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Action Bronson’s second studio album is also the third installment of his Blue Chips mixtape series. It’s full of bare raps and funky beats, of unadorned samples and dopey swaggering. | Action Bronson’s second studio album is also the third installment of his Blue Chips mixtape series. It’s full of bare raps and funky beats, of unadorned samples and dopey swaggering. | Action Bronson: Blue Chips 7000 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/action-bronson-blue-chips-7000/ | Blue Chips 7000 | Almost seven years ago, the Queens rapper Action Bronson emerged from the underground like a neighborhood goofball. If you watch the video for an early single like “Shiraz,” from 2011, Bronson’s world is hyperlocal: in a hooded trench coat and athletic shorts, he surveys olive tubs and orders sheets of prosciutto from a Bronx corner store. Back then, his flamboyance seemed grinning and poised, but out of place and maybe a bit schticky as a result. Bronson’s sideshow character may have been bombastic, but his rapping was always legitimately prodigious, crass as it was witty, and just downright fun.
Now, Bronson has become a caricature of his former self. He’s a walking TV show—he has had two on the Viceland network—and all of the lights and cameras have overfed his exuberance. Perpetually and overly stoned, he swan dives off yachts and shares street food with Mario Batali in Rome. These are the type of things he used to rap about as mythical put-ons, but now they’re captured on screen before they land in a verse. Bronson and his hedonism have grown larger than life, and his music has taken a backseat to his celebrity foodie status. On his last album, 2015’s Mr. Wonderful, Bronson attempted to reconcile this gap by bringing his celebrity into the booth, amplifying the ridiculousness of his music with a record that tried to do too much: the tracks-long conceptual story arc bogged down the middle; the open-ended rambles let it float around. His new album, Blue Chips 7000, is just his second as a major label artist. And like many rappers before him who have turned a mixtape run into stardom, Bronson has lowered the stakes by returning to his roots.
Blue Chips 7000 is the third installment in a vintage Bronson mixtape series (all bearing the Blue Chips name), and it’s the first to ditch Party Supplies, a frenetic, campy Brooklyn producer, as the sole man behind the boards. Still, the retail album calcifies the formula the pair instigated with the mixtapes—bare raps over funky, almost kooky rare-groove loops—and Bronson remains surrounded by the producers that know him best. Accordingly, the beats on Blue Chips 7000 save its star from doing too much. “Let It Rain” jumps around like a twitching 1970s porn soundtrack before a swampy sax solo steals the show. “TANK” is the type of glitzy 1980s pop rock that Bronson has obsessed over for years. All of the beats are off-kilter, but none of them sound alike.
As much as he is a prolific emcee, Bronson is a talker. And while there are short interludes and song intros littered throughout the latest Blue Chips, once a beat kicks on, Bronson is forced to rap. On “La Luna,” he barks out orders that he needs a Towncar. “Yo, what beat is that? Ooh that shit is funky,” he wonders excitedly about the car company’s jazz-fusion hold muzak, before launching into an off-the-cuff verse over the Alchemist’s organ-laced sample flip. It’s an endearing snapshot of a guy who sometimes seems past rapping but keeps doing it because he enjoys it so much.
Blue Chips 7000 is full of unadorned samples and short on features. The reggae singer Jah Tiger toasts a slinky, quaint hook over a sunny Knxwledge loop that seems to decay back onto itself. Rick Ross pops up on the Harry Fraud produced “9-24-7000,” a shimmering and less peculiar beat than the rest to accommodate his lounging. For all the weird brags Bronson whips up, none are as casually haughty as Ross’ kicker. “I’m the label owner/I’m the only one can shelf me,” he raps as a guest on an album that has been tormentingly delayed by the label.
The gravel in Bronson’s vocals distracts from just how high-pitched and nasally it is. “Daddy back/With his long white Cadillac/Now it’s time take a nappy nap,” he wheezes, sneering on the smooth organ of “Bonzai.” There’s a sheer glee in Bronson’s voice that is sometimes soured by the things he is actually saying. He’s flirted with disgusting, inappropriate lyricism throughout his career; here, Bronson has dropped the shock value but maintained the dopey swaggering.
Sometimes it sounds like Bronson is reading deliriously from a sheet of randomly generated phrases. “The full moon make me loco/Like I sniffed a whole baseline of cocoa,” he spits on “The Choreographer,” as if his only conceit was rapping something that nobody before him had thought to. He’s still fabling over beats, too, and at one point he swears, “I might hang off the side of the mountain to trim a bonsai/Perfect 10 on the swan dive.” Then again, Bronson is a joyously wacky guy, and his ridiculous non sequiturs mesh especially well with the eccentric boogie-funk of the Westside Gunn producer Daringer’s sample flip.
Bronson has already released a few dozen songs like the one’s you’ll hear on Blue Chips 7000. But these new tracks are probably the strongest in his catalog—full of cheeky, relentless verses to match the energetic funk he’s best accompanied by—and the repetition feels strategic. For years now, Bronson has traveled the world living out his raps and overloading on new experiences. He’d probably be the first to tell you there’s comfort in ordering the same thing twice. | 2017-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Vice / Atlantic | August 29, 2017 | 7.4 | 77fe5ef9-1cc1-43b5-88ae-847f04bf411c | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | null |
Borrowing a title and sometimes a tone from Gil Scott-Heron, the Chicago rapper explores religion, consensual sex, and himself. | Borrowing a title and sometimes a tone from Gil Scott-Heron, the Chicago rapper explores religion, consensual sex, and himself. | Mick Jenkins: Pieces of a Man | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mick-jenkins-pieces-of-a-man/ | Pieces of a Man | In the pluralistic realm of Chicago rap, one thing seems certain: Mick Jenkins will never suffer a lack of ambition. His new album, Pieces of a Man, lifts its name from the 1971 Gil Scott-Heron classic and attempts the daunting task of channeling the bohemian beatnik’s indomitable spirit. Jenkins even gives us a pretty good impression, morphing his voice to match Scott-Heron’s distinct tenor for two skits that double as live spoken-word sessions. Stepping into the role of a legend is, for sure, an audacious move, but the appeal of the South Side star has typically been for those with a taste for the maneuvering metaphors and trenchant critiques that afforded Scott-Heron his status.
Central themes have defined Jenkins’ previous full-lengths. The Healing Component, for instance, was a spiritually charged concept record focused on the impossible task of defining love. Pondering police brutality, racism, and cultural appropriation, that album took stock of social ills in the United States. Pieces of a Man plays like a more personalised counterpoint. If Scott-Heron was like a photographer, snapping society from never-before-seen angles, Jenkins turns the lens on himself. The results illuminate the title: We get all the pieces that make up the man.
Religion again plays a central role. For Jenkins, there’s no chasm between being a Christian and street kid, as Pieces of a Man captures the low-key impact faith has on Jenkins’ daily grind. Take the rumbling bass and doomed piano keys of “Grace & Mercy,” which finds Jenkins wryly thanking God for the gifts he has before throwing vague threats at unidentified enemies and detailing plans to smoke weed with the squad. On “Barcelona,” Jenkins longs for an escape from his daily bullshit and ponders the impact his lifestyle has on his spirituality: “Granny praying for it,” he raps desperately. “She say we ain’t Christian-ing right!” These moments of clarity seem summoned from the deepest crevices of Jenkins’ id.
Most striking is “Consensual Seduction,” a song about the importance of verbal consent that seems inspired by #MeToo. “I need you to tell me what you want,” croons Jenkins without sucking up the song’s romantic tension. This is one of the few moments when he engages with the current news cycle. Jenkins does, though, get help in that regard from other sources. Ghostface Killah delivers an impassioned assist on “Padded Locks” as vital as anything on his own recent album, The Lost Tapes. It might not be the most graceful presidential takedown ever, but hearing Tony Starks scream “Donald Trump is a piece of shit” has an undeniably visceral appeal.
The original Pieces of a Man was Scott-Heron’s first studio record and also one of his most pop-focused efforts, where his pointed messages were presented with pleasing arrangements and hooks that stuck. Jenkins, however, has little interest in adding pop to this tome. There are hooks, sure, but nothing like a swooning chorus. The beats are built largely around twilit, soulful organ and dinky electronics. “Gwendolynn’s Apprehension,” produced by Black Milk, puts Jenkins over a riff that sounds teased from a Game Boy. The light guitar and organ of “Plain Clothes” summon the spirit of Minnie Riperton, and Jenkins comfortably shifts to singing. Though a versatile vocalist, Jenkins isn’t actually a Tier 1 rapper. His rasp can struggle when forced to take on too much, especially amid the prominent percussion and tough orchestration of something like “Ghost.”
But this is a minor gripe within a major scheme. Chicago rap is currently undergoing a multidisciplinary creative surge: Noname mixes diary pages with cosmic jazz; Queen Key makes murderous music you can chant in the club; G Herbo and Lil Durk offer visceral depictions from the trenches; Chris Crack has rapped over soul samples as well as anybody this year. Jenkins moves above these trends, claiming a corner of the city that’s all his own. The result is a gripping portrait of one human among Chicago’s 2.7 million. | 2018-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-10-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Cinematic | October 30, 2018 | 7.6 | 77ff5b19-c926-4e9a-a05a-0b20075a5668 | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
Australian singer-songwriter Grace Shaw floats between cloud rap and dream pop with the tossed-off affectations of a weary internet princess. | Australian singer-songwriter Grace Shaw floats between cloud rap and dream pop with the tossed-off affectations of a weary internet princess. | Mallrat: Butterfly Blue | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mallrat-butterfly-blue/ | Butterfly Blue | In 2015, a Brisbane teenager named Grace Shaw uploaded a song titled “Suicide Blonde” to SoundCloud. Shaw’s debut single as Mallrat offered more intrigue than the ordinary lo-fi ditty: The track addresses a woman who once appeared in the music video for INXS’ song of the same name and now struggles with depression, addiction, and an eating disorder. Lyrics name-dropping Cameron Diaz and the late INXS singer Michael Hutchence were exacting and empathetic. A year later, Shaw released her debut EP, Uninvited, a skittering, upbeat collection of songs about suburban ennui and feeling like an outcast. Massive streaming success, buzzy singles, and gigs opening for Post Malone and Maggie Rogers followed. After three EPs, the now 23-year-old Shaw’s long-awaited debut, Butterfly Blue, establishes her as an artist with ambitions bigger than the bedroom-pop genre that once defined her.
Butterfly Blue is named for dueling sensations: the stomach-churning excitement of new romance and the heartbreak that so often follows. Across 11 songs, Mallrat explores desire and distance: Her songwriting is preoccupied with lovers who remain just out of reach and stars that momentarily align only to burn out. “I was in love, it’s not something you choose,” she sings on the title track. Like many young artists raised online, Shaw has an omnivore’s musical palette, citing Three 6 Mafia, SOPHIE, and Yung Lean as influences; as a child, she was captivated by Imogen Heap’s layered vocals on “Hide and Seek,” as heard on the soundtrack to The O.C. The songs on Butterfly Blue are largely rooted in the realms of cloud rap and dream pop, with the tossed-off affectations of a weary internet princess. As if to underline the influence, a faithful cover of Mazzy Star’s gauzy hit “Fade Into You” appears as a bonus track on physical editions.
For her full-length debut, Shaw teamed up with a ragtag crew of producers including Jam City, Konstantin Kersting, and Tommy English. The SoundCloud-y “Surprise Me” does nothing of the sort until everyone’s favorite shit-stirrer, Azealia Banks, appears for a truly jaw-dropping verse: “I squirted on him like a squid, now he inky-faced/He said my pussy tighter than Nicole Kidman face.” Banks’ cocksure burst of energy momentarily transforms Butterfly Blue into an entirely different record. If Mallrat briefly comes off like a guest on her own song, she regains control with the glitchy production and hypnotic chorus of album highlight “Your Love.” It concludes with a diced-up sample of Memphis rapper Gangsta Pat’s 1995 track “Killa (Part 2)”: “Hidin’ in the bushes with a mask and a pistol grip…I got a bullet with yo’ name on the fuckin’ tip.” The menacing image adds some much-needed sharpness to Mallrat’s hazy stories of romantic peril.
Mallrat has said she aspires to make music that sounds like “angelic children’s choirs and monster trucks at the same time” and Butterfly Blue is at its best when it squarely rides that line. The gothic fairytale “Heart Guitar” crackles with electro-pop sparks as Mallrat laments a lost love: “How can you give me butterflies then tie them up in knots?” she murmurs wistfully. “Teeth” bundles vague concepts of sex and power into an omnipresent specter with the distant pout of Sky Ferreira circa Night Time, My Time. More compelling is Alice Ivy’s production, which dissolves Mallrat’s vocals into a blown-out blast of reverb. The acoustic empowerment anthem “I’m Not My Body, It’s Mine” takes a softer approach, with a background loop of hushed, wordless harmonies that would make Brian Wilson proud.
On the warm and twinkly “Rockstar,” she fantasizes about marrying a famous musician who will help her forget all about an ex. The twist, however, is that in this scenario, Mallrat is a Grammy-winning superstar in her own right, and she can rely on herself: “Don’t think you’re slick for cashing in on my magic.” Tracks like “Rockstar” and “I’m Not My Body, It’s Mine” succeed because Mallrat’s strongest songwriting prioritizes specificity over impressions. It’s this close observation that allowed early tracks like “Suicide Blonde” to stand out, but too frequently on Butterfly Blue, Mallrat gets lost in loose daydreams. When she latches onto particulars, she soars. | 2022-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Nettwerk | May 20, 2022 | 6.8 | 78177aa1-b7ac-4bdf-810b-1d0b9d9f06b7 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
With glowing synths and lyrics about labor and death, the New York duo’s fifth LP is a tastefully small reflection on modern anxieties. | With glowing synths and lyrics about labor and death, the New York duo’s fifth LP is a tastefully small reflection on modern anxieties. | Widowspeak: Plum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/widowspeak-plum/ | Plum | Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas’s first few albums as Widowspeak had a darkness running through them. The Brooklyn duo released their 2011 self-titled debut on Captured Tracks, home of like-minded bedroom jangle bands like Wild Nothing and Beach Fossils. Widowspeak and their counterparts cast a vintage haze to match the sepia-toned filters of early Instagram. Their skillful, moody interpretations of ’70s psychedelia and sad ’90s rock evoked a dreamy sense of yearning, like nostalgia for nothing in particular. Plum, Widowspeak’s fifth LP, is resigned to more modern anxieties. It’s a tastefully small album, breezy and immediate, written and recorded before the pandemic. The band focus less on collaging retro influences and more on introducing new elements into their palette.
Plum is a memento mori painted in rich hues: Fruit ripens and shrivels. Our jobs sustain us and kill us. Time is our most valuable asset and we waste it away. Glowing synth notes and guitars give “Breadwinner” the hypnotic coziness of Mazzy Star as Hamilton describes a lover’s daily slog, working late hours and longing for pure, uncomplicated romance. Acknowledgments of the past appear as faint, cloudy memories. “Amy” simmers like a desert mirage, a pulsating bass backing Hamilton’s breathy coo as she sings about a silhouette, maybe a girl she once knew: “Summer fruit, cherry tattoo/So easy-going, like your mom was there for you.”
But Widowspeak’s musings on envy and exhaustion aren’t complaints. They don’t bemoan our lives’ impermanence. Plum wavers between calm acceptance and a bright downward spiral, chasing fires before they fizzle. Hamilton swaddles reflections on labor and death in honeyed tones. “Try not to see it as a curse/You think that things are getting worse/The only body I was given/The only life that you’re living,” she whispers. “Even true love; you can’t take it with you.” Existential panic has the hum of meditation.
Widowspeak flirt with a certain strain of retail indie rock, the kind that plays softly over racks of bohemian-inspired tunics and overpriced candles—the equivalent of a stylishly distressed Fleetwood Mac T-shirt. But instead of feeling trapped in vague approximations of ’60s and ’70s aesthetics, Widowspeak’s vibes come with a sharp vision. Among the inspirations for Plum, the band cite YouTube playlists of pop songs remixed to sound like they’re playing in abandoned malls, David Byrne’s kooky 1986 film True Stories, and the celebrated 20th-century food writer M.F.K. Fisher. But you can also hear subtle flickers of the duo’s contemporaries: Big Thief’s heavy emotional undertow and deft guitar work echo through Thomas’s fingerpicked melodies, and “Even True Love” offers a shadier take on Real Estate’s sunny acoustics.
Plum stretches far beyond a boutique clothing store, but it doesn’t take enough risks to really widen Widowspeak’s scope. Some riffs nag when they intend to mesmerize, and not all the clichés land. Perhaps the familiar refrain of “Money”—it “doesn’t grow on trees”—could’ve worked if the spindly guitar had a stronger driving rhythm, or maybe the strums would’ve been more effective beneath a more novel quip about living to work. By the time Hamilton suggests that we “tune out platitudes like these” in the last verse, her advice falls flat. The sleepy arrangements of the final two tracks, “Jeannie” and “Y2K,” fade into the background. But loud isn’t their aim, and Plum’s special, big moments stand out against the quiet. Widowspeak’s capitalist critique becomes a mirror of the chaos that permeates our daily rhythm—buying, selling, making, doing.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | September 4, 2020 | 7.2 | 7817fbc2-96d8-4510-bb7b-e0baf25e16ef | Julia Gray | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julia-gray/ | |
The Los Angeles quartet’s new record turns to nature and childhood past by blending plaintive psychedelic rock with sweet folk melodies. | The Los Angeles quartet’s new record turns to nature and childhood past by blending plaintive psychedelic rock with sweet folk melodies. | Goon: Hour of Green Evening | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/goon-hour-of-green-evening/ | Hour of Green Evening | Childhood can feel powerfully dramatic as you stumble across one revelation after another, and even insignificant discoveries may stay in our minds decades after they occur—a broken playground swing that nobody repaired, your first taste of a candy you now detest. Kenny Becker, frontman of the Los Angeles quartet Goon, wanders around such memories on the group’s second record, Hour of Green Evening. A noticeably softer record than Goon’s 2019 debut, Heaven is Humming, and recorded with a completely new lineup aside from Becker himself, Goon glide through sweet indie-folk numbers as though they’ve been doing this for years.
Building on Paint by Numbers, Vol. 1, an EP of hazy pandemic recordings released earlier this year, Hour of Green Evening is a wistful record that blends plaintive psychedelic rock with lilting melodies and arrangements. Becker sings folk tales about his childhood, peering beyond the blissful innocence of those early years to notice the quiet solitude in the nature around him. The rest of Goon—along with an assist from Spoon’s Alex Fischel on keys—add to the scenery, conjuring the same idyllic dreams that Becker describes. “In a past life you softly slept through waking hours/And in the boughs/Beams of sound play a welcoming,” he sings in lead single “Angelnumber 1210,” his voice floating lazily as drums and guitar keep a steady pace.
Nature is the throughline to these memories, as Becker treats every mention of greenery or the weather with gentle care and sweeping grandeur. In “Another Window,” he croons about nighttime blooming “over the ivy in a row”; on “Buffalo,” the sight of hedges on a sidewalk remind him of “sharing grassy knees” with someone from his past. These references turn folkloric on “Wavy Maze,” a standout that recalls the band’s grungier material. Dizzying and dissonant, the track sounds like a dark Grimm fairy tale with its plodding guitars and oscillating synths, contrasting blurring recollections with gothic descriptions. “When I was small/Saria’s ageless song played along,” Becker sings, referencing the in-game journey of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The song builds in intensity, carrying on its mystic path before climaxing with a scream of pent up frustration.
Hour of Green Evening might have benefited from more of that wilder teenage thrall, but for the most part, what the music lacks in rowdiness it makes up for in emotional complexity. “Emily Says” carries the adolescent anger of “Wavy Maze” into adulthood as Becker sings of a depression that persists in a loving marriage: “Emily says, ‘Hope still appears’/And though I know in my heart it’s right/Feeling like hurting myself tonight,” he laments while his voice moves toward a soothing peak. Looking back into memories brings up these types of contradictions—we remember a detail that someone else might not, or we reinterpret feelings of events long after they end. Goon takes these nuances into account and chooses to embrace the memory anyway. | 2022-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Démodé | July 21, 2022 | 7.1 | 781c4087-68c1-4b2c-aff4-ad4765fad20e | Rachel Saywitz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachel-saywitz/ | |
Phil Ochs’ second album is a work of long-steeped fury at his country’s sins, naked in its scorn for a system showing its many fissures; still, it guards a flickering, tenacious hope. | Phil Ochs’ second album is a work of long-steeped fury at his country’s sins, naked in its scorn for a system showing its many fissures; still, it guards a flickering, tenacious hope. | Phil Ochs: I Ain’t Marching Anymore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22754-i-aint-marching-anymore/ | I Ain’t Marching Anymore | Though the cover shot of I Ain’t Marching Anymore is a graveyard of grim political rhetoric—Phil Ochs slumped against a wall of torn Barry Goldwater and Kenneth Keating posters, their slogans shredded and inscrutable—the back cover essays comprise a beatnik rhapsody for the ages. Written by Ochs and the critic Bruce Jackson, they deliver the sort of earnest, overly verbose salvo only a Greenwich Village protest-folk record could deliver: a dense scrum of cheers to the Movement, jeers at the invertebrates in Congress, and navel-gazings on the quest for truth in art, with a track listing and credits seemingly wedged in as afterthought.
Midway through all the eager pulpit-pounding, though, the 24-year-old Ochs takes a turn both petulant and self-effacing, listing the most frequent complains that have been lobbed at him in his short career:
There’s nothing as dull as yesterday’s headlines.
Don’t be so ambitious.
Sure it’s good, but who’s gonna care next year?
I bet you don’t go to church.
Don’t be so negative.
I came to be entertained, not preached to.
That’s nice but it doesn’t really go far enough.
That’s not folk music.
Why don’t you move to Russia?
Which is what you got in 1965 for leaping up onto a bench in Washington Square Park and warbling your dismay at the morning’s New York Times: you were branded an ally of the communist kleptocracy, back when that sort of charge might actually end your career. (Simpler times.) But Ochs didn’t argue these accusations; he reveled in them as proof of concept, his confirmation that he was hitting the establishment where it hurt. He labeled himself a “singing journalist,” not a folk singer like the rest of his Bleecker Street fraternity (Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton), and stuffed his lyrics with the up-to-the-minute topicality and op-ed lambasting of a newsman—championing a coal miners’ strike in Kentucky one verse, decrying Marines landing at Santo Domingo the next. He called the front pages like a guerrilla newsie, merging the sardonic wit of Woody Guthrie, the chatty candor of Pete Seeger, and the lone-gunslinger bravado of Hank Williams.
And in the troubled arc of Ochs’ career—in which he began as the voice of the antiwar movement and heir apparent to Dylan, then cooled into his also-ran, then sank a bitter and penniless outcast—these cries of unpatriotism were a rare constant. He died not even knowing their extent; decades after he committed suicide in 1976, at age 35, the Freedom of Information Act unearthed a FBI monitoring dossier on him, thick as a novel.
But only a true American idealist could have written I Ain’t Marching Anymore. Ochs’ second album is a work of long-steeped fury at his country’s sins, naked in its scorn for a system showing its many fissures; still, it guards a flickering, tenacious hope that the nation can reach its potential to embrace, to empathize. It is a work of nationalistic heartbreak, the deploring of a terrible fate: the requiem of a romantic with nowhere to love. It is zealously leftist, so unequivocal as to smack of propaganda over poetry, almost wholly dependent on Ochs’ inculcating wordplay: with his twangy, octave-at-best vocal range, stevedore coffee shop strumming, and modest melodies, this album grabs your throat entirely on lyrical ferocity.
But to Ochs, there was no time for subtlety. The Lyndon B. Johnson administration was escalating involvement in Vietnam, ignoring countrywide demonstrations of dissent and returning body bags by the thousands; the racial friction of the South was exploding in bombings and riots; young Americans were still rudderless from the assassination of President Kennedy, mourning that era of profound hope and their purpose within it. Ochs absorbed it all and was a true believer in tuneful social reform; as he quipped in the program notes of the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see an album called Elvis Presley Sings Songs of the Spanish Civil War or The Beatles with the Best of the Chinese Border Dispute Songs.” But until the day that happened, Ochs was here for us, offering 14 brisk tracks of fingerpicked guitar and unvarnished tenor, distilling the world’s chaos into a frightening thesis: An era of optimism and social promise was not only ending, but taking alarming leaps backward. But, he stressed, there was still time to reverse course.
He sets his agenda firmly in the title track—an opener that rouses and incites despite a pallor of exhaustion, regret, and fear. Over a simple acoustic strum with a subtly agitated back-trill, Ochs travels the bloody scope of American warfare, gazing wearily through the eyes of a soldier whose obedience has cost him his humanity. He begins at the War of 1812, where “the young land started growing/The young blood started flowing”; then he grips a glinting bayonet in the Civil War, pilots a plane through Japanese skies that sets off “the mighty mushroom roar.” When Ochs’ warrior reaches the “Cuban shore,” and sees the missiles looming overhead, he grinds down his heels at last. “It's always the old to lead us to the wars/Always the young to fall,” he laments. “Now look at all we've won/With a saber and a gun/Tell me is it worth it all?” In a few breaths, Ochs not only decries the cyclical carnage of war, he explores the individual in bloodshed with clear-eyed empathy and lays a wrenching argument for ethical subversion. “Call it peace, or call it treason/Call it love, or call it reason,” he quavers, “But I ain't marching anymore.” Here, his oft-nasal voice betrays a slight Scottish lilt, the result of his Queens-based family’s brief stint in Edinburgh when he was a child—a warm, global topnote to his treaty. Upon its release, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” became a ubiquitous anthem of the antiwar movement, and Ochs’ signature tune; when he performed it outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968, hundreds of young men burned their draft cards.
Ochs may have dropped out of journalism school (at Ohio State, where his fervent political columns got him demoted from the school paper), but he retained a penchant for interviewing strangers whenever he performed, from uptown street corners to dirt roads in the deep South. Early into Side A, on “In the Heat of the Summer,” Ochs recalls scenes from the Harlem riot of 1964, his reporter’s eye for detail gleaming in the “loudspeaker drowned like a whisperin' sound” and “uniforms shoving with their sticks/Asking, ‘Are you looking for trouble?’” While touring the summer folk festival circuit, he passed through Mississippi shortly after the abductions and murders of three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—as they registered African Americans to vote. Ochs marched up to their neighbors, pen and paper in hand; their unease and obstinance informs “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” a scorched-earth screed that implicates rural communities for resisting social progress and denounces the lack of education and options that perpetuate the spiral of intolerance.
“Talking Birmingham Jam” is a brutal lament of the violence in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, when black residents demonstrated in opposition of the city’s Jim Crow racial segregation laws__.__ In response, President Kennedy sent the National Guard to enforce integration in its schools, catalyzing the Civil Rights Act—and the city’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, replied with attack dogs, high-pressure water hoses, and club-wielding cops. “Well, all the signs said ‘Welcome In’/Signed by Governor Wallace and Rin Tin Tin/They said come along and watch the fights/While we feed our dogs on civil rights,” Ochs seethes in a conversational sing-song lifted from Guthrie, excoriating Connor and George Wallace. “You see Alabama is a sovereign state/With sovereign dogs and sovereign hate.” His words echo powerful ones Martin Luther King, Jr. penned the year before, though it’s not known how deliberately. “The silent password was fear. It was a fear not only on the part of the black oppressed, but also in the hearts of the white oppressors,” Dr. King wrote of Birmingham in Why We Can’t Wait. “There was also the dread of change, that all too prevalent fear which hounds those whose attitudes have been hardened by the long winter of reaction.”
While I Ain’t Marching Anymore arrived at a fractious moment in American history, it also landed at a strong pivot for Ochs’ beloved Greenwich Village protest-folk microcosm: it was the beginning of the end for this bohemian idyll. Ochs had moved to New York three years earlier, where the same liberal ire that made him an outcast in Ohio ingratiated him instantly with the other young troubadours at the Bitter End and the Gaslight. He played peace rallies at Carnegie Hall with Dylan and palling around with Van Ronk and Paxton afterward at dimly lit poker tables, sprawling in shoddy apartments to tease out new songs. He crashed on the couch of Jim Glover, his college roommate, with whom he’d once formed a band called the Singing Socialists; Glover was now half of the sweetheart folk duo Jim and Jean. (If they sound familiar, their name and saccharine charisma—plus Ochs’ frequent irascibility toward them—were imported wholesale into Inside Llewyn Davis.)
Dylan and Ochs were the heaviest hitters in the New York scene, and their reputations preceded them; in this time, they were described by *Melody Maker *in England as the “king of protest” and “the president,” respectively. They shared a mostly cordial rivalry, one with the hierarchy firmly apparent. As the Ochs biography Death of a Rebel details, Ochs revered Dylan openly, but Dylan was mercurial in return; he once raved of Ochs, “I just can't keep up with Phil. And he's getting better and better and better,” but was also quick to call him a “turncoat” and “opportunist” for wanting fame as nakedly as he did. (Once, Dylan allegedly kicked Ochs out of a limousine, hurling the “you’re just a singing journalist” epithet back in his face as the final indignity.) But for several years, both musicians coexisted in the same topical nexus. They both flourished at the landmark 1963 Newport Folk Festival; Pete Seeger, upon hearing them perform at a counterculture newspaper office, predicted vast fame for both. In one of many overlapping lyrical examples, they both bemoaned the death of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1964: Dylan on “Only A Pawn in Their Game” (from The Times They Are a-Changin’), Ochs on “Too Many Martyrs” (from his debut, All the News That’s Fit to Sing). And both were well-known volatiles; Dylan was the imperious prodigy simultaneously enjoying and bemoaning society’s quick deification of him. Ochs, one year older, envied his recognition openly and had a likewise-sticky reputation as a hothead alcoholic, a handsome narcissist who’d beaten girlfriends and alienated friends.
By 1965, Greenwich Village folk had begun splintering into their separate schools of folk ideology: Ochs believed folk songwriting should affect reactionary change in politics via blunt broadcasting of information and resistance, while Dylan teased out philosophical truths through personal ruminations, and daubing that canvas with larger social metaphor. That year, as Ochs continued to file his topical acoustic briefs sourced from Newsweek and The Village Voice, Dylan fully sniffed at it, “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival and releasing Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. (Consider the former’s oblique Side A protest, “Maggie’s Farm,” a rollicking yet not-so-dissimilar bray of sedition as “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”—though, in this case, Dylan was protesting against protest folk.) Commercial favor tipped to Dylan’s rock rancor; it would not bend back toward Ochs’ bleeding headlines. As Christopher Hitchens summarized in the Ochs documentary There But for Fortune, “Phil’s very tough, grainy songs…were far more political and tough-minded than the much more generalized, accessible ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ There was a difference between people who liked Bob Dylan—anyone could like Bob Dylan, everybody did—and those who even knew about Phil Ochs.”
But serious-minded as Ochs was, he was not without his gallows humor—the secret weapon of I Ain’t Marching Anymore. “Draft Dodger Rag” is a droll riff on shirking the call to Vietnam, spry with the impishness of a boy claiming fang marks on his homework. Ochs spits out any and every excuse that will get him discharged from duty: “I've got a dislocated disc and a wracked-up back/I'm allergic to flowers and bugs,” he wheedles. “And when the bombshell hits, I get epileptic fits/And I'm addicted to a thousand drugs.” Not all his cop-outs have aged well, exactly, by progressive standards (“I always carry a purse” sets off a modern air-raid siren), but it’s an endearing novelty. And as with all Ochs’ songs, there is a galvanizing point staked into the sand: the draft fell disproportionately to the poor, the uneducated, and minorities. Another lighter offering, comparatively, is “That’s What I Want to Hear,” a call to arms for the exploited and whiny (inert liberals being a favored punching bag of Ochs’). “You tell me that your last good dollar is gone/And you say that your pockets are bare,” he sings at a sharp but not-unkind clip. Soon enough, “Now don't tell me your troubles/No, I don't have the time to spare/But if you want to get together and fight/Good buddy, that's what I want to hear.” It is a call to action but, notably, not to knee-jerk jingoism; mobilization is easy in the first flush of fear but resistance, if taken to conclusion, will always be a pyrrhic victory. Here, Ochs tapers one of his core, conclusively patriotic theses: that he, and his listeners, should be willing to lose some comforts to keep the world turning.
The most affecting moment of the album is “That Was the President,” Ochs’ eulogy to President Kennedy that speaks to the shattered disillusionment of his generation. It’s sung as softly as an echo across wooden pews. “Here’s a memory to share, here's a memory to save/Of the sudden early ending of command,” he sighs. “Yet a part of you and a part of me is buried in his grave/That was the President and that was the man.” It aches with lack of resolution; it’s a memorial to the idealism the president fostered, whose administration itself shuttered in unfulfilled promise of its progressive agenda. (There is more than a wisp of the paternal here; Ochs’ father also died in 1963.)
Ochs’ music after I Ain’t Marching Anymore would be pocked by outside influences; he jealously watched less overtly political colleagues like Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary reach national fame, and struggled to reconcile his ardency for social reform with his craving to be a star. He watched artists advance on his back; Joan Baez’s cover of his compassionate tune “There But for Fortune” charted in the Top 50 in both America and the UK, higher than he’d ever managed. Frustrated, he retreated from earnest topicality; his next full studio album, Pleasures of the Harbor, folded in lush, Sinatra-strings and ragtime piano, adding a poppier bend to his dour character studies of empty socialites and downtrodden flower vendors. He became disillusioned with demonstrating; he and his Yippie party cohorts staged a protest at 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, during which they nominated an actual pig for president (name: Pigasus), but the mirth ended in a massive, era-defining riot between protesters and police. He retreated from New York, his wife, and his daughter, drinking heavily, heaped his flagging idealism on the communist uprisings of Fidel Castro and the Marxist Chilean revolutionary Salvador Allende. His erratic creative path onward included self-funded, unsuccessful tours through South America and Africa (where he was arrested for performing at a political rally in Uruguay, robbed and strangled in Tanzania), and attempting to replicate Elvis Presley’s 1969 comeback show in Las Vegas with his own mystifying performance in gold lamé at Carnegie Hall. He dabbled more in symphonic pop and recruited Van Dyke Parks for a country-western turn (sarcastically called Phil Ochs’ Greatest Hits), all of which fell flat commercially.
Abetted by his rampant alcoholism and persistent writer’s block, Ochs slid into a bipolar breakdown; not even the end of the Vietnam War, and its ensuing celebratory concerts, could rouse him from his nosedive. He adopted an alternate identity called “John Train” and went on paranoid rants onstage, insisting he had murdered Phil Ochs and the CIA was after him. (The miserable irony of the FBI’s monitoring.) He slept on the streets, got arrested, attacked friends. On April 9, 1976, amid the gaudy patriotism of the Bicentennial Celebration, he hanged himself at his sister’s home in Queens.
But for a moment, Phil Ochs existed in pure conviction. I Ain’t Marching Anymore reminds us to resist the dangers of acquiescence, to take to the streets to demand the country that still persists in our hearts, even if it’s not before to our eyes anymore. It would be easy to stop marching in apathy or in defeat, but Ochs pushed for something greater: a righteous, excruciating, beautiful reclamation. Small wonder his powerful polemics have been covered and updated by the Clash, Neil Young, Jello Biafra: His fight was never just his, never just of his time. And in the right hands, it will never die. | 2017-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Elektra | January 22, 2017 | 8.5 | 781f7820-3d2f-4ee0-80f9-6cad34b805d1 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
With most tracks pulled from the cutting room floor of the YHLQMDLG sessions, Bad Bunny shows he’s in full command of his music, even when it’s a little rough around the edges. | With most tracks pulled from the cutting room floor of the YHLQMDLG sessions, Bad Bunny shows he’s in full command of his music, even when it’s a little rough around the edges. | Bad Bunny: LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bad-bunny-las-que-no-iban-a-salir/ | LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR | Like almost everyone else, Bad Bunny’s life got derailed when the coronavirus pandemic swept across the globe. Unlike most everyone else, he was coming off a performance with Shakira at the Super Bowl and shooting scenes for his debut acting role in the new season of Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico when much of the western world shut down, sending him back home to Puerto Rico to wait out the crisis. Weeks of isolation tested the limits of his ability to entertain himself—and us—without leaving the house. As he told Rolling Stone, he grabbed some old beats, called up some OGs, and pulled up to his engineer La Paciencia’s crib to track some vocals. And less than three months after dropping YHLQMDLG, the high-water mark of his career, Bad Bunny had a new album out.
The title of that album, LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR, loosely translates to “The ones that weren’t coming out,” a play on words that references both the songs on the record as well as Bad Bunny himself, holed up in an Airbnb with his partner since March. Nine of the 10 tracks were pulled from the cutting room floor of the YHLQMDLG sessions; unfinished, unmixed, and unmastered beats with no vocals that Bad Bunny resurrected while in isolation, with a little help from his friends. Most of them appeared in some form during his marathon home quarantine concert broadcast live on Instagram earlier this month.
The record plays quick and dirty, with uncharacteristically crunchy production value and lo-fi aesthetics. Even the album cover is lo-res. YHLQMDLG was a slickly produced homage to marquesina mixtapes; LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR sounds like it could actually be one, the kind of record a teen Bad Bunny might play at one of those underground garage parties. He says he put the record together in two days, and it shows. But far from detracting from the experience, the loose grit is part of the appeal. “Reggaetoncitos” that smooth out reggaeton’s rougher edges may have helped it merge with the mainstream, but Bad Bunny’s career has been defined by pulling the mainstream closer to him, as opposed to vice versa. Even as he’s reshaped urbano in his own image, he’s shown a healthy respect and admiration for its underground outlaw beginnings, and consistently made the case that there’s room for perreo on the pop charts.
A quick glance at the guest features reveals the dichotomy of old school and new school—legends like Don Omar, Yandel, and Zion y Lennox represent the OGs, while nascent hitmaker Jhay Cortez offers a glimpse of the talent in urbano’s next generation. And while YHLQMDLG standout “Safaera” felt like a five-minute tribute to DJ Playero’s genre-defining mixtapes of the 1990s, he tips his cap to them even more directly here. “BAD CON NICKY,” his collaboration with Medellin-via-Puerto Rico reggaetonero Nicky Jam, samples Daddy Yankee’s “Donde Mí No Venga,” a seminal track in reggaeton’s history from Playero 37 that makes plain the lineage that connects reggae en español and reggaeton.
Lyrically, LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR mostly sticks to Bad Bunny’s trademark sex flexes and party jams. But even in tossed-off mixtape verses, he retains a goofy charm; “Tantos hijos que no sé cómo los crío/Y en los dedos tengo el iceberg que rompió el Titanic/Los mato flow Sosa y quedan blancos como Sammy” he raps on “RONCA FREESTYLE” (“So many kids that I don’t know how I raise them/And on my fingers I have the iceberg that sunk the Titanic/I kill them, Sosa flow and they're left white like Sammy”).
The album’s final track was the only one made from scratch during Bad Bunny’s self-imposed quarantine and offers the most literal view of his life in isolation. He compares the cause of his hermetic lifestyle to Puerto Rico’s corrupt governor, lamenting both his canceled concerts and lack of access to AutoTune. It’s also duet with his partner Gabriela Berlingeri, who has proven to be as much a collaborator as she is a paramour since the pair went public with their relationship earlier this year—she laid the reference vocals for his JLo collab “Te Guste,” and even shot his recent Rolling Stone cover. LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR is incomparable to Bad Bunny’s first two LPs: Those were two carefully crafted masterpieces, whereas this is merely an extracurricular project from a bored superstar trapped in a house for weeks on end. That it’s still this good is a reminder of his otherworldly talent. | 2020-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Rimas | May 16, 2020 | 7.2 | 78212309-533b-4365-89b1-67ab7c5ad0d4 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The Killers' greatest hits collection, Direct Hits, includes singles from their four studio albums along with new songs (the M83-produced "Shot at the Night" and "Just Another Girl", produced by Stuart Price). Taken as a whole, it proves the band has fewer actual hits, let alone great ones, than you thought. | The Killers' greatest hits collection, Direct Hits, includes singles from their four studio albums along with new songs (the M83-produced "Shot at the Night" and "Just Another Girl", produced by Stuart Price). Taken as a whole, it proves the band has fewer actual hits, let alone great ones, than you thought. | The Killers: Direct Hits | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18699-the-killers-direct-hits/ | Direct Hits | You can let silly facts get in the way of seeing Direct Hits as one of the most hotly anticipated records of the past 10 years*.* Sure, the Killers have technically released four albums and a collection of miscellany that have sold over 20 million copies worldwide and the cool reception to last year’s kinda OK Battle Born suggests their days as a A-list rock band are pretty much over. But c0me on, we knew from the start that was all going to be irrelevant prelude at some point. In 2004, we had a couple of guys from Las Vegas with a careerist streak so blatant it was actually charming and Hot Fuss, an album with gargantuan singles and a complete lack of even adequate deep cuts. This pattern would be repeated three times over and as the years accrued, we fantasized of “Human” or “Runaways” being extracted from their vestigial incubators and collected on a Greatest Hits record that would be amazing. And how many other bands from the past decade can honestly claim more than four actual hits? From that point forward, it would be the only Killers album anyone would ever need, and perhaps seen as the only album they ever made. So how does Direct Hits still manage to disappoint even if we’ve already heard every single song on it?
For one thing, Direct Hits is mostly chronological. Mostly. It begins with “Mr. Brightside”, and rightfully so, since it’s not only the Killers’ best song, but also one of the 2000’s as well. And it was the band’s first single back in 2003. But it shares a complex, tangled history competing with “Somebody Told Me”, as both had multiple releases and alternate videos, targeted for different markets. “Somebody Told Me” was the song that presented the Killers as a particularly UK-friendly Next Big Thing. The plural moniker generated a tentative association with the Strokes or the Vines, who were already signaling the commercial obsolescence of the "New Rock Revival." But the Killers actually got their name from the video for New Order’s “Crystal”, and there was a requisite disco thump and a cheeky, gender-bending sexuality in the chorus that placed them as an American counterpart to bands like Franz Ferdinand. Singer Brandon Flowers wore makeup too and that didn’t hurt. “Somebody Told Me” was certainly catchy, though their libido wasn’t remotely believable even if you didn’t know they were Mormons. If Hot Fuss stalled at “Somebody Told Me”, the Killers would be remembered more fondly than their thoroughly-ethered rivals in the Bravery, but not by much.
Of course, the thought of “Mr. Brightside” somehow falling on deaf ears is more absurd than any of the faces made by Eric Roberts in its indisputably pitch-perfect video. Following in the lineage of “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” or “Jessie’s Girl”, the song itself is a karaoke classic for men grappling with the catastrophic realities of a woman choosing to have sex with someone who isn’t him. Only now, it’s given a properly dashing and desperate musical conduit and a performance by Flowers that makes the finest use of his limited range and dodgy breath control. But it was the track's second, Sophie Muller-directed video that sealed the deal, that truly unlocked the band’s potential as prime purveyors of ham & cheese—as Ryan Dombal noted, Roberts and Flowers are dueling over a game of checkers, and therein lies the Killers’ best look, stupendously simple, pure Vegas glitz, overwhelming in its accessible gaudiness. Whereas most bands musically summoning 80s teenage drama went backwards to channel John Hughes' visual aesthetic, the Killers went for the ostentatious, delightfully tacky drama of Moulin Rouge! and clearly, fellow Las Vegans Panic! At the Disco were watching.
For the rest of Hot Fuss’ album cycle, the Killers wisely followed suit: the pompous stomp of “All These Things That I’ve Done” was set to a video where Flowers co-opts his entire suburban desperado chic from Violator-era Dave Gahan and “Smile Like You Mean It” is the platonic ideal for a fourth single that can coast on the success of the previous three. Before I die, I hope to meet someone who truly believes side-B cuts like “Andy, You’re a Star” and “Midnight Show” are the heart of Hot Fuss rather than proof of the Killers’ debut being one of the most laughably lopsided albums of the past two decades. But with those hits, combined with Hot Fuss opener and de facto single “Jenny Was A Friend of Mine”, the Killers accomplished what so many wanted of them, which was make the 2000s' answer to side A of Duran Duran’s Rio.
But soon thereafter, it wasn’t enough to hear Bono and Chris Martin drop “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier” in their live shows as a kind of torch-sharing. The Killers wanted to be U2 or Coldplay, not in sound so much as in reputation. In short, a band whose campiness often appears to be some sort of glandular problem rather than a product of artistic intent, but are nonetheless given the benefit of the doubt and taken seriously. You might remember how this turned out, and so Direct Hits does exactly what it’s supposed to: salvage “When You Were Young” and make you forget everything that made Sam’s Town something other than Hotter Fuss. Which is to say, the Americana fixations (inexplicably reprised on Day & Age’s DOA single “A Dustland Fairytale”), the moralizing drug PSA “Uncle Johnny”, “Enterlude”, and “Exitlude”, and all the classic rock maneuvers that showed four musicians far out of their depth. At least on “When You Were Young”, their Springsteen ambitions were charming: you can spot the baldfaced “Born to Run” rip in the descending chord changes and the “Thunder Road” iconography, though Flowers’ honking vocals often make it sound more like the most compact Meat Loaf song ever written. But once again, it’s a blast to sing along with and Killers simply steamrolled any criticism the way true hits are meant to. Sam’s Town has since sold an estimated five million copies. Did you know this? You can currently acquire many of them on Amazon for less money than a postage stamp, but that’s not the Killers' problem, is it?
It actually is, at least in the way Direct Hits plays out. By the time you’ve finished the fifth track on Direct Hits, that’s all the Hot Fuss singles and “When You Were Young”. You have 13 more to go, including a demo of “Mr. Brightside” and the Calvin Harris remix of “When You Were Young”. The big draw is “Shot at the Night”, their collaboration with Anthony Gonzalez of M83, an act that hasn’t exactly overtaken Killers in terms of arena-filling synth-pop bombast, but have certainly cut into their market share. Like Direct Hits, you know what’s coming and it’s still kinda deflating: once again, the Killers adapt only the most obvious signifiers of their charges, M83’s hollowed-out synth tones, neon synth riffs not too different than their own, and an obsession with the connotative properties of “the night.” I don’t think Anthony Gonzalez is phoning it in here, though he’s big enough to do it—similar to Oblivion, it just shows that when it comes to soundtracking blockbusters, he’s a much better boss than an employee.
Though their last truly ubiquitous single, “When You Were Young” established a problematic thread that ran through Sam’s Town, the “try everything” third LP Day & Age, and Battle Born, three very different albums that are of more or less of equal quality. There was a dissonance between what many listeners wanted out of the Killers and how the Killers saw themselves. They were in some aspects students of classic rock, though not particularly good ones, skimming the Boss, Bowie (“Spaceman”), New Order (“Human”), Journey (most of Battle Born), and the Cars (“Read My Mind”) like they were assignments handed down from their label. Likewise, many heard “are we human or are we dancer?” as a phenomenal non-sequitur, and it probably would be if Flowers didn’t make it a point to say he was actually paraphrasing Hunter S. Thompson. The Killers performed at a 2010 “Salute to the Military” show at the White House and didn’t even play the one song that contains their most well-known lyric, which is about SOLDIERS. Does Flowers' unyielding belief in his own profundity make Direct Hits even more effective as camp? Or does it make you feel like there’s a disconnect, that the Killers stopped believing there was a joke to be in on after Hot Fuss? And why weren't they any fun?
Even more damning is that most of the songs on Direct Hits stopped becoming hits. Or, at least the kind that are meant to be included on Greatest Hits collections, ones that you simply couldn’t avoid even if you tried. Chart performance is typically meaningless in 2013, but the Killers actively seek out hits and have all the resources to make them happen. If they flop on the charts, that’s on them. And yet, they did flop—“Spaceman” peaked at #67 on the Billboard Hot 100 and promptly disappeared into the void. At its most popular, “A Dustland Fairytale” still trailed 35 songs on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. Long-forgotten “When You Were Young” follow-up “Bones” isn’t even included here. The truly worthy comeback single “Runaways” stalled out at #7 on the Alternative charts behind Imagine Dragons and we were left to wonder whether Las Vegas was big enough for the both of them.
At this point, the Killers are either a phenomenally successful cult act or a headliner in serious decline, and neither seems particularly flattering for a band that’s always aiming for the cheap seats. They topped a night of Coachella back in 2009, but it was a sparsely attended weekend that stood as the festival's bottoming out. (In their defense, give it four years and their headliner gig will look more justified than that of Phoenix.) Battle Born was by far their weakest chart performance yet, but look at it this way—they moved 114,000 copies in week one, whereas Arcade Fire’s first major label record just did 140,000 with far more visibility and career momentum. And Battle Born still got voted as the #2 album in Rolling Stone’s 2012 readers poll with “Miss Atomic Bomb” clocking in as the #1 single, a testament to the diehard fanbase of Victims. (No, I did not just make up that name for the Killers' diehard fanbase, it is 100% real.) If you’re doubting their intensity, when Rolling Stone ran a similar poll in 2009 for “most underrated album of the decade,” what finished at #1? Sam’s Town.
But a Greatest Hits collection is supposed to surprise you with the familiar, to tease out how many songs from a certain band you’ve heard in the wild and make you think “wow, I didn’t realize that was all them.” Direct Hits proves the Killers have fewer actual hits, let alone great ones, than you thought and makes you wonder if they made their Greatest Hits album too early or whether they can ever legitimately put one together at all. | 2013-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Island | November 21, 2013 | 6.4 | 782129f7-8b18-4841-ac6f-025f9e8d6295 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On his latest, Jidenna invokes a metaphorical highway to Africa, uniting the sounds of the sprawling diaspora. The music ranges from booming contemporary hip-hop to feather-light afropop and highlife. | On his latest, Jidenna invokes a metaphorical highway to Africa, uniting the sounds of the sprawling diaspora. The music ranges from booming contemporary hip-hop to feather-light afropop and highlife. | Jidenna: 85 to Africa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jidenna-85-to-africa/ | 85 to Africa | On a recent episode of The Breakfast Club, Jidenna shared a physics-lesson-cum-aphorism his late father often repeated: “You can’t inflate a balloon from inside the balloon. You must inflate it from outside,” he said, in what can be presumed to be an impression of his father’s Nigerian accent. “So the diaspora must take money from outside and put it in. And the continent must take money from inside and put it out.” It’s a sentiment likely familiar to the children of many African immigrants, an optimistic, globally minded philosophy with clear goals but no obvious plan of action. Jidenna’s 85 to Africa, named for the interstate highway that runs through the southeastern U.S., is an attempt to make good on that philosophy.
The promise of a metaphorical highway to Africa, solidifying the connections of centuries of sprawling diaspora, is a useful framework for an album; it’s the highway Drake cruised for much of More Life, as did GoldLink on Diaspora, Beyoncé on the Lion King bonus album The Gift, and Burna Boy throughout his career-spanning blend of afropop, dancehall, and hip-hop. You can imagine Jidenna’s highway system including stops in Jamaica and Trinidad, where dancehall and soca mingle with the U.S. and West Africa. Jidenna’s own diasporic project was evident on 2017’s The Chief, the dense debut album that followed hit singles “Classic Man” and “Yoga,” and which sprinkled in references to his Nigerian heritage. As he’s pared down his style—the bespoke, Antebellum-recalling suits have been replaced with a crisp uniform of a T-shirt tucked into a structured high-waisted trouser, and his box-dyed finger curl grown out and braided—so has his musical style been hemmed in, stripped to the modes in which he’s most effective.
The first half of the album, presumably the domain of the I-85, features Jidenna’s take on contemporary hip-hop. “Worth the Weight,” which closes with an evocative vocal sample from Seun Kuti, son of Fela and musician in his own right, expresses a vision of a united black people. The production by DJ Dahi and Nana Kwabena, the Wondaland affiliate who handles most of the sounds on the album, is cinematic and expansive, with horns, manipulated vocals, and booming drums. Unfortunately, here and elsewhere, Jidenna’s hardy, awkward rapping—“Po-po spun the wheel on misfortune, but I ain’t play that/They come round and pat-pat-pat us down but I ain’t Sajak”—doesn't quite live up to the bigness of his ideas.
Among 85 to Africa’s most endearing qualities is its cultural references, unexplained and presented as universally understood. “Babouche,” featuring GoldLink, is a jaunty ode to the swaggy slipper common in West Africa. (The song, inexplicably, has some #MeToo commentary thrown in. “You can tell a lot from appearance/You can really spot what you fearin’/I heard Morgan Freeman got a hearing/See, I never trusted that earring,” he raps.) “Sou Sou,” maybe the album’s horniest song, uses a small-group lending mechanism common in the Caribbean and throughout Africa as a conceptual starting point.
Things improve on the second half of the album, when, to follow his metaphor, Jidenna arrives in Africa. The melodies and breezy rhythms of songs like “Zodi” and “Vaporiza” are a welcome shift from his barrel-chested rapping. On “Zodi,” featuring Mr. Eazi, he simultaneously charms and razzes an astrology-minded woman, who is the type to “text the stars and crystal ball emojis.” The subject of “Sufi Woman” might be that same person, except this time she’s reading him 13th-century poetry as he luxuriates; a surprising beat, constructed out of Spanish guitar and afropop rhythms by Nana Kwabena, hovers above like a cloudless sky.
“Vaporiza” might be the album’s high point, an easy, tender love song with high-life rhythms and Ethiopian horns: “Vaporiza/I’m breathin’ easy when I’m with you,” goes the affectionate hook. In spirit, it shares a lot with one of the summer’s most ubiquitous, and unlikeliest, hits: “Fall,” a velvety love song recorded in 2017 by the Nigerian pop star Davido, suddenly broke through this year and became inescapable. The same happened with “Drogba (Joanna),” a jaunty afrowave track originally released by the Ivorian-British artist Afro B in early 2018. It feels necessary to celebrate the visibility of these songs, propelled into the mainstream without the rubric of any A-list affiliation. It would be unwise to extrapolate too much from such anomalies, but it’s hard not to feel that Jidenna’s right about something. | 2019-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | Wondaland / Epic | August 28, 2019 | 6.7 | 782812a0-44af-47bd-b036-28036266bad9 | Rawiya Kameir | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rawiya-kameir/ | |
For his first vinyl release of new music in 25 years, Kerry Leimer makes explicit his debt to kosmische music while recasting these sounds into his own mold. | For his first vinyl release of new music in 25 years, Kerry Leimer makes explicit his debt to kosmische music while recasting these sounds into his own mold. | K. Leimer: Mitteltöner | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/k-leimer-mitteltoner/ | Mitteltöner | When the RVNG label went through the tape archives of Pacific Northwest composer/musician/sound artist Kerry Leimer for their 2014 release A Period of Review (Original Recordings: 1975-1983), Leimer was mostly unknown to 21st-century listeners. His last commercially available album, Imposed Order, was released in 1983 and if you were located outside of the Pacific Northwest, his string of experimental ambient albums and cassettes were hard to locate in the intervening years. What A Period of Review revealed was that—while Leimer was clearly indebted to the tape loop work of Brian Eno—his body of work showed that he was one of the few examples of American kosmische: minimal, melodic, and ethereal. Any number of musicians, ranging from Tortoise and Stereolab to Oneohtrix Point Never, have since taken up the mantle of German progressive music. But during Leimer’s early ’80s prime, Americans embracing the music of Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, and the like were virtually unheard of.
Since the RVNG retrospective, Leimer has slowly returned to the spotlight, reissuing long out of print albums like Land of Look Behind and Imposed Order along the way, allowing a generation of younger fans to appreciate his craft in depth. For his first vinyl release of new music in 25 years, Leimer’s Mitteltöner makes explicit this debt to his kosmische forbears, from the German language titles (the album translates as “mid-range”) to the sounds themselves. Rather than simply reiterate these ageless sounds, he has a knack for recasting them in an original manner.
Leimer’s love of kosmische is evident from the start, as opener “Dunne Luft” condenses the earmarks of that sound into its four minutes. There’s the solar flares of guitar that arise early on in the track, fuzzy and luminous, serving less as a lead instrument and more as a sonic texture. It sounds like a sly homage to the arcing six-string stylings of Neu! and Harmonia member Michael Rother, but rather than simply pay tribute, Leimer lets pinging synths bustle underneath and processes and loops live drums to keep the track’s momentum going.
“Werbemelodie” translates as “jingle” and it has a wispy, lilting melody that makes the title seem a bit on the nose. But Leimer’s touch is light, sampling just enough of a German voice and rumbling bass for added texture and letting tones ring across the rhythm, bringing to mind the dreamy, lullaby-like chimes that Four Tet had circa-Rounds. That sureness carries onto even shorter pieces like “As Long Ago as This,” with Leimer drawing together gentle rhythms and resonant electronic timbres.
There’s a sense of calm to the piece, but also a touch of shadow, a balance which carries over to the album’s centerpiece, the nearly nine-minute “Entferntemusik.” It’s this equilibrium that always differentiated Leimer from his fellow home studio musicians of the early ’80s era. While the West Coast New Age cottage industry was on the rise, these artists were also taking some of their cues from German electronic music of the 1970s. And while those suspended, luminous tones also appeared in Leimer’s productions, he also kept some grit and a sense of disquiet intact on his compositions. The tapped guitar strings that open “Entferntemusik” (translation “distant music”) take on the properties of a distant alarm, with Leimer adding bowed metal and industrial ambience to the piece, which unfurls like smoke from a power plant, growing darker and wider.
On closing track “Cafe Florian,” Leimer pays overt homage both to Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider and Popol Vuh founder Florian Fricke. The flickering rhythms bring to mind the blurry highways evoked on Autobahn while the ghostly melodies of the piece bear the evocative beauty of Popol Vuh. Rather than serve as mere pastiche, it encapsulates Leimer’s unique talents on his new work: drawing on a vintage sound now over forty years old and entering into middle age, while also finding a way to also push it forward. | 2018-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Origin Peoples | February 6, 2018 | 7.5 | 7828c44e-a0af-4b6a-a37d-2ffa623edfc0 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
On his solo breakthrough, the former LVL UP singer comes to terms with hard times by fully embracing the indie rock he loves. | On his solo breakthrough, the former LVL UP singer comes to terms with hard times by fully embracing the indie rock he loves. | Trace Mountains: Lost in the Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trace-mountains-lost-in-the-country/ | Lost in the Country | What if the worries that keep you awake at night—fear of commitment, awareness of mortality, the inevitability of loss—could, instead, motivate you during the day? That is the gist of Trace Mountains’ Lost in the Country, a brisk indie rock record that bluntly addresses our deepest concerns and transmutes them into 10 winning anthems about persevering. In the worldview of Dave Benton, the Trace Mountains singer-songwriter who gathered a studio band to shape these songs, the cure is sometimes as simple as a long walk in the woods or a solitary cry in a foreign rock club. Or maybe it’s recognizing, as he does here more than once, that funneling your sadness into a tune just to make it through another day is perfectly acceptable. Lost in the Country responds to novel modern afflictions—the inadequacy that stems from witnessing everyone else’s glamour on social media, or the generational unease of a forsaken future—with Benton’s own survival guide, as comforting for its candor as it is accessible for its instant hooks.
