alternativeHeadline
stringlengths 2
551
⌀ | description
stringlengths 2
700
⌀ | itemReviewed
stringlengths 6
199
| url
stringlengths 41
209
| headline
stringlengths 1
176
⌀ | reviewBody
stringlengths 1.29k
31.4k
| dateModified
stringlengths 29
29
| datePublished
stringlengths 29
29
| Genre
stringclasses 116
values | Label
stringlengths 1
64
⌀ | Reviewed
stringlengths 11
18
| score
float64 0
10
| id
stringlengths 36
36
| author_name
stringclasses 603
values | author_url
stringclasses 604
values | thumbnailUrl
stringlengths 90
347
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
The French musician’s giddily maximalist solo debut maintains the spirit of his group Justice’s debut album; though inspired by ’70s prog and disco, it inhabits a singular universe of its own invention. | The French musician’s giddily maximalist solo debut maintains the spirit of his group Justice’s debut album; though inspired by ’70s prog and disco, it inhabits a singular universe of its own invention. | Gaspard Augé: Escapades | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gaspard-auge-escapades/ | Escapades | If EDM had been created in the 1970s, it might have sounded like Escapades, the debut album from Gaspard Augé, better known as one half of French electronic duo Justice. Like EDM, Escapades is utterly in thrall to scale, an album of colossal gestures; like ’70s prog, it shows warm eccentricity and extreme melodic prowess. Escapades is, by some distance, the most ridiculous electronic album released so far this year, a giddy tour de force unrestrained by common sense or conventional tastes.
In the wrong hands, this improbable stew could have been stomach-churning. But Justice, Augé’s alma mater, have a history of turning the preposterous into the potent. Justice’s innovation in the ’00s was to turn rock music’s most ludicrous ideas—vast Marshall stacks and handlebar moustaches, the children’s choir on “D.A.N.C.E”—into an unlikely breath of fresh air for a European electronic music scene still recovering from the excesses of the late ’90s. Escapades proves that Augé has learned well from the day job.
The album is less abrasive in tone than the early Justice records that defined the duo’s sound—it’s incredibly sleek, for all its volume. But it maintains the spirit of Justice’s debut album, †: unabashed and unshackled, dance music stripped of the finicky trend-watching. “Force majeure,” the second track, builds to a climax of drum rolls and meaty synth lines that could level Shea Stadium; “Rocambole,” one track later, ends with an echoing piano note that appears to reference the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”—the kind of cheekily audacious, go-big-or-go-home pop plunder that can trigger a sharp intake of breath.
Escapades isn’t entirely stuck in a time warp. “Rocambole” takes equal influence from ’70s Elton John and producer Alan Braxe, a kind of Harold Faltermeyer for the French touch generation; “Pentacle” is reminiscent of Air’s proggy masterpiece 10,000 Hz Legend; and the ultra triumphant “Hey!” is contemporary only in so much as it references the same Giorgio Moroder records as so many current house records. On the whole, though, Escapades floats around in a singular universe of its own invention, like dance music whose only points of reference are Paul and Linda McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” and campy magic shows.
Escapades is maximalist to its core, but this isn’t maximalism in the Rustie or Venetian Snares sense of many things happening at once. Rather, every element is primed for enormity—a sandwich packed with hefty slabs of prime rib, rather than the sensory overload of experimental modern cooking. The album’s basic sound comprises synths, drums, and comically serpentine bass. But Augé and collaborators Victor le Masne and Michael Declerck spent a long time improving the sound of Augé’s original demos, availing themselves of the technological dreamland that is the late Philippe Zdar’s Motorbass studio. Escapades sounds gorgeous throughout: big but not overbearing; tender but not cloying.
The record’s melodies are also excellent. Much like Daft Punk’s Discovery (or, to a lesser extent, Justice’s third album, Woman), Augé calls on the European baroque tradition, as re-interpreted through prog rock or ABBA. For a largely instrumental record, Escapades is packed to the hilt with sharp hooks and clever melodic tricks, like “Captain” swerving in and out of a melancholy descending chord progression, or the operatic mid-section of “Belladone,” which sounds like a disco flip of Pink Floyd’s “The Great Gig in the Sky.”
At moments like these, you may find yourself singing along to the most unlikely of elements, twanging air bass with gusto and looking completely ridiculous. But what Escapades teaches us, more than anything, is that Adam Ant was right when he said that ridicule is nothing to be scared of. Augé may be hip, the kind of artist who can inspire a generation of club kids to sweat their brains out in ill-fitting leather jackets. But like all true style mavens, he knows that real panache exists at the opposite extreme from accepted notions of cool. Escapades is entirely in line with this gleeful approach, guilelessly reaching beyond musical norms to seek out ecstasy in the patently absurd.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-25T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Genesis / Ed Banger / Because Music | June 25, 2021 | 7.4 | 79c1defa-4a93-4c2e-83d3-f32697b4df2c | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
After a few lame actual records, Jadakiss responds with a surprisingly taut and triumphant mixtape. | After a few lame actual records, Jadakiss responds with a surprisingly taut and triumphant mixtape. | Jadakiss: The Champ Is Here 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14316-the-champ-is-here-3/ | The Champ Is Here 3 | Jadakiss' most recent proper LP, The Last Kiss, was unmemorable save for its ability to move over 100,000 units in its first week. Those numbers wouldn't have generated much money, power, or respect during the LOX's heyday. For Jada-- in 2009's cratered rap economy, and coming off two heavily A&R'ed solo albums-- it was a commercial triumph. Kiss would go on to praise The Last Kiss as his best marketed album, and all the while, tracks like "Broken Safety" and "Cartel Gathering" had everyone else wondering if a record of nothing but vivid gun talk over grimy beats would've done just as well as all of those joints with Mary J. Blige and Trey Songz. It certainly would've been cheaper.
One of the year's most entertaining mixtapes, The Champ Is Here 3, now makes you wonder if it's a moot point anyway: If nothing else, The Last Kiss helped finance this. Like most of the best mixtapes around, Champ is informed by the spirit of competition, and it's no coincidence that boxing and basketball are the parallels to which Jada draws his own work. As with his best stuff, there's a pugilistic grace to his rapping here; nearly every line draws contact, but unlike associated "punchline" rappers, there's little wasted movement surrounding his pithier bon mots. Beyond proving Jada can create a cohesive document of his prodigious skill, Champ Is Here 3 combats some of the problems that have dogged him over the years. There's a run with instrumentals from the Game's "Bang", Young Jeezy's "Sky's the Limit", and Rick Ross' "Maybach Music 2" that suggest Jadakiss doesn't have the poor ear for beats after all.
This is unlikely to be anyone's introduction to Jadakiss, more likely to appreciate by his connoisseurs. And that's perfectly fine-- 90s East Coast rap mavens will appreciate Jada rapping over Brand Nubian's "Slow Down" and "Who Shot Ya", as well as Uncle Murda returning from the major label hinterlands to steal "Pussy" and "It's Whatever" with his absurdly hilarious brand of blustery ignorance. LOX historians can indulge in Jada and Styles' nearly unparalleled tag-teaming raps on "Top 5 Dead Or Alive", while Sheek Louch becomes increasingly entertaining in his delusion, boasting "I wore shiny suits when I was down with Diddy" as if anyone listening to a Jadakiss mixtape in 2010 was unaware of that.
The Champ Is Here 3 ain't perfect, but at least it's for the reasons mixtapes typically ain't perfect. Original tracks like "All Falls Down" make you wait out forced hooks for Jada to start rapping again, and are here to remind you why Jada's Def Jam records so rarely live up to their capability. Meanwhile Champ's second half is littered with also-rans-- the D-Block d-listers who are effortlessly eclipsed by Jada on "Coach of the Year", while Masspike Miles and inexplicable DJ Drama associate La the Darkman prove why they remain the definition of "bum-ass mixtape rappers." But with all that said, The Champ Is Here 3 serves as comfort as Jadakiss says things like "it's enough money for everybody" while talking about the proposed follow-up, *Top 5 Dead or Alive. *Maybe it'll be the fourth straight lame Jadakiss solo album, but isn't it a bit ridiculous that his followers complain that his retail albums are weak when his best work is available for absolutely nothing? | 2010-06-03T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-06-03T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | June 3, 2010 | 7.7 | 79cf02e9-1179-44e3-b7b6-388f6e2e5d22 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The “ICY GRL” rapper’s debut EP is a low-stakes but gratifying listen, full of witty one-liners and cheeky quotables. | The “ICY GRL” rapper’s debut EP is a low-stakes but gratifying listen, full of witty one-liners and cheeky quotables. | Saweetie: High Maintenance EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/saweetie-high-maintenance-ep/ | High Maintenance EP | Saweetie has no qualms letting anyone know what she’s about. She’s tenacious and has little tolerance for anything, or anyone, that doesn’t get her closer to her goals. Within the first 30 seconds of her debut EP, she says as much: “Get into your bag, stay focused, and leave these bum-ass niggas alone,” the California rapper tells a member of the paparazzi on High Maintenance’s opening skit, offering a personal statement that doubles as a CliffsNotes preview of what’s ahead.
A native of the Bay Area who now lives in Los Angeles, Saweetie has documented her rap proficiency over the last year and a half by treating her Instagram followers to snappy video freestyles over beats like JAY-Z’s “Dead Presidents,” Iamsu!’s “By My Side,” and Migos’ “Bad and Boujee,” all recorded in her car. Her breakthrough 2017 single “ICY GRL,” a hookless stream of thought set to Khia’s X-rated classic “My Neck, My Back,” began the same way, and it remains a standout moment on High Maintenance. She reels off go-getter lines like “You tryna get a bag of weed/I’m tryna get a bag a week” and “Looking in the mirror, I thank God for what I’m about to be” with an unmistakable assuredness that gives the song a life apart from its source material.
The EP is built around that magnetic confidence, with verses that are concise enough to fit in a 30-second video, but injected with enough personality to last much longer. Her witty one-liners are perfect for fly captions, and her cheeky quotables are ready-made for nights when you’re feeling yourself or want to boss up on an ex. This is what hairflips would sound like if they made music.
For the most part, Saweetie’s lyrics strike a balance between relatable and aspirational, with her delivery setting a cooler, more restrained tone than those of many contemporary rappers. One exception comes on the brazen highlight “B.A.N.,” where Saweetie turns an old flame to ash with a fiery tirade. “Got your role models in my phone and they all wanna smash,” she raps, before adding the ultimate newly-single mood: “Ever since I cut you off, my skin glowin’ like Rihanna’s.”
More typical of the EP are “Good Good” and “23,” two playful tracks that share a flirty, insistent feel. The former is a demand for her love interest to pull up and stop playing games, backed by a whistling beat courtesy of the L.A.-based French producer CashMoneyAP, whose credits include Lil Skies’ “Nowadays” and YoungBoy Never Broke Again’s “Love Is Poison.” Saweetie is similarly shooting her shot on the latter, but her use of a more narrative form sets it apart from the rest of the album. The hook features a lyrical nod to Nas’ “Oochie Wally,” one of many homages to Saweetie’s late ’90s and early ’00s influences. Another comes on the title track, a brief verse-only affair based around Too $hort’s “Shake That Monkey” that harkens back to her days of rapping in her car and includes a Big Tymers call-back.
At only 22 minutes, High Maintenance is a low-stakes but gratifying listen, revealing plenty about Saweetie’s ambitions, but little about the person behind them. Even without taking many creative risks, it’s an effective introduction to her strengths. If “ICY GRL” was banking on the laws of attraction and a little bit of faith to make her glam-life dreams come to fruition, this EP shows she’s already come close enough to start celebrating. | 2018-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Warner Bros. | March 21, 2018 | 6.7 | 79cff2ee-f151-4e2b-87d7-035e55f1823c | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
Exploding death metal into atmospheric and experimental new dimensions, the dream-doom duo’s monuments to melancholy have never felt so crushing or beautiful. | Exploding death metal into atmospheric and experimental new dimensions, the dream-doom duo’s monuments to melancholy have never felt so crushing or beautiful. | Dream Unending: Song of Salvation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dream-unending-song-of-salvation/ | Song of Salvation | The guitar riff that introduces “Ecstatic Reign,” the 16-minute closing track on Song of Salvation, is a sad, wispy melody that sounds a little like distant birdsong filtered through a chorus pedal and amplified inside an empty church. When a slow-motion drumbeat enters, drowned in echo that suggests a noirish fog lifting from the cymbals, it also sounds a little like “Lazy,” a 1994 slowcore lament by Low. The landscape slowly fills with distorted guitars, gothic synths, and death-metal growls that sound like a volcano erupting. Within moments, you are fully immersed in the world of Dream Unending, the dream-doom duo whose monuments to melancholy have never felt so crushing or beautiful.
Before Derrick Vella was the guitarist of Dream Unending—or, as the liner notes credit him, the “Architect of Dreams”—we first met him as a member of the Canadian death-metal band Tomb Mold. In the mid-2010s, they emerged as one of several groups carrying the genre to wilder, artsier territory, taking notes from its most eccentric forebears to help shape its future. Across their increasingly ambitious catalog, Tomb Mold crafted songs that felt as likely to explode into pit-ready climaxes as collapse into murky, dead-space ambience. There was a shared sense among their bandmates that death metal—with its vicious tempos, dissonant melodies, and guttural, indecipherable vocals—was a means of channeling complicated, troubled emotions that would otherwise go unprocessed.
In Justin DeTore, the Innumerable Forms frontman who provides drums and vocals (in the credits, “the Bridge Between Two Worlds”), Vella finds a partner to further explore those emotional threads. Without death metal’s unrelenting speed and volume, and free to let the runtime of any given track wander into the double digits, Dream Unending is a place to wallow, wander, and explore. On a more traditional metal album, the horn-accompanied intro to “Secret Grief” (an homage to “Let’s Go Out Tonight” by the Scottish ambient-pop band the Blue Nile) or the downright gorgeous soloing in “Murmur of Voices” (which wouldn’t be out of place on an ECM release) might be relegated to a breath-catching interlude. On Song of Salvation, these are the destinations, glorious and uncharted in contemporary metal.
Where the group’s 2021 debut, Tide Turns Eternal, introduced these textures, Song of Salvation lives inside them and pushes beyond. Vella and DeTore formed the band as a means of experimenting outside their primary projects, and the pair created both albums remotely, in quick succession. Their collaborative process uses distance to its advantage (DeTore tracked his parts in Philly and Boston, while Vella recorded in Hamilton, Ontario). In each song, you can hear how a germ of an idea—take, for example, that opening riff of “Ecstatic Reign”—could unravel into a thousand different shapes given enough time and space and concentration; the songs themselves feel discursive, shapeshifting. The album’s structure—two bookending epics with a suite of three muted compositions in between—creates such a distinct experience that singling out individual tracks seems to be missing the point. This is the type of record you carve out space to listen to in its entirety, putting on your headphones and entering its world.
The cumulative effect is intense and a little dangerous if you are in the wrong mood. It only takes a few minutes before the atmosphere of Song of Salvation becomes clear. In the opening title track, Vella introduces the general tenor: spectral-sounding minor chords, stretched and embellished with deft picking—the sound of peering through a window at a gray-white sky. The song also introduces the average tempo at which DeTore operates: a doomy stutter whose minor variations can feel like sinking into a pit of despair (“Secret Grief”) or rushing into a triumphant gallop (the bracing finale of “Ecstatic Reign”). Because of these subtle shifts, and the record’s exquisite pacing, the music never feels monotonous, despite its deep focus and overwhelming gloom.
Under the heavenly swirl of electric guitars and slow, pounding drums, you can also hear traces of further collaboration, a means of making the band’s emotional palette more expansive. There are passages of spoken word—whispered overdubs in “Murmur of Voices” and a recitation in “Ecstatic Reign”—along with backing vocals from singer-songwriter McKenna Rae and warm, spacey keys provided by Vella’s father. As on Dream Unending’s debut, these touches sometimes lend an aura of new age, never quite tipping into pastiche but present enough to help distinguish the music from their death-doom influences and indicate that they are following no rule book but the one they are writing for themselves. In each moment, you can hear them striving for the light. | 2022-11-15T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-15T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Metal | 20 Buck Spin | November 15, 2022 | 8.5 | 79d16a94-2580-423b-9c40-2fc26a7cc391 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s third album, his most polished to date, covers the full spectrum of brokenheartedness. | The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s third album, his most polished to date, covers the full spectrum of brokenheartedness. | Angelo De Augustine: Tomb | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/angelo-de-augustine-tomb/ | Tomb | Dirty Dancing holds a special place in Angelo De Augustine’s heart. The Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s mother, Wendy Fraser, sang alongside Patrick Swayze on 1987’s “She’s Like the Wind,” which soundtracked the romance between Jennifer Grey and Swayze’s characters in the 1980s classic. For De Augustine, a recent breakup heightened the song’s significance. Hollywood’s quixotic image of love also clashed with De Augustine’s personal history: His father, also a musician, left when he was five years old—an old wound reopened by fresh heartbreak.
With a woozy and unrequited eye, De Augustine analyzes the hereditary nature of abandonment on his third album, Tomb. His gentle vocal delivery, lyrical tenderness, and introspection feel familiar, particularly on a label helmed by Sufjan Stevens, who achieved all three on his last studio album. Similarly to Sufjan, De Augustine travels back to his past to square away ineffable loss in the present. On Tomb, he uses infectious pop melodies and spectral guitar work to frame patterns that recur across generations. Notably, “Bird Has Flown” grapples with his father’s absence, with muted piano and buoyantly plucked chords replicating cycles of pain and joy.
The hurt De Augustine examines doesn’t feel alienating. His sound is sympathetic and effortless. The resonance of acoustic guitar and roaming, arpeggiated melodies complement his balmy vocals. His hushed tone sometimes recalls early Bon Iver or Iron & Wine, but his ache is less apparent than the former’s, and he strays beyond the traditional folk that the latter is known for. Things get playful when an uncomplicated drum machine pulses in the background (“I Could Be Wrong”) or a bassline develops a casual swagger (“Time”). These simple instrumental flourishes make De Augustine’s music affable even when the lyrics’ distress suggests otherwise.
De Augustine is known for intimate, lo-fi recordings—he has even recorded in his bathtub—that personify vulnerability. But despite being his most polished full-length to date, Tomb shows him at his most candid and introspective. Trading his habitual fuzz for high-definition clarity, Tomb continues to emphasize De Augustine’s rustling vocals. Even though he’s grappling with heavy sentiments, De Augustine has a talent for cultivating calm. It is a private and ablutionary album, like retreating into a warm shower’s clouds of steam.
Many songs feel like unsealed letters to his ex-lover. From desperation to self-reflection, Tomb covers the full spectrum of brokenheartedness. “I Could Be Wrong,” a melancholy track apt for a Wes Anderson film, laments love’s illusion of permanence. In “Kaitlin,” someone who was once a source of solace triggers fresh agony. The title track, one of the album’s highlights, invokes the myth of Osiris, who was drowned and dismembered by his jealous brother Set. Reassembled and resurrected by his wife, Isis, Osiris ended up retreating to the underworld. As cited by De Augustine, it’s a chilling testament to the fact that love does not, in fact, heal all wounds. Still, despite the album’s dark, damp, sepulchral title, light manifests numerous times on Tomb. In the dizzying chime of his careful fingerpicking and high-pitched howls, De Augustine captures love’s bright blaze. | 2019-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Asthmatic Kitty | January 23, 2019 | 7.3 | 79d57b33-5227-47ab-bf95-f4fe41879191 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Easter embraces and rebukes rock’n’roll. It’s a love letter and a break-up letter all in one, the album that brought Patti Smith fame, the rebirth of her career, and her most controversial song. | Easter embraces and rebukes rock’n’roll. It’s a love letter and a break-up letter all in one, the album that brought Patti Smith fame, the rebirth of her career, and her most controversial song. | Patti Smith Group: Easter | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23244-easter/ | Easter | In early 1977, the Patti Smith Group was on tour opening for Bob Seger, as part of Arista Records’ ham-fisted strategy to push Smith into the mainstream. She had just released her second record, Radio Ethiopia, while Seger was touring against Night Moves. While the PSG were steadfast in their resolve to win over the crowds, they were fighting a losing battle. Lenny Kaye—Smith’s guitarist and majordomo—would later say about *Radio Ethiopia, *“...that wasn’t an album of songs. It was an album of fields.” Fans who paid to hear “Rock and Roll Never Forgets” were not ready or willing to open their minds to Smith and her band’s mix of esoteric, ecstatic punk-flavored garage-rock, performed by a bunch of scruffy, black-wearing hoodlums led by a woman who conformed to no one’s gender expectations but her own.
At a Tampa stop in January, Patti Smith whirled into final bars of “Ain’t It Strange.” As the song reached its climax, she spun, lost her balance, tripped backward over a monitor, and fell off the stage onto the concrete floor 15 feet below. Miraculously, she did not break her neck, but she still emerged from the hospital with two cracked vertebrae, broken bones in her face, and 22 stitches to close the wounds on her head. Smith interpreted the incident as God’s response to her constant challenges (“I feel it was his way of saying, ‘You keep battering against my door and I’m gonna open that door and you’ll fall in’,” she told Melody Maker a year later); but in matters more mundane, her fall cancelled the tour and obviated any support for the struggling Radio Ethiopia.
Smith’s injuries would confine her to bed rest for weeks before she entered into intense physical therapy in lieu of spinal surgery. She took to the challenge of PT with gusto and insisted to her doctors and to anyone else who would listen that she would be ready by Easter Sunday. She even had a new poem, called “Easter,” as a representation of her return to battle.
After the commercial failure of Radio Ethiopia, there was an unspoken understanding that the next record needed to move Smith’s career forward. Smith was the first downtown artist to sign with an uptown label with her seven-album deal with Arista Records. She thought she could handle Arista’s demands by insisting (and getting) complete creative control, but she also understood that she would lose her access to the kids she wanted to serve if she was not able to translate her vision into something for the masses. “When we started, we believed we had responsibilities that nobody else was taking on, to take this work that erupted in the ’50s and take it somewhere,” she told Circus in 1978. This was the kind of statement for which Smith would be pilloried by peers and the press, but this wasn’t just a front—she meant it.
So after working with John Cale on Horses and Jack Douglas (Cheap Trick, John Lennon) on Radio Ethiopia, she chose to work with a new producer named Jimmy Iovine, because she liked what he’d done as an engineer working with Bruce Springsteen. It was a deliberate business decision, no matter that she would later insist that the album was “more communicative. I don’t like the words accessible and commercial.” Lenny Kaye would back her up: “There was no conscious drive to sell records, that was our last thought.”
It made sense that Smith and Kaye would publicly try to disavow intent. “Ambition” was a four-letter word downtown, even though every single band that ever set foot on the CBGB’s stage hoped that it was a step up. But Smith and Kaye were sufficiently immersed in rock’n’roll history to know better. If Easter hadn’t been successful, Smith would have been dismissed as a one-hit wonder, post-punk also-rans. Even as early as Radio Ethiopia, the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau noted that Patti was “caught in a classic double-bind: accused of selling out by her former allies and of not selling by her new ones.”
The band entered the studio in November of 1977. On the shortlist were songs that were road-tested, such as “Space Monkey,” “Privilege (Set Me Free),” and “Rock N Roll Nigger,” as well as a handful of newly written songs. “Rock N Roll Nigger” was both Smith’s original choice for the album’s title as well as for its lead-off single, which was naturally a nonstarter for the label, much to Smith’s dismay. Unfortunately, out of the material Smith had assembled for the album, it was the only song strong enough to be a single.
This was when Iovine went knocking on Bruce Springsteen’s door, asking about a certain outtake languishing in his archive. Smith was at first reluctant to even listen to the demo, wanting to write the record with her band. Iovine tried to sell her on the idea by suggesting that he loved the thought of a woman singing from a man’s point of view; Springsteen added that the song was in her key. One night, while waiting for a late-night phone call from someone she was romantically involved with, she decided to listen to the cassette, “...and the words just tumbled out of me,” she told Zig Zag later. By the time she recorded “Because the Night,” Smith already knew she had her hit single, and the rest of the album fell into place.
Smith could try as hard as she wanted to disguise or disavow her ambition, but Easter was not an accidental assemblage of material. It wasn’t an “album of fields,” it was an album of huge songs—songs that would effectively showcase the heart of the Patti Smith Group. So, yes, the album unironically opens with “Till Victory,” the kind of battle cry that made the cognoscenti roll their eyes at Smith and her band, and she doubles the cynicism by also using it as a petition to the mighty, announcing her return, and her intent: “God, do not seize me please, till victory,” Smith sings with the kind of iron-clad conviction that would make you follow her anywhere.
Even the cover concept was Smith’s twist on sex appeal; while it was probably the first major-label album cover to show a woman with unshaved armpits (which Arista tried to airbrush out), it was created with the object of selling records. After that inimitable Robert Mapplethorpe shot on the cover of Horses and the black-on-silver abstract by Judy Linn that graced Radio Ethiopia, for Easter, Smith went with Lynn Goldsmith, who had just founded the first photo agency that focused on celebrity portraiture. Smith would even tell Rolling Stone that she had masturbated to her own album cover: “I thought if I could do it as an experiment, then 15-year-old boys could do it, and that would make me very happy.”
But Smith’s version of “Because the Night” was an absolute monster of a hit. What she forged lyrically out of Springsteen’s unfinished, unwanted demo was an anthem of frank and unapologetic desire. In 1978, a woman wasn’t allowed to be an overtly sexual being in public unless she met the standards of the male gaze; if she did, there were always repercussions, and there would be constant attempts to diminish her power and/or her legitimacy. The fact that it went to No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was on every FM radio station, especially the ones who never played her before, was righteousness incarnate, as would be Easter’s eventual ascension to #20 on the Billboard 200.
The other love songs may not be as legendary as “Because the Night,” but their complexity is vital to the story being told on the album. The first line of “We Three”—“Every Sunday I would go down to the bar where he played guitar”—speaks absolute volumes. It is Smith’s history, it is rock’n’roll history, it is a quiet sentence whispered with a veneer of the innocence of early love, then immediately contrasted with a torch ballad, decisive and resolute, the expression of unresolved ardor, the saga of her relationships with Tom Verlaine and Allen Lanier. It’s not tragic so much tinged with the sadness of resignation, but it’s not the type of love song women had been writing.
Smith then flips the switch to “25th Floor.” This is when the woman in “Because the Night” takes out a match and lights the whole damn place on fire. “Love in my heart/The night to exploit/Twenty-five stories over Detroit,” she sings, tales of unabashed emotion in the ancient Book Cadillac Hotel in the Motor City, where she and Fred “Sonic” Smith had taken rooms. “25th Floor” then transmutates its closing ecstasy straight into “High on Rebellion,” the title of which is accurate and illustrative. It is about another important relationship, this time a treatise about Smith and her electric guitar: “...I never tire of the solitary E and I trust my guitar…” The band manifests its own chaos effortlessly behind Smith, before the exemplification of that solitary E fades out slowly.
On the subject of treatises, we come back to the literal black sheep of the album. “I haven’t fucked much with the past, but I’ve fucked plenty with the future,” Smith intones in “Babelogue,” plucked from Smith’s 1978 Babel, which firmly represents her artistic manifesto, issued with the pulsing energy of a heartbeat. “In heart I am an American artist and I have no guilt,” she cries as the music and the energy builds to a crescendo, before crashing head-on into “Rock N Roll Nigger.” The song is intensely rousing and absolutely spits fire, and as a rallying cry for those who feel like they were also “outside of society,” everything about the song is awesome except the title, which is the opposite of awesome.
Even in the ’70s, the slur was not something any reasonable person was going to feel comfortable yelling out loud, or feel comfortable standing in the middle of a large group of people yelling it out loud, even if the music and the performance are otherwise electrifying. Smith has been explicit over the years in her justification behind it: “The redefining of an archaic slang term as a badge for those contributing on the fringe of society was not favorably embraced,” she wrote in 1996. For someone as intelligent and empathetic as Patti Smith, this is the one moment in this otherwise triumphant record that just doesn’t make any sense. If, in 40 years, your attempt at the redefinition of a word that is pejorative and hurtful to a large part of society is unsuccessful, how, as an artist, do you not try something else?
The legacy of “Rock N Roll Nigger” overlaps with Patti Smith the iconoclast. Though Smith placed the song an album that embraces and subverts the vast spectrum of rock, underneath all of Easter is Smith’s ambivalence with rock as an art form. It is insufficient. The men for whom she wrote, the women for whom she sang, the labels to whom she catered, all are miniature underneath the soul of Smith which Easter captures in spite of the limits of rock’n’roll. A hint is hidden in plain sight at the end of the liner notes, a quote from the New Testament: “i have fought a good fight, i have finished my course…” are the last words of Paul the Apostle before his martyrdom. Smith may not have known that she would soon retire as “r.e.f.m.” (radio ethiopia field marshall), but the possibility was on the horizon, and it feels like she was trying to make her departure easier by leaving clues, early warnings for her fans that she was getting ready to say goodbye. | 2017-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Arista | May 28, 2017 | 8.8 | 79d725d3-d3ab-48a7-bac1-2dbc4bb208b8 | Caryn Rose | https://pitchfork.com/staff/caryn-rose/ | null |
Their gothy sound is reminiscent of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Cabaret Voltaire, but on their first proper full-length Zola Jesus show a distinctive voice. | Their gothy sound is reminiscent of Siouxsie and the Banshees and Cabaret Voltaire, but on their first proper full-length Zola Jesus show a distinctive voice. | Zola Jesus: The Spoils | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13487-the-spoils/ | The Spoils | On their first-full length, Zola Jesus assert the potential of their earlier work, flex a bit more songwriting muscle, and shatter the idea that their style should make them a niche interest or a cult wonder. Their earliest singles, EPs, and CD-Rs were promising, with an immediately identifiable aesthetic and an obvious talent in singer/leader Nika Roza Danilova and her enormous voice. Though there were hints of more melodic directions on her earlier work (see "Nativity" from New Amsterdam), they were pulled in a few different directions, between structure and atmosphere, or vulnerable longing and stark, theatrical wailing. Their influences were impeccable, and the music, in nodding to avant-garde and proto-goth forbearers while using back-in-vogue bargain-basement production, sounded both familiar and fresh.
But The Spoils is much more than an exercise in reverence. No doubt that this record is a little gauzy-sounding, but it's not just making something sound new by making it sound shittier-- this is a potent mix of layered and otherworldly vocals, muddy electronics, and storefront-church keyboards that congeal until it's hard to pick out where one instrument ends and the other begins. When the tension swells, there's no volume that gets turned up or pedal that's kicked; it just suddenly feels more anxious, often terribly so. The muffled industrial beat of "Six Feet (From My Baby)" sounds like someone dragging student desks up the stairs, with watery drones and Danilova's powerful wail. It's familiar ground for the group, until the synths come in at the minute mark with a brief melody, setting up a push-pull dynamic between a familiar swoon and an anchorless anxiety in the verses.
Even as the record veers away from songs and structure toward creepier pieces that concentrate on mood and tone, the music never loses its visceral impact. The backward effects and wordless upper registers Danilova explores on "Sinfonia and the Shrew" are as compelling as they are disorienting, and the piano from the fragile interlude "Lullaby in Tongues" is even pretty, while closing tracks "In Hiding From the Crow" and "Tell It to the Willow" are as unsettling as intended. But when the album's haunted feeling sneaks in an emotion like yearning, it moves from compelling pastiche to a sucker-punch to the gut. The Spoils is compelling throughout, but the peak comes much later in its runtime, with "Smirenye" and especially "Clay Bodies". The distorted keys of the former sound like chimes over Danilova's sweetened vocals and the song's dogged mid-tempo beat, and the simple wedding-march piano of "Clay Bodies" is overwhelmed by clattering percussion-- though none of it ever distracts from the vocals. Nearly anything Danilova sings sounds like a matter of life or death, especially so on these later tracks; the words are almost beside the point.
Yes, some will lose patience for the scrappy bedroom/basement production on display here. But that's no reason to preclude anyone from hearing The Spoils; the intensity of its emotion is real, and given its theatrical roots, it never veers into cartoonish exaggeration or caricature. Danilova exhaustively charts these emotions while creating temples out of stray sonic parts to house them in, creating something distinctive out of sounds often explored and emotions commonly felt. | 2009-09-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2009-09-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic | Sacred Bones | September 30, 2009 | 7.6 | 79d8ee29-e512-4172-bd98-ff2e6d56b926 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
On Universal Themes, Mark Kozelek's songs are longer, the hooks are fewer, and the observations are less profound and less likely to have you reflecting on your own life. It is ultimately a spotty album from a guy who has released a lot of spotty albums. | On Universal Themes, Mark Kozelek's songs are longer, the hooks are fewer, and the observations are less profound and less likely to have you reflecting on your own life. It is ultimately a spotty album from a guy who has released a lot of spotty albums. | Sun Kil Moon: Universal Themes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20693-universal-themes/ | Universal Themes | A decade ago, it would have been hard to imagine Mark Kozelek's Sun Kil Moon as a project embroiled in online controversy. Since Red House Painters evolved into Sun Kil Moon in the early part of the last decade, almost everything about the latter band was low-key and under the radar. Kozelek often toured alone with his nylon-string acoustic guitar, his music was generally slow and quiet, and he released a great many records that were happily received by his cult and mostly ignored otherwise. But nothing about the band seemed keyed into the now or connected to the churn of digital culture.
All that changed in the last 18 months, for two reasons. One, Kozelek noticed that the stupid things he'd been prone to saying for many years (what has been described as a "sense of humor") could have a life outside the concert hall, from calling concertgoers "hillbillies" to picking fights with other bands. And two, in the last five years Kozelek's music has become diaristic in the extreme, which allows the mundane details of his life to enter his songs, lending them a bloggy quality. At times, these two streams came together in an ugly way, as when he wrote and released a single called "War on Drugs: Suck My Cock" and, more recently, when he disparaged a female journalist (and Pitchfork contributing editor) from the stage in London. The end result of these developments is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to imagine Sun Kil Moon's music outside of how it, and he, are discussed on social media. And since Mark Kozelek's music is so specifically autobiographical, and because he is the central character in each of these songs, it's doubly hard for his behavior not to have some impact.
Even setting all that aside, if Mark Kozelek had spent the last year and a half playing his music and—to reference a lesson he supposedly learned from his father in Benji's "I Love My Dad"—minding his own business, Universal Themes would still be a disappointing record. The songs are longer, the hooks are fewer, and the "then I did this, then I did that" observations are less profound and less likely to have you reflecting on your own life. It's ultimately a spotty album from a guy who has released a lot of spotty albums.
Universal Themes does have a certain amount of experimentation; some of it is almost proggy as it moves through sections and adds and removes textures while Kozelek plays with instrumental breakdowns. "With a Sort of Grace I Walked to the Bathroom to Cry", for example, pivots between spacious arpeggiated acoustic segments to what is more or less "hard rock," even if the latter is unconvincing. "Ali/Spinks 2" has a middle section of Sonic Youth-like guitar screeches that sounds a little out of place considering how relaxed and minimal the rest of the arrangement is. There's plenty of time to add these wrinkles: the eight songs average almost nine minutes each, and in a few of them you feel every second as it ticks by. Even so, a few tracks, despite their length, make no impression even after many listens. "Cry Me a River Williamsburg Sleeve Tattoo Blues" is a funny title in search of a song, while "This Is My First Day and I'm Indian and I Work at a Gas Station" is an unfunny title in search of a delete key.
Still, the fact is, no one else writes songs like this, and when everything clicks, Kozelek's music can still be moving. Opener "The Possum" uses an image of a wounded rodent as a jumping-off point for a meditation on life, death, friendship, and the beauty of the struggle through it all. "Garden of Lavender"—which really is, in part, about a garden where Kozelek is growing lavender—has some lovely guitar arrangements and manages to convey the ineffable feeling of time passing and living inside of a moment while also watching it happen from the outside. But these are exceptions. For the record as a whole, the fact that Kozelek is droning on in so much detail is more interesting than what he's actually saying. There are many, many words, but, unlike with Benji, they add up to very little.
Benji remains a one-off masterpiece because it's the place where Kozelek's rambling style cohered around a concept, the perfect meeting of content and form. The narrator of those songs seemed vulnerable, like he was risking something by putting it out there, and the stories of life and death were riveting in part because they seemed so familiar. It was a record of a particular time, place, and circumstance, and it was sonically as well as thematically coherent. It was also a record in large part about others, of Kozelek looking outward and trying to figure out what made people tick and what they cared about and what their lives meant, even if the answers weren't always clear. Here, there's nothing at stake. Universal Themes moves in the other direction, away from connection, and it pulls inward. It feels claustrophobic, a world drawing in on itself and getting smaller and smaller. | 2015-06-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-06-10T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Caldo Verde | June 10, 2015 | 6 | 79da841f-8380-4ebd-b8e3-b2584ef5f7d4 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
On his sophomore LP, the Manchester-based electronic producer again pushes batida into hazy new territory with an unusually subdued interpretation of the sound of his native Lisbon. | On his sophomore LP, the Manchester-based electronic producer again pushes batida into hazy new territory with an unusually subdued interpretation of the sound of his native Lisbon. | A.k.Adrix: Código de Barras | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/akadrix-codigo-de-barras/ | Código de Barras | Unlike the howling sirens that opened A.k.Adrix’s debut, the chaotic and aggressive Album Desconhecido, the Portugese electronic producer’s second LP begins, instead, with a deep breath: tender “ooh-oohs,” delicate piano trills, and syncopated beats that crackle like static. It’s soothing, and by almost every measure, a surprise. Adrix and the record label Príncipe Discos are closely affiliated with batida, the raucous, electric, turbulent sound that booms throughout nightclubs and block parties in Lisbon’s projects and slums. The style tends to explode with urgency and defiance, but Código de Barras is considerably less extreme, smoothing the sharp edges to an after-hours sheen. It’s a notable albeit curious departure from batida’s thunderous, disruptive core, but such mutations are inevitable in hyper-local strands of dance music. Besides, it’s captivating to hear this sound rendered with such melody and warmth.
Adrix, formerly known as P. Adrix, was never a purist anyway. A Lisbon native of Angolan descent, he moved to Manchester, England at the age of 19, in 2015, and soon began incorporating elements of the UK underground into his Afro-Portugese palette. Album Desconhecido, released three years later, connected disparate traditions, intermingling kuduro, kizomba, and zouk with grime, jungle, and drum’n’bass. On Codigo de Barras, which translates to “bar code,” he continues this evolution, bending batida’s feverish rhythms into dense, hypnotic atmospheres. Using sleek synths, sensuous soundscapes, and playful polyrhythms that bubble and shake rather than clang and collide, he reveals a groovier side to batida—one that casual listeners can more easily sink their teeth into.
Accessibility was not always the point. Príncipe’s releases are often dizzyingly complex, a signal to outsiders’ ears that this particular Afro-club hybrid is an inherently local sound. Core catalog cuts like Puto Tito’s “Melodia Daquelas” or DJ Marfox’s “2685” harness free-form energies, with spiky synths and spiraling flutes that ricochet aimlessly, while Nídia’s S/T sounds almost militantly percussive. Preserving this dissentient spirit has been important to the label, a way to show respect to the immigrant communities who have cultivated batida in response to Portugal’s racial tensions and colonial past. As Nídia told the New York Times in 2018: “When something comes from the ghetto, it can’t come softly.”
So how do Codigo de Barras’ pastel sketches fit into this bold-type mission? The answer appears to be in the shading. Despite their relative softness, these short, experimental songs are able to stimulate more nuanced emotions than brasher iterations of batida ever could: restlessness, suspicion, mischievousness, delight. Adrix seems curious about aggression’s limitations; what else might you hear, or feel, if you lowered the volume? His heady, inquisitive compositions, each hovering between two and three minutes, feel like attempts to fill in the edges. The balmy “Positividades” evokes an almost beachy atmosphere, melting syncopated rhythms into the surrounding synths. “Ambient Spirituale” and “Espuma Nocturna,” meanwhile, are dusky vignettes that turn inward, conjuring images of the natural world in gusts, ripples, and chirps. The laid-back pulse of “Ritmo Surfista” (“Surfer Rhythm”) finds a companion in “FL Studio, Obrigado,” a tune with flute-like synths and maracas that sounds like something you’d hear in a thatched-hut retreat. In these moments, it’s possible to forget the unbridled tension that typifies Príncipe’s lineup and consider batida in a more relaxed context.
The album’s highlights, however, arrive in songs that leverage that unique tension into something exciting and new. “X50” is an irresistible, off-kilter, chopped-up club banger with an energy that belies its rhythmic complexity. And “Desenhos Animados” (“Cartoons”) is a revelation—a minimal symphony of woodwind melodies and asymmetrical beats that sounds at once precise and wholly spontaneous. Occasionally, it’s hard not to feel like something has been lost—bite, rebelliousness, a sense of rage—as Adrix has drifted further from batida’s boisterous center. But even if dissent is no longer his driving creative force, his curiosity is palpable. Innovative, left-field interpretations like this will propel the sound forward.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Príncipe | November 16, 2020 | 7.4 | 79dbaf85-b5db-4e69-a171-4c6ad040fc92 | Megan Buerger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/megan-buerger/ | |
I suspect it's somewhat mauvais temps, but let me first sing the praises of the Goldfrapp website-- more specifically ... | I suspect it's somewhat mauvais temps, but let me first sing the praises of the Goldfrapp website-- more specifically ... | Goldfrapp: Black Cherry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3505-black-cherry/ | Black Cherry | I suspect it's somewhat mauvais temps, but let me first sing the praises of the Goldfrapp website-- more specifically its "history" page, which depicts a brilliantly detailed goth nightmare. In a wintry forest, a human with a crudely pasted-on horse head embraces a dog, frost breath issuing from its snout. In the background are two wild boars, and upon contact with your cursor (mouseover, in the HTML parlance) the beasts lift off, rise several feet in the air and proceed to dangle there, irritated. It's not a terribly functional page-- one boar bears an MP3, another a video-- but it's one of the most distinctive I've ever seen, a formidable piece of art in itself.
And the inevitable segue: I wish I could say the same about Goldfrapp or their new album, Black Cherry. The bestial spookiness is there-- disturbing woman-dog hybrids are all over the booklet, and "Wolf Lady sucks my brain" is actually a prominent lyric of the first single-- but that's it. This platter of overproduced come-hither electropop is a polyester successor to the band's silky 2000 debut Felt Mountain.
Continuing the sartorial analogy, vocalist Alison Goldfrapp's purr is still decked out in the sexiest sonic lace money can buy: swooping string passages, languid sampler bleeps, whooshing pads, double bass. These are, by now, pretty rote signifiers of sophistication; while the loungy orchestration of Felt Mountain didn't raise any flags at the time, Black Cherry's oh-so-timely shift to electro beats will make many scream "ambulance chasers!" Add my reluctant voice to that growing chorus.
From the title on down, the new CD tries hard to conjure an ambiance of languid sin-- opium, absinthe, vintage porn-- but that aesthetic is just a few steps from your average bachelor pad with a zebra throw and ceiling mirrors. In fact, that's where copies of this album will inevitably spin, a soundtrack to excruciatingly banal seduction.
The songs themselves, though hard to see through all this velvet fog, are a grab bag of trendy tactics. The first single "Train" is an ancient shuffle, rendered in quantized beats and fuzzy synths. You may recall that Liz Phair used this idea on "Baby Got Going". Goldfrapp's lyrics (opening line: "Plastic brain scar/ I want laser") are probably supposed to bewilder, but instead they annoy. On the mellower end, the title track sounds like early Air, and "Tiptoe"-- the strongest song on the record-- mightily recalls Tori Amos circa From the Choirgirl Hotel. (Pardon the barrage of direct and obvious comparisons, but the songwriting is faceless enough to warrant it.)
It couldn't be more ironic, then, that it's Black Cherry and not its predecessor that's truly broken the Brit duo in the homeland, netting them a Top of the Pops appearance and a place in the charts. The bad news is that the opacity of Goldfrapp's intentions will turn against them: they could be first-class ironists, but that will hardly matter when Alison's soft coos begin to lull customers into buying $200 panties at Agent Provocateur. | 2003-05-11T01:00:04.000-04:00 | 2003-05-11T01:00:04.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mute | May 11, 2003 | 5.8 | 79df7971-626f-470b-ad3b-54e51997821a | Pitchfork | null |
|
The Dutch quartet undercut their perky, grunge-lite melodies with just the right amount of pop-fuzz aggression. | The Dutch quartet undercut their perky, grunge-lite melodies with just the right amount of pop-fuzz aggression. | Pip Blom: Boat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pip-blom-boat/ | Boat | Since the dawn of the internet, multitasking has become a way of life. In her namesake four-piece band, 23-year-old Amsterdam native Pip Blom cleverly weaponizes lapses in concentration to craft perky, grunge-lite melodies. “I’ll watch a documentary while playing guitar,” she explained earlier this year. “When I play something on my guitar that stands out more than the documentary does, then that becomes something I should use.” While she’s immersed in stories about interesting people or mental illness (her preferred choice of docs), a hypnotic melody or peculiar chord progression pushes to the front. These become the quartet’s thumping heart: moody riffs, steady post-punk percussion, and ebullient hooks that sink deep.
The catchiness and ease of the songs on the band’s debut album Boat overshadow the self-aware lyrics. Blom’s vocals, although clear, are undercut by just the right amount of pop-fuzz aggression. Boat is an enjoyable and uncomplicated listen, but it’s hindered by the sense that the production and vocals are built on top of each other, instead of building space for each other. Some songs feel rambling, while others have clear conviction. On standout “Bedhead,” lethargic strums and tempered drums build around Blom’s vocals in perfect symbiosis. “I woke up, felt like I never slept/No one knew what was wrong,” she sings, describing a mental exhaustion that goes well past everyday grogginess into a dark, depressive hole. Her voice comes closer during the chorus, strengthening the band’s scruffy pop with emotional intimacy.
In the rustling urgency of “Daddy Issues” and the zig-zagging laxity of “Sorry,” Boat offers many crisp, cozy moments. Throughout, the band teeters between themes of distraction, isolation, and victory over apathy. On “Ruby,” Blom sings about the dilemma of finally recovering: “The worst days are all over/But now that I feel fine, I don’t know what to do with all that time.” Whatever scenarios surround these new feelings are mysterious, sometimes sinister. Elsewhere, Blom seeks to numb her emotions as she prepares to act on an unnamed mistake—seemingly one of passion. A grimy bassline lurks like a devil on her shoulder, urging her to follow through. “Caught off guard by feelings/I felt happy,” she sings, with eerie perplexity during “Tinfoil.”
Blom has said that it’s fine if listeners don’t hear all her words; she “finds the melody more personal.” By focusing on melody, their greatest strength, the band also emphasize their struggle to fully captivate. The songs on Boat are comfortable but far from the irreverent edge of the earlier singles like “School.” Some tracks have the excitement and magnetism of an encounter with a fascinating stranger, while others are merely pleasant. There’s solace in distraction; it can be satisfying just to let the noise wash over you, whether it’s an obscure documentary or a pacifying wave of distortion. There is no grand thesis or groundbreaking concept on Boat, but Pip Blom provide a welcoming nook for spacing out. | 2019-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Heavenly / PIAS | June 1, 2019 | 7 | 79e152da-3a22-4174-a9a3-db2fbde978f1 | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
Liz Phair’s indelible, essential debut album has been reissued with three crucial bedroom tapes that further define the innovative and unselfconscious songwriting from early in her career. | Liz Phair’s indelible, essential debut album has been reissued with three crucial bedroom tapes that further define the innovative and unselfconscious songwriting from early in her career. | Liz Phair: Girly-Sound to Guyville: The 25th Anniversary Box Set | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/liz-phair-girly-sound-to-guyville-the-25th-anniversary-box-set/ | Girly-Sound to Guyville: The 25th Anniversary Box Set | If you, like me, were a mopey and searching 13-year-old when Matador first released Exile in Guyville, then perhaps you, too, consider it the sacred text of your youth. Now, 25 years later, Exile remains a kind of sanctified codex for girls: the map that pointed us toward adulthood, or something like it.
Liz Phair began making music in 1991. She was newly graduated from Oberlin College and had prodigally returned to the leafy, affluent suburbs of Chicago, where she’d come of age a decade before. Back in her parents’ house, she wrote and recorded three cassettes of candid, yearning indie rock that she never expected anybody else to hear or pay attention to. Eventually, those tapes got dubbed and passed around by the few friends she’d shared them with—rarified talismans exchanged among the privileged. Imagine what it must’ve felt like to cram one into your car stereo that summer, to hear such a pure and instinctive voice opining the vagaries of romance, love, rejection, and what it means to want more than you’ve got.
Back then, Phair called herself Girly-Sound. The appellation itself feels like a key to Phair’s particular brand of feminism. Rather than trying to pass amid the brooding, self-serious punks of Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood—the scene she called Guyville—she both embraced and trumpeted her girliness, even when it required admitting to certain plainly uncool vulnerabilities.
Those three tapes—Yo Yo Buddy Yup Yup Word to Ya Muthuh, Girls! Girls! Girls!, and Sooty, which were collected and beautifully re-mastered for inclusion on this reissue—contain some of the least self-conscious music I’ve ever heard. Some of that can be attributed to the intimacy of her chosen recording space—anyone who’s ever stomped upstairs, yanked a diary out from under the mattress, and started scrawling hysterical proclamations in it understands the heavy emotional sanctity of the suburban bedroom. But Phair possessed an uncommon frankness, and nerve to match. The indie ethos of the early ’90s was supposedly about candor and integrity, but it often manifested as its own kind of neurotic performance—an alienating mix of frigid indifference and unearned righteousness. Phair seemed, in her way, entirely allergic to its bullshit. She just said what she felt, without negotiation.
Which isn’t to say she didn’t suffer from the scene. The clowns of Guyville, with their apathy and dispassion, animate these songs, unnerving and frustrating her. She wants consequences: “Whatever happened to a boyfriend? The kind of guy who tries to win you over?” she wonders on the first verse of “Fuck and Run,” which she initially recorded for Girls! Girls! Girls!. Her bluntness on the chorus—“I want a boyfriend/I want all that stupid old shit/Like letters and sodas”—was so deeply revelatory to me as a teenager. I simply did not know that people could say this sort of stuff out loud. What a brave and wild thing, to be that honest about what you longed for! I still thought hunger itself was a sin. The women I admired—Kim Gordon, Kathleen Hanna, PJ Harvey—felt radical in part because they appeared so needless. Phair had desires, and some of them were embarrassing, and she sang about them anyway.
Somewhere along the way, Phair had the idea to model Exile in Guyville after the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street, though its homage was more theoretical than explicit. She was responding, at first, to the vague but salient idea of the Stones as a kind of bastion of louche male insouciance and to the hegemony of the rock canon more generally. That she hadn’t actually heard that record before she started making her own only seems indicative of the strange pervasiveness of those ideas: If you were hanging around dudes, Keith and Jagger were in the air. Their significance was nearly extra-musical.
The album isn’t a song-by-song response, as it was sometimes positioned. It’s sexy like the Stones, and, in moments, unbearably tender. But it’s also funnier than anything the Stones ever did, and infinitely more self-deprecating. “Divorce Song,” a jangly, buoyant guitar jam about a road trip that turns catastrophic, feels like a tiny, domestic movie: “And it’s true that I stole your lighter/And it’s also true that I lost the map/But when you said that I wasn’t worth talking to/I had to take your word on that,” Phair sings. Who hasn’t had one of those arguments with a partner or lover, where a thing that once felt indestructible starts to collapse, only you’ve still got to check into a motel with that person and eat pancakes across from them? This is Phair’s sweet spot as a narrator, seeing and recounting the real, oafish transactions between imperfect people, all the terrible moments we know but can’t bear to articulate.
Though she would later explore her range more fully, in 1993, Phair sang only in a low, monotone voice that felt close and confessional. She’d taught herself how to play guitar, and because she hadn’t been schooled in all the foundational moves, she inadvertently invented her own kind of scrappy and idiosyncratic style. She also didn’t seem particularly interested in persona, which allowed her fans to believe they were being let in on some kind of secret. Listening to Exile in Guyville still feels this way: Like someone is telling you that all the weird, uncomfortable things you think and worry about are, in fact, just ordinary fears. Those feelings, it turns out, are simply the fallout of being alive. | 2018-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | May 2, 2018 | 10 | 79e44854-0425-4c3e-9400-dd6fedfcf45d | Amanda Petrusich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/ | |
The masterful singer-songwriter offers her lightest, most earthbound record in years, finding newfound inspiration in the sweetly silly sound of barroom rock’n’roll. | The masterful singer-songwriter offers her lightest, most earthbound record in years, finding newfound inspiration in the sweetly silly sound of barroom rock’n’roll. | Lucinda Williams: Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lucinda-williams-stories-from-a-rock-n-roll-heart/ | Stories From a Rock n Roll Heart | The first song on Lucinda Williams’ new record, “Let’s Get the Band Back Together,” is a frail hymn of possibility in the guise of a sweetly silly rocker. The genius of Stories From a Rock N Roll Heart—her first new album in three years and the first since her stroke in 2020—is how she marries these two impulses. Behind her, the band acts like a Tuesday-night bar band: greasy but tame, rowdy but contained, carefully rehearsed but slightly wobbly at the edges. They sound like the kind of outfit that might cover George Thorogood or Bonnie Raitt, the Wallflowers or the Gin Blossoms—whatever keeps the tap dispensing watery beers—and over this groove, Williams reminisces about “staying up all night playing poker and pool/Playing Dylan and the Boss, and we thought we were cool.” There’s a survivor’s wonder in her voice: The fact that there even is a band, this many decades later, to get back together is cause for celebration. Enough hearts are still beating, enough friendships are intact. Hey, we could.
