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Tony Molina’s fat-free, minute-long missives give you everything you might want in a rock song in a third of the time. This rarities collection is the perfect entry point. | Tony Molina’s fat-free, minute-long missives give you everything you might want in a rock song in a third of the time. This rarities collection is the perfect entry point. | Tony Molina: Songs From San Mateo County | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tony-molina-songs-from-san-mateo-county/ | Songs From San Mateo County | Tony Molina’s fat-free, minute-long missives blend ’60s jangle, ’70s power-pop, ’80s metal riffs and ’90s indie-rock fuzz. They give you everything you might want in a rock song, in other words, in about a third of the time. His songs feel tailor-made for a streaming-on-demand culture where the words “Skip Intro” have become ingrained in our entertainment-consumption rituals. The Bay Area hardcore vet has issued a stream of compact, tunefully oversaturated albums that are rivaled only by episodes of “I Think You Should Leave” for the most fun you can have in quarter-hour intervals.
Songs From San Mateo County collects 14 rarities recorded from 2009-2015, encompassing unreleased material, songs salvaged from out-of-print cassettes, and solo takes of tracks later recorded with his bands Ovens and Violent Change. But unlike many similar compilations, the album fits seamlessly into Molina’s existing canon—his work already blurs the line between “impulse” and “finished track.” And where his official albums tend to focus on a specific aesthetic, Songs From San Mateo County touches on every style he’s explored, making it the ideal entry point.
While Molina’s 2018 album Kill the Lights showed him occasionally creeping past the 120-second mark, Songs From San Mateo County captures him at his most brutally economical. Even by Molina’s microdosing standards, some of these tracks are so brief they challenge the very notion of what you’re allowed to call a song. Even the leanest scraps feel purposeful—the arpeggiated instrumental “Intro” runs for all of 13 seconds, but still manages to answer the question: what if Queen played Warped Tour? And “#1 Riff” is less self-aggrandizing display than spiritual communion with Big Star’s No. 1 Record, with shimmering acoustic textures that vividly recreate that album’s bittersweet, before-sunrise mood in 28 seconds flat.
The core of Songs From San Mateo County lands squarely in the DIY-via-DGC zone Molina staked out on his 2014 solo debut Dissed and Dismissed, and a handful of these tracks (like “Can’t Find My Way” and “Hard to Know”) actually feel like trial runs for that record’s delicate balance of Teenage Fanclub hooks and Thin Lizzy flourishes. It’s also a showcase for his dexterity within confined spaces: “I’m Not Down” chimes like something out of Bob Mould’s Sugar songbook, slips into gloriously metallic riffs, and then slides home on a gloriously J Mascis guitar solo outro. And then there are the songs that feel so effortless and pristine—the Petty-esque heartbreaker “Word Around Town” and the acoustic ballad “Don’t See Me Now”—that it seems absurd they were buried until now.
Perhaps Songs From San Mateo County signals the end of this phase for Molina; he’s claimed the songs on his next album will cross the two-minute border, suggesting he’s entering his Under the Bushes, Under the Stars years. Tellingly, this collection concludes with “Outro,” a relaxed, tiki-torch-lit, surf-tinged instrumental that atypically evokes pre-Beatlemania rock ‘n’ roll. Whether it’s just a one-off or a sign that Molina is saying “aloha” to his past remains to be seen. But for now, Songs From San Mateo County presents the opportunity to appreciate an artist who’s accomplished a lot with limited time and space, yet only seems to be getting started. | 2019-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Smoking Room | July 24, 2019 | 7.6 | 725ac3b3-7ab0-479e-871f-e376e96424f9 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The electro-punk duo Rainbow Arabia make their smoothest, most pop-friendly, and sophisticated statement yet. | The electro-punk duo Rainbow Arabia make their smoothest, most pop-friendly, and sophisticated statement yet. | Rainbow Arabia: L.A. Heartbreak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22595-la-heartbreak/ | L.A. Heartbreak | On their new full-length L.A. Heartbreak, the electro-punk duo Rainbow Arabia (married couple Tiffany and Danny Preston) has evolved into a full-fledged mainstream pop act. The tropical polyrhythms of their earliest works are sublimated into post-Moroder synth vamps, and a newfound sense of balance and a lighter touch have clicked into compositions of unexpected sophistication. In one sense, this is a logical progression from their 2008 debut EP Basta through 2013’s FM Sushi, as the brightly colored and self-consciously “exotic” influences of North African and “other” pop musics have gradually becomes subtler and more balanced. But even in the album’s most satisfying moments, it’s impossible not to feel that there is something missing.
To pin down exactly what that missing element is, it’s necessary to untwine—or maybe re-entangle—the polar elements of Rainbow Arabia’s sound; big percussion grooves and brassy microtonal synths on the one hand (think Sublime Frequencies) and wistful, distant vocals and subtler arrangements on the other (think Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, New Order) on the other. These two ideas are not so different: Even at their most exploratory, Rainbow Arabia have always been heirs of a sort to new wave and ’80s synthpop. Their aesthetic could be described as Berlin or Missing Persons for a generation that has swapped out MTV for YouTube vids of Vybz Kartel and kuduro.
On L.A. Heartbreak, one gets the sense that Preston & Preston are less likely to spend their time daydreaming with a store-bought fluorescent light and more likely to address their issues like grown-ups. The trippy and exotic elements are still there—just toned down and incorporated into something that feels more like everyday life. “Followed” comes on like “Just Can’t Get Enough”-era Depeche Mode before shifting into more soaring sadness. “Top Hat” takes three of it’s four minutes to morph into a slow acid house track worthy of Mr. Fingers. But the various elements feel most cohesive on the lead single “Plena.” A slow reggaeton pulse is augmented by scintillating synth-work that suggests sunlight sparkling off water, as Tiffany intones “Take me on a holiday...I am so in love with you/Tell me what you wanna do” in a voice so plaintive it’s easy to read as “I am so alone with you.” A new listener might rightly wonder if this was the new Gwen Stefani song or maybe another EDM-pop prodigy a la the Chainsmokers (if that sounds backhanded, it’s not—pop this effortless is rare and never as easy to make as it is to listen to).
Over the LP as a whole, though, this more anonymous, disaffected sound leaves the topography of Rainbow Arabia a bit flat, sometimes (as on “Modern Contemporary” and “Mixolydian”) feeling like Afrobeat without any of the urgency or joy. The duo’s songwriting has grown stronger, and their arrangements more subtle. Even the record's honest disaffection feels in some ways more authentic than their erstwhile experiments in “world” sounds. But those forays, even when they were clunky or unfortunate, also brought a sense of play and provocation that is missing here. Now that they’ve landed back on Earth, maybe next time they can bring some of their wilder, more colorful dreams back with them. | 2016-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Time No Place | November 29, 2016 | 6.5 | 7272cf64-da2f-4bf5-8bba-7ec9aa4301fe | Edwin “STATS” Houghton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/edwin-“stats” houghton/ | null |
Aged rock critic Richard Meltzer once said that writing about music is much harder today than it was in the ... | Aged rock critic Richard Meltzer once said that writing about music is much harder today than it was in the ... | Various Artists: Chains and Black Exhaust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1911-chains-and-black-exhaust/ | Chains and Black Exhaust | Aged rock critic Richard Meltzer once said that writing about music is much harder today than it was in the 60s. He said that back then, there probably weren't 20 great bands in the world, so it was much easier to cover the scene comprehensively. I'd say he was reducing the issue a tad (especially in light of sets like Nuggets), but there is a kernel of wisdom in his observation. In 1967, Jimi Hendrix almost single-handedly rallied troupes from rock, pop, blues, jazz and soul on both sides of the Atlantic with his psychedelic call to arms, Are You Experienced?. In one fell swoop, he united the sounds of acts ranging from James Brown to The Beatles, and proved that young black men had as much a claim to rock's budding authenticity as any English mop tops. This could never happen again, as ironically, people like Hendrix contributed to a splintering of scenes and sounds that made common threads almost impossible to find (or wind) thereafter.
In the wake of that fertile era, rock historians penned millions of words in hopes of connecting disparate dots into a clear lineage. You know the drill: Hendrix begat Earth, Wind and Fire, Can and Led Zeppelin, who in turn begat everyone from Bad Brains to Lauryn Hill to Pearl Jam. The holes in this reductive reasoning-- all too common in the post-Creem, post-Rolling Stone world of music journalism-- becomes apparent when you realize that hey, there might have been more than twenty good bands way back when, and wow, people were coming up with all kinds of shit in their free time.
One crucial moment, almost always glossed over, is the short-lived Black Rock "scene" of the late 60s and early 70s (only occasionally in cahoots with Black Power); you'd figure that, coming immediately after Hendrix, bands like Parliament-Funkadelic, the Bar-Kays and the newly rockified Isley Brothers would seem obvious parallels, and accordingly, they're the ones always brought up in such discussions. However, bands from all over the place were shooting for the very same synthesis of American countercultural music that Hendrix did were all over, as the mysterious compilation Chains And Black Exhaust strives to document.
Without a track list, artist mentions or liner notes, the Memphix crew (a collective of DJs and funk 45 junkies spearheaded by Dante Carfagna) attempt to set the record straight on black rock, psychedelia and funk, releasing this seventeen-track comp on Jones (a sub-label of their own Memphix Records). The sound is on the exact same, embryonic tip as Funkadelic's first record (if they'd had even less of a budget). Hendrix's wah-wah makes several appearances, as does his stoned out vocal delivery, and the omnipresent direct-from-vinyl mastering gives it a vintage groove. Of course, it would have been nice to know what the hell I was listening to without resorting to major search engine detective work, but for the most part, it's a stone jam of such proportions as to render the confusion part of the experience.
The first half of a great bit captured from a radio talk show ("it's the color man, and the monthly payments, you know what I mean?") opens the record, and leads directly to Blackrock's "Yeah Yeah". Piano and guitar drone set the stage for badass kung fu stomp, courtesy of molasses-laden drums and bass, both doing their best to max out the mics. An acid-fried guitar solo elevates it into the Hendrix/Eddie Hazel stratosphere. Likewise, Iron Knowledge's "Showstopper" takes Hendrix's patented quivering fret trick (on bass, no less!) and slaps down an anti-war jam so infectious, the singers can barely stay on key during the chorus. OK, in truth some of these bands were less than polished, but the spirit is always there.
"Life Is A Gamble", performed by Preacher, Doug Anderson's "Mama, Here Comes the Preacher" and Hot Chocolate's "What's Good for the Goose" are prime slices of black rock, and would have sounded completely at home on Parliament's Osmium LP ("shooby dooby, bang bang, brotha's gotta groovy thang"), or one of the early Ohio Players records. The former tune features a break so potent a crossing of Band of Gypsies and a porno soundtrack, Westbound Records should pay them back royalties. Gran Am's "Get High" represents the raw end of the spectrum here, as the band overdub their vocalizing of the title over and over, threatening to bury the drums completely. On the other end is Curtis Knight's super-tight "The Devil Made Me Do It", which is an excellent mix of Superfly pulse and almost pop, classic rock hooks.
The lesser tracks play it closest to standard funk, such as the Kool & the Gang spunk of track 4, or the funky Getaway music of track 14-- of course, I have no idea who I just dissed, but so goes limited pressing, semi-bootleg funk comps. There's a rumor Chains and Black Exhaust will be reissued next year with recording info and track listing, but for now, Jones is your connection. It's not as if there are loads of other comps with this stuff out there, and until somebody gets off their ass and issues those early Funkadelic records in a decent mix, you need this. Shit, you need it anyway. | 2003-03-03T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2003-03-03T01:00:05.000-05:00 | null | Jones | March 3, 2003 | 8.2 | 7278e6df-5608-4fb4-a156-11aefac46789 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
The debut album from the SoCal trio is a flawed artifact of ’90s alt-rock, punk, ska, and hip-hop, but remains a fascinating document of Bradley Nowell as the honey-voiced musical tourist bro. | The debut album from the SoCal trio is a flawed artifact of ’90s alt-rock, punk, ska, and hip-hop, but remains a fascinating document of Bradley Nowell as the honey-voiced musical tourist bro. | Sublime: 40oz. to Freedom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sublime-40oz-to-freedom/ | 40oz. to Freedom | Most Sublime fans have only ever known Bradley Nowell as a ghost. The frontman overdosed in a motel just two months before his band’s self-titled blockbuster 1996 album, never living to witness its impact. And so, tasked with promoting a cheery, summertime record now indelibly associated with death, Sublime’s label MCA and imprint Gasoline Alley worked some marketing magic, covering for Nowell’s absence in the band’s music videos by superimposing archival footage of him, as if to reassure viewers he was there in spirit. In one, his apparition looks down from the heavens at his beloved dog Louie, the Dalmatian that had spent Sublime’s concerts on stage curled up at his master’s feet, and smiles. Later in the same video, as the band’s surviving members run afoul of Deebo from the Friday movies on a cheap spaghetti western set, Nowell’s hologram sits on a stoop removed from the action, doing what he spent so much of his life doing: playing his guitar. He looks at peace.
It’s human nature to cling to a comforting takeaway after a tragedy. In a “Behind the Music” special years later, those closest to Nowell all framed his death the same way: After battling addiction for so long, he was prepared to die, and maybe even on some level all right with it. “It wasn’t a question of was it going to happen, it was a question of when it was going to happen,” drummer Bud Gaugh recounted. Yet Nowell’s death left a bigger void than even his loved ones and bandmates could have imagined. As Sublime’s popularity ballooned, and their eponymous final album sold by the millions, MCA rushed to capitalize on the seismic demand for a band that no longer existed, clearing the group’s vault with a series of live albums and rarity and greatest hit collections. Cover bands popped up, too, along with acts that traced the band’s template of breezy Cali reggae-punk so closely that they might as well have been cover bands—an entire cottage industry, cast from Nowell’s footprints.
All those knockoffs proved poor substitutes for the real thing. Sublime only recorded three albums during their run, and the middle one, 1994’s Robbin’ the Hood, was so haphazard and caustic that only the most devoted fan could tolerate any significant time with it (it was recorded in a crack house, and it sounded like it). That meant that all roads from Sublime’s crossover hits like “What I Got” and “Santeria” led back to their 1992 debut 40oz. to Freedom, their most enduring work and one of the most musically ravenous albums of the ’90s, a countercultural melting pot that extended its hand to skate-punks, surfers, burnouts, tape-trading jam kids, and hip-hop fanatics alike, inviting them all to gather around the same bong.
Sublime trumpeted their influences proudly, stuffing the album beyond its seams with covers of Bad Religion, Descendents, Toots and the Maytals, and the Grateful Dead, samples of Public Enemy, N.W.A., and Minutemen, and repeated salutes to KRS-One, the rapper Nowell idolized most. And, as the 75-minute record hadn’t sufficiently established the scope of their tastes, they spent its closing track shouting out to all the other acts that they just as easily could have covered if the album ran another hour or two—Butthole Surfers, Fugazi, Frank Zappa, Eek-A-Mouse, Crass, Big Drill Car and on and on and on. Even Steve Albini’s defunct noise project Rapeman got a nod.
The only album of its era that neared its big-tent ambitions is Check Your Head, which the Beastie Boys recorded around the same time in Los Angeles, a short drive from Sublime’s native Long Beach, but even that album was rooted in one primary style and one very specific notion of cool. 40oz. to Freedom’s only binding thread, on the other hand, was Nowell’s insatiable need to play a little bit of everything. The album feels like a marathon attempt to hold his own interest, cannonballing from ska to thrash to dub to campfire sing-alongs at the speed of a “Beavis and Butt-Head” channel-surfing session. Never mind that Sublime weren’t great at all of those styles, or even most of them. In their wide embrace of music, they came to stand for something greater than any single sound: a spirit of radical inclusion. The group’s forbearers, Berkeley ska legends Operation Ivy, had preached unity, making overtures beyond the punk circles they primarily played to, but it was Sublime that put those ideals into action.
40oz. was an enormously prescient record, predicting hip-hop’s influence on the late-’90s alternative sound years before a DJ became a perfectly normal thing for a rock band to have on its payroll. Mostly, though, the album resonated because it captured a lifestyle. Rejecting the smoldering angst of the grunge music that was beginning to take root on the radio, Sublime made revelry their primary muse, detailing parties, hookups, and bad decisions with such rowdy immediacy. To make the most of their modest budget, they snuck into a studio after dark to record it, and you can picture the band, their friends, and their many hangers-on crowding the room, clanking beer bottles and stubbing out cigarettes on the couch cushions. It’s no wonder why the album became a staple of so many cookouts, keggers, smoke sessions, and all-night “GoldenEye” tournaments—it was a record born of having nothing to do and nowhere to be, which made it the perfect soundtrack for a generation’s leisure time.
Yet while it’s hard to imagine a future when it won’t be blasting out of dorm rooms, time hasn’t flattered the album. A belated regional hit that primed the band for their breakthrough, “Date Rape” in particular was questionable even by its era’s standards, but today it sounds downright vile. The band sold the single as an anti-rape song, which it halfheartedly tries to be—the rapist is the villain, after all, and he gets his comeuppance—but mostly it’s a “sexual assault as entertainment” song, a titillating yarn about a predator and his prey, set to giddy, Fishbone-style horns that undercut any empathy it pretends to have for its victim. “Suggestion” this is not: Even if you can look past the noxious homophobia of the song’s parting shot about the imprisoned rapist taking it “in the behind”—poetic justice at its least poetic—ending a song denouncing date rape by cheering prison rape is unjustifiably bad.
In surprisingly callous comments to an Orlando magazine that suggest he might not have been ready for the spotlight international fame would have put on him, Nowell leaves no reason to give the song’s intentions the benefit of the doubt. “I’ve never raped anyone at least as far as I can remember,” Nowell said. “We were at a party a long time ago and we were all talking about bad date rape was. This guy was like, ‘Date rape isn’t so bad; if it wasn't for date rape I’d never get laid.’ Everyone at the party was bummed out about it, but I was cracking up and I wrote a funny song about it.” If you want to understand why so many people loathe this band, remember this anecdote, because it epitomizes what Sublime sounds like to outsiders: Dudes guffawing at a joke you find appalling.
That interview is hardly the only indication that Nowell’s offstage behavior might have fallen short of even the most basic standards that today’s listeners expect of musicians. “Pinching girlies’ asses, I was drinking recklessly,” he sings on “What Happened.” On “Right Back,” he dismisses his girlfriend as a ho and strongly suggests he slept with yours—like many white rap fans of the era, he took the genre’s influence as license to parrot its misogyny. Nowell could also play fast and loose with the cultures he appropriated. His reggae voice is broad almost to the point of insensitivity, a throaty imitation of a lascivious islander, and he mimics KRS-One’s gunshot adlib (“Bo! Bo!”) with the same overzealous glee some of his white fans would adopt years later when shouting Chappelle-ified versions of Lil Jon’s catchphrases: “What? Okay!!!” There’s a fine line between homage and caricature. Sublime’s appeal rested on never asking fans to consider it.
None of those criticisms probably would have bothered Nowell much. California’s punk scene was often proudly less PC than those in other parts of the country, and Nowell never tried to pass himself off as a saint. He sang unapologetically about robbing, drugging, and whoring. On “Wrong Way,” a hit single from their self-titled album that’s somehow even more squeamish than “Date Rape,” he sang far too vividly in the first person about sleeping with an underage prostitute (“It’s almost a true story,” bassist Eric Wilson once said). It’s remarkable, then, that listeners heard so much grace in him. Here was a guy who once used—and possibly even coined—the term “butt-housed,” yet in fan circles he came to be celebrated as almost an American Bob Marley, an emissary of peace and love who proved too pure for this world.
So how did such an uncouth horn dog, a man with so many vices and such an indelicate way with words, come to represent such an ill-fitting ideal? Chalk some of it up to his most powerful instrument: his voice, a weary croon with an inviting twinkle that implied wisdom and sensitivity that wasn’t always actually present in his lyrics. “I thought that Bradley was a black guy, because his voice is so soulful,” Gwen Stefani recalled. “And I had it all in my head exactly what he looked like, you know? And I was falling in love with him, just because [of] his voice.” On record, he certainly doesn’t sound like the shirtless bro with a tattoo of his own band’s name jetting across the massive canvas of his back on Sublime’s cover. To watch old concert footage of the band is to be suffocated by their burly, beer-gut ideal masculinity, yet listening to “Badfish” on headphones it’s difficult to imagine anything other than a gentle soul. For 40oz.’s penultimate track, he even pulls off a convincingly heartfelt cover of “Rivers of Babylon,” the Melodians’ gorgeous hymn from the Harder They Come soundtrack. That’s something Op Ivy never could have done.
And of course, death has a way of imparting mystique on fallen musicians, and the band’s posthumous music videos stopped just short of literally painting a halo over him. Watching those videos with Nowell piped in from the great beyond makes it easy to buy into his coronation. Just as the immortal image of Kurt Cobain became him in a cardigan, performing angelically against a candlelit stage on the “Unplugged” special that aired ceaselessly after his death, Nowell’s became him looking down from the heavens, watching lovingly over his dog. It’s less subtle, no doubt, yet no less effective.
For years, Gaugh and Wilson resisted exploiting their late bandmate’s legacy, a moratorium that lasted until 2009, when they joined with young Nowell soundalike Rome Ramirez in a band called Sublime With Rome, despite the furious objections of Nowell’s estate. Even setting aside questions of legality and tastefulness, the band has released two albums, and there isn’t a moment on either that feels spontaneous or surprising. Without Nowell’s acerbic personality cutting through all those peppy guitar riffs, their sound is too bright and saccharine, almost cloyingly so. Nowell, for all his faults, was the human contradiction that a band like this needed to hold any interest, which is why none of Sublime’s imitators, semi-official offshoots included, have made anywhere near the same impact. Despite the popular misreading of Nowell’s legacy, listeners didn’t just want the pleasing sounds and platitudes about love. They wanted the full sordid package: the raunch, squalor, drugs, side chicks, and dog shit. Nowell’s music didn’t resonate in spite of being problematic. It resonated because it was problematic. As a white musician at the time, Nowell had license to skirt taboos and cross cultural boundaries, his intentions rarely doubted or scrutinized, and he took advantage to an extent few of his peers ever had.
And that’s why there may be a window on the movement that Nowell started. Each year 40oz. sounds a little further past its sell-by date, its songs a little more sour and its sexual politics even less excusable. For the same reason that Mötley Crüe doesn’t make many new teenage fans these days, Sublime’s well of young fans may dry up, too; time has a way of gradually erasing music that doesn’t meet modern mores. Even many original fans who still sneak a listen while doing weekend yard work probably wouldn’t want to be seen wearing their old 40oz. T-shirt in public anymore. Yet if you talk to those same fans candidly, many will admit the same thing: It’s the most embarrassing album they’ve ever loved. | 2018-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Skunk | February 25, 2018 | 5.6 | 727a3e17-39c3-40f7-9b0b-7476932522fa | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Abetted by a handful of fellow musicians from the hardcore scene, Boston’s Justin DeTore makes thick, impenetrable death metal that’s desolate and filled with tension. | Abetted by a handful of fellow musicians from the hardcore scene, Boston’s Justin DeTore makes thick, impenetrable death metal that’s desolate and filled with tension. | Innumerable Forms: Punishment in Flesh | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/innumerable-forms-punishment-in-flesh/ | Punishment in Flesh | Justin DeTore is part of a prolific group of Boston hardcore musicians updating classic metal styles, most notably as the drummer for Sumerlands and Stone Dagger and the bassist for Magic Circle. Innumerable Forms is his death-metal project, bringing the cold doom of early Finnish death metal stateside. For their debut full-length, Punishment in Flesh, DeTore assembled a formidable crew, bringing on Iron Lung’s Jensen Ward and Austin metalpunk prodigy Chris Ulsh (some of Innumerable Forms’ early shows were essentially Mammoth Grinder with DeTore on vocals) on guitars, Red Death/Genocide Pact drummer Connor Donegan, and the Rival Mob’s Doug Cho on bass.
Innumerable Forms’ demos became cult underground commodities because they essentially took a solo black-metal approach to death metal, trading one frosty, desolate sound for another. (Though it was mostly DeTore playing, it wasn’t all solo—Ward co-wrote songs for a 2016 demo and one of DeTore’s frequent collaborators, Chris Corry, produced and contributed guitar solos.) Punishment in Flesh leans heavier on the doom side of death-doom than the demos did, making it swampier yet even more unforgiving. Right off, the title track breathes in early Sentenced, strips away any decorative fringes and melodic touch, and spits back out total ugliness. DeTore has always had a vision for the thick and impenetrable, and here he has the sound and the personnel to see that out.
“Re-Contaminated,” a reworking of “Contaminated” from 2010’s Dark Worship, tacks on a doomy intro and is a touch slower than the original, yet it’s enough to put the song in another dimension. Before it was a blizzard where DeTore’s riff wall howled over everything else, where now the pummel is more distinguishable, more throbbing. Combined with Donegan’s rolling double bass drum—the drum sound is a huge leap from the demos—the new version is much beefier. It slams their Finnish sound to the concrete. Donegan’s interplay with Ulsh and Ward is key in making the slow trudges all the more agonizing; in “Firmament” there is no sweet release into speed, just hanging riffs and mid-paced torture. They have the capabilities to blast out—“Stress Starvation” and “Meaning” show the band at its most ruthless—but they know you secretly don’t want that most of the time, that the slow bits are perversely satisfying. “Joyless,” another re-recorded track, manages to sound more desolate, its ending churn arid while a disjointed solo, a guest appearance from Corry, pecks like malignant, intruding sunlight.
Convulse’s 1991 album World Without God, a bridge between death metal’s straightforward beginnings and the weirdness of fellow Finns Demilich and Demigod, still remains a principal influence on Innumerable Forms, though Punishment in Flesh also shows a debt to New York death-doom trio Winter. While less effects-driven than Stephen Flam’s solos, the record’s lead work sounds similarly driven mad by extreme temperature shifts, freaked out and angry. “Re-Contaminated” brings the ending solo up in the mix, making what should be an incomprehensible high-pitched tangle fit right in. Innumerable Forms always carried a crushing sense of hopelessness. Even with a full band and fuller production, that hasn’t changed. Winter also found a small following in the hardcore world before metal audiences took any notice; Innumerable Forms, likewise, is made up of dudes with hardcore backgrounds making vital death metal. That makes a record that offers no repentance a celebration. | 2018-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Profound Lore | August 25, 2018 | 7.5 | 727dc22a-325d-45aa-9f7c-92cba17f1646 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
The latest from the saxophonist and bandleader is a multi-genre feast of musical ideas, his most sweeping and complete statement yet. | The latest from the saxophonist and bandleader is a multi-genre feast of musical ideas, his most sweeping and complete statement yet. | Kamasi Washington: Heaven and Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kamasi-washington-heaven-and-earth/ | Heaven and Earth | Kamasi Washington—a tenor saxophonist, bandleader, and composer with the profile of a low-level pop star—designed his second full-length album as a metaphysical dyad, unfolding over two halves that each run over an hour. Far and away the strongest musical statement of his career, it’s also an exercise in contrast, if not outright contradiction.
“The Earth side of this album represents the world as I see it outwardly, the world that I am a part of,” Washington explained in advance press materials. “The Heaven side of this album represents the world as I see it inwardly, the world that is a part of me. Who I am and the choices I make lie somewhere in between.” (According to Discogs, a surprise third part, The Choice, comes as a CD tucked away in the album’s packaging; it wasn’t provided to reviewers, but it’s reported to contain five tracks—almost 40 minutes of additional music.)
This is a high-flown but still more intuitive concept than the one governing The Epic, Washington’s breakout 2015 debut, which sprawled over three hours and trafficked so heavily in heroic archetype that it should have a citation on Joseph Campbell’s Wikipedia page. Heaven and Earth proposes a play of external and internal realities—a bedrock of philosophical thought often framed as mind-body dualism. True to form, Washington presents this bifurcation more spiritually, as a pivoting balance of terrestrial and celestial concerns.
There’s a deadpan self-awareness to the framing of this theme, beginning with an album cover that depicts Washington like a Byzantine icon astride the Sea of Galilee. Musically, the idea coalesces best during the final track on Earth—an adrenalized piece of business called “One of One,” with a heraldic, hard-boppish horn line set against Afro-Latin polyrhythm and a blast of choral voices and orchestral strings. Its cyclical harmonic sequence creates a sensation of endless lift. That ascension brings us to the opening of Heaven, a sparkling interstellar overture called “The Space Travelers Lullaby.” Shifting strings and voices to the foreground, all billowy movement in a major key, it’s a cinematic theme whose rippling euphoria feels both magically ethereal and strenuously earned.
Washington wants it both ways, and that’s what he wants for you, too. As a listening experience, Heaven and Earth contains the most transcendent moments of his output thus far, as well as some of the gnarliest. His version of “Fists of Fury,” the Bruce Lee movie theme, falls into the latter camp, opening the whole affair à la Curtis Mayfield, in soul-warrior mode. The vocals on the track—by Patrice Quinn, a regular member of Washington’s entourage, and Dwight Trible, an emeritus alumnus of Horace Tapscott’s Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra—gradually move further into an exhortative mode. “We will no longer ask for justice,” they each declare, one after the other, in an echoing cadence that evokes the People’s Microphone. “Instead, we will take our retribution.”
Washington has smartly sequenced the double album in a pair of dramatic arcs. And he marshals his musicians with no less careful calculation. The heavy-tread cohesion and cyclonic undertow on Heaven and Earth serve a reminder of how much time has passed since the West Coast Get Down, Washington’s Los Angeles cohort, laid the tracks that became The Epic—late in 2011. Since its blockbuster release in 2015, Washington and his band, the Next Step, have maintained a touring schedule of the sort that few jazz groups are ever able to sustain. Along the way, assorted members of the West Coast Get Down, like bassist-turned-vocalist Thundercat and keyboardist Cameron Graves, have branched out on their own, with varying degrees of success.
A handful of them stand out on Heaven and Earth. Terrace Martin makes his lone appearance count, delivering a molten, supplicatory alto saxophone solo on a bounding modal tune called “Tiffakonkae.” Brandon Coleman fashions a psychedelic synth solo on “Connections,” whose low simmer and melodic contour recall the Joe Zawinul / Miles Davis invention “In a Silent Way.” (He also does excellent vocoder work on “Vi Lua Vi Sol,” suggesting a system upgrade to Sunlight-era Herbie Hancock.) Trumpeter Dontae Winslow distinguishes himself on a handful of tracks, including a syncopated charge through Freddie Hubbard’s “Hub-Tones.”
Scan that rundown of tunes and it’s clear: Washington remains enamored of the jazz tradition even as he insists on reshaping it. The heart of the complaint against him in jazz circles is his limited range as an improviser. He has no real instinct for developing harmonic momentum in a solo, and he slips too often into pentatonic pattern-work, as if an algorithm were kicking in. On the other hand, Washington’s strengths have never been clearer. His sound is sinewy and centered, his rhythmic footing sure. And he’s a catharsis engine who also knows when to shrewdly dial it back. (Hear how he begins his solo on “Song for the Fallen,” as if delivering a confidence.) Anyway, assessing Washington by the same standard as Mark Turner or Chris Potter, or any number of other virtuoso tenors, would be something other than apples-to-apples, and missing the point. One of his core achievements on Heaven and Earth—even more than on The Epic—is to create a framework in which his ardent, expressionistic style can carry a standard into battle.
The album hits its full, glorious stride during its last several tracks. “The Psalmnist,” a taut, unassailable post-bop theme by trombonist Ryan Porter, sparks one of the sharpest Washington solos on the album, before a virtuoso battle royal between drummers Tony Austin and Ronald Bruner, Jr. The next tune, “Show Us the Way,” opens with a modal crush of piano chords that recalls “Change of the Guard,” from The Epic. It culminates, after a rafters-raising Washington solo, in a refrain by the choir: “Dear Lord,” they sing, invoking John Coltrane, “Show us the way.”
The power of that moment, which carries through the final track, “Will You Sing,” lies in a vibrational parallel to the black church, and all the momentous weight that comes with it. Washington is flagrant in aligning his music with a tradition of transcendent struggle. The feeling he’s chasing is the feeling of someone who’s been to the mountaintop and come back with an urgent story to tell. | 2018-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Young Turks | June 22, 2018 | 8.8 | 727e0491-d92e-4414-bed6-9f62e63d2d94 | Nate Chinen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-chinen/ | |
Discovered in his teens by Warp, Edgar grows up, moves to !K7, and seems to like strip clubs (and strip-club music). | Discovered in his teens by Warp, Edgar grows up, moves to !K7, and seems to like strip clubs (and strip-club music). | Jimmy Edgar: XXX | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14491-xxx/ | XXX | One of the great pleasures of discovering musical prodigies is the knowledge that anyone brilliant enough to create great art at a young age is usually also savvy enough to change over the course of an elongated career. Bob Dylan is the totem example, but everyone from Conor Oberst to Dizzee Rascal has made bold, stirring moves. Even the failures-- usually frequent-- are interesting and fun. Jimmy Edgar was discovered by Warp at 18 in 2001, and he's spent the last decade developing the kind of résumé you might expect from a Detroiter who was playing raves at 15. His work is dotted with hard electro, funk, hip-hop, and raunchy pop. Edgar's XXX, only his second full-length album and first for !K7, is not fun and, more importantly, it's not very interesting.
XXX sounds like strip-club music made by someone who, well, really loves strip clubs. This is not a surprise from an artist whose most famous track is "I Wanna Be Your STD". To put it another way: XXX sounds like what Lords of Acid album covers look like. XXX has attraction, sex, fucking, some afterglow, but it's uncomfortably entitled and vain. "Hot, Raw, Sex" isn't about hot, raw sex, per se, it's about what Edgar considers such an experience to be. The song's mantra: "We had/ What I call/ Hot, raw sex." What are Edgar's standards for hot, raw sex? We don't know!
Edgar has often bristled at those who refer to his music as electronic, and he might finally have a point: Though the source instruments remain analog keyboards and computers, XXX is a fairly straight pop-funk album. He's probably taking aim at Prince, and sometimes he gets there: the slow-winding groove of "Physical Motion", the pillow keys and spacey funk of "Midnite Fone Call". More often he finds Prince's weirdo offspring: David Banner's whisper-porn on "Push", the brainy thwump of Mu (minus the heavy psychosis) on "In My Color".
In interviews, Edgar is confrontational, declarative, and tactless. Describing his favorite festival moment in an interview with Resident Advisor, Edgar said, "I've got video tape of black security guards booty dancing to my set at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival a few years ago. Then it pans to a one-armed break dancer, spinning on his nub." This kind of reckless confidence-- that of a person who was declared a musical force at such a young age-- bleeds into XXX. The album feels haughty and off-putting even when its influences (frequently) and execution (less so) are on-point. We expect roadbumps with prodigies, but Edgar should be encouraged to fail more charmingly next time. | 2010-07-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-07-27T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | July 27, 2010 | 4.4 | 727f9ad8-2ac8-4b6e-9d3e-226c60b5540e | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
The Scottish noise-pop legends’ second album since reuniting strikes a reflective, unusually congenial tone, paying tribute to rock history and their place within it. | The Scottish noise-pop legends’ second album since reuniting strikes a reflective, unusually congenial tone, paying tribute to rock history and their place within it. | The Jesus and Mary Chain: Glasgow Eyes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-jesus-and-mary-chain-glasgow-eyes/ | Glasgow Eyes | Since their landmark 1985 debut Psychocandy, the Jesus and Mary Chain thrived on the familial tension between William and Jim Reid, the brothers at the heart of the band. The friction that spurred their artistry during their heyday ultimately proved to be their undoing, culminating in a notorious onstage implosion at the House of Blues Los Angeles in September 1998. The Reids finally immortalize that incident in “jamcod,” the first single from Glasgow Eyes, an album that answers the question: What would a harmonious Jesus and Mary Chain sound like?
Glasgow Eyes is only the second album of new material the band has released since reuniting in 2007. After nearly a decade apart, the Reids mended fences so they could headline Coachella, then spent another 10 years figuring out how to move forward as a creative unit. They reemerged in 2017 with Damage and Joy, co-produced with Youth, whom the Reids hired because they believed they might need a mediator. Damage and Joy offered a spruced-up spin on the JAMC’s signature blend of rock sleaze and dreamy drones—evidence the group could still deliver new material yet suggesting they could be in danger of recycling past ideas. The Reid brothers opted to push back against looming stagnation by producing Glasgow Eyes themselves, revitalizing their rock’n’roll by focusing on synthesizers, not stompboxes.
Electronics always have lurked within the Jesus and Mary Chain’s sound, shaping the rhythms of Darklands and accentuating the ominous, saturated hues of Automatic. Glasgow Eyes flips the emphasis: synths often take center stage, leaving guitars as either punctuation or texture. The shift in direction is evident from the moment “Venal Joy” kicks off in a whirring squall of electronics underpinned by primitive sequenced drums. “Venal Joy” is insistent but not combative, demonstrating the Jesus and Mary Chain’s ability to bend old-school synths so they sound like the noise-pop that is their stock in trade.
They spend much of Glasgow Eyes pursuing retro electronics to a logical conclusion. Whether it’s the sneering “American Born” or chilled-out thrum of “Discotheque,” the group winds up playing murky new wave that walks the line between homage and satire. A few pointed exceptions arrive during the duo’s strolls through rock’s back pages. “Hey Lou Reid” is split between fuzz-toned garage and oceanic waves of strums—the two sides of the Velvet Underground combined in salute—and “The Eagles and the Beatles” is propelled by a riff that purposely nods at “I Love Rock ’n Roll,” the Arrows glam-rocker that Joan Jett & the Blackhearts turned into a standard in 1981 (not to be confused with JAMC’s own “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll,” which opened their 1998 album Munki).
It’s not as simple as nostalgia; the Jesus and Mary Chain have been keenly aware of the arc of rock history since their start. Yet there’s an unmistakably wistful undercurrent in these looks back, even if few songs apart from “jamcod” could be explicitly labeled as autobiography. The brooding “Chemical Animal” plays as a confession (“I fill myself with chemicals/To hide the dark shit I don’t show”); other turns of phrase suggest that former feuds are now resolved. The lyric “Brother, can you hear me calling you?” pops out on “Second of June,” whose bridge concludes with Jim Reid singing his band’s own name. Such fleeting moments of reflection intertwine with a clutch of songs draped in shimmering melancholy. The best is “Silver Strings,” a lithe slice of nocturnal new wave that illustrates the benefits of favoring synths over six strings: It floats, unencumbered by earthly notions.
Beneath its electronic veneer, Glasgow Eyes sounds curiously settled. The synthesized arrangements are something of a sleight of hand, disguising how the Jesus and Mary Chain aren’t abandoning their old obsessions; they’re still singing about longing and decadence. Ultimately, what’s different about Glasgow Eyes is not the form but the tenor. As they advance into middle age, the tension between the Reid brothers has dissipated, giving Glasgow Eyes an unusually congenial spirit. | 2024-03-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-22T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fuzz Club | March 22, 2024 | 6.5 | 728665ca-5436-41f6-8dd1-8f20e8ef4d79 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Packing 15 producers into 50 minutes, the fun but overstuffed Future Nostalgia rework hopscotches between piano house, Baltimore club, and the kind of dance remixes that power Chelsea gay bars. | Packing 15 producers into 50 minutes, the fun but overstuffed Future Nostalgia rework hopscotches between piano house, Baltimore club, and the kind of dance remixes that power Chelsea gay bars. | Dua Lipa / The Blessed Madonna: Club Future Nostalgia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dua-lipa-the-blessed-madonna-club-future-nostalgia/ | Club Future Nostalgia | A pop diva is poorer without her remixes. Madonna’s dance remixes span Shep Pettibone’s kinetic “Express Yourself” rework to Stuart Price’s revitalizing overhaul of her discography on ’00s tours. Whitney Houston’s club versions brought extra oomph to a joyous NYC Pride performance in 1999. (“If your music’s banging in the clubs, you’re doing okay,” Houston noted.) And the hip-hop and dance remixes of Mariah Carey, pop’s queen of the remix, lower drawbridges between genres and become playgrounds for innovation.
Not all of these icons descended from the pop pantheon to party with the people. But Dua Lipa, who made True Blue for the 2020s with this year’s Future Nostalgia, is a raver. At last year’s Glastonbury festival, she wore sunglasses, a red wig, and adopted the alter-ego “Valentina Vicious” so that she could party in peace. Lipa met The Blessed Madonna that weekend, and linked up with the Kentucky-born producer earlier this year to create Club Future Nostalgia, a fun but overstuffed mix that hopscotches between piano house, Baltimore club, and the kind of dance remixes that power Chelsea gay bars like so many cheap well drinks. A stacked lineup includes Masters at Work, Mr. Fingers, Mark Ronson, Yaeji, and Moodymann, with seamless transitions from The Blessed Madonna. But heavy-handed editing can make Club Future Nostalgia feel oddly uneven.
Yaeji whittles and rebuilds “Don’t Start Now” into bouncy minimal disco, chopping her own murmured vocals into the beat like ASMR with somewhere to be. The previously unreleased “Love Is Religion,” remixed by The Blessed Madonna, sounds like a Lip Sync for Your Life song from RuPaul’s Drag Race in the best way. Mr. Fingers’ skeletal version of “Hallucinate” lifts just “I’ma love you like a fool/Breathe you in till I hallucinate” from Lipa’s original. In his edit, “fool” sounds like “fucker,” a soundtrack for any darkroom sex god to lay out their agenda to a willing partner. But the Mr. Fingers track is abbreviated—The Blessed Madonna adds a superfluous sample of Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” which takes up nearly a third of its runtime. Similarly, Jacques Lu Cont’s Balearic rework of the previously-unreleased “That Kind of Woman” is sublime, but getting only three minutes of it feels like a tease; Lu Cont, aka Stuart Price, can make every second of a seven-minute remix feel essential.
DJ drops from Lipa punctuate the record, a trick Vince Staples also used on his 2018 album FM!, which was styled as a radio show. Club Future Nostalgia feels less like London pirate radio than a show from one of BBC Radio 1’s most inquisitive DJs. That accessibility isn’t a bad thing. Jayda G’s amped-up version of “Cool” is exactly what you want to hear in a warehouse at 3 AM, football whistles and all, and Horse Meat Disco’s euphoric “Love Again” seems to be made for the moment when the sun starts to peek through a club’s shutters. But Club Future Nostalgia’s starriest moments are some of its weakest. Mark Ronson’s depressingly loungey remix of “Physical,” with a disappointing verse from Stefani, manages to make one of the year’s most vivid pop songs feel like background music. And the irresistible “Levitating” is deflated by phoned-in features from Madonna and Missy Elliott, who were more charismatic when they teamed up for a Gap commercial.
Great DJ sets are built around tension and release, but whipping through 15 producers in 50 minutes, Club Future Nostalgia struggles to build the anticipation to earn a payoff. The most dazzling exception comes at the end of the album: Moodymann’s remix of “Break My Heart” is by far the best track. Built around a bass lick, cowbells, and weird ambiance—clinking bottles, a menacing laugh—it feels terrifying and beautiful. A more left-field approach to Lipa’s music—as seen elsewhere, on Hyperdub artist Loraine James’ dark experimental rework of “Don’t Start Now,” and Erika de Casier’s neo-noir take on “Physical”—would have enriched the mix. As it is, Club Future Nostalgia is a bit like a round of exquisite corpse: fun while it lasts, but somehow less than the sum of its parts.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | Warner | September 2, 2020 | 6.9 | 729114ee-24b8-4221-9a4e-7689b9d7c7fc | Owen Myers | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-myers/ | |
The veteran singer-songwriter takes inspiration from classic country on an album full of barbed wit and insight, but the music could use more of the genre’s bite. | The veteran singer-songwriter takes inspiration from classic country on an album full of barbed wit and insight, but the music could use more of the genre’s bite. | Jenny Lewis: Joy’all | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jenny-lewis-joyall/ | Joy’all | A performer who survived Toys R Us commercials, anti-drug PSAs, and the Shelley Long comedy Troop Beverly Hills, Jenny Lewis has tried to be, to quote Henry James, one of the people on whom nothing is lost. The former co-leader of Rilo Kiley has mastered the sweetly sung, acrid send-up of grifters and drifters, and the valentine to dirtbags and carpetbaggers. L.A. men, she understands, can be as gross and addictive as Red Bull and Hennessy. “This shit is crazy town,” she sings on “Psychos,” the opening track to her fifth solo album, Joy’All; the trick to Lewis is the way her remark might work as both general observation—she’s called the song “an existential take on dating in the modern age”—and a reference to the authors of “Butterfly.”
Her latest music needs that kind of vulgarity. Written as part of a Beck-organized songwriting camp in Nashville and recorded by country pro Dave Cobb, Joy’All has an amiable listlessness: It’s loveable, but I wish there was more to love. The songs rely on samey acoustic strumming. The middle stretch (“Giddy Up,” “Cherry Baby”) barely exists. The many bon mots often float like cornflakes in cold milk atop dull melodic structures (“Psychos” being the obvious example). Country music, despite stereotypes about its casualness, requires precision: Call it the real studio rock. Lewis, adept at a country-leaning aesthetic since at least Rilo Kiley’s 2002 album The Execution of Small Things, has assembled a strong band: Jess Wolfe on backing vocals, Jon Brion on sundry keyboards, and Cobb himself, among others, on guitar are standouts. But it’s as if Lewis forbade them from fussing up her material.
For Lewis, the erstwhile Hollywood scenester, country resonates as a genre that rewards the performance of feeling and foregrounds the outsider-as-insider. On her solo debut, Rabbit Fur Coat, she embraced bluegrass and the harmonizing aplomb of Parton-Ronstadt-Harris. Joy’All attempts a more conventional genre tightroping. “Marvin Gaye, Timberlake, Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, John Prine, Waylon and Willie,” she sings in “Love Feel” (Justin Timberlake’s here presumably not for the way he holds a guitar). That the list includes not a single woman is fascinating, an example of the way in which certain female country-adjacent rock acts obsess over the masculine performance of sensuality and toughness—what, no Tammy, Reba, Rosanne, and Miranda? To confuse matters, she offers this affirmation in “Psychos”: “I’m a rock-and-roll disciple in a video game.”
An album composed for adults whose songs target men who act like boys, Joy’All makes no concessions to the youth market. “My forties are kicking my ass and handing them to me in a margarita glass,” she reveals on “Puppy and a Truck,” one of the songs destined to enter her canon—fingerpoppin’ folk-pop in the mode of “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard,” or pick-your-track from hero John Prine’s flawless mid-’70s run. Bassist Brian Allen lays down a bubblicious groove on the precisely inhabited title track, where Lewis rhymes “adore ya” and “troll ya.” Its spare white funk gives the impression that Lewis heard and liked Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters.
Still, I miss those serrated instrumental gracenotes on previous kiss-offs—say, Ryan Adams’ guitar solo in “She’s Not Me,” a masterpiece of accretive sourness (imagine what Cobb client Jason Isbell might’ve contributed to this album’s boring songs, and how he might’ve given shock treatment to the good ones). Twenty years in the biz imbues artists with resourcefulness, though, and Joy’All’s quietest song is its most chilling. “The essence of life is suffering,” Lewis sings in the mournful “Essence of Life,” but before you call bullshit she acknowledges in another verse the paradox: “The essence of life is ecstasy.” The instrumental filigrees work: Beneath her vocal track a tremoloed pedal steel line by Greg Leisz underscores the sentiment. Melding her aphoristic instincts and country’s variations on performative sadness, “Essence of Life” distills how a singer-songwriter of Lewis’ acuity can kick ass in her forties. She has songs enough, and time. | 2023-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Blue Note / Capitol | June 14, 2023 | 6.7 | 7293385f-bd26-42e3-b4ef-5f9f3d5aa1fa | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | |
The debut solo album from Melody Prochet is a record of enchanting, psychedelic-tinged pop with just the right amount of thematic darkness. Produced by Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, Melody's Echo Chamber is one of the more satisfying LPs in recent times to bear Broadcast's influence. | The debut solo album from Melody Prochet is a record of enchanting, psychedelic-tinged pop with just the right amount of thematic darkness. Produced by Tame Impala's Kevin Parker, Melody's Echo Chamber is one of the more satisfying LPs in recent times to bear Broadcast's influence. | Melody’s Echo Chamber: Melody's Echo Chamber | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17095-melodys-echo-chamber/ | Melody's Echo Chamber | At a Tame Impala show in Paris two years ago, Melody Prochet, French pop aficionado and multi-instrumentalist for the band My Bee's Garden, became intrigued by the Aussie psych-rockers' scuzzy sonics. She struck up a conversation with the band's Kevin Parker after the show about how he achieved the band's signature, blown-out bass sound in particular, and a while later he asked My Bee's Garden to support Tame Impala on a European leg of their tour. Though her own band's sound was clean and somewhat precious, Prochet remained drawn to the Tame Impala aesthetic. So when she decided to go solo, she asked Parker to produce, and to push her out of her comfort zone a bit. "I tend to write songs with pretty chords and arpeggios, and I was kind of boring myself," she recalled. "So I asked Kevin to destroy everything."
Mission accomplished. Recorded mostly at Parker's home studio in Perth, the resulting self-titled debut from Melody's Echo Chamber is a record of psych-tinged pop with just the right amount of thematic darkness and grime around the edges. Prochet has a way with melody and a voice that places her among the top-tier graduates of the Trish Keenan and Laetitia Sadier school of dream pop, but it's Parker's signature production that helps this record transcend its forever-in-vogue 1960s pop influences. ("This record was my dream sound," Prochet said in a recent interview. "I've tried for years to get it but finally found the right hands to sculpt it.") Full of immersive textures that give off an echoey depth and prismatic riffs that tumble through space, Parker's production grants this record its own laws of gravity.
The record's best songs tease out tension between soft and hard edges-- a combination of beauty and brittleness. Excellent lead-off single "I Follow You" pairs an exquisitely sugary melody with a fuzzy, syncopated riff, while the dreamy "Crystallized" detonates in its final moments into a kraut-y electro freak-out. Beginning with a toy-soldier beat and warmly warped synth tones, "You Won't Be Missing That Part of Me" blooms into one of the record's best moments, a kiss-off song that flips the usual script and takes the perspective of the heartbreaker rather than the heartbreak ("Because I lied with all my heart, because it's time to change my life... Hold on, you'll see it won't be that hard to forget me.") Parker's production is perhaps at its most stunning on "Some Time Alone, Alone", on which Prochet's arpeggios rain down like a chandelier being hit with a sledgehammer in slow-motion.
The shards occasionally prick: "Mount Hopeless" is fittingly gloomy, and there's even a song about post-plane crash cannibalism called "Snowcapped Andes Crash". But for as odd and chilling as that song sounds on paper, it falls flat in execution, languishing on a Side B that doesn't quite have enough ideas or surprises to save from some repetitive lulls. Prochet hasn't quite figured out how to do anything interesting with the macabre that lurks somewhere in this record's sound, and it leaves you wishing she'd explored Melody's dark side a little more, à la Broadcast's creepy masterpiece Tender Buttons. Of course, Prochet's melodies can't quite fill the Broadcast-shaped void left in the wake of Keenan's untimely death, but Melody's Echo Chamber is one of the more satisfying records to bear that band's influence in recent years. For a collaboration between a songwriter and a producer who helped push her to the outer limits of her vision, Melody's Echo Chamber is an impressively immersive debut. | 2012-09-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-09-25T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | September 25, 2012 | 7.4 | 72946193-c396-425a-97f6-a849a7c777c2 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
On their new Is Survived By, LA post-hardcore outfit Touché Amoré emphasizes a studied recklessness, cranking out one anthemic riff after another, providing a familiar melodic framework that just skirts total recall. | On their new Is Survived By, LA post-hardcore outfit Touché Amoré emphasizes a studied recklessness, cranking out one anthemic riff after another, providing a familiar melodic framework that just skirts total recall. | Touché Amoré: Is Survived By | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18598-touche-amore-is-survived-by/ | Is Survived By | After a bracing EP and two genre-revitalizing LPs, nothing was the same for Los Angeles post-hardcore band Touché Amoré going into Is Survived By. Lead singer Jeremy Bolm’s got a lot on his mind-- He’s concerned about what his third album will mean for his legacy as an artist and whether he’s focused too much on what he does rather than who he is. He sees the replication of his father’s shortcomings in his current relationships, but realizes his old man did the best he could. Fake friends are forgiven and then quickly forgotten as Bolm starts to like who he’s becoming. Or, in short, Touché Amoré started from the bottom and the whole team’s fuckin’ here on the superlative Is Survived By, including Balance & Composure’s Jon Simmons, Andy Hull of Manchester Orchestra and revered indie producer Brad Wood.
Granted, it’s unlikely that Is Survived By will divert the attention of Drake listeners this week even if they’d find plenty of thematic similarities. But it’s not impossible and Touché Amoré appear keenly aware that Is Survived By has them poised to reach beyond a fanbase that can be described as “hardcore” one way or the other. For the most part, Bolm is trying to maintain some sort of grace while kinda freaking out about the situation-- “you can call this coming clean or a repeat of what you know/ about the struggles I once had as I’m learning to let go”, goes the frantic introduction of “To Write Content.” He tips his hand with the mere title of “Social Caterpillar” and assures the listener, “don’t worry I still get dizzy in the usual situations.” Sure, he was still pulling hours at a Burbank record shop this year, but as the frontman for an intensely loved and meaningful punk band, he gets put in a lot of unusual situations for the typical guy.
For example, the one he encounters on opener “Just Exist”, where someone inquires how he’d “like to be remembered”, the sort of question typically asked of, say, Drake. His answer becomes the sole joke on an album of almost superhuman sobriety-- “I simply smiled and said ‘I’d rather stay forever.’” By the song’s end, he figures out the trick is in the title (“you’ll never know much of the truth/so I’ll just exist”) and as insular as Bolm’s concerns may be, Touché Amoré veer towards accessibility in all aspects on Is Survived By.
Bolm still maintains the same jagged wail that got Touché Amoré (not wrongfully) tagged as “screamo” at the outset-- all grit and serration, no affectation-- and the band provides plenty of max-chaos-per-second supercolliders in the form of “DNA” and “Blue Angel". Only this time, they’re placed in the context of these funny things called “songs.” Some of them run up to three whole minutes and beyond, some are slow and even pretty in a twinkly emo kind of way (“To Write Content”, “Non Fiction”), some are love songs and all of them are produced with clarity and precision by a guy whose big credits are for Liz Phair, Smashing Pumpkins and Sunny Day Real Estate records that are older than a lot of the kids I see at Touché Amoré shows.
Is Survived By is about 50% longer than any other Touché Amoré album and the quintet wisely instruct the listener how to pace themselves. The near a cappella “Praise/Love” and near post-rock instrumental “Non Fiction” would be remarkable for introducing variety alone; in the scheme of Is Survived By, they’re plot devices, introducing lyrical and musical motifs repeated immediately thereafter in “Anyone/Anything” and “Steps". These tracks jolt the listener right back with choruses that go outside the scope of “melodic hardcore” into a bruised and spittle-flecked pop-punk that comes awfully close to radio-friendly, even if you’ll never hear it at Warped Tour.
In essence, it’s an excellent band continuing to be excellent with more people paying attention. They haven’t lost sight of what got them here, however the band downplays their own virtuosity by emphasizing a studied recklessness, cranking out one anthemic riff after another, providing a familiar melodic framework that just skirts total recall. They serve as a setting for a frontman who barks out words that take the shape of narratives and conversations rather than poetry. In particular, “Harbor” and “To Write Content” are story-songs as well as cerebral exercises based upon the multiple (mis)readings of their titles. On the latter, Bolm meets Hull for the first time through mutual friends in New York and communes over a common concern shared by an LA punk band and a southern, grungy emo act-- can your personal happiness be an artistic liability?
There is a lot of “I” and “me” on Is Survived By, but it focuses on the social utility of the self, that a content person is more likely to make a positive difference. On the closing title track, Bolm implores the listener to “write a song that everyone can sing along to/ so when you’re gone, you can live on/they won’t forget you.” It’s easy to meet that statement with cynicism: surely, our society would be better off if fewer people believed they were a special little snowflake with a song that needs to be heard, right? But if you haven’t seen Touché Amoré live, you should, in part because it provides the proper visual-- the raw-throated, stone-faced man you hear on Is Survived By is liable to appear cleancut, constantly smiling even and he knows his band would be nothing without you. “Is Survived By” is pretty much an audio thank you note. The physicality of Is Survived By is more like a bear hug than an ass-kicking, wherein the passion can be scary at first, but it’s disarming, done out of love. They take this stuff seriously because this, right here, matters. You matter. And within these songs is the struggle in realizing that self-esteem comes more from estimable acts than outside validation. Is Survived By should receive plenty praise anyway, but Touché Amoré lead by example. | 2013-10-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-10-04T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Deathwish | October 4, 2013 | 8 | 72970676-2d72-4845-b0c3-dd5d9dad26c8 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This 2xCD collection, which draws from four albums and other material the Velvet Underground drummer recorded over two decades, includes guest spots from her VU bandmates as well as Daniel Johnston and members of Half Japanese, the Violent Femmes, and Sonic Youth. | This 2xCD collection, which draws from four albums and other material the Velvet Underground drummer recorded over two decades, includes guest spots from her VU bandmates as well as Daniel Johnston and members of Half Japanese, the Violent Femmes, and Sonic Youth. | Moe Tucker: I Feel So Far Away: Anthology 1974-1998 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16612-moe-tucker-i-feel-so-far-away-anthology-1974-1998/ | I Feel So Far Away: Anthology 1974-1998 | One of the most indelible moments in PBS's 1995 "Rock & Roll" documentary comes when we see the Velvet Underground's drummer, Maureen "Moe" Tucker, slapping her thighs-- bang bang bang bang bang, no variation, no emphasis-- and then half-grinning at the camera and explaining "That's 'I'm Waiting for the Man'." Tucker was the Thing of the Velvets' Fantastic Four, the B.A. Baracus of their A-Team, a hedgehog in a band of foxes: They were avant-gardists and songcrafters and texturalists, but she was an unstoppable brute-force musician who grounded and drove their first three albums and their live shows.