Benton is an acolyte of big-guitar indie rock, particularly records that counter the self-doubt and systemic confusion of early adulthood with the bliss of getting loud in a room with your pals. His sacred texts start somewhere around Dinosaur Jr.’s 1987 landmark You’re Living All Over Me, include Built to Spill’s 1994 opus There’s Nothing Wrong With Love, and run up to the War on Drugs’ 2014 breakthrough Lost in the Dream (cannily namechecked by this album’s very title). His devotion has been clear for nearly a decade, first on the hulking albums he made with the promising but departed LVL UP, and on his own as Trace Mountains. His lo-fi debut supplied pure Bright Eyes and Sebadoh pastiche. When he kicked on the amps for 2018’s A Partner to Lean On as LVL UP wound down, he seemed adrift, sad and searching for his own sound.
Musically and emotionally, Lost in the Country is a decisive step forward. Those familiar references still abound—the title track might have fit on a turn-of-the-millennium Barsuk compilation, wedged somewhere between Death Cab and John Vanderslice, while the assured solo that ends “Rock & Roll” seems salvaged from A Deeper Understanding’s scrap heap. Benton name-checks that War on Drugs album on the title track, too, reinforcing his devotion to the romantic sweep of epic rock’n’roll, recast for the budgetary constraints of someone who recently quit his bigger band. There’s a newfound poise to these songs, an effortlessness in both conception and delivery that suggests Benton’s music can mirror his heroes while capturing his own experiences, too. Even when he gilds “Cooper’s Dream” with singing saw and glockenspiel or “I Am Leaving You” with blaring surges of bright organ lines, he turns his old loves into your new sing-alongs.
That brightness lifts Benton through the darkest parts of these songs. On “Me & May” he considers the implications of a breakup, pondering the parallel universe where he’s still happy and satisfied. Benton acknowledges the regret of choosing one timeline instead of another, but incandescent harmonies and spring-loaded drums guide him to the realization that he did the best he could with what he knew—all any of us can do, he suggests, until we are “drifting into a dream.” Again contemplating the choices we’re forced to make during “Dog Country,” he reflects on leaving Brooklyn for the woods of the Hudson Valley, pondering what he might have lost or gained. Pedal steel and a bucolic shuffle comfort him like hands on his shoulders, tempering FOMO’s bittersweet sting.
Lost in the Country’s sanguine mood and full embrace of its indie-rock predecessors run the risk of making Benton sound overly hopeful or naïve, the ostrich plunging its head beneath the surface to ignore the relentless bad news. But Benton is not above or apart from any of it. Especially near the album’s end, he reveals just how low he’s been. “Fallin’ Rain” opens with Benton at his most despondent, his tone furrowed over storm clouds of dark piano chords. And during “Absurdity,” he routes his voice through a tremolo pedal until it shakes like a dead leaf in a windstorm. “We are all on our own/There is no kindness/There is only violence—and smartphones,” he sings with a tremor that recalls Phil Elverum, tenderly rattling off a litany of existential laments.
But Benton doesn’t wallow in these pits of self-pity. Instead, he uses them as opportunities to change his circumstances and outlook, to climb out and look at the world around him and tell us about the process. As he marvels at an infinite hillside during “Fallin’ Rain,” he gets lost in something bigger than himself, something that will outlast “this hopeless heartache.” An acoustic guitar and bright electronics sparkle like prisms in the sun, echoing his epiphany. Even then, Benton’s voice remains as fragile as the feelings of inadequacy and guilt he’s fighting. That vulnerability testifies to our daily battles with our deepest insecurities, even after those fleeting moments when it feels like we’ve won.
And as it enters its second half, “Absurdity” steadily rises above its misery and torpor, a languid guitar solo leading to a verse that’s as life-affirming as indie rock gets. The most involved song in Benton’s catalog, it moves seamlessly through four distinct sections, like low-stakes prog-rock, to illustrate his lifting mood. It’s a testament to his broader musical and narrative ambitions, perhaps a suggestion of how far he can push his elemental indie rock lineage.
Above a suddenly funky beat that suggests summer days spent listening to jam bands, Benton relays a breathless story about hiking among the evergreen trees on a canyon rim. He’s stunned by the sight and feels free, at least until his phone buzzes in his pocket, drawing him back into a world of “true absurdity.” But he remembers now that he’s happy to be here at all, blinking in the daylight. “I guess this means that I can be a part of the ever-unfolding daydream,” he sings, his voice betraying a wry smile. Sometimes, there’s no escaping the sense that we’re living in shit, he seems to say. But at least it means we’re alive, always with something left to fix.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Lame-O | April 14, 2020 | 8 | 782ad9b5-80fe-4006-89ed-52d8568bfbaa | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
This Brooklyn four-piece follows its fantastic single "2080" with a debut packed with similar moments of pan-ethnic spiritualism. Like Midlake, Grizzly Bear, and Animal Collective-- who have all recently re-shaped tribal, primitive sounds into ultra-modern forms-- Yeasayer channel both a dystopian science-fiction sensibility and deep appreciation for the natural world. | This Brooklyn four-piece follows its fantastic single "2080" with a debut packed with similar moments of pan-ethnic spiritualism. Like Midlake, Grizzly Bear, and Animal Collective-- who have all recently re-shaped tribal, primitive sounds into ultra-modern forms-- Yeasayer channel both a dystopian science-fiction sensibility and deep appreciation for the natural world. | Yeasayer: All Hour Cymbals | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10805-all-hour-cymbals/ | All Hour Cymbals | Over the past few years, a few of the most talked-about indie bands have been those making music with an ahistorical sense of mythic drama. TV on the Radio, Celebration, Grizzly Bear, and Animal Collective, among others, have been variously and inventively appropriating rock'n'roll's roots in ritualistic sounds, working toward individual aesthetics that merge mutual appreciations for surface and tradition. By and large, they draw upon ideas of the pre-modern (multi-part harmonies and chants drawn from religious rites, a fixation on the unseen power of the natural world), and express them through ultra-modern forms (synthesizers, electronic textures, heavy echo).
Perhaps unconsciously, these groups are working in the shadow cast by the late 1970s and early 80s collaborations between Brian Eno and David Byrne, primarily My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and the Talking Heads albums Fear of Music and Remain in Light. By surrounding Byrne's rural preacher impression on "Once in a Lifetime" with angelic new age synthesizers and ethereal harmonies, for instance, the duo pulled an affective charge from seemingly incompatible elements. The co-presence of Byrne's anxious sermonizing, a West African rhythm section and Eno's stylish ornamentation signified not only the spiritual transformation of Byrne's character, but also an important shift in pop’s approach toward its own past along with non-Western forms of music.
Brooklyn's Yeasayer are the latest entry to this group of Byrne disciples, and one of the better bands to put a new spin on his polyrhythmic convulsing. The band gained recognition earlier this year for their fantastic first single "2080", possibly because of its sonic similarities to Midlake's buzzed-about 2006 single "Roscoe". Both share a woozy, woodsy ambience, but where "Roscoe", set in 1891, was nostalgic for a rustic world, Yeasayer gazes ahead-- and not optimistically. "I can't sleep when I think about the times we're living in," Chris Keating sings, continuing, "I can't sleep when I think about the future I was born into." After two preternaturally smooth choruses, the band lives up to its name. All new age elements temporarily vanish, and the group breaks through into communalism. The sudden, fervent "yeah yeah!" pulls from the same crowded Anglo-ethnic trough as the Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, and Danielson, and establishes the band's own link between the ritualistic and the futuristic.
All Hour Cymbals, the band's LP debut, is packed with similar moments of pan-ethnic spiritualism, filtered through walls of echo and layers of gossamer synth. The album opens on "Sunrise" with a gospel-tinged a cappella vocal that wouldn't sound out of place coming from TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe and adds handclaps and austere piano. The mix is gently, gradually taken over by a droning synthetic ambience and Keating's vocals, which express his desire to merge with nature. The song's falsettoed chorus is then fleshed out with a vague Far Eastern vibe, that same sense of foreign tension reappearing later in "Worms".
This sense of apprehension lends the album a dramatic flair, best realized in "Forgiveness", which-- while reclaiming the synthetic handclap and keystroke incantation for the band's unnatural revival meeting-- calls into question the time-honored tendency to appropriate religion for personal gain. Guitarist Anand Wilder sings: "I've come to beg for forgiveness/ So forgive me," yet after pleading that "I've tried to teach by my doing, your undoing" he admits, "But my time will be your ruin." Elsewhere, "Germs" augments its earthly paranoia ("What's hurting me when I breathe/ Perhaps it's just the mold on the ceiling") with a sonic mood somewhere between Celtic and Balkan, and "No Need to Worry" is a buzzing cathedral of dread, its title only serving as an attempted calming influence.
The peak of All Hour Cymbals' tangible sense of unease, the pummeling "Wait for the Wintertime", is Yeasayer's Black Sabbath moment, transforming their chants into a dark, persistent march. Although it's not clear whether the song is the band's own origin myth, about the apocalypse, or both, the lyric, "On a cold day, you can walk forever/ On a cold day, nothing's gonna stop us," is charged with dread, only bolstered by the atonal saxophones in its climax. There and elsewhere, Yeasayer channel both a dystopian science-fiction sensibility and deep appreciation for the natural world, employing a wide, international range of sounds. The result is a unique form of indie rock world music that resists stepping into the essentialist, ethnocentric traps consistently tripped by high-minded hipsters. | 2007-10-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-10-25T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | We Are Free | October 25, 2007 | 7.8 | 78310755-90af-4a63-bfc6-bfd7b1b25b62 | Eric Harvey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/ | null |
Detroit rapper and producer Black Milk is a paradoxical artist defined by both wild reinvention and stasis. The production on If There's a Hell Below carries the album, coming over as one big wistful wash of sound, unified, but full of idiosyncrasies. | Detroit rapper and producer Black Milk is a paradoxical artist defined by both wild reinvention and stasis. The production on If There's a Hell Below carries the album, coming over as one big wistful wash of sound, unified, but full of idiosyncrasies. | Black Milk: If There's a Hell Below | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19822-black-milk-if-theres-a-hell-below/ | If There's a Hell Below | Black Milk is a paradoxical artist, one defined by both wild reinvention and stasis. To this point, every other Black Milk album is a corrective, somehow a refutation of the album that came before it. He keeps pressing reset and then playing the game the same: Tronic was his vaunted abandonment of vinyl fetishism for synthesizers; Album of the Year his embrace of live-band instrumentation; No Poison, No Paradise his nightmare-filled stab at creating a '70s soul epic. But put them on shuffle and the delineations disappear—they all sound like Black Milk tracks. On If There's a Hell Below, for the first time, he consciously takes a sonic mulligan, trading in the same murky Castlevania synth-lines, wrecking-ball drums and dark-night-of-the-soul wails as its predecessor.
So, why does it sound better than that album? Because it's a new Black Milk record, which always sound incrementally closer to some Ideal Black Milk Album that may or may not ever exist. This makes him a difficult artist to love, but an easy one to like. He’s constantly halving the distance to his target, getting closer but not quite getting there. But those infinitesimal improvements on Hell Below—indeed, the very places where it remains static—show, in some ways, what that Ideal Album might look like.
Most importantly, he’s acknowledging where his talents lie. The old line on him is: great producer, shitty rapper. If the dude could quit spitting double-time platitudes about getting faded backstage, the thinking goes, he’d release a great record. On No Poison, No Paradise, though, he dialed back his eagerness on the mic and let the beats breathe. This trend continues on Hell Below, particularly on "Story and Her", a sprightly, smooth-jazz Tribe throwback that evokes Q-Tip more than Dilla. Over soft vibes, Black Milk drops sing-song come-ons that tumble organically into a low-key verse. The lyrics are as trite and sanctimonious as can be (think Dizzee Rascal’s "Jezebel"), but as the beat morphs, halfway in, to a keening, insistent guitar lick, Milk follows suit, with a wide-open flow painted in blank space. The crooning intro melts into an almost spoken-word outro, with a rhyme scheme that snaps into place as if only to tug the verse onward.
He sounds, in other words, good on the track—a first for the emcee. He repeats the feat on the nearly 3-minute conclusion "Up & Out", which is just a drum loop, some scratches, and a delirious, stuttering mic performance. In both instances, he raps in reverence of the beat, letting his glorious drums hit without shouting punchlines over them. Elsewhere, he resolutely does not screw up highlights like the proggy "All Mighty", the dense, clattering "Quarter Water", or "What It’s Worth", which recalls early Kendrick Lamar, of all people, in its tuneful sense of melancholy. He’s always seemed to want to be Black Thought, but he comes across more like T.I. on the best parts of Hell Below, saying very little but saying it well.
The focus, then, stays on the production, which is, as usual, an absolute feast. He’s grown fond of the mid-track left-field switch-up, sometimes just for a bar or two ("Hell Below", "Scum"), and of the short, dusty outro loop (pretty much every track). While this might sound scattered, in practice it’s just the opposite: He’s settled down a bit, flicking between beats with Madlib’s ease. A lot of his earlier stylistic about-faces were because of an anxiety, a tension between analog and digital production methods, which a recent LP and EP (tellingly called Synth or Soul and Glitches in the Break) seem to have eased. He found the ghost in the machine, and so he’s agitating less over realness—over fidelity to the "old school". The music on Hell Below is one big wistful wash of sound, unified, but full of idiosyncrasies. (Bun B, for example, raps atop a bed of trilling flutes.)
We often talk about listening to Black Milk rap as the cost of entry for listening to Black Milk produce. That's cold, but valid: his relatively flat collaborative work suggests that he saves his best beats for himself. But perhaps it’s also a mis-framing of the argument, in light of Hell Below’s success. In an interview with Complex last year, he referred to an incongruous blast of free jazz on No Poison, No Paradise as "a Spike Lee movie … written via a rap song." A more skillful emcee would recreate Lee’s sense of place and character with words, but Black Milk needs the music to do the talking. On If There’s a Hell Below, he lets it. | 2014-10-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-10-27T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Computer Ugly | October 27, 2014 | 7.3 | 7833b2c7-70dc-4798-a241-064b6eb16326 | Clayton Purdom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/clayton-purdom/ | null |
The indie pop group’s second album is filled with longing for vanished times and spaces. It explores what happens when daydreaming becomes both playground and prison. | The indie pop group’s second album is filled with longing for vanished times and spaces. It explores what happens when daydreaming becomes both playground and prison. | Sun June: Somewhere | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sun-june-somewhere/ | Somewhere | The songs on Sun June’s second album, Somewhere, are full of elsewheres. Lead vocalist Laura Colwell namedrops Manhattan, Los Angeles, and New Orleans—everywhere but the indie pop group’s home base of Austin—as memories and fantasies, but as she admits on first single “Everything I Had,” she’s still in an apartment just three doors down from her old one. In “Karen O,” a young man in an expensive suit impersonates Bob Dylan in a Brooklyn basement, and in the opening track "Bad With Time,” Colwell promises to be Jackie O, Patti Smith, and Stevie Nicks, all to convince a lover not to move to L.A. Her songs might be full of pretending, but no one is ever fooled, least of all the pretenders themselves.
But isn’t it nice to pretend? More pressingly, once you give up on pretending, what are you left with? Sun June finds comfort in these delusions, which are couched in appropriately soft, cloudy pop. Colwell sings almost everything at the top of her range, so that every word sounds barely constricted with emotion, barely squeaked out. In the penultimate track, Colwell finally exhales, repeating a call-and-response refrain: “Are you the real thing?” The chords resolve and she arrives: “I’m the real thing. I’ll be all right.”
At various points on Somewhere, Sun June adopt country-western tropes, maybe to play up the themes of dislocation. Like a costume put together with what they already had at home, it serves them well enough to get their point across: reverb consoles allow guitar chords to sound like they’re gliding through open windows and fading out slow, and Colwell trills with Patsy Cline-ish melodrama. No matter how often you may dream about being other places or people, you’re never quite where, or who, you want to be.
These affectations represent the biggest risks taken on Somewhere. These textures–solemn, guitars, barely-there synth pads–may read as pat, even self-indulgent, but for better or worse, this isn’t an album interested in exploring fresh territory. Sun June are interested in daydreams as both playground and prison, and about observing what happens when you collide with the borders of your own interiority. But even in this cloudy, circumscribed world of echoing instruments, where faking and fiction are not only indulged, but necessary, Sun June’s sincerity shines through. “Everything I Had,” for its part, might be the first successful transmutation of quarantined loneliness into an anthem: “Everything I had, I want it back.” Tell me about it. The song’s chorus is ultimately an expression of futility and regret; the past is gone for good. Sun June yield to these fantasies, letting imagination shroud reality for a spell, but its face always shows through eventually.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover / Keeled Scales | February 5, 2021 | 6.8 | 7838ccb5-3b6c-4137-afeb-f68f5d861c6a | Adlan Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adlan-jackson/ | |
The experimental composer’s accompaniment for Richard Mosse’s film installation transforms the natural sounds of the Amazon rainforest into a harrowing score to environmental disaster. | The experimental composer’s accompaniment for Richard Mosse’s film installation transforms the natural sounds of the Amazon rainforest into a harrowing score to environmental disaster. | Ben Frost: Broken Spectre | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-frost-broken-spectre/ | Broken Spectre | Richard Mosse’s photographs turn the natural world alien. Milky white rivers wind through garish rust-red forests, basins leak neon pink into branching waterways, and washes of blueberry purple stain the shores. Scale, too, is upset: Aerial shots of the Amazon rainforest look like single-cell organisms while close-ups of moss and lichen appear as planets and constellations. Mosse created these pictures for his recent video installation, Broken Spectre, using multi-spectral sensors that capture bandwidths of light invisible to the eye. Australian musician and composer Ben Frost has worked with Mosse and cinematographer Trevor Tweeten on projects about war in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and the refugee crisis in North Africa, complementing their visuals with bracing sound design. His audio for Broken Spectre deploys ultrasonic microphones to record bats, birds, and insects outside the range of human hearing. More sci-fi soundtrack than tranquil field recording, the record transforms the natural sounds of the Amazon into a harrowing score to match the film’s disconcerting visuals.
Broken Spectre chronicles the destruction of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest that occurred after Jair Bolsonaro came to power in 2019. Under his watch, cattle farms, soybean fields, gold mines, and aluminum refineries burned large swathes of forest and polluted the ever-scarcer water. Mosse, Frost, and Tweeten traveled across this blasted landscape for weeks at a time. “During that period I witnessed fires so vast they blacked out the sun,” writes Frost. “I watched illegal loggers fell 700-year-old trees, and heard the unnerving silence of the forest that followed.” Whereas field recordings of the Amazon like Lawrence English’s A Mirror Holds the Sky or Francisco López’s Wilderness Studio are typically loud and lively, Frost’s recordings portray an eerily desolate ecosystem of drones and hums where wildlife is a distant echo.
Despite its source material, Broken Spectre fits neatly into Frost’s repertoire of brutal, pummeling electronic work. The harsh tones on “The Index” or “Passport to Eternity” obscure their natural origins, sounding more like synths run through blown-out amps than insects or birds. The effect is no less unsettling when the sounds can be identified. On “The Burning World,” buzzing chainsaw pulses alternate with cries from a forlorn animal, as if a single mourning inhabitant were presiding over the leveling of the forest. Then, sharp pops and cracks announce the encroaching fire that will reduce the area to farmland. The most remarkable recording here is “The Intensive Care Unit,” on which an anesthetized jaguar breathes directly into the microphone. It is a chilling, visceral sound made horrific by the knowledge that the animal is being treated for third-degree burns.
Paradoxically, the more Broken Spectre pleases aesthetically, the more it fails in its message. The few moments of tranquility on the record elide the horrors of its subject matter. On “Cry Hope, Cry Fury,” a hovering angelic hum plays over gentle insect chirps, while “The Killing Ground” is a lovely ambient piece better suited to sound-bath relaxation. On a studio album, these tracks would be a welcome respite from an oppressively tense atmosphere. Here, divorced from Mosse’s startling images, they risk becoming merely pretty.
In a sense, attempts to represent ecological catastrophes in art can never totally succeed. Frost knows this: “This album is ultimately a document of failure,” he writes. It registers political dereliction and environmental collapse, but also his “own failure to communicate through sound the vast scale of the Amazon and the ongoing damage inflicted upon it.” Still, he has achieved a smaller success in capturing these strangely compelling traces of the forest as it is destroyed. Technically brilliant but even more emotionally affecting, Frost’s soundtrack stands on its own within the multimedia world of Broken Spectre as a testament to lost life and beauty. | 2022-12-02T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-02T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | The Vinyl Factory | December 2, 2022 | 7.4 | 783bffb5-4d5d-418c-844b-ee38a04a773c | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
Bibio's collage and pastiche-based music is hard to pin down, but his latest beams with a relaxed joyfulness that is refreshing after a spate of more laborious records. | Bibio's collage and pastiche-based music is hard to pin down, but his latest beams with a relaxed joyfulness that is refreshing after a spate of more laborious records. | Bibio: A Mineral Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21551-a-mineral-love/ | A Mineral Love | Bibio has been doing the same thing for a long time—a little bit of everything. Stephen Wilkinson's restlessness over the last decade makes it hard to pin him down, but it also makes it easy to keep listening to the diverse pop pastiches that have developed out of his more uniform sound-collage origins. A Mineral Love might be just another turn of the kaleidoscope, but it grows on you, with a relaxed joyfulness that is refreshing after a spate of more laborious records.
There are consistent things about Bibio, and even though they are general ones, he has refined his way with them to make them his. There are carefully detuned guitars that lend an alien sonority to familiar chords. There are analog electronic imperfections texturing the music with streaks and bubbles, like some obsolete, richly colored film stock. And there is his voice, soft and threadbare as a childhood blanket, to cling to during his wildest rides.
It's just that these steadfast traits happen to be set loose in a slightly insane maze of genres, often time-stamped in maddeningly specific but elusive ways. IDM, British folk, pop funk, indie rock, easy listening, hip-hop, nature sounds, ad jingles, relaxation tapes, church-social Casio jams, and more reform like a lava lamp's globules. It wasn't always this way: Bibio's early work basically mashed up Boards of Canada, Brian Eno, and Bert Jansch, until his genre gene pool seemed to explode all at once.
Each album since then has managed to wrest a distinct character from the welter of registers: Ambivalence Avenue was dominated by crunchy glitch-hop; Mind Bokeh was a woolly headphones odyssey; Silver Wilkinson was gloomy and internal. A Mineral Love bursts with cheerful, candy-colored falsetto funk, not unlike Ambivalence, while leaving out the crunch and glitch, letting the instruments breathe. The guitars flirt with African pop, blending with the overall brightness, while the bass conveys the tactile, mobile sense of fretwork. There are fleeting mechanical hitches, but mostly, low-key tape tricks color straightforward musicianship, its springy fillips more evocative of the bounce in your step on a sunny day than night, sweat, or sex.
There is a bit of the pitchy dream-folk that always serves as an accessible entryway into Bibio's records, like "Petals" and "Wren Tails," a pastoral instrumental warbling on a melted record. But most songs play like breakbeats from late-twentieth-century audio and VHS cassettes that never were. "Raxeira" sounds like theme music for an unfilmed Welcome Back, Kotter spinoff. You wouldn't be shocked to hear Jim Croce singing on the fluty confection "Town & Country." We also get Peter Gabriel-like progressive pop on "The Way You Talk," where Gotye's voice meditatively pools in itself, and Princely R&B on Olivier Daysoul feature "Why So Serious?," which wouldn't go amiss on a Blood Orange album. "Feeling" is Bibio and the Sunshine Band. Et cetera. It should feel like a music museum, but it doesn't.
What holds it all together and brings it to life is Bibio himself, who offers some revealing self-reflections in a note circulating with A Mineral Love, where he seems to anticipate criticisms of randomness and anachronism that he must have encountered before. "This is not a purist record," he warns, describing how he approaches different musical eras through their remnants in his memory, however misshapen they may be. "I think that's why it all sounds like me."A Mineral Love is a period piece, but the period is now. | 2016-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | March 30, 2016 | 6.8 | 783c20ae-c11c-4749-bb45-def12a4ea97a | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The second album from the musician formerly known as Chet Faker is at once overstuffed and underwhelming. | The second album from the musician formerly known as Chet Faker is at once overstuffed and underwhelming. | Nick Murphy: Run Fast Sleep Naked | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-murphy-run-fast-sleep-naked/ | Run Fast Sleep Naked | Nick Murphy was once the bedroom musician Chet Faker. In 2011, his sullen, downtempo cover of Blackstreet’s classic ’90s R&B jam “No Diggity” rocketed to the top of the Hype Machine chart, the peak of virality in the age of MP3 blogs. His instantaneous ascent portended bigger genre trends in the coming half-decade: In the early 2010s, “chill” indie electronica was emerging as a form of resistance against the hyper-manic EDM boom. Brooding auteurs like How to Dress Well and Rhye bubbled up with ambient, trip-hoppy alternative R&B. Chet Faker was an Australian dude with a beard who belonged to both the burgeoning worlds of Majestic Casual-core and white dudes singing soul music. He could make an EP with Flume, then turn around and record stripped-down covers of Burial on the Rhodes.
But Murphy thought the Faker vibe was unsustainable. Two years after releasing his only album under the moniker, 2014’s Built on Glass, Murphy solemnly announced that he was retiring it. “There's an evolution happening and I wanted to let you know where it's going,” he wrote on Facebook, promising that his next album would be released as Nick Murphy. In the time leading up to his real, not-fake debut, he set out on a quest to figure out himself and the next chapter of his musical career. He began working in studios instead of in his bedroom. He teamed up with Darkside guitar wizard Dave Harrington. He read Joseph Campbell’s theories of the artist as a modern shaman. On some Jack Kerouac shit, he traveled the world with a microphone, recording vocal takes when he felt like it. But after all of that soul-searching, the resulting album, Run Fast Sleep Naked, gives no indication that Nick Murphy knows who Nick Murphy actually is.
Run Fast Sleep Naked is at once overstuffed and underwhelming. The instrumental choices on “Sanity” are wildly unfocused, as Justice-style power synths and gospel background vocals compete with the clunky blues piano and bongo drumming of an already cluttered song. The grating, distorted strings of “Harry Takes Drugs on the Weekend” seem to purposefully resemble two pieces of sheet metal rubbed together, as if feigning innovation through unconventional sound design. The album aims for the punky orchestral spirit of Mitski’s Puberty 2, but ends up sounding like Jack White’s Boarding House Reach: a rock-adjacent Christian-blues slog that won’t live its best life until it’s cut down to a 15-second snippet in a Subaru commercial.
Ambitious production can’t quite cover the fact that none of the songs on Run Fast Sleep Naked have a conceptual core. On “Novacaine and Coca Cola,” Murphy borrows buzzwords that Frank Ocean and Lana Del Rey played with almost a decade ago, but never quite builds a cohesive storyline around the hedonistic signifers. Much of the album finds him chanting empty phrases like, “Guess I’m losing my mind,” and “Not night in the light, in the light, in the light.” You get that Murphy is confused, searching for some form of clarity. But because he never pinpoints the source of his internal battle or the details of his journey, the result is a swamp of abstraction.
Speaking on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 radio show recently, Murphy explained that the process of creating the record wasn’t necessarily about the music itself. “I kept doing my work as an artist to grab the music when it was falling out. The work for me was really working on my life and myself,” he said. “You travel around the world at 22, you’re a kid. It’s awesome, but you miss all the time to figure out the real stuff, the spiritual stuff.” Considering the massive incoherence of Run Fast Sleep Naked, it’s hard to say what “real stuff” Murphy has figured out. Maybe he should have put a little more work into the music. | 2019-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Downtown / Future Classic / Opulent | May 2, 2019 | 4.5 | 783e3e67-276c-4764-a907-62eb342dc032 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the haunting and beautiful 2001 solo album from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ John Frusciante. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the haunting and beautiful 2001 solo album from the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ John Frusciante. | John Frusciante: To Record Only Water for Ten Days | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-frusciante-to-record-only-water-for-ten-days/ | To Record Only Water for Ten Days | Before John Frusciante could afford to get high, he had to just read about it. Born in Queens, New York, to musician parents and raised in California by his mother, the guitar prodigy spent his childhood poring through books about rock stars, particularly David Bowie. Often, he went straight to the index to find the parts about cocaine. “I just thought David Bowie did his coolest stuff when he was on a lot of coke,” Frusciante explains during a haunting 1994 interview, in which he appears gaunt and ghostlike and strung out on heroin. “That feeling and that image is the whole reason I got into rock’n’roll in the first place,” explains the 24-year-old, who looks so much older.
Frusciante let this interviewer into his home to discuss Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt, his stark, impressionistic solo debut after quitting the Red Hot Chili Peppers at the height of their success. His departure seemed inevitable. He was a kid—only 18—when he was asked to join his then-favorite band, and his interests were expanding. He was learning about art. Maybe he wanted to be a painter. Hard drugs were becoming a dominant part of his life. All of this, he felt, was starting to clash with the world-famous funk-rock group he believed was becoming increasingly commercial and ridiculous. The incongruence seemed clearest when he was forced to do press alongside all-id frontman Anthony Kiedis. “If I say ‘Van Gogh, blah blah blah,’ and he says, ‘Whip out your cock and show it to my mother,’” Frusciante elaborates, “You know, it doesn’t go together.”
The discrepancy between Frusciante and the sex-crazed rock band that launched him to fame can sometimes be overstated. In most respects, he fit in well and he shaped the sound of their most iconic period. His primary influences—art rock, post-punk, prog, electronic—are defiantly at odds with the radio-friendly alternative sound RHCP built their name on. But his contributions to the band are inextricable from their very core. Anyone with a vague familiarity with the band at its peak will recognize his voice—the background “awws” and “whoas” that sound like a man attempting to approximate a foghorn, the moan that sounds like a lonely pedal steel filtered through a wah pedal.
Frusciante zeroed in on the Chili Peppers’ sadness, the void perpetuating their desperate fun. With his background vocals and deeply emotive guitar playing, he could expose these moods so that, for a certain listener, it was all you could hear. He had that same quality that let Johnny Marr elevate Morrissey’s totems of self-deprecation into something empathetic and eternal; the same skill that allows Gillian Welch and David Rawlings to find the dissonance in each other’s pastoral lullabies. He heard something in his bandmates’ playing and he knew how to amplify it. Frusciante’s most distinctive contributions—say, the riff in “Under the Bridge,” or his vocal harmonies during the second half of “Otherside”—suggest the work of a born accompanist, a voice best suited as part of a whole.
As much seemed true when he quit the band. You can hear flirtations with brilliance on his two solo records from the ’90s: Niandra Lades and 1997’s Smile From the Streets You Hold, a collage of lo-fi recordings dating back to his teenage years. At the time, he claimed he was making this music to balance out a lack of “real art” on the market (like Da Vinci, or Jimi Hendrix, or Jane’s Addiction, he explained). Years later, he would change his story, claiming he released them solely to fuel an out-of-control drug habit.
Some songs on these records do in fact feel clear-headed, even inspired, and they point a clear path toward the work to come. Yet the overwhelming atmosphere is decay. Listen casually and you will hear a voice straining and choking, melodies fumbling, ideas stretched out way too long or abandoned almost immediately. Listen closely and you will hear even harsher sounds—a body falling apart, wallpaper peeling, light dwindling.
While Frusciante will always be known as a guitar virtuoso, his best playing feels like a voice speaking to you one-on-one. If you were an adolescent who picked up a guitar around the end of the ’90s, his songs may have been the ones you learned to play. On his comeback record with the Chili Peppers, 1999’s blockbuster Californication, he found resonance in simple chord progressions and minimalist, almost fragile soloing on the highest strings—things you could try to replicate after a few hours of practice.
In 1998, when he was brought back to life by the doctors at Las Encinas Recovery Center, with a new set of teeth to replace the ones that rotted away from drug abuse and with skin implants over his abcessed arms, Frusciante approached this simple style as a guiding philosophy. “I’m not into being a guitar hero,” he said in 2001. “I like guitar players who are more clumsy and more awkward... and who are trying really hard.”
To Record Only Water for Ten Days is the first album Frusciante made after recovering from drug addiction, getting clean, and rejoining the Chili Peppers. The title of the 2001 record refers to a form of self-purification he envisioned, involving the body as a tape recorder that documents only what’s absolutely necessary. Its sound, distinguished by gauzy keyboards and the sharp plinks of a vintage drum machine, was inspired by electronic music, a growing interest he treated like a secret affair in order to stay focused on his day job with the band. “Because if I listened to electronic music and then I went to rehearsal,” he said, “Everything sounded so boring to me.” In these songs, you hear him find joy in recreating the claustrophobic atmosphere of his ’90s solo albums in a way that felt more controlled, more sustainable.
Even at their most polished, Frusciante’s solo records elicit a feeling of eavesdropping—hearing music that itself seems to be just on the verge of existence. It’s a quality they share with certain posthumous collections: I think of Elliott Smith’s New Moon or any other set whose appeal lies in the intimacy, the occasionally unsettling familiarity of its presentation. Are we supposed to be hearing this? Do they know we’re listening? He rarely performs live, so Frusciante’s legacy outside the band lives within these records—stories you can return to over and over again without cracking their code.
Like Harmony Korine’s 2007 film Mr. Lonely, another return from a nearly fatal addiction, To Record Only Water concerns itself with weighty topics but expresses them through seemingly disconnected visions so even the most blunt confessions feel as distant as a mostly-forgotten nightmare. “All paths divide,” he sings in “Invisible Movement.” “Life has a way of opening up.” Much of his writing proceeds in this way, somewhere between warnings, words of advice, and riddles. Explaining his lyrics, Frusciante claimed to write mostly from the perspective of the afterlife: “After you die, you’ll be hearing people saying stuff like the stuff I say on my record.” For now, we’ll have to take his word for it.
More than his lyrics, Frusciante’s songs find coherence in his performance. The ones collected here are among his most gripping. His low, slurring voice sometimes sounds like Cat Stevens and sometimes sounds like Michael Stipe, and, although imperfect, it’s an instrument he wields with confidence. The record begins with a scream. In “Going Inside,” he filters a primal cry to make it sound indistinguishable from his silvery guitar tone, blurring the line between his modes of communication. It introduces a record where nothing is what it seems. Familiar alt-rock conventions are compressed into a burbling rhythm cycle in “Away & Anywhere,” and softer moments like “Wind Up Space” feel bruised and off-kilter, like a discarded verse from an old pop standard looping on a locked groove.
“The First Season” stands among his finest achievements. The song’s first half, a jangling psych-folk ballad like something from Neil Young’s debut, spans less than two minutes before funneling into a persistent, climbing finale. “Be humble, take it the slow way,” he reminds himself. And when his voice breaks as he shouts “I keep holding on to myself,” you hear what he might have been attempting on those harrowed old home recordings: a document of survival that highlights the struggle over the outcome. Now he had gained the ability to reflect on it with hindsight. He sings like he’s rescuing the song from a dangerous place.
Where even the most concise Chili Peppers songs seem sanded down from jam sessions, Frusciante’s new work felt refined and disciplined, like it could be performed by nobody else in no other way. Some songs are genuinely carefree and fun (his new wave experiments like “Someone’s” and “Moments Have You”) and others are salvaged from his darkest years (“Saturation”). But the mood remains consistent, a dream of life that keeps regenerating from itself.
It’s a highlight in his catalog, but To Record Only Water is not his peak. Soon, he would sharpen his production (2004’s Shadows Collide With People), his songwriting (2005’s Curtains), and his vision (2009’s The Empyrean). He worked tirelessly, as if making up for lost time. A 2005 music video for a song called “The Past Recedes” offers the inverse experience of that troubling 1994 interview. He appears genuinely happy in a gorgeous home filled with natural light, massive CD shelves, and acoustic guitars. He calls up a friend. He hangs by the pool. He carries himself like someone who’s figured out how to be alone. Soon, after one more massive album and tour cycle, he’d quit the Red Hot Chili Peppers for good and follow his muse, away from the public eye, deeper into his own world.
John Frusciante’s career sometimes seems like a long life in rock’n’roll enacted in fast-forward. If he was drawn to make music through the paranoid mania of Bowie in the ’70s, he also got to experience all those less glamorous years—the genre exercises, the unlikely collaborators, the short-lived supergroup, the eras of wild prolificacy and those of disquieting silence. There’s a consistency to his music that can cast nearly any of his albums as your favorite. They all speak to a larger portrait, one that you can see best when you admire from a distance.
In 2015, Frusciante had to make something clear. “Obviously,” he wrote in a blog post, “I have a public audience. I am aware of them, and they know who they are.” The statement arrived in response to a recent article that quoted him denying he had a fan base anymore, a claim that understandably offended his devoted following. What he meant to say, he explained, was that he now makes music with no audience in mind. That is, he satisfies himself, caters to no one, works for the simple joy of bringing ideas to life. “Thinking this way,” he wrote, “Gives me a certain freedom and stimulates growth and change.” He signed off, “Thank you all for existing.”
Despite the irony in an artist breaking his hermitude simply to affirm to his fanbase that he knows they exist, his words ring true. Working mostly without major label backing and remaining too prolific for any one record to crossover, Frusciante established a path comparable to cult-level indie figures like Simon Joyner or Jason Molina more than the rockstars and festival headliners he came up with. It might be the modern version of the withdrawn artistic existence he once dreamed about. And if his evolution resembles a ghost story, it’s one at least with a happy ending. The introduction to his second life, To Record Only Water offers a humble kind of inspiration: Start again, get stronger, and disappear on your own terms. It’s what I learned from listening to Frusciante’s records, and what he learned by living through them. | 2018-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. | June 24, 2018 | 8 | 784dead8-b5df-4aeb-a524-37b08df52d0d | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Brooklyn industrial act trades its signature drum machine for Guardian Alien/Liturgy drummer Greg Fox, harnessing his intensity to fuel their most unified—and most deranged—record to date. | The Brooklyn industrial act trades its signature drum machine for Guardian Alien/Liturgy drummer Greg Fox, harnessing his intensity to fuel their most unified—and most deranged—record to date. | Uniform: The Long Walk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/uniform-the-long-walk/ | The Long Walk | For a band that hasn’t been around for terribly long, Brooklyn industrial duo Uniform has undergone many mutations. Vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist/programmer Ben Greenberg began as a dystopian industrial-noise outfit that only occasionally showed glimpses of both members’ punk pasts—but by their second record, Wake in Fright, they were injecting thrash fusion with Big Black-level freakouts. In that sense, Uniform were moving in the opposite direction from their recent collaborators the Body, transitioning from relatively loose textures to something resembling conventional (albeit heavily damaged) metal. On their third album, The Long Walk, Uniform expand into a trio. And the addition of drummer Greg Fox, of Guardian Alien and Liturgy, yields a sound that is both more unified and more deranged than ever.
Greenberg’s tone used to be harsh and dry, a style that complemented the bleakness of Uniform’s first record and Fright’s more focused thrash. Here, he turns up the bass and the noise, never shifting out of overdrive. This intensity makes Uniform feel more unhinged, even if their mode of assault hasn’t changed greatly; Greenberg is splattering all over Walk, not deploying tight, disciplined attacks. He dispenses with most of Fright’s crossover influence, in favor of mangled, mid-paced riffing, like Celtic Frost recorded through a series of budget amps and distortion pedals, then played at deafening volume.
There isn’t much clarity to be found here. Each riff is a block of noise, and that approach lends the album an unusually chunky feel on the whole. “Headless Eyes” and “Found” have blocky ’90s noise-rock grooves, but unlike most acts that fall into that genre, Uniform place the most emphasis on the noise half of that equation. Walk’s track sounds like a doom band led by a power-electronic musician: heavy on the Sabbath stomp, yet gloriously muddy.
Even with the addition of a formidable presence like Fox, the prospect of Uniform without their signature drum machine seemed worrisome. Much like industrial-metal pioneers Godflesh, Uniform relied on that robotic percussion to bring their music to (mechanical, coldhearted) life. Fox, who entered the studio on super-short notice, brings his own approach to drum-machine rhythms, accentuating the snare’s thudding beats, and introduces a slight imbalance into the band’s sound. This record doesn’t have any gothy, quasi-dance songs like Fright’s “The Lost”; instead, Fox incorporates that rhythmic repetition into Uniform’s blown-out chug. You don’t call in a drummer like this one for icy precision; Walk is the messiest record they’ve ever made. Fox doesn’t fully flex his muscles until the end of closer “Peaceable Kingdom,” but his presence adds a touch of wildness to each track.
Yet for all its controlled chaos, The Long Walk is Uniform’s most stylistically consistent record. One key point of divergence is “Alone in the Dark,” which revisits the band’s industrial origins, bringing new overtones of desperation. The track feels like it’s running from something, rather than simply destroying everything in its path. It’s the only song on the album that embodies the same fear it inspires, with Greenberg’s escalating riffs matching Berdan’s preternatural nervousness. “Alone” is the most uncomfortable moment on a record that feels more terrifying than anything Uniform have done before, precisely because it locates a fragile human spirit within the band’s visions of robotic terror. | 2018-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Sacred Bones | August 29, 2018 | 7.6 | 7851e08c-4d9d-490f-87e3-462821cd37f8 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
Live at Carnegie Hall is drawn from Ryan Adams' recent two-night career-spanning residency. Available as a 10-song sampler or a 216-minute 6xLP, it keeps the casual Ryan Adams fan in mind in both versions. The performances themselves are flawless and the recording is as well; everything is so crisp and clear that Carnegie Hall might as well be your living room. | Live at Carnegie Hall is drawn from Ryan Adams' recent two-night career-spanning residency. Available as a 10-song sampler or a 216-minute 6xLP, it keeps the casual Ryan Adams fan in mind in both versions. The performances themselves are flawless and the recording is as well; everything is so crisp and clear that Carnegie Hall might as well be your living room. | Ryan Adams: Live at Carnegie Hall | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20495-live-at-carnegie-hall/ | Live at Carnegie Hall | After Ryan Adams finishes "Come Pick Me Up", his definitive song and the one which ends both performances captured on Live at Carnegie Hall, he leans into the mic and screams: "THAT’S IT! YOU’RE SAD NOW!!! NOW YOU’RE SAD!!! EVERYBODY’S SAD NOW! YEAAAAHHH!!!!" The thunderous applause lets you know that everyone in attendance on this first night is in on the joke: Adams is big enough to play Carnegie Hall now, because thousands of people have discovered that listening to Ryan Adams alone is akin to giving your sadness a spa day. But "Come Pick Me Up" actually transforms into something uplifting in a live setting these days. For both the performer and the audience, “Rescue Blues” and “Why Do They Leave” and “Amy” are bittersweet, nostalgic and a platform for wisecracks and anecdotes. The audience arrives with their dates and laugh at Ryan Adams, who gets to laugh at himself. The original ache is gone and everyone can just admit to each other, "man, weren't those days something?"
Live at Carnegie Hall makes Adams’ impromptu comedy the main draw: somewhere within this three-and-a-half-hour package is one of the funniest standup records you’ll hear in 2015. And the subject of nearly all of Ryan Adams’ jokes is Ryan Adams. This is a career-spanning project, so "Ryan Adams" becomes a very, very broad topic. Adams offers countless punchlines about the prevalence of tears and rain in his music as well as his penchant for using this reputation to his advantage—"Probably like 86% of you are on Paxil, so you understand about depression. So... you're at a fucking Ryan Adams show," he cracks at one point.
The most cutting material aims at Adams' most self-serious phase, also known as his "New York" phase. On records like Gold and Love Is Hell, Adams relied on New York City to grant his music instant gravitas and urbane legitimacy. It was literally personified on his biggest single ("New York, New York"), and his residence in the East Village felt like method acting. At one point on Carnegie Hall, he claims Love Is Hell highlight "Please Do Not Let Me Go" as one of his proudest moments and a song he wrote out on a pizza box while stoned as fuck and ruminating on the purpose of shoes.
Live at Carnegie Hall is available as a 10-song sampler and a 216-minute 6xLP, though both versions have the casual Ryan Adams fan in mind. This isn’t for the hardcore Ryan Adams fan, the kind who will claim to have bootlegged B-side comps and shelved records that bests anything he’ll ever publicly release. This isn’t Ryan Adams’ Greatest Hits or the Definitive Ryan Adams either, something that will appeal to Whiskeytown and Heartbreaker fans who’ve begrudgingly stuck with him when he presumably lost his damn mind in 2003 and his edge on Easy Tiger. The setlists are thorough, but disappointingly conservative, writing out nearly all of his divisive records—nothing from Rock N Roll or 29, just a handful of B-sides and only the Love Is Hell tracks long-established as fan favorites.
All of his selections here work beautifully with just an acoustic guitar as accompaniment, and it all manages to cast his recent work in a positive light. Since they’re all subject to the same arrangements and production, "Am I Safe" or "Gimme Something Good" can be judged on the same scale as "Oh My Sweet Carolina" and "My Winding Wheel". The performances themselves are flawless and the recording is as well; everything is so crisp and clear that Carnegie Hall might as well be your living room. But the later songs remain what they were on record: tuneful, workmanlike numbers that can’t possibly generate the emotional payload of Heartbreaker but aren’t really trying to. Ryan Adams' music often gets called "effortless," which cuts both ways—it can sound elemental and eternal and also like something he dashed off in five minutes. He’s very much aware of this reputation as well—Adams ad libs a presumably impromptu funk number on piano based on a hypothetical text message exchange between Billy Ocean and Michael McDonald.
It all highlights the various odd turns Ryan Adams' persona has taken over the past 20 years. After his blatant crossover bid Gold, Adams released two records in two months—one was too "rock", the other was too "sad" and both were considered career-killers. He rebounded in 2005 with three albums that were vastly superior but no more compromising—in half a year, he was a honky-tonk traditionalist, a Deadhead and Jeff Buckley. More recently, oddball vanity projects Orion and 1984 give glimmers of hope that they may one day not be the exception to the rule set by Ashes & Fire and Ryan Adams. But Live at Carnegie Hall is the Ryan Adams Ryan Adams, the one who redefined himself at 40 years old as three things no one thought he’d ever be: reliable, consistent and a consummate people pleaser. | 2015-04-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-04-27T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Blue Note / Pax-Am | April 27, 2015 | 7.3 | 7855d42a-a480-412e-b15e-efcc6a794507 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Listening to the Philadelphia-based artist’s music can be an intense, discomforting experience, but their sparse sounds and diaristic text-to-speech vocals reveal a world of conflicting emotions. | Listening to the Philadelphia-based artist’s music can be an intense, discomforting experience, but their sparse sounds and diaristic text-to-speech vocals reveal a world of conflicting emotions. | Lucy Liyou: Welfare / Practice | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucy-liyou-welfare-practice/ | Welfare / Practice | It’s been just over a decade since James Ferraro first baffled the underground music world with his eerily prophetic opus Far Side Virtual. With its stock-music melodies and iPhone-menu textures, the album captured the empty convenience of modern life in all its absurdity and horror. Of all Ferraro’s outlandish ideas, one musical concept still stands out: the jarring text-to-speech voice that guides listeners through the record like a dead-eyed robotic servant. Since Ferraro, few have dared to attempt utilizing text-to-speech in their music (perhaps because it just sounds so unmusical). Yet the technology itself has only become more entwined in our daily lives. It’s not just our corporate overlords using it; just open TikTok to see ordinary people using text-to-speech as a medium for storytelling—reciting memes, recounting daily minutiae, and expressing our most hidden anxieties, one tortured syllable at a time.
For Philadelphia-based sound artist Lucy Liyou, this tension between the technology as a soulless automation and a vehicle for our innermost thoughts is everything. “The idea that a text-to-speech generator attempts to sound as perfectly human as possible is ironic,” the Korean-American artist told Tone Glow in 2020. “The way it fails to capture certain sentiments feels like a vessel that contains my voice, as twisted as that sounds.” In Liyou’s hands, the tool’s detached enunciation becomes a conduit for deep, anguished explorations into trauma both personal and generational. Sometimes it reads like a gutting AI transcript of family therapy sessions, becoming yet another contorted outgrowth of Liyou’s short-circuiting sound design. Other times, Liyou’s gentle piano playing makes the voice feel almost innocent as it unfolds like a yearning diary entry, expressing affections too private to say out loud. Listening to Liyou’s music can be an intense, discomforting experience—but devote your full attention to it, and their sparse assortment of sounds reveals a world of conflicting emotions, gliding between visceral heartache, simmering resentments, and quiet gratitude.
Collecting Liyou’s first two releases, this double-disc reissue from American Dreams demonstrates the 24-year-old artist’s unique, disorienting vision. Of the two, their 2020 debut, Welfare, is the bolder statement. Originally released via like-minded laptop experimentalist Klein’s personal imprint after the two met through an Instagram Q&A, Welfare dives headfirst into a sprawling song cycle of familial struggle, weaving together extended dioramas of sound poetry that are as fascinating as they are terrifying. It would be an ambitious project even for an artist who wasn’t 21 at the time; at the same time, its confusion and frustrated sense of release feel like they only could have come from a young voice still fighting to express itself, like a caged bird thrashing to be freed.
Liyou conceptualized Welfare as a take on Korean p’ansori, a minimalist style of folk opera built entirely around simple drum rhythms and expressive, winding vocalizations. In p’ansori, because there are almost no other instruments, the performer drives the song using the cadence of their voice, with each inflection helping to tell a little bit more of the story. Likewise, Welfare casts Liyou’s text-to-speech bot as the album’s unnerving narrator, using small wrinkles in its delivery to uncover peculiar new emotional textures. On “I’m Going to Therapy,” after a nervous intro in which Liyou admits that they haven’t told their mother they’re seeing a therapist, the automated voice appears against total silence, recounting a painful memory of Liyou’s mother: “You told me when I was six years old, ‘What kind of fucking boy cries because of X, Y, and Z?’” Even coming from an A.I. voice, that “fucking” conveys so much awful pathos and bitterness. Shortly after, over a bed of what sounds like warped church organ floating in negative space, a human voice representing Liyou’s father enters the picture coated in booming distortion, uttering, “You need to get him in check.” All these moments play like dramatizations transcribed directly from Liyou’s life, presented here through the rawest, most primitive music software available.
Each passage of Welfare subverts and expands on the last. After the hauntingly gorgeous piano ballad “Unnie”—where, in a trembling whisper, Liyou uses their actual voice to wrestle with defining themselves against Korean gender stereotypes—“Who You Feed” arrives like an unholy demon birth, briefly switching the album’s POV to Liyou’s parents and casting Liyou themself as the real monster. “I’m getting bigger,” a childlike digital voice announces over a disturbing collage of wet, breathing mouth noises. “And bigger,” it repeats, getting deeper each time. Just when it seems like the mood can’t get any more unsettling, the voice gutturally proclaims, “I’m getting tired of you”; in an instant, Liyou takes a magnifying glass to the horrors of parenthood, looking at their own parents’ hardships with raising a child and treating them with the same sense of bizarre dread. By the time the album reaches its ending with “Some Form of Kindness,” it feels like Liyou has learned how to negotiate this complex familial love, accepting its embrace and recognizing its limits in the same humbled breath.
After such a dense, pointedly profound work, Practice sounds more diffuse. Where Welfare plays like a four-part miniature theater piece, Practice’s sketches are all over the place, like Polaroids capturing ordinary day-to-day moments. Recorded over several weeks while Liyou was visiting family in Seattle and their grandmother was simultaneously suffering from a serious illness, Practice feels less like a grandiose statement of intent and more like the work of an artist piecing together their grief in the moment, turning over brief conversations and flashes of memory to uncover hidden meanings.
Musically, Practice goes down smoother than Welfare, placing the onus on softly glowing ambient passages and twinkling neoclassicalism. Swapping out the MIDI pianos they used on their debut, Liyou recorded Practice on acoustic piano at home. You can feel the difference: “You Are Every Memory” opens the album on a glistening note, as Liyou’s piano dances around pitched-up recollections of family members’ reactions to their grandmother’s sickness, each voice laid on top of one another like a racing inner monologue. On “Hail Mary,” Liyou makes the contrast between tension and release even more direct: After a text-to-speech intro in which Liyou apologizes to their mother (a mechanical voice just barely managing to eke out, “You’re right Mom, I don’t know everything about you”), a gorgeous field of drones appears, swelling with voices and angelic bells, like some peaceful clearing materializing in the wake of a great storm. Even the uncanniness of the instruments can’t stop the moment from feeling like some kind of necessary absolution.
Like Welfare, Practice thrives when Liyou shows us these intimate conversations and conflicts laid bare. Their music is surreal enough on its own that the ambiguous, unclear dialogue in scenes like “Uncle” and “How to Build an Automaton” leaves less of an impression, even if the sounds are compelling. But when Liyou confronts these complicated family dynamics directly—as on the noisy, barbed exchange of “At the Dinner Table,” or in the loving message Liyou leaves to their grandmother on “September 5”—everything abstract about their work becomes secondary to the universal nature of the feelings they describe. As much as Liyou’s struggles are rooted in personal circumstances, the ideas they wrestle with could apply to anybody. It’s as if Liyou has tapped into a strange new language for communicating difficult truths that each of us already knows, translating them through a bare, puppet-like voice. If the artificial voices seem uncomfortable, it’s only because what they’re saying is all too real. | 2022-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | American Dreams | June 3, 2022 | 7.7 | 785e91d8-145b-4c29-9841-62b7e38f2c3b | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Two decades after the Minneapolis alt-rock also-rans called it quits, lead singer Ryan Olcott resurrects the project, reworking abandoned demos into contemporary bedroom pop with a vintage cast. | Two decades after the Minneapolis alt-rock also-rans called it quits, lead singer Ryan Olcott resurrects the project, reworking abandoned demos into contemporary bedroom pop with a vintage cast. | 12 Rods: If We Stayed Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12-rods-if-we-stayed-alive/ | If We Stayed Alive | Like so many other rock acts snapped up by the majors during the back half of the ’90s, 12 Rods’ contract was supposed to accelerate their already heady velocity. Less than three years after their initial demo recordings, they were the first American band signed to Richard Branson’s new label, V2. They’d spent the intervening time raising a ruckus in their adopted hometown of Minneapolis: topping City Pages polls, landing on radio playlists, scoring an endorsement deal with an eyewear company. An ambitious local fanzine awarded their 1996 EP gay? its first-ever perfect score.
But V2 couldn’t translate that buzz for a mass audience. To the misfortune of everyone involved, 12 Rods were a prog-pop act in alt-rock duds, pairing knotty arrangements and inspired chording with the earnestness of first-wave emo. They were acolytes of XTC—another Branson-signed act—and after the tepid commercial reaction to 1998’s self-produced Split Personalities, 12 Rods followed their heroes’ playbook, hiring Todd Rundgren to produce their next full-length, 2000’s Separation Anxieties, in Hawaii. The album was no Skylarking, but it was a lesson in major-label economics. In James Francis Flynn’s 2017 band documentary Accidents Waiting to Happen, 12 Rods describe paying a third of a million dollars to a laissez-faire producer who spent sessions cracking cans of Foster’s and doing crosswords.
Separation Anxieties was a fine effort despite the circumstances, but the rock pendulum had swung to post-grunge, and soon afterward V2 dropped the band. 12 Rods recorded and released 2002’s Lost Time themselves, then split. The new album If We Stayed Alive does not reunite the Rods—in a Rundgrenesque move, its seven tracks were recorded entirely by multi-instrumentalist Ryan Olcott, the group’s lead singer and lone songwriter—but it posits them as a band better suited for a bedroom-pop age. Everything here is drawn from demos that Olcott rediscovered a couple years ago, and his production pointedly preserves that vibe. The keys and synths were programmed on a digital audio workstation from 1999; the drums were recorded to cassettes on a Yamaha 8-track from the early ’90s. He even worked to shape his vocals into the breathy yelp he wielded decades ago. The result is an atmospheric treatment of a sound—crisply off-kilter, assured but nervy—that the Rods shared with contemporaries like the Swirlies, the Wicked Farleys, and the Dismemberment Plan.
It’s informed by the music Olcott’s been making over the last 20 years: the full-band indietronica of Mystery Palace, the scrambled chillwave funk he’s made as c.Kostra. The live chestnut “Private Spies” is a power-pop ode to Minneapolis scene gossip, with a ’90s sitcom theme for a chorus and a head-cold guitar solo to close. The solo on the languid R&B cut “The Beating” is vintage AOR: a retro feint that heightens the vibe, instead of derailing it. The lyric pivots from what I think is a DJ describing his open relationship (“You can look at me while I'm working/Don't mind if you do/You can touch somebody out there/Looks like you want to”) to a gently chanted tribute to Mill City nightlife.
Even the thorny subject matter is given a similarly shimmering cast. “Comfortable Situation” has a typically sneery Olcott text (“Rock repeats the story/Every time we’re boring”) but keeps cracking its grouchy nu-rock riff open like a geode, revealing a sparkling, pensive guitar figure. Opener “All I Can Think About” starts like a dispatch from the first wave of school shootings—a glum acoustic riff, images of cops counting kids and scouring the gym for guns—before Olcott turns abruptly inward. “Where was I in junior high,” he sighs, ”Then I realized: I could solve any crime/It's all I can think about.” It’s audacious, but it doesn’t play as solipsism, just dream logic. “Hide Without Delay” is all about crime and retribution, flashing the shifting time signatures and stylistic switchbacks of classic Rods before dipping into a hypnagogic state. “Shame on you,” Olcott murmurs over ambient dissipation reminiscent of Separation Anxieties’ “Rock N’ Roll Band.” “Don't you wanna tell me something?” He could be drifting off. He could be dying.
The 12 Rods project, however, is not. Accidents Waiting to Happen interlaced its band history with performances from a triumphant 2015 reunion show involving every former band member. But none of those members—not Ryan’s brother and second guitarist Ev, not drummer Dave King of the Bad Plus—will be rejoining. Olcott has cast an all-new 12 Rods lineup with what the press materials call “new, more relevant musicians from the Twin Cities.” If We Stayed Alive, then, is more than pandemic-motivated housecleaning: It’s a proper comeback. And it’s a stirring achievement for an act that had come so far so fast, only to find itself out of place, and out of time. | 2023-07-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-07T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | American Dreams / Husky Pants | July 7, 2023 | 7.3 | 785f60cd-3805-4c52-85e1-ca56cc643bc8 | Brad Shoup | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-shoup/ | |
More powerful and focused than any of their recent records, the 11th Superchunk album is finally the one that feels genuinely urgent, both of a particular moment and built to outlast it. | More powerful and focused than any of their recent records, the 11th Superchunk album is finally the one that feels genuinely urgent, both of a particular moment and built to outlast it. | Superchunk: What a Time to Be Alive | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/superchunk-what-a-time-to-be-alive/ | What a Time to Be Alive | The arguments for Superchunk’s place in music’s pantheon sound like backhanded compliments: They are heralded for their longevity and consistency, their indie-label trailblazing and standard-bearing, and their general amiability, while their unfuckwithable batting average for delivering perfectly coiled guitar anthems is somehow an afterthought. At the peak of their initial run, they were routinely overshadowed by bands who thought they were successfully navigating the post-Nevermind boom only to wind up with a fraction of the cultural footprint. Thirty years and 11 albums in, Superchunk have now backed their way into the zeitgeist, honoring and advancing the punk rock that shaped them by railing against the banal evil of old white men.
