was one of the primary devices for storing culture's collective memory. Hundreds of millions of these fragments were strewn all around the world. What happened to all these chunks of data? Most decayed or were rendered obsolete and were tossed out, but plenty are still in circulation, and a good number of them wound up in Philip Jeck's record collection. Jeck makes music by playing, mixing and processing vinyl records (mostly obscure ones), and on 7, he reflects our memories back to us in a profound and terribly exciting way. Here, Jeck is at the peak of his creative powers.
The first track "Wholesome" shows how damn pretty Jeck can sound when so inclined. You expect pieces built from old manipulated vinyl and loops to be prickly with a disturbing undercurrent, but "Wholesome", which isolates, stretches and repeats a Disneyfied swirl of night sky strings and impressionistic piano plinks, is like a flower in perpetual bloom. It gets distorted and blacker toward the end when Jeck rolls off the treble completely, but that's just the sun setting and, like e.e. cummings said, if it has to happen, this is a beautiful way. "Wipe" is just as lovely with a different feel, distant and lonely instead of warm and welcoming. It reminds me of Experimental Audio Research circa "Tribute to John Cage in CAG*E", music for drifting slow through space, a cold drone echoing in an asteroid's cave.
"Now You Can Let Go" is where Jeck robs the memory bank for identifiable fragments. He turns crackly loops of locomotive chugs into percussion, pushes corny three-note jazz phrases nicked from a Steamboat Willie short into a dub chamber, and keeps a recording of a lathe humming along to bind it all into a singular sound machine. "Some Pennies" is doubly referential, as the ghostly bass ostinato looping through was also the central element of (the even more powerful) "Vinyl Coda I", recorded in 1999. It's an ominous piece of music, but somehow never threatens; despite its bleak overtone, "Some Pennies" is subtle and invites intimate observation. You want to inch closer and pick the piece apart, each layer of sound folded inside, a world within a world.
I like to think of "Bush Hum" as a reference to our president and the violence that's accompanied his term in office, though the sleeve notes indicate that the sole sound source for the track is the ungrounded hum of a Bush turntable run through a delay pedal. Still, the abrasive, atonal buzz generated by Jeck's processed electrical circuit could stand in for the sounds of war. An atypical track for a man whose music always incorporates the friction of the physical, "Bush Hum" is nonetheless very effective. Closing the album is the 10-minute veil, a slowly evolving rumble of Wagnerian strings, the symphonic loops of Zauberberg Gas without the kickdrum. How did Johnny Mathis say it in 1957? Oh yeah, "Wonderful! Wonderful!" | 2004-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2004-01-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Touch | January 13, 2004 | 8.2 | 6f15fce9-4b36-4634-a03d-13ab690dead9 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Danish prog-pop maestros, here sporting an absurdly long album title, consolidate everything that's made them interesting to date. | Danish prog-pop maestros, here sporting an absurdly long album title, consolidate everything that's made them interesting to date. | Mew: No More Stories Are Told Today... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13399-no-more-stories-are-told-today/ | No More Stories Are Told Today... | I've always wondered why prog rock was one of the few genres that got skipped over for a comeback. Is it just that it takes too much technical proficiency to play? Is it that latter-day prog metal bands like Dream Theater ruined it for everyone? Did the asteroid of punk actually kill off rock's dinosaurs? As someone who came up on old, (let's face it) unfashionable progressive rock, I do occasionally like to come across a new record that scratches those old itches, and Mew always seems to come through for me. The Danish trio (originally a quartet) doesn't do 17-minute epics, extended solos, lyrics about Chinese scripture, or crazy odd-metered jamming, though. Rather, they seem to have captured the exact moment when Carl Palmer, Steve Howe, Geoff Downes, and John Wetton realized prog was done for and started thinking about forming Asia.
And that's not a bad thing at all! And the Glass-Handed Kites (2005), with its continuous mix and suite-like structure, nailed just about everything you could do right with that formula. Their new record, which has a whole freakin' poem for a title (No More Stories Are Told Today I'm Sorry They Washed Away No More Stories The World Is Grey I'm Tired Let's Wash Away is how it reads complete), is a hair less awesome, but it won't lose them any fans, and its poppiest moments might even gain them a few. It doesn't open in the most welcoming way-- "New Terrain" is half-backward/ half-forward, with instruments and vocals switching back and forth for the whole song. Playing it backward gives you a different song, called "Nervous". The disorientation fades pretty quickly, though, once the tangled, King Crimson-ish guitar refrain and lung-full-of-helium vocals of "Introducing Palace Players" kick in. That nasty riff is one of several instances where Bo Madsen's guitar playing serves as a sort of dry, dissonant foil to the music's otherwise lush, floating ambiance.
Another of those songs is the other single, "Repeaterbeater", which, the way it kicks in with a hard rock rush before lifting off with multi-tracked vocals and high-wattage keyboards, seems designed as a follow-up to Glass Handed's biggest hit, "The Zookeeper's Boy". It's like "Heat of the Moment" if it was played by Phoenix with the Bee Gees sitting in on vocals. While these songs and a few others ("Beach", especially) foreground the band's accessibility and odd arena appeal, they do still chuck a few knee-buckling curveballs at you. "Sometimes Life Isn't Easy" could contain the seeds for five songs if you cut it up. The intro is a total mindfuck, with super-high falsetto outbursts and saxophone that comes out of nowhere, but it quickly winds down with some warm synths and a gentle verse vocal backed by what sounds like a choir of children. The chorus may be the most joyful thing this band has ever put to tape.
Mew show signs of trying to shake themselves out of habits, reversing their slow build approach on "Cartoons And Macramé Wounds" by starting the song at its peak and slowly ramping down from there. "Hawaii" is raw and rhythmic, with the guitar taking more of a lead role than usual in the opening verse, before giving way to a xylophone solo and anthemic final movement. The same method of through composition shapes closer "Reprise", a song that could easily be used to re-soundtrack Blade Runner in a pinch. Over the course of a long career (they formed in 1994), Mew has succeeded in developing a good sound from some of the least hip ingredients imaginable, and No More Stories... feels like a consolidation of every stride they've made to date. I'm still not sure if the word Mew means something in Danish or they're just named after something their cat said, but I'm ready to start using it as shorthand for quality prog-pop. | 2009-09-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-09-04T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | September 4, 2009 | 8.1 | 6f179676-4ea5-4f0f-adb2-1565380a27a5 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Didn't It Rain ranks with the best of the albums from the late singer and songwriter Jason Molina, and the 2002 album has been reissued in a deluxe edition. While this may have represented the slow, sad end of his Songs: Ohia moniker, the project didn't go out with a whimper. | Didn't It Rain ranks with the best of the albums from the late singer and songwriter Jason Molina, and the 2002 album has been reissued in a deluxe edition. While this may have represented the slow, sad end of his Songs: Ohia moniker, the project didn't go out with a whimper. | Songs: Ohia: Didn't It Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19805-songs-ohia-didnt-it-rain/ | Didn't It Rain | “The last Songs: Ohia record is Didn’t It Rain,” Jason Molina states definitively in a 2006 interview—not published in its entirety until after Molina’s death in 2013—with the blog Underground Bee. That statement answers a question that Molina left wide open with the release of his 2003 album The Magnolia Electric Co., which also became the name of the band that he primarily recorded under for the remainder of his life. It might all seem like so much semantics, but there’s a profound and telling truth behind Molina’s line drawn in the sand: 2002’s Didn’t It Rain, the eighth studio album by his haunting folk-rock project Songs: Ohia, was intended to be an end.
Molina’s music, especially in the wake of his death, has taken on an air of myth, but it’s the most unassuming kind of myth imaginable. A trailer-park kid with a garage-sale guitar, he spun his upbringing in Ohio and West Virginia into the stuff of hardscrabble eloquence. He began recording solo under the name Songs: Ohia in the 1990s, at the height of the slicker, more traditional alt-country boom. But rather than kick shit, Molina followed a path parallel to Will Oldham’s: cryptic, fractured, and with the faint, deconstructive underpinning of post-rock. Molina, though, struck closer to full-throated confessionals, even as his eerie guitar tunings and oblique angles of vocal engagement—marks of an autodidactic—kept him squarely sequestered as an outlier.
Didn’t It Rain doesn’t veer from the pattern Molina had established by 2002. But it’s a step forward in assurance, while remaining anything but assuring. Recorded live in the studio with a handful of musicians, including Jim Krewson and Jennie Benford from Jim and Jennie and the Pinetops, the album is a slow sketch in black chalk. The title track is one of Molina’s greatest compositions, full of glistening, suspended chords and a refusal to comfortably resolve. Molina’s narrative perspective is just as uneasy: “No matter how dark the storm gets overhead,” he sings, “They say someone’s watching from the calm at the edge.” Where are we watching from? Who is he supposed to be? The answers aren’t hidden; he doesn’t seem to know. And that slipperiness feeds into the song’s simple, circular swell.
Vocally, Molina reached new heights. Notes dip, quake, and hover. Syllables are either softly stretched or sharply snapped. He harmonizes with Benford in heart-stopping glimpses of intimacy, sounding far more like Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker of slow-core contemporaries Low than any kind of corny ’90s Americana act. If anything, there’s a walloping melancholy that matches Gene Clark at his White Light loneliest. “I’m gonna help you all I can,” Molina ultimately offers on “Didn’t It Rain”, but every quiet pocket of emptiness in the song screams that he’s powerless to keep that promise. The song’s title may be borrowed from a gospel traditional, but it isn’t about salvation. It’s about having a hand, any hand, to hold as the inevitable comes crashing down.
Molina was always imagistic, and the piercing hollowness Didn’t It Rain gives him more room than usual to project his nightmares and daydreams. In particular, the moon and the color blue surface repeatedly—not only in the titles “Steve Albini’s Blues”, “Blue Factory Flame”, “Two Blue Lights”, and “Blue Chicago Moon”, but in the way those motifs are worked into the fabric of Molina’s harsh, hushed revelations. The image of a blue moon is one of pop’s most enduring emblems of loneliness, and Molina milks that archetype for all its worth on “Blue Chicago Moon” and “Blue Factory Flame”. They’re the only two tracks played with a full band, but Molina whittles that fullness into a bony vestige; both are creeping and tentative, with picks skidding off strings as if barely willing to activate them.
Cut from the same ragged flannel as Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s “Danger Bird”—minus the smoldering guitar solos, which Molina wouldn’t begin to incorporate in earnest until Magnolia Electric Co.—“Blue Factory Flame” opens with one of Molina’s most indelible verses, and one that’s become bloodcurdling in the wake of his death: “When I die/ Put my bones in an empty street/ To remind me how it used to be.” But he follows it with a sharp shift to the everyday, a move that mitigates morbid pity with something that almost approaches levity: “Don’t write my name on a stone/ Bring a Coleman lantern and a radio/ The Cleveland game and two fishing poles/ And watch with me from shore.” When, on “Two Blue Lights”, he equates the moon with lights from a late-night bus, all those lunar allusions become ghostly, recursive reflections of each other, a way of amplifying the beauty and dread that Molina never seemed ready to separate.
The moon would also prove to be a looming symbol of austerity and menace on Molina’s next album, Magnolia Electric Co. Here, though, it shines wanly, filtered through a more polluted atmosphere. That’s heard even more clearly on the eight bonus tracks included with the new, deluxe reissue of Didn’t It Rain—six of which represent songs from the album proper, and two of which (“The Gray Tour” and “Spectral Alphabet”) would turn up in different versions on later records. They’re gorgeous, acoustic demo renditions, managing to strip down arrangements that are already skeletal. But they lack the spark of Molina’s in-studio push-and-pull with his handful of collaborators. They do, however, provide an even less guarded portrait of Molina at the time; on the demo version of the self-referential “Cross the Road, Molina”, his pleas to “Set my pulse/ To the Great Lakes pulse” feel almost transcendentally pagan.
Didn’t It Rain would be the slow, sad end of Songs: Ohia, but it isn’t a whimper. It’s where Molina felt the need to contract himself to a pinpoint, gathering all his energy into a lonesome quantum, before unleashing the wholehearted force of Magnolia Electric Co. He couldn’t have known what was to come, including some of his best work and worst times, but it’s obvious this is the sound of Molina standing on the brink of something. He didn’t seem to know quite what yet, and that stark uncertainty imbues Didn’t It Rain with a sickening yet heroic alchemy: the ability to make smallness and helplessness feel somehow brave. | 2014-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | December 1, 2014 | 8.8 | 6f194e13-e596-4d5d-a342-a318169d983c | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
On December 99th, Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def) sounds like he no longer believes his own words, or he’s tired of hearing himself say them. It is by far the worst thing he’s ever released. | On December 99th, Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def) sounds like he no longer believes his own words, or he’s tired of hearing himself say them. It is by far the worst thing he’s ever released. | Yasiin Bey: December 99th | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22720-december-99th/ | December 99th | In January 2016, rapper/actor Yasiin Bey announced his departure from entertainment. “I’m retiring from the music recording industry as it is currently assembled today—and also from Hollywood, effective immediately,” the artist proclaimed. “I’m releasing my final album this year, and that’s that.” In the 10-minute clip, posted to Kanye West’s personal website, Bey—formerly known as Mos Def—sounded weary, yet resolute. He was being detained in South Africa after trying to leave the country on a World Passport. Bey had been living in Cape Town since 2013, seemingly content with a low-key existence away from the spotlight.
Over the years, the rapper has been responsible for some of underground hip-hop's most resonant music. 1998’s Mos Def and Talib Kweli Are Black Star, with friend and fellow Brooklyn lyricist Talib Kweli, is a widely heralded classic, and a year later Bey released Black on Both Sides, a remarkably nuanced LP full of introspective soul. Bey’s sophomore album—The New Danger, released five years later to the day in 2004—marked a drastic shift from the relaxed aura of his first record. With beats by producer Minnesota and contributions from his rock band, Black Jack Johnson, Bey opted for an edgy rock sound that occasionally missed the mark. But if nothing else, at least he sounded inspired, like he actually gave a shit about the art he’s releasing. After 2006’s True Magic, another dud released to fulfill Bey’s contract at Geffen Records, he rebounded on 2009’s The Ecstatic, a flurry of repurposed beats by Stones Throw affiliates.
December 99th, Bey’s new album with producer Ferrari Sheppard, is by far the worst thing he’s ever released. I’m not just talking music; I mean this is the saddest thing—album, commercial, or film—with which Bey’s been associated. There’s nothing even remotely redeeming here, and it makes me wonder how long the rapper was awake before he wrote and recorded this material. For its 31 minutes, Bey sleepwalks through every track, mumbling nonsensical flows that never connect at all. And when he’s not doing that, he whistles through these instrumentals—like a poor man’s Negan here to terrorize Rick Grimes. Instead of a finished project, December 99th feels like a demo that listeners should never hear. These are the lines you fumble through while you think of better lines to write. On “Local Time,” the message is noble enough, but the rapper’s lethargic drone makes it tough to digest for a discernible extent: “We experience tests today/Above all, we are blessed today/Same as every day/In a special way.” Bey built his career on these sorts of affirmations, but they land with a thud on December 99th. It’s as if the rapper no longer believes his own words, or he’s tired of hearing himself say them.
The only bright spots come from Sheppard’s soundtrack, but even those are few. “Tall Sleeves” boasts dark, smoldering synths that emit a sultry vibe. Tracks “Special Dedication” and “Heri” feel lush and aerated, giving Bey evocative canvases on which to create. But for the remainder, especially on “Blade in the Pocket,” “Seaside Panic Room” and “Shadow in the Dark,” the music sounds underdeveloped, exposing Bey's disengaged, flat mumbling in the harshest possible light. While Bey and Sheppard share the blame for this debacle, December 99th is ultimately a bigger strike against the rapper’s legacy. For an artist who once uplifted the masses, it seems he needs someone to do the same for him. Maybe he’s leaving at the right time. | 2017-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | A Country Called Earth / AWGE | January 2, 2017 | 3.5 | 6f267ce7-31cb-4afd-9315-5e874fe5fb15 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
Lil Pump’s debut is loud, hyper, and catchy. There isn’t a moment where the 17-year-old rapper, seemingly born in some viral think tank, doesn’t sound completely, endearingly stoked. | Lil Pump’s debut is loud, hyper, and catchy. There isn’t a moment where the 17-year-old rapper, seemingly born in some viral think tank, doesn’t sound completely, endearingly stoked. | Lil Pump: Lil Pump | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-pump-lil-pump/ | Lil Pump | Rap has always favored the young, but never more so than in 2017, where the genre’s entire distribution model is tilted toward internet-savvy artists on the vanguard of social and musical trends. Along with fellow Miami native and frequent collaborator Smokepurpp, 17-year-old Lil Pump is part of a surge of SoundCloud rappers so intuitively aware of what plays online that, knowingly or not, they’ve essentially Moneyballed rap music, racking up tens of millions of streams with no-budget songs they’ve barely even bothered to master. Major labels used to spend small fortunes to achieve that kind of reach. Lil Pump doesn’t even need a real microphone.
In truth, even the most well-financed A&R team could only dream about creating a rapper as shareable as Pump, who at first glance can seem less like a real artist than a computer’s too-perfect aggregation of what rap looks and sounds like at this precise moment. He’s got Lil Yachty’s sense of flamboyant style and adventurous hair and Lil Uzi Vert’s taste in drugs, designers, and bright, cartoony cover art. His biggest, most blown-out tracks play like the tortured last gasps of an imploded subwoofer. And, in an evergreen angle that’s always catnip for the media, he carries an air of punk rebellion. A memorable New York Times profile opens with an account of Pump sparking an all-out brawl after kicking a fan in the head on stage, then instructing a friend to send footage of the scuffle to a hip-hop blogger. A self-marketer to the core, he played the incident for maximum viral reach.
If all that suggests a certain cynicism, it’s to Pump’s credit that none of it comes through in his music. There isn’t a moment on his brisk self-titled debut album where he doesn’t sound completely, endearingly stoked, and that kind of total commitment is all too rare on any rap album, mumble or otherwise. Where Uzi and Yachty tend to check out of their lesser material, Pump doubles down on every song, injecting SremmLife-levels of enthusiasm into even the rare ones that fall short of their goal of rattling around in listeners’ heads for hours after just a few exposures. Every track is loud, hyper, and catchy just to the brink of obnoxiousness, with only a couple crossing that threshold by a step or two.
Chief Keef is ostensibly the model for Pump’s economical, catchphrase-heavy style of rapping, and Pump has cited him as an inspiration. Compared to Keef’s tough guest turn on “Whitney,” though, Pump sounds like a kid brother too giddy with mischief to maintain a straight face. The album is filled with moments like that, guest spots from elder statesmen that mostly underscore Pump’s youth. A throwback, Lex Luger-style beat from producer Bighead highlights the generational divide between Pump and a half-present Gucci Mane on “Youngest Flexer,” while Rick Ross has never sounded more like a wooly mammoth succumbing to the tar pit than he does cast against Pump’s boyish patter on “Pinky Ring.”
As the first extended exposure to an artist previously heard only in brief fits, Lil Pump’s debut is impressively consistent, a sign that the divisive rapper may have more staying power than his many detractors have predicted. But even at a trim 36 minutes, the album does hint at some of the traps Pump could fall into if he runs out of ways to keep his routine fresh. Like Lil Uzi Vert or Mac Miller, whose voice Pump’s recalls during some of the album’s lazier hooks, Pump sometimes defaults to sickly simple melodies. The album’s two outright duds, “Foreign” and “Iced Out,” tell a stark cautionary tale: If you scale back Pump’s modernist trappings, buff away his signature distortion, and tame his jumpy energy, you’re basically left with Wiz Khalifa, and the world really doesn’t need another one of those.
While nobody would mistake him as one of rap’s great thinkers, Pump isn’t nearly the meritless insult to hip-hop that his grumpiest critics have cast him as. Compared to some of his SoundCloud peers, his album is almost downright traditionalist—it’s certainly not as audacious as Playboi Carti’s own self-titled debut, a perpetual motion fidget spinner of an album that regarded rap as entirely optional. That record was, in its own way, an art piece, but Pump couldn’t care less about art. Even his distortion isn’t artful in any meaningful way; it’s just a signifier of volume and excitement. Lil Pump’s one and only concern is turning up and he can do it with the best of them. | 2017-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Tha Lights Global / Warner Bros. | October 12, 2017 | 6.9 | 6f2f59e2-b3ba-4007-bc8c-da0a749c0b71 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
On his expertly written 10th album, the Texas storyteller delivers some of his most intense and humane work. | On his expertly written 10th album, the Texas storyteller delivers some of his most intense and humane work. | James McMurtry: The Horses and the Hounds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/james-mcmurtry-the-horses-and-the-hounds/ | The Horses and the Hounds | James McMurtry stands out even among the Lone Star State’s finest songwriters, a community of artists known for the local color that saturates their story-songs. Much like his old man, the late novelist Larry McMurtry, he’s a fiction writer rather than a confessionalist: He just so happens to choose heartland rock as a vehicle for his tales of Americans at their lowest, searching for a fast buck, a little salvation, or maybe just a quiet moment to get their hearts in order. He crams his songs full of vivid details, the kind that many other writers might not even think up but that create a sense of a larger world outside the song.
Take “Jackie,” a heartbreaker from his 10th studio album, The Horses and the Hounds. After a melancholy electric guitar intro that sounds like the beginnings of an ice storm, the song opens with McMurtry describing a plot of land: “Half a section in the short grass at the foot of the plains/Grows broomweed in the dry times and ragweed when it rains.” McMurtry savors those plant names, not just the specificity of species but the sound of those compound words, setting up a story about a woman who risks her life to keep a horse ranch afloat; it ends with the image of a white cross on another nameless piece of land.
More than 30 years after his debut, 1989’s Too Long in the Wasteland, McMurtry has become what’s known as a songwriter’s songwriter: someone whose facility with words and influence on other artists far outstrip his mainstream notoriety and album sales. On The Horses and the Hounds, he homes in on his favorite subjects, with hardscrabble songs about good people at bad extremes, the disintegration of small towns in flyover America, and the corruption of corporations during times of war. Maybe it’s the snappy production courtesy of Ross Hogarth or maybe it’s the new perspective afforded by the six-year gap between albums, but McMurtry sounds more engaged here, more focused, and more generous to his hard-luck characters.
Even in his saddest and angriest songs, McMurtry takes obvious pleasure in choosing just the right detail. On “Decent Man,” inspired by a short story by Wendell Berry, he spins a yarn about a man who commits a hasty murder and the daughter whose devotion still confounds him. McMurtry makes you smell the gunsmoke in the air, just as he makes you feel the bone-deep regret of the narrator. “When you’re shooting at a coffee can, a .38 don’t kick that bad/But it kicks right through my bones every second of every day.”
Working with members of McMurtry’s touring band and a small crew of session musicians, Hogarth brings some rock’n’roll crunch to the guitars on the title track and “Blackberry Winter” and some cinematic drama to “Jackie” and “Vaquero.” But most of all, you can hear Hogarth’s touch in the vocals. McMurtry has never been burdened with much range or power, but he’s cultivated a barbed deadpan delivery that suits his storytelling. His voice trips over the rhythmic patter of “Ft. Walton Wake-Up Call,” the best song ever written about checking into a hotel with Fox News blaring in the lobby. On opener “Canola Fields,” he conveys a sense of joy so uncomplicated that it sounds cathartic, as though his narrator is relieved to find a happy memory to turn over in his head.
None of these ideas are new for McMurtry, but they do sound more intense on The Hounds & the Horses. The best and most humane moments are those when you can hear him simply breathe between lines: Hogarth engineered the microphones to pick up every nuance in his voice, which means you can often hear McMurtry inhale before a lyric and exhale afterwards. It adds a precarious quality to the words, as though he must steel himself to impart bad news. That quality makes a song like “Jackie” sound all the more tragic. “How it ended that bad, we can wonder all day,” he sings, drawing out that last syllable like he’s struggling to maintain his composure. He makes the character sound like an old friend, lifting her tragedy out of the song and into the everyday world.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | New West | August 25, 2021 | 8 | 6f3cd409-2749-439f-a9ad-38f4cf26f09a | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Exploratory yet grounded, futuristic yet melodic, alien and charming, Cluster were among the best krautrock bands ever. This no-frills box set traces their heavenly horizon-to-horizon arc. | Exploratory yet grounded, futuristic yet melodic, alien and charming, Cluster were among the best krautrock bands ever. This no-frills box set traces their heavenly horizon-to-horizon arc. | Cluster / Brian Eno / Dieter Moebius / Roedelius: Cluster: 1971-1981 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21701-cluster-1971-1981/ | Cluster: 1971-1981 | When the German rock renaissance began in earnest in the mid-'90s, it was the result of multiple factors. Can's catalog was reissued on CD; they gained verbally outspoken fans like Sonic Youth, Tortoise, and Stereolab; and Julian Cope’s Krautrocksampler: One Head's Guide to the Great Kosmische Musik provided a crucial roadmap for casual listeners. For the most part, the revival foregrounded the era’s headiest rock bands and no doubt appealed to classic rock fans looking for new thrills: Can, Neu!, Amon Düül I and II, Faust and the like. And while Kraftwerk already enjoyed success in the worlds of early hip-hop, electro and industrial circles at this time, a purely electronic act like Cluster went unnoticed for the most part. But as listeners dug and listened deeper, the charms of the duo of Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius began to gain their own cult following. Now, their discography is rightfully regarded as one of the era’s finest. Exploratory yet grounded, futuristic yet melodic, alien and charming, the eight studio albums they recorded from 1971-1981 are now compiled in a handy if no-frills box set. With it, Cluster’s heavenly horizon-to-horizon arc—which spans from the dawn of electronic experimentation to the rise of new age and synthesized pop music—can finally be fully gleaned.
As Asmus Tietchens’s liner notes put it, the group arose from a heady blend of post-war artistic intent: Fluxus, Viennese Actionism, the Frankfurt School, as well as the rise of '60s hippie counter-culture. The group began as Kluster, a three-piece featuring Roedelius, Moebius and fellow synth pioneer Conrad Schnitzler. Seeking to breach boundaries, this incarnation utilized the electronic components of academic composition in ways that moved from high art to all-night happenings. And while Schnitzler exited the group the same year, their 1971 self-titled debut (titled here Cluster 71) carries forth that rebellious spirit. Across three long untitled tracks, the unfettered live-wire sound of their early experiments continued on in the studio. While Kraftwerk’s (now-disowned) debut album dates from the year before, it placed electronics alongside organ, flute, drums and violin; Cluster 71 is the buzzing, churning, crackling sound of electricity itself, made audible in all its untamed glory. Its closest peer would be Tangerine Dream’s Electronic Meditation, but even that album feels more restrained in comparison.
The next year, Cluster II would venture even further into the lightning field. Some numbers, like “Für die Katz',” have a slow cycling guitar line, but circuits spark and simmer on all sides around it, rising and falling like a cardiograph. One of the box set’s meager bonuses is a live concert from this same year. It’s slightly longer here, a shame since these early Cluster shows were usually all-night affairs that rippled and surged for six hours or more, soundtracking chemically altered altered mental flights much like Terry Riley’s concerts would.
The first two albums fleshed out their obtuse experimental side, and by 1972 the duo moved out of Berlin. They relocated to the rural village of Forst on the river Weser and set up shop in a massive manor that might be regarded as the group's unofficial third member. Bucolic climes altered Cluster's music as much as Brian Eno, producer Conny Plank or Michael Rother would in the ensuing years. But don't think Forst just inspired mellow idylls; when they released 1974’s Zuckerzeit, it was one of the most audacious about-faces any band had attempted. Rather than the unhurried, unstructured, beatless freeform explorations, Zuckerzeit (which I’ve seen translated as both “Sugar Time” and “Sugar Era”) was electronic pop at its most protean and still acts like a sugar overload: giddy, infectious, manic and a little queasy. The ten tracks belie the fact that the album is two solo halves welded into a whole, each person contributing five tracks and each mapping their musical personas. Utilizing an early analog drum machine, Roedelius's "Hollywood" is epic, its shuffling, chugging beat paired with sweeping synths that strafe across the song like eagles, each successive synth layer pushing towards a heart-stirring new summit. Whereas early Cluster albums might have taken an entire side to reach such a climax, now they moved to dizzying heights and back down in a pop song's runtime, anywhere from two to six minutes. Moebius' "Caramel" is equally infectious, his lines not as dramatic as his partner's but more kinetic, wiggling in and around the pistoning programmed beat. While Kraftwerk no doubt set the electronic paradigm for the decades to come across numerous genres, the dynamic established between Roedelius and Moebius was also influential. Theirs showed what a sound world two individuals could manifest—expansive yet efficient at once—and it's a dynamic that's powered most electronic music groups ever since, from the Chemical Brothers and Orbital to Daft Punk and any B2B DJ set.
By the time 1976's Sowiesoso appeared, the effects of rural living were audible on tape. While there's a stiff, rigorous Teutonic aspect to many of krautrock's biggest artists, there's a pliancy and playfulness to Moebius and Roedelius in contrast to the other sounds of the era. Kraftwerk was more formal, Can was more kinetic, Faust more Dadaist, Neu! more manic, leaving Cluster as the most Romantic, and no where does that shine through than on their latter albums, beginning here. Melody, ambience, wistfulness and gentleness underpin songs like " Zum Wohl" and the title track. But that doesn't keep weird quirks from arising, like the little drum circle that emerges around the campfire-warm "Umleitung" or the drunken lilt of closer “In Ewigkeit.”
Around this time, charmed by both Cluster's output and that of Harmonia (their trio with Neu!'s Rother), Brian Eno trekked to Forst for two collaborative albums, which no doubt solidified an aesthetic begun with Another Green World that would soon carry over to David Bowie's Berlin trilogy and Eno's ambient series. And while oblique strategies informed Eno's work during this time, there's a casual tone to Cluster & Eno and After the Heat that suggests neither strategy nor willful obliqueness were needed in the forest. The cover of the former hints at the sounds within, a microphone craning towards the evening sky as if to record drifting clouds. And while one might be inclined to chalk these albums as the work of a trio, producer Conny Plank’s fingerprints are all over these albums, suggesting a quartet at work. The ten tracks are as formless and minutely shifting as that photo suggests, lovely and intangible daydreams.
Elegant piano and twanging guitar entwine on “Ho Renomo” and then drift apart, while pensive piano chords slide across synth flares on "Wehrmut." The ambience suggests peacefulness, but there’s always something a little unsettling in these pieces. “Die Bunge” sounds like frog and bird calls from an alien bog, a concept that Eno would revisit for *Ambient 4 (*On Land) a few years on. Recorded a few months on, After the Heat kept the open experimentation of the previous encounter intact while edging closer to Eno's sense of song craft. Songs like “Broken Head” and “The Belldog” could have landed on Before and After Science, the lone instances of vocals intruding upon Cluster's otherwise wordless music. There’s more of a pulse to the album, from the brass burbles of “Oil” to Holgar Czukay’s wobbling bass on “Tzima N’Arki,” and fans of Eno’s mid-70s highs will find yet another green world to be had here.
As the decade drew to an end, the synthesizers and drum machines that had once defined the avant garde had increasingly become part of pop music’s fabric. After years of working with Plank, for Großes Wasser, Cluster recorded with Tangerine Dream’s Peter Baumann, finding a sound both darker (“Avanti”), sweeter (the charming etude of “Manchmal”) and funkier (the too-short space-disco of “Prothese”). After years spent exploring shorter times, the title track comprises the entire second side, an epic that touches on Cluster’s tropes from the decade prior: sustained piano chords, strange synth trickles, eerie drones and skeletal drums. By the time of 1981’s Curiosum, British new wavers, new-agers, synth-poppers and industrial miscreants alike had fully embraced Cluster’s examples within their own music, so much so that the miniatures of their last full-length album that decade sound more like Cluster emulating these newer artists (be they OMD, Cabaret Voltaire, or Throbbing Gristle) than the other way around. It still speaks for Cluster’s prescience, to render the mechanistic noise of early electronic devices and warm them up in such a manner so as to reveal that no matter the new technology, such components are ultimately human after all. | 2016-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | null | May 7, 2016 | 8.5 | 6f4e65e3-e92f-49a0-96a8-0f011deaa2cb | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a spirited but uneven salvo from the Ohio pranksters’ campaign to reprogram American minds. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a spirited but uneven salvo from the Ohio pranksters’ campaign to reprogram American minds. | Devo: Duty Now for the Future | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/devo-duty-now-for-the-future/ | Duty Now for the Future | Sophomore albums are a doomed enterprise. Caught in the crossfire between the demands of your original fanbase, hungry for more of the same but slightly different, and the knee-jerk antagonism of critics, nursing a masochistic thirst to chronicle your inevitable fall from grace, the endeavor hinges on figuring out who to disappoint while keeping your ego intact. Devo learned this lesson the hard way with 1979’s Duty Now for the Future. Ever the innovative pranksters, the new-wave iconoclasts found a way to not only confuse fans and lose the critics, but shatter their own inflated confidence in the process. Consider this: Greatest Misses, a companion to 1990’s crowd-pleasing Greatest Hits, features seven of Duty Now for the Future’s 13 tracks—a confirmation of the colossal nature of their second-record flop. Even bassist Gerald “Jerry” Casale, usually the band’s most stalwart defender, would later admit it. “Album one is like the Bible—you make your statement once,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “What you do next is produce the goods—that is, show in substance what it’s all about. The criticism on the second album is that we didn’t do that.”
Depending on your love for the band at the time, this disproportionate hate might have been a blessing in disguise. In 1990, when they cherry-picked its tracks for Greatest Misses, Duty Now for the Future was still four years away from reissue, shelved by Warner Bros. until Henry Rollins sought to put it out on his own label. And what better, more perverse—more Devo—way to reward the faith of hardcore fans than to repackage their greatest failure alongside such obvious winners as the superior, gloriously sludgy “Booji Boy” mix of “Jocko Homo”?
Only a true Devotee could embrace this record, where art rock’s finest wore out the punchline on their way to defining new wave’s bleeding edge. To critics and the public at large, Devo got caught lacking on Duty Now for the Future, but the resultant surge of embarrassment was just the lift they needed to leave behind their infancy for greener pastures.
Before David Bowie introduced the band onstage at New York City venue Max’s Kansas City in 1977, calling them the “band of the future,” Devo had already amassed enough subversive cred to fuel multiple careers. They’d opened for Sun Ra at Cleveland radio station WMMS’ 1975 Halloween party, extending their 15-minute slot by jamming “Jocko Homo” into a 30-minute punk-rock riot that got them kicked off stage. The Truth About De-Evolution, the self-produced short film that would open their concerts to wild cheers from their cult-like audience (affectionately known as “spuds”), had charmed critics enough to win first prize at the 1977 Ann Arbor film festival. They’d even managed to update the Rolling Stones’ existentialist masterpiece “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” well enough to earn the approval of Mick Jagger himself. Playing it for the rock icon in a bid to win his consent for its inclusion on their debut, the band looked on as Jagger “stood up and started dancing around on this Afghan rug in front of the fireplace… the sort of rooster-man dance he used to do,” Casale remembered with awe in a 2017 interview. “I like it, I like it,” Jagger exclaimed, prancing across the floor to its dilapidated rhythms and frantic yelps, jumping down from his lofty perch to bounce around with the rest of the underground.
