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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1983 masterpiece whose sumptuous sonics and ecstatic approach to songwriting brought post-punk into a mysterious world beyond words. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a 1983 masterpiece whose sumptuous sonics and ecstatic approach to songwriting brought post-punk into a mysterious world beyond words. | Cocteau Twins: Head Over Heels | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cocteau-twins-head-over-heels/ | Head Over Heels | In the beginning, I didn’t get on at all with Cocteau Twins. When Head Over Heels came out in October 1983, BBC radio DJ John Peel played the entire album on his show. Listening that night in my student room, the wispiness and warbling rubbed me the wrong way.
I decided to give the record another chance after reading a rave review in the NME. Suddenly, I had the key to the secret garden. What had first felt bombastic and hollow became cavernous, like stepping inside a grotto glistening with stalactites. The insubstantiality of the guitar sound, initially so frustrating, became intoxicating, like a heady fragrance. As for that wuthering voice: this was simply the sprite that would inhabit such a wonderland, singing in an alien tongue as impassioned as it was incomprehensible.
Head Over Heels is the perfect title for this record. You’re not meant to cogitate or extract profound literal meaning from these sounds, as was the case with so much post-punk in the immediately prior years. You’re supposed to tumble into its cascading bliss.
“Head over heels” also describes the state of mind of its makers, guitarist Robin Guthrie and singer Elizabeth Fraser. Guthrie has described it as an album of love songs. If so, they are veiled and opaque, hints glinting out now and then in a stray song title (“My Love Paramour”) or rare intelligible lyric (“There’s only a hair’s breadth between us”). Mostly, the feeling comes across non-verbally, as it does almost always with Fraser’s singing, through the swoony elation of her voice.
The romance sparked at a discotheque. Robin Guthrie, budding guitarist and occasional DJ at The Hotel International in Grangemouth, Scotland, was spinning records by proto-goth groups like the Birthday Party, tunes that completely emptied the floor. Except for this one girl with startling hair and jewelry made of chicken bones. Guthrie reasoned that someone who could dance that expressively might be able to sing.
For nearly all their career, Cocteau Twins have actually been triplets: Simon Raymonde took on the role of bassist shortly after the release of Head Over Heels, a role occupied in the early days by Guthrie’s friend Will Heggie. But Heggie had quit by the time it came to record Head Over Heels, so the lovey-dovey couple made the album alone together, which surely contributed to its atmosphere of almost stifling intimacy.
“The Cocteau Twins just happened and the music just happens,” Guthrie informed ZigZag magazine. Maybe this remark was another evasion from a notoriously interview-averse group, but there’s an element of truth. They wrote Head Over Heels, like all of their subsequent records, in the studio, showing up with nothing: no tunes, no titles, no premeditated sonic intentions beyond trying to make an album.
As much as he was a wannabe guitar hero, Guthrie was a wannabe producer: a fan of Phil Spector and a lover of reverb and effects pedals, which he deployed to dissolve the standard structure of guitar playing, replacing riffs with swirls and half-smothering his chord progressions in canopies of iridescent fog. The Spangle Maker, the title of the 1984 EP that followed Head Over Heels, could be a Fraser term of endearment for Guthrie, conveying the way he drapes his lover’s voice in swathes of glittering fabric. In practice, it worked the other way around: Cocteaus tracks were always built first, then Fraser would listen and thread a vocal melody through the lustrous construction.
For many fans, “In Our Angelhood” is Head Over Heels’ stand-out track. The pummeling speed and piercing vocals are the closest the Cocteaus get to punk, but in line with the title image, the overall feeling is celestial: imagine a church spire that suddenly blasts off into space like a rocket. Titles like “Glass Candle Grenades” and “In the Gold Dust Rush” outdo any reviewer’s descriptive efforts, distilling the crystal-shard shimmer of the first and the powdery sparkle of the latter. On the climactic finale “Musette and Drums,” Fraser’s shuddering vocals conjure unendurable ecstasy and Guthrie’s guitar swoops in fiery arcs like a kamikaze dragon.
Cocteau Twins’ immediate post-punk precursors were groups like Wire, the Associates, and especially Siouxsie and the Banshees, whose instrumental arrangements—with bassists often taking a melodic role, freeing guitarists to experiment with atmosphere and timbre—pushed beyond rock music’s aesthetic conventions. The Cocteau Twins sound is one step further out, in part because there’s no drummer. Once set on its course, the drum machine stays steady, maintaining its solemn procession or midtempo glide. Rather than locking with the beats to form a conventional rhythm section, the bass is like a brocade stitched along the song’s hem, decorative and harmonic rather than propulsive and bolstering. Piano and synth sometimes trickle in to fill out the sound—and on “Five Ten Fiftyfold,” an ostensibly un-Cocteaus-like saxophone can be heard buried beneath gauzy layers—but overall the guitarist and the singer dominate.
Fraser clinches this sound’s out-of-the-blue originality. Although she has Siouxsie’s face tattooed on her arm, there isn’t much vocal resemblance: the Goth goddess issued her commandments with glacial clarity, whereas Fraser’s singing is all oozy diffusion, more like a sculpted sigh than an attempt to communicate verbally. Now and then you’ll hear a trace of Chrissie Hynde’s tremolo quiver or Kate Bush’s rhapsodic flutter, but for the most part, Fraser’s style is a complete self-invention. The title of “Sugar Hiccup,” the album’s single, could almost be a description of Fraser’s singing: the action of her throat and lips as she siphons sweetness into the air. Like so much Cocteau Twins imagery, “sugar hiccup” feels obliquely sexual and utterly innocent at once, flashing back to a time when children held their breath and counted to 20. Hiccups lie on the pleasure-pain threshold, the same place where Fraser’s voice lives: rapture as rupture.
That sense of a singer abandoning themselves to overwhelming sensation, along with Guthrie’s sumptuous textures, which seem to caress the listener’s skin, may be the reason Head Over Heels soon established itself as a slow-jams staple for the clad-in-black set. In a 1986 interview, Fraser talked primly about the videos of fan-made erotica they got sent: “People giving it all this business, letting it all hang out… Every time it’s got chests in it. It’s got boobs and bums all over the place!”
Reams of poetry started coming through the mail, too—strange, given that Fraser rarely emitted a decipherable line. But while her vocalizing sometimes sounds like gibberish, Cocteau Twins songs always feature lyrics. Where other songwriters might start by putting feelings into words and then setting them to a tune, Fraser assembled lyrics intuitively, almost randomly, and imbued them with emotion through the act of singing. “The words don’t have any meaning at all, until they’re sung,” Fraser told a radio interviewer in 1994. She would sift through old books and dictionaries (sometimes in foreign languages), filling scrapbooks with exquisite-sounding or enigmatically arcane words for later use. They seem to stick together through mouthfeel more than semantic content, melting into each other and curling around Fraser’s melodies. After a long period of hyper-articulation in post-punk—the schematic critiques of Gang of Four and Scritti Politti, the prolix punmanship of Elvis Costello and ABC’s Martin Fry—what relief, what deliverance, it was in 1983 to hear a voice that dissolved definition: Singing that overflowed with a sensation of significance rather than clear-cut meaning.
Cocteau Twins were at a loss for words in interviews too, driving journalists to despair with their recalcitrance. Yet it seems perfectly possible that Fraser and Guthrie really didn’t know where their music came from. They seemed protective of the mystery, actively avoiding self-examination. And why on Earth should people who are good at making music also have an aptitude for talking about it?
Back in the 1980s, some criticized Cocteau Twins and their ilk as an airy-fairy flight from social-political urgencies. But they felt no obligation to register the existence of the real world in their music. Although they once used to rehearse in a Communist Party office, their “way out” was reverie, not revolution. As instinctive aesthetes, Fraser and Guthrie simply craved more than their surroundings could give. In one early interview, Fraser imagines her fate should she never have met Guthrie: probably working in a meat-processing plant owned by fast food chain Chunky Chicken. “Our music has always been a reflection of our desperate desire to get as much distance from where we came from as possible,” said Guthrie on a separate occasion.
On Head Over Heels, the couple created a dream world unto itself. From then on, with slight variations and incremental advances in production polish, Cocteau Twins sustained that alternative to reality across a series of mostly wondrous albums and EPs. Fans disagree over what stands as their peak. Some say 1984’s Treasure; many more favor Heaven or Las Vegas, from 1990. Most likely, these preferences are closely linked to which album you heard first.
For me, it’s always been and always will be Head Over Heels. Partly because it was my own initiation, the melting of initial resistance into infatuation. But mainly because it’s the Cocteau Twins album that perfectly balances eeriness and enchantment. Where the later records get ever more milk-and-kisses idyllic, Head Over Heels still has one pointy, buckled, black-leather foot in goth. That doesn’t mean the album sounds scary or forbidding. But it does have a feeling of mystery, an aura of secrets and ceremonies, a private language overheard and understood. | 2024-01-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-21T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | January 21, 2024 | 9.6 | 741d9e73-c196-4152-aa2b-4e40d9128f11 | Simon Reynolds | https://pitchfork.com/staff/simon-reynolds/ | |
Inspired by an expedition into Ecuador’s ancient caves, the vaunted techno producer presents an immersive ambient album designed to accompany guided trips. | Inspired by an expedition into Ecuador’s ancient caves, the vaunted techno producer presents an immersive ambient album designed to accompany guided trips. | Jon Hopkins: Music for Psychedelic Therapy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jon-hopkins-music-for-psychedelic-therapy/ | Music for Psychedelic Therapy | What music should soundtrack the psychedelic revolution? That’s one of many meta-inquiries bewildering neuroscientists as they work to make psychedelic-assisted therapy more widely available—and legal. The music, they’ve discovered, really matters, since it not only supports the trip but can actually shape it, steering the patient toward new mental frontiers. And yet, most clinical researchers have still been using the same choppy playlists of Brahms, Bach, and the Beatles. They wanted something better—something less familiar, more bespoke—and Jon Hopkins was determined to fill the void.
In 2018, the British electronic producer set off on a mission to conceptualize a new genre of music specifically engineered to enhance guided trips. That, he has said, is how he wound up in a cave in the Amazon rainforest, marveling at nature and thinking about synths. The field recordings from that expedition form the basis of Music for Psychedelic Therapy, his immersive soundtrack to consciousness exploration that’s timed to the length of a ketamine high. A glacial, continuous ambient piece that draws on the epic beauty of nature, it’s a thoughtful blueprint for what the future of this field might sound like: spacious, delicate, comforting, a pastel mural of sound.
The album’s function and utility are key. It’s one thing to make art inspired by altered states; Hopkins’ mountainous 2018 album Singularity is a tribute to spiritual odysseys and vision quests. It’s another to compose music to accompany such journeys, especially those conducted in supervised clinical settings where many patients are suffering from depression, addiction, or PTSD. What music will make patients feel safe while also nudging them out of their comfort zones? Should the tape exist as background music or serve as a spiritual guide?
Hopkins’ strategy is to avoid too many specifics, forgoing beats and melodies for wide open space. This vastness may verge on tedious for more sober listeners who find themselves floating in its gossamer abyss, but it gives the record an important, practical flexibility. Rather than reflect his own idea of consciousness, he constructs an expansive, pink-hued canvas upon which we can project our own. You get the impression that Hopkins is aiming to set an example, and viewing the record as a touchstone for future works. Even the modernist, academic title feels as though it’s designed to be source material, cited decades down the line.
The album’s only grounding elements are the transportive sounds of nature—the rush of water, distant bird calls, the airy echo of the cave floor—which evoke an encompassing, majestic calm. “I wanted to move the consciousness of the listener from inside to outside,” Hopkins told The New York Times, adding that the record feels more like a place than a piece of music. Remarkably, it often feels like both. When wind blows in with surround-sound precision and seems to pass right over you, you’re there. When the gentle tones and textures bounce along the background like sunlight filtering through the trees, you’re there.
In some ways, Hopkins is uniquely qualified to create such a portal. A longtime classical pianist and commercial pop producer, he’s well attuned to music’s emotional levers; “Love Flows Over Us in Prismatic Waves” is a particularly gorgeous, gradient track that feels hopeful and heartbroken all at once. Similarly, his career as a techno producer and touring DJ has made him a master at suspense and release, as evidenced on “Deep in the Glowing Heart,” the project’s most intense and confrontational moment. Celestial summits like “Ascending, Dawn Sky” and “Arriving,” each twinkling in their own uplifting splendor, feel like products of the years he spent studying transcendental meditation and controlled breathing.
There is a case to be made for psychotherapy music that’s slightly more varied and structured. Rhythms can be comforting, giving you something to latch onto, and they can draw you further into a trance state. Indigenous groups have long used drumming and chanting to soundtrack shamanic ceremonies, for example, and more contemporary playlists tend to mirror a trip’s emotional form: onset, ascent, peak, recovery. For some, Hopkins’ approach will feel overly reserved, with too-subtle variations on the same shimmering theme. Is there such a thing as too much caution? Should this music be more imposing? And what about psilocybin trips that span eight or 10 hours? There are no right or wrong answers, of course, but the sheer variety of possible preferences is an argument against a one-size-fits-all approach.
Surprisingly enough, the album’s highlight comes in “Sit Around the Fire,” which was surely Hopkins’ riskiest move. The deeply moving piano-synth track features the late spiritual leader Ram Dass speaking to a congregation in 1975. After Dass died in 2019, his foundation sought to put some of his musings to music and went digging through their archives for something “universal and uplifting.” The final clip is an affectionate, clear-eyed outpouring of love that wraps its arms around you and squeezes. “You don’t need loneliness, you couldn’t possibly be alone,” Dass says, with a matter-of-factness that feels like truth. “You don’t need doubt because you already know.”
As the author of the counterculture bible Be Here Now, Dass is a new age celebrity—he’s on the magnets by the register at bead shops or quoted in your Burner friend’s Instagram bio. Sampling him could have felt schmaltzy, a cheap way of glitzing up the record to make it more marketable. But Hopkins’ tender, respectful treatment basks in simplicity—a well-placed piano chord, a choir-like synth—lending the song a refined elegance that honors the weight of these profound, emotional experiences. When the final hums fade and tape crackles lift, you get a glimpse at the wide-eyed resolution felt when the chemical loosens its grip.
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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. | 2021-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Domino | November 18, 2021 | 7.4 | 741e4335-a6d1-4812-8dcc-7714e2239984 | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
Extending Richmond’s legacy of heavy weirdness, these upstarts flood hardcore with metal and noise references—all charged by a sense of revolutionary urgency. | Extending Richmond’s legacy of heavy weirdness, these upstarts flood hardcore with metal and noise references—all charged by a sense of revolutionary urgency. | Candy: Good to Feel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/candy-good-to-feel/ | Good to Feel | Richmond has long held the hard-earned reputation as one of the East Coast’s premier extreme music hotbeds. The capital city’s bands regularly steamroll their competition, even making the heavy musicians of a metropolis like New York City look over their shoulders each time another crew of youngbloods comes charging from the South. We saw it with Southern riff-rock via Alabama Thunderpussy. We saw it with the thrash of Municipal Waste and Gwar. We’ve seen it in extreme metal with Inter Arma and Occultist. And, once again, we see it with punk—this time, with the hardcore band Candy.
Candy collect former and current members of several RVA contemporaries. The upstarts came crashing into view last year with an aggressive self-titled demo that foretold their stylistic elasticity. And now, on their debut LP, Good to Feel, Candy tap a deep knowledge of hardcore’s past while staking a claim on the genre’s future. Good to Feel marries the baroque, shred-happy ecstasy of Japan’s Burning Spirits school of hardcore with New York’s furrowed-brow brand of pummeling and D-beat mania. They have a healthy appreciation for hardcore’s inveterate genre-smashers, Integrity. This is a primal scream from the most maladjusted branch of the punk family tree, flirting with umpteen other genres but refusing to commit to anything except pure upheaval.
The title track immediately charges ahead, with bare-knuckle swagger ripped straight off a rehearsal demo from a Japanese hardcore band like Death Side. Candy don’t let up until the brief record ends. Good to Feel is structured so as to maximize impact, with varying song lengths and sonic deviations staving off listener fatigue, the most common hardcore pitfall. Candy keep it moving, morphing, and confronting. The caveman stomp of “Lust for Destruction” and hyper-distorted two-step of “Systematic Death” bleed into a freewheeling guitar solo. “Panic Is On” may as well have come crawling out of a Lower East Side sewer in 1985, down to the anti-authoritarian message: “Polluted minds, illusion of threats/Exploiting the masses until death.” “Burning Water” pits malevolent grind against unhinged vocals, while groovy 1990s throwback “Distorted Dreams” indulges murky, headbang-ready riffs, dragging the listener’s neck toward hell.
Candy’s spiritual connection with heavy metal leaves ghostly fingerprints all over Good to Feel. The bruising “Human Target” comes with screaming speed-metal riffs, anchored by a grimy Hellhammer impression that’s complete with a spot-on Tom G. Warrior grunt. The song skewers ongoing police brutality, singling out killer cops—“Cleansing civilians, starting from scratch/Infliction of evil on the masses/Crucify, march in line/Won’t hesitate until they die.” It’s a soundtrack for burning down the police state, which Zak Quiram repeatedly rails against. That’s why this record matters—a lyrical missile, it’s loaded with the kind of revolutionary trappings that make you want to hit the streets running.
At an efficient 17 minutes, Good to Feel may make you reach for the ‘Play’ button over and over. And repeated listens do reveal clever moments and interesting stylistic choices, like the murderous homage to Entombed’s HM2-powered death crunch that anchors “Human Target.” To that end, Candy close with “Bigger Than Yours,” a surreal tapestry of droning shoegaze and punch-drunk guitar pop that fades into a bubbling wash of harsh noise. The move may seem surprising if Candy hadn’t spent the proceeding quarter-hour establishing how little regard they have for genre conventions and orthodoxy of any sort. | 2018-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Triple B | October 25, 2018 | 7.5 | 742681d5-2c45-423d-a5dd-fd1edc3dcc4b | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
Experimental electronic musicians including Loraine James, Rupert Clervaux, and Oliver Coates tackle the spooky, microtonal source material of last year’s Music for Detuned Pianos. | Experimental electronic musicians including Loraine James, Rupert Clervaux, and Oliver Coates tackle the spooky, microtonal source material of last year’s Music for Detuned Pianos. | Max de Wardener: Detuned Reworks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/max-de-wardener-detuned-reworks/ | Detuned Reworks | Max de Wardener’s Music for Detuned Pianos is such an exquisitely singular album that reworking it feels like deconstructing ice cream: largely unnecessary, potentially destructive, and unlikely to yield results as perfectly palatable as the original product. And yet, six short months after the release of Detuned Pianos, on which composer de Wardener used unorthodox tunings to create deliciously spooky acoustic vignettes, we have Detuned Reworks, featuring remixes by six UK producers drawn from the leftfield club scene and experimental electronic music. The results are often intriguing, sometimes exasperating, and occasionally revelatory.
Perhaps the biggest discovery to be made on Detuned Reworks is how extraordinarily potent the original album’s piano parts are when untethered from their mother album. Composed by de Wardener and performed by pianist Kit Downes, their otherworldly melodies are the musical equivalent of truffle oil: powerful sensory agents to be splashed across the mix, rather than employed in great quantities.
London experimental-music whirlwind Loraine James wields piano notes like weapons in her predatory remix of “Foxtrot,” slashing snatches of waspish playing across irregular electronic beats like swords through grapefruit, while experimental polymath Rupert Clervaux sets two lines from “Deranged Landscape” against each other in rickety patterns, then feeds off the results, adding sparse but effective drums to the uncanny mix. Composer and cellist Oliver Coates’ “Blue Slime Mix” of “Blueshift,” meanwhile, takes a dribble of the original’s nautical piano wobble and uses it as a base for an excruciatingly nervy acoustic drone, which builds like the headache-inducing tension of a really bad day at the office.
It’s not so much that these reworks are improvements on de Wardener’s original songs; rather, the producers pull de Wardener’s work into their own orbits. Clervaux nudges “Deranged Landscape” from its camp on the borders of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II toward the suggestion of a basement jazz club, while Call Super masterfully manipulates cinematic album opener “The Sky Has a Film” into a syrupy, house-indebted number that deserves to be heard on expensive speakers at the start of an adventurous night out.
The reworks that don’t succeed are those where the producer fails to stamp an identity onto the original work, leaving it in a ponderous halfway house. Coby Sey is a promising artist whose warped vision of modern music would seem to fit with Detuned Pianos’ witchy universe. But his remix of “Bismuth Dream” is a little too blandly beautiful, a betrayal of the original’s unsettling gloom rather than a transformation of it. Manchester producer Herron comes across as if intimidated by the source material, using echoing snatches of piano and an awkward electronic beat that don’t even seem on talking terms, let alone in collaboration.
If there is a whiff of regret to this generally fascinating album, it’s that de Wardener didn’t push the boat farther out, both stylistically and geographically, in his choice of remixers. It would be fascinating to see what someone like 100 gecs or Angolan producer Nazar, for example, might do with Detuned Pianos’ slippery source material. As it stands, though, Detuned Reworks is an avant cheerleader for Music for Detuned Pianos’ considerable charms, sending you back to the original album with a hungry ear and newly sharpened mind.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Village Green | August 6, 2020 | 6.9 | 742d4b8a-ed7e-4f67-ac5c-fcbeb841032a | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Oakland rapper the Jacka's new album suggests he should be recognized as one of the last decade's strongest writers—both within and outside of hip-hop. He makes accessible music that could easily appeal to a wide audience, but What Happened to the World will most readily reach those who still value hip-hop as an art form of evocative lyricism. | Oakland rapper the Jacka's new album suggests he should be recognized as one of the last decade's strongest writers—both within and outside of hip-hop. He makes accessible music that could easily appeal to a wide audience, but What Happened to the World will most readily reach those who still value hip-hop as an art form of evocative lyricism. | The Jacka: What Happened to the World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20045-what-happened-to-the-world/ | What Happened to the World | In a recent interview with NPR, Chris Rock suggested that the real "rapper's rappers"—much like the "comedian's comedians"—are, at some level, dysfunctional—and when it comes to ranking his favorites, he doesn't like to "reward dysfunction." Rakim was Rock's example ("He's dysfunctional 'cause he couldn't get into the studio—he had a chance to make a record with Dr. Dre and he quit. Somewhere in his mind, he would love to have 30 hits"). There's a germ of an idea here that feels correct: oftentimes the artists who most shape the medium aren't necessarily meant to be stars. But the notion that an artist who fails to cross over was never meant to be truly successful begs the question, the flipside of a famous artist rationalizing their success after the fact. To read hip-hop's history in this way ignores the massive structural changes that have worked to obscure the genre's creative spine. The rapper's rappers, the genre's true innovators, are as often victims of the market's arbitrary whims as they are their own flaws.
The Jacka came out of one of hip-hop's most creatively vibrant regional scenes. One-fifth of the respected Pittsburgh, Calif. Mob Figaz crew, the group arose in the wake of Mac Dre's post-penal second wind, and were prepared to sign to his Thizz Entertainment label when the rapper was murdered in Kansas City in 2004. The Bay's hyphy movement followed, as national attention focused on the dry, manic production style of producers like Rick Rock, and the culture that surrounded it: the drugs and the dreads, ghostriding the whip and thizz faces. While national attention focused on hyphy's production novelty, street rap fans in a network of Bay-affiliated cities from the Pacific Northwest to Kansas City became obsessed with Jacka's potent skill with the pen—particularly with the release of 2005's classic The Jack Artist. The arc of his career—the moment when every verse he dropped felt like a vital piece of the puzzle—lasted about four or five years. But this year's What Happened to the World is his best record since 2009's Tear Gas, and suggests that whatever his potential for national stardom, the Jacka should be recognized as one of the last decade's strongest writers—both within and outside of hip-hop.
What Happened to the World is a leisurely-paced record, moving at the speed of syrup. (The one exception, the uptempo "MOB 4 Life", is perhaps the record's only misfire). The production is of-a-piece and by and large Jacka still has a gift for a good chorus melody, but the heart of the album is in its star's lyrical performance. Jacka is a minimalist as a writer, an artist for whom saying a little implies a lot. Although those looking for club records or pop hits in the real-world sense might look elsewhere, Jacka still has an open, inclusive pop ear—this is accessible music which could easily appeal to a wide audience. Nonetheless, the album will most readily reach those who still value hip-hop as an art form of evocative lyricism. One of Jacka's strengths is a gift for potent and original imagery, as on "2 Dungeons Deep": "Got the Wesson poppin' like meat in the pot fryin'/ Better have respect like the vet when he feed lions." Even at his most brutal, he sidesteps cliché ("When the trigger squeeze we only leave bones, like a Lynx home," "This Canon not for pictures but it still will make your center fold") in the service of triggering powerfully rendered ideas.
For those just discovering the Jacka's work, it helps in some ways to think of him as the West Coast's answer to mixtape legend Max B: born within a year of each other, the two share similar influences (Slick Rick's melodic nonchalance seems an obvious common touchstone), and their sing-song choruses helped both become regional stars just as the old super-producer system began to break down. Their fundamental approach was both hip-hop and pop, and they reimagined New York's commercial golden era—roughly 1998-2003—for a new time or place. Where Max's style had the kind of implicit politics of music from the have-nots, Jack was more explicitly informed by both his identity as a Muslim and a tradition of the left coast's political radicals, particularly rappers like Ice Cube, Kam, and Paris. At the same time, there can be no question that his identity was first and foremost as a gangster rap artist, with all of its morally compromised implications. But it's what makes his approach so uniquely effective.
The bulk of Jacka's career feels like an attempt to reconcile principle and morality with a lifestyle that has made such stances untenable—on third song "See It Thru" (as throughout the record) he brings the contradictions together directly: "Hard times, trying to be cool, I made the bed I slept.../ Ill whip come through the night, though I'm a piece of shit." Rather than running from hip-hop's love of the fast life, of drugs, of materialism, he embraces their attraction. Criticisms of hip-hop's glorification of drugs and violence ignore that those things often glorify themselves; they are self-evidently appealing. One could argue Jack tries to have his cake and eat it too, but his fundamental realism one-ups hip-hop's typical righteous/ignorant dichotomy. "On Methazine", a record about promethazine addiction, manages to make the drug feel like a panacea for all that aches, physically and spiritually, but ends with these words: "Tell myself I'll put away the cup when the summer's gone/ Shit ridiculous, finna be Christmas and we still ain't done," spiraling into the sample's numb warmth, before shifting to the chorus: "Fuck with me, let's talk some more, 'cause I know everything/ But it's hard to notice when I'm leaned on Methazine."
Through the loose sketches of his sparse verses, the album is more than an attempt to reconcile good and evil within; it also refuses to let the outside world off the hook. In attacking his own moral failings, it gives strength to his assault on a wider system. ("Weed Farmer" is perhaps the closest a pro-pot record has come to "Nature of the Threat" in rap history.) Husalah's final verse to close the record has a dark poetic charge: "False hope tossed the rope around them tree limbs/ Horrific strange fruit hang from loops in deep Southern winds." But the album is more than its political content, too: it's a personal statement of vitality from an artist now in his 30s, who may be removed from the travails of his youth but still wrestles with their consequences. "We hit the club, takin' pictures bitches stalkin the kid/ I had the time of my life, I'll never be young again/ But now I only think money 'cuz I'm finally a man." | 2014-12-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-12-10T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | The Artist | December 10, 2014 | 8 | 742e141c-b053-493f-8439-d108e0f4f6d7 | David Drake | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/ | null |
The Pro Era rapper finds the middle of the road on his latest project, chasing hot sounds in lieu of finding his own. | The Pro Era rapper finds the middle of the road on his latest project, chasing hot sounds in lieu of finding his own. | Kirk Knight: IIWII (It Is What It Is) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kirk-knight-iiwii-it-is-what-it-is/ | IIWII (It Is What It Is) | As a rapper and producer, Kirk Knight is serviceable at best. He’s a Swiss Army knife, able to bend his vanilla rap style to any production that supports him. His 2015 debut, Late Night Special was a largely tame affair, side-stepping around the thick ’90s air that continuously threatens to engulf Pro Era’s existence. Three years, a collaboration album, (Nyck @ Knight) and an instrumental project (Black Noise) later, IIWIIarrives limply. The rhymes are cool, the beats are OK, and, taken together, it’s mostly tolerable. Truly, it is what it is.
There’s no electric presence to counterbalance the vanilla spirit of his music. Kirk firmly abides by the unspoken rap subgenre rules, refusing to deviate from well-worn pathways to forge interesting trails of his own. IIWII may be only 12 tracks but it feels like it’s dragging its feet to get to the end. His stabs at a hodgepodge of popular styles are just grasping at straws. The album can try and emulate what’s hot to win over fans of all types, but, at the end of the day, the lack of unique options makes it more boring than captivating.
IIWII, very badly, wants to be larger-than-life. “M.O.,” an inspirational, shit-talking diatribe, kicks things off with gusto. It careens along with a decent amount of pep, but its delivery of hashtag #bars are eye-rolling. The inspirational talk works when it curses you out with intense, spit-fire locution, but stingers like “Fly on the wall, I’ve been buggin’ out” will send fresh waves of Big Sean-level cringe trickling down the shoulders.
To be fair, knocking Kirk for his lack of explosive lyricism would be in bad faith. He revealed to UPROXX that his songwriting approach has evolved from just studying the thesaurus, with him focusing more on making relatable music as opposed to the nostalgic flow-heavy rap of his Pro Era cohorts. But there are plenty of artists that easily inject freshness into simplistic rhymes—hell, J. Cole rapped about folding clothes and found a way to make one of life’s most boring tasks sound tolerable.
Kirk’s problem isn’t the intelligence behind the bars or the flows; it’s the energy that drives the train. He chugs on methodically without any surprise, risk, or invention behind it. Occasionally, he shakes things up with melodies like on “Leverage” and “Downtime” where he supports the chorus with smooth vocals for just long enough to marinate the songs without simmering away some of their flavors. But elsewhere, like on “Full Metal Jacket,” the lack of creativity makes it feel like he’s pulling us through the mud. Kirk Knight’s heart is right there underneath his obsession with traditionalism. But chasing every hot sound doesn’t make up for the fact that he doesn’t have one of his own. | 2018-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Pro Era / RED Music Solutions | December 4, 2018 | 5.7 | 74312ca9-ed42-4306-a256-8b402edc6a0e | Trey Alston | https://pitchfork.com/staff/trey-alston/ | |
Though not her best work, Big Trouble Little Jupiter showcases why Kodie Shane is one of rap’s most promising prospects: she’s resourceful and she’s fearless. | Though not her best work, Big Trouble Little Jupiter showcases why Kodie Shane is one of rap’s most promising prospects: she’s resourceful and she’s fearless. | Kodie Shane: Big Trouble Little Jupiter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22816-big-trouble-little-jupiter/ | Big Trouble Little Jupiter | Atlanta artist (by way of Chicago) Kodie Shane is a young jack-of-all-trades, the Swiss army knife of Lil Yachty’s Sailing Team. She’s already mastered a few of them: rapper-singer alchemist, hook-making savant, bittersweet ballad scribe, intergenerational R&B translator, and (much like Yachty himself) effortless transmitter of communicable joy. She’s at her best when she fills rap cadences with R&B melodies and when her verses blend into her hooks, sometimes because the verses themselves are hooks, too. After releasing her breakout EP, Zero Gravity, in December, which showcased all of her skills in a sampler, she has quickly delivered a new 10-track mixtape called Big Trouble Little Jupiter. The tape ventures even further beyond genre limits—moving erratically from belligerent pop trap to vintage new jack swing. What it lacks in flow and consistency, it makes up for with big transitions and sheer ambition.
Big Trouble Little Jupiter, billed to be “starring” Kodie Shane, is at least loosely related to the 1986 Kurt Russell film Big Trouble in Little China. Thematically, the tape is mostly about rescuing a lover from a boring boyfriend only to lure her into a short-term, noncommittal relationship while-jet setting across the globe. (Not exactly the plot of the film, but close.) Much of Kodie Shane’s strength lies in her ability to generate earworms out of thin air, and that’s still in play on Big Trouble Little Jupiter, especially on cuts like “Be With or Without.” But some song drag, or never get going: Woozy opener “2 Minute” is subdued and nearly sedated. The boxy confines of the slow-trotting, En Vogue-featuring “Your Side” minimizes open space, forcing Shane to maneuver through pockets with more traditional flows. The trap screecher “Like a Rockstar” forces her to over-exert her voice. When she presses too hard, the difference is palpable.
The best songs on Big Trouble Little Jupiter are as soothing and infectious as her strongest work. Songs pivot dramatically from stunt anthems to emotional pleas to personal profiles. On “Twins,” she declares herself a hustler and a pimp in the lineage of Jeezy, Jay Z, and Meek Mill. Over bunched synth strings on “Na Na Naa,” she reassesses her surroundings: “These niggas is my sons, but I ain’t raise ‘em like this/And these hoes they not the one, but they swear that they is.” Her writing is as sharp as ever, producing subtle double entendres like “They all want my swag but they just can’t grasp it” along with scathing reads: “So keep it real with me/And you don’t have me now cause you can’t deal me/I know your man don’t know you here, you know I know you babe.” It’s in these moments, where she examines those around her, that she invites listeners to know her.
Production-wise, she continues to build a rapport with longtime collaborators Matty P and D.Clax here. They have credits on every song on Big Trouble Little Jupiter, and while the songs sometimes seem to come from different decades, Shane almost always pairs them with the appropriate melody and rhythm, finding a precise balance, ripping through some and drifting through others. As they continue to work together, they’re getting a feel for what works through trial and error, scanning the entire hip-hop/R&B spectrum in the process. Though not her best work, Big Trouble Little Jupiter showcases why Kodie Shane is one of rap’s most promising prospects: she’s resourceful and she’s fearless. | 2017-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 25, 2017 | 7.1 | 74329837-fdbe-40b9-a971-fb74f247d7af | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Sinatra’s influence can be heard everywhere from Angel Olsen to Lana Del Rey. This new compilation offers one of the only overarching retrospectives of a singular career. | Sinatra’s influence can be heard everywhere from Angel Olsen to Lana Del Rey. This new compilation offers one of the only overarching retrospectives of a singular career. | Nancy Sinatra: Start Walkin’ 1965-1976 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nancy-sinatra-start-walkin-1965-1976/ | Start Walkin’ 1965-1976 | Nancy Sinatra was both blessed and burdened with that last name. When she launched a pop career in the early 1960s, the Sinatra name immediately distinguished her from so many other promising young singers, and it meant she had a trusted adviser who could provide wise counsel (such as always own your masters). On the other hand, she was always Frank’s daughter in the public eye, always Nancy with the laughing face. She covered his songs, signed with his label (Reprise Records), and even made movies for his production company. It was her father who set up a meeting between her and Lee Hazlewood, who until then was best known for working with guitarist Duane Eddy in the 1950s. Both men have long been viewed as motivating figures in her career, barely behind the scenes, and it appears to be an ongoing struggle: “I can’t seem to get out of this trap,” she told The Believer in 2014. “I’m either Frank’s daughter or the person who sang with Lee Hazlewood. That’s OK; I don’t begrudge the men in my life. They helped me tremendously.”
In many ways, her career and legacy have been defined by getting out of the shadows of these famous men and fighting to get her proper due as an artist. Sinatra has enjoyed few major reissues. There have been many greatest-hits collections, but few that do more than scratch the surface or offer any kind of broad overarching vision. In fact, the most substantial retrospective, 2011’s Cherry Smiles: The Rare Singles, was released on her own Boots label. That paucity of compilations makes Start Walkin’ a necessary addition to her catalog and immediately the best place for a newcomer to jump into her catalog. While most compilations cover a relatively brief period in the late 1960s when she was enjoying a steady stream of hits and even filming television specials, this one extends that range well into the 1970s, concluding with her retirement in 1976. These 23 tracks cover a lot of ground musically and critically, tracing her massive hits in the mid 1960s and following her as she weathers professional upheavals and changing pop trends.
Start Walkin’ does not, however, include Sinatra’s very first singles, when she was a teenager trying to find her voice. She calls it her “Nancy Nice Lady” period, when she worked with Annette Funicello’s producer and presented a squeaky-clean image. Even Sinatra doesn’t think very highly of those songs, and Start Walkin’ locates her first sessions with Hazlewood in 1965 as the true start of her career. But that older material provides an interesting point against which to measure her transformation: She dyed her hair blonde, performed on TV in go-go boots and miniskirts straight from Mary Quant’s store in London. Always aware of the importance of visuals (her 1961 single “Cufflinks and a Tie Clip” was one of the first seven-inch singles packaged in a full-color sleeve), she projected power and sophistication from the stage and from the TV screen, along with a sexual confidence and emotional maturity that made her a stand-in for an entirely new generation of American women in the mid-’60s. Those boots suggested a whole army behind her.
Those qualities extended to the music and then some. Hazlewood goaded her in a more sexual direction, often describing what he wanted in vulgar terms (in a 1968 interview with Cosmopolitan, Sinatra says he asked her to sing “like a 13- or 14-year-old girl who goes out with 40-year-old men”). But Sinatra’s songs never sound vulgar. Like the first generation of rock’n’rollers a decade earlier, Sinatra has a blast with innuendo rather than stating her desires outright. She teases the possibilities in her infamous cover of Cher’s “Bang Bang,” as though she knows that you know what she’s really singing about. That song was neither a single nor a hit at the time, but half a century later, it’s one of Sinatra’s most popular and enduring tunes largely because there are so many different layers in her performance: She foregrounds the poignancy in the lyrics—the sting of betrayal, the weight of regret—to match Billy Strange’s noir guitar licks. Similarly, she revels in the breezy ambiguity of “Sugar Town,” which may or may not be about turning on and tuning out. “I’m gonna lay right down here in the grass, and pretty soon all my troubles will pass,” she sings, her voice skipping along to the melody, but the song is less about the wink and more about the calm she finds looking up at the sky.
As Start Walkin’ progresses through her career, the songs grow more florid and more idiosyncratic, incorporating folk rock, country, chamber pop, and a kind of theatrical pastoral psychedelia. Until he abruptly moved to Sweden (allegedly without telling Sinatra) and later after he’d returned to the States, Hazlewood served as her primary songwriter, and this compilation suggests that it was her versatility that allowed him to embrace his own mannerisms as a lyricist, producer, and pop conceptualist. The jump cuts on “Some Velvet Morning” are fairly well-known, but can still knock a listener off balance, while “Arkansas Coal (Suite)” is more cinematic and certainly more ambitious, as Sinatra sings in the voice of a woman whose life is made and then broken by the coal mines. More generally, her voice seems to invite oddball arrangement ideas, such as the backwards guitar solo on “Sand” or the solo kickdrum on “Lightning’s Girl,” which rumbles like an idling motorcycle. It’s fun listening to her navigate these unexpected flourishes, as though she is responding to the music and the music to her.
One of the best moments on Start Walkin’—and certainly one I’ve returned to repeatedly—is a small, tossed-off line on “Friday’s Child.” The song, a hit in 1967, is about an individual abandoned by society, an outcast born with no blessings, only burdens. It seems to suggest some allegory, but Hazlewood’s lyrics can be vague. Still, Sinatra invests the song with the weight of experience and empathy, culminating in the line, “Friday’s child… whom they’ll forget to bury!” She spits the line, almost choking on her disgust. It’s the rare moment when Sinatra’s composure threatens to crack. But it never does, at least not on Start Walkin’, not even when she bursts into sobs at the end of her melodramatic reading of Dolly Parton’s “Down from Dover.”
It’s unfortunate that this retrospective concludes with “(L’été Indien) Indian Summer,” from 1976. Hazlewood takes lead, reciting in his stentorian baritone verses about an old lover and a beach and the moon, and Sinatra is reduced to singing wordlessly in the background—window dressing for his reminiscence. True, this was her final single before she retired to raise her daughters, but Start Walkin’ plays loose enough with the tracklist chronology. It has the perhaps unintended effect of leaving her career open-ended, as though she still hasn’t escaped the shadow of the men in her life. Everything up to that point proves otherwise.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Light in the Attic | February 8, 2021 | 8.1 | 74391ac9-1e2c-446b-8c86-b1f6ec959e8b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The Australian producer's latest project creates a sense of spaciousness, tracing the almost forgotten flutters and rushes of a good night out. | The Australian producer's latest project creates a sense of spaciousness, tracing the almost forgotten flutters and rushes of a good night out. | Logic1000: You've Got the Whole Night to Go EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/logic1000-youve-got-the-whole-night-to-go-ep/ | You've Got the Whole Night to Go EP | Logic1000 debuted in 2018 with an undoubtedly excellent self-titled EP, packed with tracks that tip between techno, IDM, and garage. The record put her firmly on the map as a producer to watch, and dance heavyweights—most notably Four Tet—championed Logic1000 consistently. But while the EP was a strong introduction to Logic1000 as an artist, she herself has admitted that the production was scattered.
Recently, Logic1000 has been curating her own musical identity through remixes; her work for Låpsley, Christine and the Queens, and Caribou has allowed her to find a throughline in her own sound through the additions of her signature clean garage beats and hook-bolstering harmonies. These act as a strong introduction to her latest EP You’ve Got the Whole Night to Go and give a taste of Logic1000 as a producer with a keen ear for melding the underground with pop-worthy hooks. Though just four songs, it shows Logic1000 flexing her stamina and spinning ideas more consistently across the EP.
Central to the feel of You’ve Got the Whole Night to Go is a sense of expansiveness throughout, from the wafting trance drones and the vocal samples fed back and forth through a tape machine on “Like My Way” to the airy, echoing melody and bouncing bassline of “Medium” that sound as though they’re reverberating around an empty dance floor. This spaciousness unites each track in spite of the EP’s varying genre aspirations—“I Won’t Forget” gives lighthearted house; and “Medium” is eclectic and glitchy, whereas “Her” ends the EP on a downright dirty, sweaty, techno note. It all grants Logic1000’s productions a touch of something bigger that stretches outward and upward, hinting at her ability to reach beyond the underground to break into a wider consciousness.
You’ve Got the Whole Night to Go also works as a concept album, tracing the almost forgotten flutters and rushes of a good night out. “Like My Way” functions as a pregame track, the light trance paired with sharp hi-hats and a cheeky ascending bassline echoing the heady mixture of vague excitement and nerves. The way the muffled melody of “I Won’t Forget” gradually becomes clearer is reminiscent of the sudden clarity of music that hits when the club doors fling open. A strained vocal sample cuts through with “I won’t forget,” but the rest of the sentence is lost in the first muffled voice, as though the remembering is more important than the thing remembered. The immersive hard techno of closing track “Her” recalls that exact moment halfway through the night when you feel you could continue full-throttle forever. It seems cruel that a release that speaks so potently to the club experience probably won’t be played in its proper setting for a while, but for the moment, it’s a necessary simulation of it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Therapy | February 3, 2021 | 6.7 | 7441ac91-6d2c-4412-bc84-c81f2a0be347 | Jemima Skala | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jemima-skala/ | |
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 1995 record from the experimental New Zealand guitarist, a psychedelic invocation of drone, noise, and the spiritual beyond. | 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 1995 record from the experimental New Zealand guitarist, a psychedelic invocation of drone, noise, and the spiritual beyond. | Roy Montgomery: Temple IV | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/roy-montgomery-temple-iv/ | Temple IV | It’s a common misconception that the cult New Zealand indie label Flying Nun launched with the Clean’s 1981 single “Tally Ho!.” The Dunedin band’s debut would make sense as a shot across the bow: a jaunty, bratty organ choogle declaring “yesterday’s another day” to shake off the gray drudgery of the nation’s ’70s—of rugby, racing, and pubs teeming with cover bands. In fact, FN001 was that year’s “Ambivalence” by Christchurch trio the Pin Group, a flinty post-punk rumble about two would-be lovers each baffled by the other’s inscrutability.
Unlike the Clean, the Pin Group would have made terrible ambassadors for Flying Nun, their attitude fairly summed up by the title of that first single. They refused to be photographed and struggled to convey their sound in the recording studio, even going so far as attempting to prevent copies of “Ambivalence” from getting to local reviewers, and apologizing for their sonic limitations in the sleeve to the follow-up single. By the time they released their third and final 7", “Go to Town,” their mercurial frontman and guitarist Roy Montgomery had left to go traveling. He didn’t hear the finished product until Flying Nun sent a copy to England, where Montgomery, then in his early 20s, had sent himself on an “anti-sabbatical” to see in the flesh the acts he had only previously read about in expensively imported copies of NME.
Today, we’re in the midst of a gentle Roy-naissance: Grouper has long led the charge, citing him as a key influence and releasing splits and reissues on her label. Dry Cleaning guitarist Tom Dowse cited his playing as an inspiration on the London band’s second album, and they invited him to open for them in New Zealand. He appears on harpist Mary Lattimore’s new album and is working on a collaboration with London songwriter Martha Skye Murphy. In March, his masterpiece, 1996’s Temple IV, is getting its first vinyl pressing. It was one of two solo albums recorded simultaneously and released in quick succession that would establish the wordless, pummeling thicket of sound that would become the Montgomery trademark.
Back in the early ’80s, Montgomery was still trying to work out his “relationship with the ‘rock’ medium,” as he would later tell the Wire. His disaffected baritone had earned him sufficient comparisons to Ian Curtis that someone graffitied the words “ROY DIVISION” on the front of the EMI record shop where he worked, a jibe he found both funny (it lives on as his Instagram handle) and fair comment. On that trip to the UK in 1982, he became comrades with the Cure (even witnessing the recording sessions for Pornography), Echo and the Bunnymen, and the Fall, who he described as “very hospitable, even when I told [Mark E. Smith] that his favorite brew tasted like used sump oil from a Morris Minor.”
From his year in England, Montgomery concluded that no one other than the Cure was making ends meet as a musician: “Any faint notions of a viable rock’n’roll lifestyle were quickly extinguished.” He returned to New Zealand and released just one single under the name the Shallows in 1985, “Suzanne Said,” which showed a dronier side to his playing inspired by his burgeoning interest in film soundtracks. He took up a degree in Russian language and literature and got involved in the avant-garde theater scene as a practitioner, soundtracker, and critic. One might discern something about Montgomery’s outlook at the time from his droll review of a 1989 production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit: “Existentialism can be fun!”
In the early ’90s, he was cajoled into adding his gauzy guitar textures to the experimental band Dadamah, who released one great album and played live just three times or so before breaking up—perhaps owing to Montgomery’s dislike of live sound; perhaps too because his partner, Jo, died that year. He set off on the road again. “I felt I owed it to her to travel and deal with what had happened,” he later told The Guardian. He went to the Guatemalan rainforest and broke into the ancient Mesoamerican pyramid Tikal Temple IV to stay overnight and undertake a focused personal trial. “I wasn’t in advance convinced that I had to go there to make an album…it was more about getting there and sitting still for a little while,” he said. “And if that’s all it was, a moment, pure spirit, that would have been enough.”
But Montgomery made the moment last, turning his long night at the temple into a towering record of what it is to live and commune with grief. At the turn of 1995, in an empty apartment at 324 East 13th St in New York, equipped with a four-track recorder, some effects boxes, and an old department-store guitar, he recorded those defining first two solo albums: Scenes From the South Island looked back towards home, while Temple IV was his attempt to reinhabit his relationship with Jo. Like its monumental namesake, the latter remains grounded in the material world while reaching for a realm beyond it as Montgomery tills this unmapped kingdom of loss in steady, melancholy strums. At times, he plays as if he were feverishly trying to reach someone, or create the spark that might resuscitate a memory into a presence. Storms and static strafe his scenes, but the deep furrow plowed by his guiding hand remains consistent. The music demands the intimate focus and willing adjustment of witnessing Rothko’s “Black on Maroon” works in low light.
Temple IV’s experimental nature was not driven by wilful boundary-pushing, à la avant-guitar forebears like Glenn Branca or Rhys Chatham, but by circumstance. The four-track enforced a minimalist approach, and Montgomery used a cheap Teisco guitar with four pick-ups: ostensibly a feature, but in practice a bug, creating an excess of electrical interference. The Japanese knock-off was a workhorse for blues musicians who couldn’t afford fancier guitars, whose ability to wring beauty from such simple means was an inspiration to Montgomery. (He overdubbed some Moog synthesizer later.) He also professed his own limitations as a musician who could neither read music nor play especially complicated chords or melodies, who claimed no awareness of any world musics, like Indian raga, whose influence one might discern in his undulating hum: “I could play barre chords and, sometimes, leaving a string open by mistake created a droning aspect I liked,” he said. “I fumbled my way to that sound.”
Yet the results are pristine in their way, the four tracks of guitar often so distinct that each can seem to take on the character of a different element. The contemplative opener “She Waits on Temple IV” is a 12-minute burble of tributaries braiding into a single seam, fizzes of static and feedback glinting like silver in the silt. One guitar line is recorded close and bright; others bleed to fill the frame and then recede; the most distant seems to evanesce at the limit of the horizon, lending this patient composition a sense of infinite hope—only for the clenched static of “Departing the Body” to quickly annihilate that peace. The dramatic arc of Temple IV suggests both the conflicting stages of grief and the Mayan belief that death parts the soul from its physical form, with song titles that reference the religion’s symbols and ideas. It’s a work of fraught transmutation: body into spirit, loss into some manner of acceptance, pain into self-expression.
Miraculously, on Temple IV, both body and spirit prevail. The music is as intensely physical as it is seemingly divine, as thrilling in its viscera as it is sensitive to the disembodying feeling of grief and the unexpected flashes of reanimation in its wake. “Departing the Body” attempts to depict the separation of flesh from spirit as heavenly, its initial billowing drone washed in a benevolent glow as peaceful as any depicted in children’s images of the afterlife. But then violence sets in, with static that whirrs like a tornado tail scarring the ground and coils of feedback piercing the squall. The comparatively brief, anxious jangle of “The Soul Quietens” suggests the soul does anything but. “The Passage of Forms” approaches a formless high, Montgomery’s insistent strum melting into the ether. Rather than Montgomery’s avowed “fumbling,” these tactile evocations suggest a direct line from his gut to his guitar.
In grief, we look for signs and symbols, and often find them in nature. For Montgomery, the Mayan deities of jaguars and snakes connected to this music in a way “that I hoped wouldn’t be seen as just tourism,” he said. In Mayan culture, the jaguar was able to cross between the two worlds of day and night, but given its ease in the latter was regarded as a member of the underworld. The snake carried celestial bodies across the heavens, and with the shedding of its skin became a symbol of rebirth and renewal. Montgomery has these beings embody the bereaved’s conflict between hope and defeat in Temple IV’s most fearsome moment. “Jaguar Meets Snake” is eight minutes of white-knuckle feedback that seems to shear flesh from bone. Something about its gnashing intensity evokes the crunch point of irreconcilable pain, where nails dug furiously in palms offer a poor substitute for absolution. But the closer you listen, the more tenderness emerges: The wooly thrum below the noise suggests a safety net, one that allows the feedback to begin to jump and lurch with zip-wire glee, finding playfulness and freedom. In its most piercing blasts, there is the euphoria of being able to feel again after a long dull spell.
Even after that rebirth, Montgomery is not done with epics: The near 15-minute “Above the Canopy” is the longest but simplest song, a dense, insistent strum that seems to ring with good news, quietly triumphal and undisturbed by more than a whisper of static. The shortest, closer “Jaguar Unseen,” is almost groovy in its looseness, slipping from the scene in a swift fade-out: no grand climax or evolution. The wispy, mellowed guitars are as in sync as they were on “She Waits on Temple IV,” suggesting a cycle: another inevitable ascent up the mountain to come, and a calm readiness with which to approach it.
Decades later—after sporadic flurries of music in between completing a Ph.D., lecturing, and working as a volunteer firefighter after the 2011 New Zealand earthquakes—Montgomery would say that it was often intense life experiences, and particularly grief, that brought him back to music after long periods of inactivity. “Critical mass is reached when I’m thinking about doing a piece that acknowledges someone’s life,” he said. The Shallows’ “Suzanne Said” had memorialized Suzanne Irvine, a key figure from the Christchurch scene. In 2016, four decades after the Pin Group’s “Ambivalence,” Montgomery released four albums, collected under the title R M H Q: Headquarters, which hymned the likes of Sam Shepard and Popol Vuh’s Florian Fricke, evoked the death and destruction wrought by those earthquakes, and acknowledged the cancer that his partner and mother to their two children Kerry McCarthy had been diagnosed with in 2014. She died in 2021. The couple had been together 20 years, and Montgomery made 2022’s Camera Melancholia in the immediate aftermath: “I needed to respond while things were still raw rather than wait years, which is what happened when my partner Jo died in 1992,” he said.
In a recent post on Instagram, Montgomery shared a cocksure image of himself staring down the lens from early 1995, having just finished recording Scenes From the South Island and Temple IV in New York. “I may look self-satisfied but the Olympus OM-1 is on self-timer and they were hard, lonely yards,” he captioned it. He paid tribute to the people who pulled him through, among them the Clean’s Hamish Kilgour, who died in late 2022. “I am not done remembering you Hamish,” he wrote. The ornery young Montgomery may have made a terrible ambassador for any sound or scene. But in 1995, the sublime incantations of Temple IV set out his emotional and formal acuity for memorialization, and established a monolith to which listeners might make their own pilgrimage on long dark nights of the soul. | 2024-01-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Kranky | January 28, 2024 | 8.5 | 744b1dc6-eae7-4c03-9d89-238ca09890af | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | |
As Blessed Initiative, experimental producer and sound artist Yair Elazar Glotman explores some deeply uncomfortable and unsettling spaces. But there is a strange and beautiful majesty to his work. | As Blessed Initiative, experimental producer and sound artist Yair Elazar Glotman explores some deeply uncomfortable and unsettling spaces. But there is a strange and beautiful majesty to his work. | Blessed Initiative: Blessed Initiative | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22657-blessed-initiative/ | Blessed Initiative | Experimental producer and sound artist Yair Elazar Glotman has an unparalleled knack for wresting gold from uncomfortable sounds. With the album he released under the moniker KETEV in 2014, Glotman gutted the basic operating principles of techno. KETEV’s music is rife with vaporous rhythmic apparitions that resemble dance beats, even if you can't touch them physically. Likewise, on his 2015 album Études, released under his own name, Glotman basically threw his classical acoustic bass training out the window in favor of hacking the strings with the bow to make solemn dark ambient drones. And yet Études has a certain grace of form that even an untrained ear can readily trace back to classical music.