Their albums since returning from nine years of self-exile in 2010 have felt increasingly purpose-driven: Majesty Shredding was an unexpected victory lap, thrilling and joyful, the sound of rediscovering the fun of being in a band without the pressure or baggage of careerism; 2013’s I Hate Music had a heavy shadow of mortality hanging over it and was a moody reaffirmation of what it means to love something even if it plays an inconvenient role in your life. But those were just prelude to the first Superchunk album that feels genuinely urgent and of a particular moment and built to outlast it.
Calling What a Time to Be Alive a political album, or a protest album, risks sounding too withering when anyone can be a hashtag away from thinking they’re storming the gates. But the 11 tracks add up to a fitful, cohesive statement, aiming squarely at the world’s most obvious target without ever sounding obvious. Save for a Chelsea Manning reference, no names are named; timelessness isn’t sacrificed for timeliness. The result feels like a definitive document of the Trump era despite being less about him than the attendant ugliness that the past year has dragged into the light. The villains aren’t new but their brazenness is, and the raw nerves throughout the record follow suit.
On each of the previous post-hiatus albums, Superchunk threw a couple full-throttle punk songs into the generally mid-tempo power-pop mix, as if to prove they still could. What a Time as a whole is faster and feistier than any Superchunk album in 25 years but the band acts its age. The furiousness sounds earned and in context, and if any of the racket reminds you of listening to 1991’s No Pocky for Kitty in college, that’s great, it’s just beside the point. At first blush, the album appears less personal and introspective than I Hate Music or 1994’s breakup cringe-classic Foolish, but the fact that a lifetime of thinking about punk music and the people who make it can lead to a crisis response as focused and heartfelt and spittle-flecked as this itself feels like an act of introspection. “Our empathy weaponized,” Mac McCaughan sings in “Erasure,” like he’s writing his own sticker blurb.
The album’s most meta moment, “Reagan Youth,” is about being molded by firebrand punk during depressing conservative regimes. In the process of paying tribute to a tragic ’80s NYHC icon, it argues that identifying with angry music—“To tell the truth/There was more than one Reagan Youth”—at a formative age builds more than character or taste. Orneriness and skepticism of authority turn out to be pretty useful life skills during times of national despair and it’s not a huge leap to suggest that running your own successful independent record label for nearly 30 years might give you a particular and valuable perspective on ossified, unfair institutions. Not that the album concerns itself with practical solutions—we are still in the exorcism phase.
Stewing in a relatively liberal enclave within red-state North Carolina has made Mac McCaughan’s lyrics more pointed while managing to avoid trite sloganeering. Yes, “The Simpsons”-indebted title itself is by now a cliche (and isn’t even the first album in recent memory to adopt the phrase), but plays here like a call to arms rather than the resigned or befuddled sigh it usually connotes. As peppy opening-track choruses go, “The scum, the shame, the fucking lies/Oh what a time to be alive” isn’t looking for a pat answer; making the best of a dire situation, it’s trying to be fun, not funny. And none of this vitriol comes at the expense of hooks; the Katie Crutchfield and Stephen Merritt-assisted “Erasure” and “Bad Choices,” a herky-jerky plea to racist, close-minded neighbors, are as catchy as anything the band has ever done and don’t get overwhelmed by their messages.
On “I Got Cut,” first released as a single last summer, McCaughan seethes, “All these old men won’t die too soon,” but he also knows he’s closer in age to some of his targets than he is to the generation that will ultimately have to clean this mess up. A couple tracks later, on the breakneck “Cloud of Hate,” “I hope you die scared of all the kids that know the truth” is what passes for hope and a way forward, and you can feel McCaughan’s chest puffed out as he belts it out. Superchunk have never been anyone’s idea of angry but their most beloved song resonated as a snotty rebuke to the mistaking of youthful DIY energy for rudderlessness, and paying that forward now feels like nothing less than a means to survive. What a Time to Be Alive’s rage feels visceral because of age and experience and exhaustion, not despite it. | 2018-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | February 21, 2018 | 8.1 | 7864babf-3698-4f7b-9ebc-94098c921f02 | Steve Kandell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steve-kandell/ | |
The songs on the L.A.-via-Boston grunge-popper's first full-length are brazenly simple, but they have a shrugging, take-me-as-I-am charm that makes them feel like celebrations of their own limitations, recalling Beat Happening, the Ramones, and Blink-182 before they briefly grew up. | The songs on the L.A.-via-Boston grunge-popper's first full-length are brazenly simple, but they have a shrugging, take-me-as-I-am charm that makes them feel like celebrations of their own limitations, recalling Beat Happening, the Ramones, and Blink-182 before they briefly grew up. | Colleen Green: Sock it to Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17738-colleen-green-sock-it-to-me/ | Sock it to Me | There are, roughly, two kinds of musicians in this world: the ones who make grand gestures that suggest the universe’s infinite depth, complexity and wonder, and the ones who execute their ideas with such perfect simplicity that they make you believe-- often for 3 minutes at a time-- that the world might actually be flat after all. L.A.-via-Boston DIY grunge-popper Colleen Green stands resolutely in the second group. Her scrappy brand of minimalism follows in the tradition of Beat Happening, the Ramones, and Blink-182 (she’s cited the band’s 1993—1999 run as a crucial influence; in other words, nothing after the fart-and-boner-joke auteurs’ short-lived “mature phase”) and is based in a faith that most things worth saying can be expressed with just a deadpan drum machine, an uncomplicated couplet, and three torpedoed power chords. Green’s persona is a logical extension of her music, too. When an interviewer asked her last year to elaborate on the lyrics to her song “Green One” (what did green signify, he wanted to know—nature? her family name? weed?) her response to this question was as laconic, goofy, and no-frills as one of her best songs: “I dunno, it’s like, green is just what I AM, you know?” To ask Colleen Green what does it all mean, man? is sort of like asking Joey Ramone to elaborate on the pedagogical philosophy of the teaching methods at Rock & Roll High School.
The songs on Green’s Hardly Art debut Sock it to Me are brazenly simple, but they have a shrugging, take-me-as-I-am charm that makes them feel like celebrations of their own limitations. All of her songs begin with a nearly identical beat made by a drum machine that sounds like a model discontinued about 20 years ago. When asked why she uses a drum machine, she’s said it’s because she doesn’t know how to play the drums; I doubt she will ever learn. Her music is anti-striving: why push past your limits, it seems to ask, when you can just get stoned (her Twitter handle, it must be said, is “@colleengreen420”) and then write some pretty solid songs with the chords you already know?
Sock it to Me mines the melodic sensibility and lyrical themes of 60s girl groups-- good boyfriends (“When He Tells Me”), bad boyfriends (“Darkest Eyes”) and mean girls at school (“Every Boy Wants a Normal Girl”). But while the first wave of girl group music was a profession of collectivity and shared wisdom, Green’s music is proudly solo, the product of one singular, isolated person. Not that it bothers her. About a minute-and-a-half into the album, on the infectious, wound “Only One”, she engages in a multi-tracked call-and-response chant with herself. “Oh yeah/ Uh-huh/ Oh god/ I really love my boyfriend,” she sings, and then plays her own backing singer: “She really loves her boyfriend.” In Green’s solitary bedroom-pop universe, loneliness isn’t a source of sadness so much as aesthetic choice and, occasionally, a well-executed punch line.
Sock it to Me comes on the heels of a couple solid cassette releases-- Green One, Cujo, and the awesomely titled Descendents-wink Milo Goes To Compton-- and tightens her established formula without cleaning it up too much. When Green’s on (which, on this 10-song album, is a little more than half the time), her melodic sensibility is almost Merritt-esque; in fact, the delightful “Taxi Driver” sounds like a long-lost Claudia Gonson-sung track off the Magnetic Fields’ Distortion and has a silly, curmudgeonly conceit to match (“I wanna be a taxi driver/ I wouldn’t have to talk to anybody”). The sun-scorched “Time in the World” also ranks among her best, its distorted synthesizer riff adding the perfect amount of blown-out, overexposed atmosphere to its beach-pop hook. Green’s strongest songs are almost always her upbeat ones, though. She hasn’t quite figured out a way to translate her music’s charms into the slower material, and so after getting off to a strong start, Sock it to Me moves from a sugar rush to a diabetic coma about halfway through, no thanks to the somnolent title track. But the B-side picks up beginning with “Darkest Eyes”, which combines grumbling power chords with some of the record’s most poignant lyrics: “I tell him every day he’s the only one I wanna see/ And his eyes look right through me.”
Green’s songs are like single-panel stickfigure comics. Some people will dismiss them as amateurishly two-dimensional, while plenty of others will find their personable, unpretentious ethos crucial to their appeal. But at its most sly, Green’s music seems to be mocking the very idea that an artist needs to grasp for depth or profundity as she evolves. The darkest song on the predominantly sunny Sock it to Me addresses some kind of unnamed anxiety-- it’s called “Heavy Shit” and its most revealing lyric goes, “Heavy shit on my mind.” Still, like most of Sock it to Me, maybe it’s sharper and more cathartic than it seems. After all, turning bad feelings into flat, darkly funny cartoons is one surefire way to defang them. | 2013-03-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-03-15T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | March 15, 2013 | 7.2 | 7866164d-b29b-44fc-a7e8-1f75b31b2889 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The 18-year-old rapper continues to polish his frenetic breed of pop-trap while maintaining a fundamental weirdness that’s neither too loud nor too discreet. | The 18-year-old rapper continues to polish his frenetic breed of pop-trap while maintaining a fundamental weirdness that’s neither too loud nor too discreet. | midwxst: better luck next time. EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/midwxst-better-luck-next-time-ep/ | better luck next time. EP | About 30 seconds into “riddle,” the lead single off midwxst’s new EP, better luck next time., a sunny guitar riff is swallowed by a distorted 808, metallic snares swap places with rock drums, and midwxst’s mannered emo rapping warps into a wail. “Don’t say you ever knew me, ’cause you don’t know my pain,” he sings with roiling intensity, his voice scratching against the bass like sandpaper. The pyrotechnics don’t last, though; the guitar and campfire claps soon return, and we’re once again folded into the arms of a pop song. midwxst relishes in maximalist beat drops and Juice WRLD-meets-digicore cocktails, but on better luck next time., he polishes his frenetic breed of pop-trap into a more digestible package without relinquishing his disruptive energy.
The Indiana-raised rapper’s most recent project, last year’s Back in Action EP, was largely a rage rap record. Inspired by Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert, midwxst cast off his sad-boy posture with exuberant punchline flows atop euphoric synths and thundering bass stabs. I can do this too, he seemed to snarl throughout the EP, and I can do it better than you. In a post-Whole Lotta Red world, where much of the rage rap has been, well, bad, Back in Action sounded like an artist expanding upon the Carti template. Successful as the project was, it was clearly not midwxst’s preferred mode of musical expression, which is why better luck next time. feels like a return to form, a more authentic application of his melodic gifts.
The EP depicts a teenage breakup in suspended animation, a space where rationality dissolves and pain rips through the body like a switchblade. Each song addresses an amorphous ex, one who spews lies, sends spiteful texts, and hurts our protagonist for the thrill of it. On the pop-punk-inspired “car seats,” midwxst inhales a whiff of his ex’s perfume and is reminded how she emotionally broke him; on “misery,” he hurls insults at an ex who won’t stop blowing up his phone. He’s a magnetic vocalist, singing these scenes with animating anguish, his nasally timbre dipping in and out of different cadences. And although the tormented romance gets exhausting—nearly every song recycles tropes about “running away” and feeling “sick and tired”—the thematic and emotional consistency works to solidify the narrative while the beats constantly bend into new shapes.
The production adds essential anxiety and urgency. “switching sides” sounds like a Drake song on LSD, an exhilarating emo-trap banger with bass so huge it threatens to obliterate midwxst’s wonderfully catchy hook. On the brakence-assisted “okay,” a smattering of live drums and glitchy trap snares collide with beeps, squelches, and electric guitar to form a dizzying maelstrom of technical and textual incongruities. Unlike other ascendant hyperpop acts, such as glaive and ericdoa, whose sounds have hewed closer to center as their spotlights have widened, midwxst’s music maintains a fundamental weirdness that’s neither too loud nor too discreet.
better luck next time. closes with “on my mind,” a melodramatic yet heart-wrenching emo pop ballad. Even when the writing falls into affectless bromides—he’s still running away—the song is saved by midwxst’s commitment to the performance; the pain he expresses is located in a place beyond language, and it feels visceral, even intoxicating. In a streaming economy with no shortage of drab, genreless songs, it’s exciting to hear an artist leap so adeptly across styles, from Uzi-styled flex raps to pure pop. His dexterity makes midwxst stand out in the ever-evolving world of hyperpop. | 2022-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-03-22T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Simple Stupid / Geffen | March 22, 2022 | 7 | 786aea30-17f0-4690-bde3-ebe8fb777fad | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
Turning his ear for imperfection toward dub techno, versatile producer Paul Dickow turns out six tracks that conceal worlds of activity under their grimy patina. | Turning his ear for imperfection toward dub techno, versatile producer Paul Dickow turns out six tracks that conceal worlds of activity under their grimy patina. | Strategy: Graffiti in Space | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/strategy-graffiti-in-space/ | Graffiti in Space | Paul Dickow, best known as the Portland, Oregon, electronic musician Strategy, once sent a demo to a European dance-music imprint, and the Europeans liked it—they just wanted it a little cleaner, tighter, more professional sounding. Problem was, Dickow liked to record on a ragtag setup of borrowed or busted gear, jamming live straight to two-track stereo. He didn’t have a high-end audio interface; it would have been impossible to edit the muck out of his tracks even if he’d wanted to. But eventually he realized that dance music—even the most crowd-pleasing, floor-filling dance music—needs to have something a little bit wrong with it. “That’s what’s great about well-done yucky music,” he told Resident Advisor. “You’re like, ‘Fuck! It sounds so fucked up and I keep listening to it, I can’t tune it out.’” Science bore this out, he reasoned: The ear is attuned to imperfection. “We map sound by what’s wrong,” he said. “If it’s fucked up and it has a hook, then you have this delicious problem, and that’s where I think I live.”
For more than 20 years, Dickow has been exploring different shades of wrongness in his music, finding delicious problems in loose-limbed house jams, intransigent rave anthems, and ambient nodders that sound like they’ve been stewing in battery acid. On Graffiti in Space, Dickow turns his ear for imperfection toward dub techno. It’s an audacious proposition, if only because dub techno is so often treated as a color-by-numbers exercise; it’s among dance music’s most formulaic styles. Berlin duo Basic Channel perfected the form almost as soon as they had pioneered it, and three decades later, it’s less a living genre than a museum piece. But where most latter-day dub techno is vaporous, billowing, and virtually friction-free, Dickow digs gleefully into the gunk.
The opening “Remote Dub” has all the hallmarks of the style: pulsing minor chords, plunging dub bassline, metronomic beat. Filters yawn open and closed around a hazy ostinato wash. The mood is somewhere between gently narcotic and pleasantly narcoleptic. But the texture is classic Strategy—soft and sticky as a bag of candy on the dashboard. All six tracks on the 41-minute album have a similarly damaged patina. Dickow is fond of building his own effects units—compressor pedals, spring reverb—and it sounds like it; you can practically smell the globs of solder sizzling between the notes. “Fountain of Youth” opens with metallic wisps twisting over a loud electrical hum, and the atmosphere is periodically punctuated by laser-zapping feedback squeals. The elements sound like they’re competing for space on the tape: Every time that shrill siren comes through, it seems to suck up all the air in the room. But it’s also a viscerally powerful track, with a cascading dub bassline that threatens to flood the mix.
“Message From Ouroboros” is even heavier, with a pounding, butcher-block beat and a lithe modal bassline that bares sharp teeth every time the filters pull back. The sounds are in constant flux and the groove moves with a playful strut. It’s the polar opposite of contemporary dub techno’s tasteful efficiency: sweaty, rough, and ungainly, and you can tell that Dickow likes it that way. But elsewhere on the album, the drums are little more than phantasms, and some of the finest tracks are all but ambient. “Daydream Space Graffiti” sends burbling chords floating over a pastel-colored churn, like a syrupy riposte to Pole, and the closing “Surface Worlds” is similarly buoyant, a pointillistic field of shifting colors. But even at his most bucolic, Dickow refuses to let complacency dictate his choices. As calm as a track like “Surface Worlds” might appear, beneath the surface there’s a world of activity: a soft riot of competing frequencies and haphazard counterpoints colliding and drifting apart again. A firm believer in the power of accident, Dickow harnesses all these imperfections into music that moves with unmistakable grace. | 2023-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-26T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Constellation Tatsu | January 26, 2023 | 7.4 | 7875c4fc-bb28-4b4b-a14a-eadd2307e7d6 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On his major-label debut, SoundCloud rap architect Ronny J showcases his talents as a producer, songwriter, and rapper, with assists from Denzel Curry, Smokepurpp, and XXXTentacion. | On his major-label debut, SoundCloud rap architect Ronny J showcases his talents as a producer, songwriter, and rapper, with assists from Denzel Curry, Smokepurpp, and XXXTentacion. | Ronny J: OMGRONNY | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ronny-j-omgronny/ | OMGRONNY | In a recent interview, Miami producer Ronny J noted that the Clipse’s Lord Willin’ was the first album he ever bought. He referred to it, tellingly, as “the Clipse album with ‘Grindin’’ on it,” adding, “That beat was just so amazing.” “Grindin’” is the kind of song that’s felt as much as it’s heard, its kick drums landing with a cartoonish thud that dominates the mix. It’s easy to imagine how that 2002 hit might have shaped Ronny’s understanding of what a rap beat should sound like. At the age of 25, he’s emerged as an elder statesman in the raucous subculture of SoundCloud rap. His early work with Denzel Curry more or less created the template for an entire generation of South Florida artists: overdriven, in-the-red songs built for tinny speakers and irresponsible volumes.
Ronny’s sound cuts a contrast against the gleaming production that rules much of today’s rap radio, but it is not without precedent. The Southeast has long offered a counternarrative to mainstream fidelity, one which runs from the gothic murk of Three 6 Mafia to the scuzzy aesthetic of early Raider Klan to the blown-out chaos of Waka Flocka Flame mixtapes. Ronny’s innovation was embracing not only the texture of distortion but the willfully amateur spirit that goes with it, arriving at a sound that has as much in common with lo-fi punk as it does rap. He didn’t have to travel far to find rappers willing to tackle his beats, whether with dead-eyed stoicism (Smokepurpp) or unhinged intensity (Lil Pump).
OMGRONNY, Ronny J’s debut collection for a major label, showcases some new collaborations, as well as the producer’s first forays into rapping. The guests featured here—Denzel Curry, Smokepurpp, XXXTentacion, Wifisfuneral—are, for better and for worse, the most recognizable faces of South Florida rap in 2018. With the notable exception of Curry, none of these artists are objectively great rappers per se; the success of their songs hinges on atmosphere and attitude. “Snakes,” which features Wifisfuneral’s heavy-lidded rapping, sounds like a PlayStation plugged into a thrift store TV while a car blasting rap radio idles outside. On “Glacier,” Curry barks his bars like a hardcore singer, surrounded by synths that reverberate like steel drums played underwater. “Costa Rica” is the closest thing here to a mainstream rap song: chiming synths that recall Metro Boomin’s lustrous style are coated in a thick layer of grime, while Ski Mask the Slump God does his best approximation of Travis Scott’s Auto-Tuned yelp.
The most surprising thing about OMGRONNY is how strong Ronny’s own songs are. He displays a better sense of melody than any of his guests, and his persona—successful artist with an air of understated confidence—feels like a breath of fresh air in a subgenre where the usual rap machismo is often paired with emo’s self-pity. On “824,” the music is melancholic, anchored by a lurching beat and reverb-soaked minor keys, but Ronny details a life where flexing is incidental. “Everybody knows that I got it/Ride around the city in exotics,” he sings in a tone that veers from slippery to earnest. Lead single “Banded Up” mines similar territory with even more refined production: the primary beat rattles loudly while a secondary rhythm patters softly atop the track’s synths. The song’s chorus revolves around Ronny refusing sex, making clear that he’s the pursued, not the pursuer. (Drake wishes he could strike such an unconcerned pose.) Unfortunately, SoundCloud rap’s most reprehensible heel, XXXTentacion, drops in for a guest verse that’s both unnecessary and jarring. When he raps “She got lockjaw, I put my dick all in her face, ha ha” in an adolescent squeak, it breaks the song’s spell.
As the South Florida scene continues its journey from regional curiosity to focal point in the national rap landscape, the primary question its artists face is one of compromise. Will promising rappers file off their hard edges in search of wider acceptance, or continue to make music that’s both sonically and thematically confrontational? On his own tracks, Ronny J finds an intriguing middle ground between these approaches, pairing the undiluted sound of his scene with a less abrasive persona. At his best, he sounds like he’s already outgrowing the subculture he helped create. | 2018-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Independently Popular / Atlantic | March 9, 2018 | 6.8 | 78767609-180c-437f-a77f-48950d54d219 | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | |
The 22-year-old classically trained composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone's chamber pop debut was inspired by working closely with Nico Muhly, his time at Yale and the Banff Centre, and the sounds of Sufjan Stevens and Dirty Projectors. It’s a loose concept album that dives into the complexities of young love. | The 22-year-old classically trained composer Ellis Ludwig-Leone's chamber pop debut was inspired by working closely with Nico Muhly, his time at Yale and the Banff Centre, and the sounds of Sufjan Stevens and Dirty Projectors. It’s a loose concept album that dives into the complexities of young love. | San Fermin: San Fermin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18500-san-fermin-san-fermin/ | San Fermin | After graduating with a degree in music from Yale, Ellis Ludwig-Leone stole away to the Banff Centre in the Canadian Rockies to write his self-titled debut LP under the moniker San Fermin. For six weeks at this artist space on the border between Alberta and British Columbia, the composer filled pages with arrangements, took afternoon walks up the mountain, and came down to blacken the pages some more.
In that isolated environment, with years of classical training, inspiration from working with Nico Muhly, and a playlist that included the avant pop of Sufjan Stevens and Dirty Projectors, Ludwig-Leone's ideas started to only fit on grand scales. The final score for his debut required over 20 players, including a string quartet, a brass quartet, a vibraphone, and operatic sopranos. Coupled with inspiration from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (Ludwig-Leone grabbed the name "San Fermin" from the famous Pamplona festival where they hold the Running of the Bulls), William Henry Hudson romance novels, and the self-imposed profundity that comes with being an anxious love-lorn 22-year-old college graduate, San Fermin arrives as an ambitious chamber pop debut. It’s a loose concept album that grazes, and sometimes dives into the complexities of young love, and slips in and out of dreams that often are just as absurd as the idea of a relationship actually working out.
Ludwig-Leone wrote lyrics for the baritone voice of Allen Tate, as well as the breathy sopranos of Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig of the band Lucius. The three interweave parts across the album, trading off leads, and joining back together for ornate duets. Some initial thoughts may run to how much Tate sounds like the National's Matt Berninger, not just in register, but in cadence, inflection, and sometimes lyrics. Or how Wolfe and Laessig’s whispery, hyper-accurate voices recall the women in Dirty Projectors' tight harmonies as well as the kind of choirs used on* Illinois.* The mosaic of sounds on San Fermin align with much of what has often been done before in chamber pop and indie, and on a song-by-song basis there’s plenty of side-eyeing. But the album works best as a cycle, as a series of movements rather than individual songs.
In that regard, Ludwig-Leone’s world, imbued with a fanciful style that balances the pop and the obtuse, is very much his own. The two “characters” Leone created are representations of ideologies, with Tate’s low voice handling the maudlin pleas and Wolfe and Laessig working together as his dry, world-weary counterweight. “I will tie to my body some roses/ I will fly till I get you alive” Tate sings on “Methuselah” an early-morning acoustic ballad in the first half of the album. It’s a bit much, but soon enough the female character undercuts the purple prose: She’s introduced with the line “I wouldn’t worry/ Your melodramas are embarrassing” on the aptly named “Crueler Kind”.
The conversation between the two places San Fermin directly in the current of high-stakes love. At its most turbulent, Ludwig-Leone writes palms-up climaxes deftly executed at three tentpoles on the album: the early highlight “Sonsick”, the finale “Deadalus (What We Have)”, and the beating heart of the album, “Bar”. Of all the exalting pleas for emotional catharsis, “Bar” is by far the most successful. On the track, the thrill between the two is like "a drug in the arm/ makes you weak when you’re young," a line that's sung in a thick blanket of harmonies between the singers. It’s one of those perfect 21st Century indie arena songs, the kind you play through your iPhone with a crush, the ear buds split between the two of you while you watch fireworks go off in the distance. That said, when you hear Tate sing “Dead of the night/ I’m alone with the tigers” you might have a difficult time not also hearing “It’s a terrible love/ and I’m walking with spiders.”
Hiding around the three peaks are several interludes, and it's in these mini neoclassical compositions that Ludwig-Leone really shines. The pieces offer a rest from the broad-spectrum emotions found in the proper songs, also texturing the album with more curious sounds like spitting cellos, a xylophone under dissonant string drones, and a surprise crackling of a faulty synth patch. They manage to cut down some of the weight of the sung pieces, casting them in a more unique light, while giving San Fermin much needed tension and even a bit of violence.
The menagerie of baroque sounds on the album can be a bit more decorative than purposeful, but under the brambles, it's really just a story of two people wrestling with the love that exists between them. There’s a recurring phrase peppered throughout San Fermin, something about falling asleep in someone’s arms. It’s hard to say exactly what happens to these two people in the end, as the album closes with a ghostly Gustav Mahler-type epilogue that leaves both the music and the story unresolved, but San Fermin is less about a narrative plot and more about abstract ideas and those lucid dreams that happen just before sleep. | 2013-09-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2013-09-30T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Downtown | September 30, 2013 | 7.4 | 7886b0b1-a582-47bf-ae85-53f5cc7f72ed | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | null |
Kieran Hebden’s latest album of club-ready barnstormers and downbeat daydreams feels like a companion to 2017’s New Energy. | Kieran Hebden’s latest album of club-ready barnstormers and downbeat daydreams feels like a companion to 2017’s New Energy. | Four Tet: Sixteen Oceans | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/four-tet-sixteen-oceans/ | Sixteen Oceans | For two decades, Four Tet has stayed remarkably consistent. It’s hard to think of another electronic musician whose work feels so tactile: Sampling acoustic instruments from folk and jazz recordings, his music revels in the physicality of sound—the way a plucked string quivers in the air or a drum brush tickles a snare head. His touch is unmistakable, and while Sixteen Oceans is frequently gorgeous and sometimes gripping, there are signs he’s starting to repeat himself.
Until now, Kieran Hebden has kept his music fresh by subtly tweaking his formula. Ten years ago, with There Is Love in You, he began channeling the energy of clubs like London’s Plastic People, a basement joint where dubstep and house were spawning mutant forms. With Pink and Beautiful Rewind, he pushed deeper into the dance floor, teasing the balance between his own vision and dance music’s collective spirit. Morning/Evening’s pair of hypnotic, 20-minute tracks took an extended detour into Indian devotional music and film soundtracks, and 2017’s New Energy synthesized all of his interests, looping back to the slow-motion bliss of his early work on songs like “Two Thousand and Seventeen” and reasserting his peak-time bona fides on floor-fillers like “SW9 9SL.”
In sound and spirit, Sixteen Oceans feels like a companion to New Energy, a mix of club-ready barnstormers and downbeat daydreams, held together by field-recorded miniatures and ambient etudes. Four Tet shares a palette of muffled rimshots and flashing hi-hats with his occasional collaborator Burial, and his more forceful beats remain charged with the snap and swing of 2-step. Slower tracks, like “Teenage Birdsong” and “Romantics,” fall back on spaced-out hip-hop grooves. Regardless of tempo, they all share the same basic elements: acoustic instruments (harp, flute, bells, and harpsichord) interwoven with dreamy synthesizers that curl like wisps of colored smoke. The predominance of birdsong gives the album the feel of a stroll through an aviary; when there are voices, they are invariably wordless, pitch-shifted, and just this side of melancholy. Everything feels calibrated for a certain Goldilocks zone of wistful reverie—not too heavy, not too light, neither forlorn nor jubilant.
Sixteen Oceans is best when Hebden disturbs the placid surface. “Insect Near Piha Beach” bumps along atop the sort of choppy drum groove that Hebden can write in his sleep, but its cascading pentatonic scales pile up in a way that sounds new, pouring down accelerating and decelerating runs in a way that threatens to overwhelm the rhythmic grid. “Love Salad” is virtually the platonic ideal of a Four Tet song, but as it gathers force, it begins to spill over into exciting dissonance. But “School” and “Something in the Sadness,” which are virtually identical—same key, instrumentation, same tempo, practically the same beat—somehow never manage to spark the same sort of rapture. They tap out at “beautiful” rather than tipping over into the ecstatic.
Sixteen Oceans is 16 tracks long, yet five of them are basically interludes—minute-or-two-long sketches made of watery synth pads, tape hiss, or rudimentary beats. Strangely, most of them fall toward the end of the album. In fact, after “Something in the Sadness,” the record’s driving climax, the album’s final six tracks all zigzag between marginally differentiated pastel dream states. From titles like “1993 Band Practice,” “Bubbles at Overlook 25th March 2019,” and “Mama Teaches Sanskrit,” one gets the sense that many of these pieces have personal meaning for Hebden, but these blurry snapshots don’t impart much more than a feeling of bittersweet serenity. Were they threaded more evenly through the album, they might serve as a kind of mood-stabilizing connective tissue between the more upfront songs; as it is, they feel mostly like an extended denouement, a slow drift into the doldrums. The same could be said for Sixteen Oceans as a whole: The view’s lovely, but for the moment, it feels like Hebden is sailing in circles.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Text | March 18, 2020 | 6.9 | 788ce6a9-e843-494d-874c-1befb735ea6a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
On Imani, Vol. 1, their first album in a decade, Blackalicious reunites triumphantly. Gif of Gab, one of the most underrated technicians of his time, can still trade bars with the best of them, but what makes Vol. 1 particularly powerful—and what separates it from the duo’s work outside of Blackalicious titles—is its warm energy and its infectious groove. | On Imani, Vol. 1, their first album in a decade, Blackalicious reunites triumphantly. Gif of Gab, one of the most underrated technicians of his time, can still trade bars with the best of them, but what makes Vol. 1 particularly powerful—and what separates it from the duo’s work outside of Blackalicious titles—is its warm energy and its infectious groove. | Blackalicious: Imani, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20890-imani-vol-1/ | Imani, Vol. 1 | For better or worse, the tag "alternative rap" comes with many connotations: this rap subverts mainstream politics; this rap has a message; this rap is different; this is #RealHipHop. It’s often a distinction used by rap elitists and purists to separate rap with a supposed intellectual bent from the rap they consider low brow or obtuse. It can be an ugly, divisive term, one that stands at the center of rap’s greatest schism; it has been a defining label in many rap class wars.
But sometimes the term categorizes rap acts that truly exist on the fringes of the genre, acts that stretch the boundaries of how rap can sound with progressive and daring compositions. Producer Chief Xcel and emcee Gift of Gab have been one such creative force as Blackalicious, a Sacramento-based project pushing a positive, often Afrocentric message that’s more prudent than preachy over dynamic production. From 2000 to 2005, the tag-team released a trio of strong LPs—Nia, Blazing Arrow, and The Craft—but parted soon after to pursue individual interests. On Imani, Vol. 1, their first album in a decade, Blackalicious reunites triumphantly.
With Blazing Arrow—the duo’s seminal work—Blackalicious offered up one of the greatest alternative rap records of the last decade, a complex opus that felt seamless and simple with Gil Scott-Heron’s barreling profundity, Questlove’s drums, a DJ Shadow interlude, Zack de la Rocha’s anarchist shouts, and rapid-fire rapping all arranged carefully on a funky sonic canvas. The pair’s last album, 2005’s The Craft, lived up to its title with a yeoman's approach to lyricism and a tinkerer’s mentality toward innovation, but in its quest to be an experimental marvel, it over-thought its thesis, occasionally doing too much, sonically and technically. The first of a projected trilogy, Imani, Vol. 1 takes important lessons from both, tempering its big ambitions with subtler arrangements and careful pacing.
Blackalicious is most effective when Gift of Gab’s knotty multisyllabic schemes unspool without decryption and nestle neatly in the nooks and crannies of Xcel’s soulful romps, and on songs like "Ashes to Ashes" and "I Like the Way You Talk", they lock in. Gab, one of the most underrated technicians of his time, can still trade bars with the best of them, but what makes Imani, Vol. 1 particularly powerful—and what separates it from the duo’s work outside of Blackalicious titles—is its warm energy and its infectious groove.
Imani is the Swahili word for "faith" and on the opener of the same name Amde of the Watts Prophets spells out the album’s mission statement: "Never let life’s troubles block your flow/ Have faith and get where you’re trying to go." Blackalicious has always promoted positivity, but here it seems less like a cultural critique and more like general life-coaching. Throughout, Imani, Vol. 1 is driven by an underlying spirituality and palpable chemistry. It’s often about connection. The duo has joined forces once more in an effort to overcome personal trials, and Imani is no different: Gab suffered kidney failure just as the duo started preparing to make the record in 2012, and a "borrowed time" narrative punctuates many of Vol. 1’s loose ideas, particularly on "The Hour Glass" and "Escape". Time is a central theme on the album, especially with nostalgic glimpses into the past, like on rare missteps "That Night" and "Inspired By". But there’s also a watchful eye on the future, too ("Love’s Gonna Save the Day").
Xcel productions are often rooted in the sounds of rap yesteryear, but they hedge toward the modern. On Imani, Vol. 1, he again bridges the then and now, lining crisp boom bap drums with splitting guitar chords, protruding basslines, and prickling piano riffs. He samples less often than he has in the past, but he still finds time to chop up Lee Perry (on "Blacka") and scratch in a vocal fragment here and there ("On Fire Tonight"). His beats aren't game-changers, but he finds new and interesting ways to follow the patented Blackalicious formula.
When Chief Xcel and Gift of Gab are both producing at max output, there are few rap duos more capable, and on Imani, Vol. 1 they flex their muscle, showing little sign of rust after the long layoff. What Vol. 1 lacks in memorable hooks, it makes up for with ferocious lyricism. That the album was even made feels like a victory, especially considering it took a PledgeMusic campaign to fund it, but Imani, Vol. 1 doesn’t feel crowd-sourced: It is an intimate piece of work, an inspiring take on conquering personal struggle and coming out whole on the other side. On "The Sun", Vol. 1's brightest moment, Gab spins metaphors on the darkness-vanquishing power of light, jubilantly basking in its rays, shining once again. | 2015-09-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-17T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | OGM | September 17, 2015 | 7.2 | 788e56f4-eb59-4a7a-822e-297de28ae9ee | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Morrissey and some (barely audible) high-profile guests rework 12 of his favorite ’60s and ’70s songs by American artists to mixed results. | Morrissey and some (barely audible) high-profile guests rework 12 of his favorite ’60s and ’70s songs by American artists to mixed results. | Morrissey: California Son | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/morrissey-california-son/ | California Son | Like all misfits, the Smiths never seemed entirely comfortable in their own timeline. They clung to old relics: the photographs of niche idols and faded stars on their artwork, the lyrical hat-tips to Oscar Wilde and Shelagh Delaney, the music-hall notes and rockabilly riffs, even a name that was symbolic of an old-fashioned sturdiness. But the nostalgia was always undercut by the sense that though they dreamt of the past, they knew they could never bring it back. “It just wasn’t like the old days anymore,” sighed Morrissey on “Still Ill,” his lips sore from trying to reawaken some distant, dormant magic.
How times change. There’s no bittersweet beauty to be found in the reactionarism of today’s Morrissey, who just performed on “Jimmy Fallon” while wearing the badge of far-right political party For Britain. It’s the latest regrettable act in the charmless offensive he’s been escalating since 2017’s patchy, snarky Low in High School, as he continues to cheerlead for risible politicians, trot out his own inflammatory rhetoric, and dismiss dissenting voices as the product of myopic political correctness.
At this point, then, it’s hard to trust even an album as supposedly innocent as California Son. Its premise is pure fan service: Morrissey and some (barely audible) high-profile guests rework 12 of his favorite ’60s and ’70s songs by North American artists, some of which flirt with ideas of social justice. The inclusion of those tracks feels pointed. Maybe they’re meant as proof that he’s still on the side of the underdogs, or as a sly suggestion that this is what real progressive politics sounds like. Maybe, as his manager said, there’s no agenda and it’s just supposed to be fun. If he’s right, it’s only to a point. It is more enjoyable to hear Morrissey in thrall to his passions than his peeves, but the toxicity of his public persona still poisons the well.
To be clear, a mawkish take on Bob Dylan’s “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” about the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers and the racist killer manipulated into pulling the trigger, would be a bad choice for anyone: However generous your thoughts about the nuances of Dylan’s original or Morrissey’s intentions in covering it, framing racists as victims and excusing their hate crimes seems ill-judged at best and downright reckless at worst in 2019, when the president gladly goes to bat for white nationalists. But it feels particularly disingenuous for Morrissey to bemoan fear-mongering politicians who whip up prejudice, considering some of the unsavory public figures he’s fond of.
It’s a shame, because the best bits of California Son are as strong as anything Morrissey’s done in years, thanks to him and producer Joe Chiccarelli ditching Low in High School’s waspish spirit but keeping its zest for new sounds. The strongest songs pull out some inner strangeness from the originals you’d never really heard before. Buffy-Sainte Marie’s “Suffer the Little Children” is recast as a devilish, ramshackle stomp with bluesy keys and a hammily spooky vocal turn: “He keeps his nails clean/Did you think he was a boogeyman?” Morrissey adds a dark surrealism to Carly Simon’s “When You Close Your Eyes,” too, crooning over its twinkling electronics and lush harps like an eerie figure from a children’s fairytale. He and Chiccarelli turn the sci-fi fantasy of Jobriath’s “Morning Starship” into a space odyssey, filling its glimmering score with futuristic squiggles and crunching cosmic guitars, so it’s like being serenaded by the house band on an intergalactic cruiser.
When they play it safer, like on their workmanlike strum through Joni Mitchell’s “Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow” or the easy-listening wistfulness of their take on Roy Orbison’s “It’s Over,” the results are less remarkable. And while it’s a relief to be spared Morrissey’s bitterness, sometimes California Son feels too frothy, and he sounds like he doesn’t have any skin in the game at all. He and Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong aim for playfulness with Laura Nyro’s “Wedding Bell Blues” and land on cloyingly kitsch instead. Producer Stephen Street once marveled at how Morrissey would build himself up for studio takes like a dramatic actor; here, he’s taking his work about as seriously as a goofy “SNL” sketch.
The choice between listening to a misanthropic relative telling you old stories they love or hearing them grouch at the news is a no-brainer, but that doesn’t make some of the sugariness easier to swallow: As hard as Morrissey tries, it’s difficult to enjoy a celebratory gambol with him down memory lane when it’s full of potholes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the gloomiest moments that come closest to winning you over, like when he turns Tim Hardin’s “Lenny’s Tune” into an exquisite elegy at a doomy cabaret bar, or when he makes Melanie’s “Some Say (I Got Devil)” sound like the darkly dramatic last stand of a vengeful titan. When you hear them, you could almost pretend it was the old days again, even though you know it can never be the same. | 2019-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | BMG | May 25, 2019 | 5.9 | 788e9d91-7615-4adc-a99f-0066791c2947 | Ben Hewitt | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-hewitt/ | |
On their first album as a trio, these jazz-rooted musicians create a luxurious atmosphere drawing from funk, krautrock, and noirish electronica. | On their first album as a trio, these jazz-rooted musicians create a luxurious atmosphere drawing from funk, krautrock, and noirish electronica. | Ilhan Ersahin / Dave Harrington / Kenny Wollesen: Invite Your Eye | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ilhan-ersahin-dave-harrington-kenny-invite-your-eye/ | Invite Your Eye | Nublu, the downtown New York venue owned by saxophonist-composer Ilhan Ersahin, makes a big tent of improvised music: You might catch a party-starting Brazilian forro ensemble one night, a shaggy rock’n’roll jam band the next, and a straightforward post-bop quartet on the third. Ersahin himself is a frequent performer, as are Dave Harrington, Darkside member and journeyman guitarist, and Kenny Wollesen, a drummer whose sideman work includes collaborations with John Zorn and Bill Frisell. Like the club itself, all three men are rooted in jazz but not limited by it.
Ersahin gets top billing on Invite Your Eye, their first album as a trio, and his fluid playing is a constant across eight tracks that pull variously from funk, krautrock, and noirish electronica. But the album’s sumptuous atmosphere and collage-like approach to composition will be familiar to any follower of Harrington’s projects: Darkside’s flickering psych odysseys or the electro-jazz miniatures of his 2019 album Pure Imagination, No Country. In addition to playing guitar, bass, and various keyboards on Invite Your Eye, Harrington also served as producer, using the trio’s live ensemble takes as raw material for editing and embellishment, much like Teo Macero did with Miles Davis’ 1970s albums. Harrington is very good at this sort of tinkering: As a purely sonic experience, Invite Your Eye is spectacular. Playing on my home setup, I wished I were instead worshiping at the altar of some $100,000 hi-fi system, ideally with drugs in my system and the sun setting outside my penthouse window. Even in its occasional dissonant moments, this is luxurious music; you don’t listen so much as you bathe in it.
Harrington’s interventions can be drastic, as with Wollesen’s drum kit on the Afrobeat-inflected “Dusty Village,” which seems to descend into a vat of codeine in the final stretch, becoming suddenly slow and sticky as Ersahin’s sax wails on as if nothing has changed. But the most affecting moments are subtler, blurring the line between performance and production, theme and improvisation. Earlier in the same track, a chantlike sax melody takes the lead for a few bars before disappearing, as if beamed in from a different recording entirely. Was it written into the composition? Overdubbed later? Or did Harrington find a particularly piquant section of a different Ersahin solo and drop it in here? Who cares? It sounds great. This could be the album’s guiding ethos.
Psych-funk workouts in the vein of “Dusty Village” make up roughly half of Invite Your Eye. The trio’s playing is top-notch throughout, and Harrington’s production is filled with one inventive moment after another. But as compositions, these groove-oriented tracks can be a little undercooked, often chugging along on a single chord, sounding more like plushly appointed jam sessions than proper tunes. This is a fairly minor gripe: Listening to Ersahin’s sax melt away and reassemble itself atop the heist-scene rhythm of the title track, I don’t really care that his solo isn’t anchored to any particular central melody. Still, it would be interesting to hear this trio make an album with compositions as finely wrought as their arrangements.
I’m more partial to the spacious, relatively free-tempo explorations that make up Invite Your Eye’s other half. On “And It Happens Everyday,” the album’s opener and best tune, Harrington leads the band through a series of sunlit chords, sounding more than a little like Frisell. Ersahin spins out delicate arpeggios, the sturdiness of the harmonic framework giving him better footing as a soloist than he gets on the one-chord groovers. The two-part “Long Goodbye” suite bears no direct relation to John Williams’ title theme to the Robert Altman slacker-detective classic, which strikes me as mildly unfortunate—these guys could probably nail that song’s delicious languor. But there’s something of the film’s shaggy-dog aspect to the way “The Long Goodbye” ambles through its ideas, especially in its second part, an assemblage of vibraphone, piano, and fizzing electronics that dissolves just as it seems on the verge of cohering. The music doesn’t always follow a clear line from one point to the next, but when the scenery is this beautiful, Ersahin and company can get away with losing the plot from time to time. | 2022-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Electronic | Nublu | March 9, 2022 | 7 | 788ee12a-153c-4dd5-b04b-17cf111c00b8 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Channeling new age and spiritual jazz, the multidisciplinary artist’s debut solo album creates its own thoughtful and potent world with the help of many guests and many flutes. | Channeling new age and spiritual jazz, the multidisciplinary artist’s debut solo album creates its own thoughtful and potent world with the help of many guests and many flutes. | Shabaka: Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shabaka-perceive-its-beauty-acknowledge-its-grace/ | Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace | Shabaka Hutchings’ tenor saxophone shows up exactly once on this album. Around 10 minutes before the LP ends, he summons the fierce momentum and sandpapery grit that have powered beloved bands like Sons of Kemet, the Comet Is Coming, and Shabaka and the Ancestors, and helped to make him one of the most celebrated jazz musicians of the past decade. As is usually the case when Shabaka—now billed by first name only—picks up what he has called the “big, loud, shiny horn,” the solo is thrilling. But this brief, incendiary statement carries a special weight in the wake of Shabaka’s announcement—made on New Year’s Day 2023 and clarified that summer—that he would be taking an indefinite hiatus from the tenor and his groups that feature that instrument.
It’s easy to admire Shabaka’s stated reasons for putting down the horn: a feeling of burnout stemming from a heavy touring schedule that has kept him “on the road consistently treating the performance of a spiritual practice as a commodity to be sold repeatedly”; a quest to generate “energy without tension,” which has led him instead toward various flutes, including the Japanese shakuhachi and the clarinet, his original and, in his eyes, principle instrument. But could a Shabaka album with almost no tenor really have the same impact as his prior output? The answer is yes, absolutely, and that’s primarily because on Perceive Its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace—the artist’s first full-length statement in this vein, following a 2022 EP, Afrikan Culture—Shabaka hasn’t just subbed out one signature instrument for another; instead, he’s remade his music from the ground up.
Shabaka’s prior work was as much dance music as jazz. You couldn’t help but move to the heady electro-funk of the Comet Is Coming, the mighty Afro-Caribbean grooves of Sons of Kemet, or the richly layered intercontinental exchange of Shabaka and the Ancestors. Perceive Its Beauty, on the other hand, focuses on tranquility, a sense of meditative communion with a variety of guest vocalists and instrumentalists. Of course, Shabaka is hardly the only musician thinking along these lines lately. New Blue Sun, André 3000’s own flute-pivot LP, which featured a Shabaka cameo on shakuhachi, signaled the mainstream arrival of a wave that’s been building steadily across the past decade or so wherein various questing sounds of the 1970s—from Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders to Steve Reich, Brian Eno and private-press New Agers like Iasos— have swirled together in a plume of incense, wafting across the decades to inform artists working in and around jazz, electronic music, and more.
But, despite a significant overlap in personnel between Perceive Its Beauty and New Blue Sun—André himself appears on one track here, as does his New Blue Sun collaborator Surya Botofasina, while that project’s creative catalyst Carlos Niño turns up throughout—the two albums have little in common. Whereas New Blue Sun offered sprawling sonic environments, Perceive Its Beauty presents more focused episodes, thoughtfully sequenced to move from abstract and spacious to pulsing and upbeat and back again. (Also, it must be said: As an instrumentalist, André 3000 is a proud novice, while Shabaka is a classically trained practitioner with years of professional experience and a deep dedication to craft.)
The album’s parade of guest stars might feel like a distraction if each of these artists weren’t so well integrated into Shabaka’s overall vision. Opener “End of Innocence” and fifth track “The Wounded Need to Be Replenished” feature different piano luminaries (respectively, Jason Moran, known for his brilliant reimaginings of jazz history, and Nduduzo Makhathini, the South African bandleader and sometime member of the Ancestors), but each achieves a similar kind of pensive beauty. On the former, Shabaka’s clarinet traces liquid arcs over Moran and drummer Nasheet Waits’ somber, abstract textures, while on the latter, the leader’s flute floats wisp-like among Makhathini’s spare phrases, with Niño’s percussion and Botofasina’s synth heightening the feeling of aqueous suspension. In both cases, as much as Shabaka’s tone on these instruments differs from his steely projections on tenor, the artful poise of his phrasing remains fully intact.
Of the album’s many vocal tracks, the most transporting are those that treat guest singers more like fellow instrumentalists. On “Insecurities,” Moses Sumney seems to channel the timbre of Shabaka’s flute as he joins the leader and harpist Charles Overton with wordless lines. On “Kiss Me Before I Forget,” Lianne La Havas melds her voice with Shabaka’s clarinet, creating a lovely braiding of tones, and on “Living,” Eska Mtungwazi’s multi-tracked singing unites with the strings of Miguel Atwood-Ferguson to create a lush, orchestral feel.
Tracks featuring the poets Saul Williams (who contributes a serene monologue to “Managing My Breath, What Fear Had Become”) and Anum Iyapo (Shabaka’s father, who declaims tenderly on album closer “Song of the Motherland,” referencing the title track of his own 1985 album), and rapper Elucid (who brings incisive verses to “Body to Inhabit”) feel a bit less interactive, with vocals sitting out in front of the ensemble. But each piece makes room for compelling interplay between Shabaka’s flute and Charles Overton’s harp, with Brandee Younger, a fellow harpist who has brought the instrument a fresh wave of attention in jazz in recent years, adding to the richness of “Body to Inhabit,” along with Esperanza Spalding, who contributes an insistent bassline. On “I’ll Do Whatever You Want,” André 3000’s flute ends up making less of a discernible impact than producer Floating Points, who gives the track its psychedelic synth pulse, and ambient trailblazer Laraaji, who adds droll vocal excursions and a signature laugh at the end.
Amid the ever-shifting personnel, it’s the confidence of Shabaka’s vision and the potency of his playing that leave the strongest impression. Throughout Perceive Its Beauty, we hear him confidently stepping outside the boundaries not just of jazz but of any easily defined genre and finding a firm footing. Taking in a category-defying track like “As the Planets and the Stars Collapse”—another standout instrumental, with its lush bed of harps and strings, and Shabaka blowing his flute over top with as much muscle as grace—you don’t miss the big, loud, shiny horn, or the in-your-face ensemble sound of a band like Sons of Kemet, in the slightest. The incarnation may be new, but the music’s underlying spirit, its animating force, is very much the same. | 2024-04-11T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-11T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | April 11, 2024 | 8 | 789389ac-14aa-4865-ac4e-78d3b683642b | Hank Shteamer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hank-shteamer/ | |
The Chicago-based improvisational artist layers politically charged sound collages over drum machines and a children’s choir. The result is uplifting activist jazz for tumultuous times. | The Chicago-based improvisational artist layers politically charged sound collages over drum machines and a children’s choir. The result is uplifting activist jazz for tumultuous times. | Damon Locks / Black Monument Ensemble: Where Future Unfolds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/damon-locks-where-future-unfolds/ | Where Future Unfolds | Four years ago, the Chicago-based improvisational artist Damon Locks began layering vocal samples of speeches from the Civil Rights movement over original beats programmed on a drum machine. These politically charged sound collages gradually expanded and transformed into the Black Monument Ensemble, a 15-member performance collective that features singers from the Chicago Children’s Choir and musicians active on the city’s jazz and improv scene, including clarinetist Angel Bat Dawid, drummer Dana Hall and percussionist Arif Smith. Where Future Unfolds is the fruit of Locks' vision, an ensemble performance recorded live at the Garfield Park Botanical Conservatory last year. Locks' project feels revelatory in its bridging of the past and future, its blend of old and new. This is uplifting activist jazz for tumultuous times.
"Statement Of Intent/Black Monument Theme” fires the ten-track album into life. It’s a song commandeered by Locks, who delivers an impassioned sermon against a backdrop of shimmering wind chimes and rattling percussion. “Confrontation/Dislocation by avenues and blocks/Whole neighborhoods upturned/Officials constantly re-framing, presenting, re-presenting, composing and positioning," roars Locks in a similar fashion to hip-hop poet Saul Williams, before reaching and repeating the climatic mantra “Some things never change—black monuments.”
The music moves easily between Afrofuturist gospel—typified by the spacy synths of “Which I Believe It Will” and the luminous electro beats of “Which I Believe I Am”—and hip-hop grime. “The Colors That You Bring” sets the choir’s soulful harmonies against wavering strings and murky boom-bap drums, like a civil rights protest movie scored the RZA. Upping the intensity, sampled fragments of archived speeches are embedded in the songs; on “Solar Power” a voice proclaims, “There's no black person on this planet that will disagree with freedom.” These spoken snippets give the album a militant edge, recalling interludes from the classic Public Enemy records, where speeches from social reformers like Frederick Douglass were fused with steely breaks.
Where Future Unfolds began as a retelling of the Civil Rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s, but as the title suggests, it is also concerned with what is to come. At one point we hear the sweet, youthful voice of Rayna Golding—the daughter of Black Monument Ensemble singer Monique Golding—leading the choir in a vow: “I can rebuild a nation no longer working out.” The line comes to encapsulate the tenor of the album: gritty sentiments that radiate an optimistic glow. In the way that music from old eras can be sampled and repurposed into new forms, Locks’s majestic work strives to reach better days by looking back and learning from the past. | 2019-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Experimental | International Anthem | June 3, 2019 | 8 | 789525b8-5233-4197-8a8b-446884a974f4 | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
After seven years-- an eternity in punk rock-- Steve Albini, Todd Trainer, and Bob Weston return, digging in their heels, relishing their in-jokes, and doing what they do best. | After seven years-- an eternity in punk rock-- Steve Albini, Todd Trainer, and Bob Weston return, digging in their heels, relishing their in-jokes, and doing what they do best. | Shellac: Excellent Italian Greyhound | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10314-excellent-italian-greyhound/ | Excellent Italian Greyhound | You're not even really reading this. Why would you? I could rate this album a 12 divided by Q or say it's on par with seven ham-and-cheese Hot Pockets and it wouldn't matter. Anyone who cares has already marched to their nearest independent retailer and purchased Excellent Italian Greyhound, laughed aloud at the dog picture, shook the unmarked CD from the gatefold cover (because Steve Albini hates digital recordings-- and you), and spun the vinyl with warm, grating satisfaction. The reviews are irrelevant, and one from Pitchfork probably means even less to Shellac listeners than most.
Shellac's audience is built-in and guaranteed in a way that, despite Touch & Go's perfectly respectable roster, no other active band on the label can claim; they're the last real band standing on the last real label standing. Steve Albini's notorious reputation may precede him, but Shellac have maintained their integrity by cutting out the promoters, the promos, the PR, the interviews, the hype, and the bullshit. Who cares about integrity any more, you ask? Just wait. One day you'll tell your kids who Albini and Ian MacKaye were and get blank stares in return. You'll watch your children grow up to become managers and "indie" PR shills for groups with at least two exclamation points in their bandnames while you shout about how "back in my day, bands used to stand for something" while slack-jawed, iPod-toting orderlies push your wheelchair in a circle around the nurses' station at the old-folks home. That Shellac continue to seek the shortest path between the music and the fans is a point worth repeating.
Yet there's a point, I think, when the fans will wonder what they're getting beyond a pat on the back. Excellent Italian Greyhound is unique in being one of very few albums anticipated for seven years-- a punk-rock eternity-- that still feels rushed. Albini and Bob Weston are both very busy engineers, and Shellac was never a full-time gig for either of them, or drummer Todd Trainer, so no one within reason gets pissy over the wait between their records. Plus, the band's very occasional live shows (which have thankfully increased in number lately) are still essential life experiences. Of course, you could say the same for a band like Fugazi, whose last release, The Argument, came out way back in 2001: They pushed past boundaries and expectations until the very end before wisely resting on their laurels. Here, Shellac are simply digging in their heels, relishing their in-jokes, and doing what they do best-- and not much else.
All that said, EIG's first half is a holy affirmation, and maybe short of "Prayer to God" features the band's best opening track. "The End of Radio" is a minimalist three-chord funeral march for (you guessed it) radio, as Albini assumes the character of the last DJ (and man) on earth, screaming dedications to a deserted planet. While the vocals aren't as foaming as they've been during live performances, the more desperate and pathetic tone fits this clever conceit. Albini errantly lets out nervous patter and thanks non-existent sponsors before wailing, "Can you hear me now???" and letting loose with the crackling guitar lines we love Shellac for. "Steady as She Goes" is another live staple finally seeing release, exemplary of the thin, metallic chug they've patented, though it's without the tension or left turns of their earlier work.
The band saves the stretching out for side two. "Lulabelle" is undoubtedly the strangest and most difficult track to get through: Its heavy riffage is interrupted by a long segment of the Sinatra-like crooning of some pretty unsettling lyrics, plus voiceovers from maybe-movie announcers and Strongbad. The juxtaposition is hilarious and disturbing, and while you may never play it more than a few times, it's the most confrontational the band gets on this record, as well as closest in spirit to At Action Park or Albini's former projects. "Boycott" is a quick-and-dirty anti-capitalist rant from Weston, and though the metronome tick of the instrumental "Kittypants" strikes me as filler, the other instrumental, "Paco", is a vicious highlight with atmosphere that's as sparse and evocative as an Ennio Morricone score. The odd interlude that introduces "Spoke" gives way to straight-up punk rock with unintelligible screaming from both Weston and Albini. I can't help but feel like the joke's on the listener here, but it's hard not to smile at it.
I bring up Fugazi because they're the only of Albini's like-minded contemporaries still (maybe) kicking, and because the Weston-sung "Elephant" makes the curious choice of directly quoting them at the start ("Here comes the argument"), before proceeding with some slippery bass chords and militant rhythms that are pretty darn close to sounding like the flagship Dischord band. Elsewhere, the relentless hammer-ons and spat-out non sequiturs of "Be Prepared" ("I was born wearing pants!") stop abruptly in midstream to start an oddly cheerful groove that sounds not unlike Thin Lizzy. It's a gleeful moment, but there was a time when Shellac barely acknowledged other bands, leaving a blazing trail of influence in their stubborn wake. Not only is Excellent Italian Greyhound Shellac's most off-the-cuff record; it's often an uncharacteristically indebted one.