Born in the working-class suburbs surrounding Akron, Ohio, Casale made a beeline for art school at Kent State University in 1966, eager to leave behind the rubber-factory town’s cultural malaise. “The Goodyear Museum, and the Soapbox Derby and McDonald’s and women in hair rollers beating their kids in supermarkets,” Casale would later groan to an interviewer regarding Akron’s all-American landscape. “Just reaction, without knowing what was going on. Getting fat, getting mellow, getting drugged out, getting married.”
In 1969, Casale sought out Mark Mothersbaugh, a printmaking student who’d made a name for himself by plastering campus with self-made decals. Taken with his drawing of an astronaut holding up a potato, Casale struck up a conversation on the hierarchy of vegetables. “Since we were both from working class families,” Mothersbaugh recalled, “we said, ‘Yeah we’re potatoes.’” We used it pejoratively and also [as] a ‘welcome comrade’ type thing. ‘Hello spud!’” With their long hair flowing free, united by a love of the Velvet Underground and Andy Warhol, the two slipped into a clique of similarly minded art students, working on projects together in blissful ignorance that they were hurtling towards tragedy.
In a 2020 Rolling Stone interview commemorating the 1970 Kent State Massacre, Casale refers to the killings as the “beginning of my red pill moment.” Hundreds of students, including Casale and Mothersbaugh, had gathered on the university commons to rally against military expansion into Cambodia. Also among the crowd were Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, two first-year students who Casale had guided through registration as part of his work-study program. Claiming that they feared for their lives, Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on the unarmed protestors, leaving Krause, Miller, and two other students dead as ambulances arrived to attend to the nine wounded.
Casale walked away, spared from the hail of bullets but stripped of his idyllic dream of academia, or anywhere, as a safe haven. “I confronted the vast, illegitimate authority that pervaded American government and institutions of ‘higher learning’,” he later said. “Any illusion that the squeaky-clean idea, the ‘white hat’ exceptionalism of the brand known as America, had much truth to it was wiped away. I felt like I had unwittingly been complicit in the big lie.”
Slowly, Mothersbaugh and Casale assembled a patchwork ideology to expose it. Piecing together anthropology and psychic spillover from a motley of sources—The Beginning Was the End: How Man Came Into Being Through Cannibalism, a pseudoscientific book that theorized that homo sapiens had gone insane after consuming the brains of their Neanderthal forebears; an anti-evolution pamphlet titled Jocko-Homo Heavenbound; and repeated viewings of the 1932 sci-fi film Island of Lost Souls—Devo’s crusade to expose humankind’s regression to its most savage instincts slowly came into focus. Lyrics about a decaying world were joined with Casale’s blues-based bass riffs and Mothersbaugh’s experimental synthesizer playing, a mess of sci-fi squeals and squelches designed to imitate “V-2 rockets and mortar blasts and ray guns.” “De-evolution” became their gospel, and the band solidified into a razor-sharp quintet with the arrival of jazz-trained drummer-turned-human-metronome Alan Myers, followed by Bob 1 and Bob 2, the brothers of the band’s founders, on lead and rhythm guitars.
Devo’s bracing cyberpunk stomp quickly wormed its way through the underground, turning all the right heads as they began recording their soon-to-be-classic debut, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, with no less than avant-pop kingmaker Brian Eno. Eno’s utopian “studio as instrument” sensibilities would be almost entirely shrugged off by the ascendant band, relegated to background harmonies on “Uncontrollable Urge” and one or two splashes of synthesizer, but Devo’s intuition proved to be spot on: Audiences ate it up. Whether live, where eager crowds could be heard repeating “Jocko Homo”’s call and response chant night after night, or on late-night television, their message was spreading.
Though critics would lag behind in appreciation—in an essay about Talking Heads’ Fear of Music, perennial hater Lester Bangs couldn’t resist getting in a few digs at Devo, calling them a “shrill hive-multitracked voice of appeasement, like giggling mosquito larvae”—the band’s ballooning popularity assured them that the tipping point for de-evolution to reach critical mass was near at hand. So in early 1979, they set up in a Hollywood studio, ditched the lofty Eno for the hands-off Ken Scott (known for his work with Bowie and Supertramp), and got to work making good on Casale’s promise to NME: Devo were “getting the broom out to make way for the ’80s,” one year ahead of schedule.
No moment in Devo history captures the awkward hubris at the heart of the band’s messianic project better than Duty Now for the Future, the album that those sessions yielded. From the moment the nauseatingly cheesy triumphal march of “Devo Corporate Anthem” comes blurting out of the speakers, Duty Now reveals itself to be exactly the sort of half-baked provocation you might expect from a band of art students positioning themselves as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement to reprogram society via rock’n’roll—the kind of album made by and for people who would go on record saying, as Casale did in Melody Maker, with a straight face, “We are simply the only people really creating new music,” and, even more audaciously, “Pop music needs a big enema.”
Duty Now’s pop-music enema is indeed the work of a new-wave clean up crew. The brooms, however, are aimed squarely at their own past: Regardless of Casale’s taunts about creating new music, many of the album’s strongest songs are relics from their earliest days. Taking up their guitars like they never would again, Devo do their due diligence, codifying these well-worn favorites for the fans before they vanish beneath their Freedom of Choice-era energy domes. The versions here hit harder than anything on their Eno-soothed debut. The tight, explosively twitchy “Wiggly World” is the best of the bunch, leaping off the turntable and into your chest. Myers’ drums heave forward with a breathless immediacy, colliding headlong into the explosive growl of the Bobs’ guitars. Mothersbaugh sounds utterly fried, shouting one of Devo’s earliest mantras at the top of his lungs: “The fittest shall survive, yet the unfit may live!” This kind of bracing punk squall never goes out of style, but the prophetic skewerings of a vicious corporate hellscape—the deadpan portrait of a bumbling cog in the machine on “Blockhead,” “Clockout”’s swaggering mockery of “the biggest little business down on the block”—glow with a particularly inspired timelessness. Devo may be bidding bon voyage to an era of laser-targeted cultural criticism, but when they stay on message and turn up the amps, they simply can’t lose.
Duty Now’s fatal flaw is their insistence on expanding the juvenile sexual comedy of Are We Not Men?’s “Sloppy (I Saw My Baby Gettin’).” The band’s at times breathtaking immaturity surges to the forefront, a minefield of cringe-worthy, unevolved schoolboy horniness that makes a full-album listen a lesson in patience for even the most hardened spud. Ahead of Duty Now’s release, Mothersbaugh claimed that it would contain “love songs,” but that’s a frightening way to think of “Triumph of the Will” and its leering misogynistic analysis of how “females” never know what they want. Equally dreadful is “Pink Pussycat,” where a chittering, disconcertingly violent lust to “touch your fur” and “tear your little ears off” manages to turn a perfectly great riff/turnaround combo incurably sour.
The band’s greatest crime, however, is sandwiching the exultant power pop of “The Day My Baby Gave Me a Surprize” between the two offensive duds. Energized with the same sparks that would ignite Freedom of Choice’s hypnotic populism, Mothersbaugh soars with otherworldly sincerity between crushed guitars and theremin-like keys, summing up an idyllic sci-fi romance with a crooning one-word chorus. Dropping from these heavenly surroundings into the muck of “Pink Pussycat” feels more than a little deflating. Devo may have claimed to be cleaning house for the ’80s, but Duty Now catches the band in the middle of vomiting up its worst impulses and preserves them in mid-air, like a freeze-frame, still hurtling towards the pavement.
Before the surprise success of 1980’s “Whip It” could lead Devo up the charts to become synth-toting new-wave icons, the band had to learn to play the damn thing. Duty Now for the Future was the crucible for Devo’s much-anticipated reinvention; a heated sparring match in preparation for their showdown with the future. On their first album, synthesizers served primarily as humble punctuation; here they learn to sequence in full sentences. For every “Triumph of the Will” there’s a “Strange Pursuit,” sputtering along to a jerky, slightly-too-fast pulse that Devo would distill into the sharper, more refined “It’s Not Right,” minus the vocoder. “Devo Corporate Anthem” ends mercifully fast, but “S.I.B. (Swelling Itching Brain),” an eerie ode to the cranial cannibals of their founding texts, stretches out to become Duty Now’s most atmospheric work and most dynamic synth workout, its criss-crossing swarm of keys playing out like a tutorial for the coordination they’d need to reanimate dense tracks like “Girl U Want” for a live setting.
Devo always knew they’d be a band for the ’80s, presciently describing themselves as an “eighties industrial band”—a tag repeated in the same Melody Maker review that saw them take responsibility for flushing out the rot of the ’60s and ’70s. Duty Now for the Future is their greatest miss by virtue of being their greatest, most necessary mess. Fumbling through their own de-evolution, Devo shed just the right amount of ego to claim the future for themselves. | 2022-08-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner | August 28, 2022 | 6.6 | 6f4fb2a7-e207-4d40-860a-afb53e4dfefc | Phillipe Roberts | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillipe-roberts/ | |
Newly reissued on vinyl, Bikini Kill’s 1998 compilation stands as the defining document of the feminist punk band whose music remains relevant, righteous, and unflappably cool. | Newly reissued on vinyl, Bikini Kill’s 1998 compilation stands as the defining document of the feminist punk band whose music remains relevant, righteous, and unflappably cool. | Bikini Kill: The Singles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bikini-kill-the-singles/ | The Singles | The silencing of women is a social plague; Bikini Kill spent seven years annihilating it. From 1990 to 1997, the Olympia band fought to cultivate a feminist punk counterculture that blazed and shrieked and cared: “Dare ya to do what you want/Dare ya to be who you will,” went one early Bikini Kill rallying cry. Their fanzines burned between every weaponized word as they encouraged a participatory logic. “A band is any song you ever played with anybody even if only once,” as drummer Tobi Vail wrote—could a song topple the world? Could it destroy the deafening quiet? Bikini Kill were a scream in the face of silence, shattering it, casting its bondage into stark relief. This would not have been possible without their seismic, heroic songs, of which The Singles is the defining document.
The Singles compilation arrived in 1998, a year after Bikini Kill broke up, collecting three 45s: “New Radio,” produced with Joan Jett in 1993; plus two singles from 1995, The Anti-Pleasure Dissertation 7" and “I Like Fucking” b/w “I Hate Danger.” Concision is a virtue in hardcore and punk, which have historically flourished in the abbreviated EP form (see: Black Flag’s The First Four Years, the Minor Threat EPs, Bikini Kill’s own First Two Records). With brighter and more robust productions, Bikini Kill’s effect exploded, as if someone flipped a light on in their dark basement. If a person in your life wants or needs Bikini Kill—wants or needs proof that punk can seek justice and thrills at once; that feminist rock’n’roll can be palatable without being formulaic; that protest music can be unflappably cool—give them The Singles first.
By September of ’93, when “New Radio” first arrived, Bikini Kill had yet to release an LP—their lo-fi debut, Pussy Whipped, came out one month later—but their EPs had already laid out the core pro-girl principles of their band. In the early years, singer Kathleen Hanna would repeat single phrases like mantras to ensure the audience didn’t miss their insurrectionary messages in busted P.A. systems. But now, Bikini Kill fans were memorizing the words at home, so with “New Radio” and other singles, Hanna took more liberties with her lyrics. The Singles largely deals in the pursuit and politics of joy, adventure, friendship, and sex. As Hanna put it on “I Like Fucking”—in a semi-fried voice that immortalized her vision of a generation of scrunchie-clad philosophers, the Valley Girl Intelligentsia—“I believe in the radical possibilities of pleasure, babe!” Anger is an energy, she seems to say, but pleasure is power.
Joan Jett was 34 years old when she entered the studio with Bikini Kill that March, well over a decade removed from her all-girl teen rock band, the Runaways. Brash, glittery, and nails-tough—a woman who taught herself guitar with Sabbath riffs—Jett had been through the industry ringer many times over (she was rejected by 23 majors before she had a hit with “I Love Rock N Roll”). Jett felt quick camaraderie with the emerging generation of oft-misunderstood feminist punks. She was handed a Bikini Kill demo at a Fugazi show; the tape’s label said, “For a good time, call Kathleen.” Hanna was in sheer disbelief when Jett dialed the number: “Who the fuck is this?!” she spewed into the phone, sure it was a prank. In 1981, Jett was alone, singing, “I don’t give a damn about my bad reputation”; later, Bikini Kill sang, “We’re the girls with the bad reputations,” joining her. It started on “New Radio.”
Bikini Kill recorded two glammy new songs with Jett, “New Radio” and “DemiRep,” plus a definitive version of their signature anthem, “Rebel Girl.” Jett sang back up and played guitar on all three, revving the band’s joyride energy with her giddy “Cherry Bomb” fuel. Jett had experience putting a highlighter to hardcore—14 years earlier, she produced the first Germs album—and these recordings pop and fly like her motorbike. On “New Radio,” Hanna’s lyrics of depraved childhood sound like lines from a lost Kathy Acker novel. “I’m the little girl at the picnic who won’t stop pulling her dress up,” she quavers at the start, before practically cartwheeling to the song’s sex-positive finish: “Let’s wipe our cum on my parents’ bed!” This is the self-determined “thrilling living” that the radical critic Valerie Solanas wrote about.
“DemiRep” opens with another marker of girlhood: Hanna and Jett playing the hand game “Miss Mary Mack,” concluding the rhyme scheme with an enthused “Fourth of July/Lie/LIAR!” Is America the lie? Is childhood? “DemiRep”—a word defined on the 7" label as a “woman of doubtful repute; an adventuress”—suggests both. Hanna hollers biting critiques of body image, class privilege, and capitalism: “I got something, man, that your fucking money cannot buy!” As “DemiRep” blasts forward, Hanna practically sticks her tongue out at the man: “You don’t know what it’s like to be alive!” She does not mince a word.
The steadied thrum of “Rebel Girl” is the march of patriarchy crumbling. Hanna observes her punk-rock queen and writes an ultimate girl-love anthem, tracing “the revolution” in “her hips” and “her kiss.” In every bar of “Rebel Girl,” our relationships matter; our speech matters. This gift of a song is a framework for rethinking both. “Rebel Girl” is like the glue that binds the two teen girl outcasts attending prom together in last year’s Lady Bird, defining for themselves what it means to be cool (Lady Bird, of course, has a Bikini Kill poster in her room). When Hanna’s rebel girl “holds her head up so high,” she’s hipper than James Dean. With Jett, Hanna sang “Rebel Girl” as if her life depended on it; lives did. The word “revolution” is practically dissected by her scream, made real, screeched into the brightest red.
Hanna could often depict the complexities of identity in a single verse, diving between yelps and bellows and growls. On The Singles, she does something similar to portray the rage and vulnerability of sex. “Strawberry Julius” shimmies from a shrill “WHAT THE FUCK?” to a tender “come on!” “It’s you all over my skin/Taking invisible streets/To the fake places where we win,” Hanna sings. On “Anti-Pleasure Dissertation”—a song about being in love with someone who “[writes] about fucking you in their fanzine”—she lashes, “Go tell your fucking friends..../How punk fucking rock my pussy smelled!” The Slits weren’t even this explicit. At its core, though, “Dissertation” is about the emotional burden of deception: “Was I wrong to trust anyone?” Hanna asks sincerely. On the swaggering “Rah! Rah! Replica,” it is pure emphatic joy to hear Bikini Kill scream “DON’T! YOU! TRY! TO! FAKE! ME! OUT,” as if blowing a colossal wind back at every man who has ever inflicted emotional or psychological harm.
Before Bikini Kill, Vail had made her name as a razor-sharp writer and thinker with her feminist music zine, Jigsaw. Her lyrics were accordingly searing, ideological, often essayistic. The two songs Vail brings to these Singles—“In Accordance to Natural Law” and “I Hate Danger”—are monumental moments in American punk, jolts of seething, inspired conviction. Both feature Vail on vocals, Hanna on bass, and bassist Kathi Wilcox on drums (Billy Karren stayed on guitar). “In Accordance to Natural Law” is a 29-second bomb, like a screamed monologue—proving that even as Bikini Kill polished their sound, they were taking risks, deconstructing and reimagining what we think a song can be. In less than half a minute, Vail ignites a scathing critique of underground media and flimsy scene politics, her own girlish V.G.I. shout dripping sarcasm. The whole song is a clenched fist.
Vail’s livid Singles closer “I Hate Danger” is what happens when a woman’s eyes look through punk’s societal magnifying glass. As she shouts about the subtle silencing of women in an everyday social situation—just sitting around with a friend and their other, narrow-minded friends, and not managing to get an inch into the conversation—“I Hate Danger” offers a clear metaphor for the systemic silencing and sidelining of women in the world. Vail captures the particular fury of being undermined by being ignored. She goes to war for every girl who could never articulate why it is so belittling to not be taken seriously in small ways, turning her anger into a singing polemic about the politics of hanging out: “It’s one particular point of view/This group dynamic caters to,” she sings with remarkable ease, “I think you know when it caters to you!” Vail is not here for your feigned ignorance: “If you do know/Don’t act like you don’t/Cause it’s really annoying/And if you don’t know/Well, let’s just say/You’re a lot, lot stupider than I thought!”
In the girl-gang refrain of “I Hate Danger,” Vail, Hanna, and Wilcox invert the situation in which our narrator felt so psychically powerless: “I stopped talking an hour ago!” they chant exuberantly over chainsaw Karren riffs. It sounds like solidarity, like three girl geniuses linking arms in protest. Vail imagines going back in time to say exactly what she meant—“You’re so not dangerous! You’re so no what you say you are at all!”—and those final words tumble and lock into one another like armor. “I Hate Danger” is charged with the superpower of the greatest punk: Our hearts race faster, we grow six inches taller, and in the eternal battle of us-against-them, if only for two minutes, we win.
In Bikini Kill’s orbit, women spoke openly about sexual assault, rape, harassment, abuse. “It was intense to be at the center of all that female rage and terror,” Vail said in 2012. “We were at the frontline of teen-girl pain.” The Singles validated these brutal realities while offering fun as an antidote. This combination makes these songs even more relevant in 2018, as these conversations permeate the public consciousness. Maybe it’s in how these particular Bikini Kill songs circle pop’s pleasure-centers, but there remains a felt optimism to The Singles. In “I Like Fucking,” when Hanna sings, “Do you believe there’s anything beyond troll-guy reality? I do. I do. I do,” it could be a mantra for fighting and overcoming the many forms of harassment that persist online today. This is legitamtely encouraging. Bikini Kill’s miraculous songs ultimately believe in a world beyond rape culture, beyond eating disorders, beyond female pain, and that hope makes them life-affirming.
Bikini Kill thought that if all girls started bands, the world would actually change. They were right: When girls make work to narrate their lives, they embolden each other and demand to be heard; they begin to infiltrate and subvert every crevice of existence; they no longer keep the truth of female experience trapped like secrets inside of their bodies and minds. The world is progressing with the unleashing of those truths. The Singles remains one of our most potent catalysts for that revolution. “I want to scream because I am just as much of a human being as any man but I don’t always get treated like one,” read an early Bikini Kill zine. “I want to scream because no matter how much I scream, no one will listen.” The world is listening now. | 2018-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bikini Kill | October 11, 2018 | 10 | 6f5c9945-48ca-4b4f-985d-c0d28555c53a | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The LateNightTales series asks artists to create a "late night" mix from their record collections. Belle and Sebastian's second contribution leans heavily on the 1960s and early 1970s, with occasional glimmers of modernity. | The LateNightTales series asks artists to create a "late night" mix from their record collections. Belle and Sebastian's second contribution leans heavily on the 1960s and early 1970s, with occasional glimmers of modernity. | Belle and Sebastian: LateNightTales, Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16428-belle-and-sebastian-latenighttales-vol-2/ | LateNightTales, Vol. 2 | Belle and Sebastian sometimes seem like the kind of people who like to have friends over and play them one record after another for hours-- "but have you heard this Lovin' Spoonful track? Oh, you have to! Here, I'll put it next in the queue after the Stan Tracey Quartet's King Crimson cover and-- okay, hold on, let me fade out this Pop Group instrumental, you kind of get the idea..." They also seem like the rare people from whom that behavior would not result in silent pleas to just put on an Al Green album or something and leave the stereo alone, because their ability to dig up amazing, not-overexposed music defies the Dunning-Kruger Effect by being as good as they think it is.
Hence, Stuart Murdoch and company have been invited back for their second volume of the LateNightTales series of "here's a bunch of not particularly dancey stuff a well-known artist likes, plus a new cover by that artist, and a spoken-word piece" compilations. (Their first came out in 2006.) As expected, their taste is superb; as you might also expect, they lean heavily on the 1960s and early 1970s, with occasional glimmers of modernity (Gold Panda, Toro y Moi) and the odd touch of naff-and-obvious just for contrast. (Blood, Sweat & Tears' "Spinning Wheel"? Srsly?) Not a lot of this set sounds much like their own music, although the Wonder Who?'s pop-psychedelic "Watch the Flowers Grow" sounds like the Belle and Sebastian rhythm section might have taken a few cues from it. They also include two tracks by Broadcast, the much-missed Birmingham group whose aesthetic was all about stereophilic retro-futurism, and whose admirers are probably almost entirely a subset of Belle and Sebastian's own.
A handful of the songs they've picked effectively declare "but have you heard it like this?": not Margo Guryan's lite-psych delite "Sunday Morning" but Marie Laforêt's French cover of it, not the Cure's skeletal synth-pop heavy breather "Close to Me" but the repurposing of its plinky hook in Ce'cile's dancehall track "Rude Bwoy Thug Life", not the regular version of Pete Shelley's "North American Scum"-prefiguring "Homosapien" but some kind of dub mix. (They're the kind of record geeks for whom the less-heard version is obviously better.) And they turn out to be fond of very precise music by hairy hippies-- the folk-prog band Trees' "Streets of Derry", from 1970's On the Shore, sounds especially brawny in this context.
Still, this mix is trying a little too hard to be a mix, rather than letting tracks play out-- their few attempts at cross-fades leave a lot to be desired, and the echo-chamber effect that curtails several tracks isn't so hot either. And one of the album's few weak links is Belle and Sebastian's own pallid, ambling cover of the Primitives' "Crash": without the original's brakes-are-out momentum, there's not much left of it. (If it had come out back in the days when B&S were flicking out a new single every few months, it wouldn't have been disappointing, but a year and a half after Write About Love, that's it?)
LateNightTales' requisite spoken-word closer doubles as a commentary on the project itself: critic-turned-label-guy-turned-critic Paul Morley's piece "Lost for Words, Part 3", whose centerpiece is a string of his favorite sentences by other writers. They're fun to hear, they're intriguing as a key to an aesthetic, and they're no substitute for the anthologist's own work. | 2012-03-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-03-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Late Night Tales | March 29, 2012 | 7 | 6f5d1174-3be6-40b6-8b98-637c14f003cf | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
An unexpected comeback from the legendary indie pop band fronted by Dan Treacy. | An unexpected comeback from the legendary indie pop band fronted by Dan Treacy. | Television Personalities: My Dark Places | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8975-my-dark-places/ | My Dark Places | Dan Treacy and the Television Personalities have a big legacy-- a spot on the CV as godfathers of do-it-yourself pop, and a terrific 1980s back catalog of witty, eccentric new-wave and indie. Listening to Treacy's signature puppy/schoolboy voice-- the most vulnerable voice in the world-- and clocking the humor and whimsy scattered across those records, you'd hardly expect the guy to turn out a rock-star casualty; he's a twee-pop touchstone, not a sweaty romantic. But drug problems (and mental ones) don't much care for those distinctions. By the 90s, Treacy was missing and presumed dead; when he turned up this decade, it was while doing time on an English prison boat. When he was released, and told his friends he'd been writing songs all along, a lot of machinery sprang into motion to make this album possible-- from fans raising cash for studio time to the Brit rock label Domino signing the Television Personalities to its roster. Their press release calls the band "the original Babyshambles," but this particular wreck is a lot more human than stylish.
The first track we heard from this turned out to be perfect. The re-recorded version on the album is titled "I Hope You're Happy Now", and it's exactly the kind of song Treacy's always shined on-- languid, unassuming, unguarded, shambling-along guitar-pop, recorded in the kind of warm, naturalistic way not much heard these days. It was also perfectly placed in the Treacy story: The original title was "I Hope He's Everything You Wanted Me to Be", and the sense of fatigue, resignation, and disappointment in his vocals was awfully easy to connect with. Everyone must have been hoping that prison time had netted a whole record's worth of songs like this-- well-crafted, forlorn, and with a whole lot of very serious things to say, an unpremeditated "real deal" collection of intensely human stuff. A whole lot of people write a whole lot of earnest songs on guitars; sometimes it's nice to hear some that feel like one of them is genuinely struggling to express something honest.
But not quite. My Dark Places doesn't just uncover shadowy corners in its subject matter-- it's also musically unkempt, stumbling along and veering off in directions most bands wouldn't even be comfortable using as B-sides or jokes. "All the Young Children on Crack" consists mostly of a spare drumbeat repeating while Treacy sings the title-- interwoven with some fumbling handclaps and acoustic guitar wanders. "Ex-Girlfriend Club" is actively creepy, with Treacy speaking as the club's tour guide ("Help yourself to the salad bar") before singing bits of "Uptown Top Ranking", running in an odd sampled break, and talking about Puff Daddy over shapeless piano lines. Some tracks seem improvised, thrown-together, Treacy half-singing off a lyric sheet as the instruments around him try to find something interesting to do. Fans-only references abound: paisley shirts and miniskirts, "paradise is for the blessed," etc. Even the best songs aren't prime-time performances-- they're shambling in a worrying way, as if they only just barely managed to get themselves recorded at all.
When the songs are good, though, that quality is what provides a lot of the charm-- which has often been the way with this band. And a lot of these tracks turn out to be incredible. "She Can Stop Traffic" captures lots of things: the raw romantic enthusiasm of this act; the boyish, starry-eyed quality that comes out when the band "rocks"; and the wit and the pain both, which Treacy combines over the ending fade. ("She can stop traffic," he sings, "and she's mine. Or she was.") On tracks like "Dream the Sweetest Dreams", it's just the sound of the act that makes this so great-- these recordings aren't "lo-fi," but they're unadorned, in-the-room, full of a wide-open warmth, a slack human quality, and voices that leave them feeling spectacularly intimate. Considering that you get the same feeling from the lyrics, it's easy to see how the band's fans will be taken with this even in the moments where it's close to being a musical disaster: You forgive those things the way you might with your best friend's band. And as you listen more, a lot more of the record reveals itself as not so disastrous at all. This is a strange kind of "difficult" pop, where songs that first seem hard to listen to gradually take shape and acquire potent emotional effects.
On a few of these songs-- where Treacy plays his songs on piano, maybe accompanying his voice with a melodica-- that's exactly what's on offer: Whatever the quality of the music and the performance, there's an incredible amount of emotion that winds up coming through. (See "There's No Beautiful Way to Say Goodbye".) And whether Treacy's music is working or not, the one thing he always has working for him is the uniqueness of his approach; now more than ever, this sounds like pretty much nothing else, and in a way that's entirely unpremeditated. The most vulnerable voice in the world makes for the most vulnerable album in the world, and it's largely a train wreck-- but there are very good reasons to hope that Treacy stays well and keeps at it. | 2006-03-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-03-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | March 16, 2006 | 6.7 | 6f68817d-8a6b-4301-8775-a893888c898b | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
No longer able to summon his mythical sense of storytelling, Nas sounds lost on his 11th studio album. Kanye’s production doesn’t help, either. | No longer able to summon his mythical sense of storytelling, Nas sounds lost on his 11th studio album. Kanye’s production doesn’t help, either. | Nas: Nasir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nas-nasir/ | Nasir | It’s hard to discern whether Nasir was even Nas’ idea. When Kanye West announced he’d be producing it, it felt like a personal milestone for him more than a fleshed-out collaboration. Nas clearly obliged, but it’s hard to imagine Nasir is the album Nas bragged about on the 2016 DJ Khaled song “Nas Album Done.” The record was not done at the time that track was released, but the sheer brashness of Nas treating a completed album like a plutonium cache indicated that he was feeling himself. But on Nasir, even as he tackles classic Nas subjects like police brutality, managing money, and conspiracy theories, a noxious cloud hangs over everything: Nas is bored.
He opens the album with the perfunctory enthusiasm of a waiter describing the daily special to her 30th table that night. “Escobar season begins,” he says flatly, quickly passing the mic to Diddy, whose raucous presence, by contrast, is immediately felt. A sped-up loop of the main theme of The Hunt for Red October gives “Not for Radio” some cinematic and regal flair, but Nas lumbers through his verses. Weaving together outsized paranoia (“They try to Hyman Roth me/John Fitzgerald me”), textbook hotepisms (“Black Kemet gods, Black Egyptian gods/Summoned from heaven, blessed, dressed in only Goyard”), and boilerplate faux-deep commentary (“Shoot the ballot box, no voter cards, they are all frauds”), he builds to a doofy litany of falsehoods and unsolicited history lessons.
On the surface, lines like “Fox News was started by a black dude” (it wasn’t) and “Edgar Hoover was black” (he wasn’t) are standard Nas soapboxing; messianic titles aside, Nas has very rarely claimed to be anything other than one guy trying to move the masses by sharing what he believes. But there’s an emptiness to these provocations. Nas sounds less like a street preacher touting with conviction and urgency, and more like an online commenter shitposting in search of a jolt of entropy. It’s not quite trolling, but there’s an abandon to his claims, a lack of consideration. It’s lazy writing.
“Cops Shot the Kid,” a bouncy track built around a rickety sample of Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story,” is more purposeful. Nas flits between irritation and resignation as he chronicles the dread and terror of being black in America. He’s been on this beat since he rebuked a “foul cop” who shot an allegedly unarmed man on Illmatic’s “Halftime,” and you can feel the history in his voice. “Y’all are blowing my high,” he laments as cops circle around some city kids enjoying a hacked fire hydrant. The song falters when Kanye dips in to detail the “other side” of cops killing black kids. Whereas Nas’ verse had setting, character, and mise en scene, Kanye’s is all stage directions. “I know every story got two sides,” he raps to the clouds. It’s clear which side he wants to empathize with, but considering his recent comments about slavery and his sloppy verse on Pusha-T’s Daytona (“Will MAGA hats let me slide like a drive-thru?”), his verse is distracting. The fact that it wasn’t cut feels negligent.
It’s easy to pin this lack of focus on Kanye’s domineering vision of Nas, but Nas never really demands the spotlight. Abandoning the keen eye for details that he honed from his famous project window perch, Nas instead offers bland reports from the Met Gala and somewhere in the south of France; his narratives have the excitement of a geo-tag. Luxury items, artisanal foods, and women are rendered crudely, without flourish or even appetite. “Having drinks in Vegas, my business,” he boasts on “Bonjour,” the beverage and the business omitted.
When Nas does find inspiration, his passion is outrageously misplaced. “Everything,” the centerpiece of the album, is essentially a bizarro version of “If I Ruled the World” where, instead of outlining a black utopia, Nas rails against… child vaccinations, inclusion, and the ghosts of rich white people. “If I had everything, everything/I could change anything,” Kanye croons, driving home the aimlessness of the song. They covet the power to shape the world, but not the responsibility.
In the rare moments where Nasir achieves coherence, Nas is often concerned with the precarity of his successes. “Adam and Eve” and “Simple Things” contain multiple allusions to loss, longevity, and humiliation. Nas frets often about his children missing out on his gains, and his own peace of mind being threatened by his indiscretions or generational trauma. Kelis’ recent allegations of abuse during her marriage to Nas can make these nods to broken families and debts feel like elisions and barbs, but that is probably too generous. The writing is so meandering and mechanical that little here feels intentional, even the gaps. And strangely, that’s the bittersweet takeaway: Nas the meticulous observer has been supplanted by Nas the nervous rambler. It doesn’t feel like an accident. | 2018-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mass Appeal | June 20, 2018 | 6.1 | 6f6dec49-b178-4301-90bd-9592d3e7e83e | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The 21-year-old bedroom-pop artist’s major-label debut displays shaggy charm and an eclecticism that’s still confined to the more pleasant parts of the color wheel. | The 21-year-old bedroom-pop artist’s major-label debut displays shaggy charm and an eclecticism that’s still confined to the more pleasant parts of the color wheel. | Cuco: Para Mí | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cuco-para-mi/ | Para Mí | “I’m only interested in a label if they come through with whatever terms I send them,” Cuco told Rolling Stone last year. Interscope must have come through. According to Billboard, the 21-year-old bedroom-pop songwriter signed a seven-figure deal with the label, which promised him freedom and flexibility. That’s as much a testament to Omar Banos’ devoted fanbase as it is an admission by the suits that they no longer care to dictate the conversation. Why risk a flop when they can just follow the streams?
Para Mí, Cuco’s major-label debut, arrives with no other hands on the joystick. It’s just Banos, who’s still writing songs about love and other drugs and whose eclecticism is still confined to the more pleasant parts of the color wheel. The album pulses with the influence of Kevin Parker, as well as multi-instrumentalist tinkerers like Toro y Moi, Sen Morimoto, and Mac DeMarco. Its backward-seeming track sequence improves significantly as it goes along; its instrumental interludes are better than most of the songs. Para Mí may have been the result of a near-fatal car crash, but the album is a happy meanderer. Cuco knows it. His introduction concludes with the question, “Where is this fool going?”
Nowhere, really. Cuco’s unadorned songwriting isn’t for everyone. If you’re not in a place to appreciate a line like, “Don’t play with me/You broke my heart/But I’m also so obsessed with you,” the early portions of the album will be frustrating. (That’s from the third track, “Bossa No Sé.”) Stretch similarly simple lyrics over five minutes of gentle psychedelia and you have “Love Tripper,” the insipid song that’s smack in the middle.
Still, Banos’ appeal is undeniable. Every so often he hits upon a great dumb couplet, as irresistable as Best Coast’s early love for the ultimate Californian rhyme, “crazy/lazy.” (Cuco’s biggest hit, 2018’s “Lo Que Siento,” shared the same simple, sincere energy.) One of the highlights here is “Best Friend,” a ballad of devotion with a wry turn: “I know I’ve been quite dumb/But baby we’re quite young.” Awww.
It’s this shaggy charm that’s won over Cuco’s fans. A manager, Doris Muñoz, described the audience at an early backyard show: “Latinx teens singing every single lyric in English and Spanish to his music, which is inspired by our culture; it gave me chills.” Banos, whose parents are Mexican immigrants, has talked about how important it is to him to represent the Chicano community. But though his politics contextualize his music, Para Mí is not overtly political. When Cuco does get serious, it’s usually because he’s had a bad love affair. Once over the hump of “Love Tripper,” the album reaches a higher plane, starting with “Ego Death in Thailand,” where an insistent hook shoots skyward from the same gorgeous synths that make the interludes “Perihelion” and “Room Tone” so compelling. These tracks put muscle behind Cuco’s goofy obsession with psychedelics: They’re about expansion and exploration. Imagine Roger Troutman producing an all-instrumental album for Tame Impala featuring Mac DeMarco.