With the debut of his new project Blessed Initiative, he ventures into even more forbidding territory. This time, Glotman, who works in sound installations and film scores, drew mainly from foley recordings. Blessed Initiative begins with a sound that resembles a huffing car muffler, digitally chopped up to create the sensation of air being sucked out of the listening space. On an instinctual level, the listener can't help but feel a sense of suffocation—an effect that Glotman plays up by introducing gurgling and splashing sounds. And when a human voice suddenly appears and gets choked away, it’s as if we’re listening to a person drown. It's gripping, astonishing, and nearly unbearable.
“Jazz as commodity,” the album’s cleverly titled second track, deposits us in a similarly unsettling place. At first, the piece is completely devoid of rhythm or melody. We hear only a perforating sound—something like a door opening and echoing across the expanse of a parking garage. Glotman builds a beat out of multiple layers so that eventually it takes on the character of a heavy-footed creature dragging chains. “Xanax interlude (relax!)” features a stereo panorama of crunching sounds that might make Matmos shiver, bringing to mind the magnified acoustics of insects moving through soil, while “Delirium juice & taste of jewelry,” reprises the air-sucking and bubbling effects of the album's opening.
The sensations induced by these works can be profoundly unsettling. Yet, as usual, Glotman’s brand of discomfort never loses its flow and, on repeated listens, even acquires a certain majesty. The history of experimental music is littered with records that give bragging rights to anyone with the stamina to endure them. Blessed Initiative doesn’t fit that mold. Much to Glotman’s credit, there are moments where he is utterly convincing at bringing the sound-installation experience to you. His skillful placement of natural (or at least natural-seeming) reverberation casts the composer as an architect, someone who could have spent hours drawing blueprints for these tracks as much as he spent working on the KYMA software system he used to generate and manipulate some of the sounds.
Blessed Initiative would be intriguing enough based only on its visceral sense of physical space. But there’s more dimension to Glotman’s process than that. You glimpse his vision most clearly in second half of “Delirium juice & taste of jewelry”; as dozens of wind chimes clatter, Glotman frames them as if they’re doing so in an indoor space, i.e: without wind. You end up with the distinct sense of having stumbled upon something magical, an unseen force bringing these inanimate objects to life. As with the rest of the album, Glotman scoops the music of any traces of human presence, which makes you feel as if there’s no one else around to witness this strange and beautiful event. Describing it is impossible, and no one will believe you, but you know you were lucky to experience something special—much like this album as a whole. | 2016-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Subtext | December 9, 2016 | 7.5 | 7453d8eb-33a6-4dc7-8ef1-900f56cb6e3d | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
On their debut album, the UK duo nudges classic British bedroom indie toward a fuller, richer sound, while singer Nancy Andersen discovers the potential of her understated voice. | On their debut album, the UK duo nudges classic British bedroom indie toward a fuller, richer sound, while singer Nancy Andersen discovers the potential of her understated voice. | Babeheaven: Home for Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babeheaven-home-for-now/ | Home for Now | Babeheaven first made their name with dreamy bedroom indie pop; their early songs were like teenage confessions whispered into their pillows. After the double whammy of their Suspended Animation mixtape and Circles EP last year, vocalist Nancy Andersen and producer-instrumentalist Jamie Travis are stepping into their grown-up selves, bidding the band’s adolescence goodbye with a gentle kiss on the forehead and readying themselves for a new chapter. On Home for Now they show a more evolved sound, still interior in its focus, but far more self-assured.
They’ve included a few of their older songs, nodding to the crowd favorites that have brought them this far. “Friday Sky” is the most notable of these, with reverberant guitar chords that instantly evoke memories of a very specific brand of British bedroom indie—bubblegum, hopeful, head in the clouds. (Travis is the son of Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis; british bedroom indie is, in a sense, in the duo’s blood.) The wistful “November” strikes a balance between Andersen’s tentative vocals and a forceful drum pattern; “Jalisco” melds a kicked-back trip-hop beat with layered, echoing vocals that keep it feeling airy.
In their new songs, Babeheaven continue to play with genre, rolling it around in their hands and molding it to fit their own strain of dream pop. “Human Nature” opens on a bassy throb that signals the group’s trip-hop influences, expanding on what they started with “Jalisco”; the wobbly guitars on “Cassette Beat” sound as though they’ve been run through a tape recorder several times over, an example of Travis’ increasingly adventurous studio techniques. “Craziest Thing” is the most out-and-out indie song on the album, but touchingly so. The peppy twang of echoing guitar strings is imbued with a naive hope, in stark contrast to Andersen’s anxious lyrics (“I lie in bed, try not to think/But my head’s on the ceiling”). Sometimes mournful, sometimes pleading, Babeheaven favor a primarily minor-key palette to give voice to vulnerability in a way that’s endearing yet empowering.
Throughout Home for Now, Andersen’s voice flows with understated confidence and quiet power. She has spoken of her discomfort on stage; when she finally took singing lessons, just before the UK went into lockdown, her teacher advised her to remember to breathe. Home for Now sounds like Andersen allowing herself one long exhale and settling into her talents as a vocalist. On “In My Arms,” she indulges in subtle R&B trills and pushes so that the chorus hits with a greater intensity. The close harmonies of the all-too-brief interlude “6 Times Round” buoy the woozy drum beat. On the closing “Through the Night,” Andersen takes things at exactly her own pace, singing just off-beat enough to pull the rest of the instrumentation in line with her own rhythm, her rich voice cushioned by soft layers of synths.
Home for Now isn’t necessarily groundbreaking; there are plenty of bands working with similar fusions of indie, pop, and electronic music, but the album shows them clearly moving forward in their abilities and ambitions. What’s most exciting is hearing Andersen discovering her potential as a singer. If she was unsure of herself before, Home for Now sounds like her proof to herself that she’s doing exactly what she needs to do.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | AWAL | November 20, 2020 | 6.6 | 74551693-a4ca-4a57-9e00-fafdc25a3ecf | Jemima Skala | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jemima-skala/ | |
After a relatively quiet 2015, the Bay Area legend returns to his firehose production methods, dropping another slab of new material. But there's an increasing sense that he's repeating himself. | After a relatively quiet 2015, the Bay Area legend returns to his firehose production methods, dropping another slab of new material. But there's an increasing sense that he's repeating himself. | E-40: The D-Boy Diary Books 1 & 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22613-the-d-boy-diary-books-1-2/ | The D-Boy Diary Books 1 & 2 | E-40 only released one project in 2015—unusual by the prolific rapper's standards. After dropping nothing but double and triple albums on an annual basis since 2010, a 7-song EP felt might’ve felt scant in comparison to the tomes to which we had grown accustomed to receiving; instead, the succinctness of Poverty and Prosperity felt like fresh air rushing into a cellar that hadn’t been opened in decades. But a fundamental shift in the Bay Area legend’s approach to disseminating his music the EP was not. With The D-Boy Diary: Books 1 and 2, E-40 returns to the firehose method that over the past six years has become his default mode. Except this time around there’s an increasing sense that he’s beginning to repeat himself.
The most obvious example: “Uh Huh” is a shameless retread of E-40’s own “Choices (Yup),” the now gold-certified track from 2014’s Sharp on All 4 Corners. It uses the same call-and-response format, except it swaps out “Yup” and “Nope” for the nearly synonymous “Uh huh” and “Mm mm.” Even its beat is a simulacrum of its predecessor’s eerie slink, only less eerie and less slinky. Of course, being as inventive a rapper as he is, E-40 still manages to cram “Uh Huh” with novel swaths of wordplay: “Your paper shorter than a fake smile (Mm mm!)/My paper longer than a murder trial (Uh huh!).” It’s not the only instance of déjà vu—many of the double album’s 44 tracks feature production that recalls earlier E-40 material in broad strokes if not exact configurations: squelchy synths, block-shaped percussion, and an endless buoyancy.
Which isn’t to say that any of these beats are bad; there’s nary a dud in the entire batch, but they do feel slightly less imaginative than they have in the past. The sheer amount of music on most E-40 projects can amplify this issue—when the beats are as homogeneous as they are here, even the slightest dip in quality will produce uneventful stretches. For every “Hunedz,” whose hydraulic bounce comes courtesy of hyphy pioneer Rick Rock, there’s a “Bag on Me,” which hits all the required marks but not particularly enthusiastically, or boilerplate hyphy like “The Grit Don’t Quit.” All of E-40’s usual in-house collaborators are here: from his son Droop-E—whose three contributions are all highlights, the inside-out lurch of “Goon Music” standing tallest—to fellow Californian DecadeZ, all the producers enlisted deliver beats that range from guaranteed function-starters to merely functional.
As with most of the E-40’s gargantuan projects, the moments that fall furthest from the mean stylistically tend to be found towards the tail-end of each volume. Book 1’s “Check” is a collaboration with Zaytoven, and the Atlanta producer known best for his work with the likes of Gucci Mane and Future serves up one of his iciest tracks in recent memory, full of slow-rolling menace and verging-on-EDM wubs. “2 Seater,” from Book 2, is the most conspicuously anomalous beat on the whole project. Nard N B bring a pop sensibility to the Kid Ink-featuring love song, and E-40 brags about how for a special night out with his girl he “booked this room on Hotels.com.” The track’s low-friction glide sets it apart from the rest of the album’s bottom-heavy focus, but it suits E-40, a rapper who has always had a strong ear for beats.
It helps that even though the production sometimes leans run-of-the-mill, E-40 remains as enamored as ever with the physical act of rapping. Nowhere does he sound more energized than on “I Had It in a Drought,” a joyous back-in-the-day reminiscence that naturally doubles as a brag session. The main character of the song, however, is not E-40 himself but rather the Bay Area itself: “On Solano Avenue, I bought a clothing store/In Vallejo, California: entrepreneur/Next to Davenport, Elite Check Cashing store/Across the street from Church's Chicken, it was on/A couple of doors down, Studio Ton.” His lyrics are so hyper-specific that you can find the actual street view using Google Maps. And on an album where his rubber-ball cadence belies his age (49!), it’s no surprise that he sounds most youthful rapping about his second favorite topic (after E-40): his hometown.
Straight thoughts delivered with zig-zagging technique: this has always been E-40’s formula. It sounds simple; in reality, it’s anything but. His rapping style—all over the beat without being bucked off, simultaneously pushing and pulling in all directions—is one that few if any try to approximate at all, let alone lift wholesale. It’s so inextricably linked with him that it would sound alien coming from anyone else. And the rub is he makes it sound as natural as breathing. “I’m a master of reality/Rap about good times and casualties” he raps on “Blessed By the Game.” There’s always been an underlying current of civic duty in his music, an unquenchable need to document the events around him for the benefit of future generations—and this one, too. The D-Boy Diary is just further proof that as long as he’s alive, E-40 won’t stop. | 2016-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Heavy on the Grind | November 28, 2016 | 6.8 | 74591720-7553-4a34-82b7-2395a653e1a2 | Renato Pagnani | https://pitchfork.com/staff/renato-pagnani/ | null |
Despite her new-age leanings, the Milan musician refuses to let her music fade into the wallpaper. With a playful, enveloping touch, she makes the most of the genre’s whimsical possibilities. | Despite her new-age leanings, the Milan musician refuses to let her music fade into the wallpaper. With a playful, enveloping touch, she makes the most of the genre’s whimsical possibilities. | Francesca Heart: Eurybia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/francesca-heart-eurybia/ | Eurybia | About 15 seconds into track two of Francesca Heart’s new album, the Milan artist’s veil of dizzying synths is pierced by what sounds like a dolphin’s chirp. Before you can process what’s happening, a noise appears like magic cartoon bubbles rising and bursting in midair, casting off their translucent spray in the process. It’s a glittering jumble of sounds as absurd as it is delightful. This moment feels like a microcosm of Eurybia: Where recent new-age music has often trended toward tones so soft and airy that they barely rise above the hum of background listening, Heart refuses to let her work fade into the wallpaper. Instead, she conjures vivid vistas with her sparkling palette, diving headfirst into the more whimsical side of new age with a playful, enveloping touch.
Compared to the current wave of ambient artists channeling the delicate environmental music of Japanese composers like Hiroshi Yoshimura and Takashi Kokubo, Heart’s music pulls from the quirkier end of the pool. Like older weirdo relics such as Andreas Vollenweider’s Down to the Moon and more recent left-field classics like Spencer Clark’s The Spectacle of Light Abductions, Eurybia isn’t made for taking candle-lit baths so much as it is for experiencing dazzling, hallucinogenic visions. Synths flicker like fireflies waltzing in the dark, while Heart’s voice refracts against itself in hard-panning echoes, at once inviting and disorienting. The sounds may be silky smooth, but in Heart’s hands they’re also exhilarating—a constantly unfurling tide of melodies spilling out in all directions at once while feeling eternally, peacefully still.
Eurybia takes its name from the Greek goddess of the sea, and in keeping with the theme, the album creates a lush world with the radiant colors of a coral reef. On the title track, Heart and fellow Italian hypnagogic guru Polonius gently layer swaying marimba lines until an iridescent drone streams through, like sunlight glistening beneath the waves. “L’Inno delle Oceanine alla Bellezza e alla Fortuna” is even more stripped down, revolving entirely around a bewildering mallet arpeggio whose spiraling notes contract and expand at will, dancing as nimbly as krill caught in an underwater whirlpool. Tracks like these might seem simple if they weren’t so texturally rich with ear-tickling detail; “A’Marina” verges on musical ASMR, with Heart coating the song in resplendent water droplets that shimmer psychedelically.
Heart’s greatest strength is her ability to imbue this ostensibly relaxing music with a rejuvenating jolt of energy; her more sedate tracks are less impactful. “Stella Rugiada” is calming, but at seven and a half minutes, it fails to go places that weren’t covered long ago by the likes of Michael Stearns. Likewise, the closing “Argentosfere” rests too heavily on its basic three-note synth arpeggio for the entirety of its runtime, turning up no new depths as it progresses. But outside of these moments, Eurybia is frequently bewitching, a reminder of how wondrous new-age music can be when powered by both curiosity and complexity. Rather than simply trodding down the path taken by seers before her, the composer charts her own way, playing with the tropes of classic new age to unlock ornate, heavenly new dimensions. In honing her craft, Heart earns her crystals. | 2022-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Leaving | May 13, 2022 | 7.3 | 74652fa4-fc54-4283-8c4a-e506042c0145 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Pete Kember follows up his first album under the Sonic Boom moniker in 30 years with a remixed version that stands as its own discrete work, as impassioned and cohesive as the original. | Pete Kember follows up his first album under the Sonic Boom moniker in 30 years with a remixed version that stands as its own discrete work, as impassioned and cohesive as the original. | Sonic Boom: Almost Nothing Is Nearly Enough | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonic-boom-almost-nothing-is-nearly-enough/ | Almost Nothing Is Nearly Enough | Hackneyed as it may sound, you can learn a lot by taking the right drugs at the right time. You can also learn a lot by quitting drugs, but the emotional and physical lessons of substance experimentation aren’t to be sneered at. Few musicians have been as outspoken on this topic as Peter Kember, who calls taking DMT a “sacrament” and whose first band, Spacemen 3, were unparalleled in their desire to mimetically reproduce the experience of tripping on record. Their Möbius strip of a motto, “Taking drugs to make music to take drugs to,” rendered both activities equal, cause and effect crossfading into an endless bender. And while their output, aside from the single “Big City (Everyone I Know Can Be Found Here),” was hardly danceable, they embodied a late ’80s shift in their native England when rock music became gentler and less aggressive thanks in part to the rise of rave culture and ecstasy. The fans mellowed out, as well.“They were hugging, not fighting,” Kember said on the C86 podcast earlier this year, laughing, “and it was a big improvement. People stopped chasing me.”
Always a raver by association alone, Kember changed his tune in 2020 with All Things Being Equal, the first album in 30 years he released under his Sonic Boom moniker. Electronic and undulating, if not exactly booty-shaking, All Things suggested Suicide if they moved to Ibiza and sang about love and environmentalism. Sonic Boom’s new album-length remix of its predecessor, Almost Nothing Is Nearly Enough, locates him more firmly in Britain’s so-called Second Summer of Love. Surprisingly, Almost Nothing isn’t an afterthought, but rather a companion vision, as cohesive and impassioned as its source material.
Kember has a fraught relationship with remixes. He doesn’t enlist other producers to rework his tracks, and dislikes the cross-genre treatments that have become ubiquitous in the past couple of decades. Yet he approaches his own work like a remixer: he winnowed down an excellent mix of Spacemen 3’s masterpiece The Perfect Prescription simply because he and his bandmates determined that the songs were too difficult to play live. Reflecting this same logic—that records can be simplified without losing the qualities that make them great—Almost Nothing is Nearly Enough scoops out its precursor’s blissful core and presents it to us as a discrete artwork.
The scenery here is sunnier, the beats more propulsive. The introspective spoken word pieces are gone, and even on the title track, lyrics about “floods” and “fire” are elevated by sky-bound synths. The ceaseless optimism of Kember’s drones and the delightful languor of his vocals evoke his friend and frequent collaborator Panda Bear, which only adds to the tone of positivity. Cutting his last album down to its throbbing pulse, Kember captures the spirit of the rave—if not its sound.
He does employ some time-tested moves. Songs that were originally shorter, like “Just Imagine,” stretch out past the 11-minute mark. ”Tawkin Techno” lives up to its name with more four-on-the-floor pummel, and throughout the album, Kember loops stems, filters drums, and begins songs with nearly a capella vocals. The project is nonetheless suffused with his auteurist sensibility, its 51 minutes chock full of signature Kember mantras. “Take me somewhere a lil’ bit deeper /Take me somewhere a lil’ bit sweeter,” he sings on one track, and later, “Make it about, the way that you live /Make it about, the love that you give.” His new motto, it seems, is “Making music to become a better person to make music to become a better person.” The key is change, whether of your consciousness, mixes, life, or all three: Past and present selves can coexist as easily as records on a shelf.
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. | 2021-04-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Carpark | April 23, 2021 | 7.6 | 746bfca0-7643-4524-a182-5b895edd0aec | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
The co-founder of seminal kosmische bands Cluster and Harmonia, Roedelius has two of his records reissued just as their sound is enjoying a comeback. | The co-founder of seminal kosmische bands Cluster and Harmonia, Roedelius has two of his records reissued just as their sound is enjoying a comeback. | Roedelius: Selbstportrait / Selbstportrait II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15080-selbstportrait-selbstportrait-ii/ | Selbstportrait / Selbstportrait II | Digital technology provides modern electronic producers with superhuman control over countless hyper-real sounds. In the analog 1970s, Hans-Joachim Roedelius made do with the merely real, coaxing miles of variation from his Farfisa's limited selection of timbres, which all tended to be shrill and watery. He recorded the material that would be released in a long series of Selbstportraits whenever he wasn't busy helping to define Krautrock and ambient music as a co-founder of seminal kosmische bands Cluster and Harmonia. His augustly hyphenated name makes him sound like a severe German classical composer, but he brought a playfully jazzy sensibility to these solitary miniatures, improvisations, and moods. Amid Brian Eno's stillness and Kraftwerk's speed and light, Roedelius found a middle way between the void and the Autobahn. His Selbstportraits are dreamy, introspective cruises, rising and falling as if over looping country lanes.
Recorded over old tape at low speed, in mono, on a Revox reel-to-reel, these albums sound really dated. That's why this happens to be an ideal moment to re-release the first two, as their datedness-- they were originally issued on Sky Records in 1979 and 1980-- feels quite contemporary, thanks to the modern resurgence of Roedelius' style of gently propulsive, floridly minimalist keyboard music. You hear it everywhere in recent years, from Oneohtrix Point Never and Arp to Ducktails and Nite Jewel, burbling in woolly analog atmospheres. It seems that when modern musicians aspire to something back-to-basics with electronic music, it's Roedelius' durable easy-listening/new-age aesthetic they're after. Selbstportrait I and II are similar in style and quality, and casual fans may need only one in their lives. II has a couple of the best individual tracks, and contains added material. I is stronger overall, or at least feels that way because it came first, introducing the palette and ideas Roedelius continues to explore on II.
The formula is deceptively simple. There are usually two or three distinct voices, one of which will be an ostinato-- the coursing piano of "In Liebe Dein", or the thrumming bass clusters of "Fabelwein"-- while the others modulate thematic material around it in windy, twisting lines. Sometimes, the ostinato is left out in favor of sheer thematic exploration, as on "Inselmoos", where Roedelius manipulates a sticky harpsichord-like motif through major, minor, and hints of chromatic modes. The music is usually solidly tonal, eschewing dissonance to create a sense of everlasting flow. Roedelius preferred gambits of harmony and counterpoint-- one of his favorites is to let a clump of established intervals suddenly unclench and go wheeling across an octave or more. It's not that the music isn't brainy: The carefully patterned pitches, timbres, and durations of "Girlande", for instance, suggest a lot of forethought. But it doesn't make a big deal about its braininess. Each track is intent on clearly illuminating a musical notion. The groovy low-frequency bagatelle "Signal" seems to preemptively summarize Boards of Canada in less than 12 seconds.
The Selbstportraits can be monotonous; monotony is part of their charm. Roedelius' versatility with limited resources imbues the music with what can only be described as a deep humanity-- a mandatory thoughtfulness. "Prinzregent" has a remotely Asian cast, while "Herold" gestures at funk. "Halmharfe" has a Nordic dolefulness, and "Arcona" has a breezy Latin feel. "Aufbruch", a standout track from II, introduces the pointillistic arpeggios of techno into the matrix. But it's all so blended into Roedelius' almost-subliminal style that a cursory listen makes the albums sound monolithic, like one undifferentiated electronic pulse. You have to slow down and attune to both the pace and the narrow palette of Roedelius' world, and then the little differences seem huge. That, all in all, is the magic of this music-- it inspires the familiar nostalgia of having more appreciation for fewer options. | 2011-02-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-02-08T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic / Global / Rock | null | February 8, 2011 | 7.9 | 746d0c6f-514a-480f-9089-e9e0d5c11ff1 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
For Pet Shop Boys' first decade, they were impostors so studious and inspired that they were better than the real thing. Now they've settled into being elder statesmen of pop at a time when pop has little use for elder statesmen, and they're off-puttingly bitter about it. | For Pet Shop Boys' first decade, they were impostors so studious and inspired that they were better than the real thing. Now they've settled into being elder statesmen of pop at a time when pop has little use for elder statesmen, and they're off-puttingly bitter about it. | Pet Shop Boys: Elysium | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17032-elysium/ | Elysium | When the Pet Shop Boys made their appearance at the closing ceremonies for this year's Olympics, they were as marvelous as they've ever been, in their spectacle-that-punctures-the-spectacle way: a reliable part of the English firmament, like a more tuneful Gilbert & George in better outfits. They were trotting out a truncated bit of "West End Girls", now 28 years old, whilst on the cusp of releasing their eleventh studio album, Elysium. The videos for new songs "Invisible" and "Winner", are elegantly conceived and executed, and so is the packaging associated with the record and its singles. They have all the design sensibility anyone could want in a pop act. If only they'd put the same vigor and power into their new songs, they might be on to something.
As always, the Pet Shop Boys' latest studio LP has a resonant single-word title. "Elysium" is a reference to Elysian Park, near where they recorded the album in Los Angeles, but it's also a high-class sort of word for paradise, in the specific sense of the afterworld of the blessed. The implication is that, somewhere in there, Pet Shop Boys slipped into the great beyond, and Neil Tennant is now singing to us from the other side. But Tennant and Chris Lowe's relationship to pop and its audience has changed over time, and not in a loss-and-beatification way. For Pet Shop Boys' first decade or so, they were impostors so studious and inspired that they were better than the real thing. Now they've settled into being elder statesmen of pop at a time when pop has little use for elder statesmen, and they're off-puttingly bitter about it.
Their self-consciousness is overtly the subject of Elysium's two worst songs: "Your Early Stuff", whose title gives away its only good joke, and "Ego Music", a slapdown of fake-humble stars ("There's a real purity to my work, a childish innocence...") that's a diluted variation on the theme of 1993's "Shameless". And it keeps coming up in Tennant's lyrics, one way or another. "It's queer how gradually I've become invisible," he croons: That's most obviously a commentary on being a gay man in his 50s, but it's hard to miss the suggestion that he's talking about his position on the charts.
Lowe has suggested that he'd have preferred there to be "no fast songs at all" on this record, and the quietest songs on Elysium are generally the best, especially the heart-on-sleeve "Memory of the Future". (There's one full-on dance track here, "A Face Like That", whose fake-orchestral stabs and strobing single-note synth bass make it sound like an outtake from the Actually era, but its melody is instantly forgettable.) Tennant's mature gift as a lyricist is for sentimentality tempered by slyness, and he pulls that off a few times: "Ossie's last collection/ Biba's closing sale/ A little more rouge on powdered cheeks/ But the base is pale," he sings in "Requiem in Denim and Leopardskin", an elegant tribute to the late makeup artist Lynne Easton that's also a tender remembrance of the London of Pet Shop Boys' prehistory. (It's no "Being Boring", but one can only write "Being Boring" once.)
Too much of Elysium, though, misplaces its subtlety. There's no suggestion that "Hold On"--adapted from a piece by George Frideric Handel-- is anything more than a vaguely inspirational lighter-waver, for instance, and the arrangement's alternating male and female choirs are corn syrup poured on cotton candy. Is there some covert archness to it, some enormous conical hat peeking out from behind its bromides and bombast? Or does Tennant and Lowe's vision of paradise really consist of unpunctured spectacle? | 2012-09-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-09-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | September 25, 2012 | 5.4 | 746d24c4-bbed-4573-b68a-37335254ede5 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
On her first full-length release since her viral breakout, the rapper-singer and songwriter proves that her real gift is her versatility. | On her first full-length release since her viral breakout, the rapper-singer and songwriter proves that her real gift is her versatility. | Doja Cat: Hot Pink | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/doja-cat-hot-pink/ | Hot Pink | Doja Cat can’t be boxed in. A little over a year after her kooky viral hit “Mooo!,” the 24-year-old rapper-singer and songwriter is still full of personality and endless wordplay. On Hot Pink, her second album and her first full-length since achieving viral fame, Doja cements her voice as the most crucial part of her sound. Depending on the track, her tone can be ultra-soft and chill or peppy, almost frantic as she fires off verses. But it’s her sarcasm and cheek that cut a more dynamic figure in pop music. “PLEASE DO NOT BUY MY ALBUM IF YOU BUY MY ALBUM I WILL PEE IN YOUR LAP,” she wrote alongside a video of her dancing to celebrate the release. She’s in her bag, giving us her kinky, soulful, pop queen, and not-to-be-fucked with sides all at once.
Hot Pink runs the gamut of a sound that’s still taking shape. Doja’s equally capable as a rapper and a singer, but it’s her understanding of melody that makes the project flow. On “Like That,” featuring Gucci Mane, Doja weaves easily from rap mode into a whispery chorus with an upbeat R&B groove reminiscent of early-2000s Janet Jackson. It’s the perfect soundtrack for a backyard party. “Rules” captures a more serious—though hardly humorless—mood, pairing eerie old-western bass with Doja’s memorable command: “Play with my pussy, but don’t play with my emotions.” (Both songs were co-written with Dr. Luke; Doja Cat is signed to his imprint Kemosabe.)
Other songs, like bubbly opener “Cyber Sex” and the Blink-182-sampling “Bottom Bitch,” explore Doja’s potential as a pop star. Their imaginative videos cast her as a playfully raunchy android or a rebellious, milkshake-throwing skate punk, attention-grabbing themes designed to illustrate distinct musical aesthetics. To some, tracks like these could seem ultra-commercial, but Doja’s earned the right to flex her duality. Her pop songs complement her more intimate music without diluting it.
Throughout the rest of the LP, Doja leans into her softness. The dreamy soprano she introduced on 2014’s Purrr! EP cradles the ear like a fluffy pink pillow. It’s when Doja slows down or lightens her bars with her silky rasp that she sounds the clearest. “Shine” dazzles with spurts of tasteful Auto-Tune as she brags about her jewels and her pearly whites in an enchanting blend of rap and breathy lullaby: “What’s that drippin’? No, baby, I’m not cryin’/Baby, that’s my diamonds, everything so vibrant.” It’s not hard to picture her recording a ballad like “Streets” from within an all-pink lair. She’s even more serene on the penultimate “Better Than Me”: Surrounded by slinky, psychedelic guitar, her voice is soothing and slightly coy as she sings to a man who needs a reminder that there’s no one above her. “The best pussy/Comes from wifey,” she coos, elongating every word so he’s sure to hang on. It’s a Doja love song: a tinge of heartache and vulnerability with more than enough confidence to drown out the sadness.
Doja’s versatility is a gift, but as varied as the album is, Hot Pink doesn’t feel scattered or semi-rushed like her debut Amala. And though there are moments where a new tone or inflection runs the risk that Doja might be mistaken for someone else, the album’s anchor in her R&B and soul background creates a tender space for her to stack and reveal her layers. Hot Pink doesn’t demand that Doja figure out the totality of her sound right now. It’s a continuous process and her recipe for success is to honor it. | 2019-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | RCA | November 14, 2019 | 7.4 | 746dc119-7611-4448-af7c-25df4668df7e | Lakin Starling | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lakin-starling/ | |
On his first release in five years and his major-label debut, Pat Grossi offers his cinematic anthems as a sort of spiritual balm. | On his first release in five years and his major-label debut, Pat Grossi offers his cinematic anthems as a sort of spiritual balm. | Active Child: In Another Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/active-child-in-another-life/ | In Another Life | On In Another Life, Active Child’s Pat Grossi offers cinematic strings, surging choral harmonies, and his dazzling harp as a kind of spiritual balm, a respite from the harsh outside world. Frequently, his new album sounds like church music (which comes as no surprise, given his roots as a choir boy). On the anthemic album closer, he urges us to “Hold your head up/Even though it’s a cruel world.” But Grossi never fully introduces the conflict or cruelty of that world into the realm of his compositions—there is no ugliness here, only affirmation, and sounds as pristine as the upholstering on the album cover.
This is the Pasadena-based musician’s first release in five years, and his major-label debut for Sony. In a note shared to Twitter, he alluded to the fact that this release had been “with me for too long really”; he also mentions that he began composing it after the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. These attacks were perhaps the impetus for the soothing, sympathetic offerings on In Another Life like “Cruel World,” and “Brighter Day,” though Grossi also cites death and the birth of his daughter as songwriting inspirations. The loosely circling themes feel almost irrelevant; the textures are what’s most striking.
Grossi has largely ditched the soft-rock sheen of his 2015 album Mercy, returning to full-bodied strings and choral chamber-pop dotted with electronic flourishes. When he’s in this mode, Active Child sounds glorious. But perhaps even more impactful than the grandiose moments are the lower, more somber offerings. “Spirit Buoy” is a showcase for his delicate double-tracked vocal and harp, while he delivers a horror movie-worthy distorted vocal in his trembling higher register on “Color Me,” the record’s only thrillingly discordant moment. On lead single “Weightless,” the percussive hand claps resound viscerally in your eardrums and the dam-bursting strings lead to a dramatic payoff that feels earned.
Elsewhere, Grossi creates moments of bombast that fall flat because of the platitudes at their center. “Weightless” is followed by “Brighter Day,” a dusky track that urges its listeners to “Love one another/Help your brother/Lean on each other.” These cliches are met with no tension; as with the sunny “keep your head up” hook on “Cruel World,” they shimmer earnestly over a bed of powerful drums and Hollywood strings, offering nothing but uplift for uplift’s sake.
Grossi often hints at shadows in his lyrics, but shies away from looking directly at the objects casting these shadows. On “In Another Life,” he sings that we’re surrounded by “something bigger”; on “Cruel World,” he dedicates himself to “something richer,” but in both instances he swerves away from specificity. There’s a hollowness to this worship, though Grossi plugs the gap with distractingly beautiful arrangements. It is an unmistakably lovely record, which is occasionally stifled by its own loveliness. | 2020-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sony Music Masterworks | April 17, 2020 | 6.2 | 746e7116-88bf-40b3-abb3-cd15bff119c0 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
Leonard Cohen's 14th studio album feels like a pristine, piously crafted last testament, the informed conclusion of a lifetime of inquiry. | Leonard Cohen's 14th studio album feels like a pristine, piously crafted last testament, the informed conclusion of a lifetime of inquiry. | Leonard Cohen: You Want It Darker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22514-you-want-it-darker/ | You Want It Darker | Leonard Cohen has been bidding his farewell for decades, since before we ever met him. In 1966, he opened Beautiful Losers—his mystical, lysergic, gleefully obscene second novel—with the sunset plea, “Can I love you in my own way? I am an old scholar, better-looking now than when I was young. That’s what sitting on your ass does to your face.” He was just 32 then, rakish without ravaging, not yet celebrated for pairing wry, elegant sacrilege to folk melodies—a year before courting “Suzanne,” 18 from raising his “Hallelujah.” But even then, he was conscious and deferential to the light waning around him.
Which is a placidity his followers don’t always share; what other 82-year-old artist could possibly acknowledge his impending mortality and alarm his fans enough to recant? After The New Yorker’s remarkable recent profile quoted him as “ready to die”—depicting a mentally dexterous, physically frail ascetic “confined to barracks” in Los Angeles, solemnly tidying his affairs—Cohen took pains to console his fans, with familiar drollness: “I’ve always been into self-dramatization. I intend to live forever.” But even as he demurs, it’s hard not to play his 14th studio album, You Want It Darker, and hear a pristine, piously crafted last testament—a courtly act of finality that extends to the title. (Notice it’s not a question; it’s a prescription.)
Cohen has always kicked up his heels in the ambiguities of love and spirituality—casting prayers to the carnal, getting off on enlightenment. And so this new darkness he offers has dimensions instead of declaratives—it feels, in turn, to lyrically reference the encroaching blackness of death, the insularity of plumbing the soul ever-deeper, a fresh fatalism toward the spinning world. “I’m leaving the table/I’m out of the game/I don’t know the people/In your picture frame,” he laments, achingly, on “Leaving the Table,” over a warm and minimal waltz. Later, he intones, “I’m traveling light/It’s au revoir/My once so bright/My fallen star” (“Traveling Light”). It’s delivered with a wink, and no more dramatically brooding than his past work, but it is inescapably morbid; every track is vivid yet still enigmatic as it conjures loss and lamentation of some variety.
This darkness also apparent in the newly fathomless boom of his baritone, which already stripped the floorboards on recent albums Old Ideas and Popular Problems. Whereas the rough edges of his younger, nasal reediness suggested chic bohemian nonchalance, now his low caroling is edged in defiance, and Darker’s production is singularly complementary to it. When he imagines, not so subtly, the stars above him losing light (“If I Didn’t Have Your Love”), his intoning dips below cherubic organs, hinting at what these enamored lyrics soon reveal—that this bright devotional is of the spiritual sort, hewing closer to his past career as a monk than as an Olympic-level ladies’ man. (The most jarring thing about Darker is how utterly devoid of lust it is.) The gracious, spare production adds to the spell—contributed by his son, Adam Cohen, who almost wholly replaces his father’s proclivities for tinny keyboards and stately, gospel-esque female harmonies in favor of violins, warm acoustic guitar, and a cantor male choir. The elder Cohen’s familiar scaffolding of flamenco-influenced guitar remains, a bridge to history.
Cohen is not a songwriter who panders; he speaks above us, sometimes quite literally to higher forms, but also to universality instead of common denominator. Topicality, to him, remains somewhere around the Romantic era. But Cohen is also keen to experiment here. He embraces spry, rootsy bluegrass strings on “Steer Your Way,” which nods back in a few directions—to his college stint in a country band, to 1971’s Songs of Love and Hate (which featured Charlie Daniels on fiddle), to brighter moments on Popular Problems. The album’s final track, for the first time, is a string reprise; it bows out “String Reprise/Treaty,” Cohen’s difficult conversation with his higher power (“I wish there was a treaty we could sign/It’s over now, the water and the wine/We were broken then, but now we’re borderline”) with delicate, mournful dignity.
The album’s heart is exposed early, and plainly, in the title track. Its religious tones veer toward disdainful (“If you are the dealer/I’m out of the game/If you are the healer/I’m broken and lame”) but his oaky growl quickly becomes rapturous. Three times, as the choir drops out, he chants, “Hineni Hineni”—a Hebrew cry of devotion, the reply of a ready worshipper who hears their calling from God and is ready to act in service. Often, it’s the service in the afterlife. His is not a yelp of fervor, or excitable in any shade; the moment is his most quaking, sunken baritone delivery on the album—so deep, it would sound sinister without such compassion imbuing it. It’s the informed conclusion of a lifetime of inquiry. Hopefully, it is one holy dialogue of more still to come. But in this moment, he sounds satisfied; he has loved us in his own way, and he is ready for what awaits him next. But that doesn’t mean we are. | 2016-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia / Sony | October 24, 2016 | 8.5 | 74738b88-8f1a-45b2-a4c5-f6f63ea9b117 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
In the latest installment of his anthology, Glen Boothe continues dipping rap verses in warm, nostalgic loops. | In the latest installment of his anthology, Glen Boothe continues dipping rap verses in warm, nostalgic loops. | Knxwledge: WT_PRT15. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/knxwledge-wt-prt15/ | WT_PRT15. | Rappers loved bootlegging Glen Boothe’s beats, so he started bootlegging their raps. That’s the lore behind the Wraptaypes anthology, which Boothe (aka Knxwledge) started back in 2011 and of which he has dropped multiple installments every subsequent year. (It’s hard to tell how many, as he likes to put decimals points in the edition number, like last summer’s part 14.8). Each one combines lo-fi a capellas of songs and freestyles ripped from dollar-bin record finds and YouTube with burly sampled loops, sometimes barely altered beyond a degradation in fidelity or a few drum clicks.
WT_PRT15., his newest, is no different, dipping vocals from Jay-Z, UGK, and Young Thug into a gluey mixture of vintage horn riffs and soul croons. Some may view the formula as tired, but there are always moments of brilliance to catch you off-guard. Just as his beats start to lull, an entrancing melody, or a punchline that’s tee’d up dazzlingly off a sample, hits you square in the heart.
That moment comes fairly early on in PRT15. Wedged in between a pair of minute-long sketches sits “UGK[TAPE],” a repurposing of UGK and OutKast’s 2007 classic “Int’l Players Anthem (I Choose You).” The southern MCs are parachuted in over a bed of strings, a sample that sounds like it was plucked from the score of some 1940s MGM classic. Accentuating the strings, you can still sort-of hear the soaring vocals from the a capella’s original sample, Willie Hutch’s “I Choose You.” The track is over four minutes long, doesn’t include any changes in its song structure—just like all the other beats on the tape, the loop keeps looping—and yet remains mesmerizing.
Another high point comes on “freeallmynihgas,” a sprawling freestyle from an unnamed MC that sounds captured from a cell phone. Boothe takes this verse, a roll call of loved ones locked away, and sets it to a sprightly keyboard melody, giving it a near-musical theater quality. He pulls a similar move on the opener “shotgunvision,” pinning a gritty verse referencing ski-mask robberies and trapping from the sofa against a bright synth. In these moments, Boothe is reimagining not just songs, but moments in time, a method he’s been pursuing since his childhood in church, where he would record sermons on small cassette tapes and then chop them up on his Roland SP-303.
But not all the tracks on PRT15. justify their run times. A handful start to lose steam past the first few minutes, when the initial rush wears off. On “team [SRF],” for example, which reworks Young Thug’s So Much Fun highlight “Surf,” the bare-bones instrumental of guitar plucks and doo-wop hums is simply too sparse to keep things interesting, a bridge section stretched too far. Meanwhile, Boothe’s ghostly revision of Reasonable Doubt classic “Dead Presidents” is thrilling in its first moments, with its muffled carol choruses and croaking bass notes, but is too gooey to go four minutes without any sort of beat change or break.
This is par for the course when it comes to Wraptaypes, a series that finds Boothe hardly extending himself beyond his first strike of inspiration. It could explain why he can produce at such a prolific clip, cranking out numerous installments of other anthologies simultaneously, including an R&B vocals-based tape series and a Meek Mill-centered one. If an a capella and instrumental sound right on first alignment, he lets them take on a life of their own, leaving the door open for both imperfection and symmetry. | 2019-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | December 17, 2019 | 6.9 | 7474bc56-8543-4505-a23f-50033b906af9 | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
Rising Canadian hip-hop artist offers underground-leaning lyrics over gargantuan synth riffs and decidedly non-boom bappy beats. | Rising Canadian hip-hop artist offers underground-leaning lyrics over gargantuan synth riffs and decidedly non-boom bappy beats. | Cadence Weapon: Breaking Kayfabe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1801-breaking-kayfabe/ | Breaking Kayfabe | Ask most United Statesians what they know about Canadian hip-hop, and they'll answer with a wistful remembrance of Tom Green. Occasionally, some wiseacre will blather about his collection of Kardinal Offishal mp3s or, god forbid, his love and respect for Swollen Members, and you wish you'd never said anything in the first place. As deeply as we love Canadian indie boys and girls, rappers trying to cross the border still find it surprisingly difficult. We like our rap stars either angry, self-educated, and packing or benignly solipsistic and fashionable; the politely unarmed of Canada don't offer much beyond, for all intents and purposes, the edited version of American commercial hip-hop, and nobody wants that. This was enough to make Rollie Pemberton neglect his blog long enough to issue a grimy clarion call to Edmonton and beyond as Cadence Weapon.
It makes sense that Rollie's first proper album would be a rousing alarm. His father, Teddy Pemberton, having emigrated from Brooklyn to Edmonton, almost single-handedly introduced hip-hop to the province in 1980 through his college radio show "The Black Experience in Sound". In a 2000 interview with See Magazine-- which, like Pitchfork, later employed Rollie as music journo-- Teddy Pemberton remarked of his arrival in Edmonton, "I would see the kids walking around, and they didn't even have a clue. I decided right then and there: 'I've got to change this.'" Breaking Kayfabe is infused with the same sense of obligation, an idealist's thrust against perceived indifference. Call it Rollie's Künstlerroman, his struggle against the insouciance of a scene that his father helped birth. Sounds heavy, but Rollie pushes forward with a slap on the back, like the friend who gives you a new shirt "Not because yours looks bad." It does. Your shirt looks horrible.
Breaking Kayfabe revels in clashing the two worlds of hip-hop together, the self-awareness of Rollie's underground-leaning lyrics spilling over gargantuan synth riffs and decidedly non-boom bappy beats. Imagine a less-irritating Slug if produced by a Three 6 Mafia inspired by Sparks instead of cough syrup, and you're somewhere near Cadence Weapon's aesthetic. Rollie's electro clatters and clangs, but not at the cost of rhythm, as many of the underground's boundary testers would have you believe is necessary. Anti-Pop Consortium hinted at this kind of accessible experimentation, but then ate themselves. Cadence Weapon sees the idea through on songs like "Vicariously", a tumbler of bleeps and drones borrowed from Nintendo backed by a grinding, metallic break. "Julie Will Jump The Broom" does Books-like, but struts where they stumble. "Diamond Cutter" talks noir and treats a Rick Rubin-esque break with caustic techno-disrespect.
Throughout, Rollie makes choices that surprise: flipping a sample from video game Silent Hill into a Wild West shootout with the Canadian rap establishment; subtle references to his father's passing; admitting his contradictions and not expecting credit for doing so (ahem, Kanye). These are things most rappers don't like to bother themselves with, and much of that can probably be attributed to Rollie's background. Raised in a library of music and having already dissected his influences, Rollie takes confident first steps as Cadence Weapon. Breaking Kayfabe may not be his masterpiece, but it hints that he may be capable of one, and now you can finally get his music without having to write a check to his landlord. | 2006-05-03T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2006-05-03T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | Upper Class | May 3, 2006 | 8 | 74756c24-62f2-466b-8082-b3ea15fe864b | Peter Macia | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peter-macia/ | null |
Bishop Nehru debuted as DOOM's protege and signed and split with Nas' label all before age 19. Now, he stakes out his own territory on a mostly self-produced effort that blasts off for other galaxies. | Bishop Nehru debuted as DOOM's protege and signed and split with Nas' label all before age 19. Now, he stakes out his own territory on a mostly self-produced effort that blasts off for other galaxies. | Bishop Nehru: Magic 19 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22036-magic-19/ | Magic 19 | Accepting DOOM as your mentor is a gift and a curse. There’s barely a young rapper in the world who wouldn’t want the super villain playing the Palpatine to their Darth Vader, but he hasn’t crafted one of rap’s deepest mythologies by being easy to predict. The 2014 joint album with teen protege Bishop Nehru, NehruvianDOOM, was a break for the young New Yorker, but the final product suffered from a lack of care. The regurgitated Special Herbs* *beats, slight running time and limited on-mic appearances from DOOM himself reflected his patchy interest in the project, and he’s since retreated to his hidden underground lair, plotting the next move in his malevolent masterplan. Meanwhile, Bishop, still just 19 years old, has been left exposed to the rising levels of hype surrounding him.
The union with DOOM had looked good on paper. Bishop deploys the same complex rhyme patterns as his hero, while early mixtapes saw him jack beats from DJ Premier and J Dilla, solidifying his status as a new-age guardian of the old school. After signing and splitting from Nas’ Mass Appeal label, the stakes have been raised to seemingly suffocating levels. “I hate expectations, they ruin every single thing that I think of doing,” he rapped on last year’s single “User$.” With his debut album perpetually delayed, maybe it’s all come too early for a kid not yet old enough to know what it is to step in front of a liquor store counter without sweating under the collar.
Magic 19 sees Bishop abandon the block to blast off into another galaxy. Mostly self-produced, the 11 tracks move towards a more disorienting sound, full of ethereal synths, skittering drums and lots of dead space. Bishop sounds like he’s rapping in an outer orbit, alone on board a starship made up of aluminum walls and alien technology. “Sacred Visions” is as graceful as a gravity-free float around the cosmos, while the gritty “He the Man,” built around a two-note piano riff and sledgehammer drum beat, bears down with claustrophobic intensity. Stripped back to the bare elements, the atmospheric orchestration hypnotizes.
Elsewhere, though, too many of the beats feel overcooked. Sounds rattle around each track, bumping into each other pointlessly. “Cake Up,” an out-of-place look back at Bishop’s childhood, is hampered by a grating key riff that tugs the thing earthward. The abrasive, totally unmusical collage “I Know (Angel Of My Dreams)” sounds like the young producer trying to test the outer walls of his new style.
Cut through the failed experimentation and Bishop still has skills in the booth. The nimble dexterity of his thickening voice is more impressive than ever as he relentlessly crams his bars with syllables without losing rhythm. Here he adds a creeping paranoia to his style that reflects the schizophrenic beats. Opening two tracks “Did I Find It” and “It’s Whateva” sees him brush more dirt off his shoulder than a 19-year-old ought to have. He spits venom in all directions, calling out haters, phoney rappers and tastemakers who’ve missed him “off their list like I ain’t been lyrical for half a decade.” Talk of forces actively invested in his demise sound fearful and suspicious.
While NehruvianDOOM suffered from a lack of interest from its overseer, Magic 19 could do with an experienced hand on Bishop’s shoulder to help harness his gifts. The beats are sloppy, the rapper’s voice struggles to carry a memorable hook, and too many of the song concepts, like the thin ode to his girl “You Should Know,” fail to make an impact. Bishop’s strengths are all on show, but it’s going to take a little extra to funnel them into a great project. | 2016-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | June 22, 2016 | 5.9 | 7480054a-33ed-49ba-937f-41e76e6e36f6 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | null |
The alt-rock icon returns with tasteful, timeless rock arrangements on a record about friendship, sobriety, and the love she’d like to receive. | The alt-rock icon returns with tasteful, timeless rock arrangements on a record about friendship, sobriety, and the love she’d like to receive. | Liz Phair: Soberish | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liz-phair-soberish/ | Soberish | Soberish is Liz Phair’s first album in 11 years. There is a lot riding on this one. Her 1993 debut Exile in Guyville is an enduring alt-rock touchstone. Her mid-2000s foray into radio-friendly pop? Not so much. Unlike certain other artists for whom this is true—say, Weezer—Phair largely took the 2010s off. She reissued Guyville, with an excellent box set of early bedroom recordings, and toured on it. She worked, for a while, on a song-by-song response to the Beatles’ White Album. After several women accused the record’s would-be producer of sexual abuse, Phair scrapped it. And thank God for that: Soberish is far more honest, forthright, and heartfelt than any concept album. It is a solid, sharply written record of sturdy, enjoyable songs that gradually unfold to reveal new depths of feeling.
It doesn’t sound like Guyville, not even with Guyville producer Brad Wood at the helm. It doesn’t sound like the glossy “Why Can’t I,” which is really not such a bad song. It doesn’t, mercifully, sound anything like the frenzied rap stylings of “Bollywood.” Instead, Phair opts for tasteful, timeless rock arrangements. She hones in on a few key themes: falling in love at 54, falling out of it; falling into bars, hauling herself out of them. She is refreshingly frank about her struggles with sobriety, firm and empathetic when she refers her friends to recovery. It’s like Brandy Jensen’s beloved Ask a Fuck-Up column; you trust Phair’s advice because you know she’s seen the bottom of the barrel.
The obvious highlight here is “Hey Lou.” It’s an intervention set to song, built on crisp couplets: “No one knows what to think when you’re acting like an asshole/Spilling all the drinks, talking shit about Warhol.” It barrels along at top tongue-wagging speed, Phair sounding every inch the weary mom-friend—“I’m not running a zoo here!”—until, abruptly, she lets the song fall apart. The punchy guitars and drums drop, and her voice repeats the same line, washing over itself in dense layers: “How did that work out for you? How did that work out for you?” It’s tough in the way “Divorce Song” is tough; there is tenderness and fragility in every word she sings.
Elsewhere, she’s concerned less with friendship and more with love—losing it, gaining it, looking back on it with the perspective that only 50 years of life can bring. She’s been burned, but she’s also burned others. Her priority now, it seems, is simply to move forward. She makes amends (“Good Side”), avoids old date-night haunts (“Spanish Doors”), and imagines the kind of love she’d like to receive. In the stunning, stripped-down “Lonely Street,” she sings to herself, pretending the words are her lover’s: “I’ve gotta run/I’ve been missing you, girl, like the sun.” There are no “Flower” or “Hot White Cum”-level come-ons here, but she’s still unapologetic about her sexual appetites. “We’re gonna go on up to my hotel room, make each other late,” she sings, on the sweet, gentle “Ba Ba Ba.” Her next rhyme is “I don’t have the guts to tell you that I feel great/I feel safe.”
There is much to love on this record, and only a little to skip past. The use of programmed drums and synths occasionally distracts from the substance of Phair’s lyrics, and from her unvarnished guitar. Poor mixing keeps the chorus of “Spanish Doors” from fully blasting off; the Haim-lite backing vocals come to the fore, and Phair’s leading melody is nearly inaudible. “Dosage” is a tad too shiny for its dark subject material, and “Soul Sucker” collapses under the weight of its experimental concept. I caught myself cringing, too, at the overtly sexual opening of “Bad Kitty,” before Phair herself chastised me in the chorus: “I don’t live in a world that appreciates me.”
In her 2020 Netflix documentary, Taylor Swift fretted about the prospect of turning 30. “Women in entertainment are discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they’re 35,” she said. “As I’m reaching 30, I’m like, I want to work really hard while society is still tolerating me being successful.” Swift may well have learned this fear by watching the arc of Phair’s career. The girl who made Guyville is preserved in amber; the woman who made Liz Phair became a punchline. Soberish succeeds largely because Phair is no longer asking for tolerance. She is simply, fully, being herself.
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. | 2021-06-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Chrysalis | June 5, 2021 | 7 | 74850f62-c9a6-47ff-9e79-c7f04ca487b5 | Peyton Thomas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peyton-thomas/ | |
Erika M. Anderson’s third solo album is a surreal and powerful story about political alienation. Her character-driven songs of noise, folk, and pop music thrum with rage and fear. | Erika M. Anderson’s third solo album is a surreal and powerful story about political alienation. Her character-driven songs of noise, folk, and pop music thrum with rage and fear. | EMA: Exile in the Outer Ring | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ema-exile-in-the-outer-ring/ | Exile in the Outer Ring | Red State, the first and only album by Erika M. Anderson’s late-2000s noise-folk trio, Gowns, opens with a bleak but hopeful spoken-word tableau. Over morbid drones, Anderson describes a soldier’s bedroom in Fargo, N.D., “with an American flag draped over a basement window.” She listlessly names the various drugs consumed one summer in that subterranean chamber. Titled “Fargo,” the brief track ends with an image of secular transcendence. Echoed by what sounds like a heavenly chorus of junkies, Anderson recalls that “the light shining in through the window was golden/And the days stretched out as far as the horizon/And you could see the dust flow like sparkles in the air.”
A decade later, Red-state rhetoric feels more suffocating than ever, Anderson is now the solo artist EMA, and her new album, Exile in the Outer Ring, ends with a similar scene. Her voice emerges from a mist of feedback as she recounts an escape attempt: “I ran away/To the darkest place that I could find:/A basement in the Outer Ring/It was an interior that was familiar to me/ The smoke, the blinds/Sometimes sunlight coming in/And sometimes street lamps/Brighter now than they used to be/Casting lines on beige carpeting.” This time, there’s no redemption to be found. Darkness pervades the squalid room, even with the lights on. “It seems to be closing in from around the edges,” Anderson whispers, “but it’s possible that it’s coming from inside you.”
Contrast these two views of American alienation: If the former is a vérité-style documentary on life in Anderson’s native Dakotas during George W. Bush’s hawkish, theocratic presidency, then the latter is a horror movie that captures the darkly surreal mood of the Trump era. Fargo is an actual city. The Outer Ring is an imagined territory that may substantially overlap with certain segments of the U.S. electorate, where broken dreams and desperation metastasize into a B-movie monster of uncontrollable rage.
Anderson has said that she finished writing Exile before the end of last year’s presidential primaries. Coming from an artist whose prescience about societal preoccupations yielded an entire album, 2014’s The Future’s Void, suffused with the same kind of technology anxiety that is fueling the current “fake news” panic, that’s entirely believable. And Exile’s timing might’ve made it a more complex work than it would have been if it had been composed after Trump’s victory. In the past few years, EMA has released a series of overtly political songs, from “Active Shooter” to her cover of Sinead O’Connor’s “Black Boys on Mopeds.” Accompanied by a lyric video in which phrases like “no hate” and “no xenophobia” appear over images of rural decay, Exile’s deceptively catchy first single, “Aryan Nation,” seemed to promise more of the same.