For those of us scratching our heads and laughing at that album cover, anyone who's seen the band live knows that they're hysterical, and EIG, like 1000 Hurts before it, proves you can still provoke listeners without being uniformly dour. Even at their silliest, even when they're treading water, no one else sounds quite like Shellac, and anyone who professes to be a serious music fan without having spent quality time with the band's albums should be forced to familiarize themselves. This just wouldn't be the first record I'd force on them. | 2007-06-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-06-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Touch and Go | June 7, 2007 | 7 | 789e62c0-943c-483a-b111-dc379ed13498 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
The son of Willie Nelson has led a charmed life, playing with Neil Young and inspiring Bradley Cooper in A Star Is Born. His own band’s throwback roots-rock toes the line of escapism. | The son of Willie Nelson has led a charmed life, playing with Neil Young and inspiring Bradley Cooper in A Star Is Born. His own band’s throwback roots-rock toes the line of escapism. | Lukas Nelson / Promise of the Real: Turn Off the News (Build a Garden) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lukas-nelson-and-promise-of-the-real-turn-off-the-news-build-a-garden/ | Turn Off the News (Build a Garden) | Looking the part has never been a problem for Lukas Nelson. Between his scruffy charisma and clear love of the stage, the rocker looked so much the part that Bradley Cooper recruited him as the “authenticity consultant” for A Star Is Born, modeling his character’s look and presence after Nelson’s. That gig bloomed into a bigger role contributing to the film’s soundtrack, parts of which Nelson co-wrote, and on screen, where Nelson and his band Promise of the Real appeared as Cooper’s backing group. Symbiotic relationships don’t get more glamorous than this: a rock star who looks like a movie star, helping a movie star look like a rock star.
For Nelson, A Star Is Born was just the latest lucky break in an already charmed life. The son of Willie Nelson, he inherited quite a bit of his father’s talent and, just as importantly, enough of his father’s connections and goodwill to grant him a head start in an industry where traditionalists devoted to the 1980s Rolling Stone Record Guide ideal of Good Music aren’t exactly hard to come by. By his early 20s he was opening for and recording with his father; after 2014’s Farm Aid he and his band began backing Neil Young, further cementing their standing among rock purists. Even before his big-screen moment, his band was already well on its way to becoming to throwback roots-rock what Greta Van Fleet are to blacklights and bell bottoms.
Lady Gaga lent her star power to Nelson and Promise of the Real’s 2017 self-titled breakthrough album, and an air of celebrity hangs over the group’s new Turn Off the News (Build a Garden) as well. Sheryl Crow sings backup on the title track, a Byrds-esque imagining of a better world, while Kesha graces “Save a Little Heartache,” a breezy piña colada of a blues-rock jam, and Neil Young sits in on pump organ on a rustic reprise of the title song. Randy Houser and Shooter Jennings both guest, too, although they take a respectful backseat to a father/son duet on “Civilized Hell.” The younger Nelson’s reedy lisp so resembles his father’s that it’s like hearing Willie sing with a Benjamin Buttoned version of himself.
Sometimes Nelson even seems to be writing for his father’s voice. “I don’t trust computers anymore, gonna buy a little weed in the marijuana store,” he ambles over some leisurely twang on “Lotta Fun,” accompanied by Margo Price. “Simple Life” doubles down on the boomer-baiting, playing like a worry-free rewrite of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound).” Nelson’s entire persona is pitched somewhere between a tailgater at a Jimmy Buffett concert and Paul Rudd’s surfer bro in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, bragging that he quit wearing a watch because his cell phone has a clock. To the extent he acknowledges society’s woes, it’s only to recommend how best to ignore them.
That escapist worldview may be the most divisive thing about an album that otherwise aims to build bridges. Nelson is a natural showman, and his band plays with similar spirit—there isn’t a moment on Turn Off the News where they seem to be faking their enthusiasm for this material. There’s a fine line between escapist and naïve, though, and Nelson and company aren’t afraid to toe it. The extent to which listeners enjoy this record depends on how much they buy into the fantasy of Nelson and his famous pals clinking Coronas around the pool while the rest of the world goes to hell. If it feels a little hollow, well, that’s by design.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Rock | Fantasy | June 21, 2019 | 6 | 789eed19-119e-4782-ad8a-72bf0fba79f4 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Tupac’s 1996 double album was made in a frenzy. It is paranoid and brazen, fun and fearless, but it is Pac’s singular style that keeps one of his greatest records from coming undone at the seams. | Tupac’s 1996 double album was made in a frenzy. It is paranoid and brazen, fun and fearless, but it is Pac’s singular style that keeps one of his greatest records from coming undone at the seams. | 2Pac: All Eyez on Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2pac-all-eyez-on-me/ | All Eyez on Me | About 300 miles north of Manhattan sits the Clinton Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison that, in 1995, housed its most famous inmate: Tupac Amaru Shakur. He had been sentenced to one and a half to four and a half years in a sexual assault trial the previous fall. On top of normal psychological torture that comes with imprisonment, Pac was also having trouble sleeping. In November of the previous year—the night before a jury convicted him—he was shot in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio. “I have headaches,” he’d later tell Vibe. “I wake up screaming. I’ve been having nightmares, thinking they’re still shooting me.”
But outside of prison, he was becoming a superstar. In March of ’95, Interscope released Pac’s third album, Me Against the World. It’s a remarkable record, at turns tender and fatalistic. There are fever dreams of the golden age in New York City; he mulls suicide and perches by windows with AKs. The album went immediately to No. 1.
It also had Pac’s first Top 10 hit, the towering “Dear Mama,” where he raps about “hugging on my mama from a jail cell.” Few mothers could relate more than Afeni Shakur, who was one of 21 members of the Black Panther Party indicted by a New York grand jury in 1971. They were accused of plotting to bomb two police precincts and the Queens Board of Education office, and of planning to shoot the officers who would flee from one of the precincts after the explosion. The Panthers were ultimately acquitted on all 156 counts in what was, at the time, the most expensive trial in the history of New York state. A month later, Afeni gave birth to her son who, growing up in East Harlem, was surrounded by radicals: the Panthers, the Black Liberation Army; Assata Shakur was a family friend. His stepfather, Mutulu Shakur, was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list and on the run for much of the ’80s—FBI agents would approach Tupac at school and hound him for information.
“Dear Mama” and the rest of Me Against the World was written and recorded at a tipping point. “I Get Around” and “Keep Ya Head Up” were gold records, and roles in the films Juice and Poetic Justice revealed a complex, magnetic actor. But legal bills were stacking up. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail for his part in a fight at a Michigan State concert; he served 15 days for assaulting the director Allen Hughes, who had fired him from the set of Menace II Society. Then, of course, there was the sexual assault case that ultimately landed him in Clinton. While he planned to appeal the case, he couldn’t scrape together the $1.4 million he needed to bail himself out. Royalties weren’t rolling in fast enough, and the Panthers were nowhere to be found. So there he sat with his headaches and nightmares.
Enter Suge Knight, the imposing co-founder of Death Row Records. By 1995, Death Row was a behemoth, and Suge had muscled his way into boardrooms, helped make Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg superstars, and taunted Puff in Midtown at the Source Awards in what’s arguably become the most-quoted podium speech in rap’s history. His grip on the West Coast might have been tenuous—Snoop was in constant legal peril, and Suge was likely beginning to sense that Dre wanted off of the label—but it was, for the moment, unquestioned. Burned onto the retinas of anyone in the business was Suge draped in blood red, chomping on an unlit cigar, scowling, dangling pop stars off hotel balconies by their ankles.
The exact business arrangement Suge negotiated for Pac’s bail is hazy: In The Defiant Ones, the HBO documentary that aired last year, those who worked at each major label say that Atlantic and Interscope financed and engineered Pac’s move from Interscope to Death Row as a way to placate Time Warner’s skittishness about gangsta rap. Either way, the bail got paid, and Pac was locked into a three-album contract with Death Row. It was a relationship that would irreparably alter Pac’s life, Suge’s life, and the arc of rap history.
It would also yield All Eyez on Me, one of the most sprawling, furious, paranoid, brilliant albums ever released. The anger that simmered in Tupac through his time in Clinton was stoked by Suge, by the assassination attempt, by the press and his rivals. Where Pac’s earlier work had described the experiences of those who were fleeing the law or the feds or death, now all those things were rendered in the first person. On October 12, 1995, Pac was released from jail. He flew to Los Angeles and immediately started recording. On his first night out, he cut one song called “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” a heartfelt elegy for an incarcerated friend finding Islam, and regards the growing distance between them with a mixture of pain and pride. But there was another song from that first madcap session, something sparse and sinister that would eventually open the album. He starts it in a whisper: “You don’t wanna fuck with me.”
~~
At the height of its power, Death Row operated out of Can-Am Studios, a complex in Tarzana, Calif., just over the hills from L.A. All that Suge surveyed was red: the walls, the couches, the chairs. On the floor was a red carpet, with the label’s logo outlined in white; the understanding was that no one could tread on the logo, a residual superstition from Knight’s days as a defensive end in Division I football.
From the moment he landed in California, Tupac wrote and recorded at an incredible pace. Some artists who worked alongside him during this period, like Nate Dogg, later suggested that this was so Pac could quickly satisfy his contract with Death Row and leave the label. It’s also possible he simply felt the clock ticking on his time as a free man. By 1996, that fatalism had begun to engulf nearly all of Pac’s writing; he was also keenly aware that he was out on bail, and a return to prison was a very real possibility.
Whether or not the Nate Doggs of the world were right about Pac wanting to burn through his Death Row obligations, there’s something almost Old World about the relationship Tupac traced between art and money. This is a superstar who was relying on expense money to eat, someone whose temporary freedom had been granted, magnanimously, in exchange for his art. When he says, on “Can’t C Me,” “If this rappin’ bring me money, then I’m rapping till I’m paid,” it warps the archetypal rapper-label relationship, and Suge comes out looking like a particularly brutal Medici.
Whatever the reason, Pac was working off the cuff, and he demanded the same from his collaborators. He challenged guest rappers to have their verses ready after giving them mere minutes to write—if they didn’t finish crafting something, or if they couldn’t nail it on the first take, they’d be cut from the song. The only artist who escaped this fate was Snoop Dogg, who slipped out of the studio to perfect his verses from “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted.”
All of this gave All Eyez on Me the feel of a furious storm. “Heartz of Men,” which opens with the stutter from Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” is about that breathlessness: From the opening ad-libs (“Ay Suge, what I tell you, nigga—when I come out of jail what was I gonna do? I was gonna start digging into these niggas’ chests right?”) until the climactic “Tell the cops to come and get me,” there’s barely a pause, certainly never a second thought.
Pac’s greatest strength as a writer was his ability to isolate emotions: to identify them within himself, to evoke them in listeners, and to convincingly ascribe them to the characters he rendered, be they imaginary Brendas or caricatured Biggies. While he was an endlessly complex individual, Pac liked to choose one gut feeling and blow it up to its technicolor extreme—never to the point where it became unbelievable, but he had little interest in hedging himself or tacking on qualifiers. On All Eyez, that impulse, combined with the pace and method and recording (and with his legal situation, and with his mounting paranoia), made for an alchemic blend of horror, fate, and defiance.
During the sessions he was an omnivore, swallowing up sounds from his youth or his periphery, borrowing the syntax of those who floated in and out of Can-Am, distilling his collaborators’ most painful life stories for 30-second cameos. That’s what he coaxed out of Napoleon from the Outlawz on “Tradin War Stories”: a 10-bar verse about the day when, as a 3-year-old, he saw his parents murdered in front of him. “Got My Mind Made Up” might as well have been a Wu-Tang song. The album’s second disc, which is packed with guests like E-40, C-Bo, and Richie Rich, is practically a love letter to Bay Area hip-hop: not only the self-consciously political tradition that Pac came of age in, but also the swaggering, eccentric stuff that was seeping out of Vallejo.
There are two factors that help to unify such a sprawling, ambitious album full of disparate pieces. The first comes from the album’s phenomenal post-production and mixing. Sixteen of the 27 beats are credited to either Daz or Johnny “J,” each of whom delivers a career-defining performance. But All Eyez benefits greatly from DJ Quik, who was forced, due to contractual red tape, to work mostly under his government name, David Blake. Only “Heartz of Men” is officially a Quik beat, but the Compton legend did a significant amount of mixing and remixing. As varied as the sounds themselves are, the album has a uniformity of texture, and elegies like “Life Goes On” and larks like “Check Out Time” foreground their shared DNA.
Pac’s relationship with Dre never gelled like Suge had hoped. Dre had planned to use a solo version of “California Love” as his next lead single, but Suge’s edict that the best work of every Death Row artist be cannibalized for Pac’s album tabled that idea indefinitely. So All Eyez on Me is in the curious position of having its lead single included only as a remix with an entirely different beat. Though Dre’s other contribution to the album, the George Clinton-assisted disc-two opener “Can’t C Me,” is a highlight, the musical chemistry far outpaced their personal bond.
The other element that helps connect all these disparate threads is Pac’s increasingly singular rapping style. Since 1993’s jagged, Public Enemy-indebted Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., he had known precisely what worked for him. But on All Eyez, the component parts of his formula—voice, cadence, mixing, energy—cohere into something powerful, accessible, but inimitable. To go back to “2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted”: Listen to the interplay between Snoop’s silk and Pac’s sandpaper, one rapper slipping over the beat, the other clawing his way through it. The 21st-century notion that Tupac was an unexceptional technical rapper is absurd; some of his simplest approaches require incredibly powerful performances. He was a master of mounting tension, giving full dimension to words that would fall flat with from the mouth of anyone else.
That clarity of style and identity allows All Eyez to spiral out in the grimmest and most lighthearted directions without ever losing its focus. And so there are moments like the end of “All About U” where Snoop, curled up in a bathrobe, flips through the channels and cross-compares the Million Man March with Montell Jordan videos, but five songs later, Pac lets “No More Pain” bludgeon the listener into a sort of hollow hypnosis. The sugary “Thug Passion” slides right into the sober “Picture Me Rollin,” “I Ain’t Mad at Cha” into the incomprehensibly filthy “What’z Ya Phone #.”
All Eyez on Me is just as political as Tupac’s first two albums, which dealt with national politics in more overt terms. Pac’s writing is inherently and inescapably political, and his feelings about prison, about race, and about America permeate nearly every verse. On songs about video models, he slips in lines like “Life’s hell for a black celebrity.” Take this to its logical end: “How Do U Want It,” the gleefully sleazy single with K-Ci & JoJo, features a mid-song tangent about Bill Clinton, Bob Dole, and C. Delores Tucker. For Tupac in 1996, sex would inevitably be wrapped up with politics and freedom.
The sexual abuse conviction that landed Pac in Clinton Correctional Facility has been documented exhaustively. In November 1993, Tupac and several associates of his sexually assaulted a woman in a New York hotel. A year later, he and his road manager were convicted of first-degree sexual abuse. (Each was acquitted on related sodomy and weapons charges.) Tupac was sentenced to one and a half to four and a half years in prison, with the possibility of parole after the first 18 months.
Through the trial, Pac adamantly maintained his innocence. While the case is the subtext for much of Me Against the World, he addresses it head-on only in fleeting moments (“Who you callin’ rapist?”). What’s curious about All Eyez on Me is that Tupac raps so ravenously about, well, fucking. Two of the first three songs are about sex, and the fifth is “How Do U Want It“; then there’s “Phone #,” the conceit of which is “here’s a lot of phone sex.” It is defiant and it is tone-deaf; it is baiting those who believed the charges and it is an attempt to will something out of existence.
All of it was of a piece with personal feuds and paranoias. When “How Do U Want It” was pushed as the album’s third single, one of its B-sides, the anti-Bad Boy screed “Hit Em Up,” became perhaps the most famous diss track of the ’90s. Following the shooting at Quad Studios in Manhattan, Pac had become convinced that his former friend, Biggie, was involved in plots to kill him. And so you get Pac lashing out, taunting his rivals, trying to clear Biggie’s wife Faith Evans’ vocals for a song on All Eyez. But you also hear a chest-crushing fear come through on songs like “Holla at Me.”
In August 1996, just two weeks before his assassination, Pac was doing a press junket for Gang Related, the last movie he would ever act in. Someone asked him about his name. He talked about a man named Tupac Amaru II, who in 1780 led a revolt against Spanish colonists and what was effectively an economy of slave labor that exploited the native populations. In the centuries since, the uprising has been mythologized by some of those fighting for indigenous rights or independence throughout Latin America; in his own time, Amaru was marred by rumors of his uneven control over the rebels, with stories of brutal looting and violence dirtying his reputation and eroding support.
Eventually, two of his officers betrayed him, and he was captured. He was sentenced to watch his wife, son, and other relatives be executed, after which he was to be drawn and quartered in the town square. His tongue would be cut out and his severed head would be displayed on a stake.
Pac talked about this—the revolution, the betrayal, the execution. Then he composed himself. “People ask me what my name means, and I don’t tell ’em like Tupac Amaru,” he said. “I just say it means ‘determined,’ because I’m determined to never, ever negotiate again.”
All Eyez on Me was likewise without compromise—an exhaustive survey of Tupac’s brain matter at the most harrowing time in his young life. It captures him at his most vulnerable and provocative. He executes an array of styles at an almost impossibly high skill level that never feels like an exercise in form. What could have been (and perhaps what was) a creative work made out of obligation turned into a bloodletting, a remarkable final document from one of his era’s defining voices.
And yet for all the mania and fury, the best revenge Tupac exacted against enemies—those real and imagined—came when he was at his coolest and most controlled. Tucked into the back half of the second All Eyez on Me disc, “Picture Me Rollin’” is that proverbial eye of the storm. Pac opens the song rapping about frayed nerves and federal surveillance, then cedes the floor to CPO and Big Syke for several minutes. When he comes back in, it’s for a satisfied, almost tranquil monologue. He’s waving at Clinton Correctional from the outside—he sneers at the punk police, the crooked C.O.s. The District Attorney who tried his case is “that bitch.” He wants to know: Can you see me? Can you see me from there?
But his last words take on a sort of phantom quality. Pac’s surely talking to the guards who wish he was still under their thumb when he says: “Anytime y’all wanna see me again, rewind this track right here. Picture me rollin.’” | 2018-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Death Row / Interscope | January 28, 2018 | 9.4 | 78a15c3b-3d96-4d38-bc33-540d5a549e46 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Kevin Abstract seems like an endearing alt-rock frontman in a rapper's body. On American Boyfriend, his sophomore album, he explores the insecurities and ravages of his high school years. | Kevin Abstract seems like an endearing alt-rock frontman in a rapper's body. On American Boyfriend, his sophomore album, he explores the insecurities and ravages of his high school years. | Kevin Abstract: American Boyfriend: A Suburban Love Story | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22689-american-boyfriend-a-suburban-love-story/ | American Boyfriend: A Suburban Love Story | Kevin Abstract just happens to rap; in another era, he would have been an endearing alt-rock frontman. Only 20 years old, Abstract is a member of the self-described “All-American Boy Band” BROCKHAMPTON, and he travelled much of his childhood before recently settling out in Los Angeles. American Boyfriend, his sophomore album, holds onto the theme of constant movement as Abstract situates himself in a nameless high school in an unknown city, where he fantasizes about football players. His lyrical specificity is reserved for people: “Showed me obscure bands he was into/His mom was in the dining room, we’re in his bedroom,” he raps on “Seventeen,” as he describes afternoons spent with an unrequited crush.
He’s almost old enough to drink, but Abstract’s world here is for kids who are barely old enough to drive. His last project MTV1987 teased out tendrils of post-Odd Future Tumblr rap, harsh production, strained parental relationships, and sexually frustrated lyrics; American Boyfriend removes that youthful angst. He no longer chastises past lovers, but rather turns inwards to investigate what he even wants out of romantic relationships. “Can’t tell my family I’m bi/Can’t tell my mother I’m gay/The hardest part of my day/Is wishing I was fucking straight,” he raps on the album’s centerpiece “Papercut.” Where MTV1987 spoke down to women, the boys on American Boyfriend open Abstract’s eyes to new worlds and sides of himself. Only a year between projects, Abstract’s music is now imbued with a freeness and warmth that was previously only hinted at in his music.
Michael Uzowuru, an executive producer on American Boyfriend, who also worked on Frank Ocean’s Blonde (“Nights”) and Endless (“Rushes To”), helped bring Ocean’s genre-blurred vision to Abstract’s work. But, where Frank’s ideas languorously stretched the boundaries of traditional pop songwriting, Abstract’s are more frantic. At 16 tracks long and clocking under under 40 minutes, the album still dips into a few too many ideas. “Suburban Born” and “Runner” meander needlessly, where the wistful acoustic guitar and falsetto of the angelic “Yellow” speak to the same struggle of opposite poles of self-confidence and self-doubt. That moment, along with “American Boyfriend,” inches towards a Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness B-side territory. He doesn’t reach Billy Corgan’s dramatics, but it is encouraging to watch him reach.
Two years ago, Abstract wrote an open letter to Childish Gambino, where he described himself as “too black for the whites and too white for the blacks.” American Boyfriend appears to find Abstract still struggling through those issues of his high school days, as he places himself back inside those hallways and bleachers that made him feel like such an outsider. Even before Glover’s critically beloved TV show “Atlanta” and the surprise funk turn of “Awaken, My Love”, his inward-facing persona offered a direction for black kids like Abstract, who felt too removed from the ego of rap’s biggest stars. Abstract’s myth-building isn’t meant to occupy a stadium tour or a floating stage setup, but instead for the kids alone in class needing something to by another day.
The freedom of abandoning rap’s default confidence stance gives American Boyfriend an almost twee preciousness, Abstract isn’t afraid to swim freely in his emotions. On “Miserable America,” Abstract speaks about his mother’s homophobia and the racism of his boyfriend’s parents, as he mournfully observes, “They love gays, but they hate niggas.” Even in the familial and romantic relationships that should provide comfort, Abstract instead finds irresolvable identity conflicts. American Boyfriend can feel a bit scattered and unsure, but it’s an album seeking love in a world now primed to find new angles for hate. For that reason alone, it feels welcome. | 2016-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | BROCKHAMPTON | December 17, 2016 | 6.4 | 78a2b166-18ae-434c-a492-fb4192eaad16 | David Turner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-turner/ | null |
Gates' major-label debut Islah, released this week on Atlantic Records with few pushbacks and (even more astonishingly) almost no big-name guest spots or features, suggests that no-holds-barred candor is working for him. The album is a sustained and triumphant outpouring, and Gates gives every good, bad, and ugly thing he has. | Gates' major-label debut Islah, released this week on Atlantic Records with few pushbacks and (even more astonishingly) almost no big-name guest spots or features, suggests that no-holds-barred candor is working for him. The album is a sustained and triumphant outpouring, and Gates gives every good, bad, and ugly thing he has. | Kevin Gates: Islah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21287-islah/ | Islah | Kevin Gates does not mince words. It's his great gift, really. "I look like I’m balling 'cause I’m really balling," he correctly points out on his radio single "Really Really." As a rapper, he's perfectly comfortable reeling off "lyrical-miracle" technical displays, but his best music is rooted strongly in the 2Pac tradition of blunt-force honesty, and all his best songs emerge straight from the gut.
Gates' major-label debut Islah, released this week on Atlantic Records with few pushbacks and (even more astonishingly) almost no big-name guest spots or features, suggests that no-holds-barred candor is working for him. Someone, somewhere, correctly deduced that the appeal of Kevin Gates is that he offers the maximum amount of Kevin Gates, and they’ve left him alone to turn out as much of that product as he’ll offer. Islah is a sustained and triumphant outpouring, and Gates gives every good, bad, and ugly thing he has. It's by far the best single release of his career: It's more melodic and more focused; fiercer and more playful; funnier and sadder. It's also probably the best pure rap release of the first quarter, and the best-case scenario for how a locally famous rapper can make a great album for a wider audience without getting lost in a corporate ledger.
His music scans unquestionably as gangsta rap, but then he puts in lines like these: "I used to tease you about your feet, we would laugh and we’d giggle/ And having breakfast on the beach, you don’t know how much that meant to me" ("Pride"). The line zeroes in on something important about Gates: In his personal life, he is decidedly not a model of human decency, but on record, he is not just vulnerable, but tender, maybe the rarest of pop-music currencies. "Baby hit this weed cuz it might calm you down/ I rub your feet listening to everything you talk about," he offers sweetly on the sex jam "One Thing."
The moody music, full of minor-key piano and delicate synths, feels pitched somewhere between dramatic alt-rock (Gates is a professed fan of Lifehouse and RHCP) and traditional street rap, staggering this way or the other depending on Gates' weathered, changeable voice. The new age synthesizers on "Ain’t Too Hard" could plausibly be sourced from a Lil B mixtape or a Belinda Carlisle single: "I’m commitment-shy, so when feelings get involved, I tend to run," Gates admits. He bursts into melody almost as often as he raps, which has led to Drake and Future comparisons, but his closest analog might be Fetty Wap, if he were stuck on an uncontrollable crying jag in the bathtub.
Despite this, you could never call Islah (named after Gates' eldest daughter, who often appears on camera with Gates in the rapper's Instagram videos) mournful or depressing. Like any street rapper determined to survive the late-'00s rap-album-budget implosion intact, Kevin Gates has become his own best hook singer, his best songwriter, and the best (and usually only) rapper on his songs. On Islah, his hook-writing is sterling. The chorus of mid-album track "Time for That" has the rhythmic playfulness of Jeremih's "Pass Dat," while "2 Phones," in which Gates struggles with the mobile-phone implications of the "keep your business and family completely separated" Crack Commandment, is deliriously good, the sort of hook you plunk down in front of an A&R rep and immediately collect house-down-payment money. But it's all Gates.
His emotional appeal, along with his ear for affecting melodies, makes him an odd sort of crossover star. His music has everything hardcore rap fans look for—emotional immediacy, a compelling voice, unimpeachable integrity—but he lacks some things that can reliably be counted on to draw in interested outsiders: a novel style, a flashy or "weird" persona. Gates is weird, yes, but not the kind brands typically attach themselves to. Imagine the chipper associate social media manager trying to build a "strategy" around Gates' famous admission that he discovered he was accidentally sleeping with his cousin, and feel a twinge of pity and horror.
And yet when you listen to the sure-to-be upcoming single "Hard For," you start to see it: The unlikely but powerful Gates fan coalition. The song is tremendously unusual—with its acoustic guitar backing and chorus chant "you’re the only one that my dick’ll get hard for," it’s practically an Uncle Kracker song about erectile dysfunction. But it’s also improbably beautiful: The second line of that couplet is "I’m confused, what the fuck you want my heart for?", a line that cuts painfully to the core of heartbroken post-relationship confusion. This is the humanity that brings out the best in Gates: His music paints a picture where life is messy, where close friends cross uncrossable lines all the time. Out of love and out of a healthy appreciation for the workings of karma, you massage your temples and forgive them. | 2016-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Bread Winners’ Association | February 4, 2016 | 8.5 | 78a3deb7-0ace-442b-a459-b237a342bb19 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Reality television, actors-turned-governors, and wrestlers-turned-rappers aside, it's hard to think of many things that elicit cynicism and offhand dismissal ... | Reality television, actors-turned-governors, and wrestlers-turned-rappers aside, it's hard to think of many things that elicit cynicism and offhand dismissal ... | The Shins: Chutes Too Narrow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7114-chutes-too-narrow/ | Chutes Too Narrow | Reality television, actors-turned-governors, and wrestlers-turned-rappers aside, it's hard to think of many things that elicit cynicism and offhand dismissal like a sophomore album on the heels of a hyped debut. The dreaded "sophomore slump" is hardly a fictional pitfall fabricated by bitter music journalists and defensive cred-mongers; the pressures of turning out a second record can be crippling for bands who've encountered early success, and it often results in an album that pales in contrast to its predecessor. Yet, for every band that falters in the wake of initial success, there's another that puts their newfound experience to work for them, producing a second record-- a sophomore hump, if you will-- that delivers upon all the promise of their first. And with Chutes Too Narrow, the second album from much-lauded Pacific Northwest popsters The Shins, that sophomore hump is in full effect.
Arriving on a wave of pre-release hype in 2001, The Shins' debut record, Oh! Inverted World, immediately established itself as one of the most uniformly and universally likeable records of that year. Though not nearly the second coming of The Beach Boys as described by its most vocal proponents, the album was forged in melody and drenched in atmosphere, casting a thin but palpable haze over a beautifully arranged landscape of sincere hooks and sparse instrumentation. It was an immediately inviting formula, if one that ultimately proved limiting; the blurred sonics that blanketed the record also often smothered it, dulling the focus and clarity that frontman James Mercer skirted during the album's most powerful passages.
On Chutes Too Narrow, the blanket has been lifted, and the complexity and grace revealed underneath possess a surprisingly depth. Every instrument is allowed to exist in its own space, no longer smoothed together by excessive reverb. Mercer's voice resides comfortably at the front of the mix, revealing previously undiscovered layers of emotional subtlety and expressiveness. Every sound and syllable is perfectly and distinctly articulated, granting the album a much greater capacity for detail and profundity.
And then there are the songs. Dear god, the songs! The uniqueness and inventiveness of James Mercer's melodic sensibility simply cannot be overstated. On Chutes Too Narrow, as with its predecessor, Mercer makes brilliant use of his formidable vocal range, writing soaring melodies every bit as original as they are memorable. "Saint Simon", one of two or three songs on the record that could easily contend for song of the year, sees Mercer exploring an almost Bacharach-ian level of melodic sophistication. The track is host to an elegance of exposition and development not even hinted at on Oh! Inverted World, as it seamlessly segues from a straightforward pop hook to an ungodly gorgeous choral segment, replete with lush strings and chiming guitars. By the time Mercer reenters with a perfectly aching vocal melody, it's almost unbearable-- this is the kind of song that overwhelms simply with the intricacy of its beauty.
The evolution of Mercer's songwriting extends wonderfully into the louder songs on Chutes Too Narrow, as well. "Kissing the Lipless", the album's leadoff track, blissfully transgresses the restraint of Oh! Inverted World, building to an impossibly powerful chorus that slyly mirrors the melody of its verses. Indeed, while many pop songwriters seem to use verses simply as something to kill time between anthemic choruses, Mercer manages to squeeze some of the album's most memorable moments into places most songwriters would neglect or ignore. "So Says I", the album's first single, excels largely through the subtle variations worked into its verses, and enjoys its strongest moment in the transcendent harmonies that adorn a brief, seamless bridge.
The attention to detail on Chutes Too Narrow is truly impressive, but the way that these details combine to form music so effortless and emotionally rich is astounding. Chutes Too Narrow is host to enough perfect moments to carry ten records, each one arising spontaneously from the multifaceted frame of a masterfully constructed song. The album may alienate some listeners by eschewing the instant and consistent gratification of Oh! Inverted World for more involved, developed songs, but the clarity and intricacy of these songs renders the record a much more rewarding listen. Not simply an excellent album, Chutes Too Narrow is also a powerful testament to pop music's capacity for depth, beauty and expressiveness. | 2003-10-20T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2003-10-20T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | October 20, 2003 | 8.9 | 78af0bb2-542d-4269-a987-fe20e77e2abe | Matt LeMay | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/ | null |
Toronto-based producer affiliated with London's Night Slugs label steps out with a strong full-length debut engineered for headphones and dancefloors alike. | Toronto-based producer affiliated with London's Night Slugs label steps out with a strong full-length debut engineered for headphones and dancefloors alike. | Egyptrixx: Bible Eyes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15041-bible-eyes/ | Bible Eyes | The reputation of David Psutka's Egyptrixx among beat music cognoscenti was quickly cemented last year by tracks like "Battle for North America" and "The Only Way Up", the latter being one of the brightest cuts to come out of a packed-with-hits Night Slugs camp. His willingness to take the basis of UK funky into techier, more austere turf meant he could stake a potential claim as a progressive-minded genre-tweaker. Still, all through his previous peaks, you could hear his music stretching, testing itself, reaching for something ahead even as it planted a couple solid feet directly in the midst of a spotlit movement.
Bible Eyes is what those earlier singles were reaching for, and as a full-length debut it's a bit of a shock-- the familiarization process of a compelling new artist sped up into a rapid succession of surprising revelations. Earlier singles hinted at clean minimalism and deep rhythmic space, but that sound is significantly starker here. The rhythmic underpinnings feel more in line with Kompakt-brewed minimal house rather than a label that stormed the gates on the back of Girl Unit's colossal "Wut". Most basslines are pared down into pure percussion, pulsing like kickdrums instead of dubstep wobbles or electro throbs, but their deepness and intricacy playing off the snares and claps provides the momentum.
In those terms, you get songs like "Naples" or the title track-- cuts that seem both propulsively rich and structurally airy. The louder you turn it up, the bigger the spaces between the beats seem, the larger the drums loom, the more negative space to pit your steps against. And in evoking other stylistic side roads that don't slot as neatly into his post-funky precedent-- the Kris Menace-simpatico electro synths in the pop-friendly "Chrysalis Records", the straight-up tech house nod of "Recital (A Version)", the brooding dubstep of "Fuji Club"-- he gives those wide-open beats a lot of contexts to sink into your medulla and filter down your backbone.
But maybe the most surprising revelation is how willing Psutka is to use disorienting, inside-out melodies as a front-and-center element. Think of the current vogue for warped and faded tape-jam sonics freed from its nostalgic VHS trappings, made both crisper and noisier. At their most accessible, the fluttering, woozy chords from singles like "Drive You Crazy" and "Everybody Bleeding" are pushed just a bit further out; the shaky-kneed hook that cuts in halfway through "Liberation Front" has the tactile sensation of an aluminum-rubber alloy, all metallic sheen and resilient elasticity. At its most extreme end, you get "Barely", which foregrounds a squelching hook so dissonant and queasy-- yet so gravitational-- that it redraws the parameters of what it's possible to make anthemic.
And yet it all falls together in that calculated way bass music albums do when they're simultaneously engineered for headphones and dancefloors. This is an album that sounds invigoratingly abrasive when you're moving and pins you to your seat when you're not, a study in pushing the limits of distortion that works as just plain good club music. And it's eclectic enough to anticipate a half-dozen directions for Egyptrixx to go from here-- odds are he's not out of surprises yet. | 2011-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2011-03-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Night Slugs | March 4, 2011 | 8.1 | 78affdad-4caa-4067-a029-538eee38786b | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The 24-year-old Cash Money singer upcycles ’90s R&B hits on an album of charmingly naughty sex jams—but his referential style is more than just a schtick. | The 24-year-old Cash Money singer upcycles ’90s R&B hits on an album of charmingly naughty sex jams—but his referential style is more than just a schtick. | Jacquees: 4275 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jacquees-4275/ | 4275 | Popular R&B has reached the perfect vantage point from which to appreciate its 1990s heyday. Whether interpolated or simply borrowed, the sounds of Ginuwine, Dru Hill, and Xscape are seeping back into the charts. To recycle an old hit, all a young artist needs to do is repurpose a sliver of familiar melody or production.
The 23-year old Cash Money singer Jacquees is a master at this. Throughout his debut album, 4275, some of his best and most memorable performances contain upcycled elements—moments when he lures you in with sounds you’ve heard before. His breakout hit “B.E.D.” repurposes a whole bridge from Avant’s 2003 song “Read Your Mind” as a chorus. “Play the Field” steals the crunchy, croaking bassline from Ginuwine’s “Pony” and lays it out over freshly gurgling synths. The first time I heard “Inside,” a raunchy lead single that features Trey Songz, a throwaway bit of vocal noodling near the end of the song lodged in my head. It had been there before, in 1997, courtesy of Usher’s “Nice & Slow.” Familiarity is the front door to Jacquees fandom. Listening to 4275, it’s hard not to notice these touchpoints because they’re everywhere. But this isn’t just a schtick; it’s the artist singing in his first language.
Although it’s named after the house number of Jacquees’ childhood home in Decatur, Georgia, 4275 is hardly an account of his elementary school years. He sings almost exclusively about sex on the album—or, more specifically, about the titillating promise of sex. This oozing sensuality yields mood music, rather than a crass play-by-play. Jacquees’ voice, a velvety, rippling tenor, quivers and moans with tension, and he croons almost every word as a proposition. “You know that the decision is yours,” he sings, with a slithering smoothness, on “Studio,” before pleading, “Please don’t tell him where you goin’ ’cause it really ain’t his business.” On the sex anthems “House or Hotel” and “Whatever You Into,” he treats consent like a warm embrace. Still, there’s a charming and almost adolescent naughtiness to the way Jacquees romanticizes sneaking around. You almost want to whisper right back at him.
As pleasant as it is to listen to Jacquees creep around town, 4275 is burdened with extra baggage. Sixty-four minutes is too long to sit around in anxious anticipation, and sometimes the company makes the wait feel longer. Chris Brown and Trey Songz foul up the flow of the party. On the title track, Birdman and Jermaine Dupri chatter obnoxiously over the host.
But Jacquees remains gracious. He has a string of exciting collaborations with Young Thug and DeJ Loaf under his belt, and both pop up here on songs that leave the bedroom without losing the romance. With understated guitar strums, filigree-like finger picking, and backup from Young Thug, “Studio” makes a date out of sex. Carried by a swampy trap beat, the steamy DeJ Loaf duet “Red Light” stops in the middle of the road for the deed.
Elsewhere on the album, Jacquees stands on the shoulders of his heroes instead of jostling with his contemporaries. Jagged Edge and XScape’s LaTocha Scott pop up separately, like guests of honor reveling in a youngster’s appreciation of the classics. Jacquees’ most obvious influence, “U Know What's Up” singer Donell Jones, talks him up on the intro to “23,” as if to simply pass the baton.
All of these playful references work because Jacquees is so light-footed. He doesn’t just have a swaggering vocal style—he has sass. It’s in his moaning ad-libs (“aw yeah,” “mm-hmm”) and cheeky self-referencing, the way he tells himself, “Jacquees, saaang,” before launching into a verse. On “Beauty Doesn’t Cry,” you can almost hear the bawdy grin spread across his face as he issues a waggish taunt: “You got a scary movie and some ice cream/Girl, I know what that might mean.” He might as well be saying, “Girl, I see you.” Jacquees’ music may be simple and familiar, but the personality he brings to it could charm the pants off a mannequin. | 2018-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Cash Money | June 22, 2018 | 6.9 | 78b2e612-3dfa-4923-bcf6-5fdeebc398d4 | Jay Balfour | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jay-balfour/ | |
The endlessly adaptable Chilean star flexes her versatility across synthy bossa nova, breezy trip hop, pummeling dance-punk, and dirty perreo. | The endlessly adaptable Chilean star flexes her versatility across synthy bossa nova, breezy trip hop, pummeling dance-punk, and dirty perreo. | Mon Laferte: Autopoiética | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mon-laferte-autopoietica/ | Autopoiética | You might think you know the Chilean pop chameleon Mon Laferte, but allow her to reintroduce herself. The 40-year-old artist’s best work revolves around grief-stricken ballads—the kind you might blast in your depression dungeon while surrounded by smelly laundry and dirty dishes. Her videos and costumes have evoked the glamour of pin-up girls and rockabilly up-dos. But anyone who has tried to pin down Laferte to a singular mode has been sorely mistaken: She has experimented with SoCal folk-pop (2021’s 1940 Carmen), gloomy cumbia (2018’s Norma), and yearning boleros (many songs on 2017’s La Trenza).
Her new album Autopoiética is a refusal of stasis by an artist now 20 years into her career: “I’m a big bitch, star machine, microparticles subdivided into interspatial nanoparts,” she quips on “40 y MM,” breaking down her ineffability. Autopoiesis, a term coined by Chilean biologists Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana in the 1970s, describes the cyclical self-maintenance of cells; Laferte adopts the scientific vernacular as a metaphor for the endless redefinition of self as she strays from nostalgic idioms and dabbles in pummeling dance-punk and dirty perreo. She lampoons anyone who tries to define her by fixed gender roles—“Not a beauty queen/Not a whore nor a princess”—while asserting her own pleasure: “Préndele Fuego” is a babymaking bossa nova tune where Laferte sings of the joys of sitting on her partner’s face and getting fingered on the dancefloor. In her words, this album is for the MILFs, maestras, and “hardcore señoras.”
One of the most thrilling left turns is “No+Sad,” an antidepressant dosed with 40 milligrams of goth reggaeton. Over blaring sirens and a spiky dembow riddim that rumbles under her vocals, Laferte seems to address the vitriol she’s faced as a cultural agitator. She snubs the haters who insult her “saggy breasts” and label her a communist, feminazi, and “tacky fucking bitch” (“pinche naca”), rehashing this slander in a coy whisper. It’s one of three songs on the album where she speaks in hushed tones, instead of reprising the maximalist vocal performances she’s known for. If anything, her words are more arresting when murmured. Meanwhile, “Tenochtitlan” and “40 y MM” illustrate Laferte’s love of Portishead, wading in the mellow tempos and airy vocals of ’90s trip-hop to tell a moving story about her immigration journey and longing for artistic freedom—another stylistic adventure.
Still, not everything feels fresh. “Mew Shiny” is an old-school ballad, reminiscent of classic rock, that teeters on cloying sentimentality, one of the record’s weakest moments. Luckily, Laferte embellishes some of the traditional songs with clever adornments and sharp reversals. At first glance, “Pornocracia” is a bolero sex jam, but a second reading reveals it as a rebuff of an objectifying partner. “Casta Diva” is an orchestral epic that interpolates the 19th-century Italian opera Norma by Vincenzo Bellini, accompanied by a divine string section and a macabre church choir. In the final minute, a thunderous boom and a steady dembow riddim crash into the production. Laferte’s voice, once the embodiment of seraphic bliss, short-circuits into unintelligible digital glitch.
While some of Laferte’s previous work verged on pure nostalgia, Autopoiética transcends mere reverence for the past. The choice looks good on her. Autopoiética challenges anyone who dared to relegate Laferte to late-career stagnation: She insists on boundless transformation. | 2023-11-13T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-13T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Universal Music Mexico | November 13, 2023 | 7.5 | 78c30afd-6e57-43ea-b37b-34b06ea26693 | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
San Franciscan five-piece churns out sharp, garage-minded jangle-pop with more bite than most of their peers. | San Franciscan five-piece churns out sharp, garage-minded jangle-pop with more bite than most of their peers. | The Mantles: The Mantles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13796-the-mantles/ | The Mantles | If it weren't for the fact that "What We Do Matters" is such a good song (hands down the best out of a considerable few here), the remainder of the Mantles' self-titled debut might have suffered greatly at that song's assertion that "what we do matters/ If you don't think so, take a good look around." It's not overly declarative or pushy-- in fact, there's a feeling of uncertainty in its delivery that asks you to step back for a minute and give the statement a fair once-over. For a San Franciscan four-piece that churns out the same kind of sharp, garage-minded jangle-pop as a lot of their fellow Left Coasters, it's a perfectly reasonable defense mechanism. Of course this kind of stuff matters to people on some level, and if the Mantles are ultimately fishing for a compliment, I'll give them this: Most of The Mantles is much tighter and more athletic than stuff you'd traditionally find in this vein of late, with nearly every groove-furnished, guitar-spiked rumbler feeling more taut and refined with each listen. A lot of the talk about this band contains references to the Chills or the Dream Syndicate, and while a cursory listen will be able to dig that stuff up pretty quickly, most of the Mantles' debut packs more of a punch, as the Radio Birdman-propulsed "What We Do Matters" suggests. Pretty soon, the question has little to do with what matters-- they should've just had the balls to tell us that what they do is good.
Most of these songs do hinge on some Paisley Underground staples, leaving C-list cuts like the wandering "Burden" to be forever condemned to burn in Brian Jonestown Massacre demo hell. But with most of the livelier material, it's pretty clear that the Mantles are a band with a real set of teeth. "Yesterday's Gone", a psych-revved splash of Motor City thrash, boorishly boosts the infamous riff from "I Wanna Be Your Dog" while still retaining the grit and reinforcing the groove. Shaggy opener "Disappearing Act" can't help but interject surf's-up guitar licks, and even on the mid-tempo "Look Away"-- nicely padded with organ hum and a little pissed-off soul balladeering-- the song grinds to a near halt so the band can twist it into a desperate flop-around. It's these welcome spurts of primal boogie that afford some of the lighter fare an honest sense of drama.
The more dangerous themes become more and more apparent at almost every turn, as the titular theme of the sock-hoppy single "Don't Lie" feels less like a sad-sack plea and more like some weirdly formidable domestic warning. But read too much into anything on The Mantles and you'll run the risk of missing much of the purely pleasurable moments that require little effort to realize. Even with forgettable material, like the too-aptly titled closer "Thin Reminder", it's hard not to just plain enjoy these breeze-kissed tunes. In that respect, it's pretty easy to understand why these small fish are asking for that tiny bit of reinforcement in their big pond: "If you don't think so, take a good look around." It's only natural to feel a little bogged-down by your own niche constraints, but it really matters only if what you do works. Here, the Mantles have proved they have little to worry about. | 2010-01-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2010-01-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Siltbreeze | January 8, 2010 | 6.8 | 78c73898-a76e-480d-a1b5-50751d79739b | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
After 2016’s loopy Painting With, Animal Collective return with a companion EP. | After 2016’s loopy Painting With, Animal Collective return with a companion EP. | Animal Collective: The Painters EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22932-the-painters-ep/ | The Painters EP | One way to think of a shape-shifting group like Animal Collective is that they’re a different band with each album. Sometimes that’s true in a literal sense, considering that Noah “Panda Bear” Lennox, David “Avey Tare” Portner, and Brian “Geologist” Weitz recorded without Josh “Deakin” Dibb on both 2009’s luminously definitive Merriweather Post Pavilion and on last year’s busily candy-coated Painting With. But one of the more intriguing observations from the Painting With press cycle was that Animal Collective had themselves toyed with switching band names, only to be dissuaded by practical concerns, like listeners being able to find their music.
It seems fitting that a previously suggested alternate name, the Painters, resurfaced during the demo process for Painting With. Like its predecessor, 2012’s Centipede Hz, the last record is dense and ornamented with samples, but it’s also brightly colored, synthetic, and dizzyingly hyperactive. After each Animal Collective album, the group has typically issued a related follow-up EP, including career highlights like 2005’s Prospect Hummer and 2009’s Fall Be Kind. The companion to Painting With is the four-song The Painters EP, and the records share a sensibility.
For however much Animal Collective have changed between each album, a juxtaposition between campfire primitivism and electronic experimentation has remained a near-constant. Painting With seemed to ball that up like never before into skewed, breakneck-paced pop miniatures. Generally speaking, more recent Animal Collective songs bang you on the head, lyrically and sonically, in a way the band didn’t previously, but they don’t necessarily get stuck in your head in the same way as a “My Girls,” either. The Painters EP was mostly recorded around the same time as its companion album, and while it’s a reasonably compelling elaboration on its predecessor’s synth-splattering aesthetic, it’s unlikely to change anyone’s mind about this version of the group’s sound.
The opener and first single, “Kinda Bonkers,” resembles “FloriDada,” its counterpart from the last album: Both songs overcome their playful if obvious titles; both find Panda Bear and Avey Tare trading vocals in such a way that they’re almost finishing each other’s sentences; and both convey a utopian faith in transcending human differences. “Kinda Bonkers” distinguishes itself, though, partly because its odd burbles and tribal pulse are at a statelier tempo. And where “FloriDada” plays its vision of “a future/connected by sutures” into wry “where’s the bridge” puns, “Kinda Bonkers” resolves into a communal mantra: “Unity of all kind, unity of all kind.”
The middle of the EP passes pleasantly but less arrestingly. “Peacemaker” is more relaxed than almost anything on Painting With, and here the vocal exchanges tend to happen at the level of syllables, not half-sentences. At high volume in headphones, it offers enough squiggly nuances to hold interest, underpinned by glassy synth and a lurching rhythmic base. On the bouncier “Goalkeeper,” what precisely is being sung about this soccer savior gets largely buried in thuds and squelches.
Painters’ most notable inclusion is a cover of Martha & the Vandellas’ mid-’60s classic “Jimmy Mack,” done the Painters’ way: delirious, yawpy, and belching with synth. As anyone familiar with the original song might hope, it’s ecstatic with yearning, and it’s no surprise Animal Collective made a habit of working this into their 2016 tour stops. But the song doesn’t lend itself to their current manic style, and it’s hard to imagine choosing this take over the Vandellas—or any other version.
If hearing Animal Collective do “Jimmy Mack” tells us anything, it's that writing a great song, like painting a modern-day masterpiece, is difficult. Animal Collective have done it before, and they’ll hopefully do it again. Odds are, they’ll be a different band then, and, as a wide-eyed Painters EP narrator might point out, their listeners will be different, too. | 2017-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Domino | February 17, 2017 | 6.1 | 78ca0ab5-806b-4a8e-9452-309eaf784472 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The Compton rapper’s latest is a musical therapy session, a concept album filled with intimate writing and rich, varied production. | The Compton rapper’s latest is a musical therapy session, a concept album filled with intimate writing and rich, varied production. | Westside Boogie: More Black Superheroes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/westside-boogie-more-black-superheroes/ | More Black Superheroes | Westside Boogie knows he’s toxic, but he’s working on it. Toxicity—especially when it comes to relationships—is nothing new in hip-hop, though it’s become something of a meme over the past decade. And though Boogie hasn’t reached Future levels of performative irony just yet, unpacking the tribulations of love and his time immersed in California gang culture is central to the Compton rapper’s music. Every sepia-toned memory of friends lost, like 2014’s “Still Be Homies,” is matched by the petty romantic squabbles of 2016’s “Two Days” or “Nigga Needs,” with Boogie unafraid to be the complicated antihero of his own story.
More Black Superheroes, Boogie’s second album under Eminem’s Shady Records, searches for deeper meaning in navigating emotional vulnerability as a Black man. Honesty means little when it’s not backed by actionable change, and Boogie finds power in admitting when he’s fallen off the trail. “Running from my issues/Don’t give me your praises/Just want you to know that even heroes still need saving,” he says bluntly on “LOLSMH II” before lamenting that “fame is a prison.” Like Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, Superheroes is a concept album from a thirtysomething California rapper putting themselves through musical therapy. What distinguishes the project is Boogie’s earnestness, which makes his struggles feel tangible.
Boogie’s songwriting is at its best when he homes in on just being another dude from the block with his own set of problems. On “Stuck,” the tug-of-war between old and new thinking manifests in the banal (putting chips on a sandwich) and the raw (telling his mother he loves her more). “Nonchalant” is a jaunty back-and-forth between Boogie and vocalist Mamii where he lays out his destructive habits (“She into crystals to release/And meditation at the beach/I’m into actin’ like a thief/And comin’, takin’ all that peace”) and then acts surprised when she stops answering his calls. On several occasions, he dwells on the irony of continuing to make songs about the harmful patterns he’s perpetuating. He’s the rap game Sisyphus, making emotional progress and watching most of it slide back down the hill.
The subject matter isn’t much different from other Boogie projects, but there are enough new variations to keep his thoughts fresh. He’s more likely to let his guard down, indulging the idea of romance on “Can’t Get Over You” and “Somethin Strange.” On “LOLSMH II” and “Prideful II”—both sequels to older songs—he rattles off tales of lust and deception worthy of an episode of Insecure. The production, primarily handled by executive producer Keyel, sways between the modernized G-funk grooves and synthetic lowrider snap that have always characterized Boogie’s music. Sometimes, like on “Prideful II,” the sounds meet in the middle, hi-hats bouncing next to guitar strums and vocal coos. Boogie sounds as comfortable singing over soul drums and smooth bass licks as he does rhyming over steady speaker-rattling drums.
While Boogie handles every sound thrown his way, the structure of the album occasionally derails its ambitions. Closer “Anthony (War)” dilutes the effect of previous track “Windows Down” and its shock ending: soul-bearing confessions cut off by a car crash. This snag briefly detracts from Boogie’s intimate writing, which is as sticky as a wad of gum. As opposed to the straightforward way 2019’s Everything’s for Sale approached the transactional nature of love and death, there’s a tinge of irony to More Black Superheroes that gives weight to its darker moments. Honesty may be his superpower, but he’s no better at avoiding temptation or succumbing to emotional impulses. And yet, the dichotomy of trying versus succeeding to better yourself is the latent theme of the album. You can't be a hero if you’re not willing to face your demons. | 2022-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Shady / Interscope | June 23, 2022 | 7.3 | 78cb284a-e76d-4593-9a71-395ea5ccb604 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Discovered gathering dust in an old storage unit, the Detroit artist’s lost album from the ’90s is an interesting curio that slots nicely alongside techno’s current renaissance. | Discovered gathering dust in an old storage unit, the Detroit artist’s lost album from the ’90s is an interesting curio that slots nicely alongside techno’s current renaissance. | Ashtar Lavanda: Unsolved Mysteries | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ashtar-lavanda-unsolved-mysteries/ | Unsolved Mysteries | The eccentric producer and Detroit native Jimmy Edgar once described his label Ultramajic as a platform for “futuristic music, digital shamanism, and virtual altars.” Even its newest release, a collection of lost electro tracks from the mid-to-late-’90s, fits so well with the label’s forward-looking ethos, but the story behind Unsolved Mysteries sounds like classic Edgarian lore. In 2014, Edgar took possession of an East Detroit storage unit that contained over 1,000 vinyl records, some rare, broken recording equipment, and boxes of over 100 DAT and reel-to-reel tapes, one dusty box of which contained tapes from 1995 to 1998 inscribed in black Sharpie with the name “ASHTAR LAVANDA.”
Edgar at first assumed that it was a pseudonym of an already prominent Detroit recording artist, but after two full years of searching—Google came up with no results—he tracked down the real Ashtar Lavanda, a previously unknown producer who hadn’t released any music (in a recent interview, he said that he assumed that the tapes that gave rise to Unsolved Mysteries had been tossed in the garbage long ago). Lavanda still resides in the Motor City to this day, where he apparently works in the medical industry.
And while all of this sounds almost too serendipitous to be true, especially considering Ultramajic’s willfully obscure roster of artists, it’s fitting given much of the genre’s tropes: Electro has always been infused with a certain sense of mystery and myth-making. From the time when a 14-year-old Edgar would download electro tracks on GeoCities websites to the Afrofuturistic myth that Gerald Donald and James Stinson fleshed out as Drexciya, the funky sounds derived from the Roland TR-808 are frequently encased in an epic, enigmatic backstory.
The provenance of these tracks aside, the six songs that make up this collection of archival recordings are undeniably fun additions to the canon, and by clocking in at only 22 minutes, it’s tight enough to not overstay its welcome. “Opulence” starts things off with a rising arpeggiated synth line and some classic 808 rhythms, and “Gratiot Shake” follows with an even funkier bassline that’s accentuated with vocoded commands to “shake it” and “get freaky” along with some sci-fi phaser sounds. The title track and closer “Marfa Lights” are the highlights—the former’s menacing refrain contrasts well with its rickety percussion, and the latter’s more atmospheric touches end things on a relatively breezy note.
Lavanda himself didn’t exactly have lofty ambitions for these songs—he claims that when he was programming these tracks in the ’90s, he just wanted them to play on the “New Dance Show,” Detroit’s local, techno version of “Soul Train” (Ultramajic uploaded an Ashtar Lavanda mix to YouTube that plays alongside clips from the show, and the audio and the visuals sync up remarkably well). In light of the genre’s current renaissance, with artists like DJ Stingray and Helena Hauff leading the pack, this collection sounds surprisingly fresh. When asked what he thought about these songs finally seeing the light of day, Lavanda responded: “It would have been better as a record in the ’90s.” And while it’s not necessarily a crucial release, and Edgar’s claims that it belongs in the cultural memory alongside acts like Drexciya or Dopplereffekt are overstated, it does accomplish what Lavanda wanted—it’s a pretty playful, taut selection of songs to dance to. | 2018-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ultramajic | February 15, 2018 | 7.1 | 78ce16c3-edf2-497e-adee-bee0a77bce66 | Rachel Hahn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rachel-hahn/ | |
Late Night Tales, the compilation series that asks artists to create their ultimate "late night" mix, has become an institution. Röyksopp’s installment includes a new original, a Depeche Mode cover with fellow Norwegian Susanne Sundfør, and top-notch curation and sequencing. | Late Night Tales, the compilation series that asks artists to create their ultimate "late night" mix, has become an institution. Röyksopp’s installment includes a new original, a Depeche Mode cover with fellow Norwegian Susanne Sundfør, and top-notch curation and sequencing. | Röyksopp: Late Night Tales | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18168-royksopp-late-night-tales/ | Late Night Tales | In its second decade of existence, Late Night Tales is an institution. The compilation series asks artists to create their ultimate "late night" mix and has featured a variety of acts, from MGMT to Belle & Sebastian to Four Tet, Jamiroquai, and Lindstrøm. The line-up's been so diverse, it's interesting it took until now to ask Röyksopp to curate an entry: the group's always showcased a smart design sense as well as an open acknowledgement of other music's influence on their work. Unsurpisingly then, on their 19-track collection, the veteran Norwegian dance duo's instincts on curation and sequencing are top-notch, offering a feeling that's sweetly compelling but gently guarded.
“Daddy’s Groove”, the duo's sole original contribution to Late Night Tales, is the opener. In light of Daft Punk’s retro doings this year, the title, the treated vocals, and the easy pulsing pace of the song feel shaped by larger trends. Röyksopp also offer a studio recording of early Depeche Mode B-side “Ice Machine”. Their version features fellow Norwegian performer Susanne Sundfør on lead vocals and a generally faithful take in the main arrangement with a slow, dramatic start to give it its own flavor. Sundfør’s lead vocals contrast nicely with a brief midsong break from the duo.
Röyksopp's selections generally live somewhere in a late-1970s/early-80s setting. The most compelling include Tuxedomoon’s “In a Manner of Speaking”, a showcase for part-time member Winston Tong’s portrayal of romantic miscommunication over a stark arrangement of nervous guitar and distant swirls, Vangelis’ “Blade Runner Blues”, a pure synthesizer realization of the late-night and disconnected melancholy of Blade Runner that steers clear of the pounding doom of its end theme, and F. R. David’s remarkable synth ballad “Music”, which sounds like a Eurovision winner with all heart and inspiraiton and no irony, even 30 years after it was originally written.
There are also choices that merrily trash received ideas of coolness. Like “Stranger on the Shore”, Acker Bilk’s clarinet-lined Easy Listening smash from the early 60s, which is a kind of outlier from the midcentury that nails both big band jazz and romantic film music. Ready to be reclaimed by the cassette/chillwave generation, Andreas Vollenweider's 1981 track “Hands and Clouds” is a brief bit of swirling delicacy that sounds like a lost track from the high point of West Coast radio stations like the Wave. Meanwhile, the neo-classical impulses of acts like Johann Johannsson, whose composition of strings and deep electronic bass plus voice of “Odi Et Amo” features here, showcase a further connection at work.
