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Brooklyn duo uses unusual instruments and quick-cut songwriting structures on their quirky and bracing debut. | Brooklyn duo uses unusual instruments and quick-cut songwriting structures on their quirky and bracing debut. | Buke and Gase: Riposte | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14697-riposte/ | Riposte | Some of what makes Buke and Gass so unique is borne of need-- a need to sound like a full band despite having only two members; a need for singer Arone Dyer to find a physically comfortable instrument to play that won't aggravate her carpal tunnel syndrome. Yet the Brooklyn duo's approach to music making goes far beyond simply finding solutions to these problems. Dyer plays a modified baritone ukulele (the "buke" in the group's name) that, yes, is smaller than a guitar, but her cohort, Aron Sanchez, also plays a bastardized instrument (the "gass," Sanchez's own Frankenstein melding of guitar and bass) for no other obvious reason than the fact that he can. Percussion is taken care of by drums and bells operated by the pair's feet, yet Buke and Gass purposefully abstain from utilizing prerecorded loops.
As you might imagine, all this ingenuity and rule-breaking engenders a noise that's quirky and bracing, and those are the hallmarks of Buke and Gass' debut album, Riposte. Dyer and Sanchez feed their respective buke and gass through amps and pedals, creating a buzzing, springy sound that brims with kinetic restlessness. Meanwhile, the foot-propelled percussion monolithically thwacks away, lending the duo's music an austerity that belies its post-punk roots (groups like the Ex, Swell Maps, and Theoretical Girls are some of the main spiritual godfathers here). Dyer's voice easily gets swept up in this nervy momentum, her girlish yelps often evoking Karen O. So twitchy and bursting with ideas are Buke and Gass that their songs have a tendency to jump abruptly from one passage to the next without ever finding resolution or an anchor, and it causes a measurable chunk of Riposte's middle to blend together into something indistinguishable and a little wearying.
When Buke and Gass manage to focus their energy, however, the results are positively arresting. Standouts are several, starting with the opening "Medulla Oblongata", with its evocative lyrics and Dyer's breathless repetition of the words "danger doctor" (the album's strident, clinical lyrics are occasionally clumsy but actually suit the music well). Other highlights include the hypnotic, circular repetitions of "Sleep Gets Your Ghost", the fervent, psychosexual "Bundletuck" ("These days you wake up in a bundle of orgasm"), and the winking "Outt!" ("Everybody here is out to get you"). Dyer and Sanchez are the sort of artists who will continue to challenge themselves at every turn. As long as they can keep that boundless creativity from going in a million different directions at once, their listeners will reap plenty of rewards. | 2010-10-22T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2010-10-22T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Brassland | October 22, 2010 | 6.8 | 7b8f056c-5b77-47f0-a657-d711efad4cf6 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
Chicago producer Ryan McRyhew, aka Thug Entrancer, started out on an IDM pathway but his new Death After Life gravitates toward stripped-down, chromed-out footwork. | Chicago producer Ryan McRyhew, aka Thug Entrancer, started out on an IDM pathway but his new Death After Life gravitates toward stripped-down, chromed-out footwork. | Thug Entrancer: Death After Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19067-thug-entrancer-death-after-life/ | Death After Life | You'd be excused for reading the descriptor "tribute to the music of Chicago's South Side" flown under the banner of a name like Thug Entrancer and, I don't know, shaking your head slowly and knitting your brow, maybe letting out a huff of annoyance. That the musician born Ryan McRyhew started out on a more IDM tip, moved to Chicago from Denver a couple years ago, then moved back out a couple years later, bringing an evangelical enthusiasm for old Trax Records 12" classics back with him? That's the way a lot of super-suspect appropriation nightmares start.
But that's also how a lot of engagingly weird cross-genre works happen, and Thug Entrancer's full-length debut album Death After Life—his breakthrough release on Daniel Lopatin's Software label—is more definitively a bold experiment than a cheap jack move. McRyhew's context has always been that of the generation that grew up with the idea of digital music as a normalized way of making things, from formative Mario Paint experiences onwards. So when Death After Life touches on a blend of styles, it comes across less like a cultural lift and more like someone finding a new element to add to the periodic table of beats.