But the album turns out to be an atmospheric, character-driven narrative more than a polemic, and that makes it a more graceful political statement than the singles that preceded it. EMA doesn’t distance herself from the angry, poor, white, largely male milieu she understands intimately, having grown up in South Dakota. Instead, she channels her own leftist, female rage through the abject rhetoric of Middle America. She has described her persona on Exile as “a woman who swallowed a scumbag teen boy whole,” and the fusion of those two points of view is astonishingly seamless. At the chorus of “Aryan Nation,” Anderson’s voice goes from sweet to strained as she sings, “Tell me stories of famous men/I can’t see myself in them/We could steal, we could steal, we could steal/But we’re stealing from them.” A tornado of noise gathers before Anderson’s torrential vocals kick in and propel us through “33 Nihilistic and Female,” whose title is self-explanatory.
The Outer Ring has an aesthetic. It is the creeping dread of “Breathalyzer,” whose six minutes of jittery synths, echoing drum beats, and narcotized vocals paint a blurry picture of an intoxicated suburban couple in a landscape of big-box stores and parking lots. The music video follows a white woman with a nose ring, a bondage collar, and a baggy FUBU parka who rides with a male companion (gold chain, black baseball cap, red-tinted glasses) through a desolate suburban landscape. Anderson appears as a drug dealer, selling a glow-in-the-dark paste that the woman spreads under her long nails. This is a reminder that the Outer Ring isn’t exactly the real world, but rather an uncanny, impressionistic rendering of life on America’s fringes—dirtbag cyberpunk.
Anderson’s ideas and lyrics tend to be so compelling, they drown out any discussion of her songwriting. But it’s a mistake to consider her words or sounds in isolation, especially on Exile. The album is a bridge from EMA’s past to the present, fusing Red State’s drones and fuzz and political-made-personal portraiture with the dystopian sci-fi of The Future’s Void. From her excellent solo debut, 2011’s Past Life Martyred Saints, it takes pop vocal melodies and the sparse, explosive percussion of “California.”
What’s unique to Exile is the unreal world of the Outer Ring, which is as well developed in the music as it is in the lyrics and videos. To a base of noise, folk, and pop, Anderson adds industrial coldness, in the pounding and clanging of “Fire Water Air LSD” and the buzzsaw synths of “Breathalyzer.” These sounds will force many of us who are 33, nihilistic and female (especially if we’re white and grew up outside of any major urban center) to recall blasting Nine Inch Nails in grimy, ’90s bedrooms with disaffected white boys who might have grown up to be neo-Nazis. There is empathy in EMA’s insistence on revisiting that place and making us remember the anger it incubates, but don’t mistake Exile in the Outer Ring for some “understanding Trump’s America” thinkpiece. It’s a horror movie. It does not have a happy ending. | 2017-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | City Slang | August 25, 2017 | 8 | 748bc6fa-cf98-49be-89b6-f086afc8649a | Judy Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/judy-berman/ | null |
An album’s worth of dub versions of last year’s Con Todo El Mundo offer playful, if inessential, tweaks to the Houston band’s psych-funk sound. | An album’s worth of dub versions of last year’s Con Todo El Mundo offer playful, if inessential, tweaks to the Houston band’s psych-funk sound. | Khruangbin: Hasta el Cielo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/khruangbin-hasta-el-cielo/ | Hasta El Cielo | Khruangbin are a conundrum. The Houston band with a Thai name has skillfully showcased a crate digger’s approach to global sounds, setting heads nodding by homing in on southeast Asian funk (2015 debut The Universe Smiles Upon You) before widening out into styles from Iran and the French Antilles (last year’s Con Todo El Mundo). At the same time, despite Khruangbin’s globe-trotting narrative, their more obvious sonic touchstones are among American music’s most heavily sampled, whether the Isley Brothers’ “Footsteps in the Dark” or the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache.” Melded together, the group’s low-slung psych-funk threatens to turn into a Spotify chill-playlist slurry: Notice how, although Khruangbin’s music actually has occasional subdued vocals, many publications, including Pitchfork, have described them as “instrumental.” More and more people are listening to Khruangbin, but how many are really listening?
Hasta El Cielo, a dub version of Con Todo El Mundo, seems unlikely to settle many debates. Traces of the Jamaican dub reggae tradition are already evident on the original album in Khruangbin bassist Laura Lee’s deep rumbles and drummer Donald Johnson’s cavernous breakbeats, filled out by guitarist Mark Speer’s balmy spaghetti-western brambles and, yes, sometimes Lee’s and Speer’s ghostly vocals. In fact, Khruangbin have released a handful of dub remixes as B-sides going back a few years now, and Lee even purportedly learned the bass listening to Scientist’s dub touchstone Scientist Wins the World Cup. There’s also a decent precedent for non-Jamaican artists issuing dub versions of their albums, from Massive Attack to Bill Callahan and Franz Ferdinand. Khruangbin’s effort succeeds in subtly making a mellow record even more mellow. But it also feels like an album-length equivalent of a B-side.
The strongest cuts on Con Todo El Mundo are also the standouts on Hasta El Cielo, where they’re run through the usual dub effects: echo, flange, drop-outs, and more. The “Apache”-based “Maria También” still sounds urgent when it’s warped and hollowed into “Mary Always.” The disco-tinged “Evan Finds the Third Room” basks warmly in a world of echo as the dub version “A La Sala,” with a detached vocal cry of “yes” now more starkly positioned in the foreground, ambiguous as a Mona Lisa smile. Attentive listeners may enjoy flipping between the two albums to notice such little, nuanced differences. For dub devotees, the record ends with two additional tracks processed by Scientist himself, lathering extra atmosphere onto “Rules” and “Cómo Te Quiero.” But the sequencing does him no favors, as other, slightly varying dub versions of the same two tracks appear earlier on the album, as “Order of Operations” and “How I Love,” respectively. A better idea for an album might have been to let Scientist just do the whole thing.
As it is, little of Hasta El Cielo sticks. The wobbly instrumental interplay and dub-standard FX of “Sunny’s Vision” (“Shades of Man” on Con Todo El Mundo) or “Four of Five” (née “August 10”) are never less than pleasant in the background. But Khruangbin seem capable of more. Maybe, for a band that recently covered Warren G and ODB at Coachella—and, full disclosure, will be playing at this month’s Pitchfork Music Festival—that “more” is merely a future as a crowd-pleasing live act. But late last year, Khruangbin released a dreamy cover of Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here.” Conceptually inspired and sublimely executed, this worldly trio’s take on a homely holiday chestnut was a stunning indication that for all Khruangbin’s savvy as curators, they might have it in them to someday create something of their own with comparable staying power. By comparison, Hasta El Cielo is so laid-back that it’s almost inert. Inevitably, Khruangbin’s “Christmas Time Is Here” single also included a dub version—as a B-side.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans / Night Time Stories Ltd. | July 15, 2019 | 6.3 | 748cece1-5d39-4442-9a81-c86b1fdbca4a | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
The Weeknd’s new six-song EP finds him in limbo between the bleary-eyed vibe of his early mixtapes and the bulletproof pop stylings of his last two albums. | The Weeknd’s new six-song EP finds him in limbo between the bleary-eyed vibe of his early mixtapes and the bulletproof pop stylings of his last two albums. | The Weeknd: My Dear Melancholy, | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-weeknd-my-dear-melancholy-ep/ | My Dear Melancholy, EP | Over the last five years, Abel Tesfaye has publicly executed a sort of artistic evolution-in-reverse, inching away from the oily R&B aesthetic that propelled his initial ascent as the Weeknd in order to seek pure pop omnipresence. And who can blame him? The early releases collected on 2012’s triple-disc blowout Trilogy cast a long shadow of influence over modern pop, for better and worse. The mood those mixtapes captured—horny, druggy, and downright miserable, like a never-ending bender—was overbearing in a way that could suffocate creative growth, and eventually it did: 2013’s Kiss Land doubled down on Trilogy’s aesthetic received a tepid response critically and commercially. Just a few years into his career, it seemed like Tesfaye had already hit a creative dead-end.
What followed was, even in this transparently careerist era of pop music, a fascinatingly direct dilution of the Weeknd’s brand. Big-deal pop wizards like Max Martin and Diplo started sharing production credits alongside O.G. Weeknd collaborators Illangelo and Doc McKinney. And Tesfaye, who was once content to exploit anonymity as a marketing tool, could now be seen shamelessly mugging in a tux in a promotional tie-in for one of the most successful erotic dramas of all time.
Increasingly, the Weeknd’s musical output resembled a Seussian randomness: You could hear him over a trop-house beat, choral hair-metal, starry-eyed new wave, and lilting filter-disco. 2015’s Beauty Behind the Madness was a bombastic Event Record streaked with aspirations of Grammy gold; the following year’s Starboy pushed his newfound eclecticism into the red, a try-anything-once album that doubled as the Weeknd’s longest LP to date. Dreams of Michael Jackson abounded on both records, to a sometimes comical extreme: Watch Tesfaye literally bursting into flames in the video for “Can’t Feel My Face,” and try not to think of when MJ’s hair caught on fire while filming a Pepsi commercial in 1984.
The knowingly crass gambit—Tesfaye losing his sense of self in the service of increased image awareness—worked. As of this writing, Beauty Behind the Madness is triple-platinum, with Starboy certified double. Following all this eclecticism, the Weeknd’s latest project, My Dear Melancholy, turns Tesfaye’s gaze back to the project’s earlier, more morose material.
Many have speculated that the album’s six tracks of downcast, bleary-eyed electronic pop are direct responses to Tesfaye’s recent split with pop star Selena Gomez, and there’s certainly enough for celeb-gawkers to chew on in that respect. But the record’s title and contents could also be interpreted as Tesfaye’s sign of affection for the moody music that he made his name on—a love letter to the aesthetic past he left behind.
If old habits die hard, though, then so do new routines, and My Dear Melancholy, finds Tesfaye trapped in a middle ground between where he came from and where he is right now. As it was with his last two records, the production list is moneyed and well-respected: Skrillex, Nicolas Jaar, Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Cristo, and Mike WiLL Made-It are among the collaborators here, adding new wrinkles to Tesfaye’s ever-expanding sonic palette.
Skrillex continues pursuing his recent 2-step fascination with “Wasted Times,” featuring a breakdown that seems tailor-made for a capable UK Garage flip; the pained nihilism of “Privilege” takes on a subtle bloom in the hands of Frank Dukes (Lorde, Camila Cabello), with a pleasingly wordless chorus that emerges in the song’s final third. Arguably, the production has always been the most interesting element of the Weeknd as a project, and these highlights showcase Tesfaye’s still-sharp ear for cool, contemporary sounds.
When My Dear Melancholy, does recall Tesfaye’s creative past, it serves to illuminate the project’s weaknesses. It’s impossible not to hear the pronounced “Call Out My Name” as a redux of Beauty Behind the Madness’ “Earned It.” On “Hurt You,” Homem-Cristo and fellow Frenchman Gesaffelstein draw from the same well that produced Starboy’s title track and “I Feel It Coming,” but fail to match the radiance of either.
Simply put, it’s too early in this stage of Tesfaye’s career to so obviously attempt to replicate past glories. While My Dear Melancholy, makes for a slight curio in the Weeknd’s discography, it also feels like an unnecessary step backwards following the down-for-whatever approach of his recent work. There’s nothing wrong with reflecting on the past, but sometimes it’s better to just leave it there.
Correction: An original version of this review mislabeled the album as an EP. | 2018-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XO / Republic | April 3, 2018 | 6.5 | 7490a74f-17a9-40ba-94e2-c686536648e6 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
For all its unrelenting gloom, the Connecticut post-punk outfit Have a Nice Life's six-years-in-the-making second album, The Unnatural World, oozes beauty. Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place. | For all its unrelenting gloom, the Connecticut post-punk outfit Have a Nice Life's six-years-in-the-making second album, The Unnatural World, oozes beauty. Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place. | Have a Nice Life: The Unnatural World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18828-have-a-nice-life-the-unnatural-world/ | The Unnatural World | The most striking measurement of Have a Nice Life’s growth over the past couple years can be made by playing the new version of “Defenestration Song”—a high point of the Connecticut post-punk outfit’s second album, The Unnatural World—against the original version from 2010’s Voids cassette. Previously stringy and pale, the song is now brawny and dark. The bass line, once a bubbling throwback to Joy Division’s “Walked in Line”, has become a flood of sludge. Drums and guitar claw at each other. And the vocals seep through the sour atmosphere like a poisonous fog. An entire dimension has been added to it—and the same can be said of Have a Nice Life as a whole.
Founded by core members Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, Have a Nice Life came on strong with their 2008 debut, Deathconsciousness, then seemed to retreat in the face of an imminent breakthrough. It’s taken six years to issue a proper follow-up, but their central message hasn’t changed: Existence is bleak, gallows humor undergirds it, and sometimes wallowing in that sick paradox is the best revenge. But instead of sporting the sort of smart-ass song titles found on Deathconsciousness (“Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000”, “Waiting for Black Metal Records to Come in the Mail”), The Unnatural World submerges most of the duo’s bitter irony, or at least the irony, leaving nothing but the bitter.
For all its unrelenting gloom, The Unnatural World oozes beauty. On “Burial Society”, a rolling blackout of congealed noise only barely clothes a sumptuous, lonesome vocal melody—one that’s as full of rage as it is resignation. Smothered in sorrow, “Guggenheim Wax Museum” plods and throbs in time with some cosmic, cancerous organ. Hints of shoegaze gauziness and industrial pneumatics float through “Unholy Life”, even as “Dan and Tim, Reunited by Fate” bypasses what would appear to be cheeky self-mythology in favor of dour, murky balladry. When the track’s skeletal tangle of beats and static finally disintegrates, all that’s left is hellish echo.
“Cropsey”, named after Staten Island’s eerie, mad-slasher urban legend, opens with an even more chilling sample: testimony from a young boy named Johnny, an inmate of the notoriously abusive Pennsylvania mental institution Pennhurst that was featured in the 1968 exposé Suffer the Little Children. Accordingly, the song’s spiraling synths and ghostly wails evoke stolen innocence, nerve-deadened dread, and cries for a rescue that may never come. Rather than feeling like morbid exploitation, “Crospey” slowly morphs into a goth-dub uproar that tears loose a heart of tenderness and empathy. Hope, however, is still nowhere in sight.
The album’s matched pair of drumless tracks, “Music Will Untune the Sky” and “Emptiness Will Eat the Witch”, are equal parts brooding interlude and mocking reprieve. They hover over the rest of the songs like an unspoken, fatalistic threat—an ominous horizon that can’t be escaped from. Where fellow travelers such as the Soft Moon and Cold Cave religiously exult in the darkwave tradition, Have a Nice Life use The Unnatural World to distance themselves from any kind of retroactive pull. Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place. Instead it moves, and moves others with it. | 2014-02-06T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-02-06T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | The Flenser / Enemies List | February 6, 2014 | 7.8 | 7495dabb-82fb-43a3-bf06-f307972c1d26 | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
With Sonic Youth drifting into an unofficial, maybe-permanent hiatus, Thurston Moore has started a louder, younger rock band featuring Samara Lubelski and members of Hush Arbors and Sunburned Hand of the Man. Their self-titled debut is the heaviest, most dissonant music Moore's put together in recent memory. | With Sonic Youth drifting into an unofficial, maybe-permanent hiatus, Thurston Moore has started a louder, younger rock band featuring Samara Lubelski and members of Hush Arbors and Sunburned Hand of the Man. Their self-titled debut is the heaviest, most dissonant music Moore's put together in recent memory. | Chelsea Light Moving: Chelsea Light Moving | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17766-chelsea-light-moving-chelsea-light-moving/ | Chelsea Light Moving | If you've been following Thurston Moore's career over the last several years, you might have gotten the impression that the Sonic Youth singer/guitarist was beginning to mellow out. Two recent solo efforts-- Trees Outside the Academy and Demolished Thoughts-- were relatively low-wattage affairs that were anchored by acoustic guitars and strings, rather than half-stacks and bashed-up electric guitars.
Since then, Sonic Youth-- which has, for some 30 years, been the central outlet for Moore's screeching rock'n'roll id-- has drifted into an unofficial, maybe-permanent hiatus spurred by the guitarist's break-up with his wife and bandmate, Kim Gordon.
Rather than give his ears a rest, Moore, now 54, opted to start a louder, younger band. Chelsea Light Moving, named for a moving company founded by Phillip Glass that briefly employed his fellow composer, Steve Reich, is a quartet featuring guitarist Keith Wood, of Hush Arbors, and Sunburned Hand of the Man drummer John Moloney. Samara Lubelski, who's released some great, retro-leaning psych-pop solo records, plays bass.
The band's self-titled debut record is the heaviest, most dissonant music that Moore has put together in recent memory, easily out-skronking Sonic Youth's 2009 LP, The Eternal. The album opener, "Heavenmetal", is easy-going, jangling, business-as-usual, with Moore drawling out the cool, neo-hippie refrain, "Be a warrior and love life." But after that, they crank up the volume. The songs, which often stretch up to six-minutes, make frequent nods to metal and hardcore punk, genres that deeply informed Sonic Youth’s earlier records, but that the band has mostly shied away from over the last decade or so.
Moore is the principal songwriter here, but the record's best moments are its most inclusive-- the chugging meltdown that ends "Alighted" or the fuzzy free-for-all that closes "Empires of Time"-- where the guitarist becomes anonymous and melds into the din with his bandmates. The new cast of musicians also helps to inch Moore's compositions away from the sound of his old band. Sonic Youth's drummer, Steve Shelley, played tight, metronomic rhythms. Moloney's rhythms are looser and heavier, buoying some of Chelsea Light's multi-movement zone-out. When they’re hitting hard, they evoke UK blues-prog band Groundhogs plowing through the SST catalog.
The record seems like a conscious attempt for Moore to get back to serious shredding, to move away from introspection and toward the immediate thrill of pummel and screech. Sometimes, Chelsea Light goes too far, stumbling past primal and towards boneheaded. On "Lip" and a cover of Germs' "Communist Eyes", Chelsea Light Moving pays homage to early 80s hardcore and punk. These were musical movements that were defined by freaked-out 18 year-olds and listening to a 54 year-old man echo the snotty tenor of their delivery induces a sort of music-nerd vertigo. Most of the time, though, he just seems like he's trying to get out of the way so that the band can plow back into atonal churn.
Like a lot of Moore's work, the songs on Chelsea Light Moving's debut are a carefully curated mash-up of the singer’s favorite strains of American subculture-- Beat poetry (see "Burroughs"), New York poetry (see "Frank O'Hara Hit"), Texas psych-rock, no wave, hardcore, and so on. And listening to the record, you can get a feeling similar to that of leafing through a really great rock-zine. Sometimes you land on a page that clues you into the mystical, prophetic weirdos of yesteryear. Other times, you get the gross, puking cartoon. | 2013-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-03-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Matador | March 1, 2013 | 6.8 | 749cdf6e-d850-4995-b451-33aec768b8fa | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
The veteran New Zealand noise band, as it had begun to on 2008's Secret Earth, returns to something close to rock music. | The veteran New Zealand noise band, as it had begun to on 2008's Secret Earth, returns to something close to rock music. | The Dead C: Patience | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14753-patience/ | Patience | It's funny that, out of 30-plus releases over 23 years, the Dead C decided to call this one Patience. Many of their other records have actually required patience-- both from the New Zealand trio and their audience. Take "Speederbot" from 2000's The Dead C, which drifts and wanders through a half-hour of stubborn noise, or "Garage" from 2007's Future Artists, 20 minutes of humming distortion and loose guitar (all good things, by the way). Patience, on the other hand, opens with the attention-grabbing "Empire". Surging steadily forward with a simple beat, churning metal/psych riffs, and sheets of whirring feedback, it evokes classic Dead C page-turners like "Helen Said This" and "Bitcher".
Come to think of it, maybe Patience refers to what the album rewards if you've been waiting for the Dead C to return the rock-rubbing style of those songs. For such followers, the trio represents a unique step sideways from rock convention. On landmarks like 1992's Harsh 70's Reality and 1995's The White House, they split the rock atom to preserve the fun parts-- momentum, guitar heft, art-punk attitude, outsider edge-- and blow up the rest. What emerged was a sound that could swing and lurch, hang together and fall apart, and rock insistently while grinding unreservedly. The logical extension of those 90s detonations was abstract noise, and the band did some great work in that realm in the 2000s. But, as it had begun to on 2008's Secret Earth, the rock side regains the upper hand throughout these four motoring tracks.
Which is not to say that you can sing along. In the Dead C dictionary, "rock" is more a translation than a definition, and besides, there aren't even any vocals here. That's a rarity-- Michael Morley's moan usually arrives somewhere along the band's far-flung journeys, but here it's eschewed in favor of creating structure and atmosphere with morphing sonics. In that sense, Patience's closest parallel is the underappreciated 1996 live album, Repent. Both albums move like storm clouds, with Morley's guitar and Bruce Russell's noise riding Robbie Yeats' primal drumming as if it were laying tracks. But this album is also open and spacious, and remarkably energetic for a band that's been at it this long-- just check out "Shaft", a five-minute blast that could pass for a teen band's uneducated, unjaded punk.
Patience closes with a track that might seem to contradict my back-to-the-rock thesis. "South" starts with seven minutes of slow chords and amorphous din, more like lost radio transmissions than music. But it eventually coalesces into a sticky beat, before descending into echoing feedback that somehow swings. In its own way, "South" rocks as solidly as the three tracks that preceded it*.* But it also serves as a nice reminder that the Dead C not only do a fine job of destroying rock, they're pretty good at sifting through the rubble, too. | 2010-10-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-10-19T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Ba Da Bing | October 19, 2010 | 7.8 | 749ff102-8b52-47a7-9675-79e69602581d | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The Baltimore music student’s soft-focus popcraft plays like a lost link between the hazed-out aesthetic of chillwave and the smooth precision of sophisti-pop. | The Baltimore music student’s soft-focus popcraft plays like a lost link between the hazed-out aesthetic of chillwave and the smooth precision of sophisti-pop. | Julien Chang: Jules | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julien-chang-jules/ | Jules | The streaming revolution has been very good to precocious teenagers tumbling headfirst into music obsession. Imagine being a teen today: You don’t need a well-stocked record clerk or in-the-know older sibling to place life-changing albums in your hands. You don’t even need spare cash for a Sam Goody run. Those barriers to entry have collapsed—and so have barriers of taste. Low culture is high culture, indie is pop, and for every celebrity teenager who does not know who Van Halen is, 20 more non-famous teens just devoured Van Halen, Van Halen II, and 1984 for the first time without leaving their bedrooms.
Julien Chang is the sort of preternaturally talented pop wunderkind who benefits from this new world order: He has listened to a vast range of music, absorbed the most appealing ideas, and discarded the scraps. Chang recorded most of the songs on Jules, his first album, the summer before his senior year of high school. He was 17 and lapping up influences as varied as Gregorian chant, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2, and the Afro-funk compilation Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump. “I was really getting into a different kind of music each week, and I recorded a new song each week,” the songwriter, who is now 20, told Billboard recently. The resulting album—self-produced and recorded in a basement home studio—earned him a deal with the London label Transgressive.
While nothing on Jules evokes Gregorian chant, the album’s breezy eclecticism floats between genres and influences with impressive fluidity. Opening track “Deep Green” travels from sci-fi mysticism to proggy grandeur before settling into a gentle psych-pop vocal melody. There is still room for a space-age guitar solo before the five-minute mark arrives.
If Chang has a signature sound, it’s his knack for soft-focus psychedelic popcraft. This album suggests a lost link between the hazed-out aesthetic of early-2010s chillwave—Neon Indian, Washed Out, et al.—and the smooth precision of early-’80s sophisti-pop. The retro glow of “Two Voices” and “Moving Parts,” with their muffled vocals and generous helpings of reverb, tilt towards the former pole. But Chang’s best material highlights his obvious keyboard chops (he’s a classically trained musician) and penchant for soft groove. “Memory Loss,” with its staccato-funk groove and pleasantly stoned hook (“My memory is failing me/And I can’t remember why”), is an easy highlight. And the spry and funky “Dogolouge,” which appears to be sung from the perspective of a family dog (“Take me out/And I don’t know where”), boasts a surprise sax breakdown that could have been transplanted from an Avalon outtake.
Much of the album has a transformational feel to it: Songs begin innocuously, then veer into unexpected territory, such as the key change in “Dogolouge.” The first single, “Of the Past,” seems content to coast on a supple funk groove buoyed by a vintage Microkorg from Chang’s father’s synth collection. But the song’s back half gives way to a startlingly proficient jazz piano solo that’s a kissing cousin to David Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane.” Played by Jeheiel Smith, a friend from school, it is one of just two guest performances throughout the album.
Chang’s vocals are not quite as distinctive as his instrumental chops. Throughout Jules, he tends to layer his voice, or bury it under thick sweaters of reverb—a technique commonly favored by young musicians who aren’t quite accustomed to stepping up to the mic. And while his lush harmonies are occasionally quite striking (as on the slow-motion Fleet Foxes pastiche “Butterflies From Monaco”), this tendency leaves lethargic material like “Somerville Demo” feeling especially listless. On an album as rich with the spirit of teenage discovery as Jules, these are forgivable sins. Chang is 20, and his first album explores a wider stylistic terrain than plenty of bands manage in a full career.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Transgressive | December 9, 2019 | 7.4 | 74a01edf-22fd-4ddb-b9a0-0df017ff187f | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
The Atlanta rapper attempts to convey the subtleties of romance on his new R&B-inspired album. It sounds as though he’s never even been on a date. | The Atlanta rapper attempts to convey the subtleties of romance on his new R&B-inspired album. It sounds as though he’s never even been on a date. | Tony Shhnow: Love Streak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tony-shhnow-love-streak/ | Love Streak | The central theme of Tony Shhnow’s dozen-plus mixtapes and albums is constant effort. “I want this shit more than anyone,” he declared on 2021’s “Want It,” a grindset ethos reinforced by the titles of releases like “No Holidays,” “Can’t Sleep,” Kill Streak, and Plugg Motivation. But Shhnow’s relentless exertion yields little on Love Streak, a new R&B-inspired album on which he talks about love like he skimmed an Axios article before walking into the booth.
Love Streak is supposed to showcase Shhnow’s more sensitive side through songs about romance and its complications, but he sounds as though he’s never even been on a date. For inspiration, he explained, he watched “love movies” like Poetic Justice and The Notebook and “would take bubble baths, light candles, and listen to 48 Hz music and shit like that.” That crash course in deeper feelings conveys the extent of his investment. Instead of grounding his writing in his chosen topic, Shhnow cuts and pastes romantic signifiers into non sequitur punchlines.
The resulting music is empty and often nonsensical. The disembodied women Shhnow invokes across the album amount to a word cloud from a porn site search bar: “thick,” “Spanish,” “sisters.” Though all these ladies are inexplicably horny for him, they lack personalities, jobs, and even home states. “She from up North, got an accent,” Shhnow says of one lover on “Control Issues.” Another sounds like a malfunctioning fembot on “Need,” offering a truly inhuman string of stock pleas: “She in my ear saying/‘Touch me, tease me/Feel me, please me/Free me, heal me/…Somebody save me.’”
Moving away from plugg, which softens trap bustle with whimsical 16-bit melodies seemingly ripped from a JRPG battle theme, Shhnow opts for production designed to evoke the tension and catharsis of quiet storm. He’s rapped over these kinds of arrangements before, but this time the choice of R&B is more intentional, positioned as a natural soundtrack to the workings of the heart: “Women are always listening to like R&B and watching love movies and Casablanca,” he’s observed. “I tried to go into their world so I could really understand how to speak on some of these topics.” But despite plush standouts like “Control Issues” and “On the Street,” the mood of seduction and longing feels strained. Women-led R&B groups like SWV and Kut Klose are sampled perfunctorily, their songs barely tweaked or reimagined. “Unordinary Drugs” turns Sade’s “Ordinary Love” into a bass-heavy clunker that sounds like a bungled karaoke round.
You could choose to ignore the tender conceit and think of Love Streak as “Tony Shhnow talks his shit over R&B-type beats,” but that would require his flexes to be distinct or entertaining. Though Shhnow imagines himself as a chameleon like his idols Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane, in practice, most of his lines are just dopey puns (“I smoke on this kryptonite, but she say I’m superior”) or boasts that wouldn’t be memorable even if he were rapping over his standard trap and plugg fare. “If getting money illegal, I promise/The president ain’t thinking pardoning me,” he raps on “Sometimes, Pt. 2.” What?
Typically, when rappers turn to R&B for an entire album, they use the melodrama and vulnerability of the genre to expand their songwriting. Chief Keef’s disarmingly tender Thot Breaker, Future’s gently toxic HNDRXX, and Ghostface’s effusive Ghostdini are all journeys of self-discovery that unlock new flows and personas. T-Pain’s solo debut Rappa Ternt Sanga is perhaps the pinnacle of the genre, transforming him into the stripper-loving robot casanova that he couldn’t be as part of harder-edged group Nappy Headz. Love Streak offers no such reinvention; Shhnow, ever the workman, just punches in and out. In the end, it really is a grind. | 2023-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | May 11, 2023 | 5.8 | 74a96d4b-47c1-47ad-b6a9-9a8885202071 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
On his proper debut, the 24-year-old artist dabbles in generic singer-songwriter pastiche, flattening what made his intimate, solitary music so promising in the first place. | On his proper debut, the 24-year-old artist dabbles in generic singer-songwriter pastiche, flattening what made his intimate, solitary music so promising in the first place. | Christian Alexander: I Don’t Like You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/christian-alexander-i-dont-like-you/ | I Don’t Like You | Summer ’17, the 2019 project by British songwriter Christian Alexander, evoked such intense loneliness that it felt intrusive to listen to. Over lo-fi mist and gently strummed guitar, Alexander sang of pain, regret, and high school malaise in an effortlessly soulful voice. Writing, recording, and producing the music from his parents’ garage in Garstang, England, he self-released Summer ’17 under a guise of anonymity that added to its appeal. He quickly found success with “Going Thru,” which has since racked up millions of streams. Several months later, after releasing another project, Summer ’19, he caught the attention of Kevin Abstract, who tweeted that Alexander was his “favorite artist in the world.”
Cue a BROCKHAMPTON feature, a record deal with Abstract’s Video Store label, and a shift from his DIY garage setup to a professional studio. No longer bound to Garstang, nor the solitude that informed his early work, the 24-year-old artist is positioned to become an edgier Rex Orange County who can gracefully glide between hip-hop, R&B, and guitar pop. I Don’t Like You arrives under these pretenses, and it nearly collapses under the weight of its own ambition. Built from simple chords and inoffensive lyrics, it’s a collection of lackluster songs that aspires toward timelessness but winds up regurgitating a generic singer-songwriter pastiche with barely any pulse.
Working alongside BROCKHAMPTON producer and engineer Romil Hemnani, Alexander’s once grainy sound broadens into brighter colors. Opener “Waste Her Time” blends a dusty drumbeat, rich grand piano, and cavernous harmonies, yet it never lifts off the ground. It sounds good in the way that music in an advertisement can sound good. Though Alexander’s signature lo-fi haze still textures a few songs (“Head” and “Paper Bag”), the big acoustic numbers are sappy and spineless, like cast-off demos from “A-Team”-era Ed Sheeran. A tacky guitar riff leads “Small Things,” an aimless song about singing songs. “Bertie” borrows the strumming pattern from the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and the vocal cadence of an English drinking song. The layered harmonies and strings are nice touches, but the song remains hapless and one-note, ending in the same place it started.
Part of the problem with I Don’t Like You is Alexander’s voice, which hardly ever expands past his nasally middle register. When his voice does open up, his songs erupt: The bridge on “Where’s Your Head At?” throbs with desperation, a fervor almost entirely absent from the rest of the record. But then, in an instant, Alexander returns to neutral, and any emotional intrigue goes with him. On past projects, his melodies and homespun production were engaging enough to mask his vocal range, but here, under glossy studio lights, it falters with the burden of carrying a big-budget album.
The best moments are when Alexander dares to get dark. The title track revolves around a chorus that delivers one of the album’s sharpest melodies: “If you ask me what I think of us/I’d say ‘I don’t like you, never have,’” he sings, briefly flashing the alluring promise that pulsed through his early work. It’s not that Alexander needs to go emo to access his best material, but eschewing immediacy for accessibility flattens what made him a riveting talent in the first place. I Don’t Like You seeks to explore the contours of his sound and take bolder risks, but the result is an aloof and frictionless record that leaves little to look for beneath the surface. | 2022-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Video Store | April 4, 2022 | 5.6 | 74ab00d6-0f69-4cde-aa61-b108ead38123 | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Indulgent, arcane, and often hilarious, the Ohio noise-jazz improvisers’ new three-and-a-half-hour cassette collection is too weird to be boring. | Indulgent, arcane, and often hilarious, the Ohio noise-jazz improvisers’ new three-and-a-half-hour cassette collection is too weird to be boring. | Moth Cock: *Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights * | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/moth-cock-whipped-stream-and-other-earthly-delights/ | Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights | A fixture in the Hausu Mountain roster since the label’s 2012 founding, Ohio free-jazz duo Moth Cock bridge the gap between the noisy DIY cassette scene of the aughts and the progressive, MIDI-powered scene that emerged in its place. Their manic improvisation blends Pat Modugno’s crunchy live electronics and trumpet with Doug Gent’s saxophone, testing one surreal textural fusion after another at length. Though they’ve typically stuck to a traditional 45-minute album format in the past, dropping off a small handful of drawn-out jams per tape, their latest Hausu release allows the band to explore its maximalist impulses to the fullest.
Whipped Stream and Other Earthly Delights, Moth Cock’s low-fidelity answer to Autechre’s NTS Sessions, gathers its three and a half hours of material from their recent Twitch broadcasts. The physical release spans three cassettes, and even as a digital release, it’s unlikely you’ll have the time (or desire) to consume it in one sitting—a dilemma that plays to the band’s strengths. Several of the album’s 14 tracks stretch 20 minutes or longer, developing discrete atmospheres and timbral vocabularies despite emerging from the same small arsenal of instruments. Each jam is a fresh rabbit hole, and the record’s generous structure encourages listeners to leave and return at their leisure, tumbling down a different tunnel every time.
Half-hour opener “Castles Off Jersey,” a hazy drone performance accented by howling woodwinds and synth arpeggios, waxes nostalgic for the tape-warped ambient music that flourished on Blogspot around the time Moth Cock formed. “Invisible Pranks,” which stretches out at similar length, sounds like the work of a different band, assembling its suite-like structure around tortuously woven drum machine beats. Mechanical toms and snares rush into the mix at the outset, forming a singeli-like maze of rhythm. Gent’s sax emerges with a bestial wail, then scrambles to orient itself with a series of zig-zagging licks. When its phrasing steadies, Modugno raises the floodgates, deploying sampled bike horns, throbbing bass synths, and even more drums, as if attempting to trip up his partner. Despite its length and abstraction, the track remains in constant flux. Even as things devolve into what sounds like a deluge of Space Invaders sound effects halfway through, Modugno seamlessly splices some of Gent’s more melodic ideas into a final loop pedal collage.
Like chapters in a short story anthology, the individual tracks are as—if not more—rewarding when approached one at a time, in no particular order. “Mineshaft Full of Caspers” is Whipped Stream’s most thrilling isolated experience, propelled by wobbling dub rhythms and a kitchen-sink approach to sound design. The duo cycles through samples with assembly-line efficiency, presenting a dissonant guitar riff, unsettling chanting, or cartoonish congas to flesh out their funhouse soundscape. Moth Cock’s toolbox seems bottomless, and whenever things threaten to get stale, Modugno starts tinkering with the mix, pitch-shifting and mangling the entire performance. The aesthetic isn’t necessarily “accessible,” not unless you’re the type to haggle over harsh noise cassettes on Discogs, but there’s no shortage of novelty, and if one idea’s not your speed, Moth Cock will probably replace it with another before you’re tempted to skip ahead.
The shorter tracks here occasionally fall short of their ambitious neighbors. The sci-fi inspired synths on the relatively melodic “Almost Flirted” and the house-adjacent “Finn McCool” are fun detours that leave you wondering how they might have evolved with more space to unfurl. These sketches would have been high points on a C-60 cassette release, but in the context of this ambitious multi-tape album, they feel gratuitous. Moth Cock work best when they have space ahead to confidently chart their next few moves.
Whipped Stream is indulgent, arcane, and often hilarious—the mere existence of a tastefully packaged three-tape box set emblazoned with a reference to insect genitalia feels like a prank. Appropriately, it’s the first Hausu Mountain release to bear the label’s new 10th anniversary logo: an anthropomorphic cake-in-a-trophy topped with slime-green frosting. For a collective as entrenched in Tim & Eric-esque surrealism and jam-band fandom as this one, you couldn’t ask for a better birthday present. | 2022-09-02T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-02T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Jazz | Hausu Mountain | September 2, 2022 | 7.2 | 74ab48f5-3b27-45eb-b03e-ed8b7021fbd2 | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
The debut album from the young pop figure transforms her jittery, emotional miniatures into songs that feel more extroverted, more joyful, and sometimes more complete. | The debut album from the young pop figure transforms her jittery, emotional miniatures into songs that feel more extroverted, more joyful, and sometimes more complete. | PinkPantheress: Heaven knows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pink-pantheress-heaven-knows/ | Heaven knows | Intimacy and distance exist in a delicate balance for PinkPantheress. Since she started posting snippets and demos to TikTok in 2020, her shy club tracks have exuded warmth and tenderness, like a friend whispering secrets in your ear on the dancefloor. Her earliest singles—like “Break It Off” and “Pain”—captured the desperate yearning and the lingering pain of young love. At the time she was a teenager studying film in London, uploading music in her spare time, and naturally she kept the public at arm's length. Her songs were light on details, heavy on suggestion, and rarely stretched longer than a couple of minutes. Just when it seems like she might be willing to open up, the song ends. She’s onto another breakbeat and another thought.
Heaven knows, her debut album, largely dispenses with this approach. Working with a cast of new collaborators—including pop industry staples like Greg Kurstin and producers with roots in the underground, like PC Music’s Danny L. Harle—she transforms her jittery, emotional miniatures into pop songs that feel more extroverted, more joyful, and sometimes more complete. It’s a natural step, following the success of “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2,” the pillowy, pastel-hued club cut with Ice Spice that vaulted up the Hot 100 earlier this year. That song’s prismatic production and charismatic guest appearance represented PinkPantheress pushing at the boundaries of her ambition—aiming bigger and broader than ever before. The track’s inclusion here is reflective of a general desire across Heaven knows to outrun the URL spaces she came from. Earlier this year, she said that she doesn’t use TikTok anymore, and that she’s uninterested in being an “internet artist.” She’s always had a desire to be pop in the most literal sense, the sort of songwriter, she told NPR, who makes music “your cousin or your mom” could relate to.
Consequently, she returns to the palette that’s worked for her so far: synths that flicker with technicolor richness, dizzily 2-stepping drum programming, and the fragile wisps of the upper range of her voice. “Feelings,” as its title suggests, digs into her tried-and-true themes: desire, anxiety, and general uncertainty. But the song—which casts a similar nocturnal glow as early ’00s R&B—feels more fully realized, with gleaming production choices and a more emphatic vocal delivery. Throughout the record, she excises any hesitance or half steps: She embraces the fluorescent confidence of newfound stardom.
PinkPantheress claims to write intuitively: Her songs were short because that’s how long she felt they needed to be. She doesn’t seem to want anyone to read into the relatively epic length of songs like “Capable of love” (three minutes and 43 seconds), but it is a notably different listening experience. Her older, miniature songs sugar-rushed through their ideas, while “Capable of love” teases out its melodies patiently, indulging tasteful repetition and turbulent dynamics that she previously wouldn’t have room for.
Heaven knows flexes her abilities as a writer, producer, and curator of guest spots (Kelela and Rema’s appearances add crackling energy to “Bury me” and “Another life,” respectively). But part of what separates her from nostalgia-pop peers like piri & tommy or Yunè Pinku was a willingness to lurk in the shadows of the club, letting quiet overtones hang heavy over the tracks. Even as she extends herself as a songwriter, and as she grows more comfortable in the spotlight, she hasn’t found a way to build on the full extent of her mystique. | 2023-11-10T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-10T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Electronic | 300 Entertainment | November 10, 2023 | 6.4 | 74ac2a67-8ca3-47f9-9d3c-7d200dc2189c | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
Much more than mood-setters for Stranger Things, the synth masters of S U R V I V E carve out a compelling niche of their own. | Much more than mood-setters for Stranger Things, the synth masters of S U R V I V E carve out a compelling niche of their own. | S U R V I V E: RR7349 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22430-rr7349/ | RR7349 | Overnight success is rarely that, but in the case of experimental synth group S U R V I V E, you’d be forgiven for assuming that they arrived fully-formed this past summer. Two of their members collaborated on the Stranger Things OST, Vol. One and Two, the soundtrack to Netflix’s zeitgeist-consuming sci-fi TV series. Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s uncanny ear for ’80s synthesizers—not to mention their proclivity for building their own from scratch—was absolutely perfect for scoring a supernatural thriller set in the Reagan Era. But as one-half of S U R V I V E’s four-person outfit (they’re joined by Adam Jones and Mark Donica, on even more synths), they now find themselves at a crossroads. With the band’s newfound success, their fans will surely be looking for the points of reference that hooked them in the first place: the film compositions of John Carpenter, Tangerine Dream, Giorgio Moroder, and even Vangelis’ less grandiose moments.
And while those influences are abundant on their new album RR7349, the challenge here, as with any band who becomes suddenly popular, is to avoid that albatross and temper those expectations with enough individuality to stay true to their core sound and identity. It's not an easy balance, but the album gets there, and once it settles into its slick groove, is unrelenting in its deconstruction of their soundtrack work.
Despite, or perhaps because of the restrictions of their instrumentation, S U R V I V E’s music has gone through a range of tones and atmospheres since their inception only seven years ago. 2012’s HD009 (all of the band's releases are simply titled after their catalog number) consists of two tracks, both exactly 22:06 minutes long, interacting like mirrored reflections of the same ambient piece of music. That year they also released Mnq026, a record that more closely resembles the structure and tone of the Stranger Things OST, while maintaining the eerie sparsity that permeated their music up to that point.
However, the slight of hand that S U R V I V E recreate across all of their records has nothing to do with ambiance, or underrated cinematic touchstones, or even their vast knowledge of their cherished instruments, which, credit where credit’s due, rightfully make up for much of the band's appeal. The most difficult part of making instrumental, non-dance electronic music for an audience beyond your typical avant-garde connoisseur is injecting it with a sense of narrative, a story, an energy that replaces vocals and conventional musical structures to give the tracks an augmented dimension. S U R V I V E are very good at this. They may be one of the best bands currently employing those skills, and RR7349 is their most succinct example yet.
As engrossing and brilliant as the Stranger Things OST is, its success relies, much like the TV series, largely on its capacity to mimic the feel of an era. There’s not a moment on it that is as stomach-lurching as “Dirt,” an early highlight of RR7349; like most of the tracks on the album, it's sensory almost to the point of overwhelmingness. The pulsating “Sorcerer” is built around a harsh, driving percussive synth line that bulldozes almost everything underneath it, and when a drum machine actually does pierce through the layers and layers of foggy keyboards, like on “Copter,” it’s so arresting it almost jolts you out of your seat.
The album closes with “Cutthroat,” its best track, a composition so deliciously creepy you almost wish it were accompanying a particularly splattery scene of mayhem. Its arpeggiated squelches swirl in an unsettling void until, little by little, deep bass and tinkering chimes begin to seep in, and suddenly, the next thing you know, you're caught under the weight of the track's increasing paranoia. Based on “Cutthroat” alone, it’s clear that S U R V I V E’s capacity for imagination and evocation goes well beyond homages to film scores of the 1980s, and much like the machines they meticulously build to create their dense soundscapes, they’ll continue to tweak and augment their sound until the unholy day their monstrous creation is completed. | 2016-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Relapse | October 1, 2016 | 7.4 | 74b2b8f8-1cc0-4d58-a6fc-86ebfb6c5d5f | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
Armed with passable productions and an uneven roster of guest stars, the Wu-Tang dynamo's first full-length release since 2011's Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang LP rarely smacks of anything like victory. The sound's too lousy-- and the stakes too low-- to live up to his past glories. | Armed with passable productions and an uneven roster of guest stars, the Wu-Tang dynamo's first full-length release since 2011's Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang LP rarely smacks of anything like victory. The sound's too lousy-- and the stakes too low-- to live up to his past glories. | Raekwon: Unexpected Victory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16170-unexpected-victory/ | Unexpected Victory | The avalanche of mixtapes that accompanies every new year has positively blanketed 2012 in rap music, with seasoned veterans and hungry newcomers alike sending 2011 off with one last test of the DatPiff download limit. While Rick Ross' grandiose Rich Forever mixtape, on sheer size alone, has threatened to blot out a lot of its Q1 competition, solid efforts abound for hip-hop fans-- this has been the single best month in what seems like years. It's here, in this overcrowded field, that Wu-Tang dynamo Raekwon has unleashed Unexpected Victory, essentially his first full-length release since 2011's fine Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang LP. In any other month, Victory might eke out a few more ways to live up to its title. But for Rae, spitting criminology raps over grimy orchestral stabs and murky slivers of soul isn't exactly unexpected, and-- armed with a crop of passable productions and an uneven roster of guest stars-- rarely smacks of anything like victory.
Victory splits its time between fellow New York vets (Mobb Deep, Busta Rhymes, C.L. Smooth) and relative newbies (Fred Da Godson, Chicago's L.E.P. Bogus Boys), and holds to a fairly tight-knit stable of guest rappers and producers (Sauce Money, Scram Jones) eager to cook up a slinkier take on post-RZA muck at the Chef's behest. Flossy, almost Rossian widescreeners "Just a Toast" and "Luxury Rap", the sinewy, stretched-out soul of "Silk" and the Just Blaze-nodding "MTV Cribs" bring a little light to the proceedings, but the sound here mostly hangs out in the dank realm Rae's been favoring forever. Victory's greatest flaw is its wildly varying fidelity; listening, you'll have to get up every few minutes to work the volume knob, and even then, you may not be able to make out everything that's going on in, say, the hissy "The Brewery". Still, on a tape that could use a few more outliers, skits, practical jokes, something, this little bit of audience participation works wonders for engagement; you'd probably never hear Ceazar-n-Reason's lackluster "Brewery" verses if you didn't have to crank the song so loud to hear Raekwon at all. Couple that with the incongruous appearance of young Altrina Renee's post-Aaliyah/"E-Mail My Heart" lunger "Facetime", and you've got less mixtape, more data-dump: an anything-goes, congruity-be-damned assortment of whatever was lying around at the time.
Ever since threatening defection from the Wu following 2007's intoxicatingly odd 8 Diagrams, Raekwon's revealed himself to be a key figure in the Wu-Tang's conservative wing. His much-lauded 2009 LP was, after all, the sequel to one of the more singular LPs in rap history, and while Cuban Linx II wasn't exactly a Xerox, you could certainly see where he'd laid down the tracing paper. Last year's Shaolin vs. Wu-Tang was similar, richly detailed, in-the-pocket mafioso talk over stark, gritty strings. It's a lane Rae absolutely owns, one he's ridden pretty much since the start, and while he should be congratulated for never bending to any whims but his own, his set-jaw consistency doesn't always make for the most dazzling music.
He gets some good lines in all over Victory, of course; any Raekwon song with "Story" in the title is bound to be a good one, and both "Soldier Story" and the 9th Wonder-produced "A Pinebox Story" find his masterful narrative skills and unflinching brutality as sharp as ever, still stringing together bits of seemingly disconnected detail until a picture begins to take shape. But, when he drops a Twilight reference in his very first verse here, he seems a little lost without a plot. It can't all be smoke-filled backrooms or alleyway beatdowns, but elsewhere, Rae seems a little scattered, either resorting to stock phrases ("Riding at breakneck speed/ Gimme weed/ Gimme cheese/ I like cheddar") or finding a reference-- any reference-- that sorta works. (Raekwon, if you're wondering, is on Team Jacob.) The occasional line pops out, but it's rare that he grabs you for a whole verse that doesn't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Victory's guest roster hits more than it misses; the elder statesmen types bring about what you'd expect to the table, though Prodigy had me rolling with "you tacky like headrest TVs." It's rising star Fred Da Godson who fares best here, though, noting on "Luxury Rap" that he's "a phenomenon [like] Travolta with the tumor" who "should rhyme with some Wallabees on." But, apart from the irrepressible Busta and a few of the more excitable youths, these guys tend to trade in the kind of cold-eyed, unexcitable confidence Rae does, which-- coupled with Rae's own coolness of demeanor and the general steeliness of these beats-- leaves one with the weird feeling that there's both a lot of Raekwon on this record and not very much Raekwon at all.
I was maybe three or four spins into Unexpected Victory before I realized something: I had no idea what exactly Rae meant to promote with its release, what gap he meant to stop by unleashing these songs into the world. I'm told Rae, Ghost, Cappadonna, and the LOX are at work on a collaborative LP called Wu-Block, and of course, there's talk of a new Wu-Tang LP by year's end. To prepare for the new Wu LP, GZA reportedly went to MIT to spend a few days studying mitochondria or something; you'll be pleased to hear there's been no talk of Raekwon shipping off to Le Cordon Bleu for a week of chef's training. Ultimately, you want Raekwon rapping; preferably, you want Raekwon rapping about the grisliest possible subjects, over crackling, cinematic RZA beats. Unexpected Victory's sound is too lousy-- and its stakes too low-- to ever possibly live up to his past glories. What's most frustrating, though, is how little Rae's adjusted to this brave new world of the mixtape-as-album; here's one of the premier album artists in hip-hop history, tossing out what amount to well-intentioned scraps without even bothering to check if the thing's mastered before it went live. Can you blame anybody for burning their first click on Rich Forever? | 2012-01-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-01-16T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 16, 2012 | 6 | 74b77113-1458-4e13-8d5b-d0f5d92a8a53 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
The LA duo’s sixth album is notably abstract and eccentric, showcasing a renewed sense of possibility. | The LA duo’s sixth album is notably abstract and eccentric, showcasing a renewed sense of possibility. | No Age: People Helping People | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/no-age-people-helping-people/ | People Helping People | No Age’s breakthrough release, Weirdo Rippers, came out 15 years ago, when Billie Eilish was five years old and people could still afford to live in Los Angeles. The compilation of early lo-fi singles shifted guitarist Randy Randall and drummer-singer Dean Spunt into indie rock’s low-watt spotlight; stories tended to focus on their deep involvement in L.A. performance art venue and community space The Smell, a hub for the city’s burgeoning bohemia. The Smell is still kicking. And so are No Age, thankfully, even though their hazy, propulsive, and blissful skate-punk hasn’t changed substantially since 2007.
Between 2008’s universally acclaimed Nouns and 2020’s Goons Be Gone, Randall and Spunt have remained committed to their foundational sound—wielding whirls of guitar effects to smear three- or four-chord punk songs—but tend to differentiate each release through mixing and tweaking. They’ll lower the levels of distortion or accentuate Spunt’s slurred, slacker vocals; they’ll cut out the drums, or anything resembling a song, entirely; they’ll thrash away or chill out. But on People Helping People, No Age’s sixth album, Randall and Spunt break from their template with music that’s more abstract and eccentric. For the first time since their early releases, they’re playing with a renewed sense of possibility.
Of all No Age’s LPs, People Helping People has the most in common with the jagged arrangements of 2013’s An Object. Yet that album was still primarily song-based, whereas People Helping People emphasizes sound and texture. It’s bookended by two ambient pieces, and the first track resembling classic No Age—the squelchy, nervy, and unexpectedly poignant “Plastic (You Want It)”—doesn’t arrive until nearly a third of the way in. Seven of the 13 cuts have no vocals; five have no drums. The most straightforward songs are an unusual hybrid of IDM and post-punk. No Age draw lots of comparisons to Hüsker Dü, but People Helping People is more like Mouse on Mars trying to make The Flowers of Romance.
The kitchen-sink sound design is likely a byproduct of the recording process. People Helping People is the first No Age album created without an outside producer, in their own studio in Randall’s garage. Some songs feel like experiments with new tools. A motorik-paced synth-drum beat is the sole backing on “Compact Flashes,” with clipped guitar scrapes and drum hits entering at random. “Interdependence” is a phased-out passage of psychedelic guitar shredding that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Six Organs of Admittance LP. The ceremonial and downright dreamy “Blueberry Barefoot,” backed by orchestral synth chords, could be a Disintegration demo, a punk church wedding, or hold music for androids.
Spanning just over half an hour, People Helping People requires a few listens before its logic begins to click, but eventually the fractured music overlaps with their catalog, even suggesting new directions for their work to come. No Age’s music always felt like it was equally at home in a gallery or a basement show, but now they seem to be inching further toward the art world. That holds true for Spunt’s lyrics, which are still too cryptic to be sloganeering (“I don’t like the obvious, I made you my man,” he sings on the single “Tripped Out Before Scott”). The video for closing track “Andy Helping Andy,” directed by noted L.A. photographer and experimental filmmaker Kersti Jan Werdal, shares a similar sensibility, with a montage of found footage of Andy Warhol. None of these gestures are pretentious or off-putting. In fact, they’re in line with No Age’s persistent virtue: to inspire and energize through ambiguity and without resorting to cheap sentiment. | 2022-09-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-16T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | September 16, 2022 | 7.2 | 74b9a7cb-2ddb-4277-bd97-3b7df81c8300 | Tal Rosenberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tal-rosenberg/ | |
With newly complex arrangements and more freeform songwriting, the Atlanta duo ventures from its bedroom pop origins with occasionally fascinating results. | With newly complex arrangements and more freeform songwriting, the Atlanta duo ventures from its bedroom pop origins with occasionally fascinating results. | Lowertown: The Gaping Mouth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lowertown-the-gaping-mouth/ | The Gaping Mouth | Lowertown writes about childhood as a recent past, like a strong gust of wind could transport them back to adolescence. It doesn’t hurt that the duo, made up of vocalist and guitarist Olivia Osby and multi-instrumentalist Avshalom Weinberg, are barely out of high school. The two bonded over The Glow Pt. 2 and Alex G during sophomore year at a private school in Atlanta, and they graduated into the uncertainty of 2020 with a self-produced album and a record deal with Dirty Hit. Their second EP on the label, The Gaping Mouth, gestures toward their bedroom pop influences but veers from the form, cutting a meandering path into adulthood.
