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California duo Wreck and Reference provide a radical vision of what the metal of the future might look like with their latest album, Want. Metal claims to be challenging, but Wreck and Reference go one step further, challenging the genre's practicioners to pull themselves out of complacency. | California duo Wreck and Reference provide a radical vision of what the metal of the future might look like with their latest album, Want. Metal claims to be challenging, but Wreck and Reference go one step further, challenging the genre's practicioners to pull themselves out of complacency. | Wreck and Reference: Want | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19492-wreck-reference-want/ | Want | For all of its bluster of rebellion and individuality, metal remains a particularly conservative genre. There are entire labels affiliated with the genre that are dedicated to the idea of preserving the old, signing a glut of bands that, at best, unfavorably smack of the innovators they're so slavishly devoted. So California duo Wreck and Reference provide a radical vision of what the metal of the future might look like with their latest album, Want. Their version of metal does not have guitars, bass, leather, devil horns, or any other metal tropes; their arsenal is comprised of a sampler, drums, voice, and bottomless despair.
Limited instrumentation does not stop Wreck and Reference from bringing in a range of dark sounds, as they have a habit of flipping their own script quickly. This is evident from the smooth transition from the industrial squeals of opener “Corpse Museum” into the piano-driven “Apollo Beneath The Whip”, or the shift from the dimly-lit lurch of “Bankrupt” to their interpretation of doom metal on “A Glass Cage For An Animal”. Want maintains a consistent atmosphere throughout, excelling even as it broadens and warps the definition of metal. Felix Skinner, who handles electronics and some vocals, conjures up the closest thing to big, blocky riffs that an experimental effort like this can offer, feeding them through dehumanized filters.
While Wreck and Reference are redefining metal, “Whip” is their most metal song in a sense, mainly because of its enveloping buildup. As drummer Ignat Frege gets busier, Skinner’s piano sounds more nervous, and his vocals sound grander in their misery, resembling a charismatic preacher that wants to swallow you in the greater void. The songs on Want are too diverse for Wreck and Reference to possess a “signature song,” but “Whip” deserves to become one of their staples.
For a band driven by electronics, it might seem that using a drum machine would make the most sense, Frege serves as both a compliment and a foil to Skinner, amplifying his movements without going overboard. He also takes a freer approach to drumming on Want, removing blast beats from his repertoire; on “Museum”, he flirts with the technique but ends up holding back just enough to lend a looseness that works with Skinner's electronic freakouts. Frege's cymbal rides on “Bankrupt” are tense, making Skinner’s howls and spare electronic hums loom even more dreadfully. It's often perceived that hitting the snare and double bass hard and fast is a surefire way to sound “heavy”, but Frege challenges that notion by doing more with less. His performance is such a secret weapon that it’s quite missed on “Machine of Confusion”, an ambient break that is the only song not to contain drums.
Amidst the boundless experimentation, there's one flickering light of traditional metal on Want. Closing track “Apologies” features swells that are oddly reminiscent of the opening to "Cathedral”, Eddie Van Halen’s solo guitar piece on 1982’s Diver Down where he gorgeously replicated a church organ. "Apologies" is the closest thing the album comes to providing a comforting presence, in terms of both lushness and familiarity, but it’s still buried beneath the overbearing existentialism that Skinner and Frege traffic in, its beauty interrupted by faint snare rolls and creeping static.
Most metal groups are either blind to the future or are scared shitless by it. Wreck and Reference take on what’s on the horizon, and while most metal groups are content to yell that they don’t give a fuck, Skinner and Frege put it into principle too. Metal claims to be challenging, but on Want, Wreck and Reference go one step further, challenging the genre's practicioners to pull themselves out of complacency. | 2014-07-17T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-07-17T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Metal | The Flenser | July 17, 2014 | 7.7 | 75bc0f78-f8d7-43b0-b70b-cfba31dac3cc | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
Kurt Vile now builds albums the way other artists might compile demo collections. His latest LP conjures images of dreaming and traveling without worrying where they lead. | Kurt Vile now builds albums the way other artists might compile demo collections. His latest LP conjures images of dreaming and traveling without worrying where they lead. | Kurt Vile: (watch my moves) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kurt-vile-watch-my-moves/ | (watch my moves) | Listening to (watch my moves) is not like watching a man relax in a hammock. It’s more like following him as he peruses the house for all the right snacks and just the right book, as he steps into the yard to assess his surroundings and find a sweet spot in the sun, as he sets up a hammock between two trees and settles in to recline until, aw man, it’s time to get dinner goin’. The songs on Kurt Vile’s latest album are patient and methodical, building gradually as the lyrics descend from a general premise—say, getting on a plane or chilling in the practice space—to casual observations of what’s happening in the music itself: narrating the mood before receding into a tranquil guitar solo or dreamy coda that feels like the payoff for a long day’s work.
Anyone accustomed to soundtracking their routines with little made-up songs for their cat or houseplants will immediately recognize the tone. “Thoughts become pictures become movies in my mind/Welcome to the KV horror drive in movie marathon,” Vile announces in “Like Exploding Stones” before downplaying his invitation with a sheepish aside: “But I’m just kidding and I’m just playing.” Within the first two minutes of opener “Goin on a Plane Today,” he announces plans to chug a beer, listen to some Neil Young, and try a mindfulness exercise of checking in with his younger, more insecure self. His message from the future? Guess what, things turned out pretty OK.
At 42, Vile has worked hard for this kind of self-assurance. He’s inked a new deal with the prestigious jazz label Verve and met some of his heroes. He’s written a block of slow-motion anthems to form the staples of a festival set and developed the kind of sprawling discography that feels more akin to the classic rock era he adores than the fickle streaming era, even as playlist curators and commercial music directors have embraced his vibed-out sound. All the while, Vile seems no further from his muse than he was back in his early lo-fi days, when you could only barely see the shape of his singer-songwriter ambitions through the pot smoke and amplifier fuzz.
The result of this consistency is two-pronged. On one hand, it makes minor updates feel more rewarding. Nowadays, Vile’s singing leans toward the deadpan spoken word of late-career Lou Reed, an approach that helps the stoner-dad observations land harder (“That teapot sings in a beautiful falsetto”) and melodic outliers like “Jesus on a Wire” stand out from the pack. On the other hand, you are less likely than ever to hear a new Kurt Vile song and think, “Wow, maybe I didn’t have this guy all figured out.” For large swaths of the record, if you’re not paying close attention, you might wonder if he set a loop on the drum machine, picked up a guitar, and forgot the tape was running.
In both his music and lyrics, Vile conjures images of dreaming and traveling, moving forward and getting lost in thought. He works well with duet partners—Cate Le Bon on “Jesus on a Wire,” Chastity Belt on “Chazzy Don’t Mind”—and remains a singular guitar player, even as his loose, major-key melodies become harder to differentiate. More playful and atmospheric than 2018’s Bottle It In, the music sometimes recalls Vile’s earliest material, when his songs were distinguished more by their textures—the muted horn arrangement in “Goin on a Plane Today,” the descending slide guitar in “Mount Airy Hill (Way Gone),” the woozy synth in “Fo Sho”—than the actual songwriting.
One track cuts through the fog, and it’s Vile’s cover of “Wages of Sin,” an eerie Bruce Springsteen outtake written between Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A. It makes sense that Vile gravitates toward this kind of obscurity, something that likely materialized during a single day in the studio. (Springsteen himself forgot it existed until coming across the recording while poring through master tapes for 1998’s outtakes collection Tracks.) Ignoring an ominous sense of desperation that Vile rarely approaches in his own writing, you could easily mistake it for one of Vile’s originals: the collage-like string of memories and visions, the unresolved chord progression that seems born from those early, sleepless hours when every thought feels frayed and bittersweet.
The song also serves as an interesting center of the Venn diagram between Vile and the War on Drugs, former bandmates and fellow Springsteen acolytes whose path has diverged considerably from his own. While the War on Drugs, also now on a major label, build their glossy, meticulous arena rock piece-by-piece to summon the magic of their heroes’ biggest hits, Vile has burrowed into the messier corners: He’s less interested in the endless studio hours spent perfecting “Born to Run” than all the other songs neglected on the cutting room floor, half-formed or unfinished, lost to time or resurrected decades later.
In some ways, Vile now builds his albums the way other artists might compile their demo collections. He wants you to hear the wide-open, negative space where someone might place a chorus; he wants you to zone out to the endless jams before they get sculpted into tighter compositions; he wants you to consider the banal, vulnerable diary entries that often lead to sharper observations. Occasionally, he frames this all as a self-soothing mechanism against the uncertainty that courses through his lyrics: “Even if I’m wrong, gonna sing-a-my song till the ass crack o’ dawn,” goes a line in “Fo Sho.” “And it’s probably gonna be another long song.” The deeper Vile gets into his career, the more his creative process seems to blend with the results. On (watch my moves), he invites us to follow the introspective journey from the spark of an idea to its steady pursuit to its contented fadeout, knowing the next flash of inspiration could be just on the other side. | 2022-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Verve | April 15, 2022 | 7.4 | 75bf58d7-d818-43dd-a79d-bd3cbae9e82b | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The South African singer’s star-making debut is a lithe, contemporary take on pop-R&B that pulses with the log-drum heartbeat of amapiano. | The South African singer’s star-making debut is a lithe, contemporary take on pop-R&B that pulses with the log-drum heartbeat of amapiano. | Tyla: Tyla | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tyla-tyla/ | Tyla | “Water,” Tyla’s first major label single, had a rare sort of alchemy: sultry, cheeky vocals on a humid dancefloor anthem with a chorus so divine that hearing it over and over was actually appealing. The 22-year-old’s lithe blend of amapiano and R&B shot her to seemingly instant ubiquity in the second half of 2023, as “Water” blasted from streetside subwoofers, through club sound systems, and across the TikToks of young acolytes and horny dudes. (The song’s oiled-up video featured Tyla slow-wining as she doused herself with a bottle of agua, accounting in part for the horny dudes.) A little over six months after its release, “Water” had earned Tyla the Recording Academy’s first-ever Grammy for African Music Performance, edging out global superstars like Burna Boy and Davido, as well as Asake and Olamide’s well-deserving “Amapiano.” It was the kind of industry anointment—off one big single, not yet an album—that aspiring pop stars dream about.
Though amapiano has ascended from South African clubs to the global charts, the broad appeal of “Water” lies in Tyla’s voice, which seems attuned to contemporary R&B in the same way that Rihanna’s debut single “Pon de Replay” was geared to split the middle between pop and dancehall. Tyla’s pre-“Water” music, crafted not long after she graduated high school, inclined towards the underground; her first single “Getting Late,” from 2019, emphasized the sparse interplay between her angelic voice and club-centric 808s. “Been Thinking,” from 2021, had its own anthemic chorus and a clever interpolation of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” displaying her admiration for Y2K-era radio hits on a rhythm whose lineage threaded through South African kwaito and back to another diasporic genre, UK funky.
On her debut album Tyla, she flexes her fidelity to pop-R&B, weaving through its lingua franca—attraction to bad boys, puzzlement over bad boys, and finally the cathartic elation of moving on. It helps that the album pulses with amapiano’s log-drum heartbeat, with Wizkid collaborator and “Water” producer Sammy SoSo co-helming most tracks and brushing them to silky fluidity. The terrain is familiar but Tyla is playful within it, as on “Breathe Me,” a song about sex with a paramedic analogy (“Mouth to mouth when you’re touching me/Open up baby I’ll fill your lungs/CPR”) and a song-length meditation on how Tyla’s body is worthy of a high-end gallery (“ART”).
She’s a savvy singer, capable of a full belt while mostly residing in the realm of sensuous breathiness, which gives her songs the air of an internal monologue. The vocal intimacy betrays her influences—she’s studied the Aaliyah canon—and her rendition is committed but cool, like she’s singing from the back of the club and hasn’t yet removed her sunglasses. In “On and On,” the Babygirlest of these tracks in name and execution, she unwinds the chorus as though whispering a secret, her easy melisma slinking through the bass.
On “No. 1,” Nigerian star Tems drops in with a welcome jolt, her vocal power contrasting with Tyla’s charming effervescence. “Jump,” with Atlanta rapper Gunna and St. Thomas dancehall deejay Skillibeng, is a black-light banger that slinks “from Jozi to Ibiza,” though I’m begging for an edit without Gunna rhyming “Put some carats in your ear” with “Wanna put it in her rear.” (Perhaps I’m just “in the wrong place with the right energy,” as Tyla sings on the lovely, flange-drenched Afropop track “Priorities.”)
Gunna’s presence in general is a bit confusing, suggesting the shadow hand of a music conglomerate, as is an appearance by Becky G, singing in Spanglish over the delectable “On My Body,” which showcases amapiano’s deep house influence; it sounds great, but what’s the connection other than to create an avenue into the lucrative “Latin music” market? Meanwhile, “Girl Next Door,” Tyla’s excellent 2023 collab with Beninese-Nigerian singer Ayra Starr, is nowhere to be found. But this is the kind of decentralization that occurs upon reaching the mainstream, even while being nestled in a very specific sound—the preordained path of a gifted young musician who became a near-instant star. | 2024-03-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-27T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fax / Epic | March 27, 2024 | 8 | 75c20d78-7487-425a-b141-dceccc5ec1d8 | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
Following the camp-infused club music of 2017’s Shaneera, Al Qadiri once again examines questions of gender and representation in the Arab world, this time invoking women poets of the Middle Ages. | Following the camp-infused club music of 2017’s Shaneera, Al Qadiri once again examines questions of gender and representation in the Arab world, this time invoking women poets of the Middle Ages. | Fatima Al Qadiri: Medieval Femme | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fatima-al-qadiri-medieval-femme/ | Medieval Femme | Like certain Celtic druids or Rome’s emperor Constantine, the 7th-century Arabic poet known as Al-Khansa leapt into an unfamiliar cosmos, converting to the nascent faith of Islam during middle age (Muhammad himself was said to be a fan). She composed elegies in an era of social upheaval and imperial collapse, including this defiant lament for her own brother:
Thus I shall weep for you as long as ringdoves wail,
as long as night stars shine for travelers.
I’ll not make peace with people that you fought
until black pitch turns white.
The new Fatima Al Qadiri album Medieval Femme takes inspiration from female Arabic poets of the Middle Ages, and it quotes directly from Al-Khansa’s verse on “Tasakuba.” A soft-synth lute melody wanders until it becomes only faintly audible, the sound of footsteps through a cavern. As Al-Khansa once passed down these half-remembered pagan rituals to Baghdad’s grand libraries, Al Qadiri gives the poet’s threnodies a modern context.
On Al Qadiri’s previous release, Shaneera, she returned to Kuwait, where she grew up, to record purposefully outrageous club music. She lifted her lyrics from drag routines and Grindr chats, and posed as an evil queen on the cover. This record turns inwards, its archetypal women more yearning than commanding. Al Qadiri looked to the past for instrumentation as well, evoking antique ouds; little percussion can be heard, and digital effects only bring subtle estrangement. “Sheba” interrupts a reverberating organ with kick drums, as if waking from a hypnotic trance, while “Golden” draws out the title into a distorted mantra. I thought of the bardcore “Hips Don’t Lie” cover that a streamer friend often plays, where Shakira’s single becomes the soundtrack for a rival seductively lifting your chin with their sword-tip. Al Qadiri dislocates the standard images of courtly longing: Imagine a scented garden on the moon, or thwarted lovers crying out to each other around some impossibly curlicued balcony.
Left alone long enough, dance music can drift into languor, as when Donna Summer sighed, “Love to love you, baby,” for 17 straight minutes. The critic Richard Dyer once argued that disco’s sinuous rhythms “restore eroticism to the whole of the body.” Medieval Femme, barely half an hour long, uses repetition to suggest open space rather than abundance. Its songs feel like movements of a single composition. “Vanity” winds Al Qadiri’s regal vocal along melodies strung with lambent synth tones; “Qasmuna (Dreaming)” returns to that same infatuated phrase as the singing grows more and more otherworldly. So many medieval love poems dramatize private desire through the ceremony of speaking it. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish called back to that contradiction with one of his early verses: “Rita’s name was a feast in my mouth/Rita’s body was a wedding in my blood.” The austere style of Al Qadiri’s music makes its beseeching words sound all the more bereft.
“Zandaq,” the final track on Medieval Femme, is the only one that uses a traditional Arabic scale and simultaneously the most radical, an airy ecology of plucked strings and flutes like mourning birds. Microtones echo as they might in nature, carrying the gentlest sense of desolation. Al Qadiri brings together past and future in an uncanny rhyme, nodding toward loss without wallowing in torpor. Walter Benjamin, who appreciated with ambivalence the political force of sadness, once wrote: “Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to rescue them.” There are no such hollow forms among Al Qadiri’s music. Like the poet who vowed to weep until constellations burn out, she remains unreconciled.
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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. | 2021-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | May 20, 2021 | 7.7 | 75d02a99-0b1c-4460-a659-b950ac8ea047 | Chris Randle | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-randle/ | |
Decades after it surfaced as a bootleg, a collection of demos from the late 1970s reveals hidden threads running through a crucial moment in the UK post-punk legends’ evolution. | Decades after it surfaced as a bootleg, a collection of demos from the late 1970s reveals hidden threads running through a crucial moment in the UK post-punk legends’ evolution. | Wire: Not About to Die | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wire-not-about-to-die/ | Not About to Die | Wire were never much for fan service. On the televised performance captured on the Wire on the Box: 1979 CD/DVD set, bassist Graham Lewis bats away an audience member’s demand for “I Am the Fly” by gravely informing him, “We don’t play requests,” like a boarding-school headmaster telling an orphan there’s no more porridge. That philosophy has served them well: The UK art-punk pioneers have thrived for the better part of 45 years by largely avoiding the things that 45-year-old bands do to stay in the newsfeed, like anniversary tours, trendspotting collaborations, or self-mythologizing biopics. Wire don’t give the people what they want so much as what they think they deserve.
But while Wire have always been paragons of anti-nostalgia, they also recognize that a lot of the stuff that gets left off their albums takes on a life of its own, acquiring a mythic status among fans that its creators never quite intended. And though they haven’t been shy about bringing castaway material to market via live albums or modernized re-recordings, Wire’s latest move constitutes their most extreme act of pride-swallowing to date: They’re giving an official release to an old bootleg they once wished never existed, but have come to recognize as a valuable snapshot of their evolution in its most dramatic phase.
On their 1977 debut, Pink Flag, Wire made a convincing case for being the world’s first hardcore band, setting new standards in brevity and velocity that the likes of Minor Threat would later use as their starting point. But within its opening seconds, 1978’s Chairs Missing reduced that legacy to an afterthought, introducing a more patient yet more peculiar strain of avant-pop that, with 1979’s 154, opened up into vast expanses of synth-frosted ambience and mutant prog. Cue up these three albums back to back to back, and you could be forgiven for wondering if you were still listening to the same group. But when it first surfaced on some fly-by-night imprint in the early ’80s, the unauthorized Not About to Die revealed a steady linear trajectory connecting albums that seemed to be separated by leaps and bounds. Comprising cassette demos passed around the EMI offices circa 1978-79, Not About to Die functions as a real-time document of a band caught between the idea of cranking out Pink Flag II and the reality that they were already getting bored of punk.
The songs collected here have dribbled out on various official releases over the years, whether through now out-of-print compilations or as reissue bonus tracks. This edition of Not About to Die brings them to vinyl for the first time, presenting a standalone “lost” album that provides a clear, chronological view of Wire’s metamorphosis in the late ’70s. And while the new remastering job can’t completely mask the album’s dubbed-cassette roots, the wobbly fidelity is ultimately overpowered by the kinetic thrill of the most innovative band of punk’s first wave. Of Not About to Die’s 18 songs, only half wound up seeing official release at the time, and the rest damn well deserved to.
The album’s first side reminds us that, for all their turbo-charged aggression and militaristic shouting, Wire also had hooks and humor to spare. Had they opted to take a safer route for their second album, discarded delights like “Oh No Not So (Save the Bullet)” and the ba-ba-ba-bouncy “Love Ain’t Polite” could’ve positioned Wire as serious challengers to the Buzzcocks. The band teased at this direction with the release of their 1978 stopgap single “Dot Dash” / “Options R”; the latter track is featured here in more or less finished form. But an early take on “French Film Blurred” provides a stark indicator of just how swiftly and severely Wire would change course. The version that appears on Not About to Die is a scrappy rave-up that would’ve been right at home on Pink Flag, but when the song surfaced on Chairs Missing just a few months later, all that remained were the lyrics, which singer/guitarist Colin Newman applied to an entirely different arrangement that tiptoed the line between eerily calm psychedelia and time-bomb tension.
While no other song on this set underwent quite as radical a transformation on the journey from demo to post-punk classic, the 154-era material included here is equally fascinating. By that record, Wire’s punk roots had been all but vanquished by their growing affinity for proto-industrial propulsion, gothic grandeur, and futurist sound design, so it’s a real treat to hear steely, synth-streaked standards like “I Should Have Known Better” (née “Ignorance No Plea”) and “On Returning” in more primitive, violent form, while charting the development of “The Other Window” from Newman’s pogo-ready romp to a queasy spoken-word set piece recited by guitarist Bruce Gilbert. Alas, the sheer rapidity of Wire’s progression meant they could no longer accommodate simpler pleasures like “Stepping Off Too Quick (Not About to Die),” whose slow, sustained intro tees up an exuberant jangle-punk surge that anticipates the Feelies’ epochal Crazy Rhythms. Newman has claimed this song contains “the best intro to any song ever,” but even that was apparently not enough to meet Wire’s exacting standards at the time. So if you’ve ever been to a Wire show and had your hollered requests for “12XU” or “Outdoor Miner” met with derisive stares from the stage, take heart: Sometimes, this band ignores even its own members’ favorites. | 2022-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Pinkflag | June 25, 2022 | 7.8 | 75e6ec8a-92ea-4610-ba5e-effc5324469b | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Featuring Mikey Young of Eddy Current Suppression Ring, among others, Total Control is as close to a supergroup as a tandem of cult Australian punks can get. Surprisingly, their debut LP surpasses even the top-shelf efforts from their other bands. | Featuring Mikey Young of Eddy Current Suppression Ring, among others, Total Control is as close to a supergroup as a tandem of cult Australian punks can get. Surprisingly, their debut LP surpasses even the top-shelf efforts from their other bands. | Total Control: Henge Beat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16143-henge-beat/ | Henge Beat | For the most part, "supergroup" is a relative term. It's a descriptor that itself holds a load of other nebulous, subjective ideas, such as "success," "relevance," and the notion of a "primary band." But with musicians-- especially nowadays-- being prone to enlist in three or four groups at a time, devoting a fairly even amount of attention to all of them, is there any way to logically keep track of which bands are bands and which bands are side-projects or supergroups?
Total Control are as close to a supergroup as a tandem of cult Australian punks can get. Each member is involved in another band, the most well-known of which being guitarist Mikey Young's Eddy Current Suppression Ring-- which, if you only have a passing knowledge of current garage-rock, can elicit the same sort of confused blank stare as if you told someone your band's most famous member also plays in the Growlers. Thankfully, when mild obscurity is on a group's side, they are allowed few expectations to conquer and the chance to legitimately surprise people. But even if you're intimately familiar with Eddy Current Suppression Ring, UV Race, Straightjacket Nation, and the Collapse, Henge Beat is startlingly good; good enough to surpass even the top-shelf efforts from the members' other bands.
As you might expect from a band named after a six-minute Motels single, Total Control possess a rich knowledge of a very specific point in music history. Though bearing no resemblance to the song in which they've derived their name, most of their key influences were very much active in 1979, the year the single was released. Opener "See More Glass" is indebted to Suicide's second self-titled album. Shades of late-period Roxy Music can be found in closer "Love Performance". Wire, the Buzzcocks, Joy Division, and Swell Maps all slow up in the strands of Total Control's DNA.
But if Henge Beat were simply a 36-minute post-punk genre exercise, it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining. The band explores a different realm of possibilities in every song, punctuating creeping lurches with ear-splitting explosions and delivering spacey instrumentals not incredibly far removed from elevator music right after. "The Hammer" is eerie, black-clad darkwave. "Shame Thugs" sounds like alternate title screen music for beloved Super Nintendo RPG EarthBound. "No Bibs" comes off like SST hardcore thrown into vertigo. (If you have an older sibling that grew up in the 1980s and passed you all of their coolest punk records when they went off to college, give them a copy of Henge Beat and they may shed actual tears of joy.)
As if the ultra-cohesive fusion of punk music's fruitful first decade wasn't enough, Dan Stewart (Straightjacket Nation) makes for a compelling frontman, a lyricist weaned on Salinger and Philip K. Dick whose vocal range stays in the pocket but exhibits a great deal of versatility regardless. His taste in literature proves that he knows the value of a good narrator: The greedy factory owner in "Retiree" barks, "keep them at work," in an icy, robotic tone while looking at a gold watch ticking down the days. "Meds II" captures the redundancy of self-medicated culture-- through methods both legal and otherwise-- with the lyric, "Taking pills to remember to take pills to forget."
"Love Performance" can sound glittery and optimistic due to its blinking neon synths and "these are not the last days" refrain, but it's actually a rumination on our fantasies of being eulogized ("In the last days, they'll sing your praise"), finding Stewart pitching rocks at the celebratory stance of the supposedly righteous whenever they think the world's number is being called (think Y2k, the rapture, the end of the Mayan calendar). Album centerpiece "Carpet Rash" finds Stewart at his most detached vocally while crafting an array of evocative imagery ("Drinking detergent and licking the walls/ Eating your breakfast in shower stalls"), writing a song that fully embodies how desperate, unfulfilling, and hopeless sex can sometimes be.
Throughout the entirety of Henge Beat, there is a sharp fluidity in all of its elements, from the interplay of the band's members to its lyrical concepts. In spite of being primarily described as a composite of members from other groups, Total Control display the kind of unity that veteran bands take years to cultivate. They make you realize that a lot of the best "supergroups" are merely regular old groups with members noteworthy for being excellent at what they do. | 2012-01-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2012-01-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Iron Lung | January 11, 2012 | 7.8 | 75eb92ba-cb4e-4b6e-8b37-2b596bbc86a5 | Martin Douglas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/martin-douglas/ | null |
Mostly recorded before Pimp C passed away in 2007, the final UGK album is steeped in the craft the duo took years to perfect. | Mostly recorded before Pimp C passed away in 2007, the final UGK album is steeped in the craft the duo took years to perfect. | UGK: UGK 4 Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13073-ugk-4-life/ | UGK 4 Life | "Back from the dead." Delivered by Pimp C, these are among the first words you hear on UGK 4 Life, and unfortunately, it's a sentiment delivered way less metaphorically than we're used to. Lives are cut short with a sad frequency in hip-hop, but Pimp C's early death was something of an anomaly: too often, ascendant talents are snuffed out before we get a full glimpse of their capabilities. But by 2007, UGK had become something like Houston's answer to Gang Starr, a partnership that thrived on consistency and longevity while their peer groups either broke up, soldiered on in an unknowable format, or just fell the fuck off completely (I'm looking at you 8Ball & MJG).
So, yeah-- UGK 4 Life doesn't dwell a whole lot on what the future holds in large part because it's so steeped in the craft they took years to perfect. Though it lacks something as jump-off-the-screen as "Int'l Players Anthem" and the feel-good momentousness of a #1 debut on Billboard, it also lacks double-album stuffing filler. Though probably not the best UGK album, it might be the strongest illustration of what they do best. As with most of their material, the vast majority of the UGK 4 Life's action takes place behind a woodgrain wheel, in the vicinity of a pistol, or inside various female orifices, with only the incredibly ill-advised Akon spot about erectile function ("Hard as Hell") to fuck up the flow. Of course, there are still plenty State of the Streets sermons, as "Purse Come First" makes the latent political awareness in Bun B's raps come to the forefront ("it's a new world order, at least that's what I read"). But even if Pimp C opened up about his image ("I look like this, I don't talk it/ I make 'em think I'm dumb"), he still ended his verse with a blowjob joke.
While UGK's albums have always delivered, I never quite shared the opinion that they're godbody MC's. For me, there's not enough clever wordplay and not enough detailed storytelling-- basically that whole East Coast bias bullshit. But maybe due to the proliferation of Kanye-jacking newbies who used to rap and now wanna sing, I've come to appreciate UGK as having two of the best voices in hip-hop. It's a dynamic that's been explored over-and-over-- the deeper, more methodical cadence balancing out the nasal loose cannon. Bun B's performance is a masterwork of nuance here, sounding doubled even when it's obvious he's not. His oaken, sturdy intonations give authority to anything he's saying, whether introspective ("The Pimp and the Bun") or just stuck on the same ol' bullshit (just about everything else). As for Pimp C, it's easy to point out that nearly all of his metaphors on this record are food-based and related to him getting his dick sucked, but he remains untouched in terms of delivering hooks and his mere accent can still be the highlight of any track. Just check "She Luv It" for the incomprehensible pronunciation of "barbecue rib," wherein the former word has fewer syllables than the latter, or the entirety of "Everybody Wanna Ball", where he takes an obvious line and flips into a spirited performance on his own terms.
There's also a nice "Eh, why not?" feel to the guest list: there's Akon, Ronald Isley, B-Legit, and E-40, but also Snoop and Too $hort (guess what the song they're on is about) and even commercial non-starters like Big Gipp. The common thread through all of them here is that they're all on UGK territory, and they don't get beats so much as music, steaming organ trills and wah-wah guitar filling out the backdrop and rendering even the most smutty material sultry. The delightfully nasty "She Luv It" could even be a hit if it didn't begin with Pimp C trying "to fit [my] whole dick and nuts inside your mooooouth" and end with his advice on female grooming. Same for "Harry Asshole", which raises the question of how it could be filthier than its title and answers with "feat. Lil' Boosie and Webbie."
Is it weird for UGK 4 Life to make pretty much no mention whatsoever of the fact that half of the rapping is done by someone who died a year and a half before its release? A little-- Sleepy Brown gets himself off the milk carton to propose a toast to Pimp during the ice-grilled rumination of "Swishas & Erb" (possibly a nod to OutKast's similar-sounding "Crumblin' Erb"), and only then do you realize it's the only Bun B solo performance on the whole thing. But UGK never seemed like the type to buy into a whole lot of self-mythologizing, maudlin or otherwise. You'd expect something of that sort from the penultimate "Da Game Been Good to Me", but instead it might as well be subtitled "But Not to You", as Pimp and Bun talk down rappers who failed to respect the game like they did. It makes sense: As long as there's grain to be gripped, lanes to be switched, and, for better or worse, way too many words that rhyme with "bitch," UGK's music remains timeless in its own way. | 2009-05-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-05-26T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Jive | May 26, 2009 | 7.9 | 75f3551c-2210-4430-b8e2-07a14aa87651 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
This compilation gathers experimental musicians like Dan Deacon, David Grubbs, Senyawa and others, all of whom explore the strange sounds they can make from eccentric instruments. | This compilation gathers experimental musicians like Dan Deacon, David Grubbs, Senyawa and others, all of whom explore the strange sounds they can make from eccentric instruments. | Various Artists: I Said No Doctors! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22797-i-said-no-doctors/ | I Said No Doctors! | For Tom Tolleson, the fourteen-track compilation I Said No Doctors! began with a personal fascination. The founder of oddball record label Dymaxion Groove, Tolleson began tinkering with ways to manipulate his guitar, making it sound strange and unpredictable. He soon encountered the famed Dutch luthier Yuri Landman, who has long built unorthodox guitars and instruments for experimental stars. Several gear purchases and years later, Tolleson started assembling I Said No Doctors!, an hour-long survey of such eccentric instruments used in wildly different contexts, from meditative free jazz and surf rock to folk hokum and total noise. It is an exhibition of instrumental diversity, an attempt to showcase the possibilities of sound and song when the sources are no longer standard.
There’s plenty of intrigue and some inevitable filler here, all bound together by instruments that, as Tolleson puts it, are “only in tune with [themselves] by the way [they’re] made.” Dan Deacon’s MIDI triggers a trillion tiny notes from a grand piano on “Opal Toad Segment,” while a bowed Indonesian plough on Senyawa’s “Anak Kijang” conjures a militia of aging cellos. David Grubbs doctors his guitar until its notes ring like hiccups and gurgles. The synthesizer builder Peter Blasser wields his invention, the Deerhorn, to reshape a lovely torch song into a lonely transmission from an alien jukebox. And Simeon Coxe uses the Simeon—the amorphous electronic namesake that’s been the core of his Silver Apples for fifty years—to create a soundscape that crawls with creepiness. Tolleson himself plays a mutated kalimba made by Landman here, while Landman’s own band, Bismuth, contributes a simmering, Sonic Youth-like instrumental.
Deacon’s stunning “Opal Toad Segment” is the true standout, making good on his professed love of daring composer Conlon Nancarrow by turning a storm of fast piano notes into billowing clouds of sound. It comforts with cacophony, and its busy structure somehow soothes. Likewise, Oval’s “ISND” lands perfectly between the prickly and the pleasant, with chimes and drums dissolving into one another like ripples from raindrops on a lake. Both tracks suggest new possibilities for their composers—one point, after all, of such technical innovation.
The diversity of I Said No Doctors!, though, stalls out at sound. There are more prepared guitars and novel programming arrangements here than women. In fact, there’s only one, Pauline Kim Harris, whose adventurous, cliffhanging turn with scrambled classical duo String Noise should have served as a potent reminder to build the roster’s gender balance. The compilation’s one concession to diversity—the radical Javanese duo Senyawa, whose contribution is an acoustic uproar—smacks of exotic fetishism, given its total outlier status.
The realm of making and using experimental instruments isn’t a white men’s club, but I Said No Doctors! presents it as such. Hell, a quip from Theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore inspired the design of the Deerhorn, deployed on one of this compilation’s most interesting tracks, “Deer Biphenyl.” That the past and present of experimental sound brim with and depend on both women and people of color should be obvious enough. The potential roster for a more-balanced survey is astounding, from guitarist Mary Halvorson and harpist Mary Lattimore to pedal steel master Susan Alcorn and synthesizer legend Laurie Spiegel. Their omission here lands less like mere oversight, then, than an insulting insinuation that instrumental innovation stems only from boys with toys. For a compilation so concerned with possibility, I Said No Doctors! overlooks more than half a world of it.
Ultimately, Tolleson’s fascination yields the musical equivalent of a coffee-table book, the kind of record you keep around as a conversation piece when friends come over or pick up from time to time for a scan when you’ve finished a better book. You keep it around for a spell because of its curios (remember, a bowed plough!) or its genuine accomplishments (like the radiant pieces from Deacon, Oval, and String Noise) before passing it along to a used bookstore, finally realizing it was out of date before it even went to print. | 2017-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Dymaxion Groove | January 20, 2017 | 6.2 | 75f6fe33-9804-412a-a35b-4e6e8fa2a33e | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Detroit-based basement punks head into an actual studio and embrace classic hardcore sounds for their latest LP. | Detroit-based basement punks head into an actual studio and embrace classic hardcore sounds for their latest LP. | Tyvek: Nothing Fits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14860-nothing-fits/ | Nothing Fits | Full of half-hearted fuzz riffs and tossed-off two-note vocals, Tyvek's self-titled debut made for great recession-era listening. In a world suddenly crowded with dying malls, half-built condos, and underwater McMansions, the Detroit basement-punks' wobbly songwriting sounded weirdly poignant. And the name-- copped from the ubiquitous polyethylene house-wrap-- didn't hurt either. But unlike the Midwestern punks that came before them-- the Stooges, the Electric Eels, Negative Approach, to name a few-- Tyvek never seemed particularly cheesed-off about their surroundings. The rotating cast of collaborators fronted by guitarist/singer Kevin Boyer was agitated and noisy, but never aggressive. Something must be getting to them, though; on Nothing Fits, Tyvek are pissed-off.
The band's new full-length is tight, snotty, and pogo-worthy. The mellow instrumental snippets that padded the last LP are long gone. Now there's only the clacking of drumsticks to signal the next onslaught of distortion and motor-mouthed shouting. At some point in the past year, Tyvek decided to go hardcore. As a result, they nail the burnt-out 'burbs imagery better than ever. "Underwater institution/ Silent hallways vacant always endless yards of paper trails/ Medications healthy systems baby doctors cut their tails," shouts Boyer over chunky power chords on "Underwater 1", ticking off his list of gripes. In the refrain, he boils it all down to one perfect image of a "Safeway bag now sticking to my shoe." "Frustration Rock", the band's original aggro anthem, sounds kind of nerdy in comparison.
Tyvek's first full-length was cobbled together from a smorgasbord of the bands favorite tapes-- practice takes and basement jams full of lo-fi gristle. This time around, Tyvek spent some money. Nothing Fits is the band's first release to be recorded in an actual studio, and the result is a shorter, more focused record, but hardly a cleaner one. The vocals are strangled, the guitars awash in amplifier buzz. On the title track-- with its unrelenting snare cracks and blizzard of treble-cranked guitars-- Tyvek come off like the Motor City's answer to Huggy Bear. It's mosh-worthy, but not to an ugly, macho extreme. Deep down, Tyvek will always be a little bit art-school.
But like the best old-time hardcore, there's an element of audience participation built in via shout-along refrains. Those lyrics are clear enough: "People in the passing lane, just pricks in a car," sings Boyer. "Fuck off!" responds an overdubbed chorus. And burried down in the din, there's a tried and true posi-punk message. "Underwater 2" delivers the counter-arguement to Pt. 1's bleak, dumpster-diving worldview: "Want to make it something out of nothing at all/ So we've gotta pull together/ Now we gotta just start small," sings Boyer. "It's all right/ just do what you want." Tyvek are slackers no more. | 2010-11-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2010-11-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | In the Red | November 12, 2010 | 7.8 | 75f8551e-a1a5-4036-a35b-dd1ffc9c6c76 | Aaron Leitko | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aaron-leitko/ | null |
After more than a quarter-century, the Dinosaur Jr. leader releases his first solo album of all original material, and it's an almost entirely acoustic gem. | After more than a quarter-century, the Dinosaur Jr. leader releases his first solo album of all original material, and it's an almost entirely acoustic gem. | J Mascis: Several Shades of Why | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15211-several-shades-of-why/ | Several Shades of Why | On Dinosaur Jr.'s self-titled 1985 debut, J Mascis sang, "I never try that much 'cause I'm scared of feeling." Over the last 26 years, Mascis has produced a number of guitar-rock touchstones, yet it's been tough to tell exactly how much effort and emotion has gone into his work. Cited as one of the original slackers, his demeanor is infamously laconic to the point of aloofness; even as he peels off some of the most ear-busting guitar solos you've ever heard live, he sometimes looks like he's about to doze off while doing so. Meanwhile, his words-- usually involving vague alienation and confusion-- are often drowned out by the ungodly squall behind him. Across his career, Mascis has let distortion, excess wattage, and virtuoso technique do most of the talking for him, and the translation can be surprisingly clear. But Several Shades of Why is different.
It's his first solo album of all original material and it's almost entirely acoustic. Here, the grey-haired 45 year old's weathered husk of a voice is close-mic'd, as if he's drawling mere inches away from your head at all times. And while he was rightfully dubbed "the first American indie rock guitar hero" by Michael Azerrad in Our Band Could Be Your Life-- and has backed that claim up with countless memorable solos-- the songs on Several Shades of Why are marked by background strums and finger-picking rather than spotlit wails. By using his own name and going with such bare sonics, it's reasonable to suggest that this album could be Mascis' most knowingly personal yet. On the title track, he clears up the whole "trying" issue, kind of. "I'm not saying much, I tried hard, that's all I do," he croaks, his feelings of hurt, wisdom, and wistfulness fearlessly up-front.
Though the album is confessional in nature, the reveals are relative-- there are no clear narratives and almost comically nondescript song titles like "Not Enough", "What Happened", and "Is It Done", are good representations of the ambiguous pronouns (and profundity) found therein. Dinosaur Jr. bassist Lou Barlow once said Mascis "had nothing to say, yet he had everything to say," which is about right. But, even considering the imprecise language, Mascis does a fair amount of telling through his indelible voice, which wears its years with crackling grace. Though Neil Young has been a common reference point for Mascis' vocals since he first opened his mouth to sing, Several Shades of Why has him going for After the Gold Rush-type intimacy like never before. So when he finishes the Laurel Canyon hangover track "Not Enough" with "I know my love is over/ And I wish I didn't know," the simple admission carries serious heft.
That song is also aided by the vocal talents of Band of Horses' Ben Bridwell, Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew, and J's current tourmate Kurt Vile, whose recent album Smoke Ring for My Halo shares a somber eloquence with this one. Guests are used frequently and wisely throughout the album-- adding subtle vocal harmonies or instrumental atmospherics-- proving that the notoriously non-communicative songwriter still knows how to make the right connections when he needs to. None of the featured players are more effective than Godspeed You! Black Emperor violinist Sophie Trudeau, who adds elegant ache to the title track. For all of his technical gifts, Mascis is wise enough to know he shouldn't do it all, a fact supported by Dinosaur Jr.'s brilliant comeback this century. (While Barlow and Dino drummer Murph are nowhere to be found on this album, they are thanked in the liners.)
On opener "Listen to Me", Mascis repeats the song's titular phrase in a pleading voice. As the album's 10 tracks unravel with effortless, low-key ease, it's easy to obey his appeal. He's no longer "scared of feeling," though that doesn't mean he's not scared. The specter of loneliness and aging is a through-line here, too, brilliantly visualized by artist Marq Spusta's gorgeous cover, which shows a pair of fuzzy, unmistakably J-like creatures-- one big, one tiny-- using a sea monster's back for an island. (Mascis had a son in 2007.) Though dour, Mascis' sleeve avatar is also kind of cute. Several Shades of Why gives us that softer, gentler J Mascis. But it's not kids' stuff-- these are lullabies for adults, offered up with a compassion that doesn't come easy. | 2011-03-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-03-17T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | March 17, 2011 | 7.9 | 75fc3df1-0f47-46eb-aba3-4aef542b8e56 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The duo foreground their most conventional pop sounds on their fourth album, but remain at their best at their strangest. | The duo foreground their most conventional pop sounds on their fourth album, but remain at their best at their strangest. | Phantogram: Ceremony | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phantogram-ceremony/ | Ceremony | Phantogram thrive on discomfort. The New York duo’s 2010 debut Eyelid Movies revealed them as masters of tension: their prickly, minimalist trip-hop moved at its own pace, their lyrics full of barbed, abstract images that hinted at bigger stories the band refused to tell. As they’ve crossed over into a mainstream space via Republic Records, Sarah Barthel and Josh Carter have remained at their best when they’ve refused to let go of this strangeness—as with their excellent, twisted 2016 single “You Don’t Get Me High Anymore,” a pop song about addiction that opens with a line about teeth falling out of your head. But on their bombastic fourth studio album, Ceremony, the band sound thoroughly comfortable.
The album bounds into life with the soul-sampling “Dear God,” perhaps the closest thing there’s ever been to a happy Phantogram song. It’s followed by a run of short, sharp singles, each burying a streak of sorrow below shiny surfaces. The synth-dazzled “Into Happiness,” the best of the bunch, beautifully undercuts its own hook (“Fall into happiness”) with the next line (“Wish you could be here”).
Mostly, though, these songs feel impatient, front-loaded with choruses and stacked on top of one another. Perhaps Barthel is catering to the streaming-age trend towards shorter songs and swifter hooks, but she flattens the nuance of her non-linear, evocative songwriting. On the jagged “In A Spiral,” she delivers the non-committal social commentary “I’m a meme/On a feed/In a spiral”; “Love Me Now,” a brass-driven song at the heart of the record, leans too heavily into the repetition of its hook.
The record’s most powerful moments come in its second, stranger half. On “Glowing,” Barthel leans uncomfortably close to the microphone, her voice ringing in the listener’s skull like ASMR over a backdrop of underwater ambience; that’s followed by “Gaunt Kids,” a prowling, visceral spoken word track spliced with an eerie piano ballad. The title track provides the record’s most gratifying moment, building from a barely-there, moonlit song about insomnia and skinny-dipping into a furious rock jam over nearly six minutes. The tension is thrilling, and a reminder of what this band are capable of when they go to darker, weirder places.
In early 2019, Billie Eilish performed a cover of Phantogram’s “You Don’t Get Me High Anymore” on BBC Radio 1, referring to it as one of her “favorite songs.” It’s clear that, along with indie bands like The xx, Phantogram laid the groundwork for the whispered, gothic sound of mainstream pop today. It's a shame, then, that on their own album, Phantogram foreground their most conventional, clipped pop selves, when their quietest moments are often the loudest of all. | 2020-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | March 11, 2020 | 5.9 | 75fce7f4-226d-4330-ad75-fb71e72deb08 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
The Detroit rapper's second mixtape of the year is like a compilation of leftovers, with enough meticulously told tales to justify the experience. | The Detroit rapper's second mixtape of the year is like a compilation of leftovers, with enough meticulously told tales to justify the experience. | Baby Smoove: Hardwood Classic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baby-smoove-hardwood-classic/ | Hardwood Classic | A typical Baby Smoove song sounds like he’s having an early-morning, hungover phone conversation and struggling to recap what he did the day before. The Detroit rapper’s vignettes are a never-ending cycle of trips to shopping malls, pit stops at corner stores, sitting in traffic, and weed smoke-filled strolls through his neighborhood. The most exciting moments are when he shows up at Saks Fifth Avenue or gets a package from the Dior store in the mail—which, if you take Smoove’s word for it, occurs at least once a day.
But Baby Smoove’s music comes to life in mixtape form, where each track feels like a chapter in the story he’s trying to tell in the backseat of a long car ride. Though this lethargic style has a low margin of error, all it takes is a lackluster beat or an anecdote short on details and it quickly becomes painfully boring. It’s no coincidence Smoove’s best mixtapes—the piano-driven Purple Heart and the G-Funk synth obsessed Baby—are the two with the most consistently vivid production. He flourishes on vibe and feel, and without that, loses his appeal.
Baby Smoove’s second full-length mixtape of the year, Hardwood Classic is like a compilation of leftovers. On his strongest projects, the raps and production are complementary, but here they don’t have the same color or flash. Normally when Smoove uses the flow, which sounds like he’s in the recording booth wrapped in a blanket and neck pillow, the energy is made up for by uptempo and lush instrumentals. On “DX,” both Smoove and the brooding beat are lifeless—not even his lines about freely scuffing his Diors or referencing Shawn Michaels and Triple H’s old friendly catchphrase is enough to make it memorable.
In Detroit, rappers like Babyface Ray, G.T., Veeze, and the World Tour Mafia crew have made the lane of laidback lifestyle rap highly competitive. Why put up with formulaic production and mailed-in punchlines when there are so many other options? Smoove’s few funny lines about money counters and internet beef on “Swing the Wood” don’t make the routine Michigan-style beat any less forgettable. Similarly, the “Sleepwalking Pt. 3” instrumental is so sluggish it’s hard to even laugh at his guest Veeze calling someone a “jabroni” (“Jabroni” is in between “bozo” and “doofus” on the list of underused rap insults).
But even though Hardwood Classic is nowhere near the top of Baby Smoove’s fast-growing catalog, there’s still enough meticulously told tales to justify the experience. On “Load Management,” he raps about going to the store in a $6,000 outfit for absolutely no reason over a pulsing Enrgy beat; on “Prada Me,” he’s annoyed a girl, who is spending the night, keeps getting phone calls from her boyfriend; on “Floyd May,” he counts the number of Amiri Jeans he owns over breezy Mexikodro production. Baby Smoove can make his days of nothing sound as thrilling as Rio Da Yung OG’s borderline action movie set pieces, but only when it’s all clicking.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Dha | December 10, 2020 | 5.8 | 7601b9e1-18a7-4bc1-b8d5-61ff70dddd68 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Electronic producer Natasha Kmeto has spoken frankly about her coming out experience, a development in her sexual identity that has found its way into her music. Her awareness developed in large part on the dance floor—Inevitable brings this catharsis to her listeners. | Electronic producer Natasha Kmeto has spoken frankly about her coming out experience, a development in her sexual identity that has found its way into her music. Her awareness developed in large part on the dance floor—Inevitable brings this catharsis to her listeners. | Natasha Kmeto: Inevitable | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21072-inevitable/ | Inevitable | Electronic producer Natasha Kmeto has described her new album Inevitable not as a conceptual project, but as a reflection of herself. Within the past year, she's spoken frankly about her coming out experience, a development in her sexual identity that has found its way into her music. Her awareness developed in large part on the dance floor, manifesting in a colossal yet loving environment that also served as a space for personal catharsis. Inevitable brings this catharsis to her listeners.
Kmeto's vocals have always been a tool in the production of her past works, but they ring out with clear and present force on Inevitable. Her singing is forthright but also verging on breaking, as if she was struck by a sudden wave of vulnerability. From the record’s first seconds, she telegraphs how different the stakes are for her: On opener and title track "Inevitable" she pleads "When you coming back, baby? When you coming back?/ I will love you down, baby, when you’re coming back." The unadorned sound and raw sentiment send a powerful message: Take me for who I am.
Inevitable sounds sharper and smoother than Crisis, but it still feels raw, like the sort of music that is ripped in desperation out of the heart and guts—the truly messy parts—of its creator. There is an unfinished charm to her music; the components of the tracks sound like they don’t (or shouldn’t) mesh together. Kmeto’s voice shimmers on "Inevitable" while the slow, rumbling and minimalist instrumentation dies just short of a climactic peak. It seems incomplete, but Kmeto saves it with the vividness of her lyrics and the quiver of her voice.
Kmeto has been compared to Grimes and Maya Jane Coles, but those comparisons feel flimsy at best. Kmeto is better understood next to the criminally underrated Cooly G. Both make music lyrically fueled by desire, exploring the possibilities of unspoken meaning found in mood, in space and silence, and in carefully considered lyricism. The music builds as the stakes do as well.
On "I Thought You Had a Boyfriend", one of the strongest tracks on the record, Kmeto sings about a confusing romantic connection. "Your eyes, lingered on me as you said goodbye," she sings at the outset. "And our hands held a little bit longer than what would seem polite." Kmeto sounds at once frustrated and open, and as the song progresses, the synths build and build to an overwhelming wall of sound. Is it the rising bite to Kmeto’s words as she sings on the chorus that makes the song so unsettling? "I thought you had a boyfriend/ I thought you had a man," she says. "I thought it wasn’t like that/ I thought you had a plan." After two verses, the synths wash over the listener like a tidal wave of emotions as she repeats the chorus again and again. Kmeto doesn’t ask a question, but she does demand an answer.
Other strong songs on the record fit this same structure. "Closer Comes My Love" at first sounds like a sensual slow jam, but peaks in cacophony. "Peak", more of a traditional dance track, has straightforward lyrics that pair seamlessly with the slight dubstep flourishes found in the track's final minutes.
Unlike her young peers also creating soulful jams (Tinashe, Jhené Aiko), Kmeto’s music refuses to slink into the background. On Inevitable, Kmeto’s personal awakening blooms into her music, both lyrically and structurally. As queer identity gets shoved aside with the mainstreaming of electronic music, as if the queer community didn't fuel the genre's formation, it's more vital than ever to have voices like Kmeto's bringing it to the forefront. This, without question, is a record of discovery and confusion as much as it is about the power of confidence in understanding and loving oneself. Inevitable is a collection of slowly ripping cords, the underlying tension manifesting on tracks as if Kmeto must manage simmering emotions and can’t, or maybe won’t. | 2015-09-22T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-09-22T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Dropping Gems | September 22, 2015 | 7.8 | 76021c05-64bb-4650-ae7c-e8380820dc45 | Britt Julious | https://pitchfork.com/staff/britt-julious/ | null |
On the first posthumous album from the famed singer-songwriter, his renowned talent often feels lost in the glut of over-the-top arrangements, flashy production, and cheesy songwriting. | On the first posthumous album from the famed singer-songwriter, his renowned talent often feels lost in the glut of over-the-top arrangements, flashy production, and cheesy songwriting. | Harry Nilsson: Losst and Founnd | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/harry-nilsson-losst-and-found/ | Losst and Founnd | One night in 1974, Harry Nilsson saw blood on his microphone. He was recording his exuberant album Pussycats—produced by friend and fellow hellraiser John Lennon—and the two artists launched into a screaming match to determine who could produce the most ragged, self-destructive wail. Nilsson won, at a price: His once-pristine, three-octave tenor was tarnished for good, never to regain its shining high end before he died in 1994.
Losst and Founnd, Nilsson’s first posthumous album, is a constant reminder of that fateful night. His voice is deep, frayed, and faded—qualities that marked his work in the last half of the ’70s, but never masked his rare gifts as a songwriter. However, on this new collection of songs—assembled by Nilsson’s longtime friend, producer Mark Hudson—Nilsson’s renowned talent often feels lost in the glut of over-the-top arrangements, flashy production, and cheesy songwriting.
Early in his career, Nilsson was prolific. Following his 1966 debut Spotlight on Nilsson, he released at least one record per year for over a decade. But Lennon’s death in 1980 had a crippling impact on him. Earlier that year, he’d released Flash Harry; in the wake of Lennon’s murder, it became the last album Nilsson made in his lifetime. For years after, Hudson attempted to coax Nilsson out of early retirement, and Nilsson eventually played Hudson demos of songs he’d been working on. Those recordings have become Losst and Founnd, but the final product is a mixed bag: wry ballads reminiscent of Nilsson’s heyday as a pop prodigy, tributes to the Beatles and Nirvana, and an unfortunate anthem for the L.A. Dodgers. It’s a lot to sift through, and its jumble can feel disorienting.