Her singular gift (and game-amateur singing voice) also made her the least likely member of the Velvet Underground to have a solo career, and after briefly rejoining the Doug Yule-led lineup, she drifted away from music for nearly a decade. Aside from a remake of the Velvets' then-unreleased "I'm Sticking With You" recorded in 1974 with the band's disciples Jonathan Richman and Willie Alexander, I Feel So Far Away picks up the story in 1980, picking over the four studio albums and other material she recorded over the next two decades.
For the most part, she stuck to comfortable territory: low-polish, uncomplicated rock'n'roll, with the occasional heart-on-sleeve slow one. Six of the songs on these two discs are Velvets remakes; two more are by Bo Diddley, and a third is named after him. There are covers of "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", "To Know Him Is to Love Him", "Then He Kissed Me", and "Danny Boy". Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison all turn up in Tucker's groups here-- all three of them on "I'm Not". (Other guest stars include Daniel Johnston, Half Japanese, two Violent Femmes, and three Sonic Youth.)
Two discs of solo Moe is probably a surplus for anyone but Velvet Underground aficionados, although there are a lot of those. The only original song that really stands up alongside their canon is "Hey Mersh!", from Tucker's headlong 1989 album Life in Exile After Abdication, with Reed's lead guitar carving his initials all over it. There's also something to be said for 1982's Playin' Possum, a bunch of home-recorded oldies (plus "Heroin") on which Tucker played everything herself: It's loose, out of tune, and clearly done purely for the fun of flexing the old muscles. And if anybody's got the right to write a ripoff of the Velvets' "I Can't Stand It" (1991's "Too Shy"), it's the inventor of that cavewoman beat.
Tucker apparently quit making music about 10 years ago; she was most recently in the public eye about a year and a half ago, when she appeared on TV news as a Tea Party supporter. Her strongest political statements, though, appear here: "That's B.A.D." and "Spam Again", both of which concern the economic trap Tucker found herself in as one of the working poor. That a member of one of America's most important rock bands could have to struggle to support her kids with a low-wage job at Wal-Mart is an embarrassment for both the country and the music business. | 2012-05-15T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-05-15T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Sundazed | May 15, 2012 | 6.6 | 72996b0e-b54f-4be7-a12f-f04138206f6c | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
Gaussian Curve is a multi-generational ensemble focusing on beautiful slow-burn ambience. Clouds unfolds like a dream, and to call it "atmospheric" would be an extreme understatement. It probably bears as much in common with watercolor as it does most electronic music. | Gaussian Curve is a multi-generational ensemble focusing on beautiful slow-burn ambience. Clouds unfolds like a dream, and to call it "atmospheric" would be an extreme understatement. It probably bears as much in common with watercolor as it does most electronic music. | Gaussian Curve: Clouds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20064-clouds/ | Clouds | One of last year's most warmly received archival discoveries was Talk to the Sea, a collection of unreleased recordings by the Italian musician Gigi Masin. His debut album, Wind, self-released in 1986, is an understated gem that falls somewhere between Balearic ambient music and secular new age, with echoes of Harold Budd, Jon Hassell, and Arthur Russell's World of Echo. It's not terribly well known, but those who have heard it tend to be passionate about it. A former radio DJ, Masin has done other things over the years, including a 1989 split LP with This Heat's Charles Hayward, on Sub Rosa, and, in the '00s, a handful of recordings for small Italian labels. But he's remained largely under the radar. I had never heard of Masin until I encountered Talk to the Sea, released by the fledgling Amsterdam label Music From Memory, but its impact was immediate—if "impact" is quite the right word for a sound so warmly, woozily amniotic, a sound entirely without hard surfaces or sharp edges.
Masin returns here as one-third of Gaussian Curve, a multi-generational ensemble that also includes the Scottish musician Jonny Nash, a founder of the ESP Institute label and member of the synth-besotted softronica act Land of Light, and Amsterdam's Marco Sterk, better known for his woozy house productions under the Young Marco alias. Nash and Sterk first met Masin in the fall of 2013, and they wound up briefly jamming together in the house of a friend. The three musicians reconvened in Amsterdam in early 2014, and they ended up completing eight tracks in a single weekend. Clouds is the result of those sessions, and it's every bit as dreamlike as the musicians make the weekend sound. "It was almost like we weren't involved," Nash told Juno Plus. "It just slipped out."
The eight songs here, all instrumentals, feel less like standalone pieces than variations on a common theme. They share similar instrumentation, and they're all uniformly limpid and languid. Masin sets the tone, and the pace, with slow-moving chords on acoustic piano or Rhodes keyboard, while Nash and Sterk flesh out the songs with gently meandering electric guitar, wispy synthesizer pads, and, occasionally, trumpet and melodica. Given the trumpet, the music often brings to mind Jon Hassell's Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street. A few songs feature rudimentary drum-machine programming, mostly just tuned toms and woodblocks, that might be mistaken for dripping faucets. To call it "atmospheric" would be an extreme understatement. (On the closing "Red Light", they hold a microphone out the studio window and record the voices and footfalls of the alley outside.) It probably bears as much in common with watercolor as it does most electronic music.
While the music unfolds with about as much drama as a smoke ring wafting towards the ceiling—about as much consequence, too—these are masterfully crafted mood pieces. In the opening "Talk to the Church", Masin mimics the chimes of a bell tower that loomed over the trio's studio, his chords gently bouncing and swaying, enlivened by millisecond-long syncopations and subtle shifts in volume. And despite the limited palette and the uniform tempos, they wisely change keys for virtually every song. So while the view remains the same, the light shifts, ever so subtly. True to the title, the experience of this short album, just 38 minutes long, feels a little like a time-lapse film of clouds crossing the sky—of day turning to night, and back again. With the closing "Red Light", the music returns to its original key, and it feels like things have come full circle. The logical response—my response, anyway—is to resume the cycle, and launch into the daybreak bells of "Talk to the Church" all over again. | 2015-01-14T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-01-14T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Music From Memory | January 14, 2015 | 7.8 | 729f9b4e-56a2-4b9c-ab66-57b7f2404467 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The Chicago composer and clarinetist’s latest album interrogates the supposed “death” of jazz. Structured as an Afrofuturist requiem, it offers an impassioned look at the genre’s role in Black history. | The Chicago composer and clarinetist’s latest album interrogates the supposed “death” of jazz. Structured as an Afrofuturist requiem, it offers an impassioned look at the genre’s role in Black history. | Angel Bat Dawid: *Requiem for Jazz * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angel-bat-dawid-requiem-for-jazz/ | Requiem for Jazz | Rumors of jazz’s demise have hung over the genre for decades. In 1960, composer and filmmaker Edward Bland asked, “What, then, is the future of jazz? None. Jazz is dead!” His 1959 film The Cry of Jazz had argued that the structural elements of the genre—its recurring forms and chord changes—could not evolve. Whereas Ornette Coleman simply abandoned these restraints on the same year’s The Shape of Jazz to Come, Bland saw the exhaustion of jazz’s fundamental musical materials as its end.
“If jazz is dead, why wasn’t there a funeral?” asks Angel Bat Dawid. Requiem for Jazz, the Chicago composer, clarinetist, and educator’s latest album, is a requiem mass for jazz recorded 60 years after Bland’s film. The service was held at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival in 2019 and featured Tha ArkeStarzz, a 15-piece instrumental ensemble, and Tha Choruzz, a four-person choir, along with dancers and visual artists. The 12 parts of Dawid’s Requiem, from the Introit to the Lux Aeterna, are adapted from the Roman Catholic Liturgical Requiem Missal and paired with dialogue from The Cry of Jazz. Later, Dawid created interludes that sampled the performance and added her own Auto-Tuned vocals, clarinet, and drum machines to create a sprawling, 24-track opus designed to, finally, lay the genre to rest.
The death of jazz was not necessarily a tragedy. For Bland, the death of its body was necessary for its spirit to survive. Jazz’s endlessly repeating choruses represented a “futureless future,” the cyclical daily oppression of Black Americans, while the elaboration of the melody by the soloist reaffirmed an “eternal present,” the constant improvisational creativity needed for survival. The Cry of Jazz intercuts images of poverty in Black Chicago neighborhoods with footage of joyful church gatherings. “Jazz is dead because the restraints and suffering of the Negro have to die,” the narrator says. “Jazz is alive because the Negro spirit must endure.” Dawid leads her ensemble like a minister who has taken Bland’s film as her text. “Let me preach,” she proclaims in the interlude to “LACRIMOSA- Weeping Our Lady of Sorrow.” “In the movie, he said, ‘We made a memory of our past and a promise of all to come.’ Guess what, I wasn’t born in 1959! I am the promise! Everyone on this stage is the promise!”
Dawid’s ensemble grieves for jazz’s memory and exalts in its promise on songs that range from melancholy ballads to angry martial chants to rollicking improvisations. Throughout, they recount jazz’s role as a momentary stay against systemic oppression, what Bland calls “the Negro’s answer to America’s ceaseless attempts to obliterate him.” “KYRIE ELEISON- Lawd Hav’ Merci” is a slow dirge, a cappella except for subtle percussion, that builds from a dense choral harmony into a wild lament for the “stolen children of Africa,” while “OFFERTURIUM-HOSTIAS- Humility” celebrates the genre’s apotheosis as “the one element in American life where whites must be humble to the Negro” with a jaunty tune centered around a freewheeling piano solo by Dr. Charles Joseph Smith. The album’s climax, “AGNUS DEI- Jazz is Dead!” is a dramatic number in which the strings and horns trade swirling melodies over plodding percussion while the choir sings that “The jazz body is dead/But the spirit is alive.”
Requiem for Jazz borrows from spirituals, the blues, rap, and Mozart, but Dawid’s most direct influence is Sun Ra, a fellow Southern migrant who moved to Chicago to enlighten audiences with cosmic jazz. An early iteration of Ra’s Arkestra was featured in The Cry of Jazz demonstrating the forms and changes that Bland said doomed the genre. In the following decades, Ra’s interplanetary ethos shaped the Afrofuturist movement that informs the work of Dawid and other artists, like Moor Mother and Matana Roberts, who are invested in notions of Black temporality. Bland’s film posed similar questions by positing that jazz’s “eternal present” guards against the “futureless future” imposed upon Black Americans by white America. It is doubly appropriate, then, that the current leader of the Arkestra, Marshall Allen, appears at the end of the concert playing a blazing sax solo to help Tha ArkeStarzz mourn the loss of jazz.
Requiem for Jazz is a complex record, requiring sustained attention and careful thought. Though it lacks the fiery rage and visceral immediacy of 2020’s LIVE, its nuanced critique of jazz’s role in Black history is an important and necessary continuation of the conversation that Bland began over six decades ago. The concert is as much an exorcism as a funeral rite, an attempt to free the participants from the ugly ghosts of America’s racist past in order to make a different future possible. Dawid believes in the power of jazz—not its restraining elements, but its creative potential—with the evangelical fervor of a preacher, and expects to see the results of her faith enacted in the world. She concludes her Requiem with a “long tone,” a collective hum generated by the band and the audience. She brings a child onstage to dedicate the performance to: “I don’t want this to be what she has to look forward to, OK?” Dawid pleads, enunciating each word carefully. “I don’t want that for her! So let’s take this deep breath, and let’s let out this tone, so that our future can be bright.” | 2023-03-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-03-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | International Anthem | March 27, 2023 | 8 | 72a357a7-b9fd-4498-acdd-c51e7a1f4c61 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
The seven albums after Bruce Springsteen’s commercial peak tell a story of lost faith and self-doubt. It’s a darker, messier portrait that still includes one of his essential records. | The seven albums after Bruce Springsteen’s commercial peak tell a story of lost faith and self-doubt. It’s a darker, messier portrait that still includes one of his essential records. | Bruce Springsteen / The E Street Band: The Album Collection Vol. 2, 1987-1996 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bruce-springsteen-the-album-collection-vol-2-1987-1996/ | The Album Collection Vol. 2, 1987-1996 | A man works his whole adult life and finds himself exhausted, disillusioned. He looks for comfort in his community and feels trapped. He changes his clothes, his hair, his face—it only makes him feel more lost. Marriage isn’t what he thought it’d be, and neither is the money or stability he’d always dreamed about. The things that seemed so important, well, now he’s not so sure. In 1987, a sharp-dressed man stands beside a Cadillac Coupe De Ville on the side of the road. Eight years later, he wanders the deserts of California wearing a large brimmed hat.
Bruce Springsteen’s output between 1987 and 1996—remastered and collected in this new vinyl box set—tells a story of lost faith and self-doubt. If Springsteen were simply the one telling the story and not also the flailing protagonist tangled up in it, there’d be some catharsis, or at the very least a saxophone solo. While the previous box set in this series chronicled his steady rise to fame through 1984’s commercial peak Born in the U.S.A., the tension throughout the music here stems from his abstinence of those things that had endeared him to the public. It’s a darker, messier portrait.
For many fans, this period can be categorized as a time of “Others.” There was the “Other Band”: the cutting if inevitable name given to the group of Los Angeles studio musicians Springsteen assembled after breaking up his beloved E Street Band in 1988. This “Other Band,” who aspired to harden his sound and add a more soulful sensibility, can be heard on three of these seven records: 1992’s dual studio releases Human Touch and Lucky Town and the following year’s sprightly but inessential In Concert/MTV Plugged. With this band, Springsteen played some excellent shows and added a few new classics to his repertoire (“Living Proof,” “If I Should Fall Behind,” “My Beautiful Reward”), but they never quite inspired him like his most trusted collaborators. There’s a reason why they never outgrew their nickname.
Beyond his accompanists, Springsteen spent this era in search of other characters, other places. With his forties on the horizon, he left New Jersey to settle in New York City and later L.A. He recorded his most understated music (on 1995’s solo album The Ghost of Tom Joad) and his most straightforward rock songs (in the murky barroom fog of Human Touch). In the lyrics, he went as deep into character as he’d ever allow himself (in Tom Joad’s thoroughly researched immigrant ballads) and the closest to autobiography he’d ever come. On some of these records, he even sings from the perspective of a wealthy, aging rockstar, one who draws analogies about “eating caviar and dirt” and finds humor in the garish caricatures of himself he finds hanging in North Jersey pawn shops. Sometimes he dresses like a cowboy; sometimes he dresses like a pirate cowboy. If you weren’t specifically looking for him, you might pass him by.
Accordingly, these are often remembered as Springsteen’s other albums. As in, there’s the Bruce we all know and love, and then there’s this stuff. Some of this music is so tangential to his career that it feels almost like parody: 1996’s Blood Brothers EP, now on vinyl for the first time, is a collection of outtakes from the bonus tracks on his Greatest Hits set. Human Touch is an album cobbled together over several languid years during which Springsteen aimed to compose admittedly “generic” music to pad his upcoming live shows. In 1992, a Rolling Stone journalist asked if he considered scrapping that record once he wrote its more inspired companion release, Lucky Town—a fair question for an artist who famously left some of his finest songs on the cutting room floor, who considered shelving even Born to Run because it didn’t measure up to his standards.
“Yeah,” Springsteen responded. “Except that every time I listened to it, I liked it.”
If there’s a revelation to be found during this era, that’s it. There’s a calmness to this music, a breeziness that counters the intensive self-inquiry in the lyrics. “These days I’m feeling alright/Except I can’t tell my courage from my desperation,” he sings in Lucky Town’s “Local Hero,” a distinction that would have hardly been worth mentioning on previous records. For so much of Springsteen's career, desperation and courage came packaged together: That’s precisely what placed so many of his characters on the road, hurtling toward whatever promised land they dreamed up on the other side. Now, everything seemed to have a price. In an era of so much abandonment, the thing that’s really missing on these records is that sense of blinding, reckless optimism, of transcendence somehow within his grasp. In its place is acceptance, hard-won and subdued, the kind of remove that comes when you find something more important in your life than work. The victory is costlier; the wisdom is quieter.
Take, for example, “Straight Time,” a gorgeous, fingerpicked folk song from The Ghost of Tom Joad. Here, Springsteen gives us a quintessential character in his songbook: a factory worker returning to his family after serving an extended prison sentence. On Nebraska, we might have heard the gritty rundown of his crimes. On Born to Run, we’d witness the epic homecoming celebration. In “Straight Time,” Springsteen barely rises above a ghostly, defeated grumble, narrating the unspoken anxiety guiding his character’s every move. “Seems you can’t get any more than half free,” he sighs.
It’s a lesson that Springsteen learned throughout the ’90s. In retrospect, it’s easy to hear this music as a brief detour before he returned to the past he’d been avoiding: moving his bandmate and wife Patti Scialfa and their children back to New Jersey; relaunching the E Street Band; finding new inspiration in their “a-one-two-three-four” rock’n’roll momentum. The band’s reunion, kickstarted in 1999 and more-or-less chuggin’ along to this day, leaves these records in a peculiar place. The remasters are welcome, even if sound quality is rarely the issue on Springsteen LPs. Not to mention, a compilation of this era isn’t quite definitive without his 1990 solo shows, or non-album cuts like the Oscar-winning “Streets of Philadelphia,” or the mini E Street reunion included at the end of 1995’s Greatest Hits. Instead, this collection provides a fascinating if incomplete dive into an uncelebrated era: a map of the places Bruce Springsteen burrowed away while he was presumed to be lost.
The set kicks off with 1987’s Tunnel of Love, his high point as a writer and one of his truly essential releases. Springsteen has said he designed the album to be like a well, something people can return to “for fun, or sustenance, or some faith, or some companionship.” Like Nebraska, it seems designed for solitary listening. Some of Springsteen’s records build and explode; Tunnel of Love sighs and soothes and, even in its darkness, brings a sense of peace.
The ghost of country music glides through Tunnel of Love, as if it came in through the open window in the garage studio where he recorded the album between the hours of 1 and 6 p.m. over the span of three weeks. Exploring a genre that often inspired him thematically more than formally, Springsteen is rumored to have considered making an old-school country record to follow-up the arena rock blockbuster Born in the U.S.A., enlisting virtuoso harmonica and fiddle players in place of his E Street bandmates. Somewhere along the way, he decided to work by himself, mostly on acoustic guitar and a new state-of-the-art synthesizer. The result is a haunted solo collection with a few notable appearances—Nils Lofgren’s slithering, metallic guitar solo in the title track, Patti Scialfa’s affirming vocal accompaniment in “One Step Up.” The mood throughout is isolation, working through the same questions and hoping to summon new wisdom.
In the video for first single “Brilliant Disguise,” Springsteen lets us in on a convincing recreation of that process. Performing alone at the kitchen table, he stares into the camera as it zooms deeper and deeper into his eyes, increasingly focused and intense. “God have mercy on the man who doubts what he’s sure of,” he sings before it fades to black. Those words, and the ensuing fade, form the emotional core of Tunnel of Love: an album that lingers and gleams like the moment ahead of a revelation. “Usually right before I put a record out, I have a lot of conflict,” he said calmly around the time of its release. “This record, it was like… Stuff came very naturally.”
He continued following his intuition. After tossing around the idea of supporting the album with his first-ever solo tour, Springsteen invited the E Street Band along for a brief run of dates with a horn section. Four highlights from those shows, including an acoustic take on “Born to Run” that sounds like some old lullaby unearthed, were released on 1988’s Chimes of Freedom EP. Once the tour wrapped up, Bruce sent the band their pink slips. Around that time, he also divorced his wife of four years, actress Julianne Phillips. In the liner notes of Tunnel of Love—his album obsessed with what happens at the end of our adult relationships—he included a small shout-out to her: “Thanks Juli.”
For a collection of songs about love, there is very little actual intimacy on Tunnel of Love. Its couples are illustrated instead by the spaces between them. “The lights go out and it’s just the three of us,” Springsteen sings in the title track: “You, me, and all that stuff we’re so scared of.” In “Walk Like a Man,” he thinks back to his wedding day but can only seem to remember that troubling look in his father’s eyes when he gazed at him from the altar. The music is lush and warm, but the things that are missing dominate the frame.
Tunnel of Love—and with it, Bruce Springsteen’s imperial run in the ’80s—closes with “Valentine’s Day,” a ballad so slow and serene that it’s almost dirge-like. To a droning waltz, he narrates from the driver’s seat, with “one hand steady on the wheel, one hand trembling over my heart.” A rush of images flashes before him: the dreary, familiar highways of New Jersey; his own mortality; a friend’s new baby; a partner he’s leaving behind, maybe for good this time. In some Springsteen songs, the journey is the point. At any moment on Tunnel of Love, it’s difficult to imagine what lies ahead. How far do you have to travel before you feel free of yourself? What do you expect to find? Where do you even go? | 2018-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 19, 2018 | 9.5 | 72a3ba2a-10dc-43d9-ae6a-404c319ce2b1 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Produced mostly by Southside and Lex Luger, the collaboration between Waka Flocka Flame and French Montana sounds more well-grounded in the streets of Atlanta than the East Coast rap scene. | Produced mostly by Southside and Lex Luger, the collaboration between Waka Flocka Flame and French Montana sounds more well-grounded in the streets of Atlanta than the East Coast rap scene. | Waka Flocka Flame / French Montana: Lock Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16237-lock-out/ | Lock Out | Last year was a weird one for albums by rap duos. We had Jay-Z and Kanye, Eminem and Royce Da 5'9", and of course Gucci Mane, who released two major label duo albums-- the disappointing Ferrari Boyz with Waka Flocka Flame and the bizarre BAYTL with Kreayshawn associate V-Nasty. This time out, Waka pairs with French Montana, who has worked extensively with the currently imprisoned Max B, formally of the Harlem based Byrdgang.
Coming from Atlanta by way of New York City, Waka's energetic and aggressive style has endured longer than most probably would have suspected. When he released his first single, "O Let's Do It", he was mostly known as the guy standing in the shadows of old Gucci Mane and OJ Da Juiceman videos. French Montana has been around for a few more years than Waka in the New York mixtape circuit, but last year's "Choppa Choppa Down" and his most recent single, "Shot Caller", got him signed to Bad Boy Records and got his name out there nationwide.
Given the players, you might expect Lock Out to be an East Coast rap affair, but with a couple of exceptions (the bouncy seriousness of "Dat All" and the triumphant finale of "Promise"), the tape sounds well-grounded in the streets of Atlanta. The production on Lock Out is handled mostly by two producers with whom Waka has worked extensively (Southside and Lex Luger), alongside other lesser-knowns who share an appreciation for dark, brooding beats that are, ultimately, pretty hard to distinguish from one another. The first half of the tape finds French Montana struggling to find his footing as his flow reduces songs to a slow creak, while Waka affirms his ability to rip any rap instrumental he comes across. "1230" has a great opening verse by Waka, and he delivers one of the strongest hooks on the mixtape, but the momentum that track builds is lost as soon as French appears, as he just cannot keep up with Waka's pace.
French Montana does have a few moments like "Call It Dat", a rare track where they display an equal amount of intensity. The same goes for "We Mobb" featuring Prodigy, where French sounds right at home and Waka shows going back to his New York roots can work, as they rap over the beat from Mobb Deep's vintage "Hell on Earth". But the more you hear the mixtape, the more you wish they'd found a better middle ground. The first single from Waka's upcoming album, "Round of Applause", produced by Lex Luger, is a great slice of Atlanta strip club music in the vein of Travis Porter, and it's a good match for French's style, since it would allow him to relax his flow a bit. French's recent hit single "Shot Caller" is a jazzy New York cut that could use a regional expanding verse energy ball verse from Waka to give it more radio and club appeal. On these songs, you get a better sense of why they'd want to work together, but Lock Out never comes close to that promise. | 2012-02-01T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-02-01T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 1, 2012 | 5 | 72a7a74c-d487-4fad-bbb1-993188aa0469 | David Turner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-turner/ | null |
Returning to his long-running solo act, the Japanese producer Keigo Oyamada aims for the glowing emotional core of his playful, retro-futuristic aesthetic. | Returning to his long-running solo act, the Japanese producer Keigo Oyamada aims for the glowing emotional core of his playful, retro-futuristic aesthetic. | Cornelius: Mellow Waves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cornelius-mellow-waves/ | Mellow Waves | On his first proper album in over a decade, the meticulous pop experimenter known as Cornelius arrives floating on the promised Mellow Waves of its title. Gentle guitars and soft-hued synths sustain a mood of a familiar but far-flung locale: a veneer of artistic maturity that camouflages the brilliant and ambitious playfulness of the 48-year-old former guitarist Keigo Oyamada’s music. Known for the wild, kaleidoscopic pastiche of 1997’s Fantasma, Oyamada’s Cornelius continues to specialize in creating moments of startling fun, even if his sonic palette isn’t always as show-offy and sugar-coated as it once was.
It’s as subdued an album as Oyamada has made. The jazzy exotica of the opening “If You’re Here” sounds so much like pop that Oyamada’s deconstructed arrangement flits by almost unnoticed. But it is music no one else could make. Oyamada’s hyperactive early albums, representative of Tokyo’s cut-and-paste Shibuya-kei scene of the mid-’90s, led to a career defined not by novelty but an evolving compositional voice. While bloops skittered across a vast bleep grid on 2002’s Point and bright grooves dominated 2006’s Sensuous, Mellow Waves aims itself at the glowing emotional core of Oyamada’s retro-futuristic soundworld; it even contains, in both Japanese and English, some fairly straightforward love songs. Though he’s still drawing from the same kitschy waters from which he pulled his Planet of the Apes-referencing name, the easy pop feels of songs like “In a Dream” are its least interesting moments, despite being a tonal element that holds the album together.
But thankfully “subdued,” by Cornelius’s standards, still entails unceasing rhythmic invention, perhaps the central musical theme of his career. Filling the stereo horizon with flickering instrumental flashes that often careen off each other in intricately syncopated arrangements, even the album’s most lulling moments have non-mellow currents churning beneath the surface. Live, Cornelius and his band have been known to transmogrify his constructions into surprisingly fluid Stop Making Sense-like grooves, all miraculously synced to the songs’ dizzyingly rhythmic videos. Mellow Waves’ lead clip, for the dreamy “If You’re Here,” continues this trend with a strikingly complementary pairing of sound and image.
Which isn’t to say Cornelius doesn’t still get lit and set off fireworks. Keyboards and acoustic guitars and synth dabs politely pop into view during the verse of “Sometime / Someplace,” culminating in an ecstatic chorus filled with slashing, dizzyingly panned guitar and, by the song’s end, a toy noise break. It’s classic Oyamada, perhaps as close to Fantasma as he’s gotten since that album. “Mellow Yellow Feel” goes equally ape, with a stacked Cornelius chorus and stereo-panned interlocking guitar patterns in the manner of Point. But in general, he keeps it under his wig, musically speaking. On the archetypal Cornelius groove “Helix / Spiral,” a repeated vocal mantra almost completely distracts from the digital snares, synth patterns, robo-voices, and other rhythmic events, all making coordinated entrances as if high-stepping into a Busby Berkeley Hollywood dance spectacular one soundstage over.
Releasing his American debut on mega-indie Matador near the late-‘90s peak of the pre-Napster CD era, Oyamada was futuristic beyond his sound, setting the stage for the more global scene of the 21st century. While “Shibuya-kei” may not make for trend pieces anymore, its eclectic and playful coordinates can be heard in a range of contemporary projects like Are Euphoria, the most recent collection of hyper-real dream-paths by ex-Ponytail guitarist Dustin Wong and producer Takako Minekawa, Oyamada’s ex-wife. Former Yura Yura Teikoku leader Shintaro Sakamoto (who contributes lyrics on Mellow Waves), has lately taken his own exotica interests to Hawaiian lap-steel-dappled climes. Cornelius continues on, too. Though Mellow Waves follows Sensuous by 11 years, Oyamada has spent his time on video game and anime soundtracks and productions for other artists (Salyu x Salyu’s S(o)un(d)beams is a must for serious Cornelius heads).
Concluding with a trio of electro-acoustic reveries, including the English-language “The Spell of a Vanishing Loveliness” (sung by Lush’s Miki Berenyi), Mellow Waves arrives at a grace heard only fleetingly on previous Cornelius releases. Nominally an acoustic piece, “The Rain Song” turns individually struck guitar notes into rhythmic starlight ripples and layered vocals. The concluding “Crépuscule” takes it further, gradually opening up into infinite space while Oyamada’s guitar grows even more intricate. A quarter-century since disbanding Flipper’s Guitar and arriving on his own private Planet of the Apes, Keigo Oyamada continues to be some kind of genius, though happily still undecided about which kind. | 2017-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rostrum | July 20, 2017 | 7.7 | 72a82b10-cbbb-4729-a788-e3fbb0de9df1 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
The Philadelphia band’s new record often veers towards an alluring ugliness. But when they let some light in and it hits just right, *Pleasure Suck *emanates a psych-folk warmth. | The Philadelphia band’s new record often veers towards an alluring ugliness. But when they let some light in and it hits just right, *Pleasure Suck *emanates a psych-folk warmth. | Spirit of the Beehive: Pleasure Suck | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23139-pleasure-suck/ | Pleasure Suck | If it were up to fellow indie rock musicians, Pleasure Suck would be one of the most hyped albums of 2017. But the Spirit of the Beehive exist to confound. Their new LP elevates purity of vision over clarity from a band whose desire to be easily understood is far down on their list of priorities. The Bandcamp genre tags on their self-titled 2014 debut said it best: “benzos,” “klonopin,” “poppers,” “weed,” “weird beer,” “whiskey,” and “xanax.” While the Spirit of the Beehive’s earliest work could pass for shoegaze, it was defined by an unusually squalorous ambience, fueled by cheap highs and bad vibes. This is one of the few things that has remained constant about the band. “I just ate three grams of magic mushrooms,” a voice mutters halfway through “Future Looks Bright (It’s Blinding),” the only time the Spirit of the Beehive are ever direct about anything on Pleasure Suck.
The band simply tags itself as “alternative” this time out, a nebulous term that’s actually an accurate way to describe TSOTB’s counterintuitive lo-fi songcraft. Think Elephant 6 by way of Ween, whimsical and scatalogical, held together by Scotch tape and Scotchgard. “I start my walk, I step in shit,” Zack Schwartz sings on the album’s first lyric, setting in motion a kaleidoscope of only shades of yellow, orange, and brown.
When the Spirit of the Beehive lose focus, they veer into ugliness for its own sake, and the effect is oddly alluring. But when they let some light in and it hits just right, Pleasure Suck emanates an autumnal, psych-folk warmth. The brilliant single “Ricky (Caught Me Tryin’)” fashions a memorable chorus (“You don't need an education...you don't need to go to college”) by linking two bands who once traded in similarly feral bursts of noise. At points, Pleasure Suck recalls the urban-paganism of Animal Collective before Sung Tongs, though it’s the misanthropy of later Pink Floyd that becomes an unexpected through line.
“Future Looks Bright (It’s Blinding)” and “Ricky (Caught Me Tryin’)” are lovely songs about how ambition can make you look ugly: “Just tell us where to sign/Maybe the money will save us all,” Schwartz sings. Otherwise, it’s hard to identify the band’s primary concerns. “Pianos, Heavy Instrument” and “Snow on the Moon” are upfront about their inscrutability, though Schwartz does shrug at roadkill (“check the windshield/could be human/could be rodent”), police raids, “sports talk shows and a seasonal hellhole,” and a headspace that could double for the dingiest basement apartment in Kensington.
“Pleasure sucks the life out of everyone,” goes the album’s opening track. It serves as TSOTB’s thesis statement, a cynicism that can certainly have its own narcotic effect. It’s also their songwriting principle, as every potential moment of instant gratification is defaced by pitch warping, reverb, and distortion. Spend enough time scraping away the caked-on resin, though, and the asymmetrical melodies that typified TSOTB’s earlier work emerge. And so we arrive at the familiar, pleasurable debate with zonked-out, lo-fi pop tinkerers: Are the Spirit of the Beehive self-saboteurs blessed and cursed with too many ideas or is this approach just a cop out for a lack of ideas? Either way, Pleasure Suck is an equally compelling and impenetrable album most bands are either too square, too scared, or too savvy to make themselves. | 2017-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | April 10, 2017 | 6.8 | 72abfb97-4f71-454e-9a6e-3cdc8bf561d5 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
New York City is a laser light show. It is everything you could conjure, juvenile and immediate, like the overblown ... | New York City is a laser light show. It is everything you could conjure, juvenile and immediate, like the overblown ... | Black Dice: Beaches and Canyons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/748-beaches-and-canyons/ | Beaches and Canyons | New York City is a laser light show. It is everything you could conjure, juvenile and immediate, like the overblown store-bought psychedelia of Pink Floyd: mall and science museum culture. Like a proudly brandished tie-dyed t-shirt, Black Dice dances and hums its way from a Phish concert crowd straight to the Knitting Factory by avoiding the funk, amping the jams, and turning up the volume.
Black Dice's Beaches and Canyons is full of spaced-out planetarium moments, drenched in high-pitched squeals and thunderous low end. "Seabird" is a tone poem: the repeated sound/image of flight and wings is warped until only creaks remain. Repetitive knob-turning seems to conjure animals who appear to be fighting. The frogs always win.
The album generally tends to eschew pounding hardcore rhythms, employing beats in unique and clever ways throughout the compositions to keep them vital. The drums are very effective throughout in their ability to add presence to the ongoing loops, adding a pounding heart to the web of tortured sounds and affected melodies. While the violence seems to be almost entirely washed away from their previous efforts, the impressive aspect of this LP is its ability to translate the live show for which the Black Dice is primarily known into a private show-- an ideal recording. These songs seem more like juxtapositions, blueprints, instructions.
With Beaches and Canyons, Black Dice fully embrace the chanting, pounding and moaning of the Grateful Dead: lovin' the jam. These songs, all of which I've heard played live in the past six or so months, are imminently changeable, fluid, and interesting. The songs reveal themselves in subtle ways, hiding their identities for minutes at a time, then briefly reappearing as themselves throughout the song, as a slightly repeating pattern or token sound. The songs go out of and back into themselves in a manner similar to John Coltrane's late-era renditions of "My Favorite Things": the crowd in Japan, stunned by an hour-long take on Rodgers & Hammerstein, suddenly remember what they're enjoying when the theme returns as a slurred parade of squeaked notes.
"The Dream is Going Down" is Black Dice at its evocative best. At the end, the song breaks down, like any good trip, into its most primal elements: Hisham pounds away on the drums, Aaron hums and half-sings through thick delay while Bjorn and Eric shriek and wail on guitar, voice, and effects. "Big Drop" points to Black Dice's most violent impulses, spreading seven or eight grindcore melodies over the course of nearly 17 minutes. It seems to be all beach here, too-- ebbing, flowing, and following the water. The screams are balanced with falsetto moaning, which falls into itself, collapsing, canyoning, ending.
"Endless Happiness" is a mess of recorder sounds and chiming, ring-modulated guitar, as well as the heavy bass swells for which Aaron is known. The percussion kicks in halfway through the track, and the recorder begins to sound Ayler-esque while the modulations and bass swells stay constant. The loops reach a frantic pace before dying, leaving a bed of static dry air. Air is overcome by water, and the end of the track is a thorough brain-cleaning, a nice and clear literal representation of the 'beaches' component. The collage of water samples lasts for several minutes-- a lucid translation from thought into music of a serenity Black Dice rarely acheive.
Black Dice have managed to create an album that properly illustrates the changing nature of their sound. Many groups have found this extremely difficult to achieve on tape, often sticking to formulas in the studio while limiting their experiments to live shows. Beaches and Canyons is an intense document of Black Dice's evolution-- cycling through styles and equipment like they're simple and meaningless tools, eyes on the goal of reorganizing sound and transforming it through sheer volume. | 2002-10-03T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2002-10-03T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | DFA | October 3, 2002 | 8.5 | 72acee07-6ed5-4746-86cd-ba2612493959 | Pitchfork | null |
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Like everyone else, Sleigh Bells are feeling the weight of the world in 2017. Their lean new mini-album has more thematic cohesion than their previous releases and also a surprising tenderness. | Like everyone else, Sleigh Bells are feeling the weight of the world in 2017. Their lean new mini-album has more thematic cohesion than their previous releases and also a surprising tenderness. | Sleigh Bells: Kid Kruschev | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sleigh-bells-kid-kruschev/ | Kid Kruschev | Sleigh Bells are in a dark place these days, and who can blame them? The electroclash mélange of their first two records—2010’s Treats and 2012’s Reign of Terror—emerged during a period of comparatively little ambient stress, but in 2017, like everyone, the New York duo is feeling the weight of the world around them. While their early work tended to use lyrics as texturing tools, splicing in the words that sounded the best and brashest, they have since adopted a narrative thrust in their songs. The band’s newest release, the mini-album Kid Kruschev, offers perhaps the most thematic cohesion of any of their albums so far. After last year’s scattershot Jessica Rabbit, it feels like Sleigh Bells have narrowed in on the stories they want to tell and the leanest way to tell them.
They still write lyrics with the winking flair that made early tracks like “Infinity Guitars” and “Rill Rill” addictive. Singer Alexis Krauss rhymes “gasoline” with “trampoline” within the first two minutes of opener “Blue Trash Mattress Fire,” but her vocals do more here than counterbalance guitarist and producer Derek Miller’s thrashing power chords and overdriven drum machines. She elongates her phrases throughout Kid Kruschev, letting the instrumentation follow the push of her voice rather than trailing Miller’s jarring tempo changes. Sleigh Bells have slowly cultivated that change in dynamic over the past few years, as Krauss began to belt more instead of lingering in her head, but by now it’s fully bloomed. She directs this show, and the space she occupies helps the lyrics stick.
Kid Kruschev takes its name from the post-Stalin Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, which is only the most superficial indication of what’s stirring inside this seven-track collection. After all, it’s hard not to hear the word “Russia” on a daily basis even if you only absorb the news peripherally, and the Cuban Missile Crisis lurks as an oblique historical precedent to the nuclear tensions of our own era. Sleigh Bells don’t delve into the specifics of their record’s sociopolitical contexts, but they allude to them: Krauss works the colors red, white, and blue into the agitated “Blue Trash Mattress Fire,” and on the more grounded, tuneful “Panic Drills,” she sings, “At the end of the war/What’s mine is yours.” The couplet could describe a nasty fight with a loved one, or it could point to a couple sharing resources in the post-nuclear hellscape—there’s a narrative thread running through the song, but it’s loose enough to wrap around fear on either an interpersonal or a global scale.
Most of the songs on the record appear to operate on both scales at once. On “Show Me the Door,” Krauss sings, “You made it this far/Just a little bit more/Before we show you the door,” simultaneously as an encouragement and a threat. Her voice is high and clear at the chorus, but during the verses she’s echoed by a copy of her voice pitched down into a demonic range. Miller, for his part, reins in the guitars in favor of reverbed bass, synthesized vocal syllables, and incongruously cheery disco keys, playing up the song’s internal contradictions. Sleigh Bells rode for a while on the contrast between Miller’s hardcore-trained guitar playing and Krauss’s clean soprano, but by this point they have to dig up more subtle incongruities, scraping together sounds that don’t quite fit and leveraging them toward a broader sense of disquiet.
The song that lingers the longest off Kid Kruschev, though, is also its most internally cohesive. “And Saints” punctuates the record with a more or less straight narrative: Everyone is worried about Krauss; even the delivery guy who comes to her door wants to know if she’s OK. She’s not, for the record. “I swear I’m the shell of a man,” she sings at the chorus, but at least she’s got someone in there with her to contradict her: “You said, ‘Nah, you’re a hell of a man.’” She cruises on a vocal melody that’s lovely in its simplicity while Miller accompanies her with little more than a single strobing synth. The frenetic pulses and tantrums that made Sleigh Bells songs instantly recognizable ebb away, leaving a surprising tenderness in their wake. When they push aside their usual bag of tricks, Krauss and Miller have it in them to write direct and disarming pop songs, the kind that reach out to comfort you in your helplessness. These longtime adherents to the school of “everything louder” have finally found their quiet place. | 2017-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Torn Clean | November 9, 2017 | 6.4 | 72b4cc40-6baf-4986-9fe0-248cd15572a1 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Brooklyn-based songwriter Kyle Wall (aka Wharfer) makes his influences immediately clear—Bill Callahan, Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, later Bob Dylan—but he doesn't really sound like anyone else. | Brooklyn-based songwriter Kyle Wall (aka Wharfer) makes his influences immediately clear—Bill Callahan, Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, later Bob Dylan—but he doesn't really sound like anyone else. | Wharfer: Scenes of the Tourist | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22752-scenes-of-the-tourist/ | Scenes of the Tourist | Kyle Wall, the Brooklyn-based songwriter who records under the name Wharfer, doesn’t exactly sing his melodies. He swirls them around in his mouth, chewing on his words as he describes how they taste. And while his influences are all immediately clear (Bill Callahan, Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner, later Bob Dylan), Wall doesn’t really sound like anyone else. His voice is the first thing you’ll notice about his music: his folksy drawl, his odd pronunciation, a phlegmy grumble like he’s fighting a cold. And while some singers might sand down their idiosyncrasies as their songwriting progresses, Wall has doubled down on them with Scenes of the Tourist. Over 12 songs, he has refined his music to mostly piano and vocals, relegating his backing band to more atmospheric duties while his strange and weary voice does the heavy lifting.
On the whole, it’s a risk that pays off. These are the finest songs of Wall’s career, and he treats them like he knows it. The arrangements are stately but sparse, centered on simple melodies that recur like gloomy dreams. The slow, lapping “Lilacs” sounds a little like Darkness-era Springsteen with all the energy siphoned out and replaced with seasonal affective disorder. “You’re a thing of the past,” Wall sings in his lowest register, “And I love you like that.” “Somewhere a Meteor Calls Me,” meanwhile, is the album’s catchiest moment and its most expensive. Here, Wall is backed by a dark-hued storm that effectively pulls in some of Ultraviolence’s shades of cool. It’s a song that hints at work to come that might build on this album’s starkness with a more dynamic palette.
That isn’t to say that Scenes is monotonous. Wall varies his songwriting enough to make room for a multitude of styles, from the barroom balladry of “Blue Lewis” to the heady slow-build of “The Suitcase.” Some of Wall’s attempts to diversify his sound lead him directly into other songwriters’ territory: “Marigold” takes major melodic cues from Sufjan Stevens’ “Fourth of July,” while “St. Helena” is basically Mark Kozelek’s “Ceiling Gazing” without the happy ending. Still, thanks to Wall’s distinctive vocals, he makes each song his own, and, especially if you’re in the right mood for it, Scenes of the Tourist is a powerful and engaging record. But it also feels like a step toward more distinctive work—Wall’s attempt to strip back to discover his core identity. He’s found his voice, and now he’s a lot closer to finding what he has to say. | 2017-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | self-released | January 17, 2017 | 6.7 | 72bcdd33-fcb3-4642-8580-d6e469f4c39c | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The news is hardly any less grim since 2019’s Civilisation I, but the UK pop trio’s second entry considers the emotional toll of disaster with ingenuity, wit, and a warm, bright sound. | The news is hardly any less grim since 2019’s Civilisation I, but the UK pop trio’s second entry considers the emotional toll of disaster with ingenuity, wit, and a warm, bright sound. | Kero Kero Bonito: Civilisation II EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kero-kero-bonito-civilisation-ii-ep/ | Civilisation II EP | Though they came up in the same scene that produced A.G. Cook, GFOTY, and Hannah Diamond, Kero Kero Bonito’s hyperpop always had a more personal touch. On 2013’s Intro Bonito and 2016’s Bonito Generation, the London trio synthesised a nostalgic and unruly palette of influences ranging from J-pop to post-punk, creating a modern sound that paid tribute to the trio’s hometowns—the London suburbs for producers Gus Lobban and Jamie Bulled, and Otaru, Japan, for vocalist Sarah Midori Perry. This implicit fondness for cycles of reference—for the way that culture compounds over time, accruing layers of influence—meant that KKB never affected the same tongue-in-cheek tone as their peers: For Lobban, Bulled, and Perry, music is an earnest way to celebrate and interrogate the idiosyncrasies of history.
Since Bonito Generation, KKB have strayed further from hyperpop conventions. In 2018, Time ‘n’ Place took its cues from suburban shoegaze, the indie rock of Phil Elverum, and pop-punk, a musical Venn diagram connected by noise and vivid vignettes. Concurrently, the band’s writing became more precise, less reliant on the deadpan catchphrases that structured early favorites like “Flamingo.” As hyperpop has become more interested in replicating the memeish terror of the internet—see the abrasive non-sequiturs of 100 gecs—KKB traveled in the other direction, evoking the pathos and bathos of everyday life. Time ‘n’ Place’s “Visiting Hours,” a verité-style account of Lobban’s trip to see his father in the hospital, is typical KKB 2.0: poignant, emotionally aware, and anxious about modern life.
If Time ‘n’ Place was colored by personal loss, Civilisation I, the band’s 2019 EP, shifted its gaze to the collective loss engendered by colonialism, capitalism, and global heating. Though only three tracks long, it hit hard, evoking nightmarish visions of perpetual war and wildfire smoke. On centerpiece “When the Fires Come,” Perry sang about global decline with prophetic economy: “Everybody takes their time making work to do, do, do, do/But no one will be left here to remember us/When the fires come.”
Civilisation II, a second three-song EP, arrives over a year later. In the intervening months, grotesque catastrophe has only become more commonplace: Violent wildfires dominated headlines at the beginning of 2020, before the pandemic—and the ways in which it exposed the seemingly bottomless depths of corporate greed and governmental incompetence—took over. The conditions of its creation would seem to inspire another EP of soothsaying, but Civilisation II takes a different tack, focusing on the emotional toll of disaster with ingenuity, wit, and a warm, bright sound scrubbed of Time ‘n’ Place’s grit.
KKB describe the songs on Civilisation II as representing past, present, and future, respectively, a concept that feels unnecessary when the music is as intellectually salient and catchy as ever. Opening with a racing hi-hat rhythm and amiable analog synth, lead single and opener “The Princess and the Clock” feels warm in a way that KKB singles haven’t always; straightforward verses give way to a swelling chorus that cuts up and resamples Perry’s voice into a new vocal melody, à la Porter Robinson. The lyrics recount a fable about a princess trapped in a tower, “painting pictures of the land that made her” as a form of remembrance. In the context of Civilisation I, the image of the solitary princess suggests a message about the creation—and, by extension, the degradation—of history, bringing to mind the ways in which Indiginous peoples the world over have seen colonial and capitalist forces degrade and destroy their cultural histories, and, by extension, ancient resources on caring for and protecting the Earth.
On “present” track “21/04/20,” the spectre of disaster is felt without the need to spell it out. Rather than attempt to capture the stress or anxiety of pandemic isolation, Perry writes about its mundanity. The lyrics are ambling and diaristic, like a sequel to “Visiting Hours”; were you not paying attention, you might not realize it’s a song about lockdown at all. But around the corners of the frame, things are upset in a casual, resigned sort of way:
As I sit down to eat, I hear a song riding the breeze
“Happy birthday to Eloise”
Their mum and dad both let out a cheer
They’re gonna throw a party another year
And I should take a walk for a bit
As I head up the road, a private ambulance zooms off into the distance
In silence
Like all of Civilisation II, “21/04/20” was produced entirely with vintage hardware, a choice that scans as both aesthetic and conceptual. Scientists have warned of more pandemics arising with greater frequency in the coming years, and aside from its title, “21/04/20” is written and produced without distinct markers of time and place. KKB’s smart, subtly meta approach allows the song’s power to stem not from what it is, but what it isn’t: If this present is to be our new future, why write a polemic or a tragedy?
On “Well Rested,” Civilisation II’s swollen final track, KKB blow up the mythmaking to dizzying proportions. Over a beat that strikes somewhere between vaporwave and acid house, Perry delivers a spoken-word sermon on humanity’s stubborn persistence. “False prophets proclaim that the end is nigh, and that humanity is not worth existence,” she yells. “This is a trap laid to ensnare the living.” The language is uncanny and cold: She sounds like a cult leader or a con artist, perhaps not even convinced of her own words. That feels entirely the point: “Well Rested,” like the rest of Civilisation II, meditates not on human decline as much as the fables and myths we create in order to adjust to it. KKB are as inquiring and self-aware as ever—only now, their eyes are trained on the future.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Polyvinyl | April 21, 2021 | 7.5 | 72c11af7-cb49-4723-8e95-054072bc11e5 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
September's Black Dollar showed Rick Ross refocused, proving that he’s more interesting with his back against the wall. His new album, which has no MMG features, continues the motivated, slightly weary feeling of that mixtape, scrapping his cartoon supervillain persona. | September's Black Dollar showed Rick Ross refocused, proving that he’s more interesting with his back against the wall. His new album, which has no MMG features, continues the motivated, slightly weary feeling of that mixtape, scrapping his cartoon supervillain persona. | Rick Ross: Black Market | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21344-black-market/ | Black Market | The life of a boss is defined by highs and lows. Five years ago, Rick Ross was voraciously bragging about blowing up like napalm and parking his Caddy in the living room on Ashes to Ashes, a free Christmas gift-slash-Teflon Don victory lap. But since reaching his pinnacle with 2012’s Rich Forever, oversaturation has exhausted much of what made him successful in previous years. It’s not that Ross’s output has been poor, but releasing Mastermind and Hood Billionaire in 2014 made both largely forgettable. Worse, the cracks in the seemingly untouchable Maybach Music Group’s beautiful granite finish have deepened.
If MMG is rap’s luxury car dealership, then Ross is its cigar-smoking general manager; Meek Mill and Wale his top salesmen. At this stage of his career, Ross should be sitting and tallying sales. But after Meek Mill fumbled a winning hand against Drake, Wale and Meek began squabbling, and Ross himself went to jail for assaulting his groundskeeper. Ross was forced to roll up his sleeves and right the course of his imprint. September’s Black Dollar was a step in the right direction, with a refocused Ross proving that he’s more interesting with his back against the wall than when he’s dropping hits like Steph Curry three-pointers. With Black Market, he continues this narrative.
"Bottom of the black market, time to rise again," he announces on the album’s opener, "Free Enterprise". As the first song written for the album (albeit, during Ross’s jail stint earlier this year), it’s a strong tone-setter. Aided once more by John Legend’s soaring vocals, Ross ponders future possibilities. Think of it as the next step after Black Dollar carryover "Foreclosures", where he waxes eloquent about how financial problems can still complicate the lifestyles of the rich and famous: "You reap what you sow, and they speakin’ repossessions/ To the culture itself, these are powerful lessons." Ross excels when given a focal point, and adversity (specifically, the fear of going back to rags from riches) gives him something to dig his teeth into.
Absent from Black Market is the boisterous production heard on previous Rick Ross projects. With the Lex Luger trademark heard on "B.M.F.", "MC Hammer", and "9 Piece" pirated into extinction over the years, Ross has wisely moved on. He's at his most effective when he dials back the Rick Ross character, so the album’s standouts feature him laying bawse insight over slow-burners. The radiance of Jake One’s production and CeeLo Green’s chorus add another layer of warmth to "Smile Mama, Smile", lifting it out of routine homage territory. "Crocodile Python" is as smooth as the title indicates, and "Silk Road" is beautifully minimal. On the latter, he explains that he fixates on ostentatious imagery to create something vivid for the less fortunate: "I entertain niggas under poverty lines/ So I paint these pretty pictures as part of my rhymes." "Black Opium" falls into the same neighborhood, adding scratches from DJ Premier for furnishing and decoration.
But amidst the good, errors loom. "Peace Sign" treads into lazy, "Diced Pineapples" territory. Meanwhile, "Can’t Say No" revives and refurbishes an old Mariah Carey gem. Carey sounds great, but the song’s inclusion is as unnecessary as the resurrection of its source material. It’s the inverse of what Carey previously did to Cam’ron’s "Oh Boy". "Dope Dick" features more stellar production from Jake One, but the laughable title and hook (has "dick" been uttered more over a five-minute period?) makes you wish Ross saved the beat and verses for something more serious.
"Success is a precious jewel," Ross warns on "Foreclosures". It should be cherished, because, like popularity, it can vanish at a moment’s notice. Rick Ross’ has waned in recent years, but the trials have added new shadings to his four-color persona. The motivated, slightly weary Ross heard on *Black Market—*which has no MMG features—is a better fit for the moment than the bulletproof supervillain of old. Ross has proven his resilience in the past; maybe carefully controlled doses of reality are just what he needs to move forward. | 2015-12-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-12-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Maybach/Warner Bros. | December 10, 2015 | 7 | 72c1c479-9e20-4748-815b-5e0d4d441fa7 | Julian Kimble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julian-kimble/ | null |
The New Jersey duo’s seventh album sacrifices some of the group’s youthful spark, blurring emo nostalgia with contemporary pop polish. | The New Jersey duo’s seventh album sacrifices some of the group’s youthful spark, blurring emo nostalgia with contemporary pop polish. | The Front Bottoms: In Sickness & In Flames | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-front-bottoms-in-sickness-and-in-flames/ | In Sickness & In Flames | The Front Bottoms made their name singing anthems for ordinary people: songs for the suburbs, about drinking beer out of coffee mugs and hating your friends. Like much of the New Jersey duo’s fourth-wave emo, pop-punk ilk, their music works when it’s most immediate—a gut punch, not a slow burn. Brian Sella and Mat Uychich are at their best when they’re shouting about the minutiae that make your brain swell and fill your stomach with rocks, like the wine stain on your couch that’s been there since the night she left. Our current period of confinement calls for such intense accounts of mundanity. We’re trapped at home, some of us in our parents’ basements, lonely and out of work, awaiting the next spike in COVID cases. A new Front Bottoms album could’ve complemented our solitude. But In Sickness & In Flames doesn’t really seem fit for any moment.
An air of unfixed nostalgia blurs the past with an approximation of the present. Dusty acoustics and guttural full-band chants harken back to the duo’s early work that captivated college radio during the first half of the 2010s. But that influence is sandwiched between, and subdued by, modern indie-pop flourishes, synth breakdowns, and a chorus of “oohs.” Sella has mostly abandoned his signature Moleskine impressionism and hometown scene-setting. IS&IF deals largely in cliches, gesturing toward broad themes like love and growth without saying much of anything.
Lyrics are the album’s biggest downfall. Solid riffs are tainted by half-baked platitudes: “You are the truth I choose to bend myself around”; “We are all going the hard way”; “Everyone blooms in their own time.” The songs place a lot of weight on these phrases, repeating them until they almost sound profound. “Jerk” could have been a fun MySpace-era ditty, with its tinny Auto-Tuned intro, but it devolves into a refrain that sounds stale by its second round: “Like a jerk, yeah I know that I look like a jerk.” The Front Bottoms’ once charming, choked-up spoken-word interludes feel awkward and stilted.
As made evident by 2017’s ’80s pop-tinged Going Grey, Front Bottoms lose their magnetism when they focus on radio appeal. IS&IF’s hooks are catchy enough to make their way onto, say, the Sirius XM indie channel, but probably won’t inspire a new generation of Front Bottoms fans. A few songs embrace the band’s old style and intimacy, enough to attract day-one listeners, but not enough to make IS&IF an essential album.
After co-producing their last LP with Nicholas “RAS” Furlong, an Avicii collaborator who counts credits with Blink-182 and All Time Low, the Front Bottoms decided to co-produce their new album with Mike Sapone, whose roster includes acts like Sorority Noise, Oso Oso, Brand New, and Taking Back Sunday. On the album’s highlights, he brings the band back to their unpretentious, guitar-driven roots. “Montgomery Forever’’ is a buddy jam about mental illness and self-deprecation. If mosh pits can exist in a post-COVID world, this song will inspire some flailing bodies. “Leaf Pile” blazes forth with fiery guitars and echoed shouts (“I don’t wanna talk/I wanna look out the window”). The lyrics land when you can tell they were transferred directly from brain to paper: Lines like “You’ll always be my girlfriend even after we get married” and “Seemed like a good day to be barely alive” are unfussy and childish in a good way.
The Front Bottoms have consistently avoided labels, falling somewhere between folk-punk, pop-punk, and indie rock. That fluidity was a strength when their music was undergirded by a sense of urgency and earnest DIY sensibilities, when they built a community around angst. In Sickness & In Flames is just noncommittal. The album is twee and punk and neither of those things. It’s understandable that the Front Bottoms, a band whose legacy revolves around post-adolescent growing pains, have lost some of the spark that fueled their first six albums. They’re older now, no longer concerned with the girl that forgot about them during her semester abroad. Sella once stood out for a demeanor that was both wide-eyed and jaded, torn between a yelp and a sigh. In Sickness & In Flames tilts too far toward the former; the Front Bottoms have lost their bite.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Elektra | August 26, 2020 | 5.6 | 72c6110a-c35f-4d94-911a-19040a2aa352 | Julia Gray | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julia-gray/ | |
The former Pavement frontman—never someone who seemed interested in making a straightforward acoustic album—releases an unexpectedly deft and learned folk record. | The former Pavement frontman—never someone who seemed interested in making a straightforward acoustic album—releases an unexpectedly deft and learned folk record. | Stephen Malkmus: Traditional Techniques | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stephen-malkmus-traditional-techniques/ | Traditional Techniques | Later this year, Stephen Malkmus will take part in a pair of Pavement reunion shows where, if the band’s reunion tour a decade ago is any predictor, he’ll dutifully play the songs fans expect to hear the way they want to hear them, then move on. Malkmus has never been subtle about his disinterest in nostalgia, but in truth, he’s never seemed especially interested in shaking things up, either. Since unshackling from Pavement, his solo albums with the Jicks have offered only the most minor variations on his wry, guitar-forward indie rock. Sure, one of them was produced by Beck, but could you really tell?