Osby sings with a nervous lilt, cramming rushed syllables into contrastingly lolling measures as if each verse might be her last. Though her voice retains the same baseline youthfulness as on last year’s Honeycomb, Bedbug EP, it sounds gnarlier and brattier, nasally vowels elongated and protruding from her whispered phrases. Her pinched aggressiveness suits the more freeform writing, recalling Frances Quinlan’s raspy indignation as she sings about blackbirds (“those stupid little beasts”) on “Seaface,” her voice dripping with contempt.
The songwriting is a marked step above Lowertown’s previous efforts: Conspicuous Alex G imitations (the dog named “Randy” in last year’s “My Dog” might as well have been “Harvey” ) are replaced by poetic imagery and nonlinear narratives. Although Osby’s stream-of-consciousness mumbling leads to a few stoned aphorisms (“Everything is intentional if you payed attention to it,” she murmurs on “Clown Car”), there are just as many surprising gems: “You are the iris in my eye,” she sings on the title track, “The more light, the more you shrink away.” Her cryptic metaphors and close miked vocals evoke the hushed tones of an insomniac’s ramblings, sometimes literally: Producer Catherine Marks liked Osby’s 4 a.m., home-recorded vocal take for “The Gaping Mouth” so much that she used it in the final mix.
The music and lyrics on The Gaping Mouth move independently of each other, reaching the same destination at different paces. Osby sings over Weinberg’s instrumentation with a shared mood but a distinct rhythm. Phrases and musical motifs repeat, but anything resembling a chorus hardly reappears in any predictable fashion. Instead, Weinberg’s accompaniments seem more like loose guides for Osby’s words, more like a score to her slam poetry than a unified song.
Weinberg experiments more with song structure here, and his willowy compositions often leave a more lasting impression than the words. His classical training and background in jazz and math rock are evident in the nimble fingerpicking and complex rhythmic changes. On the prettiest moments, it’s tempting to want an instrumental version of these songs, their delicate melodies cast into the background even by Osby’s quiet delivery. For an album so grounded in the minutiae of teenage emotions, the plaintive accompaniment, which evokes solo guitar composition more than indie rock, feels mismatched. But when they lean into more straightforward song structures, as on closer “Sunburnt,” the duo’s chemistry comes into clearer view, Osby’s voice rising to meet the bigger sound.
Lowertown tends to catastrophize adulthood, but they lace their anxiety with caveats—they know 19 isn’t old, but it’s “old enough” to be threatened by the passage of time. That nuance sometimes comes at the expense of melody: The winding verses of The Gaping Mouth might find their way into the margins of a notebook, but they’d be a tough sell for a karaoke night or a cathartic group singalong. Still, that sense of solitude might be the point. Leaving childhood is a deeply isolating experience, even more so when lockdown and quarantine plague your last year of high school. The Gaping Mouth sounds the way that adolescence feels: self-aware but not yet self-assured.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dirty Hit | September 21, 2021 | 6.9 | 74bcec85-b33f-4cdc-9ae4-840e6b8dcf67 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The K-pop group’s latest is part memoir, part fan service, and part amateur psych eval. They can still tap into something enchanting, but the glimpses of personality here are fleeting. | The K-pop group’s latest is part memoir, part fan service, and part amateur psych eval. They can still tap into something enchanting, but the glimpses of personality here are fleeting. | BTS: Map of the Soul: 7 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bts-map-of-the-soul-7/ | Map of the Soul: 7 | The BTS brand has never been stronger. The seven Bangtan Boys have already parlayed their massive fanbase into a merch and media empire that includes a Mattel toy collection, a mobile game, and a soundtrack doubling as a collaborative EP. Their new album, Map of the Soul: 7, is already a huge global hit. It sold two million copies in its first two hours in South Korea and is projected to do bigger first-week numbers stateside than Justin Bieber did. The shareholders are satiated. The Army is spoken for. The K-pop superstars have emerged as the product arm of a worldwide commercial apparatus that’d make the Svengalis behind turn-of-the-millenium teen-pop salivate.
Except the members of BTS maintain that there’s still a beating heart at the core of the machine. Authenticity is part of their appeal, and they use vaguely philosophical, Jungian blueprints to make music about being true to one’s self. 7, which follows (and includes much of) the 2019 mini-album Persona, is part memoir, part fan service, part amateur psych eval. Though the music is flattened enough to appeal to just about everyone, it can still tap into something enchanting, but the glimpses of personality are fleeting.
The “seven” in the title is an obvious reference to the number of members in the group and the number of years they’ve been performing together. Fittingly, the album is dedicated to their group arc and highlighting their individual journeys within. 7 is highly self-referential, with new songs sampling old songs and alluding to others dating back to their 2013 debut. It is tasked with doing a lot—not only chronicling the group’s path to this point but also unpacking the rest of their ambitious yet hard to parse concept: an exploration of the relationship between the persona and the shadow. There is some obvious overlap between the two: the negativity we unconsciously bear and its correspondence with the masks we all wear mirrors the dichotomy of managing a public face amid the looming private pressures of being a famous K-pop star.
Because the album repurposes Persona as a five-song preface, 7 really begins with the interlude “Shadow,” performed by Suga. “One message that penetrates the album as a whole is that you must face your inner shadow, but resist becoming submerged into its depths,” he explained during the album’s seemingly endless press junket. “Shadow” is supposed to set the tone for a more intense exploration of self from the Boys, together and individually, but it turns out to be the most thoughtful moment on an album that is unnecessarily drawn-out, jumbled, and uneven.
Persona lacked the natural fluidity and chicness of their best music. Those problems aren’t exactly mitigated here, since most of those songs appear on this album too, but within this new context, they feel like a flashback before the saga continues. Many of the new songs are better about balancing Easter eggs for day-ones with new entry points for more casual listeners. J-Hope’s solo cut “Outro : Ego” flips the boom-bap sample from their first intro “2 Cool 4 Skool” into a vibrant dembow groove, and this sonic convergence of the band’s past and present traces its musical history, as he traces his personal one in the lyrics. Conversely, “Louder Than Bombs,” co-written by Troye Sivan, is moody synth-pop that represents the group they’re transforming into—one less reliant on rapping.
Unlike most of their K-pop peers, the BTS prototype was constructed specifically around rap. “I had considered putting together a hip-hop crew, not an idol group,” Big Hit CEO Bang Si-hyuk, also known as group producer Hitman Bang, told Time last year. “But when I considered the business context, I thought a K-pop idol model made more sense.” BTS rappers RM, Suga, and J-Hope were the holdover trainees from that original vision; Bang Si-hyuk refers to them as the group’s “musical pillars.” Tiger JK, of the trailblazing Korean rap group Drunken Tiger, has claimed that BTS cornerstone RM broke the stigma of idol-group MCs as mere roleplaying puppets. Rap-laden art-pop is still what they do best, but they’ve diverted their focus of late. In its attempt to placate every type of BTS fan, 7 sacrifices what’s most effective about the unit.
There are a few reminders. On the lyrical speed run “UGH!” the group’s trio of MCs place themselves among the best Korean rappers, lashing out at haters in the process, with J-Hope putting on a cartoonish display to rival a kook like Danny Brown. With trap drums and heavily Auto-Tuned vox, “Black Swan” sounds like the kind of SoundCloud rap novelty that, in an alternate reality, would land the posh crew on a No Jumper pod. And when solo, Suga and J-Hope each sound comfortable in their elements.
As on 2016’s Wings, the members of BTS separate for solo turns on 7, and those can be more illuminating than their characterless crossovers with Halsey and Sia. Jimin glides throughout the sanitized, Latin-leaning “Filter,” bringing some color to its convoluted concept and tapping into music’s hottest market. Jungkook’s “My Time” uses a strobing R&B template usually reserved for professing love to capture the overwhelming pace of his career like a nostalgic time-lapse video. But for every moment on 7 that feels revelatory, there’s another that is regressive. On the spectrum of transitional, autobiographical pop, it’s closer to Bieber’s flavorless Changes than Ariana Grande’s vibrant thank u, next.
No genre courts extramusical interest quite like K-pop. There’s a blood pact between stans and idols that complete devotion to the product may sometimes have a dehumanizing effect. As the biggest act working in the industry, it’s interesting that the members of BTS seem to have at least a surface-level desire to maintain the humanity within their cash machine. But their conception of the shadow is personified so literally (as a swallowing black mass of negativity) and so vaguely (rarely speaking to the being of any individual specifically) that it lacks pointedness.
If the most personal is indeed the most creative, then 7 could have benefitted from a bit more personality. V has been open about how “scary” it is to be stalked by fans and Suga has rapped about depression before, but that kind of candor and complication doesn’t factor much into this, their album about the dark side of the psyche and the BTS journey. They could’ve gone deeper and used this psychoanalytic framework to say more about the joys and terrors of all-consuming celebrity—about what it does to the soul. Much has been made of BTS’ autonomy as creators, but their album feels like a brand activation, the latest petition for everyone to like and subscribe.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Big Hit Entertainment | February 25, 2020 | 6.3 | 74bdb573-f974-4995-a328-ce10907851fe | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
Jordan Lee’s latest record aims to make his beatific melodies and rich orchestrations match the gravity of his subject matter. | Jordan Lee’s latest record aims to make his beatific melodies and rich orchestrations match the gravity of his subject matter. | Mutual Benefit: Thunder Follows the Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mutual-benefit-thunder-follows-the-light/ | Thunder Follows the Light | Climate change can feel like an ambient crisis—slowly, sea levels rise, at first in micrometers and then in centimeters, and then in feet. Incrementally, summers feel hotter, and storms seem to rear their heads more often and more violently. It is this combination of inevitability and deferred disaster that makes climate change an alluring inspiration for artists: Ryuichi Sakamoto salvaged a waterlogged piano from the 2011 Great Tōhoku Earthquake to manifest the warped sounds of environmental catastrophe. ANOHNI used her 2015 single “Four Degrees” to paint a terrifying view of the future, one where dogs cry for water and fish die en masse. On Thunder Follows the Light, the latest album from Jordan Lee as Mutual Benefit, the climate crisis is a call to self-reflection. The album assumes that we’re all heading towards an apocalypse—political, environmental, or both—so we might as well be kind to one another while we’re all still here.
Interiority is nothing new for Lee. His debut LP as Mutual Benefit, 2013’s Love’s Crushing Diamond, was a striking collection of contemplative chamber folk, filled with careful musings on the transcendent quality of love. His follow-up, 2016’s Skip a Sinking Stone, plotted Lee more firmly in the folk-rock tradition of vagabond anthems and tunes about heartbreak. But behind the gentle, sloping guitars and rich orchestration, Lee quietly slipped more radical political views into his writing: the hopelessness of an impoverished mining town, the brutality of state violence—broad discontentments refracted through the prism of Lee’s personal experience.
With Thunder Follows the Light, Lee directs his focus towards more theoretical injustices, studying the works of science fiction author Octavia Butler and activist Naomi Klein to imagine a world without polar ice caps. Leading up to the new record, Lee spoke of “massive societal strain on both people and the environment” and a metaphorical “lightning before some thunderous change.” But writing from within can only go so far when the subjects at hand are, quite literally, matters of life or death. And rather than rise to the challenge, Lee seems content to sing broad platitudes. Despite his best intentions to reflect a necessary sea change in the way we treat our terrestrial home, the resulting ten tracks put forth distinctly quotidian coping mechanisms for waiting out the “thunder.”
Throughout the album, Lee carefully avoids any political stance; for Lee, there is no hardship that cannot be overcome with intimacy and affection. On album opener “Written in Lightning,” he embeds himself into the farmer’s market crowd, asking, “If love is an armor, then can we love stronger?” On “Storm Cellar Heart,” Lee romanticizes taking shelter from a storm with a lover by his side: “When you hold me, it’s so much better; it’s enough to drown out the thunder.” This doe-eyed optimism is easily digestible, and that is perhaps the biggest issue: the realities Lee purports to write about are not easy.
Though the lyrical themes may lack potency, Thunder Follows the Light highlights Lee’s knack for composing beautiful melodies. It is densely packed with bespoke orchestration, filled with glittering piano and mellow horns. Lee’s voice, as always, is lilting and gentle, so hypnotically rhythmic that it often recalls children’s lullabies. On “No Dominion,” he strikes an agreeable balance of muted, contemplative piano and somber, religious lyrics: the title is a reference to a poem by Dylan Thomas, which in turn references St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans. The sentiment is heavy, arguing for the perseverance of an ineffable soul after our earthly bodies no longer occupy this earth. For a brief moment, as he sings about reciting Thomas’s morbid poem, his voice drops and flattens. It is a welcome reflection of the sobering topics at hand, and proof that Lee can write an affecting and serious ballad.
But too often, the preciousness of the album’s instrumentation seems cloying in the face of such weighty subjects. Meditations on historical ignorance like “New History” are mismatched with the cheery vocal harmonies that deliver them. A solemn commentary on rising sea levels, “Waves Breaking,” is sadly drowned out by the song’s overcrowded arrangement and muddled metaphors. For Lee, romantic and even fantastical idealism has long been a means to parse his inner demons. But when those demons become too large for charming poetics, beatific melodies and jangling orchestral compositions fail to rise to the occasion. | 2018-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Transgressive | September 27, 2018 | 6.4 | 74bf5106-772f-4f08-a52c-7db37fe307cf | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The core elements of Sonic Youth were still scattered all over their 1986 album, but its dark and sordid sound brilliantly captured the essence of an “underground” band coming to life. | The core elements of Sonic Youth were still scattered all over their 1986 album, but its dark and sordid sound brilliantly captured the essence of an “underground” band coming to life. | Sonic Youth: EVOL | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonic-youth-evol/ | EVOL | Sonic Youth were destroying music: In the no-budget 1989 film Weatherman ‘69, Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore thumb through dollar-bin-grade vinyl records before ominously snapping them to bits. Like anything, the act was a symbol, irreverent, a simple fuck-you. In a way, it was noise: the sound of life and death at the same time, annihilating music and rendering it limitless.
This clip from Weatherman ‘69—shot and directed by the band’s SST Records comrade and eventual art world fixture Raymond Pettibon—remains a shining document of Sonic Youth’s anarchic era on that L.A. hardcore label. EVOL, the band’s sordid third LP, released in 1986, was their first of two pivotal albums for SST. Sonic Youth began to fuse with lawless West Coast punk: Minutemen and Black Flag versus sadistic cops and sun-bleached strip-mall banality. This ultimately showed how unmistakably East Village the Sonic Youth camp was. Sonic Youth was subterranean subway clangor; windowless bohemia; a fast-walking stomp on a sidewalk grate; the hallowed doors of Trash & Vaudeville; a secret. As if to assert their Downtown identity, the album opens with the somnambulant churn of “Tom Violence,” a song inspired by Television’s Tom Verlaine, which narrates a classic renegade pose. In her liner notes to the 1993 CD edition, transgressive zine writer Lisa Suckdog quoted Moore’s lyrics: “‘I left home for experience’—me, too!’”
By 1988’s Daydream Nation, Sonic Youth’s deep inquiry into pop and the avant-garde—into Madonna on the one hand and La Monte Young on the other—had cohered into a fundamental sound. Pettibon’s black-and-white cover illustration for 1990’s Goo became an eternal RayBanned shorthand for wry art-punk cool. But on EVOL, the pieces were still laid bare: bent glitter-pop here, macabre spoken-word there, gauzy instrumental noise, a persistent clatter, all with a reverby DIY iridescence that sounds buried in the ground. EVOL is “underground” as both form and aesthetic: deconstructed and raw, dim and boomy. Gordon once called the sound of Downtown “abandoned,” and that fits here, too. If Daydream Nation is Sonic Youth’s opus, EVOL was crucial research. There’s a directness that makes everything feel close. It is pure tension with little release. The entire record is a shadow.
EVOL was not just a skewering of rock’n’roll but also of America. A college syllabus could revolve around its vast allusions to Marilyn Monroe, Charles Manson, The Great Gatsby, and Alfred Hitchcock. EVOL might have a cheeky Richard Kern horror-film still on the cover, it might feel like the most dissonant passages of the Grateful Dead’s Dark Star held captive and tormented in a cavernous haunted house, but the album was beyond a “faux-goth” record, as Gordon once described it. EVOL is a graveyard for 1960s peace-and-love idealism. (The title is “love” backwards.) The destructive force of no wave and hardcore was cast as a new kind of sonic conceptual art.
The spooky EVOL title was inspired by the multimedia artist Tony Oursler, who in 1984 devised a black-comedy video piece, also called “EVOL,” offering a hallucinatory critique on the construct of love. Gordon wrote about Oursler—as well as Pettibon and the artist Mike Kelley—in a 1985 Artforum essay called “American Prayers.” Her article discussed the failures of Pop art (think of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans) and how these three men more successfully upended American iconography. The ideas in “American Prayers” echo through EVOL’s doomy screech. Sonic Youth weren’t protesting American conservatism like their hardcore contemporaries, but EVOL was an affront to the American myths that fostered it. The atonal sorcery of “Marilyn Moore” was inspired by Norman Mailer’s book about Marilyn Monroe, but instead of a shiny portrait, Moore sings of how she’s “full of disorders,” with a “hammer in hand and her head to the floor.” A great photograph of Sonic Youth from this era, by SST’s Naomi Peterson, captures their negative realism: The band looks depressed and disheveled in front of a Wonder Bread truck, Gordon with her back to the camera. Sonic Youth pushed Warhol into the red.
EVOL has a seductive, uncanny ease, which makes its violent undercurrents even more frightening. It was Sonic Youth’s first record to feature new drummer/hardcore kid Steve Shelley, previously of the Crucifucks, and their atmospheric songs could newly thunder and pop. EVOL has enthralling hooks—this was around the time Gordon recorded “Addicted to Love” in a karaoke booth for The Whitey Album—albeit skewed ones, pop songs trudging uphill, carrying the weight of their own dread. Sonic Youth’s tilted cover of Kim Fowley’s cheap “Bubblegum” has only grown seamier with time. With a twisted hop, “Star Power” was inspired by the unbelievable 1970s Star magazine, which was aimed at underage groupies: “She knows how to make love to me,” Gordon sings. The equally poppy “Green Light” borrows one of The Great Gatsby’s major recurring images, a symbol of the American Dream. Sonic Youth’s racket implicitly subverts that.
It’s sinister all over. Lee Renaldo’s densely-packed monologue “In the Kingdom #19”—the very number connoting a process, the Beat-inspired endless scroll—is a tale of “death on the highway” and “blood everywhere” and “smoke and flames, alright.” It’s eerie for how the agony of the careening car crash feels like an inevitability on U.S. highways of 1986 and today; eerier still because the Minutemen’s Mike Watt appears on the track, laughing and playing bass. It was Watt’s first recording following the death of his best friend, bandmate, and forever punk hero D. Boon, in a van crash, in 1985. The track’s samples of skronking traffic may evoke the Cagean idea that music is everywhere, or color its bop-prose swarm. Moore called it “a way of trying to be celebratory about the fact that you die” and told biographer David Browne it was inspired by Boon. Per Sonic Youth lore, Moore threw lit firecrackers into the booth while Ranaldo was recording it.
Neil Young said “Expressway to Yr. Skull” was the best guitar song ever written. When Sonic Youth opened for Young on tour, he liked to stretch under the stage while they jammed it. EVOL ends with the barrage of its epic seven-minute sprawl: If noise has ever sounded more arresting, this controlled chaos could erase your memory. “We’re gonna kill the California girls [...] We’re gonna find the meaning of feeling good,” Thurston sings laconically, like Brian Wilson on bad acid, mixing classic Fugs-like New York antagonism with the nihilism and hedonism of Los Angeles. Any question of whether EVOL belongs in the pantheon of New York rock is obliterated by that grenade of a lyric. It is EVOL’s neat concluding paragraph, and no less than when Moore makes an overt reference to critic Greil Marcus’ marvel of rock’n’roll history, Mystery Train, his groundbreaking 1975 book. “Mystery train/Three-way plane/Expressway to your skull,” Moore sings, before a burst of squalling cacophony gives way to ambient noise, minimalism, and space. Rock history is collapsing onto itself, derailing, but then so is American history, American culture.
Gordon wrote in her memoir that she wanted to feel music like a crashing wave—“deliverance, the loss of myself, the capacity to be inside that music”—and EVOL’s “Shadow of a Doubt” is the sound of it cresting. It’s the highlight of EVOL: One of Gordon’s most iconic vocal performances ever, capturing the inspired, physical reach of her spacious speak-sing. Inspired by Alfred Hitchcock, the song is charged by all the anxiety, suspense, and noirish voyeurism his films represent. This fever dream of violence and lust is the tale of a woman in public: punk-feminist city music. It feels of a piece with EVOL’s surreal piano revery “Secret Girl”; Gordon has said she wrote its lyrics in light of how “threatening” it could be to portray yourself as a girl in rock. Both songs build tension and never resolve, never climax conventionally, never conform to a linear start-middle-end of pop hegemony, which feels so anti-rock, their own feminine kind of hardcore.
What is it that makes Kim Gordon “cool”? Her Black Flag earrings? Her flip-up shades? The fact that she made a song called “Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu”? Perhaps it is the process of becoming that exists in every note she pushes out, the sense that her stoic persona is an act of edging into the unknown, and then being vulnerable enough to let the unknown take over.
EVOL, after all, was also an evolution for Sonic Youth. SST originally pressed 5,000 copies; EVOL sold 40,000 in one year. Like most Sonic Youth albums, EVOL is packed with so many ideas, so much rigor and obsession, it is too absurd to begin to wonder what they would have done in our current era of endless information. But if EVOL is one of Sonic Youth’s more do-it-yourself records, that manifests as an inspired “do anything yourself,” as a 40-minute testament to the virtue of curiosity. For all the “NO” that Sonic Youth’s earliest iteration espoused, EVOL explodes possibility, offering “yes” after profound “yes.” | 2019-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | SST | May 9, 2019 | 9.4 | 74c7ef29-9f7e-4267-a833-7a66114dce57 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Inspired by goofy junk like the Brian Eno-composed Windows 95 sound and the melodies that kick out of a keyboard when you punch "demo," Far Side Virtual is a collection of eerily wholesome music delivered in an uncomfortably straightforward manner. | Inspired by goofy junk like the Brian Eno-composed Windows 95 sound and the melodies that kick out of a keyboard when you punch "demo," Far Side Virtual is a collection of eerily wholesome music delivered in an uncomfortably straightforward manner. | James Ferraro: Far Side Virtual | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15992-james-ferraro-far-side-virtual/ | Far Side Virtual | James Ferraro's latest stares down our contemporary world of the future, invaded by iPads, overwhelmed by Skype meetings, and caught up in the unnecessary conveniences of self-serve frozen yogurt spots, with an equal sense of dread and awe. All those 1980s and 90s approximations of the future, in which we'd collectively have luxury stacked on top of luxury, actually sort of arrived, and they're totally awesome-- and really fucking creepy.
Far Side Virtual is inspired by goofy junk like the Windows 95 sound (composed by Brian Eno, it should be mentioned) and the melodies that kick out of a medium-priced keyboard when you punch the "demo" button. It's a collection of eerily wholesome sounds delivered in an uncomfortably straightforward manner. Either a whole lot of work or very little work went into this record.
This is a "sell-out" album. Not in the pejorative sense of pandering-- it's actually a much more difficult listen than his previous work-- but because it's intended to score mindless comfort and endless hours of outlet shopping. And unlike his other releases, which toyed with similar concepts of getting lost in the technological, consumerist singularity of energy drinks, action flicks, and worldwide web convenience, this one doesn't send the soundtrack through the gossamer hum of a VHS. There's no distance between the concept and the execution here. Every sound on, say, "Fro Yo and Cellular Bits"-- a triple threat of rocking drums, melting synths, and a guitar solo that wants to be Eddie Van Halen but comes closer to Stan Bush-- is clear as a bell.
Indeed, the songs here are exactly the same as what they're ostensibly parodying, which is bold and maybe even the point. Such dedication to an aesthetic means Far Side Virtual gets a little tedious: It's 16 songs that aren't all that catchy but aren't exactly ambient either. Subsumed by his concept, Ferraro is one with the buying and selling machine, which was perhaps his perverse goal all along. "Hopefully these songs were made available for ringtone," he declared in this Elle interview, "and the album will be condensed into ringtone format, so the album won't be the centerpiece, it will just dissipate into the infrastructure."
There is however, an obsessive focus on authenticity that really works towards justifying the album's goofy indulgences. Quite a few tracks feature a robotic voice speaking to you ("Sir, Richard Branson's avatar says hello"), providing a bizarre, world-building aspect to the project. And, hey, this kind of music is pretty great! There is a place for pleasant, lilting tunes made to be ignored. The propulsive MIDI symphony of "Dubai Dream Tone" and the stiff jazz on "Adventures in Green Foot Printing" are undeniable and surprisingly affecting-- like a cyborg Vince Guaraldi was placed in front of a keyboard and told to knock out some somber tunes.
The nightmarish qualities of the music begin to break through on "Dream On" and "Condo Pets", both of which possess some of the creepy, cacophonous drone of Citrac or Night Dolls With Hairspray, subtly unveiling the horrors behind music that's just way too springy and wide-eyed. You suddenly realize you're listening to 45 minutes of utilitarian music that doesn't really have a purpose. Can something be utopian and dystopian at the same time? Probably. Maybe even always. | 2011-11-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-11-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hippos in Tanks | November 4, 2011 | 7.6 | 74ca4911-ad9d-429c-b7e4-629fb8d80050 | Brandon Soderberg | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-soderberg/ | null |
The Polish composer’s sumptuous new album draws on Renaissance-era vocal music, contemporary theater, and the uncanny magic of Auto-Tune. | The Polish composer’s sumptuous new album draws on Renaissance-era vocal music, contemporary theater, and the uncanny magic of Auto-Tune. | Piotr Kurek: Peach Blossom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/piotr-kurek-peach-blossom/ | Peach Blossom | Growing up in Lublin, in the east of Poland, Piotr Kurek could never quite decide what kind of music he wanted to make. First he played drums in a garage-rock band; then he banged out gabber on his PC. At the same time, he was learning the cornamuse, a Lord of the Rings-looking double-reed instrument, and schooling himself in the work of Thomas Binkley’s medieval ensemble Studio der Frühen Music. So perhaps it stands to reason that Kurek’s music is all over the place, as he cheerfully admits. On 2011’s Heat, the Warsaw-based composer combined sampled exotica with vintage organs and electric piano, evoking humid landscapes and mid-century kitsch. He wove a double helix of Baroque counterpoint and minimalist repetition on 2012’s Edena, then turned around and paired drum-machine jams with quixotic electric guitar soloing. And on 2020’s A Sacrifice Shall Be Made / All the Wicked Scenes—based on scores written for Beijing’s Paper Tiger Theater Studio—he pivoted to doom-metal drones, Renaissance opera, and whispered incantations.
But there are common threads to almost all Kurek’s albums. He’s particularly fond of treating the voice as an instrumental texture—sampling and stacking it into intricate chords, to sumptuous and uncanny effect. On last year’s spellbinding World Speaks, he directed his focus to the anatomical sources of voice, delving into an array of nasal and guttural tones evocative of cartilage and flesh; now, on Peach Blossom, he trades laryngeal meatspace for the hyperreal polish of Auto-Tune.
Auto-Tune is more than a quarter century old, and few genres have not yet been slicked by its chrome. Yet Kurek makes its cyborg mewling sound newly strange. The album opens with a lone voice cooing sweetly to itself: first, a single, unadorned line, and then two multi-tracked parts braided in blissful harmony. In its deepest register, it sounds almost like a bowed cello, while flickering tremolo and rigidly stepped melisma evoke—not unpleasantly—the bleat of a baby goat. This brief prelude, “The Art of Swapping Hearts,” morphs seamlessly into the title track, in which the voice bursts into an a cappella constellation of bagpipe-like wheezing and humming—thick, grainy globs of tone distributed in weirdly perfect swirls, like an AI rendering of peanut butter.
Similar pitch-correction techniques play out all across this short, captivating album, complemented by sparse, pointillistic daubs of flute and marimba and, in the interconnected “Breathing” and “Ds / The Moss Beneath,” a bed of sentimental Hollywood strings. The mood is idyllic yet alien, and scattered interruptions—an acoustic chime reminiscent of a pinging iPhone high in the mix; a low voice muttering “whoa”—keep even the most syrupy passages unpredictable. The Auto-Tune spell finally breaks on the closing “Bau”: Over a melancholy, MIDI-driven chorus of stacked and arpeggiated monosyllables, Paper Tiger performer Xiangjie delivers a thrillingly ominous spoken-word monologue. He sighs and grumbles in a gravelly baritone untouched by pitch correction, part purring cat and part shredded speaker cone; the results sound like a Chinese-language Linton Kwesi Johnson fronting Meredith Monk’s ensemble.
The songs on Peach Blossom grew out Kurek’s compositions for a performance by the Münchner Kammerspiele, 某种类似于我的地洞：心室片段 Heart Chamber Fragments, once again directed by Paper Tiger’s Tian Gebing. The album’s title is a reference to a fable written 16 centuries ago by the Chinese poet Tao Yuanming, who tells the story of a fisherman who stumbles upon a hidden valley where a utopian society has flourished for centuries in seclusion. When the fisherman leaves the isolated village, he attempts to mark the path back to its hidden entrance, yet no seeker ever succeeds in finding it again. Kurek’s otherworldly album feels like a map of this lost paradise; every cryptic, crystalline note—ancient and futuristic alike—might be a coordinate pointing to a fantastical place that exists outside the familiar sweep of linear time. | 2023-04-04T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-04T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Mondoj | April 4, 2023 | 7.8 | 74d13a7b-c932-4388-99a7-68b4c6a6cf8b | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Produced by Brandi Carlile, the Nashville songwriter's melancholy new album presents only a few facets of a complex artist. | Produced by Brandi Carlile, the Nashville songwriter's melancholy new album presents only a few facets of a complex artist. | Brandy Clark: Brandy Clark | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brandy-clark-brandy-clark/ | Brandy Clark | Brandy Clark is one of the finest rhymers in Nashville. In addition to finding unexpected pairings of words, she can use a simple AABB to blur comedy and tragedy, or combine humor with pathos. “Crazy Women,” off her 2013 debut 12 Stories, opens with the memorable question of “Who’d’a guessed that Aqua Net/Could start a fire with a single cigarette?” Both set-up and punchline, that couplet doesn’t treat the arsonist as a joke just because she McGuyvers her revenge from household items. Instead, it reminds you that a woman wronged is a woman to be reckoned with.
There are more great examples on her fourth album, matter-of-factly titled Brandy Clark, but what’s more surprising are the few instances when her rhymes fall flat. On the swampy murder ballad “Ain’t Enough Rocks,” Clark relates the story of a woman whose abusive husband turns his attention to her younger sister. They weigh his body down, then plead ignorance with the police. “Cops blamed it on his liver, so they never drug the river,” she sings. “Those girls don’t even shiver when they’re fishing off that dock.” Perhaps in another, more animated version of the song, those lines might stick out as defiant: a third finger in the face of anyone who might well, actually… the song’s vigilantism. But in this grave and self-consciously southern gothic version—more “Janie’s Got a Gun” than “Goodbye Earl”—she delivers that clever procession of liver-river-shiver in a self-serious whisper that deflates the song’s righteous anger.
“Ain’t Enough Rocks” is both the opening track on Brandy Clark and the only third-person, character-driver song on an album full of first-person testimonials on love, sex, family, and country music. Its position as the opener is a confusing bit of sequencing, but one that gestures toward a larger problem. This is a collection that embraces melancholy to the neglect of humor, world-weariness at the expense of wit. Produced by Brandi Carlile, this self-titled album only captures a few facets of a deeply complex artist. Clark can break your heart with a turn of phrase or a stray observation, but too often she sings like she’s suppressing a sly wink. That’s exactly what she needs to sell the line on “Buried” that goes, “I’ll be an over-you-achiever.” Rather than a phrase that laughs in the face of unending heartache, it’s just a bad pun.
On the other hand, those are just sour moments, stray clunkers. Pun aside, “Buried” is impeccably penned and beautifully performed. “If you don’t want me/If you’re beyond me/If you don’t love me anymore,” Clark sings on the chorus, as the instruments fall away to leave her delicate twang hanging in the air. There’s a powerful story in the way she delivers that “if”: worry and sadness and fear in the i, resignation and acceptance in the way she cuts off that f. If there are some flaws in her diamonds, there are plenty of instances that make you realize that Clark can do things with a song that others simply cannot. Her depiction of her grandma in “She Smoked in the House” is so vivid, so precise, so lovingly observed that you mourn this woman who “saved in Folgers cans, swore store credit was a scam.” By the end of the song she’s your grandma, too.
An accomplished songwriter, Clark is also one of Nashville’s best writers about music, and she includes on every album at least one track about how music can make you feel understood, how it can reflect your life back to you. Songs become metaphors for lost lovers, hope chests for stray memories, especially on “Best Ones”: “The good songs don’t get stuck inside my head long after they’re over/They don’t sound like Lower Broadway with your head on my shoulder… but the best ones do.” Even on the merely good ones, there’s always the sense of someone living in Clark’s lyrics, making decisions about how to transform those feelings into melodies and rhymes. | 2023-05-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-23T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Warner | May 23, 2023 | 6.8 | 74d450e2-f8cc-4142-a885-380c4cad3f8e | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The songwriter extraordinaire lets guests and producers steal his spotlight, making for a pop compilation that is interchangeably chill, spanning every genre at its absolute lowest key. | The songwriter extraordinaire lets guests and producers steal his spotlight, making for a pop compilation that is interchangeably chill, spanning every genre at its absolute lowest key. | Poo Bear: Poo Bear Presents: Bearthday Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/poo-bear-poo-bear-presents-bearthday-music/ | Poo Bear Presents: Bearthday Music | A historical fact: Poo Bear wrote two of the biggest jams of the early ’00s: Usher’s “Caught Up” and 112’s “Peaches and Cream.” Even on a personal level, it’s hard not to root for Jason “Poo Bear” Boyd. After their Connecticut home was destroyed by a tornado, he and his family moved to Atlanta, where he wrote his first hit at age 14 (112’s “Anywhere”). But hitmaking doesn’t last, particularly not when you attach yourself to folks Boyd described as shady characters, including mid-’00s producer and cautionary tale Scott Storch, whose mansion Poo Bear lived in at one point. Even his PR, like documentary Poo Bear: Afraid of Forever, calls the industry “devoid of mercy.”
Thank Justin Bieber—strange as the prospect might seem—for Poo Bear’s comeback. The two started hanging out earlier this decade (“making bad decisions with a minor—smoking weed and getting into trouble,” he told The New York Times then started hanging out writing songs, including Skrillex/Diplo collaboration “Where Are Ü Now” and “What Do You Mean.” While these hits didn’t start the tropical house trend—a few years prior, a wave of European chill like Klingande’s “Jubel” and Robin Schulz’s remix of Mr Probz’ “Waves,” was washing ashore in the States—they made them ubiquitous in shopping malls, festivals and car radios near you.
Since then, Poo Bear has been busy but has kept a relatively low profile. “I don’t want to oversaturate the market, and I want to keep this exclusivity,” he told the Times—an ultimately futile task, given the 15 tracks of micro-targeted guest features that comprise Bearthday Music, ranging from B-listers to C-listers to artists who peaked two decades ago to Bieber, exactly once. If it all seems a bit like leftovers, it’s because that’s exactly what the album is, as Boyd admitted to Rolling Stone. “So many great songs go in the place I call the music abyss: We make all these great songs, record them, and nobody hears a lot of them. I wanted to be a vehicle for putting out those records.”
Expect to see a lot more of these vehicles, which also include Sia’s This Is Acting or Charli XCX’s Pop 2. After all, there are no streaming royalties in the music abyss; better to release your scrapped material and make money off it then have the demo leak, like “Hard 2 Face Reality” did in 2014. But unlike Sia and Charli’s entries, Bearthday Music is a Poo Bear album in name and pun only; he doesn’t sing on most of the album, nor, as a topline writer, handle much of the production. And the problem with hanging your artistry on a bunch of other vocalists and producers is that you are counting on them to be good.
Instead, Bearthday Music is interchangeably chill, spanning every genre at its absolute lowest key. There’s trop-house for festival food-truck lines; hip-hop that’s so laid-back it’s sedated; way too many campfire strums like “Love Yourself”—the sort of radio filler Poo Bear said in 2017 he didn’t listen to, since “it’s not inspiring.” Producers include Skrillex, Boi-1da, and the Audibles, but the only way to tell their work apart is by reading their contracts.
Poo Bear was never a particularly showy songwriter—he tends toward “melodies simple enough for a child to sing along,” he told the Times—and his best hits rely on the likes of Usher’s star power or Jack Ü-like production pyrotechnics. Nobody provides those; everyone is debangerized. Ty Dolla $ign’s “That Shit Go” does not. Zara Larsson contributes “Either,” a song about hot, melodramatic, conflicted love that Larsson sings with all the inner turmoil of someone caught without a pencil sharpener. When anyone is memorable, it’s not in the way you’d want. Perhaps hoping to recapture her Murder Inc crossover days, Jennifer Lopez tries out triplets; it doesn’t go well. And it’s maybe not the best move, as a lyricist, to hand your opening track and single off to Jay Electronica and these #deep words: “Love and death are quite similar/How they come and go like cat burglars/Reality is kind of hard to face/Like actual facts is to flat-earthers.” (To be fair, it’s hardly the worst thing written by a Roc Nation affiliate this month.)
None of this is Poo Bear’s fault, of course, but his name is on it, and he doesn’t offset it. Listening to the album straight through is like reading the source code to a recommendation algorithm: possible, but a slog and beside the point. Which is a shame, because the most missable track in the streaming context is the last one, “Early or Late”: Poo Bear’s one track here without a guest feature and, probably not coincidentally, the one track that exudes the R&B warmth of his older hits. “I don't want to be an artist,” Boyd told Rolling Stone, but nobody else is stepping up. | 2018-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | May 3, 2018 | 4.6 | 74d71ae5-5307-4688-8c30-ed8be01519f6 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
It Happened in Flatbush is a flat album in every way, filled with mealy-mouthed hooks and uninspired tropes—a spiritless effort from a NYC rap group that initially seemed novel in a post-TDE scene. | It Happened in Flatbush is a flat album in every way, filled with mealy-mouthed hooks and uninspired tropes—a spiritless effort from a NYC rap group that initially seemed novel in a post-TDE scene. | The Underachievers: It Happened in Flatbush | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21940-it-happened-in-flatbush/ | It Happened in Flatbush | On the first verse of It Happened in Flatbush, the latest mixtape from Brooklyn-based rap group the Underachievers, Issa Gold comes for blood. “Niggas really just average, can’t sell a fucking thing/Niggas’ numbers is trash, Troy Ave would never win” he seethes, referring to an ongoing beef between Underachievers and their Pro Era associates with Troy Ave. Over cascading keys and a rattling beat that fits perfectly for a rap group co-signed by Brainfeeder, Gold and AK, the group's dual MCs, trade verses with a light-hearted yet fierce temerity, shouting out the deceased Capital Steeze of Pro Era (whom Troy Ave recently dissed) and declaring their Beast Coast collective will finish Troy off permanently.
It's an early peak. Unfortunately, it's also the most potent moment on the entire interminable run of It Happened in Flatbush, the Underachievers' first release since their 2015 album Evermore: the Art of Duality**. Originally turning heads in 2013, the group seemed novel in a post-TDE/A$AP scene: A New York duo who weren't cheesy enough to insist on taking NY hip-hop back to some idealized ‘90s golden age, or desperate enough to hop the coattails of rap's latest trend. Though initially tethered to their vague mystical allusions (calling to mind ‘90s groups like Leaders of the New School) and a heady “conscious” vibe, they quickly settled into a comfortable role that didn't play up their Brainfeeder connections, or lyrically deviate all that differently from A$AP's “party and bullshit” ethos and Pro Era's nostalgia trips.
This continues on It Happened in Flatbush, which is a flat album in every way, no pun intended. None of the beats really knock, instead dutifully bopping along as the two MCs stick to forgettable, uninspired tropes about weed, women, and New York chest-thumping. For all the multi-syllabic bars about how much they're winning, It Happened in Flatbush can be dismissed with one word: joyless. There’s no spirit in any of these songs, just repetitive verses and boasts poorly anchored by weightless, mealy-mouthed hooks. One example is the penultimate track “John Lennon,” which initially matches the intensity offered by opening track “Never Win,” but ends up lumbering along instead of taking off, offering a cumbersome bridge and no thematic resolution.
Intentionally or not, too much of the tape sounds unimaginatively inspired by TDE. Issa Gold frequently lapses to a hard syllable, ratatat flow that's pure Schoolboy Q, while AK's gruff bark brings Jay Rock to mind, but you wish either could match Ab-Soul's pathos. There are nearly no memorable lines (although “I’m like LeBron/I’m like Mussolini, Genghis Khan/a leader of the town” got stuck in my mind for all the wrong reasons) or impressionable beats. Even on “Gangland,” where Issa Gold raps, “I blow weed til I collapse, every night I say I quit/but every morning I relapse,” the line doesn’t land because there’s no emotional context to place it into, no weighty dynamic that redeems all the flat “smokin’ Cali shit” talk with something that grapples with morality a little more meaningfully outside this one passive moment.
Contrast all this with the Technicolor fun of a group like the Bay Area’s Heartbreak Gang, New York's genuinely weird Doppelgangaz, or Tacoma's obscure but rewarding ILLFIGHTYOU, whose debut 2013 mixtape picked up similar buzz. It Happened in Flatbush lacks a compelling reason to listen, especially if their vaguely intriguing mystical conscious brand is what got you into them in the first place. It's a concentrated dose of rappity-rap New York stuff—fine if your patience for it runs high, but if not, likely to make you tune out. | 2016-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | May 27, 2016 | 5.3 | 74e5a94a-0e83-47a1-a8a8-e65595b8a8fc | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
The culmination of a three-and-a-half-decade admiration, Steve Earle's latest is a Townes Van Zandt cover album. | The culmination of a three-and-a-half-decade admiration, Steve Earle's latest is a Townes Van Zandt cover album. | Steve Earle: Townes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13001-townes/ | Townes | Steve Earle first met Townes Van Zandt in Houston in the early 1970s, when the former was just a teenager and the latter had a couple of well-made, if not especially strong-selling, albums full of dusty melodies, desperate blues riffs, and heartbreaking metaphors. Teacher and student moved (separately) to Nashville, where they attended guitar pulls with the likes of Guy Clark and Steve Young. With his bone-deep intuition of country's potential for clearly and unpretentiously expressing emotional pain, Van Zandt, who died in 1997, taught Earle well, and you can hear the elder's influences in later compositions songs "Goodbye", "Mercenary Song", and "Everyone's in Love with You". In turn, Earle has lionized Van Zandt, naming him a patron saint of barrooms and benders and even naming his first-born Justin Townes.
So a full album of Van Zandt covers was inevitable-- the culmination of Earle's three-and-a-half-decade admiration. In fact, it's surprising that Townes, as the album is titled, didn't arrive sooner. The concept may be genuine, but the timing seems calculated: For most of the Bush administration, Earle's career has been in a doldrums, and his last album, Washington Square Serenade, was quite possibly his worst. What should have been his ace, however, is not even a face card. Townes might have been inevitable, but it didn't have to be so dull.
Earle keeps things fairly simple, performing stripped-down arrangements with a small group of musicians who function less as a backing band and more as a bunch of friends drinking beer on the front porch. For the most part, it's just Earle alone with these songs, his gravel voice matched to Van Zandt's well-worn lyrics. This approach works well enough on "Pancho and Lefty", which here becomes a headhung lament and thankfully lacks the synths of Willie and Merle's duet. Likewise, "Colorado Girl" and "Marie" re-create the casual intimacy of a late-night guitar pull. These are, along with melancholy closer "To Live Is to Fly" and the bluegrass-stained "White Freight Liner Blues", the album's brightest spots, as if Earle were emphasizing sentiment and performative spontaneity over all else.
But what's lively on some songs is deadly on others. Earle plugs in for the bluesy "Brand New Companion," although it drags ass so much you wish he'd unplug again. "Delta Momma Blues" picks up where "White Freightliner Blues" leaves off, but either the song just doesn't support the playing or this take was not especially inspired. And can someone please steal Earle's drum machine and distorto harmonica? There's something vulgar about the way they sound on this rough treatment of "Lungs", which features Tom Morello. This version trades mordant humor ("Well, won't you lend your lungs to me?") for apocalyptic doomsaying and turns the original's modest blues rhythm into a cartoonish "When the Man Comes Around". Earle is certainly allowed to manhandle these not-quite-canonical songs, but in the rough and obvious way he mistreats them, he leaves little room for subtlety, restraint, or even taste.
As gifted as Van Zandt was, Earle has him on range. Throughout his career, he has played hardy rock, straightforward country, growling blues, rambling bluegrass, and tender folk, and he has played with the Pogues, the Blind Boys of Alabama, the Del McCoury Band, Iris DeMent, and too many others to name. He's even published a collection of short stories and is working on a novel. Too bad Townes isn't as varied. There are nods toward certain styles and genres, but they come from the originals more often than from Earle himself, which makes the album sound overall a little too timid. If you're curious about Van Zandt-- and damn, you should be-- Fat Possum reissued several out-of-print albums in 2007, and pretty much any of those is a good place to start. If you're more interested in Earle, give a listen to Guitar Town or Train A Comin' or anything more than 10 years old. And if you're interested in the two of them together, track down the recently reissued Heartworn Highways collection, which features live guitar-pull performances from the 1970s. By comparison, Townes, though well intended, shows neither of these formidable artists in his best light. | 2009-05-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-05-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | New West | May 12, 2009 | 5.3 | 74ed78ef-c44d-4b56-8f8b-5a6c4ceeadd7 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Singer, songwriter, pianist, and bandleader Joe Bataan took boogaloo to its peak with Gypsy Woman, combining soul, mambo, and traditional Latin tunes and became a mainstay for the famous Fania label. | Singer, songwriter, pianist, and bandleader Joe Bataan took boogaloo to its peak with Gypsy Woman, combining soul, mambo, and traditional Latin tunes and became a mainstay for the famous Fania label. | Joe Bataan: Gypsy Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/joe-bataan-gypsy-woman/ | Gypsy Woman | To be young, gifted, and brown in 1960s East Harlem: On the stoop, you might hear the sound of chá-chá-chás and pachangas chattering down the block. Up in apartment hallways, young men harmonized together, fantasizing about becoming the next Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. Musical movements were in flux, least of all in Uptown. The mambo palaces of the 1950s were a fond but fading memory, doo-wop and early R&B were giving way to soul, and most importantly, a cohort of mostly Puerto Rican Americans—Nuyoricans—were coming of age, seeking a stake for their generation’s sonic sensibilities. Into that moment strode Joe Bataan, knife in hand.
He was born Bataan Nitollano, son of a Filipino immigrant father and African American mother. He would later self-describe himself, on an album title no less, as “Afrofilipino,” but as a kid, he ran deep with the Nuyorican crowd around 106th and Lexington. In his teens, he helped lead a local Puerto Rican street gang called The Dragons, but a few stints in the pen encouraged him to seek a different path. He turned to music.
One day in 1964, when he was in his early 20s, Bataan found himself among a squabbling group of teenage musicians from P.S. 13. They were in the auditorium, debating who should lead the band and Bataan settled things by pulling out a knife, stabbing it into the top of a piano, and declaring, “I’m the leader!” Thus was born The Latin Swingers, which he claims was the youngest Latin band in New York at the time.
The group’s trombone player and second-in-command was Joe “Chickie” Fuente and on their business card, interested parties were told to “Call Joe or Bataan.” A promoter misread that and thought the band’s leader was “Joe Bataan.” The name stuck. The group landed a steady gig with the Tropicoro Ballroom in the Bronx and in an alternate universe, that may have been the most notoriety they ever achieved. But in 1966, a “new breed” of Latin music was bubbling up in New York that would enrapture Bataan and his band: boogaloo.
A brief primer: Boogaloo began as a dance craze, similar to the watusi, jerk, twist, etc. before it. The most common version of it involves throwing your head and arms back and forth; James Brown once described it as “one of the hardest dances in the world, I used to get dizzy doing it.” As lore has it, the Chicago/Detroit duo of Tom and Jerrio saw it being performed at a sock hop and wrote their single “Boo-Ga-Loo” in homage. Their song became a runaway hit throughout the spring and summer of 1965, begetting a string of copycat recordings by other R&B artists: “In a Boogaloo Bag,” “My Baby Likes to Boogaloo,” “Boogaloo #3,” etc. By 1966, the dance had made its way into New York ballrooms and it was here that Nuyorican house bands began to tinker with it, giving birth to a distinctive Latin boogaloo style.
The fact that English lyrics were central to the boogaloo’s popularity proved fateful for Joe Bataan. During his band’s residency at the Tropicoro Ballroom, the Latin Swingers mostly played traditional Latin dance music, with Spanish-language verses. That meant it was singer George “Joe” Pagan, not Bataan, who was the dominant voice. However, Pagan’s thick accent wasn’t ideal for English lyrics so as the boogaloo began to bubble up, Bataan took over on vocals.
Though he was a proficient enough piano player, Bataan’s best instrument was his tenor. Unlike other English-language cantantes like Jimmy Sabater of the Joe Cuba Sextet, Bataan didn’t croon in the hushed, smooth tone of a Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett. His chops, full-throated and intensely emotive, bore the influence of the doo-wop and R&B records he grew up on. That voice proved key to drawing the interest of a young record executive trying to get his new Latin label off the ground: Jerry Masucci of Fania Records.
By the 1970s, Fania would become synonymous with salsa music, but boogaloo helped keep the lights on during its early years. In the mid-’60s, George Goldner’s Tico and Al Santiago’s Alegre were the dominant Latin labels in New York and to gain an edge on them, Masucci gambled on younger, unproven musicians including trumpeter Bobby Valentin, pianist Larry Harlow and a teenage trombonist named Willie Colon. With Bataan though, Masucci found more than just a musician; here was a voice that could sell to black, white, and Latino audiences. Fania signed Bataan and put him on the path to recording his debut album, 1967’s Gypsy Woman.
On the album’s liner notes, author George Rosas writes, “Today…music has gained a new ingredient. This new ingredient has become a binding force of youth and music throughout the world…This ingredient, as you must have gathered by now, is called ’Soul’…It is difficult to indicate the type of ’Soul’ which expressed, so beautifully, by Joe Bataan. It is a hypnotizing, yet a swinging and vibrant sound.” Clunky diction aside, Fania clearly wanted to position Bataan as the label’s premier Latin soul artist.
Fittingly, the first single Bataan recorded for Fania nodded to an earlier soul classic: The Impressions’ 1961 hit, “Gypsy Woman.” However, Bataan’s “Gypsy Woman” wasn’t a cover version. Beyond an opening line that riffed on Curtis Mayfield’s songwriting, Bataan changed everything else: the lyrics, the arrangement, the instrumentation, etc. Whereas The Impressions’ mellow original had more in common, aurally, with a bachelor pad exotica record, Bataan’s song was ferociously uptempo and unmistakably Afro-Cuban, opening with a lively piano montuno and background singers yelling, “She smokes, hot hot, she smokes!”
Bataan himself comes in after a five bar intro, his voice carrying a touch of smokiness and a burr of vibrato when he elongates his vowels. Other boogaloo breakout hits in 1967, including Pete Rodriguez’s “I Like It Like That” and Johnny Colon’s “Boogaloo Blues,” boasted memorable hooks but the singing was middling at best. By comparison, on “Gypsy Woman,” Bataan demonstrated that he could be a quadruple threat: singer, songwriter, pianist, and bandleader.
”Gypsy Woman” was an auspicious way to launch Bataan’s career but when it came time to assemble the Gypsy Woman album, Fania was wary of going all-in on the boogaloo. The budding craze may have been a crossover hit with black and white audiences, but Fania couldn’t afford to alienate Latin music traditionalists. Many of those conservative fans saw the boogaloo as a dilution of “pure” Afro-Cuban traditions; Latin jazz star Eddie Palmieri famously derided the style as “bubblegum.” As a hedge, labels would commit to a handful of boogaloo songs on an album but also balanced things out with an array of conventional Latin dance tunes.
The Gypsy Woman album includes, for example, a pair of frenetic mambos (”Fuego” and “Campesino”), a guaguanco (”Sugar Guaguanco”), and most interestingly, “Figaro.” The latter begins as a standard cha-cha-chá but midway, slips into a Spanish-language guajira with a slinky montuno laid over a 4/4 backbeat: basically, a boogaloo. In “Figaro” we can hear the past giving way to the present; it’s like the band decided halfway through to hit ’em with the new style.”
For the dancers, the aptly named “Fuego” offers up six-and-a-half fiery minutes of parquet-pounding goodness, capped by a stellar piano performance by Bataan. George Pagan handled Spanish vocal duties on all these traditional Latin cuts, but Bataan reclaims the mic on the album’s four boogaloo songs: “Gypsy Woman,” “So Fine,” “Chickie’s Trombone,” and “Too Much Lovin’.” Of the batch, “Gypsy Woman,” is the clear standout but “Too Much Lovin’” would prove influential down the road. The fast hand claps that open the song would return on one of Bataan’s definitive boogaloo hits, “Subway Joe,” from the 1968 album of the same name.
Gypsy Woman ends with the enduring Joe Bataan classic: “Ordinary Guy.” Despite the light Latin percussion, it’s also a soul ballad at heart, the lament of a forlorn lover suffering from an epic case of self-pitying blues: “I don’t have thousands to spend or a seaside cottage for the weekend/I’m just an/Ordinary guy/You left behind”
The song would prove so popular that between 1967 and 1975, Bataan re-recorded four different versions for three albums and a single. The last is the most obscure of the bunch and though it’s not much different from the album version, it opens with guest pianist Richard Tee doling out a melody reminiscent of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Your Precious Love.” Whether the Motown nod was deliberate or accidental, this version of “Ordinary Guy” placed Bataan within the traditions of soul music even as he was also pushing an emergent boogaloo sound.