Losst and Founnd features some of Nilsson’s closest friends and family—his son Kiefo plays bass on several tracks, Hudson produces, and composer/instrumentalist Van Dyke Parks and drummer Jim Keltner contribute—but even in their hands, the source material simply isn’t Nilsson’s best. Sometimes, the arrangement and production disappoint as well. Take “Lullaby,” a sweet bedtime nocturne that could have been written for classics like Nilsson Schmilsson or The Point—except Harry’s vocals are slathered in reverb, and the track is tainted by corny electric guitar riffs. “Woman Oh Woman” suffers similarly by processing Nilsson’s voice through what sounds like a tin can. On these particular tracks, however, the songwriting is strong enough to withstand the studio gimmicks. “Woman Oh Woman” opens with Nilsson’s trademark cynicism: “If you knew true devotion,” he sings, “You’d jump into the ocean and drown/Goin’ down/Thinkin’ of me.” Parks’ accordion bobs beneath like the sea itself.
Producing Losst and Founnd was an emotional task for Hudson, who told Final Sessions podcast host Joe Levy that he often “felt Harry in the room.” During the album’s best moments, I felt him, too. “U.C.L.A.,” for instance, sounds like a dispatch from the old Harry—a lolling melody that seems so effortless, it’s as though it floated in on a seaside breeze. It’s the most pared-back offering on Losst and Founnd, and easily its best song. Sure, there are drums and dobro and B3 and then some, but the component parts complement Nilsson’s dry vocals instead of overwhelming them. I almost feel alone with Nilsson as he laments the loss of friends, New York, and the Beatles. Throughout the song, musical homages to the Fab Four abound: Paul’s bass slide from “Come Together,” a trumpet doodle from “Penny Lane,” a string segment from “Yesterday.” It’s a masterful composition up to snuff with Nilsson’s previous body of work.
Unfortunately, most of Losst and Founnd forgoes subtle interpolation for late ’80s decadence—and it’s just too much. The title track opens with slashes of electric guitar, then piles on horns, stabbing synths, and something called a bowljo. The effect is “We Are the World” without the charity. “High Heel Sneakers/Rescue Boy Medley” pumps the brakes a little but reeks of dad-rock with its peppy brass section and faux-gospel backing vocals. That said, it’s still worlds better than the penultimate track, “Yo Dodger Blue,” a Jock Jam that spares no bell or whistle. It stuffs in handclaps, wailing guitar, skronking sax, and audience participation, all led by Nilsson’s rallying shout: “Yo Dodger blue, L.A. loves you!” It makes “Who Let the Dogs Out” sound like “Hallelujah.” Nilsson has always had a knack for writing melodies that are difficult to forget, and this is unfortunately the case with his one song about baseball.
At one point in the studio, Hudson says he sought Nilsson’s council on whether to enlist Kiefo for Losst and Founnd. “Harry, should I do this?” he asked—and he heard an answer. Despite its defects, Losst and Founnd is an honest document of Harry Nilsson’s creative process in his final years, and our first glimpse at his last wishes. It’s certainly not perfect, but it’s easy to understand the need to release it. At best, Losst and Founnd is a way to feel closer to Nilsson, no matter how long it’s been since he left us.
Buy: Rough Trade
*(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Omnivore | January 17, 2020 | 5.8 | 7602224d-c146-43cf-851f-8d210b016487 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bear sounds increasingly comfortable as a lead vocalist and personality on his most personal album to date, as a still-funky but more ambient side of his writing emerges. | Toro Y Moi’s Chaz Bear sounds increasingly comfortable as a lead vocalist and personality on his most personal album to date, as a still-funky but more ambient side of his writing emerges. | Toro y Moi: Boo Boo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/toro-y-moi-boo-boo/ | Boo Boo | Every Toro Y Moi album promises to be vastly different than what came before it, and Boo Boo is no different. “My baby got fed up with my ego/Wasn’t even thinkin’ we were goin’ worldwide/Thinking it was better than the Southern life,” Chaz Bear sings on “No Show,” a line Drake somehow didn't get to first. Though Bear (fka Chaz Bundick) has always tried to keep a low profile both on and off record, Boo Boo is his first album that dares to feed a narrative: in a recent interview, he copped to the dissolution of a relationship he likened to “an acid trip,” becoming more outspoken about his mixed race heritage, and getting freaked out by indie rock fame that only appears modest. In reality, he’s out here realistically emulating grandiose Pink Floyd concert films and celebrating Chaz Bundick Day in a city (Berkeley) where he’s lived for less than five years. Save the Underneath the Pine album cover, Toro Y Moi has never given us anything as juicy as the backstory of Boo Boo; and yet, it’s a record where Bear’s sonic inspiration can feel dry.
Boo Boo was teased by the bubbly roller-rink pop of “Girl Like You,” and it leads off with an impressive Prince homage, “Mirage,” complete with pitch-perfect spoken asides. In this mode, Boo Boo plays towards Bear’s increasing comfort as a lead vocalist and a lead personality, something hard to imagine when he was submerged into the aqueous Dilla homages on Causers of This. But that kind of funk doesn’t mesh with the other kind of funk more indicative of Bear’s mindset during Boo Boo’s creation. The airlocked ambience of “No Show” captures the overarching spirit—an inert, beatless drone interrupted by erratic blurts of synth-bass, a snapshot from the Uncanny Valley Sim-worlds created on Oneohtrix Point Never’s R Plus Seven.
Though the waterlogged sampledelia of Causers of This has little stylistic resemblance to the surprising turn to trad-indie rock on 2015’s What For?, Bear’s aesthetic has been unified by its humidity. It has allowed Toro Y Moi albums to blend into the situations where one might expect to hear them: BBQs, rooftop dance parties, 4 p.m. slots at summer festivals. Given the circumstances, the sunlight of the spirit has understandably dimmed on Boo Boo, an indoors album where the dominant tactile sensation is air conditioning, a harsh, artificial chill. While Toro Y Moi has slowly expanded to a live sextet, much of their fifth record is given to the inorganic sounds of lonely computing. No matter how often the production tactics of 1980s pop continue to be repurposed, you may not hear an indie record in 2017 more reliant on synthesized toms than Boo Boo.
But the momentum generated by “Mirage” and the equally limber funk workouts that bookend Boo Boo end up compensating for the tedious midsection of neither-here-nor-there experimentation. The songs are too overstuffed to make good on Bear’s ambient leanings, too hookless to merit the patience of repetition. “Got me starin’ out my window,” he sings rather appropriately through Auto-Tune, and Boo Boo will join you in a rut if you’re on that level. If not, the repurposed weird science can just as easily feel like sitting in a particularly avant-garde dentist’s office. Centerpiece “Don’t Try” finds Toro Y Moi as a circa-1982 connector between Prince’s plasticine pop experiments and the ashy dirges of the Cure on Faith and Pornography. It’s a pretty good trick, though it’s not enough to support the record’s weakest, most insistently pushed melody, with which Bear snitches on himself: “Give me no ideas I just waste them.”
This moment of self-pity doesn’t totally ring true; Bear’s ideas aren’t entirely in vain on Boo Boo. Since What For?, Bear has been more productive than ever, but his workaholic instincts caught him at a vulnerable yet uninspired state here. The silver lining for breakups, of course, is that they can put songwriters in touch with emotions that might be inaccessible in more stable times—unchecked spite, utter devastation, vengeful hope. Then again, breakups can also just suck really hard in a boring way—of barely wanting to leave the house—and there’s nothing you can do to romanticize it. On that level, the art of Boo Boo imitates life. | 2017-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Carpark | July 11, 2017 | 6.9 | 760b205e-dd99-4a65-8ab7-c861ee6ccf3c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
A decade ago, Ariel Pink crept out of his rented room in an ashram off Crenshaw with reels of spindly, self-destructing love songs. On his new album, the CalArts alumnus remains the stylistic next-of-kin to Frank Zappa: satirical, divisive, and more interested in terraforming genres than neatly deconstructing them. | A decade ago, Ariel Pink crept out of his rented room in an ashram off Crenshaw with reels of spindly, self-destructing love songs. On his new album, the CalArts alumnus remains the stylistic next-of-kin to Frank Zappa: satirical, divisive, and more interested in terraforming genres than neatly deconstructing them. | Ariel Pink: Pom Pom | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19936-ariel-pink-pom-pom/ | Pom Pom | Before Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian assumed fame as a feudal right, Angelyne cruised Los Angeles in her flamingo pink Corvette. License plate: ANGELNN. If her teased platinum wig or volleyball breasts led you to mistake her for a pornographic Dolly Parton, her true identity could be confirmed by the ubiquitous advertisements for herself that she purchased on billboards and bus shelters. Even though practically no one could tell you what she did or had done, she became an '80s Southern California fixture as iconic and purely ornamental as the palm trees—the sunshine daydream to Elvira’s ghoulish noir. The tragedy is that she peaked before Bravo. Without a reality show to channel the day-to-day eccentricities of Angelyne and her candy-dyed Maltese, the O.G. avatar of "famous for being famous" had to settle for a bit part in Earth Girls Are Easy, a brief gubernatorial run, and a self-released album on her Pink Kitten imprint.
In a city where Mr. Incredible brawls with Batgirl while Chewbacca and Freddy Krueger vainly break it up, Angelyne naturally still finds work in the meet-n-greet racket. Her most recent appearance was yesterday at Origami Records in Echo Park, as part of Ariel Pink’s "Tantalising [sic] Tinsel-Town Take Over." Should you have missed the mass email, the promotional docket for Ariel Pink’s latest schlock-opus Pom Pom included "Delicious Donuts and Delectable Ditties"; "Pretty in Pink. Permanently" (where "L.A.’s top manicure artists" did nails in only pink); and the "Luxuriously 'L.A.' Limo Listening Luau". The latter offered a "ride in style" to "enjoy L.A.'s finest sites" in a "pink stretch job." RSVP did not guarantee entrance.
It’s usually over-simplistic to extrapolate from a marketing scheme, but in Ariel Pink as with Angelyne, the medium is the message. The campy flair, smirking irony, and deliberately "retrolicious" alliteration matches the scarecrow-genius of his new album, Pom Pom. By wheeling out the inflatable mummy of Angelyne, the former Ariel Rosenberg wryly casts himself as her timeless prom date in the Hollywood Babylon of conniving prophets, sexualized excess, and sterling self-mythologizers.
A decade ago, Pink crept out of his rented room in an ashram off Crenshaw with reels of spindly, self-destructing love songs. Issued on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks imprint, The Doldrums (and later Worn Copy) inspired chillwave and a lo-fi revival, as well as altering the perception of L.A. as an indie-rock backwater. Pink was the sunshine and noir dialect rolled into one, writing gorgeous heat-warped AM pop made to soundtrack driving off of a cliff on Mulholland or save an animal from drowning in a shimmering David Hockney swimming pool.
The intervening years have seen him transform from wraith to wolf. The romantic cult hero fantasies have given way to headlines that he’s the "most hated man in indie rock." The analog necessity of his early work has been replaced by studio sheen, alienating those inclined towards the cassette hiss and rawness of his first wave. Pink’s compared social media vilification to the Rwandan genocide, dated porn stars, called Grimes "stupid and retarded" and scored a werewolf film—inevitably empathizing with the antagonist.
If you hate Ariel Pink, nothing in this review can possibly alter your opinion. You’ll scour the record for misogyny, say it’s too long, and roll your eyes at the helium disco-grooves about getting white freckles at the tanning salon and the amphetamine jingles for Jell-O. You think he’s funny or you don’t. If you do, the best engagement is one of suspended disbelief. After all, the CalArts alumnus remains the stylistic next-of-kin to Frank Zappa: satirical, divisive, and more interested in terraforming genres than neatly deconstructing them.
But for all the arch humor and affectation, Pink writes some of most wistful and peculiarly moving songs in contemporary music. "Put Your Number in My Phone" feels like David Crosby covering 2Pac’s "What’z Ya Phone #". Despite the '60s Sunset Strip jangle, the terrain shifts to the Eastside, a Silver Lake taco truck where Pink sweetly begs for the chance to get to know a girl better, before promptly blowing her off—which we hear in uncomfortably Drake-ian Voicemail detail. It’s the paradox at the heart of the collection and what ultimately makes it so compelling. Beyond catchy melodies, there’s a constant agitation between Pink’s moonlit dreams and everyday pessimism. He wants to be the romantic lover of fiction, but turns out to be just another undependable disappointment—but at least he admits it.
There’s "Sexual Athletics", where the sleazoid of the first half makes preposterous pull-your-dick-out boasts about being the "Sex King on a velvet swing/ Waiting for my Alice in Wonderland." The coda descends into lo-fi clatter and a tender, Four Seasons-falsetto about his life-long desire for a girlfriend. The ironic shell is always there, lest you get too close to treating the songs like journal entries, but the emotions remain conflicted and unconcealed.
If 2012’s Mature Themes found him recovering from a break-up by concocting Kinski Assassin Who Shagged Me daydreams during hungover wanderings to the Highland Park Wienerschnitzel, Pom Pom is Pink on the prowl—with its attendant sexploits and screwups. Sometimes, the tales are in villainous character. "Four Shadows" recasts Station to Station-era David Bowie as a comically morbid goth. "Black Ballerina" chronicles the night that "One-Eyed Willie" took "Shotgun Billy" to L.A.’s finest strip club for his first (short-lived) exotic dance experience. "Lipstick" concerns a predatory pick-up artist flashing his teeth and threatening to suck a girl into his darkness. There are new wave synthesizers, demands to be showered in blood, and Pink’s best "Hey Little Girl" baritone. It might be the finest Cure song since "Friday I’m in Love".
Other times, there’s no need for subterfuge. The album’s finale, "Dayzed Inn Daydreams", refurbishes an old track from Odditties Sodomies Vol. 1 with unnatural poignancy. The goofy voices and bipolar shifts are jettisoned for a straightforward psych-pop song in the vein of Love’s Forever Changes. It’s difficult not to read as a veiled statement of purpose: an anachronism to when his greatest fear was dying young and anonymous, a musical John Kennedy Toole, with hundreds of unheard songs his only hope for posthumous recognition.
The rest of the songs comprise crooked detours through Pink’s hometown. Fellow passengers include: Kim Fowley, the immemorial L.A. gadfly who played "hypophone" on Freak Out!, co-wrote with Warren Zevon, and managed the Runaways; Don Bolles, the drummer from the Germs; novelist Alex Kazemi ("Not Enough Violence"), and producer/writer Justin Raisen (Charli XCX, Sky Ferreira).
But the zigzags and bizarre pit stops are clearly at Pink’s behest. Opening track "Plastic Raincoats in the Pig Parade" finds him hallucinating cocaine banks, Tokyo nights, and Arkansas moons over what sounds like psychedelic Ringling Bros. polka. "Dinosaur Carebears" riffs on Syrian wedding music, shifts to a Tweedledum and Tweedledee melody, and then finds Pink role-calling random L.A. neighborhoods: Tarzana, Reseda, the City of Industry, Beverly Hiiiiiiilllls. Finally, the groove switches to a cosmic space dub.
This is no haven for conventional logic or normative restraint. "Negativ Ed" is pure Zappa homage, a gym class anthem for delinquent rebels in an '80s B-movie. It’s ridiculous and superfluous, but also endearingly whimsical. The same goes for "Nude Beach a Go-Go", a time warp to the Malibu surf rock of the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello era. But unlike the beach blanket bingo wholesomeness of the censored past, Pink reimagines it as the nude mating ritual it probably was.
One of Pink’s strongest gifts is making the absurd seem real and the real seem absurd. If this album has a closest predecessor in his catalog, it might be Worn Copy, with its weary refrain that "life in L.A. is so lonely." His coping strategy remains a rich fantasy life, of which he’s occasionally the star and sometimes the sardonic observer. You can see it on "Picture Me Gone", a haunting meditation about how digital technology will erase all physical evidence of our pasts. Set in the near future, the narrator’s age keeps changing. Even at his most sincere, there is something protean and shifty. Or as Pink seemingly indicts himself on "One Summer Night": "Fantasies and fallacies/ All fairy tales and lies/ Time is running out yeah/ Better write these lines." Or maybe you prefer "Exile on Frog Street", in which Pink does his best karaoke of Jim Morrison circa "Celebration of the Lizard". The song concerns an "enchanted frog... waiting for his Princess Charming to come and kiss him on his frog lips." When the kiss finally comes, the toad turns into Ariel Pink. You hear the fairy tale magic twinkle of a Disney soundtrack. Then you hear a frog’s ribbit.
You can interpret this as another surreal metaphor in his search for enchanted love or chalk it up to a teenaged fixation with the Doors. Maybe a little of both. He can be the frog prince, Shotgun Billy, or ride shotgun in a pink corvette. He can be a rock'n'roller named Ariel from Beverly Hills, complete with his own billboards. And in a place where delusion, self-reinvention, and wish fulfillment have long been the principal cash crop, who are we to tell him otherwise? | 2014-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | November 18, 2014 | 8.8 | 760c6b39-36d1-4326-98af-8d2efe59fdbe | Jeff Weiss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeff-weiss/ | null |
The reggae veteran’s new studio album doesn’t match the magic of his legacy. But when he’s not exploring grandiose thematic statements, he sounds as confident and impressive as ever. | The reggae veteran’s new studio album doesn’t match the magic of his legacy. But when he’s not exploring grandiose thematic statements, he sounds as confident and impressive as ever. | Buju Banton: Born for Greatness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buju-banton-born-for-greatness/ | Born for Greatness | Though released to relatively muted fanfare, Born for Greatness, the new studio album from veteran reggae star Buju Banton, still arrives with great expectations attached. Banton was already the first artist to break Bob Marley’s record for No. 1 singles in Jamaica by 1995, when he released ’Til Shiloh—arguably the greatest full-length statement of the era in which dancehall dominated the Jamaican charts. That LP represented roughly what Illmatic did for East Coast rap or Voodoo for neo-soul—an artistic peak which simultaneously signaled a sea change for an entire genre. It is also like those records in the sense that Buju has been shadowboxing with its legacy ever since, producing a deep catalog of classic compositions, but never quite achieving an album that rivaled its coherence or power.
The opening moments of Born for Greatness—strummed acoustic guitar and an eerily echoed and sped-up vocal sample, anchored by a simple knocking beat—are a departure from Buju’s last outing, Upside Down 2020. That album contained a number of compelling songs, but it was almost as if he jumped erratically between styles and decades, attempting, perhaps, to make up for the time lost during his extended incarceration in the U.S. on highly questionable drug charges. In some ways, BFG’s spare, haunting beginning marks a return to the ’90s sound of ’Til Shiloh, which is a good thing: The skeletal beat provides the perfect bed for Buju’s gruff baritone, famously the most gravelly in a genre wherein booming, bassy vocals are a form of combat. Here, the recently returned Buju measures up admirably against his younger self.
The “missing” years of Buju’s imprisonment are the grist for “Ageless Time,” the first cut on Born for Greatness. It raises themes that reverberate throughout the rest of the album: the self-examination and doubt that arise from isolation, the powerlessness felt in the face of passing time. The articulation of these feelings will resonate with many listeners’ experiences of the pandemic, though the lyrics here and on “Yard and Outta Road” ground them in Buju’s humbling fall from grace during his trial and conviction in Florida. “Ageless Time” feels like a declaration that this album will wrestle with bigger demons than other recent work, and it’s also a formidable vocal performance. Buju chants seamlessly through the rhythm, moving between both raspy exhalations and unaspirated downdrafts, like the soundclash equivalent of circular breathing. The song was co-written by Stephen Marley, a longtime ally of Buju’s, and Marley’s unmistakable touch appears in its melodic lines and delivery, which function as a natural complement to Buju’s style.
The next track, “Life Choices,” is a slow take on a classic, three-cornered dancehall beat, but reinforces the idea that the rhythms and production on Born for Greatness will, uncharacteristically for a dancehall record, take a back seat. The result emphasizes the strengths in Buju’s unique vocal approach without chasing current trends, but just when BFG appears to be hitting its stride, the title track derails its momentum with a mission statement that feels scripted and uncomfortable. Over a piano-driven instrumental best described as affirmation-fueled pop-rap—think Macklemore or Lizzo—Buju applies a double-time trap cadence to couplets about superstars, super cars, and supermodels. It feels very much like he is filling in a template cut for some other artist.
Likewise, on “Yard and Outta Road”—another examination of the trials and tribulations he experienced while living in the States—striking insights are marred by generic lines like “To shot callers who run every yard/Keep it real, 1,000, dog.” By the time he croons, “For the homies not coming home, I pray to the lawd,” Buju sounds less like a Rasta preacher and more like a gym teacher attempting to relate to his students by lacing his pep talk with the latest slang—and one who ends up missing the mark by five to 10 semesters. On the heartfelt hook, his voice jumps up a notch to a plaintive mid-tone reminiscent of his fellow reggae titan Sizzla. It’s the closest Buju may ever come to a falsetto, and it's not his most comfortable register. What should be the album’s center is instead like a cringey wrong turn, and where the first two tracks felt lean, this sounds like little more than a click track, a guide beat for an unfinished idea.
Though these are big missteps, they are, thankfully, momentary. In between them lies “Coconut Wata (Sip),” on which Buju ably wraps his voice around a slow-grind beat. “Body Touching Body,” featuring Victoria Monét, hits in the same baby-making zone, a mode that allows Buju to conduct a master class in riding a riddim, even if the subject matter is more worldly. These slow-wine tunes also feel the most of-the-moment, and would fit easily into a set with Koffee, Jorja Smith, or Tems, even if they’re stylistically distinct. Like a movie wherein the actors find chemistry between their characters even when the overall plotline falters, Born for Greatness reveals an EP’s worth of quiet, strong material in its smoldering torch songs.
The rest of the album proceeds in this one-step forward, one-step back fashion. It presents Buju as confident (and surprisingly grounded) on the most low-key and lighthearted cuts, including “Feel a Way,” which features vocals from Stephen Marley, or “Plans,” the LP’s only nod to the current JA trap or “chop” sound. Yet he inexplicably pivots away from his strengths on what should be the tentpole moments, like “We Find a Way,” the saccharine one drop of “Nuff Love for You,” or “High Life,” a perfectly good weed tune ruined almost entirely by Snoop Dogg’s nasal and weirdly arrhythmic attempt at a verse in Patois.
Born for Greatness resoundingly fails to deliver on its title’s promise. In fact, it mostly falls short where it strives for gravitas. Yet, it may, oddly, sneakily, deliver something better. On its less solemn tracks, it bears the good news that one of the greatest voices that Jamaica has gifted us is still evolving, still in champion form—at least when he allows himself to go off-message. | 2023-09-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Gargamel Music / Roc Nation / Def Jam | September 18, 2023 | 6.7 | 7616a534-29fa-47bb-aa5e-90c6a69f4be7 | Edwin “STATS” Houghton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/edwin-“stats” houghton/ | |
Producer and film composer Mica Levi’s solo debut operates in two modes: blown-out grunge and soporific dream pop, married by a thick layer of fuzz. | Producer and film composer Mica Levi’s solo debut operates in two modes: blown-out grunge and soporific dream pop, married by a thick layer of fuzz. | Mica Levi: Ruff Dog | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mica-levi-ruff-dog/ | Ruff Dog | Mica Levi’s shuddering film scores leave no room for imperfection. The shrieking strings of the war thriller Monos breathe hesitantly, any silence a highly intentional harbinger of doom; the solemn soundtrack of the Jackie Kennedy biopic Jackie undulates with a steady rhythm, matching the slight, deliberate movements of its grieving subject. Even the calculated, self-contained shifts of Levi’s musical calling card—a slanted, sliding glissando—signal the interventions of a composer.
But as a producer, they’ve built entire rhythms on the subtle jostles of human fallibility, crafting beats that bounce with drunken bravado. The overdriven, sludged-out pop of their band Good Sad Happy Bad (fka Micachu and the Shapes) takes electroclash intensity to its logical conclusion, leaving singer Raisa Khan’s vocals barely distinguishable from dense layers of guitar. When pressed to describe their core genre for a U.S. artist’s visa, they chose “loud and noisy.” After a lifetime of classical music training and over a decade in the music industry, Levi codifies that descriptor on their debut solo record, Ruff Dog.
For those primarily familiar with Levi’s soundtracks and distinctive, dub-heavy club mixes, Ruff Dog might seem like a lark: The album opens with a canine howl before launching into an onslaught of distortion, unbridled even for a producer with a penchant for going into the red. Ruff Dog pushes their musical tendencies to the limit, at times threatening to render chord shifts and secondary melodies completely illegible. Though Levi often reaches for thin, tinny percussion, the dry snaps of “Flower Bed”—one of the only songs to feature noticeable drums—are gratingly brittle. Rhythms, as much as they exist, are overridden at will by Levi’s voice, a gravely and pinched tenor that sounds like a post-hangover cigarette personified. On “Hi Gene,” they repeat the song’s titular phrase—perhaps a cheeky gesture at how downright dirty the album sounds—as if singing in their sleep, meeting the beat only by happenstance.
At its brightest moments, Ruff Dog recalls the blurred bliss of Micachu and the Shapes, a skilled mockery of pop song structure that becomes catchy, even inspired, once you bite through the grit and grime. The album generally operates in two modes: blown-out grunge and soporific dream pop, married by a thick layer of fuzz (one might think an engineering wiz like Levi would bristle at the term “lo-fi,” but there it is, tagged on the album’s Bandcamp page). The core riff in “Pain” channels the pummeling drive of early X; the descending guitar scales of “One Tear” play out like Doolittle on morphine, Levi’s voice rising to a swooning, romantic climax, even though the lyrics are indecipherable.
On an album that more often bristles than bends, the softer elements stand up strongest: a verbosely titled track, inspired by a dream about Jimi Hendrix, opens with breezy, echoing guitar, a welcome moment of tranquility that recalls the solipsistic strangeness of early Deerhunter. “Ride Till We Die” conjures the easy plod of one of Ennio Morricone’s Spaghetti Western scores. “Right by your side, ride till we die,” Levi sings with just a hint of irony; their voice flattens in the lower registers, but perfect pitch is hardly the point. Ruff Dog sketches out the barest ideas of puppy love and adolescent angst; its mileage depends on how many blanks you care to fill with your own musical contexts.
As often as it suggests something bigger, Ruff Dog remains stubbornly modest. Its sound reflects what the press materials describe: a six-hour studio goof-around, well deserved by a producer who’s won awards for their meticulous work for the screen. But, particularly paired with mixing from the masterful Marta Salogni, the go-to for note-perfect British pop perfection, it tends to come off as an extended practical joke. When two of the brightest lights in the UK alternative scene collaborate on a record that sounds like it could have been recorded on a cell phone—in fact, is that an errant iPhone timer dinging in the background of “Chains Baggy”?—one wonders just how far the definition of pop music can stretch. But for Levi, capping these could-be brilliant melodies at their barest inklings of potential might be its own form of release.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-08T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | self-released | January 8, 2021 | 6.7 | 761814f9-5dab-49fe-85c0-8e6483a6dc88 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The Chicago three-piece hasn’t changed a thing about its streamlined indie rock, evoking youthful abandon and the ache of distantly-recalled bliss. | The Chicago three-piece hasn’t changed a thing about its streamlined indie rock, evoking youthful abandon and the ache of distantly-recalled bliss. | Dehd: Blue Skies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dehd-blue-skies/ | Blue Skies | Dehd made the perfect road-trip album for 2020, the year no one left their living rooms. Amid the general malaise, the 13 rock songs on Flower of Devotion hit like intravenously delivered exclamation points, the sound fragile but the spirit indomitable. Their vision of youthful abandon enticed precisely because of its implied distance; Jason Balla’s simple guitars, Eric McGrady’s even simpler drums, and Emily Kempf’s hairbrush-microphone shout arrived trailing echoes, already receding. The album still summons that initial rush whenever you play it, a small but meaningful salvo in the losing battle against anhedonia.
The trouble is, now they have to do it again. Narrow perfections like Dehd’s tend to blunt themselves on repetition, and it can take a peculiar kind of nerve to stay the course. But on Blue Skies, they made the best choice, which is the only choice: Change nothing. Not one thing. Thread together Flowers of Devotion and Blue Skies onto one playlist, hit shuffle, and boom: the ache of distantly-recalled bliss, now double the runtime.
Kempf remains their life force. Like Julian Casablancas or Sheer Mag’s Tina Halladay, Kempf’s voice is basically a series of rock-star poses transubstantiated into sound-wave form. Watching her live, you can nearly see all these poses—the raised-fist howl, the heartbroken bleat, the giddy yip—leap from her throat like a procession of CGI unicorns. Her voice is the single element that sparks these tinder-dry rock songs into fire. McGrady adds a few fills this time, but otherwise he still plays like someone testing a drum kit rather than playing one. Balla’s wispy guitar tone isn’t far removed from the one employed on the Shaggs’ “My Pal Foot Foot.” Their reserve feels disciplined: They know they are the night highway, so they let Kempf be the yellow stripes, her words strafing past in flashes of color and motion.
Road-trip rock albums are tallied and graded on their supply of fun, catchy lyrics to yell along to, and Blue Skies boasts a profusion. Every song features at least one exclamation point, and most feature more—“Empty in my mind!”; “Over kissing strangers, I want to kiss a friend!”; “Where we’re going I don’t know/Makes no difference anymore!” “This is all we get!” They don’t need to resort to singing “doo-doo-doo-bop”—as they do on a song called “Bop”—because their actual lyrics are catchier. On the single and standout “Bad Love,” Kempf howls, “I was a bad love/Now I can get some/I got a heart full of, I got a heart full of/Re-re-redemption.” What does it mean to be a bad love? Take it and run with it. Mouth the words to your reflective surface of choice and try out different angles: despairing, confessional, swaggering.
When either Balla or McGrady supply lead vocals, they sound like an entirely different band. “Hold,” sung by McGrady, could be the work of a Flying Nun tribute act, one with songs about allergies and Auden. On opener “Control,” Balla sounds a bit like Nathan from Wavves if he were doing a dodgy James Mason impression. These songs are pleasant, but the charisma gap separating the others from Kempf is Liam-Noel level, and they need each other. Kempf’s voice might grate on its own, a flawless karaoke performance that goes on just a bit too long. When they sing together, some chemical reaction occurs: Three simple and effective instruments alchemize into one perfect one. Trading the line “How come I’m always last to know/What I want!” on “Dream On,” they seem less like alternating vocalists than lights strobing through fog. | 2022-05-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-31T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | May 31, 2022 | 7.7 | 761bc821-c9c2-4070-b1e8-b3a3f1d20165 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Interpol's 2002 full-length debut is given a stellar 10th Anniversary reissue complete with demos and B-sides. All told, it makes it unequivocally clear that Turn on the Bright Lights is the sum of its players, not its influences. | Interpol's 2002 full-length debut is given a stellar 10th Anniversary reissue complete with demos and B-sides. All told, it makes it unequivocally clear that Turn on the Bright Lights is the sum of its players, not its influences. | Interpol: Turn on the Bright Lights: The Tenth Anniversary Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17324-turn-on-the-bright-lights-the-tenth-anniversary-edition/ | Turn on the Bright Lights: The Tenth Anniversary Edition | On the surface, the story of Interpol's 2002 full-length debut Turn on the Bright Lights is almost annoyingly of its place and time: four guys meet in New York, start a band, make tightly-wound indie rock jams that sound great at your favorite mid-gentrification Williamsburg bar, sign to a renowned independent label, and the rest is history. But the early-aughts New York of Turn on the Bright Lights is not the young, vibrant, and impossibly cool place of cultural myth. It is a darker and more complicated place, fraught with disappointment and disconnection. It is a crushingly real place, rendered in such vivid emotional detail that it rings true even to those who have never set foot in the city. This stellar 10th Anniversary reissue documents the process by which a handful of pretty-good songs became a truly great album, making it painfully and unequivocally clear that Turn on the Bright Lights is the sum of its players, not its influences.
In retrospect, 2002 may have been the very year that we stopped talking about how music sounds, and started talking about what other music it sounds like. "Interpol sounds like Joy Division" was one of the first critical observations to turn into a full-fledged meme. In the intervening years, other bands have sounded a whole lot more like Joy Division, and the comparison now feels like just that: a comparison. While Joy Division could channel enormous amounts of energy through Ian Curtis's intense delivery, Interpol pulled off a real magic trick by constructing a framework complex and dynamic enough to bring singer Paul Banks' inscrutable deadpan to life. Banks's words can be downright laughable on paper, and are often sung as if WRITTEN OUT IN ALL CAPS WITH NO PUNCTUATION. But from this insistent, exaggerated blankness, the band coaxed a genuinely unnerving sense of alienation and melancholy. These songs are packed with a staggering amount of rhythmic and melodic tension, sometimes amplifying minuscule expressive nuances in Banks's voice, and sometimes drawing attention to their disconcerting absence.
Each individual member of the band has his own role in piecing this puzzle together. Drummer Sam Fogarino is the perfect anchor for Carlos Dengler's busy, melodic bass lines, keeping the rhythm section forceful and grounded. Guitarist Daniel Kessler is the album's unsung hero, expanding the band's dynamic range by oscillating between wide, monolithic chords and narrow, winding leads. The album's second single "NYC" achieves two unlikely successes pioneered by Matador labelmates Chavez: structuring a ballad around loud, steady drums and withholding all bass guitar until the chorus. "The New" slips a disco bass line under a morass of swirling, detuned guitars. There are a lot of things about Turn on the Bright Lights that should not work, and would not work were they not so carefully thought through and artfully implemented.
Three batches of demo recordings are far and away the most interesting bonus materials on this extensive reissue, as they show just how close the album came to not working. The first three-song demo, recorded in 1998 and featuring album cuts "PDA" and "Roland", comes off as an unremarkable practice tape by a band with lots of good ideas but insufficient energy and chemistry to pull them all together. The second three-song demo, recorded at Brooklyn's Rare Book Room in 1999, is more worked over with decidedly mixed results; there are some jarringly tacky too-loud keyboards here, and a sing-spoken interlude that can't help but bring to mind Crazy Town's "Butterfly". Somewhat ironically, it is only the third and final four-song demo, recorded at the band's practice space, where Interpol stops sounding like four guys in a practice space tentatively running through busy rock songs. Much of this can be credited to Fogarino, who joined the band between their second and third tapes and brought with him a rhythmic confidence and swagger that provided the crucial missing piece of Interpol's singular sound.
This progression of demo recordings documents not only the evolution of the band's playing, but also their increasing attention to texture and ambiance. As the group grew more confident, the gritty sonics of their demos became less incidental to the songs they were making, and more a part of the songs themselves. Producer Peter Katis did an amazing job of preserving and amplifying this rawness, and the band themselves crucially revisited many elements of their demos to better suit their evolving capabilities. The slight changes that Fogarino made to the kick pattern at the beginning of "PDA" completely make the song's signature introduction, taking it from "oh, there's a drumbeat" to "OH, there's THAT drumbeat." Banks gave his lyrics a thorough tune-up before the recording the album, excising his most rhythmically formless lines and shoring up the critical interplay between his voice and the rest of the band.
The extensive liner notes here are as much about the city in which Interpol operated as the band itself. It's certainly interesting, especially for those who are up on their New York City indie rock landmarks. And while the photographs included here do a good job of documenting the physical locations where this album was born, the album itself conveys the setting in a deeper way. Suggesting that this album is simply a product of its time and place is no less naive than suggesting that anyone who has ever been in love could easily write, arrange and record an amazing love song. There were a lot of good bands in New York in 2002, but only one band made this record. | 2012-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | December 4, 2012 | 9.5 | 761c012a-6293-47a6-95c2-e6d8a375527b | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
The latest solo album from the leader of Chromatics is a full-scale concept album about inclement weather. | The latest solo album from the leader of Chromatics is a full-scale concept album about inclement weather. | Johnny Jewel: Digital Rain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/johnny-jewel-digital-rain/ | Digital Rain | Like a film noir director shooting lamp-lit city streets at midnight drenched in rain, Johnny Jewel is enamored of the look and sound and feel of water. Dried out in Los Angeles, the Chromatics mastermind has been thinking about the hail in his native Houston and the snow in Montreal, Gulf Coast floods, and downpours in Portland, the city where he crystallized his twilit sound. “After living a few years in a desert climate, I realized I was nostalgic for the constant presence of precipitation from every city I once called home,” he recently wrote. Digital Rain is his response to that torrid absence.
Jewel’s music—whether on his own, or as a composer for television and film, or with his bands Glass Candy, Desire, and Chromatics—has always captured less a style or sound than a mood. His work around the production of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (most of which went unused in the finished film) was so intensely expressive of a menacing, neon-lit Los Angeles that it all but coined a genre. His collaboration last year with David Lynch on the soundtrack to “Twin Peaks: The Return,” provided some of the show’s defining aesthetic pleasures, in particular his moody theme for Kyle MacLachlan’s Dougie Jones (“Windswept,” the title track from Jewel’s last solo album) and his otherworldly performances on stage at the Roadhouse with Chromatics and Julee Cruise. His talent is for atmosphere. He’s at his strongest when he’s encouraged to indulge it.
Digital Rain does indeed sound wet. Composed without drums, vocals, or guitars, it’s a synth-streaked cloudburst, an electronic squall. A minute-long interlude called “Monsoon” churns and seethes. “La Ville De Neige” quivers with an expansive, frosty calm. The thunderstorms of “Magma” fizzle out into a gentle drizzle, while delicate slabs of ambience hang like mist on “What If?.” You get it. All these moody invocations of raindrops drumming on the windshield of a car as it glides down the highway at night seem carefully calibrated to resonate in precisely such a literal way. Digital Rain doesn’t merely bring to mind precipitation. It’s a full-scale concept album about inclement weather.
The album is another of Jewel’s complete recreations of an aura. With austere means, he summons an often exquisite vision of a world of ice and water, snow and rain. And while its 41 minutes are largely tranquil, flowing smoothly with the aplomb of electronic artists Loscil or Keith Fullerton Whitman, the record sometimes erupts into sudden showers and storms. On “Air Museum,” one can feel the water coming down violently, a flourish of heavy synths pouring out in torrents, while on “Ship of Theseus” little electronic swirls crest and break like waves all around. It is a document not just of nostalgia for these conditions but affection as well: Jewel admires the downpour and the blizzard. They suit his temperament. One can well imagine him in the throes of making this album—fixed in a reverie in the arid heat of L.A., stirring up for us so effectively and poignantly his fondest memories of the much-missed sleet and rain. | 2018-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | ITALIANS DO IT BETTER | January 25, 2018 | 7.4 | 761c7695-7b2d-4eea-9215-4b2020fa87c0 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
The Eagles of Death Metal may be the most misleading bandname since 10,000 Maniacs: On their debut album,\n ... | The Eagles of Death Metal may be the most misleading bandname since 10,000 Maniacs: On their debut album,\n ... | Eagles of Death Metal: Peace Love Death Metal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2903-peace-love-death-metal/ | Peace Love Death Metal | The Eagles of Death Metal may be the most misleading bandname since 10,000 Maniacs: On their debut album, Peace Love Death Metal, the band sound like neither The Eagles (a relief) nor death metal. Instead, the record's churning guitars and hook-driven choruses suggest a bizarro-world version of Queens of the Stone Age, specifically the Nuggets-inflected "Another Love Song" from Songs for the Deaf or their cover of "Who'll Be the Next in Line?" from the Kinks tribute This Is Where I Belong. Which makes sense: Queens frontman Josh Homme is listed as producer on Peace Love Death Metal.
But who are the Eagles of Death Metal? The liner notes credit J. Devil Huge on guitar/vocals and Carlo Von Sexron (nickname: Baby Duck) on drums/backing vocals. Huge is apparently the stage name for J. Everett Hughes, a friend of Homme's from Palm Desert, CA, while Von Sexron is an alias for both Josh Homme and (as the nickname's initials hint) Distillers frontwoman Brody Dalle. While the connection between Hughes and Homme goes way back, the band's fraudulent nomenclature and misleading identities-- along with the general one-off vibe of the album-- suggest that Peace Love Death Metal is really the sonic manifestation of an elaborate inside joke, in this case possibly fueled by either "nicotinevaliumvicadanmarijuannaecstasyalcoholc-c-c-cocaine" or just an appreciation of cartoonish rock clichés.
Adopting a bluesy loverman persona that at times, intentionally or not, recalls Jon Spencer, Hughes sings most of the songs in a jokey falsetto that would be unbearable if he didn't occasionally dip into a Elvis-channeling low-end grumble. On the lead-off track, "I Only Want You", he lays out his dishonorable intentions: "I'm not really interested in what's in your heart/ I don't want you to fall in love with me so don't start." Elsewhere, Hughes promises that his good lovin' will leave you babbling in religious ecstasy on "Speaking in Tongues", and even offers an articulate demonstration as he sings, "Muh-muh-muh-muh-oooh-da-galing-ling-ling-ling-da-da" over the bridge.
Backing up this self-conscious braggadocio are bundles of bandsaw riffs that add enough edgy swagger to skirt outright garage-rock parody. The stripped-down instrumentation and live-in-the-studio recording occasionally sound thin, as if you could turn the volume all the way up to 11 and it still wouldn't be loud enough. The trade-off, however, is a spontaneity and resourcefulness that adds honky-tonk piano to "Wastin' My Time", beat-keeping finger snaps to "San Berdoo Sunburn", and four false starts to "English Girl".
Peace Love Death Metal is at its best when the inside joke is buried deep in the music, but whenever the deathtongue is planted squarely in the deathcheek, the songs turn not just silly, but lumbering and self-indulgent, overburdened by the overriding concept. "Kiss the Devil" and "Midnight Creeper" are nudge-nudge exercises in rock Satanism, and "Whorehoppin'" seems to exist solely for its over-the-top chorus of, "Shit! Goddamn! I'm a man!" Similarly, the cover of Steelers Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle with You" doesn't add anything to the original that Reservoir Dogs didn't at least suggest; most likely, it's only here to provide the easy pun of retitling the song "Stuck in the Metal". Nothing rocks like a bad pun.
In another post-Songs for the Deaf death metal side project, some-time QOTSA drummer Dave Grohl recreated real head-banging metal with a revolving line-up of singers and no trace of irony. Eagles of Death Metal, on the other hand, try so hard not to sound like death metal that sometimes all you get is irony. They're not resurrecting a fallen-from-grace genre or even attempting to subvert any of the rock clichés they indulge in; their only agenda is to have a good time, dude. Still, while it sounds disingenuous compared to Probot, and the whole concept wears thin over 15 tracks, it's hard not to get caught up in the jovial fuck-all spirit of Peace Love Death Metal's best cuts. It may be an inside joke, but Homme and his cohorts, whoever the hell they are, seem to want us all to get it. | 2004-04-25T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-04-25T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | AntAcid | April 25, 2004 | 7.2 | 762a0ef2-a451-4eec-b426-3ccc5def4cb9 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Drawing on the music of his youth, Buenos Aires-born songwriter Juan Zaballa’s second album cleverly illuminates Latin America’s rich musical heritage. | Drawing on the music of his youth, Buenos Aires-born songwriter Juan Zaballa’s second album cleverly illuminates Latin America’s rich musical heritage. | Tall Juan: Atlantico | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tall-juan-atlantico/ | Atlantico | Tall Juan is as tall (about 6 feet 3 inches) as he is named Juan, and in his brief career, he has lovingly commanded the art of pastiche. On his 2017 debut Olden Goldies, Juan Zaballa introduced himself in 15 short songs as a rockabilly crooner raised on the Ramones—Iggy Pop doing an Elvis bit, maybe vice versa. The Buenos Aires-born singer made his way to Far Rockaway, Queens, where he honed his goofy brand of punk alongside former roommate Mac DeMarco and songwriter Juan Wauters (from whom “tall” distinguishes Zaballa).
When Zaballa released a modest two-song EP called Tall Juan Plays Cumbia in December, the usual adjectives no longer applied. Here, he reached for a recent past: Buenos Aires in the 1990s and its working-class neighborhoods that cultivated cumbia villera, a synth-washed genre of social protest. It was the first glimpse at his new album Atlantico, a paean to Latin America, the continent’s musical roots in Africa, and the fraught body of water in between.
If that sounds like a lengthy project, it is. “It all started when I realized that tango music was created by Africans,” Zaballa said in a recent interview. He names the music of Soweto in Johannesburg as a vector through which he came to better understand that of Latin America, and cites French no wave artist Lizzy Mercier Descloux’s 1984 anti-apartheid album Zulu Rock as his introduction to African musical traditions.
Yet at a brisk 22 minutes, Atlantico is a compact exploration of the sounds that form the cultural fabric of Zaballa’s youth in Argentina. The album opens with “Rocio,” a lilting ballad that immediately belies the influence of Zulu Rock’s experiments with Shangaan disco, Soweto jive, and mbaqanga music. Soon after, Zaballa’s whining croon enters, having lost some of its snarl as he rhymes “la isla de pascuas” (literally Easter Island, or an island on holiday) and “ayahuasca” with characteristic nonchalance.
On Atlantico’s cover songs, Zaballa uses simple tricks to illuminate the richness of Latin America’s genre dialogues. “Don’t Come,” a jauntier take on Argentine post-punk band Sumo’s “No Acabes,” infuses the song’s reggae foundation with jazz saxophone and rhythm-and-blues guitar. “Think I go to Africa, maybe Ethiopia,” Sumo mused blithely, and Zaballa echoes that desire with naive earnestness, even personalizing one lyric with his own experience as a transplant in Queens: “Living in Far Rockaway, it’s so difficult/I really don’t know what to do.” On “Irene,” the tropicália lick of Caetano Veloso’s 1969 original lends itself easily to the driving acoustic post-punk riff Zaballa adds behind it. And “Los Chicos,” while not a cover, is a sweeping, “All the Young Dudes”-esque zeitgeist ballad: “Los chicos afuera quieren divertirse/Y desde mi cuarto yo los veo tristes/Porque hoy, hoy yo no voy a salir.” (“The kids outside want to have fun/And from my room they seem sad/Because today I’m not going out.”)
Throughout the record, Zaballa asks that the music be allowed to speak for itself, just as he has sought to listen more closely. He states that mission in the slow reggae march of “El Mar”: “Desenterrando los sentimientos que hacen/Que en la canción se escuchen las notas caer/Y en las notas se escuchará esta música” (“Unearthing the feelings that allow/You to hear the notes fall in the song/And in the notes you will hear this music”). He subsequently admits he’s not always sure those feelings come through.
Atlantico lacks a deeper look at colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade, or the violence that is inextricable to the history of adopting and reframing African musical traditions in Latin America. Short instrumentals like the dreamy “White Castle” (a very Tall Juan equivalence of medieval romance and fast food) and “Rocio Piano,” the fleeting piano flourish that closes the record, give it an open-ended, unfinished quality. The album might feel more incomplete in these respects had Zaballa framed Atlantico as an outward ethnomusicological study rather than a personal one. Instead, it is an ongoing lesson in better understanding one’s own geography. | 2020-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | May 20, 2020 | 7.2 | 7639f443-7577-4a40-9511-209ed72d9d77 | Stefanie Fernández | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stefanie-fernández/ | |
The debut from the Chicago trio tempers grandiose experiments with a keen drive for melody and structure, pushing the further reaches of psychedelia without ever losing its footing. | The debut from the Chicago trio tempers grandiose experiments with a keen drive for melody and structure, pushing the further reaches of psychedelia without ever losing its footing. | Spun Out: Touch the Sound | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spun-out-touch-the-sound/ | Touch the Sound | The maximalist mentality that prevails throughout Touch the Sound, the debut album from the Chicago trio Spun Out, might come as a surprise to those familiar with the band’s history. Vocalist and guitarist Mikey Wells, bassist James Weir, and drummer Alex Otake first came to prominence in the punk quartet NE-HI, who were known for their taut, rubbery guitar sound and sweaty, livewire performances. Though NE-HI became more nuanced in the studio before disbanding in 2019, their defining textures remained sparse and wiry. NE-HI vocalist Jason Balla took that to one extreme with the joyful twang of Dehd, and now the rest of the band is fully committed to a new, grandiose direction.
Small studio flourishes decorate each song on Touch the Sound. From the chimes and synths that open “Dark Room” to the guiro accents on “Off the Vine,” every instrument finds space in the mix. Most songs use the keyboard as their point of departure; they are as warm as Stevie Wonder’s clavichord. Shrouded under a thick electronic blanket, more eclectic choices, like the addition of an errant cowbell and tambourine on “Pretender,” feel familiar. With help from producer Josh Wells, who aided in developing the carefully layered synths of Destroyer’s ken, Spun Out evoke the spark of a jam session within the smoothed, controlled environment of the studio.
The record’s internal transitions—key changes or shifting movements within a single song—feel spontaneous and easy, a mark of the half-decade of camaraderie and chemistry the band’s members have banked. That cohesion also allows for cross-genre experimentations that fit into the patchwork of Spun Out’s overall sound. The buoyant synth-pop jingle “Such Are the Lonely” feels a generation removed from the earnest, piano-driven rhythms of “Don’t Act Down,” but the snap of Otake’s drums, the wistful echo of Weir’s bass, and Wells’ croon carry them into the same universe. From that base palette, the band is freer to experiment with a rotating ensemble of studio musicians, adding a saxophone or an eerie vocal line straight out of Sonic Youth’s “Kool Thing” without running off the map entirely.
Though the beat-driven psychedelia is far removed from the threadbare punk of their origins, what remains is a shared sense of trust. That faith in their collaborative process comes through in their experimentation—what could otherwise become ’80s pastiche instead feels warmly rendered. As a group joins Wells for an emphatic final coda on “Don’t Act Now,” there’s the sense that they could easily go on for another 20 minutes, or more frankly, that time doesn’t factor in much at all; that they restrain themselves to just over 40 minutes across the album seems like a knowing courtesy to their audience. If their previous band trafficked in intense minimalism, Touch the Sound is intimacy borne from abundance.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Shuga | August 24, 2020 | 7.5 | 76417557-7123-4089-beb7-d8906997e0ac | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Ratchet, from Las Vegas singer-songwriter Shamir Bailey, feels like a study in the best dance-pop of the past decade. It's an honest, earnest pop record, as Shamir elaborates on the gutsy melodies of his early demos and singles. | Ratchet, from Las Vegas singer-songwriter Shamir Bailey, feels like a study in the best dance-pop of the past decade. It's an honest, earnest pop record, as Shamir elaborates on the gutsy melodies of his early demos and singles. | Shamir: Ratchet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20585-ratchet/ | Ratchet | "Growing up in Vegas and being the weird one out, you kind of have to put on a tough face," Shamir Bailey tells those tuned into his Ratchet Radio playlist on Spotify. There’s both weirdness and toughness in droves on his debut album-cum-deliverance, Ratchet. Less than two years after sending a demo cross-country to Brooklyn's Godmode imprint, Shamir signed to XL Recordings—a label known for pop outliers like Dizzee Rascal, M.I.A., and FKA twigs—and got his face on a Times Square billboard. On Ratchet, an honest, earnest pop record, Shamir elaborates on the gutsy melodies of those early demos and singles and makes good on the hype.
Produced entirely by Godmode label head Nick Sylvester (a former Pitchfork contributor), Ratchet feels like a study in the best dance-pop of the past decade, from the dank basslines of the Ed Banger collective to the melodic, moody prance of Hot Chip, the flamboyance of the Scissor Sisters to the technical, four-on-the-floor finesse of Azari & III. This powers a record that’s about the sine wave of adolescent emotions; Shamir, a cherub-faced fashion kid with a voice like Crystal Waters, flips easily between confidence and vulnerability. The piano house/diva vocal-influenced R&B track "I Know It’s a Good Thing", from last year’s Northtown EP, merely hinted at how dance-indebted this record is. Acid basslines chug and squelch on "Call It Off" and "Hot Mess", and "Make a Scene" and "Head in the Clouds" both ascend to frenzied, laser synth peaks.
House, particularly within the context of its early black, gay roots, has been described as liberating. There’s a freedom narrative at play on Ratchet too, as Shamir excises those childhood demons while calling upon the showy, campy glamor of his hometown. "Vegas, we’re sinners all right, at least at night," Shamir warbles on the lounge-y intro track, named after the city. Shamir's voice is the most immediately unusual element; whether singing or rapping, he moves from comely to coy to cocky, depending on what the song calls for. Like on "Youth", a nu-disco lament with a soulful breakdown, where he pours his tinsel voice over a double-time rattle and a Morse-quick buzz synth. Each word trickles out slowly and precise at first, and then it’s like he backs away from the mic to sing from the gut, trilling and ad-libbing to a rapturous breakdown.
Squint past his vocal brass and the dazzle of the production and there’s that weirdness and toughness. "On the Regular", a gleaming, dance-rap contagion, is the kitschy lure into the album, more subdued than Azealia Banks’ "212" but sharing a spiritual bounce and temerity. "Don’t try me, I’m not a free sample...Haters get the bird, more like the eagle," he alternates between a regal, almost sensual moan and breathless rapping, which dilutes the crassness of alluding to dropping down and thrusting his crotch in someone’s face. And on the wry ballad "Demon", about a life-altering relationship, "If I'm a demon, baby, you're the beast that made me." It’s a beautiful, delicate melody that’s slightly blue, and brings Shamir as close as he’ll get to straight up vulnerability on a pulsing, in-your-face record. Perhaps most indicative of Ratchet’s pseudo-redemptive, leaving-Las-Vegas arc is "In for the Kill", an orchestral freak-out that finds Shamir looking back to say, "I’ll be back someday, and when I do I promise you, I won’t make the same mistake." The adult Shamir has reconstituted his precious voice as armor.