It’s also the lightest music she’s made in a decade. Over the past 10 years, Williams has peered into some darkened corners—depression, addiction, mortality, abuse, despair—and her music has often darkened with her. Perhaps a brush with death refreshes your senses for all the good old slights and discomforts of daily life, because the songs on Stories From a Rock N Roll Heart are earnest and earthbound. She indulges in the luxury to be jealous, self-deprecating, horny. These are also the most quotidian and diaristic songs she’s written in years. “Driving down Sunset/I’m stuck in traffic/With the sun coming in from the west/So I cover my eyes and I wait for the light to change/And I think about you/And it’s kinda strange/but I think about you,” the opening gambit from “Stolen Moments,” is just point-blank more words than Williams generally allows herself. Her songs have worked in brilliant broad strokes—God is a big rotator, there’s a big black train coming, she oughta know about lonely girls—but the writer we meet on Stories From a Rock N Roll Heart is a notebook scribbler, a noticer, an observer.
On “Last Call For the Truth,” she’s also back in the corner booth. “Give me one more taste of my lost youth/Then it’s last call for the truth,” she sings, which reads dire but comes out sounding wry. She’s been singing about lost youth ever since she had it, and now that it’s gone, she sounds fonder than ever. “Celebrating our lack of social graces/Staying true to our ragtag mystique,” she sings, with more than a touch of “2 Kool 2 Be 4 Gotten”—this might even be the same bar, with the same characters, or maybe Williams is the only regular still hanging around from those days. Maybe those are her words notched in that stall.
In order to bring this booze-soaked vision to life, Williams recruited bar-rock legends: Tommy Stinson of the Replacements, Patti Scialfa, and, of course, the Boss himself. Bruce Springsteen’s spirit looms large over the record, lending his background vocals to “New York Comeback” and “Rock N Roll Heart.” The mood on the latter is rousing, and it’s certainly reassuring to hear Springsteen and Williams howl together about a “blue-collar kid in a no-win town,” but Lucinda does Lucinda better than she does Bruce. She’s far more convincing when she snarls “Nothing’s the same as it was back when/You can’t go home again” on “This Is Not My Town,” her voice edged with ambivalence, even contempt. It’s always more personal and sour when she leaves mythology behind for observation.
Even as she’s lost some of her range, Williams’ voice remains sui generis. She’s never sounded more tender or unguarded as she does on “Where the Song Will Find Me,” leaning into her vibrato, letting the holes and pockmarks in her voice tell their own stories. It’s a hymn of helpless devotion to songwriting itself, and maybe the purest love song she’s ever written. As it comes to a close, Williams steps into the spotlight: “I find myself alone in the madding crowd/On the buckling New York streets, people talking loud/Sitting on a stool in the corner of a bar/The errand of a fool has carried me this far/To a place where the song can find me.” The songs—she’s still devoted to them, and they are still visiting her. | 2023-07-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-07T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Highway 20 / Thirty Tigers | July 7, 2023 | 7.7 | 79e6e749-808e-418e-87e6-035a4f2fc836 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Pickpocket's Locket finds Frog Eyes sounding almost muzzled—it's a quieter, toned-down version of the band. But despite the record's deliberate transparency of production style, the musical structures are as hard to parse as they have ever been. | Pickpocket's Locket finds Frog Eyes sounding almost muzzled—it's a quieter, toned-down version of the band. But despite the record's deliberate transparency of production style, the musical structures are as hard to parse as they have ever been. | Frog Eyes: Pickpocket’s Locket | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20876-pickpockets-locket/ | Pickpocket’s Locket | The past three years have brought a great deal of grief and uncertainty into Carey Mercer's life and music, but these days, the singer and songwriter's demeanor possesses a kind of aloof geniality. In concert, he seems just as content to talk and joke as play, like a charismatic acquaintance regaling you with stories at slightly uncomfortable length. In the muted and gently loping songs on his band Frog Eyes' latest LP, Pickpocket's Locket, too, Mercer playfully mulls over a couple of musical ideas rather than pushing past them quickly or distending them quickly into cracked-mirror reflections of themselves. The approach would have been quite different just a few years ago. The tremulous, haunted tenor of the early 2000s—or for that matter, the percussive, histrionic assaults of 2004's The Folded Palm, or the breathy, epic-poetic narration of Tears of the Valedictorian and *Paul's Tomb: A Triumph—*is a far cry from the more polite and conversational parlance of this album.
Pickpocket's Locket’s finds Frog Eyes sounding almost muzzled: The drums are hit with brushes and felt-tipped mallets, the guitars and bass are often acoustic, and a lot of the prime sonic real estate is taken up by bright piano chording and string arrangements from Mercer's erstwhile bandmate and former roommate —Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade, Sunset Rubdown, and Moonface. Mercer’s vocal is dry and up front, speaking colloquially, and just from the padded studio room instead of from a mountaintop created by delay or cathedral-like reverb. Despite the record's deliberate transparency of production style, though, the musical structures are as hard to parse as they have ever been; the high dramatics and longform organization of earlier, heavier records feels more intuitive, while it can be pretty difficult to determine where verses and chorus begin and end here.
This element of the album points to why—despite his close association with consummate "songwriter" types Dan Bejar and Krug —Mercer's work calls for a different mode of listening, more like one would use with avant-garde music. Its surface-level structural complexity can add up to a net overarching simplicity, if one hears it first as an inchoate whole before worrying about picking it apart. Eventually, the important musical phrases distinguish themselves; in Mercer's case, in any song, a few distinguishing paeans create signposts. "Death Ship"s dense, "Thunder Road"-paced libretto is filled with sneered, ear-catching lines like "I floated to the New York on the back of a log" and "A man shot in the hand from indiscreet fire" which serve as organizational dividers. The ecstatic closer "Rip Down the Fences That Fence the Garden" is built around several belted and bright melodic phrases—"In the dawn, by the river I shall swaddle my wrath!" The goal in these lyrics is preserving attractive sibilance and meter at least as much as cosmic suggestion. Still, there are powerful shadows of meaning. Pecking at the edges of Mercer's neo-Modernist poetry are images of seediness and criminality— political corruption ("Crystal Blip"), lechery ("Two Girls"), and betrayal ("Rejoinders in a Storm"). But even the darkest moments feel perversely comic; the album lacks, certainly, the staring-into-the-abyss ruminations on mortality and human cruelty of previous releases.
In these clearer sections, Pickpocket's Locket proves itself to be increasingly rewarding upon repeated listens, but it still fails to deliver anything particularly remarkable. All of its component gestures can be found on other Mercer projects. The restrained sound palette resembles parts of FE's Carey's Cold Spring, the poppier moments recall Mercer's contributions to Swan Lake, and heavy piano work also anchors excellent Frog Eyes records Valedictorian and 2003’s The Golden River. The main distinguishing feature here is Krug’s string arrangements, but disappointingly, these can feel childishly simple and precious in the same, borderline irritating way as the heavy counterpoint in Krug's own solo work—see the layered, scalar instrumental melodies on Sunset Rubdown’s last two albums, in particular. At their best, Krug's charts here lend Mercer's more modest songs a baroque quality, reminiscent of the modest string work on records like John Cale's Paris 1919 or Robert Wyatt's Shleep (see, in particular, the effective, wry figures in "The Beat Is Down").
Mercer has long been someone worth keeping up with in indie rock; his voice has, since his early recording, been commanding, immutable, and seemingly impervious to trends. Fans have grown with the subtle changes in his mode of attack, and given the specificity of his style, sometimes it's easy to overlook the significant ways his approach has drifted since his formative releases. It's startling to realize Pickpocket’s Locket is the odd Carey Mercer release you can almost mellow out to. Once you delve deeper than the pleasant aesthetic, however, it's hard not to wish for a few more distinguishing moments to hold onto. | 2015-08-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-08-31T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Paper Bag | August 31, 2015 | 6.8 | 79e8682b-49c5-4b90-844e-fd3f9212c8bc | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
The Canadian indie rock band sorts through a largely subdued grab bag of material on this career-spanning set, highlighted by offbeat experiments and homespun, intimate moments. | The Canadian indie rock band sorts through a largely subdued grab bag of material on this career-spanning set, highlighted by offbeat experiments and homespun, intimate moments. | Broken Social Scene: Old Dead Young: B-Sides & Rarities | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/broken-social-scene-old-dead-young-b-sides-and-rarities/ | Old Dead Young: B-Sides & Rarities | Broken Social Scene have been soundtracking intimate firsts since the internet was a little baby and made a lot of noise when you turned it on. For over two decades, the Canadian collective has written anthemic, heart-on-your-sleeve indie rock songs that make you want to sit on your crush’s lap at a house party or shotgun a beer in a cornfield. For fans of a certain age, their work has become synonymous with being a teen: Lorde is one of those fans, and she memorably interpolated “Lover’s Spit” into “Ribs,” making an adolescent anthem of her own. Old Dead Young, the band’s new career-spanning B-sides and rarities collection, won’t necessarily give you the same ecstatic lift of their more beloved material. For the most part, these 14 tracks are a pretty subdued listen. They’re not the band’s best songs, and most of the record isn’t particularly memorable. Old Dead Young is best appreciated as the first retrospective from a band whose music is already all about self-mythologizing and looking back at the past.
Despite being essentially a grab bag of ephemera, Old Dead Young plays like an actual album, sequenced like any Broken Social Scene record, shifting between styles and collaborators. Opener “Far Out,” originally from a pre-order EP released in anticipation of 2010’s Forgiveness Rock Record, is a delicate ambient interstitial, twisting and turning like a toy ballerina in a jewelry box. It segues into the 2001 track “Do the 95,” where Kevin Drew’s vocals feel like baseballs being flung at you from inside a batting cage. The mood grows more hushed around the album’s midpoint. “This House Is on Fire,” an outtake from Forgiveness Rock Record, evokes being stuck inside during a snowstorm. It’s so tender it’s almost a bit twee. “National Anthem of Nowhere,” a Broken Social Scene version of a song written for Andrew Whiteman’s Apostle of Hustle side project, is just as chill, but not nearly as schmaltzy. It’s calm and searching.
The collection’s latter half features its strongest and most complicated material. “Stars and Spit,” from 2006, is loud and jangly, with pops of synth, scuzzed-out guitars, and cavernous percussion. It’s a mashup of “Stars and Sons” and “Lover’s Spit” made by producer David Newfield and originally released on a 7" single from 2006. While definitely a bit gimmicky, the song is also oddly compelling. “Until It’s Dead” is equally experimental but far more muted. It integrates sampling with cool-toned, krauty guitars and synths. “All My Friends,” meanwhile, is a beautiful but sardonic song about having friends in magazines and telling “little lies” while having “massive dreams.” Most of the record feels up-close and personal, but “All My Friends” is so homespun and raw it feels particularly intimate.
These songs feel like an old photo album of Polaroids and disposable camera pictures from the band’s formative years, even if none of them feel all that essential. They’re less varnished and intoxicating than the songs that would make the final cut on a studio album. But that’s the appeal: Sometimes it’s the outtakes—the photos where everyone is blinking and has beady red eyes—that feel the most candid, the best representation of the past, decades out.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Arts & Crafts | January 18, 2022 | 6.8 | 79f38ffb-9fee-4df5-944f-39bee39d8dd3 | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Grand Hustle rapper Young Dro has managed to hold onto relevance in an ever-changing rap landscape with sheer giddiness and force of personality. On his third album, Da Reality Show, he gets a little reflective, seeming comfortable enough in his skin to reflect on the highs and lows a long rap career can bring. | Grand Hustle rapper Young Dro has managed to hold onto relevance in an ever-changing rap landscape with sheer giddiness and force of personality. On his third album, Da Reality Show, he gets a little reflective, seeming comfortable enough in his skin to reflect on the highs and lows a long rap career can bring. | Young Dro: Da Reality Show | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21080-da-reality-show/ | Da Reality Show | Grand Hustle rapper and former T.I. sideman Young Dro has been surprisingly good at maintaining relevance in an ever-changing rap landscape. To anyone not paying attention, his return to the mainstream with his viral Vine hit "FDB" in 2013 was probably out of left field, but in truth he's been around the whole time: producing a steady stream of mostly solid mixtapes and using his always slightly-offbeat eccentricity to keep the songs exciting. Da Reality Show, Young Dro's third major-label album, is an acknowledgement of Dro's place in the current rap landscape; it's at once an album that could have easily dropped shortly after 2006's Best Thang Smokin'**, yet still feels refreshingly new without being forced.
Dro has been making music since the early '00s, but we're coming up on 10 years since his first major album, and Da Reality Show is a celebration of and a reflection on a life well-lived, full of goofiness, giddiness and sobering reminiscence. He's feeling himself—"I kilt the streets and made history", he boasts on "Coupe"—and very few are as good at doing that as Dro is, with as many undertones. On the song "Dead", he raps: "Hope yo ass be ready for the fed/Hope yo ass be ready for the lead/Hope you ready for the hospital bed/dopeboy, dopeboy, now the nigga dead" as a way of calling out another dealer as a sucker. It's typical braggadocio, but in it also is a glimmer of awareness about the inevitabilities of trap life.
This introspective honesty carries the back half of the album. "I know how it feel to be numba one/I know how it feel to be numba nothin’”, he raps soberly on “Feeling Myself”. Dro seems comfortable enough with who he is to put his real self on record, and the record carries the gravity that comes with seeing both the highs and lows a long rap career can bring.
He also has a natural sense of how he fits into the sounds of rap radio today without compromising his essence. The album finds Dro perfectly at ease with the sound of current Atlanta and making it work for him instead of the other way around. The Zaytoven-assisted "Ugh" is a melodic and busy hymnal, and amid Zaytoven's menagerie of sounds, Dro's is the best instrument. He glides through it, crooning then rapping like his words are drum kicks to making playful ad-libs and ad-libbing on top of those ad-libs. It's an effortless energy and showmanship that he carries into the next track "Parallel Park". The church organs that surround the song are appropriate; Dro captures your attention and is as theatrical in his style as an Atlanta Megachurch Preacher.
Da Reality Show would have probably been better off holding onto this momentum, because the traditional attempts at inspirational anthems in the back half feel a little forced, and lack the freewheeling excitement of the rest of the album. At the end,however, Dro allows himself to really get sentimental on "Hood Gospel", reflecting on lost love and the murder of his mother. The pain is audible in his voice, but so is the full-hearted joy and wonder at his rise from those traumatic experiences to where he is now. It is a beautiful moment and a reminder that behind all the boasts about exotic-colored cars and women, there is a man who just wants to share his testimony. | 2015-10-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-08T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | Entertainment One | October 8, 2015 | 7.4 | 79f4ba68-951b-4520-b45c-42997728021c | Israel Daramola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/israel-daramola/ | null |
Massive Attack's new EP is a welcome reminder that the group have always excelled as both producers and curators. While retaining their old sound, they offer carefully judged and effective updates, including appearances by Young Fathers, Tricky, and Azekel. | Massive Attack's new EP is a welcome reminder that the group have always excelled as both producers and curators. While retaining their old sound, they offer carefully judged and effective updates, including appearances by Young Fathers, Tricky, and Azekel. | Massive Attack: Ritual Spirit EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21553-ritual-spirit-ep/ | Ritual Spirit EP | Massive Attack made not one but three of the defining albums of the '90s, and are nearly single-handedly responsible for founding trip-hop, which, depending on who you ask, is either the most prevalent or worst genre of the decade's latter half. They were probably guaranteed to weather some tough times after the turn of the millennium, and they did. Their once-genre became a punchline, and band members splintered off one by one, leaving only Robert "3D" Del Naja, his increasingly claustrophobic production style, and a cloud of drama.
Times are friendlier to Massive Attack now, though. Half a decade on, 2010's Heligoland holds up surprisingly well, and "trip-hop" isn't quite the epithet it used to be. This year, one of the biggest new crossover pop stars cross-audience is a guy who used to be produced by Doc McKinney of—of all people!—Esthero. As such, Massive Attack have spent much of the decade in a long, protracted process of getting the gang back together. The group's been occupied with soundtrack work for documentaries on tax evasion and global warming, and a live show that skewers, in Del Naja's words, "utopian tech companies"; that live show featured both longterm vocalist Horace Andy and former Tricky collaborator Martina Topley-Bird. And Tricky himself appears on Ritual Spirit, an EP produced entirely by 3D from material on remix-your-own app Fantom. (A second EP, with songs by Daddy G, is due later this year.)
It's instructive to think of just how many ways this EP could be awful, how many gimmicky collaborators or landfill house vocalists could be on the album. But Massive Attack play it mostly conservative. Aside from Young Fathers—whom Del Naja called "currently the best fucking band in the world"—and newcomer Azekel, the personnel on Ritual Spirit have been around: British rapper Roots Manuva and Tricky himself, whose single "Take It There" is such a return to form it almost works best as speculative history: What if Tricky had stuck around for Mezzanine? It's also the most diehards-only track of the four—suffice it to say, if you always found Massive Attack's post-'97 schtick contrived and 3D's lyrics ridiculous, you probably won't get through this one without some eye-rolling.
"Dead Editors," with its EKG opening, begins like a 100th Window cut, but reveals itself as something with more interesting things to say: In 2010, Marshall rejoined the group with a vow that he would "bring the black back to Massive Attack," and the line that appears near-verbatim on "Dead Editors"; it's also noteworthy that Ritual Spirit features entirely black collaborators and engages significantly more with rap than Heligoland. Feverish "Ritual Spirit" hangs somewhere between meditative and heatsick, Azekel's vocal like a smoke curl; meanwhile, "Voodoo in My Blood" captures its collaborators' best impulses: a more driven version of Young Fathers' polyglot rock, a more dynamic version of Del Naja's often-of-late meandering work. Massive Attack were always equally as good producers as they were curators; it's promising that, as much of their old sound as they've retained, they've kept this as well. | 2016-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-02-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Virgin / EMI | February 5, 2016 | 7 | 79f51e6b-36dc-4c0f-9c33-97f071d72fd0 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
Swedish Italo disco producer's latest album features frequent collaborator Sally Shapiro, as well as CFCF. | Swedish Italo disco producer's latest album features frequent collaborator Sally Shapiro, as well as CFCF. | Johan Agebjörn: Casablanca Nights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15394-casablanca-nights/ | Casablanca Nights | The title of producer Johan Agebjörn's new album isn't necessarily a reference to the 1942 Bogart-Bergman film or to the Moroccan city where it was set. Instead, it's almost certainly a nod to Casablanca Records, one of the most prominent labels of the 1970s. While it did sign the likes of Cher, Kiss, and Parliament, Casablanca was best known as a haven for disco artists, including Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder, Santa Esmeralda, Village People, and a deep roster of one- and no-hit wonders. It's even rumored that Steve Guttenberg's character in the Village People film Can't Stop the Music was based on Casablanca founder Neil Bogart (no relationship to Humphrey).
It's no shock that Agebjörn would invoke this bellwether of pop history for his latest album. He is one of several Swedish producers enamored with various American and European strains of disco, and his two albums with Sally Shapiro reveal a steadfast belief that heartache is best conveyed via soft vocals, shimmery synths, modulated bass lines, and pulsating beats. Casablanca Nights is his chance to play curator as well as producer, hand-picking such acts as Shapiro, CFCF, Friday Bridge, and Le Prix. The album plays like a label sampler you might dig out of the dollar bin and wonder why none of the artists made it bigger.
Despite that title, Agebjörn isn't abandoning his signature Italo disco-derived sound for a more American style. His production remains exquisitely lush and luxuriant. On "The Last Day of Summer", the relatively robust vocals by Queen of Hearts stand out on the album, and it's too bad she doesn't appear more often. Many of the vocalists blur together over the course of Casablanca Nights, although Shapiro remains Agebjörn's most captivating muse, her expressive vocals illuminating each one of her songs.
Most of Agebjörn's songs create the same sort of yearning, thumping dancefloor melancholy, differentiated more by their lyrics than by their instrumentation or their tone. As Casablanca Nights makes its way to morning, he introduces a few new sounds and tricks, to varying degrees of success. "Alice", a collaboration with Le Prix, Fred Ventura, and Shapiro, is the most intriguing detour, drumming in some new wave influences from the early 1980s to counterbalance the 1970s sounds. Thanks to the halting chorus and the dynamic boy-girl vocals, the combination of styles is intriguing, not only because these two eras have such different concerns but mostly because similar experiments on Casablanca Nights prove much less compelling.
By the time the requisite chill-out closer comes along-- "Stranger (Chill Remix)" with Halftone-- Agebjörn has already thoroughly chilled out to a sequence of downtempo songs like "Le Noir et le Blanc Sur le Piano" (where Shapiro sings in French) and "Memories of Satie" (with CFCF). Intriguing in their reach if not necessarily their execution, those two numbers weigh down the second half, such that "Stranger" doesn't sound like the sunrise to end Casablanca Nights, but an abrupt finale that plays to a long-empty dancefloor. Granted, Agebjörn's intention isn't historical re-creation or even dance-party endurance, but a kind of musical evocation that opens up more conceptual possibilities than perhaps he's willing to explore. Yet, this time-machine quality means the music serves similar purposes to its influences: The songs are meant to be immersive, enveloping, and most of all transportive. Where disco went far beyond mere escapism in the 1970s, Casablanca Nights only gets you out of 2011 for a few sweet minutes. | 2011-05-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-05-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Paper Bag | May 23, 2011 | 6.7 | 79f8b4d5-2ae7-44ad-9929-1d6774bf7941 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
"He not busy being born is busy dying."
- Bob Dylan, "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding"
"Live flesh ... | "He not busy being born is busy dying."
- Bob Dylan, "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding"
"Live flesh ... | John Coltrane: The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1550-the-olatunji-concert-the-last-live-recording/ | The Olatunji Concert: The Last Live Recording | "He not busy being born is busy dying."
- Bob Dylan, "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding"
"Live flesh and coursing blood, hearts, brains, souls spluttering fire!"
-LeRoi Jones, "Black Art"
April 23rd, 1967. John Coltrane appears for his penultimate public performance before a crowd at Babatunde Olatunji's Center for African Culture in New York City. Three months later, liver cancer would claim his life. He would play once more in front of a live crowd, but the last available live recording is documented here. On this set, he's bolstered by drummer Rashied Ali, bassist Jimmy Garrison, pianist Alice Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders on tenor sax and Algie Dewitt on bata drum (a Yoruba instrument). For legions of jazz aficionados around the globe, this final live document is something of a Holy Grail. And now, thanks to sound engineer Bernard Drayton (who still had possession of the master tapes), anyone with $15 can finally get their mitts on one of the most historic documents in all of 20th century American music.
Coltrane spent the last years of his life engaged in a mission that few could understand. As witnessed on A Love Supreme and other recordings during those later years, his ultimate objective was that of a continued spiritual awakening. Whereas the objective itself was not that difficult to grasp, Coltrane's means of attaining it were far from conventional. Abandoning the preconceived notions of tonality, and immersed within a musical state of dissonance, Coltrane's music became a communicative attempt at reaching a higher plane.
Spawned during one of the most tumultuous eras in history, Coltrane's ideas were reflective of a period in which the foundations of American life trembled to the core. Influenced by the nation's entrenchment in war, its social and political upheavals, and its civil rights and protest movements, John's music deserted almost any semblance of traditional form in a move toward celestial harmony and universality. In the early months of 1967, faced not just with the chaos of society, Coltrane waged his own personal war with death and his music again shifted. What's documented here is that personal warfare, replete with bursting explosions and a splattering of machine-gun notes.
No sooner than Billy Taylor can introduce John as "one of the most remarkable forces in jazz today," Coltrane comes up front and center on "Ogunde," opening the set with a warm, bluesy moan. But this is only temporary. Almost immediately, the rest of the band in tow, Coltrane embarks on a trans-dimensional flight, bleating and coaxing sounds from his sax, and escalating at a fever pace to the highest register with guttural whoops and hollers. "Ogunde," based on the Afro-Brazilian song "Ogunde Varere," is an almost thirty-minute wall of dissonance, peppered with shrieks and howls. It's as if Coltrane is expending every imaginable source of personal energy here to create a swirling maelstrom of noise.
Coltrane and Sanders swap solos: John rips out with a weeping wail before ascending into a full-blown shriek attack; Pharoah begins playfully, reeling off a fiery solo, dancing around a theme, and then descending into a grunt-filled rage. Ali focuses on polyrhythms and spacial dancing, consistently adding dimensions and crossing barriers, taking the band into something otherworldly, while Garrison's bass remains muscular, anchoring the sound and expanding the framework. Alice Coltrane's percussive plonks and thuds drift in and out of the background before she rolls out her own deft solo, scrambling around the melody and filling the space rapidly with sixteenth notes while the saxophonists quietly wait for their scorching return. Soon, Coltrane roars back in, the band following on his comet's tail. Coltrane and Sanders successively spit out anguished yelps while the band soars into wraithlike dimensions, teetering on the precipice of a volcanic eruption. From here, the track remains full-throttle until it ends with Coltrane and Sanders invoking the spiritual via an ecstatic rite of fire.
After Coltrane humbly gives his thanks to the elated audience, Jimmy Garrison steps into the spotlight for a lengthy bass solo that introduces Rodgers and Hammerstein's "My Favorite Things." A staple of Coltrane's set since the early 60s, "My Favorite Things" had now morphed from The Sound of Music's simple innocence into something altogether beastly and monstrous. Garrison flexes his chops for well over seven minutes with brawn and grit, piecing together a skeletal structure and beating the path for the others' departure into unknown terrain.
What follows is music overflowing with such emotional and spiritual intensity that it floods your living room. Coltrane's bleats and squeals are drenched with a searing pain. It's like the sound of rending flesh, the tune ripped apart and broken into sorrowful hollers and moans. With the band thundering behind them, the two sax players are intent on dousing every inch of that NYC block with their incendiary fury. Explosions, barking yawps, shrill high-register runs, and throaty, rasping groans-- the place sounds like it's going to spontaneously combust. Occasionally, there's slight recognition of the Rodgers & Hammerstein theme as Coltrane references the motif before descending into death howls and mournful prayer. If "Ogunde" was a full-throttled blare, "My Favorite Things" clambers rapidly out of this realm and into permanent celestial gravitation. Coltrane maintains velocity at this pace for nearly twenty minutes, caught in a firestorm from which no one will walk away unscathed.
For every intent and purpose, this is difficult music. It's the demanding sound of a man faced with impending death, yet unafraid to carry forward and remain steadfast to his intense, singular vision of music as a universal bridge. With every note, Coltrane chases a higher power in an attempt to transcend the corporeal. For the unprepared listener, it might all be too much-- not only because of the sheer intensity of noise levels or dissonance, but because this is the sound of a man who knows every breath he draws inches him one step closer to the grave. Yet, the sadness this evokes is overwhelmed by the pure beauty of a man being rebirthed, recreated, and reimagined. The Last Live Recording is a deliriously scattered mess of joy and pain, intermingled and bound up within Coltrane's unbridled and luminescent energy. And now it stands as his parting gesture: one last moment bursting out at the seams with elation and ferocity, an awe-inspiring testament to life. | 2001-10-15T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2001-10-15T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Jazz | Impulse! | October 15, 2001 | 10 | 79f92958-4dfb-4fd8-98d5-b653159277aa | Pitchfork | null |
|
The Atlanta rapper and singer Kodie Shane is the most talented member of Lil Yachty’s motley crew, and on this EP—a bite-sized compilation of old tracks and new ones—everything clicks. | The Atlanta rapper and singer Kodie Shane is the most talented member of Lil Yachty’s motley crew, and on this EP—a bite-sized compilation of old tracks and new ones—everything clicks. | Kodie Shane: Zero Gravity EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22682-zero-gravity-ep/ | Zero Gravity EP | Viral bubblegum rap star and self-proclaimed “King of the Teens,” Lil Yachty first introduced his motley crew of young stooges, the Sailing Team, on the Summer Songs 2 posse cut “All In.” It was a bubbly team theme that could double as a nursery rhyme. “All my brothers with me!” he shouted in the intro. That distinction somehow excluded R&B phenom Kodie Shane, the crew’s sole female voice, and unequivocally its most talented member. Her short, sweet verse stood out brightly from the half-cocked joke raps, ending with confidence: “I’m tired of talking, can you cut my check?” Shane established herself early on as more than a wave-rider—she’s a rising tide lifting all boats. If Perry is Yachty’s first mate, then Kodie is their anchor. Following the breakthrough, her new EP, Zero Gravity, makes a strong impression.
Born in Atlanta but raised in a Chicago suburb, Shane is a product of both nature and nurture. As a baby, she traveled on tour with her sister’s platinum-selling R&B group, Blaque, and later returned to Atlanta, where she recorded her first songs at 14. It was local guru Coach K—a manager of Gucci Mane and Young Jeezy, and mentor to Shane—who later introduced her to Yachty. For much of the past year, Shane has been toying with ideas and tinkering with form: Her 2060 EP, released in March, trended toward the productions of trap it-boys Metro Boomin and TM88 before randomly, dramatically turning to sample things like Rufus & Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody.” It was scattered, but it showed off the range and arsenal of a prodigious writer who has spent her life around musicians. A few months later, the sugary, genre-scanning Little Rocket explored Shane’s pop sense.
A highlight of it all was 2060’s Yachty duet “Sad,” a candy-coated jam about unrequited love and the solace that can sometimes be found in bitter moments. Shane and Yachty are kindred spirits who pull the best out of each other, and their collaboration provided an important benchmark for Shane: the precise moment where everything clicked. It’s no surprise, then, that “Sad” resurfaces on Zero Gravity, which is, as its title implies, a study in weightlessness.
Zero Gravity is a bite-sized compilation of old tracks and new ones, showcasing Shane’s seemingly limitless potential; it’s compact but full, animated yet balanced, marrying the buoyancy of Yachty (on a song like “Losing Service”) with the lucid journaling of Tink. She, like Tink, is a rapper and singer who blurs the line between the two (see: “A Ok”). But she’s far more explosive, with an impish warble that quickly morphs into a liquid falsetto, a playful chirp, or even a mopey whimper in a snap. This dynamism is obvious on the hook-heavy “Drip in My Walk,” which is the song most in-line with the Yachty canon here. She cycles through a few subtle inflection changes before settling for flat out exuberance, her natural state.
Listening to Shane feels rejuvenating. There’s a very particular energy to some of her songs that replicates tumbling around in a bouncy house. But there can be a delicacy to them, too, when her writing ventures into mature(r), more thoughtful R&B. In any mode, Shane meticulously crafts tunes that stay with you. She has the nuanced ear for melody that continues to elude Yachty, but her hooks are equally infectious, as she unspools skipping refrains with sweet, almost chant-like variations. Shane is a more complete songwriter, too; her ideas find resolution, especially on “Drip in My Walk” and “Can You Handle It”—the former seeing an extended basketball metaphor through to the end. Still, she fits her team’s bubblegum aesthetic perfectly. Even as her songs constantly move, they’re easy to follow. Yachty may be the internet’s star of today, but all signs point to Shane as a star of the future. | 2016-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Epic | December 9, 2016 | 7.8 | 79ffe138-8070-4789-b578-396477194013 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
Guided by her spellbinding whistling, the Los Angeles musician’s debut album is as sumptuous and wistful as a vintage film score. | Guided by her spellbinding whistling, the Los Angeles musician’s debut album is as sumptuous and wistful as a vintage film score. | Molly Lewis: On the Lips | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/molly-lewis-on-the-lips/ | On the Lips | Some things are best left unsaid. But for Molly Lewis, they might be better whistled. In her wonderfully quirky world, lyrics are omitted and replaced with high-pitched chirps and trills. Across her debut album On the Lips, Lewis invites you to sit back and relax in her so-called Café Molly universe, where the music is as glittering and enticing as the romantic world it conjures up.
Lewis’ idiosyncratic gift makes it easy to picture her as the lounge act hidden in a Guillermo del Toro film or at the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks. She knows how weird her career path is, dialing up the humor in the opening track: “Good evening,” she whispers. “Tonight I’ll be”—pause for dramatic effect—“whistling.”
Once you get past the initial eccentricity, Lewis’ whistling eventually becomes so familiar and immersive that her vocalizations feel as mundane as the soft crooning of a jazz singer. Song after song, her abilities are astounding—how she quivers the final note of “Cocosette” or sustains such a clear and steady tone on “Slinky” is impressive, even after multiple listens. She maintains your attention with wistful production flourishes, courtesy of her backing band. That might be a brief saxophone solo on the swaying “Lounge Lizard,” a distant choir on the tragic, Nancy Sinatra-like “Crushed Velvet,” or the gentle plinks of a piano on “Moon Tan.”
On the Lips is the kind of inviting ambient record that neither distracts entirely nor melts into monotony. Take “Slinky”: The opening synths and steady percussion resemble underwater submersion, but Lewis’ whistling persuades you to come up for air, beckoning you to her like a siren. Rather than dissolving into tedium, Lewis molds the accompanying background melodies to enhance and be enhanced by her vocalizations, a balance that makes On the Lips a singular joy.
Lewis’ cover of Jeanette’s 1974 track “Porqué Te Vas” keeps the same funkiness as the original, but she adapts it to her own loungey sound. It might be one of the more compelling tracks on On the Lips; driven by the slightly faster tempo, Lewis playfully chases after the track’s rolling guitars and percussion. On the Lips delights in taking things slow. Her songs feel romantic, full of longing—a fact only amplified by the listening instructions she offers in the album insert, which recommend ambient lighting and being dressed in ornate silk fabric.
The charming “Sonny”—which is dedicated to Kenneth “Sonny” Donato, former MC for Lewis’ Café Molly show series and Charles Bukowski associate—contains the same fantastical, expanding wonder as an Alexandre Desplat score and the vintage nostalgia of Jon Brion. Lewis’ music feels this way for a reason; she referred to her work as “soundtracks” back in 2021 and has been featured across film and TV, including last year’s Barbie. On the Lips succeeds as an introduction to her mystifying world: Its whimsicality leaves you spellbound, hoping to hear just one more faint whistle even after the final track fades out. | 2024-02-23T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-22T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | February 23, 2024 | 7.6 | 7a026ce8-9fc9-4a6e-9b16-d5d2cc35e092 | Jaeden Pinder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jaeden-pinder/ | |
Spanning the sessions for 1997’s Time Out of Mind, an illuminating new edition of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series both subverts and magnifies the legend of his haunted, trancelike comeback album. | Spanning the sessions for 1997’s Time Out of Mind, an illuminating new edition of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series both subverts and magnifies the legend of his haunted, trancelike comeback album. | Bob Dylan: Fragments - Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997): The Bootleg Series, Vol. 17 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bob-dylan-fragments-time-out-of-mind-sessions-1996-1997-the-bootleg-series-vol-17/ | Fragments - Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997): The Bootleg Series, Vol. 17 | The official story surrounding Time Out of Mind goes something like this: Bob Dylan, stricken by the death of Jerry Garcia and sensing a hellhound on his own trail, turned to his beloved old blues records to exorcise the quickening dread he felt upon realizing that the bell also tolls for Zimmerman. Dylan, who was only 55 at the time, read his resulting lyrics to producer Daniel Lanois, who was stunned by their unearthly power, and the pair headed into the studio to fashion a record falling somewhere between a seance and a last will and testament.
Like all of the stories surrounding the creation of Bob Dylan albums, this one bears traces of myth and marketing. Typically, his Bootleg Series either subverts received knowledge (Trouble No More, Another Self Portrait) or magnifies legends (More Blood, More Tracks, The Cutting Edge). Fragments might be the first release that manages both. The series can feel overwhelming by design or aimed only at the highest-security-clearance Dylanologists, but Fragments presents us with a clear chronology: Disc One gives us the final studio album, remixed and scrubbed fresh so we can avail ourselves once more of its glorious shadows and submerge ourselves in its delicious mood. The remaining four discs—two of unreleased outtakes, one previously available, and a live set—repositions Time Out of Mind as a rebirth rather than a farewell.
What becomes abundantly clear over the course of the set’s six hours is that Time Out of Mind is primarily the story of a mood, and one ensemble’s single-minded pursuit of it. The making of this album was protracted, painful, and in all ways alive, and the album’s dour countenance was largely the product of theater and shadow. Dylan, ever the role player, was inhabiting a persona, slipping into a black jacket and working the character for fresh angles. Lanois accentuated the gloom and submerged the album in a damp chill of effects pedals and reverb until Dylan seemed to be speaking to us from the beyond. But—as the new mix on Fragments underlines—his baleful pallor was stagehand’s makeup, the gushing blood just red silk scarves.
The story began, appropriately enough, in a picaresque old playhouse Lanois dubbed the Teatro, filled with storybook touches—cob-webbed 16mm projectors, dusty mirror balls. Dylan and Lanois started with looping jams inspired by Charley Patton’s old 78s. Accompanied by bassist Tony Garnier and drummer Tony Mangurian, they built the tracks on top of those primordial beginnings. The mighty, roaring sound that emerged spooked everyone to attention: “The hair on my arms went up,” recalled sound engineer Mark Howard.
But Dylan, predictably, wasn’t settling in. He couldn’t work this close to his home and his family, which, by now, included six children and multiple grandchildren. They decamped instead to Criteria Studio in Miami, a space with a hallowed history (Aretha Franklin’s Young, Gifted and Black, the Allman Brothers’ Eat a Peach) and the ambiance of an airport security detention center. Lanois, shrugging, packed up all of his priceless tube microphones and moldering tape loops and relocated without complaint to this concrete box. But it was the beginning of a split between the two that would define and nearly overwhelm the sessions. The two stubborn visionaries seemed destined to remain at loggerheads. Lanois rarely spoke to Dylan before and after takes, and entire days unfolded in icy, uncomfortable silence.
Dylan, meanwhile, seemed determined to complicate things as much as possible. He reportedly felt haunted by Buddy Holly, and in tribute, he created his own ghostly version of the Crickets, pulling from his touring lineup, session-player royalty, and beyond. All in all at least 12 musicians found themselves crowded in Criteria, with Bob Dylan as their bandleader (“Two of everything, like Noah’s Ark,” marveled pedal steel guitarist Cindy Cashdollar). Dylan would try songs out in different keys, abruptly switching in the middle and expecting the band to remap their own chord progressions without a moment’s hesitation. The playbacks were a disaster, musicians crashing audibly into one another as they struggled to adapt. Lanois, listening with Howard, knew that he might only have a few shots at catching each song before his tempestuous leader grew bored and moved on, so he ordered musicians to simply not play if they couldn’t navigate the changes.
Whatever else was happening in the studio, the musicians achieved a rambling, spacious, loose cohesion. Guitar lines seem to be on the verge of wandering entirely out of sync with the drums only to fall in on beat with a satisfied breath. These are not driving rock numbers, and yet they were three or four drum kits rolling away at any point. The music came on like a big, black thunderhead, rolling forward with guitar echo merging into a clatter of drums.
The unreleased outtakes on Fragments reveal some of the extraordinary moments they littered along the path. On Disc 2’s take on the folk standard “The Water Is Wide,” Dylan leans into the performance as if he might reach out and touch the shoulder of his beloved. It’s as devoted as he ever sounded, and behind him, Garnier and Mangurian play so subtly and understated they register as lighting. Disc 5 gives us the original haunting take of “Can’t Wait” that raised Howard’s arm hairs: Over a hard backbeat, Dylan’s block piano chords and impressively tasty riffing from Lanois, Dylan chews the scenery with the unhinged glee of a Shakespearean actor let loose in a Hollywood blockbuster. The song is mesmerizingly dark, but hearing Dylan bite down with panther’s teeth on “I’m getting old,” it’s easy to conclude that he was feeling nothing but the opposite.
The extra discs yield the usual Bootleg pleasures: The Disc 2 version of “Cold Irons Bound” features stunning alternate lyrics about “stones in the pathway hurled” and “clouds of blood,” while the live versions of “’Til I Fell in Love With You” and “Standing in the Doorway” inflect the songs with sinewy hints of roadhouse blues, soul, gospel. But the true glory of these recordings is witnessing session legends like Mangurian, Jim Dickinson, and Bucky Baxter—giants whose playing pushed the blood through the veins of American song—sound momentarily lost, reverent, uncertain. The performances on Fragments surely represent some of these players’ most unguarded and searching work. Years later, they still spoke of these sessions with a mixture of anxiety and awe.
This lingering unease points to what makes Time Out of Mind special in Dylan’s discography, maybe even singular: More than almost any of his studio albums, it was the product of cult-like group obsession. Everyone from Lanois to Dylan to the phalanx of hired guitarists behaved like people gripped by a shared trance. Sessions stretched to 10 hours while Lanois drove Dylan to try “Not Dark Yet” again in E-flat, then in B-flat, until Dylan finally snapped, “If you haven’t got it now, you ain’t getting it.” Whatever their disagreements or tensions, everyone toiled under the mutual assumption that there were spirits in this material, ones that only they could coax out.
Their struggle centered on two songs—“Not Dark Yet” and, ironically, “Mississippi,” a song written for and left off of the final album. There are multiple versions of both songs littered across Fragments, and it is fascinating to hear them expand and contract, changing shapes and keys and tempos. For Dylan, the song had always been the thing: His catalog had always boasted the folk virtues of pliability. You could speed his songs up, slow them down, throw rock drums behind them or do any old thing, and the songs would remain, somehow, themselves: “Desolation Row” remains recognizably “Desolation Row” on take 5 and Take 13. But something different happens to “Not Dark Yet” and “Mississippi” when the players fiddle with them: They become different songs.
Listening to the evolution of Time Out of Mind’s most beloved song, “Not Dark Yet,” shows how these lurching, unsteady sessions wound up yielding their particular exhausted glitter. The first alternate take is in a different key, sending Dylan’s voice into a higher register and the song into ill-fitting sunlight; it’s a harmless little ramble. The second take, on Disc 3, is slower, and in the same key as the final version. You can hear Dylan’s voice settle into the tired languor that defines “Not Dark Yet.” But although you get a tantalizing glimpse of its potential, the view is blocked by a marching-band triplet fill on the drums and some Hornsby-esque piano trills. It doesn’t feel gloriously endless, as it does in the final studio version; it simply feels long. It wasn’t until the band stumbled into lockstep, all musicians’ frills burned away, that the song’s dark shadow loomed into view.
But the story of Fragments—the story of the album Time Out Of Mind isn’t, but almost was—rests with “Mississippi.” No song undergoes so many fitful revisions. On Disc 2, it’s an uptempo, zydeco-inflected rocker. On Disc 3, the band works it into a gut-wrenching funk that Lanois loved but Dylan rightfully discarded. The definitive version of “Mississippi,” which wasn’t released until 2008 and included on the fifth disc, is suffused with air and light. If “Not Dark Yet” sounded like it was in the beginning stages of evaporation, “Mississippi” felt like fumes itself—far too ethereal and light for Time Out of Mind.
Dylan, with his typical foresight, understood this implicitly. This is why he saved “Mississippi” for 2001’s Love & Theft. Critics and fans hailed that one as a rebirth: here, seemingly, was Dylan riding high, Time Out of Mind’s Edgar Allan Poe rags tossed off in favor of a natty bowler hat and a riverboat gambler’s mustache. But Fragments reveals the truth of the matter: The man who croaked about walking through “streets that are dead” already had his glittering blue eyes on the next horizon. | 2023-01-30T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-30T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia / Legacy | January 30, 2023 | 8.6 | 7a08475c-bfbe-4d02-acac-52fecaacaf8a | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Her first full-length since the dissolution of hers and Dean Blunt's Hype Williams project, abstract beatmaker Inga Copeland's latest is a strange, singular record that offers as many questions as it does answers. It's not an easy listen, but she wouldn't have it any other way. | Her first full-length since the dissolution of hers and Dean Blunt's Hype Williams project, abstract beatmaker Inga Copeland's latest is a strange, singular record that offers as many questions as it does answers. It's not an easy listen, but she wouldn't have it any other way. | Copeland: Because I'm Worth It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19392-copeland-because-im-worth-it/ | Because I'm Worth It | Hype Williams never made it easy. In an age where a cloak of mystery seems more rule than exception, Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland's (presumably) fake names and slippery interview tactics always felt like an altogether different beast. They somehow managed to combine total transparency with a shroud of secrecy; with all those obfuscations flying around, you could never be too sure where anything stood with them, even when they seemed to be giving it to you straight-up. Their music similarly existed in the cracks between genres: too out-there for post-dubstep, too amorphous for IDM. With no neatly packaged narrative to bounce off of, listeners had to seek answers in the music itself: no mean feat, when—much like its makers—that music never quite seemed to stay in one place long enough to wrap your head around it.
Copeland and Blunt parted ways in 2013, after the release of Black is Beautiful, a record that stripped away some—but certainly not all—of the willful obtusity of their previous shapeshifting. As Blunt offered up the Redeemer—a presumptive breakup record that sported some of the most straightforward, soul-baring music of his career—Inga Copeland issued the brief, bracing Don't Look Back, That's Not Where You're Going EP, an occasionally puzzling, frequently beguiling array of corroded electronics and clamorous calls-to-action. Now, Copeland's returned with her debut full-length, Because I'm Worth It, another strange, singular record that offers as many questions as it does answers. It's not an easy listen, but Copeland wouldn't have it any other way.
Opener "Faith OG X" begins with a discomfiting crackle of static. It's soon overtaken by a queasy, lurching synth, and then, two minutes in, a thought-swallowing, concentration-decimating beep. The effect of this incessant ping proves wildly disorienting; after a few spins, you'll learn to anticipate it, but you'll never quite get used to it. That's true for much of Because I'm Worth It, a nebulous, deviously off-kilter listen, impossible and intriguing in roughly equal measure, constantly rearranging itself for maximum discombobulation.
Over the whinny-and-pop of a door on a hinge, "Advice to Young Girls"—produced in conjunction with her fellow UK beatmangler Actress—finds Copeland in direct-address mode. "Sneak out the window and meet your friends on the corner," she urges. "Together, you're strong. You walk the streets: face the city, face the night. The city is yours." "Advice" is Worth It's finest hour, a near-perfect meeting of music and message; between Copeland's uncompromising aesthetic and her appeals to self-expression and sisterhood, "Advice" feels bold, urgent, necessary.
"Advice to Young Girls" is one of few vocal-centric tracks on Worth It; most of the rest is given over to Copeland's clattering, claustrophobic production. At barely half an hour, Because I'm Worth It is a dank, foreboding listen, a difficult space to accustom oneself to, at once enervating and intoxicating. The murky, pitched-down voice buried near the back of "Insult 2 Injury" is largely obscured by its sputtering rhythms and frosty synths, while the dank, zero-gravity dancehall of "Inga" finds her voice slathered in effects, rendering them half-incomprehensible. This is slippery, expectation-upending stuff; even after umpteen listens, you'll never quite feel as though you've acclimated yourself to the darkness.
There are moments—the morse code tappings of "Serious", the jolting beat and transmogrifying synths of closer "L'oreal"—that seem just little too hermetic, too impenetrable, lost down the hall of mirrors Copeland's built around them. And while the briefer pieces—"Serious," again, and the strange, sinewy "DILIGENCE"—help tie everything together, neither holds a candle to the denser, more enveloping darkness that surround them. Taken together, though, all these abstractions and interjections forge a dingy, disquieting dreamscape that seems to operate by its own laws of physics. The oft-bewildering Worth It is, like every record Copeland's put her name to, a deeply challenging, deliberately unorthodox listen. But you're not likely to hear another record quite like it anytime soon, and the impression it leaves isn't an easy one to shake. | 2014-06-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2014-06-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | June 2, 2014 | 7.1 | 7a14800b-475d-4ce2-ae1e-561a9bc67942 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
On what may or may not be the final album from his legendary space-rock project, Jason Pierce finally sounds as though he has a hold on his passions, preoccupations, and demons. | On what may or may not be the final album from his legendary space-rock project, Jason Pierce finally sounds as though he has a hold on his passions, preoccupations, and demons. | Spiritualized: And Nothing Hurt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spiritualized-and-nothing-hurt/ | And Nothing Hurt | Jason Pierce does not make casual records. Since the start of his career, nearly four decades ago, the co-founder of Spacemen 3 and the center of the Spiritualized universe has dived headlong into sounds, styles, and themes with ecclesiastical obsessiveness. In Spacemen 3, he created a funhouse of droning guitars and drugs, tunneling between primitive rock’n’roll and shamanistic hum as if following the true path to deliverance. And in Spiritualized, the audacious band through which he’s pursued pharmaceutical and romantic salvation for the past quarter-century, he has compromised nothing, sparing no expense or indulgence. A gospel choir quoting Elvis, an ambulance-siren orchestra embodying addiction, a string ensemble stretching for heaven: Spiritualized have always aimed to match the grandness of Pierce’s subject matter, monumental stuff like sex and death, God and despair. Pierce does not cobble songs into albums; though erratic, he aims to make masterpieces, unified responses to our biggest anxieties.
More than any previous Spiritualized album, however, And Nothing Hurt feels like a mere set of songs, an accessible group of tunes that may be painstakingly constructed but are only casually connected. This isn’t (despite the title) an extended metaphor for the release of heaven or heroin, and there’s no lingering feeling that these songs were written from the doorstep of certain death. And Nothing Hurt isn’t a trembling reaction to the sounds of Pierce’s past, like the middling Amazing Grace, or a maximalist exposition of them, like Let It Come Down. Pierce simply distills and gathers the essence of what has often made Spiritualized so powerful—hypnotic hymns of self-doubt, charging rock songs about confusion, swooning R&B odes to love—setting aside his past compulsion to make an overarching statement in favor of making a compact album. Some of these songs, like the romantic “Let’s Dance,” are as soft and warm as Christmas lights strung above a dive bar; others, like the caustic “The Morning After,” are as cutting and jarring as teenage pain. Taken together, they feel like Pierce coming to comfortable terms with his legacy.
During the last decade, he has often talked about writing like a grownup, about being a little truer to the experience of someone in his 50s than songs that recount afternoons spent with “me, my spike in my arm, and my spoon” tend to be. He finally does it on And Nothing Hurt: Pierce sings about the exigencies of adulthood, the anxieties of older age, and the realities of a lifetime spent letting people down. Even when he describes teenage terror, as on the righteously wailing “The Morning After,” it’s through the lens of a parent and someone who survived his own adolescent hell.
Pierce finds new resonance in the pedestrian, forging comfortable new connections to the rest of us. When he wants a relationship to end, he lies and says his cell phone is broken, the Spaceman becoming the ghost. He dances to Big Star’s “September Gurls” in a bar that’s closing, content to waste hours falling for a new paramour. He longs for a weekend getaway in the California desert and worries, like the rest of us, about the grumpy cop filling quotas on some built-for-speed backroad. Even the loftiest songs here, like twilit closing pair “The Prize” and “Sail on Through,” depend upon a newfound directness. Pierce wonders about the meaning of life (could it be love?) and questions his ability to keep up his end of any bargain. “Gonna burn brightly for a while,” he croons in his modest way, “then you’re gone.” There’s nothing to parse, no hidden meaning to unpack in Pierce’s feelings about this moment in his life.
If And Nothing Hurt feels only loosely connected as a whole, the individual songs are another matter entirely. Each is a meticulously realized testament to Pierce’s endless pursuit of perfection. He spent years shaping these songs alone, building the sounds with scraps culled from his record collection and with parts written for nearly 20 musicians and recorded in 10 studios, including his bedroom. At various points, Pro Tools—designed in part to help musicians juggle a massive number of inputs with relative ease—forbade him from adding anything else. That intricacy is the real delight of And Nothing Hurt. Despite the grandeur of these tunes, and the way they seem built to fill both regal concert halls and big, dark rock clubs, the best way to listen to them might be at home with lights out or eyes closed, headphones clamped tight. You can ignore the forest of the songs themselves and marvel at the trees within them, as if this were GAS or Grouper, not some survivor of space-rock bluster.
Listen closely to “Here It Comes (The Road) Let’s Go,” for instance, and you’ll notice a serialized electronic melody, moving up and down with the rhythm section like a ghost in the machine. It is the foil to Pierce’s sharp gospel guitar lick, framing a musical tug of war between the influences of Pops Staples and Tod Dockstader. And there’s the power electronics spree that knifes through the Sousa-sized horn march of “Let’s Dance,” as if Merzbow were battling the London Philharmonic. These are bold juxtapositions, contrasting compositional elements so at odds that they run the risk of coming across as gimmicks. But Pierce’s authorial scrupulousness and the same slavish devotion to an ideal that made Ladies and Gentlemen... a masterpiece and Spacemen 3 an institution gives these songs, one by one, their power.