After Gypsy Woman, Bataan would become one of Fania’s most prolific artists, releasing seven more albums over the next five years before acrimoniously splitting from the label over royalty disputes in 1972. During that time, boogaloo flew high and then, depending on who you believe, either burned itself out or was deliberately killed off by the Latin music industry in order to clear the lane for salsa. Regardless, in that brief time, boogaloo’s appeal went global. Latin music artists in countries such as Puerto Rico, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela cut their own interpretations of boogaloo and in a marvelous full circle, musicians in West African countries such as Benin, Senegal, Nigeria and others also embraced the style. Boogaloo was always a melding of different musical threads spooling from the African diaspora and here it was, a prodigal Afro-Latin-American son, returning home.
For Bataan, the ’70s were far kinder to him than many of his boogaloo-era peers whose careers rose and fell with the style’s fortunes. Ever keeping his ear to the street, he went onto release two popular disco-era albums, Salsoul in 1973 and the aforementioned Afrofilipino in 1975. He even recorded a pioneering disco rap single, “Rap-O, Clap-O” in 1979, just months after “Rapper’s Delight” had introduced hip-hop to the world.
When his career began to wind down in the early ’80s, he took it as an opportunity to focus on his family and for decades, he worked as a youth counselor at the very juvenile corrections center where he had spent quality time as a teenager. Latin soul fans rediscovered him a generation later, sparking a career revival that began in the late ’90s that’s allowed Bataan to return to a prolific touring schedule. I’ve seen him perform a slew of times and at all his shows, however else he mixes up the play set, “Gypsy Woman” and “Ordinary Guy” remain in constant rotation. The former shimmers with verve, the latter is soaked in pathos, but both remain important legacies from the moment where boogaloo broke out of el barrio and took flight across the world. | 2017-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Fania | August 27, 2017 | 8.2 | 74f66be8-7e54-46c3-81ef-71742babe1f0 | Oliver Wang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/oliver-wang/ | null |
A reissue of the Downtown fixture’s 1981 debut album is a reminder that despite his striking look, campy repertoire, and operatic range, the onetime Bowie collaborator was no novelty act. | A reissue of the Downtown fixture’s 1981 debut album is a reminder that despite his striking look, campy repertoire, and operatic range, the onetime Bowie collaborator was no novelty act. | Klaus Nomi: Klaus Nomi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/klaus-nomi-klaus-nomi/ | Klaus Nomi | Klaus Nomi is an easy artist to eulogize. The German-born East Village fixture’s striking, self-made look and soaring operatic countertenor—in layman’s terms, he sang really, really high—brought him to the attention of culture vulture supreme David Bowie. Nomi famously performed with the Thin White Duke on “Saturday Night Live,” hoping for a full collaboration that never materialized. A deal with Bowie’s label RCA, however, enabled Nomi to release two albums abroad before his death, from complications due to AIDS, in 1983. From ANOHNI’s angelic warble to Janelle Monáe’s sci-fi tuxedos, it isn’t hard to find Nomi’s legacy in pop’s outer reaches.
Klaus Nomi, his 1981 debut album, affords us an entirely different opportunity: celebrating Nomi’s music rather than his myth. When an album’s repertoire goes from Man Parrish to Chubby Checker to Camille Saint-Saëns, it’s hard to look anywhere but the music. As beautiful as Nomi was, it’s worth peeling your eyes away from the ghost-white makeup, mountain-range hairstyle, and Tristan Tzara tux to see the truly gifted musician beneath.
A trio of pop covers displays Nomi’s interpretive range even within narrow bounds. Take his handling of Lou Christie’s cloying AM radio hit “Lightnin’ Strikes” as a starting point. (Here it’s titled “Lightning Strikes”; the informal contraction feels beneath Nomi’s dignity.) Working off an arrangement by Kristian Hoffman that plays the song relatively straight, Nomi uses his piercing voice to subvert the lyrics’ smarmy, swinging-bachelor heteronormativity—hearing Klaus Nomi sing “Every boy wants a girl” is never not funny—and the very idea that America’s postwar culture comprised the full range of human experience.
But in covering Lesley Gore’s teen-feminist anthem “You Don’t Own Me,” Nomi lets the power of the original do most of the talking for him. From his pointed delivery of “Don’t say I can’t go with other boys!” to singing “I’m free and I love to be free” even higher than Gore did, he’s simply making the same points in a shifted context. There’s more that unites his struggle and Gore’s than divides them.
“The Twist,” which via Chubby Checker became one of the biggest dance crazes of all time, gets a much more thorough reimagining. Nomi slows it down into a bass-driven space-out, using his upper range and Germanic diction to make one of the most overplayed songs of all time sound disorientingly unfamiliar: “Come on humans,” he science-fictionalizes, “let’s doooooooo the Twist!” By the time you realize he’s transforming the original song’s subtext into text, turning Checker’s hip-shaking anthem into an alien’s plea to understand what we humans call “sex,” it’s already too late!
Nomi’s originals also show an impressive thematic and tonal scope. Suffused in ominous synth washes by electro godhead and frequent Nomi collaborator Man Parrish, “Keys of Life” is the most Bowiesque thing on the record. A message from an otherworldly visitor that’s both messianic and apocalyptic in intent, it’s his “Oh! You Pretty Things,” “Ziggy Stardust,” and “Station to Station” all rolled into one. “Nomi Song,” by contrast, is a much warmer affair, a tender self-portrait of a man desperately and doubtfully seeking acceptance (“If they saw my face, could I still take a bow?”), while “Wasting My Time” feels like a rejoinder from the woman to whom the cad in “Lightning Strikes” was singing infidelity’s praises.
Finally, the nuclear panic of “Total Eclipse” wouldn’t feel out of place on a Devo record, except of course for the singing. Terror about the seemingly inevitable atomic apocalypse was thick on the ground in those early Reagan years, but Nomi was one of the few artists who could sound like an air-raid siren when he sang about it. Which is not to say the song’s sentiment is at all dated. Exhibit A, the opening line: “Big shots argue about what they’ve got, making the planet so hot, hot as a Holocaust.”
But the songs from Nomi’s operatic oeuvre, which open and close the album’s second side, are the showstoppers. “Cold Song” is based on an aria from baroque composer Henry Purcell’s King Arthur; the melody is evident in Giorgio Moroder, Michael Nyman, and Hans Zimmer’s themes for Scarface, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, and The Crown respectively, but it’s forever Nomi’s. His daring transformation of the original bass vocals into his most urgent and terrifying countertenor work (“I can scarcely move or draw my breath/Let me, let me freeze again to death”) is a career pinnacle, as footage from a performance a few short months before his death demonstrates.
Nomi’s rhapsodic, album-ending interpretation of Saint-Saëns’s “Mon cœur s’ouvre à la voix” aria, “Samson and Delilah,” is heartbreaking in a wholly different way. It’s a song about doomed love, sung from the perspective of the still-loving person who dooms it; Nomi embodied the role powerfully enough to poleaxe an audience full of cynical scenesters when it was part of his New Wave Vaudeville act.
It’s this kind of multifaceted musical intelligence that belies any attempt to write Nomi off as a novelty act or one-trick pony. Depending on the context, Nomi’s singular voice could cut right to the bone of operatic compositions, drawing forth their desire and despair like some kind of glowing quicksilver ichor. Or it could make like an inverted-triangle tuxedo and turn the conventions of pop upside down, pointing out their inadequacies while celebrating their strengths. Yes, his voice, and yes, his look, and yes, his tragic story—you get it, I get it, we all get it. But he’s so much more than merely interesting. He was, and on this album he remains, a spectacle in the best sense. The album’s overwhelming impression is of outsized emotion, and that’s precisely the spectacular thing that Nomi’s spectacle was designed to convey. | 2019-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Real Gone | June 18, 2019 | 8.4 | 74ffa249-4f69-4dee-a4d2-76c1e4f3cc50 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
A mixtape from Houston’s worldly psych trio digs deep into funk classics, spiritual jazz, and unusual finds from South Korea, Belarus, and Nigeria. | A mixtape from Houston’s worldly psych trio digs deep into funk classics, spiritual jazz, and unusual finds from South Korea, Belarus, and Nigeria. | Khruangbin: Late Night Tales | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/khruangbin-late-night-tales/ | Late Night Tales | Like most of the world, Houston slow-jam trio Khruangbin had big plans for 2020: a collaboration with Leon Bridges, a new album, a worldwide tour with fellow slow-psych purveyors Tame Impala. The pandemic waylaid their globe-trotting (though they still managed to make the cut on a former president’s summer playlist). Mark Speer has said of the enforced downtime that what he missed the most, aside from the live show, was DJing after-parties, where he might fold in cuts that reflected the band’s coordinates that particular night, like Serge Gainsbourg sleaze in Paris or funky molam in Bangkok.
Khruangbin’s entry in the esteemed LateNightTales series closes a circle of sorts. It was on Bonobo’s own 2013 mix for the franchise that much of the world was introduced to Khruangbin via their hushed, meditative “A Calf Born in Winter,” the clear standout of the set. That instrumental sowed the seeds for their own global rise, so it’s fitting that a group prone to making eclectic, exploratory radio shows and playlists would finally take the LNT reins themselves. The time-loosening, un-placeable qualities generally associated with the band apply to the mix itself. Spanning from the early 1970s to the past year, the trio’s 15 worldly selections favor a hazy, sun-bleached sound: Every new track conjures the image of a thousand dust motes spilling into the air as the record is pulled off the shelf.
Much of the mix is rooted in their hometown, from local artists to a spirit of eclecticism that reflects the diversity of the city itself. They feature the city’s dub-and-vocoder outfit Brilliantes del Vuelo as well as Kelly Doyle and his ponging drum machine and exotica guitar; the spoken-word piece that closes the set comes from another Houstonian, Tierney Malone, paired with a banjo version of Erik Satie’s “Gnossienne.”
Another portion nods to their live set. Onstage, Khruangbin have long played a medley that weaves together old funk and hip-hop rhythms, slotting Kool & the Gang’s jazz-funk classic “Summer Madness” alongside tunes like “Nothin’ but a G Thang” and “Electric Relaxation,” and they finally record a studio version of “Summer Madness” here. Fully inhabiting the song’s mellow haze, Speer’s guitar captures the psychedelic soaring of the original’s Arp and Mellotron.
Elsewhere, the group ranges far and wide. They open with “Illuminations,” Alice Coltane’s mystical 1974 collaboration with Carlos Santana, the one corner of her catalog that hasn’t experienced a renaissance yet. It’s a baffling entry point on the surface, packing more drama, dissonance, and ornate opulence than anything in the Khruangbin aesthetic. But in Santana’s long, sustained strings, one can hear the careful pacing of Speer’s own guitar work.
Playful motifs run across the mix, like the big, chewy bass tones of South Korean trio Sanullim, Ethiopia’s Roha Band, and Nigerian boogie singer Maxwell Udoh (the latter doing an excellent job of repurposing the whispered come-on of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” for a more upbeat setting). The detached cool of Nazia Hassan’s Bollywood disco classic “Khushi” echoes in the deadpan disco of Justine & the Victorian Punks’ “Still You,” a delirious cut from downtown composer and Arthur Russell collaborator Peter Gordon. Sensuous, sax-laced, inscrutable, sprawling, and woozy, it’s as mysterious now as it was back in 1979.
As to be expected, some of Khruangbin’s digs are ludicrously deep, like the cassette-only Latin pop tune from crooner David Marez or Gerald Lee’s lo-fi soul number from the never-released soundtrack to blaxploitation film Black Shampoo (IMDB keywords: “pubic hair,” “mafia,” “barbecue party”). But after a few times through, smooth yacht rock from Japan and Belarus loses its luster and just sounds like yacht rock. And even though the tempo barely tops 100 bpm, all the far-flung fusions of Asian pop, Nigerian reggae, and Korean boogie leave Khruangbin’s set feeling a little like a busy touring schedule on the international festival circuit: both awe-inspiring and exhausting.
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. | 2020-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Late Night Tales | December 8, 2020 | 6.8 | 750147f2-96a1-4e4a-adac-2b60b42bd886 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On her debut album, Coffman leaves behind the indie-prog of the Dirty Projectors for sunny kaleidoscopic pop that reveals how love and loss are tied inextricably to the music of our youth. | On her debut album, Coffman leaves behind the indie-prog of the Dirty Projectors for sunny kaleidoscopic pop that reveals how love and loss are tied inextricably to the music of our youth. | Amber Coffman: City of No Reply | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/amber-coffman-city-of-no-reply/ | City of No Reply | On her debut solo album, Amber Coffman erects an altar to the shine and glow of ’90s pop-rock and R&B. The former Dirty Projectors vocalist noted in an interview with The Guardian this year that the women of ’90s R&B “partially raised” her through a tumultuous childhood. That heritage lives in every nook and cranny on City of No Reply, which sparkles in part thanks to the production hand of Coffman’s former bandmate Dave Longstreth. Despite his assistance on the album, though, Coffman’s debut wholly belongs to her: It wears little of the shaggy indie-prog that characterized her albums with the Projectors, and instead opens up plenty of space for her clear, smooth vocals to blossom under her confident songwriting.
Though the swinging instrumentals and Coffman’s abundantly multitracked voice might make the album sound like an easy companion to Haim’s work, City of No Reply embraces more laser-cut quirk than the L.A. sisters, edging Coffman closer to the stylings of How to Dress Well or Carly Rae Jepsen. In place of traditional percussive sounds rain down snakes, squiggles, and skitters galore. One particularly hypnotic beat, on “If You Want My Heart,” prominently features the sound of champagne flutes clinking. While four out of five synthpop bands seem to have settled on a comfortable pastel ’80s palette replete with big drums, gushy keys, and downpours of reverb, Coffman instead fixes her lens on a vision of the ’70s refracted through the ’90s she grew up in. Her sunny and anxious pop songs tackle love, loss, and the hideous farce that is navigating through your late 20s and early 30s.
Having come of age in the era of Top 40 radio mélange that juxtaposed Toni Braxton and Melissa Etheridge, Coffman twirls those memories into a saturated kaleidoscope of her own making. The lovestruck single “No Coffee” wears echoes of Etheridge’s 1994 hit “Come to My Window” in both structure and tone; “Brand New” owes some of its moody slink to Sade’s Love Deluxe period; and album highlight “If You Want My Heart” takes cues from Mary J. Blige while simultaneously mirroring the if/then lyrical construction of Spice Girls’ “Wannabe”: “Baby, if you want my heart/First you gotta come through the door.”
That Coffman is able to cut the veneer of her soul idols with slices of bubblegum is a testament to just how deeply the radio sank into her bones. The various threads that make up City of No Reply don’t just get woven in for nostalgia’s sake, though. In her lyrics, Coffman stares down encounters that, given enough charge, can become life-altering: the dissolution of a long-term relationship, the sparks that fly across a new one. These moments of vulnerability can feel unprecedented, as if they have no context save for the music that first taught you how to get desire and disappointment and pubescent angst out of your body and into your head. Even in adulthood, mapping those insecurities onto the music of our youth can be a way of clinging to the only lifesaver that’s always kept you above water.
In those moments, an unreturned text can grow to the size of a whole city, a labyrinth of self-doubt with no visible exit. The only way out is found by retracing your steps: through who you’ve been before, and the songs that made you. Coffman doesn’t necessarily transcend the cornerstones she’s sampling on City of No Reply, but she’s not aiming to. | 2017-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | June 14, 2017 | 7.8 | 7502c191-94d5-429e-9f62-414a72a52606 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | null |
The six-piece BANANA features members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Warpaint, as well as the singer Cate Le Bon. LIVE is a playful, energetic session, influenced by Arthur Russell and Jon Hassell. | The six-piece BANANA features members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Warpaint, as well as the singer Cate Le Bon. LIVE is a playful, energetic session, influenced by Arthur Russell and Jon Hassell. | BANANA: LIVE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22828-live/ | LIVE | In March of last year, six musicians congregated in a house in Los Angeles, intent on making something original. Their band, BANANA, originally assembled as an opening act and backing group for the singer Cate Le Bon, included members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Warpaint as well as Le Bon herself, coming off of her excellent 2016 release Crab Day. The ensemble was helmed by Josiah Steinbrick, a producer and fixture of the L.A. music scene who’s collaborated with Devendra Banhart, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Tim Presley of White Fence.
The musicians had gotten familiar with each other while touring Crab Day, and it seems that they were in an even looser mood than usual when they came together to record what would become LIVE, a mix that uses original compositions by Steinbrick as a jumping-off point for the rest of the musicians to improvise over. Influenced by the recordings of the trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell and incorporating the work of Arthur Russell, the playful, energetic LIVE was originally recorded as a special for the online radio station Dublab. But it proved to have staying power, so Leaving Records has issued it as a standalone album this month.
LIVE is comprised of four tracks named for the first four letters of the alphabet, and runs 24 minutes its length. Its tracks are predicated not on guitar, piano or drums, but on loops of vibraphone and woodwind, with other instruments chiming in wildly, a rainforest cacophony layered over the slower, deeper patterns of a lush musical ecosystem. Tracks don’t develop in a linear fashion but instead grow outward in strange, unexpected directions. On “A” and “B,” this growth is segmented, as a second loop tags in to replace the first at the midpoint of each song. “C” and “D” are more coherent and as a result, more easily digestible.
Depending on the listener’s mood, the record’s early going can be frustratingly chipper. All those plinking mallets and that farting brass come to feel grating, a forced smile that stays on too long. But occasional moments of shade dull the insistent sunshine, providing some relief as you delve further into the record. Plaintive strings on the back side of “B” and the sudden jangle of piano two and half minutes through “C” cool things down, and “D” by far the shortest track here, is decidedly the darkest, introducing a somber note that anchors an otherwise escapist record in the real world.
The compositions here forsake Western divisions of major and minor keys. This gives all the tracks a modal, somewhat hard-to-place flavor, particularly the baroque “B,” which makes use of ceremonial music from Southeast Asia and incorporates a minimalist piece from the Estonian composer Heino Jürisalu, before morphing into a tribute to Arthur Russell’s ’70s work that includes a yearning sample of electric piano from Russell himself.
Steinbrick has said that he wants the music to sound “exotic” and “pleasant,” both characteristics that LIVE nails easily. But after a half dozen listens, despite some of its more outré qualities, LIVE starts to sound familiar, even tightly controlled. The members of BANANA know each other well, and on the record, they seem capable of anticipating their tourmates improvisational tendencies, like a conversation at the family dinner table where it’s always obvious who’s going to speak up next. That makes for a strikingly coherent improvised album. But it also dulls some of the surprises that LIVE might have otherwise offered, making something that was supposed to feel fresh and alive, seem occasionally, if not unhappily, predictable. | 2017-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Leaving | February 2, 2017 | 6.6 | 7505b374-058c-4ea7-b1c3-388965087bc0 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The Chicago DIY star is capable of presenting even the most technically difficult music as a casual, catchy pop song. His Secretly Canadian debut makes for an ideal introduction. | The Chicago DIY star is capable of presenting even the most technically difficult music as a casual, catchy pop song. His Secretly Canadian debut makes for an ideal introduction. | NNAMDÏ: Please Have a Seat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nnamdi-please-have-a-seat/ | Please Have a Seat | NNAMDÏ should be exhausted. He’s a bottomless well of creativity, the type of musician who resides at an imagination boot camp and isn’t satisfied until he’s wrung out every possible idea. In the two years since BRAT and Krazy Karl, the experimental pop multi-hyphenate underwent wrist surgery, toured with Wilco and Sleater-Kinney, released an EP, and was named a Chicago Tribune Chicagoan of the Year. By the time NNAMDÏ was ready to prop his feet up for once, he couldn’t even do that. “I fought my way in for a seat by the throne/Looked for a space but it was already gone,” he begins Please Have a Seat, his sixth official album and first for Secretly Canadian. After that two-minute exhale of an opener, he takes off running. Billed as an exercise in being present, Please Have a Seat casts NNAMDÏ’s trademark restlessness in a new light, loosening up the ecstatic absurdity of his songs and rethinking what it means to be accessible without sacrificing passion.
Written, produced, and performed entirely by NNAMDÏ, Please Have a Seat is perhaps the best introduction to his catalog for the uninitiated listener. The album is a revolving door of genres, unified by slick production that sets the glitchy rap of “Anti” alongside the unassuming piano of “Careful.” NNAMDÏ mixes a trap beat with Röyksopp-style electronica on “Touchdown” and twists regal orchestral strings into downtrodden indie rock on “Lifted.” He showcases equal skill on the drum kit during “Dibs,” launching into a burst of thrash metal before pivoting to anthemic, spaced-out fills. Sprinkled in between are commercial-style skits. It’s unpredictable and also exactly what you’d expect from a guy who’s as devoted to Sum 41 as he is to Blake Mills. The only thing consistent about NNAMDÏ is that he thrives on inconsistency.
The best songs on Please Have a Seat indulge the playful, hybrid picking style of math-rock guitar (even if NNAMDÏ bristles at the term). Album highlight “Smart Ass” layers glittery, pitch-shifted vocals and guitar noodling akin to finger exercises, like if Owl City covered Emergency & I. It’s a vibrant song that summarizes what makes NNAMDÏ such a singular artist and a worthy tourmate for eccentric rockers like Black Midi: He blends genres the average listener may find off-putting and turns them into something not just palatable, but fun. He’s the people’s nerd, an artist who can present even the most technically difficult music as a casual, catchy pop song.
With his musical growth and rising profile, NNAMDÏ could be considered on the cusp of fame by now. But he’s not waiting around. On Please Have a Seat, he repeatedly critiques his ascent: If he’s going to be a celebrity, he’ll take the opportunity to cash in and share the wealth with his community. “Fuck being popular/I want the bread,” he raps. “312 love me/Ain’t no man above me/So pull up a seat/I’ll make you a plate.” On lead single “I Don’t Wanna Be Famous,” he grapples with his career stature, acknowledging the hustle for playlist placement and cringing at outlets that once dubbed him “too weird” to be taken seriously. He may get to hang with the Miley Cyruses of this world, but he’s ambivalent about the attention that comes with it.
An indie musician at the middle tier of fame is in a strange position: too big to duck the pressure of public perception, too small to be able to afford to ignore it, and busy touring all the while. If he’s running on fumes, not only is NNAMDÏ not showing it, but he’s turning them into his own brand of renewable energy. On Please Have a Seat, his gusto is as unrelenting as the blistering jazz drumming on “Anxious Eater.” Wrangling together dozens of technical ideas and arranging them with idiosyncratic flair, NNAMDÏ enters this challenging middle zone without compromising his priorities. It’s what makes Please Have a Seat the best he’s ever sounded. | 2022-11-28T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-28T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rap | Secretly Canadian / Sooper | November 28, 2022 | 7.5 | 75070305-49e3-4710-9458-2d3f90e03abb | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The D.C. death metal band attacks with pummeling force and socially pointed lyrics, in the tradition of Bolt Thrower and Incantation. | The D.C. death metal band attacks with pummeling force and socially pointed lyrics, in the tradition of Bolt Thrower and Incantation. | Genocide Pact: Order of Torment | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/genocide-pact-order-of-torment/ | Order of Torment | Washington D.C. has had a storied impact on heavy music in this country, from the hardcore that emerged from the city itself to the doom metal from its outlying regions in Maryland and Virginia. You have to wonder why there aren’t more death metal bands from the area, too—if evil and corruption are your trades, there’s no shortage of inspiration, to say the least. Genocide Pact are a death metal trio from the capital who are out to change that. Their second record, Order of Torment, takes from Bolt Thrower’s bull-headed charge and anti-establishment outlook and Incantation’s death-doom, creating another crushing altar to the early Nineties that also revels in some aspects of the genre missed by less politically-inclined revival bands.
As with a great deal of modern-retro American death metal, Genocide Pact veer towards less complexity and more pummeling. This is in part a result of the band members’ hardcore backgrounds: Guitarist/vocalist Tim Mullaney and bassist Michael Nolan also play in Disciples of Christ, while drummer Connor Donegan bashes in Red Death and has filled for Power Trip live. Bolt Thrower were the most punk-connected of the early death metal bands, and that quality lives on in Torment. Opening track “Conquered and Disposed” moves with a pulverizing efficiency, setting a tone for the album as it finds a common ground between primeval murk and combat-like flexibility.
Genocide Pact’s inclination is to remove some of the cryptic nature of Incantation’s music, leaving behind a time-warping ooze. Torment feels slower than it actually is, submerging you in a slo-mo apocalypse you can only marvel at. Even when the band speeds up, as with Donegan’s blast-beat drumming on “Spawn of Suffering,” they still sound like they’re sloshing through a mile of damning tar. “Pain Reprisal” trudges along like sludge and teases out a melody so pained it’s practically crying against its own existence. Mullaney starts “Ascendency Absolved” with a chugging rhythm that morphs into a Bolt Thrower thrust at half-speed, throwing in a lead riff that hardens into something more torn by battle than exalting it.
If Torment feels like a hellworld encroaching with the heat swelling, that’s also thanks to Mullaney’s lyrical direction. He deals in violence and destruction like many death metal songwriters, but uses those themes to explore deceptive power dynamics, a decision that dates back to when he formed in the band in college. (This lyrical stance is Genocide Pact’s biggest debt to Bolt Thrower, a band that revelled in battle lore as a way of criticizing the nature of power.) “Decimation Grid” puts the costs of war in personal terms: “Victims of a lie, a truth that never was/Pitted against those, who similarly starve/Used by greater fools, who laugh at your pain/Promised a dream, but receiving terror.” “Authoritarian Impulse” is even more blunt, opening with “Paranoid filter/Obscures the horizon/Of oppression and deceit.” Mullaney uses death metal as a way to lift the veil on society. And while his imagery is general enough to apply to many historical eras, it strikes particularly deep now.
Social commentary wasn’t unusual in death metal’s late Eighties/early Nineties heyday: Carcass’ gore lyrics were tied to their animal rights stances, Napalm Death have openly leftist politics, and death-grind band Brutal Truth had songs like “Anti-Homophobe,” the pro-weed “Choice of a New Generation,” and “K.A.P. (Kill All Politicians).” Even with a post-2010 groundswell in the genre, though, there hasn’t been a lot of notable death metal that criticizes power as of late. Torment is a welcome exception, attacking with such force that it makes the bands who don’t tackle these issues feel like the real outliers. | 2018-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Relapse | February 13, 2018 | 7.3 | 7510dfa3-2873-4a4b-8623-1e8bbc426880 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
An outlier on the outlaw country scene of the 1970s, Terry Allen's Juarez is a bawdy song cycle that alludes to the fall of the Aztec Empire, Jesus, and motel sex. It retains its kick 40 years on. | An outlier on the outlaw country scene of the 1970s, Terry Allen's Juarez is a bawdy song cycle that alludes to the fall of the Aztec Empire, Jesus, and motel sex. It retains its kick 40 years on. | Terry Allen: Juarez | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21914-juarez/ | Juarez | To best understand the impetus that drives artists ranging from the Neanderthals to an outsider artist like Judith Scott to a small town fellow like Terry Allen, consider this line: “Everyman he got to leave his mark/So I got my pencil and I got my chalk/and there ain’t a rock made I can’t make talk.” It’s a verse from the piano-pounded “Writing on Rocks Across the USA” from Allen’s 1975 debut album, and in the next verse he scales a cliff in the midst of a Galveston hurricane with a pencil in hand, boasting: “I scribbled down some of the mysteries and I stopped that howling wind.” Is there a more succinct image of artistic futility than graphite put to granite amid gale winds?
That artistic impulse must have felt like an alien transmission for someone like Terry Allen, who was raised in a small Texas town. Like fellow Lubbockians Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings, Allen had to get the hell out to realize his vision, though even when he was at art school in LA, he was haunted by a cast of characters that he soon set to a song cycle and series of lithographs titled Juarez (and subsequently as a screenplay and sculptural and video installation).
Pressed up in minuscule quantities the same year that another Texan, Willie Nelson recorded his own spare song cycle, Redheaded Stranger, Juarez was an outlier even on the “outlaw country” scene: a hand-darned film noir that alludes to the fall of the Aztec Empire, Jesus, motel sex, and the purgatory that is the Rio Grande border. It's now regarded as a touchstone in alt-country but even still, it has more in common with Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, Mexican folk art, and Terrence Malick’s Badlands than anything in the country genre. And while Juarez has been reissued a few times over the decades, only with Paradise of Bachelors’ deluxe new reissue are Allen’s peculiar visuals again wedded with the music.
Now Allen is more prominently known as a sculptor, painter, and conceptual artist who has been awarded NEA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, to where his songwriting takes a backseat to these other practices. But Juarez retains its kick 40 years on. Centered around Allen’s by-turns barrelhouse and contemplative piano playing and his Texas twang (with glints of mandolin, pedal steel, maracas), Allen tells the story of two couples—one a sailor on shore leave with a Tijuana prostitute, the other a pachuco with his girlfriend—and how their encounter ends in bloodshed.
His way with the ivory and his coyote howl of a voice can best be appreciated on the six-minute “Cortez Sail,” seguing from seemingly unconnected scenes in a manner that approaches fine cinema: a rainy highway out of Los Angeles; the landing of Cortez in Mexico; an APB for an outlaw on the run in Colorado, a gun in his lap. Allen is impressionistic and cinematic in his details, such as the image of lightning that tears clouds and then closes that tear in that same instant.
His sparse yet driving music and the trenchant visual work accompanying are noteworthy elements of Allen’s four decades as an artist, but what stands out in revisiting Juarez now is the stunning poetry of the lines themselves. Allen’s words are a piquant kick throughout: raunchy, pithy, and richly redolent. Of course there are quirky lines like “Today’s rainbow is tomorrow’s tamale” at the end of “Radio…And Real Life” that brings a chuckle every time, as does a fantasy about a tryst in the desert, which includes “anal with whipped cream” as jackalopes look on.
But other lines quiver with a raw vision rarely heard in folk or country. On the rollicking “Border Palace,” Allen yowls how “my skinny body slip[s] like a knife into her perfume,” while the sweet “Honeymoon in Cortez” features the image of the TV’s glow glimpsed between toes. And on “There Oughta Be a Law Against Southern California,” Allen threatens with a real ripsnorter: “I’m gonna turn your asphalt back into brimstone.” Whether it’s the side of a cliff or on those tiny black rocks, Allen and his pencil leave quite the mark. | 2016-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | May 24, 2016 | 8 | 7511dd61-b3dc-4cf9-a3b5-3af0812b35fc | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Actress’ sixth LP reaches deep into both Darren Cunningham’s clubbiest and most avant-garde impulses, exploring language and Afrofuturism while maintaining a musicality that holds the listener close. | Actress’ sixth LP reaches deep into both Darren Cunningham’s clubbiest and most avant-garde impulses, exploring language and Afrofuturism while maintaining a musicality that holds the listener close. | Actress: AZD | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23078-azd/ | AZD | Several regional dance music scenes feed into the work of Darren Cunningham, aka Actress. His singular, ever-evolving breed of experimental techno has precedents in Detroit, Chicago, and his native London, though none of these cities explain Cunningham. Rather, his music—which has grown conceptually weighty over his past few releases—imagines and perhaps even conjures another place, a new home for itself. In Kodwo Eshun’s *More Brilliant Than the Sun, *a collection of essays considering electronic music through an Afrofuturist lens, he writes “Everywhere, the ‘street’ is considered the ground and guarantee of all reality, a compulsory logic explaining all Black Music, conveniently mishearing antisocial surrealism as social realism.” The phrase “antisocial surrealism” is an excellent term for the broadly-drawn but inward-leaning world Actress creates.
On his last full-length, 2014’s Ghettoville, the place conjured was dusty and post-apocalyptic; the songs were intensely evocative, but also dragged under heavy bad-signal fuzz. That album’s press materials led many to believe it was Cunningham’s last release as Actress, but with AZD, he returns, though his persona has evolved. Its first single “X22RME” stoked hope that Cunningham might return to the project’s less abrasive, more club-oriented early sound, but it’s for the best that AZD (its title, pronounced “azid,” an anagram for Cunningham’s childhood nickname Daz) forges ahead on its intensely contemporary path.
While AZD moves between modes and styles, reaching deep into both Cunningham’s clubbiest and most avant-garde impulses, it maintains a clarity of vision. With the fuzz of Ghettoville dialed back a bit, the tracks’ skeletal structures come into relief: it’s generally easy to hear the distinct components of each and to meditate on the album’s juxtapositions. Actress’ plaintive music-box melodies and shuffling beats can loop unchanging for a pop song’s length. “UNTITLED 7” combines a tense synthesized-string passage with a sticky ascending bassline; halfway through, the strings are traded for hi-hats, a small change that relocates the track entirely. “FANTASYNTH” loops a liquid melody over the crunchy pulse of a beat, with some tinny, whirling sounds moving between.
The late New York artist and musician Rammellzee, sampled in “CYN,” looms over AZD. And his language-building (or language-deconstructing) projects seem a particularly useful point of reference. Rammellzee’s “Gothic Futurism” manifesto drew a link between medieval monks and graffiti artists, positing the latter as regaining some multi-dimensional power in the Roman alphabet that, he thought, had been previously quashed by the development of Western culture. Though Cunningham uses words sparingly, mostly in partially-lodged samples, he’s also concerned with the limiting and liberatory possibilities of language. If we think of the structure of a song as itself a vernacular language—guiding us, in the case of dance music, through the builds and drops of a track—Cunningham then develops his own forms, sinking us deep into a soundscape through relentless repetition, and overlaying that space with alternate ideas so that we’re stretched in a few directions at once.
Cunningham’s structures also disintegrate, and those moments of collapse are key. One of AZD’s stated themes is chrome, that highly reflective plating that has intense black-and-white contrasts. Little about this album is aesthetically crisp. Cunningham’s deliberate use of hiss gives the lovely impression that parts of these tracks are playing through an old car stereo—and, more broadly, contributes a sense of space outside of the neutral confines of the club. But when tracks come undone, it’s precipitated by metallic elements breaking apart. “DANCING IN THE SMOKE” maintains a churning pace, a sampled voice instructing or observing: “Dance, hear my record spin.” As another vocal sample interjects to repeat the phrase “the future,” sharp atonal accents pierce through aimlessly. This leads into “FAURE IN CHROME,” which came out of his collaboration with the London Contemporary Orchestra earlier this year. Passages from Romantic composer Gabriel Fauré’s “Requiem” are interlaid with glitchy squeals, which erode the melancholic tones to reveal new frequencies below.
But for all its artfully-deployed discordance, AZD maintains a musicality that holds the listener close. Sometimes this comes through in more danceable techno moments, like the single “X22RME” or the 80s-leaning synth-driven track “RUNNER,”; elsewhere, it’s in the emotive minimalist breaks of “FALLING RIZLAS” or “THERE'S AN ANGEL IN THE SHOWER.” Cunningham participates in a futurist tradition, following an arc set by artists and writers like Rammellzee and Eshun. But that futurism isn’t predictive, something yet to come; rather, his combination of science fictions, music histories, and socio-spatial realities feels deliriously adjacent to the world we’re listening to it in. | 2017-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | April 12, 2017 | 7.9 | 751eb4fa-be15-4bd5-be9b-76942418d82f | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
The New York singer-songwriter deftly captures indie-pop longing, though her musical gestures can feel a bit lifeless. | The New York singer-songwriter deftly captures indie-pop longing, though her musical gestures can feel a bit lifeless. | Emily Yacina: Remember the Silver | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emily-yacina-remember-the-silver/ | Remember the Silver | Online, thirsty people take masochism to delightful extremes. They honk for their crushes to punch them in the face, steamroll them with a car, or batter them with a 16" cast-iron skillet. New York singer-songwriter Emily Yacina makes this type of boiling, uneven desire sound prosaic: “Yeah I need you to swallow me,” she sings mildly over bobbing chord progressions on “Arcades & Highways,” as if rattling off a grocery list or picking lint off of a sweater. The mousy and withdrawn indie-pop on Remember the Silver, her new album, rests on this crooked pairing. On one hand, there’s a longing so all-consuming that it threatens to extinguish her; on the other, a dry and often listless delivery.
The title of the album originates from a Dana Redfield book about alien abduction. Like a UFO, Yacina implies, love can disappear in an instant, but it was real; you must remember how it felt. And so, Remember the Silver dwells on these tender ache of romance, at once swooning with promises to “wait forever” and whimpering at lost intimacies. Wisps of past loves slip between her fingers: She imagines them on the beach, on 96th Street, in her bedroom. “Time is a silk web tangled in pleas/I choke to move on,” she admits over muted, scratchy guitars in “Bleachers.”
But who is she straining to move on from? The sources of her anguish are as blank as paper dolls; it’s like they’re not real people, but only closed-off figments of her memory. The closest we get to specificity are gestures to “the most perfect face” or “all the little things you’d say to cheer me up.” Instead, her lyrics tend toward flat lines of monosyllabic words, vague and impressionistic notes bound up in juvenile rhyme schemes. On “Secret Drawers,” she concocts a spell to lure in her crush: “With a drop of blood, I say your name/Like I knew it would, it makes a stain.” On “Better Off,” she tackles self-delusion with fairy tale references to birds singing and prayers to the sky. Her attempts at profundity devolve into fluff: “I feel my angels stretch me soft/Whisper to myself that I’m better off.”
Of course, even the most seemingly understated, opaque lines can be rescued and imbued with larger meaning. “Southern Sky” by frequent collaborator (Sandy) Alex G, on which Yacina contributes gentle vocals, spins in her same universe of swallowed-down emotional realities. The two artists share a language: dreams and skies, blues and greens. But the vivid landscape of “Southern Sky,” with its ensemble of wheezing violins, tambourines, and jaunty piano keys, makes a simple observation like “You and me/These are titles I can hardly speak” ache with nostalgia. By contrast, the emotions in Remember the Silver feel weakly brewed; the slow-moving, monotonous arrangements do little to reveal any expressive subtlety. Yacina’s papery singing rarely elevates above a murmur, often blending into the dinky and minimal instrumentation: some drums, some lightly pawed-at guitars. Occasionally, there is a sprinkle of trombone or electronic whirrs like a quickening heartbeat. But mostly, everything is rendered in the same pallid shade.
Remembering that you are a young woman with real, unregulated emotions is mortifying; it can make you want to eject yourself straight into the mouth of a great white shark. As I listened, I kept searching for a sharper, more complex female subjectivity—a perspective to match Frankie Cosmos’ weird and existential wit, Sidney Gish’s offbeat self-deprecation, or Soccer Mommy’s snarling cool. I wanted a deeper sense of how slippery, heady, and frightening new love can be, at a time when young women have turned out in droves to describe that experience beautifully. There are refreshing glimpses at the mundane humiliations of having a crush on songs like “Only,” whose sly opening line—“Desexualize my soul/I want to be a piece of paper”—scans as a more composed way of saying “fuck my life.” And Yacina’s trembling moans on “96th Street,” manage to bathe the listener in a quiet grief, despite the song’s generic lyrics. But as a whole, Remember the Silver is crumbly and pale like a bouquet of dried flowers. I wish I’d been given more to remember. | 2020-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | January 4, 2020 | 6 | 752b01f0-4431-4d9b-bbb5-ea50b2665157 | Cat Zhang | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cat-zhang/ | |
The producer known as Ahnnu is affiliated with L.A.’s beat-music scene, but his sounds are swirling and gelatinous. Rhythms never unfold quite the way you might expect them to on his hypnotic new LP. | The producer known as Ahnnu is affiliated with L.A.’s beat-music scene, but his sounds are swirling and gelatinous. Rhythms never unfold quite the way you might expect them to on his hypnotic new LP. | Ahnnu: Special Forces | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ahnnu-special-forces/ | Special Forces | That the Los Angeles producer Leland Jackson tends to get lumped in with the so-called beat-music scene is partly a question of proximity: When the Richmond, Va., native moved out to LA, early in the decade, he linked up with Knxwledge and Mndsgn, musicians deeply entrenched in the city’s sampling-centric experimental hip-hop community. But the music Jackson records as Ahnnu rarely features much in the way of actual beats; you’d be hard-pressed to find anything as clear-cut as a boom-bap backbone in Ahnnu’s gelatinous swirls of sound. On 2013’s World Music, incidental scraps of piano and percussion tumble like agates in the tide, and easy-listening vibraphones pool in pastel puddles. The 2013 LP Battered Sphinx and 2015’s Perception slink closer to ambient music’s vaporous atmospheres, suffusing beat music’s repetition in elliptical tonal loops and the fuzzy gait of the runout groove.
His new album, Special Forces, is clearly related to its predecessors, but it also feels like a major step forward—in two opposing directions at once. On the one hand, rhythm and pulse are more deeply woven into the fabric of the music than we’re used to hearing from Ahnnu. Rather than a freeform sprawl, the music is ordered by a sense of deep structure, held together by properties that feel almost physical, like mass and gravity. At the same time, the album travels far from beat music’s percussive stomping ground.
Jackson has said that one technique that informed the record was attempting to make percussive tracks with only melodic sounds. It’s not a new idea for him: Way back in 2013, Jackson discussed his interest in moving away from drums. Across the 13-track, 35-minute album, there are almost no audible drums at all, save some loose-wristed tom rolls and scattered ride-cymbal hits on “Laughing,” a woozy album highlight fueled by bursts of clarinet. For rhythmic bite, he turns to gurgling synths, muted balloon squeaks, and the occasional blast of white noise, and much of the time, the forward drive comes from soft sounds, not hard ones. In the opening “Passing Through a Horizontal Slit,” thick, gloopy loops of tone churn like two adjacent boat engines bobbing in the waves, their interplay an impossibly complex equation. In “Senseless,” electronic insect chirps mark time against a backdrop of radiophonic fizz. “Two Squares” is a curved metal maze lined with dripping icicles, and “Pluck-jump-freeze” sounds like a chorus of rubbed wineglass rims tuned to an alien scale and played back at a fraction of its original speed. Honing in on his twin obsessions—hypnotic repetition and subaquatic sound design—the slowly spinning “Bubble Horn” is part Steve Reich and part whale song.
Adding to the music’s hypnotic qualities, ironically, is the fact that Jackson’s rhythms never unfold quite the way you might expect them to; that unpredictability has the way of pulling the listener even deeper into the music. Just listen to the slow shudders of “The Terrible One,” whose gravelly synths recall Actress, three or four discrete loops all spinning slowly out of sync. There’s no one master clock holding it all together, and the individual elements resist teasing out, collapsing into a wet, wooly tangle. The same could be said for the album as a whole: It flows together as one long piece of music, with longer, more composed pieces stitched together with 30- or 60-second sketches of abstract sound. There is no magnetic north once you’re inside its disorienting span.
Wherever Jackson has sourced his sounds from, your guess is as good as mine. “Laughing” reveals scraps of free-jazz drumming and what might be a sample of Jon Hassell’s chorused horn; the unstable waveforms and quavering pitches that predominate across the album suggest that Jackson may be sitting on a treasure trove of early electronic recordings from pioneers like Luc Ferrari and Tod Dockstader. Ultimately, though, the pleasure of this music isn’t so much trying to figure out where it comes from as where it takes you. Understated and counterintuitive, Special Forces exerts a powerful grip on the senses. Like any alien world, its gravity and its atmosphere are different from those of the planet we call home. | 2017-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | NNA Tapes | December 15, 2017 | 7.6 | 752f6507-a94a-4369-bb50-9bd61923c2b6 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Did you know that one of Erykah Badu's collaborators made what could very rightly be called an opera about Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks? Well, he did. Composer Ted Hearne's productions have tackled George W. Bush and Katrina and now the tale of Manning and what led to her 25-year prison sentence. A complex, beautiful piece of theater, Hearne has pushed to make The Source succeed as a piece of music. | Did you know that one of Erykah Badu's collaborators made what could very rightly be called an opera about Chelsea Manning and WikiLeaks? Well, he did. Composer Ted Hearne's productions have tackled George W. Bush and Katrina and now the tale of Manning and what led to her 25-year prison sentence. A complex, beautiful piece of theater, Hearne has pushed to make The Source succeed as a piece of music. | Ted Hearne: The Source | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21131-the-source/ | The Source | More than a few of the vicious old debates in "new classical" music have been settled. In 2015, a composer isn’t obliged to choose melodic minimalism over atonal complexity, or vice versa. If she wants to write something that "addresses the times," there’s no set aesthetic to follow. Execution is what the community of listeners has (generally) pledged to judge.
You can hear this relatively new, pan-stylistic freedom quite clearly in the music of Ted Hearne. As a political animal, he’s a liberal populist; as a composer, he’s a fan of preexisting texts and musical maximalism. His 2010 protest song-cycle Katrina Ballads set real life excerpts from an American tragedy—think of George W. Bush’s famous assessment "Brownie you’re doing a heck of a job"—to a richly textured musical backdrop that blended jazz and classical vocal approaches with aggrieved electric guitar and frenetic chamber scoring. In 2013, Hearne provided Erykah Badu with well-judged orchestrations of songs from New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War), which Badu performed live with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. (We’re still waiting for a proper studio recording of those.)
With this album, Hearne gives us a distillation of an experimental stage work about Chelsea Manning (and WikiLeaks) that was presented in 2014 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Composing once again atop found texts—including logs of Manning’s chats and leaked government documents that were selected and edited by the novelist Mark Doten—Hearne’s latest project gives us some of the composer’s most intriguing music yet.
In the song "s/as boy/as a boy", Hearne scores one of Manning’s haunting pre-arrest concerns—"i wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life/ if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me.../ plastered all over the world press.../ as boy"—by way of a somber cello-and-guitar riff that is frequently interrupted by percussive slaps. (The discrete instrumental parts swirl together with an affecting unease, circa Manning’s line, "I'm just kind of drifting now.")
Another highlight is "Julian in a Nutshell", in which Doten creates lyrics from shards of questions delivered to Julian Assange by reporters. At first, Hearne pairs Doten’s documentary cut-up fragments with airy individual string and vocal lines. As the journalistic narrative is better established—demanding that Assange define himself as either a "journalist", an "anarchist", or the victim of a "smear campaign"—the vocal lines settle into sunnier harmonies. It’s the sound of the press finding an angle, though Hearne’s subtly clattering orchestration isn’t as sold on the quality of the conversation.
Inevitably, this audio-only version of The Source also omits some key aspects of the "multimedia oratorio", occasionally rendering an abstract production even more conceptually opaque. In director Daniel Fish’s filmed excerpts from the original staging, we can see that The Source originally included a chorus of silent observers that surrounded the audience, on video-projection screens. Looming large over the proceedings, that visual chorus adds a measure of ghostly gravity to the long chunks of leaked military cables that Hearne’s actors recite through vocal filters.
These bureaucratic passages certainly deserve grimly robotic accompaniment. (Think of lyrics like: "An IED detonation was reported by C co 1-327 INF to Task force SPARTAN, in the Salah Ad Din Province, Ad Dawr, vicinity. 38S LD 8930 1490.") But on the album version, these long stretches of war-euphemism can wear thin. Without the ability to conjure the silent witnesses on a recording, Hearne instead references the wider culture by inserting drops from pop songs. At best, these feel unnecessary. At worst, they’re distracting: Liz Phair’s "Girls! Girls! Girls!" isn’t contemporaneous with the WikiLeaks era, nor is its consideration of gender politics particularly relevant to Chelsea Manning’s worries about being misgendered while serving some future prison sentence. This version of The Source could have benefitted from some stronger editing, though when it connects, it can still resonate as some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory—from any genre. | 2015-11-04T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-04T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Experimental | New Amsterdam | November 4, 2015 | 7 | 7533329f-bb21-4454-aca8-fec005081bf4 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
Sergio Sayeg’s unhurried nylon string guitar and softly danceable rhythms put a smooth, minimalist flourish on the vibrant musical heritage of Brazil. | Sergio Sayeg’s unhurried nylon string guitar and softly danceable rhythms put a smooth, minimalist flourish on the vibrant musical heritage of Brazil. | Sessa: Estrela Acesa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sessa-estrela-acesa/ | Estrela Acesa | Sessa’s terminally chill music sounds like he’s been lounging on the beach or just smoked a joint before entering the studio. Yet on his second album, Estrela Acesa (Burning Star), the São Paulo-born artist moves past the honeymoon phase of his 2019 debut to express both passion and pain. Paying tribute to the music of Brazil in the classic styles of Caetano Veloso or Antônio Carlos Jobim, Sessa augments his nylon string guitar, softly danceable rhythms, and airy vocal harmonies with understated orchestral arrangements. There aren’t many contemporary artists replicating the sounds of tropicália, bossa nova, or MPB as immaculately as Sessa does, but he favors minimalist flourishes over the madcap approach of a band like Os Mutantes. Singing in Portuguese, Sessa’s unhurried voice hovers in space like his hero Leonard Cohen.
Sergio Sayeg (aka Sessa) grew up in São Paulo’s isolated Sephardic Jewish community, beginning his musical education in the synagogue. In high school, he joined the band Garotas Suecas (Swedish Girls) before his father’s work brought the family to New York City. Throughout the mid-2010s, Sessa joined Israeli rocker Yonatan Gat on bass, while spending his days working at the East Village record shop Tropicália in Furs. It was here that he immersed himself in the vibrant musical heritage of Brazil, as his debut album Grandeza gradually came together. Over six or seven different recording sessions between Yonatan Gat’s globe-trotting tours, Sessa gathered whoever was available to join him in the studio with only the briefest of rehearsals.
In comparison to the patchwork of Sessa’s first album, Estrela Acesa is silky smooth. Its 12 short songs were primarily recorded on the island of Ilhabela, off the coast of São Paulo, where percussionist and co-producer Biel Basile set up a studio early in the pandemic. The album’s orchestral arrangements by Simon Hanes and Belarusian composer Alex Chumak flash back to the subtle psychedelic sound of Arthur Verocai’s 1972 debut. This is perhaps most evident on Estrela Acesa’s melancholy instrumental, “Helena,” with shivering strings, timpani swells, and wordless vocals swirling around a gently strummed guitar. As the song drifts towards its conclusion, it feels like watching ocean waves lapping onto the sand.
The mood is so copacetic that, without a working knowledge of Portuguese or access to the translated lyrics, it’s almost impossible to know what Sessa is singing about. On the breakup song “Que Lado Você Dorme?” (“On What Side Do You Sleep?”), he intones “I love you, I hate you, and everything in between” without a trace of emotion. “Dor Fodida” (“Fucking Pain”) similarly bottles its feelings with pissed-off lyrics about commonplace struggles delivered softly and sweetly. “Pele da Esfera” (“Skin Sphere”) settles into a winding groove like the dance party it describes, though Sessa’s words sound more romantically direct on the page than they do coming out of his mouth.
“Canção da Cura” (“Song of Healing”) is a breakup song as well, with a bubbling pace that matches its lyrics about “consuming” a loved one “to the sound of the drums.” Sessa returns to the healing properties of sound on both “Música” and “Você É a Música” (“You Are Music”), explaining how songs fill the “head, flesh, heart.” Many artists have explored this kind of meta-commentary (including Cohen), but Sessa might be the first to call music “the sluttiest country.” On the closing title track, there is finally a small lilt in his voice as he shares a feeling of contentment (“One day without another without end/They say love’s like that”). The languid sound of Estrela Acesa is certainly consistent, but it could use a few more moments of heart-on-sleeve emotion to make Sessa’s euphoria stand out from his ache. | 2022-06-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | June 28, 2022 | 7.3 | 7539311d-7c4d-474c-aa19-e5cc7c846662 | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
Juice WRLD’s second posthumous album attempts to be more of the same, highlighting the best and worst qualities of a generational talent gone too soon. | Juice WRLD’s second posthumous album attempts to be more of the same, highlighting the best and worst qualities of a generational talent gone too soon. | Juice WRLD: Fighting Demons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/juice-wrld-fighting-demons/ | Fighting Demons | The most affecting part of the first annual Juice WRLD Day celebration was when his former DJ, Mike P, went out into the crowd to talk to fans about how the late Chicago rapper changed their lives. They said they discovered Juice in high school and credit him for helping them overcome depression and mental illness. One fan showed off a tattoo of lyrics to the song “Life’s a Mess” on her arm. Several were on the verge of tears while sharing their memories. “Whenever I need a high, all I need is to play some Juice WRLD,” one said as the crowd of thousands erupted.
Though he’d been creating music since at least 2015, the impact Juice left on the world within only a year and a half—his breakout single “Lucid Dreams” debuted on May 4, 2018, and he passed away from an overdose on December 8, 2019—is nothing short of remarkable. He utilized rap, pop-punk, and emo just as that combination became the go-to formula for a new generation of rising SoundCloud stars. His songs were often juvenile but always honest; they were the nexus for his raw unfiltered emotion.
The universal appeal of Juice WRLD’s music never came at the expense of abandoning his rap roots or rebranding himself as an artist. The reverence he paid to the struggles that he and his fans endured has persisted in the music released since his death. 2020’s Legends Never Die largely avoided the pitfalls of the average posthumous rap album: Most songs used felt as close to complete as possible, features were kept to a minimum, and its promotion was tame and respectful. Fighting Demons—the second posthumous Juice album—can’t necessarily claim that third part, since its release is tied to both an Amazon-sponsored concert and an HBO documentary. But musically, Demons is attempting to be more of the same, highlighting the best and worst qualities of a generational talent gone too soon.
Demons was culled from the same pool of thousands of intense and deeply personal songs Juice recorded before his death. His voice is expansive and tumbles through melodies and raps about life passing him by in a haze of drugs, suicidal thoughts, and thoughts of living forever through his own reckless actions. At one point, on “Already Dead,” he admits his fans and his music are the only things keeping him alive. It never becomes any less harsh or challenging to hear Juice exorcise these demons, and there’s value in the way his bluntness continues to connect with listeners. At its best, on songs like “Wandered to LA” and “Doom,” the hurt feels close, like you can touch it. At its worst, moments can become bland (“Feline”) or descend into punchline silliness that doesn’t suit the heaviness of the material (“From My Window”). None of the songs sound like demos scraped from the bottom of the barrel, but there’s little connecting them to each other outside of the fact that they were previously unreleased.
Both Legends and Demons were put together by his estate and collaborators after he passed, but Legends was a well-defined statement about Juice’s legacy; its intent and purpose were clear. For all the pomp and circumstance, Demons feels like little more than a collection of songs put together for its own sake. The songs sound complete but there’s no rhyme or reason to their sequencing. The few features are solid—Justin Bieber’s coda on “Wandered to LA” and BTS member Suga’s verse on “Girl of My Dreams” being clear standouts—but unnecessary, names tacked onto an old vision board. No individual song tarnishes Juice’s reputation, but there’s no defining moment—no crazy posthumous verse or unearthed profundity about Juice as a person—to latch onto, either.