It's tempting to call what Death After Life does "microjuke," at least in its more obvious moments. The focus cut, "Death After Life I" (all eight non-bonus cuts follow the title + roman numeral format), fits that descriptor most readily, spilling its footwork guts out with a stripped-down, chromed-out flourish and making sure the drum patterns are as frantic and agitated as the synth washes that act as de facto melody are floaty and light (if occasionally distorted to subtly unnerving did-I-just-hear-that? effect). The way McRyhew builds a beat comes across like an overflow of ideas, as if the opportunity to toy with the rapidfire snares, claps, and kicks of juke rhythms opens up so many variations he can't help but leap from one to another, chopping the one into fractions and shuffling it around like a blackjack dealer's cards.
Juke isn't the only ingredient in Death After Life, though—McRyhew puts his work together like somebody who spent decades listening to Roland-powered music and, finally given the chance to make some of his own, goes all shopping spree with it. So there's a thread running through this record that actually does juxtapose some of Chicago's core styles—not just juke and footwork, but ghetto and acid house, bracingly put through the wringer on "III" and "V". Granted, he's stripped out some of the crucial elements that make the material that inspired him so vital—with sparse exceptions, it doesn't push the BPMs to the 150-160 mark, and good luck finding an actual vocal sample anywhere on here—his ear for pitting the kind of slow-build chord progressions usually found in more ambient and minimalist works against that sort of dense rhythmic syncopation is well-tuned.
Death After Life gets a little cute here and there (cf. the extended roboseizure freakout outro to "III"), and it starts to lose a little steam near the end, when the downtempo digression of "VI" and the hopped-up yet unsurprising "VII" roll towards the official conclusion. The QED of "VIII" pulls out every genre-Cuisinart trick in Thug Entrancer's book to strong effect, and the bonus tracks of "Ready to Live" parts 1 and 2 show what he can do with his focus elsewhere—turns out he can get just as rhythmically berserk with neighbor-alienating bass hits as he can with drum elements. Whether this infatuation with the sounds of the South Side are a passing phase or a legitimate connection remains to be seen, but it's clear there are plenty of places Thug Entrancer can take it. And if Ryan McRyhew is a dilettante, then hey, looks like sometimes even dilettantes hit on something. | 2014-03-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2014-03-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Software | March 4, 2014 | 7.6 | 7b9240c8-5718-4a5c-ba15-677542205633 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
On their 15th album, the indie-rock institution goes apocalyptic with their first concept record. | On their 15th album, the indie-rock institution goes apocalyptic with their first concept record. | Deerhoof: Future Teenage Cave Artists | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/deerhoof-future-teenage-cave-artists/ | Future Teenage Cave Artists | On Future Teenage Cave Artists, Deerhoof fantasize about a future that feels frighteningly real. Populations evacuate their homes for greener pastures. People and animals are murdered senselessly. Survival is a privilege, not an assumption. Amidst this chaos, a new generation of teenagers still discover and make art, experiencing feelings as old as time.
From the first track, the world is fractured, brutal and basically over. Satomi Matsuzaki delivers the album’s opener, also its poppiest gesture, from the perspective of a hopeful, doomed adolescent: “Gonna paint an animal on a cave wall/Gonna leave it there forever while empires fall.” Greg Saunier’s snare-dense drumming is at its least busy, leaving space for listeners to share the teen’s excitement. Rapidly, the album fills up with dissonance and cluttered hooks, evoking a future in which humans are both overstimulated and denied the fulfillment of basic necessities. Matsuzaki’s one-liners are typically incisive (a few favorites: “Try my sci fi!” “Why would you kill my bambis?” “Cowboys were just a corporate invention”) and Saunier sings on a number of the tracks, his breathy, complementary voice never detracting from Matsuzaki’s singular, commanding persona.
This might be Deerhoof’s first overt concept album, but in every other regard, it fits comfortably into their well-worn blueprint. John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez write guitar melodies that are both gorgeous and guarded; Matsuzaki mangles and tweaks pop convention with dogged use of her upper vocal range. The lyrics occupy the same magically realistic, culturally wide-eyed space that the group has been exploring since it began in the 1990s.