Two years ago, Pierce mentioned that this album might be his last, largely because he fears repeating
himself. Just last month, though, he recanted, admitting that this has been a refrain for much of his career. Either way, there could be worse exits. Pierce has spent a career wrestling with his passions, demons, and preoccupations in Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized. Perhaps for the first time, on And Nothing Hurt, it sounds as though he has a hold on them—and not they on him. That’s a life’s work, tucked into 48 minutes. | 2018-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | September 11, 2018 | 7.7 | 7a1794c2-ccc7-44c4-969d-f96e1c5b1f63 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The Oklahoma roots songwriter expands his increasingly experimental and genre-resistant songbook without sacrificing his empathetic, poetic core. | The Oklahoma roots songwriter expands his increasingly experimental and genre-resistant songbook without sacrificing his empathetic, poetic core. | John Moreland: LP5 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-moreland-lp5/ | LP5 | John Moreland’s enormous voice never overshadows the small moments documented in his songs. In the past, his lyrical terrain—busted faith, regret, the losers in every fight—read as textbook “country,” earning him an opening spot for Jason Isbell and praise from Miranda Lambert. But the y’alternative marketing sometimes overpowered his increasingly experimental and genre-resistant songbook. On LP5, there’s no mistaking it, with its resulting mix of swamp-dunked soul, elevated AOR chords, thick grooves, multi-tracked vocals, drum machine clicks, and hovering ambient synths. Moreland’s heartland visions of devils, heretics, and existential discomfort were already kaleidoscopic; LP5 mutates his sound to match.
Opener “Harder Dreams” starts by zooming as far out on the map as the screen will go, to a celestial kingdom where gods watch human drama on TV, placing bets on the outcomes of wars and other mortal complications. Moreland’s last album, 2017’s Big Bad Luv, released by British indie label 4AD, seemed to reflect the mood of a country disillusioned by its institutions. “Harder Dreams” picks up the conversation, forgoing any exposition about the state of the nation to cut directly to the disconnect. “What good’s a letter in a language you can’t read,” Moreland asks, baffled as to how to communicate across the vastness.
It’s not the only time the gods, or just the Christian one, appear. Moreland was raised in the church, and though he doesn’t consider himself religious, the language of the faith you grew up in is hard to shake, and it dots these songs like little black circles. There’s a strain of Christianity that effectively teaches a person how to hate themselves, cementing a feeling of worthlessness and a distrust of your own body. Moreland recognizes its manifestation from a mile away: “You gave me a restlessness/Lives deep down in my soul/And a pretty good reason to keep right on being alone,” he sings on “Terrestrial.”
Moreland’s no stranger to mining his woes for good songs, and that kind of pain and apostate self-hatred could fill an entire album. But recognizing the damage wrought by toxic theology is just his starting point. “As a child, I repented my nature,” Moreland sings. As an adult, he suggests we leave that kind of thinking behind. Is hell all we can imagine for others because it’s all we can imagine for ourselves? Moreland thinks we might be capable of telling a better, more helpful story.
A few of Moreland’s best songs here grapple with the struggle to excise damnation from his personal lexicon. Over the the funky choogle of “A Thought Is Just a Passing Train,” he describes shame as a cancer. “Go easy on your heart,” he adds, following up that sentiment with “I’m Learning How to Tell Myself the Truth,” a composition about untangling infernal knots. It might not be possible to let go of the ache completely, Moreland admits on “When My Fever Breaks,” a gorgeous love song he began writing while dating visual artist Pearl Rachinsky, and finished years later, after their marriage. “But darling when you reach for me/It feels just like infinity,” Moreland sings, able to forgo his propensity for “howling at the universe” long enough to allow a moment of transcendence.
Moreland’s songs have long dwelled in the contested middle ground between doing the right thing and not being able to figure out what the right thing is. On LP5, he articulates what it feels like to get it, however briefly, and let go. And he doesn’t always need words to do so. Near the end of the album sits a stirring instrumental, “For Ichiro,” an ode to outfielder Ichiro Suzuki. Though less than two minutes long, its bubbling synths and plinking piano—part Satie, part Japanese “environmental music,” part Joe Jackson “Steppin’ Out” sparkle—evoke the feeling of uplift. Moreland follows it with the record’s most overt country song, the acoustic guitar, harmonica, and organ reverie “Let Me Be Understood.” The song coasts on “For Ichiro”’s trade winds: “Friend I’ve been restless/I’ve been unwell/But I have a heartbeat and a trial to tell,” he sings. The mysteries of the “monumental yonder” will still be here tomorrow. Sometimes salvation means just staying alive and never giving up on those trying to do the same.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Old Omens | February 18, 2020 | 7.6 | 7a1e62e4-d489-4c4b-8a4e-fc6091db582a | Jason P. Woodbury | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-p. woodbury/ | |
The death-metal trio is at its most complex on this pair of companion albums. Beneath the labyrinthine riffs lies some of the group’s sharpest, most distinctive music yet. | The death-metal trio is at its most complex on this pair of companion albums. Beneath the labyrinthine riffs lies some of the group’s sharpest, most distinctive music yet. | Ulthar: Anthronomicon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ulthar-anthronomicon-helionomicon/ | Anthronomicon / Helionomicon | There’s a riff that resurfaces throughout Ulthar’s two new companion albums, mutating into different shapes over the course of the combined records’ 80 minutes. It’s a descending, rapid-picked four-note motif that crashes down with all the devastating fury of cosmic debris raining from the sky. Throughout Anthronomicon and Helionomicon, the death-metal stalwarts wind the riff up and release it again in new forms—compressing it, stretching it out, raising it up and down octaves, always retaining its harrowing power. Each time it returns, it’s like sinking back into the same ceaseless nightmare, the kind you can’t wake up from.
Anthronomicon and Helionomicon constitute Ulthar’s most ambitious statements. Until now, the band’s output has largely resembled an exercise in ugliness. The trio—which includes members from Mastery, Tombs, and Vastum—practices a style of pummeling, blackened death metal, alternating between throat-tearing shrieks and gurgling roars over a stampede of riffs. But on this pair of albums, Ulthar take the form of planetary journeymen: Their guitar melodies are more melodic than ever, and they fire off in all directions at once, as if leading the listener down a reality-distorting wormhole. The band has never sounded so technically dense, its constantly morphing time signatures calling to mind Chthe‘ilist’s noxious odysseys, or Gorguts’ swirling fret workouts. Beneath the twisted complexity lies some of the band’s sharpest, most distinctive music yet.
Across both albums, Ulthar largely pick one approach—churning, never-ending death-metal riffage—and stick to it. If 80 minutes of this sounds like a lot, it is. Dividing these records into two separate albums, as opposed to billing them as one double LP, feels purposeful, as though acknowledging that spending more than 40 minutes in this world is a daunting task. But in halved doses, Ulthar’s gnarled, writhing sound proves deadly.
Running through eight tracks in 40 minutes, Anthronomicon is the more potent of the two; shorter song lengths offer concentrated opportunities for Ulthar to demonstrate their melodic capabilities. “Cephalophore” announces the band’s arrival with a triumphant opening riff, stomping into a chugging midsection that alternates between galloping chords and atonal plunges into the lower end of the fretboard. Shelby Lermo’s guitar tone has a staticky crunch to it—a cross between Entombed’s trademark buzzsaw timbre and the hiss of old Darkthrone—and “Fractional Fortresses” funnels this crackling distortion into a sickly opening riff whose feedback hangs in the air over the song’s first 15 seconds. After a minute spent plowing ahead atop a classic black-metal charge, the first instance of that recurring thematic riff appears, acting like a searing chorus for the song between dives back into the muck.
Death-metal albums often live or die according to how successfully they can avoid sheer repetitiveness, and for the most part, Anthronomicon keeps the ideas coming. Halfway through “Flesh Propulsion,” just when it begins to feel like the album may be rehashing itself, Ulthar drop the floor out from underneath with a delirious thrash-metal breakdown. When that starts getting too comfortable, the trio begins deploying one coiled pitch-bend after another, bringing the song to a wickedly dissonant conclusion. “Saccades,” a highlight of the entire two-album project, voyages between unholy tech-death onslaughts and moments of pure ghoulish bliss; Steve Peacock’s croaking howl could keep Gollum up at night. The band soon follows it with a droning passage of alien ambience, hinting at the interstellar abyss to come on LP number two.
Where Anthonomicon focuses Ulthar’s ambitions, Helionomicron unravels them into a sprawling universe of ideas. Like Blood Incantation’s psychedelic sagas, the two tracks on Helionomicron operate on a gradual build, laying the groundwork over cresting 10-minute stretches before finally exploding into frenzied peaks. Wading through those extended arcs can get tiresome, but when it works, the payoff is remarkable. On “Helionomicron,” Lermo and Peacock really dig into the recurring four-note melody, adding garish flourishes and ritualistically pulling it apart over the track’s first seven minutes. After a drifting synth interlude, the track roars back to life in its thrashing second half, bringing its many puzzle pieces together for one thrilling final blitz.
Comparatively, “Anthronomicron” never quite achieves the same layered sense of cohesion. Over the course of its 20 minutes, Ulthar continue to dip back into their cauldron, pulling forth craven black-metal riffs, grinding blast beats, and yet another extended iteration of that recurring guitar melody—but no matter what they try, it can’t help but feel exhausting. As hypnotizing as being trapped in an endless void of demonic licks can be, the majority of the riffs on the second half of Helionomicron sound like restatements of what the band has played already, albeit with less energy than before. When the album finally reaches its conclusion with a four-minute drone of eerie extraterrestrial noise, it’s a relief.
Taken together, these two LPs demand a serious investment—one that may not always completely justify itself. Even so, Anthronomicon and Helionomicon represent a great leap forward for Ulthar. More than ever before, the trio has located a sweet spot between the soaring melodies of black metal and the skull-crushing beatdown of death metal, locking into an airtight group dynamic and crafting some of the band’s most peculiar, abstract riffs yet. Ulthar’s operative mode may be one relentless, full-scale assault, with little in the way of reprieve. But what an assault it is. | 2023-02-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-27T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | null | February 27, 2023 | 7.6 | 7a2050a0-0d10-4708-acca-fe385ec5af65 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
The Detroit rapper channels the lawless energy of mixtape Nicki and Wayne on his latest. | The Detroit rapper channels the lawless energy of mixtape Nicki and Wayne on his latest. | Sada Baby: Brolik | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sada-baby-brolik/ | Brolik | Detroit rapper and world-class shit-starter Sada Baby paints his hometown as a cutthroat circus on par with Gotham City—and himself as its reigning supervillain. He’s a performer and showman, taunting foes and innocent bystanders alike with the demented glee of a classic wrestling heel, and his new tape, Brolik, helps solidify him as the unlikely usurper of the throne in rap’s most competitive city.
Sada raps like someone who hands out tapes from his trunk around 7 Mile, and as if to underscore his local-(anti-)hero status, his releases are becoming less and less accessible online. Whoop Tape was uploaded only to his SoundCloud page, and Brolik can be listened to exclusively through the mixtape database DatPiff (and its corresponding YouTube channel). Fittingly, his projects have the raw, unbottled prowess of the Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj mixtape runs, and on Brolik, Sada sounds like he could rap forever.
At his best, Sada straddles the line between hilarious and intimidating. Brolik finds the perfect balance between the two: It has the enthusiasm (and by association, the tomfoolery) of his more high-powered verses, yowled as if he were cutting a promo (“8 Legged Ape”), and the more sinister snarl of his grimmest provocations (“Bison Dele”). One moment, he’s a self-proclaimed Krampus terrorizing foes on Christmas, the next he’s pulling pistols out in public and giving out halos. Over the keyboard-powered bounce of frequent collaborators RJ Lamont and Helluva, his flow sounds spring-loaded.
His punchlines aren’t as remarkable as on Bartier Bounty, but the imagery is often just as absurd: he’s spoon-feeding hollow-tips like they’re baby food; his money looks like caesar chicken salad. “Never fuck with a mask ‘cause Jim Carrey ain’t no street nigga,” he barks on “WWF.” He compares himself to Mr. Fantastic and Spock in a three-bar span. There isn’t a single moment where he isn’t completely certain of himself or of your inferiority.
For all Sada Baby’s singular showmanship, his 2018 single with fellow Detroit street rapper Drego “Bloxk Party” was proof that he works just as well in collaboration. He is comfortable on Brolik no matter who the dance partner is, able to attune himself to their movements and match their energy. On songs like “The Big Red Whoop” and “Triple Threat Match,” he moves in lockstep with lesser rappers like FMB DZ and ShittyBoyz BabyTon, working with and not around them. On the exhilarating “Mood,” Sada rips through a devastating, hookless verse while his partner and hype man Skilla Baby just eggs him on.
Brolik is full of patented Sada puffery, but there are a few affecting moments hidden in the margins, hinting at a poignant origin story. “Anything a street nigga been through, I done went through it,” he raps on “Mood,” and there are plenty of indicators most of those experiences have been traumatic. He can be brutally honest about addiction (“I really live that pill life/I ain’t glorifying, it’s horrifying; it feels right”), and he presents rap as his salvation: “I remember I was broke as shit/I remember I ain’t have hope for shit/’Member couldn’t hit the road for shit/Now I can’t get home for shit,” he raps on “Kut N Kordial.” It’s these memories of hardship that seem to fuel his ferocity. | 2020-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Asylum | January 28, 2020 | 7.7 | 7a2281df-6027-4742-97a2-bea42c9eb780 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The singer-songwriter’s latest album is steeped in Caribbean texts that have influenced her musicianship. In its shades of love and grief, it sounds like life as it arrives. | The singer-songwriter’s latest album is steeped in Caribbean texts that have influenced her musicianship. In its shades of love and grief, it sounds like life as it arrives. | Xenia Rubinos: Una Rosa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xenia-rubinos-una-rosa/ | Una Rosa | Xenia Rubinos didn’t think she’d be able to make music again. After a period of extensive touring and personal hardship, she visited a curandero, who saw in her a “pérdida de espíritu”—loss of spirit. It’s now been five years since her last album, Black Terry Cat, and her third project, Una Rosa, isn’t a neat bookend to the period in between, nor is it a balm or salve. It’s better, truer to the joy and pain of the past that flicker into the present like unwelcome thoughts.
In its shades of love and grief, Una Rosa sounds like life as it arrives. It’s also a record steeped in Caribbean texts that have influenced Rubinos’ musicianship, alongside the jazz, hip-hop, and R&B that shaped her first two albums. And it’s her first project to cite its Latin sources so consistently and directly, adding another texture to the spirit of struggle that runs through her best-known work.
While Rubinos has always been a futurist, Una Rosa comprises very particular Caribbean reference points of the past. A melancholy flute plays a music-box version of Puerto Rican composer José Enrique Pedreira’s danza “Una Rosa,” the same melody a young Rubinos heard from her great-grandmother’s flower lamp—the album’s main visual inspiration. Rubinos hums the tune as if trying to recall its origin. Bright, icy synths cure the memory. Elsewhere, there’s the corta venas bolero “Ay Hombre”; the ad for spiritualist Santiago Aranegui’s radio program about “the mysteries of the universe” at the end of “Cógelo Suave”; the echo of an old Cuban yambú floating over the worker’s lament of “Working All the Time.” The clave often grounds the album, as on “Sacude,” which builds into a limpieza around the mantra of “Sacude sacude y Dios que me ayude,” with Rubinos as the sonero of her invented rumba.
Then there’s the spiritual bath of synthesizers, modulation, and even Psycho strings—the dark, electronic-acoustic interplay that has kept Rubinos’ music so undefinable. Her layering of the personal and political runs counter to the labels she’s resisted as a Latinx artist throughout her career. Released last October, “Who Shot Ya?” is a silvery condemnation of police and the cops who killed Breonna Taylor, the detention of children at the U.S.-Mexico border, and the wealthy who reap profit on stolen land. The song interpolates Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff” alongside verses from poet José Martí’s “Yo soy un hombre sincero” and a fanged allusion to Héctor Lavoe’s 1976 salsa “Hacha y Machete,” a song about strength in community. The liberationist implications of each are here compiled into a call to action: “Alguien preguntará más tarde/Que hiciste?/Hacha y machete/O dormiste?” (“Someone will ask later/What did you do?/Axe and machete/Or did you sleep?”).
These musical pieces fit seamlessly into Rubinos’ inventory of memories, her urge toward complexity directed as far inward as outward. “Don’t Put Me in Red” opens with a series of increasingly urgent wordless vocalizations—given subtitles like “mispronounced misspelled misunderstood” in the music video—and expands into a ballad about the red “Latina lighting” Rubinos is often placed in while performing: “the color you think I’ve spent my life in,” she sings.
Across the album, Rubinos doesn’t need to name her feelings for them to be realized. Often, it’s just the shape of an emotion stuck in the throat. “Did My Best” is a trick candle of grief whose vocals expand slower and with more uncertainty than the steady synth loop behind them. “I never thought I’d have to write this song,” she sings. On “What Is This Voice?,” she ends the album by repeating the fragment “I am so/I am so,” unhurried. Like the rest of Una Rosa, the phrases don’t beg to be whole, only felt.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | October 23, 2021 | 8.4 | 7a234cef-4c73-4bc1-88c6-d97d28fc37bc | Stefanie Fernández | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stefanie-fernández/ | |
Wave 1, the first new material from Com Truise, aka Seth Haley, in two years, plants itself at the intersection of synth-funk, electro, and fussy 80s computer-pop. On the EP, Haley seems unconcerned with the trends of the day, blissfully mining Reagan-era pop at its most meticulous. | Wave 1, the first new material from Com Truise, aka Seth Haley, in two years, plants itself at the intersection of synth-funk, electro, and fussy 80s computer-pop. On the EP, Haley seems unconcerned with the trends of the day, blissfully mining Reagan-era pop at its most meticulous. | Com Truise: Wave 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19006-com-truise-wave-1/ | Wave 1 | In 2011, Seth Haley's Com Truise couldn't have been more of-the-moment. A vintage-synth freak with a nostalgic moniker diving headlong into the sounds of 1983? In that long, hazy comedown from 2009's summer of chillwave, Haley was practically popping a wheelie on the zeitgeist. He took full advantage, too, offering up the superb Cyanide Sisters EP and the almost-as-good Galactic Melt LP in the same calendar year. But, apart from 2012's soggy early-days comp In Decay, we've heard next to nothing from him in the interim. Wave 1, Com Truise's new seven-song EP, is the first in a planned series that, as Haley told DazedDigital, concerns "the world’s first Synthetic Astronaut on this journey to a planet—each release represents the next stage in his journey." The chrome-plated, pristine Wave 1 plants itself at the intersection of synth-funk, electro, and fussy 80s computer-pop. Haley, returning from a two-year absence, seems content to reemerge as a man out of time: unconcerned with the trends of the day, blissfully mining Reagan-era pop at its most meticulous.
Opener "Wasat" whirrs to a start like a spaceship preparing for hyperdrive. Just 15 seconds in, and it's all systems go: a punctilious synth stutters like a long-lost Bambaataa track while a couple more streak past in a flash of light. The needly high-register synth and burbling bass at the center of "Mind" are almost conversant, trading garbled interstellar transmissions atop the crackling of the drum machine. Haley's fastidious—forever searching for the perfect beat—and even his fizziest synth never seems to trail too far afield. In the past, his exacting approach has occasionally tipped over into rigidity. But on Wave 1, his chosen sonic touchstones—whether it's pre-Purple Rain Prince or Cupid and Psyche-era Scritti Politti—share his fondness for clean lines, sharp edges, and inorganic rhythms. Haley's fussiness persists, but on Wave 1, he comes by it honestly.
Wave 1 peaks with "Declination", a slick, bright-as-the-sun pop deconstruction with vocals from Ford & Lopatin's Joel Ford. Haley's never quite known what to do with vocals, but Ford's an ideal fit for the otherwise all-instrumental Wave 1, his roboticized falsetto sliding its way into the nooks and crannies of the bustling track, bringing some curious new shades to the all-pastel palette. Haley's never seemed particularly concerned with innovation; as Andrew Gaerig wrote in his review of In Decay, he's a "grid-worshipping…pure stylist," more interested in playing within the lines than expanding on them. By injecting a little human warmth into this carefully delineated, fiercely technical music, Ford does as much to push Wave 1's sound forward as Haley himself.
Apart from the the splattering "I Would Die 4 U" drum patterns sitting underneath "Miserere Mei", Wave 1's post-"Declination" tracks find Haley retreating into the tried-and-true: burbling bass, squelchy zero-gravity synths, blunt-ride rhythms. These songs are sleek and glorious-sounding, each squiggle and thump given its own space. But, by leaving no space for error, Haley also doesn't allow much room for feeling, and after a half an hour of vaccum-sealed rhythms, a skipped beat or a flubbed intro never sounded so right. After a few years of silence, Haley's still a stickler for detail, still more concerned with perfection than innovation, still mixing up "crisp" and "mechanical." But by burrowing down into a few key sounds rather than stiffly approximating a dozen-plus, the intermittently funky, unshakably finicky Wave 1 is a mostly welcome return. | 2014-02-28T01:00:05.000-05:00 | 2014-02-28T01:00:05.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ghostly International | February 28, 2014 | 6.7 | 7a272f58-d157-4f6b-827a-dbad76e6d2d8 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Kings of Leon's schtick is that they have no schtick: They're just four stand-up guys who happen to ... | Kings of Leon's schtick is that they have no schtick: They're just four stand-up guys who happen to ... | Kings of Leon: Aha Shake Heartbreak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/4560-aha-shake-heartbreak/ | Aha Shake Heartbreak | Kings of Leon's schtick is that they have no schtick: They're just four stand-up guys who happen to be in a rock band. They're from a small town in eastern Tennessee; three of them are brothers and the fourth is a cousin; the brothers are minister's kids; all four were home-schooled. All of which marks them as outsiders-- people untouched by industry politics or expectations who are just playing rock'n'roll 'cause they're livin' it, man! But Kings of Leon's insistence on their own honest naturalism-- from their time-capsule haircuts to Caleb Followill's overexpressive vocals to their terrible album titles-- seems disingenuous, especially in a genre (Southern rock) that prizes realness and grumbles at pretensions. The Followill clan wouldn't last a week in The Drive-By Truckers' Dirty South.
Aha Shake Heartbreak, the follow-up to last year's bewilderingly well-received Youth and Young Manhood, is an update on the previous album's Southern bar-band rock, with just enough Nuggets-style pop chops to impress hipsters and critics. If the hooks aren't as good this time, the songs are more sculpted and succinct, with a greater sense of urgency and economy. On the other hand, these dozen tracks don't really mean anything. Sure, they're about stuff like women and being in a band, but they sound deeply impersonal, and often obligatory in their lazy misogyny ("Cunts watch their bodies, no room for make up") and lazier obtuseness ("He's so the purity, the shaven and the mourning"-- even Beck is more coherent). Caleb sings about a girl with an "hourglass body" who "has problems with drinking milk and being school tardy/ She'll loan you her toothbrush/ She'll bartend your party," but it doesn't sound like he actually knows anyone like that. Instead, the song's about a rock'n'roll archetype-- the wild heartbreaker, the man-eater, the endearing groupie-- and it never manages to transcend the blandly conceptual.
Elsewhere, the lyrics are so self-referential they're almost narcissistic. Songs like "Slow Night, So Long" and "Four Kicks" are about what hard-livin' good ol' boys the Followills are. In particular, "Soft" is stupid sex wordplay that would be insulting if it weren't so self-deprecating: "I'm passed out in your garden...I'd pop myself in your body/ I'd come into your party but I'm soft." One word: eww. Another favorite topic is the harsh realities of endless touring and low-level fame, as if having a major-label promote you and Dave Eggers worship you in print are such hardships. But on "Day Old Blues" Caleb observes that "Girls are gonna love the way I toss my hair/ Boy are going to hate the way I seem." This boy in particular thinks that's the key to what makes this band such a bunch of fakes: They're more interested in appearances than in their music. Those haircuts don't appear anywhere in nature.
On the other hand, maybe it's just the way Caleb sings that and every other line on Aha Shake Heartbreak. He is a terrible singer, like a drunken Randy Newman with Tourette's-- which would be a compliment if it didn't make you expect more intelligent lyrics. On just about every song here he lets loose a flurry of words in some bizarre approximation of backwater sass, but it just sounds willful and grating. On "Day Old Blues", he turns some lyrics into almost scat-like utterances while painfully overenunciating others. He's shooting for some sort of Southern-slash-Appalachian accent, but ultimately he defies geography and just sounds unnatural.
The album's one redeeming element is the band itself, who-- over the course of one EP and two albums-- have improved tenfold. They're tighter, more dynamic, and much more confident on Aha Shake Heartbreak than they were on Youth and Young Manhood. Granted, they still sound like they're descended from The Strokes and other garage bands rather than from southern royalty like Lynyrd Skynyrd or even Southern pop like The Gants or The Scruffs. Their boogie may have crawled out of Williamsburg instead of some backwater swamp, but Nathan, Jared, and Matthew Followill manage to incorporate vintage elements into their music without sounding overly nostalgic (which is the pitfall of soundalikes Thee Shams). "Slow Night, So Long" finds a twist ending in a slow coda, and songs like "The Bucket" and "Razz" pop and bounce elastically. With its hand-claps and staccato guitars, "Taper Jean Girl" struts such undeniable bad-ass energy that you may find yourself singing along, although you'll want to make up your own words. | 2004-11-30T01:01:40.000-05:00 | 2004-11-30T01:01:40.000-05:00 | Rock | RCA / Hand Me Down | November 30, 2004 | 4.9 | 7a29b70d-476f-4d60-9068-c3ac6c658a9b | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Space Zone is the debut album from 18-year-old David Davis, a Chicago-based producer inextricably tied to his hometown's faster-than-fast and repetitive genre of footwork. While he's still grounded in the genre, his best moments here find him exploring outside its boundaries. | Space Zone is the debut album from 18-year-old David Davis, a Chicago-based producer inextricably tied to his hometown's faster-than-fast and repetitive genre of footwork. While he's still grounded in the genre, his best moments here find him exploring outside its boundaries. | Young Smoke: Space Zone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17196-space-zone/ | Space Zone | Space Zone is the debut album from 18-year-old David Davis, aka Young Smoke. The Chicago-based producer is inextricably tied to his hometown's faster-than-fast and repetitive genre of footwork; Davis is one of the producers linked with Chicago's Flight Musik collective, which is headed up by DJ Diamond, who issued a solid footwork album under that name on UK label Planet Mu. That imprint has spent the last several years making a case for footwork as a genre that transcends functional dance music, in part through their Bangs & Works compilation series; Davis contributed two songs, "Psycho War" and "Wouldn't Get Far", to last year's second installment. Both fit nicely within footwork's sonic constraints; the former is all cinematic strings and maniacal metallic-popcorn percussion, while the latter rides an inspired vocal lick and throws it through various levels of filter.
Given his background, it's understandable to think of Davis as a footwork producer, but Space Zone is something different. The record finds Davis using the genre as a launchpad into weirder territory. The brown-sound frequencies and tightly looped rhythms are still present, but they're placed lower in the mix to dampen their intensity. On a few tracks, you barely notice that they're there at all. Space Zone also shows that Davis has a neon-streaked sense of humor. The title track features a warm, melodic voice intoning, "Welcome to the space zone," as lasers and video-game explosions bounce off of rubbery walls. Elsewhere, you get claustrophobic klaxons, blastoff noises, launchpad countdowns, and robotic voices issuing warnings about "countermeasures." After a particularly stoner-friendly run of cuts on the album's backend, a more traditional footwork number arrives in the form of "High Den a Mother Fucka". Its title underscores the fact that the target audience for this thing probably wouldn't be able to move their feet very fast without doubling into a wheezing cough.
Space Zone's closest analog in modern dance music may be Zomby's epochal Where Were U in '92?, trading that album's 'ardcore fixation with a focus on hard-hitting juke. Both records showcase a freewheeling ADD-addled sense of speed, with idiosyncratic sounds peppered throughout to keep it fresh. So it's ironic that Davis' most intriguing work comes when he slows things down, from the placid synths and drippy rhythmic squelch of "Space Breeze" to the dreamy synth drift of "Liquid Drug". Here Boards of Canada is the obvious comparison, not so much in actual form but in how he creates cloudy billows of atmosphere that retain a basic level of engagement.
Davis is young and Space Zone sounds like the work of a young artist. A promising young artist, but someone still figuring out his own sound. I've spoken with others about how this record compares to another Planet Mu release from this year from within Chicago's juke scene-- veteran Traxman's hallucinatory, melody-minded Da Mind of Traxman. But ultimately these releases have different aims. While Traxman's expression of songcraft matches and, at times, exceeds the speedy pop burps of DJ Roc's excellent 2010 release The Crack Capone, Young Smoke's not trying to push things forward. Instead, he's trying to take the genre somewhere it hasn't really gone yet, by introducing new textures, giving his productions more space and room to breathe, and infusing the results with a dose of humor. Whether or not he gets there remains to be seen, but joining him on the ride provides its own level of fascination. | 2012-10-04T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-10-04T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Planet Mu | October 4, 2012 | 7 | 7a2aab4c-4791-453e-9270-a9128a29dc10 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
At his best, Purling Hiss frontman Mike Polizze simultaneously embraces, tweaks, and subverts all kinds of vintage garage, punk, and grunge moves. This is their most classic-rock record so far. | At his best, Purling Hiss frontman Mike Polizze simultaneously embraces, tweaks, and subverts all kinds of vintage garage, punk, and grunge moves. This is their most classic-rock record so far. | Purling Hiss: High Bias | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22339-high-bias/ | High Bias | Rock tropes form the language that Philadelphia’s Purling Hiss speaks, and they’ve been fluent for a while. Most of their songs cook up repetitive riffs, three-chord melodies, and simple lyrics sung in both impassioned shouts and cool monotones. At his best, frontman and songwriter Mike Polizze—who began Purling Hiss as a solo project—simultaneously embraces, tweaks, and subverts all kinds of vintage garage, punk, and grunge moves. When his band hits that sweet spot, you feel like you’ve heard all this stuff before, but somehow not exactly like this.
There’s not much subversion on High Bias, Purling Hiss’s sixth album. Their music has always exuded a retro aura, but this is their most classic-rock record so far. In a few instances, it sounds like the band is role-playing: take the convincing Ramones costumes they don in “Get Your Way,” with Polizze stoically singing about “the rock‘n’roll boogie woogie twist and shout.” But even at their most homage-heavy, Purling Hiss muster enough distinctive personality to evade mimicry. And what High Bias lacks in surprise, it makes up for in hooks.
During the album’s best stretches, the hooks seem to never stop. The soaring “Fever” and the revving “Ostinato Musik” feel spacious enough to drive an 18-wheeler through, while the acoustic-tinted “Follow You Around” evokes a ’60s nugget filtered through stoner vibes (and, again, Ramones nostalgia). Hints of the ’90s surface in the hard-grunge riffs of “3000 AD,” delivered with conviction rather than slack distance. In fact, Polizze’s devotion to his material is stronger than ever on High Bias. He’s always been assured and committed, but here he’s settled fully into his skill set, like a craftsman whose easy mastery hides the years of work it took to get there.
High Bias does have its share of sweat, though. Hard-cranked tunes like “Notion Sickness” and “Pulsations” speed and blast like motorcycles stuck above 65. The strain in those tracks can be exhausting, but the sturdiness is impressive, especially in Polizze’s brief but combustive solos. The same goes for “Everybody in the USA,” which engages in another rock trope: the extended, album-ending jam, culminating in six minutes of instrumental amp-burning. That track might test the patience of anyone not already inclined towards Purling Hiss’s well-versed rock devotion, but if you’re happy to ride some riffs into the sunset, High Bias is a worthwhile trip. | 2016-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | October 15, 2016 | 6.8 | 7a3473f4-f43f-4675-a668-f2638111b51c | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
On his first release for the iconic British label XL, the Swedish deep house trickster leans into his pop proclivities and heavy-lidded Lothario persona. | On his first release for the iconic British label XL, the Swedish deep house trickster leans into his pop proclivities and heavy-lidded Lothario persona. | Baba Stiltz: Showtime EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/baba-stiltz-showtime-ep/ | Showtime EP | Like a number of Swedish electronic musicians in his orbit—Axel Boman, whose Studio Barnhus label he has recorded for; Yung Lean, for whom he’s made beats—Baba Stiltz is a trickster at heart. An early EP, Our Girls, was simply the same song at progressively slower tempos, devolving from a jovial skip to a woozy, tape-warped crawl. But the 24-year-old producer is a joker with a heart of gold: One of his first singles, 2013’s “Sometimes,” interpolated a snippet of Etta James’ “Something’s Got a Hold on Me”—the same song his famous countryman Avicii had popularized for mainstream EDM fans the year before—without a trace of sarcasm. Stiltz’s twinkly deep house boasts the bright colors and rounded contours of a plastic toy, and when he sings a characteristically love-besotted plea (“I’m selfish, can’t help it, I love you so much”) he really sells it, his croon gooey with a surfeit of pure feeling.
Chalk it up to his youth as a ballet dancer: Stiltz soars gracefully over thorny barriers of taste that would trip up a more heavy-handed artist. He can play it straight when he wants to, and he never beats listeners over the head with his eccentricity. But in recent years, he has increasingly let his quirks come to the fore—or near the fore. Draping his sometimes goofy, clearly untrained voice in a silky scrim of Auto-Tune, he dances around the question that invariably comes to mind: Is this guy for real?
Showtime is his debut release for the iconic British independent label XL. It’s not hard to imagine that the title alludes to the step into the spotlight that signing to such a storied imprint might entail. And while the music doesn’t make a significant break from Stiltz’s previous work, it’s clear that he’s leaning into his pop proclivities. All four tracks showcase his voice, and only the two B-side cuts—the diaphanous “Serve” and the punchier “Maze,” which drizzles syrupy Auto-Tune over a crisp, synth-heavy groove—are keyed to the sound and energy levels of contemporary leftfield house. On the A-side’s two showcase tracks, the emphasis falls squarely on the producer’s heavy-lidded Lothario persona.
It’s a good look. “Showtime” is particularly fun: Between his boomy register and his boastful sweet talk, Stiltz comes across a little like Johnny Cash singing Drake lyrics. Over lowing R&B horns and snippets of doo-wop vocals, he unspools a stream-of-consciousness tale of “a DJ with a good soul,” flitting from wry hedonism (“They say the drugs don’t work no more/They seem to work just fine”) to boilerplate braggadocio (of the “bags full of money” variety) whose naivety is worth its weight in imaginary gold. The beat is druggy and playful: Organs and guitars stretch and contort willy-nilly, and odd, extra beats cheerfully wrongfoot the groove when you least expect. Stiltz sums up his whole philosophy with a cheerful dis directed at no one in particular (“LOL on your whole life”), followed by a burst of sheeplike sampled laughter and a shrugged confession: “Grown man with a whole lotta downtime.”
“Situation” strikes a similar balance between stoner soul and unrepentant silliness. The sampled groove sounds like it’s trapped in a waterlogged cardboard box; his come-ons (“‘Cause sexy situations call for sexy measures/Sexy situations like you and I tonight”) are about as suave as someone whispering sweet nothings with a half-dissolved gobstopper in his mouth. Stiltz is basically a big, wet dog bounding out of the water and shaking his fur, gleefully oblivious to any discomfort he may cause; that he sounds weirdly like Odelay-era Beck here may or may not contribute to that discomfort.
The song is fun and fresh, if admittedly a little low-stakes—like the EP itself. It would be nice if more of the production had the sizzle of his best work. With just four tracks totaling less than 12 minutes of music, Showtime feels like a teaser; what Baba Stiltz does next remains to be seen. But if the Swedish heartthrob with the sly grin and a whole lotta downtime figures out the right balance of shtick and sincerity, we could have a pretty scintillating situation on our hands. | 2018-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL | June 15, 2018 | 6.9 | 7a38adc0-44e0-49bd-87ca-20e1df79a421 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The producer and DJ’s guest-packed “Brexit album” conjures a great sprawl of humor and tragedy that makes for Herbert’s richest album in years. | The producer and DJ’s guest-packed “Brexit album” conjures a great sprawl of humor and tragedy that makes for Herbert’s richest album in years. | The Matthew Herbert Big Band: The State Between Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-matthew-herbert-big-band-the-state-between-us/ | The State Between Us | Matthew Herbert was once a people-pleasing house DJ, but over the past decade he has become known primarily as an eccentric. His high-concept themes and unorthodox methods—manipulating samples from aerial warfare, a pig’s life, and other artifacts of consumerism—tend to overshadow the producer and composer’s core mission: an earnest campaign to make us consider not just sounds but also their sources, and to experience both as equals.
The project has a forbiddingly post-modern ring to it, so it’s worth stressing that the best entry point to The State Between Us, his sprawling and guest-packed Brexit album, is also the easiest: Go in blind, and let his collage of jazz, house, blues and politically loaded field recordings lead your curiosity. Take “The Tower”: The album track opens with a gentle shuffle and a staticky sound that eventually resolves into footsteps and wind. A shrill piano chord chimes from the periphery, the kind you might hear at a nuclear power station after pressing the wrong button. It rings out several times and settles only when a jazz beat skulks in, coaxing out a full-blown big band number. For the next few minutes, brass rises and falls in waves of rapture and panic. Then footsteps resume as a police siren sounds in the distance. After the song finishes, the curious can read a gut-wrenching footnote: Herbert made the field recording in London last May, on a silent march for the victims of the Grenfell Tower blaze.
Like Brexit, the deadly fire that “The Tower” commemorates has prompted allegations of state racism while entrenching divisions between British people and an indifferent elite. In a tone of inquiry and elegy, Herbert has found a way to eulogize these modern tragedies even as he pillories the political farce enabling them. Herbert has always obsessed over the big picture, which makes Britain’s departure from the European Union a convenient problem: Now that cultural regression is headline news, he can make these bold proclamations without being branded a kook.
In 2017, Herbert revived the big band project he launched in 2003 and enlisted multinational guest singers and big bands to record his new songs. He wanted the reboot to advance a Brexit counter-narrative, and the record even had the same deadline as Brexit—March 29—but, unlike the British government, he’s sticking to it. He enlisted local big bands around Europe for short-notice tour dates and recorded in their dressing rooms. He deployed proxies across the continent on bizarre missions. The recordings they gathered include Gibraltarian monkeys, a trumpet being deep-fried, a swimmer crossing the English Channel, and someone dismantling a Ford Fiesta. Two minutes into opener “A Devotion Upon Emergent Occasions,” a medieval chant gets ambushed by a roaring motor and mighty crash: the sound of a 180-year-old German pine tree being felled with a chainsaw during Brexit. (He’s also recorded a companion album documenting every second of the tree’s final week, reasoning, “I'd rather listen to a tree than [Brexit ringleader] Boris Johnson.”) Together these contextual flourishes conjure a great sprawl of humor and tragedy that makes for Herbert’s richest album in years.
That’s not to say it goes down easily. A hostile environment of dread and paranoia lasts through the opening songs and well into track three, when keys roll in and a spotlight falls on guest vocalist Rahel Debebe-Dessalegne. She sighs the song’s title, “You’re Welcome Here,” and the album softens: From then on, The State Between Us provides a balm to the dispossessed. To submit to the dreamlike record is to wend through cities and centuries, big-band ballads and avant-classical curveballs. Interpolating text from a Caryl Churchill play, “The Special Relationship” unfurls like contemporary opera, with Arto Lindsay yelling “Catastrophe!” and “Cunt!” in character as the British and American governments. More than an hour in, “Where’s Home?” busts out the first dance beat: a carnivalesque house squall.
“Fish and Chips,” with its cantankerous rhythms and triumphal brass, is similarly euphoric, though once you consider the title, which evokes a British innocence that now feels vaguely ironic, it begins to sound less like a carnival than a wake. In this spirit of national reckoning, Herbert rummages deep in the British psyche and pulls out an unlikely cover of Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade.” This wartime classic has a Proustian significance to many Brits that is rivaled only by the Coronation Street theme and the smell of Battenberg. Yet Herbert, with his usual sledgehammer symbolism, conscripts a German big band to perform it. He aims for your gut, where so much of the avant-garde can’t reach, and rarely misses.
At two hours long, The State Between Us ought to waver in focus or intensity, but Herbert has never sounded more at home. Safe in the knowledge that most British people, for better or worse, can’t help but engage with the subject, he taps into a small, honest hope that would be inexplicable as a thinkpiece. On “You’re Welcome Here,” for instance, Debebe-Dessalegne sings, “We can stay here in the music,” while an angelic choir serves as propaganda for the redeeming qualities of community. Like a sardonic opera, Herbert’s grand vision could easily live on as a post-colonial, anti-nationalist allegory. Yet it’s just as reassuring to imagine that, one day, Brexit’s toxic memory will fade, his field recordings will lose all poignancy, and the trees will again sound just like trees, nothing more and nothing less. | 2019-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Accidental | April 2, 2019 | 7.7 | 7a3d50ac-bda2-4bd3-bb7d-02370b948b07 | Jazz Monroe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/ | |
A$AP Mob's first group album and the crew's first major release since A$AP Rocky's debut uses the framework of producers like Clams Casino, AraabMuzik, and the Mob's own A$AP Ty Beats to trace out a new brand of cold, nihilistic New York rap. | A$AP Mob's first group album and the crew's first major release since A$AP Rocky's debut uses the framework of producers like Clams Casino, AraabMuzik, and the Mob's own A$AP Ty Beats to trace out a new brand of cold, nihilistic New York rap. | A$AP Mob: Lords Never Worry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17070-lords-never-worry/ | Lords Never Worry | A$AP Rocky is no longer just an underground star. His crew, though, has largely stayed in the background as he's ascended into the mainstream. Much of the magnetism of Rocky's early visuals came from the idea that the viewer was getting a look at a movement of culture already in progress, and though Rocky is highly central to that, there's a strength in numbers when it comes to those sorts of moments. This has been the power of Rocky and his A$AP Mob, much like it was the power of Tyler, the Creator and the once nascent Odd Future. But the A$AP Mob is just now getting itself off the ground musically. Its members are highly visible backing up Rocky onstage or in certain corners of the Tumblrsphere, but there is no trove of mixtapes. You will not, in other words, find any A$AP Mob trading cards.
That is all beginning to change with Lord$ Never Worry, A$AP Mob's first group album and the crew's first major release since Rocky's debut album. Rocky's presence looms (he appears on six of 18 songs), but this is the coming-out party for the guys who have spent the last year-plus in his orbit. The results, though, are extremely mixed-- the Mob's image emerged fully-formed, but its music is still, at best, rough and unpolished. It is a work of a group of kids who are well-versed in the aesthetics of certain strands of rap, and who have good and nuanced ideas of what they want their own music to sound like. Unfortunately, much of the crew has yet to develop a voice strong enough to prop up these general notions-- Lord$ Never Worry is an attempt to build a house from the top down.
Where the album fails is precisely where A$AP Rocky succeeds, and the unintended side effect of Lord$ Never Worry may be a greater appreciation for what Rocky is able to pull off, even taking his own lackluster contributions into account. Rocky's music is a triumph of taste over skill, but there is a songcraft on LIVELOVEA$AP that just isn't present here. What's left is an album that is long, dark, and ugly, with little to none of the pop crossover or tactful stewing of regional sounds that colored Rocky's debut. Lord$ Never Worry instead uses the framework of producers like Clams Casino, AraabMuzik, and the Mob's own A$AP Ty Beats to trace out a new brand of cold, nihilistic New York rap.
It is, though, an idea better in theory than execution. The main issue is that guys like A$AP Nast, Da$h and A$AP Twelvyy-- who all appear across the tape-- are gruff shit-talkers who are competent on a basic level but largely indistinguished. In a different context, that style can provide an effective counterpoint to Rocky's jiggyness-- take, for instance, this Funk Flex freestyle. But when pushed to the forefront on songs like "Full Metal Jacket" or any of their various solo tracks here, straight-forwardness quickly becomes dullness, and "workmanlike" begins to take on negative connotations. There is little on Lord$ Never Worry that is illuminating lyrically or stylistically, or doesn't make you wish that the central figures were better or more experienced.
But there is A$AP Ferg, whose three solo tracks go a long way toward invalidating the previous three paragraphs. Ferg's style is similar to Rocky's-- his flow is hyper-musical, largely owing itself to the lithe sing-song rapping of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. It is a flow that is stilted and off-kilter, but delightfully so. His songs are jagged paths of space and tangled words, furious rapping and soulful singing. It is rap music that keeps you on your toes, that dips and swerves around you. He chooses beats that are outlines, then traverses outside the lines or barely colors anything at all-- he skips and skates all over the mournful, melting strings of "Persian Wine" then barks in short jabs throughout the spare, Luger-ish rattle of "Work". Ferg's voice is undoubtedly unique, and there's something thrilling in that he seemingly doesn't yet have a firm grip on it. Maybe he doesn't even need one-- he is, quite possibly, figuring out how not to figure it out.
Ferg, though, is the exception. The individual members of A$AP Mob have stepped out of the shadows and shown that they have a long way to go before establishing themselves as compelling figures on their own. The A$AP formula is a tricky one-- the amalgamation of revered and trendy sounds and styles invites each member to walk a very thin tightrope on the way to standing out. Rocky is maybe even better at it than people thought. | 2012-09-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-09-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Polo Grounds / RCA | September 5, 2012 | 4.9 | 7a3e4be2-4d26-43c4-ac9e-950edcaacd17 | Jordan Sargent | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/ | null |
The producer and songwriter’s second solo album is a romantic exploration of uncertainty, a rush of momentum softened by his trademark sounds. | The producer and songwriter’s second solo album is a romantic exploration of uncertainty, a rush of momentum softened by his trademark sounds. | Rostam: Changephobia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rostam-changephobia/ | Changephobia | The ecstatic peak of Changephobia arrives in “4Runner,” an instant addition to the canon of jangly, smeared-pastel pop songs about cars: It feels wrong to listen at any speed under 50 mph. “Take off a shift for me/I’m waiting down the street,” Rostam Batmanglij sings in a conversational tone, the kind of writing and delivery that invokes the magic of the everyday. “Take all the time you want to come, come, come.” It’s a good example of what works about Changephobia, which often wrestles with expression and finding the right words. Even the album title is pitched as a winking take on a “Coexist” bumper sticker: earnest but self-aware, an awkward name for an awkward feeling.
Prior to his 2016 solo debut Half-Light, Rostam introduced himself as a founding member and in-house producer for Vampire Weekend. (He left prior to the release of 2019’s Father of the Bride). He’s now an in-demand producer and songwriter, working on a 2016 joint album with the Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser and earning writing credits for the likes of Clairo and Haim. Some of his production borrows the baroque energy of his old band, but much of his recent work has felt curiously warped, funneling Rostam’s own influences and those of his collaborators down to approachably human scale. “I always felt like the music I made was mine, whether it was part of a collaboration with people,” Rostam told Spin in 2017. “I think the reason is because I care so much, when I work with other artists… I give all of myself to it.”
On Changephobia, that sense of continuity often recalls Rostam’s work on last year’s Haim album, Women in Music Pt. III. Danielle Haim plays drums on “These Kids We Knew,” the sort of porous, guitar-forward jam that the group built their name on. Another Haim collaborator, baritone saxophonist Henry Solomon, returns for the frenetic “Kinney.” Over a drum pattern straight out of a Teklife song, Rostam rushes out the lyrics before arriving at a bittersweet release: “This shouldn’t work, but it does/Didn’t expect to spend the night/But I’m in your arms.” Despite the temporary contentment in his lyrics, Rostam’s trademark blown-out production veers toward clutter, dulling the sensation rather than heightening it.
“Kinney” is a song in constant motion, but Changephobia often evokes the opposite sensation. The album lives somewhere smoggy and sun-baked, finding small respites in moments of overwhelming uncertainty. “Staying at your place/Underneath the bridge/Laying down to sleep/Don’t know what time it is,” Rostam sings in “Unfold You.” Guided by twinkling piano, the words spill out like a sigh of relief. “From the Back of a Cab” tackles a similar subject, tracing an hour-long ride to the airport with a lover. Even as their separation looms, the connection feels sweet and secure.
Breakthroughs like these amount to some of the strongest entries in Rostam’s catalog—songs that locate their intoxicating highs in the restless spontaneity he writes about so frequently. “I want to slow it down,” he sings in the lilting closer “Starlight,” “but I can’t.” Yet even on an album so concerned with fluidity and risk-taking, Rostam mostly stays in his comfort zone. At its best, Changephobia frames the experience of giving in to doubt and ambiguity as a kind of empowerment. Other times, it just feels like giving in.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-04T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Matsor Projects | June 4, 2021 | 7.2 | 7a43aef5-88ed-48fc-ad5b-088f6662bf16 | Will Gottsegen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-gottsegen/ | |
The Blue Jean Committee is a fictitious soft-rock '70s soft-rock band fronted by SNL alumni Bill Hader and Fred Armisen. It began as a knowing Eagles parody but has expanded into a proper EP, on which they try to hit as many '70s songwriting themes as they can in as little time as possible. | The Blue Jean Committee is a fictitious soft-rock '70s soft-rock band fronted by SNL alumni Bill Hader and Fred Armisen. It began as a knowing Eagles parody but has expanded into a proper EP, on which they try to hit as many '70s songwriting themes as they can in as little time as possible. | The Blue Jean Committee: Catalina Breeze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21304-catalina-breeze/ | Catalina Breeze | This summer, Jenny Hval sang of "soft dick rock" on her incredible and unsettling Apocalypse, girl. She explained to Pitchfork that part of this idea—an inverse of hyper-masculine cock rock—stemmed from her watching the two-part, three-hour History of the Eagles documentary.
Like Hval, "Saturday Night Live" alumni Bill Hader and Fred Armisen found something to ponder with History of the Eagles. On a two-episode chunk of their new parody series "Documentary Now!", they paid tribute to the same expansive documentary that inspired Hval. But instead of the Eagles, Armisen and Hader focused on the fictitious Blue Jean Committee. What started out as fake has become fact with the Blue Jean Committee’s new EP, Catalina Breeze. The duo don't just lend their faces to the band: they wrote and recorded all these songs themselves, too—Armisen has a long history as a drummer, and is currently the bandleader on "The Late Show with Seth Myers", his "Documentary Now!" co-creator and "SNL" cohort.
Catalina Breeze barely passes the 10-minute mark through seven songs, but even in its brevity, Hader and Armisen manage to hit every hallmark of the California band they sought to be in "Documentary Now!". The opening title track offers the most complete portrait of the Blue Jean Committee: keys mix with bongos and a swishy percussion section, while the repeating chorus of "Catalina breeze, Catalina" is just as breezy as you’d hope. It feels so comfortable and familiar that, for a minute, it feels like it’s not just funny business after all. Later, "Gentle and Soft" arrives as a harmony-heavy acoustic ballad adorned with an occasional twinkling chime.
Elsewhere on Catalina Breeze, it feels like the Blue Jean Committee is trying to hit as many '70s songwriting themes as they can in as little time as possible. "Going Out to Hollywood" follows the trope of a narrative of a small-town diner waitress who’s got bigger dreams than her home can accommodate, while "Mr. Fix It" directly recalls ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" in its jumpy, earnest appeal to a powerful cosmic figure. The band throws the slightest bit of funk into the mix with "Mama You’re a Dancer", and "Walking Shoes" mimics the not-so-Southern rock peddled by the likes of the Doobie Brothers with a banjo hiding under peppy guitar licks.
All of this is enjoyable for music nerds, who get to pick out the embedded inspirations and influences. But ultimately Catalina Breeze is an impressive, if perhaps not entirely necessary, follow-through on a joke. It wasn’t enough for these songs to exist on TV; they had to get cut to vinyl and put out through Drag City, as well. Catalina Breeze makes for a fun exercise, but as a standalone release, it’s a little, well, soft. | 2015-12-01T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2015-12-01T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Drag City | December 1, 2015 | 6.7 | 7a53dd21-6d01-42a9-aacd-485eef7007ad | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | null |
On her debut, the French-American musician offers a broken heart, a jaded eye, oceans of surf-rock reverb, and a Van Dyke Parks cameo. | On her debut, the French-American musician offers a broken heart, a jaded eye, oceans of surf-rock reverb, and a Van Dyke Parks cameo. | Sofia Bolt: Waves | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sofia-bolt-waves/ | Waves | During a breakup, you fantasize about dramatic reinvention. Maybe you'll move across the ocean, change your hair, pick up a new hobby. For Amélie Rousseaux, the French-American musician who performs as Sofia Bolt, post-breakup reinvention entailed swapping Paris for L.A., getting into surfing—and oh, writing a slightly clumsy, mostly lovely debut album called Waves.
The first thing you notice about Waves is the atmosphere. On opener “London 2009,” Rousseaux recalls the initial spark of attraction over snippets of party chatter, clinked glasses, and pouty-lipped surf-rock guitars. “I was so drawn to you/Artistic, timid, cute,” she sings. Her lyrics are often messy, with endearingly clunky rhyme schemes and the occasional cliché, but she’s aided by talented session musicians and oceans of reverb.
Sometimes, Rousseaux plays it a little too cool for her own good. On “Ojai,” she casts her disaffected eye across a room full of “wannabe hippies,” sounding not so much above it all as detached. After pontificating about hot springs and horizons, she switches to French and allows a beach-rock guitar solo to see her out. The arrangements are distinctive, but Rousseaux’s own voice gets a little lost.