There are other standouts. “Hydrocodone” achieves a composure and balance that too much of the album’s first half lacks. The charming lyrics of “Best Friend” are all the more powerful because of the bossa nova rhythm and guitar they ride with. “Brokey the Pear” is like a lost Beach Boys interlude, with shades of “Let’s Go Away for Awhile.”
But “where is this fool going?” is a question Para Mí leaves unanswered. The repetitive, literal writing and head-scratching sequencing makes it seem like a bad thing that Cuco’s main sentiments are “I love you,” “I hate you,” and “I’m sad.” (Good pop songs are made of those sentiments too, of course, but they’re usually strengthened by more layered writing, more tightly constructed songs, or both.) Across an album, the weaknesses are magnified. There are not enough songs like “Lo Que Siento” here, heartfelt ballads that could close out a concert. Maybe in the old days, someone would have insisted that Para Mí shed some of its dead weight and be released as an EP. But, reportedly, it’s in Cuco’s contract; no one’s going to do that. It just means he’ll have to find his own way. | 2019-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | July 26, 2019 | 6.8 | 6f6ec24a-e2bb-43ee-afa1-c2b75fe986cb | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
Over the course of four albums, St. Vincent's Annie Clark has been focusing her vision and sharpening her music's edges. St. Vincent is in a sense the Platonic ideal of a St. Vincent record, executing with perfect poise everything we already know she can do. | Over the course of four albums, St. Vincent's Annie Clark has been focusing her vision and sharpening her music's edges. St. Vincent is in a sense the Platonic ideal of a St. Vincent record, executing with perfect poise everything we already know she can do. | St. Vincent: St. Vincent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19020-st-vincent-st-vincent/ | St. Vincent | Annie Clark's bold and almost jarringly confident fourth record, St. Vincent, does not sound like it was recorded here on Earth. Its songs sprout with their own strange, squiggly lifeforms and are governed by unfamiliar laws of gravity. Check out the first one, "Rattlesnake", a song that's bare, Kraftwerky, and full of imagery that is somehow both Edenic and post-apocalyptic. Clark glances around: "Am I the only one in the only world?" She spots the title creature, gasps, and then comes this song's idea of a chorus, like melodic gagging, or distress expressed in an 8-bit video game: "AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH AHH AHH/ AH-AH-AH-AH-AH-AH AHH AHH." You often get the sense in a St. Vincent song that Clark has touched down on a desolate, previously unexplored planet without an air supply and is showing off the fact that—for the moment at least—she can still breathe.
Given the fangs she bares on St. Vincent, it seems like Clark could take that snake, easily. Over the course of four albums, many early-career guest spots, and a 2012 collaboration with David Byrne, Clark has been focusing her vision and sharpening her music's edges; were it not for Google image search, it would be easy to convince yourself that you merely dreamed those days when she wore butterfly wings with Sufjan Stevens and blithely flowing robes with the Polyphonic Spree. With each release, Clark sounds less like anybody but herself, and more forcefully embraces a darkness that was quietly stirring in even her earliest songs. "You don't mean that, say you're sorry," she chimed in a creepy, Bride of Chucky voice on her still-magnificent debut single, "Now, Now". But the smirking overlord that stares out from the cover of St. Vincent does not apologize, not for any of the unpleasantries she utters through gritted teeth, nor the much nastier things she blurts out her fingers.
St. Vincent continues Clark's run as one of the past decade's most distinct and innovative guitarists, though she's never one to showboat. Her harmonic-filled style bears the influence of jazz (she picked up a lot of her signature tricks from her uncle, the jazz guitarist Tuck Andress) and prog rock, two genres known to embrace sprawl. But Clark's freak-outs are tidy, modular and architecturally compact—like King Crimson rewritten by Le Corbusier. Even at its most spazzy, there's always something efficient about St. Vincent. The stark, spring-wound single "Birth in Reverse" doesn't waste a second on superfluous sounds, and the same goes for the corrosive crunch of "Regret", which sounds like a classic rock song pared down to its most essential elements. All the negative space in that last one makes Clark's riffs hit that much harder, especially when—in one of the most thrilling moments on the album—a solo strikes down out of nowhere like a cartoon lightning bolt.
Critics of St. Vincent call her pretentious. Fair enough—these are the sorts of songs that dare take themselves seriously and tack on easy suffixes like "in America" when they want to let you know they are Making a Statement. But there's an under-appreciated playfulness about Clark's music that balances this out. I can't think of much contemporary guitar-based music that has this much fun with texture—the rubbery whiplash percussion on "Prince Johnny", the stretched-taffy vocals on "Bring Me Your Loves", the gleefully synthetic-on-purpose sheen of "Digital Witness". At best, St. Vincent has a mischievous curiosity about texture (and explosions) that feels almost childlike. Recently my 8 year-old cousin asked me, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, if I'd ever microwaved a banana. I'm terrified to try, but I'm sure whatever happens—splattering, abrupt, radioactive—sounds exactly like an Annie Clark guitar solo.
"What's the point in even sleeping/ If I can't show, if you can't see me?" Clark asks on the single "Digital Witness", a rather on-the-nose critique of our hyper-transparent, Instagram-your-every-meal culture. It's tempting to label St. Vincent Clark's anti-internet album, but that wouldn't be quite right—it knows too well what a life mediated through screens feels and sounds like to be sending it up entirely. (In fact, digital life may have influenced her concise, anti-jam style: "I have some restless ears, and I now have a fractured attention span because I'm like living in the modern world," she said in a recent interview. "So I'm like, how do I make this sound interesting to myself?") "Huey Newton" is maybe one of the best songs ever written about falling down a late-night, vaguely depressive internet k-hole ("Pleasure dot loathing dot Huey dot Newton/ Oh, it was a lonely, lonely winter"); seemingly stream-of-conscious references to Black Panthers, Byzantine architecture, and the Heaven's Gate cult flicker by like puzzlingly connected Wikipedia pages. The common threads emerge if you look closely. From the self-coronated Prince Johnny to the "near-future cult leader" Clark has fashioned herself on the album cover, there's a fascination with power, faith, and mind-control running through these songs—learning how to sell yourself your own lines well enough to sell them back to other people, too.
"I was reading Miles Davis' biography," Clark says of her Beyoncé-like decision to self-title a record this late in her career, "and he says that the hardest thing for a musician to do is sound like yourself." In that sense, it's a perfect title. St. Vincent is the Platonic ideal of a St. Vincent record, executing with perfect poise everything we already know she can do. But this also is why it falls just short of being her best. That honor still goes to Strange Mercy, which had a capacity to surprise and defy expectations in a way that this record does not. Strange Mercy was easier to connect to emotionally ("If I ever meet the dirty police man who roughed you up," she cooed on the title track, a line that was as jarring for its tenderness as it was for its violence) and gave Clark a little more room to stretch her legs in the grooves. The pixelated shredding on "Huey Newton" and "Regret" are great, but nothing here feels as unhinged as the borealis chaos of at the end of "Northern Lights" or the razor-sharp coda of "Surgeon". The Bowie-esque metamorphosis suggested by the cover image doesn’t mean she’s reinvented her sound. Of course it's not the worst problem for an artist to have, but Clark's become so good at being St. Vincent that, on future releases, she risks boxing herself in. You hope the next album finds her coloring outside the lines she's so meticulously drawn for herself.
Still, it’s hard to ask too much more from an album that boasts melodies as lovely as "Prince Johnny" and "Severed Crossed Fingers". That last one is the best closing song on a St. Vincent album yet—a self-deprecating, slow-motion parade of a ballad that sounds like if Lorrie Moore had written the non-existent lyrics to “Here Come the Warm Jets”. (This song and “Birth in Reverse” both take their wry titles from Moore’s great short story collection Birds of America.) It’s a moment of vulnerability and bleak hope rounding out Clark’s hardest, tightest, and most confident record to date—a vaguely ominous promise of better days ahead. "We’ll be heroes on every bar stool," she vows, sounding so sure of herself that you’re liable to follow her to whatever planet she’s headed. | 2014-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-02-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | February 24, 2014 | 8.6 | 6f71cf79-c4ea-4763-9502-8c28b33754cb | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
Though it’s not a force of nature like the other LPs Thee Oh Sees have produced since returning from their farcically brief 2013 hiatus, Odd Entrances more than keeps their streak alive. | Though it’s not a force of nature like the other LPs Thee Oh Sees have produced since returning from their farcically brief 2013 hiatus, Odd Entrances more than keeps their streak alive. | Thee Oh Sees: An Odd Entrances | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22625-an-odd-entrances/ | An Odd Entrances | An Odd Entrances arrived fast, even by Thee Oh Sees standards. The Bay Area-born psych band has always worked at a feverish clip—at least an album a year, in additions to shelves of singles, EPs, rarities and miscellany—but their 18th and latest studio full-length follows its predecessor A Weird Exits by a mere three months (for the truly impatient fan, they’d also released a live album just a month before that one). The band has reached the point where their prolificacy has become a kind of performance art, an experiment in how much worthwhile product one group can deliver without releasing an outright dud. Though it’s not a force of nature like the other LPs Thee Oh Sees have produced since returning from their farcically brief 2013 hiatus, Odd Entrances more than keeps their streak alive.
Making the most of the band’s new, double-drummer lineup, A Weird Exits was a concussive dropkick of a record, as focused and ruthlessly efficient as a wood chipper. It didn’t even pause for any of the woozy, psych-pop numbers that frontman John Dwyer usually smuggles onto each record, and now we know why: He was saving them for this one. Recorded during the same sessions, An Odd Entrances is a kinder, gentler companion to its shredding predecessor (“an appendix, if you will,” according to the liner notes), a clearinghouse for all the tangents and detours that would have dulled that record’s fierceness. It’s got riffs—opener “You Will Find It Here” is an absolute beast—but for the most part Entrances doesn’t try to melt your face. It just wants to hang out a bit, maybe split a joint and stare at the sky before calling it an early night.
Three of these six songs are leisurely instrumentals, one of them, “Jammed Exit,” a direct continuation of Exits’ trippiest number, “Jammed Entrance.” The tracks share the same Krautrock groove, except this time a wayward flute scribbles all over it. Like much of Entrances, it feels like a record collector’s in joke—a nod, perhaps, to the Blues Project’s Projections, or maybe some forgotten Nuggets-era deep cut. Other references are less obscure. “The Poem” is pure Magical Mystery Tour, right down its spacey prose and melted-taffy strings, while “At the End, on the Stairs” conjures a Donovan-esque blur of paisley and incense. Then “Nervous Tech (Nah John)” ends the record as it began, with another percolating jam that lets both of the drummers get some.
Much to the exasperation of newcomers looking for a consensus entry point into their endless discography, Thee Oh Sees have been so astonishingly consistent that few of their records tower far above (or for that matter fall far below) any other. An Odd Entrances is the rare effort from the band that clearly announces itself as a lesser work. Even at just half an hour long, it’s so disconnected that it feels more like an odds-and-ends collection than the group’s actual odds and ends compilations. Casual fans can take a guilt-free pass on this one, then, but as always, the group’s insatiable base won’t have any reason to regret placing their pre-orders. If A Weird Exits was Thee Oh Sees’ Thanksgiving feast, An Odd Entrances is Friday’s turkey and stuffing sandwich—hardly a destination meal, but plenty satisfying in its own way. | 2016-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Castle Face | November 18, 2016 | 6.7 | 6f721a97-83c3-42f1-9c6d-ee0e6bb1212f | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The celebrated avant-garde composer’s final work is a shrine to ecstatic disorientation. | The celebrated avant-garde composer’s final work is a shrine to ecstatic disorientation. | Glenn Branca: The Third Ascension | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/glenn-branca-the-third-ascension/ | The Third Ascension | “There are very few animals that kill their own kind.” Avant-garde composer Glenn Branca often began interviews with bleak screeds on human existence. “We’re vicious, psychopathological beasts,” he said in 2011, referring to our planet as a “disgusting shithole.” It was easy to take one look at Branca, drink in hand and perpetually smoking, and think you had him figured out. It was even easier to hear his vitriolic compositions and find them oppressive and terrifying, as John Cage famously did in 1982. But there was always an armored optimism in Branca’s work that suggested: If we can get lost in this maddening sound, we might be able to transcend our shared shithole, if only for a moment. With Branca’s final work The Third Ascension, released a year and a half after he died of throat cancer, the composer and his ensemble take the familiar instruments of a rock band and transform them into machines of calculated pandemonium, whose noise is so merciless it’s blissful.
The concluding entry in his Ascension series, The Third Ascension premiered at New York’s famed art space the Kitchen in February 2016, where Branca and his ensemble were recorded for this very album. Branca, dressed in his trademark black duster and slacks, flailed around the stage as he conducted for bass, drums, and four guitars (one of which was played by his wife, Reg Bloor). His movements were spasmodic, and he occasionally shimmied his hips like a beleaguered Elvis. He grumbled between songs, brief quips about the best hot dog he’d ever eaten, or a dig at John Zorn. He kept his sheet music in a plastic shopping bag, which, if memory serves, had a yellow smiley face on the front. It was the only concert I’d ever been to where earplugs were forcefully handed out at the entrance, like safety goggles at a gun range.
Branca was known to say that if you didn’t like loud music, you shouldn’t bother with his. At live performances, you had no option regarding volume. When it comes to his albums, you unfortunately do. But heed the man’s words: The Third Ascension should be played at full blast, neighbors and landlords be damned. One of the most exhilarating aspects of Branca’s music is the amount of aural hallucination it inspires—a frequent side effect of listening to his work is hearing things that aren’t really there. “The Smoke,” a 16-minute odyssey that kicks off like the opening credits in a western film, eventually bursts into a fit of distortion, and it appears as though a synthesizer simulating gale-force winds has been added to the mix. On closing opus “Cold Thing,” Branca’s guitar quartet sounds like a squad of machine guns firing at point blank range, and yet the continued roar somehow registers as distant screaming, air raid sirens, and a choir of angels all at once.
This psychoacoustic mindfuck is all part of the plan. “I want you to be confused,” Branca once said of his audience. “Because if you become a little confused, then you’re not sure what you’re hearing, and that’s the point at which you can start thinking about what you’re hearing, and you can start creating what you’re hearing.” The Third Ascension, much like Branca’s masterpieces The Ascension and Lesson No. 1, is a shrine to ecstatic disorientation. It is both exhausting and elating, so much so that the end of each song coincides with a deserved deep breath.
Branca’s work has always been as much of a physical experience as a musical one, and The Third Ascension continues that tradition beautifully. The high-frequency guitar riffs piercing through “Twisting in Space” feel like individual pin pricks, and the dueling rhythms in “Lesson No. 4” might as well be a series of 2x4s bashing you in the face. It’s a glorious, numbing assault.
Glenn Branca did not like the word “transcendence,” but he knew that was the ultimate goal. “I want everything in the world, in every minute of every piece,” he once said. “I want to create a small universe on that stage, and take you off of this earth, into a place that isn’t this fucking shithole.” Branca has finally escaped. Consider The Third Ascension his parting gift. | 2019-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Systems Neutralizers | October 7, 2019 | 8 | 6f7c7d5b-7261-4763-b219-6f74336574a2 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
House of Feelings make euphoric New York house music packed with modern anxieties. Their promising debut EP is intricate and elegant, featuring guest vocals from Shamir, Meredith Graves, and GABI. | House of Feelings make euphoric New York house music packed with modern anxieties. Their promising debut EP is intricate and elegant, featuring guest vocals from Shamir, Meredith Graves, and GABI. | House of Feelings: Last Chance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/house-of-feelings-last-chance/ | Last Chance | New York’s House of Feelings embody the long tradition of dance musicians feeling disappointed with clubs. Their music—by turns exuberant and melancholic, rapturous and despairing—is an expression of soul-defeating anguish with a great big smile on its face. Their debut EP, the ominously titled Last Chance, is, to borrow a phrase from Jay McInerney, a sustained assault on the citadel of good times. “I wrecked everything/I lost everyone,” runs a representative couplet on the title track, a buoyant, euphoric house number. “They say/You don’t live here/Until you cry alone on the train.” Doesn’t that make you want to cut loose and dance? This isn’t your run-of-the-mill 3 a.m. alienation. These guys have it much worse: They’re resigned to it. They are miserable and club-on anyway.
This quality of self-conscious wretchedness—of not only knowing how grim the nightlife is but addressing it with irony and wit—gives Last Chance a somewhat intellectual cast. It is, in other words, a record of ideas, conceptual in scope (“modern anxieties dissipate in the throb of the crowded club” is how they put it, not inaccurately) and often artful in design. Dale Eisinger’s sumptuous production, a melange of dance-punk hi-hats and rock-depth synthesizers and sax riffs in the spirit of Steely Dan, is frequently as intricate, elegant, and surprising as the work Tim Goldsworth and James Murphy did as producers in the early 2000s. Bandleader Matty Fasano, meanwhile, aspires to Murphy’s work with LCD Soundsystem—and if this ambition remains for now beyond his abilities, he at least shows promise that it’s possible.
He comes closest with “It’ll Cost You”—a six-minute thesis statement, part “Losing My Edge,” part “On Repeat,” that briefly realizes Fasano’s vision and looms as standing proof of his talent. “It’ll Cost You” is an excruciating disquisition on the modern struggle: on the cost of aspiration, the reality of compromise, and the suffering that’s part of the bargain of success. All the usual themes of an upbeat electronic dance track, obviously. The lyrics, so clear and so true, are intoned by guest vocalist (and New York-based film critic and Pitchfork contributor) Kristen Yoonsoo Kim with what you might call an understated ferocity, sometimes numb, sometimes vicious. “And your body/Let’s be honest/Well, it could be better,” she all but snarls. “It’ll cost you hunger/And the vain, harsh light of the gym.” The song is merciless: “And those slick smiling people you always wanted to run from/I’m afraid, I’m afraid, afraid you’re going to have to become one.”
This would be the zenith of any album. Over Last Chance, though, no other song comes close. Shamir guests on the lovely penultimate cut “Falling,” and Meredith Graves does get a lot of mileage out of a lugubrious refrain on “Avatar”—the sardonic touch suits her naturally. “I can’t make it/9 to 5,” she sings. “Not like I/Have endless time.” It’s among the album’s most compelling images. Last Chance works best as an ideas record, and Fasano could use more of them on this EP. He’s smart to harness his club-going woe. He just needs to let it stew a little longer. | 2017-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Infinite Best | August 14, 2017 | 6.9 | 6f8d2efa-39a9-4dce-82e3-3ca3f6886110 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | null |
The Top Dawg label’s latest signee is Inglewood-bred crooner Sir Darryl Farris, aka SiR. His latest EP embraces restraint and subtlety—a pure, 18-minute jolt of traditionalist R&B. | The Top Dawg label’s latest signee is Inglewood-bred crooner Sir Darryl Farris, aka SiR. His latest EP embraces restraint and subtlety—a pure, 18-minute jolt of traditionalist R&B. | SiR: Her Too EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22904-her-too-ep/ | Her Too EP | Since the early 2000s, the proprietors of the TDE label—Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, Dave “Miyatola” Free, and Terrence “Punch” Henderson—have made a home for more critical darlings per capita than perhaps any other hip-hop-dominated outpost. Each of the last three acts signed to TDE (SZA, Lance Skiiiwalker, SiR) have been R&B artists, an indication that the moment’s hottest rap label is perhaps looking to expand its palate.
The latest signee is Sir Darryl Farris, aka SiR, an Inglewood-born-and-bred crooner who has spent years following in the footsteps of his older brothers, the songwriters Daniel and Davion Farris (aka WoodWorks), writing for artists behind the scenes. It’s uncanny for a mainstream R&B newcomer to have started out penning tracks for Jill Scott, Robert Glasper, Stevie Wonder, and Anita Hill rather than Drake or Rihanna, but this is central to SiR’s ethos.
Her Too is an 18-minute jolt of pure, traditionalist R&B and neo-soul. SiR’s successes lay in his polish and maturity. In this lane, his peers have recently focused on self-discovery, nostalgia ultra, and experiments in form, but SiR’s concerns are in subtlety, restraint, and finesse. SiR’s releases, then—2016’s HER EP and 2015’s Seven Sundays among them—have lacked a masterpiece like his labelmate Kendrick Lamar’s “The Art of Peer Pressure.” But Her Too contains fantastic analogues to Jay Rock’s “Hood Gone Love It,” which are a purist’s thrill.
Much of Her Too feels warm and leisurely. SiR has said he was aiming for something darker than his previous EP, but the project doesn’t live up to that description, save for a few bars on the Anderson .Paak- and King Mez-assisted opener “New LA.” King Mez raps, “Man why we take the murder route?/Shouldn’t we be worried about niggas dying, niggas dying?/Or we could just not say shit and take the Cam Newton scary route.” As virtually the only patch of lyrics that aren’t explicitly romantic, it’s a bit discordant. On it’s face, it’s a whimsical and somewhat funny, topical sports reference. But it plays into the pathology that, no matter a black person’s station in life—and even if they’re currently blinded by love and passion—the threat of state-sanctioned violence lingers in the back of the mind, ready to punch itself into the foreground at a moment’s notice.
“New LA” is nonetheless the project’s brightest and most buoyant moment. Cardiak samples Drake’s overlooked “With You,” crafting a saccharine trance of a beat. “Ooh Nah Nah” is a smooth, sultry number featuring Masego’s vocals and darting saxophone; it finds SiR bellowing in a tenor full of lust. Five of the six songs here embrace a degree of calm, but the closer “W$ Boi” possesses kinetic energy that explodes in the chorus, as SiR shouts that he’s a “westside boy.” It’s like SiR’s version of “Uptown Girl,” which is Billy Joel’s Romeo and Juliet—the template for an endless trove of tales about star-crossed lovers.
In his real life, Sir Darryl Farris is about 30, and he’s been with his wife for the better part of a decade. About seven years ago, he was in Hollywood jobless, drug-addicted, and nearly homeless. The W$ Boi returned home and started writing songs in his mother’s house, which eventually turned his life around. SiR proclaims, “I don't know if she knows/She don’t know what I been through.” Even amid a song that could afford to be a bit more chaotic, the result is a contained personal anthem. SiR’s debut album is slated to come out whenever Top Dawg chooses, but up to this point, his story is one of triumph. | 2017-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Top Dawg Entertainment | February 22, 2017 | 7.6 | 6fa264b7-67a8-4567-9f7e-94bf9bfde27b | H. Drew Blackburn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/h.-drew blackburn/ | null |
Affliction and addiction shape this London band's twisted worldview. And while their musical translation of this mindset is anything but pretty on the ears, the group’s knotted noise feels inviting. | Affliction and addiction shape this London band's twisted worldview. And while their musical translation of this mindset is anything but pretty on the ears, the group’s knotted noise feels inviting. | Fat White Family: Songs for Our Mothers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21436-songs-for-our-mothers/ | Songs for Our Mothers | Four years into their career, Fat White Family have garnered a reputation for two things: acting crazy onstage and off, and gobbling up pretty much any illegal substance that crosses their path. The Londoners don’t refute either of these points—on the contrary, their madness connects them to their audience. “There are deep-set psychological issues in this band that are a bigger problem for us than drugs,” guitarist Saul Adamczewski told NME, going on to add, “there’s nothing exceptional about us as drug abusers; we’re just like everybody else.” Affliction and addiction shape their twisted worldview, and while their musical translation of this mindset—infusing the darkly-shaded psychedelia of Velvet Underground with the cheap electronic throb of Suicide—is anything but pretty on the ears, the group’s knotted noise feels inviting. On their sophomore album, Songs for Our Mothers, Fat White Family lead us misfits in another corrupt communion.
Lias Sauodi (who writes the songs along with brother Nathan and Adamczewski) finds inspiration in drunks, degenerates, domestic abusers—scummy avatars that grant him entry to the underbelly’s topsy-turvy world. (Drugs play a considerable role, of course, although one of the band’s principle songwriters, Adamczewski, primarily worked sober). The first half of *Songs for Our Mothers—*all plodding tempos, feedback fuzz, and layered whimpers—casts Lias as a strung-out participant in some depressing half-hearted orgy that begets nothing but sloth and wasted opportunity. Devoid of all flower-power optimism and good intentions, “Satisfied," “Love Is the Crack,” and “Duce” take on an almost funereal component.
Such is the Fat White Family existential cycle: drugs and delirium fuel sex, sex begets a useless life before giving way to death, and then there’s nothing. Can you blame them for casting aside trifles like dynamics and sonic variety when they openly admit that they want nothing more than to make your skin crawl? But while Fat White Family’s nihilistic heart endows their sluggish dirge-rock with a sense of purpose (or rather, explicit purposelessness) that distinguishes them from UK contemporaries like Cheatahs or Slaves, it’s not enough to make up for the uniformity of their songwriting. Apart from the understated lo-fi pop of “Hits Hits Hits” and churning opener “Whitest Boy on the Beach,” there’s little to differentiate one jam from the next.
Fat White Family’s notorious live shows prove that they’ve got the brains and the insanity to make a carnal, carnivalesque classic, but Songs for Our Mothers doesn’t come close to that energy. Where’s the aural equivalent of the shit-smearing, or the head careening into the audience? Like Champagne Holocaust, Songs for Our Mothers puts too much emphasis on setting the smoky, sinister scene—upping the reverb, working in odd yelps or electronic clatter—and too little attention on establishing dynamic, compelling arrangements. | 2016-01-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Fat Possum / Without Consent | January 19, 2016 | 6.3 | 6fa44f39-255d-4f20-b718-5aaeb9b8ad32 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The lo-fi shoegaze project from the Seoul musician is a rare find. The ambitious and alluring music expertly captures the feeling of a sound so uncannily familiar that it truly feels like a dream. | The lo-fi shoegaze project from the Seoul musician is a rare find. The ambitious and alluring music expertly captures the feeling of a sound so uncannily familiar that it truly feels like a dream. | 파란노을 (Parannoul): To See the Next Part of the Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/parannoul-to-see-the-next-part-of-the-dream/ | To See the Next Part of the Dream | The anonymous mastermind behind 파란노을 (Parannoul) has refused to reveal their name, their exact age, or whether anyone else is even involved with the making of To See the Next Part of the Dream. When I asked for this information, they demurred, admitting they’re too embarrassed to identify themselves on the internet or even tell their parents they make music. But the internal circumstances that inspired their phenomenal second album are indispensable and included in its de facto press release on Bandcamp: they’re an “active loser,” “below average in height, appearance and everything else,” a stunted adult with “singing skills [that] are fucking awful” chained to their adolescent fantasies of a middling career in indie rock.
The only subjective fact: they’re a student writing music in a Seoul bedroom. Despite the internet’s endless possibilities for personal reinvention, Parannoul is an alias, not an alter ego. To See the Next Part of the Dream is not an antidote to its creator’s paralyzing misery, but a monument that honors its enormity—“I wish no one had seen my miserable self/I wish no one had seen my numerous failures/I wish my young and stupid days to disappear forever,” they sing on the opening “Beautiful World.” If that feeling scans as melodramatic, To See the Next Part of the Dream ensures it’s every bit as overwhelming as they say it is.
In the music, there is no happiness to be found in the present or the future, only bittersweet memories of youth wasted on the young and the good times that never were—specifically, the early 2000s. To See the Next Part of the Dream is littered with time-stamped references like Welcome the NHK!, Goodnight Punpun and, more disturbingly, All About Lily Chou Chou, a pitch-black cult favorite that layered gauzy cinematography atop a brutal story of high school kids committing unspeakable acts of bullying. Like many shut-ins who’ve internalized the shame in their singing voice or instrumental prowess, Parannoul primarily works in shoegaze and bedroom-pop. The guitars are almost always either coppery acoustics or saturated fuzz, with nothing in between. The low-end is imperceptible and though they sing brutally despondent lyrics in Korean, the vocals are mixed low enough to function as texture for listeners assuming the usual sweet nothings of shoegaze.
Parannoul sees themselves as a fan more than a musician, and the clarity of their reference points inspires awe-inducing dream dates: The Radio Dept. covers “Vapour Trail”! Ulrich Schnauss joins American Football! What if Phil Elverum started the Microphones as a Smashing Pumpkins tribute act? Parannoul’s Bandcamp recommendations respectively tout Brave Little Abacus, Weatherday, and Car Seat Headrest for their “inspiration, production and passion.” But for all of its decades-old influences, To See the Next Part of the Dream takes an inherently modernist approach to shoegaze, reliant on advances in home-recording technology that have eliminated barriers to entry in a genre long obsessed with straight-to-tape purity, bespoke pedals, and an album that infamously bankrupted its record label. Your favorite shoegaze album of the past couple of years might have come from a band who openly admits to using off-the-rack guitars and DAW presets to create sounds bigger, bolder, and brighter than anything a major label could’ve financed even ten years ago.
But that’s not what Parannoul does. Their formative years include M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, which emerged as the 21st century’s first truly innovative shoegaze album by exclusively using synthesizers to replicate their analog analogues. To See the Next Part of the Dream is its inverse: all of its acoustic instruments could pass for tones triggered by MIDI pads or synth keys. It really does sound like someone routing their guitar directly into their computer to avoid waking up their parents. “Beautiful World” and “Youth Rebellion” are fascinating transmissions from shoegaze’s Uncanny Valley, its fuzz tones all neon glow and pixelated grit, erasing any remnant of fingers meeting steel. The drums are redlined to near-constant digital clipping and are as textural as they are rhythmic.
Audiophiles will go insane pointing out what Parannoul gets wrong and any attempt to remix or remaster To See the Next Part of the Dream would negate its entire emotional thrust. In every single note, there’s a reminder of what this album actually captures: the point where inspiration meets limitation. The music isn’t intended to replicate the sound of four people who pooled their money to rent a studio and hire a professional mixer. To See the Next Part of the Dream thrives on artistic decisions that likely wouldn’t have survived committee thinking: “White Ceiling” frantically adds layer after layer over its ten minutes without ever peaking, and why would a song about the punishing repetition of existence do that? But when “White Ceiling” finally ends at exactly ten minutes, there’s a sneaky sense of joy in the accomplishment of reaching that ten-minute mark; 9:58 just doesn’t have the same ring to it.
These are the flickers of joy that push To See the Next Part of the Dream towards the possibility of a brighter tomorrow: cycling through synth presets until something catches your ear, stumbling upon a countermelody and demanding it find a place in the mix, discovering the soothing effect of letting a single distorted riff cycle for several minutes. For someone who fixates on their inertia, Parannoul is obsessed with momentum, patching in hints of house music, twee-punk, and krautrock that ensure these lengthy tracks never drag.
Amidst more obvious genres, Parannoul lists “emo” as one of their tags on Bandcamp. Beyond their earnest candor and gooey sentimentality, the title track is their only clear tie to its sonic signatures of braided acoustic guitars and tricky time signatures; at least until they’re buried under magma-bright synths, leaving “To See the Next Part of the Dream” like a Pompeii in the Midwest prairies. But it’s no surprise that To See the Next Part of the Dream has found its most vocal boosters in the greater emo universe—as the fifth wave (give or take) has begun to assert its presence, last year’s Bandcamp breakthroughs like Glass Beach and the similarly anonymous Weatherday have become its leading lights: auteurist and omnivorous acts that debuted with hour-long opuses. “This album can be said to be the answer to my dream,” Parannoul writes, a bold statement of an intent that’s strangely free of ego. Parannoul aspires to be like the first Korean indie musicians they remember hearing, difficult and amateur acts doomed to obscurity and wiped from the internet, but not before implanting a “stupid and anachronistic” dream in their mind. If Parannoul aspires solely to be remembered and not to be adored, they might not have much of a choice for long.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | March 25, 2021 | 8 | 6faf283b-a316-43ff-af90-1f92f3997449 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Tangents artfully mix acoustic instruments and electronics in pieces that combine improvisation with careful processing. At their best, they bring to mind Can, Tortoise, Four Tet, and the Necks. | Tangents artfully mix acoustic instruments and electronics in pieces that combine improvisation with careful processing. At their best, they bring to mind Can, Tortoise, Four Tet, and the Necks. | Tangents: Stateless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22102-stateless/ | Stateless | In a recent radio interview, Ollie Bown, the resident electronic musician of Australian improvisers Tangents, said that the band has been trying to learn to leave more space in the music. Each of the quintet’s members—on guitar, drums, cello, keyboards and mallets, and electronics, respectively—is capable of kicking up quite a racket, and in their music, listening to each other is paramount. Judging from Stateless, their ears are as finely tuned as their chops. It’s a lovely album—porous, dynamic, lively, shot through with silence and bathed in warm light. It’s sometimes cluttered, but never distractingly so; like a cozy apartment strewn with curious objects, it’s just busy enough to keep you stimulated, your attention thrown pleasantly off balance.
Stateless marks a shift in the band’s method: while the group’s debut, I, was recorded live in the studio, the new album is the product of jams that were chopped up, remixed, and extensively processed on computers. As a result, it’s a hybrid beast, with one foot in the improv world and the other in electronic music, and it strikes the perfect balance between group interaction and digital production, and between groove and texture, repetition and abstraction.
Evan Dorrian’s drums drive the group’s sound. He likes the sound of sticks on rims, tapped cymbals, and other small, scratchy gestures, which he arranges into bursts and clusters and pin-prick constellations. Sometimes his playing is multi-tracked or run through effects, but rarely in a way that calls attention to itself. Guitarist Shoeb Ahmad alternates between reverberant background washes and potent droplets of tone, and cellist Peter Hollo frequently treats his instrument more like an upright bass, plucking instead of bowing.
Adrian Lim-Klumpes, a member of Triosk, rotates between piano, Rhodes, vibraphone, and marimba, and he often supplies the music’s tonal center. His watery vibes gives “Jindabyne” a hint of Tortoise, and his limpid piano chords run like a cool stream through the tangled brambles of “Masist Cau”; toward the end of “N-Mission,” a bass-driven tune recalling Four Tet, Lim-Klumpes unfurls a rolling, surging solo reminiscent of the introduction to Prince’s “Condition of the Heart.”
With the exception of “Directrix,” a brief free-improv freakout that lurches like a rock tumbler stuffed with steel wool and metal shards, Tangents develop their pieces patiently and almost imperceptibly. The way the hardscrabble “Masist Cau” builds, you keep expecting it to kick into overdrive—but at the same time, lulled into a state of deferred expectation, you forget you’re waiting for anything at all. It’s a curious feeling. “Along the Forest Floor” forgoes percussion, tossed like lazy ocean swells by cello and reversed vibraphone; it’s the rare track on Stateless where a lyric impulse comes to the fore. But even when there’s no melody to speak of, Tangents can be plenty expressive: “Oberon,” swirling like the inside of a snow globe, evokes a sense of peace that’s the opposite of its wild kinetic energy.