He might resemble past baby-faced rap and R&B stars like IMx or TBTBT or B2K, minus the hyper-alpha masculinity, but Shamir fits in with today’s genre-bending pop stars. Ratchet is as melodically and thematically confident as Rihanna and Willow Smith, but his aesthetic—a Vegas pixie, a black man making poetic and flagrantly rococo dance pop—is a challenge and a reclamation, not just of "ratchet," but the queer, racialized roots of house music and the unabashedly flamboyant history of black pop music.
We revere Prince and are fascinated by Young Thug, both unapologetically outre musicians walking the line of black masculinity, but they qualify that with reams of virile, hetero fuck-anthems. Frank Ocean came out and said it. Shamir, on the other hand, conveys a more ambiguous sensuality that presents a challenge to pop—his lane, for sure—especially given his soft, high-pitched, luminous voice. He doesn’t tell us anything about his sexuality, but we all know how people can treat artistic, effete boys. What Ratchet’s 10 songs of self-discovery say without saying at all is that there’s liberation on the dancefloor. | 2015-05-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-05-18T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | XL | May 18, 2015 | 8.3 | 764511f3-b239-4174-a5f4-4b9633e7f224 | Anupa Mistry | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anupa-mistry/ | null |
On the follow-up to their 2013 debut LP, the beer-swilling, self-described former “party band” grows up without slowing down. | On the follow-up to their 2013 debut LP, the beer-swilling, self-described former “party band” grows up without slowing down. | Bed Wettin' Bad Boys: Rot | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bed-wettin-bad-boys-rot/ | Rot | When they began in 2009, Australia’s Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys immediately lived up to their name. Though their music was never a joke, the band could come off as a stumbling, drunken wreck. By the time of their debut album, in 2013, they decided to grow up a bit, which is why they called it Ready for Boredom. “It seemed to indicate this exit from us being a party band,” said singer and bassist Nic Warnock. “Life is becoming more apparent, I guess. I worry about shit more.”
So how has growing up gone so far? It’s not a great sign that the quartet decided to call their follow-up album Rot, but its songs tell a more hopeful story. Many of them are about finding the maturity and patience to take life as it comes. Guitarist Joe Sukit opens the record singing about the need “to relent control,” and the rest of the way—in songs with names like “Expanding Horizons” and “Turn the Page”—the band returns to themes of acceptance and gratitude. “Well, it’s a long and lonely life,” Warnock hums on “Stunned.” “But for me that’ll do alright/Until something comes along.”
Luckily, lyrical maturation doesn’t mean turning soft musically. None of Rot’s 11 songs are a mess—the rhythms are tight and the riffs are on target—but the album is still pretty raucous. Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys remain unafraid to scrawl outside the lines and spill into the red. When Sukit strains to sing, “Try to change your life, but life changes you,” during “Device,” the rough density of the guitars makes his struggle palpable. This combination of energy and wisdom aligns Rot with their soulful Aussie brethren Royal Headache (Sukit is a former member; Warnock’s label RIP Society released that group’s first album). But Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys attack their songs with an industrious devotion that sets Rot apart.
Rot’s nose-to-the-grindstone feel fits its grown-up themes. It also risks blurring songs together; at times, the simple melodies fly by nicely enough without making much of an impression. But more often than not, Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys hit on hooks with plenty of earworm power. “Plastic Tears,” one of the album’s rare biting tunes, boasts an insta-classic guitar line, while “Work Again” turns muscular chords into a head-nodding workout. At their best, they can be both catchy and epic, as in the seven-minute closer, “Turn the Page.” “Things that happen may be strange/But I’m gonna embrace that change,” sings Warnock in what could be the band’s theme song. “Wanna deal with life's big mysteries/Trying not to sweat the small things.”
On the page, such blunt self-therapy may sound a bit on the nose. But the band sell their introspection by marrying it to convincingly urgent music. It’s also a lot of fun; all the flying guitar chords and thumping beats inevitably quicken pulses. Bed Wettin’ Bad Boys may no longer be pissing their sheets, but Rot shows they didn’t have to slow down to grow up. Or as Warnock put it back in 2013, “You can be a piece of shit but still do something awesome.” | 2017-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | What's Your Rupture? / R.I.P. Society | November 11, 2017 | 7.3 | 7649168d-8baa-4f65-84a5-aa0243d0dad9 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | |
The Seattle indie rock band’s final record is a great parting gift, one with generous portions of wit, melancholy, and even one long guitar solo. | The Seattle indie rock band’s final record is a great parting gift, one with generous portions of wit, melancholy, and even one long guitar solo. | Posse: Horse Blanket | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/posse-horse-blanket/ | Horse Blanket | If dreary Seattle indie rock had poet laureates, Posse would handily claim the title. Since 2010, across two previous albums, the trio chronicled the banality and disappointments of life in their Northwest city with wit and sadness and hilarity. The sound they crafted to accompany their stories of bad dates at terrible Seattle rap shows (“A bald white guy/With a mumu onstage” one lyric went) and workplace frustration was beautifully spartan; just two guitars and a drum chugging along in a haze. Horse Blanket is the band’s final record, an EP of six songs about the things they know best: “boredom and loss, miscommunication and regret.”
On opener “Dream Sequence,” vocalist Sacha Maxim gently shoves a listener into Posse’s disaffected, overcast world: “I was sick/I was tired/I was standing in the rain” she sings with a frown. The lyric is without frills or metaphor. Instead, Posse find poetry in blunt and dead-simple observations. This reflects in their arrangements, which are without ornamentation or glitz, just Maxim and Paul Wittmann-Todd’s depressive guitar strums accompanied by Jon Salzman’s quiet drumming.
While their sound could almost be described as rudimentary, it’s never boring. The deliberate nature of their music, the almost shuffling sleepwalking stupor of their voices and each instrument trudging forward, create a sense of pace and place that is so real it can be hallucinatory. Like on “Shiver” when Wittmann-Todd slurs, “I feel cold/Or maybe something like that,” the frigid trickle of guitar notes perfectly mimics the loneliness of his line. Something the band does so amazingly well, especially on songs like “Shiver,” is recreate an entire universe of subtle, painful interactions, “funny little rituals,” and personal landmarks. On “Shiver“ Wittmann-Todd takes you through a detailed tour of a break-up that travels between cold beaches and the interiors of shitty Volvos. The pain is self-lacerating: “I told myself I’d differ, but I never really change,” he sings.
That is not to say the band operates on the same mopey note. On “Keep Me Awake,” they have some fun, briefly donning the costume of a honky-tonk band. The grooviness of Sacha Maxim’s bass and the rattlesnake twang of Whittman-Todd’s guitar, for a moment, reinvent them as the coolest country rock act in the Pacific Northwest. And there is, of course, some fireworks to celebrate the end of things on the 12-minute title-track. It is the best song the band has ever written, a colossal, slacker-rock epic. In a 2014 interview, Wittmann-Todd said he once saw Carrie Brownstein rip a 40-minute guitar solo, and wished he could once do the same. On “Horse Blanket” he pretty much does that, letting loose a distorted, headbanging shredder.
But the song is a lot more than a rare show of pyrotechnics—it’s a duet between Maxim and Wittmann-Todd, with some their most gorgeous writing—spare and cutting and surreal. At one point Paul sings of “rolling out of bed” and Maxim answers, dreamily that this waking world is littered by “all the garbage floating through your mind.” They call it quits lazily and gracefully. The final track, “Trapped,” is an artful, slow-moving song about feeling unrooted and unsure. It ends with an honest couplet: “Have I given something away/And I just don’t know it?” It’s hard to tally the tangible output of any band, but Posse leaves us with this final thought—they may not know what exactly they gave, but it stays with us. | 2017-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | self-released | November 18, 2017 | 7.6 | 76581770-2218-4cdb-a5d3-634a3177b38a | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
In her abraded experimental club music, Berlin producer Ziúr favors a skeletal sound that still confidently occupies a maximal amount of space. It suggests that agitation can produce beauty. | In her abraded experimental club music, Berlin producer Ziúr favors a skeletal sound that still confidently occupies a maximal amount of space. It suggests that agitation can produce beauty. | Ziúr: U Feel Anything? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ziur-u-feel-anything/ | U Feel Anything? | The Berlin-based producer Ziúr seems committed to a specific brand of abraded experimental club music, with each of her releases imbued by shifting degree of relentlessness. U Feel Anything?, her debut full-length, is built from unapologetically serrated sounds, but it is measured and even delicate in its construction. A study in contrasts, U Feel Anything? is never pummeling for pummeling’s sake.
Beneath and through its harsher tendencies, Ziúr’s music is notably expressive. The breathing room afforded by an album-length release seems to nurture that, as the 12 tracks here explore relatively varied terrain. It opens with “Human Life Is Not a Commodity,” a beatless intro whose gently elongated tones and multilingual chorus of whispering voices feel dislocated from the club altogether. From there, the drill blasts and percussion—off-kilter yet tightly controlled—resume apace; still, the likes of “U Feel Anything?” or “Don’t Buy It” deploy these sounds with acute attention to negative space. Ziúr rarely relies on the cushion of static, favoring a sound that’s skeletal while still confidently occupying a maximal amount of sonic space.
These tracks frequently bend out in multiple emotional directions. While something like “Don’t Buy It” is all defiant clatter, the liquid melody of interlude “Moonlight” offers room for contemplation, and “Body of Light”—a slow, lovely piece featuring Aïsha Devi—explores a mood at once vulnerable and galvanizing. “Soaked,” which oscillates between an ecstatic build and percussive plateaus, has an almost psychedelic quality. It imagines somewhere else, and it invites listeners to develop a bodily relationship to that place through its bassy physicality.
The album’s two collaborations are among its fleshiest offerings: the pairing with Devi on “Body of Light,” and the climactic epic “Laughing and Crying Are the Same Thing,” with vocals from Swedish pop singer Zhala. With thunder production, the latter seizes and warps the boundaries of what constitutes a pop song, the piece crescendoing with a series of exuberantly grotesque whoops and grunts.
Like the best of her peers—especially Janus-affiliated producers like Lotic and DJ Hvad—Ziúr makes smart use of a kind of sand-in-the-oyster sense that agitation can produce beauty. Given its challenging palette, U Feel Anything? also benefits from its precision, the producer once more underscoring her talent when it comes to sound design. The choppy realm of “post-” or “deconstructed” club music has several times over seemed to have reached its limit, but Ziúr has carved a strong path out of these sounds. | 2017-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu / Objects Limited | October 7, 2017 | 7.1 | 765bd7a9-fa08-40d0-825c-cc4a0f1a55ac | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | |
DFA introduces Andrew Butler, a compelling new voice in American dance music. His debut album is a self-contained, self-assured set that runs vintage styles through a restless compositional imagination to create something joyfully, startlingly unique. Guest include Antony Hegarty, who provides vocals on multiple tracks, and !!!'s Tyler Pope. | DFA introduces Andrew Butler, a compelling new voice in American dance music. His debut album is a self-contained, self-assured set that runs vintage styles through a restless compositional imagination to create something joyfully, startlingly unique. Guest include Antony Hegarty, who provides vocals on multiple tracks, and !!!'s Tyler Pope. | Hercules and Love Affair: Hercules and Love Affair | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11269-hercules-and-love-affair/ | Hercules and Love Affair | Forget disco for a second. The most significant thing about the debut album from New York's Hercules and Love Affair has less to do with revival than arrival-- that of a compelling new voice in American dance music. Not Antony Hegarty's, of Antony and the Johnsons, even though his pipes are an integral part of Hercules' aesthetic, but Andrew Butler, a twentysomething resident of New York who has made one of 2008's great albums, and one of the best longplayers from DFA. (DFA's Tim Goldsworthy surely deserves some of the credit as well, as the album's co-producer and the programmer behind most of the record's beats.) Butler got his start writing music for art projects in college-- "like a remake of Gino Soccio's 'Runaway' done in the style of Kraftwerk," he told Fact magazine-- but Hercules and Love Affair's music doesn't require Fischerspooner-type theatrics. This debut album is a self-contained, self-assured, 10-song set that runs vintage styles through a restless compositional imagination to create something joyfully, startlingly unique.
Of course, you can't entirely forget about disco; the record owes a debt to the dance-music of the 1970s and 80s, from Gamble & Huff-style strings to the camp sensibilities of Sylvester or Patrick Cowley. Butler has clearly studied Arthur Russell: His dancefloor jams have the same energy that drives uptempo Russell numbers like "Go Bang" and "Is It All Over My Face?", and his arrangements-- as when he nestles Kim Ann Foxman's voice in a bed of spongy keys and bass on "Athene", like an Easter egg in plastic grass-- recall Russell's facility for space and timbre.
There are plenty of signposts for disco, the genre: octave-toggling bass lines (played by Automato's Andrew Raposo and !!!'s Tyler Pope), rattling congas, bouncing 4/4 kicks, and insistent open hi-hats. There are references to house, as well, as would be expected from a record whose lead single features a Frankie Knuckles remix. But they point less to the 90s version of house as a distinct genre, whether sleek and lush or raw and machinic, than to house music in its origins, when it was simply disco music that was played at the Warehouse. Only "You Belong", with its taut, spiky drum machine programming and pistoning chords, engages the formalism of early Chicago house.
And it engages it brilliantly. What is often forgotten when talking about music so steeped in tradition is how it actually sounds-- how it works, how it conjures. It would be a shame if Hercules and Love Affair's music were to be reduced to the sum of its references, even in shorthand, because Butler's music is too complex, too lovingly stuffed with ideas. That Hercules and Love Affair is as unwieldy as its name-- and also just as passionate, camp, and muscular-- is one of its great pleasures. "You Belong" begins as a faithful exercise in acid-house revivalism, from the syncopated cowbell patterns to a looped vocal sample recalling the classic house invocations to "Jack, motherfucker." (It doesn't matter that the indistinct sample says something different; its cadence triggers something like an unconscious memory of acid house's vocal tropes.) It's the way that Butler and his collaborators mold formalist fidelity into something stranger that makes the track really sing, beginning with keyboards that seem to float on a cushion of air, and extending to the way that the singer Nomi's lead vocals are mimicked by a multitracked backing refrain from Antony that sounds as though it's been run through a prism. For its minor-key structure, the song's augmented chords give it the quality of an exploding rainbow.
Not everything here is designed as "dance music." The opening "Time Will", one of the album's highlights, mutates a standard disco framework into a weird and gelatinous torch song. "Iris", likewise, slows house music's pitter-patter dramatically, leaving the rhythm a framing device for the interplay between horns, synthesizers, and Foxman's sentimental lead vocals. And "Easy", the album's most understated song, sounds so different from the rest of the record that it suggests an alternate trajectory Hercules and Love Affair could presumably pursue-- a dusky noir somewhere between the Knife and Shriekback.
But while more than half of the album's tracks would easily work on forward-thinking dance floors-- "Hercules' Theme", "You Belong", "Athene", "Blind", "This Is My Love", "Raise Me Up", and "True False, Fake Real" all cruise comfortably between 110 and 120 bpm-- what really shines is the songwriting. The album brims with hooks, choruses, bridges, strange twists, and turns. It's hardly maximalist-- every song feels like it could be played by a four-or-five piece band with a few overdubs-- and yet the record expands and contracts, pressing tones together before zooming outward to present each element in stark, shining relief. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the rollicking "Hercules' Theme", which opens with a spare loop of percussion, Rhodes, and electric bass and gradually balloons into a soaring mess of horns, string vamps, and vocal harmonies. Few producers can pull off excess as well as Butler and Goldsworthy; that they balance their outré tendencies with moments of careful restraint only confirms their finesse.
If the record has a flaw, it might be its overall pacing. "Time Will" and "Hercules' Theme" feel like they're vying for the opening slot, a sense confirmed by the fact that they're in the same key. And the flow of the record's latter half feels off, with the subdued "Iris" and "Easy" followed by another muted disco number ("This Is My Love") before jumping back into the jaunty "Raise Me Up" and "True False, "Fake Real". But these are quibbles. Hercules and Love Affair is a phenomenal album, one destined to save disco not from its detractors but rather from those fans and revivalists who would calcify the music as a set as a set of tropes and reference points. Lush, melancholic, gregarious, generous, both precise and a little bit unhinged-- this is the most original American dance album in a long while. | 2008-03-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-03-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | DFA | March 12, 2008 | 9.1 | 765f0756-5073-433b-8bb7-6779f34a313f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The seventh album from the Boston noise-rock band revels in a heightened level of studio ambition without losing its snarling ferocity. | The seventh album from the Boston noise-rock band revels in a heightened level of studio ambition without losing its snarling ferocity. | Pile: Green and Gray | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pile-green-and-gray/ | Green and Gray | Midway through Pile’s new album comes one of the best and most unusual protest songs of the Trump era. Its title, “The Soft Hands of Stephen Miller,” resembles an ironic in-joke. Except Pile’s singer Rick Maguire is not at all joking. Over a serrated guitar riff that sounds like a Jesus Lizard record-skip—relentlessly repeating even when every other instrument strives to sabotage it—Maguire lays into the president’s xenophobic policy advisor. It’s part diagnosis, part roast: The words “stiff pale shell,” alleged impotence, and a dig at Miller’s refugee great-grandmother all come into play. Yet there is also a nauseous glimmer of recognition. “That dude is the same age as me,” Maguire said in a recent interview, “and it’s like, what happened to you?” When the singer repeats the word “How?” in a throat-wrecking yelp, it mostly sounds like he is crying “Help!”
It’s as close to an anthem as Pile has written, though it remains staunchly unhummable. Even this band’s protest tunes are circuitous tangles of aggression and flailing limbs. Pile, the noise-rock darlings of the Boston DIY scene, achieved their cult-like measure of indie fame by touring mercilessly and doing nothing the easy way: The band has never written fist-pumping platitudes, never optioned a song for a major television show, never covered Toto. Picking up where 2017’s A Hairshirt of Purpose left off, Green and Gray employs a heightened level of studio ambition without losing its ferocious might. It is the band’s most satisfying and varied album yet.
Green and Gray reflects changes in both geography (the band moved to Nashville) and personnel (two members quit, replaced by guitarist Chappy Hull and bassist Alex Molini). Yet Kris Kuss’ pummelling work on the drums remains central to Pile’s sound, undergirding high-velocity prog-ish songs like “On a Bigger Screen” and “A Bug on its Back.” And, perhaps to match the stench of sociopolitical revulsion, Maguire summons some utterly sickening riffs: “Lord of Calendars” cracks and shakes in an odd meter and “On a Bigger Screen” sounds like a sputtering car engine trying to tell you something is horribly wrong. Both are ferocious.
There is a mournful edge to this record, too, and an increasing willingness to treat the studio as more than an aural document of Pile’s live prowess. The recording process took two weeks, and say what you will, but this is actually a long time for Pile. The resulting album incorporates considerably more atmospheric depth, including orchestral and keyboard overdubs. Pile are not growing soft, but they are growing: “Firewood,” this album’s disarming opener, finds Maguire brooding about his spent youth and gray hairs as a whining cello jostles for space in the mix. It’s lovely in the way that late-career Polvo songs can be lovely, with just the right amount of tenderness before the climax comes crashing in. “Hair” keeps its existential panic similarly subdued—the drummer even acquires brushes for the occasion.
Not every experiment lands.“Your Performance,” in particular, with its heavily treated vocals and vague allusions to a “neon cartoon” (guess who), feels limp, its crescendo somehow unearned. But everything here is caked in the blood, passion, and untamed weirdness that drew Pile’s obsessives into the cult in the first place. Maguire is very much the poster boy of the punk dude over 30, keenly aware of what it means to tour in a van when you’re old enough to seek the presidency. He does seem preoccupied with the specter of aging and the usual anxieties that accompany it. “I’m aware of my age/My impermanence and so forth,” he murmurs on “My Employer,” a callback to the album’s opening line: “No longer burdened by youth.” “My Employer” is affecting but cryptic. The song’s title alludes to music, Maguire’s profession and the apparent salve to his fear of dying: “I found fire when I was 12/It’s lasted over 20 years,” he sings. What follows, the righteous seven-minute climax “Hiding Places,” shows that the fire is still burning. Now somebody send Stephen Miller a download code. | 2019-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Exploding in Sound | May 3, 2019 | 7.9 | 76641b22-1aed-41bd-af55-f0557dffca9b | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani and composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith come together for two lengthy slices of ambient bliss as part the RVNG label's *FRKWYS *series. | Electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani and composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith come together for two lengthy slices of ambient bliss as part the RVNG label's *FRKWYS *series. | Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith / Suzanne Ciani: Sunergy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22300-sunergy/ | Sunergy | “Ladies and gentleman, this woman standing next to me is an electronic wizard,” declared a bemused and gleeful David Letterman on his show in 1980. He sounded like a wide-eyed child standing beside a chipper alien, one with braids in her hair, giving network-television watchers a portal into her new expanding universe. Letterman listed off her credentials: composing commercial soundtracks for the likes of Coca-Cola, reproducing electronic effects for “the disco version of Star Wars,” and winning many awards. “This is Suzanne Ciani,” Letterman goes, as she slathered the befuddled host’s voice in quizzical delay. Laughter persisted. “Tell ‘em what we got here,” Letterman asked, and Ciani pointed out her Prophet-5 synthesizer, a vocoder, a frequency follower, an Eventide harmonizer—“That means nothing to anybody but you!” the host interjects. “Do the one where it sounds like the whole studio’s gonna explode!” Ciani offered a pitched-shifted affirmation: “Don't be afraiiid...”
In 1980, the pioneering Ciani—who would go on to earn several Grammy nominations in the New Age category—was a decade into her experiments with the modular Buchla synthesizers, which she used to create dramatic seconds-long effects for the likes of the Xenon pinball game, PBS, and Atari. And Ciani had also just begun work on her own debut masterpiece, the elegantly spare Seven Waves, released in Japan in 1982 and the U.S. two years later*. *“In order to see something, you have to have a concept of it,” Ciani, now 70, told The Quietus in 2012. “People had no concept of electronic music back then. So even if they were sitting in front of a machine and sound was coming out of it, they still didn’t get it.”
Even as electricity has become the preeminent building-block of our musical lexicon, the Buchla—with its wires spilling over a landscape of knobs, its tactile sense of exploration, of conversing subtly with the machine—is still extremely rare. But fate has its way of bringing outsiders together. That Ciani would encounter a fellow Buchla synthesist, the 30-year-old Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, while sitting on the floor at a dinner party in the isolated California coastal town of Bolinas, where they both happen to live, is fantastic serendipity.
Ciani herself had abandoned the Buchla for decades, making her name as a classical pianist. It wasn’t until a 2012 reissue of her work, Lixiviation, by the Finders Keepers label, that she became “reincarnated as a Buchla person,” and a reissue of her groundbreaking 1975 Buchla concerts followed. Before a European tour spurred on by Lixiviation, Ciani hired Smith as a studio assistant. New York’s RVNG label ultimately asked them to collaborate for the 13th installment of its FRKWYS series, which brings together musicians of different generations in an improvisatory setting, always with the care of a gallery piece. In a film produced by RVNG during the making of the album—at Ciani’s home near a cliff with exquisite views of the Pacific—the elder artist is seen with her Buchla 200 E, a wooden box propped open with wires all flowing about, a full display of the machine and its sound’s infinity. Smith uses the slightly more contained Buchla Music Easel, which appears like a mysterious pad.
The resulting *Sunergy *is 54 minutes of generative music in three pieces, “A New Day,” “Closed Circuit,” and the bonus track “Retrograde” (absent from the vinyl pressing). Their energy exchange is potent. Sunergy is far from the lovely analog melodies and white noise that Ciani released on *Seven Waves—*it more so shares the thick, dewy feel of Smith’s 2016 *EARS**—*but as they cross-pollinate, those titular crests are all over. Sunergy is made of crashing waves and the glittering sun on water, meditations from the Terry Riley school of minimalism, as if Laurie Spiegel had composed for the tides rather than the cosmos. Ciani said she had a “long-standing desire to orchestrate the sunrise... [and] there was this synergy between us, and also the energy of the sun and the energy of the ocean... I think that’s where Sunergy came from.”
“A New Day” opens with an ominous, tectonic rumble that engulfs you like a circling Tibetan singing bowl. Sounds cut in from all angles, with static juxtaposing sparkling bleeps and textures that pop like candy. There are sounds of epic winds and rippling water, and its hypnosis seems to say something about journeying through time, about nature mixing with the artificial, about the promise and threat of the future. “Closed Circuit” comprises simpler synth figures, before swimming far out into a dark sea, a picture of the unknown. “Retrograde” takes on harsher, denser noise, but its menacing scrape is tempered with light.
All along, Sunergy makes for an inquisitive space to inhabit. The headier and grander it grows, the more its heavy drones swarm, the more undeniable the duo’s alchemy proves to be. “I was in love with it,” Ciani once said of her introduction to the Buchla, “It took my whole life… It was my boyfriend! I thought there was something wrong with me, because I was in love with a machine.” But her devotion was prescient. It is moving to hear Ciani and Smith—in some sense, creative soulmates—commune so deeply. Because people like Ciani don’t come down to Earth to join the world. They recruit comrades to enter their own. | 2016-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Rvng Intl. | September 15, 2016 | 8.4 | 766a0e28-597f-4a0d-9fcf-7807d08c0af4 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
The last release from Sufjan Stevens, Son Lux, and Serengeti's Sisyphus project was a scattered lark that featured an abundance of Auto-Tune; for their self-titled debut LP, they've ditched the Auto-Tune and improved on their ability to create fractured-sounding music together—even if the results prove a little frustrating. | The last release from Sufjan Stevens, Son Lux, and Serengeti's Sisyphus project was a scattered lark that featured an abundance of Auto-Tune; for their self-titled debut LP, they've ditched the Auto-Tune and improved on their ability to create fractured-sounding music together—even if the results prove a little frustrating. | Sisyphus: Sisyphus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19199-sisyphus-sisyphus/ | Sisyphus | On paper, Sisyphus appear incongruent. Anticon rapper Serengeti functions as the deadpan narrator, Sufjan as the whisper-drive balladeer, and Ryan Lott under his Son Lux guise as the anxious, industrial beatsmith. These three distinct talents are, in a sense, insoluble, but their electro-focused sound works when their synapses fire off of each other and the ideas dovetail and blend together. Their first release, 2012's Beak & Claw EP, was a scattered lark that featured an abundance of Auto-Tune; on their self-titled debut LP, that element's been scrubbed from the group's formula, and the three of them have improved on their ability to create fractured-sounding music together—even if the results prove a little frustrating.
Inspired by Jim Hodges’ art installation “Untitled”, as well as the artist's body of work, Sisyphus was co-commissioned by Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s SPCO’s Liquid Music series. There's high-minded artistic ambitions at work here, then, as Sisyphus can be classified as something executed with the aim of being displayed and sold in a museum. To wit: the record's most simplistically fun moment is a six-and-a-half minute, multi-section song called “Calm It Down”, featuring positive-thinking musings from Serengeti and the type of balladry that Stevens executed so well on 2010's Age of Adz. Other engaging moments are located in the slow-building noise of album closer “Alcohol”, as well as the vocoder'd pomp of “Rhythm of Devotion”, which finds ‘Geti aping Kanye West’s "New Slaves" cadence throughout.
Sometimes, though, the trio's cleverness can get the best of them. Serengeti occasionally values sticking to a rhyme scheme over telling a narrative ("Booty Call"), while Lott can't focus on honing one good idea (the shapeshifting "Flying Ace"), and Stevens issues one too many utterances of the word “booty”. Then there's the untangleable mess of "My Oh My", which unwisely merges skittery trap synths, ill-fitting sitcom references ("Drink a lot of milk like my name was Ted Cleaver"), and Stevens' now-trademark flute runs on the song's chorus.
However, much of Sisyphus is bogged down in malaise. In an interview about the album, Stevens stated the group's artistic intent: “We wanted to make ear candy—catchy raps, pop songs, and sad ballads. But if you inspect some of the content, you’ll uncover some bleak events.” You don't have to dig deep, though, to find the bleakness: witness Stevens singing in his teary-eyed voice "I'm prepared for death/ I will tear clothes” on the dirge-like "I Won't Be Afraid." On the sparse "Dishes in the Sink", Serengeti raps from the perspective of a blue-collar, acerbic character whose sardonic attitude is reflected in the rapper's delivery: "I was happy once when I went to a real brunch/ It was special." These dour elements are tied together by Son Lux’s production, whose classical-electro beats are so spiny and unsteady they inspire more squinting than head-nodding.
More often than not, Sisyphus misses its mark, but the album's dense, melancholy back half represents its strongest moments. On "Lion's Share", Serengeti tells a ripped-from-the-headlines story about a Chicago jail break in a straight-forward chilled out '80s throwback rap, while “Dishes in the Sink” and its companion ballad “Hardly Hanging On” tell a genuinely affecting story of squalor and depression. Despite these peaks, Sisyphus is more fun to ponder than it is to listen to. | 2014-04-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-04-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Asthmatic Kitty / Joyful Noise | April 3, 2014 | 6.2 | 766e0207-7f8b-41b7-be70-8a12b5c84e6f | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
The Ava Luna singer delivers an excellent solo album of minimalist funk and R&B pared down to its barest essence. | The Ava Luna singer delivers an excellent solo album of minimalist funk and R&B pared down to its barest essence. | Carlos Truly: Not Mine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carlos-truly-not-mine/ | Not Mine | Carlos Hernandez helped shape the Brooklyn music scene of the 2010s—as a denizen of the defunct DIY space Silent Barn, and as a producer and arranger for artists like Frankie Cosmos and Mr Twin Sister—but you may not know his name. As the bandleader and frequent lead singer of the perennially underrated Ava Luna, he never hogged the spotlight. The Brooklyn art-funk group operated more like a creative collective and talent incubator, with Hernandez routinely ceding the microphone to bandmates Becca Kauffman, who piloted the band’s kooky, theatrical side, and Felicia Douglass, whose versatile pipes channeled introspective soul. Hernandez could shriek and croon with the best of them, but as Ava Luna’s career progressed, his own voice became less prominent.
Now, with Ava Luna on hiatus since the 2019 departure of Kauffman (aka performance artist Jennifer Vanilla), Hernandez steps into the spotlight with an excellent solo album of minimalist funk and R&B pared down to its barest essence. Although he quietly self-released an album as Carlos Hernandez in 2018, Not Mine is the artist’s first under the Carlos Truly moniker and billed as his proper solo debut. It’s understated and warm, nimbly bridging the gap between the vintage soul influences embedded in everything Hernandez creates and the jagged hip-hop production by the artist’s brother, Tony Seltzer, who co-produced most of the record.
Never does this conjoining of worlds sound more revelatory than on the sizzling electro-funk workout “Dumb Desire.” Ava Luna sometimes described themselves as “nervous soul,” and that nervousness boils over into jittery intoxication on this ode to the terror of making one’s desires known to a crush. The track is syly addictive, with Seltzer’s escalating symphony of synth squiggles and boom-clap beats goading along Hernandez’s increasingly agitated vocal delivery, which includes stretching the word “fire” into a five-syllable anxiety swell. Leave it to Carlos Truly to make an introverted banger for the masses.
Hernandez’s voice—a honeyed soul croon—remains his purest asset. The son of a ’70s New York soul DJ, Hernandez grew up listening to Al Green on the subway, and you get the sense his engagement with sounds that predated his birth is more than casual. He self-harmonizes and reveals an enviable vocal range on “Your Sound,” which is, fittingly, an ode to the way a person’s voice can lodge itself in your memory; he wails in falsetto over the last chorus of “Why Suffer??” like only a seasoned Prince obsessive can. You can easily imagine the track’s supple funk, with its Stax-ready guitar tones, emanating from an old cassette deck on a sweltering day.
While Hernandez does not gravitate towards narrative songwriting, he does reveal more of himself in this music than Ava Luna’s. The band’s songs unfolded on faraway moons; Carlos Truly sings about his home city of New York. Inspired by adolescent memories of Central Park, the loop-driven “108th” is a nostalgic love story set against urban displacement and gentrification. The songwriting captures the tension between personal attachment to place and its utter triviality in the grand scheme of stolen land (“No, we can’t claim that old spot up by 108th/Even though that’s where we sat that third shift when you kissed me once”) as a string quartet consummates the track’s elegiac nostalgia.
Great albums are supposed to leave you wanting more, but Not Mine achieves this perhaps too well. At 23 minutes, it’s so brief as to feel a bit slight. Several tracks—particularly the 15-second piano curiosity “(my turn)” and the intriguingly tropical “A Strange Bird”—feel more like half-finished sketches; the album ends abruptly, too, with “Quietness” fading out after a minute and change. The brevity is a bit puzzling, since Hernandez left behind several neo-soul gems that appeared on 2020’s Canal EP. But perhaps recycling them felt like the wrong move. Not Mine is a tantalizing new start from a singer who has always recognized the virtues of stepping away from the mic. | 2022-07-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-01T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Bayonet | July 1, 2022 | 7.4 | 76703ad0-93bf-41c6-9614-d3dcbf76f327 | Zach Schonfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-schonfeld/ | |
Longtime Southern Lord labelmates, tourmates, and metal bands collaborate on this sometimes transfixing record. | Longtime Southern Lord labelmates, tourmates, and metal bands collaborate on this sometimes transfixing record. | Sunn O))) & Boris: Altar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9563-altar/ | Altar | Longtime Southern Lord labelmates, tourmates, and metal bands Sunn 0))) and Boris seem like natural collaborators, though they approach their music with disparate intentions: Sunn 0)))'s blood-covered drone subsumes everything around it, while Boris' blend of patiently unraveling noise and fractious thrash entices and then dramatically repels an audience. With that contrast between push and pull in mind, Altar-- written and recorded largely before a joint tour last fall-- risks leaving an audience stranded in the middle by inertia.
Indeed, the second half of Altar does just that, leaving the audience adrift in left field with little direction or purpose. But, together, the first three tracks are a perfect capitulation of their conjoined aesthetics. Opener "Etna" creeps in through feedback and slowly building and shifting bass tones before a huge guitar sweep-- split between Sunn 0)))'s Greg Anderson and Boris' Takeshi-- takes charge a minute in. A veritable war of tones follows, Boris drummer Atsuo filling the low-lying space between the subterranean guitar arches with cymbal rolls. Six minutes later, the air forces-- piercing, upper-register, signature-Boris guitar attacks-- obliterate the lowly, warring miscreants, razing the drama and letting it slow burn into "N.L.T."
The follow-up-- featuring the bowed bass of Sunn 0))) collaborator Bill Herzog-- is a vibrantly bleak and texturally captivating work reminiscent of Daniel Menche. Atsuo-- the only other musician present-- splatters the canvas, lustrous edges shaped from the sound of bowed cymbals and a carefully managed gong. It's followed by Altar’s centerpiece and masterpiece, "The Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)". "Belle" is the one track on which its players conspire to subvert outside notions of both bands. Sunn 0)))'s glacial motion is intact, as is Boris' lucid use of almost-gentle tones. But the amplifiers are turned down, and distortion is all but lost. Instead, warm analog delay lets the sound drift in plumes, and beautiful, understated slide guitars and O'Malley's careful piano create a cradle for Jesse Sykes. Here, her voice shifts and floats like the retiring wafts of blue-gray smoke from a funeral pyre at a misty dawn. It’s an exhalation, a last breath of robust beauty.
But, on the heels of such an overwhelming, unexpected triptych, Altar never recovers, essentially moving in redundant circles for 32 minutes. Three tracks either highlight the magic Sunn 0))) and Boris have crafted separately for a decade or the pitfalls that such work has avoided. The deftly fragmented chords that end "The Sinking Belle" open the door for the record's second side, but "Akuma No Kuma" is waylaid early by a harangued vocal take, an out-of-place horn fanfare, and overly involved Moog lines. Wata's eerie voice and the nebulous echo on everything in "Fried Eagle Mind" builds a paranoid sleep-state eclipsed after seven minutes by a solid sheet of guitar noise. It fades barely, slamming hard into "Bloodswamp", a 14-minute, multi-textural drone that would be an accomplishment for most other bands.
Asymmetrical and leaning, Altar isn't the metal icon its lineage would suggest: It bears neither the rapturous juggernaut geography of Sunn 0)))'s White 2 or Black One nor the transcendent overpowered amorphousness of Boris' Pink or Amplifier Worship. But it does speak of things to come, brave new directions for bands respectively referred to hitherto either as sheer sonic titans or on-off schizophrenics. Those descriptions are much too reductive, and such evidence is the onus and gift of Altar. | 2006-10-31T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2006-10-31T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Southern Lord | October 31, 2006 | 6.6 | 76717c3f-7428-4469-b966-1a702b18b76d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
2006’s most buzzed-about band address the onset of fame and the inevitabililty of backlash on this five-song EP. | 2006’s most buzzed-about band address the onset of fame and the inevitabililty of backlash on this five-song EP. | Arctic Monkeys: Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys? EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/498-who-the-fuck-are-arctic-monkeys-ep/ | Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys? EP | Five-song EP Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys? is the English quartet’s first new release since it became the year’s most-talked-band and, oh dear, it’s largely about dealing with sudden fame and its unfortunate consequences—the obligations of touring, the demands of fans, the inevitability of backlash. This is nothing new for the Monkeys—“The View From the Afternoon” kicks off their debut LP with a warning that “Anticipation has a habit to set you up/For disappointment in evening entertainment,” and tellingly that’s the Whatever People Say I Am... track featured here. Thesis statement laid out, half of Who the Fuck’s new tracks are less about the experience of being young and bored and smartly observant, the combination that, to date, has colored their best tracks, but about the experience of being the Arctic Monkeys themselves—still young, sometimes bored, but their vision now limited to a tour itinerary or press clippings, and unable to successfully articulate why that’s so frustrating.
For the listener, it’s easy to spot the chief problem: Songs about the need and drive to become rock and roll stars are more powerful and interesting than the ones about the experience of being a rock and roll star—just ask Noel Gallagher. Arctic Monkeys singer and lyricist Alex Turner—an expressive storyteller with a keen eye for detail and a deceptively sly wit—seems well-equipped to navigate the divide between talking as one of the kids and talking to the kids, so perhaps his stumbles are more a shell-shocked response to the speed in which they gained their fame than a fundamental flaw. The EP’s defensive title track comes across as a poor decision, a dispatch from the other side of the velvet rope that moves between communicating directly with their fans (“Your heroes aren’t what they seem/When you’ve been where we’ve been”) to dismissing johnny-come-latelys to admitted bouts of paranoia. The stick to your guns/last gang in town tone of the thing is admirable—lord knows, rock could use a bit of swagger—but it has a bit of a “famous last words” quality to it, reading like that “Declaration of Principles” that came back to bite Charles Foster Kane in the ass.
“Despair in the Departure Lounge” is about, you guessed it, missing your girl when you’re on the road. And sure, it’s a cliché, but it eventually unfolds as an unexpected gesture from a lyricist who’s often guarded, reserving his empathy for his characters (and, on “A Certain Romance,” for his could-be enemies) and putting up a front with regards to himself. The moment when the song redeems its cookie-cutter nature is its third verse, and it hits not because of what Turner says but how he says it, slowing his voice into a wobbly quiver that mimics both the haze of travel and the hallucinatory nature of the lyric (“Yesterday, I saw a girl/Who looked like someone you might knock about with/And almost shouted”). It’s reminiscent of the aforementioned Gallagher’s exhausted solo acoustic turn on Oasis B-side “Talk Tonight.”
The other two new tracks are a third-tier character sketch (“Cigarette Smoker Fiona”) and an understated ballad (“No Buses”), with the latter serving as the record’s grower and most thoroughly satisfying track. So, more a reiteration of their mission statement than a new record, the hint of ferociousness and fight on the title track is a positive sign; that the band feels backed into a corner by the manner and speed in which it gained fame isn’t. It would be churlish and archaic to insist in 2006 that bands drive around in a van for x number of months in order to “earn” success when they can efficiently and quickly cover the distance of the globe with a single MP3. (Gnarls Barkley, the UK market’s other recent digital-age sensation, presumably get a free pass because they’re industry vets.) If people already have their knives out for the Arctic Monkeys, the band would do best to ignore them and move on rather than address the issue itself in song. After all, the surest way to deflect backlash is to make good music. | 2006-04-25T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2006-04-25T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | April 25, 2006 | 5.9 | 76730fe0-c671-4554-a6f2-f443b3b3f19b | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | |
A new reissue collects the work of the pioneering icons of queer punk, whose uncompromising approach and knowing intimacies made them pre-Tumblr beacons of community. | A new reissue collects the work of the pioneering icons of queer punk, whose uncompromising approach and knowing intimacies made them pre-Tumblr beacons of community. | Team Dresch: Personal Best / Captain My Captain / Choices, Chances, Changes: Singles & Comptracks 1994-2000 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/team-dresch-personal-best-captain-my-captain-choices-chances-changes-singles-and-comptracks-1994-2000/ | Personal Best / Captain My Captain / Choices, Chances, Changes: Singles & Comptracks 1994-2000 | People who talk about Team Dresch’s music say it saved them. It’s not an exaggeration. The feminist queercore band was active for only about five years, leaving behind two albums and a collection of singles, but the records’ knowing intimacies made them pre-Tumblr beacons of community for isolated queers in their darkest moments. A life is shaped by minute experiences; when a great punk song captures the emotional specificity of those moments, it wins our lifelong devotion. Team Dresch mirrored the experiences of people who weren’t used to having their lives reflected back to them. In doing so, their work shattered isolation.
In the early 1990s, Donna Dresch lived in the Martin apartments in Olympia, Washington alongside many members of the rising riot grrrl movement, worked for K Records, published the queercore fanzine Chainsaw, and played in bands such as Dinosaur Jr. and Screaming Trees. When Jody Bleyle, then drumming in the Portland band Hazel, met Dresch after a show, she expressed a longing to play in “an all-dyke band.” Her desire would materialize in spring of 1994, when the two were joined by Marcéo Martinez (of Calamity Jane) and Kaia Wilson (of Adickted), who herself had once written long letters to Dresch as a lonely gay teenager living in conservative rural Oregon.
In poetic fragments dripping with humor and pain, 1995’s Personal Best recounted evergreen stories about crushing on straight or closeted girls (“Freewheel,” “She’s Crushing My Mind”), making your mother cry by shaving your head (“Growing Up in Springfield”), and dreaming of leaving it all behind and moving to the woods (“Screwing Yer Courage”). “She told me I needed God/I told her I just needed her,” Wilson sings on “Growing Up in Springfield,” named after an Oregon town which, in 1992, became the first municipality in the nation to include anti-gay language in its city charter—a measure pushed by a conservative Christian organization called the Oregon Citizens Alliance, which also advocated to classify homosexuality as “abnormal, unnatural, and perverse.” Team Dresch responded to these attitudes with “Hate the Christian Right!,” where metalcore screams, melodic vocal lines, shredding guitar, and rapid-fire drum fills combined to create a sick-of-it-all rage spiral, a plea for an out that might never exist.
Everyone in the band was already a skilled musician in their own right, and Personal Best was tight and catchy, packing deft, shifting melodies and numerous ideas and genres into less than half an hour. The bridge on “#1 Chance Pirate TV” sounds quintessentially mid-’90s emo, and “She’s Crushing My Mind” precedes one of the Promise Ring’s most memorable melodies. “Fake Fight’”s longing for tree forts and bike rides is one banjo short of folk-punk, while “Freewheel” delivers “go back to your boyfriend” levity with power-pop glee. But the album’s emotional centerpiece, destined to grace many a mixtape, is “She’s Amazing”: a tribute to every outspoken woman and queer root that did for Team Dresch what they would do for countless others: “She’s amazing/Her words saved me/She holds her head as if it’s true.”
Dresch’s Chainsaw zine grew into Chainsaw Records, which, along with Bleyle’s Candy Ass Records, co-released both Personal Best and the band’s second album, Captain My Captain. Chainsaw also released notable records by bands such as Heavens to Betsy, Tracy + the Plastics, and Sleater-Kinney, and hosted an online message board where community and conflict played out in real time. As grunge blew up and major labels began courting bands from the Pacific Northwest, independent artists felt the weight of their mission. Bleyle, whose band Hazel had been signed to Sub Pop, was familiar with the industry and wanted to remain autonomous. Team Dresch funded their own European tour, wrote to fans directly when mainstream gay magazines wouldn’t interview them, and worked to inform their peers. “The more bands and labels that… are willing to cooperate with one another—to share information and talk about what these major-media people are saying to them—the easier it will be to resist commodification,” she told Punk Planet. “There’s no way you can up against this by yourself. Once you’ve dealt with labels like this you realize that’s what they want: for everyone to be isolated.” Operating through DIY channels meant Team Dresch didn’t have to compromise, assuring fans that behind every release stood a tangible community of like-minded co-conspirators.
By the time Captain My Captain came out in 1996, with Melissa York replacing Martinez on drums, Team Dresch recognized their status as visible dykons. They wrote longer songs that were intentionally aimed at their audience, with more straightforward hooks, more legible structures, and more prominent vocals. Even without the metal screams, their directness was often combative. Take the hurtling chosen-family ode “Uncle Phranc,” where Bleyle slams a mother’s conditional love as “emotional blackmail,” or when, at the end of a ponderous musical break in “The Council,” Wilson belts a cathartic call-out of scene gossip. There’s also an enormous amount of sweetness, not just in love songs to partners (“107,” “Take on Me”), but in love songs to the community that urge listeners to survive, find their people, and live on their own terms (“Musical Fanzine,” “Remember Who You Are”). Throughout, lines about writing your own Rubyfruit Jungle or figuring out whether you’re butch or femme signalled familiarity. “Live your truth” messaging can be cloying, but Team Dresch sang it in earnest, sounding more like a trusted sibling than a sloganeer.
On Captain, Bleyle also started writing intentionally about her struggles with mental illness—a topic that wasn’t being discussed much, even in underground circles. One of the most affecting examples is “Don’t Try Suicide” (not to be confused with the Queen song of the same name), where a deflated Bleyle talks about being “scared to leave the house/scared to go to sleep.” The second chorus tells of a girlfriend’s attempt at reassurance, and Bleyle’s voice is raw as she screams, “I don’t believe her/But it makes me feel better anyway.” With queer suicide—particularly queer youth suicide—an ongoing national epidemic, these moments are, tragically, some of the record’s most prescient.
The opportunity to reevaluate these albums comes as Portland label Jealous Butcher reissues both of them on vinyl, CD, and streaming platforms, along with a CD-and-streaming-only singles compilation called Choices, Chances, Changes: Singles & Comptracks 1994-2000. A soft case with a band photo collage on the outside cover and a chronologically sequenced array of miscellaneous releases on the inside, it feels like a promo CD you might get at a punk fest and end up treasuring. Selections include fan favorite “Hand Grenade” (a track that first appeared as a 7" on Kill Rock Stars), an early version of “Fake Fight,” the bratty Tribe 8-reminiscent “Song for Anne Bannon” (released on Candy Ass’s Free to Fight self-defense compilation), and several songs recorded after Wilson left the band in 1996. Less cohesive than the full-lengths, it’s a compilation for collectors and true fans, demonstrating the band’s range and offering sought-after bonus tracks for when two records are just not enough.
Listening to the Team Dresch reissues in 2019 feels different than I imagine it did in 1995. The internet has made it easier for queers to find each other, and there are more openly queer artists than ever before. Transmisogynist elements in riot grrrl, like Wilson’s 1999 defense of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s trans-exclusionary attendance policy, seeded enduring distrust, though many current scenes are working to become more inclusive. (Wilson’s own views have since changed as well.) Still, much of the music feels and sounds as relevant as ever—both because the band’s words continue to resonate and because their harmonies, melodic defiance, and true-to-life lyrics echo through much of today’s DIY punk (Waxahatchee has covered “Freewheel” live). As a new generation discovers classics like 1985’s Desert Hearts and realizes we don’t have to settle for straight-authored queerbaiting, there is a lot to learn from queer elders, especially those that never conceded to marketability.
Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of Captain is the unabashed sexuality, stated plainly rather than cloaked in coded desire: Bleyle finding solace in cruising on “Remember Who You Are,” or Wilson asking a lover to boss her around on “Yes I Am Too, But Who Am I Really?” and declaring herself “a flaming S&M rubber dyke” on “I’m Illegal.” Fifty years after the Stonewall riots, mainstream Pride events are often sanitized and corporate, but it still feels revolutionary to put on “Musical Fanzine” and sing along: “Queer sex is great, it's fun as shit/Don't kill yourself cause people can't deal with your brilliance/Sometimes I can’t remember why I want to live/Then I think of all the freaks and I don’t want to miss this.” | 2019-06-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | June 8, 2019 | 9.1 | 768b2210-087a-4de5-bd87-1f0cdac8227d | NM Mashurov | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nm-mashurov/ | |
Released on Merge Records, the singer-songwriter’s debut is a gorgeous devotional to the South that reshapes the traditions of country music into a powerfully queer and consequential set of songs. | Released on Merge Records, the singer-songwriter’s debut is a gorgeous devotional to the South that reshapes the traditions of country music into a powerfully queer and consequential set of songs. | H.C. McEntire: Lionheart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hc-mcentire-lionheart/ | Lionheart | Heather McEntire’s solo debut is a vivid travelogue of the American South penned in her native tongue of country music. Lionheart is brought to life by McEntire’s soulful voice, by a sweeping Nashville sound, but more so by a deep sense of conviction. It feels like a baptism, the sound of a woman newly believing in who she has always been. In Lionheart’s opening psalm, “A Lamb, A Dove,” McEntire presents a Biblical image of innocence and flight as she sings of an all-consuming force in her blood, her head, her eyes—and perhaps that force is her true self. “I have found heaven in a woman’s touch,” McEntire sings, clear and assured. “Come to me now/I’ll make you blush.”
McEntire grew up in a small Bible Belt farming community in North Carolina, listening to mainstream country, bluegrass, and church hymns. It was a context in which, she said, coming out as gay “wasn’t even an option.” McEntire has called her Southern Baptist family “mountain folk who grew up in a different time,” who still do not accept her. She spent nearly two decades rejecting country and religion—in the angular post-punk outfit Bellafea, the rootsy indie-country trio Mount Moriah, and backing Angel Olsen—before retracing her path back to both again. Lionheart is the sound of a woman, now 36, returning home with a new confidence, having seen the world for what it is.
When McEntire’s voice trembles at its vulnerable edges, or curls into a rave-up, she recalls Dolly Parton or Emmylou Harris. And yet Lionheart was inspired most directly by an icon of another breed. After feminist punk hero Kathleen Hanna saw McEntire open for her own band, she was so enchanted that she offered to do anything to help summon McEntire’s solo LP into existence. With Hanna’s encouragement and the suggestion that she “listen to Wanda Jackson,” Hanna became McEntire’s de facto producer, choosing songs from McEntire’s trove of demos and shaping the record’s gentle country sound.
McEntire’s primary subject is the South and its golden fields, gravel roads, valleys, and pine groves. The smell of tobacco fills a town; junkyards and bramble are dignified. McEntire renders it all with perceptive grace and a physicality. The melody of “Baby’s Got the Blues” crawls deep beneath the skin as she sings of “the dogwood and the chicory” and wonders over acceptance: “Do you see it in my hips? It is now what it is.”
Lionheart is at once devout and critical of religion’s shortcomings; McEntire’s queerness shines through every song. “It’s a wild world/That will make you believe/In a kingdom/Full of mercy and faith,” she posits in a glorious gospel sway on “A Lamb, A Dove.” She’s more elliptical than the pioneering gay country singer Lavender Country, but “When You Come for Me” contains a searingly poignant observation: “Mama, I dreamed that I had no hand to hold/And the land I cut my teeth on wouldn’t let me call it home.” McEntire has said she was inspired by a documentary about the country-establishment singer Chely Wright, who came out as a lesbian in 2010 in the face of the genre’s staunch god-country-family conservatism. Against such stakes, Lionheart feels like a miracle. Amid the continued fight for LGBT rights in McEntire’s home state, the record’s social and musical negotiation feels like an undertaking of consequence.
“Dress in the Dark” is Lionheart’s swaggering stand-off of a closer. McEntire lingers with smoke at the edge of each line: “I can only feel your heart/Through your dress/In the dark,” she sings. More than an outlaw, she’s a country-music outsider among country-music outsiders, reclaiming and rewriting its weathered language. Rather than a mainstream country label, McEntire has released Lionheart on indie stalwart Merge—her position recalls a young Lucinda Williams, who once said, “It took a punk label from England [Rough Trade] to recognize what I was doing,” which was something utterly new. As McEntire returns to tradition, she pushes ever further towards shaping a new one. | 2018-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | February 2, 2018 | 8 | 768cda65-e197-449b-8a7d-90e269585016 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
The polymath brings his signature compositional style back to the piano for an expressive album that is intimate, immediate, and, for all its ambition, easy to connect to. | The polymath brings his signature compositional style back to the piano for an expressive album that is intimate, immediate, and, for all its ambition, easy to connect to. | Duval Timothy: Meeting With a Judas Tree | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/duval-timothy-meeting-with-a-judas-tree/ | Meeting With a Judas Tree | To say that Duval Timothy is primarily a pianist is like saying that Benjamin Franklin mainly published newspapers. The artist, who splits his time between London and Freetown, Sierra Leone, is a polymath par excellence. His work spans not just music and painting but a perpetually expanding array of media: hat-making, textiles, a children’s book, furniture, food. He has brewed ginger beer from a West African family recipe and sold it on the streets of the UK, designed sneakers from an upcycled running track, worked with Sierra Leonean traditional weavers, and co-directed a pop-up restaurant serving sub-Saharan food at communal gatherings. The piano is at the heart of his recordings, where, over the past decade Timothy has developed an instantly recognizable, plangent style of playing. Yet even here, his circular progressions might be interwoven with field recordings from his travels, voice messages from friends and family, or a Pharrell Williams sample that roots Black artistic autonomy in the history of colonialism and enslavement. Born in London to an English mother and a Sierra Leonean-Ghanaian father, Timothy consistently places themes of identity, community, and place at the center of his work.