The title track, which comes in two versions, offers the biggest surprise. The first version sounds like every other song on the record: moody, chic, simmering. The second, appearing at the very end, is arranged by the legendary Van Dyke Parks. The master L.A. weirdo’s trademark orchestral flourishes move through the flimsy song like a summer storm spinning a weather vane; it’s a trip to hear Parks’ work punctuating lines as facile as “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” and “hella easy.” But ultimately, Waves is a debut. It’s an asymmetrical listen, and that’s fine; there’s more than enough promise here. Amélie Rousseaux moved halfway across the world to heal, and it is a pleasure to hear her processing. | 2019-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-08T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Loantaka | July 8, 2019 | 6.9 | 7a583f68-2eb9-4e63-946f-8324e0813b6d | Sophie Kemp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/ | |
Wavves' fifth album was inspired by a breakup, as well as a period of what Nathan Williams calls "just drinking, straight drinking." Accordingly, V sounds like a hangover. The best songs here will make for a welcome injection into his set list, reminding you of his keen ability for penning appealing "woe-is-me" anthems that won’t bruise you too badly in the pit. | Wavves' fifth album was inspired by a breakup, as well as a period of what Nathan Williams calls "just drinking, straight drinking." Accordingly, V sounds like a hangover. The best songs here will make for a welcome injection into his set list, reminding you of his keen ability for penning appealing "woe-is-me" anthems that won’t bruise you too badly in the pit. | Wavves: V | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21042-v/ | V | In July, Nathan Williams became the latest musician to show you can take the boy out of indie but you can’t take the indie out of the boy: He got in a fight with his major label. Williams uploaded "Way Too Much", a single from his then-untitled new album, to SoundCloud, only to see Warner Bros. take it down. Without disclosing Warner’s motivation behind the takedown, he implied the label was threatening to sue him, and wrote, "Its so obnoxious to work tirelessly on something and then have a bunch of ppl who just see me as a money sign go and fuck it all up."
On this, Warner was right: V is definitely not a record that’s going to make them a lot of money. That would require Williams writing the pop-punk crossover LP of his career—a little more Paramore, a little less Psychedelic Horseshit. Instead, what we have is an angry collection of songs more indebted to his recent collaboration with Cloud Nothings and the brute-force approach of his earlier releases, where punk catharsis was achieved by saying the same lyric over and over. (Say "I’m so bored" five times fast and you, in fact, will feel bored.)
V was inspired by a breakup, as well as the band’s hellaciously bad habits: 100 beers and two bottles of Jameson a night for the four-piece group, a period of "just drinking, straight drinking,” as Williams says in the album’s press materials. Accordingly, V sounds like a hangover. Every song starts somewhere dismal, and ends up somewhere that’s only a little hopeful—a process akin to the recovery from a hangover, when by the end you're mostly happy not to be drooling and vomiting on yourself. Multiple tracks refer to headaches both physical and spiritual. Williams’ budget has outsized the lo-fi recordings he made his name with, but he hasn't deviated much from the core formula. Though there’s room for easy-breezy surf rock ("Heavy Metal Detox"), insistent riffage ("Flamezesz", "Pony"), and shuddering sounds ripped from a horror movie ("Redlead"), the predominant aesthetic is dirty and discordant backed by big harmonies—the sweet spot from which all memorable Wavves songs emerge.
It’s a faster record, too: V abandons Williams’ previous attempts at balladry, with all slow moments preceding the eventual assault. At times, the pace works to his advantage. Williams writes a killer hook, and it’s easy to hear crowds slamming along to the feel-bad vibes of "Heavy Metal Detox", "All the Same", "Way Too Much", and "My Head Hurts". A line like "I lost my job today, but it’s all the same" ("All the Same") is delivered much more happily than "It gets better" ("Pony"), a reminder that he’s better reveling in angst than trying to convince us it doesn’t matter.
When he leans into his ennui, V achieves momentarily thrilling peaks. Williams is a child of singers like Billie Joe Armstrong and Tom DeLonge, pop-punk brats great at sounding snotty next to a massive chorus. The best songs remind you of his keen ability for penning sonically fractured, melodically appealing "woe-is-me" anthems that won’t bruise you too badly in the pit. (The best songs were written with the other members of the band, too, suggesting a necessary camaraderie.)
Still, V is a slight regression from the subtle growth he showed on 2013’s Afraid of Heights. Songs like "Demon to Lean On" and "Cop" weren’t just excellent songs—they showed the crystallization of the Wavves project into something mature, a word that’s rarely been used to describe Williams or his music. V will make you think he’s lapsed back to his #worstbehavior. Take a characteristic line like "Everything sucks if you don’t get your way" from "Tarantula"—it’s like he fell through a portal from 2009, and is back to playing the perpetual brat. V is a perfectly capable record, one that showcases what we’ve come to expect—and in many cases, enjoy—from Williams and his band. Even so, you wonder where else they might have gone. | 2015-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warner Bros. / Ghost Ramp | October 5, 2015 | 6.5 | 7a63282f-b635-4dd3-bdd4-5740529420c9 | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
Chief Keef's latest mixtape feels like an emergence from the rapper's wilderness period. Over tracks from his Glo Gang Productions affiliates, he raps, for bars and bars at a time, in a way that he hasn’t seemed interested in for awhile. | Chief Keef's latest mixtape feels like an emergence from the rapper's wilderness period. Over tracks from his Glo Gang Productions affiliates, he raps, for bars and bars at a time, in a way that he hasn’t seemed interested in for awhile. | Chief Keef: Sorry 4 the Weight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20281-sorry-4-the-weight/ | Sorry 4 the Weight | In November 2013, a TMZ cameraman greeted Chief Keef as he wandered, blinking, into LAX baggage claim. Keef was being sentenced to rehab, and the TMZ drone flung questions at him in his employer’s house style (lightly mocking, difficult to ignore), about his drug use, his fast driving, his habit of carrying too much cash around. Was he planning to change? Flashing a smile that seems charitable to spare for a paparazzo, Keef responded simply (and unforgettably): "I growed up. I glowed up."
He repeats this ear-sticking phrase, "glowed up", on the first track of his latest mixtape, Sorry 4 the Weight. Dropped last week with a title punning on Lil Wayne’s recent release, the tape feels like an emergence, in a way, from Keef’s wilderness period. After Interscope released Finally Rich, the Chicago rapper underwent serious, uh, glowing pains, during which his already-dark music took a surreal, infernal turn. He uploaded songs to his SoundCloud, like "Wait", that felt too weird to include on any official releases. He taught himself to produce. On Back From the Dead 2 and Nobody, he drowned his voice in processing like someone bent on murdering their personality through technology. It was a fascinating reinvention, forged away from the glare of major labels, in the soup of YouTube and Audiomack plays. It was occasionally indistinguishable from flailing. On Sorry 4 the Weight, he emerges as something new: A calm, poised, self-sufficient auteur, a production machine of Keef Music.
The tracks on Sorry 4 the Weight are credited to simply GGP, or Glo Gang Productions. Individual names are subsumed into the collective, but members include Hurtboy AG, 12 Hunna, DP Beats, and Keef himself. The vagueness of authorship may be intentional, a way of retaining ownership over a house sound. And that sound has settled into something that feels both formally fixed and malleable, a sort of sonic Silly Putty that can be stretched and stamped in any direction. The basic stuff of the sound comes from tinny MIDI patches arguing with each other in squiggly bursts, while drums boom and rattle. The sounds all line up along the same plane, so it all reaches your ear in a trebly tangle of mid-frequencies. It’s both busy and dinky, a hard chunk of sound that separates into a writhing pile of earworms when poked.
Congas and bongos, clattering busily around the edges of the music, are the most noticeable new addition on Sorry 4 the Weight. On "What Up", produced by Keef himself, circular bongos pulse against a snare roll, and Keef weaves a third pattern in between them, so that there are at least six different permutations of rhythms to nod your head to. This is where the sneaky complexity of Keef’s music comes in: He’s a formal innovator, one who finds lots of ways for his muttering vocals to mesh with the contrary moving lines of his music. His cadences have strange emphases everywhere, and the effect is similar to hearing someone clumping around a floor above you wearing a full leg cast. He breaks words up over bars, so that words like "money" get rendered as two molten lumps, "mah" and "nah", strewn across different beats.
These sorts of decisions are often what keep skeptical rap fans at an arm’s length from Keef, but Sorry 4 the Weight is the least abstracted thing he’s released in a long while. His voice is mixed higher and clearer; there is less AutoTune applied to his voice, fewer glottal non-verbal performances. He raps, for bars and bars at a time, in a way that he hasn’t seemed interested in for awhile, and in a way that rap fans who feel reflexively derisive about him probably aren't used to. He has a gift for writing hooks that contain enough jokes, thoughts, and phrases in them that they feel like they could be the whole song, a talent that you can trace back directly to Gucci Mane, and indirectly to 50 Cent before that, who Keef idolizes and namechecks again on an interlude on Sorry.
There are still fleeting moments of the nightmarish, sinking-tarpit sound of his wildest work: On "W.W.Y.D.", over clotted-up synths, Keef’s voice moves like headlights in fog, and his words break down into outbreaks of "Skoot-doo-do". It’s still thrilling to hear, and it makes one wish that wasn’t such a clean partition set between Keef’s verses and his flirtations with the digital void. The loneliness and poetry of "Nobody", say, in which Keef’s wandering, bluesy vocal take may as well be a wah-wah guitar solo for all you can make out of it, is missing. Sorry 4 the Weight is more settled-sounding, a "grown" record from an artist who seems grimly determined to move forward at all costs. "If I'm in my mansion, every day all day, best believe I'm working on something...That's all I need to be happy. Work, work, work myself," he says on the intro to "Ten Toes Down". Maybe once he feels safe in his mansion again, he can invite the chaos back into his studio. | 2015-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | self-released | February 27, 2015 | 7.1 | 7a675ea8-92c0-474f-bc06-e8c7af08d152 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
If everything Chad VanGaalen touches seems to have a repellant, piss-pungent weirdness about it, that's kind of a ruse—his records of jangly junkyard-pop are warm, inviting, and surprisingly easy to love. His latest, Shrink Dust, is possibly his best, and certainly his most confident; it's the closest we've come yet to getting inside his head. | If everything Chad VanGaalen touches seems to have a repellant, piss-pungent weirdness about it, that's kind of a ruse—his records of jangly junkyard-pop are warm, inviting, and surprisingly easy to love. His latest, Shrink Dust, is possibly his best, and certainly his most confident; it's the closest we've come yet to getting inside his head. | Chad VanGaalen: Shrink Dust | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19226-chad-vangaalen-shrink-dust/ | Shrink Dust | Calgary songwriter Chad VanGaalen has a complicated relationship with beauty. In 2011, he made what I thought was one of the loveliest indie-rock records of the year, but I had a lot of trouble convincing other people of that fact, because he decided to call the damn thing Diaper Island. (Its most tender ballad? Well that would be "Shave My Pussy", of course.) As a visual artist, VanGaalen dabbles in various mediums; he's made animated videos, fantastical figurines and a conceptual piece that was, according to a press release, "a literal piece of shit in a hot dog bun." Recently, he began posting on his Instagram whimsical drawings he had etched into snow: Here is a cute dinosaur, a tugboat, and what appears to be a self-portrait. It was only after I'd admired a couple of them that I realized they were made out of pee.
But if everything VanGaalen touches seems to have a repellant, piss-pungent weirdness about it, that's kind of a ruse—his records of jangly junkyard-pop are warm, inviting, and surprisingly easy to love. His latest, Shrink Dust, is possibly his best, and certainly his most confident. These songs are gentle, sad, and just bizarre enough. (There's a streak of Cronenberg-ian body horror throughout, and it begins playfully unsettling image: "Cut off both my hands and threw them in the sand/ Watch them swim away from me like a pair of bloody crabs".) VanGaalen's called Shrink Dust his country record because it's his first where he makes use of a recently acquired pedal steel, but some of the quieter songs also feature the lonely-cricket chirps of a mouth bow that remind me of Leonard Cohen's Songs from a Room. Like that record, Shrink Dust has a slow, steady trot—like an eccentric stranger rolling into town on horseback, bemused but also made lonely by the vivid visions in his head.
VanGaalen records by himself at home, in a space that's equal parts garage studio and wacky inventor's laboratory. He creates a lot of his own instruments from scratch: a two-person thumb piano; a narrow, portable harp; an analog drum machine that is dotted with Legos and looks more like a middle school science fair project than a rock instrument. Triggered by foot pedals or whirring by themselves with built-in motors, most of these jerry-rigged contraptions are designed to help VanGaalen act in the studio as a one-man band, but they also give his songs a homemade feel. Like all of his records (including the two he produced for the great, defunct Calgary art-rockers Women), Shrink Dust is full of varied, ramshackle textures. Spacey lead-off single "Where Are You?" rumbles like rickety spaceship, its hollered title lyric echoing and warping through an unfamiliar atmosphere on its way back to earth. A gorgeous and languid love song in the vein of Diaper Island's "Sara", "Lila" sounds like a crooner's ballad dissolving in a murky pond, with all the scummy creatures popping up to harmonize with VanGaalen on the surprisingly stirring chorus.
"I started out just experimenting with more… sound-scapey, ambient sort of experimental music," VanGaalen said in an interview a few years ago. "The songs weren't really what I was concentrating on." Since his 2004 debut Infiniheart, though, VanGaalen has moved towards uniting those "song" and "soundscape" tendencies with increasing seamlessness. For all its cosmic-cowboy vibes, Shrink Dust contains some of the catchiest and most assured hooks he's written yet—many of which are just a single word or phrase ("Evil", "Monster", "Lila") that's been taffy-pulled into a graceful and memorable melody. Occasionally, as on the rather aimless "Weird Love", things get a little too plainspoken and laid back, but the psych-pop tune "Leaning on Bells" wakes up the back half of the record with a satisfying jolt of electricity.
In the middle of Shrink Dust, there's an upbeat folk-pop song called "Monster", which describes in vivid detail a Gregor Samsa/Teen Wolf-esque metamorphosis of man into beast: The singer suddenly sprouts quills, his skin turns "scaly and yellowish brown", his fingers wither away only to be replaced by claws. It's one of the creepiest-ever conceits for a jangly pop song, but there's also something cool—and quintessentially Chad VanGaalen—about it. It's like watching one of his surreal claymation creatures, odd drawings, or Frankenstein-esque instruments come together in real time. Chad VanGaalen's world is weird, but never just for weird's sake—his creations spring from deep inside the singular, twisted mind of their creator, and Shrink Dust is the closest we've come yet to getting inside his head. | 2014-05-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-05-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | May 2, 2014 | 7.8 | 7a6b2d61-f785-4bd6-b8bb-36eafd44f53f | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
null | null | Merzbow: Pulse Demon / Animal Magnetism | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11778-pulse-demon-animal-magnetism/ | Pulse Demon / Animal Magnetism | OH CHRIST! SHOOT ME IN THE HEAD! THIS IS THE MOST EXCRUCIATINGLY TREMENDOUSLY CLANGROUS DISASTER PSYCHO-INFERNO SINCE THE GULF WAR AND A YOUNG NIC CAGE! This is what a Merzbow review circa the early 90s would have looked like. I remember briskly walking down the streets in the crisp air, seeing the idle Merzbow-listeners in the cafes. There was an ineffable apprehension in the air. New Merzbow reviews go like this: "We heard this all a hundred times back in the 90s. It's tedious boringcore, alternating between trivial and insufferable." I saw a show where Merzbow played between Madlib and Sleater-Kinney sets, and kids were sitting on the floor chatting, patiently waiting, painting their nails. I sympathize with the position, but I can't adopt it.
Trey Parker once said the end of reality TV would only come when they started airing baby-fucking shows. Once that show starts production, it will be viewers' fault, not the baby-fucker's. Merzbow is the aural baby-fucker. Wherever your ideology lies on the experimental scale, and whatever your religious affiliation, music cannot get much more extreme than this. Maybe John Cage's 4'33", and that's so far to the limit, it's probably cheating. This is the edge of music, of sound in general.
And now, here we are, confronted by the junction of a new album and the re-release of an incomparable classic. It's a moment for reflection and memorialization, and respect for the battleaxes that have been ensconced in our brains. In a lot of circles, 1996's Pulse Demon was one of the verifiable foundations of noise, the final proof that the pythonic wall of sound was scalable. This is a gross overstatement, of course, as journals from the Sixth Century also indicate the presence of noise, but it's not an entirely deceitful one. It came after a string of near-apocalyptic releases that were far more severe and atrophic, but also entertaining, heterogeneous, energizing, malleable.
Pulse Demon is simply pure sound, viciously unadulterated static. The earlier releases stimulated the imagination; Pulse Demon decimates it. It also has a bit of a beat that would be further dismantled in the succeeding years. Pulse Demon is Meet the Beatles, where you start to understand Masami Akita's appeal before the relentless experimentalism period. And, in this sense, the record is probably one of the most archetypal Merzbow albums, the one most resolutely and incorrigibly reluctant to dilute itself with free jazz, industrial, world, or musique concrete.
"Woodpecker No.1" is a static abscess that at first overtakes some pathetic techno, and rises to a steaming squalor that subsumes the rest of the track. "Spiral Blast" performs exactly what the title promises, although the "blast" part seems to be the focus, instigating one of the most demented howls on record, like the squeal from the JBs' "The Grunt" maximized to its most trembling, terrifying, cumbersome capacity. The second half is even better. The last half of the half-hour-long "Worms Plastic Earthbound" is a brutally drunken subterranean gunfight. All in all, seventy minutes that feel like driving an 18-wheeler made out of concrete into a remedial course on nuclear winter. And there aren't even overdubs! Essential. Unimpeachable. And the packaging by itself is already more valuable than some people's lives.
In these leadenly gray days, everything from Black Dice to Fennesz is being played on the campus radio and it's easy to lose sight of what was truly revolutionary. And yet, even compared to the most recent Merzbow releases, Pulse Demon will still slaughter innocent orphans in a fraction of a second. Case in point: Animal Magnetism, one of the more approachable recent Merzbow releases. I can easily imagine someone enjoying this album who doesn't even feign to enjoy masochism. On the titular track, the mix is muddled, there are tinny beats in the surroundings, and the slow rise of a pseudo-melody. There are still static, androids, and bondage, of course, but this is definitely a step closer to getting signed to Astralwerks.
"Quiet Men" is a light, vivacious cartoon, making the sound Warner Bros. animals make when they spin around. The first half of the album feels rather fluid. Whereas startling jaggedness is to be expected on a Merzbow album, on Animal Magnetism, there's a continuity that observes evolution and decay. Unfortunately, it's also less distinctive. "Super Sheep" tries to get some propulsion going, but the bassline is so immediately familiar to the causal Alec Empire fan, it makes the distortion feel like a deleterious contrivance Akita felt compelled to include at the last minute.
"A Ptarmigan" is the most interesting track, if not particularly exemplary. In twenty minutes, it's a parade in one section, a turgid dirge in the next. "Pier 39" is an ambient, scraping anomaly that wouldn't be too out of place on a Boards of Canada album. While it's perhaps the best recent Merzbow CD for newcomers, it's not a keystone in his canon. Still, it's not nearly worthy of the horrendous dullness ascribed to it in the media in its first days of release. And, even if it's not his best, it'll still be hilarious when all our dads get it thinking it's that old album by The Scorpions. Maybe then Merzbow will finally be able to piss someone off. | 2003-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-09-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | null | September 10, 2003 | 8.7 | 7a6f5306-456e-4359-8201-32a5ae23972c | Alexander Lloyd Lindhart | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alexander-lloyd lindhart/ | null |
The band’s imposing, precarious new album cements them in a history of North Carolina bands making thrilling indie rock. | The band’s imposing, precarious new album cements them in a history of North Carolina bands making thrilling indie rock. | Truth Club: Running From the Chase | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/truth-club-running-from-the-chase/ | Running From the Chase | For all that’s changed over the past 30 years, you can still take comfort in certain recurring phenomena, like Martin Scorsese movies that require booking an afternoon off work and North Carolina acts raising the bar for unkempt yet emotionally stirring indie rock. When charting the genre’s trajectory this year, all roads lead to the greater Asheville area, which has yielded pace-setting albums like Wednesday’s raggedly glorious Rat Saw God and Indigo de Souza’s charmingly eclectic All of This Will End. Now, their Raleigh compatriots Truth Club complete the 2023 Triangle triangle: Frequent showmates with the former and occasional collaborators with the latter, the band also shares custody of Asheville studio ace Alex Farrar. But if Wednesday are like the Superchunk-esque rallying point of the current NC scene, then Truth Club are like the more enigmatic and forbidding Polvo, deploying more oblique strategies to similarly arresting ends.
Running From the Chase is technically Truth Club’s second album, but it captures a moment of spiritual rebirth for the band. While recording 2019’s wily and wiry Not an Exit, the founding trio of singer and guitarist Travis Harrington, bassist Kameron Vann, and drummer Elise Jaffe tapped Yvonne Chazal for additional songwriting support. Chazal officially joined upon Not an Exit’s release, and her addition effectively reformulated the band’s DNA, encouraging a more open collaborative process and increasingly unconventional strategies. Their debut presented a band teetering between classic ‘90s slack-rock and second-wave emo; Running From the Chase both builds upon that foundation while redrafting the architecture, integrating DIY sound experiments—from the floor-scraping sounds of a musical-chairs competition to cymbals being driven over by cars—into songs as imposing and precarious as Jenga towers.
This isn’t simple fucking-around for the sake of it—Truth Club’s alternately lurching and liberating dynamics reflect hard-fought struggles with mental health. Several songs on Running From the Chase begin abruptly, thrusting you directly into Harrington’s turbulent headspace. But after these sudden entries, it can take a moment to acclimate to the band’s slow-stalking movements and shapeshifting songcraft, where wandering, half-spoken vocal lines gradually swell into fulsome melodies and stray guitar patterns intertwine into delicately latticed tapestries. They approach these songs as if their very survival was dependent on conserving their strength: “Suffer Debt” is like a 4-7-8 breathing exercise in musical form, receding and surging at increasingly dramatic intervals. Harrington paints a vivid portrait of trying to keep your shit together when your mind won’t let you rest while also interrogating the very process of turning personal trauma into public entertainment: Three minutes in, the band suddenly shifts gear into a raucously grungy denouement where he abandons the poetic similes to speak more bluntly. “Sometimes it feels so bad I can’t even express myself/I don’t even know where to start,” he declares.
Running From the Chase is rife with similarly scabrous sentiments that go down like broken glass. As the title track makes clear, the reward for drumming up the courage to leave the house is getting your soul crushed by your day job (“Work until he’s dead/ work until we’re dead/Is there any other plan?”). “Is This Working?” transforms that existential quandary into riot-stoking unrest: “Each day: wake, worry, watch,” Harrington seethes. “Is this working?/Are you working hard?/Is it working for you?” But Truth Club never seem fully paralyzed by their pessimism: Running From the Chase also offers up adrenalized, fuzzbox-kicking rave-ups (“Blue Eternal”) that function as necessary pressure-release valves, and slow-burning moments like “Exit Cycle,” where Truth Club push back against the darkness. “Hopelessness asserts itself/Not the last time,” Harrington cautions, though he sounds less defeated than prepared for battle, while de Souza joins him on the frontline. Running From the Chase is an often agitated response to a world intent on draining you of your energy, but it’s also a reminder of the beauty in a community. | 2023-10-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-13T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | October 13, 2023 | 7.7 | 7a708e8d-2ff3-4592-b518-bee1be882275 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The debut from the English bandleader and producer is a fascinating blend of spiritual jazz and brass band that can sound full-on psychedelic while staying grounded in its clever arrangements. | The debut from the English bandleader and producer is a fascinating blend of spiritual jazz and brass band that can sound full-on psychedelic while staying grounded in its clever arrangements. | Emma-Jean Thackray: Yellow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emma-jean-thackray-yellow/ | Yellow | In a world of musical utility, it is incredibly satisfying to come across an album as supremely impractical as Yellow, the full-length debut from English bandleader and producer Emma-Jean Thackray. It’s so deliciously circuitous that it develops its own gravitational pull. The album takes inspiration from a number of modish sources, including Flying Lotus’ wonky beat sorcery, the mystic jazz of Alice Coltrane, Roy Ayers’ sunshine-soaked funk, and Sun Ra’s cosmic overload. At times, the result is not that far from Kendrick’s towering To Pimp a Butterfly or the jazzier shade of Tyler, the Creator, as witnessed on Flower Boy.
But Yellow splits off into its own lane thanks in part to Thackray’s overarching lysergic bliss. She says she approached the record “by trying to simulate a life-changing psychedelic experience,” which explains a lot: Yellow is fascinating and profoundly befuddling, a voyage deep into nowhere in particular. Just when you think you’ve got your bearings—when you’ve got “Sun” pegged as a kind of disco number, for example—Thackray throws in an impetuous chord progression or rhythmical stutter to pull the ground from under your feet.
The album’s other distinguishing characteristic comes in its use of low-end brass and, in particular, the liberal employment of the sousaphone. Its sonorous parp comes across like a trad jazz send-up of modern producers’ obsession with electronic sub-bass. As a teenager in Yorkshire, Thackray was the principal trumpeter in her local brass band, a musical tradition often associated with the North of England. The use of brass here, with the sousaphone joined by the trombone, trumpet, and saxophone, seems to call back to that era, giving her cosmic jazz a fascinating Northern English (and New Orleans) tint. Thackray has previously wondered whether “some Yorkshire white girl” should participate in the Black American musical tradition of jazz. This, perhaps, is her answer, with the tremble of brass making Yellow something more than a straight copy of someone else’s musical innovation.
Thackray clearly has a devilish skill in composition and arrangement. Fabulous vocal melodies anchor this album, from the lilting command to “stick out your tongue” on “Say Something” to “Golden Green”’s languorous ode to weed. It is a measure of Thackray’s skill as an arranger and bandleader that a song like “Third Eye” manages to sound both epic and concise, with a soaring string arrangement, jubilant vocal choir, and a melody that leaps around like a licked frog—all dispatched in three exhilarating minutes, an abundance of ideas used very nimbly. It’s a testament to the vision that Thackary puts into every moment of her debut: Few people would dream up an album as endearingly obtuse and gleefully dysfunctional as Yellow, let alone have the skill to realize it.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Movementt | July 27, 2021 | 7.7 | 7a713013-bfcf-42d0-abb6-630fe09b702f | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson, the Sheffield duo who record as Slow Club, have a knack for patient, confident evolution. The band's new record continues their developmental trend: Taylor and Watson have taken a large, proud step into the world of soul. | Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson, the Sheffield duo who record as Slow Club, have a knack for patient, confident evolution. The band's new record continues their developmental trend: Taylor and Watson have taken a large, proud step into the world of soul. | Slow Club: Complete Surrender | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19553-slow-club-complete-surrender/ | Complete Surrender | Rebecca Taylor and Charles Watson, the Sheffield duo who record as Slow Club, have a knack for patient, confident evolution. Their debut, 2009's Yeah So, was a collection of peppy, straightforward folk-pop that earned the band comparisons to pairs from the White Stripes to the Fiery Furnaces; by 2011, they had moved on to a richer, more tonally diverse sound, one captured by their strong sophomore effort Paradise. The band's new record, Complete Surrender, continues their developmental trend: Taylor and Watson have taken a large, proud step into the world of soul.
The transformation is comprehensive: arrangements move and swing, newfound emphasis is placed on rhythm, blooming horn sections hold court, and Taylor taps into a reservation of emotion and sheer vocal power that was kept hidden on the band's earlier records. But even as Slow Club moves from sound to sound with each new full-length, the core of their appeal—their unique relationship and vocal interplay—remains uncompromised. Taylor and Watson spend a lot of time singing about love and how it's won and lost, but they shy away from playing a couple or suggesting some unresolved romantic drama. Instead, they usually end up sounding like two old friends who share a powerful, purely platonic love, and have spent years singing together and for each other. That interpretation of their dynamic is complemented by their vocal strategy: they frequently sing in unison, eschewing harmony save for situations where special emphasis is required.
Complete Surrender preserves this core strength and doubles down on a few others, giving Slow Club a solid base from which they play with genre and density. The album was produced by veteran Colin Elliot, who has a good ear for space dynamics whether the arrangements are jam-packed (on rompers like "Suffering You, Suffering Me" and "The Queen's Nose") or sparse (the stunning piano-led ballad "Number One"). Elliot understands that Taylor and Watson's voices are the keys to unlocking the band's songs, and he highlights them accordingly, making sure they remain at the forefront no matter how much action is taking place in the background.
Taylor, continuing a pattern of improvement that began with Paradise, is an absolute titan of a lead vocalist. Her voice is big, bright, and open, with a complete lack of pretension. She's an expert at conveying a wide range of emotion, which renders her an instantly familiar presence; when she cuts loose on a dusty, grand ballad like "The Queen's Nose," it's like having your face unexpectedly melted by a neighbor or co-worker at a local open mic. Given that she spends much of Complete Surrender singing about complex relationships and different strains of heartbreak, it's a valuable quality, as she has no trouble connecting with the listener. Watson is a good singer in his own right, too—he carries the aforementioned "Number One" with surprising tenderness—but he's best when serving as Taylor's backup or enthusiastic foil.
An important contributor to Complete Surrender's success is the reverence and respect with which Taylor and Watson approach the material. They're not the first group to evoke the spirit of Northern soul, but they understand that the genre deserves more than a few bleating horns. Their strong sense of identity helps, too: it's clear that the duo have a good handle on their strengths, and even their less successful experiments or compositions can fall back on a base level of chemistry and comfort. Listening to Complete Surrender, you get the sense that Taylor and Watson would be just as happy making music for, and with, each other in their spare time, revelling in their companionship. | 2014-07-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-07-14T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Wichita | July 14, 2014 | 7.6 | 7a74726f-0bdc-4ded-acd2-8fcbf73eb7af | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | null |
The Singaporean band’s new album showcases a punchier indie rock sound and reinvigorated perspective on the environment. | The Singaporean band’s new album showcases a punchier indie rock sound and reinvigorated perspective on the environment. | Subsonic Eye: All Around You | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/subsonic-eye-all-around-you/ | All Around You | On their third album, Nature of Things, the Singaporean quintet Subsonic Eye pivoted from their usual wide-eyed dream pop to a raw, earthier sound. Nature was frenetic yet loose, mixing the shaggy indie rock of Life Without Buildings and Pavement with snappy vocal melodies, frisky math-rock rhythms, and buzzy emo riffs. But while the band may have sounded vibrant, their outlook seemed downcast. Witnessing the destructive effects of urbanization had left them feeling cynical, even as they were making a conscious effort to explore the environment. They ended the album with a defeated sigh, the natural world slipping from their grasp.
Subsonic Eye’s latest album, All Around You, takes on a reinvigorated, more welcoming perspective. It’s set in the crowded cityscape, the hustle and bustle of urban sprawl reflected in the band’s rip-roaring guitars and whirlwind drumming. Their production is tighter and heftier; their hooks are sharper. Vocalist Nur Wahidah doesn’t sound overwhelmed, but hopeful as she surveys her surroundings and glimpses greenery. On “Everything,” she notices wildflowers growing out of car parks and waxes poetic about the sunrise: “Watching the gold bathe the birds/Bringing song into cities/Bringing luxury in our souls.”
Across the album, she’s self-assured and playful. She responds with cool-headed sass to the demands of a nine-to-five, like on the gleeful, hooky “J-O-B” or the scuzzy “Machine,” where her mocking observations on being a corporate cog get swallowed by an exhilarating guitar solo. Bandmates Daniel Borces and Jared Lim act as strong complements to her lead. On the skittish opener “Performative,” Borces lights her flippant narration of political activism—“Signing petitions, charging laptops, separating causes from ourselves”—up with a sublime riff, shaking off the song’s creeping malaise. Elsewhere, the pair’s textured performances lend warmth to Subsonic Eye’s boisterous noise pop: Their bright guitar tones have an electrifying glint, while the reverb-heavy, shoegaze fuzz conjures the prickling sensation of sunlight on skin.
Subsonic Eye are at their most urgent and heartfelt on “Yearning,” the explosive climax of All Around You. With thrashing guitars and hammered drums, the song explores the heat of desire. As the guitars cool to a rolling swell, Wahidah finds comfort in an affectionate embrace: “You woke me from my slumber, I fall down on my knees/Basking in your warm light, it’s how I came to be,” she sings, still searching for the natural even in the arms of another. She nudges forward, driven by her hunger for contact, but it's the surge of the band that pushes her through. Even when her optimism falters, they’re a supportive backing. All Around You proves that connection—to nature, to a lover—can be a profoundly potent force. | 2023-09-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf | September 18, 2023 | 7.2 | 7a7c2247-af2b-4f60-94ff-a7dd9157be6b | Michael Hong | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michael-hong/ | |
Music is a wounded, corrupted, vile, halfbreed mutt that begs for attention as it scratches at your door. You let ... | Music is a wounded, corrupted, vile, halfbreed mutt that begs for attention as it scratches at your door. You let ... | Bonnie “Prince” Billy: I See a Darkness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/699-i-see-a-darkness/ | I See a Darkness | Music is a wounded, corrupted, vile, halfbreed mutt that begs for attention as it scratches at your door. You let it in and give in a warm place to reside. It licks its paws and whimpers for store-bought snacks. You tolerate the fact that it shits all over your lovely Persian rugs because it seems so cute and vulnerable. It becomes your center for a while. Time passes, and it learns no new tricks. You begin to grow apart. It shuffles about in the background while you microwave your popcorn, and while you're vaguely aware of it, it seems less important to you.
I'm firmly convinced that Bonnie "Prince" Billy's new record, I See a Darkness is not music. It doesn't register in the familiar ways of a pop record (although conceptually speaking, it is one). You can't dance to it, and... it makes you feel small. A friend of mine said this: "I was listening to it the other day and someone called. I had to turn my stereo off. I couldn't just have it on in the background. It felt wrong."
Bonnie "Prince" Billy is the current moniker of Will Oldham, also known as Will Oldham. Throughout his musical life, Oldham has been churning out dark, literary dirges with help from a veritable who's-who of Important Rock and Rollers (members of Slint, the High Llamas, and Gastr del Sol). If, previous to I See a Darkness, Oldham had simply quit, he would have carved out his share of the American Gothic with his tales of death, religious reckoning, incest, and wayward horses in the cold stone of history. Even his substandard records have always had their glory moments.
But here he is again, with a new name, and his consummate offering. The familiar touches are all here-- dense, ominous words and subtle flourishes of guitar, drums, bass, organs, and piano. And best of all, Oldham is perhaps the greatest of human singers, in that he sounds like a real person. There's no studio gimmickry to hide the quiver in his mostly bang-on tone.
I See a Darkness is warmer than the title would have you think, and darker than the warmth of the stellar musical backdrop-- the songs feel both familiar and eerily strange. Virtually every note feels like a universe. It's the type of record that demands solitary reverence. No, this isn't music. It can't be. It's something else. | 1999-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 1999-09-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Palace | September 30, 1999 | 10 | 7a8dfac6-ea0e-4822-ac8d-f9f2f40fd8e1 | Samir Khan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/samir-khan/ | null |
Though Teen Daze is intent on calling himself a producer, it's helpful to view the British Columbia artist's debut LP within the frame of rock music. | Though Teen Daze is intent on calling himself a producer, it's helpful to view the British Columbia artist's debut LP within the frame of rock music. | Teen Daze: All of Us, Together | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16631-teen-daze-all-of-us-together/ | All of Us, Together | "Hey, have you heard of this guy Teen Daze?" This is how a friend began an iChat conversation with me late last year and, short answer, "no." A longer answer would've been one that was likely shared by just about anyone keeping up with prevailing internet trends ca. November 2011: "No, I haven't. But do I really need to actually hear Teen Daze to know exactly what it sounds like?” The answer to that question was likely "no" as well, since if you go to the young British Columbian's watercolor-splashed Bandcamp page, you could find EPs with titles such as *My Bedroom Floor, Four More Years *and, I shit you not, Beach Dreams. His description of Four More Years includes the following phrases: "chillwave," "glo-fi," "falling asleep on the beach," "reverb-drenched," "summer vibes." Fast forward to Teen Daze's debut LP, All of Us, Together, arriving on the same label that brought you Psychic Chasms and The Year of Hibernation, and it's clear that his fervor has not waned: Note songs with titles like "Brooklyn Sunburn", "The New Balearic", and "Cold Sand". It's like Fraser Valley's cable providers allowed Teen Daze's Jamison to view the past three years of internet discourse with a snark-eliminating firewall.
Add it all up, and although Teen Daze is clearly the kind of guy who might say Memory Cassette changed his life with a straight face, his sincerity could disarm a nuclear warhead. Can you really accuse someone of opportunism when he's knowingly dressed to the nines for a party that ended at least a year ago? Look, I remember hearing this stuff start to bubble up and thinking, "*finally…*someone's doing that," and there have been plenty of great records to come from this subgenre. And can you knock a dude who for all intents and purposes comes off like chillwave's answer to the Darkness? You simply can't have that much enthusiasm about a specific artistic aesthetic and be cynical at the same time.
Though Jamison is intent on claiming to be a dance producer, it's actually helpful to view All of Us, Together within the frame of rock music. Typically, when electronic artists are likened to rock bands, it's something like Justice or Skrillex, acts that incorporate the hard, fast, and loud corndogging aspects of guitar music. But Jamison's compositional method is more along the lines of Real Estate, forthrightly melodic, unfussy, and wholly uncomplicated. These are basslines that could easily be tapped by a beginner familiarizing himself with root-note patterns. The steady 4/4 beats inch close to disco, and it doesn't sound like he went too far into his presets to select the drum sounds. The arpeggios could likely be slowed down to half speed and unpacked as open chords and ringing Strat leads. He even prefers flange and phaser effects above all else.
Jamison's intent is that All of Us, Together will inspire real life enactment of its title, but music that packs dance floors has an emotional or sonic ambition that alludes to social interaction inherently being a risky thing-- the music of Teen Daze is not, and it's hardly a total slight to say this is music meant for more meditative pursuits. It's too agile, perky, and sober to really be likened to chillwave and whether it's rangier numbers like six-minute opener "Treten" or more condensed near-pop like "The Future", everything amicably ambles along in the most agreeable way possible-- I've found it to be a good companion while walking to pick up a specific item or two at Trader Joe's, knowing exactly what I'm getting and knowing that the price never changes.
Which ultimately brings us back to where we started: odds are, you absolutely know what to expect from All of Us, Together and frankly, the actual quality of the record is less of a factor than your interest in what it brings to the table. But towards the end of All of Us, Together, you get the impression that Jamison's still learning on the job and might want to consider a name change. At times, it sounds far less like his beloved Boys of Summer 2009 so much as a simplified homage to Kompakt's more populist acts, electronic's version of a neophyte performing solo acoustic versions of Zeppelin or Radiohead at a college bar. The reverb trailing off the rigid snare hits imply the patiently-building "For Body and Kenzie" and "The Future" were created in the image of Gui Boratto's "Beautiful Life" and "Erbstück" pretty much never happens if the Field doesn't. Granted, he doesn't sound like he has nearly enough finesse as a producer to pull any of that stuff off right now, but it does nonetheless give All of Us, Together a distinct personality outside of being a guileless late adapter with more gusto than technique: if you ever wanted to commemorate the sound of your little brother discovering Pop Ambient for the first time, here you go. | 2012-06-05T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2012-06-05T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Lefse | June 5, 2012 | 6 | 7a9f316a-d6b2-4738-bc8b-5ea21df1b2ac | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On her first full-length album, the versatile Atlanta artist explores the alternate identities of girls and women, finding solidarity in a cast of striking friends. | On her first full-length album, the versatile Atlanta artist explores the alternate identities of girls and women, finding solidarity in a cast of striking friends. | Yung Baby Tate: Girls | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yung-baby-tate-girls/ | Girls | As a little girl, roleplaying is an essential part of forming an identity. With your friends, maybe you choose which Powerpuff Girl you relate to the most or debate the merits of each Breakfast Club character. When you’re a girl, the possibilities of who you could be are endless; by the time you’re an adult woman, you’re supposed to have it all figured out. But on her full-length debut, Girls, the 22-year-old Atlanta singer/rapper/producer Yung Baby Tate applies the limitless imagination of childhood to a concept album about exploring different identities. The track titles sound like characters from a budget female superhero flick: “Bad Girl,” “Flower Girl,” or “Pretty Girl.” Tate flexes all her modes, too, delivering silky R&B vocals, sassy bubblegum-popping bars, and pop-punky chants. Entirely self-produced, Girls is a playful exploration of all the facets of femininity that any one girl—or woman—can possess.
The many alter-egos of Nicki Minaj were an influential blueprint for Tate’s character survey. Tate practically sounds like a Minaj clone in sections of “Bad Girl,” too, and adopts her sex-positive lewdness on the Gucci Mane-interpolating “Freaky Girl.” Just as quickly as she flips Nicki on, though, she can pivot to a Lil Uzi Vert-esque emo rap cadence for the outro of “Cozy Girl” or a croon that ranges from syrupy like Kehlani (“Lover Girl”) to whispery like Kelela (“New Girl”).
During clear standout “That Girl,” Tate doesn’t assume any specific character. She’s just that girl—the captain of the cheerleading squad, perhaps, or the ringleader of the popular clique, like Regina George in Mean Girls. “Woke up feeling awfully cocky/Who the fuck gon’ stop me?/Baby, I’m a job, you a hobby,” she raps with glee, letting out a tiny squeal after each line. You can practically hear her flipping her hair behind the microphone. Tate is fun when she’s alluding to icons and archetypes, but she’s thrilling when she’s just being herself, as she is here.
Tate’s vision gets a little blurry when it comes to production, however. “New Girl” blends new wave and early 2000s pop without much edge, while “Hot Girl” dips into the vague zone of deep house. She is a little more successful shifting toward Charli XCX’s PC Music-produced future pop on “That Girl” or playing with Grimes-inspired electro candy. Her experimentation is ambitious, expanding far from the sonic palette of her 2018 EP Boys, but most of these references never crystallize into something more.
On the other hand, the only features on Girls are from fellow black female rappers—a pointed and welcome move, considering they are often pitted against each other. Tate spotlights fellow slick-tongued Atlanta rap queens Killumantii and Mulatto for “Pretty Girl (Remix).” With a warm voice suggesting Sampha, Atlanta’s Baby Rose contributes a stunning verse to the heart-bearing “Lover Girl.” Chattanooga’s BbyMutha practically steals the show with her dexterous bars on “Wild Girl,” while Little Rock’s Kari Faux adds a calming presence to closer “Hot Girl.” Tate’s collaborators collectively push against mainstream expectations of female rappers, making a bold statement that black girls are not some monolith. While she gets help from her friends to make that point, Tate ultimately does it for herself. When she sings a short snippet of Chaka Khan’s 1978 anthem, “I’m Every Woman” for the outro of “That Girl,” her philosophy comes into focus: She’s every woman, and you can be, too. | 2019-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-03-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Yung Baby Tate | March 5, 2019 | 6.8 | 7aa08b80-cb9e-42c6-ba93-dcc3fc0bb3e3 | Michelle Hyun Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/michelle-hyun kim/ | |
Featuring the earliest known renditions of several Velvet Underground classics, this archival set of acoustic demos highlights a formative period in Lou Reed and John Cale’s artistic partnership. | Featuring the earliest known renditions of several Velvet Underground classics, this archival set of acoustic demos highlights a formative period in Lou Reed and John Cale’s artistic partnership. | Lou Reed: Words & Music, May 1965 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lou-reed-words-and-music-may-1965/ | Words & Music, May 1965 | It’s an archivist's dream: One day, dusting a back corner office, you discover more of the past, lying dormant on a shelf. After Lou Reed died in 2013, Laurie Anderson charged Don Fleming and Jason Stern with excavating the thousands of recordings, photos, letters, keepsakes, bar tabs, and credit card receipts that comprised Reed’s creative life. And there, tucked away behind some art books, lay a weathered package made out to Lewis Reed in faded blue ballpoint pen. The handwriting was Reed’s own, and the address was his parents’ house at 35 Oakfield Ave. The postmark was May 11, 1965—the date of the mythical, heretofore-unheard first recording sessions between Lou Reed and his then-new friend, John Cale.
Because real life often bedevils the neatness of archives, the spindly little demo recordings that slipped out of the package were not, in fact, made on that epochal day. Nevertheless, the songs on the long-lost reel-to-reel tape capture the early days of John Cale and Lou Reed’s artistic partnership. Included here are the earliest-known renditions of future classics like “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” and “Heroin.” Reed mailed them to himself with a notarized signature as a sort of “poor man’s copyright,” a cheap and effective way to prove the songs on the tape were, indeed, his.
In other words, Words and Music captures Reed just as he was beginning to take himself seriously as a songwriter. “Words and music by Lou Reed,” he intones at the start of each performance, his deadpan concealing the barest hint of bashful pride. As demos often are, these recordings are bare and unadorned: just Cale and Reed harmonizing over some hastily strummed acoustic and a wheezy harmonica. They sound more like a folk duo than the unholy terror of a rock band they would soon become.
On each track, you hear Cale and Reed go on fishing expeditions, seeking the dark and untamable spirits that would soon occupy their songs. They knew they were out there, but they find them only fitfully. These versions are slight and sly and simple; sometimes, they fail to even tap you on the shoulder. Nothing on Words and Music redefines or amplifies Reed’s legend. Instead, what we get is a photograph, stark and charming. For an artist known for cool and cruel observations, for cutting remarks and misdirections, these recordings show him completely free from guile. Lewis Reed, unguarded.
There is no better illustration of this than in the two versions included of “I’m Waiting for the Man.” The first version opens the set. You hear Cale and Reed harmonizing in a way they never did again—no bent notes, no howling, no sneering, Reed’s voice breaking into an honest-to-god yodel. They sound like the Weavers or the Kingsmen, and the slouch that Reed would work so hard to perfect is nowhere in sight. The second version is even further off, with a harmless clippity-clop knocked out on the guitar’s hollow body, and the harmonies even more subdued. This narrator doesn’t really sound sick and dirty, more dead than alive, and there is no menace, no threat, to the line “Hey white boy/Whatcha doing uptown?” You can see through the song’s swagger right to its fragile, birdlike bones.
The Velvet Underground’s songs were already skeletal, and when X-rayed this way, they give up new secrets. Without the grace note Reed threw on the word “on” in “linger on,” for instance, “Pale Blue Eyes” somehow transforms into a straight country ballad. The dreamy essence of the final recording lies entirely in that vocal take. He also tries out an early version of “Heroin” with a plunky walking bassline on the low strings that sucks the liquid motion from the song, the sense of love and danger mixing as quickly and seamlessly as the blood into the dropper’s neck. Just as this set’s spartan title implies, he had the words and he had the music. He didn’t yet have the pose.
Maybe it’s for that reason the most interesting moments on the demo tape have nothing at all to do with the Velvet Underground, or with the well-known character of “Lou Reed.” “Men of Good Fortune,” for instance, bears no relation to the song from 1973’s Berlin, despite the name. It’s Reed’s take on a child ballad, a story of a woman grappling with the fear that she will die unmarried and alone. Sharing a melody with Merle Travis’ “Dark as a Dungeon,” it’s both odd and deeply out of character, and Reed sounds more committed to its performance than to anything else here. Where the other tracks sound like what they are—demos, rough drafts, ideas put down for the sake of record—this one feels like the final version, a vision of a song Reed pulled whole from somewhere in his subconsciousness. It was a place he wouldn’t have cause to go again in his songwriting life.
The same goes for the doo-wop of “Too Late,” which is a love letter to Dion and the Belmonts. Is it a remarkable recording, either in words or music? It is not. It does not have much in the way of meat on its bones, and Cale and Reed nearly give up on it halfway through. But it has Lou Reed assaying a squeaky soul shout, it has a tempo that meanders charmingly, and it has the sound of Cale and Reed, both young and unassuming, busting up laughing at each other, still in love with what they might do. | 2022-09-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Light in the Attic | September 17, 2022 | 7.3 | 7aa191bd-d74b-45a3-ade7-c1f95d858979 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
Annie Hardy and Micah Calabrese move between snaky guitar lines and demure pop. | Annie Hardy and Micah Calabrese move between snaky guitar lines and demure pop. | Giant Drag: Hearts and Unicorns | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3685-hearts-and-unicorns/ | Hearts and Unicorns | Hearts and Unicorns kicks off with "Kevin Is Gay", which opens with some indecipherable gibberish and guitars that squawk a simple theme over layers of bent, distorted chords. It quickly drops away to just Annie Hardy's innocent voice over a simple drumbeat and sunny synthesizer bass. From this, you probably wouldn't guess that Giant Drag has just two members, singer and guitarist Hardy and drummer Micah Calabrese. Calabrese's left hand should get a third of the credit, triggering the programmed bass that somehow becomes the glue holding together "Kevin Is Gay" and later the kiss-off anthem "This Isn't it", among others.
"Kevin Is Gay" ends with Hardy singing the melody with "meow" in place of every word, and segues into multi-tracked studio banter where she demands with uncontainable glee to hear the song played back. "Cordial Invitation", reprised from the group's consistently overdriven Lemona EP, gains a fleshed-out arrangement, recast here as demure acoustic pop. "This Isn't It" is another track recycled from Lemona, as is "yflmd". "This Isn't It" is just as inviting as the earlier version, giving the spotlight to Hardy's voice and Micah's hand during the verses, until three distinct chords in the chorus deflate all the momentum, as if Hardy's stopping the car to give someone an added awkward goodbye from the driver's window. "yflmd" retains a snaky guitar line that sounds like To Bring You My Love-era PJ Harvey, with come-hither lyrics that get a little creepier with context. (The song title is an acronym for "you fuck like my dad.") What's more memorable than the psycho promiscuity the title suggests is Hardy's countermelody on guitar that takes us to the chorus ("You're just like my father.")
"High Friends in Places" treads the same ground-- man-eating promises over cantankerous swells of guitar ("One wasn't clean/ One wasn't man enough for me"). There's moments when they vary the approach, adding horns to the swaying rhythm of "Blunt Picket Fence" and creeping electronic tones to "Smashing". By and large, the two-man formula is stretched for all its worth, though the bouncy "You're Full of Shit (Check Out My Sweet Riffs)" or the strong vocals of "My Dick Sux" transcend Giant Drag's simple formula.
All these silly song titles and nearly frightening studio patter scratch the surface of something, the way the snippets on a record like Surfer Rosa add another layer of inscrutability, but monochromatic guitars overwhelm the album and mute the few moments of quirk. The two gems here are the bored kiss-off "This Isn't it" and the effortless "Slayer", which closes the album. Hardy softly murmurs the melody, sliding through a riff with a pristine guitar tone over the gentle 4/4 thump of the bass drum, adding the barest back-up harmony. Yes, Giant Drag sound good with the guitars cranked to 11, but they sound great when they're barely trying. If you make it through the maniacal bonus tracks, you might get the feeling I did: That Hardy could be a far more interesting frontperson than Hearts and Unicorns lets on. | 2005-09-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2005-09-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Kickball | September 29, 2005 | 6.8 | 7aac5129-118a-4f02-b87d-9ee98e2af8d2 | Jason Crock | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-crock/ | null |
Mac DeMarco is an unusually sensitive songwriter, capable of ferreting out what someone else might be feeling even as he’s absorbed in his own perspective. His new mini-LP, which features some of his prettiest material to date, is like a novella, or a made-for-TV movie—something to chew on while we wait for the next major project. | Mac DeMarco is an unusually sensitive songwriter, capable of ferreting out what someone else might be feeling even as he’s absorbed in his own perspective. His new mini-LP, which features some of his prettiest material to date, is like a novella, or a made-for-TV movie—something to chew on while we wait for the next major project. | Mac DeMarco: Another One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20862-another-one/ | Another One | To get to Rockaway Beach you take the A train toward Far Rockaway, waiting as it winds through Brooklyn, past clumps of trees dotting picturesque residential neighborhoods, over narrow bridges surrounded by the sea, through an imaginary portal away from the hustle and bustle of New York City to a more serene existence. That's where Mac DeMarco lives on the water, when he's not busy gallivanting in the Brooklyn scene or touring across the world. At the end of his new mini-LP, Another One, he tells us his address, and invites us to come over for a cup of coffee, so that in the process of taking that long train ride, toward boardwalks dusted with white sand and the ocean stretched for miles and miles, we might come closer to understanding his slacker-poet point of view.
At first sight, DeMarco seems impossibly "chill," that meditative state achieved by studying Buddhism or popping a few Oxys, only it’s more complicated than that. He connects not simply because he's "chill," but because his relaxed self seems borne of extreme self-confidence. His music isn't for situations that are laidback in and of themselves. They're for the unguarded moments you might share with another person where the both of you are comfortable without reservation. Music made for the end of a rooftop barbecue, when the sun dips, the beer is nearly gone, and everyone who doesn't want to be there has already gone. Here, you can be honest, goofy, even silent; all of it is accepted without a dissenting word. This type of sincerity without precocity is rare in art, and the contrast between the content of DeMarco's music and the content of his character only highlights his singularity as someone whose contradictions build toward a vibrant self, rather than collapsing in disarray.
Which means: If you like DeMarco, you'll like Another One. It's like a novella, or a made-for-TV movie—something to chew on while we wait for the next major project. It riffs on his established formula: the same rinky-dink guitar tone, funky basslines, air-tight percussion announcing a band with enough experience to avoid fucking up the vibe. There are four slow songs and three songs that are a little less slow but still plenty relaxed, all of them filled with little details to catch your ear. The solo in "The Way You Love Her" was written with Robbie Robertson's strictured tone in mind, even as it ends up a few steps closer to the nu-reggae swing of Magic!'s "Rude". Few will sound as comely or as inviting as DeMarco does on "No Other Heart" when he sings, "Come on and give this lover boy a try/ I'll put the sparkle right back in your eyes/ What could you lose?"