Tangents are obvious disciples of the Necks, another improvising group from Australia: Like the latter band, they emphasize tone and texture above melody, privileging small, incidental sounds over big declarative ones, and they favor hypnotic patterns that pulse and twitch like perpetual-motion machines. And while nothing on Stateless has the sustained mood of Necks’ hour-long pieces, Tangents’ keen sense of focus leaves no doubt that they’re in it for the long haul; “Jindabyne” cycles patiently for seven minutes and could easily run longer; the flickering “Oberon,” 13 minutes long, has even more potential to just keep going forever, powered by the energy stored in its quick, snapping rhythms, its path greased by cellist Hollo’s fluid, energetic lines. Tangents’ impulses tug them toward the margins, even as their combined force pushes them ever onward. It makes following in their wake the most captivating kind of journey. | 2016-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Temporary Residence Ltd. | July 14, 2016 | 7.8 | 6fb11dad-b961-4fc5-b4b6-56168a13c924 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Fusing folk, doom metal, and improv noise, the Indonesian duo Senyawa are unlike any other band. The five songs of their new LP are drawn out and meditative, admitting little daylight. | Fusing folk, doom metal, and improv noise, the Indonesian duo Senyawa are unlike any other band. The five songs of their new LP are drawn out and meditative, admitting little daylight. | Senyawa: Brønshøj (Puncak) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22666-brnshj-puncak/ | Brønshøj (Puncak) | It’s safe to say there is no other band on the planet quite like Senyawa. What do you call the music of this Indonesian duo: folk? Doom metal? Unplugged minimalist noise improv? In fact, it is a little bit of each. Wukir Suryadi plays the bambuwukir, an instrument of his own design—an amplified zither, fashioned out of bamboo, that looks like it could double as a weapon. It does the work of many instruments, and from it he ekes bowed string passages, plucked and strummed guitar-like sounds, and even woody, percussive rhythms. He has long hair and an intense mien, and onstage, he looks like a metal guitarist coaxing spirits from an alien relic rescued from a shipwreck.
As for Rully Shabara—how best to describe what Shabara does? You couldn’t call him a “singer,” exactly. He never simply sings. He incarnates the fleshy essence of the human voice: He shrieks, he ululates, he jibbers. Sometimes, he dips down to a low, throaty growl, its texture as pronounced as the clicking of a dial; in his falsetto range, he is a bird of prey honing in on a small mammal. He lies somewhere on a spectrum connecting Diamanda Galás and Mayhem’s Attila Csihar.
Brønshøj (Puncak), the follow-up to last year’s Menjadi, is darker and more abstracted than that album. In place of melody or rhythm, see-sawing drones and scraped textures predominate. The record is the product of an intense session held in a basement studio in Copenhagen’s working-class Brønshøj neighborhood. The duo would agree on themes—cues like “old shed,” “McDonald’s,” or “forest,” although none are necessarily discernible from the music itself—and then commence playing. Suryadi ran his bambuwukir through a short chain of cheap guitar pedals, including a looping device; Shabara used an old-school Shure 55SH Series II—the “Elvis microphone”—and the mixer’s built-in reverb and echo effects. For two days, the duo jammed, cooked Indonesian food in the kitchen next to the studio, smoked, and jammed some more. Beyond the vinyl master, there was no post-production.
The album’s five songs reflect their genesis: They are slow, drawn out, and meditative, and they admit little daylight. (“Puncak” means “summit” in Indonesian, but the music feels more like a series of plateaus than peaks.) “Brønshøj 1”—all five of the album’s tracks bear simple, sequential titles—is a kind of invocation. In an approximation of Tibetan throat singing, Shabara explores the lowest, gravelliest reaches of his voice, as though caressing his larynx with a scouring pad, while Suryadi bows funereal drones. It sounds a lot like an acoustic cousin of Sunn O)))’s blackened doom, and the closing “Brønshøj 5” continues in a similar vein, applying fuzz-pedal distortion to Suryadi’s guitar-like leads as Shabara paces in slow, teasing circles around the root note. Continuing in the avant-metal vein, the short “Brønshøj 3” takes a few strands of similar material and simply runs the tape in reverse; it wouldn't sound out of place as an interstitial sketch on a Blut Aus Nord album.
In its pursuit of a singular mood, the record is slightly less dynamic than *Menjadi *or the duo’s self-titled 2010 album, but the album’s two longest tracks offer a fuller indication of the duo’s range. On “Brønshøj 2,” Suryadi loops a glowering pedal tone and twists the tuning peg on a second string as he plucks it, creating an eerie, undulating effect; Shabara largely hangs back, laying down a smoky backdrop behind Suryadi’s high-necked riffing, which suggests the liquid glint of lap steel. “Brønshøj 4” combines bowed melodic phrases with a looped rhythm reminiscent of thumb piano; it is the album’s lightest track, melancholy yet also comforting. Toward the climax of its 11-minute run, as silvery string loops begin to burn white-hot, Shabara finally lets loose with a succession of inhuman shrieks and growls, lightly augmented by delay. He sounds like a synthesizer; he sounds like a pterodactyl. Yet, despite the obvious, formidable power of his voice, he never feels the need to fully unleash it; he sticks to the sidelines, directing his voice away from the listener.
It reminds me of something Shabara did when the duo played Krakow’s Unsound festival this fall. At the end of a song, he stepped away from the microphone and unleashed a brief operatic run, which went soaring over our heads. Even unamplified, he dominated the cavernous hall. This short, intimate album functions in similar ways. Rather than attempting to bowl you over, *Brønshøj *instead invites you to lean in closer, and rewards handsomely when you do. | 2017-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Cejero | January 2, 2017 | 7.4 | 6fb4752e-7cfe-4568-a780-d027967f359f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Jessie Ware’s sumptuous fifth album is classic disco revival done right. | Jessie Ware’s sumptuous fifth album is classic disco revival done right. | Jessie Ware: That! Feels Good! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jessie-ware-that-feels-good/ | That! Feels Good! | I’m told that we’re living in a sexless era—that Gen Z simply isn’t doing it and that everybody else is too busy or too addicted to their phones or just too freaked out to fuck. There are other great reasons for this—the pandemic, the widespread suppression of bodily autonomy—but historically, eras of oppression lead right into Dionysian excess, where all that apocalyptic dread manifests in, say, clubwide make-outs at 4 a.m., bods grinding under the purple glow of bisexual lighting. New York in the 1970s was the apex of this concept: the need for temporary relief from widespread poverty, racial and queer discrimination led to the creation of a queer, Black, and brown space—the disco—where the youth could unloose and commune with like-minded peers. “You could be on the dance floor and the most beautiful woman that you had ever seen in your life would come and dance right on top of you,” the legendary house producer Frankie Knuckles once said of the original disco, The Loft. “Then the minute you turned around a man that looked just as good would do the same thing.” Which is to say, repressive eras often find an antidote in the nightlife underground, usually soundtracked by music that demands a kind of spiritual freedom.
Jessie Ware, the British quadruple threat—powerhouse singer, author, podcaster, and children's fashion magnate—has spent the last few years reading up on queer history, and is looking to her forebears for inspiration. Disco is a long-explored touchstone for excess and emancipation, and the genre, or at least the concept of the genre, has certainly taken hold of the modern pop milieu, whether Beyoncé’s full-body immersions, Dua Lipa’s corpo-rave pleasers, or Lizzo’s feel-good bass funk. But That! Feels Good!, Ware’s fifth album, stretches beyond vibes and delves into the well-oiled mechanics of bands like Chic, Sister Sledge, the Trammps, and a little P-Funk, opening up the hood and pulling out all the parts to see if she can piece them back together. Alongside disco-savvy producers like Stuart Price (aka Thin White Duke/Jacques Lu Cont) and James Ford (Simian Mobile Disco), as well as co-songwriters Shungudzo Kuyimba and Sarah Hudson, Ware has achieved a rare feat: a genre revival album that’s painstakingly true to its source material, but doesn’t sound like a curdled rehash. This has everything to do with Ware’s unfailingly strong vocals—one of her generation’s preeminent white belters—and the wild joy she emits on every track, with a thesis that le freaking it on the dancefloor and in the bedroom is key to liberation, and that love alone will save the day.
Disco is familiar territory for Ware—2020’s What’s Your Pleasure looked towards Giorgio Moroder’s blueprint for arpeggiated synths and light-up dancefloor grooves, helping kickstart pop music’s disco revival. That! Feels Good! is a grittier affair, reminiscent of the small underground disco clubs of the early ’70s at individual apartments and lofts in downtown New York. Accompanied live by the preternaturally tight eight-piece funk/Afrobeat band Kokoroko, which has the freewheeling but precise instrumentation of disco down to a science, Ware floats into the sweet spot for her elastic soul vocals, somewhere between Donna Summer and Teena Marie: a glamorous libertine we’ll follow into any dingy club so she can show us the light.
It helps that Ware is a true believer, underscoring That! Feels Good!’s title track with a command that’s almost militant: “Freedom is a sound, and pleasure is a right. Do it again.” Like Donna Summer before her, she eliminates the distance between dancefloor ecstasy and sexual pleasure, suggesting an imperceptible difference between the two. With the thrust of funk bass and spontaneous yelps, she also conjures the physical release of a Soul Train line, transported by syncopation. And when she belts, “Why don’t you please yourself? If it feels so good then don’t you, baby! Don’t you stop!” she revels in the sensual prerogative of adult womanhood, of spiritual excess, staking out her own joyful territory. (She also suggests, over the driving piano of “Free Yourself,” that rapture doesn’t necessarily require a partner.) Her confidence fizzes and levitates with an assuredness that feels deserved but hard-won. “I’ve always relied on people that believe in me because maybe I haven’t believed in myself enough,” she told Pitchfork of her past experiences with music industry men, “but now, actually, I do, which is really wonderful.”
Having reached the point where she can own her vast talent, she’s in a position to extend the favor. On “Beautiful People,” she drops a perfect pride anthem, channeling her existential angst—“I wake up in the morning and I ask myself, ‘What am I doing on this planet?’”—into a purple leather outfit and a cocktail party. “Mix your joy with misery,” she reasons, before deciding that “beautiful people are everywhere.” It’s a vibrant exhortation fueled by cowbell and the band’s robust horn section, mining the eternal solution to life’s indignities—the dancefloor, with friends—and a song dying for a drag queen to lip-sync it. (Whither Sasha Colby!)
Largely, though, Ware’s focus is on the corporeal, celebrating self-determination and sexual versatility with cheeky metaphor: bottles that pop, lips that are underworked, and the mother of all innuendo, pearls. (She also works in time-tested double entendres of food and humping, linking her career interests by invoking limes, strawberries, and pink champagne.) On “Pearls,” she conjures the soul arias of Chaka Khan with another paean to dancing until your insecurities are moot and your clothes are in a pile. “Freak Me Now” ups the cosmopolitan allure by introducing French touch and a distinctly computerized synth whorl to the equation. While it steps away slightly from the ’70s lane Ware has so carefully carved, it sits comfortably among the analog piano and string jaunts. The only other track outside That! Feels Good!’s classic disco-ball rubric is “Lightning,” where Rhodes, strings, and layered harmonies sit next to a pitch-shifted vocal flourish and a boom-bap beat that zooms you right ahead to 2016. It’s a lovely song because Ware is an exceptional vocalist, but it takes you out of the fantasy, which any actor or drag queen can tell you is a mortal mistake.
But overall, That! Feels Good! stays focused on a mission that never feels like a chore. In its relatively brief 40-minute runtime, Ware takes her task extremely seriously, but she’s unencumbered by its immensity; actually, it seems to unleash her, as she experiments with vocal tricks—smoky, Grace Jonesian talk-singing; spirit-catching falsetto that’ll absolutely melt off your Halston—with the sure knowledge that the good-time, nighttime prima donna was always who she was meant to be. | 2023-04-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-28T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | April 28, 2023 | 8.3 | 6fb637f0-703b-4034-a467-0aaa403cd561 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
The Montreal-based singer-songwriter and violinist’s music feels like an invitation to reflect. Each song recounts not just stumbling and uncertainty, but a sense of motivation. | The Montreal-based singer-songwriter and violinist’s music feels like an invitation to reflect. Each song recounts not just stumbling and uncertainty, but a sense of motivation. | Thanya Iyer: KIND | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thana-iyer-kind/ | KIND | On KIND, Thanya Iyer’s second album, she asks listeners to question who, exactly, is nurtured by our current cultural notion of togetherness and who is left out. The Montreal-based singer-songwriter and violinist has spent the past few years exploring the intersection of baroque pop and improvisational jazz, and her music often feels like an invitation to a discussion, specifically one that calls for honest reflection and careful analysis. With KIND, Iyer transforms her songs from individual sentiments into a fluid conversation, utilizing her voice as a guide to face the unknown.
Alternating her violin parts between spritely pizzicato and languorous fermatas, Iyer stacks harmonies to create the sensation of flurrying sounds. She and her bandmates—bassist Alex Kasirer-Smibert and drummer Daniel Gélinas—are periodically joined by brass players, flautists, harpists, and a choir, who float in and out of focus. The combination turns KIND into a lucid daydream that’s constantly melting at its edges. Above it all is Iyer, crooning just above a whisper with a powerful voice that sometimes recalls a blend of My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Nova and Kadhja Bonet.
At a glance, song titles like “I Forgot to Drink Water (Balance)” and “Bring Back That Which Is Kind to You” suggest the kind of self-care advice found on pastel-hued influencer blogs. But while Iyer’s overall message is optimistic and simplistic, her intentionally open-ended lyrics allow her to chronicle a journey that grapples with racism, disability, grief, self-love, and depression, among other subjects, through the richness of the music itself. After opening with an invocation of rebirth post-loss, KIND shifts into a more determined mindset. Its narrator is faced with a choice between creating change immediately, or waiting for someone else to do so later. They opt for self-made change, of course. It isn’t immediate or pretty, and each song recounts stumbling and uncertainty, yet Iyer sows it with motivation: “Looks up to the light will find me lost in layers/Light will guide me.”
In the early 2010s, the definition of baroque pop took on a new meaning. Black and Brown artists began to elevate the genre as an experimental art form, with musicians like Moses Sumney and Sudan Archives pushing the boundaries of orchestral folk and classical instrumentation. Iyer does the same, and her ear for texture and landscape is consistently noteworthy. In “Always, Be Together,” she dots verses with raindrop-like synth notes and cut-off piano runs that make an otherwise straightforward looped rhythm feel like the portal to an alternate earth. Moments like these weave throughout KIND, without wasting space or adding flair for its own sake. This may only be her second album, but Iyer’s patience, thoughtfulness, and commitment to communal growth stands out.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Topshelf | July 31, 2020 | 7.6 | 6fc47791-03b6-4deb-964c-644f7426ec81 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
A true child of SoundCloud, the small-town Florida rapper trades some of his storytelling skills for enhanced fidelity on this Kanye West–assisted project. | A true child of SoundCloud, the small-town Florida rapper trades some of his storytelling skills for enhanced fidelity on this Kanye West–assisted project. | YNW Melly: We All Shine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ynw-melly-we-all-shine/ | We All Shine | With a trill, the 19-year-old warble rapper YNW Melly can make a death knell sound like a lullaby or inflate a petty breakup into an epic tragedy. At the age of 16, Melly, from an unincorporated spot along Florida’s eastern shore, started uploading his pastel trap songs to SoundCloud, becoming a small-town sensation before spending a year in jail for firing a gun near a high school. Behind bars, he started to take rap more seriously, writing his best song, “Murder on My Mind,” a stunning prison log that morphs during its second act into an intimate exchange. Melly’s power comes from converting solemnity into enthusiasm, making sweet things of sour situations.
Melly exists a world away from the rap of Southern Florida, specifically the lo-fi, bass-boosted behemoths of Broward County. His music is less actively aggressive in sound, if not content. Sometimes his ghoulish melisma resembles Trippie Redd’s, while some of his flows and melodies feel indebted to Lil Uzi Vert. He’ll dip in and out of melodic phrases like Young Thug. A true child of SoundCloud, he is most interested in hitting the right note. Last year, on his debut mixtape, I Am You, he turned casual terrors into buoyant songs. He interpolated Chris Brown’s “Say Goodbye” for a tune called “Slang That Iron” and sometimes veered from home invasions to amorous gestures. There is a tenderness to his singing that even lends a fragility—a beauty—to his threats of violence.
We All Shine sounds more polished than I Am You, slightly more braced. There is an enhanced fidelity, giving his voice more shape and tracing his runs with more precision. At points, he sounds like he could open for the B2K reunion tour. He sings about hundred-round drums and twerkers, on songs like “Rolling Loud,” with the same passion that R&B heartthrobs use to profess their love to their sweethearts.
But while he was smoothing his tunes, his writing lost some bite. None of the songs here match the heights of their predecessors: the vivid imagery in “Murder on My Mind,” the sobering introspection of “Mama Cry,” or the rousing salvos of “Virtual (Blue Balenciagas).” His collaboration with Kanye West, “Mixed Personalities,” should be a banner moment for an unsigned artist like Melly; their duet characterizes lovers as bipolar for simply ignoring their calls, and it is almost painfully unremarkable. (Kanye, who announced that he was bipolar by scrawling it on the Ye cover and called the disorder his “superpower,” is dismissive of it here.) He’ll occasionally wander backward into a clever idea (“I just found out a new ingredient to death/I’ma give it all till it ain’t nothin’ left”), and he’s capable of dressing up some pretty bugged-out images. The most interesting thing he does here is write a diss track for his bank.
We All Shine is a regression in his development as a storyteller. “No Holidays” takes his most poignant jail revelations from “Murder on My Mind” and flattens them out until he’s rapping about jacking off in his cell, lining up for lunch, and wearing Gildan T-shirts. His observations from the inside come across as mundane. To be fair, jail by its very nature is mundane, but his potential hinges on his ability to bring a touch of the extraordinary to ordinary circumstances, to sing black and white into color. Previous prison dispatches imagined all Melly was missing on the outside, but this tape lacks that outward-looking, illustrative quality.
Melly was originally pegged as a serenader, though reports of his balladry have been somewhat exaggerated. He hasn’t penned anything quite like “Trap Queen” or “I Be U,” and the closest he gets to romance is offering to “lend” a city girl his love. But there is a warmth to his best music that feels sentimental, and it is there that We All Shine is transporting. The infectious “Curtains (Burtains)” reimagines Young Nudy flows with more robust croons. “Control Me” has the same 1990s R&B bounce as some of the most catchy Kamaiyah songs, with choice words of post-millennial intimacy: “I would never look on your post or your messages,” he sings, as if reciting wedding vows. When YNW Melly is on, it seems like he can make any banal string of words pop. Listening closely to We All Shine, however, proves just how much his writing must be the glue that holds it all together. | 2019-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | null | January 26, 2019 | 6.6 | 6fc4ac3f-ca5a-4d4b-ab47-42a128ea53fa | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Accompanied by bass, piano, and harp, the New York cellist refracts traditional Korean influences though an avant-garde lens, yielding an album as surprising as it is elegant. | Accompanied by bass, piano, and harp, the New York cellist refracts traditional Korean influences though an avant-garde lens, yielding an album as surprising as it is elegant. | Okkyung Lee: Yeo-Neun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/okkyung-lee-yeo-neun/ | Yeo-Neun | A key figure in New York’s avant-garde for 20 years, cellist Okkyung Lee is seemingly on a quest to discover every sound that her instrument is capable of making. She can attack its strings with volcanic intensity before dropping down to a fierce pianissimo, probing the boundary between tonality and noise. She is equally at home improvising alongside electronic and acoustic musicians, seamlessly melding her cello with Christian Marclay’s turntablist chaos, the overtone-rich drones of Ellen Fullman’s long-string instrument, and the abstracted blues of Bill Orcutt’s four-string guitar. Regardless of the idiom she’s working in, Lee is an exceptionally expressive performer, able to conjure rapture as effectively as unrest.
Despite the sweeping range of her work over the last two decades, Lee has never sounded as elegant as on Yeo-Neun, her debut for Félicia Atkinson’s Shelter Press label. These compositions, informed by the Korean traditional and popular music of her formative years, are spacious and patient. They contain playful counterpoint and contemplative melodic tangents, and the arrangements for quartet distill grand musical ideas into a minimalist framework. Lee’s cello is frequently the subtlest element in the mix, and the ensemble (harpist Maeve Gilchrist, pianist Jacob Sacks, and bassist Elvynd Opsvik) operates with eloquence and precision. Even for a musician so focused on extremes, this pivot to chamber music is as surprising as any primal burst of shrieking sound.
A sense of meticulous equilibrium permeates the pieces on Yeo-Neun. Even its most impassioned passages contain a sense of hushed wonder, and moments of collected calm can fluently unravel into dissonance. “Another Old Story (옛날이야기),” with its stately, syncopated ostinato and majestic melodic flourishes, is followed by the sparse, impressionistic “In Stardust (For Kang Kyung-ok),” and the contrast between the two accentuates the heavy melancholy of the latter’s Morton Feldman-esque piano figures. Even the instrumentation suggests a sense of balance: The cello and bass, capable of long, sustained tones and more varied textural explorations, often provide a foil to the chordal, rapidly decaying sounds of the piano and harp.
The most exciting contrasts come when Lee’s propensity for chaos expresses itself within the confines of more rigid compositional frameworks. Her use of extended techniques—ways of playing an instrument that fall outside established norms—is a defining characteristic of her performances, and on Yeo-Neun it feels revelatory. The creaking, scratchy texture of horsehair grinding away at her cello’s strings on “In Stardust” adds a completely alien dimension to the otherwise muted atmosphere. The penultimate piece, “Facing Your Shadows,” is a slow build that grows from spare, arpeggiated figures into a frenzied rush of scraping strings and bursts of harp: an image of serenity shot through with tumult.
Yeo-Neun is remarkable not only for its sophistication and restrained intricacy, but also as a statement of personal and creative growth. Flowing between formal tonality and structural dissolution, Lee reconciles her traditional musical upbringing with her subsequent expansion into free improvisation and avant-garde composition, and she finds an unusual beauty in juxtaposing the familiar character of popular and traditional music with experimental sound-making’s leap into the cosmic unknown. It’s thrilling to hear work so reflective from an artist often associated with volatility. | 2020-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Jazz | Shelter Press | May 11, 2020 | 8 | 6fcaa118-2856-4036-b307-d7552490b9a7 | Jonathan Williger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonathan-williger/ | |
Alexandra Drewchin has roughly 100 different voices, and she employs all of them to chilling effect on RIP Chrysalis, her second record as Eartheater. The closest recent comparison would be Cat Power’s Moon Pix, but Drewchin’s songs are more expansive and more free-form, showing hints of her time spent in the psych outfit Guardian Alien. | Alexandra Drewchin has roughly 100 different voices, and she employs all of them to chilling effect on RIP Chrysalis, her second record as Eartheater. The closest recent comparison would be Cat Power’s Moon Pix, but Drewchin’s songs are more expansive and more free-form, showing hints of her time spent in the psych outfit Guardian Alien. | Eartheater: RIP Chrysalis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21187-rip-chrysalis/ | RIP Chrysalis | Alexandra Drewchin has roughly 100 different voices, and she employs all of them to chilling effect on RIP Chrysalis, her second record as Eartheater. There’s the high, weeping one that turns up at the beginning of the icy psyh-Appalachia ballad "Petal Head"; there’s the bamboo-brittle alto that crackles menacingly at the center of the rippling "Wetware". And then there are all the others, rendered almost inhuman with digital effects: baritone-low and groaning, solemn and choir-like, chattering and mechanized. She layers them several at a time, so that it often seems like she’s in conversation with herself: two Drewchins—one way up high, one way down low—share the melody on"“Humyn Hymn", making lyrics like, "Chemical computer syringe/ Memories are fading away/ Rolling off the side of the bed," seem like they’re written in code that only the two singers understand.
It’s a fitting approach for a record which, as its title implies, deals with personal transformation; later in "Hymn", Drewchin sings, "The more I look back, the more I want to look ahead," and she spends the bulk of the album deep-diving into herself, delivering haunting descriptions of the shapes and spirits she encounters along the way. Arriving just eight months after the first Eartheater record, Metalepsis, Chrysalis displays a startling new firmness and depth to Drewchin’s songwriting. Where her first record felt more deliberately synthetic, making ample use of synthesizers and electronics, on Chrysalis, Drewchin operates from a base of American folk music. Dry-board banjos and plucked acoustic guitars form the foundation of most of the songs, leaving plenty of room through which Drewchin winds her snaking voice. There are still plenty of synths, but on Chrysalis, they augment rather than dominate. It’s as if Drewchin had raided The Anthology of American Folk Music but only absorbed the songs about ghosts. The closest recent comparison would be Cat Power’s Moon Pix, but Drewchin’s songs are more expansive and more free-form, showing hints of her time spent in the psych outfit Guardian Alien. One of the reasons Chrysalis is so fascinating and absorbing is because Drewchin obliterates the notion of song structure, starting from something as time-honored as folk, but bashing down the walls and ceiling around it to create music that feels mystical and searching.
As much as it’s about personal change, Chrysalis also seems to be about discovering new ways of songwriting, one that leaves the borders porous and the time elastic. A fiddle corkscrews at the opening of the title track before Drewchin’s banjo takes over; eventually, the background is filled with the sound of a ringing telephone and a fog of electronics, a bleary canvas of sound that Drewchin’s ethereal alto gradually floats across. She recites the lyrics of the creeping "Wetware"—"Deprogramming false fundamental makeup"—as if she’s casting a spell, while synths pulse like an android heartbeat behind her. And she begins "Mask Therapy" by repeating the words "identity crisis" over rippling, mirage-like guitar, a rhythm track that sounds like a failing air compressor thudding beneath. Songs enter and fade at their own pace, like clouds ribboning out across the sky at dusk.
The album’s title can be read two ways—the tearing of the chrysalis that allows new life, and the death of the same once that new life has begun. On "Ecdysisyphus", she flatly declares, "There’s a first time for everything/ More like, everything is the first time." At first, it seems empty—the equivalent of a dorm room stoner’s bug-eyed command to "Think about it, man." But after hearing the record that follows, it feels like a profound personal declaration. RIP Chrysalis is the sound of someone figuring themselves out in real time, making all of their distinct voices harmonize, and creating new musical forms to share their discoveries. | 2015-10-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-10-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental | Hausu Mountain | October 27, 2015 | 7.7 | 6fcab777-0789-4b8c-9a5e-deb87113e8f7 | J. Edward Keyes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/j.-edward keyes/ | null |
On his latest sorrowful dispatch, the drill veteran walks the line between reporter and preacher, gangster and citizen. | On his latest sorrowful dispatch, the drill veteran walks the line between reporter and preacher, gangster and citizen. | Lil Durk: Just Cause Y’all Waited 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-durk-just-cause-yall-waited-2/ | Just Cause Y’all Waited 2 | Who is going to save Lil Durk’s soul? There’s barely a moment on Just Cause Y’all Waited 2 where the drill veteran doesn’t sound on the verge of tears, ready to collapse in the recording booth, his voice trembling with pain. Nobody who has been paying attention will be surprised: Durk has been broadcasting an unvarnished depiction of South Side Chicago communities since around the time of Obama’s first presidential campaign. These are now areas of the city devastated by coronavirus—early reports revealed that black Chicagoans account for more than 70 percent of deaths from the virus, despite making up 30 percent of the population—and most likely to bear the brunt of prolonged economic recession. In this backdrop comes the latest tape from a man burdened for far too long, his spirit finally ready to rupture under the weight of an unjust world.
You can forget about finding a sense of catharsis on Just Cause Y’all Waited 2; Durk refuses to fill his music with false hope or easy answers. Never mind that he claims to be based out of Atlanta these days—his loyalty is to the people of Chi-Town. (Just last month he showed up at Rush University Medical Centre to help deliver meals to frontline workers.) Durk is not the most famous voice in rap to emerge from his hometown, but he’s probably the most detailed, the most compassionate, in his vision. In this latest study of the city, he walks the line between reporter and preacher, gangster and citizen.
The ghosts of lost comrades circle Durk’s music, rendering almost every cut sorrowful and spectral. In his hands, Auto-Tune has a bled-dry beauty; over the piano chords of “All Love,” his digitized voice accentuates the erosion of his spirit. Far from a one-note vocalist, he drops the effect on “248.” Durk has never been particularly interested in virtuosity for its own sake, and here he slides into a conversational style, sounding like he’s slumping back in a chair, recollecting for his biographer.
The elephant in the room doesn’t go unaddressed. About a year ago, Durk Banks handed himself over to authorities after a warrant was issued for his arrest in connection with a February 2019 shooting outside of Atlanta restaurant the Varsity. (Since he was granted bond, some countries have refused him entry to perform shows.) “Turn Myself In” was released shortly before he handed himself over to cops, so its inclusion here a whole year later feels pointed as Durk laments the situation, calls the accusation “false,” and thanks Chance the Rapper for helping to keep his spirits up. It’s not unreasonable to attribute some of the tape’s sense of suffering to the case ostensibly being unresolved.
When the atmosphere becomes suffocating, guest rappers help release the tension. “3 Headed Goat” lives up to its audacious billing as Durk amalgamates with rising Chicago star Polo G and ATL’s Lil Baby. On “Chiraq Demons,” he recruits G Herbo for a double dose of classic drill—all horror movie piano keys, crushing drums, and ample menace.
Just Cause Y’all Waited 2 does have setbacks. The chorus to the unremarkable “Gucci” is derivative of every hook that’s been formed around the luxury fashion brand’s name. And there’s no good reasoning for the inclusion of “Trifling Hoes,” an unnecessary shot of misogyny. It’s out of step with the rest of Just Cause Y’all Waited 2, a set that transforms Durk’s pain into one of his most emotionally potent tapes ever, and confirms what Chicago has known for ages: If you seek to understand the city in the 21st century, listen to Lil Durk. | 2020-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Alamo | May 14, 2020 | 7.3 | 6fcf83be-0cfd-4df1-8fe3-6dc3a2e06e9d | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Donald Glover’s got big hooks and big ideas, but his spiritual largesse is weighed down by impulses carried halfway to their endpoints and moments of frustrating pretense. | Donald Glover’s got big hooks and big ideas, but his spiritual largesse is weighed down by impulses carried halfway to their endpoints and moments of frustrating pretense. | Childish Gambino: 3.15.20 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/childish-gambino-31520/ | 3.15.20 | About 40 minutes into his new album, Donald Glover asks a simple question: “Where are those subtle men?” At times, he’s totally unqualified to answer. The record’s first full song, which I swear is called “Algorhythm,” opens with an industrial groan, as Glover growls: “So very scary, so binary/Zero or one/Like or dislike, coal mine canary/I dream in color, not black and white.” It’s all very the regional manager just watched Blade Runner and wants to talk about it. But a few bars after that passage, “Algorhythm” opens up into its hook—bright, free, danceable in spite of itself. Like all of Childish Gambino’s music since 2013’s Because the Internet, 3.15.20 is studded with little hooks and big ideas that serve as lures. Its spiritual largesse is weighed down by impulses carried halfway to their endpoints and moments of frustrating pretense.
These songs, which were recorded over several years with the Inglewood producer DJ Dahi and Glover’s longtime collaborator, the Swedish composer Ludwig Goransson, move from pulsing four-on-the-floor exercises to Prince-lite. There are times (“32.22”) when he sounds like Travis Scott clearing his throat before breakfast, and others (the excellent “42.26,” previously released as “Feels Like Summer”) when Glover lulls you into a simmering hypnosis. So the album—titled after the date it was originally streamed online, most of its song titles mere timestamps—is not a clear retro pastiche like 2016’s “Awaken, My Love!”, which mined ’70s funk with occasionally dazzling results. But it’s not exactly tethered to the present, either. Dahi, unsurprisingly, says that some early versions of songs had a kind of “The Love Below energy”: “12.38,” which features a nearly four-minute documentation of a mushroom trip, is sort of a riff on André 3000’s “Vibrate.”
3.15.20 comes after a decade of unqualified success for Glover. The 36-year-old, who grew up a Jehovah’s Witness just outside of Atlanta and began writing for Tina Fey’s 30 Rock just as he was graduating from NYU, starred in another NBC sitcom, Community, before creating one of the decade’s most original screen projects in Atlanta. He released more music to increasing critical acclaim (or at least diminishing disdain). And contrary to internet rumor, he did not become the next Spider-Man, but he was cast in the Lion King remake and a Star Wars spinoff. He made the leap from sitcoms and mixtapes to superstardom, all while seeming to reject what superstardom requires.
Yet it always feels as if Glover is in the middle of a game of tonal Russian roulette. He began the decade making clumsy post-Graduation rap, defensive and full of treacly confession. As time went on he became more withholding, on record and in public performance. He announced his departure from Community with a series of notes handwritten at a Residence Inn (“I’M SCARED PEOPLE WILL FIND OUT WHAT I MASTURBATE TO”). He released Because the Internet—a rewardingly messy album with a sly thematic complexity—alongside a bleak screenplay about the suddenness of death. His headlining set at last year’s Coachella felt stiff at first, but gave way to emotional monologue fragments about his father’s passing and about Nipsey Hussle’s, and some sincerely cathartic performances. Glover seems to toggle back and forth between not caring about the artifice of celebrity and mimicking the pose of someone who feels that way. He has learned to use this inscrutability to interesting effect on the screen, but very seldom, so far, on his studio albums.
At its best, 3.15.20 Trojan horses some of that terror into happy surroundings. Played in the background, “47.48” sounds like a locked-in house band; the lyrics are actually about a crushing and ever-present violence, and the tension mesmerizes. That song ends with a conversation between Glover and his young son about love—sweeter than it sounds on paper, chilling given the juxtaposition.
Glover is not always successful at adding dimension to these songs. “24.19” opens with a condescending ode to a “sweet thing” who moves to Los Angeles and can “still believe in fairy tales”; it sounds like something that would get booed out of an open-mic night. The writing can be exasperating. On the way-too-arch “12.38,” he rhymes “tulips” with “two lips”; the hook of the Ariana Grande duet, “Time,” goes, “Maybe all the stars in the night are really dreams/Maybe this world ain’t exactly what it seems.” All of this makes it surprising when Glover does land some of his more poetic bars. There’s something about the way, on “42.26,” he sings about the “men who made machines that want what they decide.” And on “19.10”—an album highlight, a grim song that’s given too much forward motion to brood—he says: “To be happy really means that someone else ain’t.”
That last line is reminiscent of a quote Glover gave to the New Yorker in a 2018 profile. Riding in an SUV with the reporter, a bodyguard, and his Atlanta co-star, Zazie Beetz, Glover defends the trap music on the radio that the others are denigrating. “Y’all are forgetting what rap is,” he says. “Rap is ‘I don’t care what you think in society, wagging your finger at me for calling women “bitches”—when, for you to have two cars, I have to live in the projects.’”