You can fill a posthumous album with good songs, but if there’s no reason for it to exist, then its only purpose is to sell an image. Mac Miller’s Circles was at least a companion piece to 2018’s Swimming that he was actively working on before his sudden death. Ditto the late Philadelphia rapper Chynna, whose very solid posthumous album Drug Opera went overlooked this year. Those albums had purpose and vision. Fighting Demons is too polished to be considered a total flub and its heart is in the right place, but it’s difficult to look at it as anything more than another product falling off a long assembly line powered by dead rappers.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Grade A Productions / Interscope | December 20, 2021 | 6.5 | 7539f316-f1cf-4398-b6ca-f05c08a6123a | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The L.A. rapper teams with producer ewonee for a lean and low-stakes album, but its strength is in its brevity. | The L.A. rapper teams with producer ewonee for a lean and low-stakes album, but its strength is in its brevity. | Yungmorpheus / ewonee: Thumbing Thru Foliage | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yungmorpheus-ewonee-thumbing-thru-foliage/ | Thumbing Thru Foliage | Yungmorpheus has been kicking around Los Angeles for a few years now and has come to exemplify the sound of the eccentrics that reside in the city’s subterranean bomb shelters—the sound of Madlib, of Earl Sweatshirt. The blissful, dimly lit Thumbing Thru Foliage is already Morpheus’ second album of the year after the very fine States of Precarity. But unlike previous Morph albums, Thumbing Thru Foliage is entirely produced by ewonee, a native of Mount Vernon and disciple of DJ Premier and DJ Ron G, who makes chilly beat tapes and posts them to Bandcamp. Together, the pair have created an elemental rap record: lots of casual rhymes—no hooks—over shards of old-soul vinyl. At less than half an hour, Thumbing Thru Foliage is lean and low-stakes, but its strength is in its brevity.
ewonee finds grubby samples with a distinct character and hardly dresses them up to create the beats. On “The Rat Race” and “Sovereignty,” Morph raps over vocal loops that sound like they’re being played through an inch of dust. There’s the one-two punch of “Middle Passage,” a slick boom-bap jam, and “Harbour Blvd” which harnesses something that sounds like retro sci-fi to form a DOOM-style beat. “Ride Dirty” features a gritty funk bassline and twangy 1970s-style guitars. It’s easy to imagine most producers discarding the neat drum fills of the track, but ewonee harnesses the inventive percussion to really put the button on Morpheus’ rhymes.
Yungmorpheus isn’t what you’d call a powerhouse rapper; his permanently deflated voice hangs in the air like a cloud of smoke. Morph is the guy still sitting in the corner at the end of the party with the laid-back demeanor, a little more weed-resistant than most, getting chatty. His name, in fact, is said to have been inspired by two things: an old set of circular sunglasses similar to the eyewear sported by The Matrix character, and because at every function “he’s smoked out, talking mad shit.” In true stream-of-consciousness style, Morph will drop a bar about privilege and oppression one second and before completing the thought admit he’s sold fake molly. On “Table of One,” he raps about eating smoked fish, reveals a penchant for Bay Area legend Mac Mall, and muses on the pleasure violent dreams give him. Enlightened moments emerge through a conversational haze so quickly you might miss them.
There is some gentle gesturing to L.A. rap history. On “Johnnie Cochran,” Morph sets his voice to a deeper, more menacing style that resembles MC Eiht. It’s also the closing track and ends somewhat abruptly, meaning the album kind of falls off a cliff. But the point here isn’t some filmic arc—it’s to put a bunch of entertaining raps over head-noddin’ beats and move on quickly. There’s a thin line between off-the-cuff prolificness and shoddy workmanship. Yungmorpheus and ewonee never crash into the latter.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Bad Taste | March 10, 2021 | 7.5 | 753d862a-b292-4026-b051-b4d61c52eb8f | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The Andalusian singer’s debut brushes electronic beats and R&B melodies over a flamenco canvas. It is a masterful meditation on ancestral struggle that looks back to find a way forward. | The Andalusian singer’s debut brushes electronic beats and R&B melodies over a flamenco canvas. It is a masterful meditation on ancestral struggle that looks back to find a way forward. | María José Llergo: Ultrabelleza | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maria-jose-llergo-ultrabelleza/ | Ultrabelleza | Growing up in the sierra of Andalusia, María José Llergo gained an education in the musical discipline of flamenco, surrounded by the community and spirituality of the people who helped create it. Her skill and technique are exceptional, evidence of her classical training at the Catalonia School of Music, which she attended after leaving her hometown of Pozoblanco. While flamenco is known for being technically complex and often mythologized under the domain of lone icons, in the lyrics and the expansive atmospheres Llergo crafts, she honors the genre’s heart. The folkloric style was consolidated in the region of Andalusia, and it has served as a vehicle for Romani migrants who have faced rampant discrimination in Spain to voice their struggles.
That resilient ethos appears in Llergo’s own Romani heritage and Andalusian upbringing, a vital component of the music that is too often lost in the flamenco that becomes most commercially successful outside of Spain. Her vision, this time with a more explicitly experimental bent toward electronic music and R&B, succeeds because it builds from this context instead of shedding it. Llergo’s full-length debut Ultrabelleza, which translates to “ultra-beauty,” reflects a lyrical and musical command of the form that many spend decades trying to understand—and emulate.
Her first project, the 2020 EP Sanación (Spanish for “healing”), launched her as an avant force in the genre. Her commitment to the practice of healing is present in every element of the writing here. Lyrics feature recurring motifs of flying, wind, and water—symbols of purification and liberating movement. But these lofty images are grounded in discussion of the struggles with poverty and discrimination that she’s faced in her life. She lingers in propulsive beats and extended, reflective melismas, as if the music itself is an exercise in repair.
The album opens with a prayer to her grandmother played on a cassette; the sound of it loading into a tape deck transforms sublimely into the clatter of feet on the ground, a traditional zapateo that introduces the following track, “Aprendiendo a Volar.” On “La Puerta Está Abierta,” she sings of a childhood grief that may be difficult to remember or recognize. Singing is the portal from then to now: “Cuando se abra la puerta, cuando se alce mi voz/El aire cruza la sierra de esta habitación.” (“When the door opens, when I raise my voice/The air crosses the sierra, from this room.”) On the standout “Superpoder,” she visualizes flying over overdue bills and neighborhood whispers that she’s “broken,” finding strength in the music that sustained her. She sings, “Aprendí a llorar cantando/Aprendí a cantar llorando.” (“I learned to cry while singing/I learned to sing while crying.”) At times, her warm voice literally reverberates against sleek drum machines and string sections, blending the timelines of past and present. As heavy as these introductory tracks are—they each feature a ghostly Hammond organ, which disappears as the album builds in intensity—they encapsulate the hope that exists on the other side. For Llergo, singing offers an opportunity to bear witness to healing in all of its incarnations.
Though this is only her debut album, she’s already embodied the archetype of the artist as creator and animator. Throughout the record, the act of creation becomes urgent, almost holy—a death-defying practice of survival. On the flashpoint “Visión y Reflejo,” she identifies herself as a killer of death, an all-seeing eye, flame and wax, and “the history of those who survived,” all over a copla-turned-bass-driven flow. “Rueda Rueda,” much like the rest of the record, turns on objects in revolution: repeated incantations, rotating wheels, the orbiting moon, world tours. This movement is the source of life in a literal sense; she says she will die if she stops spinning. That story of personal growth and forward motion is only amplified by the arrival of more polished, experimental beats across the record. Both aesthetically and lyrically, Ultrabelleza reflects a newfound conceptual complexity for Llergo.
The album’s reverence for flamenco history is never framed in opposition to its imagination for the future. “Novix” is a playful interlude and the most straightforward flamenco track on the album. It addresses the narrator’s boyfriend and girlfriend, using a traditional form to subvert dated and heteronormative family expectations. “Tanto Tiempo” interpolates the classic bolero “Sabor a Mí” against a backdrop of palmas, or hand claps. “Juramento” is a hand-to-heart oath between lovers, an image reminiscent of Chavela Vargas’ “Macorina.” She places these styles in a fresh context, using them to address the present-day forms of oppression her Romani ancestors faced. These touchpoints are gorgeous reminders that liberation has been the project of folk music for centuries, a language preceding the call for a future of justice.
In a recent interview with Vogue Spain, Llergo said, “Para mí, los andaluces son luces que andan.” (“For me, Andalusians are lights that walk.”) The Spanish singer knows that her roots are a beacon—that by reaching back into the sounds of her forebears, she may find a way forward. Even then, she is still rooted firmly in the present, illustrating that constant reinvention—and the hard work of living through it—carries its own potential to create everlasting life. | 2023-11-07T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-03T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony Music Spain | November 7, 2023 | 7.9 | 75402507-34d0-4cb6-91d0-c8eb967eedb3 | Stefanie Fernández | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stefanie-fernández/ | |
The pop singer’s second album captures the thrilling feelings of experiencing love, but it becomes so universalized that it blurs it out of focus. | The pop singer’s second album captures the thrilling feelings of experiencing love, but it becomes so universalized that it blurs it out of focus. | Camila Cabello: Romance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/camila-cabello-romance/ | Romance | Love is an ambitious concept and Camila Cabello has spent the latter half of the year testifying that she’s in it. Her second album, Romance, follows the same pristine pop cues of her 2018 debut Camila and imbues them with a vision about love so universalized it blurs it out of focus.
There’s love and there’s the performance of it, and Cabello is motivated by both. A Spotify playlist called “The Romance Experience,” interspersed with spoken tracks in which the 22-year-old singer discusses the experiences of love, sex, and heartbreak that inspired the album, sums up the album’s conceit: to explain a familiar experience rather than trust you to feel it yourself. Romance is to romance as Rory Gilmore is to journalism; its depiction is a simple kind of complicated, punctuated with acceptable failures, a simplification that reassures you that your life might be better if you were more beautiful and moral.
This illusion is part of Romance’s appeal. And there are many genuine glimpses into Cabello’s experience as a young woman navigating love and sex within that fantasy. She succeeds in tracks that capture love’s fleeting minutiae. “Shameless” begins as a hesitant statement, the flashpoint at which a young woman steps out of herself to embrace love’s abandon. The howl of her refrain—“Show me you’re shameless”—is equally a challenge to oneself as it is to another. By “Cry for Me,” a bright spot on Romance’s fizzling second half, Cabello is long past the point of shameless, leaning into a self-love that demands someone else’s tears in place of her own.
The trouble comes when Cabello seems obligated to cover the waterfront of love songs rather than push further on any one feeling. Her effortless “that’s funny” over twinkling acoustic guitar on “Should’ve Said It” feels written for a different project than “Living Proof,” which is driven by the stomping rhythm of stylized female empowerment à la “Fight Song.” Even when motivated by a compelling story, like the guilt of harboring feelings for someone else on “Bad Kind of Butterflies,” the song itself often doesn’t match its pain or power.
Though the album’s biggest song, “Señorita,” inhabits Cabello’s real-life relationship with Shawn Mendes, it’s of a piece with 2017’s “Havana,” a similarly Latin-influenced jaunt. Just as the “Havana” video was structured around a regular girl’s dream of starring in a telenovela, “Señorita” stars a waitress who dreams of a bad boy in a leather jacket. But the flirtation at the surface of “Havana” veiled nostalgic romance for a birthplace signaled in each note. “Señorita,” which also appeared on the deluxe version of Mendes’ self-titled album this year, is a harmless gesture toward Latin-ness for exotic effect, rather than a needle-mover. At worst, this impulse results in Ed Sheeran’s “South of the Border,” on which Cabello featured this year: a pastiche of disembodied “Brown eyes/caramel thighs,” misplaced flutes, and Cardi B’s “You never lived until you risk your life” that points to the underlying callousness of the music industry’s embrace of the “Latin” sound. Cabello’s willingness to assist in its caricature elsewhere distracts from the otherwise interesting Spanish-classical and Santana-esque riffs on Romance.
The production of Romance is inconsistent. “Feel It Twice” uses gentle minor-key guitar plucking and castanets that allow Cabello’s melody and dynamic voice to fill the space with the hurt of hurting someone else. The R&B ballad “This Love” builds off the kind of lilting ’50s dreamland riff deployed by so many saccharine love songs and repurposes it for a stream-of-consciousness attempt to process an emotionally abusive relationship: “You know how to fuck [pause] me up, then make it OK.” But at 14 songs, the album leaves too much space where Cabello is overshadowed. Even as they are ostensibly meant to show off Cabello’s range, the overproduced “Easy” and “Dream of You” lose her incredibly skilled voice in needless Auto-Tune. (The latter, for instance, shortchanges Camila’s range with a breathy “dree-HEEM” in the chorus, a note she can reach in organic, full soprano.)
The closer, “First Man,” is Romance’s outlier: an unpretentious piano ballad dedicated to Cabello’s father that transforms the driveway of her childhood home into a runway to the end of girlhood. It’s the only song on the album that stretches its conception of romance beyond the boy-girl material we’ve heard so many times before, and it’s easily the most emotionally affecting track. By the end of “First Man,” it’s hard not to wish that vulnerability would have arrived sooner. The easy ripple and control of Cabello’s unedited voice and her story as a Cuban-born, first-generation American pop star don’t need an arcane concept to feel complete. But maybe that’s what some romances teach you.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Syco / Epic | December 14, 2019 | 6.1 | 754cf1fa-39dd-4beb-a73a-c1432eced499 | Stefanie Fernández | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stefanie-fernández/ | |
The singer and guitarist’s debut solo album offers an introspective blend of R&B, hip-hop, & lo-fi pop but feels reluctant to claim the spotlight. | The singer and guitarist’s debut solo album offers an introspective blend of R&B, hip-hop, & lo-fi pop but feels reluctant to claim the spotlight. | Steve Lacy: Apollo XXI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-lacy-apollo-xxi/ | Apollo XXI | Though seldom acknowledged, there’s long been a kinship between hip-hop and bedroom pop, two genres whose music is often given life by bored teenagers in home studios cobbled together from egg cartons, bedsheets, and cracked copies of FL Studio. There are clear differences between the two styles, of course, but the aesthetic features of DIY hip-hop and lo-fi pop are often products of necessity. Steve Lacy’s music is where those two musical traditions intersect.
Lacy’s only 21, but he’s put together an accomplished resume as a member of the Internet and a contributor to tracks by Kendrick Lamar, Vampire Weekend, Blood Orange, Mac Miller, and Solange. Lacy got interested in music as a kid through Guitar Hero, which encouraged him to start playing a real guitar. He’s gotten a lot of attention not just for his young age, but for his distinctly youthful method of making music. Lacy started out making beats on his iPhone, and that’s how he produced almost all of his 2017 debut EP Steve Lacy’s Demo, as well as “Pride” from Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN.
Apollo XXI is less funky than Lacy’s work with the Internet, operating in a relaxed indie-pop mode that makes it obvious why Ezra Koenig would keep Lacy in his Rolodex. Lead guitar dominates as much as bass, if not more, with gentle synths along the edges. Lacy’s voice is often laid-back, sometimes lethargic; other times it gently ascends to the higher plane alluded to in the album’s title. There’s more crispness to his delivery when he’s rapping, like on “Outro Freestyle/4ever,” but the straight-up hip-hop here isn’t his most compelling mode.
As Lacy has a history of recording vocals on his phone, sometimes words slip by, uncertain and unnoticed. But there are moments when his intentions are clearer. The album’s clear centerpiece is the second track, “Like Me,” which marks Lacy’s coming out not only as a solo musician but also as a bisexual man, which he has discussed in interviews but never explicitly in song. In a spoken introduction, Lacy reveals that he had felt timid about touching on the subject of his sexuality. “I just want to relate to everyone,” he says, before launching into the song: “I only feel energy/I see no gender.” It’s a fairly straightforward plea for connection and acceptance; over and over again, Lacy asks how many of his listeners have struggled like he has. As if in front of a mirror, he uses the repetitive plea of the song’s chorus—“How many out there just like me?”—as a way to try on his identity and see if it feels comfortable, turning the conventional, hook-based structure of pop music songwriting into a powerful method of introspection.
In spirit, “Like Me” could have been the album’s first track, a proper introduction to Lacy’s ambitions, anxieties, and identity. But it also sounds like a closer, with several clear tonal shifts that turn the song into a multi-textured pop suite. After the catchy, chorus-heavy first third of the song, we shift into a trippy, Thundercat-like instrumental; then silence, a musical sequence centered around a glockenspiel, then silence again before Lacy, his guitar, and a gentle drum pattern serenade us for the song’s final minute. Beyond the serious themes addressed in its lyrics, the curious structure of “Like Me” is further proof of Lacy’s skill, even if his artistic voice is still developing.
“Like Me” features a verse from the vocalist DAISY, which I admire in intent—Lacy answers his call for relatability by bringing in another artist to share their own similar journey to sexual and personal self-acceptance. But it’s also the only credited appearance from a guest vocalist, and Lacy’s quest for togetherness needs more than just one more extra voice. That’s ultimately the problem with Apollo XXI: For an album whose highlight is a song about the urge to extend beyond the limits of your own experience and find solace in collective acceptance, it all feels surprisingly timid. Apollo XXI is centered on the interior self, but it’s not self-centered—it just seems a little weighed down by Lacy’s still-palpable reluctance to claim the spotlight his talents warrant. | 2019-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | 3qtr / AWAL | May 30, 2019 | 6.9 | 755442a9-e39a-4af6-99e0-ae69166d9117 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Post-rock, space rock, prog rock, psychedelic rock, grungy Alice in Chains-eyeing hard rock—it’s all here, and since it’s Baroness, it works. | Post-rock, space rock, prog rock, psychedelic rock, grungy Alice in Chains-eyeing hard rock—it’s all here, and since it’s Baroness, it works. | Baroness: Gold & Grey | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baroness-gold-and-grey/ | Gold & Grey | It is intimidating thing to sit down with a new Baroness record and try to understand its contours. There’s just so much to take into account. This Savannah DIY metal band turned scattered progressive rock collective are an entirely different beast than they were back when Red came out in 2007 and every bike messenger in West Philly was rocking their shirts; or when Blue dropped in 2009 and hipsters caught wind of their promise; or when 2012’s Yellow & Green elevated them to a new tier of progressive acclaim; or when 2015’s Grammy-nominated Purple presented a band who had quite literally been through hell, and returned bearing iridescent riffs. With their fifth album, Gold & Grey, the shape-shifting outfit hands us the latest frayed chapter in their evolution, its words and notes illuminated like a medieval manuscript. Demons still hide in the margins, but divinity radiates.
Baroness have lived many musical lives since the band first formed in 2003, and cheated death in 2012, when a terrible bus crash derailed their ascent and led to the departure of two members, drummer Allen Blickle and bassist Matt Maggioni. Seven years on from that traumatic accident, they’ve experienced a great deal of healing and growth—both planned and unexpected. This process was first explored on Purple, a barely-closed wound of an album that concealed a certain rawness of spirit, and now, on Gold & Grey, it’s mellowed into acceptance, the scars still prominent, but smoothed with time.
The addition of new guitarist and backing vocalist Gina Gleason completes a lineup that includes bassist Nick Jost, drummer Sebastian Thomson, and vocalist and guitarist John Baizley (an accomplished artist who’s equally deft with a paintbrush as a sheet of composition paper). It can’t be easy to be the new kid in a band with so much history behind it, but Gleason is a natural fit. She makes her presence felt from the onset in the album’s ambitious guitar work; her vocals on tracks like the strange, dreamy album closer “Pale Sun” add both lightness and depth, and harmonize beautifully with Baizley's earnest croon.
Gold & Grey is not quite a double album, though it sure flirts with the idea. Seventeen tracks span just over an hour, with a startling amount of variance between them. Synthesizers play an important role, but so does old-fashioned improvisation; here, Baroness convince their disparate influences to gel beautifully without lapsing into the homogeneity (or self-indulgent drudgery) that remains a common defect of long, proggy albums. The second half is noticeably quieter and spookier than the more bombastic first half, easing down gently into more melodic and even acoustic fare. Post-rock, space rock, prog rock, psychedelic rock, grungy Alice in Chains-eyeing hard rock—it’s all here, and since it’s Baroness, it works.
The album narrowly avoided being dubbed Orange; as a color, orange signifies oversaturation, an upbeat brightness verging on mania. The final title is far more fitting, as Gold & Grey is none of those things; its palette is muted, a muddle of earth and sky tones. Its lighter moments are sunny but not blinding; its tempo generally treads a middle road, even on more sprightly tracks like “Throw Me an Anchor,” with its splash of noisy synth, or in the barely restrained acid freakout of “Can Oscura.”
Baroness have never been afraid of a big rock riff, and they’ve made room for radio-ready songs like opening track “Front Towards Enemy” and “Broken Halo” (underpinned by an immensely satisfying classic heavy metal stomp) on an album littered with stranger offerings. More outré songs like the gorgeous, raw-boned acoustic ballad “I’d Do Anything,” the ghostly electronic wash of “Blankets of Ash,” and the dewy minimalism of “Assault on East Falls” add texture and balance, ensuring that, while Baroness have certainly matured, they’re still plenty weird. Spitfire percussion on “Seasons” hints to the band’s more metallic past; one riff sounds like a spiritual cousin to “March of the Fire Ants,” by fellow Georgia metal turned prog luminaries Mastodon. “Pale Sun,” with its space rock phasers and epic vocal harmonies, feels like both a primal scream and a sign of what’s to come.
All this is a far cry from the Baroness of a decade ago, churning out sludgy doom salvos in sweaty basements. If you’d cryogenically frozen a fan from back then and handed them a copy of Gold & Grey upon defrost, they’d be more than a little confused. Fortunately, Baroness trust us to grow along with them.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Abraxan Hymns | June 25, 2019 | 8 | 7561697e-215a-4396-9d3f-9da8eebe503b | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
Originally composed for a pair of soundtracks, Qasim Naqvi’s expressive new LP toggles between pure electronic sound design and minimalist composition. | Originally composed for a pair of soundtracks, Qasim Naqvi’s expressive new LP toggles between pure electronic sound design and minimalist composition. | Qasim Naqvi: FILM | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/qasim-naqvi-film/ | FILM | It has been a banner couple of years for synthesizer music of all stripes—both enveloping excursions like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s multidimensional epic The Kid and stripped-down investigations like Alessandro Cortini’s focused, meditative Avanti. Qasim Naqvi’s Chronology, released a year ago, fit into the latter category: Its six exacting studies of tone color and stillness were composed and recorded entirely on a temperamental Moog Model D, an analog synthesizer from the early 1970s. The Model D, also known as the Minimoog, is monophonic, which means it can only play one note at a time. But its sounds are so rich, that constraint isn’t as limiting as you might expect. Instead of availing himself of the kinds of more traditionally musical ideas that are typically facilitated by chords, Naqvi approached his sounds like a sculptor, lavishing attention on his buzzing, glistening waveforms’ texture, heft, and sheen.
Those familiar with Naqvi’s work in the jazz trio Dawn of Midi may have been struck by one notable omission on Chronology. He is a formidable drummer capable of both quartz-powered motorik grooves and expressionistic detailing in the deepest corners of the rhythmic grid. But the ambient Chronology featured no rhythms at all, or at least none steadier than the brief explosions of fibrillation generated by microtonal harmonies hovering in close proximity.
Naqvi’s new album, FILM, represents a step up in complexity. In addition to upgrading his Moog from a capricious ’70s model with a mind of its own to a more stable contemporary reissue of the instrument, he fleshed out his setup with an ARP Odyssey synthesizer and a modular rig. The result is a palette even richer than before: an array of coppery drones, gravelly bass, and sleek, impenetrable reverb marbled with the ghosts of sounds it has swallowed. The move to a modular system, with its emphasis on cycles and sequences, has allowed him finally to wade into rhythmic waters on a few tracks driven by steady pulses and rippling arpeggios. FILM is also, curiously, a more noticeably musical album than its predecessor: The opening “The Cast” is led by a stately bass progression that helps frame its wild backdrop of quivering sinewaves and sad foghorn bleats; “Sputnik” follows a curious, major-key chord progression along its graceful interstellar path. There’s a touch of melancholy retro sentiment to the latter, but the slippery tunings infuse its otherwise homey harmonies with a distinctly alien air.
The music on FILM was originally composed for a pair of soundtracks: The first six tracks were made to accompany Naeem Mohaiemen’s three-channel video installation “Two Meetings and a Funeral”; the final four are taken from the score to Mohaiemen’s film Tripoli Cancelled, the fictional account of a man stranded in an abandoned airport for 10 years. It’s easy to see how this material would work in a visual context. Influenced both by the films’ ruined architectural spaces and by classic, synthesizer-driven film scores of the 1980s, FILM toggles between pure electronic sound design and minimalist composition; it strikes a balance between suggestive scene-setting and subtle drama. It’s possible to detect traces of John Carpenter’s ominous example in brooding miniatures like “The Cast,” while the tumbling arpeggios of “Aligned” recall the playful, liquid pinging of Laurie Spiegel’s “Appalachian Grove.”
Mostly, though, the focus is on Naqvi’s expressive and unpredictable approach to shaping sound. In “The Cast,” small eruptions of tremolo gradually expand to fill the frame, a shift in scale that suggests fractal patterns. In “Algiers,” a similar process of dislocation takes place, as a reverberant crackle—the sound of moisture dripping off stalactites in a vast cavern, perhaps—gives way to the faraway drone of small planes circling high overhead, the combined vibrations creating intricate pinwheels of buzz-within-buzz. The record’s clear emotional climax comes with “Wreckage,” a sketch for arpeggio and reverb that sounds like Stars of the Lid heard through a very long train tunnel, or the Field sent plunging to the depths of the ocean. But the delicate “Mannequin” is just as moving: Each breathy, silvery tone in the track’s slow, painstaking progression feels like an existential sigh that has been frozen in midair. Like the protagonist of Tripoli Cancelled, these tracks are in no hurry to reach any particular destination. Naqvi’s carefully rendered tones make a tentative entrance, stretch their limbs, explore the ruined panorama for a short while, and slink away again, leaving little trace. Caught between accident and expression, it is a sound whose ephemerality makes it all the more haunting. | 2017-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | self-released | November 21, 2017 | 7.7 | 7561751e-cc96-4384-a7ea-ea7d93c18008 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
In the late 1980s and early '90s, Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, along with songwriting partners Daryl Simmons and L.A. Reid, developed a form of pop soul that's as geometrically precise as it is weightless. His new album draws from that era, less a throwback than a micro-adjustment of an enduring formula. | In the late 1980s and early '90s, Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, along with songwriting partners Daryl Simmons and L.A. Reid, developed a form of pop soul that's as geometrically precise as it is weightless. His new album draws from that era, less a throwback than a micro-adjustment of an enduring formula. | Babyface: Return of the Tender Lover | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21228-return-of-the-tender-lover/ | Return of the Tender Lover | In the late 1980s and early '90s, Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds, along with songwriting partners Daryl Simmons and L.A. Reid, developed a form of pop soul that's as geometrically precise as it is weightless. Songs like Toni Braxton’s "Breathe Again", Madonna’s "Take a Bow", and Boyz II Men’s "Water Runs Dry" occur in a seamless universe, all undisturbed surfaces that relentlessly shimmer. In 1995, "Water Runs Dry" itself seemed the most formally perfect incarnation of one of Babyface's primary pop expressions, the vaporous ballad; it’s gently animated by a brushed snare and an acoustic guitar, over which the members of Boyz II Men weave their voices together in fluid braids.
Babyface’s aesthetic is a distant refinement and elaboration of Prince and, beyond that, Curtis Mayfield, both of whom condensed pop and soul into irreducible collage. He’s capable of elastic funk and vast balladry but both are organized by an unusual pop sensitivity. Return of the Tender Lover, his first solo album of originals in 10 years, is part a period of renewed productivity for Babyface. Last year he released an album with Toni Braxton called Love, Marriage & Divorce, which described the length of a relationship through both gliding surfaces and reduced, raw circumstances; this year he contributed minimal blossoms of acoustic guitar to the Ty Dolla $ign single "Solid". But his new album is a kind of retreat—Babyface reduced to plush textures. Though Return of the Tender Lover deliberately references his sophomore album, 1989’s Tender Lover, nothing here is as dry and muscular as "It’s No Crime", or generously expansive as "Whip Appeal". In their place is buoyant, effortless pop soul.
It sometimes feels like a conscious inversion of Love, Marriage & Divorce; where that record was often capable of a fluorescent hostility, Return of the Tender Lover almost exclusively communicates security and support. "We've Got Love" and "Love and Devotion" convey an inflexible confidence, and the songs also seem supportive in their structure, as if engineered for maximum uplift. Babyface’s voice is as smooth as it's ever been, but it’s also always been somewhat granular in design; it sounds like a bloom of smoke.
El DeBarge appears on "Walking on Air", his first duet with Babyface since 1994’s "Where Is My Love"; like Babyface, DeBarge has been minimally present in the music industry over the past ten years, except for a solo album, Second Chance, in 2010, and in brief flourishes on DJ Quik records. His presence here is satisfying both texturally and textually, and "Walking on Air" is as rich and vivid as their previous collaborations. DeBarge’s voice is miraculously preserved, an incandescent peal capable of infinite ascent; in "Walking on Air", it seems to land somewhere in the troposphere. The only other collaboration on the record is with After 7, an R&B group from the '90s that contains two of Babyface’s brothers. On "I Want You", they supply harmonies, adding considerable weight to Babyface’s nimble vocal, and repeating the title until it melts into a kind of plural exhalation.
The collaborations on Return of the Tender Lover and the design of its production feel traditional, in the sense that they don't attempt to update Babyface's sound and instead lean comfortably on a long, established career. This dedication to tradition and honoring of his craft is less a throwback than a micro-adjustment of an enduring formula. | 2015-12-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-12-03T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | December 3, 2015 | 7.2 | 75621c42-5553-4357-ba7f-cbcaa67b71b8 | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
The first proper LP from Equiknoxx is a clear step forward for the Kingston-based digital dancehall duo. Its textures leap from the speakers; the sound design is more vivid than ever. | The first proper LP from Equiknoxx is a clear step forward for the Kingston-based digital dancehall duo. Its textures leap from the speakers; the sound design is more vivid than ever. | Equiknoxx: Colón Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/equiknoxx-colon-man/ | Colón Man | Despite the avant-garde tag that’s sometimes affixed to Equiknoxx’s distinctive brand of digital dancehall—and despite the fact that both of their albums have been released on Demdike Stare’s deeply left-field DDS imprint, where their labelmates are artists like Mica Levi, Shinichi Atobe, and Sunn O)))’s Stephen O’Malley—the collective and its crew of collaborators are not reggae outsiders. Based in Kingston, they are deeply enmeshed in Jamaica’s vast production machine. Over the years, Equiknoxx—which currently consists of producers Gavin Blair (Gavsborg), Bobby Blackbird, and Jordan Chung (Time Cow), and the vocalists Shanique Marie and Kemikal—have supplied beats for Ward 21, Busy Signal, and Beenie Man, among others, with credits going back to at least 2005. Still, when they came through with their debut album, late last year, they largely eschewed vocals in favor of spacious, spidery instrumentals, the better to highlight their unusual lattice of staccato beats, mercurial bleeps, and evocative sound effects.
The new record, Colón Man, is billed as their “debut LP proper,” presumably because last year’s Bird Sound Power largely comprised previously released tracks going back to 2009, while the new one was made in a concentrated creative burst earlier this year. But Colón Man is clearly cut from the same cloth as its predecessor. Save for a few vocal samples used more for tone color than lyrical signification, it’s entirely instrumental, and its textures leap from the speakers with clinical precision—dry, airless, and charged with electricity, a kind of rock-paper-scissors game between silica packet, vacuum sealer, and anti-static brush.
But Colón Man is also a clear step forward. The sound design is more vivid than ever: laser-zap kick drums, underwater gongs, crinkled Mylar, and wooden thwacks so tactile you can practically feel the wood grain beneath your fingertips. It often sounds as if they’ve raided a Foley artist’s storage locker and made off with armloads of noise-making gewgaws: doorbells, birdcalls, tin cans, maybe a leaf blower or two. In “Definitely Not Something Offensive,” a churning loop wheezes like an engine struggling to turn over; in “Enter a Raffle Win a Falafel,” the rattle of a cassette tape being jiggled in its tray rubs up against pitched-down pinball-bumper pings and the duo’s signature eagle screech. (Those titles, meanwhile—other standouts include “Your Ears Are Not Very Small” and “Kareece Put Some Thread in a Zip Lock”—are excellent encapsulations of their surrealistic vision, in which found sounds take on larger-than-life properties.)
Rhythmically, their loosey-goosey approach to syncopation takes after producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes, artists who understand the difference a millisecond can make. Their tracks move with an immaculately shuddering, flexing sense of swing, and their beats often feel like (and probably are) the products of pure accident, with loops of incidental clatter layered to create wild polyrhythms, alternately bumptious and slinky. There’s an even more direct link to Steven “Lenky” Marsden, the creator of the “Diwali” riddim, and other dancehall producers who worked with a similar set of sounds and textures—simultaneously springy, brittle, and buzzing—enshrined on the 2001 Mo Wax compilation Now Thing.
If some of Bird Sound Power’s more linear instrumentals occasionally wanted for a vocal, the new tunes are entirely self-sufficient. A skilled vocalist could probably find a way to insert him- or herself into their porous weave, but why would you want them to? A voice would only distract from the scintillating interplay of contrasting timbres. No matter how dense their collages become, no two sounds ever occupy the same space or fulfill the same function. Just try to parse the different elements of “Heathen Emissaries From the Dens of Babylon”: wooden rattle, ghostly lowing, bells, basso bleep, vinyl back-scratch, each one occupying its own patch of the spectrum, all as tightly bound together as atomic particles.
What might be most impressive about these songs is how deeply abstracted they are, without losing an iota of gut-level appeal. “A World of Welsh” is essentially an opportunity to prove how many different shades of shimmer there are in the world. There’s nothing like a melody, or even conventional musical notes; it’s all incidental sound, as impossible to hum as it is difficult to resist. Pull one piece out, and the whole thing would collapse—but put together, the force it exerts is remarkable. They do occasionally avail themselves of more traditional synthesizer sounds, but very little is of an obviously musical bent. Only Equiknoxx would take melodica player Addis Pablo—son of Augustus Pablo, arguably the instrument’s most famous player—and turn his contributions into an array of squiggles that are all but unrecognizable as a product of the breath-driven keyboard instrument. In “Enter a Raffle Win a Falafel,” a momentary explosion of dub delay serves mainly to highlight how little they depend upon echo, normally a staple of reggae. Equiknoxx’s environments, in contrast, are as exacting as anechoic chambers. Instead of turning to delay as a way of filling up space, Equiknoxx make every sound count. Nothing is wasted and nothing is unwelcome, and every waveform earns its place in the transporting and immaculate final mixdown. | 2017-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | DDS | November 30, 2017 | 8.1 | 75651b8d-3244-4941-a924-b6f7d5fcc86c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Just as they did with dub icons The Congos, Sun Araw collaborate with New Age icon Laraaji on the hazy, welcoming* Professional Sunflow. * | Just as they did with dub icons The Congos, Sun Araw collaborate with New Age icon Laraaji on the hazy, welcoming* Professional Sunflow. * | Laraaji / Sun Araw: Professional Sunflow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22008-professional-sunflow/ | Professional Sunflow | After starting Sun Araw by himself eight years ago, Cameron Stallones has guided the project through stylistic transformations, lineup iterations, and name variations. But his music has always had a core of jammy dub and hazy New Age. So since Stallones has already worked with some legends of dub—vocal duo the Congos, with whom Sun Araw collaborated on 2012’s excellent *Icon Give Thank—*it’s perhaps inevitable that he’d do the same with a New Age icon.
It’s hard to think of a better candidate for such a gig than Laraaji. Since he first gained renown for his contribution to Brian Eno’s early 80’s Ambient series, the artist born Edward Larry Gordon has made music that’s sold in the New Age section but continually pushes and expands that genre. His ability to glide between sounds and moods—both with his innovative zither playing and his meditative singing—makes him well-equipped for musical partnership, something Stallones has proven adept at too. And both artists are great at creating sonic space, making their music welcoming to voices as big as their own.
As the first recorded product of their recent meetings, Professional Sunflow does indeed see Laraaji and Sun Araw (here the duo of Stallones and long time partner Alex Gray) happily assimilating their respective styles. The results will be familiar to fans of either artist: slow, patient music in which Laraaji hums wordless prayers over Stallone’s looping guitar and Gray’s rattling electronics. In fact, at times *Professional Sunflow *is a little too familiar. There aren't a ton of magical moments like the peaks that emerged on Icon Give Thank. But the music is still entrancing.
Lately Sun Araw’s sound has leaned toward microscopically minimal, and that continues during parts of Professional Sunflow. The album comprises two half-hour live performances split across four sides of vinyl, and each half opens so sparsely you might wonder if something got erased. But eventually both pieces—one recorded in Germany, the other in Switzerland—escalate. In “Liepzig,” a bassy rhythm inspires key Laraaji exhortations, even as it settles into a comfortable groove. More exciting is part two of “Laussane,” whose steady beat provokes a web of keyboard and zither accents, veering into a psych jam not far from Can or Träd, Gräs och Stenar.
The similarity to those communal ensembles indicates how familial *Professional Sunflow *sounds. Everything flows together snugly, and the congenial symbiosis can be remarkably hypnotic. But you might find yourself wishing that decorum had been periodically abandoned for something wilder. Still, such deviations might have sounded forced, and what *Professional Sunflow *lacks in a-ha moments, it makes up for in patient wisdom—and in the potential that this partnership will continue long enough to naturally generate bigger eruptions. | 2016-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Superior Viaduct / W.25TH | June 16, 2016 | 6.8 | 75654b55-1333-45f8-a798-f244580e4c82 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
On her torrential second album, Kristin Hayter creates a murderous amalgam of opera, metal, and noise that uses her classical training like a Trojan Horse, burning misogyny to ash from its Judeo-Christian roots. | On her torrential second album, Kristin Hayter creates a murderous amalgam of opera, metal, and noise that uses her classical training like a Trojan Horse, burning misogyny to ash from its Judeo-Christian roots. | Lingua Ignota: Caligula | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lingua-ignota-caligula/ | Caligula | Eight minutes into her torrential second album as Lingua Ignota, Kristin Hayter lets out a thundering, apocalyptic scream: “I don’t eat, I don’t sleep [...] I let it consume me,” she cries. Her voice is so ugly and shredded and maniacal and alive that it creates a witness of anyone who hears it. It is the sound of trauma, that which is by definition intolerable, and Hayter traverses its most upsetting depths on behalf of survivors, including herself. With Caligula, she has created a murderous amalgam of opera, metal, and noise that uses her classical training like a Trojan Horse, burning misogyny to ash from its Judeo-Christian roots.
From renaissance paintings to murder ballads and beyond, feminist revenge has charged art to cathartic ends—envisioning a world in which women do not only demand justice but see it through, in their work, by any means necessary. Caligula embodies that insurrectionary fury. Working with members of The Body, Uniform, Full of Hell, and others, Hayter crafts a 66-minute world ablaze with contempt for man, which, though divided into 11 all-caps tracks—with such imposing titles as “I AM THE BEAST,” “IF THE POISON WON’T TAKE YOU MY DOGS WILL,” and “SPITE ALONE HOLDS ME ALOFT”—plays out like one continuous, epic composition. More than songs, they feel like a succession of enraged suites, each one a threat, an intervention, an act of solidarity.
Lingua Ignota sparks fantasies of demonic avant-opera icon Diamanda Galás joining with industrial-metal titans Godflesh to create a horror soundtrack, or Maria Callas in hell. Her goal seems to be to deconstruct and destabilize, to discomfit. She situates death growls and strangulated vocalizations amidst orchestral strings, choral singing, and chimes—like a hex on the whole social order. “Everything burns down around me,” she sings with incantatory grandeur on “MAY FAILURE BE YOUR NOOSE,” atop the incendiary counterpoint of Uniform’s Michael Berdan.
Near the beginning of Caligula, Hayter beckons Satan to come to her side, to “fortify me”—things get darker from there. Her invocation recalls Galás’ own definition of the devil in 1991. “When a witch is about to be burned on a ladder in flames, who can she call upon?” Galás asked in the book Angry Women. “I call that person ‘Satan.’” Hayter summons this original insurgent on behalf of a society that rarely believes embattled women. “How do I break you before you break me?” she seethes on “DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR.” The savage “SPITE ALONE HOLDS ME ALOFT” culminates in her disarming, boiled-over prayer to “Kill them all/Kill them all/Kill them all.” For her enemies, she wishes, “May your foes be many/May your days be few.” Unsparing would be a way to put it. Caligula wants abusers dead.
Occasionally, Hayter breaks into fragments of traditional melody and balladeering, but it is never long before she incinerates them. And though she draws on the embittered atmospheres and theater of metal, Caligula’s unwieldy, behemoth-like sprawl practically laughs at the concept of riffs. Hayter said it was her goal to “recontextualize that phallocentric format for people who need it,” and she crafts a sound that, if not feminine, feels decidedly unmale, and crucially vulnerable. The solemn highlight “FRAGRANT IS MY MANY FLOWER’D CROWN,” for one, finds Hayter singing of how “the bitter blood of many foes sustains me” with a low, chilling resolve. She pushes her voice into unsettling gurgles before declaring, with shocking clarity, “I have learned that all men are brothers/And brothers only love each other,” like an ornate rewriting of the Jenny Holzer maxim “Men Don’t Protect You Anymore.”
On Caligula’s closing track, in a final turn, Hayter quotes the poet Frank O’Hara: “All I want is boundless love.” The line is from his 1957 collection Meditations in an Emergency, but Haytner undercuts it with her own devastating experience: “All I know is violence.” This brutal ending reminds us that if Caligula is too taxing to bear, that’s because it is a work of realism. When Hayter calls herself “the butcher of the world [...] throatslitter of the world” on a cold-blooded hymn titled “FUCKING DEATHDEALER,” I think of the artist Artmisia Gentileschi, a protégé of Caravaggio, who was tortured in court in 1612 after she opened a case against her rapist. Gentileschi spent the rest of her career painting depictions of violence against men. Women have been seeking this revenge forever.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Profound Lore | July 25, 2019 | 8.1 | 75666929-115f-4d3d-a46d-8e092c423bf6 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Cocteau Twins' fifth and sixth albums are seeing deluxe vinyl reissues this week. These two releases—which were their last for 4AD—present the boundary-pushing innovators as first and foremost a pop band. And pop rarely sounds as transformative and as transfixing as it does here. | Cocteau Twins' fifth and sixth albums are seeing deluxe vinyl reissues this week. These two releases—which were their last for 4AD—present the boundary-pushing innovators as first and foremost a pop band. And pop rarely sounds as transformative and as transfixing as it does here. | Cocteau Twins: Blue Bell Knoll/Heaven or Las Vegas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19526-cocteau-twins-blue-bell-knollheaven-or-las-vegas/ | Blue Bell Knoll/Heaven or Las Vegas | It’s impossible to make out most of the lyrics on the title track to the Cocteau Twins’ 1990 album, Heaven or Las Vegas. Over Robin Guthrie’s shimmery, shivery guitar strum, singer Elizabeth Fraser bends her notes into mysterious shapes. She coos and squawks, mews and barks, murmurs and wails, as though singing in a new language. One minute she sounds like an opera singer, the next like a mother baby-talking to her new daughter. The effect can be dizzying, and the illegibility of her performance only makes it more, not less, human. Yet, a few words do stand out, primarily that title phrase: “Heaven or Las Vegas.” The Cocteau Twins’ music has always sounded otherworldly, and their many fans would certainly describe it—and rightly so—as heavenly.
But Las Vegas? It stands out as an odd, jarring reference. Their fantastical music would seem to brook nothing quite so earthly, so garish, so thisworldly as Sin City, which hauls unlikely baggage into “Heaven or Las Vegas”: gambling, corruption, tacky tourism, and cheesy crooning. But if we forget everything we know about the city and reduce Las Vegas to its atomic elements—millions upon billions of lights—perhaps we might see heaven in the radiance. This is essentially how the Cocteau Twins’ music works: Fraser’s voice doesn’t behave the way a pop singer’s voice typically behaves, nor does Guthrie’s guitar deliver the usual melody or rhythm. Along with bass player/keyboardist Simon Raymonde, whose contributions shouldn’t be discounted, they found new ways to use old instruments in the 1980s, in the process devising a unique and wholly beguiling sound. If punk had chased beauty instead of glorious ugliness, if goth had emphasized light rather than fetishize darkness, those movements might have sounded like the Cocteau Twins, who had contemporaries but no real peers. Somehow, there is immense aggression and subversion in the sheer loveliness of this music, which makes it more than just art for art’s sake.
Most people in America, however, didn’t know any of this in the 1980s, as the decade was almost over before the band officially released any music in the States. Ever since Guthrie and Fraser had shown up on 4AD Records’ doorstep like orphaned goths in 1982, the Scots quickly developed both a sound and an audience in the UK, culminating in the 1984 album Treasure, which was the first to truly capture the wildness of Fraser’s vocals and Guthrie’s ambitiously skewed arrangements. By the late '80s, they were successful enough to play increasingly cavernous London venues, to build their own 24-track studio, to rent practice space in Pete Townshend’s building. There was also friction between Fraser and Guthrie, who had been a couple throughout the life of the Cocteau Twins. Due to the pressure of the business and especially to Guthrie’s rampant drug abuse, their marriage was fraying. But they still made beautiful music together, and they signed a deal with Capitol Records to distribute their fifth album, 1988’s Blue Bell Knoll, in America.
That album is one of two getting a deluxe vinyl reissue this week via 4AD. It’s certainly a pivotal album in their career, but not necessarily one of their best. Did the Cocteau Twins tame some of their wilder elements for American audiences? Or did the prospect of reaching a whole new continent of ears even enter their minds when they recorded these songs? Blue Bell Knoll sounds minimalist, workmanlike at times, never quite matching the rapturous invention of Treasure. It’s their airiest, cottoniest album, with an enticing use of space on the production but with hooks that sound oddly restrained. As a result, it can sound as monochromatic as its album cover.
On the other hand, its general dismissal by critics and fans as a lesser Cocteau Twins album may have less to do with the album itself and more to do with the fact that it is bookended by better and more ecstatically creative works. There are moments of disarming beauty on Blue Bell Knoll—the melting keyboards on “Cico Buff”, the lush vocal layering of “Athol-Brose”, the shooting-stars opening of “A Kissed Out Red Floatboat”, Raymonde’s syncopated bass trudge of “The Itchy Glowblo Blow”, the whatever that is at the end of “Spooning Good Singing Gum” (I think it might be a herd of lovelorn goats playing saxophones). But the standout is “Carolyn’s Fingers”, which would become the Cocteau Twins’ first American single. The band never utilized its rhythm section to better effect: Against Guthrie’s crisp guitar line, that churning momentum pushes Fraser’s vocals to greater and greater heights, her unexpected swoops and eloquently rolled consonants creating a bewildering indie-pop aria.
Even as the band soared commercially and creatively, personally they suffered. Between the release of Blue Bell Knoll and the recording of Heaven or Las Vegas, Fraser gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter, yet Guthrie remained deep in the throes of drug addiction, which made him paranoid and angry. Raymonde mourned the death of his father. Suddenly the stakes for the Cocteau Twins seemed impossibly high. “Fraser named the album Heaven or Las Vegas [as] a suggestion of music versus commerce, or perhaps a gamble, one last throw of the dice,” Martin Aston writes in Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD, implying that the band was close to imploding.
Instead, they turned all that turmoil and uncertainty into the best album of their career. Heaven or Las Vegas explodes in Technicolor from the first melty guitar chords on “Cherry-Coloured Funk”. Every note sounds like a new and richer shade of indigo and scarlet and violet than the previous one, and it doesn’t fade until closer “Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires” descends into silence. If Blue Bell Knoll is spare and ambient, Heaven is supersaturated: lush without being vulgar, luxuriant without being indulgent. Tellingly, some lyrics bubble up to the surface, often loaded with personal meaning: “cherry,” “perfection,” “burn this madhouse down.” On a song called “Pitch the Baby”, ostensibly written for—or at least sung to—the couple’s infant daughter, Fraser repeats, “I’m so happy to care for you, I only want to love you,” as a sweet lullaby. We may not always be able to understand her lyrics, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. In fact, her lyrics would never be more vital or confessional than they are on Heaven or Las Vegas, which lends the music added emotional and conceptual heft.
What’s particularly remarkable about the album is how compact it is: All but two of these 10 tracks clock in around three-and-a-half minutes, and the whole thing is over and done with in a mere 38 minutes. That succinctness may have something to do with Raymonde’s increasing role in the group. His bass playing, especially on “Pitch the Baby” and “Fotzepolitic”, not only adds to the texture and, yes, the groove of the music, but also gingerly anchors these songs: He prevents them from flying off into the ether, but never lets them grow rigid or staid. The result is an album that perfectly balances ambition with accessibility. Together, these two releases—which were their last for 4AD—present the Cocteau Twins as first and foremost a pop band, and pop rarely sounds as transformative and as transfixing as it does here. | 2014-07-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-07-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | July 16, 2014 | 8.3 | 756dc7de-c27c-4996-a631-bfe3901cf07d | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
In accordance with his label’s ethos, the Fool’s Gold co-founder connects the dots between the hip-hop and dance worlds on a space-themed record that bounces from rap to rave to electro. | In accordance with his label’s ethos, the Fool’s Gold co-founder connects the dots between the hip-hop and dance worlds on a space-themed record that bounces from rap to rave to electro. | Nick Catchdubs: UFO | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-catchdubs-ufo/ | UFO | Fool’s Gold Records has forged its reputation on an ability to connect distant corners of the hip-hop and dance worlds. The brainchild of A-Trak and Nick Catchdubs, the Brooklyn-based indie boasts a discography that gleefully places New York City house icon Todd Terry next to Danny Brown’s charismatically caterwauled rap theatrics, and successfully follows Kid Sister’s spunky hip-house revival moves with Kid Cudi’s lilting sing-song delivery. It’s a DJ-focused mentality that spotlights common ground between artists rather than segregating sounds. Catchdubs’ latest addition to the Fool’s Gold vault runs with a space-age theme that promises interplanetary genre-hopping kicks and nods to the usual mix of influences associated with his label. But beyond a smattering of standout cuts, there’s a frustrating feeling that half the passenger list didn’t make it on board before takeoff.
Early on, MC Nasty Nigel from New York City rap troupe World’s Fair blesses “Ecstasy Hot Line.” The pairing smartly captures the Fool’s Gold ethos: Though the group originally broke through with an update of indie rap icons Company Flow’s “8 Steps to Perfection,” World’s Fair’s last album featured a drum’n’bass-infused track (“Elvis’ Flowers”) that paid homage to DJ nights they hosted at now-shuttered venue Elvis Guesthouse. Catchdubs serves up nuanced production for Nigel, who floats over lush waves of woozy synths and casts himself as both “the third Chemical Brother” and “a baby from the ’90s—I still blame it all on Rudy, bro.” The production teases that it’s about to erupt at various points, but Catchdubs keeps the sonic backdrop low key, allowing Nigel’s voice and punchlines to provide the thrills.
“Pick Up Yaself” conveys similar synergy by virtue of an amped-up vocal hook by Metric Man from dancehall duo Fire Alarm. The song triggers energetic rave synths reminiscent of a ’90s Dreamscape party, but it’s always the arrival of the gruff vocal refrain that provides the intense highs. Elsewhere on UFO, outings featuring FATHERDUDE and former Rapture singer Mattie Safer, plus Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire, provide an equally heady buzz. But navigating to these highlights involves traversing through a gamut of instrumental tracks that sap the album’s momentum, making for a stony journey.
There’s a hollowness about these instrumentals, which comprise the majority of the project, that makes them feel more like interludes or beat sketches than fully formed songs. They seem not so much stripped down as missing something; it’s a feeling magnified when sequenced after songs starring the compelling guest voices. Tellingly, when the rare use of a vocal sample kicks in on “UFO Style,” the spark returns. The phrase “I’m higher than a UFO” is cut up over production that’s an evocative mix of futuristic and eerie. It brings to mind ’80s electro workouts from the Knights of the Turntables and the Willesden Dodgers; the addition of vocals adds just the right amount of texture, giving the listener something to latch on to. But then it’s gone, and the album ambles back into more ambient drift with final tracks “Eyeball” and “Arp Flex.” UFO starts out promising bright cosmic thrills, but a fuller supporting crew might have helped to commandeer the vessel to more exciting outposts. | 2019-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Fool’s Gold | August 20, 2019 | 6.6 | 75713e8e-28fe-48de-8cfe-fbbf375959bd | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
This Melbourne band alternates the pop literacy of the Go-Betweens and the rambunctious energy of the Easybeats with the roaring punk propulsion of Royal Headache. | This Melbourne band alternates the pop literacy of the Go-Betweens and the rambunctious energy of the Easybeats with the roaring punk propulsion of Royal Headache. | Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever: Talk Tight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21739-talk-tight/ | Talk Tight | Talk Tight, the debut by the Melbourne quintet Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever, is presented as a “mini-LP”: seven rip-roaring tracks that move by their own logic, any one of which could be a single and all of which leave you wanting more in the best way possible. The group’s revolving team of singers and songwriters (everybody but the drummer takes a turn on the mic) chronicle knotty relationships and winding road trips, but taken together, these songs are after something more public than personal. Asked by the blog Triple J Unearthed what inspires the band, singer-guitarist Fran Keaney hinted at their music’s true subject: “It’s going to sound all at once lame, wanky and vague but: Australia? As in the concept of Australia. What it was, What it is…”
There are too many qualifiers in that response to believe he’s taking the piss on a question that’s impossible to answer. And on Talk Tight, the band evokes certain aspects of Australia in the sunbaked surf-pop guitar licks and taut punk momentum, both carefree and a little cautious and therefore perfect for a country that’s home to this fucking thing. Listening to these seven tunes, you can easily trace a national lineage: the relentlessness of Radio Birdman, the pop literacy of the Go-Betweens, the rambunctious energy of the Easybeats, and the belief—shared with Courtney Barnett—that guitars are not just crucial to the message but might very well be the message themselves.