The twinkling chord progression on "Without Me"—amongst his prettiest songs ever recorded—is buttressed by a cloud of washed out synthesizers, creating a lovesick feeling as he sings about accepting that a woman is better without him. "Just to Put Me Down" has a future as an extended set closer, with the refrain of the song title warping ever so slowly as he sings it over and over again, his guitar bursting into peals of expression. The wink of the album's title turns introspective on the title track, with a deeply languid DeMarco ruminating about the uncertainty of his relationship while wondering if "another one" is knocking at the door of his beloved.
DeMarco is an unusually sensitive songwriter, capable of ferreting out what someone else might be feeling even as he’s absorbed in his own perspective. He’s what sex columnist Dan Savage refers to as "GGG": good, giving, and game. When I saw him at this year's Primavera Sound Festival, his band dropped in a few minutes of Coldplay's "Yellow"—the joke, of course, being that "Yellow" is fairly close to a song that DeMarco would've written. Chris Martin says the stars shine for his lover; DeMarco says they call for him, only he'd rather stay with his woman. I know I'm special, he sings, but I want you to be a part of it, too. And so he continues to write another one and another one until we're convinced. | 2015-08-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-08-04T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | August 4, 2015 | 7.3 | 7aadb1b3-1060-41cc-970a-c29d6b0c346d | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
The prodigious London electronic producer, still only 21, crafts intricate music that's both deeply retro and futuristic. | The prodigious London electronic producer, still only 21, crafts intricate music that's both deeply retro and futuristic. | James Blake: CMYK EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14229-cmyk-ep/ | CMYK EP | CMYK is only the third release from London electronic producer James Blake, who is only 21-- and the reason I keep saying "only" is because I get a little dumb thinking about how much ground he's covered in so few steps. His style is already recognizable: progressions of thick soul and jazz chords (a product of years of piano lessons), pitched-down and mangled vocals (often his own), and mid-tempo beats that balance synthesized sub-bass with handclaps, snaps, and other humanizing soundlets. But each of his releases-- last year's "Air & Lack Thereof" / "Sparing the Horses" single, February's The Bells Sketch EP, and now, CMYK EP-- also sounds like its own project, filled with private rules and concepts. He's writing his theme and his variations at the same time.
Blake isn't peerless, exactly. He's got collaborators and associates. (Untold and Mount Kimbie-- two artists he's done remixes for-- come to mind.) But Blake's peers are better known for the boundaries they're breaking down than the ones they're reinforcing, which is to say that Blake-- who appears to have a brain full of uncategorizable ideas-- is in a good position to do whatever tickles him. (The BBC DJ Gilles Peterson had him as a guest on his show last week, where he talked about his plans for a vocal-and-piano EP, and how he'd just had his mind pried open by seeing Joanna Newsom live. From any other contemporary electronic producer, I'd be surprised.)
CMYK is built from samples primarily from 90s R&B. Sometimes, they're incredibly obvious-- obvious like "I hope James Blake doesn't end up with legal fees" obvious. Other times, he crushes them beyond recognition. (We know from a Rising interview last month that Brandy is on there somewhere, and R. Kelly, too.)
The title track draws on both Kelis' "Caught Out There" and Aaliyah's "Are You That Somebody"-- songs that helped define the years they came out in by sounding two steps ahead of everything around them. This is canny for plenty of reasons, I think, but I'll be brief: Blake takes two R&B archetypes-- the Spurned Woman and the Secret Lover-- and imagines them in a back and forth. It's modern homage to old ideas. But if you know the songs already, it's also an exercise in warming up your cultural memory-- both tracks are over 10 years old but under 15, a kind of dead zone for nostalgia, not yet retro-ready but no longer current. He's not reminding us of something we've forgotten or telling us about something we never knew about, he's reanimating songs that are probably just at the edge of peoples' thoughts. (It's also a statement of allegiances: though Blake-- as Harmonimix-- has worked with Lil' Wayne's voice, he doesn't seem to be as interested in current American hip-hop and R&B as much as he is in picking up where Timbaland and the Neptunes left off at the end of the 1990s.)
But what makes the track isn't its samples, its the way Blake integrates them. Everything on CMYK is remarkably balanced: throwback sounds (a soul singer) next to contemporary ones (filtered synthesizer sweeps); deeply processed sounds (a vocoder) next to clean ones; moments of dissonance and digital noise next to a consonant progression of organ chords. One minute it's naked, the next it's obscure. Blake's songs-- three- and four-minute long pieces of electronic pop-- have no real space or time. They're not dance tracks. They're deeply retro and slightly futuristic-- which is to say they're contemporary. They're made on a home computer, but sound like the work of an animatronic band.
I keep thinking of the Wong Kar-wai movie 2046, ostensibly a love story with parallel narratives, one set in the 1950s, one set in 2046. The superficial surroundings of the past are different from the future, but at one point, two characters say the same exact thing: "Leave with me." The context, though, is different, and changing the context changes the meaning. And when the meaning is changed, communication breaks down. In both cases, the characters are somehow misunderstood, and the misunderstanding leads to heartbreak. James Blake plays in these gaps-- these modern gaps-- in ways that are both clever and sympathetic. "Do androids dream of electric sheep?" is an old question. Blake's trying to figure out how convincingly they sing gospel. | 2010-05-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-05-24T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | R&S | May 24, 2010 | 8.3 | 7ab461bd-bc02-44bf-b07b-fbcbb156b1fb | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The Atlanta rapper sounds comfortable, uninspired, and indifferent on his latest album. It’s a missed opportunity to flaunt his talent for vocal manipulation and emotional delivery. | The Atlanta rapper sounds comfortable, uninspired, and indifferent on his latest album. It’s a missed opportunity to flaunt his talent for vocal manipulation and emotional delivery. | Lil Baby: It’s Only Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-baby-its-only-me/ | It’s Only Me | On his 2020 album My Turn, Lil Baby embodied a heavyweight boxer the night before his title shot. But his latest, It’s Only Me, is the championship defense against some dude they pulled off the street to lose. While his rapping was hungry then, now he’s extremely comfortable. It makes sense: As it stands, Lil Baby is one of the biggest rappers on Earth. He’s got commercials, a Budweiser World Cup theme, a major look in a new book about Atlanta rap history, and a whole ass documentary about his life at 27 years old. In that film, Untrapped: The Story of Lil Baby, which came out this summer, the story is more about his popularity than the music itself. When it was time to talk about My Turn, they might as well have had the director turn the camera on himself, shrug, and say, “Hey, it’s a Lil Baby album and people really liked it. I don’t know what else to tell you.” That way of thinking feels ingrained in It’s Only Me, as if all Lil Baby had to do was show up and rap. Nobody will care about the missing subtleties, right?
But those nuances do matter. One of Baby’s gifts is the way he can manipulate language with his voice, turning a forgettable line into words to live by, depending on how intensely, passively, or melodically he raps. This isn’t a Jack Harlow situation, where folks are more into the idea that he’s a good hang, rather than how effective the songs are. The nuts and bolts of the singsongy rhythms matter. Lil Baby is at his best when he’s using those tricks to switch between moods, but there’s just one on It’s Only Me, and it’s indifference: not in the too-cool-to-care kind of way, but in the way when words have no weight behind them. On “From Now On,” his bar about buying too many houses stands out solely because it’s a wild problem to have, but it’s not tied to any emotion. This happens a lot across the record: He gloats about dinner with Kris Jenner on the intro, or about blowing a bag on new veneers on “Everything.” He doesn’t seem to be trying all that hard, and ends up sounding as hollow as when Tracy Morgan’s 30 Rock character did a stand-up routine about how people eat their lobster in St. Barts.
It’s not that Baby’s tracks need to have tons of depth, but they should at least make you feel something. Take “Heyy,” which doesn’t need much to work, other than an extremely simple, catchy, and strangely funny hook. “Danger” has some of the most routine Baby lyrics ever, but he delivers them as if they’re life-changing, and that’s what makes them work. When he’s locked in, he can spit or croon a line that lingers long after he’s said them. Sometimes it’s because they’re chilling: On “Double Down,” he raps, “Too many dead contacts in my telephone,” his numb croon infused with grief. Other times, it’s because he can lay out a ridiculous scene and offer a detail that adds personal specificity. “It’s like sixty girls, me and gang, and no one got their phone,” he spits on “Back and Forth.” The “no one got their phone” bit is said with a hilarious sigh of relief.
These moments don’t happen enough across 23 songs to mean that much. He doesn’t even sound inspired by the trusty song templates that have long been his bread and butter. On the rags to riches intro, he just sounds bored; the mandatory collaboration with Young Thug feels like a leftover; and the track with a few straightforward minutes of introspection is missing here. “Top Priority” is close, but ultimately lands all over the place: He goes from celebrating buying his mom her own salon to a DJ Akademiks diss and crypto investing. In moments like these, flashy beats could have made a critical difference, but for the most part, the instrumentals from Murda Beatz, Tay Keith, and others are predictably safe and blank. That’s not a problem on My Turn, because the rapping does most of the leg work, but when it’s not up to snuff, he’s exposed. All it takes is one opening for the belt to be up for grabs again. | 2022-10-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-19T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Quality Control / Wolfpack Global / Motown | October 19, 2022 | 5.5 | 7ab90568-ac11-4c53-8779-55f78ae42e01 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
A listless album about being listless, Mac DeMarco’s new collection of instrumentals summons the bleary, exhausted feeling of time spent on the road. | A listless album about being listless, Mac DeMarco’s new collection of instrumentals summons the bleary, exhausted feeling of time spent on the road. | Mac DeMarco: Five Easy Hot Dogs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mac-demarco-five-easy-hot-dogs/ | Five Easy Hot Dogs | Bob Rafelson’s 1970 film Five Easy Pieces ends with the hero, played by Jack Nicholson, hitching a ride on a northbound truck and disappearing into anonymity. Mac DeMarco is too larger-than-life to ever be anonymous, but this scene is a good starting place for considering his new Five Easy Hot Dogs. Ever since he sang “What mom don’t know has taken its toll on me” on 2014’s Salad Days, he has been exploring a long post-adolescent hangover, the feeling of emerging on the other side of your young and carefree days and seeing little that looks exciting in your future. This thread came to a head on 2019’s Here Comes the Cowboy, a record whose burnt-out ballads were full of dead friends, departed lovers, and uncertain plans. Now here are 14 instrumentals made on a long and spontaneous solo road trip, where DeMarco pledged “not go home to Los Angeles until I was done with a record.” This is a listless album about being listless, and it’s a pretty accurate picture of the stretches of useless, money-burning time that come with being on the road.
Five Easy Hot Dogs isn’t DeMarco’s first instrumental release. 2015’s Some Other Ones was recorded in five days and released as a free download, and it grew naturally out of the fizzle and spark of Salad Days. Hot Dogs continues in the lugubrious vein of Here Comes the Cowboy, rarely exceeding the tempo of a resting heart rate. The familiar Mac palette is apparent as soon as “Gualala” kicks in—spidery acoustic guitar, a pleasingly round bass tone, the tap of a cheap drum machine, and a synth that sounds like a little bird commenting mockingly on the (lack of) action. But rather than building, developing, or even meandering as his songs tend to do, these pieces simply putter along for a while and end. The songs themselves seem to be twiddling their thumbs, waiting for something more exciting to happen.
As much as any Mac DeMarco release, Five Easy Hot Dogs resembles Gorillaz’ The Fall, another road diary whose half-formed songs were named for the places they were recorded. As with Hot Dogs, it was the nature of The Fall to stand slightly apart from the Gorillaz catalog, a repository for spontaneous ideas rather than a po-mo pop-prankster triumph to rank with the project’s first three albums. But in both records is the desire to make this music a little better than it needs to be, creating an atmosphere of bleariness that approximates the actual feeling of exhausting transcontinental travel. Both artists also succeed by incorporating cute little filigrees that diversify the landscape. “Victoria” gains tension from a synth melody whose notes hover in the air, casting creepy chords against the innocuous tiki-bar backing. The pan-flute sound effect on “Portland 2” is so goofy that you might not even notice the little metallic plinks in the background that contribute both a tactile feeling and their own subtle rhythm.
These moments speak to DeMarco’s gifts as an arranger and his ear for woozy textures, but even when held to the standard of his earlier instrumental work, Five Easy Hot Dogs comes up short. Some Other Ones is livelier, and the simmering lo-fi instrumentals on his Demos compilations, even ones with names like “Organ Ronald Donkey Water,” possess a mystery and depth missing from these clean-lined, minimal compositions. Though each track is named for where it was recorded, there’s not much to distinguish one stop from another, and though you could connect the locations into a journey, these tracks don’t form an arc but play as if stacked atop one another. You won’t find much of the excitement and mythology of the American road trip here—just the feeling of being stuck between destinations and not being totally sure where you’re going. | 2023-01-20T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-20T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mac’s Record Label | January 20, 2023 | 6 | 7abc2a0e-125a-4596-abd0-8864b2c065d6 | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
French Montana gives you all the raw material of a 2013 rap icon: fluent in regional microtrends, "New York" enough to keep local tastemakers satisfied, all while carrying an air of self-aware absurdity. However, Excuse My French does absolutely nothing to make French Montana look interesting. | French Montana gives you all the raw material of a 2013 rap icon: fluent in regional microtrends, "New York" enough to keep local tastemakers satisfied, all while carrying an air of self-aware absurdity. However, Excuse My French does absolutely nothing to make French Montana look interesting. | French Montana: Excuse My French | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18178-french-montana-excuse-my-french/ | Excuse My French | Here’s a guess: if you can’t promise that your blockbuster rap album will outsell the National and Darius Rucker, you don’t have a blockbuster rap album. And, as such, you do not get a blockbuster rap album budget. It’s rare when Billboard statistics can prove anything these days, but in the case of French Montana’s Excuse My French, its meek first-week numbers are an echo of an apathetic reception, the dull thud of a sunk cost. And since Excuse My French does absolutely nothing to make French Montana look interesting, it’s safe to say that the record failed in its one and only goal: to make French Montana look like a star.
This isn’t all that surprising considering that his 2012 mixtape Mac & Cheese 3 achieved the same result as loudly and expensively as its commercially available follow-up. But you can understand what people see in French Montana, as he does give you the raw material of a 2013 rap icon: fluent in regional microtrends and stylistically fluid enough to involve himself in them, "New York" enough to keep local tastemakers satisfied, all while carrying an air of self-aware absurdity. You can get all of that from his Twitter feed; his actual music just ends up putting his shortcomings in sharp relief. His flow conflates loopy rapping and off-key singing similar to Future, but Pluto somehow felt more earthbound than Excuse My French. Nobody that Montana threatens, fucks, robs, or peddles bricks to is granted any sort of humanity. Which isn’t a huge problem, since he’s often been welcome on Rick Ross’ fantasy island. But whereas Rozay has developed a character through vivid imagination and exaggeration*,* Montana doesn’t express enough individuality in his music to even be a caricature. Which itself isn’t a problem, as Montana’s emotional blankness puts him within the range of Chief Keef, but whereas the latter is fueled by nihilistic defiance, French just sounds listless and bored.
The bigger issue is that unlike any of the aforementioned, Montana has no real idea of how to put a song together. As proven by “Stay Schemin’", “I’m a Coke Boy", “Pop That", “Shot Caller” or anything else that’s willed its way into becoming a hit, when surrounded by the right team, Montana can impress himself on a track without stealing it. But left to his own devices, he raps the same way the guy in your freshman dorm played guitar, absent-mindedly moving from one unrelated riff to the next, fixating on familiar phrasings, and just basically annoying the hell out of you. Some decent one-liners are sprinkled throughout, and somehow, hearing him do his trademark “hah?” is about the only thing that never becomes tiresome. Otherwise, any French Montana verse is the sound of time being killed bar by bar.
Nearly a year old, “Pop That” is wisely and somewhat desperately included-- there’s no way Excuse My French will result in anybody’s first-time legal ownership of the song, though you figure its 37 million YouTube views will yield something. Not surprisingly, the noxious lifeblood of “Pop That” courses throughout Excuse My French. Every beat seems to be modeled after it, so whether it’s Young Chop’s domineering synths or Rico Love’s piano-laced and pathos-laden boom bap, it all pounds like Miami bass. Mixed and mastered without nuance or mercy, the relentless blare of Excuse My French becomes a paradoxically ambient experience. Think Music For Airports, except for situations if you’re engulfed in volume: sitting next to a guy on the subway whose headphones function more like a boombox, trying to have a conversation in a restaurant that allows the decibel level of a nightclub, being stuck in a cab blasting Hot 97 during rush hour traffic.
I can’t verify that Montana’s indifference infects the massive roster of Excuse My French any more than I can find concrete scientific proof that yawning is contagious. But the results make the question of correlation or causation a moot point. When the Weeknd’s sexual politics on “Gifted” are somehow less reprehensible than yours, that’s a problem. When “Trap House” finds Rick Ross so disengaged that Birdman manages a more complex rhyme pattern, that’s a problem. When an appearance from ACME-brand rapper Ace Hood feels like the first time in 20 minutes your blockbuster rap album has shown a pulse, that’s a problem. When you decide “Fuck What Happens Tonight” also needs Mavado, a clearly pre-“No Guns Allowed” Snoop, and a typically authoritative Scarface verse that could not be more out of place, that’s a problem. And when you let DJ Khaled yell at the beginning of that same song to justify his place in the credits, that’s a problem. This is the point in the review where you might expect me to say “this is everything wrong with hip-hop in 2013,” but that might’ve been the case if Excuse My French had sold a ton of copies and could be taken as a mandate for more of the same. Instead, forcing French Montana into that #1 spot and having it come off like a transplant rejection actually lets us know the genre’s in fine health. | 2013-06-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-06-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Interscope / Bad Boy | June 5, 2013 | 3.5 | 7abc60a3-bc3f-47f0-bffb-01cf87a5fa7d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The Ohio rapper’s new album sounds like a randomly generated playlist: tons of options, very little soul. | The Ohio rapper’s new album sounds like a randomly generated playlist: tons of options, very little soul. | Trippie Redd: Pegasus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trippie-redd-pegasus/ | Pegasus | Trippie Redd still wants us to believe he can do it all. Since the start of his career, the Ohio rapper has embraced a passion for rap of every possible variety. He likes to glide on top of cloud-rap beats, kick rhymes over hard-nosed boom-bap drums, skip over trap hi-hats, and wail and thrash over crunchy emo-rap fusion and booming EDM drops. He doesn’t just wear multiple hats; he stacks them on top of each other like he’s trying to start a TikTok challenge. Trippie’s musical wanderlust sounds great on paper and works decently in short bursts, but in practice, and particularly on his latest album Pegasus, he sounds like a randomly generated playlist: tons of options, very little soul.
Trippie has cited Prince as an influence on the album, but many of these songs lack one of the core tenants of the Purple One’s music: personality. Passion isn’t a replacement for voice, and Trippie has burrowed further into the bad habits that plagued his bland 2019 sophomore album !. His musical ambitions are still scattershot, bouncing between different poles of rap from song to song, but he does attempt to branch out lyrically. Pegasus features more love songs than usual, a marked evolution for a rapper who once couldn’t be bothered to chase the feeling on the first “Love Scars” from 2014. It may be a change of pace, but it doesn’t boost his writing, which is as nondescript as a PornHub comment. “Transmission went out/Transitions, my house/New positions to try out,” he belts on “Love Scars 4.” Whether he’s talking about revealing new love (“Let It Out”) or navigating charged emotions (“Mood”), the songs feel anonymous, like any of his immediate peers could’ve written them.
The lack of a personal touch follows Trippie across Pegasus’ more amped-up sections as well. When he tries to inject more personality into a song, he often comes out sounding like someone else entirely. His flows and inflections on “The Nether” sound like Wiz Khalifa circa 2012. He channels Roddy Ricch’s nasal tone on the title track and Pi’erre Bourne’s bouncy melodies on “Good Morning.” When he does manage to stand out, his punchlines are jokes that wouldn’t pass muster in a middle-school cafeteria cipher. “Them hollows hit your chinny-chin, I’m like the Crimson Chin,” he growls on the hook for “Kid That Didd,” draining all momentum from the track.
Casting such a wide stylistic net yields a few successes across the album. Trippie settles into a nice rhythm on “No Honorable Mention,” outpacing guests Quavo and Lil Mosey with a fast-paced verse about flexing through trauma. The second entry in his “Oomp’s Revenge” series, dedicated to his late brother, provides a steady beat for Trippie to continue eulogizing his fallen soldier. Other highlights across Pegasus come from its many guests. There are scene-stealing features from PARTYNEXTDOOR, Young Thug, and Future. The most bizarre song on the album is “I Got You,” where Trippie swaps verses with Busta Rhymes while interpolating the chorus to Busta and Mariah Carey’s 2003 song “I Know What You Want.” Somehow, it’s also the most effortless collaboration on the entire project.
The scope of Pegasus — 26 songs stretched across 74 minutes, not including an extra six songs worth of “Spooky Sounds” — is staggering. It’s double the length of ! while retaining many of the same problems. Trippie would benefit from selecting a few of the several styles he insists on sampling on every project and focusing his energy instead of trying to be all things to all people. Until he’s ready to reel it in, he won’t be fit to claim mastery over any of them.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 10K Projects / Caroline | November 10, 2020 | 5.6 | 7ac829dd-864a-4c89-b3d1-0fd0bd4a6daf | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The singer’s latest mixtape is soulful, summery, and without borders. Thanks in part to the production of Mixpak’s Dre Skull, Santigold commits to a careful interpolation of the dancehall sound. | The singer’s latest mixtape is soulful, summery, and without borders. Thanks in part to the production of Mixpak’s Dre Skull, Santigold commits to a careful interpolation of the dancehall sound. | Santigold: I Don’t Want: The Gold Fire Sessions | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/santigold-i-dont-want-the-gold-fire-sessions/ | I Don’t Want: The Gold Fire Sessions | The Gold Fire Sessions summons the ghosts of dancehall hits. Dub goes well with glossy pop but the combination sometimes resembles the island-inspired singles of more mainstream acts like Major Lazer and PARTYNEXTDOOR. The du jour familiarity of the music might make it seem that Santigold is pulling from a convenience store of readymade cool instead of offering an authentic upgrade on her long-simmering indie signature. But from the start of her career, all the way back to her 2000s Philly-based punk band Stiffed, dancehall, grime, and ska influences have always gilded Santigold’s releases. Santigold doesn’t sound like her peers, her peers probably sound like Santigold.
I Don’t Want: The Gold Fire Sessions was produced primarily by DJ and Mixpak founder Dre Skull, along with a few unreleased songs conceived with Ricky Blaze and Diplo. The project finds her totally self-possessed and exuding a playful freedom that preserves the bubbly tone of its predecessor, 2016’s 99¢, but plays with the swagger of a top shotta; Santigold is unimpressed by big men with fat pockets who believe she might be bought on “Coo Coo Coo” and she dabbles in timely political commentary by “Crashing Your Party.” She relishes her freedom, owns her own lane, and is unafraid to challenge existing expectations about who she is and what she does.
Santigold trades in the occasional soundsystem flourish to commit to a careful, non-traditional interpolation of the dancehall sound. “Wha’ You Feel Like” is just breezy enough to take the hot weather house party scene by storm, borrowing from Sister Nancy’s time-honored "Bam Bam" riddim, while “A Perfect Life” throws back to the ’80s nostalgia of Brat Pack-era pop soundtracks, and “I Don’t Want” is a trap slow-drag driven by a pitchy pop vocal derived from the intersection of soul singer Deniece Williams’ upper register circa “Free” and the nasal performance of Bernard Wright on 1981 funk classic “Haboglabotribin.” All along, Santigold leans into vocal experimentation to expand upon her singular artistic footprint.
There are, however, moments when her Gold Fire Sessions performance comes across like borrowed clothes; the florid chords of “Don’t Blame Me” favor Tory Lanez and Ozuna’s “Pa Mì” while the melodic flow of “Wha’ You Feel Like” recalls Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money.” Though endlessly fun throughout, Santi’s aesthetic visits the realm of Afro-Caribbean inspired pop typically dominated by the likes of Rihanna and Gwen Stefani, and occasionally riddled by controversy when major rap acts have borrowed from the riddim and patois of island culture to the point of caricature.
As if to preempt any comparison in mainstream pop—or perhaps to justify her own indifference to crashing the boards in search of megastar status—she utilizes the refrain of “I Don’t Want” to clarify the ethos behind her musical and stylistic ideals. No fast talkin’ millionaire, no regrets, no saying what she doesn’t mean:
Don’t want to be a fake
I don’t want to beg
I don’t want to be a waste
I don’t want to be a lie
It ain’t sincere if I hold it back
Her approach to a career in the music industry prioritizes cool and creative freedom as the more valuable commodities, above commercial success.
The Gold Fire Sessions combines Santigold’s musical past with a passion for spontaneous experimentation. It plays like a distillation of joy. “Crashing Your Party,” “A Perfect Life,” and the titular closing track dip into the sonic territory of Blondie, bhangra, and afrobeats to suggest that Santigold created The Gold Fire Sessions much like she created herself: without borders or rules or walls. | 2018-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Downtown | July 30, 2018 | 7.4 | 7acdeb85-03ca-4f75-b9fb-90211b7c4457 | Karas Lamb | https://pitchfork.com/staff/karas-lamb/ | |
Nails make music for when you look at life and see little of value, for when you're feeling bitter and alone. On their latest, they make a little room for others to stare at the void with them. | Nails make music for when you look at life and see little of value, for when you're feeling bitter and alone. On their latest, they make a little room for others to stare at the void with them. | Nails: You Will Never Be One of Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21982-you-will-never-be-one-of-us/ | You Will Never Be One of Us | Over the course of their seven years in action, Nails have dedicated themselves to exploring the isolating nature of existential malaise. They’ve called their two full length LPs Unsilent Death and Abandon All Life, and on those two records, the Oxnard, California trio have perfected their defiant approach to the yawning void. They preach fatalist atheism or enact brutal masochism while diving headfirst into hardcore's darkest corners (grindcore, powerviolence, and d-beat just to name a few), and that’s all in the course of just a minute or two. It's music for when you look at life and see little of value, for when you're feeling bitter and alone in the face of chaos. Vocalist Todd Jones made his intentions clear at the peak of the 2012’s “No Surrender”: “My goal/Cause you pain.”
To that end, You Will Never Be One of Us will live up to the expectations of anyone who’s experienced a Nails album before. Eight of the record’s ten tracks are under two minutes long, and each is built around monochromatic blasts of distortion, double kick drums, Jones’ paper-shredder growls, and depressing track titles to match (see: “Life Is a Death Sentence,” “Violence Is Forever”) . The high-speed anxiety of tracks like “Made to Make You Fail” are as volatile and propulsive as jetfuel. It’s as hard as ever to make out Jones’ lyrics, but producer Kurt Ballou (of Converge, who also produced the band’s other two efforts) has gotten better at shaping his guttural abstractions. Even if it’s unclear exactly what he’s saying, the effect is crystal: he hurts and so will you.
Even in the record’s title, however, Nails have made it clear that their darkness is now just a little more complicated than the music they’ve made in the past. The video for the record’s title track opens with a host of friends (including Baroness’ John Baizley) uttering the ominous phrase, but it sounds natural regardless of who says it, as if anyone is capable of owning the sentiment as long as they’re willing to get in the right mindset. Though it’s a negative statement, defined in opposition, Jones has said in an interview that he intends it as “inclusive.” Each track on the record can be read as an invitation to join him in his unsettled meditations.
Knowing that you’re welcomed in, some of the differences between this record and those that preceded it become apparent. You Will Never Be One of Us feels less like a brick wall. This is most evident in the eight-minute closer “They Come Crawling Back,” which experiments with al sorts of unfamiliar sounds for Nails: There's frosty tremolo picking, bleak doom riffs, and siren-like leads before building into the sort of off-to-the-races hardcore they’re known for. It’s all of metal’s most downcast corners shoved together into a single eight minutes that fades slowly to nothingness. It’s a little something for anyone included in the “us” in the title, for everyone who’s ever found meaning in a flurry of fists in a mosh pit. | 2016-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Nuclear Blast | June 18, 2016 | 7.8 | 7acfcd9b-8ee7-48cb-9860-f7aa0dddf4ef | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | null |
With his new band Pillorian, former Agalloch vocalist/guitarist John Haughm dives more heavily into his former group’s black and dark metal roots. Their furious first album is slightly underwhelming. | With his new band Pillorian, former Agalloch vocalist/guitarist John Haughm dives more heavily into his former group’s black and dark metal roots. Their furious first album is slightly underwhelming. | Pillorian: Obsidian Arc | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22857-obsidian-arc/ | Obsidian Arc | Agalloch’s dissolution last year was a huge loss to bear, and only half of that has to do with how beloved the groundbreaking black metal group were. Vocalist/guitarist John Haughm was at the root of the breakup, something he’ll own up to: he wanted to tour more than the rest of the band, especially guitarist Don Anderson, who chose to focus on his academic career. Haughm irked fans by referring to himself as a “visionary,” not only committing the sin of Having an Ego (see: any time Kanye West makes headlines), but also marginalizing the contributions of his bandmates. Anderson was a key songwriter and brought much of the folk element to Agalloch. And Aesop Dekker, a powerhouse drummer who also plays key roles in VHÖL and Worm Ouroboros, crucially filled out their live sound.
To his credit, Haughm realized he had to break away from the Agalloch name and start anew. His latest group, Pillorian, strips away some of Agalloch’s neofolk influence and dives heavier into their black and dark metal roots. That he’s rebuilding is obvious throughout their debut Obsidian Arc. For a less experienced band, the album would be a promising starting point. For someone of Haughm’s caliber, it’s slightly underwhelming.
Pillorian’s strengths come from Agalloch’s familiar comforts—layered, sonorous riffs and tonal shifts as smooth as the guitars are heavy—delivered with more immediacy. “By the Light of a Black Sun” opens with the contrast of bright acoustic guitar and rolling metal waves that was a staple of 1999’s Pale Folklore and 2002’sThe Mantle. The allure reigns brief, before succumbing to Haughm’s torrents of fury, assisted by drummer Trevor Matthews and guitarist Stephen Parker. While there is another acoustic break towards the end of “Sun,” the song sets the tone for the rest of the album, specifically its reliance on more metallic drivers and moods. Like Agalloch, Pillorian still finds a balance between soft and loud closer to their more progressive rock influences—King Crimson and Genesis’ artier takes and Rush’s more hard-rock based brand—than post-rock. It’s a little more evident here, since Arc is Haughm’s most “metal” record thus far. Arc is far from breezy—no interludes, no folky passages—which clashes with Haughm’s evident urgency to get it out there. “The Sentient Arcanum” is the exception, drawing up on Haughm’s solo guitar ambient works, more Fennesz than Fleurety.
The rest of Arc is more furious, but no less majestic. “A Stygian Pyre” feels angrier than anything he’s ever done, an example of spark and quickness working in his favor. Haughm has a knack for elevating black metal’s fast-picked tremolos, revealing their symphonic potential. They are the fuel for Arc’s momentum, especially in “Sun” and “Pyre.” “Archanian Divinity” shows an affinity for Swedish black metal—especially Watain’s slower breaks and Dissection’s frosty, florlorn atmosphere and blackening of classic metal melodies. Haughm is a living Jon Nödtveidt without an accessory to murder charge, one who saw towering might in pushing the melodic pillars of Priest and Maiden to new heights.
While Agalloch existed in black metal’s progressive wing, they were still a metal band, and thus understood the magic of a rapturous solo. Those moments are rare in Arc, which is its main problem. Haughm knows how to give his songs heft, but he’s missing that lighter fluidity that complimented Agalloch’s nature themes. One exception is “Dark is the River of Man,” the closer, where those leads cut through the brooding atmosphere. It resembles Katatonia if they’d honed in on their death/doom sound, instead of turning into goth AOR. “Forged Iron Crucible” also features choral vocals that gleam at what made Agalloch great. Some more bursts of beauty like that would help.
Arc showcases Haughm’s singular metal voice and commanding presence, but it also reveals what a group effort Agalloch was. Haughm is floundering without the right partners; it proves why his “visionary” claim felt dubious. For any creative endeavor, a little self-assurance is necessary for survival. But no matter your skill, with a band, you can’t go it alone. | 2017-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Eisenwald | February 10, 2017 | 6.8 | 7ada23e3-eb1c-4213-aae2-87126d256784 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
The Minneapolis duo's surprise hit album finds them less narcissistically emo than on previous efforts; rather than himself, Slug explores a procession of rust-belt standbys-- late-shift waitress, warehouse worker, deadbeat dad, homeless man, Tom Waits-- straight out of Studs Terkel. | The Minneapolis duo's surprise hit album finds them less narcissistically emo than on previous efforts; rather than himself, Slug explores a procession of rust-belt standbys-- late-shift waitress, warehouse worker, deadbeat dad, homeless man, Tom Waits-- straight out of Studs Terkel. | Atmosphere: When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11471-when-life-gives-you-lemons-you-paint-that-shit-gold/ | When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold | Drug addiction is bad, but drama addiction might be worse. That is the lesson of "Shoulda Known", Atmosphere's salvo at that stock character, the enabler. Taken from Minneapolis duo's fifth studio album, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, the song is more dramatic monologue than soliloquy-- one of those rare moments when Slug isn't plumbing the depths of his favorite subject, Slug. (Watching the video for "Shoulda Known", you might gather that Slug's new subject is soon-to-be-rescued American Apparel models.) Even the album's title-- judged against their college-rap classics Overcast and Lucy Ford-- hints that this outing may be less, well, narcissistically emo. Could Atmosphere's sad-clown era really be over?
Slug's lyrics, it turns out, are refreshingly mundane. When Life Gives You Lemons comes off not so much as a memoir of a bohemian artist, but as an old liberal's debut short-story collection. It isn't as dull as it sounds. The enabler is one of many resolutely unglamorous figures here, joining a procession of rust-belt standbys-- late-shift waitress, warehouse worker, deadbeat dad, homeless man, Tom Waits-- straight out of Studs Terkel. It's a noble idea, but it doesn't quite suit Slug's talents, which can veer, in typical backpacker fashion, toward the didactic and sentimental. Even so, it is a welcome leap for the MC to step out of his turbulent inner life and into the shoes of unsung-- at least, unrapped-- working-class men and women.
Producer Ant isn't retracing old paths either-- though he finds more success than his partner. He sets "Shoulda Known", for instance, above synthetic handclaps and a glum, coldly fuzzed bass that, together, seem like the embryo of a Justin Timberlake track, before the star's producers add the de rigueur layers and velocity. It's a far cry from the humbly retro collage of samples that grounded Ant's signature sound in the past-- and it works. In a marriage of live instrumentation and vintage analog synths, Ant finds a new way to build set pieces for Slug's tortured narratives. Take the soulfully cheesy, ersatz-Gnarls Barkley "You", for instance. Sticking to the second-person perspective, and unburdened by the gnawed-to-oblivion themes of drug abuse, "You" could have been a strong lead single. Everyone knows about the needle and the damage done; the question forgotten by too many songwriters, faithfully remembered here, is how ordinary folks make it through the day and make ends meet. Along the same lines, at the heart of "Dreamer" and "Guarantees" are families trying to get by in a broken, dead-end economy.
Obviously the trials of parenthood, not exactly a staple on DJ playlists, loom large in Slug's visions of 9-to-5 life. Lyrically, like the songs in between, those that bookend When Life Gives You Lemons are adventurous precisely because they're not adventurous, not spectacular, not sensational. "Like the Rest of Us" introduces the album with a sleepy melody from a child's music box. The song proceeds with a loop of smoky-nightclub pianos, a plaintive backdrop for Slug's smooth whispers about mothers-to-be and casual cocaine users. But a brighter, faster music box gives the album's closer, "In Her Music Box", a vibe that is wrier and angrier, perfect for a song about the R-rated nihilism streaming out of parents' car radios. The thread that runs from the first song to the last is a warm sympathy for working-class heroes and antiheroes-- especially the ones trying raise kids.
More energy and less uniformly drab scenery might have kept these well-intentioned stories from blurring into each other. One that stands apart is the mainstream-aimed "Guarantees", which treads dangerously close to mall-core. Too often the duo's slow, spartan approach just assures that songs like "Your Glasshouse" and "The Skinny" never leave the ground. And the middling tempos are only partly to blame. "Wild Wild Horses" leans on a metaphor that, let's face it, will never be pried from the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers.
That said, When Life Gives You Lemons still helps lift Atmosphere further out of indie-rap territory. The shaggy-dog narratives of ordinary people buffeted by everyday tragedies are still rare outside the genre, despite rap's origins in exactly that hue of storytelling. So even when Slug gives in to his inner corniness, we let him off the hook. Granted, the production makes the naturalism pill easier to swallow. Open-minded fans will thank Ant, whose piano-driven works ("Yesterday", the opening two tracks) and darkly pretty "Painting" reveal a mind keeping up with his partner's, amplifying and deepening and, in his phrase, Quincy-Jonesing the record's vistas of blue-collar melancholia. | 2008-05-02T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-05-02T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Rhymesayers | May 2, 2008 | 7 | 7ada3ad1-776d-438f-9acb-2fa9504fe3bd | Pitchfork | null |
|
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the duo’s first and only album, a cool and atmospheric bomb thrown into the waters of ’90s R&B. | 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 duo’s first and only album, a cool and atmospheric bomb thrown into the waters of ’90s R&B. | Groove Theory: Groove Theory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/groove-theory-groove-theory/ | Groove Theory | Bryce Wilson founded Groove Theory to resuscitate his creative drive. The Queens native had joined the hip-house group Mantronix as a teenager in the late ’80s to chase rap dreams, but the group’s dense, racing production left little room for the battle rapping and beatboxing he grew up on. A few years later, burned out after touring and recording two albums, Wilson quit the group. “I didn’t want to do dance,” he later told the music weekly Echoes. He did still want to make music, though, so he embraced producing, hoping it would take him where Mantronix hadn’t.
Wilson bought equipment and started messing around. He had no clue what he was doing, so he’d listen to records by soul maven Donny Hathaway and new jack swing architect Teddy Riley and reconstruct them. For a year, he fiddled around in his home studio, refining his beat-making bit by bit. He eventually became skilled enough to land a publishing deal, and Groove Theory soon followed, its name intended to invoke body and mind, impulse and intention.
The group’s eventual 1995 debut touched down during an R&B explosion years in the making. Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton, and Whitney Houston topped the charts with soaring, melismatic ballads. Yearning boy bands like Boyz II Men and Soul for Real sang wistfully of bended knees and candy-coated raindrops, while teen dynamos Brandy and Monica crooned about crushes and shit days. TLC crept; Jodeci feened and freeked; D’Angelo and Mary J. Blige repurposed ’70s soul for smoky fusionism and slick blues. The genre was so ascendant that even pop provocateur Madonna drew from its waters, roping in super producers Babyface, Dallas Austin, and Dave Hall for her uncharacteristically earnest sixth album.
Groove Theory peered into this vast, teeming ocean and shrugged. United in contrarianism, Wilson and eventual bandmate Amel Larrieux defined themselves against the dominant sounds of the day and set about toning down spectacle and emphasizing atmosphere. Their first and only album together, a moody, downtempo R&B record, posited Quiet Storm, a radio format that celebrated generations of Black music but was often hostile to rap attitudes and sounds, as R&B’s next frontier. Imagine Belly’s iconic title sequence—goons snaking through a throng of clubgoers, warm blue light encased in darkness, the icy melodies of Soul II Soul’s Caron Wheeler—and then escort all the occupants outside. That resulting husk of space is Groove Theory: vacated, lonely, but still communal, traces of others lingering in the air. By the end of the decade, the pair would split, Larrieux diving into jazz and soul, and Wilson producing for bigger acts like Toni Braxton and Mary J. Blige. But in the few years they were together, Groove Theory quietly resisted the rising tide.
Before Wilson met Larrieux, the groove was truly theoretical. As Wilson recruited singers for Groove Theory, even one from Mantronix, no one seemed to understand his spare, chilled-out production—especially his publisher, Rondor Music, who wanted him to make tracks that featured the explosive, adrenal rhythms of new jack swing. He found a kindred spirit in Larrieux, a songwriter, and assistant to Karen Durant, the music exec who signed Wilson. At 19, she already had a well-developed artistic identity after attending Philadelphia’s High School for Creative and Performing Arts and growing up in the West Village’s famed and eclectic Westbeth building, a rent-controlled apartment complex for artists. A lover of poetry, jazz, and Sade Adu with a subdued, sensual style, Larrieux clashed with producers who wanted her to be loud and sexy.
Wilson was different. At the recommendation of Durant, Larrieux wrote lyrics to one of Wilson’s beats and then went to his home studio to record a demo. They recorded it in his tiny bathroom, and Wilson was so mesmerized by their chemistry that he invited her into the group. She seemed to share his commitment to drawing outside the lines. “Her melodies and her notes were just like coming from a totally different angle,” he explained.
Larrieux accepted, and subsequent bathroom sessions produced the single “Tell Me,” their forthcoming hit and most canonized song. Built around a supple bassline, slick percussion, and soft keys, “Tell Me” blurs admission and confrontation. “I’ve been doing my own thing/Love has always had a way of having bad timing,” Larrieux sings, winding up for a question that’s actually a command. The track’s throbbing rhythms and cool mood embodied Wilson’s vision for the group, R&B as body high and head-trip.
Larrieux and Wilson had no attachment to the song though, because Larrieux had originally written the lyrics for another singer. Pawning off “Tell Me” to British group Rhythm N Bass, they left it behind as they recorded Groove Theory, returning to it at the butt end of the process just to pad out the album—and not at all expecting it to be a hit. In their view, “Tell Me” was too easy to make, “so straight up I’m embarrassed,” Larrieux said as their official version charted. It also wasn’t innovative enough.
Wilson hoped to, in his words, “kill new jack swing,” a goal borne out of his battle rap-bred competitive spirit and his frustration with music execs asking him to copy his muse Teddy Riley. And Larrieux wanted to dethrone sex as the default language and image of love. In a 1995 interview, she said, “I’m trying to make the impression on young women that you don’t have to be this sexy goddess—just have a love for music.” Groove Theory’s second single, “Keep Tryin’,” subtly broadcasts their anti-pop creed. “Your day is coming though it seems far/Things will be clear when you love who you are,” Larrieux sings with sweet conviction.
Groove Theory did avoid overt sexuality, but the omission was more a product of contrarianism than prudishness. “We have no desire to make ‘fast food music’ or sound like everyone else on the radio,” said Wilson in 1995. That deviant ethos drove them to seek themes other than heartbreak, desire, and romance. Although there’s plenty of all three on Groove Theory, songs like “Baby Luv,” a sweet ode to Larrieux’s daughter, and “Time Flies,” a track about the whiplash of growing up, explore passion without eros.
That divergent impulse extended to their influences, which ranged from soul and R&B classics to their contemporaries. Their lush cover of Todd Rundgren's “Hello It’s Me” is indebted to the Isley Brothers’ classic take on the song, radiating both longing and melancholy. The track doesn’t feel like a throwback though; compared to the Isley version, Groove Theory’s drums are snappier, the bassline meatier. And Wilson’s jazz-inflected production on “Time Flies” and “You’re Not the 1,” which was originally written for Mary J. Blige, channel the slick-but-street beats of Q-Tip and DJ Premier. Groove Theory detested the radio, but they loved Black music.
One significant difference between Wilson’s beats and those of rap producers is a complete rejection of samples. Although the rhythm elements on “Tell Me” sound eerily similar to the ’80s classic “All Night Long” by the Mary Jane Girls, the song, like every other track on Groove Theory, blends programmed beats and live instrumentation. Session musicians, especially producer Darryl Brown, who Larrieux dubs the third member of the group in the liner notes, are heard across the album. Brown’s bass and guitar touches on “Come Home” offset Wilson’s thundering drum programming, underscoring the hope in Larrieux’s downcast writing. “The street will never love you like I do/So leave that life behind and come home/Come home/Baby, come home,” she pleads.
Brown’s deft hands also guide “Ride” and “Hey U,” Groove Theory’s takes on G-funk. Larrieux’s coyness short-circuits the former. When she sings she wants to go for a ride with a lover, she truly means getting into an automobile and turning a key. There’s no adventure, escape, or innuendo to the statement, a far cry from Adina Howard unsubtly beckoning “Do you wanna ride?” or Dr. Dre rolling in the four with 16 switches. The slow-burning “Hey U” fares better at funking out, Larrieux’s aching melodies and breathy harmonies wafting over Wilson and Brown’s sauntering, hydraulic beat. “All that’s left to say is hey you/Hey you,” she coos, stretching the embarrassment of seeing a rejected ex in public into graceful resignation.
Although Groove Theory’s fusions never feel as audacious as the worldbuilding taking place on other syncretic mid-’90s R&B albums like Meshell Ndegeocello’s Plantation Lullabies, Sade’s Love Deluxe, D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar, and Janet Jackson’s janet., there’s no friction from all the blending. Groove Theory imagined R&B as a tentpole genre that could house jazz scats, funk grooves, and rap edge without conflict. It’s no accident that the terms most often used to describe the group are “cool” and “smooth.”
That lack of tension turns out to be a feature as much as a bug. Larrieux sometimes seems so intent on avoiding histrionics and melodrama that she undersells her most impassioned writing. “10 Minute High” and “Boy at the Window” center on a teenage girl addicted to a drug and a boy who idolizes a womanizing, absentee father, but the characters are so tragic that they don’t feel real. And Larrieux’s restrained vocals drain the songs of urgency. She clearly had Sade songs like “Tar Baby” and “Maureen” on her mind (and probably some Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye cuts, too), but she hadn’t yet learned to wield melancholy and darkness rather than just evoke them.
Groove Theory’s arch R&B didn’t take hold among listeners or their peers. “Tell Me” went gold, as did the album, but most modern mentions of the group are soaked in nostalgia, the music invoked as a portal to adolescence and young adulthood. “‘Tell me’ IMMEDIATELY takes you back to the 90s,” writer Panama Jackson wrote for The Root in 2018, a typical paean. The group’s musical legacy is also scant. “Tell Me” has been sampled by Sadat X, G-Unit, and Wale, and Solange, Hikaru Utada, and Kelela have cited Larrieux as an influence, but Groove Theory ended up being a marginal record in a decade where all strains of R&B reigned supreme. A faint line can be drawn from Groove Theory’s hushed sensuality and hard beats to Little Dragon, the xx, and R&B duos like Denitia and Sene and Lion Babe, but it would be imposed rather than traced.
That small footprint is in part a product of the group essentially breaking up when Larrieux left over creative differences and launched her idiosyncratic solo career. Wilson later recorded a second Groove Theory album with singer Makeda Davis that reimagined the group as radio-friendly, but that refurb—which was shelved and later leaked—only underscores the charms of the original lineup. That sequence of events and occasional reunion concerts have prompted interviewers to regularly ask Larrieux and Wilson about the possibility of a true Groove Theory sequel, a question both artists have answered enthusiastically. But it’s probably more fitting that an album designed to bypass radio and commerce lives on in memories, unmoored from the music industry and canons but appended to bodies that, during some distant commute or club night or first kiss, felt, and still feel, the groove. | 2022-07-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-03T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony Music Entertainment | July 3, 2022 | 7.7 | 7ae210b3-9a6a-4299-a886-123db076d8da | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The instrumental duo of guitarist Patrick McDermott and pedal steel player Barry Walker meld country-folk composition with ambient sonics, creating a languid and colorful world. | The instrumental duo of guitarist Patrick McDermott and pedal steel player Barry Walker meld country-folk composition with ambient sonics, creating a languid and colorful world. | North Americans: Roped In | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/north-americans-roped-in/ | Roped In | One joy of ambient music: the space it gives a listener to just be. Departing from prescriptivist emotional cues and binary thought, the genre rewards patience without demanding a verdict. A country-indebted subgenre has emerged within that universe thanks to the pedal steel guitar, a notoriously fussy and expensive instrument that delivers heavenly tones for all the trouble it demands, as suited for conjuring mystical desert landscapes as it is for adding elasticity to country classics. Following leads from Susan Alcorn and Daniel Lanois, acts like SUSS, Chuck Johnson, Mute Duo, and now North Americans have all recently gamboled in that realm. The project began as a vehicle for Los Angeles-based acoustic guitarist Patrick McDermott, who is joined by Portland pedal steel player Barry Walker on Roped In, a rich and languid addition to the country-ambient canon.
Roped In bears some of the hazy float of Walker’s 2018 album, Diaspora Urkontinent, but a softer, more melodic focus sets it apart from both Walker’s more free-ranging solo work and McDermott’s earlier material. On Going Steady, the previous North Americans album, the guitarist occasionally tucked his fingerpicking under sheets of fuzz, but he allows himself more breathing room here, drawing out melodies between Walker’s resonant curls. “Good Doer” is the album’s closest thing to a downer, with an anxious guitar line and fuzzy pedal steel, but even it can’t sour the album’s sanguine mood. Whatever you need to feel, Roped In gives you space to feel it.
The album’s nine pieces are all fairly short, none of them lasting for more than four and a half minutes. Rather than prioritizing complete sensory immersion, Roped In focuses on the tension of form and formlessness between the acoustic and pedal steel guitars, emphasizing the former’s agility and the latter’s unbound contours. On “Rivers That You Cannot See,” Walker curves sustained notes over McDermott’s short cycles of strumming, then layers his own picking into a dense peak. The pair slow to a molasses-like slide on “Run Down,” with low reverb forming a droning foundation to their interplay. They’re at their strongest with “American Dipper,” where their tumbling instrumental lines become almost inextricable.
While Walker and McDermott make a capable team, guest appearances from guitarist William Tyler and harpist Mary Lattimore bring more nuance to their efforts. Tyler’s contributions bookend the record—opener “Memory of Lunch,” plus the album’s final two tracks—and his own lithe fingerpicking style is well-matched to McDermott’s without upstaging it. Meanwhile, “Run Down” and “Furniture in the Valley” show Lattimore’s knack for bringing extra sparkle to everything she touches.
The soft edges of Roped In make it both a sublime record in its own right as well as a pleasant, inviting portal into a wider world of simpatico artists. The album feels like the aural equivalent of gazing into a massive and well-appointed aquarium, a vessel for color and movement that quietly soothes as it shuttles along.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Experimental | Third Man | October 21, 2020 | 7.3 | 7ae55354-fc38-406b-821a-3e19d4b31a2c | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Carter Tanton has played with artists like Lower Dens, Twin Shadow, and Marissa Nadler. For his latest solo record, he transforms himself into a Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter, building a record around a single theme: the slow destruction of a relationship. | Carter Tanton has played with artists like Lower Dens, Twin Shadow, and Marissa Nadler. For his latest solo record, he transforms himself into a Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter, building a record around a single theme: the slow destruction of a relationship. | Carter Tanton: Jettison The Valley | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21655-jettison-the-valley/ | Jettison The Valley | Carter Tanton is a tough guy to pin down. Since 2005, he’s fronted hyped rock bands (the sadly defunct Tulsa), released solo records that jumped wildly from genre to genre, and collaborated with numerous top-tier indie acts, including Lower Dens, Twin Shadow, and Marissa Nadler. He's a hard worker with serious chops—as a guitarist, a vocalist, and a producer—but his career’s volatility has tended to keep these talents on the sidelines.
Jettison the Valley marks a fresh start for the Baltimore native, an attempt to reintroduce Tanton as a thoughtfully earnest singer-songwriter. (Tanton considers Jettison to be his first proper solo album even though it’s the third he’s released under his own name.) His last effort, 2011’s admirable-if-uneven Free Clouds, flirted with synth-heavy electronica, country, shoegaze and Paul Westerberg-worshipping indie rock—all recorded under a lo-fi haze. On Jettison, Tanton’s work coheres into a single musical vision—lush Laurel Canyon folk—and a single theme: the slow destruction of a relationship.
A bad breakup can be a crutch for a songwriter who isn’t sure of his abilities, a source of lazy metaphors and cheap emotion. But Tanton handles the story (Carter and his British girlfriend move to England, where they live in a caravan outside Bristol and later in a tiny attic apartment in Oxford, before calling it quits) with nuance and compassion. Tanton wrote the entire record in Britain while the relationship disintegrated, and the sorry tale serves as a much-needed counterpoint to the record’s florid, over-bright production.
Jettison’s excellent first three tracks set the tone: elegant fingerpicked guitar, pedal steel, thick harmonies, and supple, kick-heavy percussion reminiscent of Neil Young’s Harvest—a vision of sun-dappled California as seen through rain-drenched British pub windows. On the gorgeous opener, "Twenty-Nine Palms," Tanton finds himself standing in the California desert with his mind on a woman (possibly across the Atlantic, it’s not entirely clear) "who took me rather far out of view." While on the next track, "Fresh Faced Claire," the perspective flips: Now Tanton’s stuck in "the old empire" living in a "halfway home for the breaking down," his relationship slowly collapsing as he longs to return to the sunny West Coast. This dichotomy—California vs. England, sunlight vs. clouds, movement vs. stasis—remains in tension throughout Jettison, lending weight and a sense of drama to an otherwise rather straightforward collection of songs.