This formula could make Deerhoof seem like a machine too well-oiled to keep surprising us—even if the band loves to claim that they reinvent themselves with each album, a perception that seems more and more like a fallacy with each new release. True, the indie rock collective have taken detours within their expanded universe: they released an EP covering The Shining’s soundtrack, put out an excellent collaboration with the classical ensemble Dal Niente, and brought in Awkwafina to rap on their revivifying 2017 album Mountain Moves. But Deerhoof are committed to being a band, while somehow never seeming nostalgic or close-minded to the world outside of rock ‘n’ roll: their four-piece is like a nuclear family that stays together as the indie scene that birthed them falls apart.
On the album’s cover, which Matsuzaki drew, a smartphone burns a kneeling teenager in the light of its camera. Appropriately, much of Future Teenage Cave Artists was recorded on laptops and phones, a tech-forward simplicity that reflects the album’s scrappy and cataclysmic milieu. It sounds less polished than their last couple of albums, but never as raw as their recently reissued early oeuvre.
Future Teenage Cave Artists surprises us with a sudden shift at its very end, which also brings the implicit themes of apocalypse into relief. “Damaged Eyes Squinting into the Beautiful Overhot Sun” is the record’s peak, its dynamic sound built on Deiterich’s three-chord rhythm guitar part and Rodriguez’s ascending riff, which swells before the song stops abruptly, as though the sun just absorbed the earth. Listeners are left with a stark performance of a Bach choral prelude on solo piano. This conclusion raises a bunch of questions—what does it mean for an apocalyptic album to end with a prelude? Why does a narrative about the artistic awakening of juveniles terminate with a centuries-old work? Is there hope for music after the madness of human self-destruction? In Future Teenage Cave Artists’ hectic, crammed-to-the-brim structure, Johann Sebastian gives Deerhoof listeners something they have been methodically denied: space to process the music. We’re left contemplating how a rock band, 26 years into their career, have managed to not only pin down the chaos of our time, but also to point toward our uncertain future.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Joyful Noise | June 2, 2020 | 7.8 | 7b96e90b-fa18-46dd-8557-ad7082f81e1b | Daniel Felsenthal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-felsenthal/ | |
With vivid details and subtle textures, the latest collaboration between crys cole and James Rushford folds real-world sounds into a landscape of dreams. | With vivid details and subtle textures, the latest collaboration between crys cole and James Rushford folds real-world sounds into a landscape of dreams. | Ora Clementi: Sylva Sylvarum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ora-clementi-sylva-sylvarum/ | Sylva Sylvarum | crys cole and James Rushford’s music was not made for kitchens or cars. Their work is so subtle that the smallest distraction—the noise from an AC unit, the rumble of a passing truck—threatens to drown out its nuances. The Canadian sound artist and Australian composer, who together record as Ora Clementi, specialize in small, quiet sounds evocative of rustling leaves, rubbed wineglass rims, and humming fluorescent bulbs. Silence the noise around you, and their work opens up a world of vivid and suggestive detail.
cole’s music, both solo and alongside collaborators like Oren Ambarchi, uses contact mics and controlled gestures to unlock a hidden world of vibration in everyday objects. Rushford’s pieces are fuller bodied, but not by much: Mixing electronics, tapes, and acoustic instruments, his compositions fixate upon the most ethereal textures and timbres. He described this year’s Lake From the Louvers, recorded during an artist residency on Lake Geneva, as an attempt to translate the play of light as it bounced off the surface of the water onto the windowpanes of his studio. Even when Rushford works in a more traditional mode, playing pianissimo is his forte: Last year, he released a recording of the modernist Catalan composer Frederic Mompou’s Musica Callada, a collection of diminutive piano sketches whose title translates as “Silent Music.”