On the surface, Meeting With a Judas Tree might appear to be a simpler, more narrow musical release than some of his previous projects—for instance, Sen Am, which collaged WhatsApp messages from Sierra Leone into a meditation on distance and diaspora. After last year’s Son, a billowing choral fantasia he made with the British musician Rosie Lowe, Meetings With a Judas Tree returns Timothy’s focus to the piano. It is a short album, just 32 minutes long, and all six tracks are instrumental, draping his characteristic chords in faint electronics. It’s uniformly gorgeous; in purely expressive terms, it might be his most inviting album yet. But as usual, a glance at Timothy’s notes reveals that there is more here than meets the ear. Incorporating sessions from a handful of studios across London, Freetown, and Spoleto, Italy, with field recordings made around the world—birds, bats, insects, primates, and even plants and stones—Meeting With a Judas Tree is meant to explore “what the natural environment means personally,” he says.
Timothy’s nomadic methods are most apparent in “Up,” one of the album’s highlights. The playing is typical of his customary style: His left hand toggles away at an ostinato bassline, as though treading water, while his right lays down airy chords with a wistful, ruminative feel. With UK producer (and Frank Ocean collaborator) Vegyn handling effects processing, the piano sounds submerged in a murky pool. The mood is so lulling that it would be easy to miss all the detail in the periphery: softly spoken voices, footsteps, and an electrifying array of buzzing and scraping. Some of these sounds come from a walk with his mother in Bath, England; others are termites in the Eastern Province of Sierra Leone, and still others are granite stones recorded in the hills of Freetown. The piano, meanwhile, once belonged to Alma Maria Mahler, a composer who was married to Gustav Mahler between 1902 and 1911. Timothy gained access to the instrument during a residency at the Casa Mahler in Spoleto, where he spent two months exploring Gustav Mahler’s work in the context of the climate crisis.
“Many of my projects find their inspiration in specific environments and have led me to connect and care more deeply for that place,” Timothy wrote of his residency in 2021. Taking Mahler’s The Song of the Earth as his starting point, he continued, “I’ll explore the context of Spoleto and hope to make work that could inspire people to consider the critical issues of climate change in a fresh way.” While the didactic use of “Up” is debatable—can a four-minute lullaby change anyone’s mind about global warming?—its transporting mixture of sounds nevertheless exists thanks entirely to Timothy’s wayfaring instincts. Once you know what’s behind the music, the song’s invocation of family ties, the natural world, the classical canon, and even geologic deep time amounts to a potent constellation of forces and ideas.
Despite the focus on the piano, Meeting With a Judas Tree captures a richer, more enveloping sound world than any of Timothy’s previous albums. The opening “Plunge” wraps an ascending, optimistic chord progression in elastic electronics and hints of strings; in “Drift,” the Sierra Leone-born, New York-based musician Lamin Fofana adds flickering, indistinct shapes to Timothy’s mournful chords, as birds twitter about the periphery. A few of these pieces feel like sleight-of-hand tricks, letting in a welter of disorienting detail so gradually that you’re never quite sure how you ended up where you are. “Wood” starts with simple, elegiac piano, but as the song gathers steam, birdsong swells in volume, and an additional topline melody played by Yu Su appears; run through a battery of hazy effects, it streaks like contrails across the sky. Somehow, in just three and a half minutes, we’ve been taken from the practice room to a vast plain where birds and flying machines sketch vectors across the heavens; the sense of wide-open space is overwhelming.
Timothy’s compositional style is so distinctive that at times, it’s unclear whether he’s repeating himself: The rousing chords in “Wood” are strongly reminiscent of “Slave,” a song from 2020’s Help whose theme reappeared in multiple places on that album. Even if this habit of iterating upon favorite motifs is an intentional part of Timothy’s process, there can be a slight feeling of déjà vu upon listening to his work—not an unpleasant one, necessarily, but I do find myself occasionally wishing he might push his playing style in new directions. Fortunately, on Meeting With a Judas Tree, a number of collaborators help defamiliarize his sound. Neither “Wood” nor “Drift” would have been the same without Yu Su’s or Fofana’s respective contributions; likewise, the nearly nine-minute “Mutate” takes flight in large part thanks to the London guitarist Kiran Kai’s playing, which serves as a brittle, metallic counterpoint to Timothy’s free-floating chords and pulsing synth bassline. Somewhere in the mix, apparently, are sounds sourced from the bark of a silver birch tree, and the whole thing really does resemble a tree silhouetted at dusk—branching guitars gradually filling in the negative space, electronic crackling simulating the rustle of roosting birds.
“Thunder,” as intuitive as it is complex, offers a glimpse of new horizons. Timothy improvised the song in a single take while London electronic producer FAUZIA helmed effects pedals in real time. Stretching out, Timothy leaves behind some of his characteristic tropes to explore more abstract shapes that are bounced through FAUZIA’s delays and filters. In places boldly staccato and in others as vaporous as Nala Sinephro’s spaciest ambient jazz, it feels like a real conversation, a free-flowing give-and-take between two friends, teasing out inchoate emotions without ever pinning them down. This time, the sense of place is purely virtual, as hammering chords and booming sheets of electronic tone mimic the thunder of the title. The song exemplifies what is so rewarding about Timothy’s work: It is intimate, immediate, and, for all its ambition, easy to connect to. Whether working solo or in collaboration, seated at a Steinway or with his Zoom recorder pressed up against a tree, Timothy’s musical voice remains as singular as ever. | 2022-11-17T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-17T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Carrying Colour | November 17, 2022 | 8 | 7691054e-43dd-412a-a0ce-a9da2cfa2731 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Moving in a more traditional R&B direction, new breed is a richly detailed, self-confident, yet somewhat uneven album that attempts to weave together disparate elements of Richard’s personality. | Moving in a more traditional R&B direction, new breed is a richly detailed, self-confident, yet somewhat uneven album that attempts to weave together disparate elements of Richard’s personality. | Dawn Richard: new breed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dawn-richard-new-breed/ | new breed | Dawn Richard has a sumptuous rasp of a voice and brazenly left-field musical instincts. She pulled from club, R&B, and electronica to craft a propulsive, expressive trilogy of sleek, dance-floor-ready albums that felt like the kind of accomplished artistic statement that the erstwhile Danity Kane and Dirty Money member had been working toward for years. For her latest release, new breed, Richard attempts to synthesize the pleasures of her past music while moving in a more traditional R&B direction. Where 2016’s Redemption elegantly closed out a narrative of overcoming both the music industry and romantic hardships, new breed digs into Richard’s formative years growing up in New Orleans’ 9th Ward and how they have fortified her character. The result is a richly detailed, self-confident, yet somewhat uneven album that attempts to weave together disparate elements of Richard’s personality.
new breed’s cultural and historical bent adds a welcome new fold to Richard’s music. Threaded through with clips of spoken word from elders of the Washitaw Nation, a black tribe linked to the Mardi Gras Indians of New Orleans, the album feels instantly lived-in, communal. Richard moved back to NOLA to regroup following an extensive tour behind Redemption, and here she makes strides to honor the ways in which her hometown have shaped her. She sports a hand-sewn headpiece made by Washitaw figurehead Chief Montana on the album’s cover, and on the sparse, airy intro, shoots off references to eating crawfish on Jonlee Drive and throwing beads at rude revelers during parade season. The effect is illuminating, offering up a specific, fleshed-out portrait of Richard as a person and an artist. “She just a girl from the Nine,” she makes clear over a chorus of her own soaring, multi-tracked backing vocals. “She just a king from the Nine.”
That sense of self-assurance is pervasive on new breed. “They ain’t no bitches, ain’t no queens/I’m the motherfucking king, yeah,” she spits on the title track over charging synth lines and martial programmed drums. She even cuts in a bite-sized clip from an iconic Grace Jones interview, further giving a sense of cultural context to the record. Richard’s strong sense of purpose is more deliberate on the two-part centerpiece “vultures | wolves,” when she renders her plaints against soulless music industry types: “Those packs of wolves/With suits and deeds/Tempting the girls with pretty things/Just to share them piece by piece.” Richard’s delivery is affecting, her voice both forthright and honeyed, and the imagery is haunting and timely in a way she hasn’t explored before.
When Richard recasts R&B in her own image, new breed truly excels. Her noted devotion to Prince’s wanton spirit manifests here on the smooth, sex-obsessed “sauce,” on which she adopts an appealingly louche rap flow: “I just cleaned the spot and put on your favorite panties/The ones you say look like Diamond’s from Player’s Club, I’m wylin’.” The similarly woozy, dub-inflected highlight “jealousy” finds Richard taking vindictive to a whole other level. “I know you feel you have a right to text him,” she chastises her partner’s far-too-present ex, “You don’t.” The song’s waterlogged bassline and glitchy production furnish a smoky, laid-back atmosphere for Richard to seethe.
Richard’s dusky voice is a soothing conduit for slower tempos, too, but the ones on new breed end up more stilted than usual. “we, diamonds” is a melismatic victory lap that is hamstrung by dated references to Bobby Boucher (?) and Tony Hawk (?!) in its opening verse. Even “jealousy,” with its Instagram-centered lyrics, falls into similar lyrical potholes. Richard is speaking her truth here, but the way she phrases them and the speed with which she moves from one topic to the next don’t always allow new breed’s themes—romantic jealousy, sexual autonomy, triumphing over industry setbacks as a black woman, the vibrant historical tapestry of New Orleans—to completely jell and flourish. As a sincere love letter to NOLA, new breed certainly succeeds. But as a further example of the kind of musically adventurous statement that Richard has already proven she’s capable of, it falls just shy. | 2019-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | 2 B Real / Our Dawn Entertainment | January 28, 2019 | 7 | 76944770-fa7d-4a47-b145-42803c3e6a77 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
On her first album in eight years, the iconic singer-songwriter continues to take the lyrical road less traveled on a vulnerable, sedate, ballad-heavy album. | On her first album in eight years, the iconic singer-songwriter continues to take the lyrical road less traveled on a vulnerable, sedate, ballad-heavy album. | Alanis Morissette: Such Pretty Forks in the Road | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alanis-morissette-such-pretty-forks-in-the-road/ | Such Pretty Forks in the Road | It’s fair to say that Alanis Morissette, a once omnipresent cultural icon, has slowly receded from view. As seemingly every millisecond of the ’90s has been reassessed and re-released and homaged, the musician whose 1995 album Jagged Little Pill was once the biggest album in the world (and by long-term sales, is still massive) and who became a template for the next several years of outspoken female pop-rockers, has long been under what one writer called “the curse of the CD binder.”
Part of it’s that her back catalog has either aged horribly (just imagine the respose to “Thank U”) or aged surprisingly well: Jagged Little Pill, obviously, but also “Hands Clean” from 2002’s Under Rug Swept—a song that dissects a sexual predator’s grooming with medical precision and corpse-grinning horror—and 2008’s Flavors of Entanglement, which matches late-’00s electropop at its game before the game even fully started. The other part of it is that, you-know-which song aside, she’s a zero-irony artist in an irony-poisoned world. The title of Such Pretty Forks in the Road is illustrative; if mainstream pop took one fork, Alanis continued down her orthogonal path, and soon it became entirely her own. Jagged Little Pill was credited as much to megaproducer Glen Ballard as to her, but if it wasn’t clear by the 2000s that she was a creative force, it’s clear here. She’s working with Troye Sivan and Selena Gomez’s producer, making a kind of music with more and more revivalists, and she still sounds like nobody else.
More so than on previous albums, Morrissette dips into less poppy singer-songwriter tricks. “Ablaze” and “Sandbox Love” are like lost, exuberant ’90s VH1 hits: rides on an abandoned pop-rock roller coaster. The dissonant piano that encircles “Reckoning” is all the more effective for no longer being cliché. Lead single “Reasons I Drink” is built atop a jaunty cabaret piano line and that sets up a huge chorus only to let it trail off before the payoff, too fallible for the façade; it’s like a tipsy, half-remembered karaoke version of Heart’s “Alone.” Among her reasons to drink are her hyper-productivity and the “sick industry,” which are even more relevant than when Morrissette was (her words) in “single digits.” And yet there’s something ineffably two-decades-ago about lines like “That’s it, I am buying a Lamborghini to make up for these” or, later on the album, “I am grieving the end of super-womaning.”
Not that that’s bad, entirely. By Morissette’s standards, Pretty Forks is a vulnerable, sedate, ballad-heavy album. Most of those ballads are unobtrusive, with songwriting-template piano and strings plush and regular as amphitheater seats. But a piano ballad by Alanis is still an Alanis song, and thus it just won’t sound like the rest, not with music’s most chaotic-neutral pop lyricist. Whether she actually writes like this, her songs sure sound first-thought-best-thought, no workshopping and no curation, let the syllables fall where they may.
And for this, she’s taken two and a half decades of shit. But there’s a method to the badness. For every awkward meter or future mondegreen, Alanis produces a lyric that’s charmingly handspun. “Ablaze,” written for her children, could easily be unbearably saccharine if it were just a dedication; instead, it’s specifically, wildly hers. When the songs are funny, she’s often in on the joke, like on the bleak, quavery “Diagnosis,” a dispatch from the world where you really just can’t: “I can’t remember where the sentence started when I’m trying to finish it.” If Morrissette writes mostly in epigraphs, the ones on “Pedestal” recall nothing less than Rita Hayworth (who famously said, of her titular role in the film noir classic Gilda, “Men go to bed with Gilda but wake up with me.”) Morissette’s version, “One day I won’t be craved the way you crave me now,” is more awkward but also more disarming; with a slight personal tweak, she turns the song from fear of abandonment to fear of the world’s abandonment. She knows what she’s doing.
These U-turns of phrase are well within bounds of what you expect from an Alanis Morissette album. But her music still has surprises, and she saves the most rewarding one for the end. “Nemesis,” like much of Pretty Forks, begins midtempo and pro forma. But across six minutes, it snowballs into something large, picking up element after element. Trance chimes, galloping “Running Up That Hill”-drums, buttinsky electric guitar and cellos coalesce into what sure sounds like an Alanis banger in 2020. Ironically, the song itself is about hating change—you don’t need an homage to ’90s Alanis when she’s still finding new ways to do “Alanis” herself.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-08-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epiphany / Thirty Tigers | August 6, 2020 | 6.5 | 7696580d-98ce-4df7-8fa2-e842dca6d2eb | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
Working with a few key collaborators, the singer-songwriter delves into inner turmoil and late-night anxieties. But they play with a relaxed touch, creating a cozy, inviting atmosphere. | Working with a few key collaborators, the singer-songwriter delves into inner turmoil and late-night anxieties. But they play with a relaxed touch, creating a cozy, inviting atmosphere. | Andrew Bird: Inside Problems | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andrew-bird-inside-problems/ | Inside Problems | Andrew Bird’s catalog offers ample evidence of a uniquely cerebral style of songwriting: His formidable discography spans artful Americana, refined revivals of hot jazz, a series of geographically -inspired records, and a bunch of Armchair Apocrypha, as he put it on the 2007 album that finally earned him a cult audience after a decade of steady work both on his own and with his group Bowl of Fire. Bird’s profile continued to rise in the decade after Armchair Apocrypha, to the point that he snagged a starring role on the fourth season of FX’s Fargo in 2020 and snared a Grammy nomination for My Finest Work Yet that same year.
Inside Problems plays like a retort to My Finest Work Yet, Bird’s last solo album. Where Bird addressed social upheaval on the 2019 record—a common trend among previously apolitical musicians during the Trump administration—Inside Problems is entirely concerned with matters of the mind and heart. It may chronicle an interior journey, but Inside Problems doesn’t sound insular, even if it wears its intimacy with pride. Working with a small group of musicians and featuring producer Mike Viola—a returning collaborator who helmed These 13, Bird’s 2021 duet album with Jimbo Mathus—on guitar, Alan Hampton on bass, and drummer Abe Rounds, Bird steers away from the folkier elements of his style, finding a previously uncharted territory closer to indie pop than Americana. The quartet plays with a distinctly relaxed touch, creating a cozy, inviting atmosphere.
But “cozy” might imply that Bird is mining familiar territory on Inside Problems, which isn’t quite true. He still relies on his customary tricks: He wields his violin and occasionally contributes a spectral whistle that dances along the margins, as it does on “Fixed Positions,” and he invites Jimbo Mathus to give “Faithless Ghost” a bit of revival spirit. Despite these accents, Inside Problems feels strikingly urbane, a well-tailored record whose heart and mind reside in the modern world, rather than some imagined Americana past. There are repeated allusions to author Joan Didion—there’s a direct nod on the sprightly “Lone Didion,” while “Atomized” spins off of her 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem—and Lou Reed’s ghost looms over a good portion of the record, surfacing on “The Night Before Your Birthday,” a muffled thump of a rocker where Bird adopts Reed’s patented sneer. “Stop n’ Shop” occupies the same studiously primitive territory as “The Night Before Your Birthday,” but the results are closer to the cheerful naivete of Jonathan Richman. (It’s tempting to wonder if the song’s title might be a tip of the hat to Richman’s own “Roadrunner,” which immortalized the supermarket chain in its lyrics.)
These direct, unguarded moments are countered by tracks where Bird and company stretch out their rhythms, as they do on casually funky “Underlands,” or indulge in painterly textures, creating slowly shifting sounds that capture the elasticity of dreams. “Eight” takes full advantage of its nearly seven minutes, cascading to an extended instrumental session where Bird’s violin conveys emotions his meticulous vocals do not. It’s not that Bird is a limited singer—he can command attention with a murmur and ascend to the upper reaches of his range without cracking—but rather that the strength of Inside Problems lies in the way this small crew of musicians creates such a muted yet vibrant vibe. These 11 songs may be meant to chronicle a pointedly personal inner voyage, yet he’s wound up with a warm, collaborative record that feels like a balm for fear and loneliness. | 2022-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-08T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | June 8, 2022 | 7.4 | 769d7db9-d600-496e-8a9c-4d3854e5cd27 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
One of rock music’s former Next Big Things returns with a propulsive, stream-lined album that has the modest charm of fan service. | One of rock music’s former Next Big Things returns with a propulsive, stream-lined album that has the modest charm of fan service. | Secret Machines: Awake in the Brain Chamber | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/secret-machines-awake-in-the-brain-chamber/ | Awake in the Brain Chamber | Secret Machines began their 2004 debut Now Here is Nowhere with six seconds of silence, and when the kick drum hit, years of buzz became reality: a Next Big Thing band unafraid of all the Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular comparisons winging their way. 16 years later, Awake in the Brain Chamber begins much in a similar way, albeit only similar enough to bring the difference between 2004 and 2020 into sharp relief. “First Wave Intact” boomed like “When the Levee Breaks” out of the Darrell K. Royal jumbotron, and Awake in the Brain Chamber’s opening moments thud like two kids smacking a tetherball in a deserted schoolyard—a sound that absorbed every deflating circumstance of the past decade-plus, which were marked by artistic stalemates, fading commercial fortunes, and unthinkable tragedy. But if “3,4,5 Let’s Stay Alive” is the opposite of a Big Comeback from a former Big Thing, that’s kind of the entire point—Secret Machines just sound relieved that Awake in the Brain Chamber actually exists.
It’s a wise management of expectations for a version of Secret Machines that’s downsized in all ways. Original guitarist Benjamin Curtis died of lymphoma in 2013 at the age of 35, and his imprint is still noticeable on the remaining duo of brother Brandon and drummer Josh Garza; his electro-pop project School of Seven Bells is referenced in “3,4,5 Let’s Stay Alive.” Awake in the Brain Chamber clocks in at just a bit over a half hour, sucking out the dry ice and fog that filled the air as past songs stretched out past five minutes. What remains is an album built in the image of “Nowhere Again” or “Lightning Blue Eyes,” propulsive, streamlined, and feasibly pop—the kind of songs that once put Secret Machines alongside Arcade Fire as David Bowie’s favorite rock bands of 2004, or at least ones that pointed towards a brighter future at that moment than U2.
If the concept of “krautrock, but with choruses” is no longer novel in 2020, it’s at least fresh on Awake in the Brain Chamber—even as their vision of planetarium-ready rock receded almost entirely from the public imagination, Now Here is Nowhere maintained its cult appeal in large part because there really hasn’t been anything remotely like it since. Though Secret Machines don’t have the same sense of scope or scale today, the economized production and sleek song structures become an unexpected asset. Awake in the Brain Chamber shifts towards a more stately, synth-heavy sound. The sweeping and silvery “Talos’ Corpse” and “Angel Come” reimagine Secret Machines as logical forerunners and peers of British “The Big Music” revivalists like Foals or the Horrors, studio nerds who developed into a reliable late-afternoon festival act, rather than a band at the top of the American Landfill Indie heap, as their Spotify’s “Fans Also Like” page suggests.
But Awake in the Brain Chamber has the modest charm of fan service, intended for an audience that’s actively rooting for Secret Machines to succeed. The back story is indispensable to project a sense of stakes onto a record that takes the straightest path in cruising to the finish line, never once swerving or stepping on the gas. While certainly the tightest Secret Machines LP, much like Brandon Curtis’ side gig Interpol, the band’s power is directly proportional to an unshakeable belief in its inherent profundity. As longtime fans know, Awake in the Brain Chamber stands in the place of an even more troubled predecessor: The Moth, The Lizard and the Secret Machines was completed in 2010 and scrapped at the mixing stage, deemed “too depressing.” The duo plans to release it at some point, and hopefully it does come to light, if only to reveal what “depressing Secret Machines” might actually sound like. They’ve never been particularly forthcoming with their emotions, with Ten Silver Drops standout “Alone, Jealous and Stoned” standing as the rule-proving exception. Awake in the Brain Chamber is best when Curtis is at his most vulnerable—giving himself a pep talk in the call-and-response chorus of “Everything Starts,” muttering “I want to give up” all too believably throughout the chorus of “Talos’ Corpse,” before amending himself—“I want to give up, but don’t.” They sound like they have much more to give.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | TSM | September 8, 2020 | 6.8 | 769e419b-21f6-4266-93ac-9180f516978f | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Three years before they split, at an Independence Day concert in a downtown park, the band tore through its earliest work with the polish of seasoned pros. | Three years before they split, at an Independence Day concert in a downtown park, the band tore through its earliest work with the polish of seasoned pros. | Sonic Youth: Sonic Youth: Battery Park, NYC: July 4, 2008 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonic-youth-sonic-youth-battery-park-nyc-july-4-2008/ | Battery Park, NYC: July 4, 2008 | Sonic Youth ceased to exist in 2011, at the end of a 30-year career, much of which was obsessively archived in live audio and video recordings that have surfaced both officially and not so officially. Documents of their last few years together show a band that had perfected its live show and was spending a lot of time revisiting the songs of its early days. Battery Park, commercially released for the first time this month, was originally given away along with pre-orders of the band’s final full-length, The Eternal, 10 years ago. A free show in a lower Manhattan park on the Fourth of July is a pretty good place to capture a band that was forever inseparable from New York City, specifically its lower reaches.
True professionals—the only events that ever derailed them were a massive instrument theft in 1999 and, finally, the breakup of a marriage—and seasoned festival players after years on the European circuit, they handled a daylight set in a park like just another day at the office. That might make it sound as if they were going through the motions, but that undersells how seriously they took their job. Up until the end, they came to play.
The set is relatively heavy on audience-friendly tracks from Daydream Nation. That album had just turned 20, and Sonic Youth had spent a good amount of time in the previous months on tour playing it in its entirety. Those songs perfectly showcased how polished their organized whirlwind had become over the years, while retaining the ability to give listeners whiplash with a sudden change of pace or blast of noise. “Hey Joni” veers from hardcore ranting to dissonant squalls to furious rave-up. “The Sprawl” is the set’s jammiest improv moment, extending into a dreamy cymbal-and-guitar back and forth, dying down to just a single strummed note, then roaring back. It’s also a tease for those fans who lived for the moments when the band would stretch out, toying with effects to create not so much a wall of sound as a whole, enclosed room.
A couple years later, even Daydream Nation would seem like recent material in a Sonic Youth set, as their last few shows consisted almost exclusively of material from the Bad Moon Rising through Sister era. This set didn’t touch any of those, instead reaching back to the band’s debut self-titled EP and first LP, Confusion Is Sex. Hearing those 1982 songs played by 2008 Sonic Youth collapses time in a way that’s more familiar to reunion tours, but of course there was no break for this band until they called it quits. Early, bare-bones no-wave stompers “World Looks Red” and “Making the Nature Scene” get the benefit of more musicality and, of course, Steve Shelley’s drumming, the X factor that propelled the band from very good to one of the greatest of all time.
Karen Carpenter and Madonna were always as important to Sonic Youth as the Beat poets and Glenn Branca, and, unwilling as they were to baldly grasp for the brass ring, they clearly wanted at least one big hit. Their closest shot was probably “Bull in the Heather,” one of Kim Gordon’s signature songs, released in the heat of the Lollapalooza boom. And here it gets the loudest audible audience reaction, from the start of its plinking, dissonant intro, before Shelley’s maraca-accented drumming begins. Gordon seems to be having a decent amount of fun here. Mark Ibold’s presence as the fifth Youth, in addition to filling out the band’s sound, allowed Gordon to occasionally switch to guitar or take a turn as a pure frontwoman and focus on vocals. Here she plays around with a goofy British accent while singing “Making the Nature Scene.”
As with all bands that so thoroughly reshape the genre in which they work, it’s impossible ever again to hear Sonic Youth as they sounded when they emerged. At times, it seemed like the electric guitar had been invented just for them to fuck up. The sudden blasts of feedback on their early albums were physically startling, the interplay of Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore hypnotic. Live, they could freeze you to the floor—trying to hear everything, wondering if all of it really existed or if some of those sounds were only inside your skull. Gordon’s determinedly simple bass and Shelley’s powerful, tom-forward drumming tied it all down and provided the center around which all that guitar noise swirled. While Battery Park isn’t their best or most comprehensive live document, it is further proof of how consistent their genius was and how enduring the qualities that made them such a special live act were—not dependent on youth, novelty, material, or anything except for the irreplicable chemistry between four people.
Just before “The Wonder,” Moore asks Ranaldo, “Do you start this or do I?” "We start together,” Ranaldo responds. Moore echoes him: “We start together, man. Together, forever!” Or three more years, as it turned out. But he could hope. | 2019-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | June 14, 2019 | 7.7 | 76a4a613-0791-45b6-80ee-4b51a3bf2697 | Susan Elizabeth Shepard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/susan-elizabeth shepard/ | |
The debut album from the Queens crew is fiery and kinetic, mining the history of New York rap without coming up with much of anything new. | The debut album from the Queens crew is fiery and kinetic, mining the history of New York rap without coming up with much of anything new. | World’s Fair: New Lows | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/worlds-fair-new-lows/ | New Lows | The Queens rap crew World’s Fair pride themselves on showcasing cultural diversity. The group’s members claim Puerto Rican, Dominican, Filipino, Jamaican, Jewish and Haitian heritages, a makeup that, along with the crew’s name, implicitly promises a global array of voices and perspectives. But while on paper World’s Fair have all the makings of a vibrant melting pot, in execution it’s more like a fondue, a homogenous porridge where the most interesting ingredients get buried and the dominant flavor note is always “New York.”
The crew’s regional roots aren’t the selling point they were five years ago, when they released their debut mixtape Bastards of the Party against the backdrop of a “New New York” hip-hop renaissance that’s since fizzled out. World’s Fair weren’t as overtly traditionalist as some of the more prominent acts from that movement (Joey Badass), nor were they as mold-shattering as the more exciting ones (Action Bronson, Flatbush Zombies, or A$AP Mob, to the extent they were ever really part of that scene). Their belated full-length debut New Lows finds them in the same stasis many of New York hip-hop’s true believers have been locked in for most of the new millennium: trying to grow something new from the seeds of some of the genre’s greatest music ever, with little to show for it.
Sometimes they get by on sheer perspiration. New Lows plays out as a kinetic tour of the city’s bodegas, subway stops, and underground dice games, with adrenalized production designed to keep the crew firing fast. “Elvis’ Flowers (On My Grave)” spikes its breakbeats with jungle BPMs, while the booming drums of “Win4” bring to life the song’s accounts of how shit can hit the fan even on a routine trip to the corner store. The wilder the production, the more lasting the high: The tweaked-out synths of “Dundas Street West” bring out the most hyped-up performances from the group (as well as guest Freaky Franz, the rap alias of Turnstile bassist Franz Lyons). “Birdman,” meanwhile, charts the inhospitable middle ground between gnarly UK grime and the scorched-earth noise of vintage Def Jux.
So, at its best, New Lows re-energizes some familiar sounds. But the crew’s producers can only carry so much weight, and they can’t disguise how little World’s Fairs rappers bring to the table. It’s a trap too many New York traditionalists fall into: They rap forcefully but with little nuance or personality. While rappers around the rest of the country swing for the fences with daring deliveries—not just rhyming but belting, serenading, and exploring—most of World’s Fair’s primary lyricists default to the city’s usual hard-spitting preset, rapping as if smacking a camera lens in an imagined music video. It’s a rigid, outdated notion of hard, and with each verse they run it a little further in the ground.
With such a full bench, you’d expect that at least one of the rappers in World’s Fair would rise to the challenge to standout. The big selling point of a rap crew is more bang for your buck: You get to hear a multitude of ideas and personas. But compared to a collective like Brockhampton, where each member brings his own set of convictions, anxieties, and passions, World’s Fair’s rappers are largely interchangeable, distinguishable mostly by the pitch of their voice. In a sense, they’ve been failed by their shared muse: They spend so much of New Lows riding for their city, its heritage, and its way of life that they forget to say all that much about themselves. | 2018-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fool’s Gold | July 21, 2018 | 6.3 | 76aea575-13e4-4506-a309-cefa5c2bb85d | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
For some reason, Stars decide to take a three-year-old album and commission their own tribute to it. | For some reason, Stars decide to take a three-year-old album and commission their own tribute to it. | Stars: Do You Trust Your Friends? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10240-do-you-trust-your-friends/ | Do You Trust Your Friends? | In recent years, everyone from Death From Above 1979 to Architecture in Helsinki to Bloc Party have succumbed to the temptation to create indie remix albums. Now we're faced with Stars' Do You Trust Your Friends?, which we may someday see as the tipping point from indie rock remix albums being idle, indulgent fan-club novelties to becoming inescapable annoyances. Helpfully, it gathers all the transgressions of the trend into one convenient package: incestuous choice of collaborators, unimaginative use of technology, and reconfiguration that uniformly fails to improve on the originals. It also ups the criminal ante by revisiting, track-by-track, an album that's already three years old (Set Yourself on Fire) and splitting the time between flimsy remixes and lazy covers; in other words, Stars has commissioned their own tribute album. The sheer egotism is the most impressive thing about it.
Final Fantasy's leadoff take on "Your Ex-Lover is Dead" sets the tone, lying limply between remix and cover. Preserving Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan's vocals, Owen Pallett fills in the rest with waltzy piano and random string bursts that seem fairly oblivious to the song, sounding more like an audition to be Jon Brion's film-soundtrack intern than a new take on a song that was already more effectively cinematic to begin with. And Pallett's not the only one who utilizes the "hey let's attach the original vocal track to whatever random shit we have lying around" method, as the Most Serene Republic short-circuit the glistening synth-pop of "Ageless Beauty" by layering Millan's singing over an aimless acoustic jam, and the Stills use "Soft Revolution" as a riff-and-solo trashcan, with a horrible pan-flute solo as frosting.
Even when the covers sound less like a band cleaning out their hard drive, the reinterpretations misunderstand Stars' appeal and strengths. Both Apostle of Hustle's slack "One More Night" and the Russian Futurists' breakbeat-and-power-chord "The First Five Times" over-masculinize the sleepy and sensitive Stars sound, while retaining none of their romantic grandeur. Only Broken Social Scene alumnus Jason Collett's top-to-bottom remake of "Reunion" offers any sort of surprising alternate take, turning the song into a ragged, Stonesy number that's far enough afield of Stars' usual M.O. to justify the makeover.
In the actual remix department, there are multiple examples of the most common rearrangement gaffes. Camouflage Nights' "Celebration Guns" and the Dears' "What I'm Trying to Say" (inexplicably split into two parts) both commit the crime of reproduction, with new versions mostly adhering to the originals' structure and sounds and merely moving the sonic furniture around a bit ("hey, what if the chorus drumbeat was the drumbeat for the verses!"). Then there are the tracks that are completely electronified, but to little result, like the Junior Boys' phoned-in "Sleep Tonight", perhaps the most promising (given the Boys' remix know-how), and therefore disappointing, track on Friends. Minotaur Shock (with "The Big Fight") and Metric ("He Lied About Death") at least get a little ambitious, but both leave the oven undercooked, the former rendered somewhat uncomfortable by gallons of empty space, and the latter fixated like a third-grader on the swear-word lyric "don't fuck with our lives" as it runs a psych-loop treadmill.
All together, Do You Trust Your Friends? is an ideal demonstration of why the trend of indie rock remix records should be snuffed out before they becomes industry standard. While we understand the urge to create this kind of stopgap project, either as a way to keep an artist's name in the newswire, a chance to make some extra pocket change with minimal work, or an opportunity to promote some musical pals, as an artistic statement these releases almost uniformly fail to creatively re-imagine any of the source material, only serving to fill the market with inferior versions. Ideally, indie bands will restrict their remixing impulses to B-sides and blog leaks, utilize artists with some experience and talent in the art, and spare us from the feeble, immaterial album-length likes of Friends. | 2007-05-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2007-05-21T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Arts & Crafts | May 21, 2007 | 1.8 | 76b358aa-6cdf-4037-bbc3-9114ec04773c | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
Mike Hadreas’ fifth album glides between sublime melodies and grimy, guttural dissonance, embracing the joys and burdens of the human body and its innumerable, intangible yearnings. | Mike Hadreas’ fifth album glides between sublime melodies and grimy, guttural dissonance, embracing the joys and burdens of the human body and its innumerable, intangible yearnings. | Perfume Genius: Set My Heart on Fire Immediately | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/perfume-genius-set-my-heart-on-fire-immediately/ | Set My Heart on Fire Immediately | Each Perfume Genius album is a metamorphosis. Over the past decade, Mike Hadreas has transfigured from confessional balladeer to glittering prima donna to our baroque-pop bard. On his terrific fifth album Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, Hadreas emerges with all new contours. Guided once more by the meticulous work of producer Blake Mills and an expert troupe of musicians, including experimental saxophonist Sam Gendel and renowned session drummer Jim Keltner, Hadreas glides between sublime melodies and grimy, guttural dissonance. It is his strongest work to date—a three-dimensional, dust-blown world that is cinematic in its grandeur and intimate in its inspection of the human form.
On 2017’s fantastic No Shape, Hadreas sang of liberating the body. Each song seemed to unhitch his spirit from the corporeal grind, letting it whip through the air like Fragonard’s swinging lady. Set My Heart on Fire Immediately feels more grounded, both in the earth and in the flesh. As on No Shape, there are skyward string arrangements and sparkling harpsichord passages, but Hadreas and his crew also introduce harmonium, grumbling synthesizer, and rust-worn electric guitar. The effect is sprawling and dynamic, made all the more intriguing by Hadreas’ agile vocal range. On earlier LPs, his voice pierced through the clouds with a clean note or a vulnerable falsetto. Those techniques remain, but he also dips to craggy lows, enhancing the record’s texture with layers of silt and grit.
“Leave” marries these two approaches beautifully. Hadreas’ voice is pitched-down and scuffed, backlit by beams of violin and twinkling keys. Halfway through, howling dogs and unintelligible whispers besiege the song from its edges as the dream succumbs to nightmare. Conversely, “Without You” and “On the Floor” are the album’s most spry compositions. The former floats on plinked organ, distant percussion, and dashes of viola, a blend that somehow resembles a calypso melody. “On the Floor,” the album’s sweet and chewy pop center, bounces atop Pino Palladino’s elastic bassline, so thick it sounds like he’s wailing on industrial-strength bungee cords. Mills’ synth guitar riffs chirp and belch to Matt Chamberlain’s peppery snare, evoking a contemporary translation of Chic. Both songs find Hadreas in a state of intangible yearning. “Without You” chronicles an absence as “a blurry shape” that’s “just enough to find a trace.” In “On the Floor,” he attempts to recall that shape once more. “I’m trying/But still I close my eyes,” he sings, “The dreaming/Bringing his face to mind.” He never quite gets ahold of the complete image—it dissolves just before it’s fully realized.
When Hadreas abandons the imagined world to confront physical reality, his palette darkens. On early single “Describe,” his voice seems to emerge from a crust of topsoil. Dirtied, distorted bass and twanging guitar lend a country western flair, and Hadreas’ rugged new look (perhaps a nod to Tom of Finland’s cowboys) enhances the fantasy. His multi-tracked vocals braid and tangle in the mix as he illustrates two sounds similarly entwined: “No bells anymore,” he sings, “just my stomach rumbling.” It’s a loaded couplet, hinting at his lifelong battle with Crohn’s disease, and a gesture toward Perfume Genius’ two greatest fascinations: The erosion of the body and the curative properties of love. When Hadreas confesses that there are no more bells, just bodily functions, it feels like a reluctant surrender to the mundane.
If No Shape endeavored to transcend the body, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately embraces the joys and burdens of human anatomy. On mid-album battle march “Your Body Changes Everything,” Hadreas explores the exchange of power between bodies. “Give me your weight, I’m solid/Hold me up, I’m falling down,” he bellows. It might be his most masculine song ever, chronicling a sexual exchange that alternately yields to strength and conquers it. But it is audibly macho as well: Hadreas sinks to a shadowy register, Gendel issues militant sax blurts, and the whole thing gallops to a relentless drum pattern. It’s robust and intense, echoing the theme song from 1982’s Conan the Barbarian (itself a celebration of flesh).
Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is both vast and packed with detail. The songs expand and contract, one minute blasting open with the melodrama of a Roy Orbison ballad, the next zooming in with surgical detail as Hadreas describes ribs that fold like fabric, a tear-streaked face, an instance of post-coital petty theft. He laments the passage of time in a trembling existential opus, then squeezes us into a bedroom to witness a clumsy, tortured hookup. On their own, these complementary vantage points are potent; in concert, they are grand, filmic, and tactile all at once.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Matador | May 18, 2020 | 9 | 76b380fa-0062-4a3d-b34b-05f1e23b5b92 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
A lost album from the UK post-punk greats, recorded circa 1989, sheds light on the creative process of brilliant, troubled frontman Dan Treacy. | A lost album from the UK post-punk greats, recorded circa 1989, sheds light on the creative process of brilliant, troubled frontman Dan Treacy. | Television Personalities: Beautiful Despair | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/television-personalities-beautiful-despair/ | Beautiful Despair | In his prime, Television Personalities frontman Dan Treacy was perhaps the most unconventional figure in post-punk. Indeed, the usual procedures of writing, recording and performing music seemed to bore him so much he could hardly be bothered to try. In concert, Treacy refused to write setlists or announce titles, leaving his bandmates to identify each new mystery song as he launched into it; Television Personalities rehearsals, meanwhile, were virtually nonexistent. “I remember us rehearsing once in late 1983,” Treacy’s friend and collaborator Jowe Head recalled to The Brag in 2016. “We did another one five years later, and that was about it.” So averse was Treacy to the obligatory drudgery of being a musician that it sometimes seemed as if he’d prefer to do anything else. “In fact music is probably not the right medium for me to express myself,” he confessed in an interview in the mid-’80s. “I like films and books more.”
But music was what he chose. Over more than 30 years and nearly a dozen celebrated albums, Treacy expressed his suffering with his music until the suffering overwhelmed him. (He expressed his joy and humor when he felt them, too, but the pain won out.) In the ’90s, he vanished for more than half a decade, whereabouts unknown: it would later transpire he’d been serving time on a prison barge, convicted for shoplifting. Addiction tormented him. In 2011, after a short-lived mid-aughts comeback, he disappeared again—this time owing to a blood clot in the brain that required extensive surgery. Since then, reportedly, he has been recovering under professional care in a nursing home. With not much prospect now of new music, the arrival of a lost Television Personalities album would seem to be cause for celebration—we’re getting more Dan Treacy just when we need him.
Beautiful Despair was recorded at Jowe Head’s flat at Glading Terrace in Stoke Newington over a number of sessions in 1989 and 1990, after the release of the acclaimed Privilege and before the recording of the mid-career classic Closer to God—the latter of which contains so many of these songs in more complete form that it seems more accurate to describe Beautiful Despair as a first draft of Closer to God than a proper standalone LP. It is a true “lost album” in one literal sense: Head admitted recently that he had “mislaid the tapes” from these sessions and simply happened upon them while looking for something else. But it is not as though 48 minutes’ worth of never-before-heard vintage Television Personalities material has been unearthed after all these years. Beautiful Despair is a rough sketch, and its worth extends only as far as one’s interest in such a document.
If it’s true of the best Television Personalities songs that, as NME said in a review of the band’s 1981 debut, And Don’t the Kids Just Love It, “their particular magic lies in their half-formed nature, their humble hesitancy,” then Beautiful Despair has that virtue. Indeed, the familiar tracks here sound cruder and less refined than their finalized Closer to God counterparts, ramshackle in a manner that can be quite appealing. “Hard Luck Story Number 39” and “Razor Blades and Lemonade,” two of Treacy’s best songs from this period, have the pleasant dreaminess of bedroom pop—a stark change from their full-band rock arrangements and robust production on the better-known record. A simplified “I Hope You Have a Nice Day” seems in particular an improvement over the original: shorn of its brass and wall-of-noise guitar, it’s revealed as a charming, breezy pop gem, precisely the sort of thing Treacy did well.
Beautiful Despair does boast a handful of bona-fide discoveries. The finest, a downtempo number called “If You Fly Too High,” was recorded after a show at the Ecstasy Madhouse club in Berlin in 1989; the Television Personalities were playing with the Lemonheads, and the song was conceived as a parody of Evan Dando. (It includes such memorably Treacian witticisms as “Have I told you I know Alan McGee?”) Another, “Love is a Four Letter Word,” went on to become “Love is Better Than War,” a b-side to a single from 1992. The song is a test case for the merit of much of this album. Probably it’s good that “Love is a Four Letter Word” exists in this incarnation, as a matter of historical interest and a gift for dedicated fans. But is it significant? Frankly, no. It shares with most of Beautiful Despair the unfortunate condition of superfluousness.
“It just amuses me,” Treacy told Scottish fanzine Slow Dazzle in 1984, asked how he felt when epithets like “art pop” and “psychedelic” were used to describe his style. “I can hardly be accused of jumping on the bandwagon though, can I? A couple of years ago people were saying, ‘What the hell are they doing?’” It was an old story for him even then. His band always seemed out of harmony with fashion, either too early or too late for what was popular at the moment. In 1976, aged 17, he went to his first punk-rock show, but left because he found it too violent. So he made up his own genre, and ridiculed the punk kids with defiantly uncool cheer. The world would catch up with Treacy eventually: his witty, lo-fi pop influenced everyone from Pavement to the Jesus and Mary Chain. Only by then he’d moved on to something else that wasn’t trendy—ever the prescient artist, never a man with much luck. | 2018-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Fire | January 26, 2018 | 6.9 | 76b64a97-91a2-4109-8204-384935394bc6 | Calum Marsh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/calum-marsh/ | |
The hardcore trio grapples with the ongoing death of their NYC home in their most cohesive work to date. | The hardcore trio grapples with the ongoing death of their NYC home in their most cohesive work to date. | Show Me the Body: Dog Whistle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/show-me-the-body-dog-whistle/ | Dog Whistle | In 2015, Show Me the Body frontman Julian Cashwan Pratt told The Guardian that he was struggling to write love songs. “The city is dying” he said of his native New York, outlining the institutional and economic blows NYC residents deflect daily just to survive—displacement, aggressive policing, corporate homogenization. On Show Me the Body’s new album Dog Whistle, the hardcore trio grapple with the same conundrum, but while digging through the rubble of razed local businesses is disheartening work, Show Me the Body would sift through no other city’s debris. Dog Whistle, like the band’s previous records Corpus I and Body War, is quick to state the failings of the five boroughs—but it also aims to fortify the underground community in which it was created. As a result, the band have produced their most cohesive work to date, however one that struggles to maintain interest and energy throughout its 30-minute runtime.
Dog Whistle functions best when Show Me the Body are able to capture the vitality of their live sets, as well as the sheer noisiness of New York itself. “Not for Love” is punctuated by throbs of distortion that sound like a jackhammer busting up concrete. Here, Pratt’s vocal chords are ripped raw, and they dispatch quick, incisive lyrics that sting long after the cut’s been made. Pratt’s view of his home turf is as uplifting as it is doomed: In one snarled breath, he offers a succinct manifesto on drudgery: “Fuck and work if you’re lucky.” In another, he holds his community to a higher standard: “Let’s do it right/Let's do it for love.”
“Madonna Rocket” is the most vigorous and traditionally punk song on the album, and its momentum alone makes it the most memorable. It’s easy to see how this track would translate into the band’s gigs; a pit of tangled limbs churning in front of the stage. Show Me the Body excel when they allow their music to whip itself into a frenzy like this, and co-producers Gabriel Millman and Chris Coady (who’s worked with Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Beach House) deserve some credit for letting the LP stay stained and frayed at the edges. But the album screeches to a halt during a couple of spoken word interludes that feel forced and unnecessary. The 45-second “Animal in a Dream” features Pratt reciting a poem that feels generic and half-finished when compared with his bright, insightful discourse in interviews, or the venom he spits onstage. The static sizzling in the background of the track is arguably more intriguing than his words, and would be just as effective as a transitional element on the record.
Structurally, “Camp Orchestra” is Dog Whistle’s most interesting song, creeping in with rigid bass and banjo plucks that sound siphoned from an early Genesis tune, before propelling into a furious headbanger that borrows as much from metal as it does punk and prog rock.
Show Me the Body’s comfort experimenting with different genres may stem from the fact that their Corpus collective is home to artists across mediums and styles—it might also be a result of inhabiting the city that birthed punk, hip-hop, and so many other creative movements. But what imbues “Camp Orchestra” with added weight is the trip that inspired it. While recently on tour in Poland, Pratt and his bandmates Harlan Steed and Noah Cohen-Corbett—all of whom are Jewish—visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, and were especially haunted by a phrase on the entrance gate: “Work Sets You Free.” Pratt was thinking of a specific kind of work when he wrote “Camp Orchestra,” which is named after the prisoners who were forced to perform music for Nazi officers, as well as for fellow captives while they were marched to and from labor. Pratt screams over a squall of feedback: “No work will set you free to work,” a notion that could easily be applied to the inescapable hustle that is as much a part of NYC as its artistic milestones.
New York is a complicated place to call home. This is one way to sum up Show Me the Body’s mission statement. They feel constantly at odds with the city’s imposing new structures, and their disappearing locales. In the midst of losing members of their community, they strive to bring their found family closer together. Their songs embody a ceaseless push and pull, but unfortunately don't always epitomize the fervor of their lives outside of the music. New York is a place that relentlessly demands more from you—but I imagine Show Me the Body will push even harder in years to come. | 2019-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loma Vista / Caroline International | April 8, 2019 | 6.8 | 76b9aa86-e81e-41ab-9ef3-6abe362fd202 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
On his first proper album in five years, Tom Jenkinson patches together a passel of vintage hardware to revisit the breakbeat mayhem and drill’n’bass hijinks of his early years. | On his first proper album in five years, Tom Jenkinson patches together a passel of vintage hardware to revisit the breakbeat mayhem and drill’n’bass hijinks of his early years. | Squarepusher: Be Up a Hello | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/squarepusher-be-up-a-hello/ | Be Up a Hello | The cultural cachet of the leftfield electronic music of the 1990s is higher now than it’s been in years. Aphex Twin headlines festivals; Autechre set the internet alight with radio appearances and DAT tapes of unreleased material; younger generations’ output is peppered with copious references to acts like Plaid and B12.
But what about Squarepusher? Tom Jenkinson was a huge part of the original IDM boom, not to mention one of Warp’s core artists during its late-’90s golden era. His albums Hard Normal Daddy (1997), the jazzy Music Is Rotted One Note (1998) and even Go Plastic (2001) are invoked in reverential terms, along with his early records for Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label. But Squarepusher’s recent output hasn’t been greeted with the same kind of collective enthusiasm that Aphex and Autechre’s mature work has received.
There is one key difference between his career and those of his contemporaries: Squarepusher never really went away. Where some of his peers have taken extended breaks or remained shrouded in mystery, Jenkinson has been steadily releasing music for the past 25 years. He has kept taking risks: fronting a band (Shobaleader One), soundtracking a children’s television program (Cbeebies), collaborating with Japanese robots (Squarepusher x Z-Machines), dipping his toes into EDM (Ufabulum), and dazzling us with his fretwork (Solo Electric Bass 1). Jenkinson’s experimental impulses are commendable, but not all of these creative dalliances were successful, and he’s never disappeared long enough for fans to forget the duds and fall back on their warm memories of his glory days.
Be Up a Hello, the first proper Squarepusher full-length in five years, explicitly nods to his earliest days as a producer. Abandoning the custom software he’d developed over the course of his career, Jenkinson constructed the album using a small fleet of vintage hardware, including a Commodore VIC-20, a personal computer first released in the early 1980s. Due to the nature of his setup, many of Be Up a Hello’s tracks were recorded in a single take, giving the album a loose, freewheeling feel that suits the music’s generally manic nature.
Frantic breakbeats are at the core of Be Up a Hello, which is littered with echoes of classic jungle, hardcore, and drum’n’bass. During particularly intense moments, that energy even tips into ’90s drill’n’bass territory, most notably on the unrelenting “Speedcrank,” whose full-throttle hijinks will likely prove exhausting for all but the most amped of ravers. More palatable is the berzerk “Mekrev Bass,” a showcase for glitchy 8-bit chaos. Several cuts harken back to old-school video-game soundtracks; with its bright chords and bouncy rhythm, “Oberlove” sounds like something unearthed from a wholesome Yoshi title, while the neon-streaked twists and turns of the densely populated “Hitsonu” would be perfect for the final stages of a complex puzzle game.
That kind of nerdy nostalgia is baked into Be Up a Hello, although the presence of colorful club rippers like “Nervelevers” and “Terminal Slam”—both of which pair crunchy acid blips with frenzied breakbeat assaults—ensures that the LP is more than a quaint trip down memory lane. “Vortrack” heads down a darker path, but the scattered rhythm, intermittently slipping into a dubsteppy half-time cadence, gives the song a drunken, meandering feel. (Much better was Jenkinson’s own “Vortrack (Fracture Remix)” from last year, which distilled the mayhem of the original single into a hard-stepping jungle cut with a gooey, gut-rumbling bassline.)
Jenkinson wisely puts the breakbeat onslaught on pause for “Detroit People Mover” and LP closer “80 Ondula,” both of which are beatless synth excursions. Employing a symphonic flair that’s equal parts Wendy Carlos and John Carpenter, the former evokes ’70s sci-fi film scores, while the latter’s creeping tones are better suited for a dingy horror flick. A world away from his signature drum attack, they nevertheless represent some of Be Up a Hello’s most compelling material.
For years, Squarepusher fans have been clamoring for Jenkinson to get back to his roots, and Be Up the Hello is the closest he’s come to his ’90s self in quite some time. With its glitchy bedlam and mischievous spirit, the album does offer moments of gleeful chaos, yet it’s hard to shake the feeling that it’s a facsimile, a simulacrum. The LP feels more like a technical exercise than a genuine outburst of creative spontaneity. It too often feels like Jenkinson is applying his virtuosic talents to covering his own back catalog—something he’s literally done before with the Shobaleader One project—and the overload of nostalgia keeps the album from feeling fresh. As thrilling as those vintage Squarepusher records were (and still are), it wasn’t necessary that Jenkinson make another one.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | January 31, 2020 | 6.4 | 76bb4402-d27e-4894-80e4-4a1c52de9f8a | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
The English singer’s third album promises eccentricity and personal revelation but delivers anonymous, uninspired pop-rock. | The English singer’s third album promises eccentricity and personal revelation but delivers anonymous, uninspired pop-rock. | YUNGBLUD: Yungblud | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yungblud-yungblud/ | Yungblud | Yungblud isn’t one for subtleties. Armed with his trademark smudged eyeliner and creeper shoes, Doncaster, England’s Dominic Harrison uses formulaic pop melodies to proclaim the misfit manifesto: Nobody understands me. In the music video for “The Funeral,” the opener to Harrison’s third album, Yungblud, he digs his own grave and crowd surfs in a coffin before Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne run him over with their car. “Just some fucking poser,” Sharon scoffs, signaling to Yungblud’s purist naysayers that he’s in on the joke, too.