Beck’s Sea Change—a shining example of the hoary old breakup record if there ever was one—would be the obvious musical touchstone here, if it wasn’t for Tanton’s emotive, breathy, very un-Beck-like tenor. It’s an undeniably beautiful thing, and Tanton has never sounded more self-assured, particularly on the languid closer "Diamonds in the Mine" and on "Through the Garden Gates" and "Twenty-Nine Palms," both of which feature a welcome vocal assist from Sharon Van Etten. But Tanton’s voice is strong medicine: All that sweetness can turn cloying when the arrangements and reverb-heavy production are just as syrupy, as they are on the brooding Smiths-tribute "Poison in the Dart."
All of which leaves Tanton’s fluidly inventive guitar playing as the record’s most enduring pleasure. British folkies like Richard Thompson and Michael Chapman are lodestars, as is, oddly enough, James Taylor, whose mannered melodicism shows up on "The Long Goodbye." There are surprises too: The rambling title track (starring Marissa Nadler on lead vocals) stops abruptly just before the four-minute mark before embarking on an extended instrumental coda that builds to a hot rash of dueling 6- and 12-string guitars.
For his first major statement as a solo artist, Tanton could have made an entire record of jagged indie rock (see Free Clouds’ "Horrorscope"), woozy shoegaze (see Free Clouds’ "Fake Pretend"), or Day-Glo electronica (see anything from his recent synth project Luxury Liners). Instead, he made a fairly conventional country-folk record about a breakup. And yet there is great satisfaction in witnessing a creatively manic artist like Carter Tanton finally settle in to himself. On Jettison, Tanton quietly sits down, picks up his guitar, and, without fuss or self-importance, transforms himself into a singer-songwriter. Surely that is a statement worth making. | 2016-03-10T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-03-10T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Western Vinyl | March 10, 2016 | 6.4 | 7ae6be90-0186-4bb5-b37c-329dddddb9a4 | John S.W. MacDonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-s.w. macdonald/ | null |
The Brooklyn artist’s debut is 20 minutes of chaotic, passionate, electronic rage music. Think Lil’ Kim and rhinestones, Bring Me the Horizon and silver spiderweb bras, Death Grips and latex doggy gear. | The Brooklyn artist’s debut is 20 minutes of chaotic, passionate, electronic rage music. Think Lil’ Kim and rhinestones, Bring Me the Horizon and silver spiderweb bras, Death Grips and latex doggy gear. | LustSickPuppy: CAROUSEL FROM HELL | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lustsickpuppy-carousel-from-hell/ | CAROUSEL FROM HELL | LustSickPuppy—who makes a madcap meld of punk, digital hardcore, rave, and rap—typically exerts a hyper-confident lusty indignation. It’s not that Tommy Hayes, the mind behind LustSickPuppy (LSP to the heads), doesn’t ever mention romance or melancholy within the turbulence of their mostly self-produced discography, which now totals 27 songs and a tad over 45 minutes, all counted. But all over their debut album CAROUSEL FROM HELL is the image of peeling back: “Peel ya skin back/Peel back all of my layers.” We get one surprising moment of tenderness with an almost sweetly sung “I love you, I love you/I want you to stay,” but as we move along, this peeling works in reverse, the tenderness revealed to be anger, as though to say the deepest of feeling is passionate rage.
This is the kind of music you get with or you don’t. It’s hard, it’s fast, it’s ambitious, loud, a maelstrom of genres and references only someone who grew up in Crown Heights going to punk shows and traipsing on the weirder corners of the ’00s internet would want to make. In response to my attempt to explain exactly what LSP does, a friend said “I can’t keep up with the kids.” But in certain circles of a DIY scene that centers harsh noise and breakbeats—such as those familiar with what was once called The Mutants and included Deli Girls, Dreamcrusher, and Kill Alters—LustSickPuppy is royalty. Fans will have lyrics memorized within days of a drop; they’ll bark when ordered to bark.
At barely 20 minutes, CAROUSEL is the longest LSP release to date—which I suppose is what makes it an album and not an EP, like 2020’s COSMIC BROWNIE or 2022’s AS HARD AS YOU CAN. It’s COSMIC BROWNIE’s “Graveyard Smash” and AS HARD AS YOU CAN’s “Ego Bruiser” that are key to this world—a world Hayes told Office Mag was built with and for “weird little creatures who like to dance until they die.” The former is a flip on “Monster Mash,” crawling with “Ghouls and goblins, creatures mobbing.” The latter is a sex romp (“This pussy I keep it sticky”) whose zany video features Hayes as a blonde-wigged bodybuilder. There’s always humor. This must be emphasized. CAROUSEL’s final song “Chokehold” rhymes “Tamagotchi” with “Hitachi” and throughout are tongue-in-cheek quips and self-references, giggles and lols.
The LSP universe includes but is not limited to: Lil’ Kim and neon clown makeup, Foxy Brown and rhinestones, Bring Me the Horizon and silver spiderweb bras, Death Grips and latex doggy gear. They once, for Halloween, had a prosthetic hand giving the finger made as a mask. Hayes tweets such things as, “I hate being referred to as mother plz instead refer to me as overlord,” and suggests one listen to CAROUSEL plugged into Doc Brown’s enormous amp from the beginning of Back to the Future. A porn site ad-esque gif promo-ing “CHOKEHOLD”: “Are u a Sick Puppy?? LustSickPuppy wants to put YOU in a chokehold. You won’t last 2:07!!!” CAROUSEL is missing the goofy found sounds and allusions and some of the playfulness I so loved about their previous output, but it doesn’t lack for moxie.
Hayes floats somewhere between self-drawn cartoon character and dominatrix daddy you’re dying to please. The personality is inextricable from the music, which is breakneck and uncompromising. It’s all ego, but it’s an ego that’s welcoming, not self-centered but self-assured, one that rolls between tender outrage at rigged systems and furious sensuality. Maybe it’s not so surprising, after all, that there’s some sweet-sounding affection tucked into all the chaos. | 2024-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-29T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | April 29, 2024 | 7.2 | 7ae7a2fa-69a2-491a-8c54-cffc7fe3df74 | Leah Mandel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/leah-mandel / | |
Nine years after the Rapture’s final album, the group’s singer/guitarist returns with his debut solo album, grappling with fatherhood and legacies of trauma in adventurous, ambient-infused art rock. | Nine years after the Rapture’s final album, the group’s singer/guitarist returns with his debut solo album, grappling with fatherhood and legacies of trauma in adventurous, ambient-infused art rock. | Luke Jenner: 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/luke-jenner-1/ | 1 | The Rapture were so good at being a dance-punk band that it’s easy to forget they spent much of their existence chafing against being pigeonholed as one. Go back and listen to the three albums they released between 2003 and 2011 and what you hear isn’t so much a cool, club-conquering groove machine as a strange, vulnerable, occasionally psychedelic pop group trapped inside one. If signature songs “House of Jealous Lovers” and “Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks” brought panic to the disco, curveball ballads like “Open Up Your Heart” and hippy-dippy detours like “Live in Sunshine” revealed the Rapture wanted not just to dance until the break of dawn, but to stick around for breakfast, too.
As it turns out, that tension between late-night decadence and morning-after innocence was about more than simply sidestepping indie-dance trends; it was also a reflection of the emotional tug-of-war playing out in singer/guitarist Luke Jenner’s life. As he’s since made clear in interviews, the Rapture’s ascent had a damaging effect on his marriage, while the arrival of his son in 2006—and the death of his mother by suicide that same year—put him in the nigh-impossible position of trying to be both a successful, globe-trotting musician and a present, engaged family man. Eventually, he put his career on pause to focus on being a better dad. “Well, we’re all getting bigger, but it takes time to be a man,” Jenner sang on the last song of the last Rapture album to date, and he wasn’t bullshitting. In his case, it’s taken almost a decade—a period spent reconnecting with his family, getting involved with his local community, and confronting the darkest moments of his past.
Jenner’s musical equipment hasn’t exactly been collecting dust that whole time—before reuniting the Rapture for a couple of dates in 2019, he kept busy playing drums in the DIY no-wave group Seedy Films (which he formed with some amateur musician friends he’d been mentoring) and making bedroom techno under the name Meditation Tunnel. But while 1, the first installment of a planned trilogy, marks his first proper solo album, it’s less a confessional singer/songwriter record than an abstract reimagining of one, where raw lyrical introspection and open-hearted devotionals are filtered through the exploratory ethos of an ambient soundtrack producer. While a handful of tracks provide distant aftershocks of the Rapture’s dancefloor pulse, the guiding principle isn’t so much post-punk as post-Floyd, foregrounding languid acoustic pastorales, stargazing electric-guitar slides, and ominous sound effects (ringing alarms and explosions included) that hark back to the classic-rock icons’ mid-’70s imperial phase.
Jenner has said he named his Meditation Tunnel project after a sleeping-aid toy for kids, but 1 takes that concept to a more literal level—this record isn’t so much a collection of songs as a group-therapy session, its tracks connected by various field recordings of Jenner interviewing members of his community about the meaning of life and love. As in those sorts of meetings, Jenner’s objective is to create a safe, welcoming space before working up the courage to open up and bleed. We don’t even hear his vocals until a full 10 minutes into the record, partway through the epic second track, “All My Love.” With the song’s Funeral-marching beat providing moral support, Jenner reveals his self-doubt, but that anxiety soon turns to exultation as he reaffirms his loyalty to his family en route to a triumphant, Joshua Tree-scaling finale.
On 1, Jenner finally embraces the domestic bliss he once dreamed of on those Rapture records, but the album doesn’t shy away from delving into the struggles he endured to get there. Jenner has said that his desire to be a more committed father to his son stems from his fear of replicating the dysfunctional family environment he was raised in, and 1’s most captivating moments reverberate with the aftershocks of deep-seated trauma. “Asshole” is a frank account of sexual abuse that, in perverse Lynchian fashion, accesses the past through a nostalgic doo-wop serenade. A similar combination of candor and valor pervades the piano ballad “You’re Not Alone,” a devastating portrait of bullying and parental neglect that manages to spin personal pain into communal healing.
As tracks like these confirm, Jenner is no longer the hyperactive shrieker of old. While throbbing, bass-driven instrumentals like “If There Is a God” (whose storm-cloud ambience suggests a disco remix of “Riders on the Storm”) may whet the appetite for a new Rapture album, he mostly favors a tender, graceful delivery that both reflects his current lot in life and respects the sensitivity of the album’s subject matter. In fact, 1 could use more of his voice—Jenner’s lead vocals are heard on only four of these 10 tracks and, after a while, the soundscapes start to blur into one long slow-motion, cosmic campfire hallucination.
Fortunately, Jenner outfits this meticulous album with a pressure-release valve in the closing “About to Explode,” which feels less like a spontaneous combustion than a slow, satisfying exhale. Over a gleaming melody that hovers somewhere between “Heroes” and Disintegration, Jenner leaves us with a thought that echoes his previous sign-off: “It takes time to get to this place/It takes time to finish this race.” On an album that celebrates Jenner’s hard-fought contentment, it’s a sobering reminder that overcoming trauma and becoming a better husband and father aren’t some magical end state, but an ideal to work toward every day.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Manono | July 28, 2020 | 7.4 | 7af4eeac-736a-449a-b20f-37fb2dfe8a15 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Burial’s longest release in years doubles down on his signature sounds and downcast mood. A collaged chorus of voices holds together a windswept expanse of undulating nothingness. | Burial’s longest release in years doubles down on his signature sounds and downcast mood. A collaged chorus of voices holds together a windswept expanse of undulating nothingness. | Burial: Antidawn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/burial-antidawn/ | Antidawn | Burial’s Antidawn opens with a sound so subtle, so instinctive, you might miss it the first half-dozen times: the muted harrumph of a throat being cleared. But no opening line or expository declaration materializes in its wake. Instead, a thousand shades of gray rush in to fill the void. In the background, a blunted stylus pushes its way endlessly through a dusty vinyl rut, the Sisyphean loop that carries all Burial’s music. Chimes shimmer in the darkness; a low wind blows. Far in the distance, a voice faintly reminiscent of Gregorian chant flares up and is snuffed out, like a votive in a drafty nave. Almost a full minute passes before we hear the next thing resembling a melody—a brief snippet of a voice plaintively singing, “You came around my way”—but its appearance is fleeting, followed only by more emptiness.
Across five tracks, Burial proceeds like this for nearly 44 minutes, teasing imminent emotional payoff and then slipping back into the murk. It is his longest offering since 2007’s Untrue—long enough to qualify as his long-awaited third album, if he had chosen to call it that. But it is also the London musician’s most insubstantial release, seemingly by design. The music simply meanders, drifting across stray synthesizers, snatches of voice, and Burial’s habitual diegetic sound effects—coughs, lighter flicks, crickets, thunder, rainfall—severed from any context. There are few musical landmarks and little in the way of recognizable compositional form. Crucially, there are almost no drums. Not the 2-step rhythms that have defined Burial’s work since the very beginning. Not the thrumming trance and techno pulses that have been leaking into songs like “Space Cadet” as of late. Not even the soft downbeat grooves of a ballad like “Her Revolution” or “His Rope.” (The salient exception: a brief stretch of muted kick drums, halfway through “New Love,” whose cottony thump recalls Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project.) Burial is no stranger to doom and gloom, but Antidawn is a barren wasteland, warmed only by the occasional church organ or doleful scrap of love song.
This is not the first time Burial has muted his drums. He did it on 2016’s “Nightmarket,” an eerie collage of beatless synth melodies and static that marked a significant break from the hard-charging “Temple Sleeper.” The following year’s spacious “Subtemple” and “Beachfires” descended deeper into ambient music’s chilly nether regions, and he went undersea spelunking once again with last year’s “Dolphinz,” a nine-minute expanse of cetacean wails and ominous sub-bass drone. Within the ambient corner of Burial’s oeuvre, what distinguishes Antidawn, beyond its extreme sprawl, is the collaged chorus of voices that holds together its windswept expanse of undulating nothingness. Mostly sung rather than spoken, these sampled utterances coalesce around themes of absence, desire, and unease.
“Hold me,” pleads a voice in the opening “Strange Neighbourhood”; “Nowhere to go,” murmurs another, before a third answers, “Walking through these streets.” “Shadow Paradise” deploys entreaty after entreaty: “Let me hold you”; “Come to me, my love”; “Take me into the night.” It sounds as though Burial has gone through his record collection and gathered all the bits where a singer begins a verse with little or no accompaniment, except perhaps a single quavering synthesizer. Particularly on the closing “Upstairs Flat,” the cumulative effect is like a love letter written in disappearing ink, the narrative reduced to just a few brushstrokes: “You came my way”; “Somewhere in the darkest night”; “When you’re alone”; “Here I am.” Against the ticking of a grandfather clock and a few mournful notes of muted trumpet, the record ends with a garbled plea that sounds a lot like “Come bury me”—a fitting capstone for this intensely interior EP.
Is Antidawn a potent distillation of Burial’s aesthetic, or a caricature of it? I keep vacillating between those two assessments. Few artists are as beholden to their stylistic tics as Burial; by all rights, he should have painted himself into a corner long ago, yet he’s kept things interesting by splashing garish colors and jarring details—the gospel house of “Dark Gethsemane,” the acid-trance arpeggios of “Chemz”—over his resolutely grayscale palette. Antidawn makes no room for that kind of surprise. Instead, it doubles down on his signature sounds and steadfastly downcast mood; its melancholy is so pervasive that it risks being sucked into a maudlin undertow.
Still, if you are in a mood to submit to its spell, Antidawn can exert a powerful pull. Burial has never displayed much fealty to the gridded regularity of most contemporary electronic music—he claimed to create his early songs using rudimentary audio editors that lack the quantized precision of advanced music-composition software—and Antidawn drifts further from conventional musical meter than ever. Even in the near-total absence of drums, however, a different kind of rhythm begins to suggest itself. For all the music’s apparent aimlessness, these synths, voices, sound effects, and pockets of silence are carefully paced; they add up to a kind of tidal ebb and flow, a give and take as natural as breathing.
In recent years, Burial has increasingly tried to escape the linearity of dance music by cobbling together pieces of songs into multi-part suites. With Antidawn, he makes the most of that technique; every track is riddled with fake-outs, false endings, and trapdoors. In that sense, despite the record’s heavy-handedness, there is something playful about Antidawn. Burial’s relentless refusal to deliver anything like closure suggests an acidic sense of humor, the musical equivalent of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I keep returning to that cough at the beginning of the record, and the curious sense of absence that it signals. I imagine a portrait sitter clearing their throat and abandoning the scene: Only the mottled velvet backdrop remains, yet the painter persists. The background becomes the foreground; the artist’s private obsessions—ruminative, claustrophobic, maybe even alienating—swell to fill the frame.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | January 11, 2022 | 7.3 | 7af607c0-5a69-4cb3-a8f4-0fdf512f43c7 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Citing death metal and Phil Spector as influences, the Kentucky metalcore band turn in an absurdly heavy EP that tells an even heavier story about death and grief. | Citing death metal and Phil Spector as influences, the Kentucky metalcore band turn in an absurdly heavy EP that tells an even heavier story about death and grief. | Knocked Loose: A Tear in the Fabric of Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/knocked-loose-a-tear-in-the-fabric-of-life/ | A Tear in the Fabric of Life | If Knocked Loose haven’t been subject to much critical analysis, that’s just an occupational hazard of the kind of gut-level metalcore the quintet play here: the guitars churn out either dyspeptic, detuned chug or octave-shifted panic chords. Vocalist Bryan Garris is a one-man Milgram experiment, shrieking like he’s getting a 285-volt shock and bellowing demonically like the guy pushing the button. Dramatic cymbal accents come courtesy of a guy from Kentucky nicknamed “PacSun.” There are video game samples, car crash sound effects, and a point when the music drops out for a deadpan recitation of the title. Many times, similar gestures amount to a caricature of intense, serious music that’s nearly impossible to take seriously. But while A Tear in the Fabric of Life still sounds hyperbolic enough to override any left brain activity, Knocked Loose apply themselves with purpose to tell a story with real emotional depth.
Though Knocked Loose’s studio albums have been hailed as modern scene classics, they fall victim to another occupational hazard of metalcore: being seen as the “home version,” secondary to the irrefutable ferocity of the live show. In 2021, Knocked Loose occupy a space similar to that of, say, Code Orange or Turnstile before they got snapped up by major labels—currently too aggro to appeal to the average music fan, yet too big to overlook. A Tear in the Fabric of Life isn’t the crossover event one might expect after the band’s 2019 breakthrough A Different Shade of Blue; it’s a conceptual EP accompanied by an animated short film and a wealth of references. Before the deadly car crash that sets the narrative in motion, a distracted flip of a radio dial lays out A Brief History of Knocked Loose: a dialogue sample from the psychological horror video game P.T., first heard on 2019’s “In the Walls”, the lyrics of which are later used for a climactic plot twist on “Return to Passion”; a snippet of “Blue,” the Leann Rimes song that Knocked Loose used as walkout music during their last tour; and an Alabama Sacred Harp Singers spiritual featured in Cold Mountain.
Knocked Loose’s commercial and critical fortunes have grown in direct proportion to their uncompromising approach, so they don’t even pay lip service to conventional accessibility. They cite death metal and Phil Spector as the EP’s main influences, though their only nod to ’60s pop is a literal one: A sample of “God Only Knows” serves as a contrasting moment of levity and a binding agent within the storyline. With Knocked Loose, it’s not the chorus or the melody or the build that matters; to the extent these even exist, they’re in service of bringing back the nasty riff but slower, or introducing a new one in double time. If anything, the band has only become more adept at recreating the sound of reckless driving, all slammed brakes, sudden veers, and riffs that sound like a truck backfiring in a ditch.
The EP’s subject matter and concision moderate some of Knocked Loose’s more taxing qualities, so while it’s certainly heavy, A Tear never feels melodramatic. Garris’ vocals have the shellshocked sound of a man trying to lift a midsize sedan with bare hands and adrenaline, and the compressed, face-to-the-glass urgency of Will Putney’s production ensures the fatal wreck feels as real as Garris’ struggle with survivor’s guilt. “God knows I belong in hell/That’s why he left me there by myself,” he howls. A Tear in the Fabric of Life will, understandably, inspire some people to simply bypass the lyrics and fixate on whether the swole riffage of “Where the Light Divides the Holler” and “Forced to Stay” can help them get that last rep. Give A Tear in the Fabric of Life the attention it deserves and it becomes clear why every song needs at least two things called a “breakdown”: This is the sound of a man at physical and emotional ruin.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-10-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Pure Noise | October 21, 2021 | 7.5 | 7af834c6-88dd-44ad-bf39-69f26abb835c | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
A new reissue highlights the ongoing relevance of Lou Reed’s opus about his hometown in the era of AIDS and Reaganism, a protest album unlike any other | A new reissue highlights the ongoing relevance of Lou Reed’s opus about his hometown in the era of AIDS and Reaganism, a protest album unlike any other | Lou Reed: New York: Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lou-reed-new-york-deluxe-edition/ | New York: Deluxe Edition | Lou Reed was unusually hard to pin down in the 1980s. After the gay-rights-rallying cry of Transformer in 1972, he spent a decade mating queerness with rockn’roll and flirting with his own homosexuality in public statements, an identity that seemed to culminate in 1979, when he came out to Creem Magazine. Hardly a year later, he was celebrating married love on Growing Up in Public and, by 1982, heterosexuality in more general terms on the nonetheless excellent The Blue Mask. Reed’s subject matter changed because his life did—he got married in 1980—yet his newfound pop persona as a successful heterosexual capitalist coincided with the rise of Ronald Reagan, who was murdering gay people with his refusal to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic while helping to make greed and white-collar success culturally ubiquitous. Reed never supported Reagan’s policies, but he gave the impression of a star wearing the garb of his own era, scrawling an ode to his New Jersey country home as easily as he once caked on glam rock make-up. And then he made New York, a record of unmistakable conviction, one so direct and literary, erudite and rageful that it resembles no protest music written before or since.
Released in January of 1989, days before George H.W. Bush’s inauguration, New York treats straightforward hard rock and clean-toned, mesmeric guitar as blank pages on which to lay down a series of news stories, urban setpieces, and liberal-minded principles. Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani appear in its hyperdense lyrics—gleefully, Reed subjects both to horrific calamities. He once stated that he wanted to write “the Great American Novel” using “the rock’n’roll song as a vehicle," and on New York, the directive feels apt rather than pretentious. The city of his birth becomes his Yoknapatawpha County, a location for synecdoches that encompass large swatches of experience. Like much great fiction, Reed’s handling of his themes—a depleted environment, indigenous persecution, pro-lifers, police killings, racial violence—has aged into greater relevance today.
Though Reagan is never named, New York is nonetheless a dispatch from the fear-ridden two terms of our 40th president, an album that touches on aspects of the ‘80s ignored by the era’s major-label music. Prince, Cyndi Lauper, and Reed himself worked HIV/AIDS into earlier songs, yet those few instances shied away from connecting the epidemic to the gay community. “Halloween Parade” uses the eponymous West Village tradition to show the hole that AIDS left in queer life:
There’s a downtown fairy singing out “Proud Mary”
As she cruises Christopher Street
And some Southern Queen is acting loud and mean
Where the docks and the Badlands meet
This Halloween is something to be sure
Especially to be here without you
Reed’s songwriting always shined when he wrote about subjects other than himself, and New York is structured around characters: the Romeo Rodriguez of the thrilling opener “Romeo Had Juliette,” its turns of phrase packed as tightly as Dylan’s in the mid-’60s; the abused young Pedro on the three-chord single “Dirty Blvd.;” the proverbial whale—which might be a novel, or might be an endangered species—on the VU-esque highlight “Last Great American Whale.” We have references to Michael Stewart, a black graffiti artist murdered by the police, and Bernard Goetz, an NRA-embraced vigilante who shot four black teenagers on a subway train. Over 57 minutes, New York transforms from a collection of diffuse character studies into a concept album about the futility of the individual to be a meaningful agent of political change. On the penultimate track, “Strawman,” Reed provides his album with a thesis in reverse: “Does anyone need another self-righteous rock singer?”
The danger of this kind of music is the ravaging that time does to proper nouns and political stances. Shockingly, Reed’s liberalism still feels progressive. The one exception is on the taut, distorted “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim,” about Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, and an incident in which he referred to Jews using the ethnic slur “hymies.” Reed was understandably offended, but he peppers his song with ripostes that have aged poorly, notably interrogating Jackson’s belief that U.S. leaders should meet with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Contextualized by the multiperspective New York, though, the song fits: it evokes someone agitated at home, arguing with the evening news while the city rumbles by outside.
The new deluxe edition of New York contains live versions of every track, glizted-up arrangements of the Reed standards “Sweet Jane” and “Walk on the Wild Side,” one non-album instrumental, a long-out-of-print concert film, and a number of demos and rough mixes. These works in progress largely serve to show that Reed got it right with the album’s final version.
When New York was released, Reed was 46 and seemingly done trying lifestyles on for size. He’d made something that echoes James Baldwin’s Another Country in its depiction of a city tensely cohabitated by gay and straight, black and white, Latinx and Jewish—one that nonetheless holds a candle for the possibility of utopia. New York also introduced a loose trilogy of works (including 1990’s Songs for Drella, about Andy Warhol’s death, and 1992’s Magic and Loss) that animated middle-age from a point-of-view that was not explicitly gay but also glaringly non-straight. AIDS is never mentioned outright, but the records are undoubtedly products of the epidemic: They focus on the inadequacy of saying farewell, avoiding “Family values” as well as family relationships to consider the anguish of losing friends to disease.
There’ll be no Halloween Parade in the Village in 2020. In a year of virus, election, publicized police abuses, and natural disasters, it’s a minor yet sorrowful loss. We don’t need a self-righteous rock singer now—probably, we never did—but on New York, we got a worried and determined one. After dressing up in so many different costumes, Lou Reed revealed himself to be like the rest of his city: reasonable and resilient in a crisis, staring grimly at authorities too big to wrap a song around.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | September 26, 2020 | 8.7 | 7afdf165-70e0-4db8-b3a2-31014c3340b2 | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
Following his high-profile features on records by Kanye and Kendrick Lamar, the veteran dancehall deejay returns with an idiosyncratic album that subtly challenges the conventions of dancehall itself. | Following his high-profile features on records by Kanye and Kendrick Lamar, the veteran dancehall deejay returns with an idiosyncratic album that subtly challenges the conventions of dancehall itself. | Agent Sasco: Hope River | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/agent-sasco-hope-river/ | Hope River | To many listeners, veteran dancehall MC (or, deejay, as they would say in Jamaica) Assassin, aka Agent Sasco, may be known solely as the rough baritone bawling “Action ting, yo a badman ting” on “I’m in It,” a particularly dark and raunchy LP cut on Kanye West’s 2013 opus Yeezus. It’s an unforgettable irruption into an album packed with thrilling moments, largely due to Sasco’s unforgettable voice: a vocal attack that might best be visualized as a river of gravel rendered capable of human speech. Yet within the all-encompassing scale of the Kanye-verse, Sasco’s contribution to Yeezus was such a footnote that his writer’s credit (listed under his government name, Jeffrey Campbell) was attributed by some outlets to a guy who designs shoes. It would not be any underestimation of Sasco’s talent to point out that Kanye used his powerful voice and undeniable flow as a sort of instrument, a particularly bold timbre with which to offset the other colors (de-tuned 808s, say, or pitched-up Nina Simone samples) comprising the aural painting that is Yeezus.
Sasco’s voice filled that role so well, in fact, that it wasn’t long before he was called on by another rap auteur to add his instrument of mic destruction to yet another multi-textured opus, and in 2015, he brought the whiff of scorched earth to Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry.” Its early release as a teaser for To Pimp a Butterfly ensured that it would be many fans’ first real glimpse of the album’s themes; it also helped cement Sasco’s place as someone who could be counted on to provide the oracular role within Lamar’s latter-day tragedies, a wrathful prophet with a distinctly Kingstonian cadence to his fiery declamations.
These two high-profile features embody a sea-change of sorts in the ever-shifting dance between hip-hop and dancehall reggae. Sasco is being called on to provide neither gangster credibility nor a catchy, shake-your-ass hook; it’s pure gravitas. But what’s just as notable is how these cameos have in turn affected Sasco’s own art. His album Hope River is powerful evidence that he came away from them a changed deejay, determined to be his own auteur as well as his own instrument.
The first clue that Hope River might be read as a post-Yeezus dancehall album is the stark and bass-heavy palette from which it draws. Eschewing the bright keyboard riffs and lilting Afropop melodies that define much of modern dancehall, Sasco’s more melodic hooks are fleshed out with funereal organ chords and metal-pipe snares, but the album consists mostly of several subtly different flavors of overmodulated bass, ranging in texture from rubber to mud.
“Change,” featuring Stonebwoy, Kabaka Pyramid, and Spragga Benz, is a perfect example of the impact that’s possible with skillful use of this palette, and it is used to equally spooky effect on the album openers “Energy River” and “Banks of the Hope” (the Hope River is both a real body of water that flows just north of Kingston and a guiding metaphor for the album’s lyrical themes, a sort of secular scripture premised on forward motion against all odds, no matter how daunting). There are side channels to this general flow. “Mama Prayed” and “My Song” carry the listener through gospel territory, while “New Day” is roots reggae of the kind that would be recognizable as such to contemporaries of Bob Marley. But for the most part, Sasco seems very tightly focused on developing Hope River’s distinct sound world and increasing the vocal textures he can create with in it, from echoey whisper to full wrath-of-god baritone. It feels as if Sasco deliberately wants to subvert the expectations placed on dancehall.
There is some precedent for this approach. If there is a third star alongside Yeezus and TPAB in Hope River’s guiding constellation, it is undoubtedly ‘Til Shiloh, the landmark 1995 LP from Buju Banton, to whom Assassin’s voice has been often compared. Shiloh saw Buju abandon the raunchy lyrics and fast bogle riddims that made him a star in favor of a quieter, acoustic approach that caught many fans by surprise. It’s an influence Sasco hints at in the way his chanting flow wraps around the nyabinghi drums of “Winning Right Now”; there’s another clue in a sampled snippet of a 2004 Buju interview wherein he namechecks the younger deejay as a talent to watch.
Ultimately, however, Hope River simply does not deliver the highs that could stand up next to the truly great LPs that are its primary influences. All three of those albums spawned huge singles which nevertheless fit into the overall album statement. But Hope River sometimes feels like all glue and no glitter, composed entirely of the kinds of moody album cuts and codas that can give a great album depth and coherence, but without the standout songs that give it, well, altitude. Coming from a genre where most LP releases are really just collections of 45s or dancehall singles from a particular year or studio, Sasco delivers an idiosyncratic dancehall concept LP with nary a dancehall hit—let alone a cultural touchstone on the scale of “Alright” or “Black Skinhead.”
This is a bold move in and of itself for a dancehall artist, and it feels deliberate, even willful, on Sasco’s part, adding a kind of enigmatic satisfaction even to its limitations. If Hope River falls far short of greatness, it falls short in such an original way—not only a milestone in Sasco’s personal evolution but perhaps even subtly altering the course of the wider river that is dancehall itself—that it is almost certain to be a sort of sleeper hit with the fans it does find. In that sense, perhaps the best key to his project here is not the riverine theme or the single “Change” but the collaboration with Toronto’s Kardinal Offishall that immediately follows it, “Legacy.” Over a bed of hauntingly distorted choral voices and pulsing bass, Sasco growls about eagles in cages before cutting to the chase: “You’ll never see you dream if you nuh brave/That’s why you’ll never see the critics on the stage.../Let me tell you what you’ll never see/You’ll never see your own legacy.” More water may have to pass under the bridge before we see what ripples are created by Sasco’s odd, contrarian, and highly personal statement. | 2018-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Diamond Studios | September 7, 2018 | 6.5 | 7affbaea-8487-42cd-92f5-2b4b4ad8bcc4 | Edwin “STATS” Houghton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/edwin-“stats” houghton/ | |
The experimental R&B artist tempers the ecstatic joy of his latest album with a breezy companion EP, offering subtle updates on its plainspoken songs of love and friendship. | The experimental R&B artist tempers the ecstatic joy of his latest album with a breezy companion EP, offering subtle updates on its plainspoken songs of love and friendship. | serpentwithfeet: DEACON’S Grove EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/serpentwithfeet-deacons-grove-ep/ | DEACON’S Grove EP | Serpentwithfeet sings with an exultant tenderness that could make wilted flowers bloom. He is so adept at using his silvery vibrato to convey the extremes of human emotion that the baseline when considering his music is elevated: Even when the subject matter is dark, the starting point is radiant beauty. On this year’s DEACON, he moved away from the anguished lyrics and baroque gospel and chamber-pop production that established his singular sound on releases like 2018’s soil. Instead, he spent these songs singing so earnestly about love that the results deliberately bordered on corny. The music was more accessible than ever, but his technical skill and commitment to celebrating Black queer love made the music feel uniquely his own. DEACON’S Grove, a new companion EP, features remakes of three songs from DEACON and two previously unreleased originals. Without offering much we haven’t heard from serpentwithfeet before, it is a quick, breezy project that leans into his newfound sense of ease.
Of the two new songs, “Shoot Ya Shot” falls into that category of “beautiful because serpentwithfeet made it,” without leaving much of an impression beyond that. He yearns for a lover at the end of a long day, singing over synth bursts that sound like glitter was poured straight into the mix. It’s pleasant but ultimately leaves you searching for deeper emotion or more specific storytelling. “Down Nuh River” is more interesting. Serpentwithfeet has said he was trying to channel the songs that “me, my friends and cousins made up as kids... on the playground and the porch.” There is a childlike wonder to the lyrics: He teases someone to “tell your brother that I kissed ya” and urges a friend to swim to the deepest part of the river because “that’s where all the wishes are.” Propelled by an eerie mesh of piano and synth and chanted vocals that echo and twist like children playing hopscotch, it’s the most exploratory song here.
The version of “Amir” that appeared on DEACON was bursting with nervous energy. Serpentwithfeet meets a man and is immediately eager to know the intimacies of his life: “What’s the longest you held a grudge?” “Do you like beer or like rosé?” The reprise on DEACON’S Grove is sung in hindsight, reminiscing on the moment they met. He doesn’t ask any questions. By now, he’s made up his mind: “You’re something sweet,” he sings, “so I’m all in.” The rush of meeting someone new has been replaced with quiet gratitude. On DEACON album closer “Fellowship,” he extended his devotion to his friends: He gushes about watching Christmas films in July and drinking Prosecco together. The version on DEACON’S Grove incorporates dreamy, delicately-sung verses by collaborators Ambré and Alex Isley. They sing about gratitude, warm smiles, and borrowing each other’s clothes. Ambré and Alex Isley’s voices break up serpentwithfeet’s verses nicely, turning this simple ode to friendship into a communal project.
Musicians who start out singing about their sadness often worry about losing their spark should they heal, and DEACON showed that there is power in sharing the specifics of your joy: how it feels to be fully understood, to name and pursue your desires, to access emotions that once felt foreign. DEACON’S Grove pulls back from that ecstasy without moving significantly into any new emotional territory. With a project like this, it’s hard not to compare him to his own high standard. When you know the intensity that serpentwithfeet is capable of conveying, the subtle joy of these songs inevitably feels slight.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-19T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Secretly Canadian | November 19, 2021 | 7 | 7b064c49-8826-4790-9d67-e65c763ef918 | Vrinda Jagota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vrinda-jagota/ | |
Stepping out from her futuristic soul duo with Sene, Denitia’s electro-pop Ceilings is her most fully formed solo effort so far. | Stepping out from her futuristic soul duo with Sene, Denitia’s electro-pop Ceilings is her most fully formed solo effort so far. | Denitia: Ceilings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/denitia-ceilings/ | Ceilings | Sometimes clarity means moving away from the places where you’ve staked your dreams and quieting the noise of outsiders in order to hear your voice. For Denitia, that meant getting out of Brooklyn—where she’d met musical partner Brian Marc to form futuristic soul duo Denitia and Sene—to the Rockaways. In the placid Queens suburb, the singer-songwriter searched for herself in the music she was making, a portion of which she offers up on her new EP.
Ceilings is Denitia’s most fully formed solo outing. It’s more an expansion of last year’s love and noir. project from Denitia and Sene than of her guitar-soul work of old. Musically, the compact four-song EP, which was co-produced by Daniel Schlett, dances in colorful dream and electro pop tones, accented by Denitia’s satiny vocals. In principle, it’s a manifestation of the Houston-native shedding the “protective layers her career had imposed and rediscover[ing] what songs and sounds came naturally to her.”
There’s a sense of vulnerability in her lyrics, but she sounds confident standing in her own radiance. On opener “Bound to Happen,” she’s clear-eyed, taking stock and ready to move forward the “one way [she] want[s] it.” The synths stab through the bass as assured as Denitia sounds for a dense, cinematic effect. The narrative advances on the summery “Waiting,” which finds her in a perpetual chase of the unattainable. “We’re all just waiting, we’re all the same/Looking for a reason, looking for a change,” she sings, capturing a feeling of overcome angst; a breezy saxophone melody carries the song out.
Denitia tends towards upbeat, brighter textures here, but the EP’s darkest moment is also one of its most vivid. The title track slows the pace to a crawl, the seclusion that inspired the project at its most palpable. The production, evocative of an aural heaven, is unhurried and delicate, and Denitia’s voice is given room to soar. Rising to the occasion, her vocals feather across the glowing synths without flaw. Despite the somber sound, “Ceilings” is marked by a level of rosiness (“I will see you again/We will meet in dreams” she sings on the hook) rather than defeatism that comes with missing someone or something. It’s convincing and tugs at the heart.
”Planes” snaps the EP back to a more cheery space as it brings everything to a close. The piano and percussion combination makes the track feel effervescent and hopeful even though the search of the preceding songs isn’t resolved. The sounds become fuzzy and distant, and a bell tolls as if Denitia is soon to wake up from this hypnotic state.
In leaving behind the city’s bustle, she also found a new musical territory that seems to suit her. The EP is as spacious as her beach-side community—the potential possibilities are visible on the horizon and within reach, but the pressure to navigate them in this moment is absent. Her liberation or, as she calls it, her “awakening” give the project an overarching sense of peace. It’s brief, but it’s there, and with Ceilings, she proves the music of her own heart is the strongest. | 2017-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Styles Upon Styles | July 31, 2017 | 7.2 | 7b06858b-416f-423e-b82f-dd0d493a493a | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | null |
The New York pianist’s stripped-back companion piece to her electronic-tinged 2018 album Ultraviolet is an engrossing ode to the act of creation. | The New York pianist’s stripped-back companion piece to her electronic-tinged 2018 album Ultraviolet is an engrossing ode to the act of creation. | Kelly Moran: Origin EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kelly-moran-origin-ep/ | Origin EP | Kelly Moran’s Ultraviolet grew out of a period of writer’s block. Her usual method of composition—painstakingly plotting every note on staff paper, as much a mathematical process as an intuitive one—felt stiff. So she did something that not many classical players often do: She set aside her scores and began improvising. The recording sessions yielded lyrical, free-flowing rhapsodies couched in the unpredictable sonics of the prepared piano—liquid meditations crosscut with doorbell buzz and felted whispers. Captivated by the results, she ended up studying those tapes for two months, transcribing her improvisations, and finally re-recording them. Then, she spent three more months editing and processing the new material, layering it with synthesizers and electronics, to achieve Ultraviolet’s final form: lush, mercurial, almost hologram-like in its flickering dimensions.
The Origin EP takes a step back from that dreamlike vantage: Most of its tracks are unedited documents of her initial, searching improvisations. The seven-song, 36-minute EP amounts to a fascinating snapshot of Moran’s process—a chance to eavesdrop, to perch behind the piano bench and witness her feeling her way out of a creative cul-de-sac.
“Reflexive Music (Autowave)” establishes the record’s skeletal palette and contemplative mood. Where its Ultraviolet counterpart, “Autowave,” was wrapped in cathedral-grade organ buzz, here the denuded piano has nothing to hide its battered timbre and detuned harmonies, which take on the tarnished-metal qualities of Indonesian gamelan. It’s striking how closely the re-recorded piano of the Ultraviolet version resembles this original improvisation—clearly, Moran was meticulous in re-scoring her initial flash of inspiration. But what’s even more interesting is how the quality of the piece changes once the electronic swaddling is stripped away: The tone is no longer grand or regal, but delicate, bruised, brittle as birds’ bones.
“Water Music (Piano Solo)” and “Night Music” also come from those initial improv sessions, and they share the exploratory quality of the opener. Worrying their way up and down the scale, treated notes periodically toss off the errant bong of a busted grandfather clock; the sustain pedal scatters high frequencies like mist off a waterfall. Moran recorded the pieces in her parents’ home on suburban Long Island in high summer, and if you listen closely, you can hear the faint chirping of insects in the background of “Night Music”—a fitting counterpoint to the rattle and buzz of her own instrument.
A few pieces here date from different sessions. “Halogen (Una Corda)” is a gorgeous, Debussy-like fantasia on a comparatively untreated piano. “Love Birds, Night Birds, Devil-Birds” is a recent improvisation created to accompany a video installation by Moran’s friend Cassie McQuater; recorded with electronic delay on the piano, it takes on some of the textural and harmonic fullness of Ultraviolet. Best of all might be “Helix (Piano Solo).” It’s actually the very same recording heard on Ultraviolet’s “Helix,” but stripped of the synthesized bass that fills out the more elaborate rendition. In this bare form, it reveals a kind of dogged minimalism, carving lines into the floor as it paces back and forth.
If Ultraviolet represented an attempt to freeze the act of inspiration, examine it, and ultimately embellish it—like painting atop an X-ray transparency—Origin drinks directly from that unmediated rush of wonder. More than just a glimpse of Moran’s methods, these improvisatory pieces prove engrossing in their own right. In fact, in their own quiet, unguarded way, they might even make for a more rewarding listening experience than the album eventually fashioned out of them. Where Ultraviolet’s electronics sometimes risk flattening the material, carpeting the piano’s nuances in velvety bass throb, Origin is a testament to both the subtleties of Moran’s instrument and the act of creation itself. For all the outward fragility of the sound, the EP has a wiry resilience; fleeting though these ideas may have been, their impact lingers. | 2019-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | May 20, 2019 | 7.7 | 7b0bd041-5f52-416b-9397-ce08ef22ae7a | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Their second LP in a matter of months, Move of Ten is a beat-driven complement to Oversteps' dubstep-nodding ambiance. | Their second LP in a matter of months, Move of Ten is a beat-driven complement to Oversteps' dubstep-nodding ambiance. | Autechre: Move of Ten | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14461-move-of-ten/ | Move of Ten | It's not unusual for Autechre to go a couple of years between full-lengths. So two in the span of a couple of months-- Sean Booth and Rob Brown have never released two Autechre albums in a single year-- is a pretty big deal. Why the quick follow-up to Oversteps? From the sound of these two records, it seems possible that Booth and Brown generated a large batch of material in the two years since Quaristice and decided to split it into complementary records, each with a different focus. While Oversteps had a number of drifting, ambient pieces mixed in with rhythm-oriented tracks that at times nodded toward dubstep, Move of Ten puts its emphasis on sharp beats that mostly stay within conventional meters. With these two records following on the more variable Quaristice, an album of shorter tracks that seemed to touch on almost every sound they've ever tried, that makes three pretty different albums in a row for Autechre, which is encouraging.
I say "pretty different" because we're not talking about records that sound like they could have come from completely different artists. Even if the title of opening track "Etchogon-S" didn't clue you in to who we're dealing with, the skittering half-broken beat and sharp synth stabs that verge on sounding random would do the trick. The track almost seems designed to inspire a "Yep, sounds like Autechre" sigh from its first few seconds, which isn't going to bring back anyone who tuned out somewhere around the time of 2001's Confield. Autechre have fiercely loyal fans who look forward to whatever they do next, but my sense is that they used to attract a lot more of the merely curious than they do now. And for those who followed along for a record or two a decade ago before finding more pleasure in something like, say, Four Tet, there's little here to bring them back in the fold. Autechre still specialize in dense, complicated, and texturally rich sounds that upend ideas of what music might be. Word that they are continuing these experiments while bringing 4/4 beats into the mix won't be enough for most.
But for those who want to give them another try, this is the most forceful Autechre record in a while. Their beats are stripped down and hit a little harder, and their skewed takes on dance music-- techno and especially electro-- are convincing. Autechre's love of electro and the production of old school hip-hop producer Kurtis Mantronik in particular has been a steady source of inspiration since their inception. When you listen to Mantronik's productions for Mantronix or rapper Just-Ice, you get a sense of just what Autechre heard in his music: The sharp crack of the era's drum machines and the wild stabs of synth both sound very 80s and also like another era's interpretation of the future. They also sound like brilliant examples of urban culture using discarded bits of its past in a new way.
Certain tracks here, like "pce freeze 2.8i" with its booming low-end snapped tightly into a computer grid or "rew(1)" with its slippery alien bassline and hissy electronic handclaps, sound like they could be the instrumental realization of the new century being imagined 25 years ago. This stuff is strange and eerie and off-kilter but still in its own way funky, and it's the kind of thing Booth and Brown have always done better than just about anyone else. "M62" with its steady kickdrums and jittery but warm synths is a warm and inviting bit of Detroit-style electro in the vein of Drexciya, where the following "ylm0" is the album's "pretty" track, sounding a bit like a Boards of Canada interlude playback powered by double the suggested voltage.
At 10 songs and 47 minutes, Move of Ten is relatively lean and digestible. There's none of the formal innovation that Autechre were doing around the turn of the millennium, but for my money that's a good thing. They claimed their new ground long ago, and since then they've been growing new music on it. Some of it has been excellent, some a shadow of past glories. With the addition of this solid LP, the 2010 harvest suggests that the soil has a few seasons in it yet. | 2010-07-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-07-15T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | July 15, 2010 | 7.6 | 7b0f7678-47b4-4d1e-a4c0-5f4da872df34 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Against a blend of narcotized trip-hop and uplifting R&B, the New York rapper’s fourth LP flips all traces of self-doubt into a source of power and independence. | Against a blend of narcotized trip-hop and uplifting R&B, the New York rapper’s fourth LP flips all traces of self-doubt into a source of power and independence. | Junglepussy: JP4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/junglepussy-jp4/ | JP4 | Over three brash, gut-busting albums, Junglepussy (aka Shayna McHayle) has established herself as one of New York’s funniest and most unpredictable rappers. Her music fizzes with outlandish, sex-positive lines delivered in a rollicking flow and bolstered by her endless self-reliance in the face of shitty men. There’s very little she won’t try musically or otherwise, even making a stellar acting debut opposite Regina Hall in the 2018 dramedy Support the Girls. Junglepussy follows up that performance with her fourth album, JP4, an eclectic blend of narcotized trip-hop and uplifting R&B that expands on both her sound and themes of self-sufficiency by leading listeners deeper into her psyche than ever.
Junglepussy’s vervy punchlines are still her strongest asset, and her bars delight and divulge in equal measure. She’s obsessive to a fault on “Telepathy,” with a monotone delivery that contrasts her single-minded lust: “No more drunk sex in your Porsche/I’m my own snack, why you brought me to the store?” she asks over knocking drums and a squawking synth from producer Dave Sitek—before clarifying that her friends think she should dump this guy. “What a waste of toothpaste/Brushing my teeth only to smile in yo face,” she seethes later on the bouncy “Morning Rock,” accompanied by the sound of scrubbing and spitting into the sink. “Brushing my teeth but the regret donʼt erase.” The back-and-forth between her authoritative declarations and admissions of inner turmoil tee up Junglepussy’s comedic lines for head-spinning effect.
JP4 slips through many mercurial moods, yet solid production choices enable all of them to resonate as distinctly Junglepussy. Trip-hop is the main touchstone here—on the taunting “Spiders,” lurching drums and a distant bassline from Nick Hook recall Massive Attack, while the spooky laughter and ad-libs echoing in the background intensify the uneasiness. Sporting Life (formerly of Ratking) submerges late-album highlight “Arugula” in an amniotic glow, with a looped, pitch-shifted horn sample that recurs like the fog of breath on glass. Junglepussy adopts an affecting mumble that magnifies her lyrics, which sound on the verge of a crack-up: “Congratulations, maybe Iʼm jaded/I couldʼve sworn I seen you loving things you said you hated/Wasnʼt I the one to make you love the shit you hated?”
Junglepussy is more in her head than usual throughout JP4, but she transforms all traces of self-doubt into a source of power and independence. Over a ruptured backdrop and roiling synths on “What You Want,” another Sitek production that evokes his more agitated songs with TV on the Radio, she broods on making an exit from the music industry: “I canʼt afford to mingle it cost me my sanity/I be happy out the industry like Iʼm Kelis/Rock stars is Black farmers peep the harvest.” But she always finds a way through. On “Out My Window,” a feel-good centerpiece that’s close in spirit to 2018’s buoyant JP3, she recruits Brooklyn gospel/R&B singer Ian Isiah for a sunny chorus that builds to the funk-inflected bridge where she sing-songs her boasts: “When youʼre poppinʼ you confuse them/Make them pay for the amusement.” JP4 embodies that sure-footed confidence, creating another lane for Junglepussy to mold in her own image.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Friends Of / Jagjaguwar | October 28, 2020 | 7.6 | 7b165f39-e070-4f6f-9ea9-14d72d4392ce | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The very first recordings of Aretha Franklin, captured in Detroit when she was all of 14 years old, are remastered and offer a window into the early sounds of a genius. | The very first recordings of Aretha Franklin, captured in Detroit when she was all of 14 years old, are remastered and offer a window into the early sounds of a genius. | Aretha Franklin: Songs of Faith: Aretha Gospel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/aretha-franklin-songs-of-faith-aretha-gospel/ | Songs of Faith: Aretha Gospel | These are the very first recordings of Aretha Franklin, live from the New Bethel Baptist Church on Hastings Street in Detroit, Michigan, where she used to sing for the congregation, accompanying herself on piano. You hear her voice, and she is already Aretha. There are phrasings and turns you are already familiar with. She was 14 years old in 1956 when these songs were captured, which is sufficiently impressive, but she had begun singing in church at the age of nine, which is something else entirely. Her brother Cecil Franklin said of the Franklin family, “We were blessed with the precious genes of our musical ancestors. But Aretha manifested that talent at an ungodly early age.” Smokey Robinson maintains, “She came from a distant musical planet where children are born with their gifts fully formed.” Songs of Faith is the evidence backing that claim.
Aretha’s father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, was at this point a national star of the Baptist church, his Sunday sermons broadcast on radio. Rev. Franklin was invited to preach at congregations around the country, and Aretha traveled with him. “I essentially opened for my father,” she said. Her father’s stature also ensured Aretha’s exposure to the leading gospel singers of the day, particularly Clara Ward, regarded as one of the greatest soloists in gospel history. It’s not an accident that on this record, Aretha tackles not one, but three songs that Ward often performed when the Ward Sisters appeared with Rev. Franklin. Her sister Erma posited that Aretha sang those songs “to prove her abilities,” while her brother Cecil maintained, “If you hear a 13-year-old girl sounding older and wiser than a 31-year-old woman, it isn’t because Aretha was trying to outshine Clara. It’s just what happened when my sister got up to sing.”
These early recordings of Aretha were captured by Detroit entrepreneur Joe Von Battle, whose record shop was just down the street from New Bethel on Hastings Street, the heart of Black Detroit at that time. Von Battle began recording and distributing the Reverend’s sermons in 1953, and these recordings on Songs of Faith are his handiwork as well, captured with one lone microphone; given the environment and the limitations of the technology, the clarity of the audio is impressive, and this reissue is billed as a remaster, which does slightly improve the fidelity of the previously circulating recordings.
History lesson aside, the phenomenal element of this release is the opportunity to hear Aretha’s voice in its early stages, already imbued with the power and authority she would become known for. Her ability to convey a range of emotions, moods, and colors both on the keyboard and in the vocal delivery is already present. It’s no wonder that she and her father would soon decide that she needed to make a break with gospel and turn to popular music, because her abilities dictated that the sky was the limit.
This is less an album than a collection of recordings, some gospel classics, like “There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood,” which was Clara Ward’s signature number; it seems impossible that this rendition is being delivered by a teenager, as Aretha summons a pathos that feels ancient. “He Will Wash You White As Snow” and “Yield Not To Temptation” are church favorites that she proudly makes her own: There’s a freshness and modernity to the vocal delivery as well as a decidedly secular bounce in the piano arrangement.
If you are not likely to spend half an hour of your time listening to half an hour of Aretha Franklin’s musical ministry, it is worth the six minutes to listen to her rendition of “Precious Lord,” split into two parts here so that it would fit on one 78 RPM record. Mahalia Jackson sang "Precious Lord" at Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral, and Aretha herself sang it at Mahalia's funeral. But it’s 1956, and none of this has happened yet; the point is that this is a stone gospel standard in the repertoire of the greats, being performed at that level by an artist who had only been on the planet for little more than a decade. The last minute and a half of part two, when she is invoking the last three lines of the song, are unparalleled in their magnificence.