Part of this Late Night Tales' joy lies in the atypicality of the choices from bands that might not seem to fit at first. “The Somnambulist” is an XTC B-side recorded in 1980, when the group was peeling out energetic brawlers like “Generals and Majors” and “Life Begins at the Hop,” but the song consists solely of Andy Partridge’s voice in a calmly sung undertone over a moody keyboard/drum machine riff. Thomas Dolby’s similarly chirpier side is exchanged for a slower grooving funk punch on “Budapest by Blimp”, itself acting as a callback to earlier numbers on the disc like Vangelis and Rare Bird’s 1977 effort “Passing Through”, while still standing out in its own right, concluding choir vocals and all. This Mortal Coil's showcased not through something overfamiliar like “Song to the Siren”, but via their live-in-a-room sounding cover of Emmy Lou Harris’s “Till I Can Gain Control Again”.
There's a sweetly consistent mood throughout; it’s something you can put on and treat as ambient sound, but there’s also a clever subtlety in their process. Rare Bird’s entry leads into the similarly paced and feeling “Light of Day” by the Little River Band from three years later, but the latter’s lusher harmonies-- not to mention string accompaniment-- feel like a wider development of the easy, understated swing already introduced by the former song. Following the steady, descending feeling of “Music” with Prelude’s reverb-heavy a capella 1974 cover of Neil Young’s “After the Goldrush” is breathtaking. Immediately continuing with the literal wave crashes and bossa nova lounge lizardry of Richard Schneider Jr.’s 1977 cut “Hello Beach Girls” maintains and reworks that mood, Schneider’s occasional laughs and smooth smarm a remarkable contrast to Prelude’s steady, angelic approach.
The collection ends with English actor Benedict Cumberbatch continuing his spoken word story from last fall's Friendly Fires entry in the series. The tale of a night out and house party is not quite of a piece with the rest, but it is a literal late night tale-- and, hey, why not stick with a theme? In any event, ending on a note that's both ruminative and engaging works well with Röyksopp’s intent, fitting into the overall series with a yacht-rock-for-fjords feeling that's all its own. | 2013-07-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2013-07-11T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Late Night Tales | July 11, 2013 | 7.4 | 78d245bf-9146-4b6c-8c81-3bb253cb92ac | Ned Raggett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ned-raggett/ | null |
The spoken-word poet's latest album is a meditation on social justice and protest in the Internet Age. Williams’ vision of the Internet as a kind of new frontier resembles a scene from The Matrix, and the serrated industrialism of the music is pure '90s. | The spoken-word poet's latest album is a meditation on social justice and protest in the Internet Age. Williams’ vision of the Internet as a kind of new frontier resembles a scene from The Matrix, and the serrated industrialism of the music is pure '90s. | Saul Williams: MartyrLoserKing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21517-martyrloserking/ | MartyrLoserKing | Eighteen years ago, Saul Williams introduced himself to the world by chanting, "I don’t rhyme on track." He’s largely kept that promise. Though bred in New York’s '90s spoken-word scene, and prone early on to shouting his verse in a declamatory speech rendered like cipher freestyle, he quickly transitioned into a career that resists easy categorization. His underrated 2001 debut, Amethyst Rock Star, summoned the ghosts of the Black Rock Coalition and Living Colour; his incendiary 2007 collaboration with Trent Reznor, The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, spun from Public Enemy-inspired industrial hip-hop to a cover of U2’s "Sunday Bloody Sunday."
Still, Williams remains a poet at heart. He wraps his recordings in metaphorical language and allusions to themes both subtle and pronounced. He’s a good songwriter—his Nike-approved 2004 single "List of Demands (Reparations)" proves that—who sometimes gets lost in the clutter of his ideas. That was the problem with 2011’s Volcanic Sunlight, a thrilling yet enervating work that patched together a post-disco ditty ("Dance") with a Janelle Monáe cameo, a feminist sing-along called "Girls on Saturn," and uneven hip-hop-inflected pop-rock like "Rocket."
Volcanic Sunlight was primarily produced and mixed by the French producer Renaud Létang, who is known for his work with Manu Chao and Feist, and the new MartyrLoserKing also finds Williams working with one producer, former She Wants Revenge frontman Justin Warfield, for a meditation on social justice and protest in the Internet Age. But this time, the results are more harmonious. Williams continues to hop across genres as usual, but the album’s tonal qualities remain consistent. "Horn of the Clock-Bike" consists of two piano bars looped into a motif. "Ashes" filters his voice like an AM radio transmission while the beat quickens into a bass-y techno thump. On "The Noise Came From Here," Warfield underlines a Rwandan Twa melody, "Bigirimana," with synthesizer accompaniment, and Williams portrays the undiminished spirit of his neighborhood despite the "police, sirens, guns." "All Coltrane Solos at Once" evokes Justin Warfield’s '90s trip-hop tracks like his Bomb the Bass number "Bug Powder Dust."
MartyrLoserKing doesn’t necessarily rise or fall on Williams’ ability to clarify his thoughts into a clear, memorable hook. When he simply repeats, "Fuck you, understand me" on "All Coltrane Solos at Once," he doesn’t need to say anything else. But it’s noticeable when he drifts amidst the industrial-tinged alt-rock of "Think Like They Book Say," and he has nothing but an enthusiastic shout of the title to anchor him. Throughout the album, he offers some wonderful turns of phrase, like when he sings on "Burundi," "Nike swoosh on bare feet/ Whitney Houston’s crack pipe/ The greatest love of all/ Watch me rise to watch me fall." He evokes an image of poverty-stricken neighborhoods before settling on a somewhat tired metaphor of "hacking" into and disrupting societal disparities as Warpaint vocalist Emily Kokal accompanies him.
MartyrLoserKing may be a call to 21st-century activism, but it also seems anachronistic. Williams’ vision of the Internet as a kind of new frontier resembles a scene from The Matrix, and Warfield’s serrated industrialism is pure '90s. We now know that technology enables our capitalist lusts, and our desire to have every ethnic and gender variation reflected in our culture is often reduced to a mere call for better customer service. Despite his occasionally dazzling wordplay, Williams doesn’t offer a solution for how we can evolve beyond our own inherent narcissism. He’s too optimistic for that. | 2016-02-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rap | Fader Label | February 1, 2016 | 7.1 | 78d46a23-8d1f-4bd7-a062-e4076daa3509 | Mosi Reeves | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mosi-reeves/ | null |
Holed up in their East Harlem apartment, the bassist and harpist express the early days of lockdown intimately and beautifully with one mic and a set of mostly covers from John Coltrane to Kate Bush. | Holed up in their East Harlem apartment, the bassist and harpist express the early days of lockdown intimately and beautifully with one mic and a set of mostly covers from John Coltrane to Kate Bush. | Dezron Douglas / Brandee Younger: Force Majeure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dezron-douglas-brandee-younger-force-majeure/ | Force Majeure | COVID-19 has put the music world in jeopardy, canceling concerts and threatening the livelihoods of countless people at every end of the business. The virus has also led to the predominance of the livestream, changing the nature of performance itself: Solos and duos are more common, romantic couples collaborate frequently, lamps are the new LEDs. The virtual gig is as intimate as an Instagram feed—to the sorry extent that it’s unlikely to put food on an artist’s table.
No album I’ve heard has documented this predicament as directly as Force Majeure. A collaboration between the harpist Brandee Younger and her partner, the bassist Dezron Douglas, the record is named for a clause in contracts that enables venues and promoters across the world to cancel events because of an “act of God,” which became a euphemism for the global pandemic. Marooned together in their East Harlem apartment, and without a foreseeable chance to make income from touring, Douglas and Younger streamed a set each Friday during which they ran through a range of numbers, cracked jokes, commented on the dead-seriousness of now, and offered a strangely personal window into their coupledom against the backdrop of New York City’s lockdown.
The couple collected the greatest hits of their quarantine series, which ran from March to June, into Force Majeure, a 51-minute, proudly impromptu record. Aside from one shimmering original, all of the compositions are covers, including jazz mainstays such as John Coltrane’s “Wise One,” hits by pop titans like the Stylistics and Kate Bush, and even a selection from Sesame Street. The result feels like a rediscovery of common ground. Since meeting at the Hartt School of Music, Younger and Douglas have each played bandleader, and they’ve recorded together frequently, but their careers have ridden different highs: Younger established herself as the harpist of choice for A-list pop musicians, appearing on Beyoncé’s Homecoming documentary as well as on releases by Lauryn Hill, John Legend, Common, and Moses Sumney. Douglas has equal facility on the upright and the bass guitar, and he’s followed a more conventional trajectory as a sought-after sideman, performing most notably with Pharoah Sanders. Force Majeure gives the impression of two busy musicians relearning how jazz can be a shared language as well as a weekly balm. On a version of Sanders’ classic “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” Douglas calls out chord changes, like he and his partner haven’t run through the song together before, or at least not in a while: the result, nonetheless, is fluid and assured.
The limitations imposed by Coronavirus become strengths. Force Majeure was recorded on a single microphone, and likely for technical reasons, Douglas relies mostly on an acoustic double bass. Younger loses the crutch of the larger ensembles favored by the maestras of her instrument, Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane, forcing her to engage with more pluck and forethought. One of the record’s most beautiful tracks, “Gospel Trane,” transposes Coltrane’s original piano part to the harp, a sly commentary on the depth of Younger’s engagement with her predecessor as well as an ingenious demonstration of the harp’s versatility. Elsewhere, playing the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye,” Younger’s strumming makes the main hook sound like a circular guitar riff. Douglas’ bass work is a similar exercise in resourcefulness and possibility. He slaps when the songs beg for a beat and moves between percussive structure and melody with honed instincts.
Sprinkled throughout is Younger and Douglas’ banter—calling these conversations “skits” would be misleading, considering how off-the-cuff their ad-libs are. On the outro, Younger advises listeners, “Don’t go to bars.” Douglas counters, “If you go to the bar, go to the ones where there’s not a lot of people.” A minor, good-natured disagreement plays out, one that is hilariously relatable for anyone who’s navigating COVID safety while living with another person.
This improvised speech circles around, a couple of times, to a statement that serves as the album’s theme: “Black music cannot be recreated, it can only be expressed.” Force Majeure never feels like a retread, but a response to the difficult circumstances of its creation—an expression of coupledom, identity, and persevering domesticity that could only exist in the gloom and chaos of 2020. Unadorned with tech or post-production, the bass, harp, and spoken voice offer us the experience of jazz-as-process. We’ve already seen this process unfold, week after week, in front of a webcam. On record, Younger and Douglas show us the extent of the musical path they blazed, which may be narrow, but they cleared it beautifully while the rest of the world was standing still.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | International Anthem | December 7, 2020 | 7.6 | 78d84aef-706d-415c-a0be-1b5ec1e8db07 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
The North Carolinian singer comes roaring back from multiple strokes to deliver a raw and thrilling solo debut. | The North Carolinian singer comes roaring back from multiple strokes to deliver a raw and thrilling solo debut. | Reese McHenry: No Dados | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/reese-mchenry-no-dados/ | No Dados | Music history is littered with tragic tales of talented people robbed of their creative lives by sudden illness, injury, or death. A decade ago, North Carolina’s Reese McHenry nearly joined them. The singer, known in her local community for her hurricane vocals at the front of the band The Dirty Little Heaters, suffered four strokes, which resulted in a handful of heart surgeries and other complications that threatened to derail her career permanently.
These days, McHenry is as vivacious and healthy as ever, and she’s spent her recent years bouncing back with a vengeance. She returned to the fold with The Dirty Little Heaters, issued one LP in 2015 as The Second Wife, released a seven-inch as Reese McHenry & the Fox, and teamed up with the boisterous Spider Bags for a 2017 collaborative LP. With No Dados, her solo debut, McHenry delivers a cohesive and thrilling exhibition of her raw talent.
No Dados tumbles forth with “Magnolia Tree,” a rager that shifts gears while McHenry howls like the fierce offspring of Janis Joplin and Robert Plant. McHenry finds simpatico spirits with her backing band Drag Sounds: The band’s 2016 album, Sudden Comfort, is loose and easygoing, but here they floor the pedal, as if possessed by McHenry’s spirit.
Though McHenry’s powerhouse vocals make it difficult to read her as anything but a monolith of confidence, her songs churn with anxiety. “You think that things can’t get worse/But I’m here to tell you that they can,” she begins on “Murdered Love.” She frets about infidelity and disappointment, tempering bitterness and admissions of her own thorniness with pleas to make it all right again, closing “Can You Say?” with “What are we trying to do?/Can you say you don’t miss me at all?”
But even amid her worries, McHenry can serve up a heavyweight hook. Her “Oh-oh, this fever’s gotta go” refrain on “Fever” is an immediate earworm, as is the shout-along titular kiss-off of “Bye Bye Baby.” And as she sings “Why don’t you love me, baby?” on “Clogged and Idle Freeways,” McHenry braids together anger, despair, and menace with precision and sincerity. For most of her career, McHenry has flourished within her local music scene, but with the unapologetic might of No Dados, McHenry aims for bigger stages. | 2019-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Suah Sounds | April 19, 2019 | 7.4 | 78ed8075-3310-4fd7-bc9f-97e54ce7d2ca | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Twitchy, raunchy, and full of laugh-out-loud punchlines, the Detroit trio’s new album is the best ghettotech rager in recent memory. | Twitchy, raunchy, and full of laugh-out-loud punchlines, the Detroit trio’s new album is the best ghettotech rager in recent memory. | HiTech: Détwat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hitech-detwat/ | Détwat | Like many Detroit genres, ghettotech sounds like it could have only been brewed from the sweaty corners of Motor City’s pulsing industrial landscape. A fusion of electro, techno, Chicago’s ghetto house, and Miami bass, ghettotech has operated as a playground for some of the metropolis’ most experimental electronic producers since its inception in the late-’80s, including legendary artists like DJ Assault, DJ Godfather, and Jeff Mills. In 2023, HiTech are carrying ghettotech’s torch, igniting the movement with their own kind of fuel.
Comprised of rapper-producers King Milo, Milf Melly, and 47Chops, HiTech take all of ghettotech’s classic elements—sped-up electro, distorted vocals, raw sexuality—and imbue it with a modern touch, distilled from growing up mining the depths of SoundCloud rather than tuning into underground radio stations. Détwat, their second full-length, uses nonstop 808s and a grab bag of freshly crate-dug samples to kick off the raunchiest, twitchiest club night since the heyday of Detroit techno.
From the first few seconds, HiTech impeccably set the scene: Featuring labelmate Fullbodydurag, from Omar S’ FXHE Records, “Nu Munni” launches a driving four-to-the-floor beat that rises steadily in your throat like a panic attack. More than anything else on the album, “Nu Munni” draws on the Detroit techno influences embedded in ghettotech, with HiTech laying down a sense of urgency that threads throughout Détwat. As a chubby bassline emerges, heaving breaths punctuate the production, operating as percussive stabs. There’s even a hint of ballroom here, when the beat suddenly drops and Fullbodydurag fires off the line, “Don’t start with me/Bitch I’ll finish it.” The bass levels sound as if they were being blasted out of a subwoofer in the back of a souped-up Honda; you can practically hear the screws rattle. More than simply paying homage to the genre that birthed them, on “Nu Munni,” HiTech are ushering it into the future.
Until now, HiTech were perhaps best known for their 2022 single “Cashapp,” which relied much more on Milf Melly’s rap skills than on its techno production. While Détwat’s hip-hop overtones are rightfully undeniable, it’s a cohesive evolution from the group’s 2022 self-titled debut album, in which the rap and electronic elements felt more disparate. “Birthday Pearls” is a lightning flurry of hypnotic bars; its pitch-shifting vocals give lines like “It’s my birthday/Suck a nigga dick or something” and “Pop that pussy, shake that ass/Stretch it like a yoga class” a sense of mischievous surrealism.
Lead track “Zooted,” featuring even more loopy, warped vocals, this time from yet another underground Detroit collaborator (DJKillaSquid), encapsulates the essence of ghettotech more than anything else on Détwat. Its hook—“I’ve been zooted/Bounce that ass”—is like a spiritual cousin to one of ghettotech’s most enduring anthems, DJ Assault’s 2002 masterpiece “Ass-N-Titties.” It contains the same joyful release of inhibition that defines so much of Black club music, and also like “Ass-N-Titties,” it’s funny as shit. The dance floors and nightclubs of this movement are first and foremost a place to have fun, and that spirit is front and center on “Teetees Dispo,” a story of love and lust told at breakneck speed. “If yo’ auntie in this bitch/She gon’ get on the floor,” raps our narrator, as the titular TeeTee drops it low. A second clubgoer approaches at the end of the song, delivering the final punchline: “Damn, who mama that is?/Nigga I think I like yo mama!”
“Teetees Dispo” condenses everything that makes HiTech unique in the contemporary U.S. hip-hop landscape—the deliriously catchy hooks, the unabashed humor, the detailed production, and the passion for their local scene. Ghettotech never went out of fashion in its hometown, and with Détwat, HiTech are twisting it into new, freaky shapes. It’s appropriately manic music that not only defies categorization, but does so with a blunt in one hand and a cup of Henny in the other, putting the booty bounce back in techno. | 2023-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | FXHE | June 2, 2023 | 7.4 | 790514c0-76f4-4a6b-a558-e7b6ed6cbafa | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | |
The Triad, Pantha du Prince’s first solo record in six years, is the producer's most maximalist and emotional release to date. | The Triad, Pantha du Prince’s first solo record in six years, is the producer's most maximalist and emotional release to date. | Pantha du Prince: The Triad | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21926-the-triad/ | The Triad | Techno is often dismissed as clinical music, engineered for precision impact. But an irony of the genre—and one that Hendrik Weber, who records as Pantha du Prince, understands deeply—is that, though technical by definition, techno is most satisfying when you can feel the human inside the machine. This is the case with The Field’s analog loops and Ricardo Villalobos’ live samples; it’s what makes Holly Herndon’s cerebral experiments compelling and breathes life into Jon Hopkin’s chilliest compositions. Like those artists, the tension between organic and synthetic is at the core of Pantha du Prince’s work, from his minimal techno classics, Diamond Daze and This Bliss, to Black Noise, which saw Weber celebrating nature through field recordings and a collaboration with Panda Bear. You can hear it when Weber abandoned the trappings of the genre to experiment with a three-ton bell carillon, usually found in European cathedral towers, on Elements of Light, and it’s what makes The Triad, Pantha du Prince’s first solo record in six years, his most maximalist and emotional release to date.
Since the early '00s, Weber has evolved from monastic bedroom producer to an artist who prefers the company of friends, from Noah Lennox to The Bell Laboratory to Stephan Abry, with whom he created the duo Ursprung. In many ways, The Triad plays like the sum total of Pantha du Prince’s career thus far, uniting Weber's early minimalism with grandiose instrumentation and collaborative songwriting. Though *The Triad *is billed as a Pantha du Prince release, Weber has lots of help. Joining him are The Bell Laboratory's Bendik Kjeldsberg and Scott Mou, who performs as Queens. Together, the three musicians (and a handful of guests) act as the titular Triad, melding electronic compositions with all manner of analog synths (Synthi 100, ARP, CS-80), vocals, and live instrumentation.
As a result, The Triad sounds more like the work of a full band than one guy with a laptop, and it's better for it. Compositions unfurl slowly, starting as sketches before layers of instrumentation blanket one another in unpredictable ways. Weber makes expert use of the human voice throughout, treating his own and others' as additional sonic bricolage rather than the centerpiece of any given composition. Album opener “The Winter Hymn,” for example, begins with a beat, bells, and chimes, before vocals come to the forefront, thawing the track like morning sun on snow. On “Chasing Vapour Trails,” monotone vocals offer a playful counterpunch to the clamor of bells before the track's bouncy rhythm is joined by ragged guitar squalls for an effect reminiscent of Matthew Dear.
Speaking of bells and chimes, few producers have a better grasp of how to use them than Pantha du Prince. Even before his work using the bell carillon, Weber's palette relied heavily on metallic tones and percussive elements. On The Triad, these sounds blend fully into the DNA of the tracks—it's not a gimmick or a distraction, but the heart of the sound. The effect is simultaneously cooling (bells have a way of adding a chill to the production) and wholly organic. There's a tactile resonance to their sound that's inarguably physical, even when the sound is brittle or delicate, and when a track really goes for the dance floor (see: “You What? Euphoria!”) it hits all the harder.
Listening to a Pantha du Prince record is also a distinctly visual experience. His tracks have a way of enveloping the listener, invoking images of Arctic taigas, snow-capped mountains, rolling hills. Even Weber's track titles—“Islands in the Sky,” “In an Open Space”—ask to be taken as specifically visual experiences. Song titles even directly recall films: “Lions Love” is named after an Agnès Varda film, while “Frau im Mond, Sterne laufen” references a Fritz Lang dystopia. It's hard to say whether individual listeners will *see *the same things while listening to these tracks, but there is a distinctly synesthetic element to the music. The result is an album that creates its own world, one it feels like you could reach out and brush with your fingers. | 2016-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Rough Trade | May 23, 2016 | 8 | 7906bcb9-b7d2-45d9-8a9e-809df9c8f8c9 | Nathan Reese | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nathan-reese/ | null |
Ambitious and heady as always, Patrick Wolf here takes a headfirst dive into new romantic pop. | Ambitious and heady as always, Patrick Wolf here takes a headfirst dive into new romantic pop. | Patrick Wolf: Lupercalia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15492-lupercalia/ | Lupercalia | "Songs about love are obviously the most common theme in pop music, but I wanted to approach it in a way that hadn't been done before. The title refers to the Lupercalia festival, which is the ancient fertility and love festival that happens around Valentine's Day. I strive to be original-- it's one of my biggest ambitions. There can be nothing worse sometimes than a soppy love record-- imagine if I'd called it To Love: Patrick Wolf!"
That's Patrick Wolf doing the heavy-lifting when it comes to pinpointing what went wrong with Lupercalia: It's clear he hasn't shaken off his artiste pretensions since the goth-folk of his early work, but ever since the career peak of 2005's shadowy song cycle Wind in the Wires, he seems to want pop stardom. And while the clash of those desires can lead to fascinating music, it rarely happens when the artist considers himself above pop music and its consumers. And unfortunately, much like he did on The Magic Position and The Bachelor, Wolf is operating like someone who doesn't trust his audience to think at his level, offering a subtly condescending record that leaves so little to the listener's imagination that it actually may as well have been called To Love: Patrick Wolf!
At first glance, Wolf's headfirst dive into new romantic pop seemed like a good move. As with "Accident & Emergency" or "The Magic Position", Wolf put a good step forward on this album's lead single: "The City" remains an insistently kicky piece of kitsch, its cheeseball horn charts and can-do lyrics about love transcending material possession successfully recalling 80s new pop. But like "The City"'s video-- Wolf frolicking on the Santa Monica pier with a bunch of Hollister ad types-- the rest of Lupercalia is self-aware in all but one crucial aspect, the ability to recognize just how blatantly it allows itself to lay it on so thick.
Far be it from me to deny someone the agency to make his "happy" record, but Wolf seems to feel as if self-consciousness grants him a license to go slumming in his most insipid songwriting impulses. The clincher from otherwise charming "House": "This is the greatest peace I've ever known/ Only love makes a house a home." Meanwhile, the lesson learned on "Together" is "and I can't do this alone/ But we can do this so much better together," the last word harmonized just so in case you didn't get the gist. Sure, it's awkward when he allows himself a little more poetic license on the string-choked "Slow Motion" ("before you I was living in a silverfish kitchen"), but at least it's a new way to make the same point.
How the album manages to feel so impersonal is weird considering it was inspired by Wolf's recent engagement, but the smug piano narrative of "Bermondsey Street" feels stuck somewhere between "Our House" and "Born This Way". What's frustrating is that if you strip away the unctuous lyrical gaffes, Wolf gets most everything else right. During Lupercalia's first half, he continues to prove himself a fine craftsman of major-key melodies, and this is his most confident and convicted vocal performance yet. But like most of Wolf's records, he eventually gives into sad songs and waltzes as Lupercalia progresses, and studded with the same overproduction tricks of cluttered strings and processed samples, "The Days" and "Slow Motion" don't offer much in the way of contrast outside of tempo.
Considering how intriguing it is to think about Wolf in the abstract-- undeniably talented and ambitious as he is-- there's no reason he shouldn't be some sort of star. But his claims to originality feel increasingly misplaced-- he's not the only auteur combining glam-rock ambitions with sexually ambiguous theatrics these days, and compared to Of Montreal's confrontational eclecticism, Diamond Rings' nervy confessionals, and Lady Gaga's full-frontal multimedia bombast, the domesticated Wolf of Lupercalia can't help but sound tame. | 2011-06-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-06-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Mercury / Hideout | June 2, 2011 | 5.3 | 79073b8e-5793-46e0-a955-e176bfa7c406 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The fourth installment of Leyland Kirby’s six-part series as the Caretaker is his most visceral album yet, an ambient look at the degradation of music and memory. | The fourth installment of Leyland Kirby’s six-part series as the Caretaker is his most visceral album yet, an ambient look at the degradation of music and memory. | The Caretaker: Everywhere at the End of Time - Stage 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-caretaker-everywhere-at-the-end-of-time-stage-4/ | Everywhere at the End of Time - Stage 4 | Leyland Kirby’s project as the Caretaker wasn’t always about dementia. “Initially it was all about ghosts and memories,” the experimental producer explained in 2012 about what’s now his best-known musical alias. Named after the job title of Jack Nicholson’s doomed protagonist in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, Kirby sampled old Jazz Age 78s to make the kind of eerily distorted dance tunes you could imagine haunting the Overlook Hotel. It was a spin on similar techniques Kirby employed on rave and pop music in his main project V/Vm, but he later grew inspired by neurodegenerative diseases and studies on the positive effects of playing patients music from their youth. The Caretaker’s labyrinthine recordings suddenly found a new significance, and audience, with 2011’s An Empty Bliss Beyond This World, a record instantly hailed as Kirby’s masterpiece and one where music and concept paired so perfectly it felt like they’d always been inseparable.
Kirby must have felt similarly. In 2016, he went so far as “diagnosing” the Caretaker with dementia before announcing an ambitious multi-part finale to retire the project. Titled Everywhere at the End of Time, the project follows worsening stages of dementia through six releases over three years and is scheduled to end in 2019. It’s first three albums—Stage 1, Stage 2, and Stage 3—felt like retreads of sounds and ideas the Caretaker’s earlier masterpiece already perfected. But if Everywhere at the End of Time’s trajectory felt predictable at the halfway point, the dark, disorienting Stage 4 marks a total reconfiguration. It’s the Caretaker’s best record since Empty Bliss while evolving its sound in new and often frightening ways.
The record represents the beginning of the “Post Awareness” stages of dementia, setting up the unreleased Stage 5 and Stage 6 by breaking down foundational qualities present since the project’s inception. Gone are the short, melancholy vignettes with wistful titles like “It’s just a burning memory” or “We don’t have many days.” They’re replaced by four soundscapes, each stretching past the 20-minute mark and all but one clinically dubbed “Post Awareness Confusions.” They capture the darkest, most damaged sounds in the project’s lifespan whether dwelling on one ghostly sample for minutes or violently accelerating through skipping melodies, similar to the ambient experimental touchstone, Oval’s 94 Diskont. Stage 4 is likewise a record that makes you feel surrounded, making you a participant rather than an observer.
This is all by design. Kirby has said that the project is more about the second half than the first. Songs and samples from his earlier records, particularly 1937’s “Goodnight, My Beautiful,” resurface now in a almost unrecognizable blurs. By continually returning to the same samples over the years, Kirby has subtly programmed many of them into our own memories. It pays off amid the recollections and second-guessing of Stage 4, where the simple act of remembering a sample can be filled with this sense of tragedy.
While the three “Post Awareness Confusions” reach unexplored extremes for the Caretaker, the dreamlike “Temporary Bliss State” enters a new world entirely. Kirby leaves no trace whatsoever of the dusty 78 samples that define the project, warping whatever his source material was into pure ethereal abstraction. Twinkling, liquid melodies and gentle waves of noise make “Bliss State” even more disorienting than the harrowing “Confusions,” yet it is so beautiful it barely sounds like the Caretaker at all. While previous releases used cheerful samples to create tension, to suggest, as one carefree song on Stage 2 put it, that “A losing battle is raging,” there’s a genuine sense of peace for once. It’s a welcome respite, but it also signals the loss of control from patients with dementia. Going just long enough to make you forget what came before, the abrupt end and jarring snap into the final “Confusion” only becomes more devastating.
Dementia has seen increasing visibility in the years since Kirby first artistically approached the disease. Julianne Moore won an Oscar for portraying an early onset patient in 2014’s Still Alice, last year it received a rosy Disneyfication in Pixar’s Coco, while “Bojack Horseman” envisioned it through surrealist horror. It’s on all our minds because it’s scary, unknowable, and hurts people we love in ways we can’t imagine. One of our natural responses to things like that has always been to turn them into art, but there’s always a risk of pale romanticization. Stage Four becomes much more empathetic because it offers no such romance as the Caretaker closes in on the end—only confusion, terror, and tragedy. Like the end of The Shining, the “ghosts and memories” are taking over, and it’s as difficult to watch as it is to look away. | 2018-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | History Always Favours the Winners | April 26, 2018 | 7.9 | 790be73b-c209-4a60-820b-bdd12876dbf4 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | |
Cross Record's early work boasted a desolate, folk-born sound redolent of early Cat Power. On their new record, Swans and Shearwater percussionist Thor Harris lends them an entirely new energy, creating an inspired fusion of wispy and visceral sounds. | Cross Record's early work boasted a desolate, folk-born sound redolent of early Cat Power. On their new record, Swans and Shearwater percussionist Thor Harris lends them an entirely new energy, creating an inspired fusion of wispy and visceral sounds. | Cross Record: Wabi-Sabi | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21482-wabi-sabi/ | Wabi-Sabi | Cross Record forged their path along old-fashioned and modern lines at once. Their music's presence on Bandcamp, the stalwart American site that has become the new A&R for the country's best bands, got them their start, but the husband-and-wife duo of Emily Cross and Dan Duszynski didn't land their deal with Ba Da Bing Records until Cross sent a CD of their music with a note to label owner Ben Goldberg after meeting him at a Lady Lamb the Beekeeper show. Wabi-Sabi marks the first proper album Cross Record has created as Ba Da Bing artists, and indeed indicates a marked sense of sonic growth from the duo's early Bandcamp recordings, which boasted a desolate, folk-born sound akin to Smells Like-era Cat Power and Nina Nastasia à la Dogs.
Much ado has been made about where Cross and Duszynski recorded Wabi-Sabi, which is a Japanese term for the acceptance of imperfection. And yes, the relatively remote locale on the outskirts of Austin, Texas in the little town of Dripping Springs surely played a role in the Chicago-born group's desolate acoustic Cocteau-isms, particularly in the quieter moments of tracks like "Something Unseen Touches a Flower to My Forehead" and "Lemon." Additionally, the incorporation of a women's choir across a number of tracks adds another layer of airiness to this LP's sound.
But it's the presence of Swans drummer Thor Harris, who more than makes up for his absence on the latest Shearwater album, that helps Wabi-Sabi stand out from anything Cross Record has done in the past. The rhythms he achieves working with marimba, kalimba, and what's described only as "the mysterious black box" gives the group a heft that is absent on their earlier material. "Two Rings," for instance, may remind some of Tin Drum-era Japan, while the loping gothic stomp of "Wasp in a Jar" smacks of PJ Harvey's Dry. "High Rise," meanwhile, sees Duszynski himself channeling the power of Thor on the drums, counterbalancing his own Robin Guthrie-on-steroids guitar attack.
Yet, the partnership between the guitarist and Harris on percussion forges a solid foundation for Cross and her choir of singers: Julia Lucille, Liz Baker, Anna Milk, and Sarah Duncan. Within the album's most inspired moments, they hit atmospheric heights they've never reached before as a group. On "Basket," the dreamy vocal harmonies collide with Harris’ dense rhythms before collapsing under the weight of a divebombing wall of dirge from Duszynski’s strings, like FKA twigs produced by Michael Gira. It's an inspired fusion of wispy and visceral, a combination that doesn't seem like it should work as well as it does here. Throughout Wabi-Sabi, Cross Record thread their way between graceful and sinister, unfiltered beauty with heavier and uglier sounds, and tap into a dark well of energy that has potential to grow more powerful the further they explore it. | 2016-02-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing | February 5, 2016 | 7.8 | 7913a2f8-9707-4822-8420-ac778f460a0a | Ron Hart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ron-hart/ | null |
The Brooklyn producer and Night Slugs/Fool's Gold stablemate's appealing new EP is less concerned with jostling listeners into its rhythmic space than last year's That Mystic. | The Brooklyn producer and Night Slugs/Fool's Gold stablemate's appealing new EP is less concerned with jostling listeners into its rhythmic space than last year's That Mystic. | Kingdom: Dreama EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16073-kingdom-dreama-ep/ | Dreama EP | Last year's EP That Mystic was a good introduction to Kingdom, the Brooklyn producer and Night Slugs/Fool's Gold stablemate who operates in a distinct idiom you could call "BK funky." At its core, the EP fused the intricacy of post-dubstep with the production sensibility and anything-goes nature of contemporary pop. And his everything-is-percussion approach built up a sense of bustling hugeness that, speaker-rattling immediacy notwithstanding, never overwhelmed its Swiss-watch rhythmic engineering. That it did so in an intense, almost panicky sort of way was part of the appeal-- the tweaky gallop of the title track's kick-heavy rhythm was one of bass music's best last year-- but it also left a lot of options for new directions to go in the still relatively early stages of an ambitious and wide-ranging style.
Dreama plays with a few of those options, maintaining the balance between keeping his big ideas both upfront and subtly beneath the surface. The songs on this EP are largely less concerned with jostling listeners into its rhythmic space and more prone to luring them in instead, though once they get inside they can still get thrown around a bit. The organized clamor and high tension still jumps out here and there, most notably in "Stalker Ha": Its snares are crisp to the point of brittle, it teases out a water-drip piano note just long enough to make it a neat shock when the melody turns into a Halloween homage, and it builds a sharp sense of anxiety out of the way it layers half-ecstatic/half-haunted wordless soul vocals over an insistently ringing old telephone bell. It's brisk stuff, an easy highlight of a repertoire still on the upswing.
But defining Kingdom by the standards of all that taut chaos his earlier work laid down doesn't fit quite as easily with the rest of the EP. Take the title track, a cut that opens with a loping stride of a beat-- a heavy skulk ready to break out into a Rickey Henderson sprint. If you dork out for drum patterns, it's a headspinning juxtaposition of kicks, snares, claps, and snaps that's striking enough on its own. But it's not put in service of deep-pressure dynamics and a mood steeped in turmoil-- it's more like straight-up funk, with an alternately pitched-up-and-down vocal "ayyy" careening off fat synths that simultaneously evoke classic boogie and current Dirty South-indebted R&B. It's wide open and airy to the point of almost being calming, but it still thumps. "Hood by Air Theme" is a bit more tense, with foreboding atmospherics, teased-out vocal snippets, swelling bass, and floodgate-bursting percussion buildups rolled out as a blatant prelude to a big drop. But the drop itself is what makes it, and it's so audaciously deployed and timed-- and recognizably iconic in just how joyous it is-- that it'd almost feel like a spoiler just mentioning where it comes from. (It also proves that in the right hands, there's no such thing as a too-obvious sample.)
Maybe the best summary of what Kingdom's capable of can be found in the opening track. "Let You No" incorporates a comparatively lesser-known R&B track, Sadie Ama's "Fallin", to similar dramatic effect as "Hood by Air Theme". But it's a more slippery build, capitalizing on sneaking early hints of her voice under cover of the track's whistle-squeak synth and some characteristically skittery beats. We hear her first as faint echoes, then chopped up percussively, then finally breaking through as a full-fledged hook that almost reads, in this new context, like a statement on breaking tension: "I should've held back/ But I just thought I'd let you know." For all his polyrhythmic complexity and string-pulling, emotional mood-setting, Kingdom knows his way around a voice-- and that's where he's got his future down on lock. Maybe pop's future, too. | 2011-11-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2011-11-28T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Night Slugs | November 28, 2011 | 8.2 | 79146c1b-79b5-46c8-a1ee-0ba2546d5971 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Sierra Leone musician Janka Nabay returns with another collection of joyous bubu sounds. His greatest theme remains unchanged: how bubu music makes you dance. | Sierra Leone musician Janka Nabay returns with another collection of joyous bubu sounds. His greatest theme remains unchanged: how bubu music makes you dance. | Janka Nabay and the Bubu Gang: Build Music | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23036-build-music/ | Build Music | Janka Nabay’s path as a pop musician—first in his home country of Sierra Leone in the ’90s and then in the U.S. in the 21st century—has been circuitous to say the least. First discovered in Sierra Leone, he was a big star at home before a long civil war and its brutal aftermath forced him to come to the U.S. in 2003 as an émigré. And while his 2012 Luaka Bop debut, En Yay Sah, introduced Nabay’s “bubu”—a restless, churning percussive gallop—to fans of world music and eclectic indie alike, work on a follow-up bogged down after a few false starts. The album was abandoned in 2014.
Three years on, Nabay and cohorts including Skeletons’ Matt Mehlan, Syrian-born Boshra AlSaadi, and journalist/scholar Wills Glasspiegel helped get Build Music built. At first blush, the formula for Nabay’s bubu seems to be largely unchanged. It originates from the Tenme regions in the north and west of war-ravaged Sierra Leone—a mesmerizing sound that was once the province of witches, and is now a part of the Ramadan holiday. Originally enacted on bamboo horns, bubu is now transcribed for synths. It’s a relentlessly joyous beat and at times it brings to mind the velocity of South African shangaan electro, though bubu feels more spry, as Nabay lets the rhythms rubber band between the drums, bass, and the call-and-response vocals of himself and AlSaadi.
On “Santa Monica,” Nabay reflects on a fraught incident he had out on tour, and sets it to itchy accompaniment. “Investigation, interrogation yay,” he enunciates, to which AlSaadi chirps back, “Ay/A-Cali-fornia San-ta Mo-nica,” letting the keyboards slowly arch across the song like a Pacific sunset. Nabay doesn’t go into detail about just what occurred. But with a history of Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, and the like, an encounter with the LAPD that involves interrogation doesn’t always end so well. It speaks to Nabay’s buoyancy and spirit that he defuses it just so until it’s a nonchalant—perhaps even celebratory—moment.
“Bubu Dub” bubbles like a case of cola, the Casio beats coming from one of the original Sierra Leonean “riddims” that Nabay had access to in the ’90s. So while the hiccuping, lo-fi presets percolate and give the song a vintage feel, the vocals are crisper and a keyboard whinnies with a sample of bubu horns, courtesy of Glasspiegel’s recordings made while traveling through the country in 2014. A curious blend of past, recent past, and the present, Nabay’s greatest theme remains unchanged: how bubu music makes you dance.
The album straddles a line between being thin and casual, at times pulling back the curtain on the finished product to show Nabay chatting, humming, and tapping out the building blocks of the songs to his bandmates. “Tek Lak la Gben ba Kun” finds Nabay just riffing along with a bass lick for two minutes. “Sabanoh” also eavesdrops on a session, with Nabay just chanting along with a droning synth line, before the fully formed version bursts into frame, wiggling with a cartoonish vivacity. But no matter the energy of the music around him, Nabay retains a languid calm in his delivery, the sound of a veteran in music across two continents and three decades just taking it as it comes. | 2017-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Luaka Bop | March 31, 2017 | 6.9 | 79148994-075d-4389-9ce5-ff09ffdb753b | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Funk figurehead Steve Arrington's lineage is so clear and traceable that eventually pairing up with Dâm-Funk seems like a no-brainer. Instead of aiming for retro-funk bullseye, they made the weirder, more ambitious Higher. | Funk figurehead Steve Arrington's lineage is so clear and traceable that eventually pairing up with Dâm-Funk seems like a no-brainer. Instead of aiming for retro-funk bullseye, they made the weirder, more ambitious Higher. | Dām Funk / Steve Arrington: Higher | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18350-dam-funk-steve-arrington-higher/ | Higher | Steve Arrington is one of the great underheralded figures in funk, a drummer/vocalist who transitioned from lounge acts to gigs with the Escovedos before joining the Dayton funk band Slave for a five-year stretch of hitmaking. After a successful solo career stretching through most of the 80s, he left the business at the turn of the 90s for the ministry, about the same time as g-funk was starting to mine his catalog for inspiration and a kid from Pasadena named Damon Riddick was traversing over that same turf for his own early demos. The lineage is so clear and traceable that pairing up Dâm-Funk with the recently unretired Arrington seems like an intersection of a no-brainer homage and a dream come true. Anyone who's heard classics like “Just a Touch of Love,” “Weak at the Knees”, or “Dancin' in the Key of Life” can probably picture how natural and comfortable it'd sound for Arrington to jam over the spaced-out, smooth-gliding bounce of the style that made Toeachizown so immersive. Played straight and aiming right for the retro-funk bullseye would probably result in one of the most effortlessly crowdpleasing throwback records of the year.
That's not quite what they did. Higher is messier than that, and weirder, and ultimately more ambitious. Instead of a straightforward selection of boogie jams that effortlessly recall 1982 and leave it at that, Arrington and Riddick put together something spontaneous, potentially polarizing, and joyously strange. Arrington's lost none of his range or power over the years, and he sounds instantly recognizable as the same man who laid a rubbery, often unearthly voice over tracks three decades ago. But he willfully goes off on odd tangents and improvised-sounding flights, spends a bit of time dodging a traditional on-the-one delivery for a more off-beat performance, and overall treats Dâm-Funk's backing track more like a suggestion to be elaborated on than an authoritative, meter-driving pulse. This is that rare record where the singer beats all the critics in the race to call a sound “angular”-- “that angular approach that's so funky and new,” to be specific, as he points out on “Tap That.” It's a phrase that touches on all the quirks and brow-furrowing curveballs that come with that territory.
Granted, it's not that out of character for Dâm-Funk, though it does seem less experimental than he's been of late. Keeping in mind some of his more daring post-Toeachizown work, from his amped-up yet faithful cover of Human League's “Things That Dreams Are Made Of” to last year's New Wave-via-Minneapolis jam “I Don't Wanna Be a Star,” this feels a bit more like a reversion to still-funky, but less eclectic, turf. That means a lot of similar tempos, boom-clap drum machine patterns, and flowing chords-- sounds that barely stray from the Toeachizown palette-- and the musical simplicity threatens to fall into a droning sort of repetition, albeit a pleasant one. On the bright side, it never actually drags, and the production's still a good complement: it feels like Dâm-Funk decided to cede the spotlight to Arrington, leaving his work to buoy Arrington's voice, give him a springboard to riff off, and leaving the more eccentric touches to the singer himself.
And this is where Higher really shines: this is a genuinely sincere, silly, joyous record that seems difficult to actually look down at. What it sometimes lacks in heavy groove and get-down raunch it makes up for in sheer enthusiasm and unpredictability; “the beats tend to sound the same” is less of a concern when they're all glimmering and elated to such effective ends. This album has been in the works for something like three years, but it sounds like it was thrown together off-the-cuff over a weekend by two musicians with a lot of good, pent-up ideas. That's to its benefit, and it makes the giddiness feel extra-human. Arrington has a short monologue in the middle of “I Love This Music” where he mentions how how people tell him how his style keeps changing after all this time. “Yeah,” he explains, “I think like a jazz musician.” Then he lets out this non-verbal string of rapidfire rhythmic scatting that sounds too internalized to be just a mess-around joke, even if he caps it off with a rimshot.
There's a real spiritual vibe that Arrington brings to the table, too, albeit laid out in secular terms, and he seems more like he's ruminating or meditating than singing sometimes. The ceaseless positivity of the lucid memory-banking “Good Feeling” (“I remember Little League baseball, yo/ How the bases were pure white, and the grass was electric green”), the brightly refracting refrains of love-song “Magnificent", “I Be Goin' Hard' and its “stuck on stooo-pid” defiance filtered through deliberately cartoonish runs that toy with his virtuoso range-- it's somewhere between being church and being #based. | 2013-08-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-08-09T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B / Rock | Stones Throw | August 9, 2013 | 7.3 | 79176822-9cdc-4d0c-9a49-262844a9da12 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
Coming on the heels of Drink More Water 5, iLoveMakonnen's sequel to his breakout EP bursts with a confidence that’s earned after you go through the "hit-song-now-what?" grinder. | Coming on the heels of Drink More Water 5, iLoveMakonnen's sequel to his breakout EP bursts with a confidence that’s earned after you go through the "hit-song-now-what?" grinder. | iLoveMakonnen: iLoveMakonnen 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21292-ilovemakonnen-2/ | iLoveMakonnen 2 | The sense of intimacy social media allows with stars can be tricky. Even in the most naturalistic and organic-feeling social media moments—a Snap of DJ Khaled extolling the virtues of water and cocoa butter; unscheduled Twitter rants that turn into full-blown hip-hop feuds—an element of pre-meditated performance still exists. These guys wouldn't be successful entertainers without that instinct.
iLoveMakonnen is one of a few genuinely engaging artists on Snapchat. When he Snaps himself covered in blankets in a cold hotel room, or of himself confronting pre-show jitters, his personality comes through so clearly it's hard to not feel moved. He's always seemed like a genuinely unique and humble guy, maybe somewhat performatively so. But what social media isn't in some way performative?*
*
This matters in perceiving Makonnen's art because his relatability has always worked in his favor, even when some of his songs threaten to go off-the-rails, since his limited voice can only take him so far. He seems like a guy you know. "Tuesday" was a giant hit because it nailed something about the melancholy one feels when out on a weekday—it feels liberating, because so few people are out, but it can also be a stark reminder of the aimlessness that comes when you're unemployed, or depressed, or, in the conceit of the song, dealing drugs on the weekend. But those details didn't matter. We've all had a Tuesday (or Wednesday, or Thursday) night end far later than it should have. And it struck the kind of relatable chord that Drake does well, which naturally led to his golden co-sign.
Fast-forward a year and after this spring's experimental but quietly compelling Drink More Water 5 mixtape, and Makonnen has released the official follow-up to his first EP on OVO Sound. Some of these songs have floated around for a year or so and are staples of his live performances. But more than even the first EP, which delivered a handful of great hip-hop-indebted pop songs, this sequel EP bursts with a confidence that's earned after you go through the hit-song-now-what? grinder. Compared to his last mixtape, the hooks are sharp enough to cut glass, and the sequencing ensures that every facet of Makonnen—from Heartbroken Makonnen to Riotous Makonnen to Warble Makonnen to Onomatopoeia Sex Jam Makonnen—alternates every song.
On the lights-down, open-curtain starter "Forever", Makonnen hits the ground running: "I remember when you said you needed a love that lasted forever," before the ominous beat finally drops. The open-throated ballad kicks off his second EP as ably as Tom Cruise scaling a mountain during the first moments of Mission: Impossible 2. By the time Santigold shows up to memorably rap a few bars, the hooks (literal and figurative) have sunken in—Makonnen is aiming for the fences with his pop instincts.
However, the record is at its best in the contemplative heartfelt-loner love songs, like "Second Chance" and "Being Alone With U", in which Makonnen embodies his hip-hop-Morrissey role. Closer "I Loved You" perfects this formula with a stark piano on a trap beat. Makonnen offers formulaic Drake-isms like "I know you think about me when I'm not around," but they feel fresh in context because we feel like WeKnowMakonnen.
"Trust Me Danny" is the EP's signature moment, a windows-down banger that pays homage both to Makonnen's producer Danny Wolf and a viral Vine. It encapsulates Makonnen's aesthetic as well as his target audience—fans and students of hip-hop who recognize that hooks need to sail for maximum effect for a track to land as a rap anthem. Makonnen isn't another "weird" rapper cashing in, making disposable jokes and internet references for a Twitter-ready crowd before everyone wakes up and goes, "Where are the hits? Where are the hooks?" On this EP, he's angling to be a real pop star, to step out of the OVO shadow (which hasn't produced a major pop crossover artist since the Weeknd) and onto the radio. It's hard to know if that'll happen, but coming with a likable persona, real pop-songwriting chops, and an established audience never hurt anybody. | 2015-12-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-12-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. / OVO Sound | December 4, 2015 | 7.6 | 791a798a-d1d9-4446-9265-f6f0e97fcc56 | Matthew Ramirez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/ | null |
On their first album in nearly a decade, Jakob Dylan and co. return with highway ballads and Saturday afternoon rockers, sounding like the classic rock band they’ve always ached to be. | On their first album in nearly a decade, Jakob Dylan and co. return with highway ballads and Saturday afternoon rockers, sounding like the classic rock band they’ve always ached to be. | The Wallflowers: Exit Wounds | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-wallflowers-exit-wounds/ | Exit Wounds | During the alt-rock gold rush of the 1990s, the Wallflowers didn’t quite belong to the grunge or burgeoning Americana camps, but they benefited from the abundance of guitar bands. They arrived during the radio heyday of both Pearl Jam and Hootie & the Blowfish, so there was an audience primed for their strum-and-jangle. With its enduring singles “One Headlight,” “6th Avenue Heartache” and “The Difference,” 1996’s quadruple-platinum Bringing Down the Horse provided the foundation for frontman Jakob Dylan to lead various incarnations of the Wallflowers through lineup changes and extended hiatuses, negotiating slight shifts in fashion without abandoning the group’s adherence to the basic building blocks of rock’n’roll: guitar, bass, and drums, all given dimension by whirls of Hammond organ.
Exit Wounds, the group’s first album in nine years and only their seventh record in nearly 30, doubles down on these basics, offering an album that could in many ways have been released somewhere in the mid-1990s. Dylan is the only original member from the days of Bringing Down the Horse, so the consistency in sound and aesthetic is surprising. Revisiting old Wallflowers records makes it apparent how much he struggled with a desire to modernize their trad-rock to suit the times—2002’s Red Letter Days has a discernibly glassy electronic sheen—and his instinct to forge ahead on a well-trodden path.
No attempts to reckon with contemporary fashion are apparent on Exit Wounds. Working with a lineup he assembled toward the end of the 2010s, Dylan seems comfortable playing the same kind of highway ballads and Saturday afternoon rockers he’s been writing for decades. His voice bears slight leathery undertones that are highlighted by the Wallflowers’ soulful Americana, like in the opening track “Maybe Your Heart’s Not in It No More.” The song provides an ideal opening salvo for the record: the group’s confident groove is offset by Dylan’s modicum of middle-aged introspection, a sentiment that’s echoed through many of these songs. Dylan balances these moments of doubt with wry self-deprecation, a tendency that’s pushed to the forefront on “I’ll Let You Down (But Will Not Give You Up).” This blend gives his straight-ahead songs a slight lift. He’s arriving at familiar destinations through detours, not the main road.
Call it wisdom, call it maturity, but the depth of experience deepens the traditionalism of Dylan’s music; he’s grown into the clothes he’s been wearing all his life. To that end, he is assisted greatly by the production of Butch Walker, another old-school rock’n’roll lifer who knows which elements of Dylan’s music to accentuate. The leanness of Exit Wounds is a bit deceiving. It may sound unrushed but the simple, direct arrangements give the record a pulse of subdued energy. Keyboards soften the harder edges of the guitars, Americana singer Shelby Lynne provides harmonies throughout, and the rhythms are supple even when they’re straightforward. Every detail adds not only texture but also character.
None of Walker’s brushstrokes are surprising but they do accentuate Dylan’s personality. He’s got a slightly surly disposition that camouflages an open heart; it’s hard not to see his bruises when he sings “set myself on fire keeping you warm” on “Roots and Wings.” Like Tom Petty, Dylan prefers small gestures to grand statements, finding the emotional truth within a clever turn of phrase like “the dive bar in my heart.” This modesty has been one of Dylan’s gifts since the beginning, when he was attempting to write songs that felt like they’ve been kicked around for years. Now that he’s gotten some mileage under his belt, his songwriting feels sharp and his collaborators sound at ease. On Exit Wounds, the Wallflowers finally turn into the classic rock band they always ached to be.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-10T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | New West | July 10, 2021 | 7 | 791c6546-1322-4767-84e8-c47f0ae303e0 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Bibio smartly reteams with Olivier St. Louis for a brief, effervescent, if somewhat canned retro R&B homage. | Bibio smartly reteams with Olivier St. Louis for a brief, effervescent, if somewhat canned retro R&B homage. | Bibio: The Serious EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22352-the-serious-ep/ | The Serious EP | Stephen Wilkinson knows a good thing when he hears it. The English multi-instrumentalist and electronic producer’s albums as Bibio usually draw on an acuity for curation rather than composition. He collects fine-grained sounds and moods from lightly dusted corners of music and mounts them in blurry exhibits with bespoke cultural histories. On his new EP, he curates himself, correctly identifying and expanding on the best thing about his last record.
The ’80s R&B homage “Why So Serious?” stood out on the day-glo pop pastiche A Mineral Love because of a charming guest spot by Olivier St. Louis (née Daysoul), a UK vocalist who previously appeared on tracks by Hudson Mohawke and Onra. Bibio’s settings are often distorted, as though smeared in memory, but this one was unusually period-perfect, with a guitar picking out spiky cursive in a breathy mix of synths and percussion, and a vocal line masking sex with tender concepts like devotion. It was a markedly simple look for a producer prone to bouts of electronic psychedelia.
On The Serious EP, Bibio and St. Louis concoct three new songs in the same style, and though not one is as effortlessly head-turning as the original, a pleasant froth is sustained throughout. The most striking is “Stress Me Out,” where a parched funk crunch elicits a restive performance from St. Louis, whose effects rely more on timing and inflection than natural timbre. The quieter storms of “Make Up” and “Night Falls”—an abandoned vocal from A Mineral Love with new custom-built music—are much flatter, briefly descending and dispersing with little development. They miss the loose, casual strut of their source, and the faint but pervasive remove typical of Bibio starts to creep in.
According to Wilkinson, he and St. Louis hung out at his country cottage but then made the EP over email, which may account for the lack of spontaneous interaction detectable in the tracks. Though the retro R&B style is timely, Bibio and St. Louis don’t modify it with hovering menace, like the Weeknd; or a political charge, like Blood Orange; or restrained anger, like Frank Ocean. Like the canned effervescence of the music, the emotions seem patched in from another time, neutralized by distance.
St. Louis’ lyrics here are more general than personal, let alone idiosyncratic. “Make Up” is dominated by bromides about how you’ve got to try to succeed, and so on. “Stress Me Out” is about what it feels like to be stressed out. It’s unabashedly light, limited, occasional fare. But it’s also a needed freshening up of an increasingly opaque discography. The title track is a keeper, and the prospect of Bibio providing his colorful instrumentals to other singers—albeit in a more thorough, ambitious, altogether more serious way—is an intriguing one. | 2016-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | September 7, 2016 | 6 | 7922ddf5-7944-45e3-b9b9-5aed15acbf72 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The sequel to the canonical Atlanta mixtape is meant to be a legacy-defining stamp, but despite all its glossy guest stars (Morgan Freeman!), it never rises above “just fine.” | The sequel to the canonical Atlanta mixtape is meant to be a legacy-defining stamp, but despite all its glossy guest stars (Morgan Freeman!), it never rises above “just fine.” | 21 Savage / Metro Boomin: Savage Mode 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21-savage-metro-boomin-savage-mode-2/ | Savage Mode 2 | Savage Mode 2 wants to be a moment, at a time when the only moments that seem to matter are life-and-death. It’s the sequel to the mixtape immortalized in the Atlanta hip-hop canon, the one that made 21 Savage a star and cemented Metro Boomin as the signature rap producer of the 2010s. It’s Metro’s official return after almost two years of near silence, and most notably, 21’s first release since he was unjustly detained and threatened with deportation by ICE. It’s packaged with a cover made by the historic Pen and Pixel company and it features Drake and Young Thug guest appearances, along with Morgan Freeman, who gives a Big Rube-style monologue about “Snitches and Rats.”
Sequels are supposed to be bigger, louder, and more expansive. Throughout Savage Mode 2 it’s obvious that this duty is weighing on their shoulders. Savage Mode was a straightforward collection of nine good-to-great songs, while the sequel is intended to be a legacy-defining stamp. You can tell that every piano chord, 808, and sample chop was endlessly stressed over; Metro’s production is not as effortless as it once was.
At their worst, Metro and 21 try too hard. On “Said N Done,” Metro’s flip of Stephanie Mills’ “Touch Me Now” is smooth, but given to 21, it feels like it’s only purpose is to capitalize on the modestly viral Instagram videos of the rapper singing along to R&B hits. When the Atlanta rapper unleashes the in-his-feelings side of his personality it’s gimmicky, which is most clear on the Drake-assisted “Mr. Right Now.” “Slip and slide like a waterfall/You need some TLC, we can creep if you want,” raps 21, squeezing in the most surface-level ’90s R&B references imaginable.
But Metro is up to the task, despite some overthinking. The St. Louis-raised beatmaker does more than simply lay the foundation for 21 Savage, who at his best sounds like the rare villain in a slasher movie that you root for. Metro completely controls the brooding atmosphere, with beats that lay drum patterns rooted in Atlanta trap and Memphis crunk over an unpredictable mix of melodies and samples.
“Glock in My Lap” is arguably the most cinematic beat Metro’s ever made. Produced alongside Honorable C.N.O.T.E. and Southside, their three consecutive producer tags add tension like the consecutive footsteps on a creaky floor in a horror movie. All 21 has to do is follow Metro’s lead. Similarly, the busy “Rich Nigga Shit” instrumental madly weaves together a hypnotic string section with a breezy West Coast vibe (and lots of cowbell). It shouldn’t work but does, like a french fry dipped in a milkshake. 21 comes off slightly unnatural on the song, ultimately overshadowed by a Young Thug guest verse memorable enough to reignite Metro Thuggin pipedreams.
21 Savage is only comfortable when Metro is slightly more reserved. “Slidin” could fit on any Metro project released in the last half decade, and 21 is naturally rapping about violence as if he gets a kick out of it like O-Dog in Menace II Society: “I just made an opp do the running man,” he raps. His punchlines have been better, but he makes up for it by sounding like he’s skipping through a wasteland. “Steppin On Niggas” is the one Metro risk where 21 holds his own; he flows like he spent time studying Eazy-E.