Recently, something changed. With 2018’s beguiling Sparkle Hard, Malkmus delighted in unexpected whims, deploying string sections and digital vocal manipulation so skillfully you could almost forget they weren’t always part of Malkmus’s toolkit. And if that album’s one-and-done stylistic detours felt like a lark, then 2019’s Jicks-less Groove Denied, a laptop-driven tribute to early electronic music and post-punk, proved he could really commit. For Traditional Techniques, Malkmus once again picks a muse and sticks with it. It’s a folk album, an unexpectedly deft and learned one at that.
Recorded with Decemberists multi-instrumentalist Chris Funk, Chavez/Zwan guitarist Matt Sweeney, and Afghan musician Qais Essar, among others, the project was devised as an excuse to toy around with all the acoustic instruments Malkmus observed in Portland’s Halfling Studio while recording Sparkle Hard. That’s the official telling, at least, but the final product suggests a long-simmering fascination with the sounds of the Middle East and a deeper reverence for psych-folk than anything hinted at by the stray Pavement folk jam or B-side. Malkmus is just as committed to stringed instruments as he was the bleating electronics of Groove Denied. But on that album, Malkmus was moonlighting; here he’s a devoted student of the craft.
In addition to sounding gorgeous, all these mesmerizing dirges and close-mic’d 12-string guitars are a novel vehicle for Malkmus’s sublime shit talk. Over the balmy raga of opener “ACC Kirtan,” his lyrics defuse any suggestion of New Age mysticism with first-world problems. “The Duraflame’s wet/The ganache won’t set/Where are the rings for my sweet serviettes?” he yowls, alongside accompanist Joy Pearson. “Shadowbanned” lathers its cosmic drones into a heady psych jam, as Malkmus spray-bombs modern lingo inspired by the internet’s deepest, most conspiratorial corners. In the custom of so many of Malkmus’ best songs, it disguises its barbed prose behind an unassuming veneer of aloofness.
Like Groove Denied, Traditional Techniques front-loads its most form-breaking statements. In its second half, the psychedelic edge softens, the woodwinds and sitars fade away, and what’s left is something resembling the straightforward acoustic album Malkmus never seemed interested in making. The songs aren’t flashy, but they’re tender and serene, and they center Malkmus’ voice in a way his previous records rarely did, especially “What Kind of Person,” maybe the most vulnerable song he’s written since “Church on White.” It’s not often Malkmus lets his guard down like this.
Traditional Techniques has been retroactively billed as the third part in a trilogy alongside Sparkle Hard and Groove Denied. On the surface, the three albums have little to do with each other—each was recorded with a different lineup—but collectively they represent a shift in mindset. After years of arch relaxation at the indie rock spa, Malkmus has suddenly started recording like a man with a sprawling bucket list. And while Traditional Techniques easily succeeds as a curiosity, its songs continue to delight after the novelty wears off. The most surprising thing about the album isn’t how far Malkmus has strayed from his comfort zone. It’s how at home he sounds there.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | March 6, 2020 | 7.7 | 72cc56e3-a644-49a0-bc5b-0fa26a4668d2 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Cool Uncle is the result of a chance meeting between Grammy-winning producer Jack Splash and underrated smooth jazz kingpin Bobby Caldwell. Their record takes equal parts funk, pop, smooth jazz, and yacht rock, laying it all down on a solid retro-R&B framework. Featuring Jessie Ware, Mayer Hawthorne, and Cee-Lo Green. | Cool Uncle is the result of a chance meeting between Grammy-winning producer Jack Splash and underrated smooth jazz kingpin Bobby Caldwell. Their record takes equal parts funk, pop, smooth jazz, and yacht rock, laying it all down on a solid retro-R&B framework. Featuring Jessie Ware, Mayer Hawthorne, and Cee-Lo Green. | Cool Uncle: Cool Uncle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21271-cool-uncle/ | Cool Uncle | After a chance connection via a Facebook message, Grammy-winning producer Jack Splash (Kendrick Lamar, John Legend, Jennifer Hudson) has teamed up with none other than Bobby Caldwell - yes, that Bobby Caldwell, the one with the 1978 classic "What You Won't Do For Love" has been sampled on approximately 21.9% of all hip-hop songs ever released—and the result is a smash, taking equal parts funk, pop, smooth jazz, and yacht rock, (!) laying it all down on a solid retro-R&B framework. The group winks at the project's inherent adult-contempo cheese-factor with their moniker, but really, this is is the best freshest, and funkiest adult-contempo cheese imaginable.
The best thing about Cool Uncle is the fact that both participants don't strain to sound new. Instead, they lean into their respective strengths. Given Splash's resume as a producer and arranger of R&B sounds (as well as his frontman work for funk group Plantlife) there's a ton of groove on this album, interspersed with horns (the saxophone on the Mayer Hawthorne-featured "Game Over" is a highlight) and a bassist that does yeoman's work. The project is off-kilter and odd in appealing ways: On "My Beloved" Caldwell executes what has to be the first vampire lovesong by way of a week-long bender in Ibiza and sticks the landing. And his voice hasn't aged a day since the '70s.
The record is bursting with features, and most everyone carries their weight. Jessie Ware (on album standout "Breakaway") and former '80s-pop-star ("Let's Hear It For The Boy")-turned gospel-artist Deniece Williams ("Breaking Up") both contribute passionate performances whereas Cee-Lo (on "Mercy") kind of fades into the background. Mayer Hawthorne, whose blue-eyed soul vocals tend to waver somewhere between "convincing" and "nah", sounds as smooth and appealing as he ever has on "Game Over".
This release, coupled with solid 2015 output from acts like The Foreign Exchange, Dawn Richard, Estelle, Kelela and others, serve as a solid reminder that R&B is big and vital enough right now these days to contain multitudes: Soundcloud divas, alt-R&B weirdos, returning legends like Janet, pubescent lotharios, minimalist bleep-bloop-ass whisper-singers, and beyond. Being an R&B fan right now means never having to settle for one kind of record, or one sound. When one year gives you so many different options, a fun record that doesn't take itself seriously like Cool Uncle feels like icing. | 2015-11-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-13T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Fresh Young Minds / Empire | November 13, 2015 | 7.5 | 72cfb03e-0965-4bc0-94c8-18818d88c184 | Ernest Wilkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ernest-wilkins/ | null |
Tom and Ed Russell continue to test various hybrids of techno, UK garage, and for the first time, drum’n’bass, but the EP’s most promising moment looks beyond the dancefloor. | Tom and Ed Russell continue to test various hybrids of techno, UK garage, and for the first time, drum’n’bass, but the EP’s most promising moment looks beyond the dancefloor. | Overmono: Cash Romantic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/overmono-cash-romantic/ | Cash Romantic | Overmono accompanied their early forays into music-making with dips into their parents’ record collection, which a youthful Tom and Ed Russell would raid to create outlandish mashups with the electronic tunes they were buying. The results may have been “a proper mess,” in their own words, but the idea of musical worlds colliding stuck with the fraternal duo as they developed their signature hybrid style of bass music. Those fusions provide even more direct inspiration for their new EP, Cash Romantic, where drum’n’bass, techno, and UK garage meet head on.
This kind of amalgam isn’t exactly a revelation for Overmono, whose modus operandi—as witnessed on a string of excellent EPs as well as their sparkling 2021 fabric presents mix—consists of combining the slinky sounds of garage and rave with the steel-booted production techniques of modern techno, a technique so effective it has taken them to the top of the UK’s dance ranks. So well have Overmono honed this particular skill that it is perhaps inevitable that the best track on this EP is the most typically Overmono. “Gunk” is a tightly coiled charge of industrial energy that—like “So U Kno” or “Bby” before it—swathes a modulated vocal bearing the expensive perfume of Y2K 2-step in rugged electronic cladding, a two-note synth riff bludgeoning the listener into submission as the voice pursues a more cerebral seduction.
“Gfortune” pushes the boat further out, using a vocal dusted in distortion and lightly bent out of shape to trace an exact midpoint between Overmono’s mechanized tech and Burial’s garage scuffle. The song is agreeably haunting, but Overmono’s rather reverent use of their source material—they employ hefty samples from “2am” by North Carolina’s Joe Trufant—feels uninspired compared to Burial’s ingenious cutups and recontextualizations. Burial’s music has influenced legions, but the number of artists to do anything novel with that inspiration remains frustratingly single-digit.
The EP’s title track, Overmono’s most overt excursion into drum’n’bass yet, faces a similar fate. Much as Burial has mastered the art of being Burial, the rigorous standards of drum’n’bass make it hard to dabble in the genre without coming across as dilettantish. “Cash Romantic” has a satisfying snap to the drums and a bassline that clears out the Eustachian tube like a depth charge, but the song has neither the clinical obnoxiousness of classic techstep (à la Ed Rush and Optical’s “Bacteria,” which Overmono included on their Fabric mix), nor the astral grace of vintage LTJ Bukem productions, another apparent reference point, leaving it a little short on purpose.
It falls to the acrid throb of “Bone Mics” to suggest more fruitful new avenues for Overmono to pursue, debuting a sound that could be genuinely theirs. The track has familiar traces of UK garage and techno, to which the brothers add a hint of IDM, but it lands in uncharted territory between all three. The drums are funky, flexed, and light, neither exactly up- nor downbeat; the vocal snippets are catchy but abstruse; and the bass sits between muscular comfort and weaponized dread. The result is like ambient music for the terminally twitchy.
“Bone Mics” aside, Cash Romantic is a little too neat and tidy to match the far reaches of the brothers’ excursions into their parents’ record collection, where Gerry Rafferty mixed with acid techno and Dr. Hook found company with “weirdo trance.” But the EP does suggest life beyond the peak-hour sets that have become the duo’s bread and butter, prepping a canvas where the club can be an afterthought rather than an imperative, and moving away from the monomaniacal focus on the dancefloor. | 2022-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | April 7, 2022 | 7 | 72d09bd7-78ab-49ac-b98a-44ccd05dda15 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The Swedish indie pop group Radio Dept.'s third and best LP expands their sound palette with songs that sparkle with a glowing, sun-soaked ambiance. | The Swedish indie pop group Radio Dept.'s third and best LP expands their sound palette with songs that sparkle with a glowing, sun-soaked ambiance. | The Radio Dept.: Clinging to a Scheme | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14146-clinging-to-a-scheme/ | Clinging to a Scheme | Sweden's Radio Dept. have spent their career to date quietly building up a devoted fanbase by filtering traditional indie and dream-pop sounds through an electronic haze. They've admirably honored their genre's history every step of the way, incorporating elements of vintage Slumberland noise-pop, sadder 80s UK indie sounds, and the kind of romantic, low-key dance-pop typically associated with Saint Etienne, or more recently, the Tough Alliance. The band's relatively low profile is partly due to the infrequency of their output: Up to now, they've released only two LPs throughout their 13-year career, along with a handful of EPs and singles.
As with their last two albums, Clinging to a Scheme stands to further expand the Radio Dept.'s cult. Economy has never been an issue for the band, but here, things are further tightened up: Clocking in at just 34 minutes, this album is their shortest and most finely-tuned yet, moving at a rapid clip while maintaining a sense of balance and even pacing-- a pretty remarkable show of restraint and dedication for a record that has ostensibly been in the works for four years. (Their last full-length, Pet Grief, was released way back in 2006.) The improved fidelity helps, too: These songs sparkle with striking clarity in contrast to past works, while retaining all the glowing, sun-soaked ambiance that's become a signature.
Clinging to a Scheme shows the Radio Dept. working with an extended range of sounds. While the core elements of these songs will be plenty familiar to longtime fans, the band manages to tweak the formula slightly for each track. The sparkly, Balearic "Heaven's on Fire" and the downbeat dub of "Never Follow Suit" are clear highlights, particularly on first spin. But repeat plays reveal this record's almost bottomless depth, as different tracks and subtle elements gradually reveal themselves with each listen: The sugar-rushed urgency of "This Time Around" or the complex "David", which is sunny and bright musically but lyrically wistful, are just two of eight other reasons this album rewards every ounce of attention you give it.
Great songs, higher fidelity: It should be a recipe for contentment, yet frontman Johan Duncanson remains discouraged by life's challenges. "Seemed like a good idea at one time/ But now it's all wrong," he sings on opener "Domestic Scene", and it doesn't get any cheerier from there. Although the Radio Dept. weren't regularly active until 1998, the project was concieved by Duncanson three years earlier along with a few schoolmates; in other words, his lyrics have been rooted in boyhood melancholia since day one. Duncanson doesn't show any signs of leaving that behind on Clinging to a Scheme, uttering lines in "A Token of Gratitude" that evoke pure melodrama: "Do I love you?/ Yes, I love you/ But easy come, easy go."
But that's part of The Radio Dept.'s charm and identity, and the music itself is generally brighter, which makes for an engaging contrast while preventing the tone of the songs from becoming maudlin. The strongest moments on Clinging to a Scheme, such as the aforementioned "Heaven's on Fire" and "Never Follow Suit", are effortlessly catchy and upbeat. Album closer "You Stopped Making Sense" is especially cloud-clearing, as Duncanson hits his upper register among deliciously bent guitar strings, moaning about another love lost. It's a bittersweet ending for Clinging to a Scheme, but for the Radio Dept.'s already decade-plus career, it may be a whole new beginning. | 2010-04-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-04-26T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Labrador | April 26, 2010 | 8.3 | 72d28ad0-0d49-4ff9-af22-c5096bc836e5 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Holly Herndon is an ambitious composer whose work is based on samples and her distinctive voice. Her vision was already clear on her first album, Movement, but her range broadened and deepened across a slow but steady stream of intoxicatingly dense singles; Platform is the most complete representation of her music yet. | Holly Herndon is an ambitious composer whose work is based on samples and her distinctive voice. Her vision was already clear on her first album, Movement, but her range broadened and deepened across a slow but steady stream of intoxicatingly dense singles; Platform is the most complete representation of her music yet. | Holly Herndon: Platform | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20457-holly-herndon-platform/ | Platform | Holly Herndon’s songs play new tricks on you with each listen. The Bay Area composer and singer’s work percolates in the mind first, unlike the elemental club music that informs its sprightly tempos and ebbing bass. But though Herndon’s music is at its core "cerebral"—all surface details and richly layered textures—it still exhibits warmth and emotion. Herndon’s ambitious vision was already clear on her first album, Movement, but her range broadened and deepened across a slow but steady stream of intoxicatingly dense singles; Platform is the most complete representation of her music yet.
Herndon constructs synth patches from the sound of her voice, whether she’s murmuring, singing tunefully, or on the verge of shrieking. But she also processes and sequences acoustic sounds derived from movement and disorder (what could be shattering glass, a bucket being poured out, the tapping of a keyboard, the swish of a dancer’s legs), molding samples until they no longer reference the action that produced them. Even with the processing, her tracks retain an organic quality, something fleshy that suggests a given sound once existed in space.
Into these complicated soundworlds—all of which are rooted in human action—Herndon mixes noises that emanate from the structure of her computer (hums, fan whirs, "thinking" noises), as well as its internal audio (she records the sound of her Internet activity and uses it as a source material or a point of inspiration). For her, a laptop is a natural extension of her mind and body rather than a place of escape and self-negation. Platform is animated by a constant conversation between these two elements: the embodied vocalist (usually Herndon) and the digital ghosts in the machine.
In interviews, music videos, or on her blog, Herndon spells out her themes and methods. She seems to consider her art as, by design, didactic: In its form and process, it emulates a utopian societal model, one for the next phase of the technological age. Her music offers a vision of a time in which our digital accoutrements might become places for self-expression and improvement, and our relationship with them is less fraught. Herndon doesn’t believe that her work exists in a vacuum; it signifies in all directions, and is tied to and defined by everything around it. By explaining her music, she seeks to set up a more direct relationship with her audience. Clarifying the experiment is, to some extent, part of the whole project.
There’s always the danger that channeling our listening according to an artist’s directives means we’ll miss out on engaging with the music in more personally significant ways. But though Herndon unifies her pieces with clear conceptual frameworks, the moment-to-moment experience stokes our subjective impressions. The best of Herndon’s compositions function something like the age-old visual illusion of the young woman with the big hat, who could just as easily be, on second look, a babushka-wearing grandmother. You might focus on the cold digital debris or the human voice crying out one minute and a melody or a meaningful lyric the next. At transcendent moments—busier, murkier work like "Interference" or "Home"—Herndon offers an unclassifiable combination of the two.
The previously released single "Chorus" provides the album's sonic template. It builds and settles expertly, as if catered toward the energy of a dancefloor in real time, and packs an earwormy wordless chorus. But it breaks through the wall of techno-informed percussion and synth pulsations only sporadically, like a lament filtered through a bad cell connection, or a Fever Ray melody submitted to John Cage-like randomized subtractive processes. Transitional notes fall out like baby teeth and at points the whole thing breaks down into digital chaos—here, Herndon’s Internet chatter is like a primordial ooze the song emerges out of and back into.
Those who loved the pop acuity of "Chorus" won’t find much else on Platform as persuasive in that vein. In fact, the record’s only weak moments come when Herndon adopts pop song structures instead of self-generated ones. "Morning Sun", in particular, is based around low, unembellished melody which doesn’t develop anywhere in particular, accompanied by tittering, Dan Deacon-like arpeggios of vocal phonemes. To liven things up, Herndon lays on threatening sheets of noise atop the mix, but they seem unrelated to the action going on underneath.
The most effective tracks offer something more open and spacious. "Unequal" highlights Herndon’s distinctive sense of harmony, which often has a haunting, irresolute quality recalling Baroque church music or plainchant. "DAO" also highlights her operatic vocalizations, but this time, they play a vicious game of cat-and-mouse with unstable, rough-hewn percussion patches built from everyday sounds (the approach strongly recalls Matthew Herbert’s work sampling household sounds to create elaborate virtual instruments, or Matmos’ surgery-noise drum circles).
Platform’s most unusual track sets aside Herndon's usual generative techniques. "Lonely at the Top" is designed to induce ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), a scientifically unexplained process in which exposure to certain sounds induce a tingling sensation on the necks and scalps of the susceptible. Herndon and her collaborator, ASMR sound artist Claire Tolan, adopt the general M.O. of the vibrant and extensive ASMR YouTube community, which is home to endless webcam videos featuring gentle, stylized whispering and tapping sounds. Behind Tolan’s comforting voice, Herndon contributes small, intimate sounds: extremely closely miked and subtly processed, they give the track—an ode to one online enclave that has succeeded in accessing the corporeal in a virtual environment—an otherworldly quality.
It's hard to craft avant-garde music that feels truly new; inevitably, new languages correct and build off of the old ones, and create accidental resonances with others. Holly Herndon, by her own account, still believes in a music of "now." She eschews the free-associative, playful juxtapositions of fully synthetic sounds preferred by computer-music peers like PC Music's A. G. Cook, Oneohtrix Point Never, and James Ferraro, and insists on building her sound palette from the ground up, or more accurately, outwards from herself. Despite the wide scope of her project, Herndon’s ambitious efforts are appealingly multifaceted and personal, and Platform may turn out to be the most thought-provoking experimental electronic music release of the year. It doesn’t present a solid, replicable blueprint for the future of laptop composition and performance practice, but comes over more like beta of an app, with a lot of room for further development and expansion. | 2015-05-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-05-21T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | 4AD / Rvng Intl. | May 21, 2015 | 8.7 | 72d302cb-1403-468c-8383-3fc86ed65d2c | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
This blessed collection of unreleased demos, recorded by Prince to cassette in a single take, is enthralling. It plays like both omen and artifact of his hit-making power. | This blessed collection of unreleased demos, recorded by Prince to cassette in a single take, is enthralling. It plays like both omen and artifact of his hit-making power. | Prince: Piano & a Microphone 1983 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prince-piano-and-a-microphone-1983/ | Piano & a Microphone 1983 | Just before Valentine’s Day in 1983, Prince released “Little Red Corvette,” which eventually peaked at No. 6 on the Hot 100, his first single to end up higher on the general chart than the R&B one. Eighteen months later, he would become one of the biggest pop stars in the world, an artist made more mysterious by their fame. During sessions that lasted from December 1983 to April 1984, Prince finished Purple Rain, put together incidental music for the film, laid down the bulk of the Time’s Ice Cream Castle and the Apollonia 6 album, and recorded Sheila E’s The Glamorous Life, somehow without collapsing against the studio console. His songwriting was a glistening machine, animated by inner tensions.
When some musicians die, their record company grasps for whatever material remains, like a medieval saint parceled out into increasingly meager relics. Prince left behind the inverse problem: Thousands of unreleased tracks with no suggestion for how to handle them. So far, his estate has treated that music with care; an expansive reissue of Purple Rain came out last year, but Piano & a Microphone 1983 is the first posthumous album culled entirely from Prince’s vault. Instead of piecing together one of the many projects he envisioned and abandoned, the executors found a session from Prince’s home studio, recorded to cassette in a single take; now and then you can hear him sniffling. Alone with his piano, Prince sounds unusually relaxed, mindful of the contradictions that always seized him yet willing to imagine their reconciliation.
At the beginning of Piano & a Microphone, Prince asks his engineer: “Is that my echo?” Opening track “17 Days” would later become a moody dance number, the B-side of “When Doves Cry,” whose two repeated chords seem to be scraping across the ocean floor. The sketch heard here is much looser, syncopated by a tapping foot; Prince embellishes the notes as if tugging at a frayed thread. It throws the forlorn precision of his lyrics into deeper isolation—the cigarette-counting narrator might only be talking to themselves. Later on, Prince runs through “Strange Relationship,” which wouldn’t surface until 1987’s Sign o’ the Times. The finished version marries a playful melody to alienated emotions: “Baby I just can’t stand to see you happy/More than that, I hate to see you sad.” On Piano & a Microphone, the vocal dissolves entirely, as Prince strangles his own words.
Several tracks from the cassette practice grander gestures still to come. Prince so admired Joni Mitchell that he flew her out to the premiere of his film Under the Cherry Moon on a private jet; covering “A Case of You,” his falsetto swallowed the phrase “holy wine” with reverent despair. The Piano & a Microphone recording is much shorter, barely 90 seconds long, but you can tell he returned to her song over and over again. It makes up a medley of sorts with “Purple Rain,” which is really a miniature, an idea of the “Purple Rain” that Prince would fashion from a live performance with the Revolution months later (their first time playing it in public). Hearing a fragment of that monumental song feels like coming across a sphinx’s head in the desert wastes.
The “new” material on Piano & a Microphone has already circulated as bootlegs, but this album clarifies its details, rescues it from indistinct hiss. The most surprising moment is when Prince begins playing the gospel standard “Mary Don’t You Weep,” a song that must have been absent from all his potential tracklists, even ad-libbing fraught lyrics: “I don’t like no snow, no winter, no cold.” Fingers slinking over his piano with heavy steps, vocals slurring at the edges, he gives the spiritual a physical force. “There has always been a dichotomy in my music,” Prince once said. “I’m searching for a higher plane, but I want the most of being on earth.” Piano & a Microphone is both omen and artifact, a rehearsal for another life. | 2018-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Warner Bros. | September 25, 2018 | 8.5 | 72d63b52-b525-419e-bf9e-86e1c383b0c1 | Chris Randle | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-randle/ | |
The Indiana artist’s debut album builds on his hyperpop, digicore, and rage rap roots, but positions him as a pop star in his own right. | The Indiana artist’s debut album builds on his hyperpop, digicore, and rage rap roots, but positions him as a pop star in his own right. | midwxst: E3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/midwxst-e3/ | E3 | In midwxst’s hands, adolescence is less of a roller coaster and more of a drop tower, liable to leave the faint of heart swearing off rides forever. Since breaking out in the world of hyperpop in 2020, the young Indiana producer has adopted different sounds—emo, digicore, rage rap—to convey his big-hearted, turbulent songs about loving, hating, and hating to love. On his debut album E3, Edgar Sarratt III settles into a nimbly eclectic mode of pop-trap he tested on 2022’s better luck next time. The style suits his inclination for layered harmonies, especially ones that dip, swell, and soar around his warble. Laying his omnivorous tastes over gospel and rock textures, E3 positions midwxst not as a Playboi Carti heir, but a pop star in his own right.
Unlike other SoundCloud-grown artists who’ve blossomed in anonymity, midwxst’s music is fueled by the need to feel seen: by girls who mess with his head, relatives he’s determined to make proud, and a fanbase he wants to commiserate with. On album opener “lost,” a twinkling piano tune that blooms into a full-fledged rock song, he revisits that desire for recognition from a more jaded perspective, singing: “Time has changed me/But I don’t think you cared.” “lost” is indebted to Kanye West, in part because it includes vocals from members of the Sunday Service Choir, but it is still squarely midwxst in its snarling, lovelorn vulnerability. It feels more authentic for Sarratt, a far cry from the imitative, Carti-style flexes on last year’s Back in Action 3.0.
midwxst’s big, uncomplicated hooks—crafted alongside co-executive producer Sophie Gray—feel designed to coax out oceans of iPhone flashlights. He’s skilled at making songs for the mass catharsis of an arena show: the yowled “I know” of “warning,” the repeated titular cry of “lights out,” the juxtaposition of a hopeless chorus over a wistful guitar riff on “like nah.” Even the requisite fuckboy track “s.f.b.” can easily be shouted with the same abandon that Denzel Curry brings to the Lil Jon-style outro.
Despite its studied gloss, E3 is still an introduction, and not every shot lands. Sarratt sometimes relies on well-tread idioms, such as “I’ve been shot by Cupid,” which don’t always match the intimacy of the music. Rhyming “you” with “you” on the penultimate “hate how much” is a bit egregious, especially when there’s five writers in the room. But the best parts of E3 are delicate and unexpected. The centerpiece “heartache blues” is exultant, blending stacked vocoder harmonies à la Imogen Heap, a plucky sung refrain, a radio-ready trap verse, and a pattering dembow riddim punctuated with handclaps into one big production flex. Tellingly, the verse barely stands out.
The frenzied structures of hyperpop and rage rap were valuable templates for Sarratt’s earlier work (after all, this is an artist who fondly recalls throwing punches in the pit at one of Carti’s recent Rolling Loud sets). But the softer melodies that midwxst carries through E3 elevate his high-drama impulses in a new way, lifted by producers like Gray, collaborators like Curry, and a major-label tool kit. Even when his lines lean rudimentary or his flows feel repetitive, the more expansive palette he’s drawing from helps mask some of the lyrical clunkiness. By the closing track “ready for you,” his writing reveals the growth possible with some guiding hands; the internal rhyme and evocative image of “I ride head out the window/playing limbo with the wind” is one of his strongest bars yet. He’s learning to wield his rawness, and maintaining soul even if he sounds more polished. | 2023-09-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Geffen | September 7, 2023 | 6.5 | 72d8d07a-bf43-4bbd-9de6-55ae0ed39a6b | Hattie Lindert | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hattie-lindert/ | |
Odd Nosdam recorded the T r i s h EP in memory of the late Trish Keenan of English noise-pop act Broadcast. It finds him at his most abstract and untethered, dispensing with any notion of genre to explore the evocative qualities of sound. | Odd Nosdam recorded the T r i s h EP in memory of the late Trish Keenan of English noise-pop act Broadcast. It finds him at his most abstract and untethered, dispensing with any notion of genre to explore the evocative qualities of sound. | Odd Nosdam: T r i s h EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21368-t-r-i-s-h-ep/ | T r i s h EP | What does it mean to remember someone? Beyond the abstract idea of remembrance lie some hard truths about our own limitations: our memories are imperfect and constructed and they degrade over time much as we do ourselves. Odd Nosdam’s T r i s h EP is an act of remembrance that wrestles with these limitations. Its six largely instrumental songs bear the tenor of memories: at once warmly familiar and hazily indistinct.
Nosdam recorded the T r i s h EP in memory of the late Trish Keenan of English noise-pop act Broadcast. Originally released as a limited-run cassette on the Baro label in 2013, the out-of-print EP is now seeing wider release on vinyl. While Nosdam is known best as a producer of cerebral hip-hop beats, the songs on T r i s h are comparatively formless, often eschewing low-end and percussion altogether. This is Nosdam at his most abstract and untethered, dispensing with any notion of genre to explore the evocative qualities of sound. Working with tape loops, samples, and layers of distortion, he constructs churning songs whose melodies lie buried under blankets of static. While Nosdam is certainly no stranger to noise in his work, these tracks often push into Broadcast territory, sounding like transmissions from a radio station that’s just out of range.
Nosdam’s primary focus here is texture; he spends much of T r i s h smearing recognizable shapes into more impressionistic forms. Take the chiming opening melody of "O l y n n," which feels like it was ripped straight out of a Broadcast song. Around the two-minute mark, the track cuts to silence before that same melody returns, pitched up, massively delayed and barely recognizable. Grouper’s Liz Harris contributes a vocal to the song—a haunting, wordless wail—but even that ultimately gets swallowed up by a cloud of echo as well. Nosdam approaches samples with a similarly warped sensibility on T r i s h; "L o n j a e" sounds like a yé-yé 45 left skipping on a turntable until it transforms from a song to a drone.
Broadcast’s greatest trick might have been sculpting pop songs out of noise and Nosdam manages to perform a similar alchemy on the closing track, "T r i s h." Here, the producer gives himself over fully to Broadcast’s school of songcraft, employing the sort of fuzzy organ and heavily distorted bass that became hallmarks of that band’s sound. Even more striking, though, is the vocal that floats through the middle of the track. It's a sample from a late-'60s Norwegian folk record but the singer, Annlaug Lofthus, is a dead ringer for Keenan. For a brief moment, amid swells of noise, we catch a glimpse of Trish Keenan through the haze. And then, just like that, she’s gone.
Correction (1/6, 3:50 p.m. EST): An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified the singer on "T r i s h" as Trish Keenan. It is Annlaug Lofthus, as now stated. | 2016-01-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | Sonic Cathedral | January 6, 2016 | 6.8 | 72dc16af-0ec0-4c78-9a9a-23232966b123 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
It's a rare occurrence indeed that listening to a record actually causes me physical pain. I'm capable of ... | It's a rare occurrence indeed that listening to a record actually causes me physical pain. I'm capable of ... | 12 Rods: Separation Anxieties | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8201-separation-anxieties/ | Separation Anxieties | It's a rare occurrence indeed that listening to a record actually causes me physical pain. I'm capable of putting on a stoic smile when confronted with friends' Dave Matthews records. Korn and Limp Bizkit can induce a twinge, nothing more. But listening to 12 Rods' newest release makes me hurt. Bad. Separation Anxieties is the ear infection that antibiotics can't cure fast enough. It's the headache that half a bottle of aspirin just won't alleviate. It's the splinter you can't pull out of your foot without the assistance of heavy-gauge needles or sufficiently pointy tweezers. This record is acid reflux, gastroenteritis, and dysentery all rolled into one.
But the stomach-turning pain this record causes me doesn't stem from any particularly grating noise or gut-wrenchingly awful sonic mishap to be found on the record. Rather, it comes from the knowledge that a band I once considered to be one of the absolute greatest bands in modern music could produce a record that sounds so bad. What's even more perplexing is that the same band could call such an obviously terrible-sounding record "the record we wanted to make and that sounds like us."
12 Rods' 1998 debut LP, Split Personalities, rocked ass from here to Bangladesh by showcasing a band in peak form. With Ryan Olcott's robotic whine, Christopher McGuire's maniacally inventive drumming, and Olcott brother Ev's keyboard talents and studio noodling, this band had finally figured out how to translate its unique elements into a well-oiled machine. The record sounded nothing short of perfect. Every chord, every melody, every synthetic bleep, every pathetically self-deprecating word Olcott spat out-- it all fit together so perfectly. 12 Rods were a band who not only played great songs, but knew how to listen to their own sound and refine it to the point of absolute perfection. Which is all why this record comes as such a shock.
Separation Anxieties' opening track, "Kaboom", begins with a stupid, but not overly offensive barrage of gratuitously poppy guitars, drums, and synth bursts. But any hopes for a salvageable song are instantly shattered when the sound dies down and Ryan Olcott shouts "Sex!/ It's a regular practice," just in time for a hokey and completely displaced power-chord progression that simply sounds wrong.
This is followed by "What Has Happened", which may very well be the album's worst. Over yet another generic power-chord progression, Olcott whines: "My ex thinks she's so tough/ She flicks her cigarettes before she puffs/ I think she's a man when she wears Adidas/ She lost her libido then dumped me for a punk/ Who's in a band, sounds like Korn/ But pretentiously aggressive/ Not too impressive." Yow. As the song segues into the marginally less offensive chorus of "What has happened?/ What has happened to the one that I love," the listener's sentiment mirrors Olcott's verbatim. After only the second song, almost all hope is lost, replaced only by a sickening sense of disappointment and bewilderment.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of Separation Anxieties is the fact that every time it seems like the guys might stumble upon a patch of decency, it all goes awry. "Astrogimp" is musically incredible, but the worst lyrics you may ever be exposed to taint the song's relative virtue (the title is all the proof you need). Two less offensive tracks, "I Think I'm Flying" and "Your Secret's Safe With Me", are followed by the album's single most intolerable moment, the distressingly horrid jack-in-the-box and quivering falsetto introduction to "Marionette", a song with a chorus consisting of yet another overused, run-of-the-mill chord progression-- and what the fuck are these lyrics?! Augh!!!!
Since I bought Separation Anxieties over a week ago, I've been attempting to convince myself that the alarming decline in quality from the last record is not the fault of 12 Rods themselves-- or rather Ev and Ryan, the only two remaining members of the "new" incarnation of 12 Rods. It's easy to blame producer Todd Rundgren, whose production work with Hall & Oates is eclipsed only by his vocal arrangements for Celine Dion. Certainly, the man had his day in 1987 with XTC's Skylarking, but his insipid overproduction on this album is far more typical of his recent efforts.
Another easy way out is to blame the record company. Some of the material on Gay? and Split Personalities had been around for a while-0 maybe V2 forced the band into releasing a record full of material the band wasn't comfortable with. They did title the last song on their own record "Glad That It's Over"...
But no matter whose fault it is, nothing changes that Separation Anxieties is a huge letdown-- especially considering the fact that I've patiently waited for its release for the better part of a year. I marked its release date on my calendar. I bought it the day it came out. I was expecting an album in the spirit of Gay? and Split Personalities-- a record that would instantly cement a place among my favorites. Obviously, it didn't happen like that.
It saddens me that this record barely warrants a 2.0. Nothing would have made me happier than to issue my first rating above a 9.5 to one of my absolute favorite bands. But on the plus side, I can now throw Separation Anxieties on the fire and spend the next couple of months convincing myself that it was all a bad dream, and that 12 Rods are still one of the greatest bands in the world. | 2000-06-30T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2000-06-30T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | V2 | June 30, 2000 | 2 | 72dd68e6-b999-42f9-bf52-ba41b18c55e2 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
On its third album, the Scottish indie pop group parts with band member John Henderson and continues to distinguish itself the old-fashioned way-- with memorable melodies and engaging lyrics. | On its third album, the Scottish indie pop group parts with band member John Henderson and continues to distinguish itself the old-fashioned way-- with memorable melodies and engaging lyrics. | Camera Obscura: Let's Get Out of This Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9077-lets-get-out-of-this-country/ | Let's Get Out of This Country | "I feel like getting confessional," Tracyanne Campbell sings on the title track of Camera Obscura's third LP. This comes as no surprise to those of us who got all moony and maudlin over the Glaswegian sextet's first two albums. In 2001, the group issued their debut, Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi, in perfect-storm conditions for comparisons to Belle & Sebastian. They even had formal connections: Stuart Murdoch produced the album's lead single, "Eighties Fan", and Richard Colburn had played drums in an earlier incarnation of the band. The similarities extended to the vocals, as well, with Tracyanne Campbell often sounding like a more charismatic Isobel Campbell (no relation). But while that record echoed so much lace-and-paisley B&S, in Camera Obscura, Tracyanne played the dominant Murdoch role; John Henderson her recessive yet crucial Isobel. That inversion made the two bands seem like mirror-images of each other, and it was easy to pretend that Tracyanne Campbell and Murdoch were each the silent interlocutors in the other's wry dialogues.
Camera Obscura's second album, Underachievers Please Try Harder, expanded the band's sonic palette to encompass the influence of Leonard Cohen ("Your Picture") and the Beach Boys ("A Sister's Social Agony"), but did little to allay the persistent comparisons to their forefathers. By no means does this make Camera Obscura the poor man's Belle & Sebastian-- to the contrary, by emerging at a time when B&S was moving away from intimate chamber pop toward more ambitious, less immediate fare, they fell neatly into the stylistic niche that their fellow Scottish band was gradually vacating. And Murdoch's take on heartbreak-- masculine, but tinged with the classically feminine values of empathy and spirituality-- seemed less emulated than complemented by Tracyanne Campbell's perspective, which was feminine, but tinged with the classically masculine values of coarseness and aggression. "I should be suspended from class/ I don't know my elbow from my ass," she sang to a skittish crush on "Suspended From Class".
One of Camera Obscura's finest attributes is consistency. There's hardly a dud to be found in their catalog, and their similarly styled songs distinguish themselves the old-fashioned way-- with memorable melodies and unique lyrics. Pleasantly, that ethos remains mostly unchanged on Let's Get Out of this Country; there are few subtle changes to the band's sound, and only one of them is more than cosmetic. With John Henderson's departure, lead vocal duties now rest entirely on Campbell, relieving the music of a measure of contrast. Campbell, however, has more than enough charm to fill the role herself, and so while Henderson's departure shifts the nature of the group, it isn't for the worse.
Let's Get Out of this Country also emphasizes a zaniness that was only hinted at on its slightly more reserved precursors. This is due in no small part to the fabulously schmaltzy Vegas-wedding organs that flash all over the record like blindingly white grins. You can find them short-circuiting the indefatigable bounce of lead single "Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken"; trilling through the dreamy melt of "Tears for Affairs"; and dappling "The False Contender"'s melancholy sigh. Too much of it would have wrecked the album's delicate poise, but luckily, the group doesn't lean too heavily on it for melodic counterpoint, balancing it out with elegiac brass and moodier organ tones.
Campbell's lyrical focus here remains squarely on love and its ugly aftermath. But the real struggle in her songs isn't between men and women-- it's between emotional vulnerability and the stubborn will to retain emotional independence. This unresolved point of view conveys a sense that Campbell's specific personality is coming through the words unfiltered, especially on the soaring title track: "I drowned my sorrows and slept around," she sings, adding hastily and chastely, "When not in body at least in mind." "Lloyd" contains a familiar Campbell arc, one that moves from timidity ("You can stay a girl by holding a boy's hand") to hard-nosed pragmatism ("I've got my life of complication here to sort out/ I'll take myself to an east coast city and walk about") in less than four minutes of fancifully brisk pop.
On "Come Back Margaret", Campbell addresses the still-pined-for ex of her own still-pined-for ex with "tears in [her] eyes", but still acknowledges that she "likes the free days with no expectations." And on the weepy, twanging "Dory Previn", Campbell is "sick of the sight of [her] old lover", eventually concluding that it's "time I let my love for him die." No endless yearning for Campbell, but no defiant posturing either-- instead, she explores the vagaries of searching for the circuitous route between the two. Though they haven't changed much in the span of three terrific albums, Camera Obscura no longer recall Belle & Sebastian; they only sound like themselves. | 2006-06-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-06-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | June 5, 2006 | 7.8 | 72e345ff-ce54-4417-9ae6-8cff14e53eb8 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The Oregon-based singer-songwriter's taut fifth album channels the wounded spirit of Elliott Smith. | The Oregon-based singer-songwriter's taut fifth album channels the wounded spirit of Elliott Smith. | Johanna Warren: Chaotic Good | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/johanna-warren-chaotic-good/ | Chaotic Good | A quiet rage simmers beneath Johanna Warren’s first four albums. You can hear it in the way she fries her voice on “A Bird in the Crocodile's Mouth,” or the distant, uneven percussion of "Here to Tell," which sounds like angry footsteps growing closer. It’s there under the abundant beauty of her mostly acoustic earlier work, which inspires calm and dread in equal measure. On her latest full-length, Chaotic Good, Warren lets that rage erupt to the forefront.
If the Oregon-based singer-songwriter’s music can be slotted neatly beside the lunar environments of Julianna Barwick and Grouper, women who take distance as a primary emotive strategy, she also finds a deep kinship with the work of Elliott Smith, the late folk-rock songwriter who sublimated anger into taut and compelling pop. Smith knew when to subdue his compositions and when to ignite them, when to whisper through gritted teeth and when to open into a full-hearted yelp. Warren’s study of these gestures shows more clearly than ever on Chaotic Good, which evinces Smith’s influence on the brisk, rolling guitar chords of “Part of It” and on the close-whispered vocals of “Every Death.” Alongside Smith’s echo, bolder, brasher notes of Hole and Liz Phair also peek through—’90s contemporaries of Smith who indulged their anger playfully, in ways that tore up the scripts for women artists at the time.
Warren often multitracks her voice to create a chorus of one, adding depth and dimension to her striking soprano. On Chaotic Good, the first of her albums she’s produced on her own, there’s a moment where she pitches that common technique into overdrive. It comes on a song called "Twisted," a heavy exorcism of a troubled relationship. Against a throbbing guitar progression and a simple rock drum beat, Warren's voice ascends to a breaking point. “I give up/I give up/I gave it my all,” she howls at the song's climax, her voice splitting the last syllable open into a paralyzing shriek.
Chaotic Good is an album about recognizing and deprogramming your codependent tendencies, the habit of needing a partner to feel whole. The ‘90s touchstones Warren calls upon often explored similar themes, excavating the ruins of relationships and trying to reassemble the self in their midst. “I wanted you to stay/And I wanted you to leave/Each day it’s a little harder to believe,” Warren sings on the gorgeous, sloping "Bed of Nails,” a song where her transformation from shadowy folk songwriter to rock bandleader comes into clearest view. The space around her opens up, and more instruments join the fold, bolstering her sound with adrenaline and grit.
The change fits the subject. As much as leaving a soured relationship can feel lonely, like the entire world has been compressed into the space of your own skull, the aftermath is often a communal rite. You call out to others to bear witness to what you’re leaving behind, to reestablish yourself in the social fabric. You quit codependence for interdependence, and then, eventually, independence, having learned to stand on your own two feet in a crowd. It’s a painful process, often an angry one. And then the fire finishes burning, and the nearby ground is clean.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Wax Nine / Carpark | May 4, 2020 | 7.9 | 72ebb7cf-8c23-427a-9430-f49322867b54 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
A new compilation digs deep into stacks of jewel cases and explores an inflection point in Japanese pop music where changes in technology brought changes in sound. | A new compilation digs deep into stacks of jewel cases and explores an inflection point in Japanese pop music where changes in technology brought changes in sound. | Various Artists: Heisei No Oto: Japanese Left-field Pop From the CD Age, 1989-1996 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-heisei-no-oto-japanese-left-field-pop-from-the-cd-age-1989-1996/ | Heisei No Oto: Japanese Left-field Pop From The CD Age, 1989-1996 | It’s almost impossible to talk about the renewed interest in Japanese music in the West without invoking the YouTube algorithm. The meteoric rise of city pop, as well as the ambient music that’s come to be known as environmental music, seems propelled by its musical merit and the allure of its imagery in equal parts. The striking photo of Mariya Takeuchi by Alan Levenson adorning the upload of “Plastic Love”—effectively the official anthem of city pop, with 56 million views and counting—has inspired fanart and cosplay. (The song itself has been covered in a number of different languages, and has recently even appeared in a Calvin Klein ad campaign.) The most beloved environmental music, similarly, seems to trade on an image of mindfulness and mystique; check the comments of any popular video and you’ll see tons of messages about singing trees and aligned chakras. But what about the music not so easily filed under an “aesthetic”? An unfathomable amount of Japanese music will fall through the cracks, simply because it lacks the unspoken qualities that make some things go viral.
Norio Sato and Eiji Taniguchi, the owners of Osaka record stores Rare Groove and Revelation Time, respectively, are interested in putting in the legwork to find lost treasure themselves. Though their stores primarily deal in vinyl—and there’s plenty of gems yet to be uncovered on vinyl—the format represents only a portion of what’s left to be discovered. The CD became the primary format for major labels in Japan in 1989, and by the mid-’90s had become the only format for many releases. Sato and Taniguchi, constantly on the lookout for songs that haven’t been heard by many, turned their digging efforts to things that exclusively existed on CD—and Heisei No Oto: Japanese Left-field Pop from the CD Age, 1989-1996 is the result of their archaeology.
Heisei No Oto’s mission statement of “left-field pop” is an intentionally vague descriptor, housing samplings of dance, new age, electronic music, and more under its umbrella. Rather than zero in on a niche sound, such as Light in the Attic’s city pop or environmental music compilations, it casts a wide net that broadly surveys Japan’s pop music landscape of 1989 to 1996. It’s the sort of big picture thinking that makes sense for a couple of record store owners with keen eyes for what moves through the circulatory system of their shops. Songs by artists now known the world over, like Haruomi Hosono and Toshifumi Hinata, sit alongside names you’re less likely to recognize, presented with the same acclaim. Heisei No Oto explores an inflection point in Japanese pop music where changes in technology brought changes in sound. The production of music on CD ramped up around the same time that synthesizers were getting cheaper and easier to experiment with—not only for artists working in the mainstream, but also the ones on the fringes.
The tracks that veer furthest to the left of field feel like the star players; “Yeelen” by Love, Peace & Trance—Haruomi Hosono’s excellent 1995 foray into hippie mysticism—is a cavernously wide-open ode to inner peace with a spoken monologue guiding you through a meditation. “Phlanged Vortex” by Friends of Earth and Interior alum Eiki Nonaka is another blissful highlight, with soft percussion, whistles simulating bird song, and smooth tenor saxophone played by the inimitable Yasuaki Shimizu. Even the less offbeat tracks, like pop star Yosui Inoue’s “Pi Po Pa,” follow the underlying theme—its brisk, funky bassline puts it in the camp of easy listening, but the kalimba melody and misty synth washes throughout make it just a little bit weird.
Fumihiro Murakami’s “Miko”—a deluge of synth twinkles, whooshes, and waves—was hand-selected by Haruomi Hosono for inclusion on 1995’s École, a compilation of amateur artists. The track would appear again on Strange Flowers Vol. 1 for Daisyworld Discs in 2003—a label Hosono created strictly for music that he likes. Kina Tomoko’s “INK,” one of the strongest standouts, puts her distinctive singing against a backdrop of traditional percussion and electronics that evokes the past while facing the future. Her vocal style developed from the folk songs that she heard as a young girl—she performed at some of the most popular minyo clubs in Okinawa at the age of 15, and would eventually join Champloose, one of Okinawa’s most famous bands. Yasuaki Shimizu wrote and produced the track, and ubiquitous songwriter Kenzo Saeki penned the lyrics. Heisei No Oto represents a passing of the guard, featuring several tracks in which established musicians offer their talents to fledgling artists, but leave them plenty of space to flourish.
There’s nothing here as immaculately polished as Hiroshi Sato’s sparkling pop diamond “Say Goodbye” or as transcendentally peaceful as Hiroshi Yoshimura’s “Blink.” The new technology, new ideas, and newfound ambition of the CD age coalesced into an experimental spirit that can be identified, but not so clearly defined. That resistance to being easily sorted into playlist-friendly vibes is probably why these songs aren’t likely to show up in your YouTube recommendations. Rather than a mood, Heisei No Oto builds a narrative—one that tells the story of a rapidly changing Japan, and of acceleration to new frontiers. The rough edges are on full display, but gratifying to look at closely.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Music From Memory | March 6, 2021 | 8.4 | 72ee87a5-249d-4d18-9ce6-a69394159e0f | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
You are slowly being destroyed. It's imperceptible in the scheme of a day or a week or even a ... | You are slowly being destroyed. It's imperceptible in the scheme of a day or a week or even a ... | William Basinski: The Disintegration Loops I-IV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/577-the-disintegration-loops-i-iv/ | The Disintegration Loops I-IV | You are slowly being destroyed. It's imperceptible in the scheme of a day or a week or even a year, but you are aging, and your body is degrading. As your cells synthesize the very proteins that allow you to live, they also release free radicals, oxidants that literally perforate your tissue and cause you to grow progressively less able to perform as you did at your peak. By the time you reach 80, you will literally be full of holes, and though you'll never notice a single one of them, you will inevitably feel their collective effect. Aging and degradation are forces of nature, functions of living, and understanding them can be as terrifying as it is gratifying.
It's not the kind of thing you can say often, but I think William Basinski's Disintegration Loops are a step toward that understanding-- the music itself is not so much composed as it is this force of nature, this inevitable decay of all things, from memory to physical matter, made manifest in music. During the summer of 2001, Basinski set about transferring a series of 20-year-old tape loops he'd had in storage to a digital file format, and was startled when this act of preservation began to devour the tapes he was saving. As they played, flakes of magnetic material were scraped away by the reader head, wiping out portions of the music and changing the character and sound of the loops as they progressed, the recording process playing an inadvertent witness to the destruction of Basinski's old music.
The process may be the hook for this sprawling four-disc set, but the loops themselves are stunning, ethereal studies in sound so fluid that the listener scarcely registers the fact that it's nothing but many hundreds of repetitions of a brief, simple loop that they're hearing. I imagine that life within the womb might sound something akin to these slowly swelling, beauteous snatches of orchestral majesty and memory-haze synthesizer. The pieces are uniformly consonant, embellished with distant whalesong arpeggios and echoing percussion.
In essence, Basinski is improvising using nothing so much as the passage of time as his instrument, and the result is the most amazing piece of process music I've ever heard, an encompassing soundworld as lulling as it is apocalyptic. A piece may begin bold, a striking, slow-motion slur of ecstatic drone, and in the first minute, you will notice no change. But as the tape winds on over the capstans, fragments are lost or dulled, and the music becomes a ghost of itself, tiny gasps of full-bodied chords groaning to life amid pits of near-silence. Some decay more quickly and violently than others, surviving barely 15 minutes before being subsumed by silence and warping, while the longest endures for well over an hour, fading into a far-off, barely perceptible glow.
There is another, eerier chapter to the story of the Disintegration Loops-- that Basinski was listening to the playbacks of his transfers as the attacks of September 11th unfolded, and that they became a sort of soundtrack to the horror that he and his friends witnessed from his rooftop in New York that day, a poignant theme for the cataclysmic editing of one of the world's most recognizable skylines. Removed from the context of that disaster and transposed into the mundane world we live in every day, The Disintegration Loops still wield an uncanny, affirming power. It's the kind of music that makes you believe there is a Heaven, and that this is what it must sound like. | 2004-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | 2062 | April 8, 2004 | 9.4 | 72ee8c26-b264-4e55-b01f-4c80497eda9e | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The best songs on the singer-songwriter’s excellent fourth album invoke the surreal melodramas of Björk and the wry social commentary of Pulp. | The best songs on the singer-songwriter’s excellent fourth album invoke the surreal melodramas of Björk and the wry social commentary of Pulp. | Nadine Shah: Kitchen Sink | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nadine-shah-kitchen-sink/ | Kitchen Sink | On her fourth album, Nadine Shah unearths hard-luck stories in all sorts of bleak corners, squaring off with sleazy creeps, spiteful deadbeats, and neighborhood racists. But while the songs have the verisimilitude of the grainy British dramas they’re named for, she isn’t interested in the humdrum trappings of reality. Instead, she colors her songs with vibrant shades, drawing out tragicomic absurdities with sly panache. The result is direct but disorienting, like a grim domestic scene painted by Matisse.
For Shah, it’s a concept closer to home than 2017’s fraught, state-of-the-world address Holiday Destination, which took in British bigotry, the Syrian refugee crisis, and the “fascist in the White House.” Yet she shifts focus without losing grip of her unsettling songwriting: these character-driven vignettes are rooted in grim realities, pressures, and prejudices, and although she swaps brooding post-punk for brighter, more lurid sounds, she still builds her songs for discomfort. Often she explores her experiences as a woman in her 30s and the sexist, ageist drek she and have friends have endured: “Running gauntlets/Swerving perverts,” she drones over skittish percussion and swarming-bee synths on “Walk,” transforming a walk down the street into an Escherian obstacle course.
Those disconcerting flourishes allow Shah to tease out the political grit in each personal ordeal, and the best songs land in some odd hinterland between the surreal melodramas of Björk and the wry commentary of Pulp. The title track’s slinky throb finds Shah, a British Muslim of Norwegian-Pakistani heritage, clocking dirty looks from xenophobic neighbors. “Gossiping, boring bunch of bitches,” she fires back, relishing every snarky syllable with her theatrical Geordie drawl. On “Club Cougar,” she’s pestered by a smarmy guy who just knows she’s an older woman on the prowl; in truth, they’re basically the same age and she finds him repulsive. “All dressed up/ Think I did it for ya,” she sneers, refusing to play along with the track’s carnal atmosphere of sultry saxophone and animal howls.
In the wrong hands, that grotty-scenario-meets-lavish-score formula could slip into farce, and Shah isn’t afraid of mining black humor from the incongruities. She brings a sensual purr and lithe guitar to “Ladies for Babies (Goats for Love),” the tale of a neglected trophy wife whose husband treats her like livestock and his farm animals like sweethearts, and calls out a gaslighting drunk on the swampy strut of “Buckfast.” But she never prioritizes cheap laughs over gut punches. Restless, eerie rhythms give “Trad” a dark uneasiness, and synths glower and swoon as Shah panics she’s running out of time to do what society expects—get married, have kids—even though she knows how stifling those expectations are. “Shave my legs/ Freeze my eggs,” she sings, half-mesmerised and half-miserable, in the thrall of a dangerous spell. “Will you want me when I am old?”
Early in her career, Shah was routinely hailed as a mythical lovechild of Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, and she holds onto some some of that gothic grandeur: “Kite,” with its haunted chants, whistles, and twinkles, sounds like one of her old compositions broken down into a ghostly western. Increasingly, though, she sounds less their stylistic disciple than a similarly charismatic, chameleonic storyteller. On the closing “Prayer Mat,” she explores the dwindling days of her relationship with an influential figure—“the pioneer who learned to love abroad”—the two of them blotting everything out with booze and old memories. “We batten down the hatches/ We drink on airport time,” intones Shah over shuddering guitars and electronics. “Together we write our epitaphs/Whilst dizzy from our wine.” Like most of Kitchen Sink, it’s a report from an altered state, a true story in a strange hue; real life, but only as Shah could tell it.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Infectious | June 25, 2020 | 7.9 | 73005e87-d9f1-4487-86e5-73d6bd526d2a | Ben Hewitt | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-hewitt/ | |
The piercing clarity of Youth Lagoon’s third album, Savage Hills Ballroom, feels like a reaction to the muffled bedroom ambience and warped kaleidoscopism that defined Trevor Powers' earlier collections. He worked on the record with Ali Chant, who co-produced Perfume Genius’ similarly glammed-up and streamlined third album Too Bright. | The piercing clarity of Youth Lagoon’s third album, Savage Hills Ballroom, feels like a reaction to the muffled bedroom ambience and warped kaleidoscopism that defined Trevor Powers' earlier collections. He worked on the record with Ali Chant, who co-produced Perfume Genius’ similarly glammed-up and streamlined third album Too Bright. | Youth Lagoon: Savage Hills Ballroom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21047-savage-hills-ballroom/ | Savage Hills Ballroom | Youth Lagoon's first two albums felt introspective at the time: Trevor Powers mused about the posters in his childhood bedroom, his first "it's not you, it's me," and driving his parents' car in a meek mewl that come off as conversational rather than performative. He favored post-production tricks that made him either sound trapped in a well or a bouncy castle, but he always sounded alone, and the music bore none of the visceral signifiers of rock. But he'd likely call his previous work "insular" now, created at a point when he was lucky enough to talk about love, death, and the societal contract as abstractions and avoid dealing with the real shit going on inside of him. After the release of Wondrous Bughouse, Powers cancelled a run of tour dates after the drowning of a close friend. Up to this point, Powers already seemed like a guy who'd bruise from a stiff wind; Savage Hills Ballroom has him feeling everything with even greater sensitivity.
This is first time we can hear what Powers actually sounds like—the piercing clarity of Savage Hills Ballroom has to be a reaction to the muffled bedroom ambience and warped kaleidoscopism that respectively defined The Year of Hibernation and Wondrous Bughouse. And the most immediate revelation is just how aggressive his vocals are. When clouded by reverb and dozens of flange effects, Powers resembled bemused warblers like Dean Wareham and Wayne Coyne. "Officer Telephone" and "The Knower" present Youth Lagoon as a freak-folk torchbearer gone digital, Powers adopting the keening, incantatory tones of Joanna Newsom or Devendra Banhart (and even a melodic glimpse of Tori Amos' "Crucify" on "Free Me"), though without the same kind of supernatural presence.
Powers still sounds barely a third of his 26 years ("we're all babies born too soon," he yelps), but it works in the context of his angriest music, since most toddlers don't know much about restraint either when they first discover the world pushing back against them. With the assistance of Ali Chant, who worked on Perfume Genius' similarly glammed-up and streamlined third album Too Bright, Powers equips himself with the instruments of war—Savage Hills Ballroom is full of layered drums, atonal noise, and horn sections used for both melodic counterpoint and blunt force. Even when the loping keyboards of "Highway Patrol Stun Gun" and "Rotten Human" recall Powers' standard operating procedure, the songs are kinetic, obsessed with forward motion and melodic precision—aspects that are completely new to Youth Lagoon.
Savage Hills Ballroom is also the first time we can hear what Powers actually has to say, and that's by far the greatest risk on a record that's already attempting to redefine Youth Lagoon. Powers shows an admirable willingness to engage with broader societal issues, though the accusatory tone of "Rotten Human", "The Knower", and "Again" open him up to scrutiny the often banal commentary can't withstand: "the clones, they've always said to stay in line," "so we take a pill and trust the doctor's lie," "television soundtrack drones," using "computer" as a verb. "Through aisles of cans you walk/ 'Cause you'd rather spend than grow a crop," he spits on "Again"; there's a possibility he's critiquing his own obsessive habits here, but he eventually shifts to the plural first person and becomes the guy on your Facebook feed posting #hottakes about GMOs.