Over the past four years, Harrison has become something of a Gen Z spokesperson by rehashing pop-punk clichés of yore: “All I want is a cigarette/Until I realize I’ve got none left,” he sings on the sincere acoustic ballad “Die for a Night.” If he’s done one thing right, it’s to insist that he doesn’t consider himself a true punk at all. Instead, he likens himself to Mac Miller and Lil Peep, polarizing wunderkinds whose bright careers ended in tragedy: “I got into this place where I thought the best career move would be death,” Harrison recently told NME. “I thought, ‘If I die right now, would people look beyond a horrible trend on Twitter or TikTok? Would they give me a chance?’” With this in mind, earnest declarations like “I got a fucked-up soul and an STD” sound less remorseful and more like Harrison’s attempt to conjure pathos in a way his music cannot.
While Harrison’s previous work has touched clumsily on broader topics like chasing fame, growing up queer, and even mass shootings, he asserts that Yungblud divulges profound stories about his troubled personal history. The closest he gets to real introspection is on “The Boy in the Black Dress” when he sings: “Masculinity seems to hurt a lot/The first time that you feel it in your jaw,” or on “I Cry 2” when he dispels accusations of queerbaiting by announcing, “I’ll start dating men when they go to therapy.” But it’s hard to praise Harrison for vulnerability when the songs feel this anonymous and insipid, and harder when he wastes a sample of the Cure’s “Close to Me” on infantile rhymes like “I don’t want you to hide your issues/Blow them into your tissues”—which might help you stop crying, if only because you’re laughing too hard.
It doesn’t help that none of the music on Yungblud sounds even remotely inspired. Harrison’s first two albums, 2018’s 21st Century Liability and 2020’s Weird!, interwove elements of rap with macabre pop-punk, presenting him as the UK analogue to Twenty One Pilots or his pal and collaborator Machine Gun Kelly. It might’ve felt heavy-handed and forced, but at least it was something. On Yungblud, Harrison leans almost exclusively into saccharine pop-rock, making this his most monotonous and least distinctive record. He is still struggling to come up with a song that doesn’t already ring a bell: From a bastardization of Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” (“The Funeral”) to watered-down imitations of the 1975 (“I Cry 2”) and One Direction (“Don’t Feel Like Being Sad”), Harrison has never sounded less like the boundary-breaking eccentric he vehemently aspires to be. He’s well aware he isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s not because of his unfiltered bad boy image. On Yungblud, it’s simply because the cup is empty. | 2022-09-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-08T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Locomotion / Geffen | September 8, 2022 | 4.5 | 76bbcecc-082b-42bc-8a56-c66b3ded28a1 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
The Swedish electro-pop group’s first album for Ninja Tune is a welcome departure, finally infusing their own studio work with the creative energy of their collaborative sessions. | The Swedish electro-pop group’s first album for Ninja Tune is a welcome departure, finally infusing their own studio work with the creative energy of their collaborative sessions. | Little Dragon: New Me, Same Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/little-dragon-new-me-same-us/ | New Me, Same Us | The knock on Little Dragon has long been that their best work happens on other artists’ albums. Perhaps that’s an unfair standard to hold them to: After all, their collaborators tend to be some of the world’s most creative and forward-thinking artists, like Flying Lotus, Damon Albarn, and Dave Sitek, to name just a few. It might be their skillful use of negative space that pairs so well with such different compositional styles; maybe it’s the ultra-fine grit of Yukimi Nagano’s voice that serves as such an alluring foil for others to create their best work. But with a few exceptions, their most memorable songs have not been their own.
On their own records, Little Dragon’s tendency to retread the retrofuturist aesthetic they’ve refined over the last 15 years has left much of their output feeling flat and uninspired. Part polished Brit R&B, part Swedish electro-pop, there’s an easy listening vibe to their oeuvre—think hi-fi beats to relax and study to—that feels like a waste of the potential they flashed on 2009’s Machine Dreams. But their new LP, New Me, Same Us—their first full-length for London’s Ninja Tune—is a welcome departure from their somewhat staid studio sessions, finally infusing their own work with the creative energy of their collaborations.
New Me, Same Us doesn’t completely abandon their usual toolkit. Little Dragon still strike a delicate balance between the organic and the electronic, the danceable and the downtempo. They are at their best when they loosen up, forsaking technical precision in favor of a more free-flowing funk—led by Fredrik Wallin’s bass—that lets Nagano’s husky R&B vocals flow most naturally. Album standout “New Fiction” bottles this natural alchemy: Nagano’s voice and Wallin’s bass perform an elegant duet on the verses, intertwined like dance partners who’ve been waltzing together for years. And when Wallin is given free rein on the grand piano on the bridge, pummeling the high keys in a rare moment of unbridled expression, the band achieves a high-water mark that feels years in the making, injecting raw unpredictability into a sound typically defined by its slick studio sheen.
In that sense, “New Fiction” is a bit of a tease; the rest of New Me, Same Us is relatively restrained. And while the record’s press materials tout the album as the band’s “most collaborative” yet, the creative exchange is mostly internal—the sole feature comes from Kali Uchis on “Are You Feeling Sad?”, a welcome if brief addition to the record’s tonal palette. But there’s evidence that their years assisting other artists, for so long an albatross they’ve sought to shed, have finally left an impression. “BULLETS,” their collaboration with Kaytranada, was one of 99.9%’s standouts, infusing Little Dragon’s glossy funk with Caribbean soul. The impact he made is evident from the first few minutes of New Me, Same Us, from the syncopated four-on-the-floor beat on “Hold On” to the jazzy swing of “Are You Feeling Sad?”, and even in the way Nagano’s voice fills the gaps left by the rhythm section on “New Fiction.” Their wider influences are also laid bare, to positive effect. They credit Massive Attack as a sonic ancestor to “Hold On,” and it’s easy to hear how Little Dragon’s swirling synths and clacking woodblock mirror the synthesized strings and staccato percussion of “Unfinished Sympathy.”
Historically, Little Dragon albums have felt like collections of a band’s earnest attempts to find their groove, defined more by their failure to spark the magic than the few moments when they achieve it. And while New Me, Same Us is not entirely free of woe—the melancholy melody on “Every Rain” oozes existential ennui—for the most part, they sound like they’re having more fun than ever. Fifteen years in, they seem to have turned a corner, feeding off some of the inspiration that helped them stand out on other artists’ records. Perhaps they’ve finally discovered that they had as much to gain from their peers as they’ve been giving. | 2020-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | April 3, 2020 | 7 | 76c4f419-b940-49aa-a62c-4b40eb826335 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The fifth annual compilation from Los Angeles’ Doom Trip label is a survey of contemporary vaporwave that doubles as a snapshot of a particularly vital corner of the electronic underground. | The fifth annual compilation from Los Angeles’ Doom Trip label is a survey of contemporary vaporwave that doubles as a snapshot of a particularly vital corner of the electronic underground. | Various Artists: Doom Mix, Vol. V | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-doom-mix-vol-v/ | Doom Mix, Vol. V | One of music’s chief pleasures is the way it conjures up a sense of the now, of displacement from the rest of the world into moods and grooves and hooks and melodies. But nowness isn’t just about sonic immersion, it’s about timeliness, and Los Angeles-based Doom Trip capture both on their annual Doom Mix compilations. For the past five years, label head Zac Emerson has brought together acts from his eclectic roster and elsewhere to showcase a wide array of today’s underground electronica. The results have been ceremonious because they’re an obvious extension of Emerson’s tastes; these artists are his chosen family, and pressing play on these albums can feel like peering into a cheery reunion.
As with all traditions, Doom Mix, Vol. V provides comfort in familiarity—some artists here have appeared on previous editions—but this collection is both sprawling and cohesive, providing a survey of contemporary vaporwave and similar zones. This balancing act is accomplished through astute sequencing, and the one-two punch of Fire-Toolz’s “More Spirit Spit Please” and Skylar Spence’s “Kratos in Love” is the most exquisite example. The former is a dazzling melange of screamed vocals, glittery video-game ambience, and saxophone wails that shift from free-jazz skronk to endearing melodicism—a constant pummeling of emotional release. The latter serves as the necessary comedown: a disco edit that’s breezy and light, its bunny-hopping bassline as amiable as its slick-sweet guitars.
The tracklist also features Keith Rankin and Maxwell Allison, co-founders of Orange Milk Records and Hausu Mountain, respectively. Both labels have been pillars of experimental electronic music throughout the past decade, and their inclusions point to a camaraderie in the scene at large. Rankin dons his Giant Claw moniker for album highlight “Gummy Scrub,” a collage-aesthetic pop song featuring a dizzying array of sounds: hardcore synth stabs, a warped J.Lo sample, even a hint of new jack swing. Allison’s track as Mukqs is a plunderphonic swarm of voices, its stuttered rhythm and synthetic sheen like his own take on a reduced Carl Stone track. As it progresses, a ramshackle beat works its way into the mix; it makes for an amelodic close to the album, wrapping up with a final moment of stupor.
There are long-standing vaporwave artists here as well, including Nmesh, Luxury Elite, and the aforementioned Spence. Nmesh’s “Rms Ephratha Pa (Cloud Bath)” takes samples from various movies, including Andy Sidaris’ Malibu Express, and lays them atop a ’90s downtempo beat. Its ambling bassline and skittering vocal edits provide scatterbrained introspection, standing in stark contrast to Luxury Elite’s “Psychology of Desire,” which locks you into its cozy funk-lite rhythm from the start—more than other tracks here, it’s confident in riding out a single idea across its entire runtime.
Given how disparate the artists are—“AM,” for example, features Hundred Waters’ Trayer Tryon—it’s a marvel the way Doom Mix, Vol. V manages to be more than the sum of its parts. Few tracks on this compilation are among their respective creators’ very best work, but that’s hardly an issue on a release that delights in juxtapositions. The shimmering jazz fusion of VAPERROR’s “Thickedge” rubs up against the nocturnal synth pads of Sangam’s “Broken Sky,” and the retrofuturism of Diamondstein’s opening “Heaven in Two Parts” differs from the attempts that follow. For a definitive statement from Doom Trip, you couldn’t do better than Doom Mix, Vol. V, which is emblematic of the label’s wide-ranging yet overarching ideas. But more than that, it accomplishes something that compilations rarely do so successfully: It feels like a network of artists celebrating their own niche, growing and learning and existing with each other, as friends do.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Doom Trip | April 15, 2021 | 7.3 | 76c549fd-afd4-4fd4-bed3-3949a0ddadca | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The Chicago guitarist and the North Carolina multi-instrumentalist work wonderfully together and channel many spiritual influences with great warmth and ease. | The Chicago guitarist and the North Carolina multi-instrumentalist work wonderfully together and channel many spiritual influences with great warmth and ease. | Bill MacKay / Nathan Bowles: Keys | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bill-mackay-nathan-bowles-keys/ | Keys | The folk and gospel artist E.C. Ball drove a school bus and owned a service station, but what he really wanted to do was spread the Good News. With his wife Orna, he wandered Appalachia during the middle of the 20th century, delivering sermons and singing simple songs he had made up: plainspoken hymns of joy and wonder and faith. On their new collaborative albums, the North Carolina multi-instrumentalist Nathan Bowles and the Chicago guitarist Bill MacKay cover Ball’s lovely ode to the beauty of the natural world, “I See God.” “I see God in everything, on the land and the deep blue sea/In the fields, the meadows, and the pastures green,” they sing together, as MacKay’s guitar and Bowles’ banjo combine into a gentle patter. It’s as simple as a children’s song because the wonder it expresses is so childlike and uninhibited. You could almost read it as an ecological screed: What man could spoil what God has made beautiful?
On a musical level, however, the song locates the sublime in the mundane. It finds something special in what we see around us every day, and that may be fundamentally what folk music is all about. Both Bowles and MacKay have explored this idea on their own albums, which tread a fine line between folk and avant-garde composition. They’re often lumped in with the current American Primitive/guitar soli scene, but their aims transcend those genres. The pair first played together at the Cropped Out Festival in Louisville back in 2018, where they exchanged rough ideas but were still hammering out songs minutes before they took the stage. What might seem like poor preparation was really just a way of maintaining some spontaneity and ensuring there were new things to discover during their performance.
That improvisatory spirit, as well as that sense of something larger between them, carries over to Keys, which contains eight original compositions and two covers. God is in the details on this album: in the low thrum underneath “Dowsing,” in the rising tension of “Truth,” in the subtle wordplay of “Late for Your Funeral Again,” in the halting progress of “Dry Rations I.” They’re both deft and inventive pickers who aren’t terribly concerned with precision or perfection, so there’s a pleasant flow both to their playing and to the sequencing of the album. Keys has all the formality of a front porch jam session on a cool spring night. Because they have such an obvious ease around each other, you often can’t quite distinguish between their instruments—which becomes a small but satisfying pleasure on “Joy Ride,” whose clear melody and jubilant bounce make it sound like a pop song.
Aside from “I See God,” the other cover on Keys is a solemn take on the Sacred Harp standard “Idumea,” and listeners may note its similarities to “Amazing Grace.” It was written by a man named Ananais Davisson, who operated a singing school and published songbooks in the early nineteenth century. Both lush and stark, gentle and forceful, this version proceeds with a spiritual and musical determination, as the banjo and guitar take turns rendering the familiar melody and providing sympathetic flourishes. Like Ball, Davisson seems like a humble man attuned to something far beyond his station, and they share with Bowles and MacKay a belief that a homespun melody or a gently plucked theme or even just two instruments ringing out together might give anyone in earshot a glimpse of God. That’s an awful lot for any album to hold, and at times the music bows under such weight, but Keys never sacrifices its life-size scale nor its humility.
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. | 2021-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Drag City | April 19, 2021 | 7.4 | 76c76ea2-0b36-48ac-bd1f-6c6baecb749f | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Having grown from wise-beyond-their-years aesthetes into middle-aged adults, Belle and Sebastian balance parental sentimentalism with a youthful abandon rarely entertained on their early recordings. | Having grown from wise-beyond-their-years aesthetes into middle-aged adults, Belle and Sebastian balance parental sentimentalism with a youthful abandon rarely entertained on their early recordings. | Belle and Sebastian: How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/belle-and-sebastian-how-to-solve-our-human-problems-pt-2/ | How to Solve Our Human Problems, Pt. 2 | “We’re the younger generation, we grew up fast,” Stuart Murdoch sang on Belle and Sebastian’s “Me and the Major,” back in 1996. At the time, everything about his band seemed to actively cultivate the impression of a group already wise beyond its years: the wistful black-and-white album covers that sought to preserve a certain bygone innocence in amber; the richly narrative songs that felt like pages ripped from a secondhand novella; the refined record-collector reference points (Nick Drake, Nico, Love) indicative of indie aesthetes who’d retired from the student-disco scene. But on Belle and Sebastian’s latest EP, Murdoch offers a rejoinder that suggests he grew up a bit too fast for his own liking: “It’s tough to become a grown-up,” he cautions; “put it off while you can.”
The line appears in “I’ll Be Your Pilot,” the lead single from the second installment of Belle and Sebastian’s How to Solve Our Human Problems triptych. In the song, Murdoch is addressing his young son, Denny, through the sort of private exchange that plays out in a father’s head as he watches his child fall asleep. But if the song’s oboe-sweetened folk-rock sway plays up the sentimentality of that scene, Murdoch’s lyrics shrewdly illuminate the flip side of such tender moments—namely, the unshakeable unease of raising a child in such a fucked-up time. “I’ll tell you that when you land in the real world/It’s like quicksand,” Murdoch warns, marking the point where kindly parental pep talks must give way to harsh reality checks. And while the song’s chorus—“I will keep you safe, I’ll be your pilot”—may initially elicit an “awww,” the air-travel metaphor also implies that every life will face its share of turbulence.
If “I’ll Be Your Pilot” is a plea to savor the splendor of childhood before the indignities of the outside world inevitably creep in, the rest of the EP gamely heeds the call to stay forever young, as Belle and Sebastian playfully let loose in a way that their buttoned-up twenty-something selves would’ve never allowed. In lieu of a typical brass arrangement, we hear the band vocalizing a fake one at the top of “Show Me the Sun,” as if they were drunkenly trying to hum the theme to some forgotten 1960s TV game show; that faux fanfare gives way to a rubbery bass groove, discordant psychedelic guitar squeals, and a soul-powered lead vocal from Murdoch, with the whole hodgepodge adding up to a spirited “Funny Little Frog” sequel as rendered by the Go! Team (albeit one weighed down by an awkward and unnecessary downtempo interlude). And while “The Same Star” initially finds Sarah Martin slipping into Stevie Nicks’ kimono for a shimmering “Dreams” flashback, it eventually leads us to an exultant brass-blasted outro shot skyward with the help of some sci-fi synths.
Where How to Solve Our Human Problems’ first volume felt more like a random collection of a few great songs scattered among B-side-grade material, this edition more successfully arranges its discrete, divergent elements to flow as a proper mini-album. Even if Stevie Jackson’s “Cornflakes” just plays like an extended remix of the preceding EP’s divine disco standout “Sweet Dew Lee,” it’s a welcome jolt of decadent frivolity following the heartfelt “I’ll Be Your Pilot.” It’s also an effectively over-the-top setup for the curtain-closing “A Plague on All Other Boys,” a song that bears all the hallmarks of a classic 1997-era Belle and Sebastian comedy of manners, with Murdoch lending his delicate voice to a Nebraska student crushing hard on a classmate: “I’m a mess/I’m defeated/My grade-point average went to hell.” Spoiler alert: In this case, the boy doesn’t get the girl—and it takes him a good 10 years to get over it. But, as Murdoch adds with fatherly encouragement, “Suddenly, you realize you’re free to fraternize again.” Even though he’s reached the age where he’s writing songs for his kid, he hasn’t forsaken the lovelorn misfits that comprise the B&S base. He’ll still be your pilot, too. | 2018-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | January 18, 2018 | 7.4 | 76caff82-6b50-451a-91e8-8d84a3739dc1 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Collecting two-dozen highlights from 1976 solo sets, this candid document finds the singer sorting through old standards and almost-lost classics at a particularly restless moment. | Collecting two-dozen highlights from 1976 solo sets, this candid document finds the singer sorting through old standards and almost-lost classics at a particularly restless moment. | Neil Young: Songs for Judy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/neil-young-songs-for-judy/ | Songs for Judy | Songs for Judy captures Neil Young at his mercurial peak, writing songs too fast to release and scrapping albums too fast to remember. In November 1976, on a tour backed by the reunited Crazy Horse, he opened with solo acoustic sets at his buzzed and intimate best. Sanctioned photographer and taper Joel Bernstein and teenage rock journalist Cameron Crowe sorted through recordings of that run, compiling a 20-plus-track mix that, when leaked and bootlegged, eventually came to be known as The Bernstein Tapes. Long circulated among fans, it is perhaps the definitive document of Young in his archetypal solo acoustic guise.
Restored to pristine warmth for the launch of Young’s own Reprise imprint, Shakey Pictures, and his recent archival venture, the new sequence makes Young’s surreal ramble about spying Judy Garland in the front row the introduction instead of a stoned interruption midway through (good), uses it for a title (meh), and perhaps captures an ideal performance that balances old favorites with Young’s latest work. For a musician as impulsive and forward-looking as Young, nostalgia has long been an equal presence. Songs for Judy includes many of Young’s core standards, represented on live albums in virtually every decade since, from a yearning version of “Harvest” to the insistent drive of Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul” and a dreamy “After the Gold Rush,” dedicated to “all the freeways here in Texas.”
But the heart of Songs for Judy is the palpable sense of Young in motion. Three months before these shows, he’d quit a tour with Stephen Stills, departing on his bus in the middle of the night, leaving a trail of dust and a telegram that read, “Funny how some things that start spontaneously end that way.” With Young turning 31 midway through the performances captured here, Songs for Judy has more starting than ending, featuring plenty of songs that would’ve been unfamiliar to the audiences hearing them. (That goes for the subtle organ tease of the then-unreleased “Like a Hurricane” hidden at the start of “A Man Needs a Maid,” too.)
Some of his best new material during this period would remain unfamiliar except to serious fans, demos and outtakes scattered to the winds. Several tunes show up from Hitchhiker, recorded that summer but unissued until last year, like the dreamy breakup number “Give Me Strength” (virtually abandoned after the tour) and the incandescently Richard Nixon-humanizing “Campaigner” (buried near the end of the retrospective, Decade, released a year later). “Too Far Gone” presages alt-country but would stay in the vaults until 1989’s Freedom, the distant piano lament “No One Seems To Know” until now. “It seems every time I tried to record this song, someone stepped in and stopped it,” he says by way of introducing “Human Highway,” the proposed title track from a never-finished Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young album. Here, accompanying himself on scrappy banjo, Young turns in the best of the officially released versions, Young’s fatigue bolstered by brightness.
For good reason, the heroism of being a weary and high dude with an acoustic guitar has faded some since the mid-1970s. Still, Young’s musical presence is one of goofy but deep companionship and hushed moods; it’s ideal for late nights, lonely or otherwise. The cliches about getting wasted and hung-up come early and often (“Too Far Gone” and “Roll Another Number”), and the lyrics sometimes fall far short of profound, but vibeyness is Young’s well-established superpower. “The moon is almost full/except for stars,” he sings on “Give Me Strength,” not totally making sense but illuminating a melody that slides past like a glowing night. Lyrics are well and good, and Young has written great ones, but Songs For Judy is a reminder that—even for a singer/songwriter—success can have as much to do with the rest of it: the settings, the recordings, the performances, the feels.
Recorded during the decadent pre-punk ’70s, and released in the terrifying post-capitalism 2010s, Songs for Judy now feels like a concept album whose concept is just as far out as prog rock, if less flashy and more soothing. It’s a high fantasy of meadows and moons and canyons, of shows that start after midnight, of possessing or creating enough space to let Neil Young play some quiet songs for you. | 2018-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Shakey Pictures / Reprise | December 1, 2018 | 8 | 76d0005d-dd2a-4584-8bd2-67251ba013c2 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | |
Assisted by producer Dave Sitek, the goth-folk shapeshifter explores a new dimension of her sound, bringing electronic atmospheres and industrial menace to an album about submitting to the unknown. | Assisted by producer Dave Sitek, the goth-folk shapeshifter explores a new dimension of her sound, bringing electronic atmospheres and industrial menace to an album about submitting to the unknown. | Chelsea Wolfe: She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chelsea-wolfe-she-reaches-out-to-she-reaches-out-to-she/ | She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She | With a coil of black hair always in her eyes, Chelsea Wolfe is a sibylline force with a voice to match. For the 40-year-old goth rocker—a self-described witch and native Californian, though you’d never guess the latter from her shell-pale skin—her earthly occupation as singer-songwriter has meant making singular Bauhaus-goes-folk music and, too often, drinking to excess, although that habit predated her singing; in interviews, she remembers being 11 years old with a 40 in her hand.
She quit alcohol in 2021, after releasing 2019’s Birth of Violence and before her soundtrack for the scary sexploitation movie X, a collaboration with producer Tyler Bates, came out in 2022. Beneath its shocking darkness, the Ti West-directed feature is about the persistence of desire. She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She, Wolfe’s seventh album and first for Loma Vista Recordings, likewise clears away dirt and empty bottles to find hope. With production from TV on the Radio founding member Dave Sitek, Wolfe zeroes in on the clearest message in her discography yet: surrender your heart to the unknown. Where most of Wolfe’s albums have shown anxious restraint, She Reaches Out yields to hair-in-the-wind havoc with distorted layers of guitar, drum pads, electronics, and piano, a more confident blend of Wolfe’s metal melancholy.
Occasionally, the unknown is monstrous. Wolfe has always demonstrated a predilection for gross and terrible things, including on the particularly sludgy 2017 album Hiss Spun, which abounds in bloody angels, gashes, and groans. Outside of music, Wolfe’s dreams are full of heavy black shadows—nearly every night since childhood, she has been gnawed by sleep paralysis, which can freeze your body and fill your room with imaginary demons. Lyrics on She Reaches Out to She Reaches Out to She offer a guiding hand through this terror, promising that you can coexist with the monsters. “The Liminal”—sort of a dusty, creepy, eight-legged version of Succession’s theme song—dares you to. As longtime collaborator and multi-instrumentalist Ben Chisholm plunks out a sorry piano melody, Wolfe hisses like a sorceress in the woods, watching you from 10 feet away: “All you ever wanted was the liminal/All you left behind was your exoskeleton.”
Wolfe is good at pointing you closer to strangeness; its pull lies in the all-consuming guitar/synth torrential downpour that soaks the entire album. Sometimes, She Reaches Out drowns in it: Songs like the Lorn-ish dark synth track “Tunnel Lights” feel like they’re marching awkwardly, not forebodingly, wearing all those soggy, indistinguishable layers. More often, though, Wolfe likes indulging in half-seconds of silence, a blink of sunlight before guitarist Bryan Tulao comes in to blow a bullet hole through the mirror. This approach, another way Wolfe honors intangible, in-between space, is most potent on groaning closer “Dusk.” Everything except a misty drum pad drops out for Wolfe to sing a vow—“I would go through the fire/To get to you”—and then, one breath later, Tulao delivers a deliciously simple, traffic-stopping solo.
But Wolfe’s voice comes before any explosion or ectoplasm. Other albums, especially her lo-fi 2010 debut, The Grime and the Glow, shove her glinting voice under industrial whine, forcing it into sleepy Grouper modesty. She Reaches Out, alternatively, places Wolfe at the top of the mix. Even when a vampiric guitar shakes fresh mud over the propulsive “Unseen World,” there’s no mistaking her hypnotic repetition of the song title. The clarity of her voice is most appropriate for this album, which encourages trusting yourself enough to surrender to uncertainty.
"I’ve used a lot of imagery of this egg for this album, this sort of mysterious, large egg that I’m nurturing and protecting,” Wolfe said in a recent interview with The Line of Best Fit. “And the idea is that I don’t actually know what’s in this egg, I just know that there’s potential in there.” It’s the plot of 1985 Japanese art film Angel’s Egg, in which a bed-headed girl navigates a violent industrial society with a massive white egg tucked under her petticoat. Wolfe, likewise, tiptoes over cracks in the sidewalk to prove that she can do it. “I have made it this far/To live this life,” she breathes on the glass-fragile ballad “Place in the Sun. That same type of blind faith lives in you, too, if you close your eyes and let it glow. | 2024-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Loma Vista | February 9, 2024 | 7.6 | 76f4ed73-e075-4ef7-8913-be7755d798e1 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
The Swiss-born jazz pianist’s second album with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen is animated by a spirit of playful experimentation. | The Swiss-born jazz pianist’s second album with bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen is animated by a spirit of playful experimentation. | Sylvie Courvoisier Trio: D’Agala | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sylvie-courvoisier-trio-dagala/ | D’Agala | Since moving to New York in 1998, the Swiss-born pianist Sylvie Courvoisier has had little difficulty sounding like a native of the city’s downtown scene. In her memorable solo sets, as well as her performances with saxophonist John Zorn and onetime DNA drummer Ikue Mori, she has helped define the sound of the piano for an era and a locale.
Like numerous other contemporary pianists, she plays not only the keys, but also the inside of the instrument—sweeping the strings directly, or plying them with a variety of objects. She can do this with a touch that seems just as informed by jazz balladry as it is by John Cage’s experimentalism. And because she’s a leading improviser in contemporary avant-garde circles, she’s also more than able to distinguish herself in a din factory.
Courvoisier’s displays of power seem all the more forceful thanks to the gorgeous sounds she fashions at the other end of the dynamic spectrum. This adaptability makes her a prized collaborator, but it might also have delayed Courvoisier’s entrance into some of the more familiar formats of small-group jazz.
It took until 2014’s Double Windsor for Courvoisier’s fans to hear her take on the classic piano-trio album. The group behind that debut, which includes bassist Drew Gress and drummer Kenny Wollesen, earned some feverish reviews. Four years later, we have a follow-up. Clearly, the time between releases is not a writer’s block issue, as Courvoisier has remained active in a rich variety of other ensembles (including a 2017 collaborative project with guitarist Mary Halvorson). Instead, it seems likely that Courvoisier has been carefully honing new material for this particular group.
Opening track “Imprint Double (for Antoine Courvoisier)” reveals the album’s affinity for smartly executed pivots. The composition begins with the pianist obsessing over a three-note motif in a gravely low octave. But she quickly complicates the grim feel of these tones by dropping in additional, dense chords that suggest a syncopated strut. When the bassist and drummer join in, the song’s swinging sensibility is securely established. Even when the piece halts its momentum—making space for hypnotic, new melodic fragments—this core sense of playfulness never disappears.
The rest of the album follows a similar strategy, down to song titles that are outfitted with dedications. “Bourgeois’s Spider (for Louise Bourgeois)” allows Courvoisier to range across a wild array of pianistic effects: you can hear strums of the strings, as well as knocks against the instrument’s wooden body. During the second half of the track, the pianist swaps out her pointillistic noises for some gentler clouds of minimalist repetition. Her arrangement allows this unusual sequence of sounds to hover over chilled-out rhythm section grooves. On paper, such pairings may seem abrupt or ill-matched, but the skill of this band resides in the way it makes unlikely reversals seem second-nature.
Courvoisier’s piece “Éclats for Ornette” offers a nod to the late composer and saxophonist Ornette Coleman. In its early seconds, a short, excitable theme bursts out. Traces of the same figure can also be heard in some of Courvoisier’s most out-there stretches, during a subsequent solo. Since Coleman was a widely beloved pioneer of new ecstatic styles in the avant-garde, you can’t invoke his name in a title without some risk. But here, as on much of this album, Courvoisier and her group balance structure and wildness in a way that is easy to admire. | 2018-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Intakt | February 1, 2018 | 7.4 | 76f80f22-68ad-48c1-8321-cb20c4861580 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | |
On the sequel to last year’s Listening to Pictures, the octogenarian trumpet player slips into memoirist mode, allowing old tropes from his past to flicker back to life. | On the sequel to last year’s Listening to Pictures, the octogenarian trumpet player slips into memoirist mode, allowing old tropes from his past to flicker back to life. | Jon Hassell: Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jon-hassell-seeing-through-sound-pentimento-volume-two/ | Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) | Asked about his time playing with Miles Davis, saxophonist Gary Bartz once said of the jazz icon’s many sonic shifts, “Everything around him changed, but he didn’t change.” Trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell, himself a lifelong fan of Miles, has embraced that philosophy. Across a long career that found him at the birth of American minimalism and then, on Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, the summit of art rock—not to mention in creative dialogue with Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel—the 83-year-old Hassell has always sounded irreducibly like himself. His tone voice-like and alien, earthy and phantasmal, vacillating between a child’s yip and an elephant whinny, Hassell’s electronically processed horn and its bioluminescent smears have interacted with Brazilian percussion, computer glitches, West African drums, and more. While the scenery has consistently shifted over the past 50 years, he has remained a catalyst for dynamic fusions.
Hassell returned from a nine-year absence with 2018’s Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume One), an album of cracked electronics and flinty miniatures. While he had always operated at the fringes of experimental, world, and jazz music, in his time away, artists like Destroyer, Oneohtrix Point Never, Visible Cloaks, Sam Gendel, and others had brought his sensibilities toward more popular acceptance. Leaning into familiar ideas while also forging ahead, Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) is the far warmer of the two works, despite titles that allude to Iceland and Saturn’s frozen moons. In its most mesmerizing moments, Hassell slips into memoirist mode, allowing old tropes from his past to flicker back to life.
The telltale drums on “Moons of Titan”—like a distant rainstorm, yet interior as a pulse—will be familiar to fans of Hassell’s early ’80s work like Dream Theory in Malaya, as will the high trilling of his horn between them. But there’s more space for an ethereal electronic haze to rise, making it feel even more dreamlike. “Delicado” and its skipping CD rhythm are closest in texture to Volume One, full of neo-noir ambience shot through with Hassell’s lyricism, cool yet unpredictable, a Chet Baker hologram on the fritz.
On the longer tracks that bookend the set, Hassell works with a wider canvas to immersive effect. The eight-minute “Fearless” lies somewhere between Oval’s Systemisch and Miles Davis’ “He Loved Him Madly.” A quintet piece featuring violin, electric guitars, and bass clarinet (though you’d be hard pressed to identify each liquified element), it allows Hassell plenty of space to growl and wax elegiac as the music ever so slowly dissolves. On “Lunar,” each element warps around Hassell’s horn and harmonizer, creating a sound that feels both triumphant and nauseous, as if flag-planting on a distant planet just as your oxygen runs out.
“Timeless,” another eight-minute composition, originally appeared on the Dreamy Harbor compilation for Berlin’s Tresor, where Hassell was slotted alongside techno luminaries like Terrence Dixon, Juan Atkins, and Moritz von Oswald. Gently reworked here with additional percussion from Adam Rudolph, quivering strings, and glissades of piano, the piece bubbles and flutters, neither rising nor increasing in intensity, but growing more exquisite as it goes along. Back in April, Brian Eno started a GoFundMe for Hassell, who as a cancer survivor is at high risk of severe COVID-19 infection. Hassell is now out of intensive care, but he’s still well short of his fundraising goal, and one wonders how much more music lies ahead for the octogenarian artist. In that light, the fittingly titled “Timeless” takes on additional resonance as a portrait of the master musician, unbowed and still considering every expressive breath. | 2020-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Ndeya | July 25, 2020 | 7.7 | 770157a3-53b4-4793-8a1b-dc3139aa2ca3 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
What comes across as moralistic sermonizing from lesser MCs here is the work of a rapper with a humane, often-troubled conscience. | What comes across as moralistic sermonizing from lesser MCs here is the work of a rapper with a humane, often-troubled conscience. | Brother Ali: Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13475-us/ | Us | A girl whose first sexual experience was a molestation is encouraged to overcome her trauma and learn to feel real love. White Americans are confronted with their role in the legacy of slavery and their responsibility for the cultural and social structures it left behind. Immigrants, a child of divorced parents, and a self-hating gay teenager get a keep-your-head-up. The ostracized, leprous son of a plantation owner learns to sing from the field hands, only to reject his family's adulation of his talents when he realizes they won't let those same field hands inside their house. These are some of the ways Brother Ali focuses his storytelling talents on Us, and I just wanted to mention that as soon as possible because some people may prefer an advance warning when a rap album is filled with what is perceived as moralistic sermonizing.
But this isn't "moralistic sermonizing" where Brother Ali is concerned-- it's displays of a humane, often-troubled conscience. For an MC who has so many tracks which denote his "bad motherfucker" status, his persona's dominated by a welcoming strain of populist empathy, an attitude that offers an accessible solidarity just for listening. And unless you happen to be someone who thinks he's a better MC than Ali is, this man will not actually talk down to you, no matter how sociopolitically agitated he gets. If rap didn't exist, he'd be the greatest high school guidance counselor in Minneapolis. But as a talent in a scene that holds decades' worth of some of the most sensitive identity politics of any popular culture movement in the last 50 years, Brother Ali has had to put that populism to good use.
The political material on Us is powerful without being self-righteous: "The Travelers" runs through every dehumanizing abuse in the slave trade in its gutwrenching first verse, then spends the second hinging on culpability, complete with an admission that he's been "terrified to admit it's wrong/ 'Cause I'm hiding in the ruins of a legacy that still lives on." The blues-cadenced "Breakin' Dawn", meanwhile, works in both a literal and allegorical sense, with the story of the master's son taught to sing by the slaves a fable that also hints at latter-day whitewashing in the music industry (and, by potential extension, that theoretical listener who bumps Brother Ali without paying heed or respect to his influences). And while "Games" resembles your typical get-off-the-corner message rap on the surface, Ali puts himself on the hustler's level instead of scolding him. Still, the man does have his limits: "House Keys" has his family moving downstairs from the second floor of a duplex only to find that his new upstairs neighbors are a bunch of noisy, bickering small-time drug dealers, a problem which he addresses by sneaking into their place when they're out, stealing all their shit, and selling it.
He does have moments where he makes himself the subject, whether needy and heartbroken on "You Say (Puppy Love)" or rolling his eyes at haters on "Crown Jewel". And there's still plenty of times-- "Bad Mufucker Pt. II", "'Round Here", "Fresh Air"-- where he seems content to rattle off gratitude-swagger testimonials to his own career, a tendency that's served his style well from the beginning. I've read a few dismissals of Ali's style as a blatant copy of Pharoahe Monch's, and I don't quite hear it beyond the subtle debt practically every indie rapper ever owes Organized Konfusion: Ali's lyricism forgoes Monch's rewind-provoking abstraction for an approach heavy on straightforward scene-setting, willing to sacrifice complex internal rhyme schemes and rimshot metaphors if it means he can paint you a clearer picture. With those strengths, he's somewhere between the intense street-scholar style of Freeway-- who appears, along with Joell Ortiz, on the shit-talk highlight "Best@it"-- and an eloquent everyman like Murs, who has a non-rapping cameo telling an amusing story about how Brother Ali's mere presence cooled down a tense situation. Dude can still be pretty acrobatic when he wants to-- "The Preacher" makes for a hell of a skeptic-converter-- yet there's also a clarity and non-pretension to his lyrics that, coupled with the smooth rasp of his voice, makes them fully attention-commanding.
It should be noted that this album's original title was Street Preacher, a concept that still manifests in a few spots (like the Chuck D intro and the track it segues into, "The Preacher"). And ANT, who's produced nearly everything Ali's spit over since his Rhymesayers debut, Shadows on the Sun, turns in a characteristic set of clean, crisp modern soul that accompanies his usual 1970s-skewing R&B touchstones (mournfully-glimmering minimalist g-funk on "Slippin' Away"; slinky Bar-Kays strut on "Fresh Air") with a gospel-soul current. It's a proper backdrop for an album that stands as the most deeply thought-provoking work of Brother Ali's career, an album that draws its strengths from the simultaneous expression of sympathy toward the people in the songs and anger toward the shit they've gone through. The album's title track is gospel personified-- a choir, handclaps, and a rapt MC laying down his idealistic vision of an America that still feels a long way off: "Can't nobody be free unless we're all free/ There's no me and you, it's just us." | 2009-09-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-09-24T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | September 24, 2009 | 7.8 | 770d8053-051d-4fb2-90f3-395ea4913258 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Dave Longstreth guides Dirty Projectors toward their most human and least ornate release yet. It's an album of deeply appealing simplicity that mixes subtle folk protest and gorgeous paeans to young love. | Dave Longstreth guides Dirty Projectors toward their most human and least ornate release yet. It's an album of deeply appealing simplicity that mixes subtle folk protest and gorgeous paeans to young love. | Dirty Projectors: Swing Lo Magellan | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16806-swing-lo-magellan/ | Swing Lo Magellan | If you've only tuned in for parts of Dirty Projectors' decade-long run, it's entirely possible that you've viewed bandleader Dave Longstreth and his ever-evolving band line-up as a gimmick. After all, though Longstreth had been releasing music as Dirty Projectors for years, the band finally inched toward a critical mass in 2007 on an album that reinterpreted Black Flag's Damaged from memory. The album found Longstreth replacing Rollins' gruff bellow with alien, elastic vocals, anchored to the zigs and zags of West African guitar. Two years later, Bitte Orca used a trio of female vocalists-- mainstays Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian and newcomer Haley Dekle-- to bait often abstruse arrangements and hard-to-parse lyrics. When Questlove posted a backstage video of the Projectors performing an unplugged "When the World Comes to an End" after a "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" appearance, internet commentators concurred that people simply shouldn't be able to sing like that. Between the intercalated harmonies, Longstreth's own sometimes-stringent tone, and his counterintuitive approach to guitar, Dirty Projectors occasionally could be reduced into a menagerie of eccentricities-- possible to enjoy, but sometimes difficult to internalize.
Swing Lo Magellan should help rectify that: The band's least ornate batch of songs to date builds upon Longstreth's most direct and identifiable lyrics ever. Which means that Dirty Projectors have upped their emotional and structural accessibility all at once. Culled from a batch of roughly 40 demos, these tunes explore vulnerability and vexation, sweetness and cynicism with more manageable musical complications than ever before. For instance, the gorgeous "Impregnable Question" finds the seam between Heart of Gold-era Neil Young and late-1960s Serge Gainsbourg; it's a love song between Coffman and Longstreth, her coos helping him to soften his voice above a warm acoustic shuffle. Over handclaps and a ragged, wrapping riff on "Dance for You", Longstreth offers one of his most intuitive and immediate hooks. There's gusto and playfulness here, too, from the way Longstreth clears his very-warped throat before launching into the first verse of opener "Offspring Are Blank" to the brilliant decision to record Coffman and Dekle mocking some of Longstreth's most impenetrable lyrics toward the end of the irrepressible "Unto Caesar". When he sings "Down the line/ Dead, the martyrs' morbid poetry," Coffman teasingly answers, "Uhh, that doesn't make any sense, what you just said." You want to be in the room with this band.
There's also a folk-song seriousness at work on some of the standouts, especially the tragic "Just From Chevron". Structured so that Coffman and Dekle play the part of a Greek chorus while Longstreth sings the dying narrator's plight in soliloquy, the song is a fitting one for this year of Woody Guthrie centennial celebrations. Chevron-- or any company, for that matter-- has brainwashed its employee so that, as he lays dying due to their own mechanical failure, he needs his love not to know that he loves her but that his death is worthwhile, because it's part of the company's quest to power the world. A devastating fact in a field of general abstraction, it's as poignant and profound as anything Dirty Projectors have ever released. The title track works a similar mode, with its buttoned-up rhythm section holding steady alongside lyrics about the clutches of conformity and the liberation of self-reflection. "In the grid, aware their position," Longstreth sings, any possible scorn swallowed in genuine worry. "Unconcerned with intuition."
That's not to say that all of these arrangements are exactly intuitive. After all, this is still Dirty Projectors, and this is still an album whose first single, "Gun Has No Trigger", is an unnerved look at the way things might have been and whose rhythm doesn't shift once. The tricky meter that underpins "About to Die" is quintessential Dirty Projectors, as are the two-part harmonies bouncing against Longstreth's young-love paranoia. "Maybe That Was It" even inches toward psychedelic rock. Longstreth's falsetto comes refracted through a web of effects, providing a suitable counter for the Crazy Horse-like stumbling stagger and craggy electric lead. Even the straightforward Dirty Projectors are still a mighty complex unit.
Swing Lo Magellan is a confident step into the spotlight that neither depends upon public expectations nor shies away from them. It's well-made but certainly not over-produced, idiosyncratic and intricate but very rarely obtuse. But as compelling as these tunes and these performances often are, what's most intriguing about Swing Lo Magellan is the way it suggests that, even after a decade, we still don't know everything about Longstreth or his band. If, in the past, he or they sometimes seemed like a freak show, they come toward Earth just enough here to feel like a proper rock band working in service of songs about love and confusion, anxiety and celebration.
In a society of by-the-second news updates and endless information all the time, it's strangely reassuring to feel as if a songwriter who's been endlessly interrogated, analyzed, and publicized is still something of a stranger. Longstreth himself seems to serve as the narrator of "Dance for You", an ebullient account of an odyssey for a grail that exists but has yet to be found. "There is an answer," reckons Longstreth, his voice rising optimistically over film-score strings. "I haven't found it/ But I will keep dancing until I do." This far into a career, that's a good thing not only to hear a songwriter sing but a mantra to hear him create by, too. | 2012-07-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-07-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | July 9, 2012 | 8.8 | 770e49d9-2eda-4be1-b87b-55a4528a67d2 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
Chance the Rapper and Jeremih’s surprise release is a Christmas album for the final yuletide of the Obama administration: one last bastion of hope in an uncertain and fraught time. | Chance the Rapper and Jeremih’s surprise release is a Christmas album for the final yuletide of the Obama administration: one last bastion of hope in an uncertain and fraught time. | Chance the Rapper / Jeremih: Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22719-merry-christmas-lil-mama/ | Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama | When Chance the Rapper performed “Sunday Candy” with Jamila Woods and Nico Segal at the National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony, there was something distinctly special, and spiritual, about it: A prodigious and cheery “mixtape rapper” singing modern psalms and praises on the national stage at the behest of the first black President of the United States in his last days; the convergence of a God Dream and the American Dream. It felt like something to soak in and savor, to get nourishment from—both because of its almost absurdly uplifting energy and because it was something we might never see again, on any count. Chance seemed to linger in the moment, as if recognizing and relishing its significance; for many, next Christmas will feel much different, and this ceremony will probably look different, too. Next Christmas will be a white Christmas.
The sentiment echoed weeks later on “Saturday Night Live” when Chance and Kenan Thompson performed a sketch called “Jingle Barack,” its politics laid plain in its lyrics: “It’s the last Christmas with Barack still here,” the foreshadowing clear, the successor’s agenda unspoken. Both Chicago natives, Chance first met Obama when he was 8 years old, his father a staffer for the POTUS during his Senate years. It isn’t too much of a stretch to suggest that Chance’s songs can often embody the hope Obama campaigned on—sources of inspiration for those coloring outside the lines, and also, to paraphrase Kanye, those who are colored and deemed out of line. Perhaps it’s only a coincidence that Chance is coming into his own as a lightning rod and leader as Obama departs, but it isn’t a coincidence that he identified this Christmas as a necessary time for healing.
As if realizing the magnitude of the moment, or just never one to miss an opportunity to be merry, Chance and fellow Chicagoan Jeremih surprise released a holiday marvel called Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama, a Christmas album for the final yuletide of the Obama administration: one last bastion of hope in an uncertain and fraught time; a sonic snow globe where unflinching altruism, glee, and love (both neighborly and sensual) rule; a priceless gift celebrating the season of giving.
And it isn’t just for President Obama—or for Lil’ Mama—it’s for all of us, too. It’s functional Christmas music that’s somehow also music for any function, set at Christmas. Where holiday tunes are typically hokey, decidedly old-fashioned, and predictable, Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama is actively (and perhaps instinctively) animated and stimulating, not satisfied with just conveying the spirit of the season but breathing life into it; it’s warm, natural, and even familiar in spots.
This is the rare Christmas album that breaks from convention without defying tradition, using A Christmas Story snippets, a “Carol of the Bells” rework, and an “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” interpolation as blueprints to create the most refreshing festive songs in recent memory. But more than anything, it’s frolicsome and jolly, in keeping with the theme. The album captures Christmastime joy with juke, and jive, and the Jackson 5. About three minutes in, Hannibal Buress asks for Travis Scott effects on his vocals, and he gets them. There’s something for everyone.
Over nine songs that sound like they were as fun to make as they are to listen to, Chance and Jeremih move in intervals and in tandem, complementing each other and operating in sync without losing their distinct voices. Chance’s path is mostly a righteous one (“The Pontius Pilates judge my bundle of joys/I know my bronze is gorgeous/Know who the birthday boy is”), and Jeremih’s a naughty one (“Know you cold, let’s bundle up/I’m just tryna get some love”), but they frequently find the overlaps or trade roles, as on “Snowed In” and “Joy.” In Jeremih’s capable hands, holiday staples become innuendos: sleighs and slays, hos, silent nights and unwrappings, sliding down chimneys, etc. Chance can turn a club into a nativity scene. Together they are an unstoppable force of good will and glad tidings wrapped in radiant melodies and scat raps.
Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama scans Chance’s acid rap, steppers R&B, robotic soul, the gospel lite of Coloring Book, and Teklife juke and footwork seamlessly, adding streaking string arrangements, distorted Auto-Tune vocals, choirs, standout Zaytoven keyboard fills, and production from DJs Spinn and Gantman. They enlists help from rappers Lud Foe, King Louie, and Noname (who delivers another show-stopping verse on “The Tragedy” with raps like “Our heathenous appetite, ever and after/Like Christmas will save us and bathe us in rapture”). The songs are sincere and unpretentious, and are encapsulated by a single Jeremih lyric: “Your presence is a present for me/For Christmas or just because.”
The album crescendos into “I Shoulda Left You,” a lively anthem for anyone looking to ditch toxicity in the godforsaken year that was 2016. “Rest in peace to great David Bowie/Please can we get back Prince?” Chance pleads in a half whine before beaming brightly, stifling laughter; there’s still fun to be had. The song serves as a larger metaphor for progress and optimism, avoiding stagnation, and cutting off unhealthy relationships. Its cheer feeds its mentality, seemingly suggesting better days ahead. A few minutes earlier, on “Joy,” Jeremih insinuates that we must create that brighter future ourselves. “They tend to forget about love,” he sings. “Let’s get right back to the joy.” And in these moments, where everything is snug and safe, it seems possible—probable even. On Merry Christmas Lil’ Mama, Christmas is restorative. No matter what, hope endures. | 2016-12-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | self-released | December 30, 2016 | 8.1 | 7710c896-20db-4354-98a4-dccb860bf74a | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Leipzig's Gunnar Wendel, better known as Kassem Mosse, abandons his house music background for thorny synthesizer sketches—fistfuls of gurgle and ping, sometimes beatless, and maddeningly absorbing. | Leipzig's Gunnar Wendel, better known as Kassem Mosse, abandons his house music background for thorny synthesizer sketches—fistfuls of gurgle and ping, sometimes beatless, and maddeningly absorbing. | Kassem Mosse: Disclosure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22528-disclosure/ | Disclosure | Leipzig's Gunnar Wendel, better known as Kassem Mosse, has built up a tidy reputation as one of leftfield dance music's most respected figures while keeping his person completely out of the equation. Despite using a number of aliases—KMOS, Paid Reach, Seltene Erden, the Siege of Troy—Wendel has never made an effort to stay anonymous, exactly. He's never cultivated mystique, never used his aliases as a shield. (That might precisely be the reason he's been spared the scrutiny that Burial's William Bevan has faced.) He sits for the occasional interview, though there doesn't seem to have been a new one in English in five years, and speaks thoughtfully and in great detail about his processes and his philosophy. He even maintains a Facebook page. Yet he's clearly content to remain at arm's length from contemporary dance music culture. He prefers living in Leipzig to joining the crowded techno scene in Berlin, and it makes sense; music like his requires a certain measure of isolation.
Even at its most straightforward, there's always been an element of mystery in Wendel's work. Loping house grooves may trundle ahead at 120 BPM—he's no stranger to the floor-filling anthem—but the background swims with wraithlike shapes, with creaks and clanks. Figuring out how a given track may have been made is largely guesswork, and largely irrelevant, too. The elements in his music seem less a matter of intention than tidal happenstance, like barnacle-studded scraps of plastic washed up on the beach after a storm.
Wendel used to specialize in beaten-up and broken-down house, favoring figures suggestive of a note hastily scribbled in the dark—the torn scrap of crumpled paper bag smoothed flat against the knee of someone's Levi's, the ballpoint pen poking halfway through the rough, pulpy edge—yet still legible as dance music. But he has increasingly abandoned dancefloor conventions as he has moved further out. On Disclosure, his first album for London's Honest Jon's label, and his first long-form studio output since 2014's Workshop 19, he might be mistaken for an entirely different artist than the one who produced warm, bittersweet tunes like “578” and “Thalassocalyce.”
The album covers plenty of ground, from his typical slow-motion house ruminations to tumbling, footwork-tempo dynamos, but nearly half the album's tracks are thorny synthesizer sketches—fistfuls of gurgle and ping, sometimes beatless, sometimes accompanied by tangled drum-machine patterns that tie the math-processing parts of the cortex up in knots. The opening “Stepping on Salt” gives us an idea of the kinds of tones to expect: sizzling, squelching analog waveforms yoked to broken-clock arpeggios over which the spirits of Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire loom large.
Even the most overtly rhythmic cuts here warily skirt the edges of the dancefloor. “Phoenicia Wireless” is the kind of pensive, toe-scuffing house track that Wendel can probably crank out in his sleep, but the beat doesn't start up in earnest until nearly two-thirds of the way through, and it's forever on the verge of being swallowed up by hi-hat bursts that clatter like mid-century newsroom typewriters. Woe to the careless DJ who throws on “Aluminosilicate Mirrors” without taking a good, hard listen first: A few minutes in, the tempo starts drifting upward without warning, turning the frenetic footwork groove even more hair-raising.
“Collapsing Dual Core” is one of the album's fastest, most unencumbered cuts, playing contrapuntal synthesizer lines against a TR-707 programming, and there's no arrangement to speak of, just a ceaseless series of tweaks to a few fixed patterns—a live jam par excellence. It tells you a lot about Wendel's method. Many musicians might have used what he's assembled here as the building blocks for something more finessed; they might have added more elements, woven emotive samples into the mix, teased out a harmony or two. Not Wendel: What you hear is what you get, and even the spindliest, most skeletal jam is exactly that and nothing more. It has no interest in meeting you halfway.
And that's one of the things that's so weirdly satisfying about Disclosure: It feels honest, and it feels true to the standards that Wendel has set for himself throughout his career. For all its quirks and austerity, Disclosure doesn't feel like the work of someone who's being intentionally difficult. He's simply following his own path. The rest of us are free to follow if we wish. | 2016-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Honest Jon’s | November 2, 2016 | 7.9 | 77161e7b-28e8-49de-bcc5-424a2885603a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Foxes (aka Louisa Rose Allen) sang the hook on Zedd's pristine EDM super-hit "Clarity" but has struggled for solo momentum. After listening to All I Need for the first time, nothing remains or sticks with you, which is maybe the most damning thing you can say about a pop record aimed at big international markets and radio takeovers. | Foxes (aka Louisa Rose Allen) sang the hook on Zedd's pristine EDM super-hit "Clarity" but has struggled for solo momentum. After listening to All I Need for the first time, nothing remains or sticks with you, which is maybe the most damning thing you can say about a pop record aimed at big international markets and radio takeovers. | Foxes: All I Need | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21521-all-i-need/ | All I Need | If your first foray into capital-P Pop didn't do as well as your label expected—even though you won a Grammy—how do you bounce back, especially when you’re only in your mid-twenties? Prepped and primed to be a star with "indie" sensibilities, Foxes (aka Louisa Rose Allen) debuted in 2013 with Glorious, a synth-pop record that didn't quite manage to win over international hearts. Though the record and its singles charted decently in the UK, Foxes is perhaps more recognizable when you realize she’s the voice on Zedd’s 2012 pristine EDM super hit "Clarity." As a solo act, Allen was set to be a low-key star without any fuss; she had the vocal talent without any of the frills of a generic pop star. No dance routines, matching outfits, or expensive-looking music videos. Maybe Allen and her team hoped this sort of 'realness' could appeal to a generation that prefers One Direction’s lack of conformity to boy band standards like, say, the Backstreet Boys.