At the river, Lord I’ll stand,
Guide my feet, hold my hand
Take my hand, precious Lord, and lead me home
She is shouting, she is testifying, she is proclaiming, she is calling for glory; she is achieving all of this, and then some. | 2019-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Geffen / UMe | March 25, 2019 | 8 | 7b1865d3-26ff-40f8-9454-ab704bd79433 | Caryn Rose | https://pitchfork.com/staff/caryn-rose/ | |
The UK quintet has a blast playing old-school stoner metal, balancing the riffs with sharp songwriting and a touch of camp. | The UK quintet has a blast playing old-school stoner metal, balancing the riffs with sharp songwriting and a touch of camp. | Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs: Land of Sleeper | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pigs-pigs-pigs-pigs-pigs-pigs-pigs-land-of-sleeper/ | Land of Sleeper | The heroes of doom metal seem to hold little regard for anything besides distortion and the devil. After all, subtlety can be difficult to convey with a Gibson SG, cartilage-cleaving vocals, and a cityscape of amplifier cabinets. But perhaps the legion of albums sired in the fumes of Black Sabbath, Electric Wizard, and Sleep may have overlooked the true spirit of these legendary groups, drawing from their more superficial traits and landing on repetition without the intensity, volume without the vigour. On Land of Sleeper, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs do many things but they also embody the theatre, camp, and sheer fun of all the best heavy music.
Of course, Land of Sleeper is still loud and punishing. They lead with these qualities in “Ultimate Hammer,” where guitars, bass, and drums carom and ricochet in unison before thundering into a mammoth galloping chug. It’s the first time on the record that you hear the full force of the band’s power, and it is glorious. But also raises an involuntary chuckle: It’s almost too heavy. This time around, the arrangements seem particularly hypertrophied, and the churning riffs seem genetically modified for maximum effect. Pigs’ songwriting has been on a journey of ever-increasing concentration ever since 2017’s Feed the Rats debuted with just three tracks (15, 4, and 17 minutes long, respectively). Continuing the trend of 2018’s King of Cowards and 2020’s Viscerals, Land of Sleeper feels a shade crisper than what came before. Whereas they once prioritised the churn and burn, now their songs are leaner and tighter.
Across the album, the tempo shifts jump further and the rhythm switch-ups are starker, so songs like “Pipe Down!” and “Big Rig” mutate with frenetic speeding passages, low-slung breakdowns, and melodies that spill out of the traditional four or eight bar repository. Pigs clearly revel in the extreme heaviness of those brays of distortion in “Terror’s Pillow” or the glacial speed of the middle section in “Pipe Down!” These tactics can occasionally make the album disjointed, which is perhaps why the relatively straightforward “Mr Medicine” feels like a strutting, urgent highlight.
On Land of Sleeper, Pigs also have a smidgen more belief in the power of dynamics. Between all the mayhem, you will also hear subtle pianos, synths, choirs, and sanguine, wide-eyed lyrics about “routine watering and the magic of the sun.” These details play off the finely drawn production that divorces Pigs from the need to faithfully recreate the sound of their raucous live show. The fuzzed-out guitars are well-marbled and thick, like quality guanciale—would it be a stretch to say they recall some of the gnarlier bass tones on Sly Stone records? Matt Baty’s roars and howls are often applied with an oscillating echo that evokes his voice ringing “deep in the abyss” down the “godforsaken English towns,” before the “storm coming” as described in the lyrics.
“When you’re making intentionally heavy music, a degree of levity is important,” guitarist Adam Ian Sykes told Vice in 2020. Throughout Land of Sleeper, Pigs embrace the camp of doom and stoner metal, but they also sound invested in the genre’s history, its roots in acid rock and psych. They often embed their songs with the kind of efficiency you hear in the best pop music: Gaps between vocal lines are filled with mini-riffs, melodic hooks overlap to save space, and the immaculate production submerges nothing. This is an H. R. Giger painting of an album: all muscular, misshapen forms that look all the more strange—and perhaps even a little beautiful—the closer you look. | 2023-02-16T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-16T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Missing Piece | February 16, 2023 | 7.5 | 7b2166b2-2648-49fe-9ff4-995d1b0f895f | Will Ainsley | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-ainsley/ | |
A long-forgotten gem of experimental jazz gets a welcome reissue 45 years after it was recorded in a Philadelphia basement; deep, adventurous, and soulful, it is a joy to discover. | A long-forgotten gem of experimental jazz gets a welcome reissue 45 years after it was recorded in a Philadelphia basement; deep, adventurous, and soulful, it is a joy to discover. | The Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble: Drum Dance to the Motherland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-khan-jamal-creative-arts-ensemble-drum-dance-to-the-motherland/ | Drum Dance to the Motherland | The miasma of free jazz, cosmic jazz, new thing, fire music, and improv that poured forth in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s is one of the great treasure troves of 20th-century music. Led in America by John and Alice Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, and others, a generation of players was inspired to jettison the rapidly ossifying mannerisms of post-bop for an explosive new language that pushed the boundaries of music while addressing political realities, social concerns, and spirituality in fresh, strikingly confrontational ways.
It also left a trail of flotsam that would go largely ignored for decades, a collector’s dream of uncompromising almost-classics, forgotten sessions, private-press rarities, and live bootlegs just begging to be hunted down. Sometimes the lore outshone the music, with the genre’s visceral yen for abstraction making highly sought LPs into rorschach tests. But at the turn of the millenium, a wave of reissues initiated a welcome historical corrective, bringing to light powerful work barely known in its own era. Suddenly available and affordable, this music could now be heard on its own terms. Alongside Get Back’s Jazzactuel, Atavistic’s Unheard Music Series, and others, in 2006 Eremite Records revived from obscurity one of the most long-lost of LPs from a sea of neglected recordings: Drum Dance to the Motherland, recorded in 1972 by the Khan Jamal Creative Arts Ensemble. Presented at that time with hokey crayon-illustration cover art, it is being re-released in more tasteful packaging but otherwise untouched, a marvelously trippy journey through the spacier, smokier corners of jazz psychedelia.
The first thing you notice on Drum Dance is the tape echo. It’s right there at the start of the aptly titled “Cosmic Echoes,” smeared all over the fevered drum intro. Provided courtesy of Mario Falana (credited with “sound effects”), it immediately makes you wonder why so few acts incorporated studio electronics. Though Miles Davis had begun using a wah-wah pedal on his trumpet around the end of the ’60s, it is rare to find such bold uses of echo, reverb, or tape loops in jazz’s more “free” corners. The effect is thunderous, evoking the same moody dread that King Tubby was developing concurrently in Jamaica. Throughout the record it continues to surge in and out, sending the ensemble swimming in ethereal waves.
The second thing you notice is the interplay, loose but focused and wonderfully spacious. Drum Dance was recorded live in a small coffee shop in Philadelphia, and the fidelity reflects this modest setting—it’s more “Louie Louie” mud than Blue Note precision. Apparently the ensemble was largely made up of childhood friends, and you can sense the comfort and ease between the players. You always know where you are in the music; its development is natural and connecting threads are easy to follow. Although the group takes more than a few cues from Sun Ra’s heliocentric excursions, it remains accessible, right down to the uncluttered arrangements.
The entire LP is strong, but the two longer pieces at its center are the real showstoppers. “Drum Dance” is a white-hot ride through scorched, microtonal clarinet whines and tumbling percussion that eventually gives way to a more playful marimba solo from Jamal. Harsh though its front-end may be, “Drum Dance” exudes joy throughout its 12-plus-minute runtime. In its opening moments you can hear a member of the band clapping enthusiastically and encouraging the audience to join along.
“Inner Peace,” meanwhile, goes in a more bluesey direction. Monnette Sudler’s guitar is especially effective, mimicking the sultry, seductive tone of a Fender Rhodes piano and adding a welcome sense of understatement. For almost 16 minutes the piece floats effortlessly, orbiting a dusky, modal center but wandering freely into stranger, warmer climes. Starting off with an elegantly loping bassline, the type hip-hop producers scoured for throughout the ’90s, “Inner Peace” emerges from a mist of delay and bells, slowly coming into focus as if heard from a great distance and then suddenly up close. Just shy of the two-minute mark, Sudler begins to tease out a laid-back solo that counterbalances the fogged-out cries from Dwight James’ reeds—there’s no rush here, and the group locks into the simmering vibe, cooling down from the A-side’s more full on attack.
“Breath of Life” closes with some of the most outré moments, blending passages of subtle beauty with aggressive processing from Falana’s electronics. The drums get the full treatment, crashing all over themselves. At some point, a radio voice juts in (accidentally?), directly prefiguring countless ambient collages. The vibes and guitar go against the grain, providing more cooling textures not so far off from Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way. It’s a wonderful closer, its final minutes marked by fluttering drum accents and a sense of genuine tenderness.
The rhetoric surrounding Drum Dance’s first reissue would have you believe it’s an avant-jazz holy grail, going farther out with more vision, class, and force than its more canonized contemporaries. Though the enthusiasm is understandable, this kind of breathless hype doesn’t necessarily do Jamal’s work justice. It’s a lovely record: deep, adventurous, and soulful. Taken at face value, Drum Dance is a precious stone, a joy to discover, and a worthy addition to the catalogue. The open, unhurried dynamic and expressive atmosphere remain as rich and communicative as it was when it was recorded, over four decades ago. It doesn’t need to be anything more. | 2018-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Eremite | January 2, 2018 | 7.3 | 7b292681-9f26-4503-a509-fcc2372f4481 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
Less than a year after the Can co-founder’s death, this generous box set lights a path through his sprawling catalog and confirms both his genius and his prescience. | Less than a year after the Can co-founder’s death, this generous box set lights a path through his sprawling catalog and confirms both his genius and his prescience. | Holger Czukay: Cinema | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/holger-czukay-cinema/ | Cinema | It’s all there in the eyes: impish and gleaming, the gaze both cooly challenging and warmly inviting. On the cover of his debut solo LP, Movies, Holger Czukay stares us down via his own reflection in a TV screen. Dressed like a lounge lizard and sporting his signature handlebar mustache, the television shows what might be footage of a bombed-out war zone, his face reflected in chiaroscuro above a spire of billowing black smoke and ominous clouds. Critical, sorrowful, inquisitive, stoned—it’s hard to get a read, but there he is, watching us watching him while we all watch the dark skies on the screen.
Like Salvador Dalí or Andy Kaufman, Holger Czukay was an avant-garde provocateur blessed with a look to match his work. Wiry, with a wave of mad-scientist hair and a proclivity for sartorial flair, he seemed the embodiment of his music’s winking, high-low mishmash of groundbreaking electronics, pop kitsch, and nervy confrontation. Now, less than a year after his passing, the German label Grönland has released a mammoth retrospective of his work. Over five LPs, a DVD, a book, and an unusual “vinyl video” 7”, Cinema takes in Czukay’s solo and collaborative work outside of Can, the iconic avant-rock quintet he co-founded in 1968. Starting in the early 1960s and ending in 2014, the set lights a path through his sprawling, winding oeuvre and confirms Czukay’s status as one of the great weirdo geniuses of the 20th century.
And boy, does it ever sprawl—the man was not afraid to let a groove ride. A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, he brought tape manipulation and shortwave radio experiments to lanky, unspooling jams, lacing his low-key funk with disorienting humor. Tracks like “Full Circle R.P.S. (No. 7)” and “Hollywood Symphony” exceed the 10-minute mark, interweaving breezy foundations with jarring ornamentation and unexpected sonic pileups to induce an uneasy dreamstate. At first they seem mellow to a fault, but these are insidious works: They disarm you with sloppy, unhurried guitar strums and pitter-patter drums, suddenly spike into prickly aggression, and then recede. It makes for an edgy listen—what else might be lurking beneath this balmy, fuggy exterior?
Czukay works fast and loose with genres, treating them like the radio signals he began processing in Can’s later years. On Cinema, environmental sounds, music, noise, and chatter blur together into an ambient ether, waiting to be tapped into and reprocessed. There are echoes of the Beatles’ phantasmagoric childhood reimaginings circa Magical Mystery Tour, but the Fab Four never really left the pop song behind; Czukay was the opposite. You sense he’s pitched a lonely camp in a wild, untouched expanse of sound, the goofy jazz flourishes and funky bass wiggles like torn and battered snapshots of home, pinned to the inside of his tent.
Beyond the necessary inclusion of Movies in full, there are plenty of gems. “Biomutanten,” alongside Conny Plank as Les Vampyrettes, is a dank, Argento-worthy exercise in horror. Backing up the Japanese vocalist Phew on “Signal,” Czukay and friends conjure up a no-wave workout as cheese-grater sharp as Delta 5’s “Mind Your Own Business.” Over a quarter-century later, this mood is complemented with the gloopy “21st Century,” featuring Ursa Major, which revisits the dubbier expansiveness of the post-Slits diaspora. Dub is a constant presence throughout, whether on kaleidoscopic Jah Wobble/Jaki Liebezeit collabs like “How Much Are They?” and “Twilight World,” the satirical audio collage of “Der Osten Ist Rot,” or the spatial weirdness of 2008’s “Breath Taking.”
“Breath Taking” uses a rare sample of Stockhausen, and in its languid drones and drifting structure you can hear echoes of Czukay’s astonishing 1968 tape work “Boat Woman Song.” Recorded in a single night in Stockhausen’s studio, after the composer had left—“We had a second key and went in and switched everything on,” recalled Czukay; “I prepared myself at night at home, so in four hours the whole thing was done”—that piece’s haunting cruise across the airwaves blends ominous orchestra music, “unknown traditional singers from Vietnam,” and expansive drones with a hypnotic magnetism. It’s one of the strongest pieces in Czukay’s catalogue, darkened by the long shadow of World War II. You can hear Czukay wrestling with anger and despair, invoking a fevered vision of global agony. The endless downwards march of European imperialism is epitomized by a simple, elegiac descending string figure that repeats throughout, itself slowly pitching down and receding into the shadows. Spectral cries pierce the gloom; reverberant echoes suggest abandoned industrial spaces. After an extended peak in the middle, the mix collapses in on itself with tragic inevitability. The music is so enveloping it’s easy to miss its astonishing prescience, but in this early outing Czukay is making connections that musicians are still unpacking today. If this isn’t a template for modern electronic music—the remix, the DJ set, sampling, and ambient music all find precursors here, as does club music’s fascination with lost futures, re-processed voices, the layering of found sounds, loop-based minimalism, and dystopian collapse—then what is? | 2018-03-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Grönland | March 26, 2018 | 9 | 7b2a9b27-335e-4361-8651-cd586bdc17b1 | Daniel Martin-McCormick | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-martin-mccormick/ | |
Love Streams marks a subtle shift in Tim Hecker's habitual style, a pivot away from his hazy trademark. | Love Streams marks a subtle shift in Tim Hecker's habitual style, a pivot away from his hazy trademark. | Tim Hecker: Love Streams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21635-love-streams/ | Love Streams | At last fall's Unsound festival, in Krakow, I had the unusual experience of standing in an indoor fog bank. The visibility ended just a few feet in front of your nose; the shapes of other people drifted past while the haze pulsed in deep shades of red and blue and lavender. The music was a soup of drones, and the sound, the visuals, and the space itself blended together in such a way that you felt a little like you were floating in space.
The event in question was Ephemera, a site-specific collaboration between the Canadian electronic musician Tim Hecker, German visual artist Marcel Weber, a.k.a. MFO, and Geza Schoen. While the audiovisual experience at most concerts rarely rises above the level of a laser light show, what made this performance-slash-installation so successful was not only its immersive, experiential quality; to longtime fans of Hecker's work, it was an act of transmutation, drawing out qualities that were latent in Hecker's music and bringing them to life around you, in four dimensions.
Over 15 years and multiple solo albums, Hecker has built up a formidable vocabulary of scrape and shimmer and crackle and throb. Using guitar, piano, organ, and, primarily, scads of digital processing, he treats sound as a plastic object, something physical to be molded and stretched. His work is sculptural in feel and widescreen in scope, and it is extraordinarily attentive to texture. Foremost among his concerns has been the idea of diffuseness, of dissolution. There are few hard edges, few identifiable motifs; musical events, like a shift in tone or the introduction of a new timbre, often take place under the cover of static. He prefers distant shapes with vague outlines.
Some of that fog burns off on Love Streams, an album that marks a subtle shift in Hecker's habitual style, a pivot away from his hazy trademark. "What do you do when you're known for making a certain type of work?" he recently asked, rhetorically, in an interview with The Fader. Feeling like he was beginning to repeat himself, he said, he decided that the solution "was not stacking things louder and heavier but working in a different way." That meant working with voices, for one thing—a complicated-sounding process of using software to translate medieval choral music to digital synthesis and then, working with Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, to write and record complementary new choral parts.
He treats his voices in the same way he has typically treated instruments like piano and organ—that is to say, attacking them as if with steel wool—but they're still recognizable as voices. On "Violet Monumental I," a chattering soprano sings an abstracted lamentation that feels almost liturgical, and on "Music of the Air," disconnected bursts of voice are staggered in time and spread across the stereo field, lending the impression of wandering through a choir pit while the singers warm up. 4AD turns out to be the perfect home for Hecker's new album, given the way it faintly echoes the choral fixations of '80s 4AD staples like Dead Can Dance, Cocteau Twins, and Le Mystère Des Voix Bulgares.
Hecker's palette has evolved in other ways, too. "Obsidian Counterpoint" opens the album with a blippy stream of arpeggios, an explicitly electronic sound that is unusual for his work. Throughout, his sounds seem tugged in two directions at once, as though caught between the digital and the physical. In "Music of the Air," a buzzing, droning synthesizer patch bobs in unpredictable motions like a handful of jewel-colored flies. Toward the end of "Bijie Dream," a harpsichord-like sound mutates into something resembling a steel pan, a far cry from Hecker's typically Arctic-inspired palette.
These bold, declarative sounds—which also include the bleating bass clarinet of "Violet Monumental II" and the guitar-like riffing of "Voice Crack"—cut strong shapes through the murk, but Hecker's compositional sensibilities remain opaque: He traffics not so much in melodies or song forms as in unsteady tone clusters. There's not a lot of forward motion here; motifs and timbres repeat across the record, and while many tracks flow seamlessly from one to the next, his open-ended constructions give the album a rewardingly meandering feel. Not a lot happens, except when it does: In the final minute of "Collapse Sonata," there might be more dynamic action, as tolling bells are gradually absorbed into a queasy slick of steel drum, digital distortion, and dissonant organ tones, than there is on the rest of the album put together.
It's a setup for "Black Phase," a dramatic conclusion that pairs somber choral harmonies with the gravelly guitars of Ben Frost or Sunn O))). It's as diffuse as the rest of the record, yet it feels somehow cathartic. Like Virgins, Love Streams tackles a lot of abstract concepts, like "live" sound, and synthetic sound, and rooms and space, and technology's ability to complicate all those things. But it's also about the ability to disappear into sound, to get lost in the contours of a slippery timbre, or to be made whole by a consonant harmony. At its close, those staccato vocal parts and that smoldering low end deliver a real emotional punch, the release to subtle tensions that have been building up throughout the course of the record's hazy, unpredictable run. It's a suggestion that, if you stumble around in the fog long enough, you might just find what you're looking for. | 2016-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | 4AD / Paper Bag | April 7, 2016 | 8.2 | 7b2b5f24-f904-47af-97da-0ccd260537be | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
After two albums that struggled with the growing divide between the serious band they seemingly longed to be and the bubblegum punk band listeners want them to be, The Thermals strike the right balance on We Disappear, an album that manages to satisfy both camps. | After two albums that struggled with the growing divide between the serious band they seemingly longed to be and the bubblegum punk band listeners want them to be, The Thermals strike the right balance on We Disappear, an album that manages to satisfy both camps. | The Thermals: We Disappear | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21759-we-disappear/ | We Disappear | The Thermals are a serious band that's hard to take too seriously. Over the last decade half-decade-plus, singer Hutch Harris has waxed profoundly on religion, war, politics, mortality, the improbability of lasting love, and other fears that keep us up at night, but always in the same boyish pop-punk yelp that renders his lyrics about 40% cuter than he probably intends them to be. In another world he might have been blessed with the gritty, commanding pipes of a Joe Strummer or a Laura Jane Grace, singers who by their very nature exude authority. Instead he shares a voice with the guy from Matt & Kim.
At his best, Harris just owns it. 2006's The Body, The Blood, The Machine is still the band's most-loved album, because it's the giddiest one, pairing the band's inherent fervor with slaphappy power-pop riffs that charged ahead like a classroom of kids running for the door after a recess bell. Since then, however, it's been diminishing returns as the band has attempted ever-soberer statements, often at the expense of the uncurbed enthusiasm that made that album such a treasure. They hit their nadir with 2013's buzz-killing Desperate Ground, the closest they've come to a flat-out bad album, in part because of the good-on-paper decision to pair the band with Dinosaur Jr. producer John Agnello. His stern, muddy mix sucked much of the joy out of its songs (though it's unclear how much they had to begin with).
Thankfully that joy deficit isn't a problem on We Disappear, a reunion with producer Chris Walla, which despite its fatalistic title and fixation on failing bodies and fading relationships plays up the fun factor in a way the last few records haven't. It wouldn't be right to call it a return to form, since this band never truly breaks form, but it's got higher highs than any Thermals album since The Body, The Blood, The Machine—and really, the best way to judge a Thermals album is by its highs. “My Heart Went Cold” is an early one, a double-glazed sticky bun of a rocker, all eager bass, “oh-woah-oh!” injections, and puppy-dog pep. A protest song that's as much a celebration of the form as it is an act of defiance, “Hey You” is chased by the equally determined “If We Don't Die Today,” one of the band's most ripping ballads. It's a hell of an opening stretch.
As is usually the case, though, the band stumbles when they slow things down. “The Great Dying” lends the album its title with Harris's most vivid description yet of the vast nothing that lies in store for us all: “The sky will turn to fire, the sea will turn to salt / Our memories will burn like we were never here at all / We disappear.” But the song's dreary pace makes it a slog, and the forced bleakness isn't a great fit for Walla, whose specialty is crisp indie-pop, not cacophonous forays into existential dread.
Most people don't come to Thermals albums for that stuff. They come for the shout-alongs and fist pumps, and even in its somewhat-dialed-down second half We Disappear smuggles in generous dollops of both, with tunes like “In Every Way,” which throws down the record's tersest, most blown-out riff, and the endearing power-pop quickie “Thinking Of You.” After two albums that struggled with the growing divide between the serious band they seemingly longed to be and the bubblegum punk band listeners want them to be, The Thermals strike the right balance on We Disappear, an album that manages to satisfy both camps. | 2016-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | March 24, 2016 | 6.9 | 7b35d5e9-b553-49df-85f2-9c30d7dd13d9 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The guitar icon’s first solo album in 19 years confronts heartbreak and loss with intensely melodic, disarmingly straightforward songs that feel as loose and casual as old friends. | The guitar icon’s first solo album in 19 years confronts heartbreak and loss with intensely melodic, disarmingly straightforward songs that feel as loose and casual as old friends. | Mary Timony: Untame the Tiger | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-timony-untame-the-tiger/ | Untame the Tiger | Mary Timony always sounds like she’s in control. Even at its most exuberant—the zoned-out trills and slanted poetry of Helium’s The Magic City, the hot-rod anthems of Ex Hex—her music exudes a calm, impenetrable confidence. She delivers her vocal melodies in a conversational register, holding her highest highs and lowest lows in reserve. As a guitarist, her riffs and solos tend to turn and bend with a bemused smirk; she plays like she wants you to know she’s holding her power back. “In her songs, sadness and alienation were not embodied, they were subterranean, they were alien, transferred and transformed,” Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein once wrote.
On Untame the Tiger, Timony’s first true solo album in 19 years, sadness and alienation are present on the surface. They’re clearly legible. They’re intensely human. Timony wrote Untame the Tiger following the end of her long-term relationship, while she was caring for her elderly parents. Her father died near the beginning of recording; her mother passed near the end. The searing light of grief sometimes brings with it a fresh emotional clarity, and whether related or not, the songs here are disarmingly straightforward. “A brand-new day, it still hurts like hell,” she sings on the very first song. “What did I get for loving you?” she asks near the album’s end. You can see her eyes narrow as she mutters the answer: “Nothing but pain.”
Still, it doesn’t feel right to call Untame the Tiger a sad record. She’s made those before: Her first two solo albums, 2000’s Mountains and 2002’s The Golden Dove, couch their melancholy in fantastical imagery and occasionally dress it up in antique instrumentation. They’re also, according to Timony, “miserable records about being depressed.” That may be a bit unfair, but Untame the Tiger shows that she’s determined to avoid ever making depressing music again. Even as it confronts sadness, the album is spritely, frequently bright, as intensely melodic as Ex Hex’s triumphant Rips and more playful than a record this heartbroken probably should be. Most people run a drum kit through a flanger because it sounds badass when you’re blasting cigs with the boys, not because they’re suddenly alone in their search for fulfillment.
On Untame the Tiger, Timony draws ideas and sounds from throughout her career together: the twang and drone of odd tunings and unusual instruments mingle with fuzzed-out solos and starry-eyed pop songs like mismatched old friends doing their best to be supportive. It gives the album a looseness and curiosity that, combined with the swagger of her guitar-playing, makes even the bleakest moments feel open and warm. The clarity of opener “No Thirds”’ melody, and the obvious pleasure with which she rips her lead, give it a sense of purpose, the way having a big cry can leave you feeling more grounded—still aching, but exhaling, too. “Now I wanna feel what I’ve never never felt before,” she sings. Like sunbeams through an overcast sky, her inherent melodicism can’t help but punch its way through.
Timony seems to know this, so she tries out different ways of embodying her loneliness to compensate. In “The Guest,” it becomes human and stands at her threshold; “Am I driven to emptiness or does it just come to me?” she wonders. Elsewhere, she plainly tells a partner that their declaration of eternal love is “a lie.” She guides her band, including Fairport Convention drummer Dave Mattacks, through the pastoral desert blues of “Looking for the Sun,” but when the song seems to call for a triumphant solo, she slips back into the atmosphere, helping the group frame the now-empty space. It makes it sound as though she’s left the stage entirely.
More frequently, Timony’s brand of mourning is bound up with levity, as if she can’t consider the fullness of her pain without being conscious of its absurdity. It’s all right there in “Dominoes,” a song Timony has said is about how even the transgressive pleasure of dating someone you know isn’t right for you can lead to heartbreak. As she’s “trying to steal back my affection,” amazed at her new solitude, she’s surrounded by girl-group harmonies, blown-out acoustic guitars, fills from a department-store electronic drum kit—it’s an entire ELO production. As she does so often on Untame the Tiger, Timony exercises her strongest maximal-pop sensibilities in a song about feeling abandoned and alone. It’s fun. It’s funny. It feels like a joke at the expense of the song’s unnamed lover: You thought you’d get the upper hand on someone who can conjure up all of this? | 2024-03-04T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-03-04T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Merge | March 4, 2024 | 7.6 | 7b3dced8-e7fc-4bf5-92cd-051a341909d6 | Sadie Sartini Garner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sadie-sartini garner/ | |
The long-running experimental band ends the longest gap of its career with a set of urgent, direct, and celebratory songs. | The long-running experimental band ends the longest gap of its career with a set of urgent, direct, and celebratory songs. | Oneida: Success | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oneida-success/ | Success | Oneida are one of indie rock’s most enviable and enduring institutions. When the ragtag crew assembled a quarter-century ago, they felt like New York pariahs, unwilling to participate in established industry machinations. Instead, they became a cornerstone of a scene they helped create, turning Brooklyn lofts, warehouses, and abandoned industrial complexes into creative playgrounds. They built one studio and, when condo construction took it, built another: their fabled Ocropolis. An expanded record deal that gave them their own imprint meant Oneida could use the space as a communal hub, recording bands whose music they in turn released.
But when gentrification claimed that space in 2011, too, Oneida’s feverish output slowed to the rather adult pace of a record every three or so years. Other jobs, other bands, other relationships: Oneida’s five steady members have pursued it all during the last decade, reconvening occasionally to make madcap albums for which the word “psychedelic” feels too soft. After 25 years, Oneida continue to do what they always have—that is, exactly what they want.
Success is Oneida’s first album since 2018’s sprawling Romance, capping the longest gap in their catalog. Unfussy, fun, and occasionally even funny, it is also their most purely pleasurable album in nearly two decades. Eschewing the overabundance of epics like Rated O or the massive canvases of A List of the Burning Mountains, Success squeezes seven songs into 41 minutes, with only one track breaking the double-digit mark. This relative concision doesn’t mean Oneida have forsaken their trademark eccentricity—shards of contorted guitar squeeze into punk shout-alongs, while layers of outbound synthesizers lurk beneath Kid Millions’ mighty drums. On Success, Oneida get back to the very basics of being a rock band, just buttressed by the experience and finesse of exploring some of rock’s wildest reaches since the late ’90s.
This pause and the resulting atavism stem from a now-familiar storyline—the pandemic. As lockdowns grew, Oneida scrapped a session scheduled for March 2020; the sequestered members spent the next 15 months writing a glut of new material. When they reconvened to record after a year and a half, they didn’t bother with excessive experimentation or studio chicanery. They just ripped. Remember how good it felt when you finally got to see old friends, to celebrate having lived long enough to reunite? That’s the spirit that animates these songs, as though Oneida decided not to wait around for another session that might never come.
The urgency is delightful. “Opportunities” explodes through a scrim of abrasive guitars, the band bounding forward like Superchunk begging to be punched harder; squiggling electronics chase Bobby Matador’s hook without distracting from it. “I Wanna Hold Your Electric Hand”—a lurid love song for these weird times—suggests jangle-pop launched from a slingshot, sheets of feedback howling like the wind as it rushes past. Even “Paralyzed,” the album’s 11-minute escapade into oblivion, pulses with strobe-light intensity, the beat relentless as synthesizers and guitar pedals unfurl around it in a complex duet.
There is also the lingering sense that Success is an ode to a bygone New York, before fresh development and infrastructure investments curbed wildness and danger. On opener “Beat Me to the Punch,” Oneida start tugging at a New York thread that begins with the Ramones; for the next six songs, it runs through Television, No Wave bedlam, and Sonic Youth into Oneida’s own devil-may-care scene of ecstatic improvisation in Brooklyn. They pull that link until it snaps during the finale, “Solid,” an electrifying rock song about trying not to fall apart. The righteous guitar jam collapses into a sweaty mess, a festival for chaos.
None of these old-city references smack of nostalgia, though. In 2005, Onedia were already calling themselves squares; now they’re squares deep into their 40s, their hip old nexus long gone. They are simply thrilled to have once been there and now to be here, as five friends who still love to get loud together in one room, turbocharging little rock songs with an enviable and enduring camaraderie. | 2022-08-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-19T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | August 19, 2022 | 7.5 | 7b3e8d02-ab52-4e73-a5a9-579fe1e72827 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
On his wily, restless new album as Actress, Darren Cunningham expands the canvas to make room for private jokes, stray thoughts, and cryptic musings. | On his wily, restless new album as Actress, Darren Cunningham expands the canvas to make room for private jokes, stray thoughts, and cryptic musings. | Actress: LXXXVIII | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/actress-lxxxviii/ | LXXXVIII | The human voice does not survive for long in the vacuum of Actress’ music; it is cut up, spaghettified, dissolved into fog and smoke. Demonic pitch-shifted voices cackle, howl, and recede into the murk. Sampled divas morph into distant ambulance sirens. All the while, Darren Cunningham carries on an arch, amused, perma-blazed commentary; one imagines him as Rod Serling or Vincent Price, inviting the enterprising listener to follow him into a world where reality cannot be trusted. His catchphrases and cryptic murmurings are often the only thing connecting the listener to the human world, the only reminder that there’s actually a producer behind all of this and that you’re not just listening to an ill wind blowing from Tartarus.
Cunningham’s new album LXXXVIII was inspired by chess—the idle pastime of a steel-trap mind. There are some remarkably idle stretches on this 57-minute album, which weaves between short dance tracks and long, intractable expanses of stasis; it’s the inverse of the typical techno “artist album,” where the dance tracks are sandwiched between half-baked ambient stocking-stuffers designed to show off the producer’s compositional bona fides. Many of the dance tracks on LXXXVIII seem vestigial or underdeveloped; “Oway (f 7 )” is a stark, haunted-sounding loop that never builds to anything, and “Pluto (a 2) ” cuts off abruptly after less than three minutes. You get the sense that yawning voids like “Green Blue Amnesia Magic Haze ( d 7 )” and “Azifiziks ( d 8 )” are the real heart of the record, that if you peer into their depths for long enough you might decode some of the byzantine logic that drives this music—or maybe you’re just staring at a black hole.
LXXXVIII is the Roman numeral for 88. That was the name of a comparatively spry album Cunningham released relatively under the radar in 2020, now packaged with the 3xLP edition of the new record. It is also the number of keys on a piano, and Cunningham uses that instrument as a means to transform his music into a sort of free jazz. “M2 ( f 8 )” starts out as the kind of slight, nacreous keyboard sketch Ryuichi Sakamoto might’ve cranked out between appointments before it’s subsumed into a loping, side-chained rhythm. “Push Power ( a 1 )” kicks off the record with a deranged hyena cackle, after which an imperious voice recites robotic commands and Cunningham ruminates endlessly on a circular piano phrase. It scans as a joke on the first listen, a challenge on the second, and something really quite beautiful on the third; just wait for the voice that bubbles up at the end and seems to sing, “Cry.”
Within the Actress catalog, LXXXVIII initially most resembles Ghettoville, Cunningham’s 2014 pseudo-retirement album, whose ideas didn’t always get off the ground but which remains a singularly sinister and misanthropic presence in his catalog. Yet LXXXVIII contains a few of the most purely pleasurable, dare I say chill, pieces of music Cunningham’s ever recorded. “Memory Haze ( c 1 )” is like a second cousin of 2011’s “Marble Plexus,” generously side-chained to give the impression that it’s collapsing on itself. “Its me ( g 8 )” is a gorgeous if surprisingly straightforward soul chop that stands a chance of being played in a café. Track two, the marvelously titled “Hit That Spdiff ( b 8 )” is an astral blissout that also functions as a litmus test for anyone not entirely sure they want to listen to the rest of this thing. (The pitched-down goblin voices are hardly reassuring.)
Cunningham is capable of crafting lean full-length statements; R.I.P. and AZD are sleek and streamlined. But he’s too wily and restless to want to do that all the time, so we end up with albums like this, where he expands the canvas to make room for private jokes and stray thoughts. LXXXVIII might seem like an unsolvable puzzle at first, but the only real key to this music is imagining Cunningham at his workstation, sp(d)iff between his fingers, preparing to dive back into the twilight zone. | 2023-11-06T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-06T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | November 6, 2023 | 7.4 | 7b3fee58-793f-4ff4-b254-4d361e476b2d | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Rather than packing their recordings wall-to-wall with furious riffing and tricky time signatures, these Canadian post-punks leave space for each element to build tension. | Rather than packing their recordings wall-to-wall with furious riffing and tricky time signatures, these Canadian post-punks leave space for each element to build tension. | Blessed: iii EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/blessed-iii-ep/ | iii EP | Blessed are content to play the long game. With a sparse string of releases and a superhuman tour schedule, the post-punk quartet from the small city of Abbotsford, British Columbia have slowly crafted a wiry, melodic sound. The songs on their third eponymous EP unfold patiently, shunning traditional structures in favor of extended runtimes and unexpected textures. For this release, the band tapped Purity Ring’s Corin Roddick, Tortoise’s John McEntire, and Holy Fuck’s Graham Walsh to mix one song apiece, making iii a sampling of supercharged variations on a theme.
iii marks Blessed’s signing to Flemish Eye, a long-running label that has positioned itself as a hub for dark art-rock from Western Canada. The B.C. band slots in perfectly beside releases from Preoccupations, N0V3L, and underrated Saskatoon group the Avulsions (whose Josh Rohs played keyboards on Blessed’s sole full-length, Salt). The spindly doubled guitars that filter through the EP point to an influence from beloved Flemish Eye signees Women, whose albums from the late aughts loom large here.
Since forming five years ago, Blessed have logged hundreds of live shows and developed into a tightly wound math-rock machine. But rather than packing their recordings wall-to-wall with furious riffing and tricky time signatures, they leave space for each element to ramp up the tension. As singer and guitarist Drew Riekman has explained, they began incorporating electronics on their second EP, “[toying] with the idea of a droning, stretched out piece of almost unflinching music, akin to Neu!” But though he occasionally settles into an endless, Klaus Dinger-esque motorik beat, Blessed drummer Jake Holmes prefers busier rhythms, like the pounding fills that overpower the sputtering synths of “Centre.”
Though it’s difficult to pinpoint what each guest mixer decided to highlight, there are audible differences. The nearly seven-minute “Sign,” mixed by Roddick, shares a fragile, weightless quality with Purity Ring’s emotionally charged electro-pop. It’s the EP’s most accessible cut, building to a sighing, wordless vocal conclusion that recalls Radiohead. Perhaps Tortoise drummer McEntire is similarly responsible for the post-rock-inspired passages of “Structure,” where spare, mournful guitars give way to cycling piano chords and a pulse-racing finish.
“Centre,” mixed by Holy Fuck’s Walsh, begins in medias res with metallic riffs that mirror the sound of electronic interference from an iPhone that’s too close to an amp. On this song, Riekman’s airy vocals trade off with bursts of shouty chants, a bouquet of barbed wire that recalls Dutch anarcho-punks the Ex. Riekman handles mixing duties himself on EP closer “Movement,” delivering yet another departure from expectations: This lo-fi lament drifts at a much slower pace than the previous three tracks, sounding closest in spirit to Women’s most heart-rending songs or the girl-group exorcisms of Pat Flegel’s solo project, Cindy Lee.
Blessed’s many local influences are a symbol of their dedication. iii was self-produced at a nearby Vancouver studio, with vocals tracked at friends’ homes back in Abbotsford; on social media, the band amplifies hometown issues for more distant fans. They’re not the first artists to put Abbotsford on the map—see You Say Party, Teen Daze, or synthy pop-punks Fun 100. But their choice to remain there, instead of moving to a musical center, reflects their humble ambitions and belief in affecting local change. “If you focus on trying to grow your communities…and have people on tour come see what you’ve done in your small town, [it’s] super positive,” Riekman has said. “A little can mean a lot to a few people.”
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Flemish Eye | February 22, 2021 | 7.3 | 7b410d05-1c68-456e-bc7d-2e0ef3873d87 | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
The Scottish band’s first studio album in seven years considers the importance of togetherness with clear, aphoristic language and a few musical experiments. | The Scottish band’s first studio album in seven years considers the importance of togetherness with clear, aphoristic language and a few musical experiments. | Belle and Sebastian: A Bit of Previous | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/belle-and-sebastian-a-bit-of-previous/ | A Bit of Previous | The core tenet of Belle and Sebastian has always been connection. The long-running Scottish indie-pop project was born out of necessity as bandleader Stuart Murdoch struggled with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which yanked him from bright twentysomething adventures into the shadows of invisible illness. When he had the energy, Murdoch would tinker on his parents’ piano and attempt to give shape to the songs forming in his head. As his health slowly improved, Murdoch began pursuing his art more seriously and eventually enlisted a group of musicians to record Belle and Sebastian’s 1996 debut, Tigermilk. Since then the project has sustained its insular core while stretching into a communal affair that features a vast cast of players, album covers that picture friends and strangers alike, and invigorating concerts in which fans are invited to dance onstage. Every avenue they’ve pursued seems to say: Anyone can channel the Belle and Sebastian spirit.
It’s appropriate, then, that Belle and Sebastian would emerge from a period of widespread isolation with a collection of songs that consider the importance of togetherness. The seven-piece band’s 10th album, A Bit of Previous, is a full-circle gesture: It’s their first full-length to be fully recorded in their native Glasgow since 1999, a move which proved fruitful on a trilogy of EPs released between 2017 and 2018, a series of exhalations harkening back to a similar run of short-form projects in the late ’90s. Even the album title, a turn of phrase used by bassist Bobby Kildea’s father to winkingly acknowledge past relationships, points toward their nostalgic impulses.
A Bit of Previous begins with “Young and Stupid,” a burst of wry sunshine that Belle and Sebastian have historically done so wonderfully. They’ve still got it: Murdoch’s droll reflections on youthful bliss are heightened by a flitting violin and a heavenly little bridge that flies high with a trumpet and Sarah Martin’s topline vocals. The song concludes with a spoken-word outro pulled from an interview Murdoch conducted with his friend Alessandra Lupo—the pair previously collaborated on an audio-visual piece during the early days of the pandemic—that lands on an existential musing: “Nothing matters.” What could sound like a declaration of nihilism is instead presented as an optimistic perspective shift. If there’s a wistfulness for youth, there’s also an urgency not to waste life trapped in a miserable bubble of one’s own making. “I lived my life so desperate to be in control/Scared of getting hurt again,” Murdoch emphatically declares on “Talk to Me, Talk to Me.” “But now I realize it’s all for nothing/All for nothing!”
The compassionate ballad “Do It for Your Country” transforms a patriotic catchphrase into a mantra urging a woman not to underestimate herself. “The world is just a game, something made of clay/But you are the great creator,” Murdoch sings. “So banish all your fears, grab it by the ears/Love and other things of beauty reign.” The band also acknowledges that this carpe diem attitude is easier preached than practiced: On the same track, Murdoch refers to himself as a “lobster in a pot/a songbird in a gilded nightmare.” Who is he to be offering advice about freedom?
If the lyrics share a tight thematic focus, the music is where Belle and Sebastian stretch their legs. Sonically, A Bit of Previous touches on a little bit of everything. The band’s last full-length, 2015’s Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, went heavy on the Big Pop vibes, occasionally at the expense of lyricism. Pared-down traces of that grooviness appear in the bright synth swirls of “Talk to Me, Talk to Me” and on Sarah Martin’s feminist electro anthem “Reclaim the Night.” Stevie Jackson takes the reins on the country ballad “Deathbed of My Dreams,” which is just the right amount of morose. On the soulful “If They’re Shooting at You,” Murdoch and co. are joined by a choir led by vocalist Anjolee Williams, further amplifying its message of endurance. None of these twists or turns feel abrupt—Belle and Sebastian, after all, once threw a synth-pop stunner into an album of quiet indie tunes. Even when they are experimenting, the best parts of their identity shine through.
Belle and Sebastian have never been short of wise words, but over the years, as their songs have grown less character-driven, they’ve gravitated toward clear, aphoristic language that cannot be misunderstood. Perhaps that is the result of graceful aging; perhaps it’s Murdoch’s interest in Christian and Buddhist thought. Either way, this approach feels exceptionally wholehearted on A Bit of Previous, especially in the final moments. On “Sea of Sorrow,” Murdoch admits that words—the vehicle for so much happiness, so much anxiety—are just words, and it’s up to us how we process them. And then there’s “Working Boy in New York City.” This ditty about a young person searching for their true self is delightfully on-brand for the group, from its charming title and easygoing melody to the themes of spirituality, queerness, and loneliness. “Once you are happy and you know yourself/Peace can come in your heart/You can make a new start,” Murdoch sings. It sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. | 2022-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | May 6, 2022 | 7.5 | 7b413398-8de0-4072-bd24-d61fb5f8b9fd | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Standards is Evan Weiss’ first Into It. Over It. album since he's turned 30. Often the eleoquent spokesperson for the emo revival, on Standards he banks on subtlety—as good a way as any to distinguish yourself in a scene defined by overstatement. | Standards is Evan Weiss’ first Into It. Over It. album since he's turned 30. Often the eleoquent spokesperson for the emo revival, on Standards he banks on subtlety—as good a way as any to distinguish yourself in a scene defined by overstatement. | Into It. Over It.: Standards | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21811-standards/ | Standards | Standards is Evan Weiss’s first Into It. Over It. album since he turned 30, the kind of milestone that throws some songwriters into crisis. It seems like it would be an especially hard transition for a guy whose very band name telegraphs his obsession with ephemerality, but to judge by these songs he’s doing fine, more or less. It’s everybody else around him that isn’t doing so well. For instance, "Open Casket," a eulogy to youth, begins the record with a visit to some of Weiss’s old hometown friends and finds them much worse for the wear. "They wake up still uninspired with no regrets," Weiss sings, "Hung over and divorced/ They torch their twenties like it’s kerosene."
Weiss has long been the spokesman for the emo revival, usually the most eloquent guy quoted in the "Emo’s Back" trend pieces that circulated a couple years ago. But now that the emo revival is looking less like a niche scene and more like the shape of alternative to come, Weiss is settling into a new role as the scene’s elder statesmen. He’s mellowed with age, and compared to the form-defying bands that have emerged since he first made his mark with the song-a-week project 52 Weeks in the late ’00s, he sounds downright classicist. Weiss can’t match the genre-dwarfing ambition of The World is a Beautiful Place..., the hyperventilating intensity of the Hotelier, or the youthful insouciance of Modern Baseball, and so he doesn’t try. Instead on Standards he banks on subtlety—which, really, is as good a way as any to distinguish yourself in a scene defined by overstatement.
As usual, Weiss doesn’t disguise his influences. The album’s pattering tones and corked time signatures reaffirm that this is someone who’s been in a band with Mike Kinsella and could probably identify most of Polyvinyl’s classic releases by catalogue number. The influence that looms largest this time, however, is Death Cab For Cutie, and not just because Weiss leans more than ever on Ben Gibbard’s tender vocal affectations. As the band’s tightest, most approachable album, Standards feels like Into It. Over It.’s answer to Transatlanticism, a record that, while not quite a commercial crossover, feels like a trial run for one. Standards even has a mid-album slow-burner unabashedly modeled after Transatlanticism’s title track: "Your Lasting Image," the achiest of Weiss's many ruminations about growing apart from the people he loved. When Weiss reaches the song’s climactic refrain "I have the faintest recollection of us" in concert you can almost imagine fans reflexively mouthing along "I need you so much closer now" by mistake.
After penning these songs in a cabin in Vermont, the previously Pro Tools-minded Weiss recorded Standards at analogue-enthusiast John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone Studio in San Francisco. Vanderslice’s production doesn’t have the crunch of some more modern-rock-leaning emo records, but it does have a richness and warmth that flatters Weiss’s songs. The fuzzed-out, curdled synths that send off "Who You Are Does ≠ Where You Are" deliver the record’s biggest sonic thrill, while the humming string accompaniments on "Anesthetic" make it prettiest song the band has ever recorded. Also flattering these songs: drummer Josh Sparks, a new addition to the band who already feels irreplaceable. His frolicsome drum work ties together the slow tracks together and lights up the fast ones. On the ripping "Adult Contempt" he’s essentially the lead instrument.
Sparks’ drumming is the showiest element on an album that’s mostly disinterested in showboating. What’ll be most surprising about Standards to anybody still weary of the emo tag is how tasteful it all sounds. In his many interviews on the subject, Weiss has sought not only to reclaim the term emo but also to normalize it, arguing in effect that it’s as just as respectable and ordinary as any other genre, and that for all its youthful appeal it’s the kind of music that you can grow old with, too. On Standards, a thoughtful album about bracing for the future while grieving the past, he’s leading by example. | 2016-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Triple Crown | April 12, 2016 | 7 | 7b41b22b-aa8c-4553-a4d4-bf446b4e1d95 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
Burial's latest EP has a wispy, vaporous quality, evoking a liminal space between events, a present moment all about suggestion. | Burial's latest EP has a wispy, vaporous quality, evoking a liminal space between events, a present moment all about suggestion. | Burial: Young Death / Nightmarket | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22674-young-death-nightmarket/ | Young Death / Nightmarket | In the years following the 2007 release of the most recent Burial album, Untrue, we barely heard from the London producer born William Bevan. There was a 12” a couple of years later that found him collaborating with Four Tet, but nothing in terms of solo material until the 2011 EP Street Halo. With that release, what seemed at first to be a diversion until the next full-length came along turned out to be something more significant: Burial was shaping his music to fit a new format and finding inspiration in its limitations.
The 12” vinyl EP, with a total playing time in the range of 20 to 30 minutes, proved to be the ideal canvas for new Burial creations. When no longer charged with sustaining a mood for LP length, he was able to pack more sounds and ideas into smaller spaces, incorporating rhythms from across the dance music spectrum and becoming more deft in his use of voices along the way. As important as Untrue may be to the recent history of electronic music, his EPs contain some of his finest work.
The 12”s became annual “event” records that seemed all-too-happy to slip back into the ether; the last two, 2013’s Rival Dealer and 2012’s Truant/Rough Sleeper, came out in during the sleepy release month of December, after the year-end lists had been compiled, and when a new year of music was just around the corner. December ’14 and ’15 brought precious little Burial music, but then Black Friday brought a surprise in the form of a new Hyperdub 12”, “Young Death” b/w “Nightmarket.”
It’s not quite fair to compare this record to the last four EPs, if only because this release is considerably shorter at 13 minutes. But the record feels comparatively minor in other ways. Each of the last few records introduced a new twist to the project, whether production density or a 4/4 house thump or an extra-musical idea, like the touching statement that Rival Dealer was designed as a balm for people subjected to bullying. As they arrived in succession, it was uncanny how much more Bevan could squeeze out of the narrow parameters of his style. But this 12” finds the project in a lull; it sounds like Burial (ghostly voices, clattering metal, vinyl crackle, funeral keyboard lines, all present and accounted for), which means it reaches a certain threshold for dark atmospheric beauty, but there’s very little to distinguish it otherwise.
Beats for the two tracks are almost non-existent, which might suggest that the intention is something closer to ambient music, but the songs don’t stick around long enough to be immersive. “Young Death” features a lovely repeating vocal bit featuring the phrase “I will always be there for you,” underscoring the fact that warmth and empathy were always at the heart of the Burial project, but the voice floats freely, never connecting to its surroundings. “Nightmarket” is a touch more engaging and adds some jittery John Carpenter-style keyboard textures, but it too feels like it’s gathering itself for something that never arrives. Both tracks feel like small pieces of a larger piece we don’t get to hear; there’s a wispy, vaporous, interlude quality to each, like we’re in a place where something just happened or something is about to happen but the present moment is all suggestion. | 2016-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Hyperdub | December 1, 2016 | 6.9 | 7b4201ad-c326-4dab-9324-4c09e853cd0a | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
The R&B legend returns with a soulful, deeply personal album that luxuriates in the classic sounds of wronged-woman blues, featuring guest spots from Kanye West, DJ Khaled, and Kaytranada. | The R&B legend returns with a soulful, deeply personal album that luxuriates in the classic sounds of wronged-woman blues, featuring guest spots from Kanye West, DJ Khaled, and Kaytranada. | Mary J. Blige: Strength of a Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23167-strength-of-a-woman/ | Strength of a Woman | Some artists reject equating their personal lives with their artistic ones. In the tradition of the most magnificent women in soul, Mary J. Blige has always invited it, freely discussing her travails and liberally exploring them within her songs, no matter how cutting. Yet on Strength of a Woman, ardent followers might find it jarring that the R&B diva should once again find a reason to look within for affirmation, at age 46 as she does on her 13th album’s luminous, boom-bap opening track “Love Yourself.” After a career peppered with songs detailing her abusive relationships and substance addiction, she appeared to find a plateau, a lane where she finally uncovered the happiness she deserved. My Life II...The Journey Continues (Act 1) (2011), closed the chapter on those tumultuous years, untethering her enough that she could—on part of 2014’s acclaimed The London Sessions—finally manifest as the classic house diva she deserved to be—free and exultant, unburdened by BPMs.
Wounds reopen, though. Blige is currently embroiled in an acrimonious split from her longtime manager/husband Kendu Isaacs—the source, fans presumed, of much of that early happiness—and so Strength of a Woman finds its power in going back to basics. As a whole experience, it luxuriates within the magisterial hip-hop-soul queendom she formulated in the ’90s and the attendant themes that trace back to wronged-woman blues. The bulk of the arrangements, by DJ Camper, hover in the realm of classic soul with slow-jam sensibilities, leaving space for her warm, inimitable relatable voice to speak her truth.
Strength of a Woman’s classicism is, in some ways, a relief despite the success of The London Sessions’ more modern tracks; in an era of young R&B acts that bury their vocals in hazy, gossamer production to the detriment of cohesion, it’s refreshing to hear Blige sticking with what she knows. Mary will never not be Mary, and through the deep-dive into self-empowerment and, as ever, self-discovery, that is this album, she understands her voice is her most effective tool—and her emotion its understudy. “I’ve been broken for a long time, now I’m standing in the sunshine” she intones radiantly over a simple piano accompaniment on “Smile.” The magic in Blige’s music has always been in her ability to transform straightforward, would-be schmaltzy sentiment into universal truths, and here she does that magically, perhaps more fully invested in actualization than she’s ever been. While newer R&B fans might not be drawn to the stoicism Blige embraces, particularly those who gravitated towards her via Disclosure, it’s inarguable that she’s set the template younger faves want to emulate; in an era of musical confessionalism, Blige’s instinct has always been the most confessional of all.
That said, Blige is never far from the culture at its most current. Just like rappers will sing, so too will Blige rap; on hyper-dense verses in triple-time cadences, her antipathy lives in the rhythm. Aside from “Telling the Truth,” a typically clanging club track produced by Kaytranada, she is at her most indulgent and delicious on the “Glow Up” featuring Quavo and Missy Elliott, a gleaming revenge track in which she declares herself petty in a Migos flow—“I’ma glow up! Throw it in ya face like yeahhhh”—and vows to stunt on a spurned lover; Kendu, we presume.