The duo’s debut album as Ora Clementi, 2014’s Cover You Will Softer Me, was stitched together from whispering, crackling, and scraping sounds—manna for any ASMR lover. The music’s flow was so imperceptible that for long stretches, it was possible to wonder if the duo had simply set up microphones in some out-of-the-way space and walked away, allowing the tape to fill with the sounds of a building groaning under its own weight. Their captivating follow-up, Sylva Sylvarum, feels considerably more purposeful, as though its constituent parts were all meant to lead to a kind of epiphany.
The album begins with angelic voices, tinkling bells, and distant birdsong—a soft, glowing efflorescence as beatific as a moment of religious ecstasy. Across 15 tracks, the two musicians avail themselves of a wide array of sounds, atmospheres, and moods, yet all these pieces feel linked by some hidden design. They are held together not only by the musicians’ customary crepitations but also an eerie palette of synthesizers and guitar that are forever rising and falling, perpetually on the verge of slipping out of key—not dissonant exactly, but sour, wilted, enervated.
The shortest tracks are mere sketches. The minute-long “Sirin” runs pitch-bent flute synth through heavy reverb, reveling in the resulting vibrations; “Lathe of Heaven,” not much longer, pairs mournful guitar with choral pads and shrieking birds, almost gothic in its dour, languid movements. Often, a piece might abruptly change shape halfway through: “Umbrella Spinner” begins with bright mallet synths, reminiscent of Visible Cloaks, with a tentative, searching quality; the huffing of breath provides the pulse. But halfway through, the melody falls silent, giving way to more than a minute and a half of clicking sounds, like pebbles in the tide heard from underwater. In the first half, the artists are at their most lyrical; in the second, they cede the stage to purely environmental sound, as though erasing themselves from the frame.
A number of the most substantial tracks contain vocals. Practically as cryptic as their sound pieces, these are almost liturgical in tone, the lyrics neither sung nor spoken but softly chanted, like a church congregation reciting a prayer in unison. The artists have said that all the album’s lyrics are sourced from texts pertaining to utopias and the natural world, and the album’s title comes from a 17th century posthumously released book by Francis Bacon, a kind of miscellany of scientific facts and curiosities. In “Dialogue Between a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain,” they assemble a vast panoramic image out of stray shards and fragments—“precious and common stones... minerals and metals”; “wines, oils, and different liquids”; “all the different fish that are found in the rivers, lakes, and seas”; “dragons, worms, insects, flies, and beetles”—that dances in the mind like some ancient mosaic illuminated by flickering candlelight.
The words are difficult to make out; you don’t so much register their meanings as feel the weight of them sinking like stones into your subconscious. The same feeling is true of “Magic Mountain,” the album’s closest thing to an actual song, in which soft, optimistic synth pads serve as a bed for the pair’s sing-song recitation of places of natural wonder: “the Pacific Ocean seafloor... a prehistoric geological site in Colorado… a mountain on the border of North Cascades National Park.” It is unclear what these places may share in common, but the reverence of Ora Clementi’s tone is unmistakable. In moments like this, Sylva Sylvanum feels imbued with an almost spiritual resonance. Folding real-world sounds into a landscape of dreams, this album holds your attention even when it confuses.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Black Truffle | August 24, 2021 | 7.3 | 7b97dfcd-cb13-4236-8367-d882d0bcb0a8 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The Brooklyn singer-songwriter navigates the aftermath of grief on his gentle new record. | The Brooklyn singer-songwriter navigates the aftermath of grief on his gentle new record. | Ian Wayne: Risking Illness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ian-wayne-risking-illness/ | Risking Illness | Grief is a shapeshifter. It looks different to everybody: a lingering ache, a temporary scrape, a heavy phantom limb. The Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Ian Wayne encountered a form of grief he’d never known before after the death of his 3-year-old nephew from leukemia in 2017. He learned about his nephew’s illness while on his very first tour, and, within two weeks, his nephew had died. Now, three years later, as the world tries to synthesize new forms of grief every day, Wayne has released Risking Illness, a sensitive and gentle record that navigates the aftermath of a loss sharpened by Wayne’s sense of forward momentum and humility.