Two years later, Allen’s sophomore effort All I Need shifts the focal point from synths to her vocals. However, they're still not enough for this record to be memorable. All the ingredients for a pop hit are latent, but unrealized. Tracks like "Feet Don't Fail Me Now" have a repetitive hook, strong vocals, and a familiar story of lost love, but it just doesn't stand out the way a meticulously crafted earworm should. After listening to All I Need for the first time, nothing remains or sticks with you, which is maybe the most damning thing you can say about a pop record aimed at big international markets and radio takeovers.
The record has cohesion and was clearly written to generate hits, but it’s lacking almost entirely in oomph. Co-written with Dan Smith of Bastille (another band that churns out synth hits but similarly manages to underwhelm), "Better Love" manages to hark back to '80s sensibilities, something monotonous and exhausted within the modern British synth-pop sphere. There are inevitable shifts in tone on All I Need but they prove to be small risks that don't pay off. One instance is marked with insipid piano ballad "On My Way," which was co-written by Jesse Shatkin, one of the collaborators on One Direction’s rather weak single "Perfect." Another example is R&B and dancehall crossover "Cruel," which just sounds cheaply produced—think SoundCloud bro with a MacBook Air and a pirated copy of Logic Pro X.
It’s unclear as to what Allen’s (and her label’s) objectives are for her career—is she supposed to be a mainstream hit or are they just fine with her doing reasonably well? Working with a "mindie" artist like Smith and a One Direction collaborator like Shatkin makes this record feel lost. Additionally, the middle-of-the-road "mindie” shtick proved to be close to career suicide for Carly Rae Jepsen with E•MO•TION, but the difference here is that Jepsen had good songs (and much-deserved critical acclaim) by her side. Being successful without seeming successful is a difficult medium to achieve and maintain; it’s why Frankmusik is nowhere to be seen despite propelling Myspace protégé Ellie Goulding to global superstardom.
As much as you want to root for Foxes to find her feet, there’s nothing rule-breaking or remotely interesting about this record. Of all the shifting demands on pop stars and hits over the years, catchiness is the one element that remains unchanged, and it's completely missing here. Anonymity isn't a virtue: Even singers who aren't nearly as gifted as Allen (Jennifer Lopez, Kylie Minogue) have managed to break into the music industry with a lot of success because they had catchy tunes behind them. What makes All I Need even weaker is that it doesn’t offer you something else in lieu of big, brain-sticking instant anthems. It's just kind of a "nothing" record. Considering Allen hails from a country that has bred synth-pop darlings like Ellie Goulding and the inimitably cool Charli XCX in recent years, All I Need had the potential to be so much more than mediocre and forgettable. | 2016-02-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-09T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony / Sign of the Times | February 9, 2016 | 4.9 | 7718993f-dd14-4a3b-88f4-e092878bf192 | Sarah Sahim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sarah-sahim/ | null |
The D.C. punks channel their hometown scene’s confrontational spirit on a debut album that backs its progressive politics with a fierce belief in the necessity of joy. | The D.C. punks channel their hometown scene’s confrontational spirit on a debut album that backs its progressive politics with a fierce belief in the necessity of joy. | Ekko Astral: pink balloons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ekko-astral-pink-balloons/ | pink balloons | Before moving the tassel on his graduation cap from right to left, Liam Hughes started a punk band with his best friend, Jael Holzman. For Hughes, the group doubled as a graduate thesis and a sneaky way to access American University’s recording studio. For Holzman, it was an opportunity to vent. She sang openly about her experiences as a trans woman, and those lyrics felt like a beacon for incoming band members Miri Tyler and Guinevere Tully. After releasing a 2022 EP under the name Ekko Astral, the Washington, D.C., punk outfit expanded into a five-piece with more on the line than just a framed degree: Ekko Astral’s community-building efforts in the local scene transformed them into a sounding board for DIY fans who felt seen.
If Ekko Astral sound brash and impulsive, there’s a good reason: When she’s not behind the mic, Holzman works as an energy and climate reporter, staring down headlines like “The Flooding Will Come No Matter What” even as her rights are increasingly being stripped away. Words spew out of her mouth as though the concept of a filter were laughable. But the band isn’t as reckless as its songs suggest. They quite literally sat down to brainstorm ways that their debut album, pink balloons, might foster a better future. What Ekko Astral produced was a collection of experimental punk and noise-rock songs that weld together two ideas: We’ve got to stop softening our opinions just to minimize others’ discomfort, and we’ve got to start having fun again. Ekko Astral apply those tenets wholesale to dinner-spoiling conversation subjects—the pain of aging, murder and death, the wretched anxiety of being terminally online—with beatific results.
pink balloons’ noise-punk barrage hits like a stray elbow in the mascara moshpit. Ekko Astral smear raw punk, distorted pop hooks, and experimental noise like they’re wiping dirt on their lids in place of eye shadow. Coursing through them is the distinct charisma of D.C. bands past: the chaotic unpredictability of Black Eyes, the palpable urgency of Fugazi, the commanding vocal control of Priests. Opener “head empty blues” is abrasive and unrelenting, stacking Tully’s thick bassline atop Tyler’s racing drums and the stabbing guitars of Hughes and Sam Elmore. There’s barely a second to catch your breath before “baethoven” begins, its ominous organ whirring behind a post-punk rhythm that catches fire the way a Gilla Band song douses itself in gasoline. Ekko Astral cut and push and warp, sneaking in panning vocals and submarine beeps that work thanks to Pure Adult’s Jeremy Snyder, who allows the band to level up with clean, layered production that doesn’t sacrifice their punk spirit.
Ekko Astral tear through their songs furiously, avoiding the post-punk cliches prevalent among their peers: social justice messages so obvious they’re annoying, repetition as a form of sarcasm. Instead, the band has mastered the art of casual erudition, doling out lines that are incisive but never forced—think Arctic Monkeys’ Alex Turner or Gilla Band’s Dara Kiely, both of whom Holzman admires. In “on brand,” Ekko Astral go noise-pop while calling out women who submit to manipulation, romantic or capitalistic, in the name of boredom. “She’s got a pair of cheetah print pink pumps made by federal prisoners/She likes to wear ’em to the seventies club, wax nostalgic about racism,” Holzman sings melodramatically, puckering the answering refrain of “so, so, so bored” until it turns to mush. Even when she uses others’ words, it feels like a handmade collage; in the unnerving spoken-word track “somewhere at the bottom of the river between l'enfant and eastern market” (Yes, that’s a reference to La Dispute, darling), Holzman excerpts a friend’s poem about the necessity of tense conversations, however uncomfortable, before building to a recorded chat about mortality with her late grandfather.
When Ekko Astral drop names, they couldn’t care less about appearing in the know or accruing social capital. Holzman quotes AC/DC and Kreayshawn alike, and references Lite-Brite and Molly Shannon without goading anyone to prove they get it. She takes a crack at mispronouncing Bon Iver 13 years after the internet overdid that joke on Grammys night, and uses Frank Ocean, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Carly Rae Jepsen as wordplay. When she does jab at pop-culture shibboleths, it’s with reason, like shading communist consumers who gobble up brunch and blast Beyoncé songs about hustle culture. Hearing a singer who isn’t preoccupied with topical jokes or outdated trends is refreshing. As Holzman explains on “Sticks and Stones” over a bassline fit for 13 Songs: “Nothing’s funny anymore/I wanna laugh at all the things/I don’t care about.” Though Holzman churns out plenty of zingers on pink balloons—“He skipped just one of her episodes and now he’s completely lost the plot,” she deadpans on “uwu type beat”—it’s “devorah” that uses every word carefully and cleverly. What appears as a serious, six-minute call for solidarity with Indigenous peoples subverts itself until it’s a parody of a parody, squirming at the idea of falling victim to your own hypocrisy through a checklist of blood-soaked goods: expensive shampoo, Taco Bell mild sauce, the fabric of a ratty college couch.
To position pink balloons as a trans bildungsroman is to misread Ekko Astral’s statement on our collective modern experience: Trying to be present and relaxed in an era of nonstop collapse and overstimulation only breeds disunity. The band leans so far past self-pity or righteous declarations that any mid-song statements that resemble queer trauma—“lots of us don’t make it home,” “dead kids in their bedrooms,” “I’ve got stalkers outside”—morph from personal earnestness into numbing realities. It’s bleak out there, but Ekko Astral aren’t trying to make you aware of it; they know you know. The power in their songs lies in the way the music gurgles up, emulating the acidic paranoia gnawing at us and encouraging the urge to fight it back down. Take from it what you will that Holzman shares a first name with Jael, an Old Testament heroine lauded for tyrannicide. When Sisera, the commander of King Jabin’s army in Canaan who’s holding people hostage, enters Jael’s tent and asks to be nursed, she picks up a hammer and smashes a tent peg through his skull, killing him instantly. At no point does she hesitate—is that even an option when liberation is on the line?
A brief flash of twee graces pink balloons in “Make Me Young,” where Holzman and Tully sing in tandem about trying to curb their pessimism: “Life looks down with sincerity and yells, ‘Mostly great but sometimes pain!’ and that’s fine.” This is the future pink balloons proposes: one where we can exist with the highs and the lows, but when it’s time to hit the sack, at least we’re still existing. Ekko Astral won’t waste your time recounting everything that’s gone to shit when the notifications pinging your phone already have that covered. Over the course of half an hour, Ekko Astral invite you to react to the news however feels right; so long as you’re reacting, the levity will follow. | 2024-04-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-17T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | April 17, 2024 | 8 | 7721a0f7-9c3e-4c54-939f-d1729f577dc3 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
The drone-metal titan’s “imaginary Western” fleshes out his talents as a storyteller, but this album of mostly solo electric guitar doesn’t feel as fully realized as his band Earth’s best work. | The drone-metal titan’s “imaginary Western” fleshes out his talents as a storyteller, but this album of mostly solo electric guitar doesn’t feel as fully realized as his band Earth’s best work. | Dylan Carlson: Conquistador | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dylan-carlson-conquistador/ | Conquistador | During the last quarter-century, Dylan Carlson has helped reshape the electric guitar’s possibilities not once, but twice. In the first phase of his band Earth, Carlson stood at the center of the duo’s colossal drone tide, with his creeping riffs and masterful control of distortion seeming to trace the outer reaches of infinity itself. Those records are landmarks and baselines. When Earth returned nearly a decade later as a full band, Carlson’s riffs were thin and refined, each elegant note landing like a pastel ray of light. He had found a new context for his regal, slow-motion language, one that underscored the drone inherent in primal blues. Those records are guideposts, a reminder that an innovator can always be reinvented.
During the last five years, Carlson has entered another restless phase and turned to albums of primarily solo electric guitar, where the occasional collaborators are there mostly to add texture to his themes. As Drcarlsonalbion, he has mined European ballads for cycles of instrumental folk songs and scored a Western film. Now, at last under his own name, Carlson has taken the next logical step and written what he calls “an imaginary Western,” which wordlessly traces the historic story of a conquistador exploring what is now the American Southwest a half-millennium ago. The 32-minute Conquistador feels slight, especially against the landmarks of Carlson’s career, but it does open at least one intriguing avenue for future exploration.
Conquistador unfurls like a screenplay. The title track is an extended invocation in which a simple, central riff coils and loops and warps against a rising web of noise; we are, in essence, meeting the characters and imagining the tangle of possible plotlines and misfortunes they could encounter. With “When the Horses Were Shorn of Their Hooves,” the drama arrives in earnest. Carlson’s guitar is agitated and irascible, the riff practically showing its teeth and shaking its fists. Something very bad is bound to happen. But first, there’s a forced pause, a brief interlude for plucked lute and scraped cymbals. This is the itinerant widescreen scan of the foreboding scenery. You can imagine the rolling tumbleweed or hear a lonesome whistle in the distance.
In Act II, things happen quickly: During “Scorpions in Their Mouth,” things go from bad to worse, and that stately theme from the opening “Conquistador” goes to battle. Carlson’s tone is bulbous and barbed, its growl harking back to those young, angry days in Earth. Then, at last, there’s an escape from danger to the halcyon coast, beautifully rendered in “Reaching the Gulf.” Carlson’s guitar seems to smile as it sighs, as our hero licks wounds that could have been much worse. Carlson is an efficient, effective storyteller, a trait that was never quite clear in Earth’s enormous impressionism.
But Conquistador, like much of what Carlson has done outside of Earth, feels only like a second draft of an idea from his sketchbook, the transitional point to something that could be truly magnificent. The album suggests a full story, but it still seems paradoxically fragmentary. After its slow burn fades, after our hero has returned home, what’s best about Conquistador might be the sense of possibility it poses. Having scored an actual Western film with minimal guitar vignettes, here he has shaped his amplifier worship into an auditory Western largely for solo guitar.
So what’s next in that stepwise process? A through-composed score for a big-budget Western or an actual Cormac McCarthy adaptation? Perhaps, but it’s more tantalizing to imagine Carlson taking the trail of fellow guitar hero Bill Frisell, who has turned troves of old portraits or scenes from the Mississippi River Flood of 1927 into fully realized, entirely immersive stage shows. Here’s a free idea for an expensive production for any ambitious arts presenter, then: Commission Carlson to fully realize his 21st-century Western. Otherwise, his ideas may continue to drift in this middle distance, and he’s too good for that. | 2018-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Sargent House | April 27, 2018 | 6.7 | 773578c0-7355-46a7-974c-b218aabed6d3 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The Canadian producer and DJ’s second album pays tribute to her father’s memory, fusing home-video recordings with ambrosial disco, soul, and dance-pop. | The Canadian producer and DJ’s second album pays tribute to her father’s memory, fusing home-video recordings with ambrosial disco, soul, and dance-pop. | Jayda G: Guy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jayda-g-guy/ | Guy | DJ, producer, and scientist Jayda G makes effervescent dance music with a wealth of deeper meaning. On her second album, Guy, she explores grief and renewal through ambrosial disco, soul, and dance-pop dedicated to her father, William Richard Guy, who passed away when she was 10. Understanding the extent of his illness, William documented his life in several journals and 11 hours of video interviews with Jayda’s older sister. Roughly 20 years after his death, Guy embarks on a journey of danceable self-discovery that rides this high tide of familial love and memory. Between sharp whirs of fast-forwarding tape, William’s recollections form the basis for Jayda’s songs, which balance catharsis with her allegiance to the boogie.
Dance music carries people through the darkest of times, and Guy’s early tracks outline stories of resilience and empowerment. “Scars” distills William’s memories of standing up to childhood bullies through synth-pop that showcases some of Jayda G’s best singing to date. Her vocals on 2019’s Significant Changes often sounded as if she had recorded them as far away from the mic as possible. Now, the message of redemption bursts through an undercurrent of lyrical melancholy: “And I’ve got scars/And I’m burning and exploding,” she sings, bubbly and full of hope. “Blue Lights” is grounded in her father’s memories of dodging cops during the 1968 race riots in Washington, D.C., becoming a bearing line for Jayda G to retrace her hereditary sense of survival. In connecting to her father’s past, she finds solace, purpose, and fearlessness in the present.
She also injects Guy with the unbreakable positivity that inspired William to record his stories in the first place. “Heads or Tails” begins with a delicious smattering of drum’n’bass, followed by punching keys and claps that swirl in anticipation of a daydreamy, prescriptive chorus: “Hold it, toke it, pass it ’round/Rollin’ backseat windows down.” These reminders to relish in life’s fleeting joys aren’t there to distract from the pain throughout Guy. They’re there to hold its fragmented pieces together, like a glittering disco ball. Jayda’s dance fever boils over on “Sapphires of Gold,” where she spins her lust for life into a golden thread of pop bliss. Chanting “I have fallen in love with living,” her vocals smudge like sweated-out makeup in the music’s tropically humid atmosphere.
Jayda G has always taken inspiration from life. She holds a degree in environmental toxicology, and on Significant Changes, she paired odes to oceans and orcas with splashes of disco and house. Guy represents Jayda’s next phase of alchemizing personal knowledge into dance music, though you won’t find anything quite like “Both of Us” here. The production on Guy is more understated and elusive, and at times the memories get obscured in the mist. The ’80s-inspired “Your Thoughts” presents the album’s most direct statement of intent, but a repetitive and overworked structure depletes its energy reserves. And the laid-back, Toro y Moi-esque shuffle of “Lonely Back in O,” about William’s stationing in Thailand during the Vietnam War, feels a bit too nebulous to translate as dance music or historical testimony.
On Guy, personal reconciliation takes priority over satiating the club crowd. The tragic, gorgeous closer “15 Foot,” which tells the story of Jayda’s final goodbye to her father, lands like an anchor in the chest. The music, however, is weightless: a delicate lattice accented by acoustic guitar, chimes, and trembling strings. The unifying properties of Jayda G’s sumptuous, aquatic dance-pop—and the new emphasis on voice—brings her audience close to her experience, whether or not you know the grief of losing a parent during childhood. On Guy, she takes time to steady herself to her inner metronome, finding her voice with her dad’s help. | 2023-06-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | June 20, 2023 | 7.4 | 7749ecc4-6253-4801-8963-cb65700a916c | Tatiana Lee Rodriguez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tatiana-lee rodriguez/ | |
From clumsy stadium rock to unacceptable ska, Logic’s overly ambitious album is a painful slog. | From clumsy stadium rock to unacceptable ska, Logic’s overly ambitious album is a painful slog. | Logic: Supermarket | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/logic-supermarket/ | Supermarket | Four minutes into “Bohemian Trapsody,” the hamfisted opener of Logic’s new album, Supermarket, and you find yourself inside a never-ending Pro Tools session. The track’s acoustic guitar and four-on-the-floor bass—which sound ripped from a karaoke instrumental of a Gorillaz song—have faded away to make room for a trip-hop drum break that then falls into a stuttering trap drop.
In all, “Bohemian Trapsody” contains three beat changes, no rapping, and a space-rock chorus. It is also nowhere near the most ridiculous thing recorded for a project that also features an acoustic A Tribe Called Quest cover, multiple Thom Yorke impressions, and two Mac DeMarco features. From clumsy stadium rock to reggae-tinged ska, Supermarket is a painful journey across guitar music of the past five decades and makes Lil Wayne’s Rebirth look well-thought-out in comparison.
The album stems from Logic’s novel of the same name, which quickly became the No. 1 bestseller on Amazon despite the rapper admitting that he’s not much of a reader. That sort of chutzpah has always been at the center of his artistry, which is based around regurgitating the styles of abstract, genre-pushing MCs into earnest, easier-to-digest forms. This dumbing-down process has allowed him to reach younger audiences who crave the wordplay of golden-age hip-hop but aren’t necessarily interested in its grittiness. It’s also given him free rein to be as nerdy and uncompromising as he’s wanted to be, from releasing an album that takes place in outer space 100 years in the future to a record narrated by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to a Wu-Tang Clan tribute featuring every living member of the group. But the vital difference between those projects and Supermarket is that his rubbery rapid-fire delivery, the one skill that earned him enough points as an MC to continuously reinvent himself, is almost entirely absent here.
In its place are long stretches of dull, dried-out singing by a guy who can’t sing. Logic’s frail hum mostly comes off lethargic, like on the monotonous “Best Friend,” a glossy Southern rock track without any drama, or the title track, a pre-fab alt-rock anthem that imagines a world where Thom Yorke was a literal creep: “I’m a weirdo, I’m a freak/I wish I could watch you in your sleep.” The Maryland MC is shameless in his desire to recreate the sounds of influential bands, at some points going so far as to clumsily call them out by name. Rather than coming off like his frontman idols, though, he resembles the lead singer of a cover band on a cruise ship, failing to capture any of the magic of the original material.
On “Lemon Drop,” for example, he hilariously tries out the funky scat of Blood Sugar Sex Magik-era Red Hot Chili Peppers, only to come off more like Weird Al’s 1993 impression of the band. And then there’s the two DeMarco-produced tracks, which could serve as parodies of the Canadian singer-songwriter’s sound in how formulaic and insular they sound; it’s like Logic is singing over looped versions of past releases rather than working with DeMarco to create something new.
But the most egregious moments on the album come when Logic tries to tack on hip-hop elements as afterthoughts, most painfully on “Can I Kick It,” a soulless A Tribe Called Quest cover. There’s also “Baby,” the millionth rework of Biz Markie’s 1989 classic “Just A Friend” and probably one of the worse versions yet, as well as a handful of trap drops slapped on the backends of songs, as if during the album’s mastering session Logic had some last-minute concerns about the viability of dropping a project without any hi-hats. In that moment, maybe he realized his unchecked ambition had finally gone too far. | 2019-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | April 4, 2019 | 2.9 | 774c423a-db4a-4911-8b8a-e6e0f8e46121 | Reed Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/reed-jackson/ | |
The Syrian American producer lingers with grief and horror on her past while the music accelerates into the future. | The Syrian American producer lingers with grief and horror on her past while the music accelerates into the future. | Káryyn: The Quanta Series | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/karyyn-the-quanta-series/ | The Quanta Series | On many songs on her debut album The Quanta Series, K Á R Y Y N serves as her own accompaniment, her own chorus. Her coos echo on “Mirror Me,” a song comprising only her voice and a reverb effect, cascading in foggy layers. Elsewhere, her voice grows restless. It shudders like tectonic plates colliding in the first moments of “Ever,” stutters as she recites strings of ones and zeroes on “Binary.” In her work, the voice is not a solitary character bracing against its environment. It is the environment.
Descended from survivors of the Armenian genocide, the Syrian American producer and vocalist weaves the legacy of generational trauma into music that carries a futuristic sheen. The album's earliest songs were written in 2011 while K Á R Y Y N was mourning two family members who died in Aleppo. She sings from a place rooted in the past, but always seems to be accelerating into the future: “Ambets Gorav,” is a solemn rendition of an Armenian folk song against a low electronic drone that funnels her voice into pixelating machines. The effect is dizzying, as if K Á R Y Y N were asking her listeners to gaze into vanishing points at opposite horizons.
Many of the songs on The Quanta Series were released in previous years as singles. Sequenced into an LP, they carry more dramatic weight. K Á R Y Y N's CV includes score work for games and films, and she composed music for the experimental opera Of Light while studying under performance artist Marina Abramović—she’s well-versed in the intricacies of narrative and the productive confusion that can arise when a story starts to blur. In college, she was also a student of the pioneering experimental electronic musician Pauline Oliveros, whose chaotic influence shivers across The Quanta Series.
K Á R Y Y N begins stories and then unstitches them, sending her words tumbling across icy electronic production. She's fond of puns and double meanings in her lyrics, swirling together “I” and “eye,” playing on the polyvalence of the word “tongue”: the body part and the language it produces. “Tongue is the word I want to have with you,” she sings on “Binary,” making a simultaneous bid for communication and sensuality. Often, her semantics break down in favor of pure sound. On “Aleppo,” she leaps up into her head voice, punctuating her lines with wobbling electronic bass. “I console your memory protect,” she sings, “I console your/Recall.” Her enjambment is strange, her language impressionistic. The words are vessels for her voice and not the other way around.
In the holes she leaves open throughout the album's production, the rests and pauses and empty spaces, K Á R Y Y N hints at a history of ruin. “Today is the saddest day for me,” she sings on “Today I Read Your Life Story 11:11.” “I’m missing you all the time/I have the stories you wrote one time.” She barely sings above a whisper and corrodes her voice with an effect that makes it sound as though she is crying out across a faulty phone line.
Amid the loss she mourns, the late family members and the lacunae in their histories, K Á R Y Y N locates a passage forward. She is still alive to carry her family's story. “Segmen & the Line,” a melodic continuation of “Life Story,” concludes the album on a placid note of resolution. “You are the segment/I am the line,” she sings. “Now that you're gone/I can breathe again.” Death hangs heavy over the record, but in its shadow, K Á R Y Y N projects herself into the future. An upbeat percussive glitch spurs on “Segment & the Line,” shoving her forward even as funereal drones tether her to the past. She does not close the record by allowing its grief and horror to dissipate. She lets them linger but quickens her pace, proving herself capable of carrying their weight. | 2019-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | K Á R Y Y N / ANTEVASIN | March 30, 2019 | 7.7 | 7755e92b-207e-4c4c-90dd-0ed41fb8e76f | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The follow-up to this year’s wild Fear of the Dawn is a stripped-down songwriter record, but often the songs don’t resonate as deeply as the sounds. | The follow-up to this year’s wild Fear of the Dawn is a stripped-down songwriter record, but often the songs don’t resonate as deeply as the sounds. | Jack White: Entering Heaven Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jack-white-entering-heaven-alive/ | Entering Heaven Alive | “Taking Me Back,” the song that closes Jack White’s fifth solo album, also opened his fourth. The version on Entering Heaven Alive, whose title carries the parenthetical “(Gently),” offers White’s workmanlike take on the gypsy jazz of the 1930s, brisk and lilting, complete with a see-sawing violin solo a la Stéphane Grappelli to kick things off. The previous version, from April’s Fear of the Dawn, is mutant stadium rock, furious and bludgeoning, stacked with electric guitars that sound like synthesizers and synthesizers that sound like electric guitars.
The contrast between the two, illustrative of a broader divide in approach between the mellow acoustic ensembles of Heaven and the frenzied studio experiments of Fear, is striking. But so is their similarity. At its core, “Taking Me Back” is about as barebones as it gets: Two sections of two or three chords each, a lyric that mostly consists of minor variations on the title phrase. The captivating stuff, in both versions, is in the accouterments: instrumental breaks that sound like a band gracefully falling down the stairs on Heaven, and deliberately choppy digital edits redolent of “Robot Rock” and Run-D.M.C. on Fear.
This has always been White’s way. With a few notable exceptions, the most memorable moments in his catalog are not songs per se, but riffs, grooves, solos, and aesthetic choices. Even the rough-and-ready sound of the early White Stripes albums was such a choice, albeit one born partially of necessity. His greatest gift is as a guitarist, and his second—leaving aside his talents for self-mythologizing and entrepreneurship—may be as something like a producer or an arranger. Those words conjure a certain slickness that may seem antithetical to his old-school affectations, but it’s true: Even when his songs aren’t at their liveliest, he usually knows how to dress them up in just the right way, or at least in a way that makes them a little more interesting. He brought that skillset to the forefront—perhaps too far—on Fear of the Dawn, and on Boarding House Reach, its similarly tinkered-over predecessor, albums with lots of bells and whistles but few lasting songs.
On its surface, Entering Heaven Alive indicates a reversal of that dynamic: a stripped-down songwriter record, with most tunes built around acoustic guitar and piano. But again, that setting is a conscious choice. And again, the bits that stick with you are not from the meat of the songs—lyrics, melodies, chord changes—but the sauce on top of it. Entering Heaven Alive has plenty of wonderful flourishes: the tender guitar-and-synth break of “If I Die Tomorrow”; the stately strings of “Help Me Along.” The instrumental hook of “A Tree on Fire From Within” puts bass guitar in an unusual lead role, played high on the neck in unison with piano. “All Along the Way” manages to downshift from pensive folk-rock into loping minor-key reggae without feeling forced or gaudy.
White’s skill as an interpreter of his own material is evident from these passages, but the material itself only occasionally holds up its end of the deal. “If I Die Tomorrow” is a tender and vulnerable highlight, confessing White’s fear that he’ll pass on before his mother and be unable to take care of her in old age. “Help Me Along” is similarly sweet, drawing on the childlike naiveté of “We’re Going to Be Friends” but updating its stripped-down singalong into stately chamber pop. More often, the songs don’t resonate as deeply as the sounds. “Love Is Selfish” features some impressive fingerpicking, but its chord changes feel like they’ve been recycled from older, stronger White compositions, and its lyrics reach for a wisdom about romantic relationships that they can’t quite grasp. (“I’ve got a sailboat with her name painted on it/But I don’t know how to sail,” goes one particularly awkward couplet.) The album’s biggest outliers, “I’ve Got You Surrounded (With My Love)” and “A Madman From Manhattan,” are lithe and funky, and could have just as easily appeared on Fear of the Dawn. They waste their grooves on insubstantial sloganeering in the case of the former and near-nonsense faux beat poetry on the latter.
White wrote and recorded Entering Heaven Alive in tandem with Fear of the Dawn, and he has positioned them as yin-and-yang companion pieces. Your choice of favorite between them will probably come down to whether you prefer White the earnest balladeer or White the maximalist mad scientist. For me, Heaven suffers because its settings imply a compositional weight that the songs just don’t carry; Fear has a clearer sense of itself as a collection of shiny amusements. In a recent Consequence profile, White said he’s no longer interested in producing for other artists, which is kind of a shame. It’s clear that he still knows how to craft a hot record. But it might help if someone else were writing the songs. | 2022-07-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-26T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | July 26, 2022 | 6.4 | 775d0716-0644-43cb-a660-def9bd9aceb9 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The experimental music of SOPHIE relaxes into new forms on her debut album. It is sprawling and beautiful, while still keeping the disorienting, latex-pop feel of her fascinating production technique. | The experimental music of SOPHIE relaxes into new forms on her debut album. It is sprawling and beautiful, while still keeping the disorienting, latex-pop feel of her fascinating production technique. | SOPHIE: Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sophie-oil-of-every-pearls-un-insides/ | Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides | Since 2013, SOPHIE has carved out an instantly identifiable musical vernacular based on synthesized bubble sounds, brash treble, deep bass, and distended, anonymous vocals. Listening to early singles like “Lemonade” or “Vyzee” could be a disorienting (and thrilling) experience, because SOPHIE’s music sounded like a latex-coated version of radio pop: It followed many of the same rules that governed the mainstream, but all the textures were too taut, too perfect, too unreal. But in the self-directed music video for “It’s Okay to Cry,” SOPHIE appeared in front of the lens of a camera and introduced an element of vulnerability to her work. Her own voice appeared on that track, and though still digitally altered, it sounded tentative and cracked through with subtle flaws. Finally, one of the most intriguing new presences in experimental pop had fully materialized.
SOPHIE’s debut album, Oil of Every Pearl’s Un-Insides, adapts many of the technical strategies heard on her previous work to looser, more sprawling compositions. Instead of chaining together compact singles as on 2015’s Product, the album builds and releases narrative tension. Beat-heavy romps like “Ponyboy” and “Faceshopping” nestle together at the top of the tracklist after “It’s Okay to Cry,” giving way to celestial swells of synthesizer and voice. Where SOPHIE’s early singles exhibited a keen feel for economy and a killer sense of humor, Oil makes a bid for transcendent beauty.
One of the album’s most astonishing tracks, “Is It Cold in the Water?,” brings SOPHIE’s music to a newly searching place. “I’m freezing/I’m burning/I’ve left my home,” a voice sings in breathy soprano. Cycling synthesizer chords build in volume throughout the verse and then drop away by the end of the first chorus. The voice sings the song’s title, stretching out the word “cold” across a series of notes, as though it belonged to someone standing at the edge of the ocean, wondering if they should jump. It’s the clearest image to arise from a SOPHIE song to date, and it sets the rest of the album in motion.
The rotating chords continue into “Infatuation,” a low-key number about admiring someone from afar, only now it’s a processed human voice singing the notes instead of a synthesizer. Then the song structures to which SOPHIE had been beholden for most of her career dissolve. The abrasive, chaotic interlude “Not Okay” opens up into “Pretending,” a six-minute ambient murk entirely unlike anything SOPHIE has put her name to before. Its formlessness, and the inclusion of stray, garbled voices towards the end suggests a primordial becoming, a vacancy from which structures can emerge. Out of the fog comes the refrain of the next song, gleefully repeated over handclaps that land on every beat: “Immaterial girls!/Immaterial boys!”
The transition from amorphous noise to giddy rallying cry ranks among Oil’s most satisfying moments. With self-affirming lyrics (“I can be anything I want”) sung through elastic pitch-shifting software, “Immaterial” sits at the album’s thematic core. It’s the molecules of a Madonna song filtered through a new context, speaking to how desire informs selfhood, how wanting to be something—a gender other than the one you were assigned at birth, say—is a big step in the process of becoming it. It may be the only step. “Immaterial” indulges desire the way the smartest pop songs can, by both inviting and challenging it. Its voices dance along irresistible melodies, and then they get distorted into impossible ones, twisted beyond their “natural” ranges into new, disarming shapes.
“Immaterial,” alongside Oil’s storming, nine-minute conclusion “Whole New World / Pretend World,” speaks to a conception of gender, being, and selfhood that feels increasingly resonant. By complicating the naturalness of the human voice and corrupting established pop structures, SOPHIE also complicates the supposed naturalness of gender, which has always been inextricable from music. Her work is a sphere where will and impulse take priority over fate and legacy. Nothing is preordained; everything is always in flux. When, on “Whole New World,” the distorted, feminized voices that have become her trademark shout out the song’s title one syllable at a time—“whole! new! world!”—it sounds almost like a manifesto, a political demand. It sounds like the kind of phrase you’d shout in a crowd while clamoring for the freedom to be whatever it is you already are. | 2018-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Transgressive | June 15, 2018 | 8.6 | 775f751e-d477-4ca8-bfad-c1dfa70854d0 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
The Glasgow producer Rustie surprise-released EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE, his third full-length, last week. It is a rawer, scrappier record than either of his prior LPs, and the way he flips the bird at conventional notions of fidelity is almost punk. | The Glasgow producer Rustie surprise-released EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE, his third full-length, last week. It is a rawer, scrappier record than either of his prior LPs, and the way he flips the bird at conventional notions of fidelity is almost punk. | Rustie: EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21253-evenifudontbelieve/ | EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE | It's strange to think that Rustie's debut album came out only four years ago; so much has changed since in its wake. When Glass Swords appeared, in the fall of 2011, it was measured primarily against dubstep's yardstick, praised in part for how far it had stretched the limits of that form. Nobody talks about dubstep any more. These days, as far as swaggering, hard-knuckled electronic music goes, trap rules the roost—thanks in no small part to Glass Swords, which along with Hudson Mohawke and AraabMuzik proved that Southern rap beats plus needle-nosed synths could make for an even more invigorating rave soundtrack than dubstep did.
Glass Swords wasn't just a dubstep or trap album, of course; part of its genius was the way that it spun so many sounds and ideas into a bright, high-energy electro-funk whose central contradiction—brittle in sound, pliant in structure—turned out to be visionary. (Rustie deserves some credit for dreaming up the sound that SOPHIE and PC Music would run with: Without "Hover Traps", there'd be no "Lemonade" or "Hard".) Perhaps that inventiveness is why it took the Glasgow producer nearly three years to come up with a follow-up: last year's Green Language, a mixed bag that balanced his giddy hyper-funk instrumentals with relatively standard-issue trap. Distancing himself from that album, Rustie now complains that it was "too A&Red," his vision compromised by managers and outside influences. And just a little more than a year after that album, he's back with a new one, the surprise release EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE, and it represents a hard left turn back towards Rustie's carefully tended turf.
There is no doubting who is in control of his vision this time around. There are no cloud-rap forays, no ballads, no grime MCs, no features at all—well, not unless you count the five songs credited "(feat. Rustie)," in which the producer sings and plays guitar (not that you would necessarily know it from listening to the songs). Tongue-in-cheek though the gesture may be, the funny thing about the distinction is how little difference is detectable between the songs "featuring" Rustie and those that are just by him. Both incorporate vocal chops frothed to high heaven, like towering Everests of Cool Whip; both are topped by soaring, tremolo-shaken synth leads; and both are driven forward by churning rhythms that split the difference between hardstyle's 160-BPM kicks and trap's lumbering syncopations.
It is a rawer, scrappier record than either of his prior LPs, and the way he flips the bird at conventional notions of fidelity is almost punk. The high end often has the crinkly cellophane quality of low-bitrate MP3s, and there's so much information being stuffed into the treble register that it occasionally registers as buzz. His drums are plenty forceful—his kicks and snares, in particular, sound like they've been pushed deeply into the red and then run through even more distortion, just for fun—but it lacks the sub-bass of most trap, preferring to muster all its energies for a mid-range wallop that thumps you in the sternum. The rolling toms of "Big Catzzz" sounds like he's recorded them off Fury Road with his iPhone.
If his sonics are idiosyncratic, his structures are less so. A typical track consists of a minute-long introduction, 30 seconds of the main theme, a minute of pullback, a 30-second return to the main theme, and, finally, a tidy denouement and fadeout. Everything in the song—the rolling drums, the looped voices, the smeared synths, the crescendos of white noise—leads up to that big hit of adrenaline. What's even more striking is how similar the main themes sound, once you subtract all the surrounding flotsam and jetsam. If you placed the album's biggest hooks side by side, it'd sound like one song, uniform in mood, instrumentation, and tone color.
Is that a problem? It all depends upon your tolerance. If the idea of mixing Pop Rocks in your breakfast Mountain Dew sounds good to you (or if, like Rustie, you listen to happy hardcore to go to sleep), then EVENIFUDONTBELIEVE will be right up your alley. For the rest of us, there are some genuine thrills (sorry, thrillz) here: "First Mythz", with its dolphin clicks and bullet-riddled hi-hats; the calmer "Atlantean Airship", which sounds like Glass Swords-era Rustie curdled by acidic distortion. "Peace Upzzz" is one of the few songs that actually refuses a big payoff: It's all crescendo and no climax, and better for it.
For those who aren't fully on board with Rustie's aesthetic, exhaustion sets in quickly, and the slope of diminishing returns is steep. And that's probably just fine with him, because this is a one-man rollercoaster, from the "features" to the credits ("Written by Rustie/ Produced by Rustie/ Extra vocals by Rustie/ Guitar by Rustie/ Art direction by Rustie/ Photography by Rustie"). There is zero daylight between the artist and his vision, as he pounds tirelessly away at one very specific idea. It is less an album than a set of 15 variations upon a single theme. It is the Rustiest album possible, and you have to respect that kind of doggedness. | 2015-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-11-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Warp | November 11, 2015 | 7.3 | 776554dd-4ad0-434f-a35f-fd3ce568f777 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The veteran singer-songwriter sets aside his meticulous studio approach for a quickly recorded album with orchestral arrangements. | The veteran singer-songwriter sets aside his meticulous studio approach for a quickly recorded album with orchestral arrangements. | John Vanderslice: White Wilderness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14951-white-wilderness/ | White Wilderness | John Vanderslice is a known and avowed tinkerer. He operates Tiny Telephone Studio, so if he wants to take his time making a record, he certainly can. All of his albums to date have been meticulously assembled things, full of carefully layered sounds, tweaked and prodded into shape over months. I guess everybody needs a change of pace now and then, because White Wilderness was recorded in three days with a live band, outside of Tiny Telephone. The live band in question is something called the Magik*Magik Orchestra, led by Minna Choi. They're not strictly a chamber orchestra in the sense you might expect. Yes, Choi has arranged these songs with strings and woodwinds, but the orchestra members also contribute things like piano, drums, and pedal steel.
So he got out of the studio and stretched his legs a little with a small orchestra. What kind of record does that make? Well, take away the tinkering and you get a record that still fits quite comfortably into Vanderslice's discography-- it's not that different, stylistically, from anything else he's done. The meticulous studio layering missing here is largely covered up by the orchestration. If there's any significant difference, it's in Vanderslice himself. His voice sounds much more vulnerable and fragile in this setting. I think back in particular to 2009's Romanian Names, where he seemed to be growing more comfortable with building himself into a small choir and was really putting his vocals out front; here, he recedes into the band a bit more, occasionally bolstered by a harmony from Choi or a few fluttering "ah ahs" from some of the orchestra.
He gets some of those "ahs" on "The Piano Lesson", a song literally about learning to play piano that Choi uses as an orchestral playground. Vanderslice's wandering vocal melody is anchored by an ominous sax figure, the strings play racing pizzicato patterns, brass and flutes swell queasily, and the overall effect is strikingly dark. There's a subtle tension at play on the album, almost a tug of war between Vanderslice and Choi, and one or the other typically winds up dominating each song, but there are a few where they strike a real balance. Up-tempo standout "Overcoat" is one of those songs. Vanderslice isn't so much a verse/chorus songwriter, but he can craft a memorable melody, and this one is great. It keeps the moaning woodwinds and shivering strings at bay until the second half of the song, when the complexity of the arrangement increases, leaving him to carefully pick his way through shards of orchestration.
One thing that working with an orchestra didn't disrupt is Vanderslice's commitment to concision. It must have been tempting to make something sprawling and try to live up to the orchestral scope of the project, but White Wilderness is just over a half hour long, like most of Vanderslice's albums. This has always served him well-- none of his records wear out their welcome. Neither does this one, but I do get the feeling there's a reason he usually spends so much time agonizing over his records-- all that tweaking really brings out the details of his songwriting, which are sometimes lost in the orchestration and less polished vocals here. Still, these types of projects can help a songwriter refocus and between them Vanderslice and Choi have made a memorable album that successfully adds a new twist to Vanderslice's catalog. | 2011-01-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-01-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Dead Oceans | January 28, 2011 | 7.2 | 7766fa69-1ce5-44ef-8513-09edc8c96cd6 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The Southern California rocker cobbles together a pastiche of 1950s rockabilly, 1960s pop, and old-school soul. At its best, it’s a shot of pure joy, but it never quite transcends its inspirations. | The Southern California rocker cobbles together a pastiche of 1950s rockabilly, 1960s pop, and old-school soul. At its best, it’s a shot of pure joy, but it never quite transcends its inspirations. | Nick Waterhouse: Nick Waterhouse | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-waterhouse-nick-waterhouse/ | Nick Waterhouse | “What I do has no theatricality in it,” Nick Waterhouse says in a recent fashion video for men’s fashion site Mr. Porter. It’s a curious statement to end a clip in which he wanders around a set-decorated house and explains his sartorial style as “Pacific Coast Americana,” which I think is based on the preppy kids who always got beaten up in 1960s biker flicks—the culture instead of the counterculture. That insistence that he’s not staging anything is even more curious coming from an artist who specializes in midcentury-modern rock’n’roll, a studious collision of 1950s rockabilly, ’60s pop, and old-school R&B from Memphis, New Orleans, and New York. Like JD McPherson and Eli “Paperboy” Reed, Waterhouse is a revivalist who insists he’s not a revivalist, a contradiction that extends beyond his dress code to his music.
Superficially, the Southern California native gets everything just so. Waterhouse recorded his fourth album exclusively in analog, of course, and he knows how to assemble a song so that it sounds just slightly uprooted from any one historical scene or style. “Song for Winners” opens with a Duane Eddy guitar lick before launching into a swaggering Nuggets garage rocker, with Waterhouse slightly sneering his vocals to sound a little bit like the Standells’ Larry Tamblyn. There’s a gronky sax solo and a spy-surf guitar solo. The song is pan-nostalgic: crammed with all sorts of old, familiar sounds, yet they all make sense in this assemblage, more or less. Waterhouse scrambles our expectations of old-school musical styles while underscoring how much pure listening joy can be found in these elements.
Yet Nick Waterhouse can’t really make them add up to much beyond themselves. His references remain references. When he plays a rock instrumental, it’s so close to the Champs’ biggest hit that you might find yourself reflexively yelling, “Tequila!” Maybe he’s too good as his job—or, as he sings on opener “By Heart,” “Never learn something you can do by heart/Soon as you do it comes apart.” Most everything here sounds precise to the point of fussy, even fetishistic: the tasteful distortion in his vocals, the buzzy roominess of the production, the self-conscious elegance of slower tunes like “Thought & Act.” On “Wreck the Rod” he has the backing vocalists shout “Love!” at us on the beat, which gives a distinctive, neat-o hook but distracts from Waterhouse’s conflicted ode to masochistic love. At heart these songs sound clever, and clever is the enemy of soul, the clogger of grooves. Perhaps that aspect of the music diminishes onstage, when Waterhouse and his band can cut loose and shed some of that rock-historical baggage, but it makes for an album that’s a little too shirt-and-pants. | 2019-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Innovative Leisure | March 11, 2019 | 5.9 | 77698d7d-cca0-4576-b2f1-08aae1bf5c56 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
After last year’s Feel Infinite, the Canadian producer expands and refines his arsenal of club tools, folding touches of acid and ambient into tracks that build on his melodic sensibilities. | After last year’s Feel Infinite, the Canadian producer expands and refines his arsenal of club tools, folding touches of acid and ambient into tracks that build on his melodic sensibilities. | Jacques Greene: Fever Focus EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jacques-greene-fever-focus-ep/ | Fever Focus EP | This past summer, Jacques Greene launched his party series Beau Travail with a simple premise: the Toronto-based producer going back to back all night with some of his favorite selectors. Guests so far have included Project Pablo, Eclair Fifi, and Martyn Bootyspoon; the anything-goes format recalls Philippe Aubin-Dionne’s Montreal club beginnings, allowing him the chance to test out new material in an intimate setting.
Much like those nights, which might feature anything from ghettotech to deep house, there’s a
delightful sense of informality to his latest EP, Fever Focus. Following his 2017 debut album, Feel Infinite, these six tracks began as “fun loops and ideas” that the producer then sculpted and played in DJ and live sets over the past year. Some songs, like the throbbing endorphin rush “Convex Mirror,” first surfaced as demos on Aubin-Dionne’s 48-minute mixtape shared on NTS Radio in May, but here, they’re fully fleshed out and given the space to breathe. Rather than a stopgap between releases, it’s his most high-definition collection to date, building on familiar forms and expanding his melodic sensibilities.
These tracks skew warmer and gauzier than his previous output, and they showcase an encyclopedic knowledge of his rave forebears. Whereas it’s commonplace for today’s electronic producers to have one album cut that’s explicitly “acid” or “ambient,” Aubin-Dionne opts to fold these influences into the mélange. The latter reference point rears its head on the aforementioned “Convex Mirror” with a whirring synth line evoking a babbling forest brook, backdropped by minimalist drums. Longtime followers will be pleased to find he hasn’t abandoned mesmerizing vocal chops, though here they’re dubbed and spun until they’re ghosts in his machines, like on the rattling jacker “Perlant” and the twitchy title track.
The two biggest highlights are the two longest songs, where the producer takes the time to let his ideas gently unspool. “Nordschleife”—named after the infamous German racing track known for testing the mettle of even the most skilled drivers—samples Los Angeles singer-songwriter Kelsey Belkin, whose melancholic refrain (“You make me cry”) is looped and laid over airy synths and jungle breaks. The EP culminates with the sensual mid-tempo house cut “Avatar Beach,” where Aubin-Dionne deftly balances driving percussion and feathery trance pads like a digital illustrator finding new colors.
Describing the making of Feel Infinite last year, the producer said, “I love the club as social microcosm. You get snapshots of people's true colors and I love that for the good and the bad.” While Fever Focus is deliberately less conceptual, it taps into a wide array of moods and textures while expanding the arsenal of dancefloor anthems at his disposal. For proof of its effectiveness, look no further than the recording of Aubin-Dionne’s four-and-a-half hour B2B set with Scottish DJ and LuckyMe labelmate Eclair Fifi this past summer. At the midway point, “Convex Mirror” is dropped, and you can practically feel the energy in the sweaty Toronto venue rise as the dancers cheer. Almost a decade since he released his first EP, he’s still finding new paths to euphoria. | 2018-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | LuckyMe | November 27, 2018 | 7.7 | 776c9f5f-3d1f-4e99-bd5d-c2f7497ef83a | Max Mertens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-mertens/ | |
After a scooter accident almost killed him, William Bensussen returns with a more nuanced album, full of spiritual revelations and electro-psych affirmations. | After a scooter accident almost killed him, William Bensussen returns with a more nuanced album, full of spiritual revelations and electro-psych affirmations. | The Gaslamp Killer: Instrumentalepathy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22428-instrumentalepathy/ | Instrumentalepathy | William Bensussen should be dead right now after he flipped his scooter back in 2013. But anyone who still goes by the name “the Gaslamp Killer,” a DJ name he earned in his teenage years by alienating San Diego party bros with his dark psych hip-hop sets back in the day isn’t going to compromise that easy—not for death or anyone else.
The Gaslamp Killer’s feral enthusiasm and morbid sense of style have run through his work from visuals to sonics, a beat-scene Black Sabbath in a Los Angeles otherwise driven by next-gen Pharoah Sanders acolytes. He still fits—he always has—but firsthand brushes with mortality have a way of shifting even the most detached cynic’s perspective. And GLK is no detached cynic. *Instrumentalepathy, then, is what happens when a man known for his intensity steps back from the brink, still reeling from the haze of painkillers and the sounds of family voices he thought he’d never hear again. And while his work hasn’t been 100% unrelenting doom-sludge from the get-go—even 2012’s flag-planting debut Breakthrough *shook hips as often as it chilled spines—there’s a hard-fought liveliness to this record that reconfigures his familiar tics and collaborative ideas into something more affirmational.
The beginnings of the album as it exists now started taking shape while GLK was still in the hospital. Opening cut “Pathetic Dreams” features his mother’s voice stating “I love you,” an echo of the first sound he heard when he woke up from surgery. From the meditative stretches through its more characteristically hectic, live-drummed acid-funk assault, it feels like the struggle and strengthening of a recovery process both depicted through and helped along by his music.
There are two cuts on *Instrumentalepathy *that came to be while Bensussen was still housebound, zonked on pain pills after years of sobriety, trying to recapture the feeling of making music that might be a substitute for narcotics. Fittingly enough, they’re the closest *Instrumentalepathy *has to a clear continuation from the sounds on the pre-accident Breakthrough: “Haleva,” like the earlier “Nissim,” is a Turkish funk nod to Bensussen’s lineage named after one of his great-grandparents and featuring instrumentation from guitarist Amir Yaghmai, and the penultimate “Shred You to Bits” is a growling beast of a track that would fit in cleanly on Breakthrough’s doom-breaks latter half. But even with the commonalities—including return appearances by Yaghmai, Gonjasufi, and co-arrangers like Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Mophono—there’s a different, more nuanced aim here.
It’s a trip to hear “Residual Tingles” unfurl from its subwoofer-rattling Incredible Bongo Band loop and become newly graceful and cosmic. When it builds from a floating sequence of organ chords into an orchestral flourish, it’s a clear sign that GLK’s is as comfortable with meditative beauty as he’s been with abrasive heaviness. He’s also having fun turning his ear to more playful takes on the weird: the hissing-grease glitch of Mophono team-up “The Butcher” is like a ’70s Moog novelty record tasered into joint-dislocating bass music, and the Malcolm Catto-propelled “Gammalaser Kill” lopes beneath rusty analog whistling that sounds like a run-down robot aviary. Most impressive of all is “In the Dark (Part Two),” a “digital bonus” that winds up feeling like the definitive closer the album can’t live without. Catto’s Heliocentrics reconvene with GLK for a nearly twelve-minute slow-burn crest of orchestral psych that’s the closest anyone out of Low End Theory has come to classic Spiritualized.
And that’s what happens when you’re as infectiously outgoing and enthusiastic as Bensussen is: He gathers friends, then he gathers ideas. In late 2013, less than five months after his accident, he put together an all-star lineup of musicians to record as “The Gaslamp Killer Experience.” He made his beat-scene-cornerstone status into an ensemble effort and the 2015 release of the concert as Live in Los Angeles revealed how strongly his material could carry over from DIY-studio beats to full-fledged live-band arrangements. So as much as he’s still rooted in that one man/one MPC/10,000 records ethos, he’s flourished as an artist who knows he’s part of something even bigger. He uses that knowledge to help unlock the kind of revelations that come from realizing you’ve got another chance at renewing who you are as an artist. *Instrumentalepathy *is where we learn what GLK realized once he started recovering from his accident, and his work on this earth isn’t even close to over. | 2016-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Cuss | September 24, 2016 | 7.7 | 776f639d-2b1e-41ea-96e0-887d8de946dc | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The Bristol duo championed by Portishead's Geoff Barrow indulge in sample-heavy pop that seems pulled from a UK pirate-radio broadcast from 1973. | The Bristol duo championed by Portishead's Geoff Barrow indulge in sample-heavy pop that seems pulled from a UK pirate-radio broadcast from 1973. | Malachai: Ugly Side of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13867-ugly-side-of-love/ | Ugly Side of Love | "I know what I want/ I want off this roundabout!" Given Malachai's apparent fondness for turn-of-the-1970s British music-- Badfinger, schmaltzy AM-radio pop, or the grainy reggae imported by England's Jamaican immigrant class-- this lyric from the masked Bristol duo's debut could very well just be a colloquial reference to traffic congestion on UK motorways. But the manic, cut-and-paste aesthetic that members Gee Ealey and Scott Hendy exhibit on Ugly Side of Love also suggests that the lyric could be a rejection of the (re)cyclical nature of rock, what with the 80s post-punk resurrection that informed so much indie over the past decade now yielding to 90s alt-rock revivalism, like clockwork. For a band like Malachai, who are more interested in toying with unfashionable pop arcana than conforming to hipster-baiting trends, it's hard to tell what's more wearisome: the prevalence of genre-centric nostalgia, or the fact that it recurs at such predictable intervals.