As far back as 2011, Glover was rapping about how hip-hop songs are seldom given more than superficial readings. In “Be Alone” he scoffs at how his music might be wilfully mistaken for Plies’ and, implicitly, at the very notion that that would be an insult. The first music cue in the Atlanta pilot is an OJ da Juiceman song; “35.31,” from this new album, sounds like a children’s version of another one. To be clear, this is an excellent thing. On that song, Glover is playful, knowing, leaning into his gifts for melody and charm—doing all this in service of something much darker or, if you prefer, finding what can be playful within that darkness. | 2020-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Wolf + Rothstein / RCA | March 26, 2020 | 6 | 6fdf5ac9-371f-4071-b5ce-0b860d6f318a | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Quality Control’s secret weapon sticks to his crunk roots on his new album while also venturing into the most known unknown. | Quality Control’s secret weapon sticks to his crunk roots on his new album while also venturing into the most known unknown. | Duke Deuce: Duke Nukem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duke-deuce-duke-nukem/ | Duke Nukem | Memphis, like the entire South for many years, was so ignored or disrespected by the rap industry that the city’s scene developed a remarkable sense of self-sufficiency. DJ Paul and Juicy J started off making their own beats; and today, Young Dolph is at the level of a major-label star but maintains independence through his label Paper Route Empire, offering a Black-owned network of support to younger rappers from the 901. That sense of community and self-reliance is, in many ways, the essence of Memphis—the Orange Mound neighborhood was one of the first in the country in which Black residents owned, rather than rented, their homes, allowing for a certain amount of autonomy not afforded to Black Americans. Memphis’ spirit of self-determination and independence is at the heart of the music of Duke Deuce, the slyly emerging secret weapon in Quality Control’s stable who expands beyond the regional acclaim of his Memphis Massacre mixtape series on new album DUKE NUKEM.
Duke, born and bred in Blackhaven, came of age during his city’s most mainstream moment—the era of “Stay Fly” and Yo Gotti’s prolific mixtape run—but his connection to his hometown’s rap goes beyond mere fandom. He grew up in the studio alongside his father, Duke Nitty, a producer for the likes of former Three 6 member Gangsta Blac and Nasty Nardo during the true underground days. Most of Nitty’s credits stem from the turn-of-the-millennium, but at the encouragement of his son, the elder Duke has returned to beat-making. Deuce enlists features from artists outside West Tennessee but still keeps his homegrown sound strictly in the family, as generations of Memphis rappers have done—Juicy J and Project Pat are brothers, after all, and early major label signee Gangsta Pat learned the tools of the music trade from his father Willie Hall, percussionist for Isaac Hayes and Stax Records.
Duke’s album title references the iconic video game character Duke Nukem, who alongside Doom and Wolfenstein solidified the first-person shooter as one of gaming’s hegemonic genres. Nukem retrofitted 1980s action for Generation X, combining the hard bodies of Schwarzenegger and Stallone with an ironic, Simpsons-like smarm and the transgressive, tongue-in-cheek edge of the Attitude Era. Some of Nukem’s most infamous catchphrases are quotes from Bruce Campbell in Army of Darkness and Rowdy “Roddy” Piper in They Live; and the atomic action figure and his bleach-blonde flat-top are physically modeled after Dolph, Van Damme, and pro football player turned failed action star Brian “The Boz” Bosworth.
In the same way that Duke Nukem was a pastiche of action movies past, Duke Deuce draws himself a cartoon persona out of old Southern rap tropes. His relentless beats often sound like military marches, timpanis thumping in-between trap hi-hats, and DUKE NUKEM appropriately has an army theme. “Soldiers Steppin” opens with the ten-hut chants of a platoon before Duke commands you to march, with a finger in your face like R. Lee Ermey. The No Limit-like iconography carries over into the packaging: the futuristic cover by KD Designz, with green plastic army men, Duke’s head fashioned into a nuclear bomb, and his constant and iconic “What the FUUUUUCK!” ad-lib rendered as an explosion; song titles like “Army” and “Soldiers Steppin”; music videos themed around buck boot camp drills and Nukem-inspired video game levels.
While most Memphis revivalists opt for the haunted tongue-twisting of Lord Infamous, Duke Deuce feels more influenced by the pitter-patter flows of Project Pat, a goofy court jester and absolute unit as much as he is a slick-talking player of the game. Duke frequently speaks of himself in the third person, as if he’s the Incredible Hulk about to smash the club up. He has a Bruce Banner side, of course, slipping into something more mournful and soulful on “Army.”
DUKE NUKEM is an album made with the club in mind—as Duke puts it on “Soldiers Steppin,” “2020 fucked up, so we back up on that crunk shit”—but there’s a kind of intricate weirdness to much of the instrumentation and production: the warbling, almost out-of-tune keys on “Duke Skywalker”; a distorted and shuffling loop a little lower in the mix on “Toot Toot”; a grave hum underneath Duke’s voice on “Move.” Duke brings together old and new generations of the 901; multiple tracks are produced by Hitkidd, who in addition to collaborations with Memphis artists like Blocboy JB and former Raider Klan members Xavier Wulf and Chris Travis, has produced for Bladee and Yung Lean, showing the global influence of the Memphis underground sound.
Some of the guests that Duke drafts owe a debt to Memphis: like A$AP Ferg on “Fell Up in the Club,” whose blockbuster “Plain Jane” took its structure from “Slob on my Knob,” or fellow Quality Control comrade Offset on “Gangsta Party”—what was the much-heralded triplet “Migos Flow” if not a refurbished take on Three 6’s dense delivery? Duke doesn’t just draw from the same well of Hypnotized Minds-licensed records—the first sound on the album aside from Duke’s voice, on the 8Ball & MJG-nodding “Into: Coming Out Hard,” is a brief sample of the Stooges’ “Dirt,” directly linking Southern crunk and punk mosh pits. “Fell Up in the Club” is built from a flip of a true regional underground hit that’s probably only known by a few outside Shelby County, EP da PaperChaser and Dow Jones’ “PaperChase,” which I can only imagine would have soundtracked a lot of school dances and parking lot hangs when Duke was growing up, him and his friends trying to perfect the jookin move of the same name.
Unlike so many who bite the mystic style born in Memphis, Duke Deuce was born there, too; it’s not just samples or a flow to him—crunk is an entire culture, and it’s in his blood. So much of rap is built on riffing on or playing off music history, but there’s a thin line between reinterpretation and repetition. Duke Deuce holds to certain traditions while also venturing into the most known unknown. Crunk isn’t dead, and it’s not an undead zombie of its former self, either: Duke knows and respects his history, but he’s detonating it to make way for something new.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Motown / Made Men Movement | March 10, 2021 | 7.7 | 6fe30b2d-2070-4dbd-a1d9-e033e351cc95 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Recorded prior to a divesting move to Los Angeles, Laura Marling's fourth album is a vigorously polished, hard-won achievement. Expansive and ambitious, spare but intense, dark but somehow sexy, ...Eagle is a scorching interrogation of her own and other's follies that lifts the veil that once hung over her storytelling. | Recorded prior to a divesting move to Los Angeles, Laura Marling's fourth album is a vigorously polished, hard-won achievement. Expansive and ambitious, spare but intense, dark but somehow sexy, ...Eagle is a scorching interrogation of her own and other's follies that lifts the veil that once hung over her storytelling. | Laura Marling: Once I Was an Eagle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18066-laura-marling-once-i-was-an-eagle/ | Once I Was an Eagle | Laura Marling has spent the first few years of her career in a state of perpetual arrival. Alas I Cannot Swim-- her 2008 debut, made when she was 18-- was a bright, brooding collection that set her up as the darling of the latest British folk revival and saw her nominated for the Mercury Music Prize; a feat she repeated with 2010's more polished I Speak Because I Can. On 2011's sprawling A Creature I Don’t Know, she further established herself as an ambitious artist with a widening, sharpening vision. With each release, her talents-- keen songwriter, deft melodysmith, butterfly wing-fingered guitarist-- continued to reveal themselves so steadily as to have a lulling effect, like waves hitting some shoreline where it’s always high tide. But now here comes Once I Was An Eagle, the first of her albums to sound like a vigorously polished, hard-won achievement. It’s expansive and ambitious, and divorced of all the tweedy preening and aw-shucks raggediness the idea of “folk” has accumulated in recent years. It's dark, it’s angry, it’s even sexy, in a sly, subtle way.
Once I Was An Eagle marks another, more literal departure: Making the record in producer Ethan John’s countryside studio was one of Marling's last acts as a full-time Brit. Whether she had plotted her move from London to Los Angeles before she wrote the album isn’t clear, but either way these 16 songs bear witness to the process, embodying the particular catharsis that comes from moving house, the existential tumult that so often accompanies the dismantlement of a material life, all that sifting through the detritus of past and current lives. She digs deep into the far-back grimy corners of herself, examines every scrap and trinket, fully weighs each of the thousand tiny decisions about what to throw out and what to drag along to the new address. (In reality, she took barely any of her possessions to LA.)
This could be called a concept album, or a breakup record, though neither quite seems to suffice; “emotional bildungsroman” comes close, “scorching self-interrogation about the possibility of happiness and unpoisoned human connection in the wake of one or more failed or failing relationships, carried out under the ever-present pall of mortality,” maybe closer. As a lyricist, Marling has always favored a veiled sort of storytelling, her songs never not deeply felt but always more in the vein of short stories than memoir, and executed so supremely that sussing out the “real” from the “unreal” has always seemed beside the point. But this one feels personal in ways the others haven’t; the “I” of the songs is not always clear, as always, but seems closer than ever to being Marling’s own self.
Eagle was made over 10 days, with just a cellist and Johns (on carefully-placed drums, piano, organ) providing accompaniment; Marling recorded her vocal and guitar parts in a single take each, and in one day, though it somehow sounds even more immediate. Present in both her singing and her playing is a ferocity that now seems to have been lurking there all along; at times, too, she’s possessed by a newly emergent serenity, and an astonishing ability to shift between the two modes. This is especially evident on Eagle’s opening tracks, four songs written as a proper suite and a fifth that feels equally of a piece. Together they seamlessly, almost imperceptibly, build from somnambulant finger-picked acoustic to a wild fury of howling cello and frantic tabla-style percussion, “Take the Night Off” leading it off the way a rainshower usually precedes a hurricane; by “Master Hunter”, the suite's cap, Marling is inhaling relationships and spitting them back out as heaving piles of splinters and ash.
The rest of the album is spent digging through the rubble, out of which creatures and names and scraps of ideas turn up over and over: birds and beasts, the devil, water-- and, most prominently, the unnamed “you.” All through Eagle’s first half, this seems to be the same person, the same man: her “freewheeling troubadour,” the dove to her eagle. Some amount of drama has transpired offstage, though the specifics are not made clear, are perhaps too mundane to bother with; what's extraordinary is how Marling handles the fallout. On these songs she interrogates him, indicts him, admits her own cruelty towards him, always stopping short of apology, not even allowing herself to playact the rites of guilt.
Later, after the sparse chill of “Interlude”, the perspective shifts, the cast widens. “Where Can I Go?” obliquely introduces Rosie, a figure perhaps understandable as some fragment of who Marling might have been before all this began. On “Little Bird”, loping with the immense grace of Nick Drake, Marling questions the girl, or herself: “Why did you run from everyone who only tried to love you, Rosie?” Meeting this seemingly crucial, recurring character so late in the song cycle is a jarring development; then again, perhaps that’s the point, to echo the shock of the the singer finding herself again, bloodied but alive at the bottom of all the wreckage.
By this point, the album is circling itself, or the idea of its former self, as if waiting for the thing to die. Bits of “I Was an Eagle” return in “Pray for Me”-- the “preying” becomes “praying”; the climbing and swooping riff, there edged with a sitar-like guitar effect, here just simply thumbed along. Something heavy has been shaken off; some light is breaking through. “You asked me blind once/ If I was a child once/ And I said I’m really not sure,” Marling sang way back on third track “You Know”, in the dusky murmur she increasingly favors; now she finally has a reply, or finally lets herself reply: “I was a child once/ Oh, I was happy young/ When all I didn’t know needed doing had been done.” The question-asker is long gone; Marling doesn’t answer for his sake, but for her own.
Knotting up that loose end seems to make the final quarter of the album possible-- that realization of what needs to be done, and then the doing of it; putting away childish things, which, in the end, seems Eagle’s core concern. “Thank you naivety, for saving me again/ He was my next verse,” Marling nearly barks, on the last track, over a mounting wall of what seems like every instrumental bit to appear on the previous 15 tracks: all that warm cello, palm-hammered percussion, billowing organ, and her steady, spangling guitar. The mess of love, of hate, has been sorted through, purged, sorted and packed away-- not entirely tidily, and not in a way that could protect against any future disasters, but enough for a fresh start somewhere else. Marling is 23; at first, the amount of time she had spent on this earth seemed relevant because nobody in her peer group was making albums like this. With Once I Was an Eagle, it’s because nobody of any age is making albums like this. | 2013-06-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-06-03T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Ribbon Music | June 3, 2013 | 8.1 | 6fe39ce0-d007-4b9d-8000-859322f10d41 | Rachael Maddux | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachael-maddux/ | null |
The Chicago producer plays with oceanic imagery and a collage-like swirl of influences on a four-track EP that spills over the limits of club music’s conventions. | The Chicago producer plays with oceanic imagery and a collage-like swirl of influences on a four-track EP that spills over the limits of club music’s conventions. | Ariel Zetina: Organism EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ariel-zetina-organism-ep/ | Organism EP | Ariel Zetina grew up in North Florida, where the Atlantic Ocean was a short drive away. After studying theater at Northwestern University, she moved to Chicago, finding a home in the city’s vibrant performance art and electronic music scenes. And though Lake Michigan is so vast that at times it can feel like an ocean, at the end of the day, there isn’t a tide. There is no movement of the water along Chicago’s coast, not in any daily, measureable sense. But Organism, Zetina’s new EP, is in constant motion: Vocal samples loop and twist around themselves; shuffling beats adeptly bridge the genres and cultures from which she culls her rhythms. For Zetina, the sea pulses and flows through her work, at once a muse and a beacon.
Perhaps appropriately, then, “I Miss the Sea” comes closest to tracing some kind of musical lineage for Zetina: the sparse brukdown rhythms, an homage to her Belizean heritage; the warm, thumping beat of house music from her adopted hometown; the breezy, new-age vocals from trance music, an early obsession. If you were to drop into the middle of the track, the mix of pan flutes, acid house, and spoken-word affirmations might seem jarring. But with an elegance that testifies to her experience as a DJ, each element builds in sequence, making room for the next—the brukdown beat drops out to leave room for the flutes, the flutes for the incantations, the incantations for the acid house—as if her influences were in conversation with each other.
While each of these four tracks is certainly danceable, there’s a sense that they could be taken off the shelf and inspected like sound collage. “Putamaria” is accented by what sounds like knives being sharpened; “I Miss the Sea,” in which the singer breathily pines for the ocean, has an eerie dissonance, like an Enya cover dropped into a kinetic house party.
As a member of the art collective Witch Hazel, Zetina blended her theater experience with her skills as a producer, releasing the Godzilla EP in 2015 with Chicago drag queens Imp Queen and Deven Casey. Where that record used spoken-word recitations, ambient soundscapes, and house music to satirize materialism and traditional notions of beauty, Zetina’s references on Organism are more personal, more abstract, and with more room for interpretation.
Opener “Establish Yourself in My Body” features a striking vocal sample, which Zetina introduces carefully. First, it’s “body,” a word so commonplace in dance music it hits like a kick drum. Finally, after an infectious acid line builds and takes hold of the beat, the entire song cuts out, leaving room for the entirety of the phrase: “Establish yourself in my body!” It’s a demand, a desire, a moment of corporal confusion, commanded with such confidence that you want to figure out the Derridean task of establishing oneself in the body of an other. On “Putamaria,” she samples a chorus of catcallers, who repeat the title phrase with slightly different emphases each time, each iteration further abstracting its context and turning a leering phrase into just another part of the beat.
On the closing track, “Water Nymph,” Zetina finally steps out from behind the DJ booth. The song begins with the warmth of steel drums and vocal samples of bubbly laughter but soon grows quiet, as a pitched-down Zetina sings for the first time on the record: “I wish I could be your nymphomaniac, but I’m just a water nymph.” It’s a twist on the usual virgin/whore double standards, played out at sea, the Auto-Tune rendering her singing wobbly and aqueous. After a pregnant pause, the song starts back up again in earnest, the steel drums replaced by squelching synthesizers. It’s as if Zetina wants to ensure that, even in the sticky heat of a peak-time dance floor, she can still take up all the space she deserves. | 2019-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Majia | April 30, 2019 | 7.6 | 6fe3cce7-adc1-40a3-8320-c72b98d20b10 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Following two grandly orchestral and electronic-infused folk albums, both Mercury Prize nominees, Villagers' frontman Conor O’Brien offers a radically subdued collection that finds the shy Dubliner opening up in a more direct way about his sexuality. | Following two grandly orchestral and electronic-infused folk albums, both Mercury Prize nominees, Villagers' frontman Conor O’Brien offers a radically subdued collection that finds the shy Dubliner opening up in a more direct way about his sexuality. | Villagers: Darling Arithmetic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20393-darling-arithmetic/ | Darling Arithmetic | "It took a little time to get where I wanted/ It took a little time to get free/ It took a little time to be honest/ It took a little time to be me," sings Conor O’Brien on the first track to Villagers’ new album. As opening lines go, it’s hard to get more direct than that. It’s fitting then that the song itself is called "Courage"—a phenomenon that the Villagers’ frontman describes as "a feeling like no other, let me tell you." The song is a kind of pat on the back for O’Brien but also a way of steeling himself to open up and reveal what the album’s remaining songs have yet to say—namely, that romance is the pits no matter who you happen to fall in love with, but romantic love is not nearly as hard as coming to terms with your own mysterious and complicated self.
Previous Villagers records—2010’s Becoming a Jackal and 2013’s *{Awayland}—*were much busier affairs, each Mercury Prize nominees in which O’Brien’s grandly orchestral and electronic-infused folk music is supported by a full band and a preponderance of big ideas. Darling Arithmetic, by contrast, is a radically subdued affair—nine mostly acoustic-based tracks that O’Brien recorded at home alone, playing every instrument and mixing the record on his own. It makes sense then that the record is also the most strikingly personal he’s ever made—an emotional missive about love and relationships—in which the notoriously shy Dubliner finally opens up in a more direct way about his own sexuality.
Earlier this year O’Brien spoke to the Irish Times about the motivations for his new record by saying, "It’s not a news story: ‘Man is gay.’ I don’t want that to be the main focus. I wanted the album to be a human love album because everyone in the world feels those emotions at some stage. I really wanted to make sure that anyone who was listening could relate to the songs. I didn’t want to cut anyone off or make it seem as if I was only singing to my younger self."
While O’Brien’s goal of speaking to the universal experience—rather than simply making what could be ostensibly pigeonholed as a specifically "coming out" record—is understandable, his lingering reticence leaves some of the material wanting. Tracks like "Dawning on Me" and "No One to Blame" are undeniably pretty—understated bits of finely distilled yearning—but they suffer from an intentional vagueness, the genderless and pronoun-free lyrics occasionally treading a fine line between charmingly sweet and frustratingly precious ("Excuse me while I die/ A million times before I meet your eyes with mine").
For an album of mostly acoustic singer/songwriter fare released only weeks after Sufjan Stevens’ stunning Carrie & Lowell, the simple loveliness of Darling Arithmetic doesn’t always feel like quite enough. O'Brien is a deft songwriter with a wonderfully emotive voice, but it’s only when his lyrics become more pointed—as they do on "Little Bigot"—that the record soars. Addressing a sort of of everyman asshole, O’Brien advises his would-be hater by singing that "It’s okay to be tired/ So take the blame, little bigot/ And throw that hatred onto the fire." Elsewhere, on "Hot Scary Summer", he charmingly recollects a lost love—"Remember kissing on the cobblestone/ In the heat of the night/ And all the pretty young homophobes/ Looking out for a fight"—before getting to the real heart of the matter: "We got good at pretending/ Then pretending got us good." For anyone who might have spent years grappling with their own idenity—or logged countless hours loving the one who didn't quite love them back the right way—the song hits every perfect bittersweet note.
The need to stop pretending—to admitting one’s deepest insecurities and wants—seems central to Darling Arithmetic, an album that delivers a gorgeous, if somewhat restrained, step forward. It’s a document of quiet, if not necessarily earth-shattering, revelations. "In the darkness and the light/ I give you every side," O’Brien sings at one point, in what seems as much a promise to a lover as to the listener. Regardless of whether or not O’Brien chooses to go further down the troubadour path of working solo or will fall back into a full band scenario, one can only hope that making this record has proven to be a kind of emotional throat-clearing, a way of moving into potentially murkier and possibly even more personal waters. "How did I get here?/ Am I ever gonna get back?" he asks on the album-closing "So Naïve" as if revealing oneself so fully has stranded him in uncharted territory. That needn’t be a bad thing though. Previous Villagers records too often felt like puzzles—layers of densely-packed metaphors that, when unraveled, didn’t always add up to much. If Darling Arithmetic is the sound of someone dipping their toes into the waters and finding it to their liking, then perhaps the next Villagers record will be the sound of O’Brien diving in headfirst—even more fearlessly himself. | 2015-04-13T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2015-04-13T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | April 13, 2015 | 7 | 6fe55bd1-6afa-4f0f-bbd4-999b6c61021c | T. Cole Rachel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/t.-cole rachel/ | null |
Rufus Wainwright has quite the life. After he cut his first demo with producer Pierre Marchand, his father, Canadian folk ... | Rufus Wainwright has quite the life. After he cut his first demo with producer Pierre Marchand, his father, Canadian folk ... | Rufus Wainwright: Poses | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8557-poses/ | Poses | Rufus Wainwright has quite the life. After he cut his first demo with producer Pierre Marchand, his father, Canadian folk giant Loudon Wainwright III, passed it on to legendary arranger Van Dyke Parks, who in turn saw that it found its way to Dreamworks executive Lenny Waronker. With a simple glance at the Dreamworks logo on the back of Poses, I trust you can connect the dots for yourself. If only it could be that easy for everyone, right?
Oh, wait. I guess I forgot to mention that Rufus Wainwright deserves it. On his 1998 self-titled debut, Wainwright managed to pull together myriad strands and meld them into a grand, cohesive vision. And now, with Poses, he takes that vision and refines it, resulting in an epic album that speaks with grand gestures and a refined eloquence rare in young songwriters.
Of course, it never hurts to have a killer cast of collaborators to help you achieve your vision, and Wainwright has certainly assembled one for this record. Drummer Jim Keltner (Elvis Costello, Ry Cooder) returns on the traps, trading off spots with Victor Indrizzo (Chris Cornell, Redd Kross). Paul Weller cohort Pete Wilson mans the bass, and Dennis Farias (Burt Bacharach) provides colorful trumpet accents. Propellerhead Alex Gifford, Ethan Johns (Ryan Adams, Robyn Hitchcock), and Damian LeGassick (Blur) combine for production that veers effortlessly from the dark strings of "Evil Angel" to the beat-infused "Tower of Learning," and widely across a lot of terrain in between.
Poses opens and closes with the Tin Pan Alley tribute "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk," recalling some of the Divine Comedy's more playful moments with its ode to subtle addictions and the way our compulsions rule our lives ("If I should buy jellybeans/ I have to eat them all in just one sitting"). In between, we get everything from a Ouija board session with the ghost of Jeff Buckley ("The Consort") to the faithful and endearing cover of Loudon's classic "One Man Guy" that proves Rufus has at least a touch of dad's folk roots in him.
The album's title track stands as one of Wainwright's finest songs, with an aching melody and Spartan piano backing. It also illustrates how far his voice has come since his debut. He's become far more expressive in the last few years and his voice is a bit less of an acquired taste than it used to be. The funky "Shadows" is coated in thickly layered vocal harmonies that betray a definite debt to vocal jazz, though the swelling strings might sound a little more at home on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. Still, it's pretty fantastic stuff, and Rufus takes pains to breathe life into his Frankensteins, never letting them degenerate into limp genre exercises.
"Tower of Learning" is more impressive still, opening wide up in the second verse over programmed beats in an arrangement that looms over the rest of the album. Barring the reprise of "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk," Poses is closed on a somber note with the beautifully simple "In a Graveyard," a soulful reflection on moribund themes that momentarily leaves the oboes and strings at the door for a direct heart-to-heart with the listener.
It's always refreshing to see a recording this singular find its way out the door of a major label, and it's heartening to know that Wainwright probably has a secure home at Dreamworks. With Poses, he proves that he's swinging for the big leagues, and that he has every right to be there. | 2001-10-07T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2001-10-07T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | DreamWorks | October 7, 2001 | 8.6 | 6fe6cca8-45dc-4e8e-86ea-3d10deb238a7 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
Keita Sano is the Japanese producer's most grounded and focused work yet. These tracks fit into no particular paradigm or scene; they are stuffed with ideas, all of which hope to make you dance. | Keita Sano is the Japanese producer's most grounded and focused work yet. These tracks fit into no particular paradigm or scene; they are stuffed with ideas, all of which hope to make you dance. | Keita Sano: Keita Sano | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22632-keita-sano/ | Keita Sano | Keita Sano seems unsettled. This is true both in the producer's releases—15 singles and now four albums on 14 different labels, in two-plus years, and that's just accounting the physical releases—and his productions, which veer wildly from gnarly disco-based house to noisy, almost experimental techno to downtempo groove. The Okayama, Japan-based artist is probably most closely aligned with labels like Mister Saturday Night and 1080p, North American labels with a DIY spirit and a fondness for off-kilter statements, but even in that light Sano has proven himself a singular presence.
Keita Sano is Sano's fourth album, give or take, and it arrives via Rett I Fletta, a sub-label of Prins Thomas' Full Pupp imprint, because for Sano anything worth doing is worth doing obtusely. Still, Keita Sano feels like the producer's most grounded and focused work yet: seven long tracks aimed at the dance floor, each one a treatise on how varied and dauntless Sano has become. These are tracks that fit into no particular paradigm or scene; they are stuffed with ideas, all of which hope to make you dance. Sano's debts to both house and techno are obvious—Thomas remarked he was drawn to how he “somehow managed to merge the playfulness of disco with the physical impact of techno”—but feel beside the point. Sano isn't a politician crossing the aisle, he's just grabbing whatever works.
Accordingly, the tracks on Keita Sano are as familiar as they are hard to pin down. Squelchy acid licks (“Leave the Floor,” “Full of Love”) rub shoulders with filtered disco (“Honey”) and percussion loops of unknown origin (“Sucker Pt. 2”). “Vood” clangs with hissy industrial energy for more than three minutes before opening up into a calm, looping melody. Sano's tracks are long and evolving but there's very little psychedelia or escapism in his sound; everything is very physical and present, and his peculiar choices prevent you from losing yourself. Only on the closer, “None of Your Business,” when Sano slips into a kind of contented, deep house formalism, does Keita Sano fail to feel fidgety, strange, and emotive.
This is, to a large extent, music for the heads: Sano is a precocious and enigmatic producer but Sano is unlikely to convert agnostics. For anyone inclined, though, Sano is a true talent, an artist for whom “sticking to his guns” is great because his guns are so much different than everyone else’s. Keita Sano is his calmest and most manageable work yet, a fine place to start tracking an artist who seems unlikely to sit still for long. | 2016-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Rett I Fletta | December 2, 2016 | 7.4 | 6fea5613-c9e3-46a1-b4af-6c7d5ee341d7 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The veteran DJ confirms his status as a treasured keeper of Detroit techno’s flame on an album balancing resolute functionality with a subtly psychedelic, expressive dimension. | The veteran DJ confirms his status as a treasured keeper of Detroit techno’s flame on an album balancing resolute functionality with a subtly psychedelic, expressive dimension. | DJ Bone: A Piece of Beyond | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-bone-a-piece-of-beyond/ | A Piece of Beyond | Eric Dulan has been doing his own thing for over 20 years now. Staying true to the essential principles of Detroit techno as passed down by his elders Derrick May and Jeff Mills, he has released record after record of steel-capped dancefloor movers, mostly on his own label, Subject Detroit. Doggedly independent and devotedly underground, he maintains a connection with the classic Motor City sound, balancing relentless forward momentum with a certain serenity and poise, and boasting the ability to turn simple ingredients into a heady, psychedelic soup by dint of sheer repetition.
Despite, or perhaps because of, his classic stylings, Dulan has enjoyed a surge in popularity in recent years. He has slotted into a gap that’s appeared in the market as older Detroit DJs wind down their touring careers, steadily enlarging his fanbase through masterful, highly technical DJ sets. A Piece of Beyond is Dulan’s second full-length as DJ Bone, after 2007’s Out of Knowhere, a hard-to-find CD-R release. It’s also a swift follow-up to last year’s It’s Good To Be Differ-Ent LP, released under the name Differ-Ent. Through that alias, he dug into the anger and melancholy he felt after the death of his mother, transforming his darker emotions into more experimental material on several records for the London-based label Don’t Be Afraid. The experience of communicating through an alter ego seems to have expanded his vision; there’s an obvious grandiosity to this triple-vinyl release, even as he settles back into a more streamlined sound.
The record starts boldly with “It Begins,” throwing a delicious squiggle of interplanetary bleeps over soaring, faux-choral pads—it’s a quirky track, recalling the muddy thrills of early UK rave, and it could only work as an opener. Likewise, the closing track is an outlier: a gospel house teardown featuring the vocal acrobatics of Aaron-Carl Ragland, a Detroit producer and singer who died in 2010. Dulan reanimates one of Ragland’s unused vocals for an emotional final curtain, his close-harmonized falsetto reaching back to Detroit’s peerless R&B history.
Aside from those obvious markers, A Piece of Beyond doesn’t waste a second on scene-setting or ambient diversions—this is end-to-end dancefloor material, and its hour and fifteen minutes pass in a breathless sprint. Most tracks draw their power from a careful balance of darkness and light: tough, expressive drums overlaid with increasingly psychedelic, time-shifting layers of melody and harmony. As a rule, all the working parts are visible, yet they fit together to create something mysterious. You could recreate it, but it would never be the same.
The album’s highlights seem to prove this suspicion. On “Dreamers 9,” Dulan turns the simple thwack of the 808 into sturdy scaffolding for layers of drunken organs: sleek and functional, it occasionally strips down to just a solid kick, exposing the manufacturing process before rebuilding again. “Power Outage” offers livewire danger through the crackle of a broken connection, like a substation with its doors blown open in a storm. “Sweat” is sheer mechanics, as skull-cracking drums and woozy organs take us deep into the warehouse rave zone. But despite the engine-powered efficiency, the mood is far from inhuman: “Workings of the Inner Circle” brings squelching, soulful chords, while “All My Heart” is an ecstatic romance running on an 808 throb and oxytocin-laced synths as a voice whispers those three little words, over and over.
The worship of Detroit techno can spill into fetishization too easily: This idea of a futuristic, sci-fi sound emerging from a post-industrial wasteland verges upon “ruin porn” as we imagine the ghostly clang of machinery pealing through the broken windows of the Packard Plant. But despite its many imitators, it’s hard to argue with the feeling that Detroit techno just sounds best when it comes directly from that lineage. By dint of circumstance, raw talent, and endless persistence, DJ Bone has become a treasured keeper of the flame. | 2018-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Subject Detroit | April 27, 2018 | 7.1 | 6feb0e0c-6f72-402c-bcbe-4b39ad3f1908 | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
The English psych-punks turn down the distortion and face their demons with a new, synth-y sound on their third album. | The English psych-punks turn down the distortion and face their demons with a new, synth-y sound on their third album. | Hookworms: Microshift | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hookworms-microshift/ | Microshift | Feedback and distortion are the training wheels of indie rock—obfuscating agents that provide nervous upstarts with a sense of confidence as they face the public, secure in the knowledge that no one’s really going to be able to decipher what the hell they’re singing about. On their first two albums, Leeds quintet Hookworms rode those wheels down to the rim, whipping up a psych-punk squall that was heavy on the overdriven drone and extended meltdown fade-outs. You could sense they had an excitable, charismatic frontman in Matt Johnston (a.k.a. MJ), but his blown-out vocals often sounded like they were in competition with the garage-grimed organs and fuzzed-out guitars to see which could push the needle furthest into the red. Still, it didn’t really matter—by seamlessly melding that surface scuzz to adrenalized motorik rhythms, Hookworms had forged their own brand of stoner rock for people too wired to get stoned.
The band’s third album, Microshift, is similarly an exercise in relentless forward motion and joyous abandon. But the means they use to achieve those ends have changed dramatically: Like the reformed partier who now gets their endorphin rush from morning jogs instead of amphetamines, Hookworms have traded in chaos for clarity. The adherence to krautrockin’ repetition remains, but the proto-punk engine has been replaced by electronic loops and glacial synths. Suddenly, a band that once sounded most at home in strobe-lit basement dives now sounds primed for a late-afternoon slot at your roving summer festival of choice.
It’s not just the sonic upgrade that makes Microshift perhaps this year’s most ironically titled record. In the absence of the band’s once-omnipresent din, we hear lyrics that are as emotionally messy as the music supporting them is precise and pristine. For a long time, in interviews and on his open-book Twitter feed, MJ has been disarmingly frank about his mental health struggles (not to mention the 2015 flood that destroyed his studio and temporarily sidelined the band). But on Microshift, as never before, he grapples with some serious business head-on: death, heartbreak and body image, to name a few. What’s most striking is not the candor with which he broaches sensitive subjects, but that he sounds so eager and enthused to slay those dragons.
Take the opener, “Negative Space,” a song inspired by the passing of a dear friend—but also one of the most exhilarating, exuberant indie rock songs of 2018 so far, an electro-rock Mt. Olympus whose step-by-step ascent mirrors Sound of Silver, but whose insistent vocals scream Superchunk. And where previous Hookworms songs would be content to hammer a repeated riff into oblivion, “Negative Space” showcases a newfound facility for surprise melodic changes and sublime structural shifts, like when the song’s white-knuckled energy peaks partway through and is released through a dreamy disco denouement that suggests closure. Not so: “Negative Space” is merely a warm-up for the mighty seven-minute exorcism that is “Ullswater,” where MJ eulogizes a failed relationship atop a bubbly synth-pumped beat, before calmly admitting “I wish I held you tight before” and unleashing all that pent-up regret in a climactic, guitar-charging rock-out that’s up to Hookworms’ previous paint-peeling standards.