While Savage Hills Ballroom awkwardly stretches to make universal points from Powers' personal distaste, his personal heartache results in the most truly resonant moments. Tucked within the civic-minded back half, the exceptional "Kerry" is a dramatic elegy to Powers' uncle, holed up in Vegas, on the run from the law and addicted to crack cocaine. Meanwhile, "Officer Telephone" finds Powers in a heightened sense of shock while mourning, the "terrible tone" of ambulance sirens reminding him of a time when they were too late to help. Both of these songs match the devastating emotional impact of "July" and "Dropla" while accessing a darkness he couldn't address directly on The Year of Hibernation or Wondrous Bughouse ("I've felt heaviness creep since I turned 8 years old"). Regardless of the subject matter or the production or the arrangements, the most truly self-searching Youth Lagoon album has Powers realizing he perhaps knew his position of strength all along—the inner child set adrift in the adult world, left to figure it out on his own. | 2015-09-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-09-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | September 17, 2015 | 7.2 | 73045641-4971-4f58-9529-f790f8f15741 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The veteran rapper’s 29-track, 112-minute album is a bloated attempt to remind everyone he’s a great MC, flitting between styles without rendering any of them memorable. | The veteran rapper’s 29-track, 112-minute album is a bloated attempt to remind everyone he’s a great MC, flitting between styles without rendering any of them memorable. | The Game: Drillmatic Heart vs. Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-game-drillmatic-heart-vs-mind/ | Drillmatic Heart vs. Mind | Riffing off another artist’s work to make your own is a tried-and-true cure for writer’s block. But while such exercises often serve as a jumping-off point, on The Game’s new album Drillmatic Heart vs. Mind they’re the endgame—resulting in a nostalgia trip with little substance, the rap version of the Stranger Things aesthetic. Game has long approached his place in hip-hop with a mix of reverence and entitlement; the hook on the title track of his 2005 major label debut The Documentary is literally just his list of the greatest records of all time, his own included. He may truly believe that he’s among hip-hop’s elite MCs, but his career in the two decades since has been defined by his inability to accept the fact that few would agree.
The result is Drillmatic, an exhausting campaign for GOAT status that finds the Compton rapper doing his best to out-rap his guest features while using their own style, à la the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Notorious Thugs.” The problem for Game is that this is extremely difficult to do—Biggie was one of the most talented rappers to ever pick up a mic, and even he tried this only once on Life After Death. The Game is less talented, and his experiments with different styles often prove disastrous. He whiffs on attempts to ape Cam’ron’s forceful enunciation (“K.I.L.L.A.S.”), Pusha T’s restrained Southern mafioso flow (“No Man Falls”), and the rollercoaster rhythm of Fivio Foreign’s Brooklyn drill delivery. It’s a daring move that only the most skilled performers should even attempt; Game takes shot after shot on Drillmatic without ever really coming close to succeeding.
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of these “tributes” is that Game has good taste; it’s just that the creative elements and wordplay he contributes are often so corny they scan as parody. “Money Cash Clothes,” his flip of a Jay-Z and DMX ’90s synth-heavy club hit, quickly descends into something spiritually aligned with Jersey Shore. On “Chrome Slugs & Harmony,” his awkward attempts to mimic Bone Thugs-n-Harmony’s Cleveland G-Funk are almost as bad as his play on their name. Even when his choices are aesthetically pleasing—the “Rump Shaker” horns (“La La Land”), the Janet Jackson interpolation (“Universal Love”), a snippet of the late Prodigy’s intro to Mobb Deep’s “Quiet Storm” (“What We Not Gon’ Do”)—they fail to grow into something new, feeling more like Easter eggs than inspiration.
The 10-minute Eminem diss “The Black Slim Shady” takes the mimicry to another level. Game goes beyond merely mocking the white rapper’s voice, delivery, and complexion, writing himself into the Marshall Mathers Cinematic Universe: He kidnaps the brother of Eminem’s infamous “Stan”; murders (and eats) Dr. Dre; and name-drops Em’s childhood bully D’Angelo Bailey, his ex-wife Kim, and that cluttered closet. He makes desperate attempts to sound as deranged as the white Slim Shady, making for some truly smooth-brained one-liners—“I stick my dick in your podcast,” “Wipe down my stripper pole with the hair grease from your bandana.” The Game’s reverence for Eminem is well-documented, so his claim that he’s only ever played one of his records in his car rings hollow. There’s a sad sweetness to his obsession, the kind of admiration that can only be felt by a die-hard fan.
Drillmatic still offers some poignant moments, however brief. On “Voodoo,” his remake of BOA QG and BOA Hunxho’s original, Game paints a scene of a desperate father struggling to care for his newborn as her mother battles breast cancer, imbuing an otherwise standard ode to the trap with pathos. And Kanye’s verse on “Eazy,” in which he laments the behavior of his spoiled children (“When you give them everything, they only want more/Bougie and unruly, y’all need to do some chores”) might even garner some sympathy, despite the latent narcissism and toxicity he directs toward his ex. Yet at nearly two hours of runtime across 29 songs—with almost as many features—Drillmatic is plagued by the tracklist bloat typical of the streaming era. Neither fun nor profound, the album is almost impressive in the sense of collecting so much talent to create something so mediocre.
Even at The Game’s commercial peak, he was often overshadowed by his mentor-turned-rival 50 Cent, and he’s been trying to distinguish himself ever since. It’s a little tragic: From the start of his career, the Game has been desperate to be included in the pantheon of his rap heroes, like the ones who performed at this year’s Super Bowl. Yet almost 20 years later he’s even further from that dream, his rivals having taken his place. It’s a common aspiration, to be acknowledged by those you admire. But Game has spent so much energy wanting to be the GOAT that he forgot to actually be great. | 2022-08-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 100 Entertainment | August 18, 2022 | 5.7 | 7305e337-7d4f-4e86-905c-d898c63b0c14 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The rapturous debut from the British singer-songwriter takes adventurous pop-rock crucibles to new heights with her illusory songwriting and stunning voice. | The rapturous debut from the British singer-songwriter takes adventurous pop-rock crucibles to new heights with her illusory songwriting and stunning voice. | Nilüfer Yanya: Miss Universe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nilufer-yanya-miss-universe/ | Miss Universe | In some ways, Nilüfer Yanya’s career maps onto that of King Krule: Both young Londoners arrived with stark, bruised elegies led by their electric guitar and urchin cries; both quickly eclipsed their early promise. But where Archy Marshall swerved towards solitary murkiness, Yanya, on her debut album, has shocked her desolate confrontations into some of the most adventurous pop-rock crucibles since Mitski’s Puberty 2. They are catalysts for communal outpouring that spark with adrenaline and anxiety, a mixture of the raw and the refined, her guitar fuzz mingling with tinselly synth glitter and the bluesy disaffection of her startling voice.
Between some songs, you hear Yanya playing the part of a telephone operator for a wellness hotline she has called WWAY Health, the concept of which, across five satirical skits, eventually fizzles out. They’re quite funny the first time, but they break up what is otherwise a fantastically sequenced and always essential album. They undersell it a bit, too: Yanya’s lyrics on Miss Universe aren’t so much about looking to external forces for easy affirmation as they are figuring out the kind of intensity and hunger that she can allow herself to feel as a young woman: “Got to learn/Got to realize what this means/Got to earn/Got to decide who to please,” she sings on “Angels,” her waltzing guitar gaining intensity before the pressure gauge blows.
Yanya writes gorgeously about the seduction of sensation, no matter its side effects: “Deep underwater I breathe/Let me soak/Chasing the shades of the love that we made, of the love that we broke,” she sings on “Baby Blu,” a cloudy meditation that builds into subtly euphoric gospel house. On “Tears,” if someone doesn’t hold her back, she’ll be “lying in a pool of someone else’s blood.” She’s “getting high just from the heat” in “Heat Rises,” singing in snatched, gasped phrases over a fizzing drum machine, the effect as decadent yet panic-ridden as an anxiety attack in a sauna. Her songwriting is a textural palace of wonders.
Where Yanya’s lyrics portray her as someone prone to wallowing in forbidden emotions, her arrangements are more circumspect, toying impeccably with resistance and release. “In Your Head” lurches between gimlet-eyed composure and cataclysmic panic. She never uses climaxes as a musical surrogate for emotion. A few tracks towards the end echo the spaciousness of Yanya’s early material and shape the album’s enveloping dynamic as a whole. Others, like “Safety Net,” exude a simmering sadness built from nimble drum machines and seamless pop melody, or, like “Paradise,” buoy Yanya’s worries with easygoing saxophone motifs courtesy of her improbably named sidekick, Jazzi Bobbi.
Nothing controls the mood of Miss Universe like Yanya herself. She is adept with both a wounded lament and a desperate falsetto. Sometimes she whips between the two with exhilarating yelps, as if someone yanked a ripcord inside her lungs. In powerful moments, her voice is full of hunger; in desperate moments, that hunger empties out. “I’m still wired to want these things,” Yanya sings sullenly on the last song, the relatively unadorned “Heavyweight Champion of the Year,” slashing out choppy chords that tease one final cathartic payoff. Yanya’s songs reflect a woman who’s uncertain of how much of herself to reveal to the world. That is both the allure of Miss Universe and what augurs even brighter things to come. | 2019-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | ATO | March 22, 2019 | 8.3 | 7305fae5-d27a-408e-b20b-2466f4eaa0c4 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
Snail Mail’s striking debut album is emotionally wise, musically clear, and encompasses the once and future sound of indie rock. | Snail Mail’s striking debut album is emotionally wise, musically clear, and encompasses the once and future sound of indie rock. | Snail Mail: Lush | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/snail-mail-lush/ | Lush | Sincerity is Lindsey Jordan’s superpower. The moody guitar confessionals she creates as Snail Mail contend with suburban teenage ennui—the angst of feeling like you’re the only person who’s truly alive in a dulled world. But unlike so many other disillusioned 18-year-olds with a Fender and a microphone, Jordan does not whine or wallow; she transcends. She articulates the self-conscious shame of youth with a startling clarity, but she also knows that these things too will pass. Her sorrowful pleas—of disappointment, of confusion, of unrequited queer love—often turn into triumphs upon hitting open air. When she claims “I’ll never love anyone else” on her debut album, Lush, she is not moping—she sounds psyched, turning the sad sentiment into a singalong, as a rush of bass, drums, and jangling chords raise her up high.
With Lush, Jordan earns her place as a leader in the next generation of indie rock, the ones who are keeping the genre’s honorable ideals alight while continuing to expand its purview beyond straight white dudes. She was born in June 1999, the same month Napster started, and by the time she was in her early teens, the once-sturdy walls that separated mainstream and underground music were all but rubble. So while Jordan is indebted to the ethos of ’90s indie rock, she bends it to her will and her moment. There are echoes of early Liz Phair in Lush’s stark guitars and its tightrope walk between despair and enlightenment, but there are also flashes of the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg at his most wrung-out, and Paramore’s Hayley Williams crinkled emo soulfulness, and Fiona Apple’s ferocity, and Taylor Swift’s savvy heartache, and the solemn quietude of Frank Ocean’s Blonde. Jordan doesn’t make a big show of her eclecticism on the album—on its face, it is a collection of slow and mid-tempo guitar rock songs—but there are details that separate it from the tried-and-true indie of yesteryear, that make it feel born into her era.
For one, Lush lives up to its name; “I never wanted to make a lo-fi record,” Jordan recently said. All 10 songs go down clean, every note is heard, every part delivered with both verve and poise. As a classically trained guitarist who began playing at age 5, Jordan colors many tracks with layers of pleasingly sour chords kissed by reverb, her clean tone in concert with her emotional transparency. Her guitar work helps Lush achieve a sidewinding spell that invites obsessive listening. It also opens up plenty of space for her bandmates to add unfussy accompaniment and, most importantly, for her voice to ring out unencumbered. Whereas her vocals were buried on 2016’s Habit EP, they are gloriously exposed on Lush, and we really hear Lindsey Jordan for the first time.
As a singer, she embodies the chaotic changes that teenagers quickly cycle through in a given month, day, minute. She is bored. She is defeated. She is bratty. She is jubilant. She is blunt. She is elliptical. These shifts occur from song to song, but also from line to line, or even word to word. On “Pristine,” she reels off lines of devoted romantic poetry before immediately dismissing them with a tossed-off “anyways,” pumping up and deflating her own crush in a single breath. Throughout the record, each line is given its own story. Every vocal feels deeply considered and felt, yet nothing is over-rehearsed. She knows precisely when to dial in and when to dial back, when to fully commit to her longing and when to step back and shake her head at it.
There’s a ragged grit to Jordan’s voice, and she can make it growl or tame it into a rasping lilt in order to make her point. “Heat Wave” begins warily, with Jordan pining in yesterday’s clothes, her voice a groggy croak. As the song picks up pace, it sounds like she’s gaining confidence with each verse as she considers a particular flagging relationship. Finally, after an invigorating guitar spasm, she snaps out of her funk, sets her feet square on the ground, and lets it rip: “I’m not into sometimes,” she decides, her throat full, her delivery resolute. The song is an entire Greta Gerwig coming-of-age film in about five minutes.
Several of the most disarming moments on Lush come in the form of a question: “Do you love me?” “Don’t you like me for me?” “Who’s your type of girl?” “What could ever be enough?” “Did things work out for you?” These are intimate appeals, the kind that often come with watery eyes and trembling chins. But when Jordan sings them, it’s as if she’s staring directly at the person in question, commanding in her vulnerability. This attitude defines Lush, and Jordan turns it into a mantra on “Full Control.” The song finds her moving past the bullshit of another failed romance, done with waiting for someone to love her back. The strident verses coalesce into the album’s most cleansing hook: “I’m in full control/I’m not lost,” she attests, her voice soaring. “Even when it’s love/Even when it’s not.” Lindsey Jordan does not have all the answers. But, in music and life, she knows what she wants, and she’s unafraid to ask for more. | 2018-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 8, 2018 | 8.7 | 730847d5-381a-4b11-bc41-5f61083d5d20 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
On a new collection of recordings stowed away since the 1980s, the iconic color photographer extends his knack for defamiliarizing the mundane to synthesizers and pop standards. | On a new collection of recordings stowed away since the 1980s, the iconic color photographer extends his knack for defamiliarizing the mundane to synthesizers and pop standards. | William Eggleston: Musik | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/william-eggleston-musik/ | Musik | There’s a William Eggleston photograph that I think of every time I travel; as memorable and satisfying as the hook of a pop song, it’s been embedded in my subconscious since the moment I first saw it. Eggleston, a Memphis-born photographer known for his color-saturated work, took the photo, called “Untitled (Glass in Airplane),” sometime between 1965 and 1974. It depicts a drink on the tray table of an airplane seat—rum and coke, by the looks of it. What makes the photo spectacular is the play of color and texture: the atmospheric sunshine illuminating the nubby fabric seat back, the ruby liquid in the glass, the graceful hand holding the straw.
In all its gratuitous visual pleasure, “Untitled (Glass in Airplane)” looks almost like an advertisement. But there’s a hint of something not quite right just beneath the glossy surface of the image. Something vulgar, strained—a little louche, or unhinged. The image is too knowing to register entirely as kitsch. It draws you in only to undercut your desire; the glistening colors are like the shine on a poisoned apple. Eggleston suggests that the objects of our desire might not be so desirable after all.
The casually cryptic photograph also came to mind while listening to the 78-year-old artist’s rather difficult first album, Musik, a highly unexpected compilation of instrumental synthesizer compositions. Eggleston recorded it in the 1980s on a Korg OW/1 FD Pro, stored the files on floppy discs, and is only releasing them now, with the label Secretly Canadian. Mostly meandering improvisations, the 13 tracks combine luscious, slippery textures with discordant melodies, moving without going anywhere, fighting easy resolution with every turn. The style makes sense: As the photographer famously said of his visual work, “I am at war with the obvious.”
Eggleston has played the piano since his childhood in Mississippi, and he has said that music is his “first calling,” even before visual art. It’s easy to find videos of him plinking away somewhat ostentatiously on grand pianos at openings for his own museum shows in Sweden and Tokyo. A longtime resident of Tennessee, he also befriended Big Star, providing the cover for their 1974 album Radio City. Still, Eggleston was canonized not for music but his pioneering color photography, which helped legitimize the genre at a time when it was still anathema to the art world.
In the 1970s, the vast majority of photographs printed in color were ads; art photography was always in respectable monochrome. Instead, Eggleston took snapshots that bordered on the mundane (critics called them “perfectly boring”) except for their saturated, almost sickly palettes. His iconic 1969 photo of a tricycle in Memphis settles like a bruise.
Like the ads that his photos resembled, Eggleston’s musical compositions can seem cloying or tasteless. The synths are unabashedly cheesy. “Untitled Improvisation DCC 02.9” (named presumably for the file format, digital compact cassette) is carnivalesque, while “Untitled Improvisation DCC 02.25 3-01” brings to mind the bomp-bomp-bomp theme of underground “Super Mario” levels. The pieces have classical-music pretensions—the Germanic spelling of the title apparently references Bach—but the highbrow was never Eggleston’s strong suit.
Instead, the artist excels at ambiguity. “Untitled Piano Improvisation FD 6.9” is by far the longest track, at 16 minutes of wandering, and its piano sound is the most naturalistic. You wait for the composition to cohere and it doesn’t, repeatedly flouting expectations, dipping into melodies and then dissolving them, evoking nostalgia without embodying it. It induces a Brian Eno-ish ambient stupor, like Music for Airports run through a saloon player piano.
Eggleston includes two standards on the album: Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Tit Willow,” from the orientalist musical “The Mikado,” and “On the Street Where You Live,” by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner. In both, the familiar becomes strange, in part due to the synths but also Eggleston’s ponderous hand. There’s no telling where these well-worn songs will go next. In this sense, the album—as much a kind of private sketchbook as anything—is curiously in keeping with his photographs. Even in music, he rebels against the obvious. | 2017-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Secretly Canadian | October 23, 2017 | 6.4 | 73084ca2-77b9-479c-80aa-cfd7a4e58009 | Kyle Chayka | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kyle-chayka/ | |
Erin Birgy’s delightfully freaky sixth album is dense but full of whimsy and romance, pulling in strains of folk, jazz, and chamber pop to marvel at all the odd little wonders of the world. | Erin Birgy’s delightfully freaky sixth album is dense but full of whimsy and romance, pulling in strains of folk, jazz, and chamber pop to marvel at all the odd little wonders of the world. | Mega Bog: Life, and Another | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mega-bog-life-and-another/ | Life, and Another | In Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno, the actress and performance artist used costumes and chintzy set pieces to explain how insects have sex. The series, which debuted in 2008, consists of short videos wherein Rossellini does things like dress up in a praying mantis costume and talk about how, when the male mantis mates with a female, the female mantis will bite its head off. In another clip, titled “Whale,” she explains the difficulties of reproducing when you live mostly underwater and are the world’s largest mammal. Watching Rosselini hop around in little costumes explaining the bird and the bees is endearing and goofy, but it also has more profound effects. It evokes a sense of childlike wonder, reminding us that learning is a lifelong process and can open the world beyond our day-to-day quotidian drudgery. Erin Birgy assumes a similar vantage point on her excellent sixth album as Mega Bog, Life, and Another. It is a record that is whimsical and sensual; weird and romantic.
Over the past decade, Birgy has written from the perspective of aliens, animals, and three-eyed humanoids. The sonic texture of her music behaves like these strange creatures. As a composer and arranger, there’s room for improvisation in her music, but it all feels purposeful and intricate. Her work is loaded with playful juxtapositions. She writes arrangements that are jazz-oriented, but not jazz. She writes pop songs if you consider Stereolab to be a pop group. She makes punk music if you are the kind of person who moshes to the Lounge Lizards. Her work is slinky and decadent, like a vintage mink stole draped over a fainting couch. It’s roughly of the same cerebral terroir as Cate Le Bon or Meg Remy’s project as U.S. Girls. Life, and Another is compositionally dense without feeling overwritten or pretentious. Birgy’s music is joyful. Her delivery is that of some kind of palm reader who has been around the metaphorical block of life a few times.
Life, and Another exists in a terrestrial zone. The record takes place on Earth, if Earth were slightly freaked. These songs are an approximation of reality, imbued with magical elements: purple desert stones, dogs hovering atop glittering nimbus clouds. On the smokey “Butterfly,” blasts of guitar, saxophone, and pristine flickers of keys flutter like wings in the sky at night, turning purple to dark blue. The opening “Flower” sprawls out like a lone sunbather in the middle of the desert. Here, guitars courtesy of band members Will Segerstrom and Meg Duffy are sun-soaked, and the percussion of James Krivchenia and Andrew Dorsett clips away softly and stoically. Birgy’s voice sounds relaxed, and you can tell she is having fun: “You think you’re funny,” she sing-speaks like she has a big grin on her face “I don’t get it!”
As a lyricist, Birgy doesn’t take herself too seriously, but she’s not unserious either. She’s a very evocative and very funny writer, and her songs are marked by poignant, perfect little images. On “Obsidian Lizard,” she muses about a tiny blue lizard, a girl named Mallory, and a mystical entity by the name of Debbie Dubai. Her words come in like snippets of conversations, she favors the dreamy, mercurial, and poetic. “The big cat rips at the meat between the worlds,” she sings as if she were gazing into a crystal ball. The quartz-like “Before a Black Tea,” shares lineage with the kind of jazz-oriented pop of a band like the Rotary Connection or Burt Bacharach. It sounds rooted in the ’60s without feeling overinvested in sounding at all retro or being any kind of pastiche of the past. There are blips of free jazz, and warm-toned percussion. Birgy sings about bumping beetles into jars as a guitar solo brightens the sky; somewhere in the background, someone mimics the meow of a cat and the call of a bird. Listening to her music can feel like a trip to an all-night diner where the cockroach you see on the way to the bathroom would very much like to tell you its life story.
What is really excellent about Birgy’s work is her emotional registry. “Maybe You Died,” is the record’s starkest and most somber moment. On it, visions of Coach leather bags, chewing gum, coffee stains, and bad dreams are enough to conjure the sensation of soured feelings and puffy red eyes. But it’s the end of the song that feels the most painful. When Birgy sings the line “He didn’t die for me/Or anybody,” I thought about the absurdity of what it means to literally be dead. How often is it that you sit down and listen to a weird pop record with saxophones on it, and leave thinking about how bizarre it is to not exist anymore, at least not in the physical form while also being reminded at the same time of how wonderful it can be to be alive? There is tension present in how she communicates the basic functions of living and breathing and moving through the world. She’s funny and messy and writes like the dreamiest kid on the playground and also the wisest old man. It’s kind of like in those Rossellini videos: Birgy makes it seem like even the tiniest protean critter is a marvelous sight to behold.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Paradise of Bachelors | July 26, 2021 | 8 | 73089373-3c4e-41ef-815b-ccdaaee466de | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Captain Beefheart’s 1969 masterpiece set an unmatched standard for avant-rock. This new reissue from Third Man puts it back in print on vinyl. | Captain Beefheart’s 1969 masterpiece set an unmatched standard for avant-rock. This new reissue from Third Man puts it back in print on vinyl. | Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band: Trout Mask Replica | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/captain-beefheart-and-his-magic-band-trout-mask-replica/ | Trout Mask Replica | Though it’s hard to tell by listening, the first two albums by Captain Beefheart (aka Don Van Vliet) found him creatively frustrated. Safe as Milk from 1967 and Strictly Personal from the following year were inventive blues-rock records, but Beefheart had bigger ambitions. At that point, his group the Magic Band were a mostly democratic collective, and since Beefheart had less musical expertise than his colleagues, his odder suggestions were vetoed as too unconventional. “That really pissed him off,” said bassist Gary Marker. “[Because] he had all these ideas in his head and he had no way of getting them across to people.”
To gain the control he needed to express his vision, Beefheart morphed the Magic Band into a kind of musical cult. In mid-1968, he replaced some members of the group with younger, more impressionable players (guitarist Bill Harkleroad and bassist Mark Boston were each just 19), gave everyone a nickname to match his own, and holed up with them in a house on the outskirts of Los Angeles. The sessions in the house have since become a crucial part of rock legend, the subject of contradictory stories and much myth-making. By many accounts, Beefheart imposed weird lifestyle rules and played mind games that bordered on brainwashing. Some claim the musicians couldn’t leave the premises save for a weekly grocery trip, and drummer John “Drumbo” French said he spent one month eating only a cup of soybeans every day.
Beefheart put a piano in the house—despite not knowing how to play it—and banged out ideas, which French transcribed and assembled into tunes. The resulting pieces were more like puzzles than songs, giving different instruments conflicting time signatures and varying part lengths that had to somehow meet at specific points. French compared it to building a solid wall with bricks of unequal size. This unorthodox complexity forced the Magic Band to rehearse 12 hours or more a day, usually without Beefheart. Often they would sleep right where they had just practiced, and immediately continue upon waking.
After six months of this bunkered mania, the Magic Band entered a studio with Beefheart’s friend Frank Zappa, who “produced” them by staying out of the way. Riding the adrenaline of their intense woodshedding, the group recorded 20 songs in less than six hours. Beefheart added vocals separately, syncing uncannily with the music despite rarely having rehearsed with the band and eschewing headphones during takes. In less than a week, after adding two tracks from an earlier session and a few more made at the group’s house, Trout Mask Replica was born. As Third Man’s new reissue makes clear, this 28-song double album might be the strangest record in major-label rock history. Beefheart made more accessible music before and after, but his most difficult work is still his most famous, defining his musical legacy and the sound of the Magic Band for going on five decades.
Its enduring place in the canon is due in part to the allure of Trout Mask Replica’s singular logic. Like life in a cult, the music seems crazy to an outside observer but makes perfect sense once you’re inside. In a 1993 BBC documentary, “The Simpsons” creator Matt Groening said it took him just seven listens to go from hating the album to deciding it was the greatest of all time. Few records lend themselves to such a transformation, where they eventually click into place while still sounding so thrillingly wrong. The rules that Trout Mask Replica shattered haven’t been reassembled in quite this way by anyone since. After all, capturing its sound would mean somehow retracing the steps from Beefheart’s enigmatic brain to French’s devout hands to the Magic Band’s inhuman toil.
The thrill of Trout Mask Replica also lies in the boggling assemblage of stylistic and thematic strands. There are shards of rock and blues in the band’s deconstructed grooves; free jazz in Beefheart’s primitive, Ornette Coleman-inspired saxophone playing; literary surrealism in his obscure yet oddly resonant lyrics; outsider folk in his growled a capella songs; and postmodern collage in the album’s diverse sound sources, which include field recordings, spoken skits, studio banter, and even vocals recorded over the phone. Though the songs seem to reject convention, there are references to musical history scattered throughout Trout Mask Replica, from snippets of melody borrowed from traditional tunes to lyrical quotes like Beefheart’s chant of “Come out to show them” in “Moonlight in Vermont,” taken from Steve Reich’s tape experiment from two years earlier. Though Beefheart’s lyrics were mostly oblique conundrums, he could also be bluntly topical, singing boldly about the Holocaust and the Vietnam War.
And though Beefheart could be pathologically controlling with his bandmates, he was surprisingly open to chance and accident throughout Trout Mask Replica. He left in the sounds of the tape player pausing in his acapella songs, inserted recordings of himself wandering the weeds into others, included mistakes and under-breath commentary in pre-song skits, and created one spontaneous track, “The Blimp,” by having guitarist Jeff “Antennae Jimmy Semens” Cotton call Zappa and read him a poem, which Zappa recorded while his own band, the Mothers of Invention, played in the background.
Perhaps most surprising is how catchy Trout Mask Replica’s jagged songs turn out to be. Some even have verses and choruses, albeit filtered through the band’s sonic contradictions and Beefheart’s skewed timing. The rushing climaxes of “Ella Guru,” the building swing of “Pachuco Cadaver,” and the swaying blues of “She’s Too Much for My Mirror” are all earworm inducers, as their multiple sonic elements coagulate into melody, like filaments spastically aligned by a magnet.
Over five decades, Trout Mask Replica has proven incredibly durable, still sounding as bracing and radical as any rock music since. That’s even clearer in this remaster, sourced not from the decayed original masters but from less-worn backups. But was the music worth what Beefheart put the Magic Band through? French and Harkleroad have both said that though they wouldn’t want to endure it all again, they were thrilled to have created such a landmark. They certainly deserve more credit than they got from Beefheart, who often claimed to be the sole songwriter (he even left French off the original album credits completely, apparently as punishment for leaving the band before it was released). But luckily each member’s vital contribution is loud and clear in every note, beat, and weird and wonderful turn. Captain Beefheart might have led this cult, but Trout Mask Replica is the work of a collective—a serendipitous line of charged neurons that wired together to make something truly magical. | 2018-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Third Man | April 28, 2018 | 10 | 7309b128-0cf6-466e-83e4-20412dfd9ad8 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The St. Louis, Mo., experimental composer Joseph Raglani approaches his sound like both a musician and a DJ. His newest offers a hectic mix where synths ripple in overlapping circles, melodies dive into longer tones, beats morph, and static melts. | The St. Louis, Mo., experimental composer Joseph Raglani approaches his sound like both a musician and a DJ. His newest offers a hectic mix where synths ripple in overlapping circles, melodies dive into longer tones, beats morph, and static melts. | Raglani: Real Colors of the Physical World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17378-real-colors-of-the-physical-world/ | Real Colors of the Physical World | There's so much happening on Real Colors of the Physical World that absorbing it all might be impossible. In Joseph Raglani's hectic mix, synths ripple in overlapping circles, melodies dive into longer tones, beats morph from pin pricks into plunges, and churning static melts into what sounds like a funk band jamming underwater. His hyperactive sound doesn't just encourage repeat listens-- it makes you wonder if you could ever hear it the same way twice.
Making music sound busy isn't unique, especially when it's electronic; nor is it a guarantee of quality. But even though Raglani's approach has precedents, his knack for mixing and matching sounds, through wavy dissolves, liquefied cuts, and coursing turns, is distinct. In a sense, he's equal parts musician and DJ-- attentive enough to sonic detail that he avoids mere pastiche, but restless enough that his insistence on adding new ideas injects everything with constant energy.
Part of why Real Colors feels so busy is that its first two tracks last over 20 minutes each, and they unfurl like eventful journeys. Apparently portions were designed separately, since the track list includes parenthetical subtitles. Maybe if Raglani had added gaps of silence in between, Real Colors would be easier to digest-- but it wouldn't be as interesting, or as enjoyable. Because as fascinating as the individual passages are, the fissions between them are even more striking.
Examples abound. I'm partial to a section early in opener "Fog of Interruption" where a blasting synth crumbles into distant transmissions, then rises from the dead in the form of shiny, laser-like reflections. Even better is a passage in the following track, "Terrain of Antiquity", wherein a chaotic mass of lighting-bolt synths slowly turns into a vocoder-like melody that recalls the Residents at their most beatific.
There are echoes of other antecedents throughout, particularly the strain of German experimentation known as K**osmiche Musik. But where Raglani's last widely-distributed release, 2008's Of Sirens Born, felt like a synthesis of his influences, Real Colors bears his own stamp more clearly. That comes across most in its endless pulse, which eternally bubbles and often threatens to burst. His loops feel solid enough to last forever, but never settled or relaxed. Instead, Raglani is always as interested in what his sounds could do next as what they're currently doing.
The final two tracks on Real Colors are significantly shorter-- each lasts just a bit over five minutes-- and less varied than the first two. Where their predecessors were like aural colleges, these pieces are more conventionally song-like. Each begins with an arpeggiated loop that passes through modifications in scale and volume, creating a kind of verse-chorus pattern. "The Exploded View" in particular is a bona-fide song, with haunting vocals that follow the synths through cycles of tension and release.
Despite the shift toward contained structure, Raglani makes the second half of the album as restless as its first. Perhaps this is a cleverly-designed after-effect-- once you're immersed in his busy environment, even simple synths can sound ripe with potential. Maybe it's the basic urgency he gives his loops, a skill he's recently honed with Mike Pollard in the excellent duo Bryter Layter. Whatever the reason, Real Colors of the Physical World demonstrates the beguiling versatility of Joseph Raglani's sound-crafting skills. | 2012-12-11T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2012-12-11T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Electronic | Editions Mego | December 11, 2012 | 7.7 | 730d97ca-d32e-4244-be9e-20a42114abe9 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The Texas artist’s second album contains sparks of brilliance, but its overreliance on generic flex raps feels stale and tedious. | The Texas artist’s second album contains sparks of brilliance, but its overreliance on generic flex raps feels stale and tedious. | Mike Dimes: Texas Boy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-dimes-texas-boy/ | Texas Boy | On paper, Texas rapper Mike Dimes has the resume of a rising star your teenage cousin won’t stop raving about. A year ago, the former basketball player was balancing a rap career with college, pursuing a degree in business management. But he also recently landed a TikTok hit and co-signs from JID and Joey Bada$$, a product of his cold delivery, versatile flows, and talent for spitting over sedated boom-bap and subwoofer-shredding beats. Last year’s debut album In Dimes We Trust was high-octane, but occasionally Dimes would slip into generic flexing that caused his words to get drowned out by the beats. That downward trend continues on his sophomore album Texas Boy, which has all the color and personality of a graphic tee that was left in the dryer for too long.
Dimes is still a technically competent rapper. His style blends the groove and bounce of his home state with the laidback confidence of New York, creating pockets for his clear monotone to dip into. Vocally, it’s hard to tell if he’s too cool for this world or just masking a deeper pain. After the hearty track "INTRO," which features Houston legend and Chopstars founder OG Ron C, producers Spliff Sinatra and Ben10k bring deep bass licks and drums to “WHISKEY AND WEED,” making inspired connections between different generations of Texas rap. Dimes skips across the track while reflecting on making his family proud: “They counted me out/Shout out to momma and poppa, I made me a M in the house/I don’t think they can get to me now.”
But this reflective mode only shows up in fits and starts, which would be fine if so much of Texas Boy wasn’t obsessed with bland, empty stunting. Flex rap is entertaining because it’s voyeuristic and specific; take Tyler, the Creator bragging about his kelly green BMW and canary diamonds on “DOGTOOTH,” or Megan Thee Stallion casually name-dropping her Nike deal after talking about running shit on “Megan’s Piano.” Dimes is desperate to flaunt his ends any way he can, but he is missing the flavor and magnetism that makes it compelling. “I just spilt my cup, uh, all on my kicks/Designer on cuffs, that’s all on my bitch,” he says on “ARSENAL,” leaving out the drink and the designer brands in the process. Occasionally, a stray detail will help a line pop, like when he compares himself to swordsman Tomioka from the anime Demon Slayer on “UNDEFEATED,” but for the most part, the particulars play out in the most basic ways imaginable. He hooks up with women in Venice (“GREEN”) and in the backroom of chicken spot Zaxby’s (“FEELIN’ ME”). He runs up bags, counts money, and drops bands on nothing in particular. Both “KARMA” and “KISS N’ TELL” use his boring posturing to floss on faceless women; the songs would be offensive if they weren’t a snooze.
Dimes is capable of good storytelling, which only worsens the frustration. On “HATCHBACK,” he recalls times running drugs with friends “who used to bust a couple scams off of Snapchat,” putting you in the driver’s seat for its first verse. On “ALL 4 YOU,” Dimes pines for an ex who has copies to all his house keys and envelops his thoughts: “I could’ve kept you on my team, but I’m too scared of saying ‘we.’” Rap doesn’t have to be autobiographical, but these bits and pieces are more intriguing than hearing Dimes whip it like Betty Crocker for the millionth time.
The man has potential, but the music never fully connects like it should. He sounds great cutting his way through Ben10k and cdmp3’s violins and throbbing 808s on “ARSENAL” and the screeching sound effects that power “HATCHBACK” and “STRETCH,” but often lacks the perspective or charisma to rise above them. And any time he’s paired with a guest, they consistently prove just how out of his depth he is. Denzel Curry’s memeable three-word intro to his verse on “ARSENAL” (“I smell bitch!”) hits harder than Dimes’ whole 16s. On closer “OFF THE PORCH,” fellow Texans BigXthaPlug and Maxo Kream squeeze more excitement out of clever pronunciation and word games than their host does on the entire album. Dimes is working to assert himself here, but technical skill and nonchalance aren’t everything. Sometimes you need to hit the car with a fresher coat of paint. | 2023-06-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | SinceThe80s / Camp Billy | June 28, 2023 | 6.3 | 730fff3a-91da-46af-b10f-9e06db43aa06 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The posthumous marketing of Nick Drake's music has been arduous and fitful, a decades-long attempt at setting right what everyone agreed went horribly wrong the first time. His new box set Tuck Box, the latest and possibly final repackaging, includes studio albums Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, and Pink Moon as well as two compilations of rarities. | The posthumous marketing of Nick Drake's music has been arduous and fitful, a decades-long attempt at setting right what everyone agreed went horribly wrong the first time. His new box set Tuck Box, the latest and possibly final repackaging, includes studio albums Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, and Pink Moon as well as two compilations of rarities. | Nick Drake: Tuck Box | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18793-nick-drake-tuck-box/ | Tuck Box | Nick Drake did not lead a colorful life. Shy, abstracted, and bad with eye contact, he shuttled quietly from boarding school to prep school to Cambridge and made few friends along the way. The most rebellious act of his youth was a note politely informing his tutor he was leaving school. His musical career was a disaster, but not a funny or entertaining one—his albums were simply ignored and audiences talked obliviously through his live gigs. He moved back home, fell into a deep depression, and one night, either by accident or on purpose, took too many pills. When he died, there was almost nothing to feel good about.
This has proved a difficult predicament for the record labels charged with profiting off his legacy. The posthumous marketing of Nick Drake's music has been arduous and fitful, a decades-long attempt at setting right what everyone agreed went horribly wrong the first time. First there was 1979's overpriced Fruit Tree box, which bombed. Then came the slightly more successful 1985 best-of Heaven in a Wild Flower and 1986’s Time of No Reply, a collection of rare and officially unreleased tracks. His cult profile rose modestly through the 90s, but it wasn’t until 2000, when “Pink Moon” famously found its way into a Cabrio commercial, that Nick Drake's fortune as a "penniless genius" finally received its uplifting footnote. Since then, there has been a flurry of release activity, all of it packaging the same tiny body of work spanning six years. Nick Drake is finally famous, but it took the record industry 40 years to figure out how to make it happen.
It's worth revisiting this dubious history while considering Tuck Box, the latest and possibly final repackaging. Alongside his three studio albums—Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter, and *Pink Moon—*this boxed set includes the 2004 compilation Made to Love Magic, (itself a barely altered repackaging of Time of No Reply) as well as Family Tree, a 2007 collection of Nick Drake's home recordings with a few short, haunting songs by his mother, the folk singer and poet Molly. There is not a single second of new or unreleased music waiting for you inside this handsomely designed object, in other words; the packaging, which replicates the wooden box that Nick Drake’s mother used to send him cakes in while he was at Marlborough College, is the sole original flourish.
What Tuck Box offers, then, is simply another chance to revisit Nick Drake's short, sad story. Because Drake died in desolation and obscurity, and because his music grows more influential every year, there will never quite be a bad moment to rediscover him. His three studio albums have settled into cultural totems, albums that anyone hoping to know something about rock history buys sooner or later. Even 40-odd years later, their thumbprint remains unique, a strange and compelling mix of timeless poetic melancholy on the one hand, and cloistered, pampered schoolboy modernity on the other. They sit completely to the left of all rock music, which Drake could care less about; his version of a garage band was a group of boys at his boarding school, one of whom was the grand-nephew of John Maynard Keynes. (Their name was the Perfumed Gardeners.)
Drake was influenced instead by British folk royalty like John Martyn and Bert Jansch, or Ashley Hutchings of the Fairport Convention. When he recorded his debut, 1969’s Five Leaves Left, he must have felt, at least momentarily, that he was joining their ranks. It was Hutchings who had enthusiastically approached Drake in local pub The Roundhouse, offering to pass his information along to the legendary manager Joe Boyd. Drake's entrance into the business, at least, was effortless and auspicious, and he was joined in the Sound Techniques recording studio by a few of his personal heroes. The warm, rounded upright bass playing is from Danny Thompson, a founding member of the Pentangle. Richard Thompson plays the pearly guitar leads. Listening to “Time Has Told Me”, the first song on his debut album, is to hear to what might very well be the happiest and most fulfilling moment of Nick Drake’s professional life.
Even as a 20-year-old, Drake's vision for his music was strikingly assured. He was nervous, fumbling, and difficult to engage in conversation in the studio, but he knew what he wanted. He calmly insisted that Boyd and John Wood hire arranger Robert Kirby, a fellow student at Cambridge. Bewildered, they obeyed, and were rewarded with the breathtaking string chart for “Way to Blue”. With its clean lines and grave elegance, "Way to Blue" suggests the philosophy that would distinguish Nick Drake’s music over the years and damn it during his lifetime: in Joe Boyd’s words, it simply “was not reaching out to you." Drake was painfully English, and showiness wasn’t really in his nature. But profundity glowed from his music.
This approach extends to his guitar playing, which was so obsessively perfect it almost escapes comprehension. You will never hear a single string buzz. It's not the sort of virtuosity that quiets a chattering crowd, but once you've attuned to the absolute silence, it quickly grows otherworldly. Even on densely packed fingerpicking runs like "Day Is Done", each note sits in the mix like a stone at the floor of a clear pond. He was a frighteningly flawless player, in a way that served to magnify his incorporeality: There is no surviving video of Nick Drake playing live or talking. He died in 1974, but his physicality is as remote to our modern imagination as Gustav Mahler's.
His concerns were similarly otherworldly and timeless, informed by a childhood of English Romantic poets. The futility of knowing the mind of another was a persistent theme in his lyrics, which looked right past people to stars, trees, eternity. “Who can know the thoughts of Mary Jane?” Drake muses. “Who can know the reason for her smile?” His music viewed human behavior and its peculiarities with quizzical detachment, even when the case study is Drake himself: “So I'll leave the ways that are making me be/ What I really don't want to be,”, he sings on "Time Has Told Me". Sizing up the enormity of this task, examining how it might be accomplished—these were not really his philosophical concerns. They overwhelmed him or they simply didn’t interest him, but either way, they came to trip him up, as they do us all.
When it was released in the fall of 1969, Five Leaves Left went unnoticed. Island Records had done it no favors. The packaging was insultingly botched; two songs—"Day Is Done” and “Way To Blue”—were switched in the tracklisting and “Three Hours” was mistakenly titled “Sundown”. But Drake was also complicit; he began his first ill-fated tour behind the faltering album, and between songs, he would tune his guitar for minutes on end to stony, uncomfortable silence. He often walked off dejected before finishing his set. He disappeared into dope smoke, a predilection that was slowly hardening into a crutch. He blew off radio sessions and interviews and slowly began retreating into himself. It was under these circumstances that he ventured back into the studio for Bryter Layter, his second full-length.
Ironically, it was initially conceived as his "up" album, a poppy rejoinder to Five Leaves Left. Five Leaves was pastoral, written in the wooded confines of Cambridge. Layter was written in London, and was meant to reflect urbanity. It did, but only from the perspective of Drake's one bloodshot eye, peering out cautiously at the world. Over woolly saxophone on "At the Chime of a City Clock", he confesses "I stay indoors beneath the floors and talk with neighbors only/ The games you play make people say you're either weird or lonely". Over the peppy horn charts of "Hazey Jane II", Drake sings lightly of how it feels "when the world it gets so crowded that you can't look out the window in the morning." The city, on Bryter Layter, is one long harsh unpleasant noise occurring outside. Nothing good or stimulating seems to happen there.
The music, however, is brighter—this is the Nick Drake you can hear reflected in latter-period Belle and Sebastian. He rehearsed with a band for the first time, including other members of Fairport Convention, and the result is the most fulsome studio recording he ever managed. Some of the arrangement decisions remain bewildering—the gospel backup vocals, jazz-comping guitar and noodling piano crowding the space on "Poor Boy" remain as jarring now as they were when the album was released. On "Fly" and "Northern Sky", Drake worked with John Cale, and you can hear a more natural dynamic in their collaboration. It's either a shame or a relief they didn't work together longer: "Fly" and "Northern Sky"are the two most affecting songs on Bryter, but it's also likely Cale introduced Drake to heroin.
On Pink Moon, Nick Drake’s final official album, there is one single overdub: the piano part drifting over the title track. The rest is just Drake, his pristine, eerily perfect playing, his mumbling, and silence. Bryter had also sold poorly and received near-zero notices—the most favorable review compared it to "Classical Gas". By now, he hardly spoke to anyone; in between takes, John Wood remembers, Drake betrayed neither pleasure or displeasure. He simply sat. Keith Morris, the photographer who shot the album's photography, remarked that working with Drake was "like working with still life." The album was recorded in two evenings, by his bewildered crew, who were uncertain of what they were even making. When Drake was finished, he dropped the manila package, almost without a word, at Island Records.
A "pink moon" is a baleful symbol, a sign of impending death or calamity. On "Pink Moon", it's "gonna get ye all." On paper, this sentiment reads like vindictive rage, but on record, it sounds contemplative. Drake's voice never conveyed palpable anger or sadness; he had a slight, gentle voice and upper-class accent, the product of his upbringing, clipped and clean, and his guitar, as always, rang out with a crystalline purity. His music is so consoling that the darkness at its heart is not always accessible. It's almost impossible to hear the emotional abandon in Pink Moon, then, without the taste of his first two albums lingering on your mouth. It's only then that the bone-dry resonance of the guitars registers as slightly alarming, and the backdrop of silence suggests both the purity of Drake's vision and also something darker: like someone who has dropped out of the world, mumbling prophecies.
On "Place to Be", he remembers his youth only as a time he "didn't see the truth hanging from the door"; now, he is "weaker than the palest blue." "Know" consists of just four lines—"You know that I love you/ You know I don't care/ You know that I see you/ You know I'm not there." It sounds like a back-and-forth between Drake and the world at large. There is a stillness to Nick Drake's music that bewitches anyone who gets near enough, and Pink Moon is its purest expression. It remains the Nick Drake record most people begin with, and for good reason.
The eleven songs on Pink Moon were not Nick Drake's final recordings, however. In the last year of his life, he would return to the studio, his fingernails long, his hair dirty, his clothes in shambles, to cut beginning tracks for what would have been his fourth album. They went poorly. Joe Boyd recalls that Drake, the flawless technician, was no longer able to play and sing at the same time, so the sessions limped agonizingly while he fumbled through guitar takes and then returned to sing, shakily. These four songs—"Black Eyed Dog", "Rider on the Wheel", "Tow the Line", and "Hanging on a Star"—are the only truly discomfiting records he ever made. On "Black Eyed Dog", he sang tremulously over some hammered harmonics about growing old and wanting to go home. Within four months, he was dead.
The most consequential material on Made to Love Magic remain these final tracks. The sundry unreleased tracks, such as the hallucinatory “Clothes of Sand” and the odd, jaunty “Mayfair", are interesting but inessential. The rest of the album is the usual posthumous footnotes tumble: A version of "River Man" recorded when Drake was still at college; a scrapped version of "Three Days" from the tentative early sessions of Five Leaves Left; an early alternate take of "Thoughts of Mary Jane", with distracted, noodly lead guitar playing from Richard Thompson. There are a handful of performances from Drake's first-ever public concert, the so-called "work tape" from his college days. They don't do much to enrich the Nick Drake story.
Family Tree, though, is odder and more interesting. The album, which was only released in 2007, compiles all the known existing home recordings of Nick Drake—music he recorded at his parents' house for fun or to kill time; rehearsals of Mozart trios with his aunt and uncle (he played clarinet). The 28 tracks consist largely of covers and traditionals, including a run through "All My Trials", sung with his sister Gabrielle.
Family Tree doesn’t give the world any classic lost Nick Drake music, but it does give the sensation, achieved with a little effort, of what it might have been like to sit in the Drakes' parlor in Far Leys. You can hear the actual clink of actual tea cups in the background of his cover of Bob Dylan's "Tomorrow Is a Long Time". You get to hear Nick Drake messing about on guitar, which sounds better than anyone else's. His version of "Cocaine Blues" is enjoyable both because it's a looser and bluesier Nick Drake than we're used to, and also because of his pronunciation of "cocaine," which suggests a side of finger sandwiches.
Family Tree also includes two of his mother's haunting, intriguingly wayward songs. "Poor Mum" makes for an odd companion with her son's "Poor Boy"; "Joy as it flies cannot be caught", she sings, searchingly, her voice climbing into a breath-catching question mark. There is an unmistakable hint of the fatalism that trailed her son's music in these recordings, and in "Do You Ever Remember", she sings lines that could lead directly into "Time Has Told Me": "Time was ever a vagabond/ Time was always a thief/ Time can steal away happiness/ But time can take away grief."
This was Nick Drake's existential dilemma: He would rather ponder time than observe the present, would sooner gaze into the sea than engage with the people around him. School friends recall conversations about spirits and "the little people" as the only times they saw him animated. The rage he directed at his producer Joe Boyd for his failed career on "Hanging on a Star" ("Why leave me hanging on a star/ When you deem me so high"?) was in part the sound of someone realizing that their worldly woes have slowly blotted out their view of the stars, perhaps forever. "I could have been a signpost, could've been a clock," he mused on "One of These Things First"; this is the sentiment of someone who barely assented to the burdens of being a person. For such a soul, there can never be such a thing as a career. There can only be a legacy. | 2014-01-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-01-22T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | null | January 22, 2014 | 8.5 | 73129abc-97f0-427e-ab81-e84ec8bb9c68 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the 1996 album from the hip-hop trio, a socially conscious blockbuster grounded by the realities of the immigrant experience. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the 1996 album from the hip-hop trio, a socially conscious blockbuster grounded by the realities of the immigrant experience. | Fugees: The Score | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fugees-the-score/ | The Score | In the summer of 1994, the Fugees were in danger of getting dropped. The New Jersey hip-hop trio’s debut LP Blunted on Reality, produced by Kool and the Gang’s Khalis Bayyan, was a misguided effort to conform to the aggressive street sounds that, while popular at the time, failed to capture the multi-faceted perspectives of Prakazrel Samuel Michel, Wyclef Jean, and Lauryn Hill. After the first single “Boof Baf” whiffed on commercial radio and record sales flagged, the Fugees appeared to have flopped. Were it not for remix guru Salaam Remi, they just might have.
The 22-year old producer had made his name crafting records for hip-hop OGs like Kurtis Blow and Craig G, and remixing dancehall tracks by Shabba Ranks and Super Cat. A master at blending the sounds of the Caribbean with breakbeats from the streets, Remi was recruited by Columbia to remix the next two singles in hopes of landing a hit. For the first, “Nappy Heads,” they shed the shouty rapid-fire flows of the original, giving Wyclef and Lauryn Hill’s bars room to breathe, slowing down the tempo and rebuilding the bassline with a jazzy swing. Having stripped away the tough guy façade from the album’s original recordings, what remained was a more accurate representation of their energies; Wyclef’s goofy charm, Lauryn’s effortless cool, Pras’ precocious wisdom. It quickly caught fire at New York’s Hot 97 (where Remi worked on Funkmaster Flex’s show) and cracked the Billboard 100. Columbia finally got the hit they had been looking for, and the Fugees got to make another album.
The Score was birthed at those early sessions with Remi. Not long after the “Nappy Heads” remix dropped, he played a beat originally made for—and snubbed by—Fat Joe, flipping a Ramsey Lewis sample into a boom-bap film score that inspired Wyclef to spontaneously shout his prophetic opening bar: “We used to be number 10/Now we permanent at one.” It was Lauryn that brought the “La,” riffing on hooks until she landed on Teena Marie’s 1988 hit, christening the ineffable “Fu-Gee-La.” The song would serve as the spiritual center of the new record, and their new sound.
Armed with a $135,000 advance and complete creative control, Pras, Lauryn, and Wyclef retreated to the Booga Basement, the makeshift studio in Wyclef’s uncle’s house that had become the home base for their Refugee Camp crew. They invested the advance in professional studio equipment and founded a creative hub for the constellation of artists in their orbit (including Rah Digga, John Forté, and an extremely young Akon), a home base from which Wyclef and his cousin Jerry Wonda would produce hits that would be heard around the world. They spent five months in 1995 writing and recording The Score, freed from the ticking clock of rented studio time and the watchful eye of label executives.
For Wyclef, the endeavor was a 24/7 lifestyle. He had moved into a bedroom upstairs after being kicked out of his home in Newark by his religious father for creating sinful music. The lyrical themes weren’t that different from their debut, but in the Booga Basement, the Fugees finally sounded like themselves. “Problem with no man, before Black, I’m first human,” Wyclef spits on “How Many Mics,” offering a glimpse into how the Fugees viewed their connection to the world at large. As “refugees” or even “hip-hoppers” they’d grown accustomed to being othered, but those experiences evoked as many commonalities as they did differences. From their perspective, everyone seeks refuge from something; their jobs, their families, police, or their own neighborhoods. The Fugees found it in music; the ’70s R&B and soul of Lauryn’s youth, the rock and pop Pras and Wyclef gravitated to while living with their rap-hating preacher fathers, and the Caribbean-influenced hip-hop they wanted to make themselves. All of this can be heard in The Score. At the time of its release, there was little else like it.
The group managed to balance these three volatile personalities by carving out distinct roles that naturally highlighted their strengths while covering their weaknesses. Pras was smart enough to recognize he was the weak link musically. His verses are always the shortest, and while he had an ear for pop hits, he could neither sing nor play any instruments. But his business acumen was sharp: he’s the one who got them the record deal and was trusted to handle the finances. (It was also his idea to cover an early-’70s ballad, one that would catapult them into the Top 40.) Wyclef, ever the daydreaming troubadour, brought an element of musicianship the others lacked. Adept at both guitar and piano, at Fugees shows he would spin street tales alongside screeching solos, viewing himself as equal parts Melle Mel and Jimmy Cliff.
Then there was Lauryn Hill, the virtuoso: The best singer, the best rapper, the coolest, calmest, and most collected. Her singing balances sweetness with strength, with just a touch of the vulnerability she would later explore on her solo opus The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. But Lauryn the MC was untouchable, a confident woman unfazed by her status in a man’s world. Throughout The Score, she dismisses sex pests (“The Mask”), wannabe mafiosos (“Ready or Not”), and creatively bankrupt biters (“How Many Mics”) with equal aplomb. And never has a rapper been so unbothered by so-called competition as Lauryn is on “Zealots”:
So while you fuming, I’m consuming mango juice under Polaris
You’re just embarrassed 'cause it's your last tango in Paris
And even after all my logic and my theory
I add a ‘motherfucker’ so you ignant niggas hear me
Haiti’s refugee crisis, fueled by political unrest and state violence, hit its peak in the early ’90s with the coup d’etat that deposed the democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Haitian-Americans, already callously branded by the CDC in 1982 as one of four groups determined to be "risk factors" for HIV infection (the others being “homosexuals, heroin addicts, and hemophiliacs”), were being repatriated en masse as they fled the violence by boat, and those that made it ashore were detained indefinitely. Many Haitian-Americans understandably kept their ethnicity secret, allowing people to mistake them for Jamaicans or immigrants of other Caribbean nations.
When the Fugees first got together, “refugee” was most likely to be heard in a derogatory context. But Pras and Wyclef chose to embrace the culture, and seek common ground with refugees worldwide. It was genuinely wild to see the “Ready or Not” video in rotation on MTV, with Pras rapping “I, refugee, from Guantanamo Bay/Dance around the border like I’m Cassius Clay” from a submarine, a million-dollar Hollywood production depicting Caribbean outlaws openly flouting racist—and illegal—U.S. border policies towards those they slurred as “boat people.” Their effect on the palpable stigma towards Haitians may not be quantifiable, but at a time when Haitians had trouble selling their homes and Haitian goods could not be sold in stores, it was a strong statement of identity and a rejection of the status quo. Wyclef would later squander that goodwill in the wake of the 2010 earthquake that devastated Port-au-Prince after his Yéle Haiti Foundation was accused of misappropriating what amounted to $16 million in donations earmarked for humanitarian efforts. But in the ’90s, Pras and Wyclef were some of the only high-profile Haitians in the public sphere, and it’s hard to understate just how radical it was for a crew of mostly Haitians to call themselves the Refugee Camp.
But beyond their ethnicity, the record manages to strike the elusive balance between mass appeal and street authenticity. Mainstream media at the time tended to highlight the dynamism of their impressive live performance, with their hits interwoven with medleys of classic tunes played on live instruments standing in stark contrast to their peers’ hype men and backing tracks. But the record was made of, for, and by the hood, yet it wasn’t gangster; it was socially conscious but grounded in the street by the realities of the immigrant experience. The Fugees brought a remarkably diverse set of references to a hip-hop record—Lauryn’s R&B & soul, Pras’ rock and pop influences, and Wyclef’s Caribbean flair.
“Fu-Gee-La” may have been the spiritual center of The Score, but its biggest hit was a cover, wasn’t even officially released in the U.S. as a single, and was the last song they recorded for the album. It was Pras who suggested they cut Roberta Flack’s 1973 hit, but “Killing Me Softly With His Song” ultimately served as a vehicle for Lauryn Hill’s debut to the world at large, and was the catalyst for The Score’s unprecedented commercial success. Wyclef wasn’t convinced of its potential as a single, but radio programmers had other ideas, pushing the song onto the singles charts without an official release. It sold millions of copies in Europe, but in a calculating move, the song was never released to the U.S. market. The label was banking that it would force fans to buy the album to hear it—a scheme that would be impossible to repeat in the streaming economy.
Upon its release, few would believe that The Score would represent nearly a quarter of Lauryn Hill’s creative output. She had long been identified as the group’s breakout talent, fending off suggestions—and offers—to leave her group behind long before it eventually dissolved. She seemed to have been anointed for stardom from a young age; Before graduating high school she had already acted in an Off-Broadway play (Club XII, the hip-hop Twelfth Night), daytime soap (As the World Turns), and two feature films (Sister Act 2, King of the Hill), as well as releasing the Fugees debut. In the face of the undeniable talent on display on The Score, she grew tired of feeling that people (and press) assumed that her male collaborators were largely responsible for her—and the group’s—success, tired of being seen as Wyclef’s girl.