Now, Malachai-- previously Malakai, before a namesake California rapper claimed legal dibs on the "k"-- are hardly ones to present themselves as futurists; Ugly Side of Love seems deliberately designed to evoke the dusty-grooved ambience and freewheeling feel of a UK pirate-radio broadcast from 1973. But unlike so many Britpop bands who tried to recapture the spirit of a bygone era by writing and performing songs that sound like their favorite albums, Ealey and Hendy simply take the posturing out of the equation altogether and just sample them wholesale. Ugly Side of Love is thus a rock album pieced together by crate-diggers, one that's eager to undercut notions of authenticity to emphasize its own pastiche quality with obvious samples and abrupt edits.
Surprisingly, the liners list only two sample sources, one of them 70s-era UK crooner Daniel Boone's "Sad and Lonely Lady" being repurposed on the boogie-rock stomper "Snowflake". But there's clearly so much more where that came from: "How Long" loops the Guess Who's 1970 single "Hand Me Down World" into a piece of hand-me-down rock that deviously cuts its sample off mid-guitar-lick; "Shitkicker" revs up on a riff reminiscent of Heart's Camaro classic "Barracuda" before sling-shooting back on a cavalcade of incessant handclaps, Gee's double-tracked harmonies and, of course, more cowbell; the reggafied rumble "Warriors" not only name-checks the 1979 gang flick, it uses the film's climactic, bottle-plinking "come and out play" taunt as its hook. But Ugly Side of Love is more than just the sum of Malachai's dollar-bin finds. In Gee, they boast an elastic vocalist who perfectly embodies band's mischievous approach, yielding performances that are by turns sinister (the mutant acid-rocker "Blackbird") and heart-on-sleeve sweet (the bubblegum-soul serenade "Another Sun"). Ironically, it's his least affected performance that feels the most forced, with the clap-along campfire jam "Moonsurfin'" coming off like a commercial jingle ("Now it's here/ Grab a beer!") pitched at trustafarians.
Considering Malachai's Bristol roots and flair for sample-based recontextualization, it's no surprise that the duo has found a champion/mentor in Portishead's Geoff Barrow, who first issued the album last year on his Invada imprint and served as its "executive producer." Indeed, the sole Barrow co-write, "Only For You", carries heavy, cannabis-infused whiffs of Portishead's film-noir funk. But Malachai are actually most reminiscent of Clinic, another shadowy outfit who debuted on Domino some 10 years ago. The latter tapped more canonical cult-rock sources like the Velvet Underground and Sparks, but exhibited a similar adeptness at processing and repackaging disparate reference points into seemingly familiar yet freakishly alien two-minute pop songs. And if, like Clinic, Malachai are too respectful of their retro sources to fully veer off the rock'n'roll roundabout, Ugly Side of Love nonetheless revisits a moment in British pop history through a series of surprising U-turns and thrillingly illegal lane changes. | 2010-02-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2010-02-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino / Invada | February 3, 2010 | 7.5 | 777e66f8-3d30-4708-a33d-e9901c9da63e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The Mael brothers are riding high. Their 26th album strikes the ideal Sparksian balance of madcap melody, labyrinthine arrangement, and stinging social satire. | The Mael brothers are riding high. Their 26th album strikes the ideal Sparksian balance of madcap melody, labyrinthine arrangement, and stinging social satire. | Sparks: The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sparks-the-girl-is-crying-in-her-latte/ | The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte | Most underdog rock documentaries paint a doleful portrait of neglected geniuses who have been cruelly denied their due. Director Edgar Wright’s 2021 love letter to Sparks, The Sparks Brothers, doesn’t exactly make that case: The copious clips of brothers Ron and Russell Mael performing on Top of the Pops in the ’70s and joshing with Dick Clark on American Bandstand in the ’80s indicate this band hasn’t exactly been wallowing in obscurity. What Wright’s film argues is that Sparks simply aren’t popular enough. But thanks to The Sparks Brothers’ Netflix-abetted dissemination, and the Maels’ subsequent César Award win for scoring Leos Carax’s maniacal musical Annette, the brothers are currently enjoying an unprecedented degree of mainstream attention for a couple of septuagenarians on their 26th album—complete with a Cate Blanchett co-sign and prime Yellowjackets placement. This summer, the brothers will headline the Hollywood Bowl, the same venue where they saw the Fab Four at the height of Beatlemania. Fifty years after these American Anglophiles first became cause célèbres in the UK, Sparks are an international institution—and with The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte, they meet their moment head-on and thoroughly whomp that sucker. The album marks the Maels’ return to Island (incubator of their earliest ’70s hits) after 47 years, but the move doesn’t so much signal a return to their glam glory days as reaffirm Sparks’ surging currency.
Sparks are rightfully praised as savvy shapeshifters, but the past decade has been one of relative aesthetic consistency. After a half-century of bounding between rock theatricality, electro-disco austerity, and classical frippery, recent releases like Hippopotamus and A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip have synthesized the Maels’ interests into sleek hybrid models, presenting a vision of pop music that belongs equally to Old Hollywood and outer space. The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte stays the course but exudes even more vitality and verve, striking the ideal Sparksian balance of madcap melody, labyrinthine arrangement, and stinging social satire. What Kimono My House was to their glitter-rock phase and No. 1 in Heaven was to their synth-pop period, The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte is to this late-career era of holistic stability: While it may not aspire to the same game-changing sense of surprise as those ecstatic classics, it nonetheless represents a new high-water mark for 21st-century Sparks.
As titles go, The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte would make for a perfectly wistful Belle and Sebastian record, but Sparks present that melancholy café scene as a five-alarm fire. On the opening title track, buzzing synthesizer and panic-attack beats direct our attention to a weeping woman who’s experiencing not so much a midlife crisis as a middle-class crisis: the appearance of having it all but feeling empty inside. As the pressure mounts, “The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte” transforms into an electro-shocked “Eleanor Rigby,” its dejected protagonist serving as an avatar: “So many people are crying in their latte,” Russell repeats, providing a bumper-sticker slogan for a record that suggests the true meaning of life is to brace yourself for its endless disappointments.
But no other band articulates existential dread with such playful panache and joyous absurdity. The self-explanatory sentiments of “Nothing Is as Good as They Say It Is” are packaged into feel-good power-pop sung from the perspective of a newborn baby who gets an eyeful of life outside the womb and opts to crawl back in. And on “The Mona Lisa’s Packing, Leaving Late Tonight,” even da Vinci’s eternal model of calm contentment is anxious to step out of the frame and run for the hills. “She might seem dispassionate, but that’s not true/She feels much the same as everyone, me and you,” Russell observes as he rides a synth-speckled stomp into an alternate universe where Sparks enlisted Giorgio Moroder to produce Indiscreet.
Through Sparks’ looking glass, history becomes fantasy, politics become pantomime, and dictators become DJs. Over the goose-stepping ’90s piano-house accents of “We Go Dancing,” Russell sketches a delirious caricature of authoritarianism by assuming the voice of a Kim Jong Un zealot who claims his fair leader is far more skilled behind the decks than Skrillex and “maybe Diplo.” And on “Veronica Lake,” the brothers revive the movie star of the 1940s with electronics from the 2040s, reframing her strange-but-true story of sacrificing her signature hairstyle for the war effort as a white-knuckled do-or-die mission worthy of an espionage thriller. But if The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte reaffirms Sparks’ status as rock’s most reliable fabulists, the album’s grand finale brings forth an uncharacteristic introspection. In their 1994 UK hit single, Russell asked, “When do I get to sing ‘My Way’?” and “Gee, That Was Fun” is as close as he’ll probably get: a plaintive, curtain-closing ballad that catalogs his regrets. And he’s had a few. (For starters: “Should have spent less time watching sports/Should have improved my quick retorts.”) It’s the sort of song that sounds like a deathbed reflection, or perhaps a requiem for Sparks themselves. But most likely, it’s the album’s most elaborate prank: a cunning send-up of the meditations on mortality that serious artists are expected to write once they reach their 70s—a joke for which Sparks’ ongoing renaissance provides its own self-evident punchline. | 2023-05-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental / Rock | Island | May 30, 2023 | 7.9 | 7781ad5e-cb5e-4c7b-8f83-2109017194fb | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
AraabMuzik’s long-awaited sophomore LP Dream World is packed with more sonic diversity than his beloved debut, Electronic Dream. This works both for and against him. | AraabMuzik’s long-awaited sophomore LP Dream World is packed with more sonic diversity than his beloved debut, Electronic Dream. This works both for and against him. | AraabMuzik: Dream World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22071-dream-world/ | Dream World | It’s easy to forget that AraabMuzik has successfully been making beats for close to a decade. The Providence producer's widespread allure arrived near 2010 when pop music fell head-first into the EDM scene. His 2011 debut LP Electronic Dream capitalized heavily off that trend, with woozy dreamscapes that ultimately trickled into the humble rap beginnings from which he came (primarily Cam’ron and his Dipset dynasty).
It would be remiss to say AraabMuzik (born Abraham Orellana) invented the subgenre cloud rap, but he provided a sturdier framework for it, while producers like Clams Casino and Harry Fraud unlocked a bevy of samples often ignored by Araab in exchange for his rapid-fire MPC flexing. Videos circulated of him flapping his arms over the device like a Hindu deity, solidifying his dexterity as both a hip-hop producer and a catchy electronic one. A flood of mixtapes and EPs arrived in the sizable gap between Electronic Dream and Dream World, yet AraabMuzik’s place in beat-making feels uncertain right now.
They say to tailor your resume for every different job that you want, so going by that theory, Dream World would land AraabMuzik in any career field. The experience is there, but the project breathes an unspoken awareness that his signature sound is no longer just his. Clams and Fraud have popularized that atmospheric aesthetic, but other producers have taken to wedging random electronic blips into their work in an effort ride the trap house movement. So what we’re left with on Dream World is a solid project that flies in multiple directions.
Thankfully, the dreamier cuts are there—and arguably the best parts of the album. Opener “Adonis” blends Araab’s MPC proficiency against choir chants and electronic key tones, reflecting a cult-meets-church vibe. “Mind Trip” and “Faded” bring it back to the Electronic Dream era, pairing the producer’s knack for ethereal voice samples with his hip-hop bassline foundation. A collaboration with producer !llmind proves successful, as “Dream” highlights the vocals of newcomer Vchaney on a track that travels along the same vein as a Tinashe or Jhene Aiko joint.
Araab even traipses smoothly into house territory on “Chasing Pirates,” while his collaboration with Dvnk Sinatrv (“Waiting For”) is near perfect minus the Zedd-ish build-up synths—the same crime is committed on “Stadium House.” A few tracks are begging for any one of the rappers in AraabMuzik’s rolodex, from the subtle boom-bappery of “Train Wreck” to “Left Side,” which recalls Scott Storch's stint with the Roots on keys. But on the flip side, there are other tracks where the vocal features seem extraneous. “50 Box Of Swishers” could have done without Kobe, despite his “I came to get fucked up” crooning over a hard hip-hop beat like he’s Tony Sunshine during the Terror Squad reign. Speaking of throwbacks that don't really work, Araab inexplicably revisits dubstep with “Try Me” and “A.M.”, where the genre's signature “womp womps” are literally just that.
It’s understandable to approach Dream World with demands for the mind-fuck AraabMuzik delivered on his debut. But for a producer who's now sailing along a flooded production market, his only buoy here is to try anything once. He could become David Guetta after this; he could also become DJ Mustard. But honestly, we just want AraabMuzik back. At this point, that’s the real dream. | 2016-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | AraabMuzik Label Group | July 11, 2016 | 6.1 | 778c7ed5-9fbc-4385-8215-50f8c9481fe2 | Kathy Iandoli | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kathy-iandoli/ | null |
Jenny Lewis' third solo album is defined and motivated by a sense of personal nostalgia, as these songs sift through Lewis’ past to find some key to her present. It’s not anchored in one particular scene, but plays as broadly California, with sly nods to the Byrds in the guitars, the Go-Go’s in the vocals, and Randy Newman in the wry humor. | Jenny Lewis' third solo album is defined and motivated by a sense of personal nostalgia, as these songs sift through Lewis’ past to find some key to her present. It’s not anchored in one particular scene, but plays as broadly California, with sly nods to the Byrds in the guitars, the Go-Go’s in the vocals, and Randy Newman in the wry humor. | Jenny Lewis: The Voyager | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19686-jenny-lewis-the-voyager/ | The Voyager | In the 1930s the writer Gertrude Stein traveled to the Bay Area, where she visited her hometown of Oakland. When she arrived, she discovered that her childhood home had been razed and in its place erected new, anonymous buildings. It was a different and less inviting place, one that did not match up to her memory. In her journals, which were published as Everybody’s Autobiography in 1937, she wrote about the experience and concluded about Oakland, “there is no there there.” Jenny Lewis examines a similarly thwarted nostalgia on her third solo album, The Voyager, and on the opening track “Head Underwater”, she sings, “I never thought I would ever be here/ Looking out on my life as if there was no there there.” It’s a pretty devastating admission of disconnection with oneself, as though the Jenny Lewis of today had no means of identifying with any of the Jenny Lewises of the past.
Not that you would immediately sense such alienation in “Head Underwater”. The beats thump with a laidback bustle, the synths shimmer as if submerged in a pool, the Watson Twins harmonize perfectly in the background, and Lewis’ vocals swoop sharply and assertively, with a slight ascending vocal arc that conveys optimism rather than its opposite. After the first verse, however, a dark, post-punk guitar theme emerges, more East than West Coast, casting a darker spell. The song strikes a particularly Californian balance of sun and sadness, and this glossy rumination is Lewis’ true milieu: If her trio of solo albums all sound different, they emanate from the same perspective. It’s been four years since she released that Jenny and Johnny album and six since she released her last solo album; even though the new album falters a bit, it’s nice to see the world from that point of view again.
The Voyager is defined and motivated by a sense of personal nostalgia, as these songs sift through Lewis’ past to find some key to her present. There are passing references to the L.A. Riots and 9/11, which act as clearly identifiable landmarks in in her (and many people's) life. There are musings on her past selves, such as the “furious and restless” teenager in “Late Bloomer” or the woman chasing an ex on “She’s Not Me”. If this is Lewis’ most adult album—which is arguable, as the self-possession she conveys plays as a kind of maturity—then it’s primarily because she’s more adult now, with more experiences and more past selves. These songs wonder not only about how she got where she is, but also where that is exactly. She still sings about cheating on her boyfriend on “Slippery Slopes”, but justifies the discretion by claiming it makes her feel closer to him while she’s on tour: “If for just one second it helps us to remember that we like each other the most.”
The album title and its NASA allusion may refer to the rocket-fueled momentum with which “every boy and girl” flies through life, as Lewis muses on the title track. But the word also applies to her approach to making music. Especially as a solo artist apart from Rilo Kiley, she has moved from one style to the next, trying on genres and traditions like an actress visiting the wardrobe department. It was rhinestones and Nudie suits for her debut, Rabbit Fur Coat, which plumbed the Golden State’s country and country-rock history. She explored psych-pop on her 2008 follow-up Acid Tongue.
By contrast, The Voyager is not quite so easily summed up. It’s not anchored in one particular scene, but plays as broadly California, with sly nods to the Byrds in the guitars, the Go-Go’s in the vocals, and Randy Newman in the wry humor. On the other hand, the album is produced to sound produced—that is, to remind you that it is the product of a studio, and in particular, the studios of Beck and Ryan Adams. Such an approach lapses occasionally into tedious self-referentiality and even more tedious self-regard, especially on “Aloha & the Three Johns”, about rock stars on vacation. The song plays like an episode of some low-rent game show where the contestants can’t even appreciate the luxury of their surroundings. Of course, the characters aren’t meant to be sympathetic, but they’re not especially relatable either.
Most of the time, however, Lewis is her usual smart, funny self—a singer whose default setting is wry skepticism and a songwriter with a gift for the telling detail and the blunt confession. On the Beck-produced single “Just One of the Guys”, she all but stops the song to underscore a moment of dire self-assessment. As the tempo slow and the instruments all fall away, shit gets real: “There’s only one difference between you and me/ When I look at myself, all I can see/ I’m just another lady without a baby.” Those lines nod to the expectations women of a certain age face not only from others but from themselves, yet Lewis manages to personalize it. Her delivery adds another layer of self-awareness and perhaps something darker, like resignation or regret. It’s a complicated sentiment nestled into a breezy pop tune, which is Lewis’ specialty. That precarious balance means there’s more than enough there there. | 2014-07-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-07-31T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | July 31, 2014 | 7.2 | 778ca04b-2f06-48b9-b3c2-3c940e0a0b31 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
With a new rhythm section, the notorious black metal experimentalists deliver their most aggressive and radical album yet. | With a new rhythm section, the notorious black metal experimentalists deliver their most aggressive and radical album yet. | Liturgy: H.A.Q.Q. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liturgy-haqq/ | H.A.Q.Q. | Liturgy tend to sort listeners into cynics and disciples. The first camp views the group as posers overthinking intentionally atavistic music—de facto trolls, making headlines for diatribes about their music’s transcendental intentions and its philosophical underpinnings. For the second camp, Liturgy are unapologetic radicals, channeling the basic spirit and sounds of black metal into experimental upheaval.
H.A.Q.Q., Liturgy’s fourth album, confirms what must have been right all along: The truth exists somewhere in the middle. Liturgy offer bait for the haters right there on the cover, with the philosophical framework of founder Hunter Hunt-Hendrix—divided, for your convenience, into four categories, like Axiology and Cosmogony—serving as the album’s stark artwork. And Greg Fox, the hyper-precise drummer that even the naysayers respected, is gone. On the other hand, nothing else sounds quite like these nine volatile tracks, where electronic interference interrupts full-metal sprints and where hoarse screams and mutated strings bleed into one. Yes, H.A.Q.Q. cements Liturgy’s try-hard reputation. But it’s kind of thrilling to hear any band try this hard.
For Hunt-Hendrix, Liturgy were always a way to explore his ideas about existence, which could make for an uncomfortable band power balance. Indeed, tensions over their dynamic led to a hiatus after 2011’s high-water mark Aesthethica. Only Hunt-Hendrix and guitarist Bernard Gann remain for H.A.Q.Q, with Fox replaced by ringer Leo Didkovsky and bassist Tyler Dusenbury swapped out for the versatile Tia Vincent-Clark. If you never checked the credits, you may never notice the difference: The rhythm section still flips between sprint and silence with light-switch precision, and the blast beats (yes, Hunt-Hendrix still calls them “burst beats”) continue to expand and contract, like lungs in the middle of a marathon.
But for Hunt-Hendrix and Gann, the lineup change feels like a permission slip to pursue a more aggressive and demanding version of Liturgy. Those stilted rap verses of The Ark Work notwithstanding, Liturgy have never bulldozed so many disparate sounds into the same claustrophobic space. During “HAJJ,” a lugubrious choir competes, at once, with tentacular harp lines, curdled screams, and guitar lines that prick like pins or slash like rusted razors. “God of Love”—perhaps the quintessential Liturgy track—buttresses wild expanses of black metal with a little choir of glockenspiel and vibraphone. They form intricate shapes within the din, creating a disorienting sense of infinite scale.
There’s never very much quarter during H.A.Q.Q., either. Liturgy’s interludes long doubled as the ellipses between connected thoughts, a brief shelter before the next wave hit. But here, these instrumentals are perhaps the most uneasy pieces. “Exaco I,” for instance, recalls the crisscrossing density of composer Conlon Nancarrow—who wrote pieces so tangled he composed them for the player piano—but as pounded out by Cecil Taylor. (Gann’s father, Kyle, is a Nancarrow scholar.) The chiming bells and disembodied operatic vocals of “Exaco II” feel like a moonlit stroll through an ancient graveyard. The album fades away with three minutes of miasmic solo guitar, the distortion strangling each note into one last gasp. It’s the ringing left in your ears after the music is over.
Parts of H.A.Q.Q. feel inchoate. And you’ll likely tire of Hunt-Hendrix’s new habit of splicing glitches inside these songs, a device meant to ratchet up tension that mostly produces tedium. But watch Hunt-Hendrix talk about his philosophy, his eyes darting uneasily in bed as he tries to define these ideas. Then listen to these songs, primal and often ecstatic expressions of something bigger than himself. If his ideas are a work in progress, the purpose of Liturgy is to test them, a process bound to include a little failure. | 2019-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | YLYLCYN | November 19, 2019 | 7.6 | 778dd92f-69d8-43f0-aa40-162394acd7b0 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The soundtrack to an imaginary theme park where people reconnect with nature and spirituality, the Beijing producer’s album combines traditional Chinese references with wild electronic experimentation. | The soundtrack to an imaginary theme park where people reconnect with nature and spirituality, the Beijing producer’s album combines traditional Chinese references with wild electronic experimentation. | Howie Lee: Birdy Island | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/howie-lee-birdy-island/ | Birdy Island | There’s a reason rural escapism in China has risen over the past several years. Millions are drawn to lifestyle vloggers like Li Ziqi and Dianxi Xiaoge, who portray idyllic countryside lives spent creating everything from food to clothing from scratch. There’s even a small but notable group of young people called fanxiang qingnian, who, in a departure from China’s mass rural-to-urban migration of the past four decades, have opted to return to farm life. Of course, Chinese nationalism and the state’s push to promote Chinese culture do play a role, but the fact remains that China’s rapid economic growth, not unlike that of its American counterpart, has left its people wanting something more.
On Birdy Island, producer Howie Lee takes this desire and projects it into the future, applying it to the question of what follows society’s collapse under capitalism. The artist imagines a scenario that is by turns dystopic and hopeful, in which a Chinese investment company has decided to fund a theme park aimed at reconnecting people with nature and spirituality. The park is located on a floating island (the album’s namesake), where birds and ancestral spirits commingle. Lee, as a character in this musical metafiction, has been hired to score its soundtrack.
In reality, the Beijing producer, née Li Huadi, began piecing together Birdy Island in late 2018, between multiple albums, EPs, and single releases. Since 2011, when he co-founded Do Hits as a club night, and later an independent label, Lee has pushed the bounds of what Chinese electronic music can be. Like much of his work, Birdy Island concerns itself with the social and economic questions of contemporary life in China, while looking to the (admittedly bleak) future. At once fine-grained and expansive, Lee’s work combines traditional Chinese music and historical references with wild electronic experimentation. But where past releases (2020’s 7 Weapon Series, 2019’s Tian Di Bu Ren, 2018’s Natural Disaster) were more abrasive, tongue in cheek, and club-influenced, Birdy Island admits more daylight, often conveyed through washes of ambient sound, even as it continues to cast long shadows.
Like many works of science fiction, Birdy Island blurs the line between the natural, supernatural, and man-made. The result feels something like a mash-up of a Daoist landscape painting and Coney Island, situated on Ghibli’s Laputa. There, during the day, feathered life forms announce themselves via digital blips and whoops. At night, bits of industrial debris rattle down alleyways, as if suggesting the presence of unseen forces. On opening track “Time to the Sun,” a tottering medley of machine parts, synthetic owl hoots, and tama-like drum licks gathers in the glow of dawn. An otherworldly voice (belonging to artist and frequent collaborator Yehaiyahan) emerges, singing in Mandarin, “Push open the door of aspiration/Hide the chaos of yesterday [...] It is time/To face the sun.” Here, as throughout the album, the human voice serves as a touchstone to both earthly and spiritual worlds. “Wave, Wave, Wave,” for example, follows a jaunty synth-based accordion melody over unstable percussive terrain before resolving into a choral arrangement reminiscent of Daoist temple chanting.
Yet while the park attempts to manufacture an experience that provides respite from capitalist destruction, it is also inherently tied to those very forces. As a result, it is impossible to shake a creeping sense of discord. In multiple instances, variations of a lopsided jack-in-the-box motif appear, including one played on what sounds like the dissonant left side of a guzheng (“The Door of Aspiration”). In “Island Birdy,” the trills of a yangqin (Chinese hammered dulcimer) needle over washes of ambient synth as a low, pulsing synth foreshadows the ominous dagu war drumming to come. At other times, Lee taps into easily identifiable sonic tropes, such as “Caribbean” cruise music or video-game soundtracks, to evoke alternate realities (“Feather Signifier”). These constantly shifting settings trigger a sense of disorientation that reflects the strangeness of his elaborate sonic fictions.
Despite all of this, the album is not exactly nihilistic. In the end, Birdy Island proposes a kind of hopeful syncretism, reaching back into traditional Chinese spiritual practices and finding a place for them within the destructive wake of neoliberal economics. It is also a documentation of both the beauty and the corruption of a culture that is sometimes romanticized, frequently villainized, but always human.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Mais Um Discos | April 16, 2021 | 7.6 | 7790d2dd-fcc5-4021-b499-a04825aea4e2 | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | |
With layered guitars, drifting arrangements, and gently ambiguous songwriting, Kayla Cohen and her band invoke dream worlds and trance states. | With layered guitars, drifting arrangements, and gently ambiguous songwriting, Kayla Cohen and her band invoke dream worlds and trance states. | Itasca: Imitation of War | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/itasca-imitation-of-war/ | Imitation of War | Some people play the guitar like they want to caress it; some play like they want to destroy it. Kayla Cohen, who has been recording under the moniker Itasca for around a decade, handles the guitar like she is feeling her way through a lucid dream, cutting through the fog with bright, exploratory lines. Imitation of War, her first release in more than four years, makes the searching motion of her playing its motivating principle. The result is an album conversant in a certain language of post-punk, dual-guitar rock—that of, say, Television or Pavement—but whose animating spirit lies somewhere else entirely. Over a suite of patient songs that don’t so much stretch out as tunnel inward, Cohen and her band render richly textured guitar-rock dreamscapes that nonetheless feel grounded and immediate.
Cohen’s songs can sound loose and jammy on a first listen. The delicate strummed figure that kicks off opener “Milk” quickly refracts into pinwheeling dual leads—both played by Cohen, uncannily evoking a live performance—before the band settles into a groove, anchored by Evan Backer’s sensitive bass playing and Daniel Swire’s crisp drums (Evan Burrows plays drums on two other tracks). Cosmic doodles of electric guitar wind their way around the spare, fingerpicked “Under Gates of Cobalt Blue.” But after a few listens, you start to feel the contours of a deeper sculptural form undergirding the music. Progressions postpone resolution; lyrics loop back on themselves like truncated villanelles. Cohen heavily favors suspended chord voicings that hover in a zone of harmonic ambiguity. Despite all the dreaminess, the sounds are warm and clear; there is very little reverb or other production shortcuts to transcendence—just a light coating of quavering chorus effect on the guitars. It is as if all the restless motion is happening on the surface of the music, and beneath it there is a vast, taut stillness.
“Stillness” is the first word Cohen sings on Imitation of War, and it returns throughout in various guises. In the title track, she inhabits the perspective of a painter struggling to capture a flash of sublimity; she imagines herself as “a saint there on the chapel font”—which is to say, frozen, carved into a hard surface, potentially martyred. Even this grim form of inertia would offer reprieve, perhaps, from the shapeless turmoil the songs’ protagonists seem to face. They set out on quests: Some “set sail on the maelstrom” and travel the road to El Dorado, while others try for more metaphysical feats, like reaching out to touch a moment and threading tears through a needle’s eye. These songs are dream worlds where such things are possible. Cohen has explained in interviews that she wrote Imitation of War under the influence of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychoanalyst and mystic, theorist of dreams and archetypes. From him, she took the idea that a song can be an “alternate reality” accessible through a “trance state.”
The goal here is not to reach the grail, but simply to prolong the reverie. “I knew the road to my El Dorado,” Cohen sings, just barely above a whisper, on “El Dorado,” the album’s glittering standout track. “But I was caught looking at the weeds.” She sings it wistfully, but such a detour might not be an entirely bad thing. Imitation of War gives form to the impulse to let one’s attention slacken and drift, to get waylaid along the hero’s journey and let it dilate into something weirder and maybe truer. | 2024-02-16T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-16T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Paradise of Bachelors | February 16, 2024 | 7.4 | 77916d1f-a346-4eba-b63a-7f214eddb540 | Mitch Therieau | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mitch-therieau/ | |
For his fourth solo album, the southern California rocker retreated to a cabin and wrote songs full of doubt and existential anxiety. | For his fourth solo album, the southern California rocker retreated to a cabin and wrote songs full of doubt and existential anxiety. | Mikal Cronin: Seeker | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mikal-cronin-seeker/ | Seeker | To overcome an uncharacteristic bout of writer’s block, Mikal Cronin took the took the time-honored sequester-yourself-in-a-cabin approach and emerged with the songs on Seeker, his fourth solo album. A longtime collaborator with other Southern California acts, he enlisted members of the Ty Segall Freedom Band, and despite that group’s penchant for raucousness, out came a mild, confounding blend of twangy power pop, like reaching for half and half and guzzling skim. Cronin’s wistful vocals land on lofty themes—death, rebirth, cleansing fire—but the sound itself is a shrug, a noncommittal exploration of big ideas that never quite reaches an exclamation point, let alone a big impact.
“I feel it all,” Cronin insists on the track of the same name, and yet, over the plinks of piano keys, one might ask impatiently, “What? What do you feel?!” For an album supposedly full of introspection, Seeker remains frustratingly vague. On the song “Fire,” which (as he tells it) gave the record its direction, he sings “red embers float above the front yard.” It’s an image that ought to carry some apocalyptic menace, but his delivery suggests falling leaves instead.
Cronin’s music has always been ingratiating, but that quality works against his material here, which yearns for something deeper or darker. There are clear limits to the affability that makes some of his previous singles so winsome. “Show Me” starts by teasing some serpentine Tom Petty power chords, and Cronin has a cocksure delivery, but the simmer is cooled by a tepid chorus. The song, like many on Seeker, feels like an almost-anthem, a half-decent rock song a few jolts and surprises away from becoming a good one.
“Caravan” is another example of this “almost, not quite” feeling. The chugging distorted guitars snarl at us and a saxophone honks, raising faint hopes of some Stooges-style mayhem, but the bar-band chug stays contentedly mid-tempo. Lacking a hook, many of these songs feel unsure of what exactly they’re meant to be—a ballad a la Big Star’s “September Gurls” (particularly “Lost a Year”)? Garage rock?
On closer “On the Shelf,” he sits down with just an acoustic guitar and reconnects to some of the warmth and immediacy of his best work. He’s always had a good ear for affecting closers, and the song could be straight from the back half of Big Star’s #1. “We’ll fall in love and fuck the nonsense; it’s not for us,” he sings, charmingly. It’s the only real cri de coeur on the album, the only time he seems to stare us directly in the eyes.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | October 31, 2019 | 5.6 | 779602c9-d56e-4391-b81e-99dcdbcd1ffd | Linnie Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/linnie-greene/ | |
On his first album in six years, the Vermont-based musician continues to flesh out lush, melancholy house music with amateur vocals sourced from the internet. | On his first album in six years, the Vermont-based musician continues to flesh out lush, melancholy house music with amateur vocals sourced from the internet. | The Range: Mercury | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-range-mercury/ | Mercury | James Hinton is an excavator. Over the past decade-plus he’s spent making music as the Range, he’s trawled through the unattended corners of YouTube, Instagram, and Periscope in search of vocals, most of them largely ignored by platform algorithms and the larger listening public alike. As of 2022, that strategy has grown less unusual, especially as the rise of TikTok has sent pretty much every A&R rep with a pulse scrambling online to find the next viral talent. Hinton, however, takes a more nuanced approach, having developed a specific set of search parameters to maximize his chances of striking internet gold. He’s not looking for hit songs; he’s looking for unpolished gems, fragments of speech and emotionally resonant turns of phrase that he can transform into pieces of electronic pop perfection.
Hinton’s technique has remained fairly consistent; his latest full-length, Mercury, largely relies upon the same methodologies as his 2013 breakthrough LP, Nonfiction, and its 2016 follow-up, Potential. As such, the new album represents something more like a refresh of his sound, rather than a full-blown reinvention. Its 11 tracks allude to various strains of dance music (’90s rave and classic grime most prominently) but largely steer clear of the actual dancefloor, basking instead in moments of gauzy melancholy and wistful reflection. Elements of soul, hip-hop, and R&B all factor into the mix as well, but at his core, Hinton is a pop artist, and a meticulous one at that. (Given his attention to detail, it might not be surprising to learn that he studied theoretical physics at Brown University and has admitted to being the kind of guy who does math problems for fun in his spare time.)
His methods are remarkably effective. From the rave-lite R&B of LP opener “Bicameral”—a song that makes the Bicep catalog sound like the work of hardened street toughs—to the twinkling gospel flight of “Cantor,” the album is bursting with bright colors and the stickiest of sing-along melodies. Mercury is notably warmer than its predecessors, and even as it glides between compact bits of woozy UK rap (“Urethane”), gloriously shambling soul (“Ricercar”), and tinkling garage laments (“Not for Me”), there’s an obvious universality to Hinton’s work. Referring to something as “Spotify-core” wouldn’t normally be a compliment, but every song on Mercury seems perfectly suited for today’s streaming culture, in which listeners expect big feelings (and even bigger hooks) in taut pop packages. There’s no fat or excess in a track like “1995,” even as it somehow squeezes plaintive piano, MPC boom-bap, a My Bloody Valentine sample, and the soulfully longing croon of vocalist Toiya Etheridge into less than four minutes.
For all his songwriting prowess, there is something extractive about Hinton’s process. Many of the voices on the album are by Black singers, and are being used by Hinton (a white guy currently living in Vermont) to further his craft. His use of Black voices as an expressive tool—a practice that producers have leaned on for decades, often without asking permission—may not be intentional or even conscious, but it underscores troubling power dynamics within not just the music industry, but society at large. To Hinton’s credit, he’s worked to make sure that the artists he’s sampled for the new album not only grant him permission, but also receive a songwriting credit, along with a share of the publishing—just as he did with Potential. That model may not be perfect, but it’s at least a step in the right direction; it’s also a kind of acknowledgement on Hinton’s part that there are things that he can’t do, and though he relies on strangers on the internet to fully realize his musical vision, he’s willing to compensate them for work that they’d initially put out into the world for free.
Hinton’s YouTube mining habits, and subsequent songwriting, feel distinctly contemporary. In a time when memes—themselves an elaborate form of (often uncredited) cultural recycling—have become a valid form of nuanced expression, why wouldn’t musicians source anything and everything at their disposal in an effort to most effectively communicate their emotions? Creation is increasingly defined by recontextualization, and when everyone is constantly being bombarded with content, perceptions of authenticity often become uncoupled from scrutiny of artists’ individual processes. Hinton’s own voice doesn’t show up on his latest LP, but it doesn’t have to. His songs tug at heartstrings all the same, and in a cultural landscape where “Does this make you feel something?” is now the predominant question, Mercury is sure to prompt a resounding yes. | 2022-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Domino | June 11, 2022 | 7.3 | 77987cbf-ef2d-463f-b5d0-88ab819e77ee | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
A new compilation recaps the career of the Belgian synth-pop trio, whose futuristic kitsch stretched from the Eurovision Song Contest to the roots of Detroit techno. | A new compilation recaps the career of the Belgian synth-pop trio, whose futuristic kitsch stretched from the Eurovision Song Contest to the roots of Detroit techno. | Telex: This Is Telex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/telex-this-is-telex/ | This Is Telex | When Belgian musicians Dan Lacksman and Marc Moulin first joined forces as Telex in the late 1970s, the goal, Lacksman said last year, “was to do something not serious,” like taking a well-known French song and make it as slow as possible. It was Moulin who suggested couching their hijinks in synth pop’s minimalism.
Lacksman already had ample experience making slight and silly music with modular synthesizers. Recording with his EMS VCS 3 as the Electronic System, he scored a European hit with “Coconut,” a jaunty, bleep-heavy novelty in the mode of Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn.” With the royalties from that single, Lacksman bought a Moog module—Moulin already had his own MiniMoog—that became the central instrument on a series of albums that further blurred the lines between bubblegum pop and disco.
With vocalist Michel Moers in the mix, Lacksman and Moulin developed a sound that was both futuristic and slightly tacky—like dancing to “Autobahn” while sipping a frothy drink in a seaside disco. The six albums that the trio released were knowingly goofy yet thoughtfully composed, much like the work of Sparks, with whom Telex would collaborate. Along the way, the group managed to make a modest splash on the charts, represent Belgium in the 1980 Eurovision Song Contest, and, as promised, slow Plastic Bertrand’s “Ça plane pour moi” to a sultry crawl.
That song is unfortunately absent from This Is Telex, but the compilation does provide a delightful overview of the trio’s work. Spanning three decades, the kitschy covers and playful originals collected here may not be as instantly recognizable as those of the synth-pop groups that emerged alongside them. But Telex’s bubbly energy and club-ready rhythms were just as influential to the first wave of techno and house DJs and producers. (The Detroit group A Number of Names were supposedly inspired by Telex’s “Moskow Diskow” when they recorded the 1981 single “Sharevari,” considered one of Detroit techno’s first tracks; in 1998, Carl Craig would remix Telex’s hit.)
This Is Telex runs in chronological order, and the sequencing demonstrates how Telex stayed true to their whimsical M.O. even as they brought new instruments into their arsenal. With two tracks culled from the group’s 1979 debut, Looking for Saint Tropez, the trio speed up the Trans-Europe Express on “Moskow Diskow” and put a synthesized spin on “Twist à Saint-Tropez,” a yé-yé single originally recorded in 1962 by French band Les Chats Sauvages. On selections from their final album, How Do You Dance?—released in 2006, after an 18-year absence—Telex are still up to their old tricks, turning Sparks’ “The Number One Song in Heaven” into a throbbing lament and rock standard “La Bamba” into a robotic trudge.
Telex’s most fascinating material arrived between those bookending albums. Encouraged by their label to enter the 1980 Eurovision Song Contest, the trio wrote “Euro-Vision,” a part tribute/part send-up of the annual competition. The lyrics poke gently at the ephemeral quality of most Eurovision songs, while the music is the sort of jaunty earworm that tends to perform well in the contest. Telex hoped that with their song and their adorably stiff performance, they would place last. But thanks to a surprise vote from Portugal, Belgium finished 17th out of 19 nations.
The group’s most impressive effort was their 1981 album Sex, which they recorded with Ron and Russel Mael of Sparks. The two bands were introduced by mutual acquaintance Lio, a Belgian pop singer and model, and quickly set about collaborating. The two tracks from Sex are a perfect wedding of the Maels’ arch, detailed lyrics (“Medium toast/Time to blow nose/Extraordinaire,” Mors sings with flat affect on “Drama Drama”) and Telex’s spare, bouncy production. Lacksman would later return the favor by helping engineer Sparks’ 1983 album In Outer Space at his Synsound Studios in Brussels.
This Is Telex does a good job of presenting the less-than-serious intentions of the trio, but the curation could be stronger. Placing undue emphasis on the group’s covers, the tracklisting skips over solid fare like the Art of Noise-esque “Peanuts” or “A/B,” their chirpy ode to listening to the flipside of singles. More than some of the original material included here, those songs show how Lacksman and Moulin evolved as composers as they added samplers and sequencers into the mix. But even with those oversights, this compilation makes a fine introduction to Telex’s quirky spirit and breezy sound.
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. | 2021-05-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Mute | May 1, 2021 | 6.6 | 7798a3e1-c350-41b9-a8a1-ed008e6e8b4d | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
In a recording from Berlin’s Atonal festival captured on camera mics in the crowd, the Danish electronic musician melds the sanctity of live music with the profanity of eavesdropping on strangers. | In a recording from Berlin’s Atonal festival captured on camera mics in the crowd, the Danish electronic musician melds the sanctity of live music with the profanity of eavesdropping on strangers. | Astrid Sonne: Ephemeral Camera Feed | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/astrid-sonne-ephemeral-camera-feed/ | Ephemeral Camera Feed | It is a warm August night in Berlin in 2018. Inside a former power plant located by the River Spree, people stand between towering columns under red lights that color a dense fog. With varying degrees of attention they listen to a performance by the Copenhagen-based artist Astrid Sonne, a progressive composer who melds synthesizers with classical instrumentation to craft complex compositions. She is debuting a new piece titled Ephemera. Meanwhile, two camera operators are filming Sonne’s performance from different perspectives, one static and one handheld. Four years later, the footage will yield an unusual document of the night.
Using the audio from those video recordings, Sonne composed Ephemeral Camera Feed, an EP that captures the spatiotemporal nature of live music. Rather than editing a clean line-in recording of the performance, Sonne uses camera mics, in essence capturing vibrations passing through air from different vantage points. The music is situated within the venue with all its incidental ambience, coughs and chatter from the crowd turned unintelligible by the hall’s reverberance. In doing so, Sonne highlights how venues act as vessels for moving air. The space becomes a container for not only its inhabitants but also the waveforms she produces.
The performance took place at Atonal festival at Kraftwerk Berlin, an industrial venue originally constructed as a power plant in the 1960s to provide energy to residents of East Berlin. The event space inhabits the plant’s 100-meter turbine, whose awe-inspiring proportions offer anything but a neutral listening experience. Ephemeral Camera Feed uses the shifting dynamics within that space to create a visceral, somatic experience for the audience. Sonne had previously released raw audio of the camera footage, and although this edited EP sounds cleaner, it’s still spacious.
On “Ephemeral I,” hopeful strings float over hisses of fog and idle chatter. Attendees are heard clearing their throats, whispering, and laughing. It’s hard to hear what they’re saying, but certain sharp consonants cut percussively through the music. I almost want to shush them, but then I’d be weirder than the weird guy on the subway who laughs loudly while listening to podcasts. Also I’d lose my place in this space, a simulation of being surrounded by strangers all facing the same way. It allows me to imagine what couldn’t be captured in audio: the lights, the air, the floor, the rumble. Sometimes the sounds can mimic the physical, with synths piercing the venue like light through fog. Recorded electronic music often exists in a void: Sound waves generated by machines encased in steel and plastic are sent to our ears through digital means. On Ephemeral Camera Feed, the physical space is as important as the music itself.
“Ephemeral III” begins with synth stabs that act like ellipses, punctuating the stillness to create tension before an onslaught of arpeggiated plucks urgently fills the venue with reverberance. By now nobody is talking; the room is too preoccupied with bracing itself against the intensity of Sonne’s music. Listening to the track on the train to work, I dream about being pummeled by waveforms at the venue: my head smacked into a dizzying haze, my chest vibrating as my heartbeat rises, my feet trembling as I try to hold my body up. The synths phase hypnotically and the track culminates in a dense flurry of overlapping arpeggios that flood the venue.
The music on Ephemeral Camera Feed moves from ear to ear, entering and exiting from different directions, detailing the architecture of the room. A growling bass synth mimics a vibrating floor on “Ephemeral II,” which is emphasized when someone drops what sounds like a lighter. Ominous sirens wander the hall on “Ephemeral IV,” howling and echoing against walls. The crowd converses under the electrocardiogram-like beeps that open “Ephemeral V” before the synth lines expand and start maneuvering through conversations. Sonne melds the sanctity of experiencing live music with the profanity of eavesdropping on strangers. Ephemeral Camera Feed carries the weight, length, and height of the space and all that it contains. The cliche is to say music has a way of transporting you to another world, but with these pieces, I feel less at peace and more jealous about the fact that I wasn’t there. Fortunately, thanks to Sonne’s unusual document, I almost feel like I was. | 2022-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Escho | April 20, 2022 | 7.6 | 77a5f1df-b0d8-4438-a272-6cd62b3502c4 | Arjun Ram Srivatsa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arjun-ram srivatsa / | |
Singing and rapping in Korean and English, the Los Angeles-based electronic producer takes tentative steps toward reinventing herself as a songwriter. | Singing and rapping in Korean and English, the Los Angeles-based electronic producer takes tentative steps toward reinventing herself as a songwriter. | 박혜진 Park Hye Jin: Before I Die | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/park-hye-jin-before-i-die/ | Before I Die | In the past three years,박혜진 Park Hye Jin has moved from Seoul to Melbourne to London to Los Angeles. Before I Die, her first full-length, which she made entirely during the pandemic, excavates the feelings of isolation and vulnerability triggered by those transitions: the injustice of feeling wronged, the ache of familial longing, the loss of her sense of self. Where 2018’s breakthrough EP If U Want It and 2020’s How Can I EP focused on dreamy house production with forays into experimental club, juke, and techno, Before I Die expands into trap, industrial techno, and downtempo alongside her typical atmospheric house productions. She also incorporates more storytelling into her lyrics this time, using Korean to illuminate specific incidents and English to convey her feelings in broad strokes. At its best, the album explores the contours of an emotional journey in space and time. Occasionally, though, scattered moods and unfocused songwriting blunt the record’s impact.
Hye Jin frequently explores the way that loneliness can open up into emptiness. A soft haze hangs over much of her production, as if suggesting the fluidity between her conscious and subconscious. On the wistful “Let’s Sing Let’s Dance,” her husky vocals—“I sing on sad days,” goes the Korean-language refrain—drift over lounge-y piano chords and a mellow four-on-the-floor thump. On “I Need You,” twinkling piano lines and skittering hi-hats suggest the feeling of being kept awake by restless thoughts: “I’m up all night again,” she sings, in Korean. “It seems only the moonlight knows where you are.” On the title track, her longing takes on an almost aquatic quality as a blurry, marimba-like synth motif buoys her plaintive English-language vocals: “I miss my mom/I miss my dad/I miss my sister/I miss my brother.”
Before I Die is full of references to days and nights and the patterns that repeat within them. “Good Morning Good Night,” for example, is a sort of numbed-out recitation of quotidian gestures. From within a reverb-heavy echo chamber reminiscent of a Grouper song, Hye Jin drawls, “Good morning, good night/It’s already evening/How was your day?/Hope you had a good day.” Her tone feels intentionally inert, a way of pointing up the meaningless repetition of going through the motions. By contrast, on her dancier tracks, she shakes herself out of these doldrums into a different space-time continuum altogether: that of the club. On the housey “Where Are You Think,” a metronome-like tick cuts through a crunchy, bass-heavy beat as Hye Jin hypnotically repeats the titular phrase. Meanwhile, the industrial techno track “Hey, Hey, Hey,” utilizes repetition as a means of suspending time, which is, after all, what good club music does.
But there are times when Hye Jin’s repetitive, minimalist production becomes static, almost generic, particularly on trap tracks “Sunday ASAP” and “Whatchu Doin Later.” Elsewhere, the lyrics themselves grate. “Never Give Up” is built around the heavily repeated refrain, “When they treat me just like bullshit.” “Can I Get Your Number” opens with a simple two-track loop vaguely reminiscent of the wobbly bass and finger snaps of a Bay Area hip-hop track, which ought to give the artist plenty of space to flex. Instead, Hye Jin loops her voice into an unconvincing imitation of a ghetto-house track: “We can fuck I wanna fuck.” On “Sex With ME (DEFG),” which can be read as a sequel to IF U WANT IT’s “ABC,” she raps, switching between English and Korean, “Don’t be shy, say it’s OK, just leave it up to you, say I’m your dad.” Perhaps pent-up pandemic horniness is partly to blame, but on both occasions, her entreaties sound forced and awkward.
And yet, listening to the rest of the album, it’s easy to see how this attempt at a hard, brash exterior likely has to do with self-protection. Hye Jin has, after all, been screwed over by scammers (“Never Give Up”), doubted by those around her (“i jus wanna be happy”), and uprooted not only from loved ones (“Before I Die”) but also from herself. On the album’s most personal song, “Where Did I Go?,” the artist looks to fill her loneliness not with sexual, romantic, or even familial intimacy, but rather with connection to herself. Against a gauzy curtain of jazz piano chords, Hye Jin reminisces about an image of cotton candy, now lost, that she used to draw as a child. “Where’d it go?” she repeats, as if finding it would allow her to unlock some essential part of herself. Yet try as she might, she can’t. Her longing curls around itself, as if circling a drain, before disappearing once again into shadow.
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. | 2021-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | September 14, 2021 | 6.5 | 77a88f20-1429-47c4-8261-075d22633436 | Minna Zhou | https://pitchfork.com/staff/minna-zhou/ | |
A collaboration between English extreme-metal quartet Dragged Into Sunlight and Dutch noise musician Mories, N.V. is both a supergroup-like meeting of the minds and an empty exercise in envelope pushing for its own sake. | A collaboration between English extreme-metal quartet Dragged Into Sunlight and Dutch noise musician Mories, N.V. is both a supergroup-like meeting of the minds and an empty exercise in envelope pushing for its own sake. | Dragged Into Sunlight / Gnaw Their Tongues: N.V. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21242-nv/ | N.V. | "That's when my rape fantasies first started, when I was in college," explains the late serial killer Michael Ross, who is centrally featured on the aptly titled "Visceral Repulsion", perhaps the most jarring example of the pointless and even malicious shock that characterizes N.V*.* A collaboration between English extreme-metal quartet Dragged Into Sunlight and Dutch noise musician Maurice "Mories" de Jong, who releases music under several monikers and has put out upwards of 30 records as Gnaw Their Tongues, N.V. ("negative volume") is littered with samples of true-crime confessions from the likes of Ross.
As if his presence weren't unpleasant enough, the sample delves into the various techniques Ross used to murder his victims. Presumably, the team of artists who made N.V. would argue that real-life horror is fair game for evoking a reaction(namely: disgust) with art. In fact, judging from two recent interviews, it seems likely that Dragged Into Sunlight even managed to disturb themselves with this record, and that de Jong draws from headline-news violence in his work because it genuinely frightens him. Not to mention that the sound clips are lifted from TV documentaries that sensationalize these acts while purporting to condemn them.
Still, the inclusion of these samples is flat-out despicable and speaks volumes about how decades of desensitization have blurred not only the lines of good taste but of common decency as well. If N.V. is any indication, actual murder has become indistinguishable from any other image we passively ingest from the safe, numb remove of our computer monitors. Once artists adopt "extremity" as the cowardly affectation that it is, they leave themselves little choice but to keep pushing the envelope. The musicians on N.V. would probably insist that they went this far precisely because they wanted to make the audience feel something. But to indulge them in a rewardless thought-loop by debating their intentions is to allow them to manipulate you and waste your time.
It's a shame, because N.V.'s lurid first-person homicide monologues overshadow its wealth of sonic character. Both of these acts are defined by their (arguably unparalleled) ability to create atmosphere, which makes their yin-yang pairing a natural fit that, on paper, overflows with possibilities. Judging from their respective bodies of work, there's no doubt that Dragged Into Sunlight and Gnaw Their Tongues could have rendered tunes like "Visceral Repulsion" scary—and taken the audience into a truly murderous, sexually depraved headspace—through other, more imaginative means. Pig Destroyer frontman-lyricist J.R. Hayes, for example, scares the daylights out of you and dives even further into the same thematic terrain but manages to get there without trampling on anyone's grave.
Billed as a joint effort, N.V. actually bears the stamp of two other significant contributors, Godflesh/Jesu founder Justin Broadrick and Corrupt Moral Altar drummer-producer Tom Dring. Having produced the first two DIS albums, Dring once again had a hand in shaping the sounds throughout the making of N.V., while Broadrick stepped in as co-producer and sonic overseer later, during the mixing stages. By that point, the initial collaboration had yielded three hours' worth of raw material spanning five years' worth of on-again, off-again back and forth with DIS and de Jong working out of their respective homebases in England and the Netherlands.
Stretched as it was over time, distance, and multiple perspectives, N.V. sounds surprisingly focused and, musically speaking, rather non-indulgent (perhaps because Broadrick, Dring, DIS, and de Jong boiled the final product down to a 32-minute runtime). Broadrick's input is somewhat difficult to discern, but de Jong's touch saturates this music. Even in the spots where Dragged Into Sunlight blasts away and it seems like there's no room to cram in any more sonic information, de Jong is there, hovering like a toxic, mind-altering haze that burns your eyes, chokes your throat, and soaks into your skin -- sensations that are not without their appeal.
Dragged Into Sunlight had already created a sense of psych-ward hysteria with the black-grind hybrid they established as far back as 2008's Terminal Aggressor, and their ability to use raw ingredients like cymbal wash, inhuman-sounding vocal shrieks, reverbs, and delays gave their music a queasy hall-of-mirrors feel that set the band apart from other likeminded peers. On N.V*.*, they turn to Mories as a kind of set designer who fleshes out and brings spacial and tactile dimension to the Liverpool quartet's caustic exorcisms.
Naturally, as an almost supergroup-like meeting of the minds between three highly production-conscious acts, N.V. is crammed with details that don't initially reveal themselves. But even if de Jong and Dragged Into Sunlight grasp the scale of the tragedies they've chosen to rub the audience's nose in, the fact is they're contributing to trivializing the victims in these cases. Will listeners respond to N.V. the way we might once have tittered at the gross-out slasher fantasies on early Cannibal Corpse records, or will they recognize the distinction?
At this stage in the game, metal bands should consider it their creative if not human responsibility to view these well-worn subjects through new lenses. Being "more extreme" for its own sake is not only lame but creatively and ethically bankrupt. That said, there is undeniably an art to N.V.'s execution. Together, its participants combine layers of abrasion that can be rewarding if you can, well, get past the visceral repulsion. | 2015-11-23T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-11-23T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Metal | Prosthetic | November 23, 2015 | 5.5 | 77aaec5e-2957-4983-8062-3d73a5a3b85e | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross strike a tone similar to their soundtrack work, alternating between hope and dread in sprawling ambient meditations released in response to the coronavirus pandemic. | Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross strike a tone similar to their soundtrack work, alternating between hope and dread in sprawling ambient meditations released in response to the coronavirus pandemic. | Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts V: Together / Ghosts VI: Locusts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nine-inch-nails-ghosts-v-together-ghosts-vi-locusts/ | Ghosts V: Together / Ghosts VI: Locusts | It was right and proper of Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor to name his expansive, four-volume 2008 suite of instrumental work Ghosts; in the Dickensian sense, they foretold his future. Consisting more of sketches than songs—only six of the albums’ 36 tracks run over four minutes, often just barely—Ghosts presaged Reznor and his collaborator Atticus Ross’ work as soundtrack composers, a sideline that would soon compete with Nine Inch Nails as the pair’s creative outlet of choice. The music that resulted from this transition to instrumental recordings netted the pair an Oscar and often surpassed the quality of the films and television series it was written to accompany.