As we get deeper into Microshift, it becomes clear that Hookworms’ evolution from unruly noisemakers to art-pop sophisticates isn’t purely aesthetic—it’s a rebuke of the male aggression that guitar-based rock’n’roll has traditionally encouraged, and an embrace of greater sensitivity and emotional honesty. This goes beyond the band’s first proper ballad, “The Soft Season,” an aching post-breakup farewell that suggests Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space as commandeered by Ben Gibbard. On “Opener,” MJ doesn’t just lament the inability of men to be candid with one another, he summons the song’s blissfully buzzing organs and gliding momentum as a way of melting such insecurities away, like an emo Stereolab. And in “Shortcomings,” he gives voice to a condition rarely addressed by male performers: insecurity over one’s onstage appearance. Because even though punk taught us anyone can do it, that’s no protection from deeply ingrained notions of how rock singers should look while they’re doing it. “I feel guarded/I feel less than strong,” MJ admits. “Here where our bodies don’t belong.” But as he demonstrates throughout Microshift, anxiety should never get in the way of ecstasy—and as “Shortcomings” rides its psychedelic disco groove into the sunset, he makes good on that promise. | 2018-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | February 5, 2018 | 7.9 | 6fef0fbe-5e01-4911-81de-32800e2afbd9 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Hailed often as the Dead’s best shows of their career, this massive box set showcases the band at their tightest and most accessible—it’s perfect for beginners and lifelong Deadheads alike. | Hailed often as the Dead’s best shows of their career, this massive box set showcases the band at their tightest and most accessible—it’s perfect for beginners and lifelong Deadheads alike. | Grateful Dead: May 1977: Get Shown the Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23168-may-1977-get-shown-the-light/ | May 1977: Get Shown the Light | While nearly every Grateful Dead freak has an opinion on the matter, the Dead’s May 8, 1977 show at Cornell University’s Barton Hall has achieved the unofficial status as their best show ever. Regularly topping collector polls in fan bible DeadBase, Barton Hall has been added to the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry, remixed in 5.1 surround sound by audiophile tapers, pressed to vinyl in the recent bootleg LP revival, replicated by cover bands (and released as a live album in its own right), and earned its own truther conspiracy theory, all before the show’s first official release, just in time for its 40th anniversary.
With Cornell’s 25-minute “Scarlet Begonias” into “Fire in the Mountain” as a joyous centerpiece, a pristine-sounding 11-CD/10-plus hour/four-show box set extravaganza finally elevates the mythical 5/8/77 from the long-existing Deadhead trading network to the officially streaming ecosystem. Though Cornell ’77 is neither the Dead’s most adventurous nor creative performance, it also remains arguably the Best Ever for several enduring reasons. Perhaps chief among them is that it is live Grateful Dead at its most accessible, with the Dead sounding vivid and tight and full of pep, characteristics shared by all four shows on May 1977: Get Shown the Light. Compared to most Grateful Dead shows, Cornell ’77 (and its chronological neighbors) are excellent places for (some) newbie listeners to start.
Though an ongoing critical reassessment of the Dead has been based on their woolly psychedelic jam experiments of the ’60s and sweeping Americana of the early ’70s, the revered May 1977 model was perhaps the most conservative of the band’s long career. Those hoping to find evidence of the boundary-pushing Acid Testers should first seek recordings from earlier eras, but those looking to appreciate where those boundaries settled will find them here. It’s a conservatism some Dead freaks can’t abide, their interests fading in parallel with the band’s sense of serious exploration. Cracking only short windows into open-ended jamming, the band had put their psychedelic space opus “Dark Star” on ice during their year-and-a-half touring hiatus in 1975, and quickly abandoned the fusion experiments of that year’s Blues For Allah. While still containing the core band that regularly went on extended free improv tangents a half-decade earlier, the return of second drummer Mickey Hart set the course for the arena thunder that would follow. Jerry Garcia’s voice still retained much of its youthful sweetness, and—key for casual listeners—the second-set anchoring “drumz/space” jam hadn’t been invented yet.
Even more crucially, in spring of 1977, the Dead had also just spent the early part of the year with Fleetwood Mac producer Keith Olsen, shaping what would become Terrapin Station, released that July. Olsen, who stayed on the road with the band for late-night/off-day mixing sessions until just before the box’s start, reportedly told the band’s two drummers to tighten up. They did. Though Terrapin wasn’t the hit that their new label boss Clive Davis of Arista Records wanted when he signed the band, Olsen’s influence was arguably even more important, the last piece feeding into perhaps their most legendary tour.
When the curtain rises on Get Shown the Light—on the 12th anniversary of the proto-Dead’s debut at a Menlo Park pizza parlor—the Dead sound ebullient as they crack into Chuck Berry’s “The Promised Land.” Almost inadvertently, the band created a new kind of greatest hits album on every night of the spring ’77 tour, churning out different combinations of classics and concise jams, plus a small handful of new songs. The result was a much-loved conceptual box set available for years exclusively via the Deadheads’ non-commercial alternative distribution network of tape traders. Instead of one mainstream smash, Keith Olsen yielded the band many more underground hits. And counting Get Shown the Light, 19 of the tour’s 30 shows have now been officially released.
Alternating songs led by guitarists Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir, the band virtually never worked from a setlist, though in 1977 they still occasionally repeated songs from show-to-show. Subsequently, *Get Shown the Light *winds up with four versions of Weir’s brand new paranoid space-reggae jam “Estimated Prophet.” On the former, one can very clearly hear the Dead’s creative process unfolding. Over the first three nights, “Estimated Prophet” stands alone, as it had during the previous 15 versions since its February debut, Garcia’s Mu-Tron III pedal giving his quizzical solos a whoa-his-guitar-is-talkin’-to-me tone, surely translatable by some Deadheads. On the last night of the box though—May 9 at Buffalo’s Memorial Auditorium—Weir lets the rhythm tension slack, the band shifts easily and thrillingly into the time of no-time, and (too soon) segue into the decade-old triplet-powered improv vehicle “The Other One.” By the year’s end, “Estimated Prophet” had settled permanently into its new second set slot, its non-ending a portal for the band’s evolving second set jam suite.
The vast majority of the box showcases an improvisation of a different kind, though: the sound of the band changing slowly over time, fixed only temporarily as their 1977 selves. This is especially evident during the shorter songs of the first sets whose arrangements remained fairly constant from year to year. Introducing several albums worth of new material during Mickey Hart’s half-decade touring absence from the band, the band was still adjusting to his return. On Garcia favorites like “Bertha” and the traditional “Peggy-O” (both played all three nights besides Cornell), the band’s groove is in the process of shifting. The former’s barroom jaunt is taken over by a heavier two-drummer backbeat, the latter’s sparse ghost-folk is likewise taken over by a heavier two-drummer backbeat. It’s something of a motif. Elsewhere, as during the rippling and cresting “Mississippi Half-Step” at Boston Garden on May 7, the drummers create an even bigger sound for Garcia to ride.
To Deadheads, each of the four shows of Get Shown the Light has its own personality. Defined predominantly by the shows’ big jams and song suites, all the tiny long-term changes in the band’s complexion find their biggest outlet as they mix with the real-time creative decisions of the musicians. Like Cornell, New Haven’s second set centers around the then-new pairing of “Scarlet Begonias” and “Fire on the Mountain”, a 23-minute combination that opens into a quiet valley, tethered by Mickey Hart’s chattering cowbell and the Allman Brothers-like twin guitar figures Garcia and Weir use to climb out. May 7 in Boston builds a narrative around a rare triple-shot of Garcia songs, as the breezy hippie-jazz groove of “Eyes of the World” gives way to a brief-by-later-standards Mickey Hart/Billy Kreutzmann drum session before finding deep space in “The Wheel” and redemption in “Wharf Rat.” And Buffalo on May 9 (which many Deadheads prefer to Cornell) features a sharp reading of the tricky “Help on the Way”/”Slipknot!”/”Franklin’s Tower” suite, along with the aforementioned “Estimated Prophet” to open a sequence that works its way to one of the all-time great readings of Garcia’s soulful “Comes a Time,” itself capped by an ineffable, lyrical solo that builds from a duet with Keith Godchaux to a screaming crest and back to a tender quiet. Nearly all of it was music to make Deadheads and civilians alike dance and spin and twirl and noodle and get real high, primary purposes of these performances in their original context.
But Cornell really does carry an extra magic. There is the “Scarlet Begonias”/”Fire on the Mountain” pairing to begin the second set, of course, with its upper register Phil Lesh bass slides and the rising harmonized piano figure that extrapolates itself into a jam. But that’s far from all the wonders of Cornell ’77. Nothing supernovas into psychedelic cataclysm ala “Dark Star” or “Playing in the Band” from 8/27/72 (arguably a more worthy Best Ever, released as 2013’s Sunshine Daydream), but that’s okay, too. The music is less like the transportation of an LSD peak and more akin to the long, soft glow of a psilocybin comedown, veritably emitting an everything-in-its-right-place pronoia, where the universe conspires in one’s favor.
Besides driving Dead staples like “Brown Eyed Women” (one of the few songs to survive the two-drummer transition intact), the first set closes with a 16-minute “Dancing in the Street,” the disco’d up Motown cover sounding pretty goofy until, like most Dead songs, it turns into a platform for Garcia’s guitar to converse and weave. The back-half of the show features more of that in a 16-minute version of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away”, an oldie that could sometimes run on autopilot as if Garcia’s guitar were simply reading the intergalactic phonebook. But at Cornell, Garcia luxuriates in bright themes, spinning off multi-colored yarns atop the drummers’ slow roll, the jam eventually flying into a no-time of its own. And what Cornell has especially that the other three shows of the box don’t (nor most of the shows in ’77) is “Morning Dew.” A folk cover the Dead adapted for their first album, the song was likewise the process of gradual improvisation, slowing from the uptempo 1967 arrangement to a dramatic showcase for Garcia, the sentiment of his voice and guitar interchangeable. At Cornell, the solo/jam rises from a troubled lover’s whisper to a life-affirming scream into the void, Garcia’s guitar fanning open into the song’s final refrain.
Hailed as a Deadhead favorite from the first fan-made recordings that began to circulate immediately after the show, Cornell’s legend only really began in the late 1980s, when a number of tapes recorded by former sound engineer (and Deadhead saint) Betty Cantor-Jackson were purchased from a storage locker auction by Deadheads. With the Dead themselves yet-uninterested in releasing archival live material, Deadheads restored and disseminated the recordings for free. The effect of the so-called Betty Boards was as if the band released dozens of high-quality vintage live albums simultaneously, almost unquestionably furthering the success the band achieved with “Touch of Grey” and In the Dark, their only top 10 single and album, in 1987. With its dashing performance, neither too weird nor too loose, Cornell became a dorm room staple. Only recently did the band acquire the master recordings, now able to put the show into the proper Dead canon.
Forty years later, Cornell serves as an artistic achievement in its own right, an assertion that an unofficial live recording could be just as enduring as a studio album, and just as important to the band’s popular success. Cornell ’77 and its surrounding tour now represent an almost Platonic ideal of the band, and almost certainly solidified the way Deadheads thought about the Dead.
And like many classic albums, the band created it under increasing stress. Both Lesh and Kreutzmann, the heart of the band’s rhythm section, wrote in their memoirs about their own isolating substance abuse problems that began during the band’s 1975 hiatus year. Jerry Garcia, as director of the far over-budget and overdue Grateful Dead Movie filmed at the band’s “farewell” shows in October 1974 and finally released in June 1977, had fallen into a heroin habit that would follow him until his death in 1995. In the spring of 1977, in part because of the financial chaos wreaked by the Dead Movie, the band had stripped his salary to $50 a week. He was starting to forget lyrics in ways he never had previously, too, and in the next years his prodigious songwriting output would dwindle, his voice would change, and the Grateful Dead would continue to evolve.
But in May of 1977, the Grateful Dead were just exactly perfect, a state they’d experienced before, and which many Deadheads would swear they never deviated from afterwards. And while those arguments might be valid for some segment of the Dead’s vast audience, Cornell and the spring of ’77 is one of the last places where one might find a consensus among listeners, before the Dead’s music transformed from something vaguely recognizable as mainstream rock into an even-more-secret language. After the tour, drummer Mickey Hart would crash his car, seriously injuring himself, and breaking the particular spell the Dead and Keith Olsen had cast on themselves earlier that year. It would be the last summer without a Dead tour until 1996. But May of 1977 is forever. | 2017-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | May 6, 2017 | 9 | 6ff224e2-1063-4628-a741-dc675ffe4f75 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
With its macabre textures and sinister flows, the fifth installment of CEO Trayle’s Happy Halloween series unspools the rapper’s fears and sorrows into one of the most original rap albums of the year. | With its macabre textures and sinister flows, the fifth installment of CEO Trayle’s Happy Halloween series unspools the rapper’s fears and sorrows into one of the most original rap albums of the year. | CEO Trayle: HH5 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ceo-trayle-hh5/ | HH5 | On the ninth track of CEO Trayle’s HH5, the rapper is at war with himself. The song, “Alter Ego 2,” pits the sensitive and reasonable Trayle against his twisted counterpart C4, a voice in his head that moves like he has a death wish. A 2013 home invasion that left Trayle with seven gunshot wounds is the center of this track, and it continues to haunt him, even though he wants to move on. Telling C4 that he has a son and a future in rap now, those days of fear and bitterness are gone. But C4 is set on dragging him back into the mud. “Nigga must think you Superman, them seven shots ain’t teach you nothin’,” he raps with a slithery inflection, a ghoulish echo lingering in the background. The pressure doesn’t go anywhere; the song ends anti-climatically with the promise of money snapping Trayle out of his daze, temporarily pushing C4 to the back of his mind. Most CEO Trayle songs aren’t structured this way, and it illustrates why HH5 is an adventurous and bonkers dissection of the thinking you normally try to bury.
Trayle doesn’t hold your hand on “Alter Ego 2,” which is easily one of the best rap songs of the year. Though C4 is fictional, he’s not cartoonishly evil, just a mix of anger and paranoia. The concept is also strangely funny: He’s pretty much on the same wavelength as Danny talking to his imaginary friend Tony in The Shining. These are the complexities that Trayle is working with for much of HH5, an album where nearly every flow, cadence, and strain of thought is unpredictable. No song can be boxed-in to a single mood or feeling; reality and delusions are blurred.
Trayle is a nomadic rapper by definition. For the first 13 years of his life, he lived in the Bronx, eventually moved to Alabama, and then settled in Atlanta a couple of years later. His music doesn’t have roots in a specific city: You can hear traces of Gucci Mane, Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, Young Thug, No Limit, and Chief Keef, and the latter feels like the inspiration behind his insularity. Ultimately, the lyrics are so personal, the fast-switching flows so irreverent, and the tone so uniquely offbeat, that comparisons to other rappers can’t tell the whole story.
Across HH5, almost every track centers around a different one of his strengths. The album is effective because no single song is a perfect snapshot of his subtleties. On “Mathematician/Blackout,” his delivery gradually evolves over the eerie instrumental; he tiptoes at first, then eventually transforms into a possessed member of the Migos. With “Chainsmoking,” the mood skips all over the place: The hook sounds stressful, a few of the reflections are chilling, and a couple punchlines just sound sleek. He laments his drug dependency on “Chokehold,” running through all of his remedies to the point of hypnosis. “I Love You, But…” has the heartbroken lyrics of a mid-2010s Future mixtape cut (“Bitch, I love you, but we can’t keep doing this/If I don’t got these Percocets, might end up losing it”), but his creeping flow gives the song an uneasy bent.
Despite CEO Trayle’s range, HH5 does have a sense of cohesiveness. It’s mostly because of how he invites us into his psyche, a feeling rarely captured outside of a novel told in first person. Trayle doesn’t write ahead of time, an approach that produces a true stream of consciousness: Timelines converge, unrelated thoughts thread together, and the mood shifts drastically. That lyrical process can feel meandering if it’s not all clicking: For example, on “Craxk Flow,” Trayle’s whispery lilts doesn’t add any flavor to the track, and on “Unusual,” he’s drowned out by an 808-heavy beat that sounds like it’s been churned out by the Quality Control assembly line. But these problems don’t appear that often. The beats, crafted by a collection of familiar, if unheralded names (Stribb, Section 8, and Trauma Tone, who co-produced one of Chief Keef’s masterpieces, “Blew My High”), don’t jump out at you. But they do form the album’s anxious and sinister backbone.
The sound of HH5 brushes up against the melodies of the YSL orbit, the intensity of Chicago drill, and the soul cleansing of the Deep South, but it’s so specific and unconventional that he’s also slightly removed from those influences. Trayle’s nuances come through most clearly on “Pass It On”; he describes a woman who wants him, rapping, “She tryna eat my flesh and bone.” That should have been a throwaway line, but, instead, it’s instantly memorable, putting a freaky spin on an ordinary rap flex. That’s HH5, nothing is ordinary. Trayle unfurls new flows erratically, his fears threaten to oust his conscience, and somehow, like the best horror movies, it’s all deeply serious and darkly funny at the same time. | 2022-11-14T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-14T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Do What You Love / 10K Projects | November 14, 2022 | 8.3 | 6ff6c270-2dc2-46c6-b01f-a0970d4877f5 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Austin garage rockers continue tidying up their sound and refining their songwriting on their third LP, a collection that adds piano and politeness to the mix. | The Austin garage rockers continue tidying up their sound and refining their songwriting on their third LP, a collection that adds piano and politeness to the mix. | The Strange Boys: Live Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16111-live-music/ | Live Music | Cleaning up your act is tricky for any fuzz-minded garage band, and Austin's the Strange Boys have been weathering that transition a bit roughly. Their demented 2009 debut, The Strange Boys and Girls Club, combined punk and country and even doo-wop into a bold and bird-flipping sound that proved fast wasn't the only way to convey agitated. On last year's Be Brave, they tidied up their sound and refined their songwriting, but lost so much of what made them strange in the first place. And now Live Music takes them further in that direction, adding piano to their guitar-drums-bass-and-sometimes-harmonica lineup. The problem with this trajectory: Every album so far sounds like a transition, pointing to big things but never quite producing them.
The title of the Strange Boys' new album is surely intended to be ironic: Live Music attempts to separate the instruments and create some depth in the production, but it may be the least live they've sounded. Gone is the lo-fi spontaneity and fuck-it-all atmosphere; instead, we get a newfound professionalism that translates to midtempo plods and something like self-reflection. The album is restrained, surprisingly low-key, and-- at its lowest points-- polite. The songs ask for but never demand your attention, then respond with a sociable thank you and good day.
Even so, the Strange Boys' garage remains enormous, with plenty of room to stack boxes of honky-tonk, rockabilly, R&B, and classic rock. That inclusive approach has always been their greatest asset and most distinguishing trait, although for the most part Live Music compacts these competing urges into a very generalized Americana that never takes advantage of their Texas roots. They're not synthesizing disparate styles in the great tradition of Austin, but skimming the surfaces of ideas they once explored more deeply. In this setting, Ryan Sambol's voice, which has been compared to Dylan and any number of Nuggets frontmen, sounds more like Tom Petty, but without the classic rocker's signature deadpan.
When the tempos pick up, so does the album. "Omnia Boa" adapts a train-song chug-a-lug for a subtly menacing groove, and "Punk's Pajamas" is a jumble of guitars laced together with a gangly harmonica theme. "You can study the past or dig the future," Sambol sings on the latter, "but the present will never leave you." It's a sharp insight that hints at the Strange Boys' goals: to incorporate rock history into a sound that isn't defined by nostalgia or innovation for the sake of innovation. They're trying to find a way to live in the moment, which is certainly commendable. As Sambol unravels that theme across these 14 songs, the album grows more endearing, if never quite exciting. | 2011-12-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2011-12-09T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Rough Trade | December 9, 2011 | 6.2 | 6ffb09b8-bfe7-47a4-a1cf-cc5082169c46 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
A few years ago, I made the fatal mistake of trying to introduce my\n\ grandparents to the joys of ... | A few years ago, I made the fatal mistake of trying to introduce my\n\ grandparents to the joys of ... | Clinic: Internal Wrangler | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1513-internal-wrangler/ | Internal Wrangler | A few years ago, I made the fatal mistake of trying to introduce my grandparents to the joys of rock. I figured, you know, they're pretty hip for old people-- they usually win at bridge, and they drive at night. Perhaps it'd be easier for me to relate to them if we had at least some sense of musical common ground.
So, my grandfather entered into a pact with me: he would listen to a Beatles record if I would sit through the classic 1942 James Cagney Musical, Yankee Doodle Dandy. It seemed like a glimmer of hope, but it wasn't meant to be. The agreement quickly dissipated and my grandfather returned to blasting the "noise" that I listen to. "It all sounds the same anyhow," he said.
Immediately, I was on the defensive. I was prepared to rip my poor, defenseless grandpa to bits with my biting wit and immense store of rock knowledge. But instead, I found myself stumbling for something to say that could explain the differences between rock bands to an 80 year-old man who still considers Lawrence Welk "cutting-edge." Of course rock bands sound different! I mean, to say that the Beach Boys and AC/DC are virtually identical just seems off the mark.
But for the most part, rock is defined by the presence of a few distinct elements-- mainly, the guitar/bass/drums setup. Plus, rock music hasn't traditionally broken out of fairly standard tonalities-- the majority of rock music, especially popular rock music, has always centered around a pretty limited number of chords and scales. And yet, out of these elements have come not only such a wide range of sounds, but a startlingly wide range of quality. Some bands have attained this by honing in on particular aspects of the rock sound-- one could very easily say something to the effect of, "I like band a because of their x." (Example: "I like Don Caballero for their drummer," or, "I like Britney Spears for her full, heaving melodies.")
But the best rock music has very little to do with having one standout element. Not to slip into gestalt or anything, but the best rock truly is that which manages to be infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. It's an inexplicable quality, really, but the most important in rock. It's what sets apart the true playas from the sucka MCs. And Clinic has it in truckloads.
There's nothing particularly "experimental" or ground-breaking about Internal Wrangler. Guitar, bass, and drums are the predominant instruments, with flourishes of organ and tinny drum samples thrown in. There are no microtonal guitar solos or squelching analog synthtones. The true beauty of Clinic is that they have, using a relatively standard rock vocabulary, constructed a truly distinctive, energetic, and magnetically appealing sound.
"Voodoo Wop" opens Internal Wrangler with layers of drums, including bongos, which build upon a slinky bassline and snippets of ambient noise. Coupled with budget reverb that lends a garage-rock aesthetic, the track creates a wall of tension and uneasiness. But it isn't until the record's second track, "Return of Evil Bill," that Clinic unleashes their secret weapon: lead singer Ade Blackburn.
Blackburn's delivery melds the drony expression of Lou Reed with the fragility of Sigur Rós frontman Jón Thór Birgisson and the instability of Thom Yorke; he employs his voice not merely as a vehicle for lyrical expression, but as an entirely separate melodic and percussive element. One of the album's many peaks comes with Blackburn's incoherent ramblings on "The Second Line." As opposed to the "yeah yeah yeah's" that have become such a trite aspect of rock music, the mess of vowels and consonants that Blackburn spits out during the course of the song serve as a visceral outlet for his amazingly expressive voice.
Clinic aren't interested in studio sheen and perfected instrumentation, which is exactly what makes them innovative. In a world of anally retentive college boys who spend hours at the mixing board to assure that every note is flawlessly delivered, in key, and not a 16th of a second off beat, Clinic's degree of spontaneity lends them an air of complete originality. To them, it's not about the production qualities, the change-up, or the nit-picking. It's not about anything other than playing the music itself. And more than anything else, that's what comes through on Internal Wrangler. Their delivery captures a mind-blowing live performance, despite its studio origins.
It's tough to pick a single best moment from the record. Initially, I was drawn to the "Heroin" and "Motion Picture Soundtrack" hybrid, "Distortions." Over a nicely sequenced drum machine beat and hollow organ, Blackburn cries through a straitjacket of vacuum-sealed production, "I want to know my body/ I want this out, not in me," as a lone trumpet releases a shrill yelp in the distance. As the song progresses, the lyrics become more cryptic and moving, culminating with indelible lines like, "You cannot know how often/ I've pictured you in coffins/ My baby in a coffin." As the lyrics grow bleaker, the song takes off, its rhythm increasing slightly as the trumpet returns with unfocused blasts.
The closing ballad, "Goodnight Georgie," is the most sparse track on Internal Wrangler, and one of the best. Relying almost exclusively on a gently strummed guitar, Blackburn's deeply affecting vocals, and occasional flourishes of trumpet, piano, and tambourine, the song brings into focus the band's astounding melodic sense, showcasing one of the most perfectly constructed vocal melodies to grace a record in years.
But the brilliance of Clinic is not relegated to quasi-ballads like "Goodnight Georgie." Sloppy garage punk tracks like "C.Q." and "Hippy Death Suite" crank out raw, clanging noise, utilizing the same elements as their slower, more consonant counterparts, never sacrificing their seemingly inherent sense of dense rhythm and soaring melody.
Many bands spend their entire careers trying to find a signature sound and perfect it. Clinic, on the other hand, have accomplished this feat with their debut full-length. Passionate, visceral, and immensely moving, Internal Wrangler is a landmark achievement not only for Clinic, but for all of rock music. It's the perfect testament to why rock will never die-- there will always be groups like Clinic who cannibalize their influences, pick out the tastiest bits, and reconstruct them into something that is not only completely their own, but embodies all the primal appeal of rock and roll. Internal Wrangler is that kind of album-- so engaging and well-executed, I can't imagine how anyone could not love it. Except, maybe, my grandpa. | 2000-05-02T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2000-05-02T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Domino | May 2, 2000 | 9.3 | 6ffdc067-5307-414c-83d8-64f1d64d4a41 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Sprained Ankle is a solo, singer-songwriter album, but very little of it would be considered "folky." Julien Baker's extremely intimate songs operate in existential ultimatums—life or death, hope or despair, oblivion or epiphany. These are redemption songs that sound as raw as they feel. | Sprained Ankle is a solo, singer-songwriter album, but very little of it would be considered "folky." Julien Baker's extremely intimate songs operate in existential ultimatums—life or death, hope or despair, oblivion or epiphany. These are redemption songs that sound as raw as they feel. | Julien Baker: Sprained Ankle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21260-sprained-ankle/ | Sprained Ankle | If Julien Baker wasn't cracking something close to a smile on the cover of Sprained Ankle, I wouldn't be certain that it was meant for public consumption. Much of the album was written in isolation—after Baker left Memphis for Middle Tennessee State University, she worked on these songs in a soundproof booth within the campus music building. It was recorded in Richmond's Spacebomb Studios, a destination du jour that birthed lusciously orchestrated countrypolitan records from Matthew E. White and Natalie Prass this year, but these one-mic and one-take songs could have easily been tracked in an MTSU bathroom. Listening to it can occasionally feel like a violation of her privacy.
This voyeuristic appeal plays a minor role in distinguishing Sprained Ankle, though. More important is how Baker operates in existential ultimatums—life or death, hope or despair, oblivion or epiphany. It cuts through the bullshit rather than piling onto it, and its clarity and honesty has instantly helped Baker reach across aisles. She recently opened for Touché Amoré, a post-hardcore band of blazing intensity and extreme devotees that was previously on 6131 Records and more indicative of the music on Baker's label. By the end of November, she'll be joining the tasteful-indie double bill of EL VY and Wye Oak.
Sprained Ankle is a solo, singer-songwriter album, but very little of it would be considered "folky." She professes David Bazan, mewithoutYou's Aaron Weiss, and Ben Gibbard as idols, but her guitar playing bears more of their influence than their vocals. She's a minimalist, playing bassy clusters of melodic thirds, flicking silvery harmonics, palm-muting chords. It's gorgeously recorded and yet, there's still the suggestion that these might've been demos—the scant overdubs of drums or harmonized vocals just drive home how lonely Baker is, that she may have meant these to eventually be full-band arrangements one day.
There are traces of other current acts in her sound—the album title is inspired by a lyric ("Sprinter learning to wait/ Marathon runner, my ankles are sprained") that instantly brings up the similarly ecclesiastical bloodletting of fellow Tennessean Torres, while her thick, close-harmonizing recalls Sharon Van Etten. But considering her formative listening experiences and punk roots, by the time she reaches the high notes over an aggressively strummed, stock descending chord pattern in "Everybody Does", her most apt comparison might be Dashboard Confessional. Before Chris Carrabba became a caricature of himself and an avatar for emo-as-a-Halloween-costume, there really wasn't much else like him for the hardcore kids. Baker has the same kind of magnetism to get lines like, "I am so good at hurting myself", sung by a crowd of young acolytes. Baker's metaphors can also be similarly excessive and clunky at times ("I know I am a pile of filthy wreckage you will wish you never touched").
Obviously, these songs are about resilience, but Baker acknowledges her willingness to wallow in despair. "Good News" plays on the double meaning of hysterical: "It's not easy when what you think of me is so important/ And I know it shouldn't be so important...I'm only screaming at myself in public/ I know I shouldn't act this way in public." Later, she asks to be swallowed and smothered by the parking lot as you drive away, an echo of Morrissey's operatic curtain call during the 190-proof melodrama of "I Know It's Over".
And like Moz, Baker isn't without a sense of humor about herself. "Wish I could write songs about anything other than death" isn't the sort of thing you say unless you're self-aware. But it is important for people to see someone struggle through some serious shit to get to that point, and if you prefer redemption songs to sound as raw as they feel, Sprained Ankle could bring you to your knees. | 2015-11-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | 6131 | November 5, 2015 | 7 | 6ffdf68d-623b-4ad3-885d-d0ef629c3c84 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Virginia singer/rapper D.R.A.M. exploded into the public consciousness with "Cha Cha", a song that sampled "Super Mario World", had Beyoncé dancing, and influenced Drake’s "Hotline Bling". The Gahdamn! EP is his second release in a year and it's a breezy sprint through multiple styles. | The Virginia singer/rapper D.R.A.M. exploded into the public consciousness with "Cha Cha", a song that sampled "Super Mario World", had Beyoncé dancing, and influenced Drake’s "Hotline Bling". The Gahdamn! EP is his second release in a year and it's a breezy sprint through multiple styles. | DRAM: Gahdamn! EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21226-gahdamn-ep/ | Gahdamn! EP | The Virginia singer/rapper D.R.A.M. positions himself as a larger-than-life character. On the cover of his new Gahdamn! EP he appears in comic-book form, standing several stories tall and smacking down a Godzilla-type creature. In the middle of the EP is a "Redemption THEME", which sounds like the music you would hear as Mario finally rescues Princess Peach after many unsuccessful tries in other castles. In this narrative, he's a righteous hero who exploded into the public consciousness with a song that sampled "Super Mario World", had Beyoncé dancing, and, directly or not, influenced Drake’s biggest hit since 2013.
This triumphant storyline makes a lot of sense, but since D.R.A.M. has remained under the radar since, it’s a fair question to ask: Can he escape "Cha Cha"? The Gahdamn! EP, much like this year’s previous #1 Epic Summer EP, isn't designed to answer questions. It's a fun, high-energy record that crisscrosses hip-hop, R&B, soul, electronic music, and even rock for about half an hour. Nothing is as immediate as "Cha Cha", but D.R.A.M. has other things up his sleeve. The remix of "$" replaces the original’s minimal piano and reverb with a bombastic horn section that builds around the earworm hook, "this be that shit that make a nigga get off his ass and get money." It’s a swelling, giant moment that seems to fit squarely with the persona D.R.A.M. is selling and the company he’s keeping.
However, he also goes some weird places. On "Wit the Shits", D.R.A.M. resembles no one more than Biz Markie, a punch-drunk presence on the mic who speak-raps his way around a song about doing drugs with a girl who also likes doing drugs. On the sweet, vintage-sounding R&B cut "I’ll Be Back Again" he toes a line between silliness and earnestness, singing the line "I really be contemplating on coming inside of you," punctuated with a "woo!" He recalls (and maybe parodies) the lighthearted bluntness of the most honest "baby-making" soul songs. ("I really be contemplating on making new life with you" is another great line here.)
SZA gives voice to the implied female presence on the other end of the gorgeous "Caretaker", which originally appeared as an interlude on Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment’s Surf. This moment, expertly sequenced as the EP’s penultimate track, underlines the artist I think D.R.A.M. wants to be—an outsized musical omnivore who mixes Maxwell-style neo-soul with Too $hort-style frankness. He ends with the mission statement "Okden", expressing a wish to collaborate with Kendrick Lamar ("but it must be special"), touching on working with Rick Rubin, and managing a quick line about his appearnce: "I step in places all dreaded like ‘he must be ghetto,’" which is the closest we get to glimpsing the "real" D.R.A.M. outside of viral hits and the self-conscious weirdness.
Gahdamn! is D.R.A.M.'s second release in the year that feels playful and low-stakes, and it would be nice if he made something that felt more... complete. But even when he doesn’t re-capture the madness of his biggest hit, he ignites a few other fires. Gahdamn! is a breezy sprint through many styles, demonstrating a multi-faceted artist putting all his influences in a basket, shaking them around, and seeing what comes out the other end. | 2015-10-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / W.A.V.E. Recordings | October 28, 2015 | 6.9 | 7004571e-20af-4905-8a39-b9cfe9079f65 | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
Devendra Banhart and Priestbird's Greg Rogove team up for a record that falls firmly in the "screwing around" category of side projects, with the duo unleashing styled silliness as well as some genuine treats. | Devendra Banhart and Priestbird's Greg Rogove team up for a record that falls firmly in the "screwing around" category of side projects, with the duo unleashing styled silliness as well as some genuine treats. | Megapuss: Surfing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12409-surfing/ | Surfing | Corporations nebulously define the word 'goodwill' as the value of a company not captured by its measurable assets: customer lists, public perception, iPhone pics of a rival CEO in women's lingerie. Just like most other assets, goodwill decreases over time, and to many, so too has Devendra Banhart's. "Fuck Enron," Banhart sings on Surfing, his new collaboration with Priestbird's Greg Rogove; it'd be funnier if his public reputation hadn't taken a similar nosedive.
Banhart also sings "Fuck Abe Lincoln" moments later during "A Gun on His Hip and a Rose on his Chest", and follows that song with an "Earth Angel"-style slowdown titled "Chicken Titz", so some of the skepticism here might be warranted. Surfing falls firmly in the "screwing around" category of side projects, with the duo unleashing all manner of styled silliness: "Duck People Duck Man" muses about Trader Joe's hummus; "Adam and Steve" knowingly bites the Strokes' "Hard to Explain" and Wham!'s "Careless Whisper"; "Hamman" vamps rudely about the availability of...ham. "Gun on His Hip" is a sloppy Xerox of "Bo Diddley" and the most likely to offend: In addition to aforementioned gems about Enron and Abe Lincoln, we're treated to "Fuck the president/ Iiiiiiin his asshole."
Whether this sounds stupid will likely depend on your feelings toward Banhart, but regardless, it's more compelling to hear him err on the side of nonsense than hard art: Toss-off "Duck People" can be a decent tune and a bad joke or the reverse, but it's easier to take than last year's "Sea Horse", an eight-minute, multi-part suite about, among other things, sea horses. In fact, SoCal goof fits Banhart pretty well: Think Frank Zappa with (way) less musical chops.