Nevertheless it’s hard to be swept up by the aura of Savage Mode 2 when it’s just fine. The first Savage Mode didn’t become an ATL classic because of celebrity cameos or Billboard numbers; it was because Metro and 21 were at the peak of their powers, and only the producer is close here. 21 Savage is just along for the ride.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic | October 7, 2020 | 6.6 | 792684f2-521f-4021-a248-4bfbec1737f4 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On their impressive debut album for DFA, London's Factory Floor exist along an axis of artists that embrace industrial, post-punk, disco, acid, avant-garde minimalism, electro, dub and-- most crucially-- the dancefloor, without being beholden to any one genre. | On their impressive debut album for DFA, London's Factory Floor exist along an axis of artists that embrace industrial, post-punk, disco, acid, avant-garde minimalism, electro, dub and-- most crucially-- the dancefloor, without being beholden to any one genre. | Factory Floor: Factory Floor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18477-factory-floor-factory-floor/ | Factory Floor | Originally signed to London’s blastfirstpetite label, Factory Floor’s earliest transmissions included a 10” plus DVD box set and most telling, a 12” featuring remixes from the likes of Throbbing Gristle’s Christ Carter and Joy Division/New Order’s Stephen Morris. Soon after, Factory Floor collaborated with Chris & Cosey, the Pop Group’s Mark Stewart, and former New York downtown disco composer Peter Gordon, showing that the new band was well aware of its sonic forebears. Their sinewy self-titled debut for DFA now orients Factory Floor along an axis of artists that embrace industrial, post-punk, disco, acid, avant-garde minimalism, electro, dub and-- most crucially-- the dancefloor, without being beholden to any one genre.
It speaks to the trio’s acumen that, for all of the above musical signifiers, their album never feels overstuffed. They’ve peeled back the industrial drones that informed their earliest releases so as to get at the throbbing heart underneath. It’s evident from the start as “Turn It Up” starts as a 164 BPM tock before quickly paring down to a sensible 124 BPMs: With just a nerve-jangling synth line and handful of percussive events-- including a hi-hat that sounds as if the band whetted it down to a razor’s edge-- Void’s processed voice slithers between the masculine and feminine, and there’s enough frigid, metallic-tinged negative space to suggest a meat locker.
“Here Again” is similarly spartan: an ascending arpeggio, a twitch of a beat, a mix of sequencer and Gurnsey’s beat at its most mechanistic, Void’s “ooohs” dubbed to the point of turning to steam. The trio constantly ratchet up the pressure until the song’s midway point, wherein the tension finally breaks and Void’s line can finally be heard. It’s one of the few moments on the album where such anxiety actually gives way to release.
The album’s highlight is the seven-minute “Fall Back”. “Did it feel like you were going to fall on the ground?”, Void asks in a detached tone that falls between Throbbing Gristle’s “Hamburger Lady” and an alien abduction interrogation. The menace grows from there. When Factory Floor are in this mode, DFA’s influence is most clearly felt; it’s a perfect amalgam of programmed acid lines that seem about to ooze blood and live drums that mimic a man-machine, a hybrid sound of flesh and circuitry that underpinned the label’s most crucial singles. It’s certainly the most visceral music the label has released since the earliest Juan Maclean sides (and it’s the eeriest outside of the Invisible Conga People single).
The album’s lone drawback is that, for much of the disc’s 53 minutes, there are barely varying degrees of pressurization. The pacing falls somewhere between the dread of Walter White walking down his gasoline-soaked hallway on "Breaking Bad" versus the dread of walking the zombie-filled prison corridors of "The Walking Dead". The three minute-long interludes sprinkled throughout do little to leaven the situation. It’s exhausting, to where by album’s end, I’d be hard-pressed to differentiate between “Work Out” and “Breathe In”, even though both are bracing and thrilling as isolated tracks. But in a year where the likes of Kanye and Trent Reznor have reached deep into the dark circuitry of the Wax Trax back catalog to revive the corpse of industrial music, Factory Floor’s relentlessness suits the present moment. | 2013-09-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-09-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | DFA | September 13, 2013 | 8.2 | 79350016-bc84-4d2b-9dc0-52ca8d28a14d | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
On his fourth solo album of the year, the Louisiana rapper wears his regional roots with brash defiance. It’s a reminder of how thrilling he can be when he’s focused and cohesive. | On his fourth solo album of the year, the Louisiana rapper wears his regional roots with brash defiance. It’s a reminder of how thrilling he can be when he’s focused and cohesive. | YoungBoy Never Broke Again: 3800 Degrees | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/youngboy-never-broke-again-3800-degrees/ | 3800 Degrees | YoungBoy Never Broke Again is a viral phenomenon like few others. When you break down the streaming data, the endlessly controversy-baiting Baton Rouge rapper is one of the biggest artists in the world, with his own Fortnite emote to boot. Yet he remains a cult figure, with almost no radio support and few live performances, due to his enduring legal troubles. His fame is an example of what some critics have called “invisible music stardom,” the product of a fractured industry in which artists can rack up massive streaming numbers without being packaged and promoted to the public as pop artists usually are. There’s no real deliberate strategy behind his releases, aside from completely flooding the rap market and offering another song for the algorithm to shuffle. YouTube in particular is where YoungBoy is king: It’s a fitting platform for an artist whose lyrical threats and real-life exploits paint him as an extreme provocateur.
But on 3800 Degrees, his fourth full-length solo album of 2022, YoungBoy stakes his claim as an artist whose impact transcends the world of the internet. Though stylistically very different, in spirit, 3800 Degrees is similar to the turn Young Thug took around the time of the release of his debut commercial mixtape Barter 6. Back then, Thug’s frequently overwhelming flood of releases and leaks distilled into a more thoughtful and cohesive product. At 33 minutes, 3800 Degrees is more concise than many of YoungBoy’s frequently meandering albums. With its compact style and classic sound, it is more critic-friendly and more appealing to old head haters.
If you didn’t know YoungBoy had signed to Cash Money, you could probably guess based on the Juvenile-inspired cover art—an early signal that this album seeks to place YoungBoy in a particular historical lineage. The throwbacks go deeper than just the visuals, though; YoungBoy’s remix of C-Murder’s “Like a Jungle” presaged the nostalgia of 3800 Degrees. The production is a not-quite-retro but still classic affair, draped in the kind of clean basslines and MIDI piano you might hear on a No Limit release.
Despite his willingness to buck convention, YoungBoy is almost like a Voltron assembled from the legends of Louisiana rap: There’s the alien wavelengths of Lil Wayne, the erratic intensity of Silkk the Shocker and Mystikal, and the bluesy passion of Boosie and Kevin Gates. On “Choppa on My Shoulda,” YoungBoy offers himself as the literal reincarnation of Louisiana rap’s golden age: “So cutthroat, you would think that they brought Slim back from Magnolia.” YoungBoy wears his regional roots with pride on the bounce production “Ampd Up,” which recruits fellow Baton Rouge native Mouse on tha Track and includes a salsa-style montuno piano.
He’s not always fast or especially clever in his wordplay, but YoungBoy’s bars are frequently dense, delivered with an almost demonic energy; he crams his words into spaces where other rappers might need a breath. Every bar twists and swerves, his voice at once a high-pitched whine and a deep rumble. YoungBoy is a toxic crooner with a fondness for heartbroken ballads—there’s guitar all over albums like August’s The Last Slimeto, but 3800 Degrees strips away the soulful side to emphasize the menace. The pain and passion intertwine, with the paranoia of a life constantly lived on edge filtering into every moment.
Emotion dictates his delivery above all else, but YoungBoy’s raps never feel quite like pure freestyle either, with lyrics and phrases infused with melody for emphasis. On “Won’t Step on Me,” YoungBoy effortlessly pivots between a sing-song chorus and relentless verses; he lets his Southern twang hang out, contorting “Baton Rouge” to rhyme with “would.” The unrestrained intensity feels first-take and off-the-dome, his flow almost taunting the beat, never respecting its confines or rhythms, words spilling outside the margins. E-40 comes through with a guest verse and product placement for his branded wine, the Earl Stevens Mangoscato, on “Thug Nigga Story,” suggesting another reference point for YoungBoy’s wordy and unpredictable flows.
Even when YoungBoy is working with vintage sounds, he still exists on his own terms, arriving with brash defiance. As he declares on “It Could Go,” “I ain’t no 2Pac of this generation, I’m AI YoungBoy.” Just like he plays with the beat and twists his words into unexpected combinations, YoungBoy toys with tradition. He contains multitudes: he’s an heir to No Limit and Cash Money, an artist who embodies the idea of “gangsta rap” like few artists have since the 1990s. But he’s also prescient, building his empire by gaming new platforms and algorithms. More than any of his other full-length albums, 3800 Degrees is a culmination of—and a direct statement about—his ethos as an artist and individual. The surface may change, but the hustle at the heart of it all is timeless. | 2022-10-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Never Broke Again, LLC / Atlantic | October 13, 2022 | 7.8 | 79359d84-a807-4978-8816-5c50085831f1 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Newly reissued by Ghostly, this 2008 release from the influential experimental trio represents the zenith of their early drone excursions, and hints at the more meticulous compositions that were to come. | Newly reissued by Ghostly, this 2008 release from the influential experimental trio represents the zenith of their early drone excursions, and hints at the more meticulous compositions that were to come. | Emeralds: Solar Bridge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emeralds-solar-bridge/ | Solar Bridge | In their seven years as a trio, Emeralds evolved from jammy, lo-fi noiseniks into advanced abstractionists and, eventually, unabashed sentimentalists—from the “bullshit boring drone band” they once jokingly called themselves into prog-rock perfectionists, stalwart believers in the transcendental power of arpeggios and counterpoint. Between 2006 and 2008, their first three years together, John Elliott, Steve Hauschildt, and Mark McGuire were furiously prolific, putting out at least 37 releases—mostly CD-Rs and cassettes of freeform, side-long improv sessions recorded at home in Cleveland. Solar Bridge, originally released in June 2008 and newly reissued by Ghostly, nine years since the group disintegrated, is one of the peaks of that early period. A transitional work—not only their first CD release but also the first album they recorded to a computer, rather than straight to tape—it represents the zenith of their longform drone excursions before they moved on to shorter, more varied, and more meticulously composed pieces with their four subsequent major statements: Emeralds, What Happened, Does It Look Like I’m Here?, and Just to Feel Anything.
Particularly in their early years, Emeralds forced people to think differently about the act of listening. Or if not to think, exactly—because the best of their music operates on an unconscious level—then to feel differently, to orient yourself in new ways with your ears. Compared to the aggro overload often espoused by their Midwestern noise kin, Emeralds preferred to slow down and space out, opting for immersion over confrontation. Especially on record, their music prized interiority. In the early work, there are few riffs, melodies, or grooves—in fact, few identifiable musical events at all. Very little could be said to happen, and when it does, it’s often so gradual as to be imperceptible. Everything is blurred; with the rare exception of when McGuire’s guitar snakes forth from the mix, it’s impossible to discern what anyone is doing. On their early cassettes, their music resembles—in the most hypnotic way possible—a faraway airplane heard from inside a walk-in cooler while a flatbed hauling beehives idles outside.
That description largely holds for Solar Bridge. Despite recording digitally, they were still improvising in real time, with no subsequent edits or overdubs, and nothing on the album’s two original tracks, nor the reissue-only, previously unheard “Photosphere,” sounds like it could have been planned. Twelve and a half minutes long, “Magic” crosses the depth and density of a Rothko painting with the minimalistic detail of an Agnes Martin. Newly remastered, the Ghostly edition sounds markedly more vivid than the original (and that’s before taking into account the fact that many people’s experience of the first edition will have been not even via the original CD or LP, but as a lossy YouTube rip). A rumbling swath of minor-key drones establishes the color field; an infinitude of squiggle and fizz supplies the filigreed line work. The shape of the piece is a crescendo in search of a climax that never comes, as thickets of buzz swell and intensify. Twice, the music reaches an imperceptible peak before easing off, making way for a subtle shift in the tone color. There’s a suggestion of rhythm buried in the churn, but with so many oscillators running out of phase, you can only lock into a given pulse for a few cycles before your attention drifts to another. A multiplicity of experiences, all taking place simultaneously, are embedded in the tension between mechanical repetition and freeform drift.
“The Quaking Mess” operates according to similar principles, stretching out a single pedal tone for the length of its 14-minute run. For the first half, it’s arrayed in glistening tones that suggest coins spinning on a zinc countertop; McGuire’s guitar seeks out pockets of silence in the swirl to sketch brief, mournful suggestions of melody. In the second half, as additional frequencies fan out across the spectrum, filling in the intervals of the scale, a ringing open fifth assumes an almost architectural heft, like a pair of Greek columns emerging from the mist, and the final plateau is a monolithic drone of Sunn O)))-like intensity. The 17-minute “Photosphere,” on the other hand, is among the quietest, gentlest cuts in the band’s catalog—little more than a soft, shimmering cloud of the most reluctant dissonance. Listen closely, and you’ll hear a three-note melody cycling slowly downward, but otherwise, it sounds almost incidental, like a particularly sleepy chorus of guitar feedback. Eventually it fades out, lending the impression it might go on forever.
The serenity of “Photosphere” makes for a provocative contrast with the two tracks from Solar Bridge’s original release. Recalling the dank, muted qualities of Allegory of Allergies, a two-hour cassette that preceded Solar Bridge by 11 months, it underscores an element of the trio’s sound that has tended to be overlooked. While they were active, Emeralds were often described in cosmic terms, in no small part for the obvious influence they took from so-called kosmische German acts of the 1970s, like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Popol Vuh. But as time went on, they began to resist that reductive framing, and with good reason: They were cultivating their own style, one grown from a specifically Midwestern strain of psychedelia. While it’s possible to imagine their sprawling drones as the soundtracks to thousand-year-journeys across the Milky Way, there was always something refreshingly earthy about their music. You could just as easily flip the telescope and invert the metaphor, trading galactic webs for the mycorrhizal networks running through the soil beneath our feet—every vibrating frequency, every quivering tendril of tone, a zigzagging branch in a vast, interconnected symbiosis. Part of the beauty of revisiting Solar Bridge today is the opportunity it offers to revise what we thought we knew about the band. | 2022-10-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | October 4, 2022 | 8 | 793c888c-f4ae-4ddf-8f19-2bf681b59af1 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The serrated new EP from rawboned Philadelphia art rock band Palm is their best work to date, full of tensions that boil over and careen. | The serrated new EP from rawboned Philadelphia art rock band Palm is their best work to date, full of tensions that boil over and careen. | Palm: Shadow Expert EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/palm-shadow-expert-ep/ | Shadow Expert EP | When you hang with the same people long enough, you inevitably invent your own dialect with them. You also probably get sick of them occasionally. Palm’s Kasra Kurt, Eve Alpert, Hugo Stanley, and Gerasimos Livitsanos have a preternatural ability to get both of those ideas across at once with their rawboned art rock. Kurt and Alpert have been playing together since high school; in 2012, they formed Palm with Stanley and Kurt’s roommate Livitsanos at New York’s Bard College before relocating to Philadelphia. None of the quartet is trained in their respective instruments, so they developed their own messy syntax from scratch. Consequently, listening to Shadow Expert, their best work to date, is a lot like trying to understand people quarreling in a language you don’t understand. Surely there is a fundamental logic, but it can be impossible to tell.
With that, Palm create the frenzied mental math of an obsessive, circular argument. Kurt’s and Alpert’s contrapuntal guitar phrases on “Walkie Talkie” and “Trying” are ceaseless repetitions of warring thoughts that count to infinity before tensions boil over into new wildly careening anxieties, never resolving anything along the way. Shadow Expert’s six tracks only last for 17 minutes because diagramming that kind of entropy is completely unsustainable. By “Sign to Signal,” the album’s last track, attrition takes over and a final instrumental attack gradually sputters. It’s disorienting and exhausting.
Inscrutable though they may be, Palm are not completely sui generis: They descend from a long line of experimental weirdos. Throughout Shadow Expert you can hear echoes of Slint’s Spiderland, the brash clangor of pre-SST Sonic Youth, the tricky time signatures of math rock demigods Battles, and the wonky iridescence of Deerhoof and tUnE-yArDs (the latter two have shared producer Eli Crews with Palm). But whether or not they have the chaotic compositions of these forbears in mind, Palm seem most interested in willfully straddling the line of communication breakdowns.
With a shoegaze ethos, Kurt and Alpert’s vocals are utilitarian, generally dedicated to how they are interacting rather than what they are saying. In an uncommon moment of intelligibility, Kurt, who sometimes sounds like Avey Tare, admits as much on “Walnut” when he slowly tuts “I’ve had enough of,” before enunciating every syllable: “speak-ing words so you might un-der-stand!” Palm Mad Lib-ed together the lyrics of “Walkie Talkie” from magazine clippings, and in the song’s spiky midsection, Alpert and Kurt alternate chirping words at each other, finishing each other’s thoughts via the imagined titular device. But after this flurry, a familiar phrase—the title of their previous record—emerges: “Trading basics with each other,” Kurt sings amid the band’s controlled detonations.
Trading Basics, with a few exceptions, was more subdued and straightforward than the serrated Shadow Expert, but the concept behind their debut’s name remains pertinent. At points, as on “Trying,” Stanley’s frenetic drumming perfectly mimics the panicked guitar stabs. At others, like “Two Toes,” Livitsanos’ thundering bass tries to restrain Kurt and Alpert’s guitars from jumping down one another’s throats before an unexpected moment of strummed unison. The band is constantly communicating in esoteric shorthand, often in several cross-talking conversations at once. What is basic to them is confounding to the listener, and they take that idea to a logical extreme.
In doing so, Palm offer a paradox about the precise chaos of Shadow Expert. They are navigating jagged angles, often introducing new tensions without resolving old ones, but their combined efforts create their own synchronicity. Conflict, in and of itself, becomes an act of solidarity. | 2017-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Carpark | June 22, 2017 | 7.6 | 793e8767-05ba-4e18-9bcd-a056574ae0c5 | Matt Grosinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-grosinger/ | null |
An extensive 4xCD set celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Paisley Underground mainstays’ debut LP, chronicling the early years of the Los Angeles group’s underground rock. | An extensive 4xCD set celebrates the 40th anniversary of the Paisley Underground mainstays’ debut LP, chronicling the early years of the Los Angeles group’s underground rock. | The Dream Syndicate: The Days of Wine and Roses (Expanded Edition) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-dream-syndicate-the-days-of-wine-and-roses-expanded-edition/ | The Days Of Wine and Roses (40th Anniversary Expanded Edition) | The Dream Syndicate took their name from a 1973 album by Tony Conrad called Outside the Dream Syndicate. Conrad, in turn, was making a reference to the experimental group he co-founded with La Monte Young and John Cale, which tinkered with free jazz, drone, classical, and what Young called “dream music.” Even without those associations, it’s a great band name, combining the institutional with the mysterious, but that nod to Conrad and his cohort speaks to big ideas about what rock’n’roll could say and how it could say it. These three kids in their early twenties, along with the more seasoned drummer they persuaded to join them, were fascinated by ideas of noise and abrasion, din and drone, deconstruction and entropy, and they were committed to bringing those ideas to rock clubs. To audiences in the early 1980s, that mission made them just as confrontational as the punk bands still roaming L.A., and even more confounding.
They were equally besotted with the mainstream pop and rock of the 1960s, celebrating Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds right alongside Nuggets and the Velvet Underground. Those interests aligned the band with a crew of local acts that would coalesce into the Paisley Underground, which included the Bangles, the Rain Parade, and Green on Red. Both of these pools of influence—’60s rock and ’60s avant-garde—combine beautifully on their debut, The Days of Wine and Roses, released in 1982 and generally considered to be a college-rock landmark with an outsize impact on the Minutemen and R.E.M., among others. It’s an album of sparkling spontaneity, full of songs that creep and crawl with a weird, dark energy, as though even the players themselves don’t always know where they’re headed. Pitting highly structured songcraft against discursive guitar outbursts, the Dream Syndicate struck a precarious balance of order and chaos that remains exciting and combustible four decades later.
Commemorating the album’s 40th anniversary, this 54-song, 4xCD expanded edition of The Days of Wine and Roses shows how the band developed those big ideas during its first days together. While not presented in chronological order, the set works as a year-in-the-life history that includes some of their earliest rehearsals, shows, and recordings. The L.A. scene was in flux in the early ’80s: The first wave of punk bands had generally subsided, and hardcore was only just starting up. New-wave and skinny-tie bands were enjoying some success, but they reflected larger trends rather than specifically local concerns. Fresh out of college, Steve Wynn found a job at Rhino Records (the store, not the label), where his co-workers dramatically expanded his musical vocabulary. Nels Cline had a particularly profound impact on Wynn, introducing him to the works of Don Cherry and Albert Ayler, among other free-jazz pioneers.
Yet Wynn’s first recordings barely hint at what would make the Dream Syndicate so distinctive. In October 1981 he taped a handful of songs in his basement with a 4-track and a drum machine and released two of them under the name 15 Minutes. There’s a peculiar charm in the way he turns his primitive setup into a dank aesthetic—an approach that works best on “That’s What You Always Say.” With its tinny robot beat and Wynn’s low, close-mic’ed vocals, this demo sounds curiously goth, or at the very least suggests he’ll soon start a new-wave band. Compare that version to the one the Dream Syndicate recorded a few months later, just a week after they made their live debut at Club Lingerie. This version, released on their Down There EP, opens with Kendra Smith playing a walking bassline just a click too fast, then gives way to Wynn and Karl Precoda’s violent guitar scribbles. It has a lot more life than the 15 Minutes version, not to mention a frazzled paranoia that recalls the Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer.”
The quartet spent much of 1982 practicing and playing shows around Southern California. In May they booked a short set at a vintage store called 1313 Mockingbird Lane, a show notable primarily for the debut of an eight-minute instrumental called “It’s Gonna Be Alright.” It’s not a jam so much as a distension and distortion, with the band rending the song as they play it. The rhythm section of bassist Smith and drummer Dennis Duck (who’d just defected from Human Hands) holds everything together with what could be a krautrock cover of “Gimme Some Lovin’,” while Wynn and Precoda sound like they’re cramming in bits of every other song they know. At any given moment it’s a Can jam, a lysergic Pink Floyd freakout, a psych-rock rave-up, an act of punk aggression, a hoedown. It’s a mess, but an exciting one.
When they played the song again in September—live on KPFK, at 2 a.m., with a live audience—they were calling it “Open Hour” but still capturing that same barely contained chaos. It didn’t make the final tracklist for their debut LP, perhaps because it was too unwieldy for an album of such controlled sprawl. Eventually it did morph into “John Coltrane Stereo Blues” on their 1984 follow-up, This Is Not the New Dream Syndicate.
All of these experiments and experiences culminated in The Days of Wine and Roses, which focused the band’s wilder forays while sharpening their songcraft. “Definitely Clean” has the tumble-down-the-stairs energy and lascivious feedback of prime Kinks, with Wynn and Precoda’s guitars racing toward a finish line. A similar riff works in a completely different way on “Halloween,” which sounds like the players turned their sheet music upside down. Rather than carry momentum, the guitars disrupt it in a deeply unsettling way. There are moments of sunny clarity on these songs, yet most of the album exists in a woozy, dreamlike space: “I dreamed last night I was born a thousand years ago,” Wynn sings on “When You Smile,” which locates a queasy existentialism in the imagery of silly love songs: “It seems like the end of the world when you smile.”
In some ways, it really was the end of the world. Before The Days of Wine and Roses even hit record stores, Smith left the band; she would soon form Opal with David Roback. The Dream Syndicate weathered frequent turnover throughout the rest of the decade, finally breaking up in 1989, before reuniting in 2012. During their initial run, they released a string of perfectly fine albums that sound overthought and overproduced compared to their debut. That makes the nostalgia of the album title sound like a self-fulfilling prophecy, as though they already knew that it was all downhill from 1982. But Days isn’t about the past, despite their fascination with both the avant-garde and the mainstream of the ’60s. It’s more about the present moment and all the possibilities it holds; by focusing on the immediate now—not any one point in 1982 but the point of inspiration and creation—this crew of young, inexperienced thinkers and players managed to translate heady ideas into visceral music. | 2023-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fire America | June 24, 2023 | 8.5 | 793ea1b2-ee46-4d14-8bd2-388fdf4968fe | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a monumental artifact of soul—one of the best live albums of all time, from the singer who wrote the 20th century’s defining civil rights anthem. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a monumental artifact of soul—one of the best live albums of all time, from the singer who wrote the 20th century’s defining civil rights anthem. | Sam Cooke: One Night Stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-cooke-one-night-stand-live-at-the-harlem-square-club-1963/ | One Night Stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 | About three-quarters of the way through One Night Stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club, the beat stops and Sam Cooke says he’s gotta tell us about his baby right now. Backed by drumrolls, clattering cymbals, and a swaying buzz of minor-chord guitar, Cooke is speak-singing, hoarsely, in a free-flowing cadence. He and his lover fussed and fought; she left; he feels so alone; and now he has to banter with a telephone operator before finally—finally!—he gets through to her. “I got a message for you, honey/I wanna tell you that darling you-u-u-u-uuuu, ohhhhhhh,” he roars, desperate and teasing. The crowd can’t stand it, erupts in shrieks; you can pick out individual voices. Smoke and booze hang in the sweaty Saturday night air. Cooke starts up again: “You send me.”
It’s a sly twist on Cooke’s first pop hit and only No. 1, “You Send Me,” originally released in 1957. At Miami’s Harlem Square Club, he bats the title around twice more, each time heightening the expectation he’ll switch into the familiar tune, each time also reminding us how far he’s evolved since then. Cooke doesn’t end up playing the rest of the song, but his howling entreaties make the mere promise of it feel like the entire world. When, right at the brink and without straying from his telephone story, he abruptly pivots into a different number, the 1950s are vanquished and the ’60s have definitively begun.
As a civil rights advocate and architect of soul music, alongside Ray Charles, Cooke is a towering figure in American history. After Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Rosa Parks comforted herself by listening to Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come,” and its resonance has never waned since, from Barack Obama’s first presidential election victory speech to the funeral of George Floyd. The song has become foundational, and so is Cooke’s artistry as a whole, touching anyone who was ever influenced by soul: Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding on through to Beyoncé and Bruce Springsteen, Sexyy Red and Jonathan Richman, and many more in between.
And yet for someone whose legacy has become such a part of the cultural firmament, Cooke remains surprisingly mysterious. As a successful Black singer, songwriter, and businessperson—he co-founded his own label, SAR Records, at a time when that was rare for any artist—Cooke prefigured Prince and Michael Jackson. In 1986, he was one of the first 10 inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, alongside obvious shoo-ins like Elvis Presley. But even then, Rolling Stone misstated both the place and year of Cooke’s birth. Jerry Wexler, the Atlantic executive who coined the term “rhythm and blues,” told The New York Times that Cooke was “the best singer who ever lived,” but not before the same Times critic got Cooke’s home city wrong. Though he died in 1964, Cooke seems to somehow keep winning Grammys, including a lifetime achievement award in 1999, but his discography has hardly been given the retrospective attention of other industry titans from the era. His work is messy and alive, and fraught with existential contradictions.
In 1931, Samuel Cook was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Delta blues birthplace at whose crossroads Robert Johnson purportedly sold his soul to the Devil. He was the fifth of eight children, carried by his mother on a Greyhound bus to Chicago while still a toddler. There, he started his singing career in his father’s church at the precocious age of 6, performing alongside his siblings as the Singing Children. At 16, he joined up with a local teenage gospel group, the Highway QCs. Three years later, he was invited to join the gospel circuit’s more established Soul Stirrers. At 26, he made his solo, secular debut—first unceremoniously with a one-off single as Dale Cook, and then, with an added “e” to seem “classier,” as Sam Cooke, with “You Send Me.”
In “You Send Me,” Cooke delivered a masterpiece of restraint, expressing the giddiness of new love with a breezy sophistication that kept any hint of romantic love’s usual erotic frisson concealed beneath the smooth surface. “You move me,” he sang, with the disarming politesse of Eddie Haskell, several years before the Troggs roughened the phrase on “Wild Thing.” A string of hits that still populate oldies stations, film soundtracks, and karaoke songbooks would follow, but there’s plenty of reason to wonder what could have been. As was typical of the pre-rock era, Cooke’s albums were often scattershot, at least until he won artistic control in late 1963. And even then, with an eye on the careers of the few other Black performers who had won over the era’s white audiences—especially jazz-pop trailblazer Nat King Cole and Cooke’s near-contemporaries like Harry Belafonte and Johnny Mathis—Cooke was not averse to supper-club schmaltz. Devastatingly, Cooke was shot and killed under disputed circumstances on December 11, 1964. In a posthumous insult, industry vagaries kept portions of his catalog languishing out of print for decades.
One Night Stand! Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963 is a monumental soul artifact, one of the greatest live albums of all time, and, in its defiant partying from the depths of the segregated South, a veiled precursor to the explicit activism of “A Change Is Gonna Come,” which wasn’t released as a single until after Cooke’s death. In a scant 10 tracks and 39 minutes, the album captures one of the most beguiling figures of 20th-century music as close to the peak of his powers as he was ever recorded, sounding grittier and more seductive than you’ll hear on those good-times oldies blocks but still every bit in command. Now, 60 years later, it’s a righteous celebration that collapses the decades.
Ahead of the performance that would end up on One Night Stand!, Cooke was in a fascinating flux. At the start of 1962, he was already the best-selling singles artist on RCA after Elvis. That October, while James Brown was in Harlem recording what would become his classic Live at the Apollo—and when nuclear tensions peaked during the Cuban Missile Crisis—Cooke was touring the UK with Little Richard, who dashed off for a Liverpool bill headlining above the Beatles. The appreciative reaction overseas helped encourage Cooke to incorporate more gospel fervor into a reworked set, which he debuted at the Apollo, complete with hanging-on-the-telephone “You Send Me” riff, on November 2. On the same Apollo bill was another soul luminary, saxophonist King Curtis, who Cooke cajoled into joining him on an upcoming Southern tour even though, as a revered session player, he could have made more money at home. Cooke closed out 1962 with a return to his roots, joining the Soul Stirrers onstage for New Year’s Eve.
At the same time Cooke was emphasizing gospel passion in his live music, he was becoming more politically engaged. He was poring over the poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the pioneering Black writer from the post-Reconstruction period. According to Cooke’s biographer Peter Guralnick, he was also “undoubtedly” reading a James Baldwin essay published in The New Yorker in November 1962. Alongside an urgent call to action, the piece, part of the writer’s enduring race-relations book The Fire Next Time, ends with a powerful assertion that Black is beautiful. Right before the tour with King Curtis, Cooke gave an interview urging his fellow Black stars not to forget Black weekly newspapers and magazines.
No one seems to remember how it was decided that two RCA engineers would be flown down to record Cooke’s January 12, 1963 performance in Miami. The Harlem Square Club was a 2,000-capacity building within the “Little Broadway” district of the segregated city’s historically Black neighborhood of Overtown. According to Newsweek, “Liquor was sold from a caged enclosure by a bartender armed with a shotgun.” The engineers set up their equipment—eight microphones and a three-track mixer—during a 4 p.m. matinee, adjusted it once the crowd exploded for the first evening show, at 10 p.m., and then gave up all hope of getting back to the stage before the late show, at 1 a.m., which would be immortalized on One Night Stand!.
It’s the strongest full-length Cooke ever laid to tape. His studio albums—even the best, August 1963’s wee-small-hours blues opus Night Beat and February 1964’s expansive Ain’t That Good News—were lavished with strings, choirs, and superfluous cover songs aimed at white swells with fat wallets. Live at the Harlem Square Club showcases a tight, guitar-driven band that King Curtis’ fiery sax takes to another level; Cooke’s vocals, while still as melismatic and controlled as ever, are gorgeously rough-edged. Aside from King Curtis’ introductory “Soul Twist”—a 1962 instrumental hit—and a wry rendition of the Nat King Cole standard “(I Love You) for Sentimental Reasons” that’s tucked away at the back end of a woozy medley, One Night Stand! is all Cooke originals. It’s an ode to spontaneity and evanescence that feels as elaborately plotted as a concept album.
In this setting, Cooke’s hits take on new life. After a few words from King Curtis and a friendly greeting from Cooke, “Feel It (Don’t Fight It)” sets out a pair of favored Cooke themes, the transcendent powers of good music and young love, at an uncharacteristically breakneck pace; even if you wanted to fight the feeling, you’d have to catch it first. “Cupid” arrives almost in quotes—“Maybe you remember this one,” Cooke begins, “a very nice little song, nice and sweet”—and accentuates the original’s Caribbean feel and stretches out the onomatopoeic “sss” when Cupid’s arrow goes “straight to my lover’s heart,” while Cooke’s chuckles drive home the irony that for all of the tragedies in his life, he surely never had to pray to a minor Greek love deity. Cooke livens up his dance craze tie-in “Twistin’ the Night Away,” here interpolated with part of Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” by exhorting everyone to “take round” their handkerchiefs; his “take the, take the, take the” ad libs feel as jubilantly insistent as a Chuck Berry guitar lick.
Cooke’s interplay with the crowd also transforms the material. “Chain Gang” was always an unusual pop hit, with lyrics about forced, largely Black labor, and the propulsive Harlem Square Club version posits an alternative universe where the Clash covered this instead of “I Fought the Law.” But there’s a secondary type of release in a mass of people shouting “uhh” and “ahh” as Cooke purrs, “Oh yeah,” that seems more in line with the lusty grunts at the end of Fleetwood Mac’s “Big Love.” In a full-throated sing-along of “(I Love You) for Sentimental Reasons,” at least one woman’s voice stands out on its own, filling out the harmony. Other voices squeal. Not unlike Apollo 11, the 2019 moon-landing documentary using unreleased archival footage, it feels like you’re bearing witness to a key historical moment from an uncannily intimate perspective.
Part of the tension of One Night Stand! comes from Cooke’s purposefully sappy celebrations of love positioned alongside his real-world cynicism. The front end of the “Sentimental Reasons” medley is the Cooke original “It’s All Right,” a song of unconditional devotion that’s introduced as advice for men who hear that their lovers have been unfaithful—they should try a little tenderness, obviously. The second-to-last song of the set, “Nothing Can Change This Love,” seems like a swooning love song that’s all “cake and ice cream” in the lyrics, but Cooke’s cackling laughter, King Curtis’ yearning sax solo, and the band’s ragged minor chords emphasize the cracks in the studio original’s cool reserve.
Cooke’s deconstructed take on “You Send Me” follows another sweeping bit of self-mythologizing. On the bluesy “Somebody Have Mercy,” then his most recent song on the pop charts, Cooke sings about “goin’ down to the bus station”—his own autobiographical crossroads—and wondering if a “cotton-pickin’ matchbox” will hold his clothes (“Can you imagine me carrying one of them suitcases?” he asks the audience). At its core, it’s another song about lovesickness—“have mercy” in the Roy Orbison-Jesse Katsopolis sense—but in another ad lib, Cooke shoots down an urban legend circulating at the time: “It ain’t that leukemia, that ain’t it,” he deadpans. He soon chuckles, but the need to respond to a “Paul is dead”-level conspiracy theory is an indication of the pressures confronting a gospel-turned-pop star, two weeks shy of his 32nd birthday, long before the 24-hour news cycle. The live version, with another standout King Curtis solo, vastly improves on the studio cut, but the closing lyric would be malapropistic brilliance in any incarnation: “I got such a long way to get there/And such a short time to go,” Cooke sings. It doesn’t make sense, but the dissociated feeling resonates through the ages.
One Night Stand! crests—as does, arguably, Cooke’s entire career pre-“A Change Is Gonna Come”—with an incredible rendition of “Bring It On Home to Me,” then a recent non-album single and Cooke’s most gospel-charged solo side to date. “This song gon’ tell you how I feel,” Cooke begins, and he doesn’t let the audience down; if you listen closely, you’ll hear a thumping sound that can only be Cooke pounding his chest. The band is raucous, Cooke exudes joy, and the crowd sings along like it’ll keep the lights from going on, Cooke from leaving, them from having to go home to 1963 reality. Cooke recognizes it, too: “Everybody’s with me tonight!”
As critic Hilary Saunders has written, One Night Stand! throws “the party of the century on the eve of destruction.” Six months after its recording, Cooke’s 18-month-old son died in a drowning accident. In October, Cooke was turned away from a Shreveport, Louisiana, hotel in the events that inspired “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The following February, again in Miami, he met with Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X. By the end of 1964, Cooke was gone.
Before Cooke’s passing, he did release one live album, 1964’s Sam Cooke at the Copa, a slick set so Las Vegas-ready that it’s introduced by Sammy Davis Jr.; one jarring highlight is a hepcat-paced “Blowin’ in the Wind” cover. Cooke’s manager prior to his death was Allen Klein, the infamously pugnacious impresario who later feuded with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and that fact seems to partly explain why One Night Stand! sat in the vaults until RCA brought in a new head of A&R in the mid-’80s. Indeed, several of Cooke’s albums were long out of print, including the album with “A Change Is Gonna Come.” When this live set was finally issued in 1985, as Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963, amid a spate of archival soul releases, critics took notice, sending the 22-year-old recording to No. 11 on the Village Voice’s 1985 Pazz & Jop poll.
Although Leslie Odom Jr. gives an emotional performance as Cooke in a 2020 film, One Night in Miami…, dramatizing the 1964 encounter with Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X, there may be a reason that no one has yet made a biopic about Cooke alone. His lofty mission, combined with the brutal indignities of Black stardom in ’50s and ’60s America, meant that he was constantly recalibrating, his innermost thoughts tucked away deep: a soul cipher. He was complicated. Even to his intimates, Cooke was, as biographer Guralnick wrote, “someone who could mask everything but his ambition.” As a little boy, he pretended popsicle sticks were his audience. By the time he was 9, he told his brother he was never going to work a regular job, just sing and get rich. In one of his final interviews, he spoke earnestly of his “intense desire to make all of my audiences happy.” He also offered an inscrutably open-ended definition of soul: “the capacity to project a feeling.”
In 2000, another version of the Harlem Square Club recording was released as part of the box set The Man Who Invented Soul. If this was your introduction to these performances, as it was for me, you missed out for years on much of the crowd noise that helps make the music feel so alive. The audience’s rowdy presence was restored in a 2005 remaster, which revived the original “One Night Stand” working title, swapped in new cover artwork that shows King Curtis, and is widely available on streaming platforms. If Cooke’s purpose in life was “wooing the world,” as The Independent put it, One Night Stand! is the album that can still pull it off.
Cooke recognized early on that Bob Dylan would draw a crowd not for the way that he sang, but for the message in his words. In January 1963, for Cooke, performance was still more gestural. One Night Stand! ends not with a protest song, despite the tumultuous times, but with a manifestation of communal joy that the powers that be couldn’t take away. The song is the featherlight yet floor-stomping soul groove “Having a Party,” which neatly bookends the album by name-checking King Curtis’ set-opening “Soul Twist” and then adds yet another perfect Cooke lyric: “The Cokes are in the icebox,” he sings, recognizing the poetry in the details of everyday mid-century existence. The mood is euphoric, shaky, the right amount of too much.
“I gotta go, but when you go home, keep on having a party,” Cooke announces at last, in a farewell that feels like a benediction. “If you’re with your loved ones somewhere, keep on having that party. If you feel good all alone riding with the radio some time, riding in a car and the radio is on, keep on having that party.” As “A Change Is Gonna Come” ascends to its sacred place as a national hymn, Live at the Harlem Square Club stands as a reminder that somewhere in between too-hard living and fearful dying—who knows what’s up there beyond the sky, anyway?—we surrender ourselves to Saturday night. Cooke told us how he felt, and now everybody is with him. | 2023-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | September 24, 2023 | 10 | 7942db70-1125-43f5-86f6-20a5ad66d324 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | |
Sounding at once meticulous and reckless, sinister and goofy, the experimental trio’s first album in nearly a decade is its most direct appeal to the pleasure center. | Sounding at once meticulous and reckless, sinister and goofy, the experimental trio’s first album in nearly a decade is its most direct appeal to the pleasure center. | Black Dice: Mod Prog Sic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-dice-mod-prog-sic/ | Mod Prog Sic | Listening to Black Dice has always been a daunting proposition. After years of primal catharsis therapy on early releases like Semen of the Sun and Cold Hands, the Brooklyn-based trio of Aaron Warren and brothers Bjorn and Eric Copeland began to mellow out with 2002’s Beaches & Canyons. With that album, Black Dice transformed into something more expansive and far stranger: an abstract rock group who tore up the experimental-rock blueprint. This was psychedelia that had roots in space rock, electronic music, underground dance clubs, and lo-fi ambient. They also summoned a bizarre strain of new age that carried an undertow of tumult, a subliminal threat to the peace they were trying to induce. The dominant aesthetic became something like avant-garde slapstick, with constant tension between hypnotic and disruptive impulses.
Mod Prog Sic, Black Dice’s seventh album and first since 2012’s Mr. Impossible, continues their uncompromising approach. The opening “Bad Bet” reintroduces their predilection for shifting moods and subverting expectations several times per minute. It bursts into life with no niceties, as if it had been accumulating pressure in a laboratory vat. After an intro of sinister, prowling electronic music that recalls Cabaret Voltaire’s Red Mecca, a buoyant, 130-plus BPM techno beat launches the track into an unsettling strain of 3 a.m. dance-floor hedonism. You don’t raise your hands in exultation to Black Dice’s club bangers; you use them to cup your skull in confusion. Like their best work, it sounds at once meticulous and reckless, sinister and goofy.
More than two decades into their career, Black Dice have shorn away some of the chaos and turbulence that once swirled through their music. The change brings their brutish beats and scrapyard percussion into sharper relief. The diseased, mocking guitar tone and choppy vocal sample that populate “Tuned Out” evoke Butthole Surfers during their peak 1980s live debauchery. “Tuned Out” builds a potent momentum that reminds you that guitarist/electronics wiz Eric Copeland released three records on club-oriented label L.I.E.S. These songs are still riddled with distortion and akimbo rhythms, but the music is streamlined into a twisted functionality, doing to your hips what they’d previously done to your mind.
More than ever, Mod Prog Sic extends Copeland’s demented dance-floor sensibilities to their illogical ends. “Big Chip” features the funkiest beats on the album, while “Jocko” approximates the wah-wah guitar from Isaac Hayes’s “Theme From Shaft” and then warps it into a strafing Roland 303 acid riff, processing the elements into a Rube Goldberg machine jitter. A peppy, distorted species of techno, “Downward Arrow” is the cut most likely to get dance floors throbbing, with its whip-crack beats and croaking “yeah yeah yeah”s. While nodding to pop music’s impulse to get bodies moving, Black Dice can’t help undermining it with indecipherable voices and arcade-game warbles that whirl around the rhythm.
Black Dice’s 2009 album Repo prominently featured the phrase “Go where new experiences await you” on its cover. A quarter-century into their career, and after a nine-year hiatus, this mantra still guides their work. While they revel in disorientation, Mod Prog Sic marks the trio’s most direct appeal to the pleasure center.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | FourFour | October 7, 2021 | 7.4 | 7943467f-64be-488d-964e-027011b89814 | Dave Segal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/ | |
Side project of Black Mountain's Stephen McBean this time includes contributions from members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Jackie O Motherfucker. | Side project of Black Mountain's Stephen McBean this time includes contributions from members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Jackie O Motherfucker. | Pink Mountaintops: Outside Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12918-outside-love/ | Outside Love | Vancouver's Stephen McBean may be better known as the principal songwriter and frontman for the gritty psych outfit Black Mountain, but he also leads that group's gentler counterpart, Pink Mountaintops. Though Pink Mountaintops was originally conceived as a solo project, McBean clearly thrives in a collaborative environment. The project's third album, Outside Love, features input from an impressive cast of indie rock staples such as Sophie Trudeau of Godspeed You! Black Emperor/A Silver Mt. Zion, the Sweet Hereafter's Jesse Sykes, Josh Stevenson of Jackie O Motherfucker, and his longtime creative collaborator, Amber Webber of Black Mountain and Lightning Dust.
Although Pink Mountaintops were temporarily put on the back burner after the success of Black Mountain's self-titled sophomore album in 2005, McBean resurrected the group the following year with the release of Axis of Evol, on which he continued to explore his deep-rooted love of dark psychedelia with minimalist rhythmic patterns and spidery, hazy, lo-fi guitar. With Outside Love, McBean takes this theme on an adventurous journey to surprising heights, and the fully realized sound allows his ideas more room to breathe. The granular spaciousness of the production, when paired with intentionally sloppy drums and chiming guitars, imparts an atmospheric, almost gothic feel. This works beautifully on the Mazzy Star-esque "While You Were Dreaming" and on the outstanding opening track, "Axis: Thrones of Love", which expands with lackadaisical smokiness as a rinse of reverb settles like morning mist over the male-female co-sung chorus.
Despite the cloudy threads that crisscross through every song, Outside Love throws out some supremely positive vibes. On "Holiday", McBean declares that everyone he knows deserves a vacation in the sun "until the lions are off of their backs", and "The Gayest of Sunbeams" is a shambolic, joyous romp built on uptempo chord shifts and group vocals that burn with enthusiasm. But it takes multiple listens to uncover the complexity of Outside Love; despite its deceptively simple architecture, it's grounded by rich stylistic flickering. The folky ambiance of "And I Thank You" could have slipped out of Bill Callahan's back catalogue, while the string section that hangs in the background of "Vampire" has a discreet but haunting presence, like cobwebs diffusing light through a window. This kind of agile songwriting shows that Pink Mountaintops' substance lies not only in what they show, but in what they choose to hide; here on Outside Love, they move between shadows and light until the form is revealed. | 2009-05-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2009-05-04T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | May 4, 2009 | 7.3 | 794688f4-5ba0-49fe-a3db-757a1e15bec3 | Pitchfork | null |
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Modern hardcore legends offered definitive proof of their staying power as our apocalyptic poet laureates on their latest, a demonic and harsh concept album about Armageddon. | Modern hardcore legends offered definitive proof of their staying power as our apocalyptic poet laureates on their latest, a demonic and harsh concept album about Armageddon. | Integrity: Howling, for the Nightmare Shall Consume | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/integrity-howling-for-the-nightmare-shall-consume/ | Howling, for the Nightmare Shall Consume | A word of caution: Dwid Hellion, Integrity’s vocalist and sole constant member, is not a man you want to fuck with. He’s not one for chit-chat; lend him the floor in an interview and he will go full Aleister Crowley, framing his nearly thirty-year career as an ceaseless campaign to rub the world the wrong way. “I am that moment when you would give anything to have a second chance, when everything has fallen away, hope has been lost, nothing is left to lose and when you start auditioning religions just in the distant hope that someone, something hears your cry and turns back the hands on the clock,” he proclaimed to the underground music blog Blow the Scene, in 2010. Between his deep admiration for Charles Manson (he’s released the serial killer’s music through his label); his fascination with the Church of Holy Terror, a satanic cult; and that one time he allegedly nailed a human ear to someone’s door; Dwid easily stands as one of heavy music’s most incendiary figures, the G.G. Allin of modern hardcore.
Undoubtedly, the frontman’s masterful trolling catalyzed the Cleveland band’s rise to infamy in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Nevertheless, Integrity’s reputation as fire-starters is ultimately overshadowed by their role in shaping metallic hardcore as we know it. Without their revolutionary fusion of punk, metal, and noise–captured spectacularly on 1995’s magnum opus Humanity Is the Devil–bands like Converge, Full of Hell, Code Orange, and Hatebreed may never have existed.
With their new album Howling, for the Nightmare Shall Consume, Integrity have offered definitive proof of their staying power as hardcore’s resident apocalyptic poets. As with much of the band’s discography, the group’s latest effort it is a concept album, a timely one at that; It details the final days of humanity’s long, slow march to Armageddon, a blood-spattered tableau populated by burning corpses (“Burning Beneath the Devils Cross”), demonic serpents (“Serpent of the Crossroads”), and false messiahs (“Unholy Salvation of Sabbatai Zevi”), among other terrifying characters.
The End of Days being the sublime tragedy to end all tragedies, it’s only fair that Dwid and company mine the murkiest depths so as to ensure that its ecstasies are properly expressed. Its 11 tracks and assorted bonuses play out as a march through the circles of sonic hell, with Dwid as our yawping, spitting guide. The record opens with a cold blast of Scandinavian air (“Fallen to Destroy,” “Blood Sermon,” a punishing two-parter wherein guitarist Dom Romeo unloads a clip of piercing, winding riffs à la Darkthrone). After cranking up the heat with some molten beat-downs (“Hymn for the Children of the Black Flame”, “Die With Your Boots on”), Integrity pivot to anguished long-form, the album’s evil, epic heart: the sludgy “Serpent of the Crossroads,” which contrasts Dwid’s gravelly screams with Dom’s lithe, slithering fretwork.
As always, Integrity’s affinity for chaos supplies much of Howling’s latent gravitas, especially on the first few listens. The record’s lurching pace is powered by a bludgeoning type of bait-and-switch mechanic; For every extended, arduous trudge through the trenches, there’s a shot of good, unclean fun: “Die With Your Boots on”, “Burning Beneath the Devils Cross” and “String Up My Teeth” are three of the catchiest songs the band ever wrote, ragers situated halfway between Motörhead and Morbid Angel. Spin it a few more times, though, and a more disciplined, arcing dynamic emerges: a meticulous dynamic blueprint as old as the Book of Revelation, even man himself. Every temple, no matter how arcane, needs a structure–not just in terms of brick and mortar, but of spirit. Judging from Howling, for the Nightmare Shall Consume, that foundation isn’t just well-intact—it’s impenetrable. | 2017-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | July 14, 2017 | 7.7 | 794abfb0-ec8f-48de-83c9-cbd9b58079cc | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
The Vienna-based singer and musician’s second album turns to high-concept cabaret pop, exuding a cool melancholy that complements its textured production. | The Vienna-based singer and musician’s second album turns to high-concept cabaret pop, exuding a cool melancholy that complements its textured production. | Sofie Royer: Harlequin | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sofie-royer-harlequin/ | Harlequin | As a violinist, painter, founding DJ at Boiler Room, and former staffer at her label Stones Throw, Sofie Royer brings an inquisitive, curatorial touch to the music she now creates as a solo artist. Her debut, 2020’s Cult Survivor, was an idiosyncratic, ambitious album that specialized in lush 1980s-style soft rock. On her second album, Harlequin, the Iranian-Austrian musician retains its dreamy sounds but turns toward high-concept cabaret pop with heightened self-assurance and grandiose instrumentation. The music exudes a cool melancholy that complements its textured production.
As a teen, Royer studied violin in Vienna and played at opera houses as a member of the youth orchestra Junge Deutsche Philharmonie—experiences that seem to have informed Harlequin. In visual material and performances around the album, she adopted theatrical costuming inspired by the 19th-century Italian pantomime character Pierrot, taking the desolate clown as a model for her first singing gigs. “When I did my first live concert, I dressed myself and my band as clowns,” she said in a statement. “It felt like a protective armor from my regular self. I didn’t feel as vulnerable onstage.” The album uses theatrics to impart moments of heartache and despondency. Her vocals are honest and frank, with abstract production serving as an opulent backdrop.
Baroque overture “Schweden Espresso” embraces Royer’s early training, while its opening lyrics—“I step in the room/You’re not on the scene”—introduce the record’s theatrical concept. Throughout the robust arrangement, strings interweave with Royer’s rapturous, airy vocal timbre. On “Court Jester,” she grapples with an existential crisis over a playful production, briefly singing in German. Through an ADHD-medicated haze on “Baker Miller Pink,” her straight-to-the-point vocal technique makes a clunky line like “Not an original thought in that deliberately unbrushed head of hair” lie seamlessly across the song’s new wave tapestry.
The narrative crests as Harlequin reaches its second act on “Klein-Marx,” in which Royer envisions throwing herself from Vienna’s Kleine Marxerbrücke bridge. The bluesy “Feeling Bad Forsyth Street” transports us to the Lower East Side, recalling fellow Stones Throw act Mild High Club—particularly their heady 2016 album Skiptracing. Subtle strings coat the folksy song as a spaced-out Royer offers another antidote: “I let the realm get all up in my head/I talk to my Xans before I go to bed.” A wonky keyboard shapes “Ballad of Bobby Beausoleil,” an ode for the Manson Family disciple that surveys his film roles alongside his 1969 murder of Gary Hinman: It plays like a requiem for stolen youth.
The conceits can verge on pretentious, as on the two-minute orchestral composition “Sick Boy,” which name-drops Lauren Bacall and Marilyn Monroe by her birth name, Norma Jean Baker. But behind the theatrical motifs and the shield of performance art, Royer has become a more expressive and distinctive vocalist after the deadpan approach on her debut. Harlequin ends with the piano-laced last call “Someone Is Smoking,” where she sings in a breathy register as she reconciles with nihilism: “I have traveled for so long/Only to find I’ve not come very far/I was made to do nothing/And from that, nothing comes.” At its heart Harlequin is an extravagant response to cynicism, as Royer immerses herself in an illustrious theater of the mind. | 2022-09-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-26T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | Stones Throw | September 26, 2022 | 7.1 | 794bb957-ee49-400c-96c8-4cadca55bdbb | Jaelani Turner-Williams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jaelani-turner-williams/ | |
Past popes have released albums, but Pope Francis is the first to go straight pop. With collaborators that include a folk-swami, a theatrical lyricist, and a former member of Italian prog-rock band Le Orme, Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video. | Past popes have released albums, but Pope Francis is the first to go straight pop. With collaborators that include a folk-swami, a theatrical lyricist, and a former member of Italian prog-rock band Le Orme, Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video. | Pope Francis: Wake Up! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21235-wake-up/ | Wake Up! | "Pope Francis releases prog-rock album" could only be a better punchline if the genre was swapped out with "chillwave," and nonetheless, here we are. Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the 78-year-old Argentine, is the 266th man to hold papal office; he is the first to directly condemn climate change and revive liberation theology and to have worked as a bouncer, and although past popes have released classical/liturgical compilations, Pope Francis is the first to go straight pop.
Pope John Paul II, for context, released three albums during his papacy. They consisted of classical sacred music, and none inspired fond remembrances by the executives who released them (the Pope's records "shipped gold and returned platinum", one industry insider recently quipped to Billboard). Pope Francis might be different: He is our meme Pope, the Pope of Kim Kardashian tweets and re-Vines. Just this week, he found himself the subject of a #Popebars hashtag that imagined him spitting raps by Eminem and Drake. The Holy See's populace is growing increasingly unruly, and it's a trip to hear this confusion worked out musically in the age of Spotify.
With collaborators that include a folk-swami, a theatrical lyricist, and a former member of Italian prog-rock band Le Orme, Wake Up! exists at a tremendously strange midpoint between a two-hour mass and a corporate recruitment video. It’s like you drank a bunch of cough syrup and went to Live Aid: The Vatican. Every track features a Barnes & Noble-CD-section pop instrumental, sometimes with additional choral or solo vocals, building momentum that halts when Pope Francis starts speaking. The opening track is "Annuntio Vobis Gaudium Magnum!", the Latin for "we announce with great joy." Following that phrase is an assumed "habemus papem," or "we have a new pope," and the excerpted speech is Pope Francis’s first one after being appointed. It’s a powerful moment to commemorate, only slightly compromised by the fact that the instrumental sounds like a holiday-themed IMAX.
The song titles in Wake Up!, exclamation-point-loaded and decidedly outré, are in many ways better than the songs themselves. There’s a climate change track ("Cuidar El Planeta"); another track whose title translates to "The Church Cannot Be an NGO!", and one in Spanish that translates to "Faith is whole, does not liquefy!" There’s a track in Italian whose title translates to "Do not steal the hope!", and a closing track in Portuguese whose title translates to "Do what he tells you!" Only the title track (in full, "Wake Up! Go! Go! Forward!") bears a name in English.
On it, Pope Francis speaks to a crowd after wheeling streaks of electric guitar, a cinematic horn section, the track gridded loosely by a high-hat. "It is a duty to be vigilant," he intones, to a crowd in South Korea, as a light revue piano tinkles in the background. "To not allow the pressures, the temptations and the sins to dull our sensibility of the beauty of holiness." But, if this album is the indication, beauty isn't exactly holiness's sound.
But there is something beautiful about this album; it exists. Pope Francis, already a more human papal figure than any in recent history, is humanized even further by this album's total musical awkwardness, its bewildering genre, its pluralistic good heart. The album's producer Don Giulio Neroni—who produced Pope John Paul II's 1999 choral album; the Vatican is on a relaxed release schedule, but a release schedule all the same—told Rolling Stone that he "tried to be strongly faithful to the pastoral and personality of Pope Francis: the Pope of dialogue, open doors, hospitality." He succeeded. Chill Pope, the leader of 1.2 billion people, urges you to accept this weird-ass album as your spiritual Genesis, your graceless way of saying Yes. | 2015-12-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-12-03T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Believe Digital IT | December 3, 2015 | 5 | 794d6795-7edf-4661-8fc3-8acaa0f7d888 | Jia Tolentino | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jia-tolentino/ | null |
The latest album from the Washington, D.C.-based band led by songwriter and critic Elizabeth Nelson is smart, sturdy, reference-rich rock. | The latest album from the Washington, D.C.-based band led by songwriter and critic Elizabeth Nelson is smart, sturdy, reference-rich rock. | The Paranoid Style: The Interrogator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-paranoid-style-the-interrogator/ | The Interrogator | The Interrogator is an ideal title for an album by Elizabeth Nelson’s hyper-literate band, the Paranoid Style. In her dual roles as a critic and singer-songwriter, Nelson prods and probes, putting the central tenets of rock’n’roll underneath an unforgiving spotlight. Her subjects often are artists whose tales have been told twice over, particularly on her lively X/Twitter account, where she offers tart insights on old warhorses from the Band, Van Morrison, and Prince. Her longer writing (including at Pitchfork) emphasizes her understanding of the inner workings of both songs and records, an intuition that manifests in the group she’s led alongside husband Timothy Bracy for over a decade. The Paranoid Style adhere to the gospel of three chords and overamplification; they’re true believers who don’t succumb to piety.
That long-running consistency gets a bit of a jolt on The Interrogator with the addition Peter Holsapple, a founding member of power-pop legends the dB’s (whose drummer Will Rigby also cameos here) and a onetime R.E.M. associate. Holsapple’s presence accentuates the Paranoid Style’s latent 1980s underground tendencies, adding a snappy restlessness that was absent on 2022’s For Executive Meeting. Placing The Interrogator within the lineage of college radio rock clarifies the Paranoid Style’s stance as cultural commentators—they linger on the fringe of the mainstream, understanding the form while questioning the intent. It also illuminates their kinetic appeal: “The Formal” roils to a jagged, dissonant clamor, “That Drop Is Steep” is propelled by a nagging, unnerving guitar, and “Print the Legend” has a descending riff directly reminiscent of the Pretenders’ “Back on the Chain Gang.”
Nelson can create vivid imagery with a limited number of words: Buried within “Print the Legend” is the pithy putdown, “They had a reasonable plan to make an ill-advised move.” Her true gift is cramming too many ideas into a confined space, delivering her lines with affectless speed that can require a lyric sheet to decipher the literary, political, and cultural allusions. Depending on your particular disposition, certain phrases might emerge from the racket—“Sure as you’re born, they bought me a short black dress” is a clear nod to Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land,” for instance—but recognizing the titular puns of “Are You Loathsome Tonight” or “I Love the Sound of Structured Class” isn’t required to enjoy The Interrogator; this isn’t a lecture, it’s rock’n’roll.