And while she would evolve into something bigger than hip-hop on her 1998 solo debut The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, her work on The Score remains unparalleled in the genre; no MC has ever sung with such soul, power, and grace, nor has any singer ever spit as hard as she does here. If that statement sounds histrionic, just try to come up with a list of her peers that sing and rap even remotely as well as she did. Cee-Lo? Pharrell? Drake? It’s laughable. There’s a reason why everyone freaked out when Azealia Banks dropped “212”; the skillsets just do not often intersect, despite the AutoTune crooners that have since flooded the pop charts. And even the OGs place her at or near the top of their best-ever MC lists. Yet even after all the praise and recognition, she still felt somewhat unseen, somehow unappreciated. This would manifest itself in Miseducation, both in its powerful expressions of vulnerability and in her tyrannical exclusion of her collaborators from that album’s writing and production credits.
The Fugees recording career barely lasted three years. Flooded with offers and opportunities in the wake of their multi-platinum opus, the group began to fracture. Wyclef began recording The Carnival, supported—both emotionally and creatively—by Pras and Lauryn, who both make guest appearances. But when Lauryn started writing songs for her own solo debut, Wyclef gave her the cold shoulder, a stinging rebuke in the wake of the many solo opportunities Lauryn had spurned in solidarity with her group. The dynamic was made all the more awkward by their clandestine romance, despite his marriage to another woman, and later, Lauryn’s with Bob Marley’s son Rohan. And when the birth of Lauryn’s first child became embroiled in a paternity scandal, the fracture became a fissure, ending hopes of a prompt reconciliation.
The Score was the product of chance alchemy, made by three artists whose independent visions coalesced just long enough to create something remarkable. In the process, they laid out a template for hip-hop’s cleared-sample era, where the curation of old records was more important than how you chopped it up and disguised it. Rappers and producers quickly realized that if you had to pay for it, you might as well make the sample recognizable to those that remember the orginal, and court that new audience in the process. “Killing Me Softly” exists across several decades: It borrows from the Roberta Flack version, which itself a re-arranged cover of the Lori Lieberman original; the Fugees version adds the boom-bap drum beat from A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum,” which itself samples “Memory Band” from Minnie Riperton’s Rotary Connection.
The Fugees managed to diversify the voice of the ghetto, one often depicted in a single dimension. They reclaimed pride for Haitians worldwide, a heritage maligned for its postcolonial poverty and strife but still remembered as the setting for the new world’s first successful revolt of enslaved people against their oppressors. Their sound was multifaceted because they were, too, their music diverse, just like the Black experience.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Columbia | May 16, 2021 | 9.3 | 7314d3dd-7d35-4f27-8dfc-c2fac99d471d | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
With a newfound sense of melancholy, the Florida jam duo has crafted its tightest studio album without losing the ambling spirit that fuels its live performances. | With a newfound sense of melancholy, the Florida jam duo has crafted its tightest studio album without losing the ambling spirit that fuels its live performances. | Tonstartssbandht: Petunia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tonstartssbandht-petunia/ | Petunia | No matter how many decades pass since its 1960s heyday, our collective fascination with the jam band refuses to die. One only has to look at the ever-increasing number of street fashion brands reinterpreting the Grateful Dead bootleg lot tees of yesteryear to get a sense of the innate allure that the jam band lifestyle still holds in our psyche (even if it means people are spending more money to see John Mayer than they could have ever imagined). Of course, beyond the hypnotizing tie-dye and the communal joy of taking psychedelics and dad-dancing in a field with your caravan for three hours, there’s the music. The best jam bands have always stirred the ingredients of the American songbook into a psychedelic porridge, with an emphasis on the magical, spontaneous inspiration that arises out of improvisation. Bands like the Dead were experimental in a way that still stands out in the pantheon of classic rock music, making them enduring icons of the DIY world—particularly for young searchers like brothers Andy and Edwin White of Tonstartssbandht.
But while the Dead have long played in the realm of massive stadiums and extensive lineups, Tonstartssbandht channel this same energy on a much more intimate scale. As with other lo-fi journeymen of the late 2000s like Sun Araw and Eternal Tapestry, Andy and Edwin White reinterpret the concept of “jam music” for the college basement show, stirring a spoonful of bizarro noise pop into their guitar hero worship. Though they easily slid into the slacker rock boom of the ‘10s with their punny track names and funny haircuts (the brothers were even roommates with Mac DeMarco), Tonstartssbandht always pushed their sounds to more transcendental ends, taking lessons from krautrock and noise as handily as they did from country music. Their focus on live performance has meant that for the most part, the best way to hear Tonstartssbandht was either in the room with them or on one of their outstanding live records, which captured their sprawling psychedelia in all its shaggy glory. These live documents, as well as their 2017 studio effort Sorcerer, are daunting beasts, consisting of sidelong tracks and songs that bleed into each other like a black hole by way of “Bad Moon Rising.” With Petunia, however, Tonstartssbandht have finally figured out how to translate their vision into a tight, cohesive studio album without losing the ambling spirit that’s fueled their music from the start.
Whereas previous Tonstartssbandht albums had a ramshackle giddiness straight out of the Meat Puppets playbook, there’s a sense of melancholy to Petunia. Recorded in their home city of Orlando in the midst of the pandemic (as opposed to being pieced together on tour from multiple cities, as their records usually come together), the White brothers’ Byrds-ian church boy harmonies sound more wilted than ever, like road rock anthems sung from the end of the tracks. From the moment “Pass Away” slowly rumbles to life, Andy and Edwin’s twin falsettos carry a foreboding tone, dueting about how “some folks are born who can taste their days/Me, I can’t wait to pass away.” Over the song’s nearly eight minutes, Andy pulls new riffs out of his 12-string as if making them up on the spot, each section flowing with a gentle, swelling tranquility. All of Petunia’s songs carry this quiet sense of discovery, as on the casual swamp boogie “Hey Bad,” which culminates in a fluttering riff that bears more than a passing resemblance to Jerry, or the spiraling arpeggios of “Falloff” that effortlessly build to a highway-careening blues rock sprint, before a string-bent melody brings the whole song to a dazed, sighing finale.
Petunia’s finest moment is the wistful, tremolo-driven elegy “What Has Happened,” a song that sounds unlike anything Tonstartssbandht have previously laid to tape. Over Edwin’s brushed, subtly shifting drum patterns, Andy sings softly of time slipping away, his voice barely rising above a low-hung murmur. The song’s cycling melody may seem simple at first, but its sense of sorrow slowly creeps in like a mist, conjuring those long autumnal walks where one’s thoughts inevitably drift toward the existential. “Honestly, what has happened to me?,” he asks in a quivering falsetto, before the brothers lay a fountain of gorgeous harmonies and weary chord changes, turning the song’s bare few elements into a mournful chamber of self-reflection.
On previous albums, the White brothers might have slathered these moments of clarity in a lo-fi smear, stretching them out and making it impossible to tell where they begin or end—as if we were hearing the idea of what the perfect two-man psych rock band might sound like. Now, Tonstartssbandht brush away all the echo and distortion, focusing instead on rich and complex songwriting as the foundation for their endless jamming. They haven’t lost their ability to channel classic rock’s penchant for epic mysticism, but they have learned how to make it work on a more earthly level, revealing the human emotions that lurk behind their happy-go-lucky noodling. It stands as a testament that the best jam sessions can take you on a journey, even from your living room.
Buy: Rough Trade
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*Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter* [*here*](https://pitchfork.com/newsletter/10-to-hear)*.* | 2021-10-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | October 30, 2021 | 7.8 | 7315f0c1-6699-4f07-b9b4-1e542e063488 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
This career-spanning box set to mark Roxy Music's 40th anniversary is often startling, usually wonderful, and more affecting than expected. It's also fascinating as the story of a gradual hardening of an elegant, enigmatic persona, of Bryan Ferry's transformation from art-school pop star to self-made sphinx. | This career-spanning box set to mark Roxy Music's 40th anniversary is often startling, usually wonderful, and more affecting than expected. It's also fascinating as the story of a gradual hardening of an elegant, enigmatic persona, of Bryan Ferry's transformation from art-school pop star to self-made sphinx. | Roxy Music: Roxy Music: The Complete Studio Recordings 1972-1982 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16810-roxy-music-the-complete-studio-recordings-1972-1982/ | Roxy Music: The Complete Studio Recordings 1972-1982 | In their 1970s heyday, Roxy Music enjoyed enormous critical and commercial success, but even so, they and their art-school rock were admired more than trusted. American critics snipped at leader Bryan Ferry's arch romanticism, while the Brit press considered the models Ferry squired and the suits he doffed and dubbed him "Byron Ferrari". Almost everyone affirmed that the band were great, while disagreeing as to when, exactly. For some, the great achievement was 1982's farewell, Avalon-- impeccably designed pop for weary grown-ups. Others went a decade further back, to the early, playfully experimental albums Roxy released when Brian Eno was in the band, playing androgyne peacock to Ferry's tailored lothario. Whether you see their development between those points as progress or cautionary tale, it's easy to let this contrast define the band.
This box set of remasters to celebrate the band's 40th anniversary-- not lavish, but thorough and reasonably priced-- is an opportunity to break free of narrative and see what sets every phase of Roxy Music apart. The answer is Bryan Ferry, one of rock's great, sustained acts of self-definition. In classic 70s style, like Bowie or Bolan, Ferry invented a pop star. A sybarite with a plummy, awkward croon, gliding through his own songs like they were parties he'd forgotten arriving at. A flying Dutchman of the jet set, doomed to find love but never satisfaction. Having worked his way into character over an album or two, he simply never left it, becoming more Bryan Ferry with every record and every year, whether performing or not.
Which might have been insufferable, except Ferry's performances could hit an emotional core nobody else in rock was getting near. He made enervation his own-- a real, neglected feeling, if a hard one to sympathise with. On Avalon's title track he puts it plainly: "Now the party's over/ I'm so tired". Roxy were never drained by hangovers or comedowns, more by moments of rueful self-knowledge. But you hardly needed lyrics to spot it: from first to last, Roxy Music scattered moments of exquisite exhaustion through their songs. The hanging chords on the intro to early single "Pyjamarama", as if the song can't decide whether to get out of bed. The smothering synthesised pall of "In Every Dream Home a Heartache", from their masterpiece, 1973's For Your Pleasure. The hilariously overwrought dolour of "A Song For Europe". Or the band rousing themselves on "Just Another High" for a quixotic chase after one last thrill, futility nipping at their heels.
That song, closing out 1975's Siren, was one of the great career-ending statements. Except Roxy reformed and returned-- a three year break counted as a split in the frenzied 70s-- for a trio of albums that explored ennui in ever smoother, prettier, and more laconic ways. They restarted well. The glowering, compelling title track from 1979's Manifesto promises a meaner and darker band than we ever quite got. But the later material isn't always worthwhile. There are moments on 1980's Flesh and Blood, in particular, where the band stop sounding tired and start sounding bored, a fatal difference. There are also moments, like Avalon's "More Than This" and "To Turn You On", where the entropic gloss is a feint to let heartbreaking loneliness get in close and floor you. The ultimate late Roxy Music song, oddly, might be their cover of "Jealous Guy", released after John Lennon's murder. Here genuine loss is paid tribute by studied melancholy, soul-baring replaced by poised regret, and in the greatest tribute a narcissist could pay the song stands revealed as a Roxy tune all along.
Exhaustion was Roxy Music's speciality, but if it was all they could do they'd be a footnote. The band earn their ennui by convincing us how hard they can party. The superb mid-70s albums in particular-- For Your Pleasure, Stranded, Country Life and Siren-- are giddy, muscular displays, and vicious when they need to be. They're also Ferry's peak as a vocalist: by Stranded (also from '73) he'd found his voice but hadn't settled into the lounge lizard comfort zone, and was confident playing things staccato, mocking or sentimental. More importantly, his band had the same freedom to roam. If they lack the impertinent invention of the Eno years, these records are generous with opportunities for Roxy Music's lynchpins-- Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay and Eddie Jobson-- to shine and stretch. When they reach full steam behind an inspired Ferry, on "The Thrill of It All", "Street Life" or "Mother of Pearl", it's the best, most exciting music the band created.
Eno's departure, as he himself admitted, helped Roxy become that more focused, energized band. But his contributions had been colossal. Eno helped Ferry mutate his songs into referential collages and eerie synthscapes, and that experimentation gave the early Roxy their identity. He's easier to spot on their flashy, daring self-titled 1972 debut, the inventiveness of songs like "Ladytron" and "The Bob (Medley)" helping cover up rattly production. But For Your Pleasure is a greater testament to Eno's importance: it's hard to imagine an album that better exploits the tension between two fast-diverging creativities. Its best tracks play games with sincerity and emotional tone: the preposterous schmaltz of "Beauty Queen" resolving into real anguish, while "In Every Dream Home an Heartache" lurches from creepiness to hilarity. Speculating on what would have happened if Eno had stayed with Roxy Music past two albums is wistful fun. But once you've squeezed nine-minute krautrock jam "The Bogus Man" and light-footed pop manifesto "Do the Strand" into the same space, and made it work so magnificently, where do you go? Besides, Ferry needed room to obsessively refine himself.
What they lost, over time, wasn't so much inventiveness as playfulness. Country Life (1974), in particular, is an album of delightful variety-- the genre pastiche of "Prairie Rose", the gothic folly of "Tryptych", the gentle reflection of "Three and Nine". None of these survived the three-year gap. The box set has two discs of non-album material-- singles, mixes and edits-- including all the instrumentals they put on B-Sides. Relaxed studio goof-offs ("Hula Kula", "Your Application's Failed") give way to portentousness ("South Downs") as Ferry, or the group, evolve, and it's a shame. There were trade-offs, of course. The final records may not be so much fun but Ferry had found an occasional knack of crafting brilliant, swooning radio choruses-- "Dance Away", "Oh Yeah", and "More Than This" fully deserve their thrones in AOR Valhalla.
Direct Roxy Music copyists are few, but their themes-- romantic gloom, and the weariness of hedonism-- will be pop-relevant as long as self-conscious twentysomethings get famous, or want to. The music on this box set is often startling, usually wonderful and more affecting that you might have expected. But it's also fascinating as the story of a gradual hardening of an elegant, enigmatic persona, Bryan Ferry's transformation from art-school pop star to self-made sphinx. | 2012-08-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-08-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | August 13, 2012 | 9.5 | 731690af-d157-4a0d-9682-4cb7d1b677b9 | Tom Ewing | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/ | null |
The Taos composer’s 1987 accompaniment to a sculpture exhibition with a sci-fi bent makes for a synth-heavy adventure in new age that’s by turns eerie and playful. | The Taos composer’s 1987 accompaniment to a sculpture exhibition with a sci-fi bent makes for a synth-heavy adventure in new age that’s by turns eerie and playful. | Joanne Forman: Cave Vaults of the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joanne-forman-cave-vaults-of-the-moon/ | Cave Vaults of the Moon | The Toronto DJ, musician, and producer Brandon Hocura co-founded Invisible City Editions—a hybrid record store, soundsystem, and label—back in 2012. The imprint specialized in strains of dance music that fell between genre’s cracks: African deep house, left-field soca, and opulent calypso disco. But last year Hocura stepped away from Invisible City and established Séance Centre, another label with an archival focus, but this time less oriented toward dancefloors and more toward meditation centers. But finding unusual music remains his expertise. So far, the label’s reissues include Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s effervescent new-age synth ruminations and MJ Lallo’s ambient boogie.
They’ve found a similarly hard-to-slot character in Joanne Forman. The Taos, New Mexico, composer has written operas, song cycles based on e.e. cummings poems, and children’s musicals; she’s also worked as a journalist and puppeteer. The oddest job of them all was back in 1987, when Forman was commissioned to create a sound piece for a Taos sculpture exhibition entitled “Artifacts From an Alien Civilization.” Cave Vaults of the Moon is the end result, a rare cassette now returned like some lost transmission from beyond.
The last few years have seen a reconsideration of new-age music, from a comprehensive historical survey to a well-deserved renaissance of the iconic Laraaji. With its meditative pacing, wordless voices, analog electronic washes, and abundance of flutes, Cave Vaults sounds at first blush very much like a cassette that might be found alongside crystals in an esoteric bookstore. Despite having many of the genre’s earmarks, Forman soon wriggles out of easy classification.
Cycling acoustic guitar underpins songs like “Moon Castle I” and “Promeni I,” but they sound less like something from the Windham Hill catalog and more like lost airs from The Wicker Man. They are bucolic like the former, but one can just as easily imagine eerie, disquieting pagan rituals being enacted to their stately melodies; baritone humming adds another exotic aspect to the proceedings.
Forman apparently imagined the moon as a potential vacation destination for extraterrestrial beings from other galaxies; in this thought experiment, the sculptures in “Artifacts From an Advanced Civilization” became the remnants of an abandoned playground. It’s a curious inversion that makes the music feel earthbound and alien at once. But for the most part, Cave Vaults’ most lasting memories are its darkest ones: a vacation marked not by glowing sunsets so much as looming thunderheads. “Codex” and its gently lapping rhythms bring to mind the hazy imaginary realms of Jon Hassell’s Fourth World music. But while the song moves at the relaxing pace of a lullaby, the synthesized choir that rises up in the background casts a shadow across it. It’s a dread-inducing sound that comes back later on “Compline” to much darker effect.
Amid such disturbing ambience, the album’s most curious moment suggests a playful undercurrent. A shimmering soundscape using Forman’s Ensoniq Mirage and Juno 106 makes for a ticklish and disorienting three minutes on “The Twittering Machine.” Whether anticipating the social-media platform by two decades or simply imagining a frivolous state of play and relaxation, Forman paints a vivid picture of intergalactic beings sunning themselves at the poolside. | 2018-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Séance Centre | June 1, 2018 | 6.8 | 7321cc8b-9ee3-419c-9adf-5b0647b5d1bb | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
Repentless, the 12th album from the thrash metal institution Slayer, comes at the most fraught time in the band's career. But despite the death of founding guitarist Jeff Hanneman and the absence of founding drummer Dave Lombardo, it offers the best possible outcome. | Repentless, the 12th album from the thrash metal institution Slayer, comes at the most fraught time in the band's career. But despite the death of founding guitarist Jeff Hanneman and the absence of founding drummer Dave Lombardo, it offers the best possible outcome. | Slayer: Repentless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21001-repentless/ | Repentless | Repentless, the 12th album from the thrash metal institution Slayer, comes at the most fraught time in the band's career. Founding guitarist and songwriter Jeff Hanneman's passing in 2013 from cirrhosis of the liver looms large; it's impossible to overstate the impact he had on the group. His hardcore influences, and the way these influences warped the group's early NWOBHM style, formed the more extreme wing of thrash that would later inform death and black metal. Hanneman's death is Slayer's greatest concern, but it's far from the only one. Founding drummer Dave Lombardo quit in 2013 allegedly over money concerns, and Paul Bostaph, who played on Slayer's '90s records, returned to replace him. Bostaph is no slouch, but Lombardo is a once-in-a-lifetime talent, whose ferocity set the standard for metal drumming as a whole. The two remaining members, bassist/vocalist Tom Araya and guitarist Kerry King, also seem to be somewhat at odds with the future of the band. King's never short of bluster and says Slayer will soldier on; Araya is a little more apprehensive. How much either's letting on is hard to determine, but there's definitely a rift.
There's also a clear waning in popularity. Slayer headlined this year's Mayhem Fest, which was plagued by attendance problems. It was depressing to see a legendary band barely filling amphitheaters and having to downgrade the venue in San Antonio, one of the most solidly metal cities in the States. King was also open with his disdain for the fest's lineup, and his online spats with tour organizer Kevin Lyman kept the metal news site Blabbermouth going this summer. And Repentless is not Slayer's first album to be released on September 11—God Hates Us All came out the day of the attacks. In the case of God, it was an unfortunate but morbidly appropriate coincidence; with Repentless, it seems calculated to appeal to the basest shock values of metalheads. So, yes, it's easy to be cynical about a new Slayer record.
Despite all of this, Repentless is solid—far from a classic, but the best possible outcome. King and Araya may be drawing from the same well as they always have, but no one knows how to make a Slayer song like they do. Three decades on from Hell Awaits, "Delusions of Saviour" shows they still know how to create a lurching intro, minus Satan yelling "WELCOME BACK!" It leans heavy on the wah, but King doesn't overdose on it like Kirk Hammett would. The title track and "Take Control" display steadfast worship to their own speed; the product is quality, and Repentless does benefit from focusing on that speed Hanneman fostered. But "When the Stillness Comes" recalls "Spill the Blood" from South of Heaven and "Dead Skin Mask" from Seasons in the Abyss, two of Slayer's slower classics. Araya works within his vocal limitations to complement King's rhythms to honor Slayer's slower side without straining or parodying himself. Sticking close to the Slayer playbook was probably the most sensical move—King and Araya have every chance to overindulge or lose the plot but don't. Most songs on Repentless will remind you of a specific track from Slayer's past, and there's enough diversity within their own style.
Losing two key members will irreversibly change dynamics, and Repentless isn't immune. Exodus' Gary Holt, Slayer's live guitarist since 2011, contributes solos, but King played almost all of the guitar here. There isn't the chaotic back-and-forth that Hanneman and King wrestled with in their prime. In fact, the solos are oddly conservative by Slayer standards. They fit, but Hanneman's loose touch is noticeably missing. King is essentially playing off himself—he can't be the more metallic foil to Hanneman's punk ear. Granted, he does wrangle a convincing homage to Hanneman's punkiness in "Atrocity Vendor". It's oddly a more fitting tribute than "Piano Wire", which Hanneman had a hand in writing. "You Against You" is another punky track that could have been slipped in Undisputed Attitude, and that it comes right after "Wire" and "Atrocity" suggests that Slayer made a little Hanneman suite in his honor.
Bostaph is a dependable presence, which is both a compliment and a slight. "Vices" and "Take Control" could have benefitted a little bit from Lombardo's intensity on the double bass. Still, he came into probably the toughest assignment of his career and knocked it out. Bostaph's return also brought back some of the more groove metal tendencies that Slayer adopted in the '90s, most evident in "Implode". "Implode" worked as a one-off single before it was known it was goning to be on the album, but it doesn't mesh with Repentless as a whole. It even brings down the second half of the record, which doesn't have a "Stillness" to compensate. For a band that made a genre-defining album that doesn't break 30 minutes (Reign in Blood), Slayer have lost a bit of their editing touch.
Will they continue after this record? If they do, and they're likely to milk at the very least a couple tours, Repentless doesn't spell their end. If they hang it up, at least they didn't end their career on an embarrassing note. Slayer, even with their recent turmoil, have had good fortune compared to their other peers in the Big Four. Their decline is more gradual, the kind that merely comes with age; they never fell off like Metallica and Megadeth did. They've managed to produce one good record without two irreplaceable members; even so, Repentless doesn't quite answer if they've still got it for the long haul. | 2015-09-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Metal | Nuclear Blast | September 10, 2015 | 6.8 | 7326b69f-cd6b-4308-8407-126586f04403 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The New York City dream pop band's second album sees them introduce a darker, more socially aware edge, though it trades their former instrumental rigidity for amiable, mid-fi college rock jangle. | The New York City dream pop band's second album sees them introduce a darker, more socially aware edge, though it trades their former instrumental rigidity for amiable, mid-fi college rock jangle. | Beach Fossils: Clash the Truth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17621-beach-fossils-clash-the-truth/ | Clash the Truth | Dustin Payseur sounds confused on Clash the Truth and rightfully so-- the Beach Fossils frontman is dealing with some tricky stuff. The time that's passed since Beach Fossils' solid, well-received eponymous debut has given its name an unintended resonance; when we all pass from this mortal coil, songs like "Daydream" and "Vacation" will be artifacts frozen in time, informing our descendents of what happened in 2010 when the attitudinal tenets of chillwave were leeching into fuzzy, soft-focus indie pop. There's the big picture stuff too: how to let one's ambition manifest, what really endures in a world where so much is fleeting, the challenges of squaring artistic expression with financial temptation. These are all relatable even if you're not in a band, and they've proven fine inspiration for musicians who confidently use their art as a means of making sense of it all. On the other hand, you sometimes get a passive-aggressive album like Clash the Truth, which just sounds kind of confused.
That's really the bigger concern. Their first album peers Wild Nothing, Real Estate, and Cloud Nothings have already proven themselves with assured, expansive sophomore LPs, and in even quicker succession, former guitarist Zachary Cole Smith's Dive went from "Beach Fossils side project" to DIIV, a band that surpassed them while operating in the same lane. There's a lack of conviction on Clash the Truth that finds numerous ways to infiltrate otherwise fine songs; the opening title-track makes an unexpected shift into a post-punk monotone which only stresses the utter lack of urgency in Payseur's vocals. By introducing a darker, more socially aware edge, it makes a song on the opposite end of the spectrum like "Taking Off" ("I'm taking off again/ It feels like it's so soon/ Am I excited or am I just so confused") sound like a sheepish retreat to their previous work.
Elsewhere, Beach Fossils' indecisiveness arises more subtly. Some wondered if the relative cleanliness of their 2011 What a Pleasure EP detracted too much from the scrappy charm of Beach Fossils; it isn't the production methods that defined them so much as a kind of instrumental formalism where all the moving parts work in an almost militaristic lockstep. Without that rigidity, you get amiable, mid-fi college rock jangle along the lines of "Careless" and "Crashed Out", or drowsy, rainy-day window-watchers like "Sleep Apnea" that are perfectly tuneful in the moment and do little to impress on one's mind in any way, let alone establish themselves as the work of Beach Fossils and no one else. You also get the sense of a bigger, conceptual gambit that they couldn't quite grasp. The inclusion of several short guitar pieces isn't a bad move in theory; their riffs are often tasked with handling the expression when Payseur's flat, affectless voice cannot. But while their titles suggest some sort of attempt at unifying the disparate sounds of Clash the Truth, they manage no sequential effect and unlike DIIV, the difference between their instrumentals and vocal pieces is too wide to hear them as anything other than filler.
The wishy-washy attitude may be slightly bothersome for most of Clash the Truth, but it's frankly inexcusable on "Generational Synthetic", a song about the intersection of commerce and art whose title makes its point abundantly clear. Whether or not you think Beach Fossils have earned the right to make a song like this is a moot point. Two years ago, you wouldn't have thought Cloud Nothings would've had much to say about it either, but by making their sound a philosophy, Attack on Memory was a kickass rock album and potent criticism. With its ringing guitars and brisk drum rolls, "Generational Synthetic" is not too different than any other Beach Fossils song. If they admitted to their own ambivalence, they'd come off as sympathetic. Instead, Beach Fossils come from a place of judgment and open themselves up to criticism.
As such, "Generational Synthetic" doesn't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny-- when Payseur leans on sarcastic, passive-aggressive commentary ("Oh your words are so poetic/ Generation apathetic"), he comes off as both preachy and phony in the context of music that sounds like part of the problem rather than the solution. And considering the troubling financial realities of even the most successful indie bands are common knowledge, by sneering "trade your fortune for a song," he just sounds naïve.
Beach Fossils aren't hypocritical for making "Generational Synthetic", as criticizing a system you fully participate in is pretty much democracy in action. But a guy like Craig Schuftan, author of the alt-rock dissertation Entertain Us!, has thought longer and harder about the clash of indie rock and major money and calmly, unintentionally ethers their message with one sentence: "It's not so much about whether playing in front of a logo makes a mockery of your principles, it's more about making sure your principles are good in the first place, that they're strong enough to survive a process like that." Or, as Iceage put it, "Where are your morals?" On "Generational Synthetic", Beach Fossils get on a soapbox without taking a stand, and it's the most damning example of the mixed messages that pervade Clash the Truth-- as the cliché goes, be the change you want to see in the world. | 2013-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2013-02-18T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Captured Tracks | February 18, 2013 | 5.8 | 7327baea-bcb9-4a05-86a4-8cd5fcf07864 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Originally released in the UK four years ago and subsequently dissed by the artist herself, Amy Winehouse's debut finally lands on U.S. shores. | Originally released in the UK four years ago and subsequently dissed by the artist herself, Amy Winehouse's debut finally lands on U.S. shores. | Amy Winehouse: Frank | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10900-frank/ | Frank | The self-destructive tortured-artist routine was bullshit when Kurt Cobain did it, it was bullshit when Elliott Smith did it, and it's bullshit now. As anyone who's seen the video of Amy Winehouse desperately finger-fumbling her way through "Back to Black" at the MTV Europe Video Music Awards knows, her look-how-messed-I-am public persona is now screwing up her art something fierce. So instead of a new record, Americans are now getting a modified version of Frank, her first album, originally released four years ago and subsequently dissed by the artist herself. Its two weakest links, "Know You Now" and a pointless cover of standard "Moody's Mood for Love", have been yanked out of the original running order and appended as hidden penalty tracks.
Winehouse has a hell of a voice, even when she imitates her favorite jazz vocalists-- especially Billie Holiday-- much too closely. (Just in case anybody misses the idea that she's supposed to be a jazz singer who's somehow stumbled into a neo-soul record, Frank begins with a little fragment of Winehouse scat-singing, and the chorus of "October Song" doesn't just namedrop Sarah Vaughan but lifts its melody from "Lullaby of Birdland".) None of her songs here are as indelible as "Rehab" or as cutting as "You Know I'm No Good"-- and the best are co-written with Nas and Fugees collaborator Salaam Remi-- but you can hear the development of the high-powered songwriter she turned into on Back to Black in the snarky character sketch "F*** Me Pumps" and in the way the sharp-nailed ballad "You Sent Me Flying" breaks into a Soul II Soul beat halfway through. And although she hasn't quite nailed the 1972 vibe of her later record (despite some corny vintage-vinyl sound effects), a couple of her stylistic experiments pay off, especially the high-drama soul loop that underpins "In My Bed".
But Winehouse's slow public wreck isn't just an unfortunate thing that's happening to someone who happens to be a star, it's part of her act, and has been from the get-go-- which means it makes her audience complicit in it. Her favorite lyrical topic, even on her debut, is loving not wisely but too well; on "Amy Amy Amy", she's gently wagging a finger at herself about her fondness for bad-news boys. And her deliberate affectation of Holiday's unmistakable vocal tics can't help but suggest the narrative we're supposed to buy into: "Great singer, tragically destroyed by her unhappy private life and bad habits, who turned her pain into universal art." (What are we as her audience supposed to do? Stage an intervention? Well, we can at least think very carefully about what our participation in that narrative means. And who are we to say we wish she'd stop going on about how she doesn't need any help and get some goddamn help already? Not vultures, that's who.) Winehouse is good enough that she was worth paying attention to for her music alone before her drama started ruining it, but in the light of her subsequent career, Frank comes off as the first chapter in the Romantic myth of the poet who feels too deeply and ends up killing herself for her audience's entertainment. And that is some bullshit. | 2007-11-14T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2007-11-14T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Island | November 14, 2007 | 4.9 | 73306141-8636-4ecd-a28e-7c1e3ec90649 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
Over the last eight years, the Arctic Monkeys have gone from spastic punk, to doomed stoner rock, to sparkling guitar pop, to their fifth album’s skinny-jeaned funk. On AM, the quartet, now based in Los Angeles, offer a paranoid, haunted collection that goes beyond the sweaty clubs and furtive flirts into the hotel rooms, after parties, and bad decisions that can follow. | Over the last eight years, the Arctic Monkeys have gone from spastic punk, to doomed stoner rock, to sparkling guitar pop, to their fifth album’s skinny-jeaned funk. On AM, the quartet, now based in Los Angeles, offer a paranoid, haunted collection that goes beyond the sweaty clubs and furtive flirts into the hotel rooms, after parties, and bad decisions that can follow. | Arctic Monkeys: AM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18386-arctic-monkeys-am/ | AM | Their first record was called Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not—a Nevermind the Bollocks–type sendup of the generation-defining Self-Titled Debut Album as well as a bratty act of defiance from four Yorkshire youths drunk on their own twitchy cleverness. Their fifth album is called AM, and those mountainous initials stood sky-high behind the band as they preened and stomped like proper rock stars through a headlining Glastonbury set earlier this year. Their face-shrouding hair and brown hoodies are out; greaser streaks and bespoke suits are in. And the same band that once aimed its sights at windbag poseurs on “Fake Tales of San Francisco” is now based in Los Angeles. These changes have caused some to question Arctic Monkeys’ commitment to their initial no-bullshit ideals. But the quartet isn’t giving into the mindless grandeur of rock’n’roll as much as they’re working within its confines to mine new territory; over the last eight years, as they’ve gone from spastic punk, to doomed stoner rock, to sparkling guitar pop, to this new album’s skinny-jeaned funk, Arctic Monkeys have stayed close to the spirit of their debut’s title while minimizing its excess at the same time.
Meanwhile, singer and lyricist Alex Turner has moved from syllable-stuffing chronicles of indie nightlife culture to songs that are sleeker, more blue-black, more self-lacerating. Thematically, AM centerpiece “No. 1 Party Anthem” comes off like a seedier take on Arctic Monkeys’ breakout track “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor” as it tells of a collar-popped lothario on the prowl in a dank club made up of “lights on the floors and sweat on the walls, cages and poles.” But instead of blaring, this anthem is wistful, its piano, acoustic strums, and croons suggesting days gone by (along with ’70s Elton John and Rod Stewart). Its swirling bridge sums up the scene in just a few choice phrases—“The look of love/The rush of blood/The ‘she’s with me’/The Gallic shrug”—and sounds like a definitive endnote to Turner’s most notable songwriting style.
So AM goes beyond the sweaty clubs and furtive flirts into the hotel rooms, after parties, and bad decisions that can follow. The crux of the record is neatly summed up by the hook to the blistering “R U Mine?”: “R U mine tomorrow, or just mine tonight?”—an entire world of sex and love and desire distilled to quick-hit text-speak that Drake could appreciate. Turner isn’t sure of the answer to that question, and the resulting limbo does his head in all over the LP. He’s an avowed romantic living in an unromantic world, grasping for meaning in a city-to-city road-dog lifestyle hellbent on repelling it. In some ways, Turner’s struggle and his band’s recent gleaming transformation into something like rock gods is reminiscent of U2’s turnaround circa Achtung Baby, when that quartet traded in deep virtuousness for sin, rhythm, and leather jackets. For Arctic Monkeys, loosening the tether to credulity can be freeing, allowing the band to live out their classic-rock dreams: T. Rex bop, Bee Gees backup vocals, Rolling Stones R&B, and Black Sabbath monster riffage are all rendered modern throughout AM with the help of longtime producer James Ford. And for Turner in particular, the switch has him connecting strings of desperate 3 a.m. thoughts: some horny, some bleary, some a bit frightening.
Two of the album's slinkiest and best tracks have Turner sounding slyly wolfish, like a perplexed predator confusing lust and longing. “I dreamt about you nearly every night this week,” he purrs on opener “Do I Wanna Know?,” which slowly rolls forward thanks to guitarist Jamie Cook’s lizard-brain riff and drummer Matt Helders’ Queen-sized beat; “Knee Socks,” meanwhile, tells of a wintertime tryst that climaxes with an operatic guest vocal from Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme, who could’ve used some of AM’s groove on this year’s lumbering … Like Clockwork. Whereas 2009’s Homme-produced Humbug had the Arctic Monkeys trying on QOTSA’s heaviness with varied success, AM integrates its influences more fully—and, at times, even beats Homme at his own snake-rock game.
The only solace found on this paranoid and haunted album is within its eclectic music, as well as the idea of music itself. “Mad Sounds” is AM’s most hopeful song, an achingly sincere ballad that employs melody, swing, and “oh la la las” to attest to the power of melody, swing, and “oh la la las.” It teases out the purest interpretation of the Rorschach-like sine waves that adorn AM’s cover, which—depending on your vantage, or mood—could also read as leering sunglasses or maybe a bikini top. Creeping closer “I Wanna Be Yours” combines all three meanings while seemingly answering the question posed by opener “Do I Wanna Know?” That is: When faced with the choice between easy pleasures and lasting devotion, Turner is picking the latter. Sweet, right? But upon further inspection, it's not so simple. “I Wanna Be Yours” features lyrics by UK punk poet John Cooper Clarke from his 1982 track of the same name, which uses the language of commercialism to express the deepest love. “I wanna be your vacuum cleaner, breathing in your dust,” sings Turner as a lonely drum machine highlights the sentiment’s emptiness. Still, the song doesn’t sound cynical. It’s genuinely affecting. The ultimate message—will future generations have the capacity to love people as much as their cars, their coffee pots, their phones?—rings terrifyingly true in our time of personal branding. Arctic Monkeys let these thoughts languish. “Maybe I just wanna be yours,” Turner sings. Maybe not. | 2013-09-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-11T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | September 11, 2013 | 8 | 7336b83f-bb2e-4d6b-9223-86973a24fa2a | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | |
Debut album from this Brighton-based six-piece rolls early-80s action theme songs, vintage hip-hop, Saturday morning cartoons and cheerleading squads into one sick party record bursting with surly, overdriven guitars, triumphant trumpet lines, and battling drum assaults that seem to break through walls with the barreling force of a thousand Kool-Aid men. | Debut album from this Brighton-based six-piece rolls early-80s action theme songs, vintage hip-hop, Saturday morning cartoons and cheerleading squads into one sick party record bursting with surly, overdriven guitars, triumphant trumpet lines, and battling drum assaults that seem to break through walls with the barreling force of a thousand Kool-Aid men. | The Go! Team: Thunder, Lightning, Strike | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3654-thunder-lightning-strike/ | Thunder, Lightning, Strike | The A-Team. CHiPS. The Great American Hero. Hunter. Riptide. Magnum P.I. Hardcastle and McCormick. For an all-too-brief moment in the early 1980s, network television seemed to cater almost exclusively to boys aged 7-15. I was lucky to be a member of this elite class, amongst the target demo of these kid-tested/mother-denied telecasts. But for all the hours I spent admiring Lee Majors' proto-MacGyver ingenuity and B.A. Baracus' oppressive unsilliness, I have no distinct visual memories of these shows; just a vague montage of military-grade explosives, dirt mounds, and white limousines.
The only thing I remember with any clarity at all is the music-- those awesome, supercharged theme songs that outblasted any onscreen artillery and promised more stunt-powered glory than Evel Knievel's Snake River Canyon jump. And most of them were written by one man: the cruelly unsung Mike Post, stateside television's own Ennio Morricone. The breadth of Post's stylistic range and uncanny knack for visceral impact have made him one of very few television composers worth remembering, and I guarantee you know more of his work than you think.
I can't pretend to know which brilliantly Post-themed programs were broadcast in the UK (although many were), but six-strong Brighton brigade The Go! Team are clearly just as familiar with his work as any American my age. Their debut album, Thunder, Lightning, Strike, is a hazy blend of nostalgia, evoking that period through a melange of action hero theme songs, early hip-hop (from 1979-82, in particular), and traces of 70s sunshine funk.
In a contemporary context, The Go! Team-- not to be confused with Calvin Johnson's highly inferior 1980s collective of the same name-- could be shelved alongside The Avalanches and Rjd2, as all three share a party aesthetic whose reflection of bygone eras is just slightly wistful. But one immediately striking difference between them is The Go! Team's reliance on live instrumentation. Though they certainly do their fair share of sampling, they tend to use fragments as a means of fleshing out the battling, overdriven guitars, triumphant trumpet lines, and drum assaults that seem to break through walls with the barreling force of a thousand Kool-Aid men.
Thunder, Lightning, Strike's opener, "Panther Dash", wastes no time establishing the band's modus operandi: Its "Hawaii Five-O" crash-in mates with an open-range harmonica to evoke some lost Sergio Leone-directed "Speed Racer" showdown. "The Power Is On" pops like puffy rainbow stickers, rubbing determined piano chords against surly trumpets and cheerleader chants. "Junior Kickstart" is BMX banditos navigating mud-caked spokes and handlebars through flagged-off terrain. "Bottle Rocket" throws back to Saturday morning cartoons and Brooklyn b-girl breakdowns, with female rapper Ninja lunging from dusk-cast shadows to conjure a katana-wielding Sha Rock.
This record recalls, with striking exactness, a very specific time and place that The Go! Team could only have experienced second-hand, through imported television and culture. But then, it was vicarious for us all: Thunder, Lightning, Strike aspires to recapture the imaginary good-natured competitiveness of a period before realism dominated prime-time TV, when cars and helicopters could talk, and good guys always wore pleather. It's all dusky reds and yellows, shag-headed battle royales, exploding tanks, and getting up the next day to relive it on the playground. | 2004-10-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-10-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Memphis Industries | October 26, 2004 | 8.7 | 73389e58-ae98-4dc1-a52c-c5f7eb0b1150 | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
After a solemn post-divorce album, the Nashville-via-Texas songwriter works his endearing wit back into songs about loving someone new and abhorring social trends. | After a solemn post-divorce album, the Nashville-via-Texas songwriter works his endearing wit back into songs about loving someone new and abhorring social trends. | Hayes Carll: What It Is | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hayes-carll-what-it-is/ | What It Is | Very few roots singer/songwriters would dare include “joie de vivre” in a rambling song about the state of the world; fewer still would get away with it. But two songs into his sixth album, the Texas-born, Nashville-based Hayes Carll manages this modest feat when detailing what it takes to be a good citizen: “I just wanna do my labor, love my girl, and help my neighbor,” he declares during “Times Like These,” his rapid delivery running the words together. And then, shooting beyond his upper register, he adds, “while keeping all my joie de vivre,” almost turning the exclamation into the beginning of a spirited “yeehaw.” As he’s long done, Carll is poking a little fun at himself for using such a phrase at all. The levity underscores a chagrined attitude toward the song’s subject matter, as though life in the late 2010s is itself a grim joke.
This barbed humor recalls vintage Carll, from not long after he emerged in the early 2000s with an interesting take on the Texas outlaw tradition. Setting his songs in dive bars and small towns, he livened up familiar subject matter with a sharp sense of humor, usually making himself the butt of any joke he might crack, as when he starts a bar brawl with the Almighty during “She Left Me for Jesus.” But he got serious on 2016’s Lovers and Leavers, a stark acoustic album inspired by his divorce and the gnawing realization that his songs weren’t quite reflecting his life. It’s a fine album, but, minus those moments of irony, sarcasm, and self-deprecation, it’s one that almost anyone could make.
He shakes loose again on What It Is. Carll brings in a rambunctious band for these songs, ranging from barnstormers like “Beautiful Thing” to the bluegrass of the title track. The rambling sound perfectly suits his demeanor, flourishes of organ and fiddle underscoring subtle winks and wry asides. Opener “None’ya” finds him in thrall to a mystifying lover, the sort who paints the front porch turquoise because it keeps out bad spirits. When he asks where’s she’s going, she quips, “None’ya business.” The point of the song isn’t her eccentricity but his response to it—that is, his promise to appreciate the woman in front of him. When he sings, “I try because I want to” in the chorus, he draws out the second word as if in awe of his good fortune.
The subject of “None’ya,” as Carll has said, is Allison Moorer, the veteran country artist who co-produced this album and is his fiancée. The love songs here seem less about her in particular and more about his struggle to be a good partner and person. “If I May Be So Bold” and “I Will Stay” are sweet songs about determination and devotion, but they lack a certain, well, je ne sais quoi. Carll’s sharpest instincts don’t show here, so it sounds like he’s writing about self-reflection without doing much self-reflecting, solving equations without showing the math.
Masculinity threads through these tunes, linking a love song like “Be There” to a political one like “Fragile Men,” co-written with the Tennessee singer/songwriter Lolo. Racists marching in Charlottesville inspired “Fragile Men,” and the lyrics incisively dissect their petty pathology: “It must make you so damn angry they’re expecting you to change.” But again, the song never delivers the catharsis you want. Maybe it’s the fussy string arrangement or the unwavering directness, without a character or a narrative to bring the ideas to life. Something similar happens on the squirrely “Wild Pointy Finger,” about trolls blaming everybody else for everything. The ideas are sound, but both songs need anchors, next steps to make them sound like he’s not just lampooning convenient targets.
The best song on What It Is is the most familiar. Carll wrote “Jesus and Elvis” years ago with Moorer and Matraca Berg, and Kenny Chesney recorded it for 2016’s Cosmic Hallelujah. It describes a dive bar presumably deep in the heart of Texas, decorated with velvet paintings of “the King of kings and the King of rock’n’roll.” Each verse discloses a bit more about the tragic significance of those decorations, and Carll makes that backstory sound more human and more heartbreaking than Chesney ever did. It’s the one song that’s most disconnected from Carll’s story, but it captures something very special in the everyday, a bit of the joy of life even in the face of death. | 2019-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Dualtone | February 12, 2019 | 6.4 | 73395466-bfed-4380-84cd-0a2c47f3e678 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
West Coast groove aficionado Dâm-Funk offers an engrossing selection of tracks that are as dreamy as they are funky in his installment of the DJ-Kicks mix series. | West Coast groove aficionado Dâm-Funk offers an engrossing selection of tracks that are as dreamy as they are funky in his installment of the DJ-Kicks mix series. | Dām Funk: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21942-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | The best DJ sets always involve some sort of telepathy. Usually it’s when a DJ constructs a set that steers you towards euphoria so effectively that it feels like they’re inside your brain at a panel of controls, à la Voltron—a state of ecstatic dissociation so magical that it's the third most popular subject for pop songs after love and smoking weed. But rare and particularly talented DJs can pull off an even more magical feat, dragging you out of your head and into their minds, letting you hear the world through their ears for a moment.
I used to think Dâm-Funk was the more typical kind of DJ, mostly because I’ve only seen him at festivals and big events, and never at Funkmosphere, the residency he’s held at an L.A. bar for the past 10 years. In that more intimate environment, he can stretch out and offer a fully immersive sound experience. And after hearing his contribution to the DJ-Kicks franchise, which is designed to replicate the Funkmosphere vibe, it’s clear that he’s actually the second kind of DJ, and maybe one of the best at that specific kind of mind meld.
Heard through Dâm-Funk’s ears, the world is, as you might expect, a very funky place. It’s also very dreamy. Dâm may be best known for reigniting L.A.’s passion for hard-edged, car-shaking synth funk, but at 44, he seems more interested in creating a shared hypnagogic utopian mindspace than simply rocking a party.
The mix’s tempo tops out at a fairly restrained 126 BPM, and most of the tracks chill a few notches below. The mood is overwhelmingly easy-going, from contemporary synth auteur Moon B’s study in warm, reverb-drenched minimalism that opens the mix, to the closing shimmer of Philly-inspired soul group Crystal Winds’ 1982 track “Funk Ain’t Easy.” Some of the selections, like the airbrushed erotic fantasia “Love Jam” by the cultishly strange duo Randell & Schippers (who have a screencap of a complimentary MySpace comment from Dâm on the homepage of their website, beneath a backstage photo at a Blue Man Group show), border on New Age. Others, like Gaussian Curve’s synth pad daydream “Broken Clouds,” cross fully over.
Taken as a whole, the mix paints a soothing watercolor portrait of a funk-based American counterpart to Balearic house—a style that Ibiza ravers were starting to greet the dawn with around the same time as the bulk of Dâm’s DJ-Kicks picks were being recorded–that never actually existed. Piecing together obscure old cuts from regional labels that probably wouldn’t ever have crossed paths back in the day (like Verticle Lines’ proto-vaporwave 1982 breeze-funk rarity “Theme From Beach Boy” and Gemini’s airy 1997 take on Chicago house, “Log In”) Dâm’s crafted an entire genre in retrospect.
It’s a sound with a promising future, if this mix is any indication. Dâm’s picks lean heavily on vintage grooves that are extremely rare even by crate-digger standards, but some of the strongest material is new. There’s Moon B’s “Oof,” and Kansas City funk auteur Reggie B’s purplishly psychedelic “Poison Candy,” and Dutch producer Henning’s “Arrival / Departure,” which drops a throbbing G-funk beat into a crystalline garden of blissful synth flutes.
Despite Dâm’s preference for playing tracks pretty much all the way through—which suggests an infectious, wide-eyed passion for the music that fits into his mind-control powers—the mix is properly appreciated as a whole. You can let it wash away whatever cares you have in warm, funky waves. There are a few songs that deserve to be listened to on their own, though, and one of the best comes from a collaboration between Dâm and fellow L.A. dreamchaser Nite Jewel. “Can U Read Me?” takes the peak-Janet weightless perfection of “All for You” and turns its touch even lighter, transforming it into something that captures the joy of seeing the sun rise in the corner of your eye and knowing the party isn’t even close to being over. Funk may not be easy, but with Dâm at the controls it can sure feel that way. | 2016-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | !K7 | June 3, 2016 | 7.7 | 733caf99-b26c-405e-b667-e53af951c653 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Cate Le Bon’s wondrous sixth album exists in a waking dreamscape whose locked-in grooves approach the unknowable at slanted angles. | Cate Le Bon’s wondrous sixth album exists in a waking dreamscape whose locked-in grooves approach the unknowable at slanted angles. | Cate Le Bon: Pompeii | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cate-le-bon-pompeii/ | Pompeii | “Faced with a choice, do both,” Brian Eno once proffered. On Cate Le Bon’s apocalyptically titled but sky-reaching sixth album, the Welsh art-pop iconoclast orients her bemused songs by the compass of this oblique strategy. Le Bon collages the saxophones and bass grooves of Pompeii into a heady harmonic mix of psychedelia and pop, awe and bewilderment, amplifying both her criss-crossing inscrutability and the inexhaustible pleasures of clarity. These inquisitive songs feel, to borrow a word from one of her lyrics, “multidirectional.”
Now based in California’s Mojave Desert—a peculiar, austere, and immersive landscape, not unlike that of her songs—Le Bon has been making records for her entire adult life. But she likened the process of her last, 2019’s Reward, to writing a first album. She had stepped back from music for a year to learn the craft of building practical objects—chairs and tables, specifically—while making a daily practice of listening to David Bowie. The creation of Le Bon’s next album would not be so methodical. Recording Pompeii at the pandemic’s peak, she fluctuated between hope and dread: “You can’t help but wonder if this is the last thing you’re ever going to make,” she said of her “mental polarization” then. “You’re swinging between ‘Oh, fuck’ and ‘Fuck it.’” Nodding to the crumbling nature of life as we knew it, and perhaps to her own excavation of buried memories, she named her record after a civilization in ruins beneath lava and ash. But there is a hidden optimism here: “Every fear that I have/I send it to Pompeii,” goes the titular chorus, turning the fossilized Roman city at once into an evocation of the end times and an incinerator for doubt when there is nothing left to lose.
Pompeii exists in the vivid waking dreamscape of Low and Bowie’s other late-’70s adventures, at times imagining a reality where he glittered up the production of John Cale’s wry surrealism instead of Lou Reed. But Le Bon’s particular streak of shape-shifting absurdism has its own poised and introspective post-punk lawlessness. Like her rawer, more spontaneous band DRINKS, a collaboration with Tim Presley, Pompeii sounds like music we are listening in on, and when Le Bon sings, it is with all the mystery of late-afternoon light casting streaks and shadows on the wall. Pompeii is her poppiest album, and yet one might picture Le Bon devising the title while watching her psych forebears rock amid ruins in Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, a scene with uncanny resonance in 2020: an isolated amphitheater with no audience, no feedback, the air unsettled.
If the locked-in grooves propelling Pompeii’s otherworldly textures make these nine tracks feel like one, that’s in part because Le Bon wrote primarily on the bass, which sings across this record as anchor and harmonizer. The record’s silvery tone has a similar unifying effect, inspired, as it were, by a painting of Le Bon in the guise of a nun by Tim Presley. (The actual album cover is a photographic portrait replicating the painting, which Le Bon could not bear to commodify.) In interviews, Le Bon has described how she and co-producer Samur Khouja stared at the artwork’s striking color scheme (amber, olive, Yves Klein blue) to guide the assembly of their own synth palette—how dualities of light and dark, hope and fear, exist, for Le Bon, on the canvas. To further illuminate the beguiling divinity of Presley’s piece, Le Bon has cited a Rebecca Solnit essay on Virginia Woolf that reads: “Most people are afraid of the dark… many adults fear, above all, the darkness that is the unknown, the unseeable, the obscure.” But Solnit is quick to clarify that this is the same darkness “in which love is made, in which things merge, change, become enchanted….” The spacious, improvisatory energy of Pompeii often contains the feeling of searching through this night. Its tone could be called the enchanted unknown.
Le Bon’s pristinely askew songwriting has always felt suspended between the desire to be understood versus the freedom of remaining furtively unplaceable. But more than ever—alongside Pompeii’s swarming tapestries of sax, clarinet, and synth lines—the directness and relative vulnerability of her songwriting voices a longing to connect. “What you said was nice/When you said my heart broke a century,” Le Bon sings sleekly on “Harbour,” a typically slanted image that is still charged with emotion. On the immaculate “Moderation,” Le Bon directs us to “picture the party where you’re standing on a modern age,” like a mantra for getting out of one’s head and into the world. When she sings of catching “a plastic bouquet/down the aisle” on “French Boys,” and feeling so woefully out of place, her misfit spirit is alive in every jigsaw note. Le Bon’s singing and Stella Mozgawa’s drumming can make Pompeii’s nervy rhythms feel physical and anthemic, like the Talking Heads’, and the way Le Bon pushes her voice heavenly high or tugs it down like a riptide—“You know, I’m not cold by nature,” she croons on “Running Away”—makes the songs sound as if they are constantly expanding at the edges.
One tune towers over Pompeii, an obvious testament to Le Bon’s recent ascent to Joshua Tree karaoke queen. She sings the title of “Moderation” in the album’s most irresistible hook—as in “Moderation/I can’t have it”—and the song becomes a new wave ode to the act of obsession. (Joni Mitchell was in the desert, too, when she parsed the difference between artists such as herself, who “travel the breadth of extremities,” unlike those who “stick to some straighter line,” an implication that rings through “Moderation.”) “I get by, one eye on the sky, but I can’t put my finger on it,” Le Bon sings, as if narrating the tempestuous creative process itself. “I wanna cry, I’m out of my mind.” She renders chaos and control with audacity and beauty all her own.
“In the remake of my life, I moved in straight lines,” she sings on “Remembering Me,” but on Pompeii, she fortunately gives us the first cut. Le Bon’s creative power remains in the circuitous jaggedness with which she navigates pop and poetry, uncertainty and revelation. In her favored Solnit essay about Virginia Woolf, the author suggests that it’s the job of artists to explore beyond that which is easily knowable, to “go into the dark with their eyes open” and shine. What might one say from the depths of inexplicable darkness? “It’s my heart, it’s the beating of my heart,” Le Bon attests in her highest register on the title track, deep in the mix but unmistakable, tilted but clear. From note to note, Pompeii keeps you guessing, which is a way of knowing our hearts beat, too.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | February 7, 2022 | 8.5 | 73497142-3abe-4ae5-9096-513c60f5c5be | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The New York DJ Tony Humphries mixes an impeccably smooth course through disco-inflected house from Germany’s Running Back label. | The New York DJ Tony Humphries mixes an impeccably smooth course through disco-inflected house from Germany’s Running Back label. | Tony Humphries: Running Back Mastermix | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tony-humphries-running-back-mastermix/ | Running Back Mastermix | In 2002, the German DJ Gerd Janson borrowed the football term “running back” for his new label because, he has said, he liked the way it expressed the idea of “going back and simultaneously rushing forward.” On of Running Back Mastermix, a mix album celebrating 15 years of the label, he apparently takes “rushing” to mean something more like “ambling in a slow, groovy fashion.” This is a mix of unashamedly classic, disco-inflected house that, for all its positives, doesn’t exactly sharpen electronic music’s cutting edge.
Choosing the distinguished New York DJ Tony Humphries to mix the album may have something to do with this. A legend in the clubbing world, Humphries is a masterful DJ of soulful house and garage known for his wonderfully smooth mixing skills. It is little surprise, then, that he highlights the parts of the Running Back catalogue that pay homage to classic disco and house, from Todd Terje’s celestial nu-disco number “Ragysh” to Tiger & Woods’ French touch-inspired “Time.” In doing so, he arguably smoothes out some of the appealing wrinkles in Running Back’s history. This is, after all, the label that unleashed the nightmarish techno thump of Theo Parrish’s “Black Mist” on an unsuspecting public, and once reissued an obscure Japanese sound-effects record pretty much on a whim.
What Humphries brings to the mix, however, far outweighs any possible gripes about conservative track selection. Reflecting a DJ career of more than 35 years, Humphries’ mixing and sequencing are second to none. There’s little flashy or choppy here: He may play with the EQ and filters, but Humphries mostly leaves the songs alone, favoring long, smooth transitions that might join two given tracks for a minute or more, creating something new in the process. Early in the mix, he transitions from the electro-boogie of Tiger & Woods’ “Don’t Hesitate” into the same duo’s “Time,” layering the wonderful string rush of the latter under the former’s nagging vocal hook in a perfect example of harmonic mixing. Later on he introduces the eerie, atmospheric tapestry of Paul Woolford’s “Forevermore” into Matthew Styles’ “Hot!,” helpfully dirtying up the latter’s rather-too-straightforward acid blips.
The sequencing here is key. Rather than rushing into endless sugary drops, Humphries builds in peaks and troughs that gently guide the dancer up and down. The tough filters of Tiger & Woods’ “Time” give way to the wandering, Balearic synths of Jex’s “La Casa,” which in turn cedes the floor to Tiger & Woods’ club stomper “No More Talking,” a song that brings to mind the brilliantly effective sample cut-ups on Daft Punk associate DJ Falcon’s 1999 EP Hello My Name Is DJ Falcon. The track selection, while limited in musical palette, works well as an introduction to Running Back, with songs from the label’s established names (Todd Terje, Leon Vynehall, Paul Woolford) mixed up with the work of newer producers (Roy Comanchero, Jex, and and hugely promising Shan). The individual track highlights are legion, too, including Mr. G’s minimalist Latin masterpiece “Ben & Gerd (Killin It M Day),” the taut, Mood II Swing-like bounce of Vynehall’s “Beau Sovereign,” and Shan’s fizzing rave throwback “Work It (Piano Mix).”