The record does offer some genuine treats. The vaguely Brit-poppy "Theme From Hollywood" seems like a play on Banhart's semi-recent run of publicity, with a chorus that minces up "Too much fun in Hollywood" with "Too much fucking Hollywood." Opener "Crop Circle Jerk '94" offers a loping guitar riff and a sighing chorus, and, importantly, doesn't seem to have much to do with its title. "Lavender Blimp"'s thin, trebly guitars blanket a gallant chorus. "Hamman" is alternately forceful and beguiling. The title track is a drawn-out paean to escapism and rehab ("Surfing/ Never alone/ Surfing/ Your mind is blown"), but its undulating piano chords seem like a hearty nod to Animal Collective.
Alas, Surfing troublingly ends with three plodding failures (including the seven-minute "Sayulita") that feel at odds with the record's fuck-all spirit. Too much of Banhart's bothersome wordplay-- "eat your yeast infection," "chode-alicious"-- falls far south of "having a good time." What Surfing does do well is present a more relaxed Banhart-- a let-the-tapes-roll collaborator with bad-in-jokes and sly pop instincts. Megapuss has the feel of a short-lived side project, but it may ultimately prove a blueprint for the type of left-field, anti-hero path for which Banhart seems suited. | 2008-11-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-11-07T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Vapor | November 7, 2008 | 5.9 | 70045ea5-f85d-4a1d-aa7d-3324c26c4927 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Longtime NYC band suspends its Sonic Youth and MBV worship and makes a record of all pillowy electro-balladry. | Longtime NYC band suspends its Sonic Youth and MBV worship and makes a record of all pillowy electro-balladry. | Blonde Redhead: Penny Sparkle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14609-penny-sparkle/ | Penny Sparkle | There's room for both innovators and curators in indie rock, and if you appreciate the latter, perhaps you've found time for Blonde Redhead over the past two decades. Not all of us could be there to experience No Wave, SST-era Sonic Youth, or My Bloody Valentine as actual recording artists firsthand, but as Blonde Redhead stated on their 1997 album, Fake Can Be Just As Good. The group has always strived to be a gateway to cool and, as such, would probably take it as a compliment to suggest they never sounded like they could've been from anywhere other than New York.
That comes to an end on Penny Sparkle, an album whose quest to evoke a more comfortable point in our collective lives almost qualifies it as chillwave. Yet it's not the sound of "the beach" or "youth" that Penny Sparkle embodies, but rather our last economic boom period, a time that inspired countless chill-out compilations and dubious record deals from labels who swear they found their more radio-friendly Portishead. If you happen to be a music coordinator for Banana Republic, Penny Sparkle is an early Christmas gift. For everyone else, you're left to wonder whether 2010 will produce a more profoundly boring album from a band who actually had a reputation to uphold.
This shift doesn't come wholly unexpectedly-- songs like "The Dress", "My Impure Hair", and "Heroine" leaned toward pillowy electro-balladry, but they served as important contrast between the Loveless worship. Here, it's the only side of the story being told, and it's being told with the kind of BPMs that could knock out a speed addict. This kind of stuff is derisively called background music, and rightfully so, since every member of Blonde Redhead here sounds afraid to step forward. Singer Kazu Makino is almost exclusively merely casting shadows over everything, and transitions from verses to choruses are merely implied. This is not the kind of stuff you need to hire Alan Moulder to mix for you.
Outside of a distorted vocal on "Not Getting There" and a slowly blooming and surprisingly gripping waltz ("Everything Is Wrong"), the arrangements seem done up like hospital rooms, every sound picked for maximum sterility. If you're in a forgiving mood, you can liken it to a chloroformed late-90s Depeche Mode or an honestly failed attempt at the frosted sensuality of Vespertine. If you're in a realistic mood, you'll hear Amedeo Pace carelessly whispering through the soft-focus reggae of "Will There Be Stars" and imagine Roxy Music stuck on a Carnival cruise.
Penny Sparkle could be approached from a cynical perspective, an admission that after 15 years, Blonde Redhead have realized they'll never be called "like Loveless, but better," and have decided to work in a field that isn't exactly brimming with luminaries. But there's a right way (see: School of Seven Bells' Disconnect From Desire) and a wrong way (see: the nearly identical shift of Asobi Seksu's Hush) to reconcile your shoegaze past with downtempo, pre-2k electronic pop: and a big part of the trick is that if you're going to drop the big, whooshy guitars, it helps to remember it was the vigorous Ray of Light that went multi-platinum, not Morcheeba. | 2010-09-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-09-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | September 14, 2010 | 4 | 70123ac8-375d-4a80-9e23-c6602192571f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Sacramento rapper is more relaxed and nonchalant on his latest project, a mood that suits his knack for finding humanity in the darkest of situations. | The Sacramento rapper is more relaxed and nonchalant on his latest project, a mood that suits his knack for finding humanity in the darkest of situations. | ShooterGang Kony: Starshooter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shootergang-kony-starshooter/ | Starshooter | ShooterGang Kony doesn’t make street rap, per se. Topics and moods on his albums include the memories of calling friends while being incarcerated and a seen-it-all attitude reminiscent of the Jacka. It isn’t enough for Kony to rap about what went on in the streets, he talks about the effects that it had on his family. Kony and a handful of other Bay Area rappers use biting humor that make you wince with every punchline and straightforward crime tales with a world-weary message.
On 2020’s Red Paint Reverend, Kony was trying earnestly to make this kind of affecting music. “A Sinner’s Story” off of that record was a yarn that Caine of Menace II Society would have told, a story about street killings and snitching, a cautionary tale as much as a song the block would play. On his latest album, Starshooter, Kony is less concerned with acclaim. It’s better this way; Kony is more relaxed and nonchalant this time. He still has the gravelly voice that he shares with fellow Bay Area rapper Mozzy, but Kony floats with the mindset of a veteran that has already proved his worth. On “Up2Date”—a duet with San Francisco’s Lil Bean—Kony makes flagrant disses like, “I’ll send your little brother home as a gesture.” Bean’s hook is great, a classic Bay sound that sounds like the vocals are being blocked by some light wind.
Still, despite his more subdued attitude, Kony remains one of the more deadly writers on the West Coast. It’s incalculable how much better would the Sacramento Kings be if they played his songs before tip-off. “We got all the glocks, it take one to leave you headless” is one of those lines on this album that shows Kony’s ability to make a threat sound like a polite proposition. The production, which utilizes the typical brooding and creepy Bay Area beats, is a great juxtaposition to Kony’s confident and regal flow.
Kony is at his best when he makes you look at humanity in the darkest situations. “Never knew him but they calling you your dad’s son,” on “Glizzy Over Rugers,” is a line that not only talks about life without a father figure but the feeling of being a descendant of a lineage. Everyone expects you to represent as he did. If Kony wasn’t a soldier who was first sentenced to probation before he was in High School, the pressure of making it out the streets would have overcome him. He’s been through the wringer and it shows in his music, even when he’s having fun. To him, joy is being able to tell you street tales for entertainment. Now the pain that has subsided, he is flexing.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | ShooterGang Kony / Empire | September 17, 2021 | 7.4 | 7014ae5c-140e-40b3-b8d4-59ae184015f1 | Jayson Buford | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-buford/ | |
Jay Dee continues to update soul music by paying homage to the selfsame sounds he's modernizing. | Jay Dee continues to update soul music by paying homage to the selfsame sounds he's modernizing. | J Dilla: Donuts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4365-donuts/ | Donuts | J Dilla's eagerly awaited Donuts, the follow-up to 2001's Welcome 2 Detroit (released as Jay Dee), is, like its predecessor, a stark departure from the cozy-socks-and-Xbox feel of his former group, Slum Village. In fact, Dilla, if anything, is imposing a meta-rap bent on neo-soul, assaulting the senses in ways unseemly for a guy who used to work with Q-Tip. The drums, though remarkably fluid, are lighter, domineered by dense, abrasive samples that are sequenced with a sense of swing. Percussive end pieces are shorn cheese-grater sharp, then appended to sickly spliced moans. The end result is akin to Norman Smith and DJ Shadow sitting in on a RZA-produced session-- spry, voiceless prog-hop by any other name.
Opener "Workinonit" comes on like a Rubin-produced take on Schoolhouse Rock. Clang-y guitars give way to doubled-up groans and what sounds like a back-masked Zulu chant. The sample, supplied by '60s soulsters Them, is diced with manic precision, and around the 2:00 mark, the melody builds to a climax, fading, with echo-y vocal bits, into bodiless abyss. Equally engaging is "Anti-American Graffiti", which combines lighters-up, love-not-war humility with a track both wistful and world-weary: A crazed voice spouts end-of-the-world admonishments like some disenfranchised apparition, colliding with somber guitars.
"Don't Cry" finds Dilla taking sprightly, blu-lite soul crooning and flipping it counter-cockeyed: "If Blue Magic or Whoever could see me now!" First he plays the original, then throws in the "Now, you play it and I'll show you how my voice would have made it unbelievable!" bit, before gently lifting its face off. It's chest thumping, to be sure, like the Copa shot in Goodfellas or Bigger and Deffer. And it's courteous. Similarly cordial is "Time: The Donut of the Heart", where he turns the Jackson 5's "All I Do Is Think of You" into a lucid dream-- the song's intro is now with the chorus it always coveted. Says ?uestlove: "[J Dilla] time compresses Michael and Jermaine's ad-libs with the uneasy ease of a tightrope-walker, with oil shoes on, crossing one 90-story building to another, after eight shots of [Patrone]." I'm sayin'.
Not that Donuts deals with only obvious sample sources-- "The Twister (Huh, What)" is the sound of flu-sick flutes chiming in time to a busted weathervane; "Waves", a hiccuping Hare Krishna class. It's Dilla's show-and-tell method, however, that's most effective, because it illustrates how he's, more or less, upgrading soul music-- we get to see how he unpacked its bag, what spots he told it it missed. This approach also allows Dilla to pay homage to the selfsame sounds he's modernized; the drums are light, to reflect the original sound from which he's borrowing. In that sense, Donuts is pure postmodern art-- which was hip-hop's aim in the first place. | 2006-02-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2006-02-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | February 8, 2006 | 7.9 | 7015e1df-ebbe-41e8-8a1e-8d013366c71d | Will Dukes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-dukes/ | null |
This Record Store Day round-up of collaborations conducted over the past year features a cast that includes Ke$ha, Chris Martin, Nick Cave, Yoko Ono, Bon Iver, Neon Indian, and Lightning Bolt, among others. Amazingly, it hangs together well as a front-to-back album. | This Record Store Day round-up of collaborations conducted over the past year features a cast that includes Ke$ha, Chris Martin, Nick Cave, Yoko Ono, Bon Iver, Neon Indian, and Lightning Bolt, among others. Amazingly, it hangs together well as a front-to-back album. | The Flaming Lips: The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16522-the-flaming-lips/ | The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends | Bono may be the archetype for the do-gooder rock star who wants to heal the world, but if any musician is going to broker peace in the Middle East, convince North Korea to deep-six its nukes, and get the original line-up of Guns N' Roses back together, it's Wayne Coyne. With the possible exception of Arcade Fire, everyone loves Wayne-- from the executives who've let the Flaming Lips follow their madcap muse on Warner Brothers' dime for 20 years now, to the Oklahoma legislators who named "Do You Realize??" the official state rock song, to Kevin Durant and the tall one from LMFAO.
On paper, The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends-- a Record Store Day round-up of various collaborations conducted over the past year-- doesn't appear to be the next official chapter in the band's ever-evolving history so much as a tribute to Coyne's skills of diplomacy, like his hyperactive Twitter feed brought to life. The internet may have splintered the pop monoculture into myriad musical streams, but Heady Fwends provides as inclusive a congregation of the entire, circa-2012 under-to-overground spectrum as you can muster in a single album, with a guest list that spans top-40 stars (Ke$ha, Chris Martin) and noise-rock extremists (Lightning Bolt), anarchic avant guardians (Nick Cave, Yoko Ono) and chilled-out indie new-schoolers (Bon Iver, Neon Indian), electronic experimentalists (Prefuse 73) and hip-hop heroes-cum-children's-television hosts (Biz Markie). Really, all you need to complete the picture is a Pauly D remix.
When the Lips started plotting these collaborations last year, they seemed like the latest in a growing line of guinea-pig projects that have kept the band busy since 2009's Embryonic, click-bait novelties to be filed alongside the six-hour songs and gummy-skull-encased USB sticks. And while the first of these pairings to surface-- EPs with Neon Indian, Lightning Bolt, Prefuse 73, and Yoko Ono, each represented here with a single track-- yielded interesting moments of aesthetic intersection, their free-form nature didn't exactly demand repeat listens. The songs on Heady Fwends are likewise rife with indicators of their hastily cobbled-together origins: flubbed vocal cues, songs obviously constructed via email file swaps (Ono's "Do It!"), goofy lyrics that sound like they were written seconds before recording ("You always want/ To shave my balls/ That ain't my trip"). But here's the craziest thing about the whole project: This piecemeal patchwork of tracks hangs together amazingly well as a front-to-back album-- to the point where, if the band had released this as the official follow-up to Embryonic, without the public stunt-casting campaign and Record Store Day tie-in, no Flaming Lips fan would feel short-changed.
If anything, Heady Fwends is arguably an even more wiggy experience than Embryonic, an album that marked the Lips' return to brain-bending, fuzz-covered psychedelia, but was still very much beholden to the record-collector canon of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and Can. Heady Fwends immediately adopts a more sacrilegious tack. Not only do the Lips lead with their most unlikely and unapologetically obnoxious collaborator, Ke$ha, they let her run roughshod on a classic Stooges song: "2012" presents a mutant, robot-rock rewrite of "1969" that cranks up the original's Bo Diddley beat into an industrial-strength stomp and sees Ke$ha appropriating Iggy's "oh my and boo hoo" sneer as her own. But as chaotic and scatterbrained as the track is, it effectively sets the all-bets-are-off tenor of the record, and actually serves to introduce the predominant themes of science fiction and global apocalypse that run through many of the tracks here. And therein lies the key to approaching Heady Fwends: What at first seems rather silly actually proves to be quite purposeful.
The subsequent synth-smeared ballad "Ashes in the Air" further reinforces this logic, with Coyne offering an almost comically grave account of being chased by "robot dogs" through some post-war wasteland, while Justin Vernon echoes each line with his best Rick Moranis-doing-Michael McDonald. But then the song blossoms into a disarmingly elegiac chorus that makes the scorched-earth scene suddenly feel very real and despairing. Taken back-to-back, "2012" and "Ashes in the Air" provide a handy microcosm of the emotional extremes between which the Flaming Lips vacillate on Heady Fwends. Fortunately, the album's expert sequencing makes the shifts between the two poles feel natural, and puts tracks that wouldn't necessarily stand on their own to effective transitional use. The Prefuse 73 collab "Supermoon Made Me Want to Pee" doesn't amount to much more than three minutes of manic, percussive propulsion, but, coming between the epic, Edward Sharpe-assisted folk reverie "Helping the Retarded to Know God" and the sun-kissed Tame Impala tryst "Children of the Moon" (the purest pop song in the batch), it serves an adrenalizing role akin to the one "On the Run" plays on the Lips' favorite Pink Floyd album.
And you can thank Nick Cave for casting some of the Lips' previously released collaborations in a more favorable light: in the aftermath of the delightfully gonzo, Grinderman-in-space splatter of "You, Man? Human???", the Lightning Bolt-bolstered epic "I'm Working at NASA on Acid" assumes the mantle of Fwends' centerpiece track, with ominous acoustic-driven passages bookending an ecstatic, blast-off guitar jam that hearkens back to the Lips' In a Priest Driven Ambulance days. (The squelching, slow-motion Neon Indian entry "Is David Bowie Dying?" also feels much more dramatic in the context of Heady Fwends' more somber second act, rather than as the lead-off track to an EP.) But where most of the Heady Fwends collaborations up to this point have yielded outcomes where you can easily parse out what each party's bringing to the table, the late-game Erykah Badu appearance counts as the real revelation here. On their droning, distended 10-minute cover of the Ewan MacColl/Roberta Flack standard "The First Time I Ever Saw Your Face", the two entities blur into something nigh unrecognizable: The Lips' bombast is tempered into soothing gusts of distant distortion, while Badu's commanding presence is refashioned into that of a ghost communicating through a shortwave radio frequency.
This stunner is unfortunately answered by Fwends' one out-and-out dud, "Thunder Drops", a piece of spaced-out Bowie karaoke (courtesy of Polyphonic Spree/Lips sideman Daniel Huffman, aka New Fumes) that never achieves the lift-off its grandiose intro suggests. But Heady Fwends' comes to a peaceful conclusion with "I Don't Want You to Die", a mournful piano ballad boasting a liberal quote of John Lennon's "Imagine" and a tasteful, middle-eight assist from Chris Martin. With Coyne reverting back to the creaky, Neil Youngian croon he hasn't really adopted since the 90s, the song presents a fearful rumination of death that feels like the more vulnerable flipside to the life-affirming gospel of "Do You Realize??" But it's also a welcome reminder that, stripped of all their spectacle and high-concept strategies, the Flaming Lips can still win you over the same way they did 20 years ago, with a sweet, sad melody and simple, affecting sentiment. "I love the Flaming Lips," Martin blurts out in the recording's dying seconds-- and, really, that's the only thing on this surprisingly substantial album that feels obvious. | 2012-04-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-04-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. / Lovely Sorts of Death | April 20, 2012 | 8.2 | 7015f19a-e975-4965-8645-883c6534fc26 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Curated by Ben Gibbard and featuring Sharon Van Etten, David Byrne, Japanese Breakfast and more, this tribute album fares best when the artists match Yoko Ono’s fearless spirit. | Curated by Ben Gibbard and featuring Sharon Van Etten, David Byrne, Japanese Breakfast and more, this tribute album fares best when the artists match Yoko Ono’s fearless spirit. | Various Artists: Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-ocean-child-songs-of-yoko-ono/ | Ocean Child: Songs of Yoko Ono | Whenever Beatlemania goes into brief remission, the world recalls that Yoko Ono helped invent punk, post-punk, and new wave. From Kate Pierson of the B-52’s to Kim Gordon to Kathleen Hanna to ANOHNI to RZA—the list of artists who cite her as a spiritual and stylistic godmother is staggering, and her influence spans from the avant-garde to the Billboard Hot Dance 100, where she racked up six consecutive No. 1s at the ripe age of 78. But all this history is instantly submerged the minute the Beatles reenter the cultural conversation, which will happen as long as entertainment companies have Q4s. Then, it’s 1971 all over again, and she is once more reduced to a lightning rod. Sometimes, it feels the world is not big enough to contain both Yoko Ono’s public persona and the music she made.
For that reason, there’s never a bad time to put out a compilation celebrating Ono’s output. But Ocean Child, a new tribute album assembled by Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, comes at a particularly charged moment: It was just over three months ago that Peter Jackson’s 8-hour documentary Get Back debuted on Disney Plus, reigniting the “Yoko Ono, Destroyer of Beatles” narrative that swarms without fail to the surface of any reexamination of the band’s final days. The setting is ideal for a corrective, something to put her music back in people’s ears.
The trouble is, listening to this comp is a spotty way to get to know her. In a sweet note accompanying Ocean Child, Gibbard expresses the hope that the album will guide new listeners to Ono’s work, and the list of contributors suggests he understands her music's elemental power: Thao, Sudan Archives, Deerhoof, Sharon Van Etten, the R&B group We Are KING. The song choices are smart, and all of the covers range from capable to very good, but all of them reinforce the idea that no one else could make her music.
The first selection, “Toyboat,” comes from Ono's wrenching 1981 album Season of Glass, released in the wake of her husband’s murder. The original has an eerie serenity to it, suggestive of shock or stupor. Sharon Van Etten makes a skin-prickling hymnal out of it—it’s excellent, but it’s a Sharon Van Etten song, and because Season of Glass is unavailable on streaming platforms, it’s not all that easy to contrast it with the otherworldly stasis of Ono's original.
A few artists pay her spellbinding songs the dubious honor of transforming them into unremarkable indie rock. David Byrne and Yo La Tengo’s “Who Has Seen the Wind?” would sound nice synced to a few shots of leaves falling on roofs in an A24 dramedy, but it’s hard to shake the feeling their placid performance waters down the original. Death Cab’s “Waiting for the Sunrise” smooths the emotional violence from the tempo, and Gibbard drops Ono’s brittle enunciations, so it no longer sounds like one brutalized soul offering fragile hope—just some guy waiting around for a sunrise.
The best covers summon Ono's fearless spirit. Japanese Breakfast’s unadorned take on “Nobody Sees Me Like You Do” captures her vulnerability, as does Amber Coffman’s close-mic’d reading of “Run Run Run” for just voice and electric guitar. Sudan Archives, an artist whose intensity is a good match for Ono’s, fills Season of Glass’ “Dogtown”—a song that opens with the observation “I think of my friends, they were once not so dead”— with a suffocating silence, her pizzicato and her voice spreading like spider cracks across the surface of the arrangement. U.S. Girls’ Meg Remy’s vocal tone is close to Yoko’s, and Remy’s “Born in a Prison” has the original’s baleful atmosphere, like a nursery rhyme wafting out of a collapsed building.
There was a lot of horror in Ono’s music, whether it was convulsive and nightmarish like “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for a Hand in the Snow)” or placid and eerie like “Mrs. Lennon” (“Husband John extended his hand/Extended his hand to his wife/And he finds, and suddenly he finds/That he has no hands/They’ve lost their bodies”). Ono watched bombs fall on her family’s estate at the outset of WWII as a child, and her music is full of bleak, durable wisdom about how to live in a world raging with the hellfire of war and hate. She wrote about trauma in real time and sang about it with an otherworldly vulnerability. Very little of this legacy is palpable on Ocean Child, which feels sort of like a Lifetime Achievement Award introduction in album form, without Ono taking the stage. It still seems like there are plenty of people willing to speak for Yoko Ono, but not that many willing to listen to what she had to say herself. | 2022-03-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-05T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Atlantic | March 5, 2022 | 6.6 | 7016e8b6-f49c-4b11-a619-67695d4da681 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
The UK singer weaves in and out of reality and make-believe on her debut album of lush, experimental R&B. It’s a transparent look into her swelling heart and wistful imagination. | The UK singer weaves in and out of reality and make-believe on her debut album of lush, experimental R&B. It’s a transparent look into her swelling heart and wistful imagination. | Roses Gabor : Fantasy & Facts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roses-gabor-fantasy-and-facts/ | Fantasy & Facts | Roses Gabor is a dreamer. Free-flowing like her Pisces sign, the artist’s winding career is proof of her ability to make waves in various spaces. Before arriving with her new project, the singer-songwriter was known mostly as a gifted background vocalist and featured guest with acts like Gorillaz, Brasstracks, and SBTRKT on his 2011 song, “Pharaohs.” In 2012, she took a leap and premiered “Stars,” her first independent and dub-heavy track. Over the last six years, Gabor has been working hard on building her otherworldly sound. On her debut album Fantasy & Facts, Gabor has re-emerged with silvery melodies that expand on the electronic rhythms she holds close.
Sonically, the project lives within the special ecosystem of experimental R&B while Gabor’s emotional candor carries its own light. In 2018, she shared it on her first album single, “Illusions,” featuring Sampha, which is a heart-rushing song where the two singers yearn the ghosts of a past love. Throughout all 11 tracks on Fantasy & Facts, Gabor’s production is thrilling, but she doesn’t let it overshadow what’s on her mind and heart.
Her sincerity isn’t heavy, it’s refreshing. On the standout single, “I Could Be Yours,” produced by the Stereotypes (who also worked on Bruno Mars’ “24K Magic”), Gabor tells a lover that pride and regret is the only thing stopping them from being with her again. “Tomorrow might not come for us/But you still wait for fate/You know how I was the one/But things didn’t go your way,” she sings. It seems like the type of heartfelt honesty that can only be shared and treasured far away from a jaded world. Gabor’s saccharine harmonies magnify the urgency of her bold and starry-eyed feelings. She sinks into a deeper groove on “F*ck up the Bass,” which is a slow and sensual cut with galactic chords. Gabor doesn’t want to be limited to any specific sound, but the song’s soulfulness leaves a yearning for more sultry tracks like this.
Gabor walks the lines of many genres but categorizes her music simply as “feels.” The description is vague, but it’s more fitting than the industry classifications that are a tad too linear for her art. On Fantasy & Facts, she flows through 42-minutes of moods, stretching her smoky tone comparable to Kelis’ which brings fullness to her sadness and adoration. The end of Fantasy & Facts seems to lose a bit of momentum. The latter tracks are all solid and of high-quality, but it’s hard to top the hypnotizing mid-album gem “Interlude: Awkward Desire.” The pattering drum kicks paired with Gabor’s anti-gravity lulls create a brief out-of-body experience that could last longer. But the album is her universe and all of her feelings have a rightful place. | 2019-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | AllPoints | March 6, 2019 | 7.8 | 70183cfb-3e7f-4804-83ae-bc720f41ebce | Lakin Starling | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lakin-starling/ | |
Montreal duo Essaie Pas are just one of a scattered network of contemporary groups reviving the sound and aesthetic of minimal synth music. Demain Est Une Autre Nuit captures the sound more or less at its best. It feels alluringly other: a secret, shadowy wormhole that tunnels through layers of electronic music history. | Montreal duo Essaie Pas are just one of a scattered network of contemporary groups reviving the sound and aesthetic of minimal synth music. Demain Est Une Autre Nuit captures the sound more or less at its best. It feels alluringly other: a secret, shadowy wormhole that tunnels through layers of electronic music history. | Essaie Pas: Demain Est Une Autre Nuit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21516-demain-est-une-autre-nuit/ | Demain Est Une Autre Nuit | Perhaps appropriately for a genre of music rooted in the enigmatic and the obscure, the minimal synth revival has quietly become a movement without ever quite becoming a bandwagon. Montreal duo Essaie Pas are just one of a scattered network of contemporary groups reviving the sound and aesthetic of a lost generation of DIY-minded synthpop artists of the '70s and '80s, who either by accident or design ended up too rudimentary, too melancholic, or too plain odd to fulfill the "pop" part of the equation. You might, if you chose, chalk this up to another case of retromania, of modern musicians mining post-punk history in lieu of looking forward. But in a club music demimonde that holds up druggy hedonism and flashy maximalism as guiding principles, there is something attractive about minimal synth's severe, austere poise. This music got few props at the time, but at its best—and certainly, Demain Est Une Autre Nuit captures the modern sound more or less at its best—it feels alluringly other: a secret, shadowy wormhole that tunnels through layers of electronic music history.
Essaie Pas are the husband-and-wife duo of Marie Davidson and Pierre Guerineau—she a solo recording artist, he a music engineer who has worked with Montreal musicians such as Dirty Beaches and Femminielli. This, their fourth album and debut for DFA—the title of which translates as "Tomorrow Is Another Night"—was born out of long winter nights rehearsing at one of Montreal's deserted industrial complexes, which the pair occupied after returning from tour to find their studio and practice space had been shuttered.
Some of this sense of frigidity and dislocation has found its way into Essaie Pas' music – or perhaps more accurately, has intensified and authenticated a spirit that was already there. Moments like "Dépassée par le fantasme" and "Carcajou 3" recall their New York peers Xeno & Oaklander in their skittery analog intricacy. But Essaie Pas are also wise to dance floor imperatives: deeper into the record, "Facing the Music" locks into a mute, driving techno redolent of DFA labelmates Factory Floor, while "Lights Out" is a twilit acid pulse through which Davidson periodically announces the title, voice smothered with echo.
The more song-centered moments on Demain Est Une Autre Nuit offer a sense of the pair's influences. Vocals are largely delivered in French, Guerineau dourly intoning longer, narrative passages and Davidson singing choruses, or just holding long, trilling notes that dissolve into texture. Singing in French gives Essaie Pas an umbilical link to earlier continental synth and coldwave groups such as Elli et Jacno (who Essaie Pas covered on their previous album Nuit de noce) and Asylum Party, groups whose lyrics often tipped beyond lovelorn melodrama to a place of bereft existentialism. "Retox" is a tale of romantic separation riven with violent imagery, nights spent battling insomnia, and fantasies of screams that bruise flesh; at one point we hear Guerineau lift a receiver and key in the Montreal area code before apparently perishing from the sheer ennui of it all. On "Le port du masque est de rigueur" ("Wearing a Mask Is Mandatory") he picks morbidly over the bones of a love affair. "J'ai tenté de t'oublier/ Comme on noie une portée de chatons," he sings—"I tried to forget you/ Like drowning a litter of kittens"—as electronics gurgle away maniacally on one chord.
"La Chute" ends the album on a dreamier note, a bloody Valentine with just a hint of yacht rock gleam to the synths, and listening to it, it's not hard to imagine Davidson and Guerineau working together at night, as frost collects on windowpanes and breath clouds in the air. Back in the late '00s, while minimal electronic music was the toast of underground Manhattan thanks to Veronica Vasicka's Minimal Wave imprint and the club night Wierd, DFA's attention was elsewhere, on the pneumatic house moves of the Juan MacLean or Shit Robot. Yet Demain Est Une Autre Nuit feels not just a good fit for the label's vintage-modern aesthetic, but a culmination of something. Perhaps it's simply that this weird, mannered synth music is no throwback, but merely a style ahead of its time, and one that only now is coming of age. | 2016-02-08T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-08T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | DFA | February 8, 2016 | 7.7 | 7019f135-2201-456e-8feb-9b5f7175b20e | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | null |
Super Furry Animals' Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip enlist the Strokes' Fab Moretti, Spank Rock, Yo Majesty, and others on a record that-- although it was conceived two years ago-- captures a lot of what's been in the past few years' zeitgeist. | Super Furry Animals' Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip enlist the Strokes' Fab Moretti, Spank Rock, Yo Majesty, and others on a record that-- although it was conceived two years ago-- captures a lot of what's been in the past few years' zeitgeist. | Neon Neon: Stainless Style | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11267-stainless-style/ | Stainless Style | Where we're going, we don't need roads. Remember with me, if you will, a time when cocaine was as rampant as synthesizers. When a wave of unprecedented M&A activity and yuppie-style prosperity was driving Wall Street to record heights. Sequels and superhero movies dominated at the box office, while starlets with limited discernible musical talent were releasing remarkably enduring pop songs. A conservative Republican was in the White House, giving aid and comfort to Iran as if he were someone who wasn't quite all there.
I'm talking, as you know if you're reading two words ahead, about 2006, when Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip first announced their collaboration under the name Neon Neon. Just as a yearning for the 60s characterized much of the indie pop and indie rock of the 1980s-- from R.E.M.'s jingle-jangle mourning to C86's "perfect pop" to the slowed-down garage-y guitar heroics of Dinosaur Jr.-- so the memory of the 1980s has dominated certain music circles in recent years. Whether electrohouse, new wave, new rave, synth-pop, Miami bass, Detroit techno, Chicago house, Italo disco, Balearic, or, most recently, the revival of what used to be called "world music", the 80s have left their mark on the YouTube era. Now if only the 49ers could win four Super Bowls again.
Rhys, solo artist and frontman for Welsh psych-poppers Super Furry Animals, and Boom Bip, the electronic/hip-hop producer known to his folks as Bryan Hollon, bring an eclectic background to the early-1980s revival. For an album conceived two years ago*, Stainless Style* captures a lot of what's been in the past few years' zeitgeist-- from Alan Braxe and Fred Falke's "Rubicon" to Chromeo and Cool Kids (if not quite all the way to Yeasayer); a recent Neon Neon "influences" mix included the Italian prog song that lays the foundation for Justice's "Phantom". And then the bright, 1980s-style guitar pop, murky electro rap, and cybernetic white-boy funk make for an album that upends some of the stereotypes about the hollowness of sleek 80s chrome. Hey, there's heart behind all this silvery excess.
The more melodic, Rhys-fronted tunes sped up on me first, and they're also the most chronologically displaced. Bizarre Princess Leia brush-off "I Told Her on Aderaan" puts the Cars beneath 1980s snare sounds, angelic synths, kitschy spoken-word interjections, and one of the catchiest choruses so far this year. The midtempo candidate for a weepy beach break-up music video, "Steel Your Girl", comes close, with chiming soft-rock guitars and phased keyboard. "Video games are nothing but illusion," Rhys begins. Factory farewell "Belfast" leans more toward wistful Duran Duran synth-pop. To all this, the herky-jerk call-and-response "Dream Girls" and shades-are-good electro creep-out "Michael Douglas" are wrecks by comparison.
Not that there's a clear divide between songs where Rhys seems dominant and ones where Boom Bip takes over. Raquel Welch ode "Raquel" and its Miami Sound Machine (and then Run-D.M.C.) beats comes closest to melding the SFA frontman's skewed pop vision and Hollon's electro-conscious hip-hop. On "I Lust U", meanwhile, Rhys duets with Welsh singer Cate Le Bon, trading one-liners on an Italo-tinged dream not too far from something like Simian Mobile Disco's "I Believe". Spank Rock and Sean Tillman get in a couple of snappy verses amid the Prince-ly groove and Midnite Vulture-isms of Har Mar Superstar on first single "Trick for Treat". A messed-up title pun and Rhys's fuzzed-out oddness sort of redeem Yo Majesty's heavy-breathing shtick on "Sweat Shop" (where's Missy Elliott?), but Fatlip's scene-setting rap on "Luxury Pool" is more biography than biopic, helped by a hiccuping, fame-pimping hook.
As a crossover side project involving an artist linked to 1990s Britpop, Neon Neon were bound to get compared to Gorillaz. Stainless Style is more consistent as an album than Damon Albarn's output with his first non-Blur group, and the potential hits, for what it's worth, hit equally hard. "Oh, how many are my foes?/ How many rise against me?" Rhys sings, with a choir of himself, on the title track and finale. Tuneful and engaging, though not flawless, Stainless Style holds a mirror up to a generation of 1980s nostalgia and, by warmly and humorously depicting a human being behind the bizarre rise and fall an engineer playboy, reminds us there's more to that most notoriously superficial decade than, well, surfaces. There's Huey Lewis, for example. | 2008-03-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-03-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Lex | March 14, 2008 | 7.7 | 701c246d-3462-4c1c-9338-c56c9060f0ab | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Jay Reatard was 18 when he recorded the Reatards' second album Grown Up, Fucked Up. His chaotic rage is the driving force behind most of the songs, and Grown Up, Fucked Up illustrates the final transition from sweet-faced little Jimmy Lee Lindsey to Jay Reatard. | Jay Reatard was 18 when he recorded the Reatards' second album Grown Up, Fucked Up. His chaotic rage is the driving force behind most of the songs, and Grown Up, Fucked Up illustrates the final transition from sweet-faced little Jimmy Lee Lindsey to Jay Reatard. | Reatards: Grown Up, Fucked Up | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20940-grown-up-fucked-up/ | Grown Up, Fucked Up | Jay Reatard was 18 when he recorded the Reatards' second album Grown Up, Fucked Up. The short time between the Memphis punks' extraordinary debut Teenage Hate and their new album had apparently taken a toll. "In the past year all innocence, all naiveness, and all kindness has all but been sucked out of my heart, my mind, and my soul," he wrote in the liner notes. By 1999, he'd already started to alienate some of the people around him. Guitarist Sean Redd stopped regularly hanging out with Jay outside of Reatards shows and only played on Grown Up, Fucked Up because Jay asked him. Jay once noted that about 27 different people had been Reatards at some point; the turn-around rate was significant.