Even in Melbourne, which seems to produce more great guitar bands per capita than any other city in the world, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever stand out for the precision of their melodies, the streamlined sophistication of their arrangements, and the undercurrent of melancholy that motivates every note. This is a band that thrives on contradiction and duality, pitting opposing urges against each other. To describe their own sound, the members coined the term “tough pop/soft punk,” which is apt as a label as well as a refusal to pare themselves down to any one particular thing.
As that awkward name suggests, Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever often sound like they’re in fact two different bands. There’s the group behind midtempo opener “Wither With You,” which falls squarely in the “tough pop” category. In this mode, each instrument contributes to a swirl of melody and the guitars chime and ramble as Tom Russo chronicles the strained dissolution of a relationship: “Oh your pretty face is curling up in anger,” he sings, in a tone that might deepen rather than defuse her fury. “Just keep in mind, my darling, I did it all for you.” Keeping it from sounding bitter is the nimble rhythm section, the genial snap of Marcel Tussie’s drums and Joe Russo’s loping bassline. Here and on “Tender Is the Neck,” the group foreground mood over momentum, establishing an autumnal ambience that underscores the bittersweet reminiscence of the lyrics.
The band’s other mode is to play at the punk end of the Aussie spectrum, closer to Royal Headache or Eddy Current Suppression Ring. The tempos quicken noticeably, with half-shouted vocals and guitars that fight not for the lead but for the rhythm parts. Tussie and Russo chug along diligently, as though timekeeping were the true rock star’s responsibility. You hear it in songs like “Wide Eyes,” a fierce travelogue that explodes with tightly coiled jangle and angsty wanderlust. They might be too soft to trash a club, but the Blackouts ably wring the last bit of tension from the skeletal “Clean Slate,” with its intricate curlicue riffs and fidgety call-and-response.
The great trick of Talk Tight is how Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever find the overlap between those conflicting pop and punk impulses. Even at their fiercest they’re happy romantics (“You run the bath, and I’ll warm the pasta, girl”) as well as sensualists (“Your hair stands up when I kiss the back of your neck”), qualities that seem rare in any band. Rarer still is their precarious balance of idealism and realism, which defines the closer, “Career,” about a friend who traded his rebellion and defiance for “a silk tie and an ’09 Ford.” It might sound dismissive and taunting if Russo and Keaney didn’t sound half-tempted themselves. They’re wise to the compromises that accrue with the years, but they’d rather stay on the road, rumbling through Australia and beyond like a tidal wave obliterating every coast. | 2016-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ivy League | March 21, 2016 | 8 | 757a4e8b-88d5-44f4-a6d1-17dfb198ab56 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Channeling jazz, kosmische, and prog, the Radiohead offshoot’s second album burrows deeper into their strangely enchanting appeal. | Channeling jazz, kosmische, and prog, the Radiohead offshoot’s second album burrows deeper into their strangely enchanting appeal. | The Smile: Wall of Eyes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-smile-wall-of-eyes/ | Wall of Eyes | As far back as 2009, Jonny Greenwood was fed up with the faff of the world’s most studious stadium band. “He can’t stand it anymore, the pace of the way we work,” Thom Yorke said that year. Despite the guitarist and composer’s impatience, he was prone to obsessing over what Yorke called the “extra things”: the sly strings and choked squeals that thread razor wire into Radiohead’s pillowed luxury. “‘Come on, we need some wrong notes,’ he’s always saying. OK, you got ’em,” Yorke joked.
But never have we heard Greenwood quite like this. On Wall of Eyes, the second album from the Smile, his hostile harmonies and expediency in the studio nudge the trio somewhere new; it is his most exciting and volatile performance since In Rainbows. No time for their usual effortful cohesion: Producer Sam Petts-Davies resolves to stress, not conceal, the eclecticism of Yorke and Greenwood’s songs, while drummer Tom Skinner squirrels around making nests in their inhospitable time signatures. After the debut’s big bang, Wall of Eyes connects the particles into somewhere you, and perhaps these restless musicians, might like to make a home.
More than anything on A Light for Attracting Attention, the Beatlesy “Friend of a Friend” and riotous “Bending Hectic” present contrasting spectacles of the Smile’s allure. The former draws inspiration from lockdown footage of Italians uniting in song on their balconies; the coda juxtaposes that pandemic solidarity against the elites’ response. “All of that money, where did it go?/In somebody’s pocket, a friend of a friend,” Yorke laments, invoking the COVID cronyism of Britain’s Conservative Party. But the tune is divine, even hummable—his deftest lunge for your heartstrings since unshelving “True Love Waits.”
At the other extreme, “Bending Hectic” indulges Yorke’s time-honored passion for calamitous automobile events—in this case the last moments of a public figure, apparently disgraced, who vows to drive off the Italian mountainside. The band plays the car-crash suicide ballad as a brilliantly twisted love song: Such is the narrator’s hubris that, when an orchestral crescendo signals the plunge, and Greenwood’s lustrous string bends transmute into tire squeals, we hear the infernal crusade as a valorous final act.
Across the album, Greenwood’s haywire guitars and arrangements veer between Can’s warehouse expressionism and Robert Wyatt’s alien-abducted folk fusion, conspiring with the live production and convulsive rhythms to save his bandmate from his more ponderous impulses. Yorke’s ethereal vocal register has long been his calling card and his crutch, tested to dizzying effect on the verses of “Climbing Up the Walls” before taking root on The King of Limbs. These days, he is split between warring impulses to command a song or spritz it with ghostly vapor. But even his weaker spells enchant, and Wall of Eyes opens with two irresistible slow burners: the wintry bossa nova title track, where he murmurs about digital surveillance and sedation (“You will go behind a wall of eyes/Of your own device/Is that still you with the hollow eyes?”), and “Teleharmonic,” from the “All I Need” school of fraught narrators caught in whirlpool synths, clinging to love like a life preserver.
By sequencing the two foggiest songs up front, the album lulls you into a trance. Then Greenwood’s guitar, coaxed from the sidelines, electrifies the nerve center on “Read the Room” and “Under Our Pillows,” an alt-rock suite of clanking-piston hooks and motorik finales. When the tension lifts with a music-box melody or swell of London Contemporary Orchestra strings, the songs have surprised us twice: first by forestalling expectations of beauty, then by providing it anyway.
The second side’s tour-de-luxe falters only on “I Quit,” one of those Smile songs that perhaps suffers from Greenwood’s desire to release records “90 percent as good [that] come out twice as often.” Where the arresting closer “You Know Me!” evolves Yorke’s paranoid balladry, “I Quit” is the discount “Codex” or “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor”: intoxicating as ever but without the final revelation—the sense of dawn penetrating some murky underworld—that tilts those Radiohead songs into the sublime.
After decades refining, refusing, and reformulating the Radiohead sound, Yorke and Greenwood seem emboldened to stop resisting—to loosen up and let their songwriting impulses absorb whatever happens to be on their stereo that day. Wall of Eyes gives center stage to jazz, kosmische, prog—aesthetic signposts and satellite genres usually kept in the more established band’s wings. The Smile, though stranger and wilder, more comfortably fit in the omnivorous art-rock tradition.
Greenwood’s fusion of refinement and insurrection echoes that of his beloved pianist Glenn Gould, who once made a nice observation about the pioneering modernist composer Arnold Schoenberg: “Whenever one honestly defies a tradition, one becomes, in reality, the more responsible to it.” As Radiohead defied rock convention, so the Smile cannot help but defy Radiohead. Yet defiance, Gould suggests, is the lifeblood of tradition. To defy classicism or rock or a cherished old band may finally preserve their sanctity. The defied thing endures—and then, if we are lucky, defiance provokes it to react. | 2024-01-25T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-25T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | XL | January 25, 2024 | 8.5 | 757d5f0f-61d3-4c31-8ca6-49c82bb3061e | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
Lil B's newest is a 34-track opus that demands several sessions to take in. It's the latest proof that he hasn't finished telling us his peculiar story. | Lil B's newest is a 34-track opus that demands several sessions to take in. It's the latest proof that he hasn't finished telling us his peculiar story. | Lil B: God's Father | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16414-lil-b-gods-father/ | God's Father | Even if you don't believe Lil B's produced a second of worthwhile rap music, you have to admire his warped career, which continues, in its Drunken-Master stagger, to take him to improbable new places. His impact on rap is already such that if he disappeared tomorrow, he would linger in the cultural bloodstream. But somehow, he endures: He's like Swee'Pea from a Popeye cartoon, crawling over gnashing gears while we clutch our heads and watch. God's Father, which came out last week, is the latest proof that he hasn't finished telling us his peculiar story, and that somehow, even after untold terabytes of #based music, he's still finding out new ways to tell it.
The first thing you'll notice after porting God's Father into your iTunes is that it's long. Ludicrously so, in a way that defies any sense of what an "album" is, or how one plays. It is a face-whitening amount of Lil B to contend with in a single sitting; at 34 tracks, it demands several sessions to even take in. (It took me three days, in 10- to 12-song chunks.) It doesn't feel "sequenced" in any noticeable way. Like Lil B, it just keeps going. Also as with Lil B, I have only the fuzziest idea how it sprang into existence. After years of listening to his music, I still have zero sense of how his creative decisions are made, or not made: Does he take time recording his punched-in overdubs? Does he know the order of any of his tracklists? Has he ever done a second take in his life?
With the atrocious stuff, of course, the added mystery is: "Did he even listen to this? And good lord, why am I?" The good news, with God's Father, is that even at its ridiculous length, I never found myself asking this question. It's probably his most immersive single release-- or album, or mixtape, or emanation, or whatever-- in a year and a half, better than both BasedGod Velli and *I'*m Gay. Lil B's consistency relies as much on monkeys-and-typewriters statistics as it does on luck, timing, and inspiration. With God's Father, the breezes are blowing favorably.
He has always found ear-catching beats from unlikely corners, and over the course of God's Father, he raps over whole crates of dollar-store vinyl: We get pan flutes, strings, and choirs; electro funk, 1980s R&B, and Yanni pianos; gospel soul, new age synthesizers, doctor's-office jazz fusion. Individual moments stick out: "Flowers Rise" is one of his prettiest beats in ages, a wisp of synth twirling miles in empty space above an ominous pool of warped noises. "SF Mission Music" rolls out the sepia-tinted Pete Rock piano chords. "Flash" is a skewed take on rap's Lex Luger obsession, trademark synth sweep, ticking hi-hats and all. Over the course of the album, it runs together into one gently mind-expanding blob. This isn't a rap mixtape; it's an amniotic tank.
As for his rapping, those who insist he's a "bad rapper" certainly don't lack evidence. I could pluck 11 or 12 mortifying lines from this tape alone to argue their case for them. But that would miss a larger point about Lil B's music: its use, its proper context. His lyrics rarely accomplish what traditional rap lyrics do, but you can learn a lot about how good rapping works, it turns out, from listening to Lil B, in a way that you cannot from listening to more traditional rappers.
Listening to him work out what kind of beat he's rapping on, for example, what kind of mood it suggests and how he can add to it, is fascinating. "Normal" rappers do this all the time, commenting on the vibe of the track as it rolls out ("this shit feel like a movie!" "this that 1970s heroin flow") getting themselves, and you, in the proper mind frame. But Lil B is especially good at it; in fact, sometimes listening to Lil B do this is the whole song. Menacing minor key pianos on "Breath Slow"? "Ahhhh let me out this motherfucking caaaaage!," he screams. A refracted prism of synth streaming in on "I Ain't Neva Won"? "You see that light up there? Oh yeah, that's just so beautiful." It's a bit like watching a group of little kids dance to music they're hearing for the first time: Is this dark music? Should I make my scary face?
Hearing him drop a line of thought and pivot abruptly into new territory a beat or two later is also absorbingly odd: "Even Eminem known Lil B crazy/ I wanna see how you... [pause] situations/ Duct tape ya click, ain't no way for escapin," he says on "God's Father". He leaves gaps, presumably to be punched in later, in the otherwise fairly dense rhyme pattern of "Buss Em 4 Points"'s second verse. This is how raps generally come together before the microphone is turned on, or while the song is being hashed out before entering the studio, but it is not the way rap listeners are accustomed to engaging with it. If you like thinking about language as unfinished stuff, Lil B's music will play upon rarely visited parts of your listening brain.
It doesn't hurt that he has a genuine way with words, a knack for memorable phrasing. "Man you gotta fuck a mother, and it's real still...," he says on "Be a Star". Talk about an unfinished thought! "I don't eat that pussy, man, on the dancefloor, man," he says on "Go Dumb Tonight". Sounds reasonable. On "Flowers Rise" he offers what might be the most hilariously #based lyric of his career: "I'm so lonely on this pony riding over the sunlight." Pick any stretch of God's Father, and you will be mowed over with quotable phrases. It's like being showered with fortune cookies.
"Man, I just got some deep-ass thoughts," he says, on the aptly titled "Deep Ass Thoughts". The irony is that he doesn't, or if he does, he declines to share them. But he recreates the feeling of having deep-ass thoughts-- dazed wonder, disorientation-- and then encourages you to have your own. It's the same sort of service he provides on a song called "Real Hip Hop 2012", which is a reference to East Coast hip-hop more than an East Coast hip-hop song. It's an odd, abstracted sort of music, and it will never be for everybody. But Lil B knows who his music is for: "This for everybody that/ They think so hard, man they thoughts be so deep/ And don't nobody believe 'em/ But I believe you." | 2012-03-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-03-21T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap / Experimental | null | March 21, 2012 | 8 | 75818c31-896c-4717-92ef-a7aa0c34fbd1 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On a short but charming four-song EP, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter expands on the laid-back R&B of her 2022 breakout album, finding new frames for easygoing songs about love’s ups and downs. | On a short but charming four-song EP, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter expands on the laid-back R&B of her 2022 breakout album, finding new frames for easygoing songs about love’s ups and downs. | UMI: Talking to the Wind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/umi-talking-to-the-wind/ | Talking to the Wind | On UMI’s 2022 debut, Forest in the City, the Seattle-born singer-songwriter’s vibey keys, soothing guitars, and layered harmonies cast a warm glow. Her lyrics, whether about failed relationships or fresh infatuations, have a charming, relatable ease; her laid-back neo-soul feels as soft and refreshing as grass coated in early-morning dew. To tee up her forthcoming sophomore album—and following “wherever u r,” a lovestruck ballad featuring BTS member V last month—UMI put together talking to the wind, a mellow stopgap EP that recalls Forest in the City’s highlights while occasionally branching out into new territory.
UMI balances both bravado and vulnerability in these four succinct love songs. It’s a short EP, with no track stretching past three minutes, but that’s all the time she needs to tease out conflicting emotions. On the seductive highlight “not necessarily,” she turns her attention to a lover lacking in commitment but rich in tempting lust. “She said, ‘Am I in the mood?’” UMI sings in a chatty cadence over new-age pads and a hopscotching triplet beat, playfully capturing the ambivalence of intimacy: “‘Nope, not necessarily/But I could do it for you.’” By the time she beckons to “come here so we can act like a fool,” she sounds more wistful than the come-on might suggest, tapping into the dissonance of wanting someone who’s bad for you. She continues to explore contradictory feelings on the closer “SHOW ME OUT,” a more conventional R&B song that pinpoints a head-spinning moment of reckless love over crisp hi-hats and heavy bass. Its singsong chorus—“Baby, can you show me out?/Buy me things to brag about?”—offers a vision of moneyed romance that her lilting delivery makes sound altogether dreamy.
One of the breezier tracks isn’t as successful. The jaunty, low-key disco strut of opener “why dont we go” grows monotonous even in its brief runtime; for a song about letting go and living your best life, it’s flat and curiously anonymous. UMI sounds better on the fluttering ballad “happy im,” where a fingerpicked guitar line, whistles, and loping drums guide verses sung in both English and Japanese into a free fall toward romance. Though a few lines verge upon being platitudes (“Happy I’m growing with you/Happier knowing it’s you”), she elevates the material with buoyant vocal delivery that recalls Tinashe at her tenderest. When she reaches up to her falsetto in the song’s yearning chorus, it easily replicates the head rush she’s describing.
The EP is over almost as soon as it gets going, yet in little more than 10 minutes, UMI offers plenty of beguiling vocal switch-ups and intriguing wrinkles to her easy-going sound. She’s carving out her own subdued lane, wistful and carefree at once. | 2024-01-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | January 24, 2024 | 6.8 | 75825310-f61a-462e-a903-62c6098bf2ec | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
Light in the Attic's new compilation pieces together a non-geographical scene that really cohered only in hindsight, the collection's effusive engagement with a wide range of materials and perspectives successfully binding these disparate artists together. | Light in the Attic's new compilation pieces together a non-geographical scene that really cohered only in hindsight, the collection's effusive engagement with a wide range of materials and perspectives successfully binding these disparate artists together. | Various Artists: Country Funk 1969-1975 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16886-country-funk-1969-1975/ | Country Funk 1969-1975 | "I wanna dedicate this song to the three cities that I had the pleasure of recording this tune in. Give a listen and you'll hear 'em." That's Dale Hawkins introducing "L.A. Memphis Tyler Texas," the heraldic lead-off track on Light in the Attic's new compilation, Country Funk 19691-1975. Those cities are an awfully long way from each other, but Hawkins' song makes up the miles with its feisty Bluff City horns, gritty Texas guitars, and glitzy Hollywood groove. Geography is crucial to understanding the hazy genre called country funk, which was neither an organized scene nor a simple mix of country and funk. There was no central label or venue around which its practitioners congregated, and the compilation suggests that there were no rules either. Instead, these tracks are points on a map, representing nearly every corner of America and seemingly endless musical possibilities.
"L.A. Memphis Tyler Texas" makes a perfect introduction to Country Funk because it announces a new way of thinking about country music: In the late 1960s and especially in the early 1970s, country was breaking out of its native spaces and spreading nationwide. Its roots were in Tennessee and Texas, but it had business to take care of in New York, Detroit, and points west. Immediately following Hawkins' fanfare is John Randolph Marr's "Hello L.A., Bye-Bye Birmingham", a picaresque about a songwriter seeking out fame and fortune. Proving a poignant third act is Johnny Adams' "Georgia Morning Dew", about living in L.A. but missing home. These three songs map out territory well beyond the bayou and the holler, leaving behind the downhome and celebrating the worldly.
This is no accident of sequencing: As country expanded from a niche market and into the mainstream, it was also expanding economically, socially, racially. You had stars like Johnny Paycheck, whose earnest voice and solid songwriting transcended novelty; you had Robert Altman's Nashville, a local epic pitched somewhere between condescending and admiring; you had country stars hosting televised variety shows and starring in series about truck drivers and movies about cowboys (long after the heyday of Gene Autry and Tex Ritter). Not only was country music selling to more listeners than ever, but around the time of the bicentennial, it was becoming identified as something truly and broadly American rather than just a curious regional style.
Country Funk re-creates this shift smartly, compiling songs by white artists playing with black sounds and black artists playing with white sounds, all without drawing neat parallels between these musical traditions. There are fading stars trying to keep up with the kids (yes, that Bob Darin), cross-genre oddballs (Jim Ford), also- and never-rans (Dennis the Fox), session musicians boot-scooting into the spotlight (Cherokee), and even a few country superstars (Tony Joe White). It's a lot for one 70-minute album to contain, especially considering country funk may have only really existed as a cohesive category in hindsight. Fortunately, the impetus of Country Funk isn't historical accuracy or even critical rehabilitation. Instead, it intends primarily to be a badass playlist, an alt-universe Nuggets that flirts with kitsch but crams its tracklist with unexpected ideas and flourishes, unlikely filigrees of grit and invention. Even something as potentially campy as Dennis the Fox's "Piledriver" transcends silliness and just rocks imaginatively, with its driving drumbeat, insinuating groove, and those lost, confused, sexy backing vocals.
Along with this worldlier version of country music came a new attitude toward the stock characters of the genre. "Piledriver" is a trucker anthem, but the kick is, its subject isn't your typical burly cowboy but a "piledrivin', mean mothertrucker of a girl." More pointedly, Mac Davis, a session musician turned solo artist, sings "Lucas Was a Redneck" with no little disgust, taking a stereotype that other artists have lionized-- he's dressed like Johnny Cash's "Country Boy," bears some resemblance to Merle Haggard's "Okee from Muskogee"-- and condemning him as a drunkard and a bigot who will leave only hate and shame when he dies.
Country funk turned out to be a surprisingly broad scene, such as it was, and Country Funk isn't just full of white guys. Bobbie Gentry's "He Made a Woman Out of Me" rewrites "Son of a Preacher Man" and somehow manages to intensify both the sweaty sexuality and the bittersweet reminiscence. Gentry was one of the first female artists to write and produce her own material, and her signature mix of swampy R&B rhythms and lush soul vocals shows just how elastic the term "country" could become. I'd also say that she is perhaps the most underrated singer of the era, country or otherwise, and by way of argument would point you to "Niki Hoeky" or "Fancy" or really anything off Ode to Billie Joe.
Country Funk ends with Georgia R&B guitarist Johnny Jenkins' mighty cover of Dr. John's "I Walk on Gilded Splinters" (which Beck famously sampled on "Loser"). Jenkins is backed by the Allman Brothers, and the multiracial unit creates an ungodly and unrelenting jam that reminds you of something very important: While this music occupies an intriguing place in pop history, it is first and foremost exciting to listen to. There's a kick in hearing the slinky drums on Bobby Charles' otherwise laidback "Street People" or endtimes vocals on Link Wray's "Fire and Brimstone". More than any genre or style, that sense of effusive engagement with such a wide range of materials and perspectives binds these artists together, no matter how disparate their background or their music. "It just goes to show ya," Hawkins himself exclaims, "You can take the soul pickers out of the country, but you can't take the soul out of the pickers." | 2012-07-23T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2012-07-23T02:00:05.000-04:00 | null | Light in the Attic | July 23, 2012 | 8.4 | 7583189b-a9bb-4997-b0a1-bec540fccb97 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The L.A. transplant's Kompakt debut LP collects 12 tech-house instrumentals, which can act as a form of comedown comfort food. | The L.A. transplant's Kompakt debut LP collects 12 tech-house instrumentals, which can act as a form of comedown comfort food. | John Tejada: Parabolas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15692-parabolas/ | Parabolas | It's surprising that John Tejada hasn't hooked up with Kompakt before. The twitchy grooves of Parabolas, the L.A. transplant's debut LP for the Cologne, Germany-based label, fit right into founder Wolfgang Voigt's minimal techno aesthetic. What binds Tejada's eclectic decade-plus of work is an approach where it seems like every instrumental tweak and glitch has been studiously labored over for great stretches of time. Parabolas feels that way, too. It's a collection of 12 tech-house instrumentals, pitched somewhere between the visceral punch of classic Detroit techno and the headphone-oriented approach of 1990s electronica like Black Dog Production's Bytes and Autechre's Incunabula.
That's some daunting company to keep, but Tejada has the skills to transform his pilfering into something greater than the sum of its influences. Opener "Farther and Fainter" is a case in point. The opening bars initially sound like they're pushing into the kind of densely packed prettiness Aphex Twin was obsessing over on Selected Ambient Works 85–92. But then the deadened bass drum beat kicks in, joined by a series of bell-like samples, and the song stretches to a close via low-end synth noise wrapped around a fading hi-hat. Blanketed in a pensive quality that most bedroom techno shares, the track is a good indication of what to expect from much of Parabolas, which essentially acts like a form of comedown comfort food.
Occasionally Tejada strays close to a full-on ambient sound ("The Dream", "The Honest Man"), but for the most part Parobalas is deliberately stunted at birth. Tracks like "Subdivided" juxtapose zesty synth rolls with stabs of murky bass and rarely deviate from that path. Occasionally the trance-like state Tejada favors can be a little monotonous, but he usually works in unexpected twists just before the music settles into a rut. For example, a few corkscrewing samples light up "Timeless Space", while "The Living Night" tempers its house-y piano stabs by heading somewhere far darker and then frittering into ambience.
The doomy tone that briefly surfaces in "The Living Night" recurs across much of Parabolas' later tracks, neatly contrasting with the airy material that opened the album. On "Unstable Condition", Tejada even heads close to the kind of relentless downer vibe LFO toyed with on "Tied Up" albeit with all the dissonance scraped away to fit with this record's late-night mood. The convergence of light and dark helps make Parobalas work well as a self-contained piece, while the album's sense of focus elevates it above some of Tejada's typical lurches in style. | 2011-08-05T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2011-08-05T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | August 5, 2011 | 7.1 | 758372e5-04db-4c9c-aa26-f9200116cdcf | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
A breezy Drake dance album sounds great in concept, but the half-measure house beats and lackluster songwriting keep it from really popping off. | A breezy Drake dance album sounds great in concept, but the half-measure house beats and lackluster songwriting keep it from really popping off. | Drake: Honestly, Nevermind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drake-honestly-nevermind/ | Honestly, Nevermind | Drake’s songwriting hits a particular sweet spot when he chooses narcissism over self-awareness. It’s led to arguably his most defining trait: the incredibly specific and memorable Drakeisms, which are sometimes delivered with the belief that they’re profound—making them unintentionally funny, too. Think of the melodramatic and self-loathing details that fill up Take Care (“I think I’m addicted to naked pictures/And sittin’ talkin’ ’bout bitches that we almost had”); the batshit diatribe at the end of “Diamonds Dancing”; the mafioso myth making on If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late (“I order that Alfredo Pasta/Then eat in the kitchen like I’m in the mafia”). Even on Views, his most self-serious album, his ego is so goosed up that surely he must know how ridiculous he sounds. But maybe not.
In recent years, Drake’s growing desire to be in on the joke has made his writing way less exciting. That’s how we ended up with the failure-to-launch “Toosie Slide” viral dance challenge, the desperation of 2021’s Certified Lover Boy, and now the up-and-down nature of his newest album Honestly, Nevermind. The album threads styles like house and Baltimore and Jersey club into his moody, washed-out foundation. It sounds refreshingly different from any other Drake album, and he brings back his go-to trick of legitimizing trend-hopping by recruiting genre heavyweights into his orbit: South African DJ Black Coffee and chameleonic electronic producer Carnage (under his house alias Gordo) both have major contributions to the production. It’s light and breezy, and the songs flow right into each other like a DJ mix, not unlike 2017’s More Life. All this should work, but it feels a little empty for one glaring reason: Drake’s writing lacks its former zest.
Honestly, Nevermind’s most memorable line isn’t actually on the album. In a weepy Apple Music note that accompanied the release, he wrote, “I can’t remember the last time someone put they phone down, looked me in the eyes and asked my current insight on the times.” It is hilarious—a level of self-obsession and delusion missing on the record. On “Calling My Name,” where a pulsing house beat does all the work, Drake talks about lost love with details that amount to, “You’re my water, my refresher/Take off your clothes, relieve pressure.” When he’s not saying anything worthwhile, you tend to zoom in on his singing, but his voice is too one-note to carry the load. Similarly on the 40-produced “Down Hill,” his lyrics about heartbreak are full of banalities. In the past, his genre-bouncing, even if watered-down, was made singular through his writing. Without that, you’re left with a flattened version of a superior, pre-existing sound.
This is an upbeat, all vibes Drake album that works far better in concept than execution. Black Coffee’s looming presence is the catalyst, as the DJ/producer’s deep house feel gives the album a swing even when Drake’s vocal performances don’t deserve it. “Texts Go Green” is a good time, driven by the throbbing percussion and soothing keys, though Drake’s flat melodies make him feel out of his depth. He’s more comfortable on “Falling Back,” where his cracking falsetto is infectious and the wispy, ambient atmosphere of the beat hooks you like that early summer moment when you first smell a lit grill.
The best songs happen when Drake gets zapped with the defibrillator—specifically “Massive,” where his voice melts into the changing tempos, bright synths, and the stabbing drums. Carnage, who’s credited on “Massive,” is no emissary of the dancefloor; at times his smoothed-out take on the style is wooden, lacking the quirks and sporadic bursts of better club music. But then again, he has a hand in the bouncy highlight “Sticky.” For one of two times on the record, Drake returns to rapping, and he sounds that much more motivated as he speaks in French, talks about ditching the Met Gala because he couldn’t bring D-Block, and raps in full pseudo tough guy mode. Why isn’t he having this much fun all the time?
The truth is it’s hard to build a connection with music that’s this closed off. Drake’s music has become increasingly impersonalized, like he’s slotting into a rotating shift of roles. Up to IYRTITL there was a sense that you could create some sort of sketch of his life in your head, but now the details are too purposefully vague and cloudy. This isn’t some plea for bars about fatherhood over house beats, but the details and imperfections of his lyrics once made him feel like a real person instead of just a moodboard. It’s as if the goal of Honestly, Nevermind is anonymity—inoffensively, sort of fun music that simmers in the background all summer and beyond. That’s the opposite of what the appeal of Drake’s music has been for nearly 15 years, where it was like he wholeheartedly believed the world revolved around his trust issues and breakups. Unfortunately, Drake is the rare pop star who sounds better when he doesn’t think about anyone but himself. | 2022-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | OVO Sound / Republic | June 22, 2022 | 6.6 | 758625aa-44f3-492d-94e8-a2049df9a586 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The Norwegian duo sets out to honor their forebears in electronic music, but they end up falling back on derivative, uninspired clichés. | The Norwegian duo sets out to honor their forebears in electronic music, but they end up falling back on derivative, uninspired clichés. | Röyksopp: Profound Mysteries II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/royksopp-profound-mysteries-ii/ | Profound Mysteries II | Whether you love, hate, or feel profoundly indifferent to the plundering sound of Röyksopp’s seventh studio album, Profound Mysteries II, you certainly can’t say they didn’t warn us. In the run-up to the album’s release, the Norwegian duo’s Svein Berge fessed up to the “blatant” and “heavy references” on the second installment of the Profound Mysteries series, which he said are a tribute to key influences, like Kraftwerk, Depeche Mode, Italo disco, and 1990s UK rave. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this direction. We might call it the Beyoncé rule: most people will accept artists making music that borrows heavily from their forefathers, as long as they acknowledge the debt and produce something that adds to the canon. Röyksopp fly over this first hurdle on Profound Mysteries II, but they falter on the second.
However open Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland might be about their inspirations, it is hard to imagine a circumstance in which a sentient listener would choose the clunky rhyme schemes and silver-polished rave pop of “Unity” over Meat Beat Manifesto’s evergreen hardcore belter “Radio Babylon,” which it references in the drums and clipped vocal sample. It’s also unlikely that they’d prefer the awkwardly rehashed low-cal techno of “Control” over Adamski and Seal’s house classic “Killer,” whose stately keyboard tones it commandeers. The heroically mopey melody of “Sorry,” featuring the ANOHNI-lite croon of Jamie Irrepressible, suggests Depeche Mode, but with all the deviant sex removed by deed poll.
Disappointing as this is, these three songs resemble 1970s Stevie Wonder in their invention and style compared to the trio of chill-out clichés that close Profound Mysteries II. “Remembering the Departed” bets the farm on the kind of forlorn, piano-scale banalities that wan boys used to play at parties in the days before Tinder. “Tell Him,” which features one of two appearances by Norwegian vocalist Susanne Sundfør, is a string-led plod, containing lyrics that write emotional checks the music can’t cash. “Some Resolve” is a vast sentimental soufflé; it flops when it comes out of the oven, the electro-prog layering doing little to disguise a boring chord sequence.
This is a shame, because at their best, Röyksopp were never about empty tropes. Their debut album, Melody A.M., transcended well-worn, chilled-out electronica with fantastically bendy melodic textures and unusual vocal guests, including Norwegian softie Erlend Øye. Then their collaborative mini album with Robyn, 2014’s Do It Again, revealed the duo as inventive and empathetic producers of electronic pop, flexing their trademark synth melodies just enough to allow the Swedish pop star’s vocals to shine. The best moments on Profound Mysteries II come when Röyksopp run truer to themselves than to their influences. The crunchy trip-hop drums and melodic curlicues of opener “Denimclad Baboons” sound like a nod to “Eple,” their sparkling second single, whose apple-fresh sound garnered 1,001 TV appearances and ad placements in the early 2000s. “Oh, Lover” has the opulent Nordic melancholy of Röyksopp’s best pop collaborations, combining dilatory synth, chugging disco groove, and Susanne Sundfør’s wind-swept vocals; the result is like weeping away your heartbreak in a chic Norwegian aparthotel.
Profound Mysteries is designed as a particularly grandiose project. The first installment arrived in April of this year, and all 20 tracks across the two releases have corresponding video and digital visualizers, part of Profound Mysteries’ “expanded creative universe.” You can understand why Röyksopp wanted to make such a grandstanding move after declaring themselves done with album releases back in 2014. But in shooting for Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II, they may have ended up with Chinese Democracy: an over-long, repetitive record whose derivative—and only occasionally inspired—second volume makes a compelling case for less is more. | 2022-08-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Dog Triumph | August 19, 2022 | 5.5 | 758b7ae3-6160-4125-bb2f-aa7a12ac162c | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Sorry for the Late Reply features 10 remixes by Amsterdam producer Marco Sterk, known as Young Marco. The tracks throughout are sterling, but don’t sound fussy, and it's the rare remix album that actually hangs together as an end-to-end listen. | Sorry for the Late Reply features 10 remixes by Amsterdam producer Marco Sterk, known as Young Marco. The tracks throughout are sterling, but don’t sound fussy, and it's the rare remix album that actually hangs together as an end-to-end listen. | Young Marco: Sorry for the Late Reply: Various Remixes for Various Reasons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21404-sorry-for-the-late-reply-various-remixes-for-various-reasons/ | Sorry for the Late Reply: Various Remixes for Various Reasons | Back before he began releasing his own singles and remixing others as Young Marco, Amsterdam’s Marco Sterk was gainfully employed by Rush Hour, the city’s vital record store/ dance music distribution hub/reissue imprint. Perhaps it stems from his handling of the label’s archival overviews—of such unheralded electronic music producers ranging from Anthony "Shake" Shakir to the Burrell Brothers to Daniel Wang—but Young Marco has absorbed their sense of craft. It’s understated yet undeniable, and in a few short years he’s racked up a good deal of remix work.
Ten of these remixes are compiled as Sorry for the Late Reply, its title no doubt a nod to the hectic touring schedules of most in-demand DJs/ producers (when I spoke to him last year, Sterk had recorded in Bali, toured the West Coast with Jamie xx, and was about to do more club dates in Europe). No doubt some of these remixes were done on the fly, but each submission sounds as if Marco missed its deadline to finesse a small detail and make each track land just right.
The remix that kicks off the set is the one that’s traveled the furthest, Michael Ozone’s "Hetrotopia," thanks to its inclusion on a Boomkat comp, a Ben UFO mix, and on John Talabot’s DJ-Kicks. Marco takes the queasy, anxious arpeggio of the original and shoots it through with sunlight and a sense of ease. The beat sways between bubbling acid and a touch of hand drum, shot through with echoing jungle cries and a voice sneering: "Freaks come out at night." The cheap Casio underpinning Heatsick gets paired with a swinging drum and hi-hat figure on "Dream Tennis," giving the stiffness of the original a bit more bend.
For most of the set, Young Marco prefers subtle builds, simmering drum programming, and playful recasts of his source material, with only a stomping track like Causa’s "Alji" serving as a peak-hour track. Otherwise, Late Reply will get the most work for building up sets or else easing things down at the end of the night (the shimmering downtempo take on Tony G’s "Simple Dreams" is an album stand-out). If "tropical house" weren’t already a cringeworthy subgenre, I might try to use it to describe Marco’s ability to add lilting island rhythmic patterns to house’s grid.
Regardless, it’s when he’s working with decidedly non-electronic material that Marco’s eclectic handiwork shines. Take two curious remixes, of mop-topped Dutchman troubadour Jacco Gardner and of Cameroonian musician/author Francis Bebey. Gardner’s wistful "The End of August" shades into Hot Chip/Kindness territory in Marco’s hands. It gets a rhythmic nudge in the form of a wispy conga pattern and hissing drum machine, Gardner’s gentle voice garlanded by blips that swoop down like swallows. Marco doesn’t bear down too hard on the track, but keeps it light on its feet. For Bebey’s quaint and charming "The Coffee Cola Song," Marco takes a brief pip of Francis Bebey’s nose flute and makes it into something as effervescent as the title suggests, the drums and pads underneath hiccupping about the track. The tracks throughout are sterling but don’t sound fussy, and for the range of artists represented, Marco’s sensibilities shine throughout, making for that rare remix album that actually hangs together as an end-to-end listen. | 2016-01-08T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-08T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Safe Trip | January 8, 2016 | 7.4 | 758e3183-236e-45be-b8c1-073aec26609c | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The home-recording savant stitches together micro-epics into a sprawling expanse that feels both intimate and grand. | The home-recording savant stitches together micro-epics into a sprawling expanse that feels both intimate and grand. | Yves Jarvis: The Same but by Different Means | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yves-jarvis-the-same-but-by-different-means/ | The Same but by Different Means | Over the past five years, the Montreal-based Jean-Sebastian Audet has amassed a considerable body of work, one where the conventional laws and logic of songwriting don’t apply and where the end goal is less a musical experience than a metaphysical one. An obsessive home-recording savant since his early teens, Audet (now 22) has said his goal is to record a song per day. That said, he’s less a writer than a sculptor, forever picking away at the monolithic mass of musical ideas in his mind. He’s as enamored with process as with results, letting us marvel at the little pieces he’s chipped off along the way.
The Same but by Different Means is the first album Audet has released under the name Yves Jarvis, but it is by no means a debut or reset. Rather, it’s the natural next step in the journey he initiated as Un Blonde. In three short years, Un Blonde gradually mutated from the clanging, cavernous post-punk of 2014’s Tenet to the sublime psych-folk psalms of 2016’s Good Will Come to You, with the latter record earning him a placement on Canada’s Polaris Music Prize long list and, subsequently, an American deal with Anti-.
But rather than use that profile boost as an opportunity to streamline his sound, Audet is doubling down on his wandering DIY aesthetic. His albums have become more expansive as the tunes become much shorter, and with The Same but by Different Means, he stitches his micro-songs and abbreviated epics into a sprawling opus that’s as comforting as it is uncompromising.
Audet has said the color schemes of his album covers reflect the sound of the records, and The Same but by Different Means is Audet’s interpretation of blue and all its famous connotations. But sadness isn’t the feeling that overcomes you as you settle into the opening “To Say That Is Easy,” a gauzy piano ballad that, just as it seems on the verge of decay, is set blissfully adrift on a soothing organ line and shuffling beat. In this case, “blue” assumes a more oceanic quality—of flotation and immersion, of recognizing your humble standing amidst the vastness of the world.
Audet paid his dues as a busker, and no matter what form his music has taken, he’s continued to embrace simplicity and intimacy, while favoring a field-recording ambience that often sees wind sounds, chirping birds, droning insects, and passing cars serving as his de facto backing band. The aptly titled The Same but by Different Means draws from a wider instrumental palette than Audet’s previous work, positioning him in the insular tradition of SMiLE-era Brian Wilson, Sly Stone circa-There’s a Riot Goin’ On, and early ‘70s Stevie Wonder and Todd Rundgren. But the new album retains the otherworldly aura and environmental influences of its predecessors, foregrounding the tactility of his instruments as if the sounds were being made right next to you.
The Same but by Different Means is surprisingly seamless for a 22-track record. Like a Ouija board session, each track here feels part of a collective effort to access a realm outside our own. Sometimes, it leads to sustained moments of connection, like the radiant tropicalia sunshower of “Curtain of Rain.” At others, it yields sudden, surprising moments of rapture, like the beautiful melancholic chorus of “Hard to Say Bye.” Even the briefest snippets can feel like statements: “Constant Change” is a 30-second a capella hymn whose only decipherable lyric is its repeated title. However, as Audet manipulates the tape to sound like a scratching record, it’s transformed into a meta-commentary on the chaos of modern life and the desire to slow down and stop the world from spinning off its axis.
Tellingly, the phrase “constant change” keeps popping up, and The Same but by Different Means can be seen as Audet’s attempt to come to terms with it. The album charts his quest for inner peace in real time, whether Audet is confessing to his own creative stagnation amid the slow-motion psych soul of “Nothing New” or pondering his place in the world on the church-organ confessional “Talking or Listening?” But with the closer, “The Truth,” he finds sanctuary. Stretching out its acoustic idyll for eight enchanting minutes, the song buries Audet’s muttered spoken-word vocals just below the surface, as an encroaching symphony of sampled TV sounds threatens to drown him out. It’s like a dream where you can’t quite make out the details, but it is peaceful, not unnerving. Perhaps finding serenity means surrendering your will to understand the world around you. For Audet, and maybe for us, it’s enough to calmly coexist within it. | 2019-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | March 9, 2019 | 8 | 758f67a0-57d3-4c19-9400-469980d76c23 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Choosing a single high point from Prince’s glorious run in the ’80s is impossible, but Sign o’ the Times surely stands as his most complex and varied statement. | Choosing a single high point from Prince’s glorious run in the ’80s is impossible, but Sign o’ the Times surely stands as his most complex and varied statement. | Prince: Sign o’ the Times | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21845-sign-o-the-times/ | Sign o’ the Times | In 1987, Prince Rogers Nelson was in transition. He’d disbanded the Revolution, the band that had backed him since Purple Rain. He’d toyed with doing a collaborative album with Revolution members Wendy & Lisa, but also abandoned that. He’d put a lot of time into crafting a record around an alter ego called Camille, whose tracks were recorded with his voice pitched to sound even more womanly than his trademark falsetto. But that too had stalled.
The album he released on March 31, 1987 was a Prince solo record that, like his 1980 artistic breakthrough Dirty Mind and his two earlier albums, was essentially a one-man-band recording which relied heavily on the LinnDrum, various samplers, and his remarkable aptitude on every instrument under the sun. Of the 16 songs on Sign o’ the Times, only three have co-writers, and save for one track (“It’s Going to Be a Beautiful Night”), outside musical accompaniment is slight. In a sense, Prince’s major musical collaborator at this point was his engineer Susan Rogers, who recorded him at different studios in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and even Paris.
But unlike his earlier solo efforts, Sign o’ the Times wasn’t a record by an ambitious kid trying to make impression. At 28, Prince had already made himself into a pop superstar (and movie star too), and he easily sold out arenas. In one sense, he had nothing to prove. Yet Sign o’ the Times is the most varied, accomplished record of his prime 1980s period, a testament to the range of his gifts and the bold artistic ambition that gave his music shape.
Part of Prince’s drive was that he was keenly aware that hip-hop was rising up and shifting the sound of music. Rap was entering its “golden age,” and its mix of gritty storytelling and dope beats had to be reckoned with. (Michael Jackson would release Bad, his own answer to hip-hop, six months later.) So the title cut, with Prince’s commentary on the issues of the day (“a big disease with a little name,” mentions of crack and gang violence) and minimalist Run-DMC-styled production, made clear that Prince had his ear to the street. The song functions as Prince’s version of “The Message,” and, as crazy as that sounds, it works.
Prince wasn’t just wrestling with fresh energy from the streets on Sign o’ the Times, but with the twin pillars of carnality and spirituality that had defined his career and that of black popular music for decades. For this Minneapolis native, it wasn’t so much a battle between sin and salvation, as it was how the warring desires could become one, synthesized through innovative arrangements, seductive yet fraught lyrics, and that remarkable voice.
“Forever in My Life,” for example, has the sincere melody of early Sly and the Family Stone. It sounds ready made for optimistic sing-a-longs. At first, you think it’s a simple love song, but there’s a devotional quality (“You are my savior/You are my life”) that makes it a chant of piety. At the same time, songs like “Hot Thing” and “It” are aggressively sexual, but in the context of the electronic, oddly-pitched sounds around the words, they seem more like the search for human connection and transcendence rather than a roll in the hay.
The album’s two ballads, “Slow Love” (co-written by singer-songwriter Carol Davis) and “Adore,” are both showcases for Prince’s vocal prowess. The man was an encyclopedia of vocal styles, able to croon like a 1950s pop star on the nostalgic “Slow Love” and do ’60s soul style on “Adore.” Though equally adept at showy vocal riffs and screaming in tune, Prince’s lower, cooler register seems to express his truest self.
Prince’s ability to move between genres made him a unique musical chameleon with Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney his only peers at the highest levels of pop. While he was often compared to Wonder, especially early in his career, it’s the ex-Beatle who seemed to have the most enduring influence. McCartney’s story-song sketches on The White Album helped define his career. For Prince, they were just one of many tools. His whimsical profiles of an odd elementary school classmate (“Starfish & Coffee”) and a quirky lover with the name of a celebrated New Yorker writer (“The Ballad of Dorothy Parker”) are lovely stories supported by surreal sounds and beats, suggesting you are on psychedelic journey through Prince’s memories.
Sign o’ the Times is difficult to grapple with because there’s so much going on in each track. The up-tempo “Play in the Sunshine” drops in jazz fusion riffs and choral voices just when you think its winding down. “The Cross” starts as a mournful song of devotion to Christ with acoustic guitar and sitar before exploding into a huge rock anthem with military drums and fuzz guitar. “Play in the Sunshine” opens with the sound of kids at play, becomes a rockabilly song, transitions midway into a guitar showcase, and then, with a marimba, a different drum pattern, and cleverly arranged backing voices, it ends a musical world away from where it began.
“Housequake” is, perhaps, the most obvious songs on the album, a funk jam that would have been a hit single if he’d allowed it to be released as such. But the care of the track’s construction belies any shallow analysis. It starts with a cartoony voice (maybe a Camille reference), a synthesized drum heavy with echo, then adds bass, keyboard stabs, and rhythm guitar. The synth drum and snare drum merge while there’s a double-beat on the kick. Live horns come it and the bass line moves as there’s both a synth bass keyboard and a live bass doing playing different lines. Various backing vocals float in and out with Prince doing his James Brown impersonation as singer/MC. Compared to the simple loops of your average club banger, “Housequake” is a symphony of syncopation. The beat moves even as it grooves.
Because Prince played and recorded the album using now-vintage late ’80s technology there are moments when certain sounds, particularly the drums, are clearly of their era. But these sonic distractions don’t last as the scope of the songs, the musicianship, and overall arrangements are just too glorious to nitpick. Sign o’ the Times is a double album made with a restlessness that never allows it to settle into complacency or formula. It’s a soundtrack to a highly charged and specific period, for both Prince and his listeners. I remember partying to “Housequake” in the summer of ’87, laughing along with “Starfish & Coffee,” and playing “Adore” for my girlfriend when it was time to get busy. All these years later, it’s still a vibrant thing, the product of a great artist at the height of his powers. | 2016-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Paisley Park | April 30, 2016 | 10 | 7593abda-0d73-4b7c-b297-f222c5b80431 | Nelson George | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nelson-george/ | null |
Led by the nimble 18-year-old rapper Wiki, the N.Y. four-piece come from a hardcore background and are aesthetically guided by early-90s New York hip hop. Their debut EP for XL is mostly a case of untapped potential. | Led by the nimble 18-year-old rapper Wiki, the N.Y. four-piece come from a hardcore background and are aesthetically guided by early-90s New York hip hop. Their debut EP for XL is mostly a case of untapped potential. | Ratking: Wiki93 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17352-wiki93-ep/ | Wiki93 EP | The ability to rap really quickly is a privileged skill in hip-hop, and mostly with good reason. Too often, though, rap fans get stuck in the pursuit of being dazzled, of being reminded why rappers can rap and we (often) can't. Ratking, a four-piece rap group from New York, is led by the 18-year-old Wiki, whose "Wikispeaks" single from earlier this year made minor waves across the web. Wiki, as he's likely been told countless times, sounds remarkably like a young Eminem when he raps, and his taut, elastic flow means he can actually do a pretty good homage. It's that flow that is his (and the band's) calling card, but the flair is mostly a distraction laid over the top of their Wiki93 EP, which reveals a group of kids still searching for something to say.
The idea of having "something to say," is itself a distorted one in hip-hop-- "something" doesn't always have to be life-altering truths. But having an identifiable point-of-view is almost always crucial to becoming a worthwhile rapper and to catching on with an audience. Ratking are nipping at the heels of a loose constellation of rap groups-- Odd Future, Death Grips, Joey Bada$$' Pro Era-- that have caught on in the last year or two by presenting new perspectives. Ratking come from a hardcore background (Wiki played Germs covers in high school) and are aesthetically guided by early-90s New York rap, but they have yet to progress beyond the facade of teen male angst.
Even Odd Future, fellow skate-rappers who may be their most obvious peer in this regard, had quietly constructed a deeply nihilistic world unto itself. Wiki93 is for teenage punks, too, but there's nothing at the core of the EP that illuminates the inspirations of Wiki and fellow MC Hak. Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt, for instance, bonded over their missing fathers, and that pain was unavoidable in their music. In Joey Bada$$ you can see an old soul, one who has absorbed old beats and rhyme schemes and comes at his music from a place of love. With Ratking, you catch snatches of images-- kids scrawling graffiti, jumping subway turnstiles, running from cops-- but there is nothing deeper. Wiki raps about things that kids do, but what's the significance?
There is still some potential here, though. Ratking, four kids that call themselves "mutts" and are into punk, early-90s rap and Cam'ron equally, seem like a zeitgeist rap group in some sense, and in that they have an untapped power waiting to be harnessed. There is also an obvious level of talent: Wiki's ability to rap well from a technical perspective almost works against him, but it's still a dazzling skill that could one day be put to good use.
There are also the beats on the album, cooked up by producers Sporting Life and Ramon. They are built from the ground up with hard boom-bap drums, but they attack with an aggressiveness and noise that sprouts from the group's roots in hardcore and punk. There is no dissonance, though, no skronk; they are beats made to be rapped over, but without a nod to the lived-in warmth and old crackle of typical 90s-revival productions.
"To every mother with a stroller, eyeing me when I roll up/ Know your kid's gonna be just like me when he grows up," Wiki raps on "Pretty Picture" and in many cases it's probably be true. But Ratking are a group that are a very long way away from turning that into a rallying cry, from not just embodying disaffected teen rebels but speaking for them. Being able to really connect with that fanbase-- the one that turned the Beastie Boys, Eminem and Odd Future into heroes-- doesn't come easily, and it can't be papered over with a nice flow. | 2012-11-21T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-11-21T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rap | XL / Hot Charity | November 21, 2012 | 5.8 | 75956ec5-d290-4e90-9e5c-f9fd7718dc70 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | 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 UK duo’s striking 1988 debut, full of noise and bliss and darkness, a crucial document of dream pop. | 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 UK duo’s striking 1988 debut, full of noise and bliss and darkness, a crucial document of dream pop. | A.R. Kane: 69 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ar-kane-69/ | 69 | One evening in 1985, the Cocteau Twins made a rare television appearance. Awash in a tangerine glow while performing their song “Pink Orange Red” off that year’s Tiny Dynamine EP, the group emitted an otherworldly aura. While they played, Alex Ayuli and Rudy Tambala were stationed in front of their respective televisions across London. The two young friends called each other up immediately after the segment ended, blown away by the performance. They dug the music, especially Robin Guthrie’s swirling guitar and the band’s use of a tape machine instead of a drummer, but the pair was more galvanized by what the Cocteau Twins symbolized: boundless creative freedom. Soon enough, Tambala and Ayuli purchased an electric guitar, a drum machine, and some pedals and began experimenting. The illusion that being a musician required expensive gear and formal training crumbled away.
As the story goes, at a party soon after, someone asked Tambala how he and Ayuli, a copywriter at the acclaimed ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, knew each other. Perhaps a little high, Tambala jokingly said that they were in a band together, one which was “a bit Velvet Underground, a bit Cocteau Twins, a bit Miles Davis, a bit Joni Mitchell.” The band name, he explained, was similarly cobbled together from disparate influences: “A.R.” came from the bandmates’ first initials, “Kane” nodded to Citizen Kane, and the mark of Cain as described in Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian. But say it out loud and one word looms: arcane.
Tambala’s semi-fictional origin story quickly snowballed and A.R. Kane signed to the London record label One Little Independent (formerly One Little Indian). The band’s first single did not enter into the world quietly. Its vivid title—“You Push a Knife Into My Womb (When You’re Sad)”—was censored down to simply the parenthetical. With its screeching wall of guitar feedback, simplistic drum beat, and swooning girl-group harmonies, “When You’re Sad” garnered comparison to the Jesus and Mary Chain, who had released their masterpiece Psychocandy the previous year. Whether or not A.R. Kane were influenced directly by the Reid brothers’ noise-rock, they weren’t planning on lingering in that sound much longer. “...We can’t say we’re impressed by any of these shambling bands,” they told Melody Maker’s Simon Reynolds. “The shambling sound is very trimmed, somehow.” As indicated by the single’s woozy B-side “Haunting,” A.R. Kane was aiming for something far more expansive.
Tambala and Ayuli had spent the past decade creating a shared lexicon that directly shaped the music they created together. Friends since their primary school days, they were both children of immigrants: Ayuli’s family emigrated from Nigeria; Tambala’s father came from Malawi. Growing up in Stratford, East London, the pair “were always outsiders” but “oozed African confidence and a degree of arrogance—we ruled,” Tambala later recalled. As teenagers, Ayuli was drawn to dub music and Tambala leaned towards soul and jazz-funk, but they inhaled all the sounds of London from house to post-punk to hip-hop.
Later, when journalists asked about influences, A.R. Kane never mentioned whatever indie band was on the cover of NME. Instead, they cited the fusion rock band Weather Report, the Brazilian trio Azymuth, dub-punkers Basement 5, and Mr. Feedback himself, Jimi Hendrix. But one specific inspiration kept arising: “The only person we listen to is Miles Davis,” Ayuli once said. “We’re not jazz musicians, but we’ve got a jazz attitude, if you like.” Ayuli and Tambala were conduits, absorbing, filtering, reinterpreting the world through their own means.
In 1987, A.R. Kane hopped over to 4AD, which was then home to similarly ambitious groups like Pixies, This Mortal Coil, and their beloved Cocteau Twins. Working alongside Guthrie, they released the Lollita EP, whose three tracks wander further into haunted psychedelia. With song titles like “Sad-Masochism Is a Must” and artwork by fashion photographer Juergen Teller of a nude woman with a knife behind her back, the EP was unabashedly fascinated with sex, love, madness, and violence. In the final minutes of “Butterfly Collector,” the abrasive shoegaze cocktail explodes into shrapnel; at shows, the blasts of feedback sent audiences scurrying to the exits.