On Strength, Blige’s soon-to-be ex-husband (or his avatar) is the equivalent of a cartoon villain, both centered as the antagonist in Blige’s betrayed dirges and merely serving as a plot point in the ones that chat chart her own growth through the break-up; to that point this is precisely what a Mary J. Blige album has always been, a document of a woman facing and subsequently never succumbing to her obstacles, all combatted with gritty trills and not-quite-perfect vibrato that mirrors her not-quite-perfect truth. She has never been the most precise singer and thus she is the exact right person to deliver such apparently intimate missives from the soul. Vocally, there’s nary a chirp, even in her soprano—just a conjuring deep in the diaphragm. It manifests as she is, what you hear is what you get. | 2017-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | May 1, 2017 | 7.7 | 7b502b14-3bc4-44e5-a0d6-52de06b13cfe | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | null |
On their first new album in six years, the longrunning emo outfit take ownership of their sound. Even the quietest moments sit with jagged nerves and lingering tension. | On their first new album in six years, the longrunning emo outfit take ownership of their sound. Even the quietest moments sit with jagged nerves and lingering tension. | The Appleseed Cast: The Fleeting Light of Impermanence | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-appleseed-cast-the-fleeting-light-of-impermanence/ | The Fleeting Light of Impermanence | Though years of sustained, steady success allowed the Appleseed Cast’s Chris Crisci to table the prospect of day jobs and fatherhood, it drained the band of the kind of mystique that powers rapturous reunions. Second-wave peers in Pedro the Lion, Braid, the Get Up Kids, the Jazz June, and American Football returned after long hiatuses with considerate, measured takes on maturity and familial obligation; when Crisci reckoned with “fear and irrelevance and not wanting to become an adult” on 2013’s Illumination Ritual, it was simply one new Appleseed Cast album among many. Crisci admits that it was an insecure work, timid in its viewpoint and execution. An album titled The Fleeting Light of Impermanence is no less aware of humanity’s cosmic insignificance, but the band has come to accept the freedom within: We’re here and then we’re gone, so why not make as much noise as possible?
The Fleeting Light of Impermanence does nothing you haven’t heard them do before—all of those things are just done more emphatically. Throughout two decades, the common quality of the Appleseed Cast has been “oceanic”: the misty spray of reverb across their debut The End of the Ring Wars, the midnight-zone submersion of Low Level Owl, an album called Mare Vitalis, and a symphonic post-emo swell that seemed to echo from Sunny Day Real Estate’s The Rising Tide. This time, the opener is called “Chaotic Waves” because the hyperbolic drums push against familiar, stately guitars and Crisci’s stoic bellow, recasting the band’s tidal dynamics as a cruel battle of man and nature—a ship caught in a hurricane, fighting to a satisfying standstill.
Crisci usually favors evocative and evasive wordplay that aims just outside the heart or the gut, at times neutralizing the visceral effect of his band. This time, he follows the lead of their most forceful music by saying exactly what he means: “When they try to defeat you/Just clench your fist tight/Stand up and fight,” or “We've got one day to give/One day to work and live and hold the world.” If they have any fear of their own obsolescence, the Appleseed Cast shout it down with more carpe diem slogans and fire imagery than a Japandroids record.
It’s the first time in years that the band have legitimately rocked, something that’s never really been their M.O. despite working in punk-based subgenres. But even their atmospheric tendencies benefit from sheer volume. There’s no drift, no ambience for ambience’s sake; even the quietest moments sit with jagged nerves and lingering tension. Crisci junked his original plan for a “pure synth record,” keeping only those that sound most like guitars. In the past, that would’ve left the Appleseed Cast in a post-Radiohead rut, but the brutalist textures of “Time the Destroyer” and “The Journey” push them towards the bleak krautrock of Portishead’s Third instead. Crisci’s guitar leads are more memorable than his pop choruses, and so “Collision” and “Chaotic Waves” use the guitar as the chorus, successfully situating them within the everyman transcendentalism of Explosions in the Sky and Built to Spill. Much like the latest American Football, The Fleeting Light of Impermanence is the sound of a band taking ownership of their sound after years of being emulated or even ripped off by younger arrivals.
Still, the album’s uplift wouldn’t feel nearly as well-earned if it weren’t grounded in finality, just as inspiration strikes when the finish line is in sight. As with “Chaotic Waves,” the closer on The Fleeting Light of Impermanence makes no illusions about its intent: On “Last Words and Final Celebrations,” the Appleseed Cast circle back to the youthful stargazing of The End of the Ring Wars. If this is the last song the band ever makes, Crisci seems at peace with it. For the past decade, he’s fretted over the end. The Fleeting Light of Impermanence summons strength to face whatever comes next. | 2019-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Graveface | July 2, 2019 | 7.4 | 7b526347-09b4-4178-a824-50603957fc73 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Lorde returns with a self-aware, scaled-back album. Its holistic beauty and revelations about the natural world are often lost in the drab music. | Lorde returns with a self-aware, scaled-back album. Its holistic beauty and revelations about the natural world are often lost in the drab music. | Lorde: Solar Power | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lorde-solar-power/ | Solar Power | You have to act so dumb to be happy, nowadays. You can’t read the news and you can’t check social media; don’t look at the death toll, don’t look at the wildfire, don’t look at the weather. How do you separate yourself from the world without succumbing to denial? Maybe you could go away for a while—take some time to recharge. New Zealand sounds nice. I think the air is cleaner.
Lorde is there, and she’s chilling. After she wrapped the world tour for her second album, 2017’s Melodrama, she went home to Auckland and was hardly seen in public. She undertook a tech detox, giving up social media and setting her phone screen to grayscale, to make it less enticing. When she wanted to gain perspective on the climate crisis, she traveled to Antarctica. She made Solar Power, a self-aware, scaled-back album that asks you to “breathe out and tune in,” like a strange little paperbound spiritual text at a hippie bookshop. It’s part newfound realization of social and environmental consciousness, part self-help guide: her rationale for choosing the quiet life and reconnecting with nature, a diagram for threading the needle of joy when you might also live to see the end of Earth. Her message is—literally—light.
Once, a Lorde album was a monument years in the making, but here she asks us to be satisfied with everyday beauty, unassuming arrangements of guitar, keys, percussion, and voice. Produced once again with the ubiquitous Jack Antonoff, Solar Power sounds more interesting when it bottles the jasmine air of Laurel Canyon folk, less interesting when it emulates that sound’s descendants in early-2000s soft rock (Sheryl Crow, Jewel) without any of the hooks or energy of radio pop. These songs don’t move like the songs on Melodrama: no startling change-ups, no fireworks, just a spoken interlude by Robyn and a few distracting foley effects. On the title track and on the closer, Lorde communes directly with nature, and in between, she smuggles in love songs, dreams, doubts, a memorial for her late dog, Pearl, and, for the first time, close vocal harmonies with other singers, including Clairo and Phoebe Bridgers. It is the first Lorde album that doesn’t try to tug on your sleeve, or stare directly into your eyes. It feels like doing less.
Lorde didn’t log off entirely; people who live under rocks aren’t nearly so well-versed in Antonoff discourse. Did you see her putting away Hot Ones like they’re chicken nuggets? She’s been reading about the Sacklers (“Born in the year of OxyContin”) and watching Tarantino (“Once upon a time in Hollywood…”). She’s subscribing to trendy newsletters and checking her finsta, which maybe helps explain the album’s bent towards Y2K vibes and wellness fads. Solar Power is a little bit out-of-time, but now and then it taps into the kind of paralyzing quarter-life celebrity crisis found recently on albums by Billie Eilish and Clairo. “Teen millionaire having nightmares from the camera flash,” Lorde says on opener “The Path,” explaining what she’s escaped. She begins the gorgeous “California” with Carole King announcing her Grammy win for her hit single “Royals” in 2014 and writes a breakup song personifying Los Angeles as a “golden body” with a “cool hand around my neck.” She’s grateful to be away from it all, until she isn’t, and on the next song, “Stoned at the Nail Salon,” she wonders what might happen if she changed her mind and reclaimed her place among the glitterati.
More than ever, Lorde’s writing is the best part of her music, if only because the music is a little disappointing. “You felled me clean as a pine,” she sings to her lover on “The Man With the Axe,” and describes the dark concavity of a concert arena that’s shiny as a manicure and transient as the tide: “Fingernail worlds, like favorite seashells/They fill up my nights and then they float away.” The words are elegant, compact, enormous, rich in a kind of organic imagery that distinguishes Solar Power from Lorde’s past work. But while Melodrama purportedly unfolded within the confines of a house party, the concept came so naturally you didn’t have to think about it; it just felt like you were there. Solar Power tries to be bigger and smaller at the same time, spanning scenes of domestic bliss and apocalyptic flight without the conceptual architecture to unite them.
Trying for everything makes it all sound a little incoherent. On “Dominoes,” we watch an abuser skate free by reinventing himself as a new-age guy. There’s a kernel of a great idea in the way Lorde taps her voice across the syllables of the chorus, but the slack, demo-style recording won’t let it develop; city sirens ring in the distance as Antonoff’s guitar playing transports us to the grooviest coffeehouse on the beach. Three songs later, on “Mood Ring,” Lorde steps into a phony woo-woo persona herself, as if she too can buy the cure at a crystal shop. “Mood Ring,” as the artist was immediately at pains to say, is a satire of contemporary emotional detachment, a joke about a phone with a color screen—yet it’s too sweet to be biting, not sufficiently exaggerated to be funny, certainly not funny enough to pull off the squiggle of synth that enters beneath the line, “Let’s fly somewhere Eastern.” The shallowness comes to a head on “Secrets From a Girl (Who’s Seen It All),” where the secret wisdom is occasionally heartbreaking (“’Member what you thought was grief before you got the call?”) and more often platitudinal (“You gotta want it for yourself”).
It’s worth making art that promises a way out, art that can approach climate anxiety with clear eyes and purpose instead of dissonance and dread. But most of Solar Power doesn’t solicit strong emotion in either direction. Shouldn’t an album about climate grief and puppy grief and social grief by one of the best pop songwriters of her generation make you feel something? The music cycles through chipper acoustic chords, mournful six-string lines, and drummer Matt Chamberlain’s effortless shuffle, never locking into the bittersweet angst of Natalie Imbruglia, the cerebral intricacy of Jewel, the mutual conviction of a TLC ballad. It’s soft and loose and textureless. The sharpest pain comes in a moan at the end of “Fallen Fruit,” one of two incantatory interludes inspired, if we can call it that, by pending environmental collapse: “How can I love what I know I am gonna lose?/Don’t make me choose.”
“Fallen Fruit” and its sister “Leader of a New Regime” are weird songs, but Solar Power leaves so much room to be weirder, wilder, more joyful. I’m thinking of something Lorde said to the newsletter Blackbird Spyplane about why she went to Antarctica and what she learned there: “To go someplace where all you’re thinking about all day is the climate and environment was clarifying, and also kind of mystifying.” Clarifying and mystifying: Is there any other way to feel in the thrall of our only planet? But there’s just one moment on Solar Power that does. It’s at the very end, “Oceanic Feeling,” after Lorde rambles around for a while, visiting a favorite ocean bluff, reflecting on the lives of her family members and future daughter, on her past self. The beat drops away, the music falls to a murmur, and in a fluttering voice, she calls up a beachside bonfire and ponders metaphoric self-immolation. The implication is that Lorde does not want to do this, not like this, forever; that true happiness will always be out there in front of you, the deep blue shadow over the water.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Republic | August 20, 2021 | 6.8 | 7b579c99-40b1-4515-b95e-ac73b9634c1f | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ | |
The new EP from Portland duo the Body captures a rawer, more immediate side of the band. It documents their increasingly blurred boundaries between electronic noise and metal. | The new EP from Portland duo the Body captures a rawer, more immediate side of the band. It documents their increasingly blurred boundaries between electronic noise and metal. | The Body: A Home on Earth EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-body-a-home-on-earth-ep/ | A Home on Earth EP | Portland duo the Body have a never-ending well of misery and contempt for the world at large. The need to get out all of that hatred must account, to some degree, for why they’re so prolific. On the heels of Ascending a Mountain of Light, their second collaboration with grindcore band Full of Hell, comes A Home on Earth. The EP was recorded at Rhode Island studio/gallery Machines With Magnets while the band also recorded an album to be released in the future through Thrill Jockey. Like their other limited releases, the EP captures a rawer, more immediate side of the Body, documenting their increasingly blurred boundaries between noise and metal.
The Body are becoming less of a metal band—not just in form, but also in appearance. In live shows this year supporting Alcest, drummer Lee Buford and guitarist/vocalist Chip King toured only with pedals and assorted electronics, eschewing a traditional guitar-drum setup altogether. The influence of power electronics is much more prevalent here than before. King places more emphasis on texture than discernible riffing, conjuring blocks of noise often immovable. There’s rhythm there, but it’s constantly crumbling or bursting. It’s an extension of his devolution from last year’s No One Deserves Happiness, where Buford commented that King “hates the guitar, even though he plays the guitar, so he’s trying to make his guitar just sound like utter noise.” King’s shrill yell blends in with the feedback, adding to Earth’s monolithic character despite its short length.
While the rawness recalls the band’s self-released EPs of the past, Earth does something different. Those previous Body EPs were more like basement doom metal—you could make something out of all the thick, unprocessed bass. Here, there’s not much in the way of form, and the waves of noise feel even more obtrusive. Closer “Vile Despair” is the closest to anything conventionally punk or metal, with some urgency crying out over all the noise. There isn’t much electronic percussion here, though “Plague” resembles material from I Shall Die Here, their 2014 collaboration with the Haxan Cloak, with its echoed drums over King’s noise squalls.
Earth feels off the cuff in a way that many of their past releases haven’t; there isn’t much in the way of layering or outside collaborators. No choirs, no samples of speaking in tongues, no spoken word renditions of Édouard Levé. The Body has always combined loads of disparate influences—their one way of celebrating humanity—with anger. Earth leans far towards the latter. Whether it’s a sign of things to come or a pit-stop before their next album remains to be seen. It’s proof, though, that the Body haven’t forgotten how to really go for it, and that will hopefully always be a part of their DNA, even if it’s as bare as it is on Earth. | 2017-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | self-released | December 20, 2017 | 7.2 | 7b617c48-3d66-4fd8-9770-fb77b59c11d8 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
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 pivotal album in the history of Atlanta and rap itself. | 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 pivotal album in the history of Atlanta and rap itself. | T.I.: Trap Muzik | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ti-trap-muzik/ | Trap Muzik | Before Atlanta’s Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway was named after an attorney from the Civil Rights era, its namesake was Alabama Senator John H. Bankhead, “Father of Good Roads.” Bankhead Highway, as it was then known, snaked from Memphis to Tupelo, to Birmingham, to Atlanta. It was functionally an interstate, but Atlantans took a special liking to the name.
For a nearly seven-mile stretch from the west bank of the Chattahoochee River to the edge of Atlanta’s city center, Bankhead Highway was more than a thoroughfare. Bankhead, as the corridor is unofficially and affectionately known (even after the renaming of its main street), comprises churches and seafood markets, salons and package stores. Abstract graffiti and homely murals coat the sides of crumbling buildings, demolished projects sit in frustrating stasis, poverty and prosperity live in startling proximity, and outsiders rarely mention the area fondly—but Bankhead is a community. Sprawling yet connected, industrial yet residential, hobbled but bouncing along, Bankhead is a neighborhood by virtue of collective imagination, pride, and struggle.
Drug dealing and hustling took a young T.I. down Bankhead and across it, over fences and between jobs, away from poverty but closer to peril. Trap Muzik is a record of those sprawling experiences and their compression into one life, one man. During a recent tour of Morehouse College with his college-age son, T.I. stumbled upon a strange revelation. “The trap house was my Morehouse. It was a group of brothers, and we showed up, challenged each other’s ideas, and supported one another,” he declared.
The origin of trap music has recently been disputed, as “trap” has become a muddled omni-label that describes 808s and hi-hats alone. T.I. has sought to end the discussion. Just as he believes he singularly elevated Atlanta’s streets, T.I. claims he invented trap music with this album. “August 19th, 2003 Birth of Trap Muzik & Only fools dispute facts,” he wrote on Instagram in response to Gucci Mane’s claim as the father of trap. T.I. certainly predates Gucci, but Atlanta at the turn of the millennium and before had too many drug dealers turned rappers and producers to take this claim seriously. And that’s fine. Just as John Bankhead didn’t invent Bankhead, T.I. didn’t invent trap music. But in his open embrace of the trap’s spirit on Trap Muzik, and living of its ethos, and bearing of its scars, he made it vivid and relatable. It’s only right that he’s taken a special liking to it.
In the late ’90s, T.I. (born Clifford Harris) was a barber and dope boy brimming with Bankhead pride. Rap had been a part of his life since he was a kid, but so had hustling, and it took years of losses and setbacks before music became his focus. He had a father figure in Uncle Quint, who received a 10-year sentence on drug charges. Then, P$C (Pimp $quad Clique), a group of neighborhood friends, experienced the death of one member alongside the murder conviction of another; they ended up shelving their finished album. T.I. remained active in the streets, but his trajectory was clear. “Why all my partners gotta be dead or in the feds for?” he’d rap a few years later, hinting at his own grim odds.
His pivot to rap did eventually lead him out of the trenches, but it was a bittersweet victory. His first album, I’m Serious, released in 2001, was a critical and commercial non-factor. T.I. blamed the poor performance on a lack of support from his label Arista. Labelhead L.A. Reid, a lauded R&B producer turned label exec, was perplexed by T.I.’s frequent mention of the trap. “L.A. didn’t get it,” recalled producer DJ Toomp. “[He] was like, ‘What the hell is a trap?’” Concentrating Arista’s efforts on larger acts like OutKast and P!nk, Reid refused to shoot a video for sleeper hit “Dope Boyz,” among other slights. T.I. speaks bitterly about his experience at Arista to this day, but I’m Serious also was a weak showing artistically. His zippy flows and generic pimp raps obscured his charisma and crowded out his storytelling and swagger. He embodied Bankhead but didn’t evoke it. He didn’t make that mistake again.
Soured by Arista’s neglect, T.I. terminated his contract and went independent, cranking out mixtapes on his homespun Grand Hustle label he started with his manager Jason Geter. Hawking original and repackaged songs with a reformed P$C as the mixtape series In Da Streets, Grand Hustle promoted its artists directly to the streets. The circumstances of this independence and the underground success of “Dope Boyz” emboldened T.I. to turn the trap into his cause célèbre. As Jermaine Dupri welcomed the world to Atlanta’s parties, In Da Streets took listeners beyond the city’s storied strip clubs and swank lounges. On “In Da A” T.I. makes the contrast explicit: “I know ya heard a lot/And probably seen a little/It’s more to the A than what you hear from JD and them.”
T.I. recorded most of Trap Muzik in a studio housed in the back of a hair salon, removed from the machinations of the music industry and embedded in the community. He saw the South as his kingdom, but nothing meant more to him than winning over Atlanta, his province. “Our main intention with this album was to make sure we represented the walks of life, the generation, the region, the circle, the society,” he recalled a decade later. “I felt like I had a responsibility to step out and show cats from the Northeast that there’s other people down here, other lifestyles, other stories besides Organized Noize and So So Def...I felt like we were being underserved.”
His perception was skewed given the vast range of artists and skills housed under both Atlanta camps and across the South. From Lil Jon’s rowdy crunk revitalizing Memphis buck, to Ludacris’ dirtbag sex raps channeling Miami bass, to OutKast’s ubiquitous stank, the city and the region were thriving. But in that yearning to wrest the spotlight from the city’s headliners, to put Bankhead on the map, T.I. found his voice. Street in its swagger yet personal in its spirit, Trap Muzik turned T.I.’s need to represent into an anthemic portrait of surviving poverty. Trap Muzik presents the trap as not just a setting or a sound or a state of mind, but as a portal into the self.
Trapping taught T.I. that he was both cunning and in over his head, and he spends the album detailing his dicey odds. The title track parachutes the listener right into the middle of a dope spot, where T.I. and fellow P$C member Mac Boney post up defiantly despite a trickle of customers and lurking feds. Then T.I. quickly flips the script. “12!” he shouts as cops appear and a brief skit of a foot chase plays over a beat shift. By the time he’s hopped a fence, the bounce is gone, and a cloud of bells and minor keys drifts in over slowed percussion. “Shawty still in the trap,” T.I. scoffs, irked but undeterred.
That ambivalence proves to be one of T.I.’s greatest strengths. He often establishes a mood then undercuts it, within both songs and song sequences. “Be Easy” uses a disarming calm to seek peace; it’s followed by the fiery “No More Talk,” which welcomes conflict. On “Doin’ My Job,” T.I. touts his entire stock of narcotics then makes an impassioned defense of drug dealers’ work ethic. “We got lives, we wanna live nice too/We got moms, dads, wives, kids, just like you,” he protests to the residents of the neighborhood where he works. By “Let’s Get Away,” he’s so burned out from trapping he needs a dope boy’s vacation—“a room on the other side of town” with a lover. These pivots create a panorama of experiences. T.I. doesn’t just set the scene, he world-builds, depicting the trap as three-dimensional and dynamic, a shifting space of stress, surveillance, action, and reflection. “This whole album is filled with music dealing with all aspects of that lifestyle. Whether you in the trap, trying to get out the trap, or just living around the trap. Whether you want inspiration or information, I got you,” he told an interviewer in 2003.
Within all this flux, T.I. takes immense pride in his obsession with his craft. He raps in full embrace of his Southern drawl, rounding his vowels, slowing his flows, and using his lilt to glide through syllables with grace. On “Be Easy” he raps “I’m so fly, no lie/Don’t deny it, ya felt/So inspired by my style, decided to try it ya self,” stringing the rhymes together by riding the rhythm of his accent. The pace and ease of his delivery nearly obscure the penmanship; he sounds like he’s talking.
Turning on the charm for “Let Me Tell You Something,” he constructs another slick sequence: “But anyway/When I see yo face/I’m thinking three or fo’ days in Montego Bay.” These moments often go unnoticed, but their frequency belied T.I.’s twin goals of being respected and being distinct. He sought to best East Coast purists and to bewitch them, and was willing to adopt their conventions even as he broke with them. “Y’all ain’t never seen a dope boy rap and play the piano at the same time,” he taunts on “Be Easy.”
His collaborators leveled-up alongside him. Graduating from their undermixed contributions to the In Da Streets mixtapes on Trap Muzik, producers San (Chez) Holmes and DJ Toomp inject their productions with flair and husk. Percussive but buoyant, their compositions wobble as much as they knock, the sounds hitting then rolling, like a bowling ball dropped in water. Toomp’s skittering drum patterns on “24’s” dance around a muscular modulated string melody, creating pockets of counter-rhythm that complement T.I.’s drawl. As T.I. stretches and elongates his words, a downbeat is there to catch and propel his subtle pauses. When working with Toomp, T.I. doesn’t have to rap about cornbread or yams to prove he’s a Southerner because the beats are made to fit a Southern cadence.
Chez’s productions rely on swing rather than bounce. Arranging his percussion more conventionally than Toomp, his hi-hats and snares tick like a metronome, but his bass riffs and streaks of organ and guitar generate a breezy sway. T.I. can turn introspective on Chez tracks, and that spacious, slow-winding production is key. “Kingofdasouth” is nominally an extended boast, but you can feel T.I.’s ego swell as his mythos becomes his creed. “I’m the king ‘cause I said it and I mean that shit,” he raps with gusto.
David Banner, Kanye West, Nick Fury, and Jazze Pha round out the production, and T.I.’s compatibility with their varying styles is key to his vision of the trap. “Even if you were participating in felonious activities,” he explained in an interview, “there were still other things you needed to deal with: You’re not just drug dealing but also dealing with a relationship with your parents, your girlfriend, having a child too young and being looked down on by society as one thing, when you’re actually much more than that definition. You might have had a homeboy who just died, but he wasn’t even in the streets like that!” The sprawl was the point.
Toomp’s drum patterns and 808 kicks would later be dissected and riffed on by later generations of Southern producers like Shawty Redd, Zaytoven, and Drumma Boy. They would become shorthand for the trap aesthetic, despite nearly all of Trap Muzik’s producers using those same elements (as well as contemporary producers in Atlanta and New Orleans, like Mannie Fresh and OutKast, drawing from the same well). But T.I. was the centerpiece of the sound and the concept. He was not the first Southern rapper to find his voice and his audience in the streets and clubs. But his innovation was to insist that the dangers and glories of those streets and clubs were indivisible. His 24-inch rims and rubber-band banks were badges and scars. T.I. lived for Bankhead and in spite of it—it broke him, shaped him, and set him free. | 2018-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Grand Hustle | September 9, 2018 | 8.7 | 7b695049-e76a-4c7a-b3f3-9ededc5c2ac9 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Armed with arpeggiated synths, electro-disco drum machines, and some light heresy, the German electronic musician sets her sights on dancefloor provocation, but too often, she’s preaching to the choir. | Armed with arpeggiated synths, electro-disco drum machines, and some light heresy, the German electronic musician sets her sights on dancefloor provocation, but too often, she’s preaching to the choir. | Perel: Jesus Was an Alien | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/perel-jesus-was-an-alien/ | Jesus Was an Alien | The world of electronic music loves extravagant concepts, and Perel may have taken this year’s prize for outlandish thinking. On Jesus Was an Alien, her follow-up to 2018’s Hermetica, on DFA, the German electronic musician and DJ asks a question worthy of late-night cable programming—Was Jesus actually an extra-terrestrial?—while ostensibly fostering “a social debate about what is and implies religion today,” weighty themes that make dance music’s shopworn tales of getting down and occasionally dirty pale in comparison. Add to this a mischievous sense of humor—the album’s cover depicts Perel suckling a baby alien to her breast—and you have what should be one of most entertaining dance music releases of the year.
Sadly, Jesus Was an Alien falls short in its ambition. Perhaps it’s unreasonable to expect divine revelation from an album of synth-heavy techno pop on one of Germany’s more reliably industrious labels. But despite its grand setup, Jesus Was an Alien comes across as shallow and rather innocuous. Perel’s production is undoubtedly bright and punchy, but the basic combination of arpeggiated synth riffs and electro-disco drum machines has been around since “I Feel Love,” and there are no new tangles or grit to distinguish the album from the work of thousands of tech-house journeymen. The lyrical themes, too, are rather gray: The tedious “Religion” simply repeats the phrase “Schau mich an!” (“Look at me!” in German)—perhaps potent stuff back in 1517, when Martin Luther was nailing his “Ninety-five Theses” to Wittenberg church doors, but unlikely to blow many minds in an era grappling with simulation hypothesis, string theory, and AI. The lyrics of “The Principle of Vibration” add basically nothing to an intriguing song title; and does anyone really need another song about The Matrix, three sequels down?
This wouldn’t matter if the music on Jesus Was an Alien was more spirited, but the album’s production rarely ventures beyond the competent. Perel claims to feel “emotions and colors piling up inside me” as a result of her synesthesia, but the color scheme on Jesus Was an Alien suggests a utilitarian whitewash with the occasional hint of blue. This is a slight album, musically, that operates in predictable straight lines: Synths trundle along like cruise-control electroclash, drum machines tick by, and a piano makes its innocuous voice known on “The Matrix,” a vaguely old-school house song that resembles Joe Smooth’s “Promised Land” with all the passion blue-pilled out of it.
Other club conceptualists, like Drexciya or Jeff Mills, have paired weighty subject matter with a sense of gravitas, but Perel's perfectly functional music, when stripped of its lyrics, could be about anything, really, and it steadfastly refuses to catch fire. “Kill the System” is so measured in its arpeggiated stroll that it makes me want to re-evaluate my homeowner’s insurance rather than storm the barricades.
To make things worse, Perel enlists one of the few artists today to nail the blend of subversion, humor, and intelligence that Jesus Was an Alien is striving for: Montreal mischief-maker Marie Davidson. It is a decision akin to asking Van Gogh to finish off your sunflowers, and Davidson entirely outshines her host on the album’s title track. Davidson’s lyrics enlighten and intrigue where Perel’s land with a thud; her delivery vibrates with a guileful control to Perel’s often weary trudge; and she provides the album’s best vocal melody by quite a long chalk. It would be one thing if Perel had failed ambitiously; instead, she simply underwhelms. As it stands, Jesus Was an Alien’s artwork outshines the music in both impact and audacity; Perel’s theological provocation is unlikely to win many converts. | 2022-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | May 19, 2022 | 6 | 7b6aba5c-4c8c-4921-927a-568e14aaf521 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
The defining record of 1985 sophisto-pop, now remastered and reissued with an extra disc of new acoustic renditions by the band's singer and songwriter Paddy McAloon. | The defining record of 1985 sophisto-pop, now remastered and reissued with an extra disc of new acoustic renditions by the band's singer and songwriter Paddy McAloon. | Prefab Sprout: Steve McQueen [Legacy Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10562-steve-mcqueen-deluxe-edition/ | Steve McQueen [Legacy Edition] | In another time, in another place, Paddy McAloon might have been happily productive somewhere between the Algonquin and Broadway in 1930s New York ("I want to be," he once crooned, hopefully, "the Fred Astaire of words.") Or beavering away in an office in the Brill Building in the 50s. Or maybe some place on that off-kilter middle of the road between Burt Bacharach and Jimmy Webb in the 60s. Almost anywhere, you might have thought, other than Britain in the mid-80s.
Some hard-hearted professors of pop would have it that 1985 was the absolute nadir of British music: all the fizz of new pop gone flat, the independent scene a twee shambles. Yet in records such as the Blue Nile's A Walk Across The Rooftops, the Pet Shop Boys' Please, Kate Bush's Hounds of Love, Scritti's Cupid and Psyche 85, and especially in Prefab Sprout's Steve McQueen, you have some of the most beautiful, enduring British pop music ever made. For a year or two, just before Live Aid and Q magazine, the challenge of making new pop for grown-ups without being dowdy, smug, or jaded was met, quite superbly. It's this guile and grace that bands like Stars and Junior Boys still yearn for.
The Sprout-- it's ironic that a writer so fleet-footed lumbered himself with such a clunking band name-- had debuted in 1984 with Swoon, a record that suggested they were post-graduates of the Glasgow School, taking the Postcard label template to new levels of cryptic wit and elliptical jangle. But as McAloon made plain, his ambitions were far grander. He aspired to the standards of Stephen Foster, Gershwin, Sondheim, Quincy Jones, McCartney; saw himself as a contemporary of Prince rather than Lloyd Cole. He had a grand sense of pop music, and in 1985, that kind of grandeur seemed to be available via producers like Thomas Dolby.
McAloon has said that Steve McQueen is Dolby's record-- he presented the producer with a vast archive of songs and asked him to choose his favorites. Yet [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| this is true most obviously in the profoundly 80s sonic palette. Rather wonderfully and typically, it seems that Dolby even chose to play the banjo on the opening track, the country pastiche "Faron Young", via a Fairlight sampler. And the presence on this new reissue of an additional disc of acoustic versions of the songs-- which took longer to record than the original-- suggests that McAloon now feels embarrassed, as though the production has dated or even damaged his songs.
I think he needn't be so bashful; one of the defining qualities of the record is its pop ambition, its willingness to engage with its times, precisely by not being a sullen singer-songwriter would-be timeless classic. Imagine if Sinatra had decided that Nelson Riddle's arrangements tied his albums to closely to the early 50s. According to this additional disc, Steve McQueen might have been some perfectly prim and pleasant Go-Betweeny acoustic curio, rather than how it ended up: the kind of record you imagine Elvis Costello might have made had he been signed to ZTT and been ensconced in a studio with Trevor Horn.
One thing the new versions do highlight is the astonishing maturity of the songs. Coincidentally, almost all of Dolby choices dated from 1979, when Paddy was 22. Yet they sound all the more appropriate sung by a man of 50. "Life's not complete, 'til your heart's missed a beat," he sighed on "Goodbye Lucille #1", but now when he sings "and you'll never get it back," his voice breaks with the wisdom of another two decades.
Ironically, considering the producer's name, it's a record in so many ways about infidelity. Or let's say about the consequences of romanticism. Take that cover: Paddy, looking like a dreamy young D.H. Lawrence, astride the kind of Triumph that would have carried the record's namesake to freedom. But the whole album rails against easy escapism: "Appetite", sung from the perspective of a girl left to bring up the baby of some young firebrand; "Desire As" seeing no escape from a lifetime of new flames; the rueful regrets of "Bonny".
And maybe I'm too much a child of those times myself, but it still sounds great to me: the glittering guitar that opens "Goodbye Lucille", the 10cc/ZTT moments of "When Love Breaks Down". Even Wendy Smith's gaseous backing vocals, haunting the record like the ghost of Hayley Mills.
In fact it seems to me that instead of stripping back the songs from their 80s incarnations, the additional disc could have more profitably commissioned some original covers. McAloon was, after all, the original Stephin Merritt, so there's no reason why he shouldn't have his own Sixths. You can imagine these songs performed by, oh, Marianne Faithfull, Bryan Ferry, Will Young, Kylie Minogue, Rufus Wainwright, or Antony Hegarty. A handful of these songs have the quality of standards: there's no reason why their real after-life shouldn't begin now. | 2007-08-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2007-08-29T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Kitchenware | August 29, 2007 | 8.6 | 7b6b3aa1-8e5b-4255-ab6c-3e2b2d4a9205 | Pitchfork | null |
|
Mixing viral videos with synths and the unsettling screams of lead singer Kate Mahony, the London punk quartet delivers an unusual record that’s as funny as it is unhinged. | Mixing viral videos with synths and the unsettling screams of lead singer Kate Mahony, the London punk quartet delivers an unusual record that’s as funny as it is unhinged. | Shake Chain: Snake Chain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shake-chain-snake-chain/ | Snake Chain | Punk vocalists long ago mastered anger and its many variants: rage, disdain, bratty irritation. For the London quartet Shake Chain, fear and vulnerability are equally interesting trenches of the human mind. On their debut album, Snake Chain, lead singer Kate Mahony gives madcap readings of both—sobbing, screaming, whining, and squealing her way through banal little snapshots of modern life. Her bandmates—guitarist Robert Eyres, bassist Chris Hopkins, and drummer Joe Fergey—clot their harsh arrangements with synth textures and samples of well-known videos. The blare only maximizes Mahony’s cantata of discomfort; it makes for an unusual punk record that’s as funny as it is unhinged.
Without a lyric sheet on hand, you can still enjoy the pure animality of Mahony’s voice. You’ll only catch an actual word here and there, but her psychodramatic tantrums—imagine Miss Piggy going apeshit on Maury—are a delight in and of themselves. On the surf-tinged “Mike,” Mahony recreates the paranoid shrieks of a woman whose meltdown went viral. “Miiiiiiiikkkke! He’s running me over!” she shouts over heat-warped guitar and splattered cymbals. On “Stace,” Shake Chain pluck a snippet from EastEnders, the schlocky, long-running British soap opera. They distort melodramatic dialogue into the stuff of snuff films; cries of mourning sound like teens fleeing Leatherface’s bone room.
Shake Chain are keen on perverting ubiquitous content until it’s barely recognizable, twisting the mundane into a waking nightmare. But you get the sense that they find the source material hellish as it is. As Mahony wails on “Internet”: “Don’t put that on the internet!/Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... It’s out of context!” Shake Chain are endlessly interested in everyday objects, events, and conversations—chiefly, how horrific they are. Mahony fills “Birthday” with appliances and furniture, casting them in surreal shafts of light. “Do we think that chairs are implied?” she asks, before rattling off a kinked string of small talk: “Have you got a light?/What is the time?/When you look in the oven/Does it look back at you?”
On the chugging, guitar-scuzzed “RU,” she compares security to “another anchor,” suggesting its potential to sink as much as moor. The song is structured like tortured water-cooler chat; Mahony teases out her questions, tweaking their meaning word by word. “Are you/Are you still/Are you still living?... Are you still living in that flat?” It’s a common discussion, but the delivery—like a dying alley cat—subverts the familiar. Snake Chain is littered with moments like this. On the minimal “Architecture,” Mahony spoofs upward mobility, linking it to a bourgeois appreciation of structures. A flat, robotic synth pattern nudges along underneath, as she muses on her passion: “Trying to design a deck chair/For the rest of my life,” she sings. You can almost see her flipping through a towering stack of Dwell magazines, searching for satisfaction in other people’s 3 million dollar manors.
As if slipping into the opposite role, Mahony plays a wealthy dame in “Second Home,” a companion piece to “Architecture.” It’s the most straightforward punk track on Snake Chain, fueled by fast’n’dirty guitar, bass, and drums. It may also be the closest Mahony gets to actually singing. She clutches her pearls, describing the yearly garden party she hosts at her country estate. It is posh, naturally, and the house is decked out in “Farrow & Ball”—an English paint brand so expensive that it was once parodied on Saturday Night Live. But things take a dark, nationalistic turn. “It’s such a relief to get out of the city,” Mahony growls in the song’s final moments. “Making Britain better again/The best of British for people who belong.” While most of Shake Chain’s critiques require a stretch in perspective, the last verse of “Second Home” is their most blatant. But no matter the magnitude of their satire, or the tax bracket of their targets, normalcy is the lurking foe of Snake Chain. And it’s coming for all of us. | 2022-12-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-12-12T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Upset the Rhythm | December 12, 2022 | 7.6 | 7b6c192c-f144-4a53-94ec-20235a5ee91c | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
On her solo debut, the veteran songwriter turns from writing hits for Shawn Mendes and One Direction to establishing her own voice. | On her solo debut, the veteran songwriter turns from writing hits for Shawn Mendes and One Direction to establishing her own voice. | teddy<3: LillyAnna | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/teddy3-lillyanna/ | LillyAnna | In the mid-’00s, Teddy Geiger was a somewhat reluctant member of a group of artists that also included Jesse McCartney and Ryan Cabrera. Some came from boy bands, others from reality TV—Geiger got her start on a show searching for a “new Partridge family”—but their music was much the same: exceedingly soft pop-rock that seemed made less for arenas than rom-coms or the soapy likes of “Laguna Beach.” (The video for Geiger’s biggest hit, “For You I Will (Confidence),” starred a then-A-list Kristin Cavallari.) It wasn’t a particularly remarkable run, nor did Geiger like it much—“I didn’t connect to what was happening on radio with singer-songwriter stuff at the time,” she told Rolling Stone—and after a couple sporadic forays into acting, she retired to pursue songwriting more to her own taste. Some of those songs would end up recorded by the 2010s’ crop of Ryan Cabreras, like One Direction, 5 Seconds of Summer, and, most notably, Canadian singer-songwriter Shawn Mendes, whose biggest hits (“Stitches,” “Treat You Better”) are Geiger-penned. LillyAnna, her debut as teddy<3 (It looked “cute,” she told Rolling Stone) is her coming out, both in the literal sense (Geiger came out as transgender last fall) and figuratively, as a solo artist of her own making.
Teddy joins more and more of her peers who have been lured toward solo careers by the industry’s increasingly Darwinian royalty structure. Though singer-songwriters have won some victories lately in the battle to actually get paid, the “singer” part is still far more lucrative than “songwriter.” But songwriters looking to become lead artists face two pitfalls. The first is to treat solo albums as a sort of clearinghouse for rejected tracks. The other, counterintuitively, is to release an album full of would-be hits, the same finely wrought smashes they shop to superstars—except without the superstars. This rarely works out as well as they hope. No matter how undeniable the songs, they’re still haunted by the ghosts of other artists’ voices, when emerging artists need to establish their own.
LillyAnna, named after an online alter-ego of Geiger’s, was written in the early 2010s. As a result, the album exists completely outside ’00s pop trends, which is part of its charm. The sun-kissed pop-rock of “Under the Blue” sounds a lot sweeter in 2018 than 2005, as do the lilting melody and “Here Comes the Sun” lifts of “Life Goes On,” or the VH1 scuzz of the title track. (They also, strangely, sound a thousand times better than anything Mendes has ever recorded.) Though the album was written pre-transition, Geiger wrote it from a place of searching—a “kind of all clouded” mental space, she said on Beats 1 Radio—and the subtext is noticeable and lends the album gravitas missing from the “Laguna Beach” days. The lyrics of “Under the Blue” fall like a warm hug. Geiger spits the verses of “I Was in a Cult” out with contempt, then roars the chorus like stomping on their ashes.
As an introduction to Teddy<3, LillyAnna isn’t perfect. The album’s a bit ballad-heavy, and when it departs from formula it’s not for the better—as on the distorted, Jeff Bhasker-ish R&B of “Loser,” a concession to modern tastes that comes off as also-ran Kehlani or James Blake. Sometimes there’s still a sense of holding back. “Get Me High” and “Body and Soul” sit at the exact midpoint of the Strokes, Carina Round, and Brittany Howard, and Teddy’s fuzzed-out vocal is pure glee; they’re just produced a little tinny, particularly in the percussion. (Every so often, in “Body and Soul,” a bit of twinkling keys or guitar squeals will pop out of the arrangement, like beacons from some other, more dynamic song.) But it still sets a more cohesive mood than a lot of her peers, a point best illustrated by “8,” an instrumental interlude in the middle of the album. It begins pleasant and drifty, but toward the middle, the chords go dissonant and the arrangement’s interrupted by what sounds like fences creaking or metal clattering. A high, pealing note wavers, flatting momentarily. Geiger’s said she’s interested in “roughing up pop music a bit”; this is proof of concept. | 2018-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Whatever | November 21, 2018 | 6.8 | 7b6debac-ae04-454a-b09f-2b9ef87bf146 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
In the past two years, John Talabot has become an exemplar of a new breed of producers working at the intersection of deep house, disco, and indie pop. On his debut, the Spanish producer builds upon his distinctive sound-- bursting with color, nostalgic but never retro, easy-going yet slightly unhinged-- without repeating himself. | In the past two years, John Talabot has become an exemplar of a new breed of producers working at the intersection of deep house, disco, and indie pop. On his debut, the Spanish producer builds upon his distinctive sound-- bursting with color, nostalgic but never retro, easy-going yet slightly unhinged-- without repeating himself. | John Talabot: ƒIN | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16249-fin/ | ƒIN | When the Irish techno producer Donnacha Costello released his debut album, Growing Up in Public, its title crystallized a key dilemma of any emerging artist: At what point do you decide you're ready to venture out of the bedroom? That was back in 2000, well before the internet had shifted into high gear; since then, the coming-out process has gotten only harder.
Barcelona's John Talabot and his first album, ƒIN, make for an interesting case study of the musical debutant: This is actually the artist's second time around. Under a different alias, as a resident DJ at one of Barcelona's techno institutions, he began his recording career in the mid 2000s, making punchy, melodic dance music with a clear debt to labels such as BPitch Control and Border Community. A few years later, around the same time that Barcelona's techno scene and the styles that fueled it began to go stale, his own productions began to shift. He eased into a mid-tempo chug and set aside buzzing synthesizers in favor of sun-bleached samples, trading neon fizz for dandelion fluff. Like a company de-listing itself from the stock market, the local fixture took himself private, assuming a new alias and wiping the slate clean.
It was a smart move. In the past two years, Talabot has become an exemplar of a new breed of producers working at the intersection of deep house, disco, and indie pop, and he has carved out his own niche somewhere between the slow-motion theatrics of artists such as Mark E and Tensnake, the globe-trotting jewel tones of Four Tet and Caribou, and the psych-pop rush of Animal Collective and Delorean. Having interviewed him a few times, I don't think there's a calculating bone in the-artist-currently-known-as-John-Talabot's body, but he has nevertheless benefited from being in the right place at the right time. His slow tempos, supersaturated colors, and tropical accents fit right in with the woozy, humid dance music that's currently in vogue, and he has found himself in esteemed company-- remixing the xx, recruiting Glasser's Cameron Mesirow for guest vocals, and releasing on Young Turks. He's currently on tour in Australia with SBTRKT, another indicator that his star is on the rise.
Ironically, this all means that, his quasi-anonymity aside, Talabot finds himself growing up in public all over again as he graduates from singles and remixes to the full-length album form. Perhaps it's those raised stakes that make ƒIN feel like such a triumph. Across the album's 11 tracks, Talabot builds upon his distinctive sound-- bursting with color, nostalgic but never retro, easy-going yet slightly unhinged-- without repeating himself.
Talabot's early singles tended to follow a single trajectory, beginning with a bed of chunky percussion and then piling on loops of acoustic guitars, Philly strings, and soaring, pitched-up voices, usually culminating in a swollen, almost over-the-top climax. He hasn't entirely abandoned that approach, but he hasn't remained shackled to it, partly because he has shortened his track times considerably: Where his singles and remixes routinely ran seven, eight, even nine minutes, most of ƒIN's tracks come in around the four-minute mark, giving him the opportunity to experiment with more modest ideas that say their piece and move on.
The album's first three songs show off his range. The opening "Depak Ine"-- at seven-and-a-half minutes, it's the LP's longest cut-- is disco by way of Depeche Mode, with stabbing synths, eerie vocal samples, and an inexplicable chorus of croaking frogs. (The title resembles the brand name of a mood-stabilizing drug, which might explain the shift from minor to major halfway through; perhaps the frogs denote side effects?) "Destiny", a co-production with Madrid's Pional, is one of the album's obvious standouts, with beautifully harmonized vocals over lilting Caribbean chimes and a cozy, reassuring chord progression. Then, like a kind of palate cleanser, the three-minute "El Oeste" is a sleek little miniature of melting synthesizers, scraggly drum machines and dub delay that gradually swells into a folky, Boards of Canada-gone-house vibe.
A few times, Talabot tries to recreate the sensation that he nailed on "Sunshine", an early hit that was as subtle as an ice-cream headache. With its stabbing chords and sped-up vocal loops, "When the Past Was Present" shows Talabot at his excessive best-- buzzing and slightly out of tune, with everything pushed into the red and teetering on the verge of collapse. "Journeys", the album's only misstep, goes for the same vibe, but there's something clunky about its construction, and the vocals, from Delorean's Ekhi Lopetegi, can be distractingly pitchy.
A kind of happy melancholy informs most of the album, but that unity of mood doesn't get in the way of the songs' potential to surprise. As many times as I listen, I keep discovering new sounds, phrases, and even entire songs that had previously passed me by, such as "Estiu", a demure, three-minute funk bumper that sounds like Dâm-Funk on Percoset, or "Last Land", whose breakbeat sounds based on the same sample used in Mr. Cheeks' 2001 club-rap hit "Lights, Camera, Action!".
ƒIN saves its best song for last: "So Will Be Now...", another Pional co-production, which loops sampled vocals into a dreamy haze before digging into a sparse, deep-house groove. It's restrained, but there's real power there. A friend raved to me about how the song moved the dance floor at Berlin's Panorama Bar one Sunday morning. On your home speakers, it's as comforting as a lullaby, but played loud, apparently, those stark finger snaps and swooning coos are a call to collective ecstasy. Those contradictory qualities inform the whole record as it luxuriates in the space between private and public, just as its ambiguous title blurs the line between ends and means. | 2012-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Permanent Vacation | February 7, 2012 | 8.5 | 7b78a247-6d67-4fb7-b1b7-f0efbeeb662d | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Philly throwback rock band that birthed Kurt Vile releases an EP that displays new compositional strengths and flair for sonic texture. | Philly throwback rock band that birthed Kurt Vile releases an EP that displays new compositional strengths and flair for sonic texture. | The War on Drugs: Future Weather EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14803-future-weather-ep/ | Future Weather EP | "My friend/ Rides all alone." That's the War on Drugs frontman Adam Granduciel, on "Baby Missiles", the jittery, sorta-opening track to the Philadelphia ragged-rock band's new EP, Future Weather. It's literally impossible to tell who the friend in question is, but those familiar with the band's genesis could take a stab. Granduciel and Kurt Vile founded the band back in 2003, toiling away for five years and with various band members in the Philadelphia scene, leading up to their "big break" when Secretly Canadian took the group under their wing and put out their 2008 debut, Wagonwheel Blues. Then, Vile's solo material gained even greater attention than that of his main band, and he struck out on his own. He didn't leave the band, not exactly-- he's still a member, albeit not one who appears on Future Weather.
Laws of physics aside, it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to suggest that Granduciel and Vile have some sort of telepathy when creatively separated from each other. Just as Vile's latest EP, Square Shells, moved away from the tape-hissed classic rock sound of his previous releases and toward a lonelier, more reverb-coated place, Future Weather also takes a trip down a lyrically overcast road, littered with regret, isolation, and loss. The sentiments are frequently naked in presentation, especially in the lovelorn "Comin' Through" and just plain lonely "Brothers".
Adding to the record's bummed-out mood is the possibility that this release resulted from a point of frustration and personal disappointment. The majority of the EP was taken from seemingly since-scrapped sessions from the War on Drugs' follow-up to Wagonwheel Blues, suggesting that this release could represent a creative hand-washing from Granduciel, who recorded the majority of the EP by himself, with drummer Mike Zanghi and multi-instrumentalist Dave Hartley filling in the gaps as necessary. Yet Future Weather doesn't sound rush-released-- instead, the band's compositional strengths and flair for sonic texture have clearly taken a leap forward. (See the sea of tangled guitars and far-off harmonica in "Brothers" or the knotty shuffle of "Comin' Through".) This stuff still sounds homespun, but the reel-to-reel feel of Wagonwheel Blues is mostly gone and replaced with something more fully realized. With one foot in the past and one foot in the uncertainty of now, it's exciting to see what these guys' next step will be. | 2010-11-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2010-11-01T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Secretly Canadian | November 1, 2010 | 7.6 | 7b8a0d06-0507-4913-bf65-7366436d7cf0 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | null |
Sheffield band teams with filmmakers behind The Mighty Boosh, This Is England, and Sigur Rós’ Heima for a concert DVD and its accompanying CD. | Sheffield band teams with filmmakers behind The Mighty Boosh, This Is England, and Sigur Rós’ Heima for a concert DVD and its accompanying CD. | Arctic Monkeys: Arctic Monkeys at the Apollo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13014-arctic-monkeys-at-the-apollo/ | Arctic Monkeys at the Apollo | “I always find live shows on film kind of boring. Even my favorite ones, I kinda zone out for most of it…. There’s just a visceral thing that never translates very well.” That’s none other than Mr. Arcade Fire, Win Butler, talking to this website about his band’s risky recent documentary, Miroir Noir. And he’s absolutely right. Like most notable rock films—from Don’t Look Back to Gimme Shelter to recent winner Glastonbury—Miroir Noir isn’t a mere chronicle of a band on a stage playing to people who are singing along. The film features bits of recording-session footage and offbeat montages along with grainy snips of shows; by adding elements of non-show spontaneity, Miroir Noir translates a real live gig’s snap that much better. Arctic Monkeys at the Apollo—which was released in the UK last November and hits the U.S. this week with a bonus live CD—shows the Sheffield quartet on stage at the Manchester Apollo playing to people who are singing along. The end. You are now permitted to zone out.
Well, not just yet, maybe. Apollo at least attempts to be more than just another concert movie. Instead of going with quick cuts and crisp-but-soulless HD video, editor Nick Fenton (Sigur Rós’ Heima) favors longer tracking shots and director Richard Ayoade (The Mighty Boosh) and director of photography Danny Cohen (This Is England) go with Super 16 film to give the piece a more cinematic feel. But there’s only so much one can do with lens flares and light trails (there are plenty of both throughout). The relatively artistic filming techniques are worn out within the first 10 minutes of the 76-minute movie. So it’s up to the Monkeys themselves to put on the show of their lives—to make something worth popping in the DVD player for years to come.
Too bad this band isn’t ready for such a document. They’ve got songs and charisma, but not enough to support a release like Apollo just yet. It’s the last concert of their 2007 world tour, but instead of leaving all their sweat and/or guts on the floor, they just look a bit tired. And while lead singer Alex Turner’s wise ass snarl comes through on record, his brattiness almost reads as condescension here±he tells the Manchester audience they’re being fed to the center of Berlin via satellite as a joke, but nobody really gets it.
The crowd is given short-shrift throughout, too; their vocal participation is largely muted and the cameras stay trained on the Monkeys the whole time, giving the film a hermetic feel, as if it were taped in an antiseptic studio. Aside from drummer Matt Helders, whose technical skill and enthusiasm is admirable here, the Monkeys teeter between off-the-cuff and off-the-mark; there is a difference between fuck-all and fuck-off. Songs that allow Turner to breathe—“Do Me a Favour,” “505,” “When the Sun Goes Down”—offer a little release from the wound-up monotony, but they’re not enough.
Concert DVDs are a good, cheap way for record companies to recoup losses from the decline of album sales but, as more and more flood the market, their second-hand POV quickly becomes ineffectual. Because, without any sort of originality, innovation, or personality, something like Apollo may as well be a YouTube fan clip. (At least that way we could have heard the real-life audience reactions.) Arctic Monkeys try to keep it respectable with experienced men behind the cameras and just-grainy-enough film stock, but all that is moot without something compelling to watch. This is frustrating, especially since recent YouTube videos with Diddy prove these guys have humor and chumminess to spare—why not work that into this DVD at some point? Near the very end of Apollo, the film abruptly and briefly cuts to a quick moving reel of behind-the-scenes footage of the band goofing around. They make weird faces, Turner hammily leads the camera to a picturesque oceanside locale. It's a great montage—and it’s over in 30 seconds. | 2009-05-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-05-08T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | May 8, 2009 | 4.5 | 7b8ea48b-b794-47a0-809e-8c1a290aa6bd | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.