Weighed against these are a couple of songs that start to drag in a home-listening context, notably Redshape’s “Dogz,” which could have lost a minute in the mix, and Matthew Styles’ “Hot!,” which ends up sailing too close to Pepe Bradock’s 1999 track “Burning Hot” for comfort. And Shan’s “Bassline Party,” while a great track in itself, closes the mix on an anticlimactic note, as if Humphries had a further four hours to give. The limitations of the single CD format mean this isn’t the case. Running Back Mastermix may not be the definitive story of the label, but it succeeds as a finely tuned celebration of joyful, disco-infused house. In an age of digital abundance, being left wanting more feels refreshing. | 2017-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Running Back | September 14, 2017 | 7.3 | 734ac814-ff3e-4f2f-96da-3dbad4983f73 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
On one hand, you have a group that have clearly said everything they wanted to say, whatever it is they ... | On one hand, you have a group that have clearly said everything they wanted to say, whatever it is they ... | Stereolab: Margerine Eclipse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7502-margerine-eclipse/ | Margerine Eclipse | On one hand, you have a group that have clearly said everything they wanted to say, whatever it is they wanted to say. This is a pretty common criticism of bands by people who probably stopped listening to the records years ago-- though to be fair, if that's your idea of a flaw, Stereolab are deeply flawed. It's certainly something I've considered from time to time. Why it should come up more often with this band than, say, Radiohead, is another question. Apparently, "ruts" are not inherently bad, and it turns out the majors have been demonstrating this for as long as "pop" meant "popular." No, I don't think the fact that Stereolab have been making variations on the same record every year for almost ten years is the reason they briefly fell out of favor. This is fashion, you understand, and if anyone should understand the stylish generation, it's the Lab.
Of course, Stereolab never really fell "out of favor," per se, but getting two people to agree on the value of their indie-pop stock is a tall order. The main problem is that taking stock of the band's place within a contemporary context assumes that they were ever really "contemporary." Even back in the days when they might feasibly have been playing "indie rock," all of their musical cues were throwbacks to the vintage post-rock power of folks like Neu! and Raymond Scott. Their imagery was all fluorescents and retro-futuristic schemata, even before their music became the same. Their Marxism was about ten years too late to really be cool-- but as they consistently demonstrate, their kind of "cool" is, at best, a paradox.
Furthermore, and perhaps most on point, their music hasn't actually gotten any worse over the years. That may sound like a backhanded compliment, but in the faces of a significant faction of former Stereolab fans who think they've gone soft, it's practically blasphemy. You know, in merely quantitative terms, the ratio of good songs on their records is about the same as it was during their perceived mid-90s "peak," and I would argue that their music is actually more interesting now. Their preference for lounge and faux-acid jazz textures tend to polarize people, which I guess is a good thing considering my fear of a pending acid jazz revival.
All of this brings me to Margerine Eclipse. As a reward for sticking with me this far, I'll get right to the point: if you hated Cobra and Phases, Sound-Dust and Dots & Loops, you'll probably have little need for Stereolab's eighth proper full-length. All of the hallmarks of latter-day Groop are here: harpsichords, silly (yet great) 70s analog synthesizers with futuristic roto-bossa beats, and plenty of dreamy harmonies to fill out the barely existent song structures. Mary Hansen's presence is missed when you hear Laetitia Sadier spot herself on the high vocals, though it's easy enough to imagine her back in there if you want. All of it is very easy, which is a perfect way to sum up a new Stereolab record: easy to predict, easy to criticize. And easy to like.
I should come clean in that I never hated post-ETK Stereolab, so the familiar movements of Margerine Eclipse aren't really a disappointment as much as yearly revisits from old friends. When the band released an uninspired Instant 0 in the Universe EP in 2003 (coming off their first year without new studio material since they started making records), it looked momentarily as if the train was stopping. Now, the notion seems funny because listening to bright, buoyant tunes like "Le Demeure" or the fantastic opener, "Vonal Declosion", reminds me that they'll probably keep going like this until they're gone.
The aforementioned "Vonal Declosion" rings in the new record with a flash and the trill of the Farfisa, as the bass dances below Sadier's well-worn rhythmic French nothings. What's more, as the band transitions into a section sounding ripped out of Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talking" and Mary Tyler Moore Show incidental music at once, supermarket strings enter on the left and reveal Stereolab's true calling for delivering Perfect Pop for Then People. "Cosmic Country Noir" pulls out the classic robotic Wurlitzer drum machine patterns for more antiqua-groove, though the main body of the song is more reminiscent of The Free Design than Kraftwerk.
"Margerine Rock" doubles back on Stereolab's way with pop history by sounding most similar to their own music, circa Mars Audiac Quintet, even if guitars can't quite mask their now low-key charms. More fitting seems the poignant "Dear Marge", with Spanish guitar, gliding Farfisa, percolating synth and Sadier's counterpoint vocals so obviously being transmitted to Hansen somewhere off in the cosmos. The song is nostalgic, but handled with such care that its sweetness never approaches saccharine sentiment, or worse, stale lounge-pop. They ensure the song's fate by galloping out on a disco-funk plane right out of an Earth, Wind & Fire record. (Okay, so restraint isn't really Stereolab's thing, but damn it, they just have such good taste in sudden disco flashbacks.)
Ultimately, Margerine Eclipse probably won't be received as a "return to form," other than to say it's perfectly in accord with everything they've given us for the last several years. It won't gather them new fans, etc. etc., though I think that's an unfair way to judge a record. Times have changed, and the band hasn't, so you might just as well praise them for sticking to their ideals instead of latching onto some trend (Tim Gane does dancepunk, anyone? Bad example, I'd listen to that). The best way I can think to hear Margerine Eclipse is as another in a line of accomplished, eternally pleasant and intermittently brilliant Stereolab records. Really, it's just that easy. | 2004-01-15T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2004-01-15T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | Elektra | January 15, 2004 | 7.6 | 734df358-d61e-4105-b58f-d5f21d2214af | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
The breakout rapper’s dystopian sci-fi concept album is full of glitzy soundscapes, rapidly morphing tempos, and naked cyborgian wails. Don’t mistake interstellar style for substance. | The breakout rapper’s dystopian sci-fi concept album is full of glitzy soundscapes, rapidly morphing tempos, and naked cyborgian wails. Don’t mistake interstellar style for substance. | Yeat: 2093 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yeat-2093/ | 2093 | One time at the meeting of the minds, aka backstage at Lyrical Lemonade Summer Smash, Yeat was asked by YouTube personality and guerilla reporter Andrew Callaghan what he would do with a time machine. His answer: Travel “six million years” into the future where there would be “spaceships” and “alien lean.” Pretty vague, but hey, no one is asking him to be Frank Herbert. If you’ve been following the formation of the Portland rapper’s devout cult over the last few years—from underground viral sensation with 2021’s pyrotechnic 4L to boxing out Drake on 2023’s For All the Dogs—then his ramblings about outer space and UFOs are nothing new. I never thought all that deeply about his obsession with futuristic imagery, though—I just figured that he’s frequently smacked and doesn’t have much else to talk about. So it’s a little surprising to see it becoming his thing. On his latest album, 2093—not quite six million years but far enough—he’s on top of a foggy city roof in a black leather duster straight out of Blade Runner, making galactic-scale music calibrated for interstellar communication. Welcome to Yeat’s vision of the future.
Too bad it’s not that interesting or original of a vision. The glitzy soundscapes, rapidly morphing tempos, and naked cyborgian wails, not to mention the audible generosity of the budget, make 2093 feel like a lightweight Travis Scott record. An underwhelming pivot, considering that these days one Travis is boring enough. Don’t believe me? You can hear the heavy (heavy) inspiration in “Power Trip,” especially in how his distant lilts and the gaudy beat combine for an effect as impersonal as contacting an airline chatbot. “U Should Know” is basically a UTOPIA demo, only worth it for the celestial extravagance of the instrumental. Even the glacial close-encounters ballad “1093” just seems like a Vultures 2 audition. Sure, the beats are flashy and very polished, but Yeat’s eccentricities as a rapper are flattened by the scope. He sounds less funny, less improvisational, less weird.
There’s still some fun to be had. (I would hope so at 22 tracks—or 28, if you include P2 and P3, add-ons designed to game his way to a No. 1 album.) For as showy and combustible as Yeat’s sound can be, it’s the small details that really hook you. All it takes is one silly bar or far-out melodic burst and suddenly you’re sending that one song to everyone in your contacts. 2093 has some of those moments: On “Tell më,” when he croons, “It’s easier to scream, I’ll send ya straight to hell,” and hits the final “hell” with a warped effect that makes his voice sound like it’s shattering. Or when the whirrs and bleeps of “Familia” dim for a second so he can evocatively spit, “I’m pissin’ on this beat, it’s like a bathroom stall.” One of the concepts on “Bought the Earth” is pretty funny: He gets so rich that he literally buys the planet, only to immediately sell it. He should be the CEO of a media corporation.
Speaking of CEOs, one of the most baffling parts of 2093 is Yeat’s new alter ego: the “Psycho CEO,” who debuts on the intro track and merits a few references throughout the album. Plenty of rappers have tagged themselves the boss, head honcho, or even CEO, but every time Yeat mentions the “Psycho CEO,” I can only think of how incredibly corny it is, like asking Elon Musk to host SNL. In so much dystopian science fiction, the CEOs are the slimy, greedy villains. Maybe that’s what Yeat is going for? Judging by all the sandpaper melodies he busts out (my favorite is on “Nothing Changë”) his lodestar remains Future, who is well-known for his rotten ways. But at his peak Future’s villainy was extremely complex, as if he were tortured by his own behavior. Yeat is just a “Psycho CEO” because it sounds cool. Whatever. I’m probably thinking about this idea way more than he ever did.
Don’t mistake this album’s half-assed concepts and themes for ambition. I blame the cult of Kanye, which has brainwashed us into believing that expensive and bloated spectacles signal depth, importance, and innovation. That’s how we got UTOPIA, and to a lesser extent, 2093. I’d argue that 4L and Up 2 Më are bolder than anything here: Yeat’s older projects threw you into the deep end of his magma flows and fuzzy world-building and asked that you either get it or don’t. An album this safe and familiar will be great for packing out bigger concert venues but only makes his musical identity more nebulous. On the bright side: At least Yeat isn’t trying to sell us a pair of sneakers yet. Now that’s a future I want no part of. | 2024-02-27T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-27T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Field Trip / Capitol | February 27, 2024 | 5.8 | 735051ac-54c3-4a1a-a783-bcb76992d9c3 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Harry Styles’ third solo album sometimes lacks substance, but style always abounds. | Harry Styles’ third solo album sometimes lacks substance, but style always abounds. | Harry Styles: Harry’s House | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/harry-styles-harrys-house/ | Harry’s House | When a teen idol becomes a rock star, he announces it with a Rolling Stone spread. Five years ago, in the run-up to his debut album, Harry Styles got that quintessential rock’n’roll treatment: A sprawling 6,000 words by the celebrated journalist and filmmaker Cameron Crowe. They had lunch in Laurel Canyon; Cameron likened Styles’ voice to Rod Stewart’s, his crew to the Beatles, and his recording studio to Big Pink.
When a rock star becomes a lifestyle influencer, he announces it with a Better Homes & Gardens cover. Styles’ appearance in the June issue of that publication—which runs articles about organic fertilizer and Meyer lemons and rarely profiles musicians at all, much less those of Styles’ stature—brushes off the music press and cleverly promotes Harry’s House, his third album. Harry is pictured in Gucci pajamas carrying a breakfast tray; the story’s very existence signals his hard turn into comfort and leisure. Meanwhile, he’s got Mick Fleetwood peddling his nail polish. On TikTok, Harry’s House single “As It Was” is a go-to soundtrack for supercuts of curated domesticity. The state of the boy brand is strong.
On Harry’s House, pleasure is the aesthetic proposition. The album oozes the easy charisma that lifted Styles head and shoulders above his former One Direction colleagues and makes him one of pop’s more compelling live acts. Its sounds—which move through funk, folk, and 2010s Tumblr-pop—are friendly and familiar enough to satisfy passive listening, but deftly executed, with a surplus of style and whimsy that rewards a more active ear. Styles’ previous albums seemed preoccupied with a desire to demonstrate taste and legitimacy via retro-rock pastiche, but here he wears his influences more lightly. The mood is light, too: Opener “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” kicks things off with scatting, scene-stealing horns, and a litany of food references (fried rice, ice cream, coffee on the stove) that conjure a state of goofy, sated bliss. “I could cook an egg on you”: Harry Styles lyric or Denny’s tweet?
Styles kept this record in the family, working primarily with returning collaborators Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson. For some artists, an intimate writers’ room can draw out vulnerabilities or create a foundation for risk-taking, but little here suggests that Styles is looking to tap into anything overly profound. The emotional stakes are low: Harry is either wistful for past love, but not too pressed about it, or else drawn to someone new, but not effusively so. He’s “not worried” about who his ex is going home to, despite the nostalgic halo she wears on “Little Freak”; he’s not wine-drunk and despondent, he just has the “grape juice blues.” “Daydreaming,” a skin-deep but richly textured sex fantasy that borrows from the Brothers Johnson, articulates what’s felt on much of the album: Styles is writing inside a reverie, blissfully insulated from life’s extremity.
Substance sometimes lacks, but style always abounds. Harmonies open like refracted light around the bright, decadent passages of “Daylight” (“If I was a bluebird/I would fly to you/You’d be the spoon/Dip you in honey so I could be sticking to you”). “Satellite” enters into conversation with Ariana Grande’s “NASA” and features a wonderful bit of text painting: Styles sings about “spinning out” while the back half of the song builds momentum and nearly careens out of control. And on an album whose themes are largely generic, a few dots of self-reflexivity sparkle. The third-person talking-to Harry gives himself on “As It Was” invites a burst of empathy. On the slick, salacious “Cinema,” he works in a coded boast about his union with a certain film actor and director—“I bring the pop to the cinema”—over an extended breakdown propelled by plucky rhythm guitar. It’s a moment of ego indulgence, and a rare Easter egg from an artist whose personal life is closely guarded.
Striking a balance between aloofness and earnestness is something of a Harry Styles specialty. Though direct touchpoints with fans are limited—he is minimally active on social media—his keen sensitivity towards them is evident. In that 2017 Rolling Stone profile, Styles defended his young, predominantly female audience: “Young girls like the Beatles. You gonna tell me they’re not serious?” he said then. Lately, he’s commiserated with them. When he introduced Shania Twain, who made a guest appearance during his Coachella set last month, Styles deployed familiar pop feminist logic: “This lady… told me that men are trash,” he quipped. In the same set, he debuted the Harry’s House track “Boyfriends,” opening by saying, “To boyfriends everywhere, fuck you.”
Is this pandering? Maybe. Call it penance for the misogynistic rock tropes that Styles occasionally reproduced in earlier work. “They think you’re so easy/They take you for granted,” he sighs over finger-picked guitar on the song about boyfriends, voice multiplied into a chorus of soothing affirmations—an old folk lullaby for the spurned and exhausted. (Some—identity politics purists, Larry truthers—will wonder whether Styles’ ode to the hardships of dating men is an output of imaginative empathy or of personal experience, but they’re unlikely to get answers.)
Styles’ “Treat People With Kindness” ethos radiates across Harry’s House. “If you’re feeling down, I just wanna make you happier, baby!” he insists on Passion Pit-approximate “Late Night Talking.” One song later, he’s “on [his] way to buy some flowers for you.” In this way, Styles invites participants into his project of pleasure-seeking: He is a nice guy, so adoring him is uncomplicated and guilt-free. That the persona doesn’t get grating—with the exception of “Matilda,” a wan ballad whose namesake gets lost in Styles’ abundant sympathy for her—is a feat. So what if Harry’s House isn’t especially bold; innovation is not a requirement of a solid pop album, and working too hard is out of fashion, anyway. Better to slip on your Gucci pajamas and just enjoy. | 2022-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | May 20, 2022 | 7.2 | 735e01cc-9114-456f-a6d0-d8ddc74dbde9 | Olivia Horn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn / | |
Weezer's fourth self-titled record, trumpeted as a return to form just like 2014's Everything Will Be All Right in the End, is also their first concept album since Pinkerton. | Weezer's fourth self-titled record, trumpeted as a return to form just like 2014's Everything Will Be All Right in the End, is also their first concept album since Pinkerton. | Weezer: Weezer (White Album) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21593-weezer-white-album/ | Weezer (White Album) | In 2014, amidst the wreckage of a long, dispiriting bid for mainstream pop crossover, Weezer faced a disenchanted fanbase and promised them Everything Will Be All Right in the End. That album was framed as an extended mea culpa for the folks who had stuck it out through the "Beverly Hills"s, the "boo-yah"s, and the side collaborations with flat-earth rapper B.o.B. It was by no means an empty apology: the album proved refreshing and reassuring, their best in years, and frontman Rivers Cuomo seemed to have bested the curse that had been hovering over them for the past decade. It's appropriate, then, that the band have selected white—a color traditionally associated with purity and renewal—as the palette for their fourth self-titled album, trumpeted yet again as a return to form. Ostensibly, all is forgiven, and we can resume our march further and further away from Weezer's awful '00s with renewed spirits. Unfortunately, the White album proves that some curses are damn hard to break.
On Everything Will Be All Right in the End, Cuomo appeared to swear off future attempts at mass consumption, declaring "I'm not a Happy Meal." Less than two years after that defiant statement, he's embracing the Golden Arches, so to speak. Longtime producer/Cars frontman Ric Ocasek is out, replaced by Jake Sinclair, an industry influencer who's manned the boards for Taylor Swift and 5 Seconds of Summer (he also helped them record the dreaded Raditude). Unsurprisingly, Sinclair's sonics rely heavily on prominent, over-dubbed vocals and mechanical percussion. The album's co-writers include Alex Goose (best known for soundtracking a Sperrys commercial) and Redlight, a British DJ. There's even a reunion with Semisonic frontman-turned-Grammy-winning-songsmith Dan Wilson on the limp opening track "California Kids." White's personnel and production frequently renders it indistinguishable from the milquetoast beach-pop blaring from the speakers of the half-empty Hollister at your local mall. "Wind in Our Sail" and "(Girl We Got A) Good Thing" derive their momentum from peppy keyboard plunks, rather than sawtoothed guitars. Apart from a criminally short, Thin Lizzy-esque solo on the latter track, Cuomo's joyful riffing barely gets a note in edgewise.
The White album also boasts the most batshit lyrical word bank of any Weezer album to date, and bear in mind that the last record had songs about Paul Revere and the resurrection of ancient Egyptian monarchs. Cuomo's everything-stays-in approach to lyric writing dictates that no allusion or image be left behind, however obscure or absurd it may seem to the average listener. Hence, we've got shout-outs to Charles Darwin, male pregnancy, Dante's Inferno, tiger shark extinction, composer Burt Bacharach, and opioid-induced constipation, just to name a few. This approach suits the quirkier numbers, like "King of the World," a punchy love letter from Cuomo to his wife Kyoko, loaded with intimate references to her childhood and even her fear of airplanes ("We could ride a Greyhound all the way to the Galapagos," he offers.)
The wackiness also suits "Thank God For Girls," the album's contentious lead single. At first glance, it reads like the unfiltered rant of a men's-rights activist, but a closer look reveals Cuomo is having some fun here: Through a combination of subtle homoeroticism (fantasies of coming home to a lady with a "big fat cannoli to shove in your mouth"), inverted power structures ("She's so big/She's so strong," he gushes in the post-chorus, eying a woman in "sweaty overalls") and Biblical hot takes (what if God's really a woman, guys?), he pokes at some of the deep-rooted, frequently-unadressed fears of abandonment and inferiority that accompany modern notions of masculinity and femininity. How disappointing, then, that the song's sharp commentary is overshadowed by an overwrought arrangement cribbed from Zep's "Stairway to Heaven"—right down to the acapella ending—buttressed in the chorus by wan, brittle grunge chords.
The buried lede on White is that it is also Weezer's first true concept album since Pinkerton. Rather than the ambitious adaptation of Madame Butterfly, Cuomo opts here for a three-act tale of geek-meets-girl, followed en suite by boy-gets-heart-torn-asunder. From this angle, some of the nerdy name-dropping and masochistic sexual symbolism might be thematic conceits rather than lyrical shortcomings; our protagonist's comparison of himself and his crush to "Danté and Beatrice" in "L.A. Girlz" is supposed to be dorky, because he lacks the love language necessary to properly contextualize these sentiments. But first of all, which Weezer album couldn't be described at least in part as "geek meets girl and gets heart torn asunder?" And when's the last time we listened to a Weezer album for the story?
No, we listen to Weezer in 2016 largely for nostalgic dog whistles. We listen because Blue retreads like "Endless Summer" and "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori" offer Proustian pleasures in spite of their obviously-recycled frameworks, and because the simpering, sweet "L.A. Girlz" is the group's best single since "Island in the Sun." We listen because "California Kids" opens the album with a smattering of triangle notes plucked from "Pink Triangle," while "L.A. Girlz" reclaims "El Scorcho's" rubbery guitar line as its own. Most of all, we listen for reassurance that our beloved Weezer can avoid relapsing completely into embarrassment—and by those parameters, mediocre may as well be magnificent.
*Correction: An earlier version of this review misattributed a guitar solo to rhythm guitarist Brian Bell. * | 2016-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Crush | March 30, 2016 | 6.2 | 735f505a-c8e1-4380-b1b0-2f6e8c20b2ab | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Los Angeles producer’s house and techno is hyper-attuned to the nuances of timbre, giving his music a captivating textural focus even when emotion is in scant supply. | The Los Angeles producer’s house and techno is hyper-attuned to the nuances of timbre, giving his music a captivating textural focus even when emotion is in scant supply. | John Tejada: Dead Start Program | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-tejada-dead-start-program/ | Dead Start Program | The Los Angeles producer John Tejada’s hyper-crystalline house and techno suggest a deeply-rooted fascination with sound as raw material. While his beats remain relatively unspectacular, four-to-the-floor fare, it’s his antiseptic timbres, vacuum-sealed arrangements, and meticulously programmed synth textures that stand out. He knows how to fine-tune the internal order a track so that lushnessness overflows. His high-fidelity sounds feel both piercing and immersive, and focused engagement with them has the concentrated intensity of an hour in a sensory deprivation tank.
Dead Start Program is his 13th album and his fourth for Cologne’s Kompakt label, and it features several tracks that productively mine the psychedelic qualities of precision. “Duty Cycle” is equal parts moody and euphoric, like squeegeeing the few last drops of dopamine out of your brain after dancing for 12 hours straight. “Heal,” is rigid, focused, and mathematical, propelled by a sense of spring-loaded tension. It’s easy to imagine that the elated aggression of “Hypochondriac” would be well received at an angry rave. Meanwhile, “All at Sea” emits bracing energy, making good use of nervous, circuitous patterns of dissonance and a cluttered sense of space.
Although the record has a number of aesthetically appealing moments, Dead Start Program never quite coalesces. Tracks like “Autoseek” and “Quipu” express germs of potentially compelling musical ideas; they point to a strain of gloomy romanticism but aren’t moved to elaborate this feeling with much specificity. The implied grandiosity doesn’t quite land. Others, such as “Loss,” a slightly awkward take on dubstep, and “Telemetry,” which sounds like a first experiment with a piece of software, come across more like sketches that were discarded as quickly as they were assembled.
Ultimately, the album doesn’t make a ton of particularly interesting formal decisions or engage a compelling set of feelings; the overriding mood is a familiar mixture of agitation and melancholy, tinged with slight boredom. The record often ends up sounding like an indistinct memory of itself. There is an over-reliance on club-music melodies, phrasings, and sequences so ingrained in the collective consciousness that they almost sound like readymade loops, which makes certain tracks sound perfunctory. Tejada’s 2011 album Parabolas brought a unique sensibility and impassioned spark to old forms, but that urgency doesn’t carry over here.
Dead Start Program does reward close listening in certain respects. Tejada’s affinity for neatly organized arrangements of luminous synths remains infectious. He lets notes ring out at length, which isn’t so common in dance music these days. His choice of radiant sounds gives these songs a lustrous, polychromatic quality. Although the record’s melodies might not always glow with personality, the way his synths stand out in the mix has its own transfixing quality. His emphasis on tightly defined patterns makes the focus on tone and resonance all the more pronounced. But Tejada’s careful systems management needs to be complemented by a greater sense of emotional exigency to really come alive. | 2018-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | February 12, 2018 | 6.5 | 7363e0a6-ecbb-4e3e-ae93-676b7c18d9b9 | Alexander Iadarola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alexander-iadarola/ | |
With a sound so omnivorous and open to influences that span decades and styles, Stereolab have carved one of the more intriguing and rewarding catalogs of the past 15 years; their new horn-laded album, Chemical Chords is one of their strongest outings in some time. | With a sound so omnivorous and open to influences that span decades and styles, Stereolab have carved one of the more intriguing and rewarding catalogs of the past 15 years; their new horn-laded album, Chemical Chords is one of their strongest outings in some time. | Stereolab: Chemical Chords | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12118-chemical-chords/ | Chemical Chords | Part of the fun of following Stereolab over the years has been following the declarations of mastermind Tim Gane, who has an uncanny ability to plant contextual seeds of albums in advance. The albums don't need it necessarily, but from the beginning-- when Stereolab paid prescient tribute to the likes of Neu! and Martin Denny-- on through to their present triumphant twilight, Gane has always come across as an ideal kind of character: a mix between a thoughtful critic and an excitable collector geek who gets off on trying out the ideas he hears on records he loves. Before 2004's Margerine Eclipse, Gane talked about using puddles of rhythm as the basis for songs that sparkled like reflections. For the new Chemical Chords, he's spoken of making good on an affinity for Motown.
To mention it more than once is to overstate the degree to which Chemical Chords actually does sound like Motown, but another part of the fun of following Stereolab is listening in for subtleties of inflection. With a sound so omnivorous and open to influences that span decades and styles (not to mention planets), the Stereolab discography has become a series of churning extrapolations on a steadfast set of ideas. And Chemical Chords counts among the best of those extrapolations, no matter how familiar that original set of ideas has grown in time.
"Neon Beanbag" opens on a jaunty note, with organs on harpsichord settings and Laetitia Sadier doing her scat-minded best to summon the spirit of doo-wop. The Motown influence is hearable in the way the guitar slides around from chord to chord, in swing-time and not embarrassed to fall a bit behind the beat if it means racking up style points. "Three Women" follows with a little extra wiggle and the kind of bulbous two-note bass-line that might have come out of Detroit in the days before funk changed things.
Horns figure into many of the songs on Chemical Chords, all of them intricately arranged but most surveyed rather impressively as accents more than as subjects themselves. To that end, the whole album has a lightness of touch that makes it sound warm and comfortable, especially after the sad weight evident on the also-excellent Margerine Eclipse. The songs sound tossed off in the best way: not as sketches that could have benefited from more time or care, but as songs that just presented themselves in the studio and submitted to being laid down in simple terms.
"Valley Hi!" is a driving pop song with a catchy lean, with Sadier singing in a trance of falling melodies delivered with her special brand of disinterested zeal. "Silver Sands" bounds along with circles of loopy xylophone. "Nous Vous Demandons Pardon" sounds like three or four different moody Emperor Tomato Ketchup-era tracks fitted together in a deft assemblage. And then there's "The Ecstatic Static", a cosmic rendering of Brian Wilson chords pushed along at a pregnantly plodding tempo, with strings falling out and martial drums angling in: It draws on every era of Stereolab's past without seeming concerned with anything more than what might sound cool in the next measure. | 2008-08-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-08-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | 4AD | August 19, 2008 | 8.1 | 7364b68d-42de-4062-bca1-4fe6ca73096f | Andy Battaglia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-battaglia/ | null |
On his debut album under a new alias, Chicago’s Conor Mackey focuses his varied interests on knotty electronic music, merging a panoply of subgenres into one pummeling package. | On his debut album under a new alias, Chicago’s Conor Mackey focuses his varied interests on knotty electronic music, merging a panoply of subgenres into one pummeling package. | Lynyn: Lexicon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lynyn-lexicon/ | Lexicon | Conor Mackey’s music has assumed different shapes over the past decade: proggy jazz fusion, math rock, high-speed electro. With each new turn, the Chicago composer’s studies in music theory and composition have informed the meticulousness of his approach. That foundation came through most clearly in his work as a guitarist in the five-piece Monobody, in which he built complex instrumental vistas around a moody blend of post-rock and jazz. Late last year, handling the twitchy, synth-heavy production for fellow Monobody member NNAMDÏ’s Are You Happy EP, he adopted the alias Lynyn, and on Lexicon, his debut album under the moniker, Mackey veers sharply in yet another direction, creating knotty electronic music that merges a panoply of subgenres into one pummeling package.
Lexicon moves in volatile fits and starts, whipping from sprawling IDM to disorienting digicore to muscular jungle. Mackey knows how to slowly set up the intricacies of his songs—each of Lexicon’s chaotic polyrhythms is tightly constructed for maximum impact. The frenetic “Stumbling” lays down a headache-throb beat ready-made for warehouse raves; early standout “Uja End,” meanwhile, stacks every element with geometric detail à la Aphex Twin, slowly dialing up echoing strings, syncopated drums, and an undercurrent of slippery synths. Each texture combines into a cohesive, head-spinning whole, establishing a sense of gratifying balance to the pandemonium.
Mackey occasionally slows things down with mellow, downcast synths, which wind like faint whispers through “In Dust” and “Memory.” These reflective highlights offer a brief cooldown from the tangled rhythms and intensity that can drag down some songs. “Vnar Rush” exhaustingly rides an eerie sample into infinity amid a hornet’s swarm of synths; closer “Puffling,” where breakbeats merge with the sound of glasses clinking together, feels anonymous to a fault. It detracts from the moments when the album shows a more playful sense of personality and character in the music’s modular architecture.
When Mackey does lean into his quirks, Lexicon shines. On “Amund Vise,” he splices distorted vocal melodies, one of the few instances of voice on the album, into the thudding drum patterns, giving the song a vital boost of energy—and a crucial element of humanity. The ascendant voices and melodies break through the clatter like a sunbeam, providing a respite that elevates Lexicon to breathless heights. | 2022-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sooper | July 20, 2022 | 6.9 | 737494dd-624b-487a-b1fb-9f722d086444 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Dave Grohl’s six-piece finds common cause between gaudy disco-pop and willfully absurd arena rock on an album-length collection of Bee Gees covers and live-in-studio Medicine at Midnight cuts. | Dave Grohl’s six-piece finds common cause between gaudy disco-pop and willfully absurd arena rock on an album-length collection of Bee Gees covers and live-in-studio Medicine at Midnight cuts. | Foo Fighters: Dee Gees - Hail Satin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/foo-fighters-dee-gees-hail-satin/ | Dee Gees - Hail Satin | In late February, less than two weeks after Foo Fighters released their 10th album in more than a quarter century as a band, the arena-rock placebo Medicine at Midnight (rumor has it Bill Gates put a chip in it!), they unceremoniously unveiled a disco alter ego. Billed, semi-funnily, as the Dee Gees, the Dave Grohl-led six-piece premiered their cover of “You Should Be Dancing” on BBC Radio 2. Grohl—ever the candid every-dude—said that the falsetto experiment was inspired by last December’s fascinating HBO documentary about the Bee Gees—never mind that he hadn’t actually seen it.
The stakes could hardly have been lower. The results were hard to fault. Recorded with one-man multi-platinum mint Greg Kurstin, the veteran band’s stab at the Bee Gees’ nuke-proof 1976 hit—the first in a run of disco-pop smashes that would appear on the next year’s gazillion-selling Saturday Night Fever soundtrack—is muscular but essentially faithful. When Grohl channels Barry Gibb’s horndog dancefloor exhortations (“My woman gives me pow-wah!”), it feels as self-consciously silly as disco’s monocultural phase gave audiences a license to be, from Studio 54 to suburban strip malls. Thoroughly harmless, it’s kind of a hoot. It would’ve made a fine novelty single.
Hope you’re ready to boogie down: “You Should Be Dancing” is merely the opening track on an entire album attributed to the Dee Gees, a Record Store Day exclusive titled, semi-funnily, Hail Satin. The rest of side one is devoted to loud but loving covers of four other numbers from the Gibb brothers’ massive songbook. The five tracks on side two are straightforward live-in-studio renditions of Medicine at Midnight cuts. Yes, this seems superfluous: How many Bee Gees covers by Foo Fighters does the world need? Yes, it’s also conceptually muddled: What do live versions of new Foo Fighters songs have to do with Bee Gees covers or wide-lapeled leisure suits? But it’s hard to get too worked up about all this when nobody else seems to be. Take a chill pill, Disco Stu.
Give Foo Fighters credit for their Bee Gees song selection. They don’t rehash “Stayin’ Alive.” They know their lane, and they steer clear of the British-Australian trio’s 1960s country-soul or ’80s adult-contemporary balladry. They home in on that whirlwind period when the Bee Gees were, by a good distance, the biggest act in the world—the Beatles after the Beatles, the Kings of Pop before the King of Pop. The trouble is, this is familiar territory, dated since the early days of the Walkman, so without at least some level of reinterpretation or examination, Hail Satin risks becoming little more than the tightest ever live-band karaoke.
Probably the best argument for expanding the Dee Gees project beyond an individual song is Foo Fighters’ punchy take on “Shadow Dancing,” a weirdly haunting 1978 chart-topper—it was pivotal to Marlon James’ Booker Prize-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings—that was actually recorded by Andy Gibb, younger brother of the three original Bee Gees, in collaboration with his siblings. Drummer Taylor Hawkins gamely sings lead on this, a fitting choice, and the backing vocalists playfully fill in for the horn and string sections. “Shadow Dancing” must have been inescapable when all things Bee Gees-involved ruled the radio, but Foo Fighters help make fresh sense of it here.
Beyond that, if you’ve heard one eminently competent Foo Fighters cover of a hugely successful disco song, perhaps you’ve heard them all. When they charge back into two more Saturday Night Fever staples (the chicken-scratch funk of “Night Fever,” the twinkling sentimentality of “More Than a Woman”), it’s like they’re repeating the same joke with slightly different inflections, wondering if this time they’ll elicit a laugh. The frenzied gallop of “Tragedy,” a successive 1979 chart-topper, helps illustrate how small of a leap it was to synth-metal like Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” but it also betrays the limits of the Dee Gees’ fidelity to their source material (the original’s signature “explosion” sound effect is nowhere to be found). So much of the Bee Gees’ appeal lay in their brotherly harmonies, their vast production resources, and their particular historical moment, none of which can be fully recreated here, no matter the band’s enthusiasm.
Although Grohl trumpeted Medicine at Midnight as Foo Fighters’ equivalent to Bowie’s Let’s Dance, you had to squint to discern much extra degree of disco-tude. The musical whiplash on side two of Hail Satin is like going from watching John Travolta do the hustle in white polyester to watching him mispronounce the name of Idina Menzel at the Oscars. “Making a Fire” and “Shame Shame” both have a certain strut, but not like that, and the juxtaposition with such universally enjoyed songs as the Bee Gees’ greatest hits would do no band’s new music any favors.
The buttons really go back over the chest hairs on “Waiting on a War,” a Medicine at Midnight highlight that ramps up from winsome power-pop strums to blazing hard-rock barrage seemingly just to show Foo Fighters can pull it off (or to jolt awake the cheap seats). From there, all obvious disco-band pretenses are put back on mothballs. On “No Son of Mine,” Grohl bites off syllables like James Hetfield clamoring for “Fuel.” On “Cloudspotter,” he spits his big dumb rock lyrics (“Refuse me while I kiss the sky”) with so much hammy fervor that you want to buy him a $16 draft beer. Even without the roar of a Madison Square Garden crowd, the live-in-studio feeling helps remind you that he doesn’t just know how ridiculous this is—he’s reveling in it.
If Grohl has gotten around to watching The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, the unfailingly likable musician surely has some sharp things to say about it. The Gibb brothers—Barry, as well as the late Robin, Maurice, and teen idol Andy—were the mainstream face of disco during the years revisited by this album, much as the three Nirvana members embodied grunge for a pop audience more than a decade later; the Miami Sound presaged Seattle’s sound. Grohl also recently went viral by telling Pharrell that his drums on Nevermind were “disco beats, dude,” raising tantalizing questions about the blurred lines (ugh, sorry) between genres, the delicate and sociologically fraught interplay between culture and craft. And Hail Satin tacitly represents a growing awareness, even among the “Led Zeppelin didn’t write tunes everybody liked, they left that to the Bee Gees” generation, that much of the disco backlash was rooted in racism and homophobia.
Hail Satin is too inconsequential to support serious arguments. And this isn’t a speech out of The Last Days of Disco. But more than anything, the Dee Gees record suggests that disco-pop and arena rock are united less by their drum beats than by their shared embrace of the gaudy and willfully absurd. They’re welcoming spaces for people who maybe wouldn’t ordinarily line-dance or flash metal horns to act knowingly goofy, to join in on a communal gag. For all the deserved cachet accrued over the past couple of decades around scenes like the Loft and Paradise Garage or unsung auteurs like Arthur Russell, it’s about time that the Bee Gees are getting their reappraisal as well. Disco lovers in 2021 don’t have to worry about losing their edge. They should be dancing, yeah.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | July 16, 2021 | 5.4 | 7377070c-c727-45fd-918b-5b9670c66b91 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Ambient composer Sarah Davachi departs from her usual mix of instruments and electronics on an album that (mostly) focuses on the sound of single instruments. | Ambient composer Sarah Davachi departs from her usual mix of instruments and electronics on an album that (mostly) focuses on the sound of single instruments. | Sarah Davachi: All My Circles Run | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22772-all-my-circles-run/ | All My Circles Run | The ambient music that Sarah Davachi makes is profoundly thermal. Thick and sonorous, it pushes up, welling up from silence, weaving harmoniums, string instruments, and electronics together in ways that feel indivisible, if not eternal. And even where her recordings bring slightly different pressures to bear—the soft, rippling Barons Court, the sloshy, church-organ languor of Dominions—the overall effect is similar: a benign hypnosis, the will to dissipate, a gentle weightlessness. To succumb to any entry in the Vancouver composer’s growing discography is to wade idly into the surf at low tide, only to suddenly find yourself 15 yards away from the shore.
Synthesizers—Rolands, Buchlas, EMSs—have been integral to Davachi’s sound since The Untuning of the Sky, her 2013 debut. Now, in an aesthetic dare worthy of two successive flips of an Oblique Strategies card, All My Circles Run goes synth-free, with each of its five tracks (largely) centered on a separate instrument.
Circularity is embraced wholeheartedly here. “For Voice” swirls an angelic multi-track chorus into a gorgeously smothering aria, as vocal iterations seize, then relinquish the foreground as if in a slow-motion round; the slow-drawn scrape that opens “For Strings” yields to a braided, harmonized drone. After interlocking a frayed, reverberating series of guitar figures destined to disintegrate over time, “Chanter” undercuts its own meditative drift with a two-note, interrogative counterpoint. “For Piano”—all aching, pecked tones, enervating whirr, and field-recorded backdrop pacing circuits—recalls Sontag Shogun, a Brooklyn-based trio who commingle elements of classical and carefully-chosen samples into something mournfully beautiful. Even with the new focus, this version of Davachi isn't a fundamentally altered one—her meditative warmth remains intact.
The real shift is one of artistic precision and a sense of amplification. Instead of viewing a passing scene out the window, we're looking now at the world through a microscope. That's especially true on “For Organ,” the album’s true centerpiece. Kneading and pitch-shifting wobbly, revolving tones until only a ringing, hypnotic din remains, the song seems to crack itself open and flood with brilliant melodic light; it brings to mind, ironically, Matmos’ synth-opus Supreme Balloon. On that record, Matmos temporarily set aside conceptual pranks to embrace the synthesizer's possibilities; the result was music achingly beautiful and crystalline, winking just slightly. With Circles, an insidious, sublime gambit that pays off handsomely, Davachi’s particular asceticism achieves a similar effect by pulling in an alternate direction. Like Brian Eno at his solo best, it's the sort of ambience that doesn't flood, that hovers precariously somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious, barely-there and indisputably present. | 2017-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Students of Decay | March 16, 2017 | 7.3 | 737b674b-06d8-4189-9bef-ed9162cf6ea1 | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
New recordings of the horror auteur’s iconic film themes, from Halloween to Assault on Precinct 13 and beyond, highlight his influential approach to music. | New recordings of the horror auteur’s iconic film themes, from Halloween to Assault on Precinct 13 and beyond, highlight his influential approach to music. | John Carpenter: Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-carpenter-anthology-movie-themes-1974-1998/ | Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998 | Even if you have somehow never seen a John Carpenter movie, you know what one sounds like. One of America’s finest living filmmakers, the master of horror—among other genres—has directed at least half a dozen high masterpieces, including Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing, and In the Mouth of Madness. In 1978, with the prototypical slasher Halloween, he helped create a form that’s been emulated ever since; a decade later, with They Live, he fashioned a camp-cult classic of such depth that philosopher Slavoj Žižek has held forth on its significance. Even Carpenter’s most execrated pictures are noteworthy. (Revisit 2001’s Ghosts of Mars, if you haven’t lately. It’s magnificent.)
Carpenter’s work as a composer is equally remarkable. This fact is not to be understated, given that music-making was, in essence, a part-time job for most of his career. The spare drum-machine rhythms, chunky synthesizer riffs and snarling guitars that he used in his films have become a staple horror idiom, deployed by countless directors since the 1970s as a quick way of conjuring an unsettling atmosphere. Halloween’s unrelenting 5/4 keyboard twinkle is a permanent fixture of the popular imagination, while the blood-rush throb of the Assault on Precinct 13 theme is scarcely less iconic.
Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998 is a “nearly comprehensive survey” of Carpenter’s original film scores, newly recorded by the director with his son, Cody Carpenter, and his godson, Daniel Davies—the same collaborators who helped make his 2015 standalone album Lost Themes. Like that record, which helped restore interest in Carpenter’s music as his film career went dormant, Anthology is a bold, often dazzling throwback, a grand suite rendered in crystalline keyboards and lavish synths. Unlike Lost Themes, its pleasures are instantly familiar: these themes haven’t vanished anywhere. It’s impressive, then, how well Anthology works as a coherent, standalone album—not merely a greatest-hits set, but a vivid set of haunting, bleakly atmospheric music.
In interviews, Carpenter tends to trivialize his composing work, and he can be comically modest in speaking of his musical ability. “Why would I be an influence?” he has balked. “I can barely play.” His father taught at the Western Kentucky University and was a capable violinist, but as a child Carpenter didn’t have the knack; discouraged, he gave up learning early, and to this day he credits himself with little more than jamming, as if his entire oeuvre as composer were a matter of luck. “I take the movie and synchronize it with a keyboard and then I begin improvising,” he once explained of his method. The results he describes as “an afterthought.”
Yet even early on, Carpenter’s film music showed an accomplished technique—similar to the skill he exhibited behind the camera, as noted by the critic Dave Kehr in a review of Halloween: “As a director, he prefers invisibility over the stylistic intrusions favored by most junior auteurs: His camera placements are expressive without being obtrusive.” The same holds true of the scores. Minimalism is the presiding mode of Carpenter’s music, particularly in the early films, and clarity is its defining virtue. His percussion tracks often comprise little more than a steady metronomic tick-tick-tick; his melodies, always memorable, have a spartan elegance.
This simplicity was at first partly functional: Carpenter wanted to achieve a passably professional sound quickly and on a budget. (“The score for Assault on Precinct 13 was finished in one day,” he told The Quietus in 2012. “Halloween took three days.”) And yet the effect of this plainness—in common with a number of other electronic musicians who composed for film at the time, including Vangelis, Giorgio Moroder, and Tangerine Dream—is wildly intense. In both “temperament and emphasis,” to quote Kehr on Halloween once more, “Carpenter lunges straight for the jugular.”
Decades later, the heavy thump of Carpenter’s analog synth in Assault still quickens the pulse, and the Halloween piano, however widely imitated or parodied, still stands arm hairs on end. And no matter how many times you’ve heard these pieces, the dynamic arrangements and performances on this album thoroughly rejuvenate them.
Carpenter has elected to organize Anthology aesthetically rather than chronologically, which gives the album an appealing sense of balance. We begin vigorously, with one of the director’s personal favorites: “In the Mouth of Madness,” the raucous hard-rock number that both introduces and concludes Carpenter’s underrated gothic horror coup of 1994. From there we proceed to “Assault on Precinct 13” and, less legendarily, “The Fog,” among the most evocative of Carpenter’s themes—relish that nimble, gently ominous keyboard. “Santiago,” from the minor horror-western Vampires, is comparatively guitar-forward but muted, while “Porkchop Express,” from the rollicking farce Big Trouble in Little China, cuts loose in keeping with that film’s rock-n-roll gusto. These tracks’ jangly verve is a reminder of the musical diversity of Carpenter’s scores, sometimes wrongly pigeonholed as one-note.
Anthology rounds into splendor as it reaches its end. And into covers, of a kind: First, the subtle majesty of “The Thing,” originally recorded for the film by Ennio Morricone. There’s no mistaking the slow rumble of the track as it appears here for anyone but Carpenter, who advised Morricone on his score to begin with, and reclaims it here quite effortlessly. The climax of the compilation is a lovely rendition of Jack Nitzsche’s “Starman,” the rapturous theme from Carpenter’s only straight science-fiction drama—which, as this celestial, synth-symphonic piece of music underlines, is also a touching romance. It’s astonishing what he could do with a side hustle. | 2017-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | October 23, 2017 | 8 | 737dec0f-daa2-4207-b43e-002d39f424f7 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
On their third album, the first release on their own label, the Jamaican group continues to find their outernational voice; this time with vocals. | On their third album, the first release on their own label, the Jamaican group continues to find their outernational voice; this time with vocals. | Equiknoxx: Eternal Children | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/equiknoxx-eternal-children/ | Eternal Children | While the Jamaican group made waves with previous collections of instrumentals, addressing a different, international audience than earlier productions aimed at Kingston’s dance halls, Equiknoxx’s latest finds the whole crew producing a set of songs that aim to bring together, and hold in productive tension, reggae groundings and open-eared experiments in post-diasporic Jamaican music. In merging earthy dancehall with out-there excursions, Eternal Children frequently delivers vocals that brim with sound design and abstraction that goes for the gut.
On 2016’s Bird Sound Power and 2017’s Colón Man, both released via Manchester electronic duo Demdike Stare’s DDS label, Equiknoxx distinguished themselves as whimsical, precise producers steeped in Jamaica’s musical wellsprings but inspired by reggae’s transformations in the wider world. On Eternal Children, the quirky riddims of Gavin “Gavsborg” Blair, Jordan “Time Cow” Chung, and Nick “Bobby Blackbird” Deane not only stand on their own but support a range of vocalists and genres. Rounding out the group, dedicated vocalists Shanique Marie and Kemikal ride the tracks with aplomb, speaking in tongues at once global and Kingstonian. Less a return to roots than it may seem, Eternal Children reveals that, like dancehall itself, the Equiknoxx sound is as outernational as ever.
Dancehall has always been cosmopolitan even as its artists, soundsystems, and producers prioritize downtown Kingston sensibilities. This commitment to local aesthetics has, ironically, allowed Jamaican music to flourish beyond the island, often taking forms that respond to new contexts and audiences. The Equiknoxx sound embodies their own practice of listening intently back to the echoes of diaspora—to the shifting shapes Jamaican music takes in such sites as Brooklyn, Berlin, Atlanta, and Manchester. That was already true of their instrumental work, and with the addition of vocals and lyrics on Eternal Children, the reference points multiply.
Consider “Manchester,” an ode to the city where Equiknoxx spends time working with the Swing Ting collective: The song triangulates a specific locale by sounding like several places at once. Over attenuated horn samples and chugging bass that more closely resembles the sludgy techno-dub of Stefan Betke than anything to come out recently from Jamaica, Shanique Marie recites a litany of grimey British mates while Swing Ting’s MC Fox brings UK soundsystem style to the proceedings, eagerly sending shoutouts back to the island. The chorus offers trademark Equiknoxx humor by referencing the quotidian, “Went on a tram inna Manchester,” paired with some stylish nonsense, “Ta-ta-ta-ta ta-ta ta-ta-ta-ta”—a nod to Missy Elliott’s scat-like patter on “Work It.”
Equiknoxx’s instrumentals still enjoy a certain pride of place on Eternal Children. Songs come into shape and recede again as the instrumentals accrue and reveal their strata. The group’s experimentalism is still very much on display, now grounded by verses and choruses, with their penchant for off-kilter rhythms, spacey textures, and crisp, foley-like timbres. Their attention to sculpting every element in the mix remains exacting, giving them control over the stereo field. While the number of ideas can seem dense, Equiknoxx also exercise a restraint that keeps things tense, texturally spacious, and unhurried. Jamaican rhythms and bass are a constant presence, but here they seem unmoored from any current vogues. They’re often slower, weirder, ripped from time, timeless. No doubt the album could have been released as a third collection of instrumentals (and perhaps should be), but the addition of voices adds a whole heap, as they say in Jamaica.
Eternal Children revels in Jamaican archetypes, including the rude and vulgar, an approach that no doubt will seduce some listeners and repel others. On “Grave,” for instance, Kemikal and Alozade work to channel Lee “Scratch” Perry’s inspired incantations, the absurdist stylings of Eek-a-Mouse, and the meta-dancehall Jamaican comedy duo Twin of Twins: explicit sex talk, scatological references aplenty, and disrespect for the dead are punctuated by cartoonish jungle sounds, including a cliched monkey’s “ooh ooh ahh ahh” in the middle of the chorus. The thunderous, clacking beat looming beneath them sounds as likely to have been cooked up by London’s Kevin “The Bug” Martin or to support a verse from late Hyperdub vocalist Spaceape. This is not your daddy’s dub, or his dancehall for that matter.
The vocals on Eternal Children may be a jarring and puzzling presence, especially those unfamiliar with dancehall mores and Jamaican mythologies. But several standout performances, especially by Shanique Marie, carry the album and give it a sound rooted in a history of Jamaican women getting fierce and funny on the mic. Marie pays sly tribute to this lineage while nodding to its wider influence on “Move Along” by teasing a cherished reggae melody from Deborahe Glasgow’s “Don’t Test Me,” a song made famous by a re-take with Shabba Ranks and, perhaps more so, by the Notorious B.I.G.’s interpolation of the tune on the remix of Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money.” Incidentally, Equiknoxx recorded much of the new album at the Kingston studio of Gussie Clarke, who produced “Don’t Test Me.”
Eternal Children stands as a showcase for the formidable skills of Shanique Marie, who outshines her fellows here and deserves the wider acclaim this album may bring. But Bobby Blackbird turns in some strong takes too, especially on “Brooklyn,” a strikingly anthemic offering from the group, if one that seems to celebrate a borough frozen in time. “Ain’t no shook hands in Brooklyn” is a great line but in 2019 seems like a pre-gentrification sentiment, a throwback to the 1980s and ’90s when Jamaican culture imbued the borough with cool and deadly style. When Marie jumps into the chorus with distorted and chopped vocals, she insists that the international music and culture inspired by Jamaica over the last few decades lives and breathes and reigns, especially in places where Jamaican icons like Biggie Smalls adorn murals as local royalty. Whether Equiknoxx can reach the sizeable audience that remains in thrall to the sounds of Jamaica and its vast musical diaspora is something Eternal Children seems keen to test.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Equiknoxx Music | July 10, 2019 | 7.4 | 737e1549-2a1d-4a5d-a9b9-dc6db50dc9a8 | Wayne Marshall | https://pitchfork.com/staff/wayne-marshall/ | |
The East Coast songwriter’s college-rock melodies and boyish vocal delivery waver between charming and cloying. | The East Coast songwriter’s college-rock melodies and boyish vocal delivery waver between charming and cloying. | Sean Henry: A Jump From the High Dive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sean-henry-a-jump-from-the-high-dive/ | A Jump From the High Dive | From fanny packs to Pokémon Go to Mariah Carey’s 25-year-old No. 1 song, ’90s nostalgia is a hell of a drug—one that Sean Henry employs throughout his second studio album, A Jump From the High Dive. The East Coast singer-songwriter has said that he wanted to create a record that was accessible and “listenable for anybody,” an objective he accomplishes to a fault. His college-rock melodies and boyish vocal delivery waver between charming and cloying, delivering a pleasant, vapid stream of would-be earworms.
In 2018, Henry did what any burnt-out artist low on cash would do: He left New York City, where he’d resided and often performed at the now-defunct Silent Barn. Returning to suburban Connecticut, he honed his craft and invested in sharper production that boosts High Dive above its predecessor, Fink. He studied the likes of Radiohead, Oasis, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, on a mission to create his own modern guitar pop record—the kind that might’ve spawned a surprise hit 20-some years ago.
The affable electric guitar chugs of songs like “Space Kicks” and “You Fall Away” aren’t nearly as catchy as the Chili Peppers or as sophisticated as Radiohead. Rather, High Dive feels indebted to the brisk guitar pop of Foolish or Keep It Like a Secret—records emblematic of ’90s indie rock underdogs. Plenty of current artists take inspiration from that era: (Sandy) Alex G, Spencer Radcliffe, and even the Double Double Whammy founders who played in LVL UP have tapped similar nostalgia without allowing it to eclipse their individuality. While Henry’s not alone in his appreciation, hardly anything here feels new. Even the “yeah”s of opener “Can U” approximate Collective Soul’s “Shine.” It takes dedication to make an on-the-nose throwback like the boisterous “Surf Song,” but High Dive lacks any distinguishing eccentricities.
Worse, many of Henry’s lyrics are undercooked or almost comically immature. “Rain, rain, come to me/Come to me today,” he croons on “Rain, Rain,” a song he began writing at age 8 in hopes of getting Little League practice canceled. He rhymes “halo” with “lay low” and “head up” with “fed up”; earnest phrases like “I think you’re cool and I like you a lot” and “mellow like Jell-O” feel like Nickelodeon dialogue. It seems Henry wants to dig deeper, but when he turns to heavier subject matter, such as fleeting memories of his late father on “Can U,” it’s so shrouded in banality that you might miss it altogether. High Dive was conceived with high aspirations, but it runs out of steam on the very first spin.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | January 15, 2020 | 5.9 | 73818286-cd2d-4254-8425-cf4046945621 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Teen Dream is both the most diverse and most listenable of the Baltimore band's three full-lengths, and yet it never seems like a compromise. | Teen Dream is both the most diverse and most listenable of the Baltimore band's three full-lengths, and yet it never seems like a compromise. | Beach House: Teen Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13872-teen-dream/ | Teen Dream | Beach House's sound was fully formed at the time of their 2006 debut. They had slow, shadowy dream-pop down; at times they recalled Mazzy Star or Galaxie 500, but songs like "Apple Orchard" and "Master of None" had a dark and blurry resonance all their own. Artists that start out so assured and distinctive can run into trouble on second, third, and fourth records. Hardcore fans are there no matter what, but others may wonder: Do I need another album from this band? When I'm in the mood for what they bring, can't I just put on what I already have?
Teen Dream, Beach House's third album and first for Sub Pop, obliterates these concerns. This is both the most diverse and most listenable of their three full-lengths, and yet it never seems like a compromise. It feels like the product of careful, thoughtful growth, bringing in new influences-- bits of mid-1970s Fleetwood Mac, sparkling indie pop, even a few soul and gospel touches--- while maintaining the group's core sound. Teen Dream is a stirring reminder that good things can happen when you move out of your comfort zone.
The interplay between Victoria Legrand's voice and droning keyboards and Alex Scally's guitars is still the key element of the band's aesthetic. But here, each song has its own palette, which creates new possibilities. So the repetitive guitar figure, double-time kick drum, and crashing cymbals in the opening "Zebra" immediately suggest movement, signaling that this record will have a dramatic sweep unheard on the band's more pensive beginnings. And the whispery "ah-ah-ah" backing vocals that open "Norway" imply a new openness to the allure of pop pleasure, as that bit of ear candy finds a sharp contrast in the seasick-sounding slide that hovers over the verses. More somber ballads like "Better Times" and "Silver Soul" have the thick, churning gloom familiar from earlier records, but they acquire more force by being placed alongside tracks that allow for more light. Front to back, the arrangements and sequencing are superb.
Despite the brighter, more pop-informed sound and an album title that brings to mind the hazy nostalgia of youth, Teen Dream has a pretty sad heart. Because the music is so effective, the churn of emotions is there even when you don't know exactly what Legrand is singing about (this can happen easily with her unusual phrasing). But a closer listen reveals songs about uncertainty, doubt, and feeling beaten down by the world. "Walk in the Park" sounds romantic on paper, but this is a journey taken alone as a way to try and forget someone who is no longer around. The choppy verses, nudged along by the sort of cheap drum machine Beach House use expertly to suggest loneliness, explode sideways into a shimmering chorus that finds Legrand busting out a time-heals-all-wounds affirmation over a calliope organ. This chorus turn is a big moment that gets more affecting with more listens, lunging from resigned sorrow to an anxious plea, and it accomplishes this mood swing with a damn catchy melodic hook. A similar lift-off happens on "10 Mile Stereo", when the song shifts from its deliberate opening bars to its rushing and noisy main section that's as close as Beach House have come to true shoegaze. The gorgeous racket is affixed to a song about feeling dead inside after another failed relationship: "Limbs parallel/ We stood so long, we fell."