As a faithful disciple of Dylan, Warren Zevon, and Elvis Costello, Nelson is keenly aware that rock’n’roll relies on visceral pleasures to convey its intellectual thrills. Bristling with rockabilly shuffles, refurbished Bo Diddley bops, and post-punk rave-ups, The Interrogator has an industrial-strength swing to match the steely glint in its production. The crisp execution emphasizes that the Paranoid Style aren’t content to conjure rock’n’roll ghosts: They’re creating unexpected connections by refurbishing familiar parts. Nelson isn’t a revivalist—she’s in dialogue with history, fully aware that the past is not even past. | 2024-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-07T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Bar/None | February 7, 2024 | 7.4 | 794e7f68-8eed-439f-9c12-2964611a566a | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Gap Dream frontman Gabe Fulvimar lives inside the Fullerton, Calif., record store that also happens to be his label's office. Fittingly, his debut collection of loner power pop spans the gamut of styles you’d expect from a record store guy, i.e., Beach Boys, Eno, Can, Velvet Underground, and the forgotten bands that were influenced by them. | Gap Dream frontman Gabe Fulvimar lives inside the Fullerton, Calif., record store that also happens to be his label's office. Fittingly, his debut collection of loner power pop spans the gamut of styles you’d expect from a record store guy, i.e., Beach Boys, Eno, Can, Velvet Underground, and the forgotten bands that were influenced by them. | Gap Dream: Shine Your Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18729-gap-dream-shine-your-light/ | Shine Your Light | Gabriel Fulvimar lives in Burger Records. If you’re familiar with the Fullerton, Calif., garage-rock stronghold, pretend you aren’t and put yourself in the position of a person who only knows that the Gap Dream frontman is living inside of a record store that also happens to be his label's office. And not even one of those 90s mega-chains like Tower or Sam Goody that could pass for a luxury apartment. It’s not even Amoeba. It’s the kind of place that tends to thrive in the current economy, a nationally recognized local joint that caters to a faithful and specific demographic. But consider the logistics: does a Burger Records patron that’s just looking for an Unkle Funkle cassette run the risk of bumping into a shirtless, hungover Fulvimar if he happened to have a long night? Does he have a security deposit? Are you liable to find an opened box of Cookie Crisp in the vinyl section?
Jokes aside, Fulvimar’s current home address is the first step in establishing a narrative that steers you towards an optimal conclusion: the guy literally lives inside of a record collection! And it’s true, his new LP Shine Your Light does span the gamut of styles you’d expect from a “record store guy”, i.e., Beach Boys, Eno, Can, Velvet Underground, and tons of forgotten bands that were influenced by them. More importantly, you get the sense of what kind of guy would actually go through the hassle of living in such a place, as Shine Your Light aligns Fulvimar’s musical ambitions with a total lack of personal ambitions, doling out endearing songs about arrested development and short-term solutions that end up causing more problems in the long run.
As with Burger alums King Tuff and Ty Segall, you can apply the general tag of “loner power-pop” to Gap Dream, though unlike the aforementioned, it’s Fulvimar’s main thing rather than an aspect of his overall M.O. You can sense his ear for the canon: the unwholesome “Love Is Not Allowed” perverts the preciousness of round-like harmonizing in the style of Here Come the Warm Jets, the more rhythm-focused tracks make lo-fi approximations of T. Rex’s pretty vacancy, and you can hear a fake-it-til-you-make-it Kinks homage on “Shine Your Love”, where a regal horn chart is hilariously impersonated by MS-DOS synths more suited for King’s Quest. But for the most part, he’s more of a melody-first guy who demonstrates ingenuity over innovation and you never lose sight of how low the stakes are. The tools are crude and minimal—vintage drum machines, even more vintage keyboards, and underlying fuzz-rock guitars that put him well within Burger’s wheelhouse (or, garage).
Meanwhile, though Shine Your Light was inspired by Fulvimar leaving a go-nowhere life in Ohio after receiving an invitation to hole up in Fullerton, well...he’s arrived and “go-nowhere” means something a bit different. Judging from the majority of the lyrics, it appears that just about any personal intrusion or interaction with the outside world is too much for him to handle and he’d rather kick it alone. A new pair of boots gets Fulvimar in the mood to strut a little on “Fantastic Sam”, which is still presumably named after the sub-Supercuts hair salon chain. One song later, he admits on “Immediate Life Sentence” to getting out of the house for no other reason than to move his feet. He spends the rest of it haranguing a woman who tries to socialize him, snarling “you’re the kind of girl that wants to kill all my time,” even if the petulant tone makes him sounds like a guy who’s an expert time assassin. Note how the cruelest indignity is paying $7 for a beer, at which point Fulvimar vows “I don’t need to get laid that bad/ I’ll just stay home and get high.” Two songs later on “Shine Your Love”, that misanthropy has metastasized into full-blown nihilism—his voice curdles into a bratty snarl of “there is no past and there is no future,” and he proceeds to get blotto on a bottle of gin that itself probably cost $7.
More life-reflecting than life-altering stuff for sure, but the approachability (if not admirability) of Fulvimar’s P.O.V. establishes a personality that serves as a hook when the songs themselves don’t do much to distinguish themselves. Shine Your Light never gets oppressive, though during its final third, it does suggest what living in a record store might be like after the novelty wears out—kinda lonely, a little bit stuffy, and leaving you subject to others trying to tiptoe around, “you’re gonna move out eventually...right?” That remains to be seen, but for the time being, Gap Dream is Fulvimar’s means of “trying to find a chill spot just to organize my mind.” The song from whence it came is, naturally enough, “Chill Spot”. Consider it his way of saying “mi casa es su casa.” | 2013-11-26T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-11-26T01:00:02.000-05:00 | null | Burger | November 26, 2013 | 6.7 | 794f0c51-36eb-470c-91e1-79c797642d24 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Mogwai's new album, The Hawk Is Howling, is the next iteration of the sound that began with 2003's Happy Songs for Happy People and continued with 2006's Mr. Beast: You get a handful of abbreviated heavy tracks, an equitable batch of somnolent drifts, and the occasional suggestive-of-the-future curveball. | Mogwai's new album, The Hawk Is Howling, is the next iteration of the sound that began with 2003's Happy Songs for Happy People and continued with 2006's Mr. Beast: You get a handful of abbreviated heavy tracks, an equitable batch of somnolent drifts, and the occasional suggestive-of-the-future curveball. | Mogwai: The Hawk Is Howling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12241-the-hawk-is-howling/ | The Hawk Is Howling | In 2003, Mogwai released their fourth full length, Happy Songs for Happy People, and its reception ranged from middling to favorable. Some praised the band's scope, grandeur, and willingness to explore beyond the bounds of the quiet-loud-louder dynamic it had mastered; others lamented a lack of the same, alternately calling Happy Songs too soft, too small, or too stiff. Happy Songs now feels like a summation of Mogwai's past, graced with good ideas for its future. Unfortunately, the music that led to that nexus has been much more compelling than what has emerged from it.
Mogwai's new album, The Hawk Is Howling, is the next iteration of the sound that began with Happy Songs. You get a handful of abbreviated heavy tracks, an equitable batch of somnolent drifts, and the occasional suggestive-of-the-future curveball. Just like 2006's Mr. Beast, Hawk follows an unevenly stacked 10-song structure, opening with a stately piano build ("Auto Rock" versus "I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead"), a ferocious follow ("Glasgow Mega-Snake" versus "Batcat"), and a drifting reverie ("Acid Food" versus "Danphe and the Brain") before allowing the middle sag into vacuity. The last three tracks of both records form suites of sorts: Track eight offers a hint of menace, which is reined in on a gentle follow-up before the closer amplifies it all. It's a sensible strategy, and The Hawk Is Howling is ultimately listenable, understandable, and vaguely likable. Like the songs that shape it, though, the album just feels redundant and tenuous, like the last empty cloud trailing behind a fierce storm.
Part of the problem, it seems, is that at its frequent best Mogwai's music is more than the sum of its instrumental parts. While the band's musicianship feels competent enough, the components themselves are rarely intricate or involved. Instead, the feeling pushed the songs through-- an unspoken understanding, it seems, that the band is arriving at some indefinable place, and we're just lucky enough to listen in. Neither the eerie majesty of "2 Rights Make 1 Wrong" nor the exhausting force of "Like Herod" are difficult to understand musically, but-- atmospherically-- they're brilliant, elusive, and mysterious. This partly explains why so many bands have pilfered Mogwai's trademark intervals and itinerant epic structures, even if they've gotten it wrong: Mogwai sound grand, but the stuff's not too hard to play. I mean, how many imitation Orthrelm's do you know?
But over the band's six full-lengths, there's been a steady increase in production value, in making the parts sound better or more perfectly tough and mean. So, while "Batcat" boasts viscous guitars and, in general, good mixing, its "savage" parts sound too self-conscious, almost as though the song's been flooded with alternate guitar takes that are mostly just pedals being twisted and turned to maximize cacophony. Unlike "Mogwai Fear Satan", for instance, it seems less the product of letting go and more the waste of deliberately meeting old expectations. The appropriately named "The Precipice" is a seven-minute ascent through a simple guitar pattern, vaguely resembling Rhys Chatham's Guitar Trio. It sounds great, but it also sounds exactly like what you'd expect. Frustratingly, Mogwai don't seem dexterous enough to take chances within their old meme.
So, of course, the band tries new sounds, which is where Hawk really slips. Mid-album pair "The Sun Smells Too Loud" and "Kings Meadow" lean heavily on electronics, and they fail epically. "Sun" begins smartly enough, pitting a slim, serrated little guitar riff against wide, low bass tones. But a tinny synthesizer overruns the track, its frivolous notes rattling across everything. The track goes nowhere. In fact, Mogwai miss with most of the electronics on Hawk: The static whirs beneath the opening piano bars of "I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead" are trite enough to be a Christian Fennesz plug-in for GarageBand. "Kings Meadow" adds a layer of paint-by-numbers digital synthesis beneath chiming piano and guitar. It's texturally boring, distracting from the song's pleasant sway in favor of a bastardized Oval plea. Mogwai don't do this stuff well, and here they try to do it beneath structures they've used for more than a decade.
At the risk of contrition, I wish this wasn't the case. Mogwai-- for me and for many-- have meant an awful lot. There have been moments that I've wished all music would sound more like Mogwai-- brazen, strong, and redemptive or atmospheric, reserved, and cool. But the only reason I keep listening to The Hawk Is Howling is because Mogwai's name is attached. Hawk makes marginal stylistic advances that it could stand to omit, and it lightly retreads stuff that needs no recapitulation. I hope Mogwai make another great album soon, and I hope it sounds nothing like EP+2, Young Team, or Rock Action. Really, I wish Mogwai could just forget what "Mogwai" sounds like. Maybe then, they'd finally make another record that doesn't glance backward at outdated obligations. Mostly, though, I hope Mogwai doesn't make another album that sounds like Mr. Beast or The Hawk Is Howling-- that is, another bland reduction of splendid antecedents. | 2008-09-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-09-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | September 23, 2008 | 4.5 | 794ffc80-6bda-4530-9a7c-c487e84e6784 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The slowcore band’s knotty and fascinating third LP delves into the question of what makes daily life so unnecessarily difficult. | The slowcore band’s knotty and fascinating third LP delves into the question of what makes daily life so unnecessarily difficult. | Peaer: A Healthy Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peaer-a-healthy-earth/ | A Healthy Earth | On “Commercial,” the centerpiece of Peaer’s third LP, a man has a nervous breakdown while waiting in line. Lead singer Peter Katz’s voice is barely audible, but the simmering tension should be familiar to anyone at the mercy of bureaucracy, stuck in a queue and waiting for someone to recognize their plight. “I saw your commercial in the lobby,” Katz murmurs before his voice rises to a dramatic quaver that wouldn’t sound out of place on OK Computer—“Why does everything want to kill me in a million different tiny ways?” It’s not a rhetorical question. On A Healthy Earth, he devotes himself to unpacking what makes daily life so unnecessarily difficult.
Katz recognizes that “everything” trying to kill him is a man-made problem in some way—the rising seas, the blazing sun, even his shampoo: “I saw your commercial and now I’m scared/I use that product every day in my hair/I just didn’t know what it would do to me/I even gave it to my family.” But mostly, he wrestles with the everyday suffering we subject ourselves to while trying to connect with other humans. On “In My Belly,” he wonders whether love is just another quantifiable metric that can be life-hacked, and whether it can be intellectualized at all. On “I.K.W.Y.T.,” he examines all the tortuous ways we hold back on our instincts (“Clenching my fist so I don’t cum too quick in my undies/Holding my tongue to ensure I don’t do any speaking”) and by the closing “Have Fun!,” he’s virtually given up on the idea of healthy and fulfilling monogamous relationships.
It’s no wonder that the most convincing love songs on A Healthy Earth fall outside the realm of reality. One man writes a love song to his car; another body-swaps with his dog so he can write a love song to himself. On “Multiverse,” Katz assumes a humanoid vocal to imagine Mother Earth on a self-care kick. These imaginative flights offer welcome moments of respite, but Katz quickly brings them back down to Earth; the alternate reality he envisions on “Multiverse” is simply one where he never becomes a musician and can afford to buy a new car.
Every song on A Healthy Earth could function as an essay prompt, and like a good issue of The New Yorker or The Baffler, these divergent intellectual exercises are bound by a general thematic and philosophical coherence: If Katz ever decided to go deeper, A Healthy Earth would probably make a great podcast series. That said, it’s still a rock record, one that works within subgenres of indie rock that frequently deny themselves visceral pleasures—slowcore, math-y DC post-punk.
Peaer are now a tour-tested three-piece that have somehow gotten tighter and looser, the way bands do when it’s clear that they enjoy each other’s company. Katz’s guitar figures and vocals take counterintuitive steps towards dissonant note clusters before righting themselves into delightful sing-song melodies, replicating the effect of those bizarre ice creams that have sriracha or mustard in them. Two members of Peaer make their living as recording engineers, and if A Healthy Earth is any indication, they’ve been studying Steve Albini’s every mic placement with monastic intensity. Earth has such an extreme dynamic range that it sounds almost wrong compared to others in its realm. During the times when the album is quiet, it’s as unnerving and tense as anything on the Midsommar soundtrack. When it eventually gets loud—and Peaer rock more convincingly and nastily than just about any band lumped into slowcore—its lean arrangements hit with more unexpected force than any post-rock or metal crescendo. This is the kind of visceral wish fulfillment Peaer specialize in on A Healthy Earth—it acknowledges how much of our lives are spent waiting in line to manage our agony when just giving it a voice might be the only way to get relief. | 2019-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Tiny Engines | August 23, 2019 | 8 | 79546471-11af-434b-a73d-1d028ab24779 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The goregrind crew’s sixth album, based on a 19th-century Scottish killing spree, is the metal equivalent of a bingeable British TV period piece. | The goregrind crew’s sixth album, based on a 19th-century Scottish killing spree, is the metal equivalent of a bingeable British TV period piece. | Exhumed: Death Revenge | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/exhumed-death-revenge/ | Death Revenge | If you’re going to make music about chopping people up, it follows that you’ll leave a more lasting impression if you anchor your subject matter in real-life events. That’s surely the case with Death Revenge, the sixth full-length from long-running Northern California death metal/goregrind quartet Exhumed, but not necessarily for the reasons you’d expect. Inspired by a series of murders that took place in 19th-century Edinburgh, Death Revenge marks the first time that the band’s frontman and chief lyricist, Matt Harvey, has focused his obsession with mutilated bodies on a narrative that carries the weight of genuine tragedy. It works because Harvey—never one to take himself too seriously—approaches this material with a storyteller’s relish.
Since Exhumed formed almost 30 years ago, violence has been Harvey’s one and only topic of choice. You might expect him to have run out of new things to say on this subject, and it's often felt as though he has, notwithstanding the sociopolitical messages Harvey has talked about burying alongside the blood-spattered limbs that litter his songs. Musically, his approach has stuck closely to the blueprint set out by UK grindcore pioneers Carcass in the ’80s—but like most of that band’s followers, Harvey has had difficulty replicating the satirical wit in Carcass lyricist Jeff Walker’s anatomically graphic wordplay.
This time, he comes fairly close, thanks to a clever decision to present Death Revenge as goregrind’s answer to “Sweeney Todd.” By introducing a colorful cast of characters into the storyline, Harvey turns the gruesome tale behind the album into a delicious thrill ride. Hilariously, the lyric sheet is laid out as an opera program and even includes the credit “libretto by Matt Harvey.” He commits to this presentation even further by opening the album with a classical overture arranged by former Exhumed bassist Matt Widener (best known as the bassist and lyricist in Cretin, a grindcore act that eschews Exhumed’s slasher-film aesthetic for equally shock-driven psychological and body horror). The overture begins with an unmistakable tip of the hat to John Carpenter’s iconic Halloween theme before melodramatic violins take over. If you’ve watched a British-made period TV drama lately, the similarities are obvious. When the band tears in with its usual arsenal of chainsaw riffs, the effect is almost vulgar—guttural savagery intruding on the highbrow.
As always, the influence of Carcass looms large. Every Exhumed album, including this one, contains several moments where you can play a game of “name the Carcass tune this riff is based on.” By this point, though, Harvey and company have become adept at sequencing riffs into more than just a patchwork of references to songs they didn’t write. Death Revenge is a reminder that Exhumed was never meant to function as a tribute act, though they sometimes look like one.
For good measure, Harvey throws in references to Slayer’s “Raining Blood” and “War Ensemble,” showing the formative impact that thrash metal had on him. These slight downshifts provide a change of pace from the relentlessness of the blast beats. After many years of sticking to the same shtick at more or less the same frenzied tempo, Exhumed have arguably gotten more energetic, better at conserving their energy, and more deliberate about how one riff flows into the next. The pacing of Death Revenge is the element that most clearly sets it apart from both death metal convention and the band’s earlier work.
It helps that Harvey gives his mordant sense of humor room to shine for once, despite the grim reality the story is based on. In her 2011 study The Anatomy Murders: Being the True and Spectacular History of Edinburgh’s Notorious Burke and Hare and of the Man of Science Who Abetted Them in the Commission of Their Most Heinous Crimes, author Lisa Rosner describes the killings in question as “the most atrocious murder spree of the century, outflanking even Jack the Ripper’s.” These events ultimately led to the U.K. parliament passing the Anatomy Act of 1832—which, of course, gets a playfully somber classical instrumental named after it here.
As the lyrics make clear, the Anatomy Murders were committed in order to supply black-market corpses for medical research. Harvey may or may not be commenting on the way modern market forces make mincemeat of us all when he growls, “Stone walls do not a prison make/Nor six feet of sod a grave/So pray the lord your soul to take/You’ll need defenders of the grave/Hallmarks of this ghoulish age”—but you don’t need to read that far into this album to enjoy it. The murders have appeared in British nursery rhymes, and Harvey often takes a similar tone in talking about them on the new songs. Strangely, Death Revenge doesn’t make for an especially scary or even creepy experience. It’s artfully conceived, lurid fun that sees this band finally wringing some substance out of the same old blood and guts. | 2017-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Relapse | October 24, 2017 | 6.9 | 79600534-a9f1-4294-88a3-cc5e9c5ae341 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | |
On their 17th album, the White brothers discover where their symbiotic psych rock goes when it has more space, more range, and more fidelity. | On their 17th album, the White brothers discover where their symbiotic psych rock goes when it has more space, more range, and more fidelity. | Tonstartssbandht: Sorcerer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23026-sorcerer/ | Sorcerer | With the arrival of Sorcerer, Tonstartssbandht now have seventeen releases. It’s a daunting amount of music even though brothers Andy and Edwin White have been upping entire albums to their Bandcamp page—which phonetically pronounces as “TAHN-starts-bandit”—since 2008 (not counting Andy’s solo projects as Andy Boay and Edwin’s as Eola). While Orlando-born and bred, for the better part of their existence the White boys lived in different cities, resorting to swapping their drum and Danelectro guitar parts back and forth online. It might scan as an awkward way to cherry-pick and organize jams, but their saving grace is the type of secret language and telepathic connection that only the tightest of siblings can have.
After calling Brooklyn home, the brothers are back in Orlando and the type of ramshackle pastiche that they once enacted via email must now cohere in the same room. For the most part, Sorcerer succeeds, moving their sound forward while maintaining their penchant for detours. Tonstartssbandht keeps the lo-fi qualities of their previous albums intact, the hiss of the room and a quivering snare coil audible at the start of “Breathe.” It’s the sound of Guided by Voices swapping out their arena rock fantasies of being in the Who for being a member of Amon Düül’s Munich commune instead.
“Breathe and know you’re forgiven/Screams so peculiar to the living,” one brother whispers like a ’60s sage just back from a particularly messianic acid trip. “Breathe” moves at a deliberate pace, favoring slack drum rolls while Andy lays down guitar lines clear in tone, the two never quite settling into any one meter or stanza length. But about two minutes in, a voice swaddled in effects warns “I won’t keep you safe,” the guitar thickens and a tom roll thunders across the song, signaling lift off. As is their wont, the psychedelic effects are mostly kept to the vocals, allowing Andy’s clean-strummed figures to ring out like a bell and build upwards. The siblings harmonize, the rhythms choogle along, a harmonica drones some ten minutes in and everything turns weightless and dissolves at song’s end.
Rather than enact American psychedelic rock of the ’60s, Tonstartssbandht treats their psychedelic sprawls much like Amon Düül II did circa Yeti. Each number exists less as a means to drive a blues song into your frontal lobes like a trepan and more like a trip through a dark forest. The epic songs meander from darkness to clearing back into bramble, with no clear path being taken, only to stumble suddenly upon a plateau. The lyrics too move from darkness (“Life is long as long as you’re lonely”) to light (“If you don’t believe me, that’s chill”). During a previous era, the brothers might have been stuck with recreating the likes of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix (much like the latter, their father played guitar upside-down), but thanks to decades of reissues of psychedelic music apart from the U.S.-UK axis, be it the twee amoebas of Incredible String Band, German krautrock or Swedish cosmonauts like Träd, Gräs Och Stenar and International Harvester, the boys have a broader and deeper template to draw upon and they pull from all of the above.
The three expansive pieces of Sorcerer resemble trips in how they evolve from moment to moment, but at times it means sacrificing some of the experimental eclecticism of their previous albums, be it the loopy chewed-tape beats of “5FT7,” the thrashy outbursts of “I’m a Welsh Souper,” and songs that evoke the jamborees of early Animal Collective. That said, the foggy coherence of thirteen-minute closer “Opening” careens from high to nebulous high, finding a wobbly groove like Creedence Clearwater Revival early on, then revving into heavy-fuzz near the eight-minute mark. It’s fierce like Blue Cheer could get, but just as quickly as it settles in, the two ease off the gas for a woozy interlude. “I hope you know what you’re doing/I don’t know what to say to you,” they sing in their uncanny, off-kilter harmony, and it’s unclear whether they are singing that to their fans or just amongst themselves. It encapsulates the psychedelic experience in a couplet, offering enlightenment and bafflement both.
Correction: The review originally misstated where the band lives. It has been updated to accurately reflect they currently live in Orlando, Fla. | 2017-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | March 27, 2017 | 7.7 | 79626a9a-3059-409c-b170-332a57d5a126 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The third album from the duo of Juliette Pearl Davis and Joachim Polack takes on the soft psychedelic hues of Stereolab and Wendy Carlos, shot through with malaise and a curious sense of overstimulation. | The third album from the duo of Juliette Pearl Davis and Joachim Polack takes on the soft psychedelic hues of Stereolab and Wendy Carlos, shot through with malaise and a curious sense of overstimulation. | Pearl & the Oysters: Flowerland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pearl-and-the-oysters-flowerland/ | Flowerland | Pearl & the Oysters have always indulged in pleasurable excess. Juliette Pearl Davis (Pearl) and Joachim Polack (The Oysters)—school friends from Paris who left their homeland for Gainesville, Florida in the mid '10s and never looked back—make synth sounds you can sink your teeth into, gooey guitar licks that stick to the roof of your mouth, and vocal harmonies so syrupy they linger on your tastebuds. These qualities were present on their self-titled 2017 debut and even more prevalent on their second album, 2018’s Canned Music. On Flowerland, the whorl of Rhodes keys and sparkling synth tones that herald opener “Soft Science” introduce their complex textures, building on the work of favorites such as Stereolab, Wendy Carlos, and Os Mutantes. Polack lays down a gummy bassline that melts into the meat of the track, as Davis’ persuades guest Kuo-Hung Tseng, of Taipei art-pop quintet Sunset Rollercoaster, to join her at the beach.
Tseng is one of 24 collaborators on Flowerland, who variously sit in on traditional pop instruments, as well as lap steel, electric sitar, tack piano, and the vibraslap. Other than Tseng’s contribution to “Soft Science,” though, the only auxiliary vocals come from Dent May on the hyper-saccharine “Candy”; Davis sings all the other songs alone. This is a good thing: Neither Tseng’s nor May’s vocals are gritty enough to cut through Davis’ sweet soprano melodies, and in the absence of a true foil, her gift is best presented alone.
Davis and Polack recorded Flowerland piecemeal in Gainesville, New York, Paris, and Los Angeles, where they moved just before COVID-19 hit American shores. Settling into a new city as the world shut down put them in a contemplative mood. Even the bubblegum back-and-forth of the title track touches on the alienation they felt upon arrival. The trippy fuzz guitar on “Crocodile” belies feelings of boredom, loneliness, screen addiction, and creative stagnation brought on by prolonged periods spent indoors. And the flirtatious call-and-response of “Soft Science” references Polack’s attempts to juggle coursework as a musicology Ph.D. student with the responsibilities of a working artist. Still, these fleeting references to serious subjects breeze by too quickly to produce any real emotional conflict. The duo communicates through overstimulation, and their frenetic production clouds any dissonance between music and lyrics before you have time to recognize it.
Pearl & the Oysters’ most poignant tracks convey snippets of imagery without context. “The sound of waves come crashing on the shore, Pier 64,” a nostalgic refrain from Canned Music standout “Mermaid Parade,” evokes a visceral tremble. Flowerland’s closest analog is its only certifiable slow burn, “Evening Sun.” Its simple chorus—“Colors are circling around/Turning your head upside down/My feet aren’t touching the ground/On the merry-go-round”—isn’t poetry on its own, but the comparatively spartan arrangement behind Davis’ voice allows it to shine through the mix and transport you.
When misdirected, however, Davis and Polack’s tendency to stimulate every nerve ending at once can backfire. The most puzzling choice on Flowerland is their cover of Caetano Veloso’s “Baby,” one of the greatest love songs of all time—and a subtle critique of imported American capitalism. Referring back to the rawness of the original 1968 Gal Costa version, or Os Mutantes’ mystical redux from the same year, would have offered Davis the opportunity to access a new expressive dimension. Instead, they reprise Os Mutantes’ 1971 rendition of the song—a whimsical, English-language flip—which sanitizes the track of both its beauty and its satire. The result is the same unpleasant sugar rush you get from listening to a loungey Beatles cover, or downing a full gallon of Hawaiian Punch. Luckily, the rest of the album is much more fulfilling. Pearl & the Oysters’ lush, pillowy tracks are lovely to listen to, even when they don’t leave much room for reflection.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Feeltrip / Tip Top | September 28, 2021 | 6.9 | 7966b9ee-73bb-4f3f-bb90-dad2b3f99226 | Raphael Helfand | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raphael-helfand/ | |
The funk-rock band’s second album of the year is a surprisingly introspective set filled with references to forgotten actors, classic bands, and, most tellingly, decades-old Chili Peppers songs. | The funk-rock band’s second album of the year is a surprisingly introspective set filled with references to forgotten actors, classic bands, and, most tellingly, decades-old Chili Peppers songs. | Red Hot Chili Peppers: Return of the Dream Canteen | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/red-hot-chili-peppers-return-of-the-dream-canteen/ | Return of the Dream Canteen | Anthony Kiedis is at the county fair. He’s in your lane. He’s in Baton Rouge, listening to Raw Power. The Red Hot Chili Peppers singer is everywhere at once on Return of the Dream Canteen, but he often sounds like he’d rather be at home, in the quiet, deep in his memories. Like April’s Unlimited Love—and so much of their discography—Dream Canteen is overlong, generous in spirit, inconsistent in execution, and puffed up with fraternal charm. What it lacks is harder to define, though its absence is immediately apparent. Even at their most poignant, the quartet have always sounded like a band drawing inhuman amounts of energy from the world around them. Maybe it’s the three years they spent off the road, maybe it’s the fact that the world doesn’t have much to offer a band so reliant on goofball vapor right now, but for perhaps the first time in their career, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, undefeated in their hearts, sound spooked by life’s long, slow fade.
While the sense of time’s encroachment makes Dream Canteen one of the most theoretically interesting albums in their catalog, it also makes it less compelling than the melancholy highs they brushed on 1999’s Californication and 1995’s underrated One Hot Minute. This is an album that feels like it’s wrapped up in June gloom, even when it’s trying to tell you it’s in a great mood. Those gray L.A. mornings give way to glorious afternoons, but when the fog burns off halfway through the album, Dream Canteen reveals itself as a subdued, surprisingly inward-facing album. It’s as if the fresh start with guitarist John Frusciante, who rejoined the band for a third go-round in 2019, has also prompted a new examination of all the things in life that haven’t been restored. Accordingly, Dream Canteen is populated with forgotten actors, classic bands, and, most tellingly, many lyrical and musical references to decades-old Red Hot Chili Peppers songs. Oftentimes, this most kinetic of bands sounds like they’re sitting down. They sound like they’re wearing shirts.
Whether this works or not is largely dependent on what you expect from the second Red Hot Chili Peppers double album of 2022. Dream Canteen’s 17 songs were recorded in the same sessions as Unlimited Love, and like those tracks, they suffer from the tidiness of Rick Rubin’s production. He keeps the four Peps sealed off from one another at a time when they should sound closer than ever; you could stroll in the space between Frusciante’s guitar and Flea’s bass in “Fake as Fu@k.” Many of the songs on the first half feel like valedictory takes on the band’s earlier styles: See the Mother’s Milk-era “ya-yas” with which Kiedis marks his arrival in “Tippa My Tongue,” a song whose opening drumroll and rolling bassline recall the intro to 2002’s “Can’t Stop.” The latter song pops up again in “Peace and Love,” whose chorus seems to have been written on top of the By the Way single’s.
Kiedis is in “Antoine the Swan” mode throughout the album, revisiting the band’s dormant P-Funk influence implicitly as he sings out of the side of his mouth and explicitly in the “Sir Nose D Voidoffunk” vocal pitch-shifting that opens “Afterlife.” In a cute twist, he tries to convince a love interest not to move to Los Angeles in “Bella,” and in “Tippa My Tongue,” he lays down a smoove melody, singing that he’s here to “pull your hair” in a way that is somehow incredibly sexy, not at all threatening, and a little nostalgic.
While some of these songs can feel regressive or at least undercooked on their own, they’re reframed by the open-hearted sadness that takes over the album’s second half. “My Cigarette” interpolates Lady Gaga’s “Pokerface” chorus over a noir bassline from Flea while Frusciante’s guitar rotates like a ceiling fan slowly turning in a hot room. They flash and flap like Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies in “Carry Me Home,” and Kiedis implores the listener not to “lose sight of this generous plan.” Even when they're trying to celebrate, the Chili Peppers sound exhausted by grief. Dead musicians show up often: Layne Stayley, Kiedis’ godfather Sonny Bono, possibly Bradley Nowell. Eddie Van Halen gets a whole song in his honor, though the seasick loneliness of the solo Frusciante rips through the song’s second half is a better tribute to Funkadelic’s Eddie Hazel.
As always, the lyric sheet has more proper-noun-driven non-sequiturs than the average Family Guy episode (Who can say what the Dodgers pulling off a double play has to do with the rest of “The Drummer”?), but it’s occasionally possible to hear them as Kiedis’ way of getting around saying what he wants to say directly, or as a way of acknowledging that direct language can't capture the exuberance he feels. When it works, it can be strangely touching. Over percolating clouds of synth in “La La La La La La La La,” he promises his lover, “You’ll be Chong and I’ll be Cheech.” It’s a ridiculous lyric in an otherwise tender song, but its placement suggests that this is simply who he is and singing this way to his audience is a kind of intimacy.
Despite a few experiments—Josh Johnson’s halting sax solo in “My Cigarette,” the minimalist house percussion of “In the Snow”—Dream Canteen doesn’t represent a new direction, nor does it find the band taking the kinds of stylistic risks of the earlier Frusciante and Dave Navarro eras. It can feel chalky, its silliness toned down but not turned off; it makes these songs seem a touch distant and distracted. Not all legendary bands get the chance to age, and of all the groups in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, perhaps only their heroes in Van Halen and Parliament-Funkadelic have had to work as hard at carrying their wackiness into old age. While neither of those bands were able to turn their brilliant live shows into a legacy-consolidating late-career album, the Chili Peppers do have the creative and emotional capability to do so. Like Unlimited Love, Return of the Dream Canteen is not that album, but it does show the funky monks keeping the faith in their unquenchable spirit. | 2022-10-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner | October 19, 2022 | 6.3 | 79734372-cdf8-4f93-abd0-71a8e2cc2141 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
A new reissue of the Egyptian guitarist’s 1974 breakthrough showcases his virtuosic playing and groundbreaking blend of styles. | A new reissue of the Egyptian guitarist’s 1974 breakthrough showcases his virtuosic playing and groundbreaking blend of styles. | Omar Khorshid: Giant + Guitar | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/omar-khorshid-giant-guitar/ | Giant + Guitar | In the early 1970s, Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid left Al Firka Al Masiya, one of the most celebrated orchestras in Egypt, and set off to form his own band. When asked about this decision years later during a TV interview, he replied, “Most composers who wrote for the guitar gave it the maximum they could imagine it could do.” Khorshid, on the other hand, wanted to be free to explore the electric guitar’s full potential.
The Arabic title of his first solo album, then, is a fitting one: Boss Shouf, Omar Byamel Eh!!! —Look and See, What Omar’s Doing!!!. Recorded in Beirut’s Polysound Studios with renowned engineer Nabil Mumtaz and released on the Voice of Lebanon label in 1974, the album is rooted in a deep knowledge of traditional Arabic music while experimenting with electronic instruments. The album was also released with the English title Giant + Guitar and marketed with the name Rhythms From the Orient and cheesy, Arabian Nights-style artwork to satisfy the burgeoning exotica market.
On this new reissue, the Paris-based label We Want Sounds have opted to go with the original (and much cooler) Giant + Guitar artwork, which depicts a striking Khorshid on his motorbike, guitar in hand, riding around Beirut’s famous Hamra street, where he held a residency in a local club. The release is also accompanied by enlightening liner notes from Lebanese DJ and researcher Ernesto Chahoud, and it follows the reissue of 1978’s With Love and Sublime Frequencies’ comprehensive compilation Guitar El Chark.
Khorshid was a well-known figure in Arabic pop music before striking out on his own. He built a reputation as a talented guitarist playing Beatles and Shadows covers with popular rock band Les Petit Chats in the mid-1960s. After catching the attention of composer, musician, and conductor Ahmed Fouad Hassan, Khorshid began playing in orchestras and backing pop stars like Oum Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez. The introduction of the electric guitar to such traditional outfits was timid at first, but the pioneering Egyptian composer Baligh Hamdi, who worked with Hafez, pushed to explore the possibilities of modern Arabic music by incorporating electronic violins, keyboards, and guitars in harmony with Egyptian folk melodies and rhythms. The move divided critics but was a popular success, and Khorshid’s guitar became increasingly central to the orchestra’s sound.
Giant + Guitar marked the beginning of a period of freedom and experimentation for Khorshid. It was the first of a series of groundbreaking albums that showcased his talent for fusing the style of Arabic oud players with electronic instrumentation and innovative arrangements. The album was released shortly after Khorshid moved from Cairo to the more vibrant and culturally progressive Beirut in 1973.
Even in these early recordings, Khorshid was already daring and self-assured. On his own composition, “Taqasim Sanat Alfein,” he plays scales on electric guitar, embellished with touches of understated synths, building an atmospheric solo that picks up speed and shows off his characteristic fast-picking technique. Elsewhere he interprets the work of other composers, such as Lebanese musician Nour Al Mallah’s “Rakset El Fadaa,” which opens the album with a long intro before giving way to a clamor of percussion and sinewy organ.
Elsewhere, Khorshid takes on hits like “Leilet Hob,” originally sung by national icon Oum Kalthoum, and gives them a psychedelic makeover. The sound is bold but not overwhelming, and by alternating between intricate guitar solos and delicate synth with faster, fuzzed-up arrangements, Giant + Guitar not only showcases the range of Korshid’s talents and influences but also makes for a cohesive listen from beginning to end.
A testament to his exquisite talent, the album is also a document to a time of cultural exchange and artistic openness. As a young guitarist in Cairo, Khorshid grew up immersed in traditional music, but he also absorbed the raucous guitar of the Shadows, the psychedelic experiments of the Beatles, and Baligh Hamdi’s subversive approach to composition. Giant + Guitar was his first attempt at carving out his own identity: The record’s constantly shifting arrangements would define his sound and leave an indelible mark on the future of Arabic music.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-01T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Wewantsounds | December 1, 2021 | 8.1 | 797435d9-4c86-4e15-a328-b164c3f3d161 | Megan Iacobini de Fazio | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-iacobini de fazio/ | |
John Maclean has long been DFA's secret weapon. The Rapture gives good face. James Murphy gives good copy. Delia ... | John Maclean has long been DFA's secret weapon. The Rapture gives good face. James Murphy gives good copy. Delia ... | The Juan MacLean: Less Than Human | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4360-less-than-human/ | Less Than Human | John Maclean has long been DFA's secret weapon. The Rapture gives good face. James Murphy gives good copy. Delia and Gavin give good "oh, they're easily my favorite" hipster trump card. But Maclean is the most effective. If any DFA records come close to hands-aloft status, it's his "Give Me Every Little Thing" and "You Can't Have It Both Ways". They're, you know, house music. No need for any prefixes or suffixes.
Maclean's former band, Six Finger Satellite, were a bruising mixture of skinny tie and thick neck, mixed eye-meltingly loud by Murphy live, and all but blueprinting Les Savy Fav (who I like better, but why lie?) on record. Which might explain why his dance music is so muscular (have you listened to those early Rapture EP's lately?), but it does make Less Than Human, a good chunk of which could be described as "gentle" or at least "pretty", a bit surprising. It's not quite the masterpiece everyone (at least me) was hoping for (the exclusion of "You Can't Have It Both Ways", for example, should be punishable Midnight Express-style) but it does deliver on the hype, which in 2005 is almost the same thing.
"Shining Skinned Friend" is filled to bursting over its bacon fat drums: theremin noise, vocodered sprites, ghostly coos, vocal synths, italo ripples, "dark" Euro vocals. This is his happening and it freaks me out. "Give Me Every Little Thing" is pure bliss, from the interstellar electrical storm opening to the whammy bar keytar solo that closes it out. In between, you've got a giant's handclaps, a groaning slap bass, barbiturate P-Funk chanting, and call-and-response synth squiggles. "Tito's Way" is one of the few nu-disco tracks that recognizes the power of the Party Whistle. (No "whoop whoop" though.) It also has breaking bells, steady-rocking drums, farty robot bass, and sassy-yet-dead-eyed femme vocals.
The rest of the record is surprisingly melancholy. "Love Is in the Air" is Metro Area after a crying jag. "In The Afternoon" is background music for a breakup scene in a WB teen drama starring Ralf und Florian. "My Time Is Running Out" opens with Arcadian, cascading synth-strings and trills of bleeps like all-white Christmas lights blinking on and off. It could be the intro to a Kylie Minogue record before it rolls out another gently bumping, mid-tempo groove. (Actually, re-reading that, I'm not sure if it isn't a Kylie Minogue record.) Closer "Dance With Me" lopes for 12 minutes towards a climax that never comes, a busted robot shooting little sparks of piano as it limps towards Nancy Whang's siren song.
The title track of Less Than Human (which appears nowhere on the album) was first released on the 2004 DFA Compilation #2. But come on: Even allowing for coincidence, is it possible to hear it without this year's Daft Punk album looming like an unanswered question? Alongside Vitalic-- Maclean's closest contemporary, especially when you factor in the penchant for queasy synth miniatures like opener "AD2003"-- Maclean the student is now doing the "robot rock" thing better than the masters. And he only rocks about half the time. But then again Daft Punk once made their rep singing about unrequited love, rather than just breaking hearts. | 2005-07-19T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2005-07-19T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Astralwerks / DFA | July 19, 2005 | 8.1 | 79755787-2641-4b33-83f8-c3de4c454d84 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Interiors, Cameron Mesirow's second album as Glasser, is a methodical, computer-tethered expedition into the vast, wild expanse of human feeling. The homespun warmth and tribal rhythms of 2010's Ring have given way to chilly digital perfection. | Interiors, Cameron Mesirow's second album as Glasser, is a methodical, computer-tethered expedition into the vast, wild expanse of human feeling. The homespun warmth and tribal rhythms of 2010's Ring have given way to chilly digital perfection. | Glasser: Interiors | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18602-glasser-interiors/ | Interiors | Manhattan's architecture results from the most rational possible pursuit of the irrational. That's one main argument of Delirious New York, a 1978 book by Dutch theorist Rem Koolhaas that Cameron Mesirow has named as an inspiration for her second album as Glasser. It's also a useful frame for understanding the record, not only its specific lyrical concerns but also its general spirit. Interiors is a methodical, computer-tethered expedition into the vast, wild expanse of human feeling.
Glasser's 2010 debut Ring underpinned Mesirow's soaring vocals with free-flowing, rhythm-obsessed eclecticism that made for a notably welcoming collection of atmospheric, electronics-brushed pop. That description still largely applies to Interiors, but the homespun warmth and tribal rhythms of its predecessor have given way to chilly digital perfection—though plenty of organic elements persist, in a way that's crucial—and the album as a whole is more thematically unified. Mesirow's voice, both a singer and a songwriter, still towers over the proceedings, and you can look to this to orient you anytime the sonic and conceptual edifice grows too dizzying.
Mesirow moved from Los Angeles to downtown Manhattan between albums, and the city she finds here is an Ableton Live-era update on sleek 20th-century modernism: Brancusi's "Bird in Space", in CGI space. Her Swedish co-producer Van Rivers, who also helped on Ring, applies his background in dark, shuffling techno and production credits from such albums as the Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson's self-titled 2009 solo album as Fever Ray. The nod toward heady electronic music is nothing entirely new from Glasser, who has been remixed by the likes of Jamie xx and Lindstrøm, but she credits her collaborator for helping carry out her blueprints. "I was like the designer, and he was the architect," Mesirow told Billboard.
Glasser's first widely circulated song, 2009's "Apply", meditated on the permeability of walls and windows, and Interiors' rooms, too, are rarely as hermetically sealed as a cursory listen might suggest. "Shape", the opening track and first advance track, introduces the LP's silvery, aerodynamicism with whooshing bass and crisp kick drums, but Mesirow's layered, melismatic vocals are front and center—and she's describing not a city skyline, but an ocean beach. While "Exposure" glitchily theorizes on the "modern trouble" of urban living, Mesirow is far more likely to use her fabricated sonic setting as a framework for exploring personal demons: The bird calls and tropical tinges on "Dissect" signal a lingering stylistic connection to labelmates Tanlines, but next to lyrics about being "shackled to a window/ Anything but open," they also point to her much-reported struggles with spacial anxiety.
The interiors Glasser explores most compellingly are, it won't surprise you at this point to learn, the ones within human beings. She applies the same ruthless precision to these ostensibly messier subjects, so that video selection "Design", an examination of physical desire that wields human breaths as percussion, is crystalline enough for a posh gallery. But the insides of people turn out to be at least as unknowable as those of buildings: "Keam Theme", an uptempo standout, opens with a dream sequence and carries on from its oblique title to ask, "How long before I know you?" It might just be me, but something about the hook brings to mind Arthur Russell expressing a similarly surreal, slightly different sentiment decades ago: "That's us, before we got there."
This is ultimately where Glasser manages to communicate the unknowable—in the way her meticulously arranged soundscapes convey a sense of place even when their literal meaning might be just out of grasp. "I'm in your landscape, and I don't wanna go back to mine," Mesirow intones between rippling synths, sinuous orchestration, and percussive crunches on "Landscape", a song that closes with an out-of-nowhere, live-sounding drum-and-keys groove reminiscent of Flying Lotus' Brainfeeder brain trust. It's a track that contains so many of Interiors' paradoxes: the push and pull between 1's and 0's and flesh and blood, between indoors and outdoors ("There's nothing here but walls, walls, walls"), and between two lovers.
Mesirow has also cited Beyoncé as an inspiration, but although a few of the lither moments bring to mind the future-soul of Little Dragon, her closest parallels on Interiors remain big-idea, big-voice art-poppers such as Bat for Lashes or Björk. Indeed, if the album errs in a particular direction, it's in leaning a bit too heavily on abstraction without anything that lowers its barriers quite as far as, say, "Laura", from Bat for Lashes' 2012 The Haunted Man. A three-part "Windows" suite, presented out of order, brings in fractured sax bleats and ambient textures, but it's more difficult to unlock than its title might hint, and overworked lyrics like "listlessness becomes a habit" occur a little too often throughout the album. Koolhaas, author of Delirious New York, later decided it was time to "kill the skyscraper." Glasser has built a dazzling one, but you figure she just might know the feeling. | 2013-10-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | True Panther | October 10, 2013 | 7.8 | 79777393-6b05-492c-a916-25d4f98969b2 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
With a lavish new album, the Colombian American singer serves up lush ballads about protecting your peace and sizzling reggaeton to disturb it. | With a lavish new album, the Colombian American singer serves up lush ballads about protecting your peace and sizzling reggaeton to disturb it. | Kali Uchis: Orquídeas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kali-uchis-orquideas/ | Orquídeas | In the video for “Te Mata,” a highlight from her resplendent new album Orquídeas, Kali Uchis embodies the ritual cruelties and delights of life as a femme fatale. The visual is grainy and textured, unmistakably Almodóvarian with its vivid, saturated color palette, high drama, and vintage glam. She vamps in an ivory, crystal-encrusted mermaid gown. She throws a cordless phone handset through a window. She shoves glass bottles off a table in a fit of rage. She cries a single tear in a baby-blue robe and matching lace bra, her eyes framed by immaculately feathered lashes. She chuckles when an anonymous hand presses a revolver to her forehead.
“Te Mata” is a supreme example of Uchis’ gift for crafting universes of revenge, infatuation, and sorrow. As she’s released more Spanish-language music in recent years, including her 2020 LP Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞, Uchis has sharpened that vision, securing chart hits along the way. On Orquídeas, she writes another instruction manual for baddie behavior, where women are encouraged to stuff toxic exes into the trunks of their cars and loaf the day away in red-glitter bustiers and platform heels. But the album is also a reflection of the capaciousness of diasporic music. Despite the overwhelming commercial success of bilingual artists of Latin American descent, our corporate music industry overlords still find it impossible to believe a major label singer might thrive making original music in both Spanish and English. Like Selena Quintanilla before her, Uchis proves them wrong.
Much of Orquídeas reprises the shimmering daydreams Uchis is known for, luxuriating in background harmonies and synth arpeggios that feel like they’re enveloped in charmeuse fabrics. “Young, Rich & in Love,” “Diosa,” and “Perdiste” were designed to play in the background while you bathe in a clawfoot tub full of milk and rose petals. “Heladito” is a lovely return to form; longtime fans will recognize the doo-wop melodic sensibility and pure longing of Uchis’ 2015 Por Vida EP—though she nods to a new era, singing, “No soy pop star pero si soy internacional.”
The first third of the record is so uniformly luxurious that the songs are almost hard to distinguish. But the synth-pop glitter bomb “Igual Que Un Ángel” is a beaming exception, its cherubic hook a sure shot for TikTok virality. Over a funky bassline and prismatic chimes, Uchis and the mulleted corrido prince Peso Pluma sing about a woman who never falls prey to superficial love. Pluma’s nasal vocal tones layer effortlessly over the groove, unlocking a new superpower. Uchis’ vocal performance across the record represents a leap forward too: 12 years ago, she possessed the more limited—but still soulful—range of a lounge singer; now she stretches her voice to a fluttering whistle register on “¿Cómo Así?”
When she dives into Latin American idioms, Uchis is unstoppable; Latina mode is absolutely on. For “Te Mata,” the Colombian American returns to bolero after first exploring the style via her La Lupe and Los Zafiros covers from Sin Miedo. Women bolero singers have been entrenched in cultural memory as hysterical, abject divas, but with “Te Mata,” Uchis joins a growing wave of young artists reinterpreting the form as an expression of power. Over a gentle Spanish guitar and jagged string arrangements, Uchis sings of being cast as the “diabla” in a selfish lover’s story, only to realize she’s much better off without him (the kicker: he finds her newfound autonomy so painful it might kill him). Though she’s not as much of a vocal powerhouse as La Lupe, Uchis’ smoldering performance is still gorgeous, channeling the wounded desperation and hard-earned freedom of the women who came before her.
After sad-girl hour, though, it’s time for Uchis to scorch the earth in an old-school reggaeton blaze. Built on an updated instrumental of Andy Boy and DJ Blass’ “Dem Bow,” “Muñekita” recruits El Alfa and City Girls’ JT for three and a half minutes of knee-injuring perreo magic, fueled by Kali’s feline purrs, El Alfa’s twittering breakdown, and JT’s staggering levels of shade. It’s got a delicious collection of one-liners; I highly recommend adding “sana, sana, colita de rana, bitch” to your arsenal of slander. “Labios Mordidos,” which features fellow paisa Karol G, is a sapphic ode to a dancefloor diosa who’s as sweet as arepas de choclo; its kicks are harsh, its moans are orgasmic, and its lyrics are devilishly coy.
The ventures into new genres are thrilling, too. “No Hay Ley Parte 2,” a refresh of the 2022 single, adds a smutty dembow riddim to the original ’90s house production, courtesy of superstars Tainy, El Guincho, Jam City, Ovy on the Drums, and Geeneus. The new rendition also includes a verse of come-ons from Puerto Rican playboy Rauw Alejandro. His dirty talk is a fitting accompaniment to Uchis’ breezy hook; along with the added reggaeton percussion, it elevates “No Hay Ley” to a blissful crest.
On closer “Dame Beso // Muévete,” Uchis indulges in ’90s merengue. True to form, she puts her own pleasure at the thematic center of the song, and you can practically picture a frosty Presidente in your hand, the sweat dripping down your back as Los Toros Band and Toño Rosario hits blast from a speaker. Halfway through, the band picks up the pace into a full-on perico ripiao; it’s an unexpected party trick and exuberant send-off engineered for Saturday-morning cleaning efficiency.
Uchis has built her entire repertoire on stories of seduction and anguish, fantasies where women and femmes can be as bad as they are tender. On “Me Pongo Loca,” she spells out this naked truth: “Digo que a mí me vale cero/Pero tampoco soy hecha de hielo” (“I say that I don’t care at all/But I’m not made of ice either”). On Orquídeas, the Kali Uchis Doctrine of Reina Ideology—in which drop-dead goddesses never need to text back—is more potent than ever. Most importantly, the sound of Orquídeas represents the fluidity of being a diaspora kid—even if the suits will never get it. | 2024-01-12T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-12T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Geffen | January 12, 2024 | 8.4 | 797c8c8f-3346-42d4-9d15-3a58e7dabb2f | Isabelia Herrera | https://pitchfork.com/staff/isabelia-herrera/ | |
On his eighth album, Usher sounds better than he's sounded in ages, proving he will not go gentle into that quiet stormy night. | On his eighth album, Usher sounds better than he's sounded in ages, proving he will not go gentle into that quiet stormy night. | Usher: Hard II Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22418-hard-ii-love/ | Hard II Love | Like many child stars, Usher has struggled with his transition to adulthood. He was too old to be lurking like somebody’s creepy uncle in the 2010 video for “Lil Freak,” and too young to be belting like a 55-year-old who’s just bagged his first under-30 girlfriend in the song “Hey Daddy (Daddy’s Home).” But on 2014’s “Good Kisser,” a louche wink of a song, he figured out how to relax into exactly what he was: a dude in his mid-thirties with the abs of Michelangelo’s David, the dance moves of MJ, and the money of an artist who released the sixth best-selling album of the 2000s. He sounded breezy and at ease, finally confident enough to date women his age. So it’s a little disappointing that on Hard II Love, Usher’s eighth studio album, he hasn’t managed to hang onto that effortlessness. But there’s plenty to like, starting with his voice, which sounds better than ever.
It helps that he’s back to doing R&B. Over the years, Usher has toyed with electronic music which never played to his strengths. Songs like the fist-pumping cash grab “OMG” are made for singers who rely on over-processing to plump up their vocals. Usher has a warm, rich, creamy voice that needs room to spread. Experts in dealing with exceptional voices like The-Dream and Tricky Stewart (“Bump,” one of many bangers on Hard II Love) and Paul Epworth (the glittery, star-flecked album opener “Need U”) clear out space for Usher to just be Usher. Especially on the first half of the album, the production is as sumptuous and smooth as Frette linens. Even relative newcomer Metro Boomin’s “Make U a Believer,” one of the record’s standout tracks, is at home among the veterans. The whole affair sounds so rich that the rootsy Raphael Saadiq-produced closer “Champions” is as out of place as a poor country cousin.
As “OMG” illustrates, Usher is willing to do anything in order not to two-step gently into that gospel-by-day, grown-n-sexy-R&B-booze-cruise-by-night stage of his career, even though “Tell Me,” an eight-and-a-half-minute quiet storm track is just begging for a raging fire and bearskin rug. Hard II Love will keep him safe for now. For the most part, it’s sleek and modern, and it snaps right into the current R&B landscape. The one thing that rankles is that he jacks artists on the rise to do so. From the vocal phrasings to the lyrics, “No Limit” is such a Ty Dolla $ign song that I checked to see if Ty had written it. Of course, younger artists are influenced by more established artists. But when the situation is flipped, few people outside the music industry will know Usher is borrowing from Ty or Jeremih. Let them gain more mainstream recognition before helping yourself to their styles.
Then again, Usher is always trying on new personas, and on Hard II Love, he tests out thug-lover Usher. And frankly, hearing him sing, “Tell me what nigga is perfect? Tell me what nigga is right? Tell me what nigga been with the same bitch and she been holdin’ it down for life?” on “FWM” (“Fuck With Me”) is like Ja Rule trying to sing a Luther Vandross song.
Transitioning from “Need U (Conversation With Priyanka Chopra)” to “Missin U,” Chopra and Usher talk about what they want in a partner. Usher answers that he wants a beautiful woman with a “nice thin waist, fat ass.” Chopra, on the other hand, asks for a man who makes her laugh and feel safe: “He’s gotta be effortless, you know?” On Hard II Love, Usher isn’t that, but trying too hard hasn’t sounded this good in years. | 2016-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | September 21, 2016 | 6.6 | 797dfdd9-e4cb-46cd-9418-1b68e1bb23ed | Rebecca Haithcoat | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca- haithcoat/ | null |
The second album from Michael Milosh and his soft-rock musicians deftly creates an atmosphere that builds out their sound without adding much underneath. | The second album from Michael Milosh and his soft-rock musicians deftly creates an atmosphere that builds out their sound without adding much underneath. | Rhye: Blood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rhye-blood/ | Blood | A few things have changed in the five years since Rhye laid a rose and a lace blindfold on pop music’s pillow. Producer Robin Hannibal quietly left the duo sometime around the release of their debut album, Woman. Under remaining member Michael Milosh’s command, the project has evolved from a studio confection into a real band, its members’ resumes bulleted with former employers like Kelis, Jhené Aiko, and David Byrne. Milosh also broke up with his wife, to whom Woman’s raptures and ecstasies were dedicated. He has a new love now, and she appears on the cover of Blood, rendered once again in artful black and white, even more naked than the woman on the cover of Woman.
Musically, though, Rhye remains very much the same, and Blood picks up where Woman left off: the tempos slow, the decibels soft, the heft negligible. Funk guitars twist like orchids’ tendrils. Disco basslines rarely rise above a muted thump. Textures—a close-miked hi-hat, the rustling hammers of a Rhodes keyboard—are as vivid as fingernails scraping raw silk. The mood is set with grace and ease.
The band’s reference points also remain the same paragons of soft, smooth, and sensuous as before: Talk Talk, for the attention they lavish on the minutiae of empty space, Al Green for his devotion and his sighs, and Sade, for, well, everything. It’s not just that Milosh’s voice often sounds uncannily like Helen Adu’s, it’s that Rhye’s whole bedroom R&B vibe draws heavily upon the sound of Sade albums like Stronger Than Pride and Love Deluxe, with crisp, rock-steady drumming perforating velvety blue keyboards and wordless coos. (Milosh has claimed that he’s “not a big Sade fan,” which, I mean, sure.) If Woman sometimes felt like a pastiche of Sade, Blood feels like a pastiche of Woman. Every detail is accentuated, every gesture exaggerated. Layered handclaps crackle like logs in the fire. Slinky riffs move across electric piano, guitar, clarinet, viola, and French horn. And Milosh’s voice is more delicate and more expressive than ever; it often sounds like he’s trying to locate the precise point along his vocal cords where a syllable vaporizes into a sigh. His concerns may be carnal, but he is forever on the edge of disappearing into a cloud of breath.
Rhye’s soft-pop revivalism is not quite as radical as it once felt. But Blood’s hi-def panorama of feathers and pearls is even more finely detailed than on Woman, and it helps that the band switches up its footsteps frequently without ever breaking the mood. The opening three songs go from languid slow dance to waist-winding funk to a sleek disco skip—though their unvarying palette and Milosh’s insistent whisper also mean that they tend to blend together. “Sinful,” the album’s dramatic closer, borrows from John Williams’ soundtracks and Ali Farka Touré’s desert blues; “Phoenix,” a late-album highlight, exemplifies everything thrilling about the band’s touch. The action on the Rhodes is so tactile it gives goosebumps; overdriven blues guitar riffs twitch and curl like a bitten lip. And Milosh packs real oomph into his vocalizations, even when you can’t quite figure out what he’s singing. If you could bottle the way he mutters “Oh my God,” you could make a mint. It is the sound of sex distilled.
If only he’d left it at those three words, because the more attention you pay to the lyrics, the less enjoyable the album becomes. Milosh fixates upon words with a long “a” sound: waste, waiting, space, changes, cave, awake, face, away, babe, taste, waist, painful, unstable, place, race, face, fable, chase, play, change—the assonant rhymes pile up at the ends of his lines like heaps of scarlet letters. That’s fine; they lend Blood a sort of ruby-colored uniformity. It’s an approach that treats writing as a kind of tone painting. But his sweet nothings (“I kinda love your vain”) are often truly insubstantial.