The fifth and sixth volumes of Ghosts (subtitled Together and Locusts respectively) return to the atmospheric terrain now familiar from Reznor and Ross’ soundtrack work: buzzy ambience, simple melodic hooks, an emotional palette that vacillates between peace and dread. But rather than soundtracking an on-screen drama, they arise from the very real COVID-19 pandemic and its society-wide remedy, social distancing. The musicians say that the current crisis was the reason they completed the two records in the first place, “as a means of staying somewhat sane.” As such, Ghosts V-VI—released for free less than two months after the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency—are very likely the first major albums to have been inspired by the coronavirus crisis.
These two Ghosts volumes feel much more concrete and ambitious than the original quartet. Each has its own clear-cut identity, too: Volume five (Together) has a more hopeful sound, while volume six (Locusts) is where the dread creeps in. And while the 2008 iteration’s songs were short as a rule, many of the tracks here are uncharacteristically sprawling. This isn’t about getting ideas down on tape and shooting them into the world—this is about identifying an emotional angle and working it as long and as hard as possible.
Maybe it’s because the tone better matches the animating spirit of the project, or maybe it’s simply because the pair have better ideas in a major key at the moment, but Ghosts V: Together is solidly the stronger of the two. Opening track “Letting Go While Holding On” begins with a woozy, eardrum-tickling buzz, adding a five-note melody and layered, synthesized vocals until it feels almost like a choral composition. It’s followed by “Together,” which employs the same basic structure to even stronger effect.
The album’s subsequent tracks each introduce a novel element or two into that basic template. “Out in the Open” begins with a sort of faux string section, lending it a filmic feel; “Apart” brings in a flute midway through; “Your Touch” adds science-fictional bleeps, sweeps, and creeps. Throughout, there’s a vibe of quiet optimism. By the time the closing track, “Still Right Here,” rolls around, you’re so used to ambient uplift that when a full-fledged rhythm erupts around the 4:30 mark, it’s as bracing as cold water in the face.
Ghosts VI: Locusts is Together’s opposite number. It’s anxious and anxiety-inducing, very much of a piece with Reznor and Ross’ Watchmen score; indeed, from its clockwork motif on down, the opening “The Cursed Clock” feels like an unused excerpt from that world of paranoid superheroes. To their credit, the composers introduce a slew of novel elements here—horns in “Around Every Corner” and “The Worriment Waltz,” a huge “The Perfect Drug”-style drum breakdown in “Run Like Hell,” the sound of some massive thing inhaling and exhaling in “Just Breathe,” a susurrus of sampled vocals in “Turn This Off Please,” a cyclical heartbeat in closing track “Almost Dawn.” Yet without Together’s relatively rousing melodic template and pacing to propel it, Locusts often feels like its titular swarm, devouring itself for 80-plus minutes until there’s not much left by the end.
Ghosts V-VI speak to their moment in just the way Reznor and Ross intended. Trapped in homes and apartments with only ourselves for company, we can all use music that feels as alternately hopeful and despairing as we do—and consuming it in two-and-a-half-hour chunks is not nearly the tall task it might have been a month ago. With these albums in your ear, you can soar and/or jitter at your leisure. | 2020-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 1, 2020 | 7.7 | 77ab2215-9473-4e69-b391-7813285296f6 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
Sample-happy electronic producer Jim-E Stack steps out with his debut full-length, which folds in influences like Baltimore club, electro, R&B, and dancehall. | Sample-happy electronic producer Jim-E Stack steps out with his debut full-length, which folds in influences like Baltimore club, electro, R&B, and dancehall. | Jim-E Stack: Tell Me I Belong | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19513-jim-e-stack-tell-me-i-belong/ | Tell Me I Belong | Brooklyn-based Jim-E Stack grew up in a pre-gentrified San Francisco, surrounded by a variety of different cultures and sounds; after an early stint as a drummer, he started making beats in high school, and though he was turned on to house music in his late teens, you can still hear echoes of all the styles he’s loved on his debut full length, Tell Me I Belong.
Much of Stack’s reputation comes from his live sets, and his feel for mood and transitions on the first half of the album justifies his reputation as a club DJ. Tell Me I Belong has a narrative ambition not often present on electronic LPs, and Stack takes plenty of time patiently building energy for the album’s early climax, “Reassuring”. Leading up to that track, the listener is taken on a slow climb through the mid-tempo Baltimore club-influenced “Run” and “Below”'s saccharine electro. “Reassuring” is the reward at the top of the mountain, a deep house jam with a screwed-up vocal sample, plaintive R&B keys, and a dancehall shuffle. The track that follows, “Everything to Say”, is the perfect denouement, and if Tell Me I Belong were an EP consisting of these five tracks, it would be hard to find anything wrong with it.
But the second half of the album is a lesser echo of the first, up to and including its vocal-looping climax, “Without”, which, at best, stands as a mere duplicate of “Reassuring”'s charms. Other counterpoints are similarly weak: the blocky stabs at house and B-more club on “Out of Mind” feel random when compared to the precision of “Run”, and the working man's samples-n-synths package on the one-minute, “Ease Up”, while an amusing diversion, could use a little extra weight.
When the second half of Tell Me I Belong finally deviates from the established blueprint, Stack comes through with “Wake”. It’s a full-fledged, album-ending anthem that manages to combine the emotional heights of “Reassuring” and “Without” with the sure-handed patience that marks the album’s superb sequencing. Skip to any two random points within the track, and there’s a chance that they’ll make absolutely no sense in relation to one another. But in real time, these disparate moments are smoothed out by Stack’s ability to shift gears with the speed and serenity of a Formula One driver. "Wake" is a reminder of Stack's talent as a storyteller; shame, then, that the narrative of Tell Me I Belong doubles back on itself halfway through the tale. | 2014-07-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2014-07-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Innovative Leisure | July 29, 2014 | 6.5 | 77af21ba-5b79-4f57-8be6-07ebab1eca3d | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The ambient, five-track mini-LP from the French producer further accentuates the wide-eyed rapture of her early work. | The ambient, five-track mini-LP from the French producer further accentuates the wide-eyed rapture of her early work. | Malibu: One Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/malibu-one-life/ | One Life | One of the highlights of Mono No Aware, an ambient compilation released in 2017 by the Berlin experimental label PAN, was “Held,” a beguiling track by a relatively obscure French producer named Malibu. The song moved through four distinct movements in just six minutes; its careful juxtaposition of elements—filmic synthesized strings, ASMR-grade whispers, an eerily Auto-Tuned lullaby—was reminiscent of an immaculately arranged terrarium. But despite the promise contained in that verdant miniature world, for anyone wanting more from Malibu, pickings were slim.
There was a vaporous abstraction on the Astral Plane label’s Psychotropia compilation, from 2015, and a milky ambient sketch, “i can see hills,” that Malibu had self-released on Bandcamp at the beginning of 2017. (Bizarrely, the cover art was a screenshot of the logo of Bedrock Records, John Digweed’s famously emotive progressive-house label, suggesting that for all the seeming seriousness of Malibu’s music, she did not lack for a cryptic sense of irony.) A year after Mono No Aware, she returned to Bandcamp with an Auto-Tuned cover of José González’s “Crosses.” But aside from a few early, exploratory pieces on SoundCloud, that was pretty much it.
One listener eager for more was the ambient composer Julianna Barwick, who discovered the French producer’s music in the background of an Instagram video. “I let the video cycle seemingly endlessly as I thought, this is maybe the most beautiful music I have ever heard,” Barwick writes. “Once I found out who the maker was I scoured the internet for whatever I could get my hands on. It ended up being a treasure hunt—finding bits of her voice and textures hidden in mixes, compilations, and radio shows.” Barwick, a guest curator of Joyful Noise Recordings’ White Label series, the label’s platform for “undiscovered or underappreciated bands,” tapped Malibu for a record.
Malibu’s early music took prettiness—which conventional critical wisdom typically has deemed inferior to more “serious” attributes, like complexity or nuance—and raised it to the level of the sublime. One Life is no exception. If anything, the five-track mini-LP further accentuates the wide-eyed rapture of her early work. Its primary materials are lush strings, endless reverb, and the suggestion of vastness that the pairing of the two implies. It is unabashedly atmospheric, right down to the sounds of rolling surf that accompany two songs (a tribute, perhaps, to Malibu’s oceanographer father).
It’s not hard to hear the ways that Malibu is inspired by film music; any of these songs could work wonders as soundtrack cues. The yearning cycles of the opening “Nana (Like a Star Made for Me)” are reminiscent of Ennio Morricone’s score for The Mission, but melody here is generally secondary to mood. She favors long, held tones that arc wistfully toward the horizon; at most, we get a rising, three-note figure like the one at the heart of “Lost at Sea”—less a song than a clothesline from which to hang the airiest of emotions.
Malibu’s formless melancholy shares something in common with Grouper, but where Grouper is lo-fi, Malibu is hi-def. I could be wrong, but her washes of strings typically sound synthesized or sampled, in any case ersatz—they’re a little too smooth to be the sound of a real orchestra. But this quality adds to their nostalgic air; in their too-perfect surfaces, they echo those films that didn’t have the budget for a full orchestral score, and instead made do with synths and software. This isn’t vaporware, but it faintly resembles that genre’s obsolete-media sheen. Another point of comparison is Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project, though where he typically swirled his symphonic samples into murky gloom, Malibu’s music gleams.
One Life’s simplicity can be deceiving. A little like a quartz crystal, what at first looks like a radiant, unblemished surface turns richly contoured when viewed up close. The interplay of contrasting textures is most vivid in the forlorn “Lost at Sea,” one of several tracks to feature the British cellist and songwriter Oliver Coates. For several minutes, the widescreen sweep of piano and strings swells and recedes, tiptoeing right up to the edge of maudlin. Then, faintly, the resiny scrape of Coates’ bow rises in the mix, sawing rapidly away, as though cutting against the grain. The overwhelming consonance turns microtonal; around it all wordless voices hover, diffuse as a sunrise mist. It might just be, as it was for Barwick, the most beautiful music you’ve ever heard. The gorgeousness of it is almost overwhelming. But squint a little, and a world of microscopic detail flashes into focus. | 2019-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Joyful Noise / UNO NYC | November 7, 2019 | 7.7 | 77c5353f-c9be-4635-ad7e-92f95de712e2 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Not quite a reinvention, the Goldfrapp singer’s solo debut sets her against sleek synth disco that she mostly complements rather than commands. | Not quite a reinvention, the Goldfrapp singer’s solo debut sets her against sleek synth disco that she mostly complements rather than commands. | Alison Goldfrapp: The Love Invention | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/alison-goldfrapp-the-love-invention/ | The Love Invention | Beyond the Juicy Couture rhinestones and TMZ flashbulbs of 2000s tabloid culture lay another, cheekier way of keeping up appearances: high glam. Arty flamboyance strutted through the aughts pop industrial complex, offering up outré, high-fashion freakiness as an antidote to twisted celebrity ego and meat-and-potatoes Abercrombie & Fitch sexuality. Consider: Róisín Murphy in a greasy spoon, serving up Margiela couture with a side of fascinator. Kylie Minogue storming the runway with overdrawn pink eyebrows, a gaggle of alien queens in tow. A young Lady Gaga, lightning bolt affixed to cheek, musing about self-declared fame just as she was poised to realize it.
Consider Alison Goldfrapp! With her luxurious mane and penetrating cat-eye stare, the British singer adopted more glam-rock swagger than almost anyone in her cohort. Together with bandmate Will Gregory in the duo Goldfrapp, she pitted her honey-and-venom voice against moody trip-hop, silvery folktronica, and floor-stomping stadium pop, putting on and casting off identities with aplomb. After coming down from the late-career high of 2017’s Silver Eye, a record that featured the band at their dark-sided best, the singer felt the need for a new possibility. Following stints driving across America and holed up in East London, she put her partnership with Gregory on ice to collaborate with producers Richard X and James Greenwood (aka Ghost Culture) on The Love Invention, her debut solo record and first in a 25-year career.
If there’s a unique quality that distinguishes this Alison from the frontwoman of Goldfrapp, it’s not particularly obvious. The Love Invention introduces “Alison Goldfrapp, house diva,” a pivot she doesn’t totally sell. For one, it’s not that radical of a departure and musically invites comparisons to other, better moments across her back catalog (and nothing on this record comes close to touching “Ride a White Horse” or “Alive”). Goldfrapp is also staking her claim in a pitilessly crowded field and the album she’s presented is neither eclectic enough to stand out nor danceable enough to hold its own against the likes of Jessie Ware’s disco purism or Beyoncé’s megawatt starpower.
It takes an incredibly flexible performer to span the range of genres and identities that Goldfrapp has tackled, but on The Love Invention she is frequently too accommodating, more often complementing Richard X and Greenwood’s production rather than commanding it. Over the throbbing, Moroder-inflected beat of the title track, she alternates between a sultry purr and a vocoder that dissolves the edges of her voice into a barely audible murmur. That track at least benefits from a breakneck, diamond-studded pulse; the same cannot be said of “The Beat Divine” or “Digging Deeper Now,” which roil in place interminably beneath layers of breathy vocals.
Like Bowie or Bolan, Goldfrapp is equally capable of turning out a gorgeous character study as she is of elevating so-stupid-it’s genius lyrics with sheer energy and charisma. It’s a shame that on The Love Invention she too often plays things straight. The slinky, ice-melting beat of “So Hard So Hot” loses steam with time-keeping monosyllable verses, while tracks like “Fever” and “Digging Deeper Now” feel punishingly functional with canned rave-ups and generically euphoric lyrics. In a New York Times profile, Goldfrapp mentioned that the title track was partly inspired by the regimen of hormone replacement therapy she underwent for menopause, which would be a fabulous and far-out conceit if it were played up with more audacity. On The Love Invention it simply remains a glamorous suggestion.
The record’s best moments are its quietest. The lush, twinkling ambience of “Hotel” and “In Electric Blue” are reminiscent of Carly Rae Jepsen and exist thematically, as Jepsen’s work does, at the threshold between longing and consummation, when the possibility of true connection feels most dazzlingly real. But these are dress rehearsals for “SLoFLo,” the album’s final and best track. For three minutes Goldfrapp holds a swirling mass of indescribable feelings in gorgeous suspense with little more than her voice and some gentle synth washes. It is airy and abstract, a trick of light and shadow more impressive than the album’s more labored vamping. Alison Goldfrapp can conjure magic on her own. | 2023-05-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-15T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Skint / BMG | May 15, 2023 | 6.8 | 77c7cd7f-d146-4aca-a12a-90c6b81bbf33 | Harry Tafoya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/harry-tafoya/ | |
Two decades in, the gifted West Coast producer/rapper is making some of the most inventive music of his career. | Two decades in, the gifted West Coast producer/rapper is making some of the most inventive music of his career. | DJ Quik: The Book of David | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15369-the-book-of-david/ | The Book of David | For more than 20 years, DJ Quik has been the secret ingredient in the broth. Whether you know it or not, the gifted West Coast producer/rapper has worked on dozens of L.A. gangsta rap classics you've drunkenly screamed along to, often without even a liner-note credit to show for his efforts. Pop music's grumbling cast of neglected innovators is long, but Quik doesn't quite fit with that crowd: He's released platinum and gold records, as well as helped craft them for Tupac, Snoop, and Dre. Instead, he's stuck in that weird purgatory between Unknown Legend and Not-Quite-Star. It's a situation that could bog you down if you let it. But if you decide, one day, that you simply do not care anymore, something amazing can happen: You realize you can do whatever the hell you want.
This realization has been dawning in real time in DJ Quik's music recently. On BlaQKout, his 2009 collaboration with fellow West Coast warrior Kurupt, he experimented with stylistic detours from electro to dub, letting his free-associative musical imagination run wild. On the surface, The Book of David feels more straightforward. A rich stew of warm disco, grown-and-sexy R&B, and classic g-funk, it sounds engineered to waft out over barbecues. But it's also riddled with idiosyncrasies: songs that dissolve into deep-dub fade-outs, vocal samples that pop up in unexpected places, astonishing statements of raw heartbreak and anger. It's as weird as it is crowd-pleasing, and it underlines what BlaQKout suggested: Unencumbered by commercial expectations, Quik is making some of the most inventive music of his career.
Quik has always been quirkier than his gangsta-rap peers-- underneath the monstrous knock of his drums, he's snuck in all manner of odd little details. On The Book of David, though, he's a full-blown mad scientist of trunk-rattle. "Fire and Brimstone", the album's opening track, lurches out of the gate with a stumbling drum pattern. It's a pulverizing track that could transform a passing Jeep into a noise-disturbance complaint, but it's also a sprawling grid of counter-rhythms oddly similar to the rhythmic map of Radiohead's "Bloom". (Seriously.) "Poppin'", meanwhile, feels like a random collection of unrelated sounds accidentally colliding to form a perfectly coherent groove.
If any of this sounds wonky or cerebral, don't worry-- The Book of David is a pleasure-first listening experience, and Quik deploys each of his tricks with a showman's flair. "Hydromatic" loops an intoxicating vocal sample around some bone-jarring piano stabs and New Orleans brass-band blurts, and that's before the head-spinning syncopated hand-claps glide in. "Killer Dope" rolls in on a regal fanfare of French horn pads and jazz-inflected pianos. On that song, Quik brags about his ability to simultaneously rhyme and play his piano live; it's a telling boast, revealing the old-school funk producer Quik is in his heart. On The Book of David, you feel his keen musical intelligence-- and his humble pride in his talent-- presiding.
Most rapper/producers struggle to be as memorable on the mic as they are in the booth, but not Quik. On BlaQKout, he effortlessly lapped frowning technical lyricist Kurupt, and given a sprawling 70-minute album to hold down, he makes for durably fascinating company. His word choices-- meticulous and hilarious-- land somewhere left of your expectations, making him the most vivid presence on each song he's on. "I got wordplay acumen/ And I've had it since you was in grade school watchin' the janitor vacuumin'," he informs us on "Babylon". When he doles out insults, it's with a sense of school-teacherly calm (he's "a dignitary, you're a lowly beggar," he says on "Fire and Brimstone"), and even when Quik summons true venom, his voice never rises above the level of casual conversation.
Most of that venom on The Book of David is directed, as it has been for most of his career, at an intimate place: his own family. "Ghetto Rendezvous" ("I hate you so much it just shows/ I hate you more than Michael hated Joe") is directed to his own sister, whom he almost did 10 years in prison for pulling a gun on when she allegedly tried to kidnap his children. It's a horrific story, the kind of dirty laundry some rappers would air as a perverse badge of honor (see: Game, The). But Quik has no interest in battering us with his personal pain; he just wants to tell us about it. So he slips it in easily among the boasts, the jokes, and the party jams. In that way, David mimics the texture of real life-- jokes and confessions, partying and pain, all mixed up together.
The Book of David emanates this decidedly zen confidence and ease at every level. Quik has a lifetime's worth of career relationships and unlimited lines of credibility to draw on, but he shows zero interest in crowding his tracks with guest-verse favors called in from his more famous friends to wiggle closer to the mainstream. The features on David-- relative no-names like Jon B., BlaKKazz K. K., local legends like Suga Free, over-the-hill West Coast rappers like Ice Cube and Kurupt-- are his compatriots, people he's worked with for years, and they slot into his overall work exactly as he sees fit. When you've exerted the kind of unacknowledged influence on your art form that Quik has, bitterness can take hold easily. But Quik has chosen a wiser route: He's created a tiny island on which he is king. | 2011-04-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2011-04-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mad Science | April 28, 2011 | 8.4 | 77c9f2fa-c4fc-4d8f-81ca-00ac125b3926 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The strength of Marina Diamandis’ work, historically, has been her lack of subtlety and her playful Technicolor self-presentation. And yet on Froot, her focus is inward. Here, she ditches the mega-star collaborators and writes not only by herself, but about herself. | The strength of Marina Diamandis’ work, historically, has been her lack of subtlety and her playful Technicolor self-presentation. And yet on Froot, her focus is inward. Here, she ditches the mega-star collaborators and writes not only by herself, but about herself. | Marina and the Diamonds: Froot | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20368-froot/ | Froot | "She is a Polish girl in America!" Marina Diamandis sang in 2010 on "Hollywood", a song from her debut album The Family Jewels. She went on, "Oh my god, you look just like Shakira, no, no, you’re Catherine Zeta— actually, my name’s Marina!" In one verse, she mimicks the voices of those grouping her with other crossover celebrity women who scan simultaneously as "White" and "Other" to American audiences and answering them, at once. It was a smooth performance, demonstrating her place within American’s white spatial imaginary (Diamandis is Greek and Welsh)— a dream-like double consciousness acknowledged with nary a nod or a wink.
It is within the space of disacknowledgement that Diamandis created the character Electra for her 2012 followup Electra Heart, an album produced and co-written with American hit makers like Diplo, Dr. Luke, and StarGate. Electra was a "cold, ruthless character who wasn’t vulnerable" she told The Daily Mail—a personification of the American Dream. On her third album, Froot, she ditches the mega-star collaborators and writes not only by herself, but about herself.
The strength of Diamandis’ work, historically, has been her lack of subtlety, her playful Technicolor self-presentation. And yet on Froot, her focus is inward and free of peacocking. The hushed, bare-bones opener "Happy", built on a piano-ballad core, is a meditation on inner contentedness that seeks self-realization over companionship. "From the concrete to the coast, I was looking for a holy ghost," she sings. On Froot, she's found God, and pop music, within herself. She is an artist who knows who she is, and Froot luxuriates in the confidence that we do, too, relaxing in the space and power that Diamandis has claimed.
Part of her art has always been to pack the emotional punch of confession while denying over-the-head admission, an approach with a political tinge—"the impersonal is political," in her case. Her flamboyance and theatrics have served to both deflect and detach—some songs on Electra Heart and The Family Jewels alluded to an eating disorder without explicitly saying so, while other songs feature second-person lyrics—an implied "I." Sharing—thoughts, emotions, information (where you live, what your plans are, take your pick)—is always a risky act for women, opening them up to potential violence, and this is the violence Marina explores. In "Savages", Marina sings, "I’m not afraid of God, I’m afraid of Man." "Underneath it all, we’re just savages hidden behind shirts, ties and marriages," she posits. "Solitaire", which opens with the lyric, "Don’t wanna talk anymore, I’m obsessed with silence," doesn’t land quite as well as its antithesis, the final track "Immortal", does. "Immortal" is about a deep longing to "reserve a space" in history, to be remembered by others.
Almost every song on Froot plays with memory and sensory imagery—"Gold"; "Blue"; "Forget"; "Froot"—thematically, lyrically or otherwise. But it’s the tucked-in songs—in the "Weeds", so to speak—where Marina shines colorfully: "Happy", "I’m a Ruin" and "Can’t Pin Me Down" are stand-out tracks, speaking most directly to the album’s core. They’re also the most sonically interesting songs. The bare piano accompaniment of "Happy" makes it a somber and sweet track. Her production is more understated than the lush, orgasmic pulse of Electra Heart, making Froot a more elastic and dynamic work, with Everestian highs and darker depths. In "I'm a Ruin" the drums carry the song, thumping into climax and ecstasy. The other percussion-heavy tracks, like "Can’t Pin Me Down", give the album power and drive. Others, like "Gold", go at the tempo of a slow soul clap, taking you to a quiet church.
There’s cognitive dissonance between Diamandis' flamboyant posturing and her subtlety. She performs feeling. She no longer hides behind shaky, furtive archetypes and characters as she did on Electra Heart, an album created explicitly for American consumers—she’s untangled herself and trusts us to understand a record that is internal, and rich in nuance. Froot traces her career arc: with The Family Jewels she is mistaken (by record companies) for a "foreign cross-over success" like Shakira, and with Electra Heart she tries on this identity and finds that it doesn’t actually fit her. With Froot she’s refuting the myth that female artists are forever the first, the only, that they can only exist if they fit within the shape of whatever cultural precedent exists for them. Mind the bold corrective: "Actually, my name's Marina!" As if we could forget, now. | 2015-04-17T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-04-17T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic / Neon Gold / New Elektra | April 17, 2015 | 7.5 | 77d19697-6ac9-48c2-8231-87d9bc5c2eba | Safy-Hallan Farah | https://pitchfork.com/staff/safy-hallan-farah/ | null |
The Brooklyn duo Tanlines recorded their second album in a church with Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor, and Highlights sounds like a legitimate pop record. | The Brooklyn duo Tanlines recorded their second album in a church with Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor, and Highlights sounds like a legitimate pop record. | Tanlines: Highlights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20571-highlights/ | Highlights | After Random Access Memories, The 20/20 Experience, and Reflektor, we were tired of protracted album release stunts. Now we have Surprise-Album Fatigue. Granted, Tanlines don’t answer to as big of an audience as Justin Timberlake or Beyoncé. But they deserve an immense amount of credit for constructing a rollout for Highlights that likely could’ve gone on for another two years without complaint. The Brooklyn duo’s second LP was teased with a Netflix-aping website, and "premiered" with a fake "conference call", which featured some "Sound Advice" from "SNL"'s Vanessa Bayer. Eric Emm and Jesse Cohen’s charming social media presence had long established that they’re "one of us" and they’re the change we want to see in Music Nerd Twitter: clever, but not snarky, self-aware but not overly self-conscious, willing to poke fun at the inherent silliness of PR, album cycles, and branding without framing the whole affair as meaningless. Now, very little of this innovation or irreverence or ingenuity carries over to Highlights, but the goodwill Tanlines have generated isn’t all for naught. It just allows one to see the divergence between the rollout and the record as an unfortunate coincidence rather than a cynical cover-up.
There is a kernel of truth behind the Tanlines-as-TV joke: think of them as the offbeat comedy that got picked up after accumulating a fanbase while muscling through an erratic first season. For the second go-round, reinvention would be unwise or impossible, so the goal is to capitalize on the quirky chemistry of its leads and modify it to establish replicable consistency. Or, to make it ready for syndication; Tanlines are much more effective as a singles act than as the subject of an immersive binge listen.
The duo are a study in compatibility rather than contrast, each favoring brassy, spotless tones, Emm’s vocals sounding as much a synthesized version of a real instrument as the actual synthesizers. While male vocalists in this realm typically rely on a bass register to convey sage wisdom, sex appeal, or a sinister aura, for Emm it’s a means of foregrounding Tanlines’ everydude appeal. It works in conjunction with the often maddening mundanity of Highlights lyrics: "I fall to pieces when you’re away," he sings on the opener, the implication being that this meltdown will be short-lived and she’ll definitely be back, probably sometime after the holiday weekend. They’re modest songs for modest moments, occupying the space between the hookup and the breakup, of getting hired and getting fired, that manageable lovesickness, regret, and anxiety that underlie just about every URL and IRL interaction.
But the essence of Tanlines lies in the contrast created by the simplicity of their songwriting and the luxury of the sound design. Imagine a child winning a contest where his Construx design is turned into an actual skyscraper; that's Highlights. There isn’t much distance from what could’ve started out as FruityLoops demos or factory presets—Cohen’s arrangements still don’t provide much texture or polyphony. But the post-production is crucial all the same, allowing Highlights to sound like a legitimate pop record rather than shareware.
This time out, they recorded in a church with Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor rather than in Miami with Jimmy Douglass (Foreigner, Timbaland)—it’s the reverse of what you’d expect from a band trying to update their sound from 2012 to 2015. But Tanlines aren’t really about staying on trend anyways. Since they work with a limited number of tools, it’s often difficult to distinguish one Highlights song from the next, or even remember them 10 minutes after they've ended. However, when it’s a Tanlines song, you definitely know it’s them. It’s an impressive accomplishment for an act that once appeared destined to be a footnote from Brooklyn Indie Rock 2010, a couple of scene mainstays who got more out of tropical keyboard presets than any New Yorker since Swizz Beatz.
That said, Highlights hightails down the same escape routes that have been overbooked since the turn of the decade: Balearic, Drive, Caribbean rhythms, New Romantic synth-pop. As with Mixed Emotions, there’s the opener that doesn't oversell its anthemic ambitions ("Pieces"), the New Wave cruiser ("Slipping Away"), the one with an acoustic guitar ("Invisible Ways"). The most notable update in their software results in a track that still could’ve fit on their proper 2012 debut: "Two Thousand Miles" is Tanlines’ EDM moment, though the strobing synths and triplet beats are strangely muffled, meant more for an apartment party with noise restrictions rather than the festival tents where the duo have become a frequent and effective crowd pleaser.
Tanlines have proven more than capable of hosting a celebration, and they can attract a surprisingly massive flock of hands-in-the-air party people as well. That shouldn’t change, as Highlights is more consistent than its predecessor, which was propped up by a few tentpole singles. But Tanlines could also be the center of the affair, particularly when Emm fearlessly leaned into big pop hooks during "All of Me" and "Real Life". Those moments are sorely lacking on Highlights, which becomes defined by its deceiving sort of consistency: maintaining a baseline pleasantry that makes the title into the only unintentional punchline of the whole campaign. | 2015-05-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-05-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | True Panther | May 22, 2015 | 5.8 | 77d622ab-b3df-445c-a21c-250058e0e285 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Toronto singer's debut EP arrives fully formed, a short mix of quiet storm R&B and dark pop for doomed lovers. | The Toronto singer's debut EP arrives fully formed, a short mix of quiet storm R&B and dark pop for doomed lovers. | Charlotte Day Wilson: CDW EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22276-cdw-ep/ | CDW EP | Charlotte Day Wilson was the satin surface in the “smooth-ass R&B” Toronto quartet The Wayo. Her low voice draped around their suave arrangements just like Sade’s around her group of smooth operators. A smoldering guest spot on BADBADNOTGOOD’s recent ’70s jukebox number “In Your Eyes” made her credentials as a warden of the old school all the more official. But her debut solo EP, the mainly self-produced CDW, shoots ahead a couple decades to a more polished, contemporary adult sound. With Sade still a touchpoint—as well as Maxwell’s stylish neo-soul and some pre-“Heartbreaker” Mariah Carey sprinkled in too—Wilson’s quiet storm whirls with similar magic.
Only, the opener “On Your Own” is a bit of a red herring. The short, freeform piece is a soundscape built on futuristic keys and Vangelis-esque ambience. Words are hard to make out, but the atmospherics spark as Wilson’s voice emerges on the horizon. It’s not until the blurry ballad “Work” where you hear how well her woozy production and voice work together. Her musings are vague, and her thoughts are scattered, as she quietly sings, “It’s going to take a little time but with you by my side/I won’t let go ‘til I’ve got what’s mine.” The familiar feelings of relationship anxiety come through clear as a crystal tumbler.
With a chorus that soars, “Find You” is the nearest thing CDW has to a brash pop number that stays inside Wilson’s dapper parameters. The EP’s high point, though, might be “Where Do You Go.” Produced by rising star River Tiber—the only person other than Wilson invited to jump behind the boards—the horns and basement club jazz underpin a feeling of loneliness and isolation as the singer ponders the whereabouts of her missing-in-action lover: “Where did you go today?/It could have been anywhere.” Her voice doesn’t just sound great on the ear; it carries a huge emotional weight.
The one thing missing is friction. A longer release would have benefitted from one or two more muscular productions, or some stylistic shifts to keep you guessing. But even without some extra force pressing down, these six tracks show Wilson has already mastered her strengths. The smooth-as-hell Canadian’s got the voice and a lot more besides. CDW funnels timeless sounds through her own distinct filter, making songs for doomed lovers sitting alone in a dimly lit living room over a bottomless bottle of cheap bourbon. | 2016-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | August 24, 2016 | 7.8 | 77dac56b-088c-4365-8734-85690007a185 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | null |
The Manchester band’s catchy, well-executed pop-punk stumbles on generic songwriting and bland ballads. | The Manchester band’s catchy, well-executed pop-punk stumbles on generic songwriting and bland ballads. | Pale Waves: Unwanted | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pale-waves-unwanted/ | Unwanted | Pale Waves may go through the motions of big emotions, but they never quite sell the feeling. Three albums in, the Manchester quartet has earned a reputation for pristine-sounding replications of past generations’ heartbreak anthems, bouncing through styles as if curating their own hyperactive, self-soothing post-breakup playlist. On their previous record, 2021’s Who Am I?, they took comfort in the sounds of early-2000s pop-punk, and on their latest record, Unwanted, they lean even further into it. With the help of producer Zakk Cervini (Blink-182, All Time Low), the band strides into darker territory, amping up the guitars and calling on heavier sounds from the era.
Pale Waves aren’t the only act mining this sound for inspiration. Dirty Hit labelmate Beabadoobee uses its aesthetics as a palette to paint a personal dreamworld; Willow embodies its brazen attitude to unpack modern anxieties. And while Unwanted may be pastiche, it occasionally earns its place among a crowded field of mainstream sellouts, aspirational TikTokers, and even the prototype herself. These are precise, catchy, well-executed pop-punk earworms. The bustling, Avril-inspired “Unwanted” revels in pop-punk’s contradictions, providing a sugary hook with a dark, rippling undercurrent of anger. Lead singer and songwriter Heather Baron-Gracie cleverly sets us up, singing “You’re so good” before the guitars tear in to help her finish the thought: “At making me feel like nothing, making me feel unwanted.”
Despite these flashes of wit, the band’s Achilles’ heel is Baron-Gracie’s generic songwriting, which becomes most apparent when the tempo slows. “Without You” packs changing seasons, a burning candle, and an ocean of tears into one bland, cloying ballad. The story behind “The Hard Way” is affecting—the lyrics explore complex feelings of guilt in the aftermath of a classmate’s suicide—but the anti-bullying message lacks the specificity and emotive delivery necessary to transcend cliché. Coupled with a gauche TikTok challenge, any weight the song has dissipates. When Pale Waves strip back the drama and let the songs speak for themselves, it’s much more effective. The ambling “Numb” sets us in the center of a depressive daze with only Baron-Gracie’s restrained vocals and a few gentle plucks of her electric guitar to guide us. When she belts out “let me be free” at the chorus, it’s genuinely moving.
Less convincing is the ambitious diatribe “You’re So Vain,” where Pale Waves seemingly attempt to reunite Lavigne and ex-husband Deryck Whibley by combining the mocking talk-sing verses of “Girlfriend” with a riffy, Sum 41-inspired chorus. As compelling as these ideas are, they don’t quite mesh. Still, the stylistic variety would have been welcome on some of the more cookie-cutter tracks—the consecutive “Alone” and “Clean” blend together with near-identical melodies and song structures. The quartet also rarely lets their songs breathe—vocal-free moments are few and far between. One of the album’s strongest moments comes at the end of “You’re So Vain” once guitarist Hugo Silvani is finally given the opportunity to shred out, following a wordless chorus of “da da da”s.
Despite Unwanted’s valleys, Pale Waves know how to make a good pop song. The band channels Paramore on brash lead single “Lies”: propulsive percussion, distorted vocals, and a brisk tempo are the perfect vehicle for an angsty kiss-off to a self-centered partner. With a big hook and a punchy bassline, even the shallow melodrama of “Ripped out my heart and left it bleeding” can’t halt the momentum. It’s the oldest cliché in the book, and the rare moment when Pale Waves muster enough spirit to make you want to believe it. | 2022-08-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-12T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dirty Hit | August 12, 2022 | 6.1 | 77e5e6a8-0c2b-4fe4-baa6-789efc85a0cf | Danny Cooper | https://pitchfork.com/staff/danny-cooper/ | |
Tango in the Night is the final album the band would record as an infamous quintet. It's a pop and production masterpiece, yet remains this monolithic, lucrative idea of a Fleetwood Mac record. | Tango in the Night is the final album the band would record as an infamous quintet. It's a pop and production masterpiece, yet remains this monolithic, lucrative idea of a Fleetwood Mac record. | Fleetwood Mac: Tango in the Night | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22976-tango-in-the-night-deluxe-edition/ | Tango in the Night | It started with “Sara.” The first two Fleetwood Mac albums to feature Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks—the self-titled album and Rumours—featured production typical of the pop-rock generated in Los Angeles in the ’70s. They were professional and pristine, exhibiting an instrumental and emotional warmth that was, in terms of the actual recording technique and the cerebral atmosphere of the people making the records, a product of isolation. On their next record, Tusk, Buckingham shifted the balance of Fleetwood Mac’s studio pop. He deliberately produced his songs so that they sounded trebly and makeshift—as if they were translated from brain to tape as quickly as possible—and produced Nicks’ and Christine McVie’s songs with a lush and carefully-sculpted dimensionality. “Sara,” a song Nicks wrote to a daughter she never had, is so gently shaped that every instrumental and vocal materializes in the song like vapor in the atmosphere. At the Blockbuster Music Awards in 2001, Nicks said that when she writes songs, she tries to “make little worlds” for the listener. Whether intentional or not, this sensibility invaded Buckingham’s production of the song; “Sara,” as it appears on Tusk, is its own world, a complete environment, a beach house built out of sighs.
The follow-up to Tusk, 1982’s Mirage, was a kind reflexive scaling back; both Warner Bros. and Buckingham wanted to regenerate the success and the coherent atmosphere of Rumours. It didn’t take. The band members had already drifted too far from each other: Nicks sang country-western and synth-pop songs; Buckingham quoted Pachelbel’s Canon; McVie’s formal romanticism began to take on a crystalline quality; the production flowed in the direction of their individual fascinations. After a brief tour, the band went on hiatus. Nicks released two successful solo albums; McVie and Buckingham put out one each. In 1985, Buckingham had begun work on an additional solo album, when Mick Fleetwood suggested Buckingham fold his new songs into the more monolithic, more lucrative idea of a Fleetwood Mac record.
The resulting album, Tango in the Night, is exactly that: a monolithic, lucrative idea of a Fleetwood Mac record. It was recorded over eighteen months between 1986 and 1987, mostly at Buckingham’s home studio in L.A. Buckingham devoted himself to the record, laboring intensely over its songs, its sounds, and the integrity of its design. Recording technology had advanced substantially since the early ’80s, and Buckingham found the methods by which he could determine the shape and temperature of a Fleetwood Mac song had expanded.
“Most of the vocal parts were recorded track by track,” he told the New York Times in 1987. “The voices used in the textured vocal choirs were mostly mine. I used a Fairlight machine that samples real sounds and blends them orchestrally.” Out of these newly available materials, he could practically build an entire band, which was useful at the time. Mick Fleetwood was almost entirely consumed by his cocaine habit, and the band had been experiencing an internal drift for years. “Constructing such elaborate layering is a lot like painting a canvas and is best done in solitude,” Buckingham added.
The album’s artwork, “Homage a Henri Rousseau” by Brett-Livingstone Strong, is so lush and romantic that it walks a fine line between formal elegance and kitsch, blending the terrestrial with the celestial. It’s an accurate illustration of Tango in the Night’s sound design, of the glitterings and humid shimmers that Buckingham placed in the songs. He made each track on Tango just as he produced “Sara”: less an arrangement of bass, guitar, drums, and vocals than a complete world, a living panorama. There’s a phenomenal wholeness to the recordings on Tango that seems like a superficial compensation for how deeply fragmented the band was at the time.
After Nicks resurfaced from her cocaine addiction at the Betty Ford Clinic, she visited Buckingham’s studio for a few weeks. Three of her recordings figure into the finished Tango, only two of which were written by her. Her voice, invariably hoarse after years of cocaine abuse, often warps or fails the already incomplete material. She howls her way through “Seven Wonders,” a song written mostly by Sandy Stewart. (Nicks receives credit because she misheard “All the way down you held the line” as “All the way down to Emmiline”; for Nicks—and I don’t disagree—sometimes accident and authorship are indistinguishable.) For all of its bluster, the song is not only enhanced by the incidents of its arrangement but is the incidents of its arrangement; try to imagine the song without its synth hook and hear the rest of it evaporate. On “When I See You Again,” Nicks’ voice almost crumbles and shatters into atoms. “Stevie was the worst she’s ever been,” Buckingham told Uncut in 2013. “I didn’t recognize her...I had to pull performances out of words and lines and make parts that sounded like her that weren’t her.” Fittingly, each verse and chorus that Nicks sings sounds generated by a different uncanny assemblage of Stevie, among them one who sings in a kind of mutilated whisper. After the bridge, Nicks completely disappears. Buckingham finishes the song.
Buckingham’s songs on Tango are less knotted than they were on Tusk and Mirage, newly permissive of space. The first single, Buckingham’s “Big Love,” is a song that inadvertently simulates the essential failure of the album. It is devoted to a totally abstracted and imaginary form of love, while Tango in the Night is devoted to a totally abstracted and imaginary form of Fleetwood Mac (neither of which could be assembled in reality). The song’s arrangement feels austere and detached, a byproduct of the narrator’s alienation, but it’s also decorated with overlapping, pointillist guitar phrases. Even the empty spaces on Tango feel like deliberately-wrought emptinesses—for instance, the airy synths that hover over the verses of McVie’s “Everywhere,” or Buckingham’s title track, which through its sense of space imparts the feeling of rowing through fog and mystery.
Still, it’s McVie whose work is most realized by Buckingham’s impressionism. Her “Everywhere” is the best song on the record. Like “Big Love” it too is about encountering an idea too big to contain within oneself (love, again). But where “Big Love” apprehends it with icy suspicion, “Everywhere” responds with warmth, empathy, and buoyancy, describing a kind of devotion so deeply felt that it produces weightlessness in a person. Its incandescent texture is felt in almost any music that could be reasonably described as balearic. Elsewhere, “Isn’t It Midnight,” McVie’s co-write with Buckingham and her then-husband Eddy Quintela, seems an inversion of the values of “Everywhere,” a severe ’80s guitar rock song that gets consumed by a greater, more unnerving force by its chorus, as if it’s succumbing to a conspiratorial dread. “Do you remember the face of a pretty girl?” McVie sings, and Buckingham echoes her in an unfeeling monotone (“the face of a pretty girl”) while behind him synths chime in a moving constellation, UFOs pulsing in the dark.
This is the essence of Tango in the Night: something falling apart but held together by an unearthly glow. More of a mirage than Mirage, it is an immaculate study in denial (its most enduring hit revolves around McVie asking someone to tell her “sweet little lies”). It’s a form of dreaming where you could touch the petals of a flower and feel something softer than the idea of softness. In this way, Tango seems to emerge less from Buckingham’s pure will and imagination than from a question that haunts art in general: How can one make the unreal real, and the real unreal?
The remaster of Tango in the Night isn’t as topographically startling as last year’s Mirage, where new details seemed to rise out of the mix as if in a relief sculpture; it sounded good on CD in 1987. The reissue does sound warmer and brighter, and the instruments feel less digitally combined, which lifts background elements to the surface, like the seasick drift of the bass notes in “Caroline” and the coordinated staccato harmonies in the title track. The reissue also includes two discs of b-sides, demos, and extended remixes, several of which were previously unreleased. “Special Kind of Love” is described as a demo but sounds like a completely developed Buckingham song, gentle and simple, with every edge expressively filigreed; it could’ve been a potential second sequel to “You and I.” “Seven Wonders” appears in an earlier, more relaxed arrangement, with Lindsey’s guitar warmly swanning between the notes that would eventually be reconstructed in perfect digital isolation by a synthesizer.
The demos also reveal the ways in which the songs could fold into and out of each other. On the “Tango in the Night” demo you can hear Buckingham, at the edge of every chorus, begin to invent the trembling choral part that opens “Caroline.” Nicks’ eventual solo track “Juliet” is present in two of its primordial forms—as the instrumental “Book of Miracles” (credited to both Buckingham and Nicks) and as a five-minute “run-through.” The run-through is especially curious, reducing “Book of Miracles” to a formulaic blues-rock over which Nicks’ voice produces a just-barely musical static, full of wobbles and distortions and exclamations. After the take she says, ecstatically, “I thought that was wonderful! I didn’t play! I did not play because I am so smart!”
Nicks exhibits a strange, dissonant giddiness in this moment that isn’t present in any of the band member’s memories of the recording process. At the time, in his interview with the Times, Buckingham imaginatively described Tango in the Night as a restorative process. “This album is as much about healing our relationships as Rumours was about dissension and pain within the group,” he said. “The songs look back over a period of time that in retrospect seems almost dreamlike.” Twenty-six years later, Buckingham summarized the experience to Uncut in more severe terms: “When I was done with the record, I said, ‘Oh my God. That was the worst recording experience of my life.’”
The jealousy and resentment he felt toward Nicks for the success she experienced in her solo career, and the prevailing feeling that his architectural work on the band’s records went unnoticed and unappreciated, had built to a flashpoint. Later in 1987, the band met up in anticipation of the promotional tour for Tango, for which they had already secured dates and signed contracts. At the meeting, Buckingham announced he was quitting the band. “I flew off of the couch and across the room to seriously attack him,” Nicks told Classic Rock in 2013. “...I’m not real scary but I grabbed him which almost got me killed.” They spilled out of McVie’s house and into the street. Buckingham ran after Nicks and threw her up against a car. She “screamed horrible obscenities” at him, and he walked away, from the moment and the band. What’s left, after these harsh fragments of reality are swept away, is Tango in the Night: a remarkably complete album, a lavish garden growing out of negative space. Just a dream. | 2017-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-03-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Rhino / Warner Bros. | March 11, 2017 | 8.7 | 77f39412-4787-43aa-a6b1-83b3d159936e | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
Jacob Buczarski’s cerebral, complex melodic black metal is an elegy for a dying planet. There is little hope on offer here, but plenty of silvery, well-executed riffs. | Jacob Buczarski’s cerebral, complex melodic black metal is an elegy for a dying planet. There is little hope on offer here, but plenty of silvery, well-executed riffs. | Mare Cognitum: Solar Paroxysm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mare-cognitum-solar-paroxysm/ | Solar Paroxysm | As cheap recording tools and solo projects have proliferated, the early-2000s glut of so-called “one-man black metal bands” has fallen out of vogue with artists of all genders. But with Mare Cognitum, Jacob Buczarski offers a convincing argument that the model is far from dead. His cerebral, complex, and often startlingly lovely black metal speaks for itself; Buczarski is an accomplished musician with a clear vision for his work and the chops to back it up (the man simply loves a solo, and who can blame him?). His atmospheric black metal feels ripped straight from the cosmos, a stroke of luck for fans seeking a little soul with their shredding. On the band’s fifth full-length—and third for the I, Voidhanger label—Buczarski comes armed not only with a sterling assortment of riffs, but also a warning: He envisions the album as a cautionary tale “about what happens if we don’t shape up and, firstly, deal with our rapidly approaching doom to climate change, and secondly, pay real attention to the societal ills [of] fascism, racism, and hatred in general that are plaguing us and dragging us away from real solutions.”
Muscular album opener “Antaresian” sets the stage for an album that promises to tear Mare Cognitum’s gaze away from the heavens and cast it down upon the filth and fury of terrestrial reality. Solar Paroxysm is a requiem for a dying planet, and a condemnation of the overgrown primates blithely hastening its demise. “We have unveiled the harrowing end of our world/We have foreseen the devouring of our galaxy/And when the light has gone/So too will be our memories,” Buczarski howls in his workmanlike rasp. Rather than hew to the genre’s tired obsessions with Satan, nihilism, and the like, Mare Cognitum’s lyrics are more in tune with Neil Gaiman than necromancy: Each song on Solar Paroxysm lays out another aspect of our potentially cataclysmic future in excruciating, albeit poetic, detail. The album cover—an apocalyptic scene of heaving earth and fiery skies—offers a stark vision of inevitable collapse.
The album’s focus may come as a surprise to those unaware of Mare Cognitum’s position on metal’s political left flank, but reading between the lines has always been critical to black metal fandom, and Solar Paroxysm is no exception. There’s a deep well of disappointment in humanity, which has progressed so far and yet fallen so short. The stormy, sublime “Terra Requiem” is both the album’s beating heart and its most caustic messenger, coldly assuring us that “so great is the debt we have incurred/So too will we wilt and fade into dust/We’ll pay with the ashes of our humanity/And cease to walk upon this earth/And the earth will forget our name.” There is little hope on offer here, but plenty of silvery, well-executed riffs.
Buczarski has perfected his formula, and spends this album teasing out ways to deconstruct it. Each song tops 10 minutes and flows nearly seamlessly into the next, knitted together with the expected tremolo and blastbeats as well as a surgically precise commitment to melody and atmosphere; Solar Paroxysm may not have its head as deeply in the clouds as its supernal predecessors, but it’s still located in the same galaxy. For all its kinship with contemporary purveyors of melancholia and experimental twists like Darkspace or Spectral Lore, Mare Cognitum’s musical lineage often leads straight back to the 1990s (though, thankfully, steers clear of errant Nazis). The bright guitar melodies on “Luminous Accretion” are gorgeous, and “Frozen Star Divinization” is a particularly effective exercise in both grandeur and nostalgia. Both summon a partial comparison to the frostbitten likes of Windir or early Enslaved, ’90s melodic black metal bands whose mastery of the embryonic form helped etch a blueprint for generations to follow.
Don’t be fooled, though; Mare Cognitum is ultimately about progress and pushing forward, whether that’s into the next galaxy or the wretched depths of the human soul. Solar Paroxysm’s remarkably consistent ride ends on a high note with the commanding closer “Ataraxia Tunnels,” an elegy disguised as an intricate, bombastic final salvo. As its narrator slips away, so do the album’s last notes, lingering for a long, pregnant moment before finally succumbing to silence. Solar Paroxysm is one of the year’s strongest black metal albums, but it is also a depressingly effective reminder that there’s only so much time left.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | I, Voidhanger | March 23, 2021 | 7.5 | 77f45a17-3b21-474d-a24f-ba4390754874 | Kim Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kim-kelly/ | |
It’s hard to amass much of a vault off one album and tour cycle, and perhaps inevitably, a good 80% of You and I, the latest posthumous release bearing Jeff Buckley's name, consists of covers, many already released. | It’s hard to amass much of a vault off one album and tour cycle, and perhaps inevitably, a good 80% of You and I, the latest posthumous release bearing Jeff Buckley's name, consists of covers, many already released. | Jeff Buckley: You and I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21588-you-and-i/ | You and I | Here we are again. It’s been nearly 20 years since Jeff Buckley’s untimely death by drowning, a timespan in which posthumous releases of various sorts has come to outnumber his solo work more than ten to – literally – one: live albums, compilations, EP sets, and now demos. Nevertheless, the musical gravedigging will continue until the vaults are barren, which for Jeff Buckley is probably pretty soon.
It’s hard to amass much of a vault off one album and tour cycle, and perhaps inevitably, a good 80% of You and I, the latest album of the lot, consists of covers, many already released in some format. "Just Like a Woman," "Calling You" and "Night Flight" were on Live at Sin-E. Buckley’s de-stylized version of The Smiths’ "I Know It’s Over" appeared in part on Mystery White Boy and in full on Buckley’s 2007 compilation So Real. "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side" was circulating online several years prior. The new material includes a version of "Grace" that is basically a fully formed demo, while "Dream of You and I" is barely even that; the title is literal, Buckley thinking aloud about a dream he had about a band’s "space jam," which inspired him to write what’d eventually become "You and I." It’s not even a skeleton of a song so much as the first few bones, dug up before anyone knows what they belong to and before the excavation was suddenly called off.
Unlike the haphazardly curated collections of the past, You and I is an artifact with a history: part of the set of demos, recently discovered, that Buckley recorded in producer Steve Addabbo’s studio for Sony shortly after signing with the label. The covers, standards in Buckley’s numerous New York sets, form the blueprint for what would eventually become Grace, and each represents some touchstone: an influence on his style, a demonstration of his interpretive skill. It’s likely no coincidence the collection has two Smiths songs – not only are they the sort of songs a musician might hang onto from adolescence waiting for a chance to record, but if you’re out to demonstrate your singular music identity, there are far worse ways to do it than to take a track and eliminate all trace and inflection of Morrissey. Sly and The Family Stone’s "Everyday People" and Louis Jordan's "Don’t Let the Sun See You Cryin’" undergo similar transformations, from sunshine-pop to something more aloof or tortured. It’s a transformation, though, with definite limits; the version of Dylan here holds little surprises even if it’s one’s first time hearing Buckley’s take, and "Poor Boy Long Way From Home" begins as a promising demonstration of form – whether in emulating Bukka White’s slide guitar or retrofitting his voice into the genre’s confines – but the novelty gives way over the six-minute runtime to blues pastiche.
The one truly "new" bit of material here is as frustrating as it’s enlightening. "Dream of You and I" begins as an intricately woven guitar instrumental that, given the right conditions, might be spellbinding live, and the beginnings of a chorus. The bulk of the track, however, is Buckley telling a rambling story about a dream of a "spacey Deadhead band" playing something or another – "not like what I’m playing here on guitar" – in 7/4 time about a possessive lover or AIDS ("or something like that"), which may or may not resemble what’s on the record. There’s no way of knowing, and there never will be, and therein lies both the draw of such a collection as You and I and its inherent limitations. | 2016-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia / Legacy | March 16, 2016 | 5.8 | 77f89ab6-8d57-4ab6-aae6-1b94418d9b22 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
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