Though the Teen Dream lyrics are printed in the booklet, they lose their power on the page. "Real Love", from the album's less immediate but equally rewarding second half, has my favorite imagery from the record, and is also Legrand's best vocal performance. At first, it's just her and a piano, with chords that lean toward gospel. Hearing her voice in such a spare setting reinforces just how rich, earthy, and, dare I say it, soulful it really is. "I met you somewhere in a hell beneath the stairs," she sings, "There's someone in that room that frightens you when they go boom, boom, boom." There's pain in these lines, but her cracking, husky intonation amplifies it tenfold. It's easy to miss that Legrand's presence is forceful and deep rather than ethereal and angelic, but here these qualities stand out like never before, lending her darker laments extra weight.
As with Liars' Drum's Not Dead, the Teen Dream CD comes with a DVD containing videos for each of the record's songs, all by different directors. The clips range from 8mm found footage to colorful Flash collages to silly stories that clash with the music in a big way. To be honest, it's a little overwhelming to be dealing with 10 videos when you're getting to know an album, and I'm not sold on this sort of package at this point. The DVD, while it looks reasonably interesting, seems like something to spend time with later, after the record has had a chance to sink in. For now, I'm more inclined to close my eyes and imagine my own pictures for Teen Dream. The music has been inspiring some pretty vivid ones. | 2010-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Sub Pop / Bella Union | January 26, 2010 | 9 | 738582cb-4b17-4396-a7e5-f54267764426 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The ascendent Buffalo rapper combines ’90s boom-bap and a love of wrestling for his latest, which features Anderson .Paak, Busta Rhymes, and more | The ascendent Buffalo rapper combines ’90s boom-bap and a love of wrestling for his latest, which features Anderson .Paak, Busta Rhymes, and more | Westside Gunn: Supreme Blientele | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/westside-gunn-supreme-blientele/ | Supreme Blientele | Along with his brother Conway, aka Conway the Machine, Westside Gunn has the distinction of being a rapper who made it out of Buffalo, New York. After a life in the streets, Gunn, who will turn 36 later this month, only started taking rap seriously in 2012, the same year Conway survived a bullet to the head.
Gunn is a mid-’90s revivalist whose high, creaky voice makes him sound younger than he is. He established himself with releases like the 2016 album Flygod (used copies go for hundreds) and his Hitler Wears Hermes series, both released through his own Griselda Records. Along the way, Gunn has collaborated with guys like Kool G Rap, MF Doom, and Royce da 5'9", and he and Conway inked a deal with Eminem’s Shady Records last year. (They were two of the guys standing in the background during Em’s Trump-bashing BET Hip Hop Awards freestyle last fall.) Underground rap fans have gravitated toward the authenticity of Gunn’s gloriously grimy boom-bap, and while his sound might be dated, he might’ve been a true star in an earlier era.
Gunn’s sophomore album, Supreme Blientele, actually has two other titles besides the one honoring Ghostface Killah: Chris Benoit and God Is the Greatest. Chris Benoit was the professional wrestler whose disturbing life story infamously ended with him murdering his wife and 7-year-old son before killing himself in 2007. Gunn released the album 11 years to the day after the first murder, and some might feel that attaching Benoit’s name to the project is some twisted, fucked-up shit (though Gunn has long incorporated his love of professional wrestling into his music and artwork, and most of the album’s song titles have to do with wrestling).
Overall, though, the album doesn’t play out as twisted or macabre, nor is it a concept album about Benoit. It’s a mostly satisfying hunk of ’90s revivalism, working from a dusty boom-bap framework without sounding rigid. It incorporates bright, colorful jazz, neo-soul, and psychedelic sounds courtesy of producers including the Alchemist, Pete Rock, 9th Wonder, Harry Fraud, and Griselda in-house producer Daringer. Atop their beats, Gunn’s favorite topics range from his experiences with the most desperate of fiends to his taste in designer clothes. It’s street-oriented lyricism that can be simultaneously blunt and vivid, as in the repetition of “Elizabeth”: “I know some niggas got two bodies and still a teenager/I know fiends that wanna lick the resi off the razor.”
While Gunn’s sound might be insular, Supreme Blientele is full of guest features. This works both for and against it. Sometimes Gunn fades too much into the background of his own album, but the collaborations also result in some of the best songs here, whether it’s Jadakiss and Griselda rapper Benny (aka Benny the Butcher) joining on “Gods Don’t Bleed,” Benny and a Salt Bae–referencing Busta Rhymes on “Brossface Brippler,” or Anderson .Paak singing all over the six-minute soul swirl “Wrestlemania 20.” Ultimately, while this crowdedness prevents Supreme Blientele from feeling like a definitive statement from Gunn as a rapper, the album can still function as a fine entry point to the fast-growing catalog of an ascendant rap cult hero. | 2018-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Griselda | July 12, 2018 | 7.1 | 7386d882-a47e-4966-ae53-f0f47087fde5 | Mike Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-madden/ | |
This self-titled debut on Daptone Records follows a tried-and-true formula for the records: Hire incredible musicians and get out of their way. | This self-titled debut on Daptone Records follows a tried-and-true formula for the records: Hire incredible musicians and get out of their way. | The Olympians: The Olympians | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22556-the-olympians/ | The Olympians | The self-titled debut from the Olympians is a quintessential Daptone Records release, featuring many of the label’s best musicians as commissioned by the pianist and vibraphonist Toby Pazner. Pazner has played on many Daptone records himself, but he’s also occupied a Daptone-adjacent space as the keyboardist for the soul singer Lee Fields and others. That Aloe Blacc “I Need a Dollar” song you couldn’t escape—or stop listening to—in 2010? It was Pazner who played the signature piano take.
As a listener, there’s a certain delight in chasing down session musicians in an album’s credits and threading together their careers. In jazz especially, that type of context is rewarding, knowing that this guy played with that guy and is now leading his own thing with both of them involved. This is the position Pazner is in with the Olympians, commanding a group of regulars that includes members of the Dap-Kings, Lee Fields’ band, and other players like Michael Leonhart, a noted trumpet prodigy who directs Steely Dan’s band and was formerly a house player for the now-defunct label Truth and Soul Records. The Olympians is a Pazner pet project years in the making: piling these instrumentalists on top of each other, boxing them in with smart arrangements, and then letting them out to play.
A lot of The Olympians will sound familiar to Daptone devotees, but Pazner sneaks some ambitious switch-ups into a form frequently tied to grooves, and the addition of a sparse string section lends some space and delicacy to the sound. The usual discrete building blocks are never far: chugging wah-wah guitar, a persistently syncopated horn section, impeccable percussion. Halfway through “Venus,” a characteristically lush track that leans on bowing sideline strings, the song breaks in half—silent in the middle—to reveal a bumbling, then barking, then breathy, then rambling trumpet solo I’ve listened to dozens of times. Pazner smartly deploys dexterous solos like this throughout: an airy flute cuts through the end of the swampy funk opener “Sirens of Jupiter”; the reverse delay guitar on “Mars” achieves a measured psychedelic effect in contrast to the grace of the harp runs.
There are riffs on the album that feel pleasantly misplaced or slyly repurposed, barely recognizable in their new setting. “Sirens of Jupiter” features a tucked away but recurring single-note vibraphone step down that jolts back to Menahan Street Band’s “Tired of Fighting.” Pazner, unsurprisingly, played the instrument on both songs. Later, “Europa and the Bull” opens with a first-generation drum machine ping and sighing guitar twang that evokes Shuggie Otis on Inspiration Information.
The Olympians also sometimes tries to do too much: When “Mars” gives way to “Neptune,” a slowly uplifting number that almost floats away, it sounds like a heart-attack inducing cop chase scene that cuts into a happy-ending montage. The transitions between songs sometimes feel jostled together or even like sequencing mistakes. Still, like good session musicians, the Olympians never sound out of pocket.
Pazner has a fever-dream like backstory for The Olympians that explains the mythical band name and song titles, as if this were soul music for or from the Greek Gods. Perhaps it’s a more compelling narrative than “yet another Daptone instrumental funk album,” but that latter tagline is trustworthy for a reason. The label’s house sound isn’t borne out of try-hard duplication as much as a finely tuned cast; Pazner has exemplified that approach and added some flair with a string section and his own ear. A few years ago the Daptone co-founder and engineer Gabriel Roth fessed up to a studio secret in an interview with the trade publication Sound on Sound. “The sound you want really is coming from the musicians,” he said. “And when guys have played together for a while it's not a strain to get a good sound.” Pazner knows this stay-out-of-the-way tactic well, and the Olympians make their toughest tricks sound effortless because of it. | 2016-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Daptone | November 3, 2016 | 6.8 | 738828a0-13e8-405a-8006-3ff4d1f18eb5 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
null | With all of Stephin Merritt's cleverness and theatricality, it's easy to forget that the Magnetic Fields started out as an indie pop band. Merritt didn't really establish himself as a widely feted songwriter until 1999's *69 Love Songs*, a far-flung compendium spanning acoustic ballads and skittery electro pop tracks. Merritt continued his conceptual unification streak with 2004's *i*, but that album's all-acoustic approach felt at odds with the songs themselves. (Compare the passable album version of "I Don't Believe You" with the vastly more fun single version.) While the overdone thematic focus of *i* generally seemed flat and frustrating, *Distortion*'s | The Magnetic Fields: Distortion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11049-distortion/ | Distortion | With all of Stephin Merritt's cleverness and theatricality, it's easy to forget that the Magnetic Fields started out as an indie pop band. Merritt didn't really establish himself as a widely feted songwriter until 1999's 69 Love Songs, a far-flung compendium spanning acoustic ballads and skittery electro pop tracks. Merritt continued his conceptual unification streak with 2004's i, but that album's all-acoustic approach felt at odds with the songs themselves. (Compare the passable album version of "I Don't Believe You" with the vastly more fun single version.) While the overdone thematic focus of i generally seemed flat and frustrating, Distortion's aesthetic conceit-- conveyed by its title-- is worn well, and its blown-out sound breathes life into a collection of songs that brings together many of the best ideas from Merritt's back catalog.
In the four years since i, Merritt has had plenty of opportunities to indulge his interest in all things theatrical, and that impulse is largely played down on Distortion. Instead, Merritt explores his 1960s pop fetish more directly than he has since the early 90s. Distortion is hardly a retread, though-- its fuzzy production substantially alters the focus and nature of Merritt's music. Opener "Three Way" serves as a straightforward statement of purpose; its simple, surf-y riff is almost unimaginable without a distorted guitar tone. Throughout Distortion, the squelching, tight-focus rhythmic interplay of Merritt's music is blown out into loud, distorted drum beats and smeared guitars, introducing a new level of messy, energizing depth to Merritt's characteristically stately and considered songwriting.
These aesthetic changes resonate emotionally as well, often lending Merritt's music a previously unexplored shambolic melancholy. "Old Fools" plods along beautifully, Merritt's lugubrious voice offset beautifully by the loud, squealing guitars behind it. Indeed, while Merritt has gotten more technically adept at singing, Distortion's hazy and reverb-drenched arrangements consistently prevent him from slipping into fey preciousness. At its best, the effect is similar to that of Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers, a wall of disintegrating feedback bringing out the most rough and human tones of Merritt's well-honed voice.
While the sonic treatment of Distortion flatters Merritt's singing, the album's greatest moments belong to Shirley Simms, the finest and most nuanced singer in Merritt's orbit. "Drive On, Driver" brings to mind The Charm of the Highway Strip with its serpentine melody and roadway imagery. "The Nun's Litany" is perhaps the best song on the record, cutting Jesus and Mary Chain guitar feedback and percussion with a striking, clean organ sound. And the audaciously titled "California Girls" is irresistible, bolstered by sly harmonies just peeking out from a sea of distorted guitar fuzz.
For all its boldness, though, "California Girls" is a bit obvious and overstated in its approach. This hardly makes the song less enjoyable, though-- thankfully, cleverness isn't really the point of this record. In fact, the more laid-back and loose feel of Distortion casts its more ostensibly funny moments (see the sing-songy intro to "Too Drunk to Dream") as anomalous and weirdly charming like the goofier tracks on a Robyn Hitchcock record. For the first time since Get Lost, the conceptual conceit of Merritt's work sounds like a well-considered and-- dare I say-- fun, jumping off point for a thoroughly solid album. As such, Distortion isn't a return to form so much as a return to content. | 2008-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2008-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | January 14, 2008 | 8 | 7398f5fd-5295-4b0b-b0b3-f0c6d9fbc1b5 | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Wet are a Brooklyn three-piece that has flitted around synthpop, Cat Power-ish folk, '90s R&B, and modern alt-R&B without quite committing to any of them. Their debut album's main problem is a common one: if you set out to be an amalgam of beloved styles, you’d better equal and preferably outdo at least a couple of them somewhere along the line. | Wet are a Brooklyn three-piece that has flitted around synthpop, Cat Power-ish folk, '90s R&B, and modern alt-R&B without quite committing to any of them. Their debut album's main problem is a common one: if you set out to be an amalgam of beloved styles, you’d better equal and preferably outdo at least a couple of them somewhere along the line. | Wet: Don't You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21460-dont-you/ | Don't You | At some point during the past year or so, adult contemporary R&B became au courant—blame nostalgia, blame retromania, blame folks in their twenties jonesing for the music they loved when they were eight—and it’s been disorienting. Some good can come of this: smashing up the canon, rediscovering some classics that got left out of pop culture’s ongoing "I Love the '90s"*-*ization, recognizing that Diane Warren is actually kind of a national treasure. Some good albums have come of it too—Solange’s True, Jessie Ware’s Tough Love, Dornik’s self-titled. But this stuff is harder than it sounds. Done right, you salvage everything timeless and nocturnal about the genre and leave the fustiness behind. Done wrong, you’ve written more of the filler songs you’d have found buried around track 12 of a Monica album, or the ballads that used to be near-contractual requirements for pop starlets needing "mature" cuts for their records.
Enter Wet, a Brooklyn three-piece that has flitted around synthpop, Cat Power-ish folk, '90s R&B, and modern alt-R&B without quite committing to any of them, which nevertheless positions them perfectly for starring roles in Baby’s All Right showcases, BBC Radio 1 playlists, and hair-whipping clips on Khloe Kardashian’s Instagram. (This is how we 2016.) The uninformed listener might think Wet would be fun. Their band name may or may not be a gag. Their former online presence, squashed for legal reasons, was @kanyewet—it’s goofy! It’s Yeezy! It’s maybe a grab for those typo clicks, if you want to get all cynical about it! Debut album Don’t You, however, is a downbeat, decidedly unfun affair—this is the kind of album where early single "U Da Best" turns into "You’re the Best," from which you can extrapolate a lot.
The main problem with Don’t You: if you set out to be an amalgam of beloved styles, you’d better equal and preferably outdo at least a couple of them once. Wet cite Usher and SWV as touchpoints in almost every press story, but seem to have forgotten all their exciting songs, as well as everything uptempo; most of Don’t You aims for Babyface but lands somewhere around Surfacing-era Sarah McLachlan, except nowhere near as good. Instrumentalists Joe Valle and Marty Sulkow reproduce the slick sounds of background music—synth pads, polite rhythm guitar, vague drum pitter-patter—with sample-replay fidelity. Vocalist Kelly Zutrau’s thin voice has none of the sighing wispiness of Romy Madley-Croft, Tracey Thorn, or even Jennifer Paige, nor the melisma or force of basically any R&B artist Don’t You emulates; her go-to tricks are (admittedly pretty and sometimes inspired) double-tracked harmonies or a Banks-y quaver that’s plaintive the first couple times you hear it. Their songs are near-identical takes on the wallow phase of a breakup, each rendered in passive, beige indifference—one misses the emotional peaks of '90s R&B, which go all the way up to "If You Died I Wouldn’t Cry." Yet telling-not-showing lines like "when you hold me, I still feel lonely" (responsible for perhaps the best/worst Genius annotation in recent memory) are nevertheless preferable to the likes of "today, New York feels like an island," a metaphor that manages the remarkable feat of being clichéd and geographically hilarious. (Perhaps they meant upstate?)
Don’t You isn’t without standouts. "Deadwater" is well-constructed, though better as a standalone single, and skittery "All the Ways" is a standout purely by dint of having a higher tempo. But two-for-eleven does not an album make. "Don’t Wanna Be Your Girl" drowns Brian McKnight’s "Back at One" and Cat Power’s "Good Woman" in a puddle of reverb and repetition. "Weak" is an approximation of what it might sound like if Meghan Trainor traded her poodle-skirt-costume versions of the '50s for roller-rink-costume versions on "Waterfalls." Either everyone involved with "You’re the Best" developed iron deficiencies before its re-recording, or it simply blends in with the rest of the album’s downtempo sulk.
Wet, to their credit and detriment, know they’ve got competition. "Our music plays into the more general trend of artists incorporating certain elements of R&B and pop into their sound and creating something really unique," Zutrau told Interview. But of those on-trend artists, Haim have more exuberance and better studio players; the xx have more space and ambition; almost any contemporary R&B act has more imagination, more rhythm, and more interesting blues. Wet know this too: "[We’re] now adults in a time when the music playing on Hot 97 is some of the most exciting music being made right now," Zutrau said. Perhaps the future might capture a bit of that excitement; some names floated as future Wet collaborators include Clams Casino (whose "Weak" remix is more sonically interesting alone than anything on this record) and Drake producer Nineteen85. As it stands, Wet may as well be directing readers toward better versions of them. And there have never been more to choose from. | 2016-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | January 26, 2016 | 4 | 73996567-5feb-43ca-bb29-c8d877bac394 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer’s latest installment in his Become trilogy is expansive and inviting. The piece explores resonance and the way sounds mutate, stick in our heads, or just disappear. | The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer’s latest installment in his Become trilogy is expansive and inviting. The piece explores resonance and the way sounds mutate, stick in our heads, or just disappear. | John Luther Adams: Become Desert | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-luther-adams-become-desert/ | Become Desert | John Luther Adams has long been a naturalist outsider to the insular world of classical music. In 2014, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Become Ocean, an orchestral piece that rumbles and bursts and flutters, pointedly bringing to mind the shifting tides of the sea. Become Desert is Adams’ sequel to his mammoth Ocean. The piece offers a calmer and more inviting journey than its predecessor. Desert is wide and expansive with a stillness that makes it the most forgiving piece of Adams’ Become trilogy, which also includes the intricate and winding Become River.
Across Desert, Adams explores resonance and the way sounds mutate, stick in our heads, or just disappear. A high-pitched ringing may stick around so long that you forget it’s gone when it’s morphed into another note. Sometimes that noise comes from a chorus of women singing “luz;” other times it’s violins holding a placid tone. It’s not the sort of place you want to sit and think, as may be the case with genre-tagged “ambient music.” But there’s also not the underlying dread present in Ocean. Instead, Desert offers some intangible glimmering: Bells and chimes ring only to plop away; horns swell gently but don’t linger. It doesn’t sound designed to exist for very long.
There’s a moment midway through Desert that recalls the “Sunrise” movement of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra. The Seattle Symphony, however, dampens the drums and brass for a much humbler evocation of sunrise. It’s emblematic of the piece as a whole: The nature that John Luther Adams wants to conjure is real, not some imagined fantasy of the outdoors to symbolize the human condition. Humanity is not built to survive the desert for long stretches. An orchestral piece about the desert should, Adams’ music suggests, reflect the inability to conquer vast swaths of arid land.
A darkness surrounded John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean. Strings quivered and crescendoed as drums rolled beneath them, instilling a sense of danger. The piece has lighter moments, but they’re quickly washed away by louder passages, as when piano roars behind the horns and strings. Hearing Ocean now highlights how restrained Desert is. The various instruments become indistinguishable at times, as if they’ve all decided to float together at a higher plane instead of crashing together from all different directions to envelop the listener. Even at its loudest, Desert does not feel menacing.
John Luther Adams has assessed nature’s extremes. There’s the ocean, which is inspiring and life-giving. But it’s also a beast, an unpredictable entity that will swallow you whole if you’re not careful. And now with the desert, Adams is reverent in his portrayal, reflecting the landscape’s openness and the ephemera that may flit in and out of the frame. With Become Desert, Adams portrays a respectful image of the world, full of beauty yet unknowable. | 2019-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Cantaloupe | June 19, 2019 | 7.6 | 73abb365-0316-4a63-8c61-5e5c3d7aed91 | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | |
The melodic Texas rapper attempts to step out of Travis Scott's shadow with a debut that mimics Scott at every turn. | The melodic Texas rapper attempts to step out of Travis Scott's shadow with a debut that mimics Scott at every turn. | Don Toliver: Heaven or Hell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/don-toliver-heaven-or-hell/ | Don Toliver: Heaven or Hell | After becoming a fixture with Houston strip club and radio DJs, melodic Texas rapper Don Toliver was invited to a glass mansion on the water in Hawaii by Travis Scott. Together, the two made “Can’t Say,” a track on the back half of Astroworld that was Toliver’s breakout moment. Astroworld had something for everyone: Drake rapping about falling asleep after popping half a Xanax, Travis crooning over Tame Impala, a detour into the druggy haze of The Weeknd, Stevie Wonder harmonica lines. But Don Toliver pierced through the superstar glitz with his unique voice, which resembled a soulful robot.
Nearly two years later, Don Toliver is still inseparable from Travis Scott. He signed to Scott’s Cactus Jack imprint, but outside of appearances on the group album JACKBOYS and snippets passed around by those who have yet to miss a Travis merch bundle, he didn’t release much music. Toliver’s debut album, Heaven or Hell, is his first real follow-up to his Astroworld moment, but most importantly, it’s an attempt to stand on his own.
Unfortunately, listening to Heaven or Hell is like watching a younger brother mimic their older brother. Toliver’s album has all the makings of a typical Travis Scott project. It features the producers who precision-tooled his arena-ready sound (Wondagurl, Frank Dukes, and TM88), the unmistakable Mike Dean synthesizers, mailed-in guest verses from sundry Migos, and melody-heavy rap songs that can seamlessly blend into any playlist. It even has most of the same flaws: tracks like “After Party” come with verses that exist solely to fill time until the chorus. “Okay, I pull up, hop at the after party/You and all your friends, yeah, they love to get naughty,” sings Don on the hook. It works just fine, and you can imagine it playing anywhere—a Soho boutique, a Jenner Instagram story, a Rolling Loud set—but it’s hard to forget that it’s simply Don Toliver in Scott’s spot.
There’s a handful of good moments, all of which could have been reference tracks Travis passed on. “Cardigan” blends a perfectly crafted chorus with lush production; there’s a reason why fans were crying out for it after its YouTube snippet. Written out, some of Don Toliver’s hooks look like satire, “Don’t wa-wa-waste it/Don’t wa-wa-waste it,” he croons on “Wasted.” But over the grim Cássio production, reminiscent of an early Metro Boomin beat, it’s irresistible. And Don Toliver can sing; he’s spoken about the influence of R&B artists like Bobby Womack, and his 2018 mixtape was called Donny Womack. Though he rarely gets the chance to explore his emotional side, the stripped-down and soulful “Company” is the closest Don Toliver gets to staking out a style of his own.
Still, we never learn anything about Don Toliver, or why we might be listening to him. On “Candy,” he sounds lost in the production, and it’s hard not to imagine that the song would have been better as an instrumental. There are no hints of his personality, his musical taste, his daily life. Does he just wake up, go to the club, stand behind the DJ, drink too much, go home, and repeat it the next day? It’s disappointing, because it’s clear that while there might be more to Don Toliver than this, for now he seems comfortable existing in Travis Scott’s shadow. | 2020-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Cactus Jack / Atlantic | March 19, 2020 | 6.1 | 73ba56fc-8bb5-4e65-9d13-a81c7da1c72c | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
A garage band as steeped in Pixies as Nuggets, Harlem's Matador debut is filled with bubblegum choruses flavored with booze and cigarettes. | A garage band as steeped in Pixies as Nuggets, Harlem's Matador debut is filled with bubblegum choruses flavored with booze and cigarettes. | Harlem: Hippies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14093-hippies/ | Hippies | Young, emerging guitar rock bands are lately investing a lot of thought and time into ensuring that their pop music is as steeped in fuzz and scuzz as possible. Harlem are an Austin three-piece that opt out of messing with fuzz pedals and wear their grime on their sleeve instead. You might say they rub some people the wrong way. Their first record's title, Free Drugs, was punctuated with the following, ironically placed emoticon: ;-) Their band name doesn't do them any favors with the more politically correct. Their current press bio reads as though it came to its author on PCP, nonsense slapped together solely to give hapless music journalists migraines. :-( Their live set is comprised of as much on-stage, intra-band ribbing as their jukebox rock'n'roll. But they do seem to care deeply about one thing, and that's their songwriting.
A garage band studied in the ways of Nuggets but clearly enamored with Pixies, they are committed to crafting bubblegum choruses flavored with booze and cigarettes. Hippies, their Matador debut, showcases just how strong that commitment is from the opening bell. On "Someday Soon", sometime-frontman Michael Coomer runs us through an exchange in which his friend catches fire and asks for a little help being extinguished. The pleas are ultimately declined for kicks. It's sick but singable, the Nirvana-nodding "Torture Me" one other deliciously dark example. Coomer shares time playing guitar and drums with co-founder Curtis O'Mara, the two halving songwriting/guitar/lead vocal duties. The split provides a duality in tenor that does the record some serious good. When Curtis is in charge, as he is during the psychotropic shimmy of "Faces" or Casper tribute "Friendly Ghost", the bent is relatively hopeful. If the strep-throated Coomer has the reins, expect thunderstorms.
If Hippies has a flaw, it's only that it overstays its welcome by just a few minutes. By the time highway mood piece "Prairie My Heart" runs its haunting, three-minute course, it feels like an opportunity is missed to wrap things up. But then again, if you look at the way they've stacked hook on top of hook on top of hook, each so dangerously close to one another, it becomes clear that this is a singles parade more than an album. Also, "Stripper Sunset" jams awfully hard. It's pervy, but man does it ever jam. | 2010-04-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-04-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | April 6, 2010 | 8.1 | 73c3a0dc-a690-4d05-97e4-d50f6b06447e | David Bevan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/ | null |
Dropping knowledge is good. Pedantry, lecturing listeners and telling them what to think is bad. Those poles make up two sides bisected by a thin line, which Homeboy Sandman straddles for the entirety of his first LP with Stones Throw. | Dropping knowledge is good. Pedantry, lecturing listeners and telling them what to think is bad. Those poles make up two sides bisected by a thin line, which Homeboy Sandman straddles for the entirety of his first LP with Stones Throw. | Homeboy Sandman: First of a Living Breed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17074-first-of-a-dying-breed/ | First of a Living Breed | Dropping knowledge is good. Pedantry, lecturing listeners and telling them what to think is bad. Those poles make up two sides bisected by a thin line, which Homeboy Sandman straddles for the entirety of his first LP with Stones Throw, First of a Living Breed. Sand is one of the best pure lyricists around, and Stones Throw seems like a natural fit. It's the perfect place to get the kind of beats that a rapper like him thrives over-- glitchy, sideways drumlines and soul-infused sunbeats, phenotypes emerging fully-formed from the masters at Stones Throw's HQ.
But when Sand starts grandstanding on a song like "For the Kids", it's truly a waste. This is the song that Fred Rogers would have made, had he invested time in a hip-hop side project. I wish I could say that the tribute to Whitney Houston that starts the song off is tongue-in-cheek, but it's followed by such banal advice as quit smoking cigs and "go study for a quiz," "you're not an ugly duckling, you're a swan," and "the object of life ain't makin' bucks."
There's no problem with making a positive song. But there's a massive problem with making a song that's entirely comprised of advice that kids have heard a thousand times before, without even switching up the phrasings. There's only one way I can imagine this track getting any play with its target audience: in the eventuality that some desperate parents try to show their kids that hip-hop can be fun and healthy, they will no doubt turn to "For the Kids". And lessons like that turn kids on to metal.
Songs like "For the Kids" and the similarly useless "Cedar and Sedgwick" are aggravating because Homeboy Sandman is capable of so much more. When he takes a topic between his teeth and chews it, there are few rappers who can compete. In the past, on songs like "Angels with Dirty Faces" and "Mean Mug", Homeboy has taken topics as serious as homelessness or as innocuous as a scowl and constructed powerful lessons around them. These meditations were all the more puissant for the fact that the rapper seemed to be exploring them for the first time himself-- he was guiding, rather than lecturing.
Thankfully, there are plenty of songs on First of a Living Breed on which Sandman bats a topic around like a hyper-intelligent cat professor*,* seemingly confident that his students will learn something from watching the yarn unspool*.* The most casually impressive of these is the pretty piano-rap track "Couple Bars (Honey, Sugar, Darling, Sweetie, Baby, Boo)". Though it's ostensibly a pick-up song in the classic mold, Sand's slow, heavily-enunciated lyrics make for observations that are at least as amusing as a simple "Ay babay."
Lines like "I don't know if you are into sports but I am hoping so," (which comes after a Robinson Cano reference) are charming in their odd formality, and when Sand digresses, he's often pretty damn funny. "Wish I was your articles of clothes, just a particle of cotton on your cones, that'd be the most wonderful destiny ever, only possibility possibly better than being a stich on your sweater is being human and me and you together," he raps, internal rhymes going blammo. But the best part of the song is it's logical conclusion. After being so weird ("I've got you under my skin, nothin' fungal"), and going on for so long about the perfection of what turns out to be a perfect stranger, Sandman thanks the lady in question for "inspiring a hot record" whether or not she wants to take a walk with him. And therein lies the simplest of lessons: Do you, and don't sweat the response. If you're funny, that'll help.
Sandman takes on a host of more serious topics with the song "Illuminati", one of the best political rap tracks in a year positively writhing with them. Creeping production by J57 highlights the importance of listening closely, as Sand spits indisputable truth. On a song that goes as deep as this, and with my limited word count, it's best to just pick out some highlights. "Every man is not created equal, we're all created mad different, some are bad people." "Think [cops] are tapping your computer, your computer is a tap." "The war on drugs has been goin' on for awful long, folks married to the game instead of dating off and on." "We used to beat on Bush but now he's not around so people found a different bush to beat around." Though the song doesn't necessarily have a clear subject, its dual messages are simple: Don't believe what you're told and think hard.
"Show, don't tell," is the oldest, most clichéd writing advice ever, the kind of overused aphorism that I'd expect Homeboy Sandman, on one of his off-days, to spit in a song called "For the Writers". And yet, the difference between his good songs and his bad songs on this album is the difference between showing and telling. The brilliant writing on First of a Living Breed (along with songs mentioned above, there's the sunny, Oddisee-produced "Watchu Want From Me?", album opener "Rain" and exotic "The Ancient") would position the album as a candidate for one of the year's best rap records if it weren't for those drawback tracks. As it is though, we'll have to take this one as a compromised effort, and hope that, next time out, Homeboy Sandman can avoid taking us places to which we've been before. | 2012-10-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2012-10-08T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Stones Throw | October 8, 2012 | 7.1 | 73c5a097-ca6b-4422-a9ec-69a5e2c9eb13 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
Death Grips' fourth album Government Plates loudly reestablishes the band as a group freed by having no ideals whatsoever, making music without a past about a present with no future. It isn’t defined by dissonance, volume, or abrasion so much as discomfort, Death Grips trying to figure out how to advance a sound that won’t stay still. | Death Grips' fourth album Government Plates loudly reestablishes the band as a group freed by having no ideals whatsoever, making music without a past about a present with no future. It isn’t defined by dissonance, volume, or abrasion so much as discomfort, Death Grips trying to figure out how to advance a sound that won’t stay still. | Death Grips: Government Plates | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18779-death-grips-government-plates/ | Government Plates | Whenever Death Grips get accused of bad intentions, they’re usually guilty of bad judgment. It’s easy to understand why people get offended by their dick moves, both literal and figurative. But for anyone invested in the group as an artistic entity, all of this retro and regressive Punk 101 chicanery serves as a distraction or a depletion from music that derives a purer shock value by sounding like it has no real precedent. If nothing else, their fourth album Government Plates is a reminder that, right, Death Grips make music! And it drops without any narrative context or controversy about its packaging, its label situation, or their disappearance from social media—like your parents, Death Grips have a Facebook page and unlike NO LOVE DEEP WEB or Sky Ferreira’s album, Government Plates boasts a cover that won’t get you temporarily booted off the site. With a lack of external talking points and most of indie rock's ire currently being directed elsewhere, Government Plates loudly reestablishes Death Grips as a group freed by having no ideals whatsoever, making music without a past about a present with no future.
And here’s the squalid moment in which Death Grips find themselves: a bottle breaks, an air raid siren serves as MC Ride’s alarm clock, and he defaces his scrambled, arrhythmic rapping with batshit shrieking. Is it meant to suggest that he’s waking up from a bad dream? Or is he just being tasered mid-verse? As you might expect, Government Plates spends about half its time expressing its paranoia and the other half justifying it; enforcers are shadowy and lurking, their use of power always theoretical and impending, spelled out in the titles for people who have no interest in engaging with the thrilling music herein. But are we to cut through the battered radio soundclash of “Bootleg (Don't Need Your Help)” and the mesmerizing drones of seven-minute closer “Whatever I Want (Fuck Who’s Watching)” with Occam’s Razor and assume it’s all directed at Epic or concert promoters?
You could do that, though Government Plates functions as a Rorschach and not just because many of these songs are ugly, amorphous inky splatter. Throughout, Ride smears words and multiple meanings unwittingly tease themselves out—darting over and through Zach Hill’s drums like they're a tire maze, Ride mutters “L.A. creeping under my skin,” or possibly “scales.” This is from “Big House”, so is the title an understood synonym for prison or a reference to how Death Grips blew Epic’s money by living at the Chateau Marmont? During “Birds”, is Ride saying “I got higher, I got fake”? Or is it, “I got hired, I got fake?” “I got hired, I got paid”? Is it a critique of drugs, of corporate influence or a boast about how Death Grips have made a career largely out making people who give them money look stupid?
It’s easy to assume something this purposefully noided is Death Grips crafting a response, that they’ve been cornered by the music industry, expectations of fans, something on the outside. But to conclude that Death Grips are reacting to anything strips them of their unique power. You will learn nothing about how they feel about, say, about Obamacare, the NSA or Yeezus, a record that may have not been directly influenced by Death Grips but was likely aware of their existence. Death Grips may have endured a tough year, but they brought almost all of it upon themselves, and Government Plates is a pointedly proactive record that seeks out its own stimuli; and that’s why their pranks are nowhere near as interesting as their self-inflicted stunts. As with Bikram yoga or a hunger strike, artificially heightened circumstances help them realize internal purity.
So Government Plates isn’t defined by dissonance, volume, or abrasion so much as discomfort, Death Grips trying to figure out how to advance a sound that won’t stay still. “You might think he loves you for your money but I know what he really loves you for it's your brand new leopard skin pillbox hat” is a good place to start. That’s an unwieldy title that at least has room to say everything it needs to. The song itself cramps what could otherwise be a wubbed-out dubstep appropriation into a gawky 6/8 meter. Ride discovers a staggered cadence that works between corroded pinwheel synths and drums that evoke the crunch of a stomped cockroach during “Anne Bonny”. Then the beat switches just to see if he’s willing to contort himself into its spaces (he accepts).
You can certainly project anger onto Death Grips, it’s tough to imagine happy people making this kind of music. But hey, might as well party at ground zero. Death Grips can actually be fun, or at least promise a payoff to all this stress. In that way, it recalls The Money Store, which in retrospect was the kind of album a major label would’ve been very pleased with after signing Death Grips, i.e., one with actual bars-and-hooks songs. Government Plates is also filled with hooks, if you remember that the word is also a synonym for a boxer connecting flush with your face. MC Ride is every bit as percussive as Zach Hill, and Zach Hill’s drums can prove to be a mouthpiece that’s more fluent and expressive than its human counterpart. “Two Heavens” and “Im Overflow” in particular are hip-hop as survivalist minimalism, merging little more than vocal texture and percussion into chest-puffing B-boy boasts.
And hell, Death Grips can be kinda funny, too. You can’t be this premeditated with knowing what people think about you and if it wasn’t clear that a) there is a joke and b) Death Grips is in on it, there’s a song called “This is Violence Now (Dont get me wrong)”. Remember when MC Ride namedropped Magical Mystery Tour curiosity “Blue Jay Way” and Santana’s Abraxas on The Money Store*?* If not, the first song on Government Plates is a Bob Dylan reference. If a Dadaist Death Grips nursery rhyme sounds hilarious in concept, that’s because “Birds” is pretty much just that. Ride sneers “I cop this attitude at all times,” in a posh, flippant accent, the kind attributable to someone vapid enough to say “I cop this attitude.”
An awkward one-off upon its original release, “Birds” serves as a pivot for Government Plates, the point where “new Death Grips” starts to become Death Grips doing something legitimately new. Some parts of Government Platesare actually pretty and not in that perverse, S&M way. And during the second half, they get awfully close to proper dance music, or at least its rigorous structure and of course, this formalism makes for even more interesting tension. “Feels like a wheel” is Death Grips’ take on HI-NRG drum and bass, which is to say, it focuses less on emotional ecstasy than the artificial components and side effects of the club drug, the toxic chemicals and fried nerve endings. The only intelligible lyric is “let me live my life,” which turns the title into a double entendre, it could mean “rolling” or just being stuck. “Im overflow” about sums up how Death Grips react to stability and yet it hinges on Ride’s most straightforward battle rapping, punctuated with a yell of “hot shit!’
Government Plates isn’t here to teach you a lesson. When Death Grips are overt about what they think, they often come off like bratty teenagers, acting out against people who want to help them. Unlike the blunt, confrontational NO LOVE DEEP WEB, Government Plates lets you think for yourself and even if it doesn’t have an agenda, that doesn’t mean it’s nihilistic. It’s music that doesn’t care about how you feel, just how you react to it. All the same, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum and when Death Grips interact with the public, they can produce something elemental, in a literal sense where the periodic table can take violent turns: oxidation, sulfur fumes, nitrous, horrible fluorescents and neon, fossil fuel. Or, maybe a hydrogen bomb, with all of its attendant amorality: Death Grips provide the power, you provide the politics. | 2013-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rap | self-released | November 19, 2013 | 8.4 | 73c8ac75-65b2-4cc2-8eb8-ea9193dab8ab | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Recorded in 1978 and shelved for two decades, what should have been the band’s London Calling befuddled record execs who didn’t know what to do with a B-movie-obsessed punk with an Elvis croon. | Recorded in 1978 and shelved for two decades, what should have been the band’s London Calling befuddled record execs who didn’t know what to do with a B-movie-obsessed punk with an Elvis croon. | Misfits: Static Age | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/misfits-static-age/ | Static Age | When Static Age finally saw the light of day, in 1996, as part of The Misfits box set, it felt more like a time capsule being unearthed than a record release. By that point, singer Glenn Danzig had long since abandoned his corpse paint and so-called “horror punk” origins in search of bluesier, Black Sabbath-inspired pastures with Samhain and, ultimately, the eponymous Danzig. Bassist and co-founding member Jerry Only, on the other hand, found Jesus, as well as full-time work in his family’s machine shop, before converting his absurdly named Christian metal band Kryst the Conqueror into a new incarnation of Misfits in 1995, thanks to an out-of-court settlement with Danzig and the installation of a 19-year-old scab singer known as Michale Graves.
The long-overdue release of Static Age shed a painful light on the absurdity of having a kid not yet of drinking age sing Danzig’s lyrics about Patty Hearst, Vincent Price, and a Kenneth Anger book from the late 1950s. After all, the record’s thematic content was refracted through the hyper-specific lens of what a young Glenn Anzalone had watched on TV in the 1960s and 1970s, growing up across the river from New York City in the North Jersey suburbs. The 17 songs that would eventually comprise Static Age were recorded in 30 hours over the course of a few months in 1978, in a barter with Mercury over a trademark Danzig held. The result was a tight 35 minutes of catchy hardcore paired with Danzig’s rockabilly-inspired baritone vocals—what should have been Misfits’ scorching debut album, recorded a scant nine months after the band had formed. In a fairer world, Static Age would have been their breakout record, their London Calling or their Never Mind the Bollocks. Best laid plans and all.
The record ended up collecting dust on a shelf for almost 20 years, because no label would touch it. “We talked to Chrysalis Records, who were doing Blondie and Billy Idol, and they didn’t want it,” Only said in a 2015 interview. “We talked to Sire Records, who were doing the Ramones and Richard Hell, and they didn’t want it.” On paper, it’s easy to see why Misfits were a tough sell. The band’s fixation on horror B-movies and pre-Oliver Stone JFK conspiracy theories probably made them look remarkably less sophisticated, and, dare I say, less cool, than their cosmopolitan New York City punk peers. After all, Danzig was a grown-ass man singing lyrics like, “We’re teenagers from Mars/And we don’t care” and “Return of the fly/With Vincent Price/Yeah, return of the fly.” While the Ramones and Blondie were pushing gritty downtown glamour, Misfits embraced suburban ennui and built a campy aesthetic based on old black-and-white midnight monster movies. While Joey Ramone and Tom Verlaine were wispy, reedy, and slender, Danzig was a squat, solid fire hydrant of a man, and his similarly jacked bandmates resembled shop-class meatheads more likely to beat up high-school punks than start their own bands.
Although the majors turned up their nose at songs sung by a guy demonstrating a pronounced Elvis influence, about zombies from outer space, infanticide, and a grieving first lady lapping semen out of Danzig’s palm, the tracks eventually found an audience, years after the band’s early-1980s split, via various EPs, singles, and collections. Misfits didn’t release a proper debut album until 1982’s Walk Among Us, but by that point, the production was far more polished. What set Static Age apart was the palpable urgency of a young band eager to prove itself—that and an almost surgical knack for crafting infectious melodies. It helped that Danzig was so eager to show off his vocal range, rather than taking the Ian MacKaye or Henry Rollins route and just barking lyrics. A punk band can do a lot within the typical three-chord limitations when it has a frontman with velvety pipes and a propensity for showboating. On Static Age, Misfits proved themselves capable of writing catchier riffs than virtually any of their peers—never mind the subject matter. Good luck finding a group of teens over the past few decades that hasn’t broken into spontaneous karaoke when “Last Caress” kicks in on the car radio. Anyone who can resist shouting “I killed your baby today” after Danzig’s gauntlet-dropping “I got something to say” would probably fail a Voight-Kampff test.
Whether it was a calculated move or not, Static Age demonstrated just how quickly the band was evolving. The record opens with the title track and “TV Casualty,” two perfectly fine but unremarkable hardcore romps, before launching into “Some Kinda Hate.” Suddenly, we’re smack in the middle of Misfits’ deranged world: “The maggots in the eye of love/Won’t copulate,” Danzig moans, yet the Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh chorus wouldn’t sound out of place on an old doo-wop 45. Damned if he doesn’t make the celibacy of fly larvae sound heartbreaking. The journey from there down the tracklisting shows a band embracing its unrefined, weirdo, and sometimes downright dorky influences and ultimately discovering what makes it unique.
Static Age’s greatest triumph is the way it makes 90-second songs about goblins and ghouls sound legitimately dangerous, even romantic, instead of silly. It takes a real commitment to the bit to croon the line, “When new creatures rape your face/Hybrids opened up the door,” (“Hybrid Moments”) and make it sound like it was plucked from a Roy Orbison ballad rather than a deleted Simon and Hecubus sketch from “The Kids in the Hall.” Perhaps Misfits pulled it off so well was because for Danzig, the macabre aesthetic wasn’t an act, but a lifestyle. The frontman spent years living in a decrepit Loz Feliz Craftsman that looked more like a haunted house straight out of a “Scooby-Doo” cartoon than the dwelling of a bona fide rock star.
The shelving of Static Age didn’t halt the band’s success, but it did impede it. Misfits eventually played audiences of tens of thousands; it just took about 35 years of acrimony and protracted legal battles between Danzig and Only to get there. “About 40 years ago, Jerry and I got onstage in New York,” Danzig said onstage last year at Riot Fest in Denver, “and we shocked the whole fucking punk scene who didn’t know what the fuck to make of us.” Audiences eventually figured it out—it just took a few decades. | 2017-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Caroline | October 31, 2017 | 8.8 | 73c94811-ed8a-4e7b-924e-ef457057222f | Maggie Serota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/maggie-serota/ | |
The electropop band's second LP doubles as its attempt at kicking and screaming its way out of punchline hell. | The electropop band's second LP doubles as its attempt at kicking and screaming its way out of punchline hell. | Fischerspooner: Odyssey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3074-odyssey/ | Odyssey | Why exactly was I supposed to hate Fischerspooner again? They dress like spangley futuristic mime robots, which I suppose is sort of annoying, but that really doesn't have anything to do with their music. They bankrupted their record label and waited way too long to put their first album out, but again, all that stuff is strictly extra-musical. They actively and knowingly marketed themselves as electroclash, but Fischerspooner has much more in common musically with the Scissor Sisters than Miss Kittin or A.R.E. Weapons. They've never managed to make anything as great as their first single, but then "Emerge" was such a dizzy, searing monster jam that it'd be hopeless to hold any group to that standard forever.
So the only real reason I can think of to hate Fisherspooner is the vwerdle-vwerdle-vwerdle oscillating synth-bass sound they use on every single song. This can grow tired after an entire album, but it's a good, malleable sound, as effective on breathy, luxuriant opium-disco tunes like "A Cloud" as on swooping, lazy filter-Fleetwood-Mac tracks like "Happy". And plus you can ratchet up the pitch a bunch on the chorus and the song will automatically sounds way more intense.
On Odyssey, the group piles on huge, clattering drums, mournful house pianos, deliriously sleazy strutting white-funk guitars. The album's production is clean enough to sterilize needles; everything has a lavish, glossy cocaine sheen. The group has recruited help from pop-music pros like Mirwais (who produced Madonna's "Music", which is fucking awesome) and Linda Perry (who wrote Pink's "Get This Party Started", which is fucking awesome). They got the now deceased Susan Sontag to write the lyrics for "We Need a War", which is nice, but it's not like anyone ever listens to the lyrics on Fischerspooner songs.
Odyssey is Fischerspooner's attempt at kicking and screaming their way out of punchline hell, so it's a bit of a surprise how good everything sounds. The deluxe, swirley disco tracks that begin the album slide nicely into the brittle new-wave funk and imperiously sighed synthed ballads. All of this builds beautifully to the group's cover of the Boredoms' smeary psychedelic symphony "Circle". It's something of a shock hearing the Boredoms' messy drum-circle monolith translated through Fischerspooner's glammy synths, but the group approaches the song with the majestic fervor it demands, and the result is a truly gorgeous pileup.
Odyssey isn't a great album: Many of the vocal hooks are weak and underfed, the group never finds the widescreen abandon of "Emerge", and there's that synth burble on every song. But the group has managed to come up with an appealingly grand, ridiculous epic, more than anyone could reasonably expect from these forgotten freaks. So find some other band to hate. May I suggest Kings of Leon? | 2005-04-07T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2005-04-07T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Capitol | April 7, 2005 | 7.3 | 73cc0767-c96b-4021-8123-78e9dee60a11 | Tom Breihan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/ | null |
Unlike the previous Alone iterations, Alone III: The Pinkerton Years feels like an actual Weezer album rather than Rivers Cuomo's yard sale. It's a bracing, imperfect reminder of a time when music was something Cuomo couldn't live without. | Unlike the previous Alone iterations, Alone III: The Pinkerton Years feels like an actual Weezer album rather than Rivers Cuomo's yard sale. It's a bracing, imperfect reminder of a time when music was something Cuomo couldn't live without. | Rivers Cuomo: Alone III: The Pinkerton Years | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16152-alone-iii-the-pinkerton-years/ | Alone III: The Pinkerton Years | You'd think Alone III: The Pinkerton Years would work like Rivers Cuomo's past installments of vault clearance: In exchange for being offered these very #rare and #based freestyles, you, Weezer Superfan, will not do something so petty as to question the need for their release. Ah, but note the subtitle: "The Pinkerton Years." It's a powerful but potentially dangerous sales pitch. Alone III comes sidelong with The Pinkerton Diaries, a $75 (and thus collectors-only) volume that compiles Cuomo's "journals, emails, letters, photos, and school papers" from the Pinkerton era and offers "an intimate look into the writing and recordings of Rivers Cuomo from 1994-1997." Which threatens not only redundancy but a complete undermining of Pinkerton's integrity*.* "I thought Pinkerton was Cuomo's diary," you might be thinking. "He was holding back on us? Editing?" Does this compromise the perceived purity of such a powerful record?
Then again, Pinkerton has always been accompanied by a healthy serving of half-truths, tall tales, and revisionist history. But you can see why so many want to give it a protected status: Cuomo was far more embarrassed by its Billboard failure than anything he actually said on Pinkerton, and his output since then has been the work of someone with severe commercial abandonment issues. But Alone III doesn't feel like a cash-in like the Pinkerton reissue or 2010's Memories Tour, in which the band (minus bassist Matt Sharp) played their first two albums in full. No, this is something else entirely. With its whiplash sequencing (26 tracks in far less than an hour), low production values, minute-long asides, and pause-record tape overdubs, Alone III seems to ask: What would've happened if Rivers Cuomo had wanted to be Robert Pollard or Lou Barlow for the rest of the 90s?
So if you value these archaeological digs as an opportunity to construct an alternate band history, Alone III is easily Cuomo's most worthwhile project since*,* well, Pinkerton. But what's truly surprising is that it satisfies in actuality as much as it does in theory, and not just because it puts a bunch of Pinkerton songs in the mix. Alone III actually deconstructs that record by spreading out into three sections, providing anchors for Cuomo's mini-suite ambitions rather than the lead-up to Pinkerton's autobiographical payoff ("Across the Sea", "The Good Life"). Fully formed but raw-as-hell versions of "Getchoo" and "Tired of Sex" mesh easily with Cuomo's off-the-cuff material and allow Alone III to exist in its own orbit as a no-fi, freewheeling, and ultimately fun record that either Geffen or Weezer wouldn't allow themselves to ever release in the midst of the record industry's then-booming economy.
Even with the impression that Cuomo is dipping into his private stock, a lot of this will be familiar to non-diehards, like the two-minute surge of "You Gave Your Love to Me Softly" that leans to the latter side of "pop-punk" and could've replaced "Why Bother?" on Pinkerton with a 180-degree attitude change. And it's tough to imagine Weezer ever pulling off something like "Lisa". Its blues-bend Kiss riffs would've been employed too smirkingly, its charming chorus harmonies polished to anonymity, and its lyric about a workplace crush ("I wish I didn't work for you/ All we ever seem to do is business/ Read and sign and fax this") extended beyond its means into dad-humor.
So those are the reasons why III is the most like an actual Weezer album of any of the Alone records, and the least like a Cuomo yard sale. But the real pleasure is in how Alone III casts the creative up-ramp to Pinkerton as an inspired if not always productive time for Cuomo-- you can practically visualize his brain giddily whirring with a flood of new ideas and classicist ambitions. Sure, there are 50-second sketches that have limited replay value outside of Alone III, but they keep the end-to-end listen brisk and pleasurable. Elsewhere, some songs are so self-explanatory and complete that they don't need much elaboration ("I'm So Lonely on a Saturday Night"), others crash into a dead end ("Oh God, I'm Hungry", "The End of My String"), and of course, some are just flat out unlistenable ("What Is This I Find?").
In a Spin interview leading up to Pinkerton's re-release, Cuomo expressed why he enjoyed going back to these tapes even though he's far more excited by his new material, saying "I was really touched by the emotion in my voice… there's so much sensitivity and pain." Alone III's last track would seem to reiterate that: On "One Glorious Moment", Cuomo gives a post-operation captain's log, confiding to a tape recorder, "I actually peed for the first time on my own… it was a glorious moment. I'm going to try to set up some music to listen to, goodbye." That candor can be seen as being every bit as self-obsessed and pandering as Hurley or Death to False Metal, but that last line sticks out. Alone III is a bracing, imperfect reminder of a time when music was something Cuomo just couldn't live without. | 2012-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Geffen | January 12, 2012 | 7.3 | 73d284d1-901c-4333-b4d1-6ad54534a238 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Building a hypnotic counterpoint between a bright chamber-music ensemble and groaning analog synthesizers, composer Elori Saxl’s debut is an investigation of emotion and seasonal change. | Building a hypnotic counterpoint between a bright chamber-music ensemble and groaning analog synthesizers, composer Elori Saxl’s debut is an investigation of emotion and seasonal change. | Elori Saxl: The Blue of Distance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elori-saxl-the-blue-of-distance/ | The Blue of Distance | Much has changed in music since Antonio Vivaldi unveiled his set of four concerti, The Four Seasons, some 300 years ago. Yet composers’ awe and fascination for the ecological cycle remains undiminished. Edvard Grieg’s To Spring? The Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’”? DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s “Summertime”? All are paeans to the strange wonder of something as inevitable and elementary as, say, the first warm day of spring, or the humid ecstasy of summer.
In its own way, so is The Blue of Distance, the quietly mesmerizing debut album by Elori Saxl, a Brooklyn-based composer and filmmaker with an interest in how technology alters humans’ connection to nature. Saxl wrote the first half of the album in mid-summer, during a blissful stay in the Adirondack Mountains. She wrote the second half months later, in northern Wisconsin, her mood darkened by winter. “I was staying at my family’s place on an island in Lake Superior surrounded by ice and gray skies, and I was feeling pretty low,” Saxl said. “I would look at photos from my summer and try to remember what it had felt like to be there and then to write music from that now-distant place.”
This would be an intriguing academic exercise, but Saxl’s music—which builds a hypnotic counterpoint between a bright chamber-music ensemble and groaning analog synthesizers—works on an emotional level as well. The Blue of Distance is unusually beautiful, drawing on the gushing orchestral minimalism of 1970s Steve Reich (“Blue,” “Memory of Blue”), the dramatic harmonics of Philip Glass’ Glassworks (“Wave II”), and even Matmos’ flair for found-sound samples. Saxl incorporates processed recordings of wind and water, but instead of foregrounding these natural sounds, she manipulates and molds them into quasi-beats. A track’s only rhythm section, so to speak, may be the sound of water flowing beneath ice.
The “summer” half of the record is rich with bubbling strings and buoyant woodwinds, based around music written for an 18-person chamber orchestra. There are no vocals, but Saxl’s melodic gift shines through, propelling the gorgeous, oboe-driven “Wave I.” The “winter” half is more brooding and spacious. By her own judgement, Saxl failed to replicate the emotions of summer: “That process didn’t work,” she writes, “but what resulted was perhaps more interesting: a distorted version of the original experience.” On “Memory of Blue,” the swelling strings feel distant and strained, as if the composer’s own memory were fading in and out.
Ambient music is sometimes associated with reverent stillness, but one of the best qualities of The Blue of Distance is its constant, pulsing movement. The modular synths of “Blue” chug and whirr like steam locomotives. The ascending cello scales of “Wave II” are always in motion, seamlessly morphing from bowed strings to pizzicato notes; below, a percussive loop rustles and clangs like rusty machinery. (This loop, strangely enough, resembles the field recordings from Panda Bear’s 2007 classic “Take Pills.”) Only the final track, a seven-minute drone, lacks this sense of movement. It’s the album’s least compelling piece, drifting off into a melancholic sigh.
Listening at home, I find myself longing to hear the album in actual motion—on an airplane or a speeding train, peering out at lakes or mountains like those that inspired Saxl. In a time of quarantine, that’s a distant fantasy—fitting, perhaps, for an album so focused on interrogating the limitations of memory and technology to create real sensation. Luckily, The Blue of Distance is expressive enough to conjure a sensory experience of its own.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Western Vinyl | January 27, 2021 | 7.8 | 73d5dfc4-629b-477e-aa45-4d742e97f4e5 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
This EP prelude to Mykki Blanco's forthcoming debut album sees her rapping markedly improved from 2012's Cosmic Angel. Still, Blanco comes off extremely defensive about her art, adopting all kind of voices, mannerisms, and characteristics (a la Nicki Minaj) to throw shade every which way. | This EP prelude to Mykki Blanco's forthcoming debut album sees her rapping markedly improved from 2012's Cosmic Angel. Still, Blanco comes off extremely defensive about her art, adopting all kind of voices, mannerisms, and characteristics (a la Nicki Minaj) to throw shade every which way. | Mykki Blanco: Betty Rubble: The Initiation EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18179-mykki-blanco-betty-rubble-the-initiation-ep/ | Betty Rubble: The Initiation EP | Over six months after the release of her last mixtape, Mykki Blanco-- the female alter ego of Michael Quattlebaum-- is beginning to prove much more than just a walking talking point. Last year’s Cosmic Angel showed a dextrous rapper with fury to spare, a whirl of energy when she didn’t drown in her own ambition. After taking on an exhausting and seemingly endless international touring schedule, Blanco has earned a reputation as a powerful live performer. She harnesses this energy well for her first official follow-up, Betty Rubble: The Initiation, an EP-sized prelude to her official debut album that sees her rapping markedly improved.
The Initiation starts strong with “Angggry Byrdz”. Like the video game it’s named after, the beat is cartoonish, all plasticky plink-plonk sounds that Blanco pirouettes around with ease. As always, she’s got a bone to pick with, well, everyone, spitting, “Look at them angry birds/ Tryna shit on every word.” If you didn’t already get the feeling that Blanco was automatically defensive about her art, The Initiation makes it pretty damn clear. But in a world where drag queen feistiness is the subject of a popular reality show, Blanco is both caricature and cut-to-the-bone reality. You wouldn't fuck with her.
The rest of the EP is an up-and-down affair that loses the razor focus of its opener. More sprawling than your usual eight-track release, the clumsy experimentalism of Cosmic Angel remains despite Blanco's improved chops. She adopts all kinds of voices, mannerisms, and characteristics, flitting through personalities with the hummingbird hyperactivity of Nicki Minaj, especially on “Crisp Clean”, where her distinct rasp is contorted and choked like a crazy straw. Things get druggy and paranoid on the Supreme Cuts-produced “Bugged Out”, while Matrixxman’s “Ace Bougie Chick” is a jaunty summer jam with all the winking charm of Lil Wayne’s “Comfortable”. But even this one has a sinister undertone: its playful chorus goes “but you gon’ keep on fucking me/ And nobody has to know,” reminding us of the grim reality that being a gay black man is still an unspeakable position for so many.