His single-minded devotion to lewd double entendres can leave a sour taste, too. “Surrender to your needs” turns into “Surrender to your knees,” while in “Taste” he flips the scenario, “licking wounds” while his lover sleeps. And the “rising” that happens in “Phoenix” is almost certainly not a bird. Which is fine; sexy music can be fun! But when all this heavy breathing isn’t flat-out corny, there’s a creepy undercurrent running underneath, a menacing sluice of blood and tears that makes sex and romance sound not very fun at all. It’s a shame, because Blood is a marvel of engineering, of both sounds and moods. With nearly 500 shows under their belt at this point, Rhye have evolved into a formidable machine, but this album often sounds like a studio-crafted simulacrum of a full-band performance, every element a bit too polished. Like a retouched photo, it scans as just a little too perfect—a formalist exercise made primarily just to show that it can be done. Emotionally, it is stunted, a vision of desire as shallow as its cover. | 2018-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Loma Vista | February 5, 2018 | 6.3 | 79850b92-6152-405f-98a4-b52e79297932 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Into It. Over It’s Evan Weiss has a rock band for every occasion. When he’s looking to goof around, he turns to Pet Symmetry, and here they’ve made a record that feels like a sweet spot. | Into It. Over It’s Evan Weiss has a rock band for every occasion. When he’s looking to goof around, he turns to Pet Symmetry, and here they’ve made a record that feels like a sweet spot. | Pet Symmetry: Vision | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23294-vision/ | Vision | Evan Weiss sure knows how to compartmentalize. Last we heard from the multitasking Into It. Over It. songwriter, he was pouring out his heart on Standards, one of the more sophisticated albums to emerge from the emo revival, but Weiss has a band for every occasion. In his side project with Mike Kinsella, Their/They’re/There, he indulges his inner math-rock geek, paying homage to some of the more niche corners of Polyvinyl’s discography—much as his old project Stay Ahead of the Weather reveled in the sugary emo of groups like the Get Up Kids. His defining records have been passion projects crafted for people who love these genres as much as he does, but when he’s just looking to goof around, he turns to Pet Symmetry, his trio with a couple of Chicago pop-punk vets, Dowsing’s Erik Czaja and What Gives’ Marcus Nuccio.
Until now the group has mostly defined themselves by their love of puns. Their 2015 full-length Pets Hounds tossed them off at a clip seldom witnessed since Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!! phase, and in concert the band dials up the silliness even further, taking the stage in matching varsity jackets or Hawaiian shirts. In a certain light, there’s something radical about that irreverence, especially given the more serious tendencies of emo’s fourth wave. Acts like the Hotelier and the Wonder Years have raised the stakes with each record, documenting grief and depression in discomforting detail. Sorority Noise and Modern Baseball’s recent releases have doubled, sometimes literally, as suicide prevention hotline advertisements, giving emo a renewed sense of purpose. Meanwhile, Pet Symmetry have taken the opposite track, pulling back the curtain on one of emo’s great secrets: Behind all the sobering prose and artful conviction, there’s usually a bunch of guys who love sports and find it hilarious every time their drummer farts up their tour van.
On their sophomore album Vision, Pet Symmetry look to emo’s more carefree corners, particularly the pop-centric emo of bands like the Promise Ring and the Smoking Popes. Vision delivers on that promise of a good time. “St. John” sets its frothy mall-punk riff to a pogoing bassline, while Weiss breaks out a surprisingly convincing Frank Black impression on the manic, alterna-punk throwback “Eyesores,” one of several tracks that slide in under the two-minute mark. It’s all so brisk and agreeable that it takes a few spins to notice the band’s recalibration: They’ve dialed back the indiscriminate humor of Pets Hounds, bringing their songwriting closer in line with Weiss’ heartfelt Into It. Over It. output.
Punkier tracks like “Hall Monitor” and “Stare Collection” are fun without being overtly funny—no puns here—while a handful of weightier, dialed-down numbers suggest Weiss has begun treating the band as something more significant than a side project. “You & Me & Mt. Hood” even has the autobiographical setup of so many songs on Standards, detailing a lazy vacation day spent traversing a river, beers in hand, in the company of a friend. Unlike most tracks from that album, though, this one has a happy ending: The trip lifts his sunken spirits. “I can’t complain,” Weiss sings, “I’ve got a never-ending week, a couple loose plans and a peck on the cheek.”
The relatively low stakes flatter him. If there was one thing that held back Standards from being the masterpiece it clearly wanted to be, it was its overbearing need to be respected. From its first track, that record telegraphed its hopes of soundtracking the anxieties of an entire age group, but Vision is never so foolhardy in its ambitions—with their jocular image, Pet Symmetry would have you believe they don’t even have ambitions. They’re underselling themselves: Here they’ve made an album that’s lovable without needing to be loved, and insightful without feeling self-important. There are any number of directions Weiss and his bandmates could take a project as easy-going as this one, but Vision feels like a sweet spot. | 2017-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | June 5, 2017 | 6.8 | 79857ec8-14c9-4f29-b347-07e5ceddbb67 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The UK drill artist's debut album offers a richly drawn portrait of a young man feeling his way through life. | The UK drill artist's debut album offers a richly drawn portrait of a young man feeling his way through life. | Headie One: EDNA (Deluxe) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/headie-one-edna-deluxe/ | EDNA (Deluxe) | Last October, Headie One claimed a slice of history when his debut album Edna went to number one on the UK chart. He celebrated his achievement at his mother’s graveside, where he rested his award from the Official Charts Company on her black marble headstone and took a picture. He named the album after her—Edna Duah, the epitaph reads—and her image runs throughout. On opener “Teach Me,” he asks her to teach him forgiveness, while “Psalm 35” finds him gazing up at his mother, her presence a steady guide. But this isn’t a project focused solely on grief or mourning. Edna instead provides an anchor point in this richly drawn portrait of a young man feeling his way through life.
Headie’s appeal stems as much from the unflinching realism in his lyrics as it does his wry-smiling, understated demeanor. He blends street-beef references with lingering memories of the UK’s state school curriculum, all carried off without so much as a wink. “My young boy got the stick like Moses with the Israelites,” he offers as an intro on slinky Afrofunk number “Princess Cuts.” He’s witty, too, and not afraid to poke fun at himself: He started out rapping as Headz, after being told his bonce looks like a 50-pence piece.
This charisma helped him parlay features from two of the biggest rappers in the world—Future paints by numbers on “Hear No Evil,” and Drake slips awkwardly off the beat on “Only You Freestyle”—as well as a who’s who of the UK’s sparkling domestic rap scene, with AJ Tracey, Stormzy, Young Adz, Ivorian Doll, Skepta, and Aitch all appearing. Kaash Paige’s vocal acrobatics on “Cold” prove a fitting foil for Headie’s stretched monotone. But for the most part, Headie sounds best on his own. On “Mainstream” he encapsulates the dichotomies of leaving the streets for fame with crisp succinctness: Lines like “Mainstream rapper, autographs on the wing/Mainstream rapper, but my arse full of cling” distill in a handful of syllables what others have wrestled with over years and entire albums.
Headie’s frank and unfettered approach—much like his so-laidback-he’s-almost-comatose flow—allows his taut lyricism to spring forth. His verses on “Breathing”—calmly delivered, full of unfiltered reflection and frank self-assessment—offer the sort of insights that political focus groups could only dream of conjuring. However, he’s quick to move beyond limiting narratives of what drill music represents. The immediately familiar Lady Saw and Red Hot Chili Pepper samples on lead single “Ain’t It Different” embed the track in a mainstream pop context, along with Headie’s recollections of whipping crack, faking urine samples, and baking cakes from Digestive biscuits in prison. References to Harry Potter, Game Of Thrones, and Premier League soccer (one of Headie’s favorite subjects; a budding career of his own was cut short by an ankle injury) give a relatable frame to his otherwise shocking personal stories. It dismantles the idea that the struggles Headie has endured took place in an alternate reality.
The original version of Edna packed 20 tracks and often felt bloated—the clumsy, syllable-cramming “21 Gun Salute” could go, for a start. This deluxe edition adds another eight. “Hung Jury” proves a highlight—lines like “Have you ever felt guilty for being free?” lavish in melancholy—but otherwise, the expanded edition does more to prove the original should have been shorter. Ultimately, this is a shame. But whether you blame the bloat on streaming or impatience on Headie’s part, there’s plenty here to make a mama proud.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Relentless | February 18, 2021 | 6.8 | 798c8918-b023-4f56-92cd-2c325b180e05 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
On his austere fourth full-length, the Berlin-based electronic artist Steven Warwick uses ambient synth sketches to convey feelings of precarity and millennial abjection. | On his austere fourth full-length, the Berlin-based electronic artist Steven Warwick uses ambient synth sketches to convey feelings of precarity and millennial abjection. | Steven Warwick: Nadir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22700-nadir/ | Nadir | “Why so sad?/Don’t feel so bad/Get out of bed,” Steven Warwick tunelessly sings over gutted synths and a plodding drum machine on “Get It Together,” the bleak ode to something resembling self-care that introduces Nadir. This half-hearted plea offers quite the starting point: climbing, out of absolute necessity and with little fanfare, from a very low place. The UK-born, Berlin-based Warwick has performed with Luke Younger (aka Helm) in the duo Birds of Delay and, more recently, solo as Heatsick; his output under that moniker offered wry, danceable commentary on the niche social realities of the creative class. This mixtape-like offering is his fourth full-length with PAN, but his first under his own name, and marks a shift away from sardonic needling into something that’s more acutely—and personally—an artifact of total precarity. Balancing a fatigued observational poetics with ambient synth sketches, Nadir strings together a series of uncomfortably crisp images of a parched present.
As Heatsick, Warwick composed and performed using a beat-up Casio keyboard and a drum machine. While his productions weren’t exactly rich in sound, they tended to reach beyond those limited means, deploying skittering rhythms and juxtaposing textures to complex effect. Here, he gives up on this resourceful streak and embraces austerity. Sounds are bluntly placed, without much in the way of effects to dull their sharp corners: A harsh synth patch on “CTFO” maintains a single, flat volume throughout, running head-on into Warwick’s passive baritone. “Low Ceiling” matches a grating beat with the sound of helicopters overhead: “I feel scared/So I took a pill/And it calms me down,” he narrates. More ambient-minded offerings like “Racetrack Playa” and “Canyon Shadow” rumble aimlessly, streaked with staticky, trembling synthesizers. These still stretches are among the most evocative moments on the release, like the wordless reprieve of looking out a window while you’re in transit.
This threadbare aesthetic is propelled by Warwick’s writing. His accounts of panic attacks or souring relationships are indistinctly one-size-fits-most, if occasionally a little repugnant in their sheer passivity. But his descriptions of place are particularly lucid, as on “The Mezzanine,” in which he looks into a new urban shopping plaza: “There’s a zone of near serenity,” he says. “Sometimes you catch the gaze of a passing onlooker. You scan the purchases of an innocent bystander. The mezzanine is your dance floor. It’s your chessboard.”
A visual component to the album exists on Dutch artist Harm van den Dorpel’s delinear.info platform, comprising a nonlinear sequence of lyrics, cellphone videos, and photographs taken by Warwick between Berlin, Los Angeles, and New York, the three locations where Nadir was recorded. This colors in the transient spatial logic and general sense of dislocation that permeate these songs: an image of a desert sunset or a touching abstract photo of a beach at low tide will be layered with an iPhone picture taken in a shopping center or a German fast-food restaurant.
Though it can be beautiful in a stark, sad way, there is little comforting in Nadir’s millennial abjection. Many of the most effective recent attempts to process our troubled socio-political moment in sound have presented some form of escape, or at least catharsis. But these compositions contain neither, and don’t attempt to synthesize a broader narrative. They function instead—like the images Warwick has assembled to accompany them—as snapshot-documents of impermanent locations, of experiences that don’t quite add up, of the bizarre conditions of urban life in 2016. The uneven emotional and social landscapes Warwick conjures feel honest, and woefully relatable, in their inability to resolve. | 2017-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Pan | January 3, 2017 | 7.6 | 798cef13-ecf6-47a4-b538-53e1927e6237 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
The Earl Sweatshirt collaborator’s curated, understated mixtape fits a wealth of words into a small space. Even when rapping, he thinks like a producer, as concerned with texture as he is with text. | The Earl Sweatshirt collaborator’s curated, understated mixtape fits a wealth of words into a small space. Even when rapping, he thinks like a producer, as concerned with texture as he is with text. | ovrkast.: Try Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ovrkast-try-again/ | Try Again | The artist known as ovrkast. emerged seemingly out of nowhere last year with a producer credit on Earl Sweatshirt’s FEET OF CLAY. The Oakland-based producer’s sole contribution to the project, “EL TORO COMBO MEAL,” is a static-heavy slice of chopped-up sampledelia: rumbling drums, a scattered piano line, and cooing, soulful voices. Ovrkast. would probably be familiar only if you’d spent a lot of time digging on Bandcamp, as I’m sure Earl Sweatshirt has. He’s been posting beats there since at least 2016—jazzy and Nujabes-like in their sound, scavenged a capellas woven in and out, with track titles like “.08lamplites[recipe]” and “shouldaz[dust]” that recall of lo-fi beat mastermind Knxwldge’s method of stylizing song names. He’s kept a humble profile in the months since his professional debut, but ovrkast. makes his official introduction with the mixtape Try Again.
Ovrkast. came onto the radar as a producer, but here he also expresses himself lyrically—he began writing bars even before he started making beats, according to a recent Twitter Q&A. His production has an ever-so-light jazz texture, and his rapping does too: not flashy, but bouncy and dense, with a slight monotone edge that demands extra attention to take stock of what he’s saying. There’s a track entitled “2 Minute Bars,” and hardly a song stretches beyond that length. Ovrkast.’s compositions are breakfast nooks, not big rooms—he fits a wealth of words into a small space without making it feel like too many words, not the easiest balance for any backpack-friendly rapper to strike. He doesn’t sound unconfident, but there is an almost intentional shyness to his delivery, a quiet moodiness or restraint, and his voice often comes at us through the sound of tape crackle. There’s a consistent tone across the album’s nine beats, and ovrkast. carefully curates his guest features too, surrounding himself with acclaimed and esoteric lyricists like Mavi and Pink Siifu.
Try Again shows us an artist’s struggle to show himself—as his moniker suggests, ovrkast.’s persona remains cloudy and obscured. His identity-related dilemmas are most explicit on “Face,” featuring the Earl Sweatshirt-affiliated Navy Blue (aka professional skater Sage Elsesser), where his anguish forms the song’s chorus: “Everywhere, like I don’t know my place/I got people waitin’ on me/Still though, I can’t show my face.” At times, like on the tape’s title track, the mood approaches upbeat, but confidence and anxiety are two sides of the same coin—the drums soften and slow, and the song’s central call to “do it all over, try again” mutates from an affirmational mantra into a self-critical monologue, ovrkast. overwhelmed at the blank pages in front of him and the words waiting to be written.
On “Interlude,” ovrkast. lets an audio clip of painter Kerry James Marshall talking about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man outline the thesis of his tape. Marshall reflects on Ellison’s notion of the “simultaneity” of African American life, a kind of dually felt “presence and absence,” which inspired Marshall’s play with different values of black in his own work. Presence and absence offers a useful paradigm for approaching ovrkast.—we see inside his mind, but he still finds a way to keep his distance. Like Kerry James Marshall, ovrkast. is working with color temperature, crafting his sounds in grayscale. He writes bars that require unpacking, but even when rapping, ovrkast. thinks like a producer, as concerned with texture as he is with text. The shades he works in are primarily charcoal and silver, but the spectrum of cool feelings is rich. | 2020-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 10, 2020 | 7 | 798e4e19-700f-4f6b-b252-45feeab4f110 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The soundtrack to the Sharon Jones documentary isn’t quite a career-spanning compilation, but provides the unflinching honesty and ceaseless vitality that abounds in her life and music. | The soundtrack to the Sharon Jones documentary isn’t quite a career-spanning compilation, but provides the unflinching honesty and ceaseless vitality that abounds in her life and music. | Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: Miss Sharon Jones! OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22273-miss-sharon-jones-ost/ | Miss Sharon Jones! OST | The Sharon Jones survivor story is well-known to her loving fans: Jones beat pancreatic cancer in 2013 and circumvented the music industry more than a dozen years earlier. She’s never been short on insight or frankness when confronting those matters, as seen at the 2014 EMP Pop Conference keynote panel and her recent appearance on Billboard's Soul Sisters podcast. The documentary Miss Sharon Jones!, directed by two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA; American Dream), is an unflinching *verite *account of both those fights. It’s a must-see for fans, but also an insightful intro for neophytes who’ve only heard the Dap-Kings on Amy Winehouse records.
So what do those neophytes get when they pick up the soundtrack? It’s odd to categorize the release outside the context of the film itself. This isn’t quite a Greatest Hits, and if it were, there’d be plenty of omissions worth griping about: no “Stranded in Your Love,” no cover of “This Land Is Your Land,” no appearance of the debut Daptone single “Got a Thing on My Mind” or anything else from her name-making 2002 debut Dap-Dippin’ With...? But burdening the album with those kinds of gripes is mostly a matter of unfair expectations. A bigger question is why the *Miss Sharon Jones! *soundtrack doesn't take advantage any of the live performances that appear in the film. With a reputation earned in part due to her F-5 tornado stage presence, that’s a big letdown.
But it’s damn near impossible to put together even a mediocre Sharon Jones compilation, and the soundtrack* looks at her career from a unique angle. As a kiss-off to a no-good man retrofitted to her defiant stand against her disease, “Retreat!” belongs at the top of the tracklist. It’s become an anthem that embodies what she and the Dap-Kings do in the face of turmoil—and may very well be, after all this time, her signature song. The film also seems to posit 2007’s 100 Days, 100 Nights as Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings’ signature album, with five of its 10 songs (including the Motown-inflected “Tell Me,” the Etta James-ian soul-blues of “Let Them Knock,” and the slinky title cut) making up nearly a third of this soundtrack. And cuts from succeeding albums I Learned the Hard Way and Give the People What They Want *round things out, making *Miss Sharon Jones! *more of a synopsis of her and her band’s last 10 years than the deeper examination fans might hope for.
Yet despite the tunnel-vision tracklist that relies too much on the movie’s narrative, there are a couple surprise gems lurking in this collection. “Longer & Stronger,” lifted from another soundtrack (2010’s For Colored Girls), is a Southern soul ballad that reveals Jones’ resilience against the bullshit, even before she faced her health issues. Hearing her testify that “Longer and stronger, that’s how I live/The more I get, the more I got to give” is all the evidence you need. And the closer “I’m Still Here,” newly recorded for the soundtrack, is the autobiographical soul of the album that ties in her upbringing, her struggles, and her perseverance into the force she’s become today. Naturally, its brassy arrangement and Jones’ enduring voice make for one of the most vibrant and energizing tracks on the album, and maybe the group’s entire catalog. It’s a vital primer for those who haven’t familiarized themselves with Sharon Jones, and a reaffirming bolt of lightning for the fans who have. | 2016-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Daptone | August 23, 2016 | 7 | 79921885-6400-4f30-8adf-7de4a449695f | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
This reissue of William Basinski's 2009 album finds the composer doing what he does best, creating haunting loops and drones that have a way of burrowing into your life. | This reissue of William Basinski's 2009 album finds the composer doing what he does best, creating haunting loops and drones that have a way of burrowing into your life. | William Basinski: 92982 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22277-william-basinski-92982/ | 92982 | When you travel to 351 Jay Street on Google Maps you’re greeted with the image of a nondescript office building. On its ground floor is an art supply store. The rest of the scene is anonymous. Much of Downtown Brooklyn looks like 351 Jay: brutalist buildings of medium height that evoke industry and bureaucracy. Thirty-six years ago, in this building, William Basinski lived in a loft space that he called the Music Laboratories. He moved in at the beginning of the 1980s with his partner, the artist James Elaine.
Most of the work Basinski released in the 2000s consisted of remixed, reworked, and wonderfully garbled homages to the archive he started to build in the Music Laboratories. While there he made hundred of tape loops, organizing the ribbons of magnetic tape on a tree branch he kept near his mixing desk. The loops were a combination of recordings of his own compositions and incidental noise that seemed to come his way from the whirl of urban life outside his window or from the whisper of radio broadcasts seeding themselves into his recording equipment. He didn’t release his experiments at the time, choosing to record, finagle, connect. The impulse was a natural reaction to the time and place, as he later said: “I was getting all this great stuff. It was just coming from the sky.”
One day in September of 1982 he was experimenting on the fly, collecting fragments, and maybe hours later the backbone of a piece was made. He called it 92982, a clinical name designating the date of the composition, as if it was just a file to be tucked away. He released the recordings for the first time in 2009, long after he garnered widespread acclaim for his monumental 9/11 elegy The Disintegration Loops. Seven years after its initial release, 92982 has been remastered and reissued as 2xLP set of startlingly crisp and veritably haunted music.
92982 is over an hour long, and the original improvisation makes up the first two tracks, while the back half of the album includes an extended rework of a piano-based piece from Variations: A Movement in Chrome Primitive and another loop constructed from the 1982 material. Given the sources, the tracks present in 92982 seem almost unstuck from time, floating between dates and points of inspiration. The continual cutting up, editing, and processing of a tape loop was something closer to necromancy than normal composition. It’s a quality that actually infects the overall feeling of the music, creating an environment for free-floating listening.
The album’s opening track, “92982.1,” drifts, separates, grows quiet, and then rumbles loudly. The wash of noises is teeming with potential, a quality that defines the inner workings of 92982. All four tracks are open canvases, they invite the rest of the world’s sounds to participate in making the experience of listening different each time. The sound of a helicopter whirling in the atmosphere and the Doppler splatter of a police car’s siren on “92982.2” mix into the sounds of banal moments, like laying in bed, listening to the buzz of an air conditioner, the honking of cars, the rustle of leaves, the drip of an open faucet. The drifting of “92982.4”’s piano loops hang like flickering presences hovering above a room. Overall, a disembodying and strange thing slowly happens as this album keeps playing: it sucks the noises of your environment into the loop. What’s contained here is sometimes not exactly a piece of music but an experiential filter.
Basinski’s music is constantly toying with the idea that rote moments in life can be engulfed with emotion, and it has a way of burrowing into your life. As his perpetual loops drift across the surface of experience, they are incredibly porous, and invite a listener to complete them by taking a walk around their block or just go about their day. 92982 accomplishes this more successfully than much of Basinski’s work; compared to The Disintegration Loops, it’s more open to interpretation and devoid of the same weight of history or narrative. It is an extremely plastic and pliant piece of music, an eternally empty vessel that gets filled up from listen to listen. | 2016-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Temporary Residence Ltd. | September 2, 2016 | 8.7 | 79936156-ca64-45a6-988b-97b8d0ce387e | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
Parquet Courts’ new mini-LP Monastic Living contains just one song with words; the remaining eight tracks aren't just wordless, they're also tuneless. It feels like their first true statement of total rejection. | Parquet Courts’ new mini-LP Monastic Living contains just one song with words; the remaining eight tracks aren't just wordless, they're also tuneless. It feels like their first true statement of total rejection. | Parquet Courts: Monastic Living EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21301-monastic-living-ep/ | Monastic Living EP | On "No No No!", the opener of Parquet Courts’ new mini-LP Monastic Living, Andrew Savage declares in a mangled grunt, "I don’t want to be called a poet/ Don’t want to hang in a museum/ Don’t want to be cited, tacked onto your cause/ No, no, no/ I’m just a man." From a band who've typically resisted disenchantment against the odds, it’s an alarming statement of rejection. On 2012's Light Up Gold, Savage and co-songwriter Austin Brown blazed through mundane minutiae–"train death paintings, anti-meth murals"–yet saw beauty in the banality; on last year’s "Content Nausea", released as Parkay Quarts, Savage yelled denunciations of the digital era in excited bursts, like a smalltown newsreader reporting alien landings. Pitched between stoner gags and urgent instructions, their sizzling one-liners felt like a bulwark against capitalist dread, the battle between righteousness and resignation. Monastic Living, their debut EP for Rough Trade presumably ahead of a full-length in the new year, is them saying, "We’re tired, that’s enough."
"No No No!" is unique to the record, in that it has words, a hook, a rhythm you could tap, a sonic and philosophical destination, and replay value. In the liner notes, the track’s expanded lyric sheet blends cliché ("We’re just a band," "retreat into solitude") and aphorism—"Perhaps silence is purity of spirit"—into a grave mission statement. The remaining eight tracks aren't just wordless but tuneless; they're sometimes baffling, often boring, and always deliberately so.
Part of what makes "No No No!" work is that its litany of targets—"open letters, long reads"—is broad enough to appeal to everyone’s digital unease. Parquet Courts are resolutely unchill ("Life’s lived best when scrolling least," Savage sang on "Content Nausea"), bewildered by the hot takes and the jostling think-pieces, as are we all. But these are popular targets, and without the counterweight of wit, Parquet Courts' grand disavowal feels reactionary. On Monastic Living, they make a personal decision to reject a web culture constantly renegotiating what it means to be socially conscious ("I don't want to be an essayist!" begins Savage's salvo), and in doing so they reclaim art’s right to political neutrality. As statements go, it’s fine but hardly revolutionary—a passionate shrug.
Redeeming moments in the music are scarce. One is "Vow of Silence", with its clattering drums, pleading, squealing guitars, and haywire arpeggios, which resemble the misfiring pistons of a manic brain. "Alms for the Poor", comprising several seconds of a postpunk riff that dies suddenly, sounds like the husk of a practice session; a chugging number called "Monastic Living I." is Battles without the epiphanies.
Unlike that paragon of artistic rejection, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, which actually coheres rather nicely, the EP has little textural detail; the music is not immersive, much less transcendent. It isn’t just a score to modern ennui but a work that itself feels indifferent. Yet it’s presented with a straight face: The band are touring the EP and we can buy it, though I’m unsure why anyone would—perhaps its existence as a paid-for product is part of the statement. What it means for the band’s future is, for now, a mystery, though not the kind it is fun to unravel. | 2015-11-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2015-11-25T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Rough Trade | November 25, 2015 | 4.9 | 79995765-ce03-4e38-b35c-b366d7fffcec | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | null |
Once best known best as the cryptic PC Music character QT, Hayden Dunham returns with an updated electro-pop sound that strips away some of the artifice from their previous project. | Once best known best as the cryptic PC Music character QT, Hayden Dunham returns with an updated electro-pop sound that strips away some of the artifice from their previous project. | Hyd: Hyd EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hyd-hyd-ep/ | Hyd EP | On the 2014 single “Hey QT,” the artist known simply as QT used pop as a vehicle to travel deep into the uncanny valley. A collaboration with hyperpop pioneers A. G. Cook and SOPHIE, the bubblegum bass anthem took the form of a marketing campaign for a (mostly) fictional soft drink, fetishizing the sound of soullessness while crystalizing key PC Music elements: hyperphysical synths, chipmunk vocals, advertising as genre. After seven years of silence across a rapidly changing pop landscape, the mysterious face behind QT, Hayden Dunham, returns as Hyd. Co-written by a coterie of experimental pop icons like Cook and Caroline Polachek, their four-track debut EP lacks some of the radical thrill of QT’s lone single; the songs mix stellar electro pop with some curiously tame stylistic choices. But Hyd still constitutes an intriguing statement of self and renewal from a performer who, after disappearing for the better part of a decade, now strips away the artifice of their previous project.
Pearlescent opener “No Shadow”—a ballad inspired by a temporary loss of vision the artist experienced in 2017—explores identity in the binary opposition of light and dark, asking, “Am I finally home?” over stark bass synth. Dunham’s skill as a producer is readily apparent throughout the EP: On the excellent “Skin 2 Skin,” their kinetic, hair-rising whispers seem to directly penetrate your ear. They sleekly dole out an assonant waterslide of “Gemini”s and “thigh”s and “ride or die”s that could rival Charli XCX’s “Claws”; they gasp, leaving suggestive gaps in their bitten-off phrases, flirting through fragments like “feeling kind of ___ on the inside” and “sweating through the ____, take it outside.”
Elsewhere, the influence of current-day PC Music affiliates takes hold. Though Hyd skirts the extremes of hyperpop—QT’s characteristic chipmunk vocals are nowhere to be seen, and the texture of the music’s electro pop is mild by current-day standards—Brooklyn producer umru still brings a deep bubblegum bass sound to “The One,” building its framework on metallic, claustrophobic synths. As the song darkly changes textures, Dunham innocently observes, “Now you’re gonna smash it to the ground/Now you’re gonna have to smash it to the ground.” Half love song and half lament, the track divides its time between twinkly, yearning ballad and quietly violent breakdown.
Polachek’s influence is even more obvious, sometimes to the point of eclipsing Dunham’s own identity, which can border on indistinguishable within the polished art pop of “Skin 2 Skin” and “No Shadow.” Hyd often bears traces of an early-’10s Tumblr landscape that no longer feels quite so relevant; single “The Look on Your Face” is a strangely straightforward ’90s bedroom-pop pastiche built on a foundation of acoustic guitar and hushed, untreated vocals. Both the lyrics and delivery—“I know she’s with you/But in my mind/We’re still back at your place/Back at your place, yeah”—are stilted and awkward, calling to mind an Olivia Rodrigo demo.
The pop innovations that PC Music helped catalyze—bubblegum bass, deconstructed club, hyperpop—have evolved dramatically since the singular “Hey QT.” As Quinn Thomas, Dunham symbolized the scene’s conceptual hijinks; seven years later, their belated debut presents them as a living, breathing, feeling person. But their updated sound feels like a lateral move into merely competent pop, rather than anything genuinely new. Hyd offers a sideways look into 2021’s alt-pop landscape, if not its advance.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | PC Music | November 8, 2021 | 6.5 | 799e65a8-a8b0-4859-8814-056b5893d975 | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the great jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s 1972 opus, a one-of-a-kind dispatch from the vibrant, polygenic, and contested lofts of downtown New York. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the great jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s 1972 opus, a one-of-a-kind dispatch from the vibrant, polygenic, and contested lofts of downtown New York. | Ornette Coleman: Science Fiction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ornette-coleman-science-fiction/ | Science Fiction | A decade after he arrived in New York and reshaped jazz to come, Ornette Coleman purchased a co-op. He wasn’t searching for valuable real estate when he bought two stories of a former factory on Prince Street, in the bloodless heart of the then-barren post-industrial neighborhood known as SoHo. It was 1968, and the saxophonist, who laid the foundation for free jazz, wanted a place where he could compose, sleep, shoot pool, and host friends’ concerts. His 10,000-square-foot residence on the third floor was sparsely furnished, in true downtown bohemian fashion, with an inflatable raft he used as his couch and a myna bird who greeted guests. On the ground level was a concert and practice space he called “Artists House,” which he lent to fellow musicians nearly for free. Just a few years later, in the 1970s, jazz players galore began moonlighting apartments, storefronts, galleries, and warehouses as live venues, birthing the genre’s legendary loft scene. Artists House presaged this generous ethos and its paper-thin walls between home and work. A 1972 album Coleman made while living at his urban perch anticipated the movement’s aesthetic: Science Fiction’s style-agnostic, Afrofuturist vision thrums with city life, logging an unusual moment in time that rippled far into the future.
The native Texan had already indelibly influenced the loft generation with his mythic run between 1959 and 1962 on Atlantic, during which he all but rewrote the language of his medium. Coleman abandoned fixed tonal centers and scaffolded the chromatic scale with quarter tones, sometimes while playing a plastic, flamboyantly white alto. He flouted the expected but based his originality in a wide range of musical traditions. Coleman’s upbringing in Fort Worth, where he was born in 1930 and grew up in a series of tiny, rented shotgun shacks, inundated him with big bands, bebop, and a kind of expanded American songbook—spirituals, ragtime, blues, R&B, Tejano, Western swing—that either predated jazz or molded it into a regional vernacular. When he was 14 his mother gave him his first horn, which soon became a way of making cash. As Maria Golia discusses in her terrific biography Ornette Coleman: The Territory and the Adventure, he gigged around his hometown’s vibrant scene during the late 1940s, helping out in a single-parent household. Coleman’s father had died when he was 7. His sister found him work as a musician in clubs that catered to varied clientele yet remained starkly segregated.
Coleman hated most of these performances, which felt racially and creatively conservative, although he went along with whatever she rustled up. He rebelled on other stages; his high school band booted him for improvising during a traditional Sousa march. In 1948, while soloing at an all-white joint, he had a revelation: What if he left the melody behind entirely on “Stardust,” pulling instead from the bounty of other notes he heard in the chord changes—wouldn’t that make a tired standard less boring? The dancers who led the crowd in their revelry froze, confused by his improvisations, and the club owner fired him. Soon after, Coleman taught another player bebop while he traveled the South with a variety tent show, performing for audiences who were more accustomed to ragtime and Dixieland than the compositional modernism in vogue among New York’s edgier audiences. He was ejected from the bandstand and left penniless in Natchez, Mississippi, where cops harassed and chased him out of town. Downriver in Baton Rouge, belligerent locals beat him up and smashed his instrument beyond repair. They found the 18 year old’s long hair offensive, and his strange sax styling—a preview of how he soon outgrew bebop’s complex harmonies in favor of the more open-ended and dissonant music that the world deemed “free jazz”—freaked them out, too.
Such tales often come with the implication that Coleman fled the South and Texas—which he did, but merely in terms of geography. In Los Angeles, during the 1950s, and in Manhattan, where he made a home for himself from the decade’s end until he died in 2015, Coleman stayed close to his roots. His small crew of collaborators included a couple of high school friends, saxophonist Dewey Redman and drummer Charles Moffett. A cousin from Fort Worth, James Jordan, produced Science Fiction; Coleman’s son, Denardo, drummed frequently for his father, beginning on 1966’s The Empty Foxhole, when he was just 10 years old. Other mainstays in Coleman’s numerous groups had backgrounds in the gradient of Black culture that bridged the Lone Star State and the Southeast, which gave glimpses of a wider, freer musical universe. His perennial right-hand man, Don Cherry, was born in Oklahoma; another trumpeter, Bobby Bradford, hailed from Dallas; drummer Ed Blackwell came up in the musically fertile crescent of New Orleans. Coleman’s sound was otherworldly, but he never left Texas behind.
Science Fiction is a welcome return to the singable, quintessentially Southern melodicism that counterbalanced his dauntless early oeuvre, but was increasingly absent from his more recent work. It also reflects the palette-broadening connections he forged at Artists House. By the dawn of the ’70s, free jazz had been a fixture for a decade. Fusion, which mixed jazz with electrified funk and rock, looked like a fertile new frontier. Science Fiction isn’t strictly a fusion record, but it is etched with the zeitgeist. Coleman incorporates vocals, poetry, amplifiers, overdubs, and a bevy of jazz customs he refracts through the trick mirror of his characteristically wonky arrangements. This seemingly shaggy digest from mid-life is in fact one of his most eloquent, succinct, and consequential statements: The album is a chronicle of a culturally fecund era, a diary of where Coleman had been since his Fort Worth days, and a star chart for where he wanted to navigate next.
Coleman had been criminally underpaid throughout the 1960s, like other avant-minded peers, and so he stopped touring domestically in the decade’s middle and reduced his recording to a trickle, allowing his collaborators to move on to other bands and projects. Artists House offered an answer to both his resulting creative fallow period and his constant fury at being cheated by club owners. The germ of loft jazz was the recognition that playing challenging music didn’t mean you had to be a victim of other people’s business models: Coleman and his acolytes may have lost money by putting on their own shows, but at least they lost on their own terms.
Science Fiction is fully on Coleman’s terms—it’s a kaleidoscopically personal experience, like a new home filled with old furniture and beloved mementos. Several compositions resuscitate and twist foundational traditions of his youth: blues (the opening bass figure on “Law Years”), bop (the frenzied horn races of “Civilization Day”), Dixieland (the staggered lead lines of “Street Woman”). Coleman reunited his early quartet of Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Billy Higgins for the latter two tracks, which from a different bandleader might scan as nostalgic, or otherwise like a glib marketing hook. But Coleman extends and upends their nuclear family by bringing new folks into the fold from song to song, replacing familiarity with the splatter of possibility.
The composer engages in a brilliant dialogue with his era, an exchange and not a prescription for change. On 1961’s Free Jazz, the release that named the genre, he employed two quartets playing at once. Science Fiction abounds with overstuffed, misshaped ensembles, but they feel like notions of what a band might be, not final destinations. Blackwell and Higgins pound at their drum kits simultaneously on the clamorous title track and a couple of spiritually soaring vocal features, “What Reason Could I Give” and “All My Life.” Fusion takes hold on “Rock the Clock,” which forefronts a multi-reed attack, as Redman blows a musette along with his tenor. The song deals in overdubs and, for the first time in Coleman’s recorded output, electric instruments: Haden’s wah-wah bass enters midway, accompanied by Coleman’s untutored violin, a shoutout to the fiddle customs of the American West. Yet “Rock the Clock,” like the surrounding record, refuses to lean on fusion’s signature 4/4 backbeat. Instead, Science Fiction offers a blend of approaches, temporalities, and traditions, melding the old with the new, the Texan and the Yankee, and especially the cosmopolitan and the rural. At heart, this is a suite of urban transplant songs, tracing a variety of styles that people—particularly people of color—brought to the cultural melting pot of Lower Manhattan.
Opener “What Reason Could I Give” features Asha Puthli, a fresh-faced New Yorker from India who would go on to be an eclectic and frequently sampled disco diva. Coleman had never recorded with a singer in the studio, but in proto-loft spirit he elevated an archetype from a prior iteration of jazz, the once-prized role of the vocalist, which was often eschewed by composers in the late 1960s and ’70s. Puthli brings to her two songs the embellishments of raga tradition, and also simmering, hungry emotion. Her vocals on “What Reason Could I Give” sound like the lamentations of a recent arrival in the city sitting on their fire escape after a tough day: weary, homesick, welling with melancholy. She sighs alongside a doubled-up brass section, toggling between dissonance and sweet harmony, her melody in search of a resting place. The title track layers samples of a baby’s wails, a sound familiar to any denizen of a cramped tenement. “My mind belongs/To civilization,” the phenomenal Harlem-raised poet David Henderson recites beneath the fray, a man trying to hear his own thoughts by speaking them out loud.
“All My Life” gleams with rosier fortunes: The love song feels like living someplace new long enough that it begins to seem hopeful. “To wait for you, I’m glad,” Puthli sings, and later, “Joy that I never knew.” Coleman, Redman, and New York Philharmonic trumpeters Gerard Schwarz and Carmine Fornarotto restate her vocals triumphantly on their horns. The presence of classical musicians is yet another example of Science Fiction’s uneasy relationship with jazz, its zigs and zags into space-age lieder, spoken word, and sound collage. Coleman’s initial innovations can seem quaint today, if you’ve absorbed enough of the avant-garde music that came in their wake. Science Fiction shocks, paradoxically, because it didn’t generate a totalizing revolution: It envisions culture as a field in which multiple strains could thrive under the wide umbrella of the vanguard, like fellow travelers making room for each other in the mountingly inhospitable landscape of ’70s New York.
The set is never laser focused, unlike Coleman’s own frame-shifting breakout albums, or other saxophonist-turned-auteur masterworks like A Love Supreme. The composer’s mid-career opus proffers a patchwork of celestial dreams, hurried bits of supernatural musical chemistry, and aesthetic left turns. Even the more “typical” jazz compositions push out toward impending styles. “Street Woman” is ostensibly orthodox because it centers around a head, squawked by Coleman’s sax and Cherry’s pocket trumpet. The song’s blues conjures an image, as though Coleman is observing a desperate scene from a park bench—a frantic counterpoint to the gentle melancholy of its spirit sister “Lonely Woman,” perhaps the best-known composition from Coleman’s early repertoire. But the solo sections on “Street Woman” unsettle expectation, miring us in Haden’s swampy bass and Higgins’ exclamatory drumming. This bottom-heavy minimalism reflects the stripped-down grooves of funk, and even predicts, albeit obliquely, disco’s eventual turn toward the grittier rhythms of techno and house.
Coleman’s economical renderings of urban claustrophobia echoed throughout the next decade of experimental music. All eight compositions sound like brief, profound sketches that point to the prospect of future expansion. Each style gets a moment in the sun; every ostinato repeats just enough times to imprint its contours on our minds. The album’s marriage of urbane resignation and wide-eyed artistic possibility points toward David Bowie and Brian Eno’s 1977 collaboration Low, which similarly introduced a slew of novel notions without harping on them, as well as Suicide’s self-titled debut, also a product of the downtown loft era. These projects forefront a metropolis’ buzz and refuse to either compromise or indulge: All that contradicts their conceptual severity is a frazzled, searching beauty.
Coleman continued to unspool Science Fiction’s aesthetic knot throughout his life. In 1988, the twangy Virgin Beauty again reached into the regional sounds of his childhood, and his dabbles with electric instruments and large, layered bandstands blossomed with the jazz-funk group Prime Time, who joined Coleman from the late ’70s until the ’90s. Perhaps the best proof that Science Fiction was the catalyst for Coleman’s second act is a long-unused session highlight, “School Work,” which he saved for 1982’s companion LP Broken Shadows. Its horn motif kept popping up, morphing into a symphonic arrangement on the superb Skies of America later in ’72, before it became the basis for much of 1977’s repetition-obsessed Dancing in Your Head. The exclusion of “School Work” from the original release is less a liability than a sign of Coleman’s vision. The tune may have continued to reverberate in his head, but its refrain-centric structure was perhaps one nod too many to bebop for the thrillingly motley Science Fiction.
In the mid-’70s, when loft jazz was at its peak, Coleman was forced out of Artists House. Prejudiced communities often used eviction, just Jim Crow wearing Northern garb, to persecute even the most exalted jazz musicians. His neighbors complained about noise, and the courts pushed Coleman from the ground floor, seizing on the semi-licit, predatory grounds of the original sale in the former industrial area. The law tried to strip his apartment from him, too, but after an excruciating legal battle Coleman managed to sell it. Unlike many of the jazz visionaries who followed him, Coleman had indeed made money from music—he was able to buy Artists House in the first place because he was one of the first composers without a classical music pedigree to receive a Guggenheim grant, in 1967. Yet by choice, habit, or maybe a less conscious impulse, Coleman spent the late ’70s flitting between cheap hotels and cold-water flats, a touch-and-go lifestyle he knew well from his first decade in NYC. Sometimes he slept in the back room of his manager’s office. Coleman invested much of his income back into his practice, and he gave to the poor and to people in his life; his exuberant, glorious wardrobe aside, he was unlikely to shell out on personal luxury.
He tried home ownership again in 1982, acquiring a building on Rivington Street near the East River, a former elementary school he envisaged as an “art embassy”—another benevolent dream in an unsympathetic society—that happened to be located at the epicenter of the Lower East Side’s drug trade. Well into middle age and eminent, Coleman was beaten multiple times and held hostage in his property during the several years he stayed there. The IRS targeted him simultaneously, claiming that he owed considerable back taxes, investigations he ultimately managed to skirt. Coleman had left behind the dangerous path of playing jazz in the South, only to face a new set of perils as a famous, eccentric Black composer in the largest cultural and financial hub of the North. Science Fiction is the most diverse and enduringly wild dispatch from an imagination that found joy and sustenance in itself, and was hardly wanting for public recognition—but also one that understood firsthand how the United States turns misery and terror into a persistent fact of life. Coleman’s art contains experiences that clash with the unwieldy brilliance of two quartets playing at once: a celebration of Afrofuturist reverie, a wallop of American realism. | 2024-02-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-25T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Columbia | February 25, 2024 | 9.5 | 79a0c2e9-6150-4fc0-8dc9-e34b326d3fbb | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
Male Bonding's full-length debut cleans up the sound of their ultra lo-fi early singles but the music is still fast, noisy, and full of hooks. | Male Bonding's full-length debut cleans up the sound of their ultra lo-fi early singles but the music is still fast, noisy, and full of hooks. | Male Bonding: Nothing Hurts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14241-nothing-hurts/ | Nothing Hurts | Male Bonding's songs are fast, noisy, and full of hooks, a combination that might remind you of any number of things: Nirvana-era fuzz-pedal stompers, 1990s American indie rockers, Hüsker Dü and Dinosaur Jr. followers, not-quite-shoegazer English bands. Like a lot of those acts-- and like their contemporaries in No Age and Abe Vigoda-- Male Bonding started out making more abrasive music. Two of the three members used to be in the noise-pop band PRE, and the rich London scene they're coming out of-- a loose collective of bands with more of a common spirit than a common sound-- is full of scratchy post-punk, lo-fi fuzz, and hints of classic labels like Teenbeat, K, and Flying Nun. These are the kinds of foundational sounds that indie rock often turns back to when it needs to clear its head. But with Male Bonding, part of the treat is hearing them jump out of that and find room in the wide-open field where amped-up, rangy punk stuff collides with tuneful slacker pop. (Early on, they covered both Black Flag and Blur.) No surprise that they've wound up signed to Sub Pop, a label that built part of its reputation on that sound.
"That sound" isn't new, of course. It helps that Male Bonding are shockingly good at it, and remarkably efficient. The songs on Nothing Hurts are short, direct, pared down to essentials, and tightly packed-- with hooks, with changes, with instrumental fireworks. They move rapidly from zoomy rock to more atmospheric breaks ("Franklin"), and from a terrific run of loose, spiky gems in the middle ("Crooked Scene", "Weird Feelings") to some surprises toward the end. (The closer, a scratchy acoustic number, features guest vocals by Vivian Girls.) Frontman John Arthur Webb's vocals and lyrics can be a little hazy and non-committal-- often that's part of the charm-- but they're not really in the spotlight. Listening to tracks like "T.U.F.F." and "Pumpkin", you get the sense that this band's songwriting starts from the way their instruments lock together when they're playing in a room-- cymbal-bashing drum parts, chunky bass lines, and Webb's shattered-sounding guitar leads-- leaving this record as a fuzzy, no-nonsense, half-hour document of what they do.
And then there are the hooks. The hustle, the energy, and the sheer number of them make this an easy album to love-- especially if you're in the mood for some feedback, Nirvana moves, and punk-rock energy along with your melodies. One of the best comes during the killer chorus of a slack pop song called "Nothing Remains", which runs back and forth between a punk-rock build and a burst of high, cooing backing vocals; it's loose, noisy, and wonderfully graceful. Nothing Hurts is full of that kind of excitement: the sound of a fast, fuzzy rock band racing from hook to hook, plowing happily through breakdowns and guitar blasts, springing through scrappy melodies with style. It's one of the happiest surprises of the year so far. | 2010-05-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-13T02:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Sub Pop | May 13, 2010 | 8.5 | 79aad1bd-b6a4-4ea3-a66f-a96c2c7c10c1 | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
On Deerhunter’s swaggering fifth album, Monomania, they almost completely jettison the dreamy ambience that usually characterizes their work in favor of straight-up raw, bleeding garage rock, populating the songs with junkyards, leather jackets, and motorcycles. | On Deerhunter’s swaggering fifth album, Monomania, they almost completely jettison the dreamy ambience that usually characterizes their work in favor of straight-up raw, bleeding garage rock, populating the songs with junkyards, leather jackets, and motorcycles. | Deerhunter: Monomania | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17966-deerhunter-monomania/ | Monomania | Bigmouth strikes again: the latest target of Bradford Cox's verbal jabs was none other than Morrissey himself, but this particular barrage had a precision of intent that went overlooked by most online gawkers. "Have you ever read Morrissey's description of the Ramones?," he asked Buzzfeed. "I will always be on Team Joey, and Team Dee Dee. I come from America, where Bo Diddley was born!" While Deerhunter's always had a thing for indie rock advocacy, Cox's pointed patriotism was a new kind of stump speech, and in light of Monomania, his typically hilarious candor doubled as media savvy. On Deerhunter’s fifth album, they almost completely jettison the dreamy ambience that tempered even their noisiest work for straight-up raw, bleeding garage rock and populate these songs with junkyards, leather jackets, and motorcycles. The message from Deerhunter: We’re an American band.
So adjust your expectations accordingly, and if this sounds like the protracted playacting usually associated with Cox's work as Atlas Sound, you’re on the right track. The stable democracy of the past few Deerhunter albums has been upended; Josh Fauver left the band, and besides writing most of “Nothing Ever Happened”, his basslines kept Deerhunter rooted in proper rock. Meanwhile, after increasingly proving himself to be a top-notch songwriter in his own right, Lockett Pundt took advantage of a rare year in which Cox released no new music by dropping the excellent Spooky Action At A Distance as Lotus Plaza in 2012. His sole contribution on Monomania is “The Missing”, a fine piece of wistful, ringing indie pop that gets placed between “Leather Jacket II” and “Pensacola”, the album’s raunchiest songs. It could easily be seen as Cox defending his turf, if not for a hazy, meditative stretch during the middle of Monomania that sounds like his take on Lotus Plaza.
But while the songwriting power has become centralized, Monomania as a whole represents Deerhunter’s attempt to get outside themselves. This is particularly true of Cox; whereas on Cryptograms’ “Hazel St.”, he imagined what it might be like to fit in with the normal kids during his childhood in Georgia, years later, this dynamic is fully inverted and he’s found a group of outcasts that’s emboldened in their idiosyncratic embrace of a Dixie upbringing. You can hear the influence of neighbors/collaborators Black Lips in dirtbag storytelling like “Pensacola”, or just in the plain fact that Monomania is the first Deerhunter album that would be welcomed in a dive bar. Their previous physicality was defined by coiled intensity and quick strikes, whereas here they swagger and flex beer muscles. The perverted classic rawk riffs of “Neon Junkyard” and “Leather Jacket II” twist and yowl while “Back to the Middle” and “Dream Captain” are so immediately accessible, they could somehow come off as beneath Deerhunter.
The more prevalent inspiration comes from fellow Athenian and mentor Michael Stipe; you can hear echoes of R.E.M.’s Monster in both the obscene distortion and the decision to follow up their richest, most rococo record with a defiant squall. Cox similarly plays against his reputation given the opportunity, using winks and irony to deviate from the impression that his band’s music is somewhat humorless and sexless. It’s every bit as confrontational as Deerhunter in their dress-wearing, blog-attacking days, only more fun. This can manifest in the glammy stream-of-consciousness from *Monomania’*s opening duo (“I am the Queen of Bass,” he announces on “Leather Jacket II”), or any of the first-person narratives that make good on his purported Hank Williams and Bo Diddley listening. Taking as many liberties with “Werewolves of London” as Kid Rock, “Dream Captain” might come off as puerile southern comfort if it wasn’t such an obvious defilement of it-- bratty boasts like “I’m a boy, man/ And you’re a man, man” are tough to hear as anything other than comedy. Likewise, on “Pensacola”, an unfaithful woman leaves a Greyhound-riding somebody who is clearly not Bradford Cox with “a bald head and trouble.” Is it unfair that Deerhunter can get away with these because they’re Deerhunter, whereas it’s pure shlock from any number of southern rock revivalists? Perhaps, but having a laugh at one's own expense is hardly the most egregious form of an earned indulgence.
But while Monomania as a whole is an unpredictable fulfillment of an unforeseen whim, it’s Deerhunter’s least revelatory and surprising album on a song-by-song basis. There isn’t a clear showstopper along the lines of “Helicopter” or “Nothing Ever Happened”, though the title track makes an admirable effort. They’ve always had a knack for mantras, and after a verse of plaintive gospel shouts (“Come on God, hear my sick prayer/ If you can’t, send me an angel!”), the nagging phonetics of “mono, monomania” get repeated ad infinitum before dissolving into white noise, motorcycle revving, and a soap opera device that Deerhunter makes frequent use of: after all this time, Cox unexpectedly wakes up.
“I was a dream of myself,” Cox admits during “Nitebike”, a startling confessional of nothing more than his reverbed vocals and acoustic guitar. Perhaps taking another step back towards the medical maladies that pervaded both his youth and early Deerhunter, he imagines himself on his Big Wheels, “On the cusp of a breakthrough/ When they took me out/ And stuck it in/ It went so deep, man.” Another line gets repeated in greater detail on the Baudelaire-referencing closer “Punk (La Vie Antérieure)”, where Cox muses, “For a year, I was queer/ I had conquered all my fears/ Not alone anymore/ But I found it such a bore.” It feels something like Cox’s “All Apologies”, a litany of wearied, bemused dissatisfaction with everything that he presumed might save him-- getting drunk, being punk, friends, lovers. The plainspoken finality of “Punk” suggests it’s not just a closure on Monomania, but of everything that preceded it.
And that could be disappointing for a lot of people since Monomania is the first Deerhunter record that isn’t a quantifiable leap from what came before; the narrative and artistic arc that ran from *Cryptograms *to Halcyon Digest was clear and upward, their diametrically opposed centrist indie songwriting and diffuse, noisy ambience eventually converging into a brilliant horizon point. While a knocked-out, “back to basics” approach makes a lot sense as the follow-up to Halcyon Digest, it adheres to someone else’s idea of “basics” and follows the longest break between Deerhunter albums. But Monomania is certainly a strong effort on its own merits, and more importantly, they’ve avoided making their deflating “diminishing returns” record-- their King of Limbs, Centipede Hz, Transference, Sky Blue Sky, etc.-- that casts doubts about whether they’ve gone too far down the same path. They’ve pulled off something admirable in making an illogical left turn feel like the logical next step where one didn’t exist. For the first time since Cryptograms, Deerhunter’s next move will be harder to predict than Cox’s. | 2013-05-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | May 3, 2013 | 8.3 | 79b8a1c0-421c-4864-bc87-1fe2755f636d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Atlanta MC's third album is billed as a response to the nation's current economic crisis, but instead finds him appealing to his base: synthetic beats that drop like anvils, ad libs by the freight load, and all-or-nothing punchlines. | The Atlanta MC's third album is billed as a response to the nation's current economic crisis, but instead finds him appealing to his base: synthetic beats that drop like anvils, ad libs by the freight load, and all-or-nothing punchlines. | Jeezy: The Recession | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12159-the-recession/ | The Recession | Young Jeezy "fucks with John McCain," but he's an ardent Barack Obama supporter. This confused stance makes more sense after listening to the Atlanta MC's third LP, billed as a response to the country's current economic troubles. But really, The Recession relates to the recession about as much as McCain relates to pacifist immigrants; there's no mention of subprime mortgages or the credit crunch throughout its 18 tracks. Jeezy, like McCain and Obama, is a quality politician who knows how to appeal to his base. So instead of offering Economist-style predictions and Dowd-y editorials, Jeezy gives us a Jeezy record: synthetic beats that come down like anvils, ad libs by the freight load, and all-or-nothing Bald Bull punchlines. Like the world's most famous 72-year-old Republican, the rapper is trying to tweak a working formula to his advantage. If there's any sort of recession happening on the album, it's a mental one-- for the first time, Jeezy questions the world around him instead of simply reveling in it by any means necessary. And, like a certain history-making Harvard Law School alum, Jeezy is searching for change from the inside out while trying to maintain a superhero guise.
"It's a recession, everybody broke/ So I just came back to give everybody hope," huffs the street preacher on the title track. This is Young Jeezy the Savior-- the same guy who wore a Marvel-like seal on the front of his chest at a recent New York City concert. It's the guy who stacks his hoarse vocals in an effort to inspire and motivate on albums like The Inspiration and Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101. Minutiae is his enemy. After all, there's no time for Plato (or KRS-One) style philosophizing in 2008, when sound bites talk and your iTunes hotness pales compared to the Jonas Brothers. In this version of The Dark Knight, Jeezy is everyone: caped crusader, diabolical villain, jolly fatalist, big guy who surprisingly takes the moral high ground.
On the wicked Okayplayer bitch slap "Word Play", he drops a drug-selling campaign slogan ("You niggas want word play but I got bird play"), reveals his anti-matter approach as ingenious strategy ("I'm way too intelligent to play up my intelligence"-- still President Bush, take note), and floats democratic ideals before snatching them back with an iron fist ("If [Pac] had to pass the torch that bitch would go to me/ Now wouldn't you agree?/ Doesn't matter, I accept!"). A few songs later, on the regal "My President", he begins by throwing out his cue cards ("I ain't write this shit, by the way!") and suckering old-guard delegate Nas to finish things off sounding tinier than ever. Chalk up another win for the NYC outsider with the hearty guffaw.
But not even this highly inflatable rapper can solve all of America's problems with a tautological twist and a spirited "yeeeaaahhh!" Whereas he once supported going crazy, Jeezy's now thinking twice about a planet gone nuts on "Crazy World". Flip-flopper? You decide: "They want that Young shit, that dumb shit, that 'where you from' shit/ That ride around your hood with your gun shit," he starts-- whether it's a lament or a statement of purpose isn't entirely clear. He later considers swiping his "granny's nerve pills" before ending up at a "how many houses do you own?"-esque dilemma: "I want a new Bentley, my auntie need a kidney/ And if I let her pass her children never will forgive me." Apparently, Def Jam's health care package is kinda stingy.
The self-recession can be ridiculous, but it's there if you look hard enough. Though he's made mainstream inroads with cameos on tracks from Usher and Mariah Carey this year, "Hustlaz Ambition" has Jeezy retreating from the spotlight: "As far as award shows, we all know how that goes/ So what's all the doubt about, because he ain't sellin' out?/ Because he ain't givin' up?/ Because he don't give a fuck?/ I guess he ain't lame enough." While Jeezy may piss away his Grammy chances, he also allows Mr. Grammy Family, Kanye West, to spew Auto-Tune and steal all sorts of shine on stellar single "Put On". Between his verse's wrenching pleas to his late mother and mildly intimidating pick-up lines, West embodies the crazy world Jeezy is still too scared to fully admit exists. People like to see their heroes break down now and then.
The Recession is a third-term bid that can't help but repeat talking points of its previous incarnations. Bolstered by a gimmick and a catchphrase, the album is by-and-large Jeezy qua Jeezy, and the new fissures aren't enough to keep pundits gabbing. Nobody else can pull off this brand of big, and its singularity is noteworthy but oftentimes second-rate: "Welcome Back" was more welcomed when it was called "Standing Ovation" or "Hypnotize", and "Circulate" pulses Philly Soul like a less crazed "Go Crazy" or "Mr. 17.5". "I know I ain't there yet, just know I'm gonna be," says Jeezy during a rare moment of self-reflection. But where is "there"? A staid state of survivalism characterized by baseless crowd pleasing or something more dynamic, elusive and ultimately hopeful? The choice is his. | 2008-09-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2008-09-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | September 3, 2008 | 6.5 | 79c12e30-a28e-4e9d-8312-8fe90dc1f0b6 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
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