While signed to 4AD, A.R. Kane teamed up with their label mates Colourbox under the name M|A|R|R|S. The two groups almost immediately ran into creative differences and in the end, the partnership produced a double A-side with just the slightest hints of cross-pollination. Colourbox’s sample-heavy acid house number, “Pump Up the Volume,” quietly featured Ayuli and Tambala’s guitars while A.R. Kane’s contribution, “Anitina,” included Coulourbox’s drum programming. To the shock of everyone involved, “Pump Up the Volume” skyrocketed to the top of the UK charts, becoming 4AD’s first No. 1 song.
It was in the wake of this strange and unexpected success that A.R. Kane recorded their debut album, 69. Now signed to Rough Trade, Ayuli and Tambala decided to forgo the professional studios where they had recorded with producers like Guthrie. Instead, they built out a space in Ayuli’s mother’s basement; rather than recalibrate their ambitions to fit a predetermined system, they constructed their own playground from scratch. Left to their own devices, with occasional assistance from producer Ray Shulman, A.R. Kane had complete freedom.
They would coin a new term to loosely describe their music: dream pop. “DREAMPOP,” as they explained in an article around the release of 69, “is a whole new concept which we think of as pure hooks, pure pop tunes with a little harsh melodic accompaniment.” Dreaming, the duo agreed, was “crucial” to their work, and they aimed to emulate an ethereality that could just as easily become nightmarish. The band used tape echo to make every song on the self-produced 69 feel just out of reach, like your memory struggling to grasp the last wisp of a dream before it slips away. In the vein of dub pioneers like Lee “Scratch” Perry and King Tubby, they reimagined their equipment’s logical endpoints, bending, sampling, manipulating, stretching, filtering, distorting, and reversing every idea. The duo combined all these parts and then, drawing on their intertwined intuition—they were two halves of a whole, yin and yang, 69—skimmed away the fat until a song emerged.
A.R. Kane recognized the ecstatic potential of noise, that when they cranked their guitars all the way up until every individual element melded into a singular void of sound, new doors might open. “We want our music to be a rush of things coming at you through the speakers, so many that the mind doesn’t have time to assimilate them and manage them,” Tambala told Reynolds. “It should be like a baby being confronted with a rattle for the first time, seeing it as it is, without preconceptions.” That’s certainly the experience of “Baby Milk Snatcher,” whose title alludes to oral sex, breastfeeding, and Margaret Thatcher. Touching on glitchy trip-hop, lethargic psychedelia, and carnal post-punk, it sounds thrillingly lawless.
69 is difficult to pin down; dream pop naturally begets dream logic. After opening with the unexpectedly jangly “Crazy Blue” and “Suicide Kiss,” the album descends into the distant, lethargic caverns of “Scab” and “Sulliday.” These last two songs sound like they were recorded in a basement where two human bodies were the only sources of warmth. Meanwhile, “Dizzy” counters an elegant Arthur Russell-esque cello melody with a faraway shout that sounds like a ghoul’s last rally as it gets sucked down a drain.
Then there’s a song like “Spermwhale Trip Over” whose trippy haze is best summarized by the central verse: “Here in my LSDream/Things are always what they seem.” All the while, the faint groove acts like a guideline leading a diver through an underwater cave. The staggering late album centerpiece “The Sun Falls Into the Sea” seems to come from an entirely different planet. “An ambition for us would be for people to have dreams in which our music was the soundtrack,” Ayuli said to Reynolds back in 1987. Dreams are limitless realms of new realities and 69, with its ambition, fascination with flaws, and ability to embrace both darkness and bliss, aims to capture it all.
In the summer of 2020, as demonstrations against systemic racism surged throughout the United States, an infographic titled “Tracing Black Influence in Shoegaze” appeared on my Instagram feed, asserting A.R. Kane’s role as pioneers of a sound almost exclusively credited to white men (and the occasional afterthought of a willowy white gal). A.R. Kane’s music traveled far beyond the walls of shoegaze and they never quite identified with the “indie” bands, but the point was correct: A.R. Kane forged their own path and that legacy can be heard in groups like the Veldt, Slowdive, and Flying Saucer Attack. During the years that A.R. Kane were active, the pair did not speak in-depth about their racial identity or role as figureheads for those who did not see themselves reflected in an indie scene (they were, to be fair, willfully esoteric about pretty much everything). But, as Ayuli said in a 1999 interview, “We were a force of ideas. We helped to get rid of stereotypes. In the ’80s black men were doing soul, reggae or rap, not psychedelic dream rock. We opened doors for bands to be more experimental.” Similarly, in 2012, Tambala pushed back on the notion that the band’s existence might be seen as shocking: “Don’t know why they’d be surprised by our music; negroes invented rock music, dance music, and free jazz and psychedelia. At least that’s what mama says.”
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2021-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | February 14, 2021 | 9.1 | 75957fb8-1c3d-449a-83c5-f6f15d7d8438 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Busta Rhymes is back with a new tape of unheard material. The Return of the Dragon (The Abstract Went on Vacation) doesn’t exactly herald the return of Peak Busta or even Good Busta—in fact, it does the opposite. | Busta Rhymes is back with a new tape of unheard material. The Return of the Dragon (The Abstract Went on Vacation) doesn’t exactly herald the return of Peak Busta or even Good Busta—in fact, it does the opposite. | Busta Rhymes: The Return of the Dragon (The Abstract Went on Vacation) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21397-the-return-of-the-dragon-the-abstract-went-on-vacation/ | The Return of the Dragon (The Abstract Went on Vacation) | When Busta Rhymes and Q-Tip released "Thank You," a rap relay featuring Kanye West and Lil Wayne, it fueled speculation that the two might be working on a project together, something those entrenched in New York rap’s history had been pining for. What we got instead was The Abstract and the Dragon, a mixtape that turned out to be a chill way to revisit the pair’s enviable chemistry and friendship but not much else.
Two years later, Busta Rhymes is back with a new tape of unheard material, this time without Q-Tip. The Return of the Dragon (The Abstract Went on Vacation) doesn’t exactly herald the return of Peak Busta or even Good Busta—in fact, it does the opposite. The raps are mostly uninspired and sometimes they don’t even make sense ("My money long, thicker than a waffle," on "God’s Plan"; "I’m Def Leppard and I ain’t tryna hear the noise," on "Choose a Side"). When they do communicate, the thoughts and observations are unbearably generic, the kind of bars a rap generator might cough up. And on top of all that, Busta packs his words into the husks of worn tracks that somehow escaped the first Obama term.
Many of these B-sides sound years old—songs recorded for alternate purposes that were at one point or another shelved and never should’ve seen the light of day. For starters, there’s a guest appearance from long-forgotten R&B singer J. Holiday on a song ironically titled "Hits for Days." When Styles P and Jadakiss do their usual back-and-forth on "Respect My Conglomerate 2," a sequel to the 2009 Busta song of the same name, there’s a reference to the bank Wachovia, which was absorbed by Wells Fargo in 2008. Some other songs feel like relics from a bygone era, especially "Real Niggas," which reeks of Lex Luger "MC Hammer"-like trap opulence with big, dramatic chamber orchestration (and a Rick Ross feature to boot). "UFC (Tap-Out)" reunites Waka Flocka Flame and Gucci Mane, a dated pairing given their contentious recent history and Gucci’s overlapping prison stint.
Whether or not these songs actually are old isn’t the issue—rappers put album throwaways on mixtapes all the time, and some of these releases exist to serve that exact purpose. The issue is that this particular batch feels old. These throwaways are stale, and to present them to rap fans as some sort of gesture of good faith on Christmas Day seems like a cheap trick.
If you manage to hang in for a bit, The Return of the Dragon isn’t without its moments: Chance the Rapper’s lengthy verse on "Hello" is a barn burner ("I know contracts are like handcuffs/ I know combat when it’s hand to hand or with handguns/ I know answers, I know man to man, can’t stand us/ I know exactly how you wanna brand us"), the cathedral organ tenor of the choir-backed, Mary J. Blige-featuring "Your Loss" is heavy and evocative, and there’s a vintage Raekwon showing on the gritty outro to "Watch How You Move." On "Tonight," a horn-heavy funk gem from the Pharrell archives, Sean Paul lathers his signature patois yelps over a pounding bass, and the sensory experience is a pleasant blast from the past. But the shoehorned-in Busta verses sound labored, especially when his words are heard outside of densely packed double-time raps.
There are flashes where Busta Rhymes’ juking, stutter-step flow, which can burst into an elastic double-time on a whim, is sharp and reminiscent of his best performances. The BJ the Chicago Kid-featuring "In the Streets," which carries a pair of MF DOOM verses to its credit, is highlighted by one of the strongest Busta verses in recent memory. "We Home," which reunites Leaders of the New School with fantastic results, is one of the few instances of unadulterated bliss. But these are momentary reprieves from a slog of tiresome listens. Busta Rhymes will forever be known for one of the most fluid deliveries in the genre’s history, but this rap giant is slowing and his wit seems to be dulling. "Ain’t nothing changed, I’m still the Goliath of this rap shit," he spits on "Hits for Days." Someone should remind him how that fable ends. | 2016-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | January 14, 2016 | 5.6 | 75976d06-b4c6-4b0c-823a-26dccda5afb2 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The Berlin-based DJ’s first official mix in four years sounds new and vital even when steeped in retro sounds. Her encyclopedic taste and smooth, linear style of mixing defines the shape of the set. | The Berlin-based DJ’s first official mix in four years sounds new and vital even when steeped in retro sounds. Her encyclopedic taste and smooth, linear style of mixing defines the shape of the set. | Steffi: Fabric 94 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steffi-fabric-94/ | Fabric 94 | Music “with a certain mindset” was the brief that the Dutch-born, Berlin-based DJ and electronic musician known as Steffi gave to her friends when she solicited new material for Fabric 94, her first official mix CD since 2013’s Panorama Bar 05. Whatever further specifications she may have given them, that mindset rings out clear as a bell from virtually every bar of the 70-minute mix, which she composed entirely from the exclusives she sought out. It's remarkably cohesive both in mood and style: energetic but never wanton, bittersweet but never wallowing. Songs are steeped in the synthesizers and whip-cracking drum programming of 1990s electro and IDM, yet because it covers a set of stylistic cues that aren’t particularly in fashion right now, the set is also free of retro pretense. Most of these tunes could be mistaken for tracks put out by tiny Dutch or Detroit labels 20-odd years ago. To hear the style sounding so vital is a little bit like spotting a bird long thought to be extinct flourishing in the wild.
Many artists have utilized Fabric mixes as proving grounds for their own material: Ricardo Villalobos, Omar S, Shackleton, and Daphni have all delivered sets comprising only original productions and custom edits. Steffi’s decision to commission a set’s worth of exclusive material marks a new twist in that approach, one that goes to the heart of her interest in narrative—in the mix as a kind of essay, a thought experiment. “It’s very important to me to tell a story when I’m DJing,” she told RBMA in 2015. “The records that I choose have certain connections, in my head, with each other.”
The story she tells here has to do with sounds that tend to get left out of the standard, binary accounts of house and techno as dance music’s twin poles. Instead of steady, four-to-the-floor grooves, she opts for slippery syncopations and rhythms that lurch from side to side, reflecting on her earliest years as a DJ, when she cut her teeth playing electro, Miami bass, and laser-cut grooves from labels like Warp and Rephlex. Despite the jagged beats, Steffi’s smooth, linear style of mixing defines the shape of the set: Her blends are seamless yet dynamic, and tracks fit together like robotic hands in robotic gloves.
She begins with scene-setting shoegaze chords—perhaps the only element in the entire mix that isn’t descended from “Numbers” and Man Parrish—and a gravelly scrap of NASA control room chatter. It's a fitting way to set up Voiski’s “Sound of Distance”: Combining tension-building drums with unfurling synths, it serves as a launch pad for everything to come. The next few tracks build on that widescreen vibe, with gorgeous pads falling across bruising drums like sunbeams cutting through thick clouds. Echoes of mid-‘90s Autechre and Carl Craig are all over “No Life on the Surface,” by Doms & Deykers (Steffi and the Dutch producer Martyn), and Dexter’s “66” offers an even more thrilling take on classic IDM, with stuttering vocal loops reminiscent of Gescom or Phoenecia perforating a legato melody that’s pure Boards of Canada. Forceful and fluid all at once, it marks the set’s first major peak.
From there she steps back and concentrates on rebuilding energy with a series of dark, ominous cuts infused with electric jolts of bass. The sun pokes through the murk again in the middle of Duplex’s “Voidfiller,” as bright funk keys splash over rolling, mechanical grooves. Much iconic electro and techno was inspired by Detroit’s car culture, and Fabric 94 excels as an automotive soundtrack: It takes its inspirations from long, halogen-lit avenues and graceful cloverleaf sweeps. Heading into the final stretch, she tunnels into deep electro-funk with a driving, atmospheric cut from Late Night Approach, a Milan act with scant profile, and a kinetic, deeply hued tune—sounding like a Miami electro remix of Violator-era Depeche Mode—from Afik Naim, a new producer on Steffi’s Dolly label. All hell breaks loose for the finale. With Dexter & Virginia’s “Off the Beat,” the drop-top pops open to reveal the tremolo-soaked synth flourishes of electro at its funkiest—a pure party jam—while Privacy’s shimmering “Broke” takes us out with a melancholy Drexciya tribute. As with her Panorama Bar 05 mix, there’s no lengthy outro, just a gentle fade to black—a reminder that, as moody as it might get, Steffi’s favored mindset always puts rhythm first. | 2017-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fabric | July 6, 2017 | 7.7 | 7597908a-8287-4f4d-a6ac-bec449e7f19c | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Music has always been just one aspect of the former YouTuber’s cryptic multimedia experience, but Flux makes it finally feel like the most important one. | Music has always been just one aspect of the former YouTuber’s cryptic multimedia experience, but Flux makes it finally feel like the most important one. | Poppy: Flux | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/poppy-flux/ | Flux | There’s an entire subgenre of videos dedicated to catching the YouTuber and walking avatar Poppy breaking character. These clips present their findings as a kind of gotcha journalism—watch as Poppy’s soft voice sharpens in response to an unpleasant interview question, or as she laughs through a bit she should be playing straight. The artist and musician born Moriah Pereira dove headfirst into the uncanny valley with her early video work, creating an android-like character whose cheerily flat speech and demeanor felt like a Lynchian satire of vloggers. The Poppy persona was so unsettling that seeing the person behind it briefly appear human was disturbing in its own way, like witnessing a glitch in the matrix. But over the past few years, Poppy’s albums have increasingly offered revealing glimpses of the woman behind the mask. Flux is her most unguarded work yet, and it’s the closest we’ve come yet to meeting the real Poppy.
On 2020’s I Disagree, Poppy flicked a lit match at her YouTube-era identity, charring its edges with chaotic hyperpop and nu-metal riffage. She couldn’t fully burn her former self down, though, at least not when her former creative partner Titanic Sinclair was still involved. (Sinclair co-wrote every song on I Disagree and directed two of its music videos, though he and Poppy had parted ways at the end of 2019 after she accused him of manipulative behavior.) On Flux, she finishes the job. The album’s catharsis feels convincingly raw, and the anarchic genre mashups that could sometimes feel shticky on I Disagree have been subsumed into something more seamless. She’s still a musical polymath, but she’s learned how to channel her omnivorous tastes into a cohesive whole.
Most of the textures Poppy explores on Flux are rooted in rock music, and she spends much of the record sounding more like the frontwoman of a killer band than a pop star. That’s perhaps an inevitable result of recording live in the studio with her touring musicians, a decision that lends the songs a sweaty, electric frisson. Poppy and her band work through excursions into pop-punk, shoegaze, grunge, dream pop, and in a few carefully chosen moments, the metallic fury that served as I Disagree’s calling card. Where that album delighted in smuggling a Slipknot riff into sugary pop like a razorblade in a candy apple, Flux comes by its bursts of heaviness more honestly. At the climax of “On the Level,” Poppy’s self-proclaimed “first love song,” a chugging thrash passage overtakes the mix. It’s overwhelming in the way that falling in love is, channeling that rush of blood that makes your head swim. “Sometimes love will find you, and it comes at the most unexpected of times, and it’s a nice feeling,” Poppy told DIY of her recent engagement to vampiric shock-rapper Ghostemane. “On the Level” invites us to share in that feeling.
Elsewhere, Poppy taps into her rage. The vicious pop-punk of “Lessen the Damage” sounds like Paramore with harsh vocals—a “good 4 u” for the Hot Topic set. “Her” is one of several songs that feels like a pointed rebuke of her ousted collaborator: “Give her a taste/Take it away/Under your thumb/Tell her to stay.” Its empowering chorus is a moment of triumph for this new, liberated Poppy, who “picked herself up, put her back together.” Delivering such obviously autobiographical lines in the third person is a canny touch from an artist still in the process of shaking off the character she once played. When the storming metal guitars return deep into the otherwise serene closing track, “Never Find My Place,” Poppy screams “You broke into my life!” over and over. The effect is purifying.
Music has always been just one aspect of the Poppy multimedia experience, but Flux makes it finally feel like the most important one. It’s been a long journey, from going viral with a cotton-candy ASMR video to making the kind of vibrant, sophisticated pop songs that populate the album. Yet every previous version of Poppy—every outdated operating system—informs who she is today. “So Mean” is the only song on Flux where she reverts to her former character’s small, synthetic voice, to ask “How did I get here?” That’s a big question, but with Flux, it feels like Poppy’s finally on her way to answering it.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Sumerian | September 29, 2021 | 7.3 | 759a3ea0-3e87-4ab0-a659-be7d339436f2 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
Faye Webster adds gorgeous orchestral arrangements to songs from her most recent albums, drawing on Old Hollywood drama to expose the emotion in her words. | Faye Webster adds gorgeous orchestral arrangements to songs from her most recent albums, drawing on Old Hollywood drama to expose the emotion in her words. | Faye Webster: Car Therapy Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/faye-webster-car-therapy-sessions/ | Car Therapy Sessions | Faye Webster knows the power of an arrangement. Never one to relegate her instrumentation to mere backup, she has a knack for underscoring the emotional resonance of her words, whether through a well-placed pedal steel mewl or a nimbly unwinding bassline. Her typical compositions are lush yet economical, sitting well against lyricism that’s at once vulnerable and dry. But she tries her hand at something different with her new EP, Car Therapy Sessions, in which she and a 24-piece orchestra reimagine several songs from her last two records, 2019’s Atlanta Millionaires Club and 2021’s I Know I’m Funny haha, plus one new entry, “Car Therapy.”
Created and conducted by Trey Pollard (Foxygen, Natalie Prass), these orchestral arrangements sound like love letters to golden age Hollywood. The instrumentation is strictly classical, and Drew Vandenberg’s production is rich and glimmering. For fans, it’s an Easter egg hunt to hear how the particulars of the songs are translated. “Cheers (To You & Me)” most pointedly illustrates the value of these transformations, based as it is on Webster’s rockiest cut. Without the anchor of the original track’s robust drums, there’s an insistent lurching feel to its cellos as they mimic distorted guitar, giving the song a new, almost drunken swagger; the closing guitar solo, transposed to violin, ends the EP on a triumphant high.
Webster, who recorded live with the orchestra in view, is having a lot of fun with her vocals: controlling them tighter, flexing them a little more, and imbuing them with new drama. But it’s also apparent that she’s genuinely moved by these gorgeous interpretations of her songs. Rising to meet the occasion, she delivers some of her best vocal performances to date, like her tender, entrancing repetition of the refrain at the end of “Kind Of (Type of Way)”.
Most interesting is how the maximalism and earnest vintage homage of these interpretations strips away the defensive irony in Webster’s lyrics, exposing naked emotion in the exact same words. That’s clear even in the new track “Car Therapy,” as Webster quietly requests, “Hold my body and I’ll forget I hate me”*—*no “haha” here. Where the original “Sometimes” is a dreamy slow dance, this version—“Sometimes (Overanalyze)”—sounds like the heartbreaking final act of a musical, Webster alone and hopeless under a spotlight just before the curtain falls. And in the second half of “Suite: Jonny,” which combines a two-part song from Atlanta Millionaires Club, Webster hams up her spoken-word delivery atop an instrumental that sounds like a score, turning a voicemail into a film monologue. Like the rest of the EP, it’s audacious, but Webster knows what she’s doing. These arrangements make her a star. | 2022-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-05T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Secretly Canadian | May 5, 2022 | 7.5 | 759f3c8c-e9bf-444b-9fe9-e139527c9dd4 | Mia Hughes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mia-hughes/ | |
The first thing to know about Greetings from Michigan, the third album from Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens, is that ... | The first thing to know about Greetings from Michigan, the third album from Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens, is that ... | Sufjan Stevens: Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7510-greetings-from-michigan-the-great-lakes-state/ | Greetings from Michigan: The Great Lakes State | The first thing to know about Greetings from Michigan, the third album from Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens, is that its creator was born there. Few albums more clearly evoke their namesake: Towering pines, highways paved through granite walls, great lakes and deep valleys resonate in its gentle piano, muted trumpets, and close-mic'd production-- which is particularly odd, given that Stevens' home city is Detroit. It leads you to wonder how one could craft an album so delicate from an inspiration its author calls a "monstrous concrete prison" which has been "destroyed by its infidelity." Certainly, the album is run through with a wistful melancholia, with lyrics that reference the city's dead machinery and empty warehouses. But there's a reason the album's title greets its listeners from the state and not the city: The record is a beautiful, sprawling homage to the self-described pleasant peninsula.
Fittingly, Stevens opens the record on a pensive note: "Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid)" is a lulling, depressive hymn comprised of dew-drop piano and a shimmering backgrounded trumpet. Like Roger & Me, the song focuses on the titular city's impaired economy and empty rust-belt factories, albeit with a more bathetic and singular approach than the everyman journalism of Michael Moore: Stevens softly sings, "Since the first of June/ Lost my job and lost my room/ I pretend to try/ Even if I try alone."
"All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!" follows, offering the first of only a handful of upbeat tunes. Here, the pace shifts to a sound more informed by the metropolis at the opposite corner of Lake Michigan, echoing the tight, sophisticated arrangements of Chicago's post-rock scene. The lengthier "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!)" follows suit, also invoking a vaguely Sea and Cake-inspired background over which Stevens layers an extensive list of shoutouts to Michigan cities, as well as a warped guitar solo and nice tempo implosions.
"For the Widows in Paradise, For the Fatherless in Ypsilanti" is a banjo-led boy/girl bluegrass spiritual, dour but uplifted by the kind of sighing instrumentation Jim O'Rourke made his name on, while the strumming of "Romulus" evokes the fragile folk of Eric's Trip and Nick Drake. Here, Stevens' pen most achingly depicts the everyday sadness of muted familial disruptions. The song's narrator remembers his mother distantly: "Our grandpa died in a hospital gown/ She didn't seem to care/ She smoked in her room and colored her hair/ I was ashamed of her."
Equally beautiful are the sporadically placed instrumentals. If Philip Glass wrote pop songs, they might sound something like these, as Stevens often uses Glass-like patterns as the foundation for his lushly produced, moody indie pop. "Tahquamenon Falls" is what I took to be a glockenspiel clocked with a number of mallets and buried within a diaphanous echo of reverb; it varies and shifts slightly for over two minutes before trailing off upward. "Alanson, Crooked River" is similar in tone, perhaps using ice cubes or the rims of wine glasses as instrumentation. The mostly instrumental "Redford (For Yia-Yia & Pappou)" is a gently repetitious piano piece with whispered notes at the end: The human voices that resound here do so as isolated elements of a winter breeze, not as fully articulated words or thoughts.
If Stevens can be at all faulted on Michigan, it's for erring on the side of indulgence, with the occasional track running too long. "Oh God, Where Are You Now? (In Pickeral Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?)" drags somewhat over its nine-minute runtime, though to be fair, it does bloom icily towards the end. Its sleety water crystal feel reminded me of the almost anonymous hoarfrost of mid-period, pre-Kinks-fixated Lilys and the vastly underrated work of the 90s D.C. indie pop band Eggs. On the ebullient eight-minute "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head!", the repetition works: Nowhere else on the album is the Philip Glass influence quite so notable, as its note patterns occur and recur, adding layers and resonance through chance sonic meetings.
On "The Upper Peninsula", Stevens harmonizes with The Danielson Famile's Megan and Elin Smith: "I live in America with a pair of Payless shoes.../ I've seen my wife at the K-mart/ In strange ideas, we live apart." It's this kind of sad observation of the lives of the working class that repeatedly moved me on this album, as Stevens offers both realism and idealization in his portrait. The record is stacked with impressive space for Stevens' shimmering geography, and it manages a melancholy beauty; Michigan is a frost-bound tone poem in which average people live out their victories and defeats with a shadowy, dignified grace. | 2003-07-27T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2003-07-27T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Asthmatic Kitty | July 27, 2003 | 8.5 | 75a06e47-134a-4685-b1f0-8f758d561aa3 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
The debut EP from upcoming singer Ogi Ifediora introduces a gifted vocalist and charismatic performer who’s still finding her feet as a songwriter. | The debut EP from upcoming singer Ogi Ifediora introduces a gifted vocalist and charismatic performer who’s still finding her feet as a songwriter. | Ogi: Monologues EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ogi-monologues/ | Monologues EP | Los Angeles-based R&B singer Ogi Ifediora got her start posting cover songs on Instagram as a senior at Northwestern University. After PJ Morton shared her take on his song “Alright,” producer No I.D. got in touch; a record deal and tour opening for Snoh Aalegra soon followed. On her debut EP, Monologues, Ogi wields her voice with precision and joy. Though there’s room to hone her original songwriting, the project is an impressive showcase of her technical skill and vocal prowess.
Ogi’s musical background—she sang with an a capella group in college—is apparent in her enveloping harmonies and precise vocal control. The jazzy arrangements and layered vocals are dense and complex, but her singing feels effortless. Listening to Ogi’s voice wind from a gauzy falsetto to her golden deeper register on “Let Me Go,” you feel completely immersed, as if watching a wave of fog roll in. EP highlight “Bitter” boosts the energy, with syncopated vocals skipping over snappy drums and a bubbling horn line. The arrangement conveys prickly frustration at feeling inadequate in a relationship, but Ogi’s confident delivery implies that she’s still very much in control.
She has described Monologues as her “audition into the industry,” a collection of six songs selected to showcase her range. The project feels like a sample pack, covering a variety of emotional states in broad strokes. On “Let Me Go,” Ogi cooly informs a lover that they deserve someone who cares more about them. She grapples with other people’s resentment on “Envy,” flexes on “I Got It,” and devotes a ballad to a struggling loved one on “IKYK.” Each new direction could be a viable concept for a longer project, but since it never focuses on any one mood or theme, the EP feels a bit scattered.
In part, this is because the lyrics on Monologues can be vague, gesturing at feelings and experiences with less nuance than Ogi brings to her singing. “Was the problem always me?/Or the fact you can’t believe/I have what I have and that you don’t,” she sings on “Envy,” never quite moving beyond a generic description of envy itself. At other times, the metaphors can border on corny. “All these blessings falling in my lap like I’m a grandpa/All this money I go swimming in it like a tadpole,” she sings on “I Got It,” a moment of would-be bravado that comes off stilted.
But on the effervescent “Bitter,” storytelling comes second to the restive mood Ogi establishes. “I hate that I’m not what you want,” she repeats, her voice full of frustration. But as she stacks up harmonies and maneuvers around them with the ease of water slipping through your fingers, it’s also clear she’s taking pleasure in every note she sings. Even as she parses out angst, envy, and disdain, her charisma makes these songs shine. | 2022-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Artium / Atlantic | May 18, 2022 | 7.2 | 75a3c9f6-7202-4f88-809b-ee4de595520c | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
The genre-defying rapper’s third album pays tribute to the artists who helped shape his sound—and sounds like something else altogether. | The genre-defying rapper’s third album pays tribute to the artists who helped shape his sound—and sounds like something else altogether. | Pink Siifu: GUMBO’! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pink-siifu-gumbo/ | GUMBO’! | Before he was a rapper, Pink Siifu was a dancer. “I would battle people at parties,” he told the blog Passion of the Weiss in 2018. “I wasn’t a b-boy, but pop locking and krumping and dances I grew up on—I was doing that.” You can hear it in his music, which prioritizes movement and feel above almost everything else. The Alabama-born artist seems more concerned with following his own kinetic energy than abiding by the rules of genre or narrative focus.
When Siifu occupies a style, he tilts it, keeping that sense of play alive. His early Bandcamp releases were spacey, jazz-inflected sound collages that occasionally waded into ambient. He raps in koans; he doesn’t tell stories so much as he drops hints. He can create strangely memorable moments out of densely muttered lines, but he also knows when to just let the beat ride, saying only enough to propel the song along. On last year’s Negro, Siifu yelped and screamed, begging for deliverance from the earthy pain caused by racial oppression and police violence. His latest album, GUMBO’!, is a sprawling homage to the artists that purportedly shaped his sound (especially Dungeon Family). Mainly, though, it serves to prove how unique his sound is.
On GUMBO’!, Siifu deconstructs hip-hop and neo-soul, treating the genres as blank canvases for his own odd compositions. Over the G-funk ambience and clomping hi-hats of “Bussin’ (Cold),” he uses his voice as percussion, repeating the words “Snakes all eye see” in a clipped monotone. Cincinnati rapper Turich Benjy drops in with more straightforward lines (“Can’t keep fucking these dusty ass hoes/Wondering where the money had gone”) that seem to exist just to remind listeners that this was supposed to be a trap song. On “SMILE (wit yo Gold),” Siifu is backed by singers V.C.R and Coco O. and the jazz-funk band Butcher Brown, who add warm percussion and syrupy guitar. He sings the song’s title with a raspy growl of desperation that contrasts with their more mellifluous contributions; it’s as if the other musicians are pulling him away from his angst.
When Siifu wants to, he can skillfully step into the frame provided by one of his references. On the gorgeous “Scurrrrd,” a posse cut halfway through the album, he comes as close as possible to recreating a classic Outkast song. Over a Rhodes-centered beat created by Siifu and Richmond producer DJ Harrison, it opens with spoken word by Dungeon Family associate Big Rube (who famously provided some of the most poignant lines on “Liberation”) and closes with Georgia Anne Muldrow’s earnest promises of comfort and health for her son. In between all of this, Siifu details hardships and prays for his family. It’s a loving emulation, played straight and made with care.
But on most other tracks—the rage-filled “Roscoe’!,” the introspective Alchemist production “Living Proof (Family),” the playful “lng hair dnt care”—Siifu is more inscrutable. He buries his voice low in the mix and goes wherever his mood takes him, even if that makes him hard to pin down. As he told Stereogum recently, “I just want you to just listen to this, and hopefully be like, ‘Nah, Siifu his own cat. He’s on his own shit.’” GUMBO’! is an ambitious sprawl that doesn’t always work perfectly. But when it does, there’s nothing else like it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 6, 2021 | 7.4 | 75a4e5d1-6f25-4a2e-9651-6600685e3f93 | Hubert Adjei-Kontoh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hubert-adjei-kontoh/ | |
This Portland, Ore. duo have been racking up Iron & Wine comparisons but there's something a bit more avant going on beneath its rustic façade. | This Portland, Ore. duo have been racking up Iron & Wine comparisons but there's something a bit more avant going on beneath its rustic façade. | Horse Feathers: Words Are Dead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9689-words-are-dead/ | Words Are Dead | That echo chamber's a dangerous thing: A number of critics have mistakingly labeled Horse Feathers-- the Portland, Ore., duo of Justin Ringle and Peter Broderick-- another folksy Americana troupe with an interesting vocalist. Broderick, a talented 19-year-old multi-instrumentalist, certainly adds folk instruments such as banjo, mandolin, and saw to emotive, gothic backdrops; he also accents Ringle's quavery, near-falsetto with cello, piano, viola, violin, and various sorts of almost-funky percussion. Ignore the chatter-- there's something a bit more avant going on here.
The two approach music rustically, but the Iron & Wine name-checks are off the mark-- there's a different vibe and pacing and phrasing entirely. You could snag some Sam Beam beard curls on "Dustbowl", but what to do with the truly swinging send-out of "Falling Through the Roof"? Or "Untitled", a quiet bit of chamber piano that makes me think of a slow, sad, last waltz? Same goes for the syrupy keyed'n'bowed ministrations of "Like Lavender".
Ringle, who contributes guitar, banjo, and some percussion in addition to his arresting voice, is reminiscent of John Orth from Holopaw; there's something more gorgeously unhinged, though-- not mentally, but the way he sings with his entire body. You keep thinking he'll crack. At times, his pronunciations come out like a male Chan Marshall-- but on a bit too much caffeine. Listening to "Honest Doubters" from a distance, I heard the ghost of Jeff Mangum or Arthur Russell (a real ghost) via Kelley Polar.
In the end, forget the RIYL one-sheet copy and instead absorb a fragment of "Like Lavender"'s track marks: "Some things always stay the same/ How you looked wet from all the rain/ Like lavender the small of your hair, silly errs postponing your despair." Follow this with a small, stringed flourish to complete the silent epiphany. The ambiance of the album is great: "Hardwood Pews" rapidly builds from bedroom hush (and blush) to saw-bent crescendo. "Blood on the Snow" lists body parts in a somber parade-- "Their heads, their lips, their chests, their hips, they walk. Them bones they move, they talk. Their bones they bleed they rot"-- a deep-pool cello acting as slithery metronome.
Lyrically, Ringle's fond of thorny repetitions: "Goodnight, night, night" or "Like how her bark, it has calmed before her bite, bite, bite." These extra words add an emphasis, but also keep the libretto moving. For such a sweetly silent (but always swiveling) set, there's a ton of activity: "Walking and running, sucking and fucking at your will. You won't debate us, nor entertain us. It's your thrill." A truck-full of action verbs: "they move, they touch." Gathering bruises, there are trips to Heaven and Hell (and, well, Hades). Tongues "taste the sky." The boys hop a little waltz, tumbling through a bruised roof. Sometimes Ringle makes his voice quaver intentionally, stuttering with his tonsils.
Amid the blood, snow, sawdust, roses ("bones may break, parts go on bleeding"), the body's breakdown is seen as but another way to move. Worms singing in your guts, creating air holes-- you, yourself, become an instrument. Maybe this gets at what the album's title means to say: It's okay words are dead because they'll find newer forms within their decomposition. Whatever the case, Horse Feathers just keep moving (in both senses of the word...). | 2006-12-14T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2006-12-14T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Lucky Madison | December 14, 2006 | 7.5 | 75a837e7-6185-4bbf-8259-7b8b789b24d1 | Brandon Stosuy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-stosuy/ | null |
Over the last four years, Virginian guitarist Daniel Bachman has lazily meandered through the outer realms of American music. On his newest LP, he sculpts his work into a comprehensive thesis; where he once made stylistic leaps in between songs, he now ambles effortlessly. | Over the last four years, Virginian guitarist Daniel Bachman has lazily meandered through the outer realms of American music. On his newest LP, he sculpts his work into a comprehensive thesis; where he once made stylistic leaps in between songs, he now ambles effortlessly. | Daniel Bachman: Orange Co. Serenade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19605-daniel-bachman-orange-co-serenade/ | Orange Co. Serenade | Over the last four years, Virginian guitarist Daniel Bachman has lazily meandered through the outer realms of American music. Cribbing the best bits from a long line of outré acoustic guitarists, Bachman's taken an academic approach to the wide-ranging styles once herded under the umbrella of "American Primitivism," and on his newest LP, Orange Co. Serenade, he sculpts his work into a comprehensive thesis.
Where Bachman once made stylistic leaps in between songs, he now ambles effortlessly. Opener "Blue Mass" leans on a lurching drone to underpin its melodic play, which couldn't be farther from the nimble-fingered twang of "Pig Iron" that shows up just two tracks later. Bachman has gotten better at using these interstitial moments to stitch together his disparate interests.
Despite the fact that the seams show less frequently, Bachman nonetheless retains his adventurous approach to the acoustic guitar. Whether relying on subtle slide flourishes, as on "Little Lady Blues", or on the slippery, barely-there melodic leads that mark "Up and Down the C & O", he uses the familiar language of American folk music to conjure a quietude that's unique to his particular brand of guitar work. Even the tracks with more locomotive fingerpicking, like "Pig Iron" or the dreary "And Now I Am Born to Die", use minimal melodic movement as a way of eliciting stillness from that apparent motion.
Though the record is largely uniform in its instrumentation, Bachman still leaves plenty of room to ramble. Unlike William Tyler or Steve Gunn's interpolations of pop structures into instrumental guitar music, Bachman largely leaves his melodic lines open ended. Even the title track, the only track on the record that comes close to possessing a proper refrain, swells to the fullest expanses of its three-and-a-half minute runtime while exploring variations on its loping theme, until Bachman wipes it away with smears of slide work.
On Orange Co. Serenade, Bachman delves into the joyous ("Little Lady Blues") and the desolate ("We Would Be Building") with the same amount of gleeful fascination. The album underscores all the little emotional breakthroughs that Bachman has made over his career thus far, but it also serves as a reminder that he's more interested in the act of discovering rather than the discoveries themselves. | 2014-07-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-07-24T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Bathetic | July 24, 2014 | 6.8 | 75aaa5fb-2265-4b7f-999c-428e970eae8f | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
The 19-year-old rapper’s latest project is a quest of self-discovery that serves as a reminder of the power and dexterity New York’s new vanguard of artists. | The 19-year-old rapper’s latest project is a quest of self-discovery that serves as a reminder of the power and dexterity New York’s new vanguard of artists. | MIKE: Black Soap | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mike-black-soap/ | Black Soap | The easy gripe with what most people consider “lyrical” rap is that it’s preachy, that it fills space with excessive pontificating. True, words are messy, easy to trip over and to misuse. But the best artists know that the right words can hit you over the head, landing squarely in the quietest corner of your mind. MIKE, a 19-year-old rapper living in Brooklyn, works diligently to find out which words do exactly that. Over the span of several self-released projects, including last year’s excellent May God Bless Your Hustle, the rapper exhibits a knack for packing big ideas in just a handful of phrases. On his latest, the seven-track EP Black Soap, words are a tool of liberation.
The album is billed as “a collection of songs for black and brown excellence,” and a recurring theme is the discovery, and ultimate love, of self. Black Soap is itself a product of self-discovery. Last fall, MIKE traveled to his childhood hometown of London to record the record as well as reconnect with his mother who, after challenges with immigration, was separated from MIKE when he was a child. The record opens with a prayer from his mother spoken in their native Yoruba dialect. The language centers MIKE’s existence underneath his mom, the first of many tendrils of this sort of cultural specificity. The album art, made by the Brooklyn-based designers Abraham El-Makawy and Isaac Baird, takes its inspiration from black soap packaging found all over West Africa. The ebullient syncopation of the track “Of Home” is likely familiar to anyone who's ever attended the types of Nigerian celebrations that extend into the wee hours of the morning. “You can tell by my nose I’m a king” he raps on the song, alluding to distinctly African facial features as a source of pride.
As a lyricist, MIKE is fleet. He earns comparisons to baritone rappers MF DOOM and Earl Sweatshirt by exhibiting the same penchant for inventive and unexpected rhyme schemes, but MIKE isn’t a mere copycat. It’s more like the lo-fi style of those benchmarks found him—a means to get out what he needs to say. “I know the truth I’m tryna get it out my teeth,” he raps on “Ministry.”
Thematically, Black Soap is dead-set on growth. Challenges with depression color the lyrics across all of MIKE’s projects, but rather than languish in gloom, he finds the power within, and much of Black Soap feels like the first ray of light after a bout with darkness. “Remind me that I’m real/Remind me that I’m still here/Remind me that I will,” he raps on “God Save the Queen.” One of MIKE’s greatest strengths as a writer is his level of self-awareness, of both his physical presence as a black man in America, and of his emotional self. “Love is scary but it’s cheap,” he reminds us on “Ministry,” juxtaposing the brutal financial reality of New York with the need for connection.
The instrumentation on Black Soap was provided by Standing on the Corner, a crew of creatives in New York that, like MIKE’s sLUms collective, offers a decidedly more ground-level perspective of life in the city. It’s a commitment to authenticity that makes MIKE one of the more exciting young voices in rap today. If the darlings of the streaming era are the glitzy glass skyrises that litter Brooklyn, MIKE and sLUms are the neighborhood bodega still going strong. And while lyricism has slowly become synonymous with holier-than-thou didacticism, Black Soap reminds us of what’s possible when you choose your words carefully. | 2018-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Lex | May 28, 2018 | 7.8 | 75b55bf2-a353-44c5-b406-81b807ef4413 | Jeff Ihaza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeff-ihaza/ | |
Free is a collaborative, improvised mixtape of freestyles from Chance the Rapper and Lil B. At its best, the tape's live atmosphere highlights what the two have in common. What really makes this release replayable, though, are the gold foibles: the moments where both artists—especially Chance, who's not as used to this sort of thing—surprise themselves. | Free is a collaborative, improvised mixtape of freestyles from Chance the Rapper and Lil B. At its best, the tape's live atmosphere highlights what the two have in common. What really makes this release replayable, though, are the gold foibles: the moments where both artists—especially Chance, who's not as used to this sort of thing—surprise themselves. | Lil B / Chance the Rapper: Free (Based Freestyles Mixtape) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20955-free-based-freestyles-mixtape/ | Free (Based Freestyles Mixtape) | Short of perhaps Keith Jarrett, you could find no better company than Lil B for creating an album of collaborative, improvised music. For years, the elusive Berkeley rapper has built a cottage industry out of making invention-in-real-time the focal point and pleasure center of his music. Process is foregrounded, not sublimated; there is no desire to pull anything, in particular, off with a given song, just to tap into a mindset and atmosphere. This is part of what has made Lil B's unconventional style so maddening to traditionalists: Normally, the success of a freestyle is gauged by the degree to which it sounds too "good" to be one—by the rapper's ability to keep up steam. In B's world, the approach is hands-off, quasi-Eastern-philosophical; steam, as a concept, is rejected completely. Vulnerability is the Based God's most important tool: He tunnels into his moments of non-proficiency, like a free jazzer might lean into a bad note to justify it. This is, in a nutshell, B's "Based" state of mind, which was, before it became the stuff of hip-hop's most legendary meme culture, just an adjective describing a musical procedure.
With Lil B, the creative environment automatically creeps into the listening experience. Since his multiple-MySpace days in the late '00s, Lil B's music has conjured the image of a lone wolf at his laptop in the basement of his Berkeley villa, leaving the Record button red for an hour or two at a time, ripping songs to MP3 without even listening back to them. While this lonesome vision has heightened the "Based God" mystique, it also makes some of B's music feel cramped and ritualistic—a one-man-show confined to too small of a stage.
Recently, it seems as if B, too, has been feeling the claustrophobia. Tapes have been arriving at a diminishing rate, with a paltry three last year and nothing in 2015. He's been getting out of the house more—not only to do tours and motivational lectures, but to work with others. His new six-song Based Freestyles mixtape with Chicago superstar-in-the-making Chance the Rapper is the first major yield of this more social period, putting B back in human space and time to a degree we haven't heard since the days of his Soulja Boy collaboration Pretty Boy Millionaires.
Free, initially, highlights the Based elements of Chance's style, though he is usually more associated with Kendrick's more athletic tongue-twisting. Chance, like B, is interested in tapping into the rhythms and cadences of speech in his rapping: see the dialogue-y features he contributed to Kehlani and Action Bronson's recent projects. Both rappers, in their own ways, frequently make their bits of doggerel feel almost-cogent and sometimes beautiful.
But it's essential for any great duo to be foils to one another, and Free is propelled by the differences between the two young rappers as much as their shared agenda. Though Chance is a known studio rat, his art comes from a very live and extroverted tradition—the open mic stage. So while B's verses gradually dissemble instead of building in clear trajectories, Chance's are a series of razor-sharp gestures, monologues delivered to hypothetical stadiums. The younger rapper is a more apt rhythmic stylist, or at least a more hyperactive one, with a unique sense of daubed-on phrasing and improvisational timing. For Chance, the musical squiggle comes before the thought, whereas for B, rhythms get weird only when the words do. This is particularly evident on the faster tracks, "Do My Dance" (with an acid-jazz-trap beat in the vein of Acid Rap's "Chain Smoker") and the demented, strip-club-anthemic "Rare," where Chance enters with a swaggering half-hook before devolving into yips and screech ad libs. In some of these pre-verbal moments, it feels like one is truly witnessing something previously unnoticed at the heart of these rappers' artistry—what is at the root of "songwriting" for them.
What really makes this release replayable, though, are the gold foibles: the moments where both artists—especially Chance, who's not as used to this sort of thing—surprise themselves. In "First Mixtape", the most fun-loving and directly collaborative track, Chance categorizes his own rapid-fire flow almost by accident ("Need a gas mask just to rap ass fast/…As Eminem back in '96"). He breaks off, stunned, as B in the background responds with a long "Wooo!" in amazement. "Who you think you rhyming with?" Chance explodes enthusiastically, laughing. "You don't got a mixtape with Lil B!"
Likewise, on his half of the nine-plus-minute mellotron dirge "Amen", Chance sings with a soulful, beatific air, but as he heads more and more uncontrollably into the inexpressible, his phrases become stifled by giggles: "It's like God is my...on the side of my ear and I watch him talk into the shit/ I can't get into the shit, but understand that I'm blessed...God, just say 'yes.'" B, naturally, swoops in to play the Creator: "Yes, yes." Meanwhile, in the background, there are mutterings of friends coming into the studio, getting introduced to one another, and leaving, possibly weirded out ("What happened to my bros?" Chance cries out at a certain point, as if desperate for something to ground him).
All of the tracks feature engaging microdramas along these lines. To make a record of this sort— both intimate and compelling—is no small achievement: Anyone who's ever recorded themselves jamming with friends, and then forced their other friends to listen back to it afterwards, will realize this. On all fronts, Chance and B deliver, with an extra helping of humor and lust for life—even beyond the degree we might have expected from these two. When B stops ranting about how it's okay to get "a Buick or Ford" and "liv[ing] with the Lord" to turn on a dime and ask, earnestly, "How you doin' today, Chance?", I would defy anyone not to laugh, and resist the urge to play the exchange right back again. No, this is not the stuff of genius, but it's enough to save anyone's bad day. | 2015-08-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Experimental | self-released | August 10, 2015 | 7.7 | 75b80b87-a959-4f3d-b15a-880d04f8dafa | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
The teenage Baton Rouge rapper’s latest mixtape an intense and emotional collection about finding new power in freedom. His versatility and charisma are shaping a style that’s all his own. | The teenage Baton Rouge rapper’s latest mixtape an intense and emotional collection about finding new power in freedom. His versatility and charisma are shaping a style that’s all his own. | YoungBoy Never Broke Again: AI YoungBoy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/youngboy-never-broke-again-ai-youngboy/ | AI YoungBoy | The first thing to know about YoungBoy Never Broke Again, or NBA YoungBoy, is that he does most of his talking in verse. The teenage rapper from Baton Rouge is quiet outside his raps, which teem with pent-up aggression and anxiety. Because of this, many songs read like journal entries. He spills his guts in a grisly drawl still coated in a nasally boyish rasp, constantly negotiating the terms of innocence and indecency. When he was 4 years old, he broke his neck play-wrestling, and he still has scars on his face from the brace that held his head up while he healed. After dropping out of school in 9th grade, YoungBoy turned to crime, and was booked for robbery. This path escalated quickly last year when he was arrested on two counts of attempted first-degree murder, later pleading down to aggravated assault with a firearm. The murder charge came just as he was gaining traction with 38 Baby, a singsongy mixtape of cold pronouncements from a kid resigned to the violent cycle that governs his city’s rap scene.
A week after his release from jail, YoungBoy shared “Untouchable,” a post-prison screed of resilience and prosperity. “I didn’t really mean untouchable because you are touchable,” he explained. “The only thing stopping me is jail or death now. Either you’re going to see me on the sideline or you’re gonna come get rid of us.” YoungBoy seems cognizant of how real the latter threat is, for the video opens with an urgent FaceTime advisory from Meek Mill: “You gotta move or you gon’ die.” Now free and ready to realize his promise, he’s growing sharper, flowing effortlessly. YoungBoy’s new mixtape, AI YoungBoy, is an intense and emotional collection about finding new power in freedom, dedicating oneself to craft as a means of escape, enduring betrayal, and having a complicated relationship with home and the people searching for meaning there. He wants out, but the prospect of a shootout is still constantly lurking.
YoungBoy is primarily influenced by late Trill Entertainment wunderkind Lil Phat, a 19-year-old rapper killed in a murder-for-hire plot outside a Georgia hospital waiting for his daughter to be born. YoungBoy isn’t unlike Lil Phat; both Baton Rouge-born teenage shooters were implicated in robberies as juveniles, and rapped about juuging as a means to feed broken families. But retaliatory violence and real talk are far more focal to YoungBoy’s outlook. In this respect, he is a disciple of Boosie Badazz and Kevin Gates, Baton Rouge cult heroes with rap sheets who relive street life through gritted teeth. None are wordsmiths, but they are all illustrators, and YoungBoy can be nearly as visceral. He sometimes embodies one or the other, on songs like “Murda Gang” and “Ride on Em,” which channel their respective energies. Then there’s the croaking “Left Hand Right Hand,” his first clear-cut hit, which clearly embodies Gates.
These are the voices that inform YoungBoy’s, but he has a style and charisma all his own. His early work was less defined and somewhat limited in tone, but on AI YoungBoy he evolves as a writer and rapper, and he begins to realize his versatility. He refuses to mold himself in the image of any one artist (he once rapped, “I ain’t never had a role model, watched Chief Keef growing up”), and here he mixes spacey outsider trap and local country blues. He is as comfortable flexing in his shoot ‘em ups and he is decompressing in his half-ballads (“No. 9,” “Twilight”).
There is a remorselessness to YoungBoy’s murder threats that can be chilling (especially given his circumstances), but he has a softer side that complicates him. “Gotta keep my head above water, gotta make it through/I do this shit for my momma and my lil brother too,” he raps on “Untouchable.” Then there are heart-stopping admissions like this one on “Graffiti”: “You know I got money but I’m in a hole/Scared I’ma die when I’m out on the road.” These moving flashes of accountability and paranoia reveal a teenager indoctrinated by the streets, seeking an escape hatch. In this light, the chest-puffing “No Smoke” and the bouncy, gun-brandishing romp “GG” come off as necessary warnings and preemptive strikes, measures taken in self-defense. All at once, his music communicates the ways hood masculinity corrupts and guards black boys. | 2017-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 15, 2017 | 7.6 | 75ba3b87-738c-4567-9fad-64ed83041b18 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Fat Joe and Remy Ma had their biggest hit together in 2004 before last year’s comeback “All the Way Up.” On this collaborative LP, their hard styles are too similar to make for a compelling dynamic. | Fat Joe and Remy Ma had their biggest hit together in 2004 before last year’s comeback “All the Way Up.” On this collaborative LP, their hard styles are too similar to make for a compelling dynamic. | Fat Joe / Remy Ma: Plata O Plomo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22892-plata-o-plomo/ | Plata O Plomo | Fat Joe can no longer take hits for granted. While never a megastar, Joe has proved himself one of the most resilient rappers of all time, with a lengthy career spanning Big Punisher, Ja Rule, and DJ Khaled. At a point, he looked to be one of those old icons, like Snoop Dogg, whose stature seemingly grandfathered him into radio play for life. But then the hits dried up. Before his comeback single with Remy Ma “All the Way Up” returned him to the charts last year and earned a pair of Grammy nominations, it had been nearly seven years since Joe released his last commercial album, and almost a full decade since his last Top 40 hit.
In truth, “All the Way Up” would have been a hit with or without him. It’s primarily a showcase for Cool & Dre’s deliriously celebratory beat and a never-better feature from French Montana, which makes it a Fat Joe hit in the same way that “Fuckin’ Problems” was an A$AP Rocky hit. No matter the means, though, a smash on this scale is a major feat for any rapper. And so on Plata o Plomo, the belated follow-up to 2010’s The Darkside, Vol. 1, Joe goes to almost superstitious extremes trying repeat that single’s formula. He brings on Remy Ma as an equal partner, recruits Cool & Dre as primary producers, and invites back French Montana for its second single, “Cookin’.” Despite his best efforts, lightning does not strike twice.
Joe’s great gambit is going halfsies with Remy Ma. Her own career was limping along before “All the Way Up,” and the two had previously scored the biggest hit of their respective careers together—2004’s inescapable “Lean Back”—so it figures they’ve come to view each other as lucky rabbits’ feet. And recently, other New York rap lifers have found second winds with these kinds of collab albums. Smoke DZA and Pete Rock just teamed for a widely praised record, and Joell Ortiz has rarely sounded more alive than he did on his Salaam Remi-produced album last year with No Panty, his group with neighbors Bodega Bamz and Nitty Scott.
Collaborations like this work best when there’s some meaningful contrast between the performers, though, and Joe and Remy Ma are too similar to establish any kind of yin/yang dynamic. Both stem from a school of New York hip-hop that values presence over personality, and they both rap with meticulous enunciation, punctuating each bar with percussive emphasis. Their voices hit like rocks on concrete. That may be catnip for some diehard New York rap enthusiasts, but for younger listeners who came up with the nimble, free-form expression of modern Atlanta rap, that delivery can feel downright arthritic. What scans as hard for one generation of hip-hop fans just scans as stiff to another.
And while Joe can bend just enough to fit different styles—he’s been doing it since he was biting Das EFX flows on his 1993 debut Represent, riggity-riggity-rather blatantly—Remy is inflexible to a fault. She assumes a default battle stance even on songs that in no way call for it, like Ty Dolla $ign’s smooth ’80s R&B homage “Money Showers,” or the Sevyn Streeter-featuring DeBarge/Blackstreet flip “Go Crazy.” She still continues to rap about shitting on her enemies, too. She does it on two different tracks.
Plata o Plomo does feature one strong single candidate: the Caribbean-flavored the-Dream feature “Heartbreak.” Joe delivers his loosest performance in years, and for once even Remy Ma unwinds a bit and breaks out the suntan lotion. But more representative of the album’s conservative approach is the mid-album champagne clink “How Long.” The song’s yawn of a chorus is supposed to be a boast about their veteran status—“How long?/How long?/How long we been getting to the money?/How long?/How long we been gettin’ it?”—yet through sheer repetition it becomes a kind of commentary on their songwriting: How long have we been rapping about this? How long have we been returning to these sounds? Without running the math, it sure feels like it’s been ages. | 2017-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Empire | February 20, 2017 | 5.3 | 75ba43c1-bd1e-4c16-b939-6232018294cc | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
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