Blanco’s rapping is unmistakably stronger, flowing faster and more naturally than ever before, but when she’s not in full force she has trouble keeping getting from point A to point B. The grumbly “Feeling Special” feels like it’s dragging itself from bar to bar, and the rapped-in-Latin title track, while daring, falls a little flat. In typically unusual form, The Initiation’s most engaging track features no actual rapping at all: “Vienna” is simply spoken word over an electro beat. A hilariously detailed story about a tour stop in Austria starring “this waifish Persian pretty boy named Sammy Nagasaki,” it oozes with warmth and humour, qualities that her acid-barbed lashings sometimes lack.
The Initiation is a stepping stone for an artist who’s looking increasingly important. Quickly sharpening her stock as a rapper, Mykki Blanco is so much more than the gimmick some have tried to make her out to be. And though The Initiation isn’t turning down any of the camp, it’s a deadly serious manifesto from an artist who wants you to discard your preconceptions and set fire to them. To those familiar with gay culture, Blanco’s outsized aggression is not just welcome, it’s maybe even standard. But there’s a world out there to whom Blanco is an anomaly, a spectacle-- and if she keeps up this ascent, they’re about to be shocked and surprised in exactly the way you begin to sense Quattlebaum wants. | 2013-06-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-06-06T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | UNO | June 6, 2013 | 7.2 | 73de9740-9b8a-4eb5-90e1-0af6a0ec64d0 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
On his second LP since being released from prison, Gucci revisits the darker, weirder style of his classic period but keeps the clear-eyed outlook of his new, healthier lifestyle. | On his second LP since being released from prison, Gucci revisits the darker, weirder style of his classic period but keeps the clear-eyed outlook of his new, healthier lifestyle. | Gucci Mane: Woptober | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22522-woptober/ | Woptober | Prison can change anyone. Enough time isolated from the world, treated as subhuman and discarded like garbage is soul-breaking and creatively stifling; it would be hard for anyone to maintain sanity or balance, regardless of a strong belief that one day you’ll be back on the outside. When Gucci Mane was finally freed from the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana back in May, it was a joyous moment for his fans but it was unclear what effect being gone since 2013 would have on the rapper and the music. Seeing his dramatic weight loss and new healthy regimen on Snapchat was a shock but a welcome one, if it meant avoiding the vices that had nearly destroyed him.
During that time in prison, the one thing that kept Gucci’s name relevant in music—beyond the success of the younger artists he had supported, like Young Thug and Migos—was the steady stream of mixtapes that were able to come out using his unreleased music. Since being freed, he’s taking over the reins and is making up for lost time with the release of Woptober, three months after his first post-prison album Everybody Looking. Woptober is more attuned to the classic Gucci Mane aesthetic than Everybody Looking; The production is colder, murkier and with heavier bass, with Gucci slinking and swimming through it with precision and clearheaded insight. Songs like “Wop” and “Hi-Five” highlight this with an icy, brooding sound; and Gucci feels perfectly at home there. Despite the newfound clearness of his voice, likely a result of those shed pounds, it still has that guttural allure. On Woptober, Gucci can be fun and playful, grimy or poignant and thoughtful and sometimes he’s all of these things at once.
Woptober gets off to a great start with “Intro: Fuck 12”: the Phantom Of The Opera piano keys giving the song a ghostly, demented air while Gucci comes in strong, focused and charismatic: “I ain't never been embarrassed, I ain't never felt fear/I got post-traumatic stresses like I can't shed tears,” The album proceeds with this laser focus and thoughtfulness throughout. Everybody Looking, while a good record, was more celebratory, a big “welcome back” party for Gucci. Woptober goes back to the dirtier, oddball style that Gucci became successful with but this time, it’s more disciplined and perceptive. On the album’s best track “Dirty Lil N***a”, Gucci takes a moment to relate to the fictionalized street kid he’s spent the song rapping about. “The streets don't kill him, then the law gon' get him/Better listen to me kid, it's a fucked-up system/Y'all might don't feel him but I damn sure feel him/Cause I was just in a jail cell fucked up with him.” It’s the same avenue that Boosie has always taken—somber but not preachy or self-righteous, and it suits Gucci Mane well as a rapper who’s always been good at reaching out to young artists and understanding youth culture.
The album’s first single “Bling Blaww Burr” is a much brighter affair, a club record more memorable for its infectious ad-libs than anything else. It is the stale kind of party record Gucci can make in his sleep and a Young Dolph feature can only do so much for it. “Money Machine” is boosted by a better beat and a guest appearance from Rick Ross. Woptober slogs towards the end, but it moves too quickly to feel like a chore to sit through. It has all the markings of what we’ve come to expect from Gucci’s music only this time—rather than drowning in his addictions—he’s found a way to integrate drugs and violence into his new outlook. new life outlook. It’s a great strategy and, if he plans to continue pushing music out at such an accelerated clip, it’s hopefully just a taste of what’s to come. | 2016-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | October 21, 2016 | 7.5 | 73f015b5-b22c-49c5-8efc-0a3d88d9e716 | Israel Daramola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/israel-daramola/ | null |
Drawing on its members’ diverse backgrounds and distinguished resumes—including work with Broadcast, Gruff Rhys, and Zongamin—the London band tilts its psychedelic pop toward a utopian future. | Drawing on its members’ diverse backgrounds and distinguished resumes—including work with Broadcast, Gruff Rhys, and Zongamin—the London band tilts its psychedelic pop toward a utopian future. | Vanishing Twin: The Age of Immunology | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/vanishing-twin-the-age-of-immunology/ | The Age of Immunology | When the Brussels-bred, London-based musician Cathy Lucas was 12 years old, she learned some startling news about her family: She was supposed to have had a twin sister. But at some point in her mother’s pregnancy, the twin embryo was absorbed into Lucas’ own, through a process called fetal resorption. And though it’s the sort of event that many pregnant women don’t even realize has happened, it can have profound effects on the living child, who may experience deep feelings of survivor’s guilt.
For Lucas, that sadness has been offset by a fascination with the notion that her phantom sibling somehow lives on inside of her, as a facet of her personality. It’s a concept that not only inspired the name of her psychedelic pop outfit, Vanishing Twin, but also its guiding aesthetic. This is a band that fearlessly floats in the hazy space between the real world and an imagined one, blurring the line between warmly nostalgic and eerily haunted.
Vanishing Twin began as Orlando, the experimental solo project Lucas launched in 2015 after a stint playing violin and mandolin for London indie-pop hopefuls Fanfarlo. But as she embarked on her inner-space explorations, she amassed a seasoned flight crew that includes Japanese bassist Susumu Mukai (aka electro-funk producer Zongamin), Italian drummer Valentina Magaletti (whose credits include Bat for Lashes and Gruff Rhys’ Neon Neon project), former Broadcast sound manipulator Phil M.F.U. (a.k.a. Man From Uranus), and Parisian avant-garde filmmaker Elliott Arndt on flute and percussion. The group’s cosmopolitan membership initially reflected its mission to synthesize psychedelic traditions around the globe, from tropicalía to kosmische rock. But as Brexit has stoked the fires of xenophobia across the UK and beyond, Vanishing Twin now stand as a model of the inspired cross-cultural pollination that results when you encourage open borders and open minds. On The Age of Immunology, they respond to our tense present by using strange sounds from the past to light the way to a utopian future.
The Age of Immunology takes its name from a 2002 book by A. David Napier that examines how the logic of medicine—i.e., ridding the body of foreign agents—is reflected in reactionary social attitudes towards the Other in all aspects of life. More so than Vanishing Twin’s 2016 debut, Choose Your Own Adventure, the new album foregrounds the group’s international spirit: Where its predecessor positioned Vanishing Twin as eager heirs to Stereolab and Broadcast’s bottomless milk crate of Free Design and BBC Radiophonic Workshop records, The Age of Immunology better highlights the individual personalities and nationalities that inform the group’s unique alchemy.
Lucas’ elegantly stoic voice remains the orienting focal point in Vanishing Twin’s panoramic, ever-expanding sound world. On the enchanting opener “KRK (At Home in Strange Places),” she issues the calming siren’s call that guides the song’s Brazilian psych-jazz drift. And with the divine “Magician’s Success,” she rallies the band for a hit of narcotic northern soul that suggests the first step toward toppling the forces of darkness is to picture the better world that awaits after they fall. (“The noise of hope/Is like a racket in my heart,” she sings, before letting us savor the emphatic follow-through: “Imagine that!”) But Lucas is also the sort of lead singer whose presence is amplified by her absence—after letting the band float atop the seasick disco rhythm of “Cryonic Suspension May Save Your Life” for nearly four minutes, she coolly emerges for a lone extended verse that snaps the song into taut, militaristic funk.
While Vanishing Twin have reined in their wandering tendencies in service of more sculpted songcraft and laser-guided hypno-jams (like the bewitching Can-meets-Congotronics trance of “Backstroke”), they’re still redefining their methodology as they go. On The Age of Immunology, Lucas’ star turns are supplemented by lead-vocal cameos from Mukai (on the meditative, Japanese-language title track) and Phil M.F.U. (whose new-agey drone-folk opus “Invisible World” imagines a parallel universe where Mark E. Smith detoxed, mellowed out, and decamped to an ashram). One of the album’s most sublime moments belongs to Arndt, who grabs the mic on “Planéte Sauvage” to wax rhapsodic in French about the namesake 1973 sci-fi cartoon. As the song’s stuttering West African groove gets massaged by lush synthetic strings and Lucas’ wordless harmonies, this absurdist exercise gradually fortifies into a showcase of the band operating at peak strength. Vanishing Twin started as a vehicle for Lucas to explore her unresolved feelings about the sibling she never had, but with The Age of Immunology, it’s become a communal celebration of the second family that’s helped fill the void.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire | June 15, 2019 | 8 | 73f088ec-3c74-437e-9dd4-bf54d15acd19 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The rapper-producer’s new mixtape creates its own solar system, one where Hannah Montana samples and Jersey club orbit around the triplet suns of Afrobeats, emo, and rap. | The rapper-producer’s new mixtape creates its own solar system, one where Hannah Montana samples and Jersey club orbit around the triplet suns of Afrobeats, emo, and rap. | Jim Legxacy: HNPM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jim-legxacy-hnpm/ | HNPM | Rapper-producer Jim Legxacy opens “miley’s riddim,” the third song from his latest project HNPM (homeless nigga pop music), with two blasts of early 2010s nostalgia. The first is the drop from Iroking.com, a Nigerian digital streaming service that catered to all kinds of African music in the 2010s; the second is a sped-up sample of Miley Cyrus’ “Ordinary Girl,” a single from her Hannah Montana days. The source material couldn’t be more disparate, but with little more than a story of crumbling love and a shuffling Afrobeats drum break, Legxacy manages to join them as links in the same chain. The track is just one example of the amorphous, generation-spanning pool of references familiar to anyone molded by the internet: the kind where American Football demos share space with Drake freestyles and songs from Disney Channel Original Movies in the same iTunes library. homeless nigga pop music encapsulates this deep referentiality, creating a solar system that orbits around the triplet suns of Afrobeats, emo, and rap.
This brand of fusion isn’t the only thing that sets Legxacy apart. Rappers like Rico Nasty, Kenny Mason, and Polo Perks have consistently reminded us that rap and emo are capable of meeting in the middle. But it’s the way that the London rapper-singer’s gossamer, self-produced arrangements clash with his melancholy stories of love and innocence lost that add weight to his ballads and raps. Take “dj” and “old place,” which pair tales of rekindled relationships with shimmering takes on drill and Jersey club rap. On “Eye Tell (!),” Legxacy tries and fails to get over an ex by confiding in friends; its bouncy, stringy beat sounds as fit for Fireboy DML as it is for Dave or J Hus.
Most of homeless nigga pop music’s early singles leaned aggressively on a formula that paired guitar licks and recognizable samples, so it’s a relief to hear Legxacy pull other tricks (both old and new) out of his bag. Several songs shift on a dime, revealing darker cores underneath their sparkling shells. Early highlight “block hug” begins with a meditation on heartbreak and Black masculinity (“She told me hood niggas don’t cry/So when she broke my heart, I had the straight face”), which morphs into a moody drill beat that Legxacy proceeds to rip through like he’s Central Cee. The title track sheds the singing and guitars entirely, trading them for pointed storytelling over a smooth chunk of soul. He’s not the first rapper to sound as comfortable crooning as he does doling out bars, but there’s an urgency and freshness to his approach that gives it a golden shine.
Lyrically, Legxacy flips the script on typical stories of romance, but what truly makes his music spellbinding is how the nostalgic references amplify his scene-setting. The beat for “candy reign” doesn’t work just because it’s built around a prominent sample of the Soul for Real classic of the same name; it excels because it twirls around vocal samples from UK rappers and his own friends, all while his ode to budding love rubs up against the immortal hook of the original track. Or take the echoing guitar strings and crunchy bass of “call ur dad,” which sound airlifted from an Algernon Cadwallader song, and the way that they brush against Legxacy’s effortless vocals. It doesn’t feel like a cheap grab for remember this? points, nor does it resemble empty genre pastiche. These flourishes sound like more refined takes on his 2021 album CITADEL and his 2020 EP BTO!; here, the arrangements and samples tell as much of a story as the lyrics do.
Earlier this month, Legxacy tweeted something that’s as close to a manifesto as he’s ever offered: “genres are not even real, music is not even real, it’s jus like air with seasoning on it.” It’s a lighthearted but truthful statement, one that dovetails with the sense of freedom and experimentation that courses through homeless nigga pop music. Legxacy doesn’t just acknowledge sounds from other cultures and traditions, he rearranges them to paint a fuller picture of himself. As he sees it, music is a colorful jungle gym that’s his to conquer. | 2023-04-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Experimental | (!) | April 26, 2023 | 7.8 | 73f53197-bdf2-474d-aa18-a4f0f64d5b27 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
At its best, Hannah Merrick’s stream-of-consciousness songwriting feels like sitting shotgun with her as she crosses the country, taking in the sublime and the absurd in equal measure. | At its best, Hannah Merrick’s stream-of-consciousness songwriting feels like sitting shotgun with her as she crosses the country, taking in the sublime and the absurd in equal measure. | King Hannah: Big Swimmer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-hannah-big-swimmer/ | Big Swimmer | If you think of other artists while listening to Big Swimmer, that’s not lost on King Hannah. Singer Hannah Merrick namedrops Bill Callahan, titles a song after John Prine, and recruits Sharon Van Etten on two songs; the album, Merrick’s second, is clearly the product of those influences. It’s easy to hear echoes of Callahan’s dry humor and Van Etten’s plaintive vocals; Cassandra Jenkins’ meditative jams and Courtney Barnett’s stoned observations come to mind as well. It’s all in service of Merrick’s meandering writing style, which finds meaning in small vignettes borne from traveling America. At its best, Swimmer feels like sitting shotgun with the duo of Merrick and guitarist Craig Whittle, like a tour vlog set to music. Because it’s so laid-back, Swimmer doesn’t necessarily try to transcend its inspirations, but it’s charming in its own right.
Merrick spends much of the album going on tangents in a low deadpan voice, as though recording exhausted voice memos documenting a given day’s journey. A lot of those tangents are genuinely funny, like the job interview that opens “New York, Let’s Do Nothing:” “He said, ‘So tell me something about you’/I said, ‘Well I’m a singer, musician too’/He said, ‘Oh no, not another one.’” Elsewhere, the commentary gets lost amid wandering musings on vending machines, as on the eight-minute “Somewhere Near El Paso.” In the album’s most compelling moments, the observations lead somewhere: Merrick increasingly ruminates while watching true-crime documentaries on “Suddenly, Your Hand,” despairing at the callousness of serial killers without being able to pull away. Merrick apologizes for her obsession right at the end (“And I’ve said it before and I will say it again/I’m really sorry for all the moods that I get in”), but Whittle’s closing guitar solo carries on long after, prolonging the fixation.
Whenever the album breaks out of its stream-of-consciousness flow, it shows a clearer sense of identity. Merrick’s secret weapon is her soaring singing voice, effectively contrasting the Sprechgesang of much of the record. On the title track, Merrick plays with her vocal phrasing, speeding up and slowing down like a human tape machine, which makes it more striking when she draws out the line, “If it feels right to do so,” on the refrain. On “Lily Pad” and “Davy Says,” Whittle turns his guitars up: The former is an intentional Slint homage (complete with a reference to the Spiderland album cover) and the latter a straight-up catchy pop song. The tighter song structures are a welcome salve against the duo’s tendency to meander. “Lily Pad” changes course halfway through, and that shift hits harder for its abruptness.
The levity of Merrick’s lyrics occasionally goes overboard. In between the terrifically tense guitar breaks on "Milk Boy (I Love You),” she watches as a parent threatens his child, and the descriptions are haunting until a baffling lyric about Dallas Buyers Club nearly sinks the whole song: “They reminded me of McConaughey/In that film about AIDS that didn’t win enough.” (For the record, it won three Oscars from six nominations, one of which went to Jared Leto.) The sweetest song on the record, and one of the best, is the much lower-stakes closer: “John Prine on the Radio” is literally about chilling out to your favorite music, but it has the most focused songwriting on the whole record. When Merrick harmonizes with herself, it’s plainly beautiful, with no snark deflating the earnestness. On an album insistent on speak-singing across America, documenting every place visited and song listened to, the moments of sincerity are the most distinctive. | 2024-06-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | City Slang | June 5, 2024 | 6.9 | 73f7da5c-f3cd-4b95-8c7a-5014e7efa8ee | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
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 an overlooked masterpiece from 1971, one that helped define the essence of Japanese rock. | 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 an overlooked masterpiece from 1971, one that helped define the essence of Japanese rock. | Happy End: Kazemachi Roman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/happy-end-kazemachi-roman/ | Kazemachi Roman | In 2007, Rolling Stone Japan declared Happy End’s Kazemachi Roman to be the greatest Japanese rock album of all time. For a band that can boast such an accolade, Happy End still isn’t all that well-known in the West. If you’re a hardcore J-rock fan, you probably think Happy End aren’t as interesting or cool as noisier artists from the 1970s like, say, Flower Travellin’ Band. Today Happy End are celebrated in Japan, yet Kazemachi Roman sold fewer than 10,000 copies the year it was released, and it’s still not available on streaming services. By this point, Happy End should be as documented and famous as Love or even Os Mutantes, but they are rarely if ever mentioned in the same breath.
When Happy End first formed in Tokyo in late 1969, the Beatles were basically kaput, which should give you an idea of how much had already happened in Western popular music. In Japan, pop music transformed more slowly, to some degree because it was constantly being measured against the West.
Aside from fringe experimental psychedelic outfits like Speed, Glue & Shinki and Les Rallizes Dénudés, Japanese countercultural pop music in the mid-to-late ’60s was largely divided into two camps. On one side were “Group Sounds” acts, basically the Japanese equivalent of bands you’d find in the Nuggets box set; they combined skunky garage rock with kayōkyoku, a mix of Western scales and traditional Japanese music. The other faction was folk, either “campus folk” amateurs trying to reconstruct mid-’60s West Coast coffeehouses, min’yo artists attempting to re-create indigenous and traditional Japanese music, or unvarnished protest folk in the vein of early Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Language was another demarcation: Group Sounds bands would often sing or perform covers in English, on some level in the hopes of appealing to American listeners, while folk acts sang in Japanese, a purposeful act of resistance toward U.S. cultural dominance.
The members of Happy End weren’t interested in either side, let alone the debate itself. Actually, they thought it was all pretty lame. Guitarist Shigeru Suzuki puts it bluntly in a 2014 documentary for the Japanese TV station NHK BS Premium: “Honestly, I thought Group Sounds was pretty boring. In the end, it was just an extension of the traditional Japanese ballad. The folk musicians had good melodies, but … their rhythms were just boring.” At heart, Happy End felt that in trying so hard to either win over America or defy it, both sides were defined by their relationship to the West. The message of rock’n’roll might be universal, but the music is inescapably Western; you had to bring Japan to rock’n’roll, rather than try to force rock’n’roll to be Japanese.
Happy End only existed for three years, but the band’s enduring legacy is creating dynamic rock music that was essentially Japanese, exemplified by their 1971 masterpiece, Kazemachi Roman. Sung entirely in Japanese, the songs don’t initially sound innovative—it’s crisp, melodic, and swaggering folk-rock that recalls the Band, Little Feat, or the Kinks in the late-1960s. But Happy End refashioned early 1970s folk-rock into their own style marked by conceptual, compositional, and emotional depth. The album signaled to Japanese artists and audiences that you could make pop music influenced by the West while maintaining a distinctly Japanese identity, a breakthrough that permanently altered the trajectory of Japanese pop.
Like all legendary bands, Happy End emerged from a cosmic alignment of supernatural talents. There was Suzuki, an 18-year-old guitar prodigy. Singer and guitarist Eiichi Ohtaki didn’t have Suzuki’s chops, but he was a skilled songwriter and musician in his own right. Drummer Takashi Matsumoto wrote the lion’s share of the band’s sly and surreal lyrics. And then there was Haruomi Hosono, primarily the bassist but also an adept multi-instrumentalist and arranger who, along with Ohtaki, was Happy End’s other main songwriter.
Hosono and Matsumoto had played together in the psych-blues band Apryl Fool, which was even more short-lived than Happy End. Loosely associated with Group Sounds, Apryl Fool covered American songs like Bob Dylan’s “Pledging My Time” and sometimes sang in English, but they stood out with original, Japanese-language material suffused with lysergic vibrations.
Apryl Fool lasted less than a year and released only one self-titled album, splitting up in late 1969. Mere weeks afterwards, Hosono and Matsumoto became session players and met Suzuki; the famous Japanese folk singer Nobuyasu Okabayashi then recruited the trio, along with Ohtaki, as his backing band. It didn’t take long for the four musicians to figure out that they were destined for greater things than “Nobuyasu Okabayashi’s backing band.”
Ohtaki and Hosono both grew up listening to the Far East Network, a radio station that broadcast to American GIs stationed in Japan after the war. The two were particularly obsessed with Buffalo Springfield. “Buffalo Springfield was pretty hard for me to grasp,” Hosono says in the documentary. “I thought, ‘How could I create a sound like that?’ … I discovered that they valued their ‘roots.’ It wasn’t just the music, it was Western culture and literature.”
Hosono was amazed that Buffalo Springfield had not just one, but three talented singer-songwriters. He and the other members of Happy End envisioned an equally gifted group of musicians in which every person would write songs and sing; instead of mimicking Buffalo Springfield’s “roots,” they would channel their Japanese history and culture. Suzuki had no songwriting experience, and Matsumoto was solely a lyricist, but they were nearly at the point of making their ambitions a reality.
Multiple sources cite Happy End as the first rock band to sing entirely in Japanese, which is empirically untrue. However, Happy End was the first to bend the rules of their native tongue to glom on to the rhythms of rock’n’roll singing. As University of Chicago professor Michael K. Bourdaghs details in his book Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon (the title of Happy End’s final song), most of Happy End’s lyrics were written in desu/masu, which he explains is “a more polite yet also more conversational form of Japanese conjugation.” Happy End manipulated the cadence of their lyrics to fit the melodies and rhythms of their music, most conspicuously when, as Bourdaghs describes it, “relatively meaningless syllables are extended to remarkable length.”
Released in August 1970 on the experimental label URC, Happy End’s self-titled debut is considered by some to be their finest moment—most notably by impassioned musician and Japrocksampler author Julian Cope. (The album is sometimes referred to as “Yudemen,” meaning “boiled noodles,” which is written on a storefront sign on the cover.) While it demonstrates its members’ near-instantaneous telepathic interplay, Happy End today feels a little like the band was trying to replicate Buffalo Springfield instead of taking inspiration from them. Some songs, like “Kakurenbo” and “Juuni Gatsu no Ame no ni,” sound exactly like late-’60s Stephen Stills and Neil Young sung in Japanese.
Happy End was far from a commercial hit, but it had a huge impact in the Japanese music press. The Japanese New Music Magazine anointed it the best album of 1970. Naturally, with anything that receives overwhelming acclaim, there’s an inevitable backlash. In this case, it even had a name, the infamous “Japanese-language Rock Controversy” (“Nihongo Rokku Ronsō”). Most notoriously, Yuya Uchida, who produced and managed the Flower Travellin’ Band, believed Happy End’s approach posed two problems: By singing in Japanese, they were alienating global audiences, and because of the unusual style of their singing, the words were too difficult to understand. Happy End couldn’t relate to Uchida because they didn’t share his objectives. “He was thinking about business,” Hosono says in the documentary. “We were just experimenting, without thinking about how it would appeal to the rest of the world.”
For Happy End’s follow-up, the band wanted to refine its sound and deepen its fundamental Japaneseness. Matsumoto devised a concept album that would revolve around a changing Tokyo. In the West, the city seems impossible, vast, intricate—a puzzle box of nesting dolls of rooms within rooms within tunnels within buildings within buildings, surrounded by mountains in one direction, water in another, and imperceptible horizons everywhere else. But as Italo Calvino writes in the 1973 postmodern novel Invisible Cities, “the sum of all wonders is an endless, formless ruin.” Had that sentence existed at the time, it’s one Matsumoto might have used to describe what he dreaded about Tokyo’s future. To him, the real wonder occurred in the Tokyo that existed before the Olympics, the quainter Tokyo of his boyhood.
Beginning in 1952, when the U.S. occupation of Japan began to diminish (the occupation hasn’t really ended; approximately 30,000 troops remain in Okinawa today), Tokyo transformed amid a rapid blur of development and displacement, especially en route to the 1964 Summer Olympics. In fact, Matsumoto and his family were forced to leave his childhood home, which was razed for the construction of a new highway in his neighborhood of Aoyama.
Matsumoto didn’t only bemoan new development, he disliked what postmodernity had done to the shape and character of the city. “First the streetcars disappeared,” he says in the documentary, referencing the tramway that used to operate between the Shibuya and Shinbashi neighborhoods. “It felt good to ride along at a leisurely pace like that.” The easygoing rhythms of pre-1960s Tokyo life corresponded to an increased level of community. When Matsumoto was expelled from his home he lost contact with all his middle school friends, who were likewise displaced by the new road. He describes the aftermath as “like a piece of your heart is missing.”
Kazemachi Roman is widely considered to be a paean to Tokyo prior to the 1964 Summer Olympics—a drawing of the Tokyo streetcars features prominently in the gatefold of the record cover—yet as Moritz Sommet argues in his essay, “Framing the Tokyo Cityscape,” the concept is far more layered. Matsumoto wrote in 1985, “I made it an indicator of this act to project my personal panorama of the city in my memory, which I called Wind City, and which had been erased by that other city.” Wind City was his memory of a triangle connecting the Aoyama, Azabu, and Shibuya neighborhoods. The title of Kazemachi Roman literally means “Wind City Romance.”
Matsumoto and his bandmates weren’t hawking, in his words, “idle mourning.” Instead, they would create a new way of seeing by grafting their childhood memories onto 1971 Tokyo as it was. Bourdaghs refers to this as Happy End’s “Copernican revolution,” in which addressing the problems of history requires holistically taking on the present, rather than hashing out the past or working toward an uncertain future. As Matsumoto wrote in 1971 about the name “Happy End,” Japanese youth were living through the instability of identity, neither fully committed to a hegemonic West nor a Japan trying to appease it. The only solution was to “seek out our own Japan.” The “happy end” was one in which his generation could start over.
And musically, as they polished and focused their craft, Happy End would assemble something of the moment, something that broke away from Japanese rock up to that point. You can hear it immediately on Kazemachi Roman’s monster opening track, “Dakeshimetai” (“I Want to Hold You”). It begins with acoustic guitar, bass, and drums all playing in 4/4, but in alternate syncopations, a jerky march that coalesces all at once into a steady, galvanizing rhythm when Ohtaki’s vocals kick in. In a bridge between the second and third verses, Happy End run everything through a phaser, a passage of psychedelic trickery momentarily intruding like an acid flashback.
In Matsumoto’s first verse, a protagonist, likely a fictionalized version of himself, reminisces about the city of his youth while viewing the present-day metropolis before him: “A faint light is flowing in through the window/Flying away to the far-away countryside/I take a hard drag of my cigarette and/I think of you.” It’s a showcase of Happy End’s habitual use of irony—it scans as Matsumoto referring to another person, when he’s really describing his relationship with his boyhood.
Double meanings are all over Kazemachi Roman. “Haikara Hakuchi” (“Westernized Idiot”) opens with a short jam on a traditional taiko drum before crashing into a rollicking rock rave-up, Ohtaki growling Matsumoto’s pointed dig at glib Japanese youth imitating foreigners: “I am so stylish under a bloodstained sky/Playing with your emotions, drinking a Coca-Cola.” Yet Matsumoto playfully constructs the words so that they are also about spitting up blood (“Hai” = lungs, “kara” = from, “haku” = to vomit, “chi” = blood). The song curdles into black humor in the absolutely badass line, “I am so stylish while spitting up blood/It’s only twilight in your skull.” But Happy End follow “Haikara Hakuchi” with “Haikara, Beautiful,” a 30-second Beach Boys-esque incantation in which the band keeps repeating that Westernization is beautiful. The song is credited to Bannai Harao, a popular fictional detective in Japanese mysteries.
Humor and duality are undercurrents of Matsumoto’s expressionistic, bucolic, and dreamy imagery, and his imagery and the music often dovetail in sublime moments. “Natsunandesu” (“It’s Summer”) is meant to evoke the season in all its blurry, floating beauty. Hosono weaves a finger-picking melody around slow-moving double-tracked drums, singing in curling arcs in a mellow baritone about being stopped by a dusty wind “on a white path, between the fields in the country,” where the summer is “eye-splittingly dazzling” and “cicada-crying.” “Natsunandesu” is the song that most acutely emanates the warmth and richness of Kazemachi Roman’s production; the band recorded the album on an eight-channel setup, which was state-of-the-art technology at the time. (To get a sense of how oaken and sticky Kazemachi Roman can sound, I highly recommend listening to the Los Angeles-based record store In Sheep’s Clothing’s “room recording” of an original pressing of Side B.)
“Kaze Wo Atsumete,” (“Gather the Wind”), Happy End’s biggest hit, is Kazemachi Roman’s buoyant acme, the most literal depiction of Matsumoto’s “Wind City.” Aside from the drums, Hosono performs all the instruments and sings the lyrics, yielding a sunny melody and mid-tempo rhythm that feel like a stroll through city side streets, with a wrinkle of yearning in the bridge and chorus that adds a thin film of melancholy.
Matsumoto composes the verses on “Kaze Wo Atsumete” as discrete passages: The first positions the protagonist seeing a tram roll through an open street in the morning; the second portrays “A city that was flying scarlet sails/Lying at anchor”; and in the third the narrator looks upon skyscrapers out of the window of a coffee shop. Hosono sings a chorus of “I want to gather the wind…and run across the blue sky.” After each verse, the chorus means something different. In the first, Matsumoto wants to run forward and celebrate the joy of his surroundings; by the end, he wants to run backward in time to the joy he experienced.
If you know “Kaze Wo Atsumete” or Kazemachi Roman, most likely it’s because the song is sandwiched between Phoenix’s “Too Young” and Brian Reitzell and Roger Manning Jr.’s “On the Subway” on the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation. Due to the film’s popularity, Happy End was suddenly and belatedly exposed to a global audience. In the NHK BS Premium documentary, Hosono says that Americans have stopped him on the street and started singing “Kaze Wo Atsumete.”
Those encounters belie Kazemachi Roman’s initial reception. Though it was also an overwhelming critical success, due to URC’s small-scale distribution the album failed to reach many people. In a last-ditch effort to gain a larger audience, Happy End flew to LA with a considerable amount of money in an attempt to approximate the West Coast rock albums they loved. They linked up with Van Dyke Parks and members of Little Feat, but confronted even more hostility from Americans and American musicians than they did in Japan. Happy End dissolved two months before the February 1973 release of their final album, confusingly and perhaps ironically titled Happy End.
It didn’t take long for the members of Happy End to find individual success. Before he died at the end of 2013, Ohtaki had a long career as a solo artist and songwriter (his 1982 album A Long Vacation sold more than a million copies and is widely beloved in Japan). Suzuki became an in-demand session guitarist. Matsumoto forged a multifaceted career as a record producer, songwriter, and novelist—he is the third-best-selling songwriter in Japan. And of course Hosono is one of the most influential figures in Japanese pop music history, as a solo artist, session musician, member of the pioneering electronic group Yellow Magic Orchestra, and composer. All of these people were major figures in city pop, the sleek, glittery, R&B-influenced style that dominated Japanese popular music in the late 1970s and 1980s.
In hindsight, Kazemachi Roman’s canonical stature can be traced to its connection to city pop. For most people, “nostalgia” conjures the cheap sentiment of half-baked kitsch, when the word is actually a Greek compound of “homecoming” and “pain.” Just as city pop embraced American style as an underhanded way of calling attention to its artificiality, Kazemachi Roman pioneered a new Japanese rock through the true definition of nostalgia, pining for the Tokyo that existed before it became beholden to commerce, preserved in a sepia-toned portrait of four prodigal musicians fortuitously united and seizing the moment. | 2022-03-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | URC | March 20, 2022 | 8.8 | 73f809e1-41a5-47a6-88e1-3e31409f0cfd | Tal Rosenberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tal-rosenberg/ | |
Pushing beyond his customary dancefloor focus, the French-Canadian producer twists club influences and collaborative input into a textured, exploratory sound, both intimate and immense. | Pushing beyond his customary dancefloor focus, the French-Canadian producer twists club influences and collaborative input into a textured, exploratory sound, both intimate and immense. | Jacques Greene: Dawn Chorus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jacques-greene-dawn-chorus/ | Dawn Chorus | For some time, Jacques Greene’s curious career was defined by the French-Canadian producer’s knack for fusing different modes of dance music with contemporary pop and R&B influences. Philippe Aubin-Dionne’s curatorial ears (and eyes; he previously worked as an art director) helped him navigate electronic music’s shifting trends. But where his debut LP, Feel Infinite, took an insular approach, Aubin-Dionne’s sophomore album, Dawn Chorus, treats the Jacques Greene project more like a band. Inspired by groups like Massive Attack and Slowdive, he brought on producer and Oneohtrix Point Never collaborator Joel Ford as well as contributions from Brian Reitzell, Oliver Coates, and Julianna Barwick. The result feels at once intimate yet immense—a collection of ruminative dance tracks with a shoegaze heart.
The muscular loops of last year’s Fever Focus EP, crafted for peak-hour DJ sets, made for an incremental step forward, but Dawn Chorus largely abandons the pretense of the club altogether. From the instant that the smeared rave sirens of “Serenity” go soaring across snippets of indistinct radio chatter, it’s clear that Aubin-Dionne is just as concerned with kindling introspection as he is with moving bodies. It’s a trick he pulls off differently on almost every track: Rainy field recordings envelop mid-album highlight “Sel,” and spirals of hazy, resampled textures on “Let Go” set the stage for a moody guest turn from Toronto-based singer Rochelle Jordan.
Until now, Jacques Greene’s signature move has been to lift melodies from beloved singers like Mario and Brandy, slicing them into wistful refrains. He was hardly the first to repurpose R&B vocals—what up, Burial—but Aubin-Dionne understands that the provenance of his samples is less important than the vocalists’ charismatic timbres, rendered mystical by washes of synth. Instead of falling back on familiar sources, he opts to alchemize his guests’ voices into hooks, occasionally ceding the spotlight altogether, as on “Let Go” and the acid-tinged “Night Service,” with Cadence Weapon. Unfortunately, Cadence falls a bit flat as he rhapsodizes about a night out during the bloghouse days of yore, when DJs used to play the Rapture. It’s charming but awkward.
Dawn Chorus is most compelling when the production does the bulk of the talking. Nearly a decade into his career, Jacques Greene continues to hone his sound design and arrangements. Much of Dawn Chorus was recorded at Hudson Mohawke’s Los Angeles studio, where Aubin-Dionne set out to wrangle new sounds from specific pieces of hardware used by his musical heroes. You get the sense that exploring unfamiliar equipment in new spaces has helped him find new possibilities in his own work—that by plunging himself into guitar pedals and classic French-house compression modules, he’s ushered in a new era for Jacques Greene without losing sight of his unique sentimentality. “For Love,” possibly the only track geared for the floor, turns a hit by Canadian disco outfit THP Orchestra into a pumping funky house number with a dream-pop middle eight. The expansive “Drop Location,” co-produced by Aubin-Dionne’s old friend Clams Casino, shows that the cloud rap pioneer’s chilly tendencies pair well with Jacques Greene’s newfound love of distorted drones.
The shoegaze influence is most apparent near the end of the album. Hesitant arpeggios waft through a barren Shlohmo-esque atmosphere on “Understand,” while the seven-minute closer “Stars” is a slow-burning meditation on nature and childhood, undergirded by the steady pulse of warehouse drums. Aubin-Dionne’s gleaming synthesizers ebb and flow; the woozy swells and quietly crackling drones flank the spectral spoken-word passages of another Toronto artist, Sandrine Somé. Eventually, Somé trails off, and so do the resonant pads, leaving a lone breakbeat to loop into the ether. The brooding, ambient nature of Dawn Chorus suggests that one day, Jacques Greene just might abandon dance music altogether—but for now, it’s a form that he continues to reshape in his own way with each new release.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | LuckyMe | October 17, 2019 | 7.7 | 73fe031e-7175-4c53-8d0d-ea84478a4fcb | Noah Yoo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/noah-yoo/ | |
Fueled by earnest writing and exhilarating vocal performances, the Asheville songwriter’s third album aims for stadium-sized feelings. | Fueled by earnest writing and exhilarating vocal performances, the Asheville songwriter’s third album aims for stadium-sized feelings. | Indigo De Souza: All of This Will End | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/indigo-de-souza-all-of-this-will-end/ | All of This Will End | Indigo De Souza used to fear the reaper. Death haunted her first two albums, 2018’s I Love My Mom and 2021’s Any Shape You Take, lurking in all her relationships. Ruminating on our collective impermanence can be humbling, but for an artist preoccupied with existential doom from an early age (“Why do we die?” she asked in a childhood letter addressed to herself), it’s evidently also liberating. “Accepting you are a temporary thing is what gives way to meaning and intention and connection,” she said in a recent interview. The title of her third record, All of This Will End, is a mantra born from an obsession with finality and a reason to swing for the fences, pushing De Souza to elevate her once quiet bedroom recordings to their stadium-sized potential.
De Souza wrote her first two albums in relatively short succession, but the pandemic forced her to take space between the bursts of creativity that became All of This Will End. That period also saw the departure of her original bandmates, multi-instrumentalists Jake Lenderman and Owen Stone, which resulted in its own form of creative isolation. “I felt really scared and alone, because I had been convinced that those people were the only people for me,” she said about their exit after recording her second album.
In the absence of her former collaborators, De Souza sounds more self-assured, no longer just hinting at dance pop but embracing it with effervescent synths and propulsive electronic percussion. The subdued folk-electronica that she introduced on Any Shape You Take returns as incandescent dream-pop on opener “Time Back”; padded synths give way to ricocheting drum loops that evoke the wide-eyed exuberance of M83. “Smog,” a pillowy dance song about finding joy in the solitude of the night, reflects the pandemic delirium in which it was written, her compressed vocals softening the snap of a snare drum, recalling indietronica forebears Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. When she hits the chorus—“I come alive in the nighttime”—her falsetto wavers, clipping in its upper ranges, like a fevered bedroom performance on a Zoom rave.
De Souza’s strength as a lyricist is her ability to extract universal truths from small moments. Rather than begin her “L.A. model fuckboy” kiss-off “You Can Be Mean” at the peak of her anger, she opens with a familiar scene of pointing a relative stranger to the bathroom in her apartment, setting up a trope of a lighthearted hookup that she upends on the verse’s final line: “Thank you for trying to be polite/But, babe, I think we’re already past that.” She builds intimacy with small disclosures—“I eat too much when I’m lonely/I bury everything” on “Smog”—and even her broader declarations feel honest as a result. “And I’m not sure what is wrong with me/But it’s probably just hard to be a person feeling anything,” she sings on “Parking Lot.”
De Souza operates at an almost jarring level of earnestness, one that could be cloying if not for her elastic vocal delivery. She cuts words tersely on “Wasting Your Time,” her ode to self-doubt, but then elongates the consonants on “Not My Body” until her voice sounds like a warm hug. “Who gives a fuck? All of this will end,” she sings in a lower register on the title track, underscoring the ambiguity separating resignation and acceptance.
De Souza worked with local Asheville producer Alex Farrar and an ensemble of new collaborators who feel pivotal to the shift in her sound. Alex Bradley’s trumpet on “Parking Lot” adds triumphant warmth to a song about having a panic attack, and a chorus of whistles function like backup singers on “You Can Be Mean,” sharpening the daggers in her lyrics. John James Tourville weaves the gentle sigh of a pedal-steel guitar into the album’s latter half, and De Souza finds new depths to her songwriting in these plaintive moments. “Younger and Dumber,” the slow-burning ballad that closes the album, is unlike any song in her catalog, tender in its quiet power. Written as a letter to De Souza’s younger self, it begins as timid self-talk, her falsetto cracking, laced with the queasy nostalgia of watching home movies and mourning childhood innocence. Her voice rises, catching on the line, “Sometimes I just don’t wanna be alone/And it’s not cause I’m lonely.” She sings the last word over two notes, and as if a switch is flipped, the song gains momentum. As the percussion and the pedal steel pick up, she finds a soulful, almost mournful, power in her voice. “And the love I feel is so powerful,” she belts, as if willing it into existence.
Just as pronounced as joy and sadness is a sense of indignation; after all, in the process of grieving, anger comes before acceptance. “I’d like to think you got a good heart and your dad was just an asshole growing up,” she sings on “You Can Be Mean.” A younger De Souza might have been more forgiving, but she now knows better than to pull punches: “But I don’t see you trying that hard to be better than he is,” she sneers, twisting the knife. Any Shape You Take’s “Real Pain” featured her friends’ screams as a form of collective catharsis, but on “Always,” she owns her anger, and her pain, alone. Written about De Souza’s fractured relationship with her often absent father, the song starts as a near whisper. But about halfway through, a jolt of distorted electric guitar crashes in and De Souza’s curdled, guttural howl takes hold. “Father, I thought you’d be here,” she roars, any apprehension annihilated by her fury. “I thought you’d try,” she howls, her voice nearly breaking. It’s a discomfiting listen: In bearing witness to her agony, there’s a kind of transference of pain that occurs in her shredded screams—the sound of an artist stepping into her shadows in order to find her light. | 2023-05-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-03T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | May 3, 2023 | 7.6 | 74041080-9584-480c-9a61-b56a20a979e6 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Andrew Hung’s piercingly electronic Rave Cave 2 is an ambitious and autobiographical effort. Throughout the EP, he emulates the juxtaposing elements found in youth, a time in life when everything is confusing and you have to navigate a path through conflicting options. | Andrew Hung’s piercingly electronic Rave Cave 2 is an ambitious and autobiographical effort. Throughout the EP, he emulates the juxtaposing elements found in youth, a time in life when everything is confusing and you have to navigate a path through conflicting options. | Andrew Hung: Rave Cave 2 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21159-rave-cave-2-ep/ | Rave Cave 2 EP | Andrew Hung’s piercingly electronic Rave Cave 2 is an ambitious and personal autobiographical effort. The initial two tracks are named after places in Hung’s life—"Ashill" which Hung lists as his residence on Bandcamp, is a bright and inviting opening number. "Gladstone Park Gang" is a shout out to a park in North London, and the title itself is reminiscent of a key pastime among bored British youth: hanging out in a drab park, smoking weed, and drinking disgustingly cheap cider.
The second installment of his debut solo venture, Rave Cave 2 interweaves themes from the original but stands strong on its own, and is in fact denser and richer overall. "Ashill" forgoes the syncopated swing of Rave Cave’s opener, "Fables", but still embodies that cheeriness. Though the choppy and sharp melody initially seems out of joint with the accompanying smooth, heady synth bass, the more repetitive it becomes, the more it settles in.
Throughout this EP, Hung emulates the juxtaposing elements found in the nature of youth, a time in life when everything is confusing and you have to navigate a path through conflicting options. "Repetition vs Time" summons a childlike wonder and calm, with an intentionally cheesy chorus and boom-bap beats invoking nostalgia for playing keyboards in high school music class. Towards the latter end, the song is more reminiscent of video game menu music than anything else, but perhaps this is intentional. Hung’s littering of 8-bit grace notes is ultimately refreshing, and an apt ode to his work as one half of Fuck Buttons.
"That thing you want won’t make you happy" is distinctly melancholic in comparison to the rest of the record. It carries the melody of a more somber '90s boy band ballad, and closes with finger-picked acoustic guitar tinged with subtle reverb. "Star Ferry Dub" immediately starts off as a pounding antithesis to the previous song. It’s heavy on the ears and on the heart, flashing a raw hedonism seldom found in the Rave Cave series. The song rings in the musical themes evident throughout the EP—we are reintroduced to the 8-bit ornamentation of "Repetition vs Time" and that thumping arpeggiated bass echoing "Ashill", but this time the ghosts of these tracks are more lingering and intense. There’s so much going on at once that it’s hard to pin down, but the complexities and wide sonic scape don’t sound excessive or sloppily piled on top of one another. They’re seamless, intricate, and intoxicating. Then, the imperfect cadence fades and stutters into oblivion, leaving the listener aching for more. Andrew Hung’s story isn’t over yet. | 2015-11-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2015-11-19T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | self-released | November 19, 2015 | 7.2 | 74053a45-d2c4-49f2-b2f9-cc601e2ceb5c | Sarah Sahim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sarah-sahim/ | null |
The debut from the Chicago-based composer and clarinetist serves as a vibrant, spiritual, free-jazz document of black life as it stands today. | The debut from the Chicago-based composer and clarinetist serves as a vibrant, spiritual, free-jazz document of black life as it stands today. | Angel Bat Dawid: The Oracle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angel-bat-dawid-the-oracle/ | The Oracle | Years ago, we would record the soundtrack of our lives on cassette. A blank tape became filled with not only the music that we listened to but also what surrounded that music, the breadth of our experiences. As part of a limited edition, the Chicago-based clarinetist will release her debut album, The Oracle, on cassette tape. It evokes how the album itself was conceived—Angel Bat Dawid overdubbed, mixed, and performed almost all of the voices and instruments herself, and recorded and produced the album mainly on her cell phone as she trekked across the globe. The result is a spiritual opus of one’s refusal to accept the cards that life has dealt her.
After a brain tumor diagnosis halted her music studies at Roosevelt University, Dawid began working full-time to pay off the bills she had racked up post-surgery. This included a stint as a hip-hop producer, who teamed up with another fellow Chicagoan, rapper/producer DeLundon, to form the group Angel/DeLundon. Meanwhile, her classical training on piano and clarinet had gathered dust. In 2014, Dawid quit her job, cashed out her 401K, and lived off of that for one year as she discovered (and rediscovered) her connection to free and spiritual jazz.
The Oracle charts Dawid’s journey with improvised music and all that inspired her during her world travels. It conjures a vast, immersive aural exploration of black experiences, from the unwavering strength of the “Black Family” to the plethora of borrowed traditions, notably call and response: “Capetown” features an exchange between South African drummer Asher Simiso Gamedze and Dawid on clarinet, passionate and untempered. On “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black,” as layered vocals, tinged with traditional gospel and operatic contralto, become intertwined, Dawid transforms the first line of a poem into a prophetic and resonant call. The song’s universal theme of racism in America grows more palpable, especially after hearing the line that follows: “What it means to be captive in this dark skin.”
As a direct response, Dawid counters with “We Are Starzz.” Written especially for her live set just last month at NYC’s Winter JazzFest, she delves into Afrofuturism as digital and acoustic sounds converge seamlessly, like Sun Ra’s magnum opus, “Space Is the Place.” Thematically, it not only denotes the first glimmer of hope for the future of blacks on the album, but it also marks perhaps Dawid’s own reawakening through avant-garde music in her adopted home of Chicago.
Despite her journey from London to South Africa captured on The Oracle, it’s Chicago that serves as the album’s through line. Dawid summons the spirits of the movement’s progenitors, like Sun Ra, both in her playing and in her production, to guide her through unchartered territory. Much like Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount), she not only surrenders her given name (Angel Elmore), but more importantly, she abandons her dependence on a score, both in life and in music. As she captures the unbridled sound of obstacles overcome, history revered, and a future imagined, The Oracle serves as a vibrant document of black life as it stands today. | 2019-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | International Anthem | February 7, 2019 | 8 | 740ab318-8938-4ce5-9429-90be9001f6fd | Shannon J. Effinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shannon-j. effinger/ | |
Kintsugi is Death Cab's first album without Chris Walla. It was produced by Rich Costey, who has worked with Muse and Foster the People, and though it has been framed as a new beginning, little of Kintsugi gives the impression that Gibbard’s motivation to reboot Death Cab is matched by legitimate inspiration. | Kintsugi is Death Cab's first album without Chris Walla. It was produced by Rich Costey, who has worked with Muse and Foster the People, and though it has been framed as a new beginning, little of Kintsugi gives the impression that Gibbard’s motivation to reboot Death Cab is matched by legitimate inspiration. | Death Cab for Cutie: Kintsugi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20343-kintsugi/ | Kintsugi | Chris Walla quit Death Cab for Cutie last year, which means he will never again be called the band's "secret weapon." His nuanced craftsmanship served as a buffer against Ben Gibbard’s increasingly broad and bland songwriting on recent LPs Narrow Stairs and Codes & Keys, but Walla "long[ed] for the unknown" and Gibbard felt the band was becoming stagnant and "self-referential". Though Walla contributes guitar and electronic collage to the band's eighth LP Kintsugi, he abdicates the producer’s role for the first time in the band’s history—in his stead is a proper big-budget pop guy, the preposterously and perfectly named Rich Costey (Muse, Foster the People, Chvrches). But it wouldn’t have mattered if DJ Mustard or Steve Albini produced Kintsugi: as with Codes & Keys, Gibbard promises reinvention and continues to play against his strengths without developing new ones.
Gibbard’s desire to write from a less personal standpoint is understandable, considering the widespread misunderstanding that any song in the first-person has to be autobiographical—his private life is a matter of public record these days, and surely he’s grown tired of having to clarify that wasn’t him eating Thanksgiving dinner in a suburban Denver Catholic church after dad bounced or treating that girl from Silver Lake like complete shit. But even when Gibbard was clearly writing in character, the sketches were personalized, and therein lay the genius of his work—he had an uncanny ability to see things as others might, penning deeply felt and detailed lyrics, willing to risk certain sentiments and awkward phrasings to reward the listener with a richer, more complex and relatable experience. They were someone’s stories. This is why Death Cab for Cutie played the KeyArena in Seattle and not, say, Matt Pond PA or Rogue Wave or any of their other peers from the "O.C. indie" era.
But Gibbard's change in approach hasn't coincided with a change of subject; Death Cab for Cutie has not developed a political conscience, nor is Gibbard suddenly experimenting with tone poems. The same relationship breakdowns and travelogues captured on The Photo Album have gone big screen as Gibbard strives for universal, one-feel-fits-all songs meant to be shared but not owned. Take "Little Wanderer", where the narrator (not Gibbard, y’all) is stuck at home and the girl is showing him pictures of her very commonplace vacation spots (Tokyo and Paris) through Messenger. Gibbard knows how to wring pathos out of long-distance relationships; he invented a damn word for it. He can also tease out how technological improvements in communication can leave even more unsaid. And yet, here’s the chorus: "You’re my wanderer, little wanderer/ Off across the sea/ You’re my wanderer, little wanderer/ Won’t you wander back to me?" It’s startling, almost amusing, to hear a hackneyed line like that cutting against the stonefaced sobriety of his delivery and plangent reverbed guitars—every pejorative stereotype of Death Cab becomes true for four minutes.
And yet Gibbard also indulges some explicit nostalgia for older Death Cab—during the climactic kiss in the baggage claim, the song reveals itself as basically fan-fic to the video for "A Movie Script Ending". This spark of recognition happens far too often on Kintsugi, resulting in songs that just sound like an impersonal reading of better ones from the past. Solo acoustic centerpiece "Hold No Guns" wants badly to be Kintsugi’s "I Will Follow You Into the Dark", but the narrator pleads harmlessness rather than "til death do us part and then some" devotion. "Binary Sea" makes a blatant metaphorical callback to the planetary myth-making of "Transatlanticism" and a number of previous weepy closers ("Stable Song", "A Lack of Color"). The lightly chiding tone and basic structure of "Your Heart Is an Empty Room" is reprised for "Everything’s a Ceiling"—little of Kintsugi gives the impression that Gibbard’s motivation to reboot Death Cab is matched by legitimate inspiration.
The newly luxurious production sets Costey up as a convenient scapegoat; "Everything’s a Ceiling" and "Good Help (Is So Hard to Find)" are the newest sounds here, and they recall the pop-funk Silly Putty of the 1975 or the Neighbourhood, both of whom are currently competing with Death Cab for KROQ spins. Otherwise, Kintsug**i sounds not altogether different than Plans, with Costey's chromed-out glossiness subbed in for Walla's fragile glassiness. Costey keeps Gibbard’s voice as high as possible in the mix, just as Walla would have; the sole exception is the distorted cloak on late-album highlight "Ingenue", which is the one track that makes good on Death Cab’s hope to integrate electronic influences like Flying Lotus and Jon Hopkins without just sounding like the Postal Service. In the context of the full album, this just feels like their latest well-meaning, but ultimately empty promise of a cred infusion (see also: Can, Brian Eno).
"Kintsugi" actually refers to a Japanese style of art where broken ceramics are fused together with gold, an apt metaphor but a weirdly honest one. And yet, when Kintsugi gets broken into individual pieces, there are heirlooms worth treasuring. Advance singles "No Room in Frame" and "The Ghosts of Beverly Drive" are where Gibbard remembers to write great Death Cab for Cutie songs the way he knows how—zooming on important specifics that speak on a larger idea, trying to make sense of newly formed concepts as he’s explaining them to someone else, rather than starting with the most broad, market-tested metaphors. Maybe it’s not Gibbard driving down I-5 through Fresno Valley, maybe it’s not him doomed to live with regrets in a city he still harbors resentments towards. It probably is, but at least Gibbard is willing to share some of himself while leaving plenty to the imagination. It also helps that these songs deliver Death Cab’s proprietary chorus melodies, winding, thrilling and sunlit like the Pacific Coast Highway of which Gibbard sings so fondly.
But I get it: Death Cab for Cutie have gone platinum, they’ve hit #1 on Billboard, they’ve been nominated for a Grammy and lost to "My Humps", they’ve played the former NBA arena in the city where they started and now they’ll play the Hollywood Bowl in Gibbard’s new home. If he’s straining to go against his instincts by writing self-explanatory songs like "Good Help (Is So Hard to Find)" and "You’ve Haunted Me All My Life" with equally pat arrangements and melodies, well, he’s got cheap seats to reach now. But after 12 years of hearing him repeat "I need you so much closer" ad infinitum, that line never hurt more than it does now. | 2015-04-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-04-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic | April 2, 2015 | 5.5 | 741abc4c-c8d5-479a-9224-a48f60bd17ad | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The debut album from this New England-based producer blends ambient, techno, and house into a single sumptuous mood, suffused in tape hiss. | The debut album from this New England-based producer blends ambient, techno, and house into a single sumptuous mood, suffused in tape hiss. | juneunit: juneunit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/juneunit-st/ | juneunit | juneunit’s debut album is full of familiar sounds—classic hardware synthesizers, analog drum machines—but there’s something special about this record. It beckons. It has a way of lulling the senses and then prodding you awake. It follows well-trodden paths to previously undiscovered destinations. It’s music that feels alive.
Not much is publicly known about juneunit. On her SoundCloud account, there are tracks in a similar vein stretching back three years; Jacktone, the Detroit label behind the record, mentions various unreleased albums on her hard drives, but this is her first official release, at least under this alias. The lack of context feels appropriate for music that refuses to give up too many of its secrets.
Running nearly an hour and a half—both full sides of a C90 cassette—juneunit is surprisingly long for a debut album, but it earns its runtime. It’s not a record made for cherry-picking. The cryptic titles (“enwm,” “fdsh6”) virtually guarantee that you’ll never remember the name of any given track; they’re meant to be anonymous, to blend in with the whole. There are no jarring left turns, no moments of rupture. It’s a single, sumptuous mood suffused in tape hiss, and the success of each track is the way that it subtly fleshes out the dimensions of this seemingly limitless fogbank.
Even inside this murkily lit world, juneunit finds plenty of variety. There are jacking house rhythms, well-worn breakbeats; there are quivering acid lines and stretches of pure ambience. Sometimes her synths recall early Oneohtrix Point Never; sometimes her dense layers of filter, flanger, and chorus suggest an artist who has logged many hours listening to Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography on a loop.
If the richness of the sound is the record’s immediate sell—anyone fond of the nostalgic warble of a record like Music Has the Right to Children will fall in love here—the true mark of juneunit’s artistry is her subtlety. It takes a while to get your bearings in juneunit’s music, but the longer you listen, the more you become aware of how many different kinds of pulses there are at work, how many different tempos. “fdsh6” sustains a feeling of being perpetually about to kick off, even though it never does. “atmw” is largely static for three minutes, just a skeletal house beat firing against swirling chords, but then halfway through, something imperceptible happens and it comes to life, flush with new layers, new voices.
Perhaps these moments are so satisfying because we recognize ourselves in their ruminative movements, as though they were metaphors for human potential. There’s something invigorating and inspiring about these late bloomers springing to fruition. We tend to think of ambient music as a refuge, a zone of safety, something to fall back upon. But in juneunit’s debut album, it might also be a springboard, a process of transformation—the search for self, set to tape. | 2020-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Jacktone | January 4, 2020 | 8.2 | 741ba586-5f39-4db3-94d9-5a2907d8bde8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ |
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