There's footage of Reatards playing a Reno basement in 1999, which offers a pretty good illustration of his live presence at the time. He screams and thrashes everywhere, hitting the floor and smashing himself in the head multiple times. He chokes himself with the mic cable. He'd just been dumped; he is not kind when he described her in his between-songs banter. "I use [sic] to be a nice caring sweet kid that everyone loved," he wrote in the album's liner notes. "Now I'm just fucked and no one can fucking stand me." Grown Up, Fucked Up is about making the final transition from sweet-faced little Jimmy Lee Lindsey to Jay Reatard. There was no going back—from then on, he was that shrieking figure writhing on the Reno basement floor.
On Grown Up, Jay's chaotic rage is the driving force behind most of the songs. His enemies list on the record includes Led Zeppelin fans and the entire city of Memphis. On "No One Stands Me", Jay posits himself as a "dirty motherfucker," growling and screaming. Many of these songs are about feeling like the perpetual other. "I'm gonna break down," he repeatedly sings in one of the album's best hooks. It's ironic that this declaration is the album's closing sentiment (before the bonus cuts on Goner's new reissue)—he seems to have been going through a loud, violent breakdown all along.
Of all of Jay's many projects, Reatards are among the most primitive. While speed punk jams like "Sat. Night Suicide" and "Eat Your Heart Out" reinforce that idea, there are moments that begin to take it apart and predict where Jay would travel next. "Blew My Mind" is all muscular guitar and gang vocals right up until the bridge, when handclaps enter and the power-chord melody takes on a saccharine sheen. In glints, you can see the the aggressive-but-catchy sound he'd master on Blood Visions.
The middle of the album bogs down a little bit, with hooks and performances that blend into each other. The three bonus tracks from the 1999 "You're So Lewd" 7" feel tacked-on and inessential. Their cover of the Persuaders' "Heart of Chrome" is sluggish when stacked next to songs like "Sick When I See" and "Sat. Night Suicide". But even when this album's on the downswing, the Reatards are still screaming, blaring, and ferocious. Sometimes they trudge and sometimes they sprint, but they are always effective.
Jay Reatard pushed people's buttons, but he was beloved. This love shines through in the reissue's liner notes, which feature tributes from Goner Records' Eric Freidl and Empty Records' Meghan Smith. Both remember him for who he was—a frustrated teenager who broke disco balls and sought refuge in rock'n'roll. He was an incredible performer—an unhinged presence whose emotions seemed to be spilling out from all sides at all times. It's been five years since he died, and while many artists make angry rock'n'roll in the Reatards' wheelhouse, Jay's absence is felt. Many have tried, but nobody screams like that. | 2015-08-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-20T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Goner | August 20, 2015 | 7.9 | 702ad42a-3790-43af-9428-d9a1de87163c | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
Game's business is making you cringe for him, and on his fifth studio album, a collection featuring spots from 2Chainz, Rick Ross, Meek Mill, Lil Wayne (twice), Future, Young Jeezy, Chris Brown, Common, Pusha T, Jamie Foxx, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and others, business is...well, it remains a business. | Game's business is making you cringe for him, and on his fifth studio album, a collection featuring spots from 2Chainz, Rick Ross, Meek Mill, Lil Wayne (twice), Future, Young Jeezy, Chris Brown, Common, Pusha T, Jamie Foxx, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and others, business is...well, it remains a business. | The Game: Jesus Piece | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17469-jesus-piece/ | Jesus Piece | The Game has no dignity, but it certainly hasn't hindered his career, which was built entirely without it, and even predicated on its absence. Dignity's overrated, anyway; if you leveled the accusation at him, he'd probably work it into a rhyme about Blackstreet so he could remind you how much he likes "No Diggity". When you've sold 10 million albums abasing yourself at every available opportunity, there's no reason to change course, and on his fifth studio collection, the Game is still happily, busily, thoroughly ethering himself beyond all comprehension: "I don’t care if Kanye hit it/ I don’t care if Jay hit it/ I’ma eat it up and I’ma lay with it" he says on the first verse of "I Remember", a song that is a bald imitation of Future's "Same Damn Time", with Future himself on the hook. Looking away yet? He's just getting started.
Here are some other things the Game says on Jesus Piece: He reminds us on "Freedom", again, that Eminem murdered him on The Documentary's "We Ain't", as if if wasn't embarrassing enough when he exclaimed it on that very song. He tells us that his iPod is "shuffling between Common, Jay Electronica, and Bono" on "Heaven's Arms". At one point, he interrupts himself to say "Hold on, I gotta take Birdman's call," before interpolating audio of a Birdman voicemail. He yells "Murder is what I do to these Just Blazes," on an album produced entirely without Just Blaze's input. Game's business is making you cringe for him, and business is...well, it remains a business.
Truthfully, it's a little shocking to see another Game product in stores a mere year after The R.E.D. Album, a project with a development so troubled it redefined the lengths a record label will go to double down on a losing hand. It hit the top of the charts with what felt like a dead-cat-bounce, but here the Game is, seemingly unscathed, with another full platter of his signature blend of desperate-networker hip-hop. He is the rap game Wile E. Coyote; no matter how many times he blows himself to smithereens, he survives to do it again another day.
What presumably keeps him going-- besides, of course, a frightening, "Walking Dead"-like tenacity-- is that when you scrape away all these irritating quirks, he remains reliably good at cobbling together poppy gangsta-rap songs. He's always boasted excellent, if unadventurous, taste in beats, and he sources some excellent ones on Jesus Piece from SAP, a 22-year-old kid from Delaware whose biggest hits thus far have been Mac Miller's "Donald Trump" and Meek Mill's pre-MMG street hit "In My Bag". SAP provides the catchy Bone Thugs redux "Celebration" and the choir-sampling "Name Me King", a song that also has a sharply focused verse from Pusha T. Jake One gives him an infectious early-Kanye-style beat, reminiscent of "The Glory", for "Hallelujah", and Game makes a very early-Kanye-style song out of it. Longtime collaborators Cool & Dre soak his ruined voice in greyscale synth tones in "Can't Get Right" and "Pray" and then give him a helium-filled bouncy castle of New Jack Swing vocals on "All That".
The album and song titles hint at a sustained religious fascination, but this isn't Game's concept album. Even so, it's more focused than he's been in awhile, and while you couldn't call an album featuring 2Chainz, Rick Ross, Meek Mill, Lil Wayne (twice), Future, Young Jeezy, Chris Brown, Common, Pusha T, Jamie Foxx, J. Cole, Kendrick Lamar and more "lean," Jesus Piece is less all-over-the-place than The R.E.D. Album. Except for an embarrassing breakout of "hanhs" on the Kanye-sampling title track and his blood-draining Future imitation on "I Remember", he mostly keeps a lid on his irritating habit of mimicking other rappers' flows.
The flip side to being prone to saying any fool thing that pops into your head is that you can occasionally be hilarious: on "Church", he for some reason kidnaps and attempts to drown a woman before saving her and explaining to her that she was baptized. On "Can't Get Right", he continues his long string of overly attached girlfriend messages to Dr. Dre, telling us that after Dre passed him up to work on Kendrick Lamar's record, he had "nightmares" that someone shot him. The Game's contract with Interscope is up after this record and something tells me that wherever he goes next, it will be messy to watch, and probably just as entertaining. Seven years into a career that's resembled a slow-motion wreck as often as a highlight reel, and I remain morbidly fascinated with what will happen to him next. | 2012-12-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-12-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Interscope | December 12, 2012 | 6 | 702e446b-95e3-4443-acbe-d0cbf1c07a6c | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Aaron David Ross’s latest as ADR is composed of vocal samples, most scrubbed clean of any signifiers of human origin. The effect is amusing, even creepy, and recalls Holly Herndon or Katie Gately. | Aaron David Ross’s latest as ADR is composed of vocal samples, most scrubbed clean of any signifiers of human origin. The effect is amusing, even creepy, and recalls Holly Herndon or Katie Gately. | ADR: Throat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22697-throat/ | Throat | As half of Gatekeeper, Aaron David Ross produced dizzying, over-the-top synth experiments, full of conceptual knots. His 2015 solo release under the name ADR was similarly dense, an exploration of life within networks that mimicked the spiraling disjunct of online life. With THROAT, he delivers something more distilled. Maybe the most conventionally listenable release of his career, its smoother productions serve as subtler—even insidious—vehicles for his ideas about communication and mediation.
The conceptual twist here is that the album is composed of vocal samples, most scrubbed clean of any signifiers of human origin. Remembering this as you listen can be amusing, even creepy, and the overall effect is that of a futuristic gloss, each sourced note subsumed into a larger whole. Ross has built these abstract fragments into all-but-seamless collages that climb, flutter, and drop in accordance with the rules of pop songwriting, but what’s constructed here has no singular voice, no characters, no storytelling—indeed, no language, at least not in the traditional sense, though occasionally a voice will float out in an unintelligible lead. Still, these tracks brim with feeling, or feeling’s synthetic analog.
Where his previous work tended to assault the listener, here there’s a sense of being swept up or carried—a more elegant transaction, but still one that requires the listener to cede power. On opener “Every Node,” Ross weaves bubbly melodies into a hopeful chorus, developing into a sort of call-and-response over a whispered R&B beat; “Lost Ya” supplements a bassline full of chipper indifference with wistful pitched-up interludes. Musically, the effect isn’t so far off from the high-definition, high-anxiety likes of Holly Herndon, Katie Gately, or, dare I say, PC Music—music that strives to sound ultra-contemporary.
Especially within this focused palette, Ross’ hyper-detailed approach to composition comes into crystalline focus. As pop producers do, he’s plumbing and deploying an array of styles here, from classical choral arrangements to polyrhythms to, on “King David,” what sounds like a muddled take on the “Ha Dance” break. But he’s also a student of a certain breed of outsized radio-EDM; Jack Ü comes to mind. The implication is that while such music succeeds because of how intensely legible it feels, this belies a dangerous lack of genuine content to communicate.
Ross’s project might be dystopian at its core, revealing us to be floating a little too comfortably in the cybermuck that builds up invisibly between sender and receiver. But his choruses still speak, in their own strange and affecting ways—I think, for example, of the plaintive solemnity of “Advice,” or “Effort,” in which danceable ambivalence gives way to a sample that’s been blown out into a cathartic machine scream, not unlike something you’d hear in a Linkin Park song. The structures of communication twist and splinter, but we can still sense a constant longing. | 2016-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Pan | December 17, 2016 | 7.1 | 702fc9bc-1084-4a3b-b245-c8dddd98da5e | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
Four years after its self-titled debut, this collective-- which features members of Memphis' garage-rock community-- creates a swifter, cleaner-sounding record than its predecessor. | Four years after its self-titled debut, this collective-- which features members of Memphis' garage-rock community-- creates a swifter, cleaner-sounding record than its predecessor. | MouseRocket: Pretty Loud | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12032-pretty-loud/ | Pretty Loud | In some ways, Memphis has never gotten over garage rock. Largely left to their own devices by an industry that had little use for the city after the 1970s, generations of local musicians have been rethinking, reformulating, and in some cases re-creating that 60s sound and attitude. Following the Grifters, Simple Ones, and Oblivians in the early 1990s, the members of MouseRocket have mined these influences for more than a decade in numerous outfits: Alicja Trout in Lost Sounds (with Jay Reatard), the River City Tan Lines, and Black Sunday; Robby Grant in Big Ass Truck and Vending Machine; and cellist Jonathan Kirkscey in, um, the Memphis Symphony Orchestra. In 2004, with rhythm section Hermant Gupta and Robert Barnett, they released a self-titled debut full of dirty guitars, distorted vocals, raunchy organs, and covers of Love and the Nightcrawlers.
Gloriously dark and weird, MouseRocket sounds like a one-off, but it wasn't. Four years later, the band has launched its follow-up, Pretty Loud, which they recorded locally over two years and are releasing exclusively on vinyl (the LP includes an afterthought CD, but it sounds significantly better on a turntable). It's a swifter- and cleaner-sounding record, less distracted by all the noisy interludes, spoken-word samples, and studio shenanigans that gave the debut its oddball flair. In a word, Pretty Loud sounds professional: a concerted effort by a real live band rather than just a bunch of friends screwing around in the studio. Both approaches have their merits, of course, and opener "All Been Broken" immediately lays out the virtues of this new attack. Beginning with Grant's low vocals over Kirkscey's elegant cello, the song crescendos into a heavy riff that sounds like the fossilized skeleton of a Dinosaur Jr song. MouseRocket have carefully arranged the song for maximum impact, ratcheting up the soft-loud dynamics until everything falls into place on the last chorus, which smacks you squarely in the jaw.
MouseRocket reshuffle the garage rock deck effectively, adding classic-rock guitars, punk vocals, new wave keys, prog drums, and Kirkscey's dexterous cello, which reinforces Grant and Trout's brazen riffs, bolsters Gupta's booming bass, and generally adds a distinctive texture to these songs. A curiously calm, nearly Byrdsian guitar theme opens "Never Stand a Chance", which builds over three minutes to an ear-splitting freak-out finale. Trout and Grant trade off vocals, each proving a commanding frontperson: He gives "All Been Broken" and "44 Times" a world weariness that contrasts nicely with the songs' frantic energy, and she alternates between sing-songy vocals on the country-pop "Set on You" and shouted attacks of the glam-metal "Shadows", whose abrupt, punchy chorus is one of the album's best moments.
The album flags toward the end. Following a buzzy cover of Steven Calhoun's "Fall Down South", "Steal" deconstructs itself aimlessly, barely holding together, and the start-stop momentum of "Aphrodite" is more stop than start. They're followed by an "electro" version of the MouseRocket closer "Missing Teeth", whose paranoid lyrics about fluoridated water are illustrated with muted beeps and clicks that cannot improve on the original. Sequenced together, they close a strong album weakly, which is especially a shame considering that most of Pretty Loud manages to put a distinctive stamp on familiar styles. Most bands never get around to doing that, but MouseRocket have done it twice already. | 2008-07-30T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2008-07-30T01:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Tic Tac Totally | July 30, 2008 | 7 | 703a06ab-1fc0-4d1f-9bec-46b2f62f36ce | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The fifth disc from the New Brunswick, N.J., punk trio builds off the group's reputation as shred-oriented SST revivalists, with a refined focus on songwriting. | The fifth disc from the New Brunswick, N.J., punk trio builds off the group's reputation as shred-oriented SST revivalists, with a refined focus on songwriting. | Screaming Females: Ugly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16539-ugly/ | Ugly | The Screaming Females story begins with sweaty, ask-a-punk gigs in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at such dank, quasi-legal basements as Meat Town USA. As the tale goes, drummer Jarrett Dougherty suffered from tendonitis during the band's infancy, which barred him from drumming for weeks on end. While recovering he spent much time with Michael Azerrad's seminal survey of 1980s indie rock in America, Our Band Could Be Your Life, presumably getting stuck on the ethos, humility, and hybrid rock stylings of the Minutemen.
Quite fittingly, the band recorded its 2006 debut on a shoestring budget in Dougherty's attic. They booked hundreds of shows themselves. In time, the college student who ran the local punk label Don Giovanni threatened suicide if the band didn't sign on for 2009's Power Move, so they did. They were plucked up by the Dead Weather and toted around the States on tour. They were written about by a teenager for Rolling Stone. Years later, they recorded their nuanced fifth disc, an opus of sorts, with Steve Albini, and called it Ugly.
If any Screaming Females record has suggested they may someday become a group worthy of cataloging in a book like Azerrad's, Ugly is it, igniting a classic punk sound with a friction that falls somewhere between SST and PJ Harvey's Rid of Me. The band's sound has always been characterized by frontwoman Marissa Paternoster's fiery howl and brutal guitar work, the latter of which has garnered her "Best Guitar Shredder" distinctions that never feel hyperbolic. Ugly puts a newfound emphasis on songcraft and sustained momentum. Paternoster has always been an astounding guitarist and performer, equal parts J Mascis and Carrie Brownstein; her songwriting is finally entering the ring.
Given the backstory, it's almost comical that the record begins with the title "It All Means Nothing". Much of the discourse surrounding the Females has centered on Paternoster's spectacle: She shreds, she is very short, and she is also female. But here, she equates her self-worth to "a broken hand" and makes it clear that she can't buy what people are selling her. There is a fun, anti-commercial sentiment that comes with her dismissal of a commodity for sale, and the song's opening line-- "You take what's mine, and face me like you're blind/ It all means nothing"-- diminishes the relevance of a visual element.
Of her sonic trademarks, one of Paternoster's most distinct characteristics is her vocal vibrato, which conveys a sense of liberation that is intrinsic to the band; like a maximum-throttled Corin Tucker, little is restrained, and she occasionally dips into a hardcore screech. The chorus of "Rotten Apple" finds Paternoster painting words with a broad palette, hitting the many corners of her register over a pointed guitar crunch. Loud, animated shrieks come often at the end of the band's songs-- like the unhinged bellow that helps close out "Red Hand" (and that's after three minutes of Paternoster sounding like she could maybe murder someone). The color red is a noticeable motif throughout Ugly, from the "red ribbon" and "red blood" on "Slow Birth", to "Doom 84", a heavy seven-minute piece that's true to its name, where Paternoster is "blinking red fury." This emphasizes the passion, rage, and aggression on Ugly, qualities that make rock music such a powerful language of freedom, particularly for women.
Ugly is the most varied Screaming Females record, as evidenced on tracks like "Leave It All Up to Me", which is full of vaguely psychedelic fretboard mystics. Album closer "It's Nice" is a real change-up, a proper Screaming Females ballad, with Paternoster's vocals showcased over orchestral strings, as she sings, presumably, about not selling out ("If I'm bought and sold, then I'm cruising in on a dead end street"). Hell hath no fury like Paternoster on "High", where she is at her most anxious and intimidating. One of the most frightening moments of the album comes with her roar at the end and its ensuing patch of chaos; it's also one of the many points seemingly designed for a live show.
Visceral lyrics abound elsewhere on Ugly, and Paternoster specializes in violent, abstract musings. She offers plenty of references to death and an undefined "family curse," and all over, there are images of blood and bones, a clenched gun or noose, a burning altar or sun. The earth shakes. The sea recedes. At a point, there is a sour taste in Paternoster's mouth.
But Paternoster also gets quite literal about the radical qualities of what she is doing-- a testament to her growing capabilities as a lyricist. On "Something Ugly" she is on the phone with her mother, afraid to die alone; on "Crow's Nest", she's trapped in a self-constructed "prison," analyzing her own scars. She burns, throughout, with an earnest desire to quench and feed her own wants and needs. Paternoster is perpetually contemplating her own satisfaction, pleading for help, and presenting clear-headed ideas about defiance, all the while exerting her knack for creating suspense on a song and then, with her band, leaving it entirely obliterated.
One of the record's most surprising moments comes on the otherwise unmemorable "Help Me". Paternoster admits she'll "learn your letters" and "rewrite all the books," after which, she declares, "you've been warned." Screaming Females are a group with a classic rock sound who are expanding our idea of what a rock band can be. They could help redefine it if Paternoster remains true to her word. | 2012-04-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-04-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Don Giovanni | April 25, 2012 | 8 | 7040ef62-acc8-4ce8-a067-5fa8020f210c | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
With the Royal Trux once again in his rearview mirror, Neil Hagerty returns to his own group. In place of the genre mashups of 2013’s Best Of, he’s back to making satisfyingly ragged rock’n’roll. | With the Royal Trux once again in his rearview mirror, Neil Hagerty returns to his own group. In place of the genre mashups of 2013’s Best Of, he’s back to making satisfyingly ragged rock’n’roll. | The Howling Hex: Knuckleball Express | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-howling-hex-knuckleball-express/ | Knuckleball Express | For a band who often looked like they had just rolled in from recording Exile on Main Street, Royal Trux were far too abstruse to be genuinely retro. But recent noises from Neil Hagerty—former/current/who knows? Royal Truck and now head honcho of the Howling Hex —have suggested a certain wistfulness in his dotage. “Rock and roll is what’s missing in bands these days that take a generic approach to playing that’s almost machine-like,” he harrumphed to Rolling Stone, indulging the kind of ruefully nostalgic statement that Liam Gallagher would tape to the studio mood board. The new Howling Hex album, Hagerty said, would be 100% real—a record, he promised elsewhere, that “people want to listen to without throwing it out the window.”
To an extent, Hagerty keeps this promise on Knuckleball Express, the first Howling Hex album since Royal Trux’s ill-fated, occasionally wonderful reunion. Black Crowes fans will certainly find less to defenestrate than on 2013’s not-actually-a-best-of The Best of the Howling Hex, which was awash in polka rhythms, fuzz, and bizarre cowpunk lurch. “Lies,” the most immediate yet least satisfying track on Knuckleball Express, is a slice of heads-down Southern boogie, frenetic enough to raise a knowing smile without greatly troubling the cortex, while “Words” oozes with the leery strut of an acceptable Jagger outtake.
Elsewhere, Knuckleball Express has enough of Royal Trux’s obstinate weirdness and willful rough edges to distinguish it from the retro blues of the barroom band. Hagerty’s guitar may be turned up as loud as you would expect of a man who has recently escaped an unhappy musical partnership, but there’s something deliciously unrefined about his playing, all jagged lines, rusty nails, and hangover shuffle. The drums have a similarly imperfect edge, their classic rock clip punctuated with a few too many lolloping tom rolls for comfort, while many songs shun the traditional verse/chorus structure in favor of bolting intros to riffs and solos to verses. “Heavy Curtains” sounds—brilliantly—like three unrelated songs welded together in a musical cut and shut.
At its best, Knuckleball Express channels its awkwardness into songs that are thrilling in their instability. “Mr. Chicken” trembles on the edge of collapse before the unexpectedly well-mannered vocals of Kristine Shafer nudge the song into Belle and Sebastian-meets-Pussy Galore territory. “Cowboy Motors" throws a harpsichord into the mix for no particular reason, like a cruel parody of 1960s baroque pop, while “North Aquarian” introduces a drunken-sounding face-off between drummer and electronic squiggles—hardly Beatrice Dillon in its audacity, but modish enough to remind you that Knuckleball Express was recorded this millennium.
This waywardness is important. The tensions that drove Royal Trux, like many bands before them, were the same impulses that eventually unraveled the group. The risk for Knuckleball Express was that Hagerty, safely ensconced in Colorado with no tempestuous bandmate to spark off, might have succumbed to the easy musical life. Certainly, there are moments here—like “City in the Country,” where he hymns the “sweet Rocky Mountain waves”—that suggest a certain mellowing. But Hagerty remains as wily and weird as ever. Full of charm, panache, and eccentric raw power, Knuckleball Express makes good on his promise to make something real.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | April 20, 2020 | 7.4 | 7042d8d4-83b6-4671-a60d-d57a25ffdf1a | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Montreal musician and former Grimes collaborator weaves synthetic woodwinds and harpsichord into a dizzying yet heartfelt fusion of classical pastiche and skewed electronic pop. | The Montreal musician and former Grimes collaborator weaves synthetic woodwinds and harpsichord into a dizzying yet heartfelt fusion of classical pastiche and skewed electronic pop. | d’Eon: Rhododendron | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deon-rhododendron/ | Rhododendron | A decade ago, Chris d’Eon went looking for the archangel Gabriel in the depths of cyberspace. Having recently returned from a year-long stay at an Indian monastery, he was living in a windowless room in Montreal and working in a call center. The economy was falling apart. Everywhere around him he felt a sense of malaise, a creeping pessimism at odds with Silicon Valley’s utopian promises. It felt clear that God, if He existed, had abandoned us; if His messenger was out there, d’Eon reasoned, he might be lurking somewhere in the chaos of the internet.
The result of d’Eon’s spiritual quest was LP, an ambitious and occasionally overblown album that loaded up an opulent bed of synthesizers with new-age atmospheres, pop melodies, jungle beats, and lyrics shot through with Quranic references and technological disillusionment. Following 2011’s Darkbloom, d’Eon’s split EP with fellow Montrealer Grimes, LP cemented his reputation as a visionary figure in the nascent vaporwave scene. But while Grimes turned a similar strain of techno-spiritualist world-building into bona fide hits—and a career as the world’s foremost futurist pop star—d’Eon’s music only became more hermetic. With his Music for Keyboards series, also inaugurated in 2012, he largely abandoned LP’s pop overtones and lyrical preoccupations in favor of sparkling synthesizer etudes fit for crystal emporia. The Trios series, launched in 2015, veered down a knottier path, trading prismatic bliss for dissonant thickets akin to black MIDI. Rhododendron, which marks d’Eon’s first physical release in six years, feels like a return from the wilderness and a culmination of his diverse interests, folding classical pastiche, obsolete technology, and bracingly inventive compositions into an unmistakably heartfelt package.
Stylistically, Rhododendron is a curious hodgepodge of neo-Baroque, medieval folk music, and 20th-century serialism, moving among intricate counterpoints, Ren Faire melodies, and impenetrable blasts of atonalism. What holds it all together is a palette of chamber instruments like harpsichord, oboe, and clarinet—or synthetic versions of them, anyway. But these are not particularly faithful copies; they are clunkily ersatz and clearly fake. The vibrato is too steady, the harmonies too perfect. But that patina of inauthenticity is a big part of their charm. d’Eon’s use of “rompler” synths popular among game designers in the 1990s—devices capable of playing back pre-recorded sounds of acoustic instruments—imbues the music with an almost subliminal nostalgic charge: The idealized forms of the 18th and 19th centuries come cloaked in the outmoded sounds of the much more recent past. It triggers a kind of temporal vertigo.
In mood, Rhododendron often feels like a series of fake-outs. “Intro” opens the album with stately cello and reeds before “Rhododendron pt. I” launches into an innocent pastoral refrain. Every eight bars, a new voice enters the frame; the melodic themes amount to a breezy amalgam of Baroque, pop, and classical minimalism. Two more versions of “Rhododendron” appear across the album, each one jauntier and more bucolic than the last; by the end, it sounds almost as though d’Eon has been pilfering old tapes from the music library of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre. But as the album progresses, other pieces turn thorny and dissonant, less Switched on Bach than “Jazz From Hell.” “Into the Clearing pt. I” begins as an airy fantasia for woodwind, but jabbing harpsichords upset the key signature; the scattershot “Into the Clearing pt. II,” which follows, sounds as indeterminate as John Cage’s star-chart compositions. The two-part “Through the Mangrove,” for electric organ and harp, hiccups like a tangled garden hose of wrong notes.
Even d’Eon’s more melodic tracks are not always what they seem. “Cobra” follows the limpid, reassuringly consonant “Rhododendron pt. I” with a jarring study in contrasts. This time, dissonance reigns, trills clattering like coins on a countertop. But after a series of sour, staccato counterpoints, the song eases into a slinky, almost Latin-tinged pop motif, like some unholy blend of Shakira’s pert “Me Enamoré” with David Sylvian’s dour “Pop Song.” Here, all the contradictions of d’Eon’s music come excitingly to the fore. He grinds gears between exaggerated naivete and extreme difficulty; possibilities multiply in the uncanny valley of his presets. The chintziness of his synthetic instruments is almost poignant, like a remnant of a simpler era. In its own way, Rhododendron feels as much like a spiritual quest as LP did. Now, however, instead of looking for messages from God in the darkest corners of the internet, he’s seeking transcendence in shopworn tropes, bargain-bin synths, and the collision of sounds that were never meant to go together.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hausu Mountain | August 20, 2021 | 7.4 | 704aae29-be7a-4647-ab9d-d0eeba87223e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Japanese post-hardcore titans Envy have reached a point of being so embedded within their genre that they can disappear without going away. Their first album in five years is an opportunity to reappraise their overlooked past work without having to go through the trouble of reissuing it. | The Japanese post-hardcore titans Envy have reached a point of being so embedded within their genre that they can disappear without going away. Their first album in five years is an opportunity to reappraise their overlooked past work without having to go through the trouble of reissuing it. | Envy: Atheist's Cornea | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20712-atheists-cornea/ | Atheist's Cornea | Atheist’s Cornea arrives after the longest break between Envy albums, but that’s immaterial—the Japanese post-hardcore titans have reached a point of being so embedded within their genre that they can disappear without really going away. Their splits with Thursday and Jesu are crucial documents of post-hardcore diplomacy as is their working relationship with Mogwai, reaching out towards post-rock, metal, and emo. Bands that incorporate some combination of those elements—Deafheaven, Touché Amoré, Mono, to name a few—sing their praises. They may have singlehandedly legitimized screamo. All of which sets up quite nicely for Atheist’s Cornea: it can be framed as a "triumphant return" and also an opportunity to reappraise their overlooked past work without having to go through the trouble of reissuing it. But after five years that reiterated how much Envy has influenced other bands, for 40 minutes, Atheist’s Cornea plays out a complete role reversal.
"Blue Moonlight" starts with a 20-second salutation of wayward, delayed notes that gets decimated when the band enters with a typical, consumptive roar. This move doesn’t get repeated all that much throughout Atheist’s Cornea, though it’s a proper introduction in promising, "this is a post-hardcore record that will have pretty moments." Its means of making good on that promise go as expected. "Blue Moonlight" bursts apart in opposite directions much like Deafheaven’s “Dream House", heat-seeking guitars skyrocketing towards the sun and drums keeping the rhythm of falling down a jagged mountainside. Meanwhile, the twin guitars of "Ignorant Rain at the End of the World" swordfight like early Thursday, swift clashes of sharp, clanging metal. Closer "Your Heart and My Hand" damn near namechecks an Explosions in the Sky song with its title alone, to say nothing of the tremolo-picked clean leads and drum crescendos and everything else that causes "cinematic!" and "epic!" to be dug out of critical wordbanks like a reflexive, glassy-eyed dig into a bag of popcorn.
Fortunately, the specific textures of Tetsuya Fukagawa’s vocals aren’t as easy to imitate as Envy’s pedalboard setup. Compared to most of his peers, Fukagawa has a squat, muscular, and ugly tone rather than something shrieking or abrasive. Especially as the band becomes more slickly produced, Envy songs are immiscible mixtures where the vocals always rise to the top. It can be difficult for non-aficionados to distinguish what makes for a good vocalist in this realm, but Fukagawa clearly has range. Not in the multi-octave operatic sense—rather, he has a number of distinct modes of expression. Whether he’s dramatically muttering spoken word, letting out a blowtorch-intense, burnt-black scream, or a surprising sing-song cadence in "Footsteps in the Distance", Atheist's Cornea maintains an urgency that’s palpable even for those who don’t speak Fukagawa’s native language.
Still, this is a tenuous foothold as the instrumentals of Atheist’s Cornea go through every "emotional" post-hardcore motion. They may boast more technical precision and higher production values than most—the gleaming open chord strums on "Footsteps in the Distance" sound like straight-up alt-rock triumph rather than some distorted approximation of it. Likewise, the tinkling Rhodes solo in the middle of "Shining Finger" is a legitimately new touch and there’s unassailable beauty in the sighing string arrangements of "Ticking Time and String" (naturally) and the cymbal washes of "An Insignificant Poem". It’s not Envy’s fault these effective means of establishing contrast are basically public domain tropes in post-hardcore. But Envy established their reputation of being one step ahead rather than in lockstep with their peers...it is their fault for assuming the risk of doing these things in 2015. There’s almost no way Envy intended to namecheck their progeny in such an orderly manner. But it does get to the troubling contextual effect of hearing them in 2015 rather than echoed in other’s work: Envy just sound like an Envy-influenced band now. | 2015-07-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-07-10T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | July 10, 2015 | 6 | 704d680b-84b6-478a-ba0a-028ff1d5a844 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
A producer with a knack for matching any rapper’s flow and a rapper at his best when embracing his regional flair are, turns out, good influences. | A producer with a knack for matching any rapper’s flow and a rapper at his best when embracing his regional flair are, turns out, good influences. | Q Da Fool / Kenny Beats: Bad Influence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/q-da-fool-kenny-beats-bad-influence/ | Bad Influence | Kenny Beats may be the perfect producer for Q Da Fool. Last year’s fastest-rising beatmaker, Kenny possesses the chameleonic ability to match most any rapper musically while retaining his own dirty, low-end thump. With JPEGMAFIA, that means metal-edged sludge accented by the synths of British grime; with Rico Nasty, it means chasing her energy with sparse, loud hits, highlighting her without crowding her half-yelled flow. On Bad Influence, Kenny’s six-track EP with Q Da Fool, it means trap-indebted, percussion-oriented beats that carry weight, letting Q settle into the pockets of every groove.
Q has risen to the top of the DMV’s ascendant rap scene, but, on a collaboration with Atlanta street king Zaytoven last year, he eschewed the regional tonality that gave him his initial break. Still, on last year’s standout track “Heavy Metal,” he solidified his place not as a mere area talent riding the wave of an increasingly popular scene but instead one of the nation’s most exciting acts. He matches machine gun beats with menacing one-liners like, “If we was beefin’, you’d be dead/So don’t say my name.” Q’s blend of terror and excitement gives his tracks immediacy. On the best parts of Bad Influence, he commands the same attitude and attention.
“Drop,” the opener, serves as an apt summary of Q Da Fool’s interests. Over a flute sample and the hi-hat triplet so crucial to trap beats, he doesn’t mince words: “Got her legs up/Like a Tesla truck/Bitch said I fucked her bed up/Made her catch the nut.” The imagery is unsavory, but Q’s electric delivery and playful eye for details allow him to color the scene with flamboyance and gravitas. During the trap-inspired “100,” neither Kenny nor Q let up for two quick minutes. Q’s flow boosts the enthusiasm of his strongest lines—cocky without becoming off-putting, more charisma than braggadocio. Q sounds even more confident in his own voice on “Win,” using the same approach that took him toward the top of the DMV heap in the first place. Over wispy synths, he presses ahead in a vivacious double-time flow.
When Q approaches the sing-song method of regionless rap birthed and developed by SoundCloud rappers untethered to place, Bad Influence drifts off course. “Had Shit” relies too heavily on Auto-Tune, the effect interrupting Q’s flow and swallowing his energy. Still, as a whole, Bad Influence is another win for Q Da Fool, a course correction after last year’s effort with Zaytoven. When he abandoned his bread and butter to match the producer’s melodic stomp, he pulled shakily him away from his most engaging styles. It’s reassuring to know it wasn’t permanent. At his best here, Q realizes that home isn’t necessarily a place but instead a concept—the sound peerless and singular, distinctly personal yet universally relatable. More and more, it belongs to Q Da Fool. | 2019-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Roc Nation | February 14, 2019 | 7.2 | 7053b763-86a4-4e6f-9dc4-4e2e1d3b2909 | Will Schube | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-schube/ |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.