The album’s melancholic, close-knit arrangements of acoustic guitar, piano, and light percussion soften its devastation. Wayne’s level voice and sober pacing allow the record to unfold carefully, prioritizing deeper emotional understanding over split-second eruptions. Though Wayne doesn’t hold himself to all of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, themes of bargaining, depression, and acceptance form most of the album’s foundation. How is it possible to return to a “normal” life after it’s been suddenly cratered by forces beyond your control? Wayne asks questions that simply have no answers.
Mid-tempo jog “Gimme Something” is Wayne’s most hurried track, coasting over layered guitars and a pattering rhythm. He leans the titular request more toward a plea than a demand. Having reached a new low, Wayne introduces a vein of humility on “Gimme Something” that runs through the record. He addresses it directly in the soft, better-days aspirations of “Now Is Was” and promises to “own [his] problems” on opener “Coyote.” Wayne’s admissions of vulnerability sometimes bring an energetic edge to his despair, as if he’s still trying to wheel and deal his way into a better outcome. And when he’s exploring the duller pains of a relationship (“Baby,” “People”), he re-adjusts the commonplace bruises of disagreements and missed connections within his widened perspective.
Above the warm undercurrent of Risking Illness, Wayne uses strategic pauses to highlight the most impactful moments. In “Baby,” he leaves a moment of space between an instrumental break, explicitly declaring the start of a new chapter, relying on a hair’s-breadth of room to make his point land. As he sings, “Baby, I will always love you/In between the times that I do not,” he honors how tender affection can still linger long after the lights have gone out in a relationship.
On “Winter’s,” however, moments of silence feel like daggers, the album’s strongest and most affecting track by far. Singing alone with an acoustic guitar, Wayne fumbles with the loss of his nephew and its circumstances, guilt lacing his voice. He fidgets as if he’s trying to get the math—or any of it—to make sense by looking at it from another angle. An electric guitar slips in before Wayne completes the final line, “Twenty-seven on the day that he died,” and the full-band flourish that seals the track mirrors the busy preventative measures of turning thoughts in another direction before they get too dark. Some grief doesn’t ever go away; it makes room for itself at any size. Risking Illness acknowledges the heartfelt futility of trying to get over it.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Whatever’s Clever | September 24, 2020 | 7.3 | 7b9a31a3-d7ce-47d2-98ce-00b818f729af | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
Ludwig Göransson’s spectacular score captures the multiplicity of the fictional nation of Wakanda. | Ludwig Göransson’s spectacular score captures the multiplicity of the fictional nation of Wakanda. | Ludwig Göransson: Black Panther (Original Score) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ludwig-goransson-black-panther-original-score/ | Black Panther (Original Score) | In a blockbuster movie, nothing says “important” quite like the imposition of a large orchestra—especially one that favors a Eurocentricity that’s historically been set against black expression. The use of such an orchestra in Black Panther is intriguing because the film is the first of its magnitude to carry the joy of an African utopia that never was. The story wraps itself with a specific kind of grandness that a traditional, classical orchestra has rarely appealed to. Ludwig Göransson—the composer of the Black Panther’s score who’s frequently worked with the film’s director Ryan Coogler, not to mention Childish Gambino—does incorporate some African accents into his 132-piece orchestra, but even he noted that that’s not really enough. “The most difficult part is that as soon as you put production and orchestra on top of African music, it doesn’t sound African anymore,” he told Pitchfork. “So the challenge was incorporating these things and making them still feel African.”
Part of what keeps Göransson’s use of African music from feeling dilettantish is how he recognizes the breadth of the Black Panther universe. The horns swell and the polyrhythms rumble not with a distant awe, but with a believable intimacy; the reference point isn’t the mere idea of Africa, but all of what that idea encompasses. In a spectacular way, Göransson’s score captures the multiplicity of the fictional country of Wakanda.
”Wakanda”—which plays when the hero, the Black Panther T’Challa, prepares to take his throne in the film’s opening act—offers a glimpse into that sort of specificity. T’Challa begins the movie as an inheritor of a new kingdom who feels the magnitude of his deceased father’s legacy, and in this vulnerable moment, Senegalese musician Baaba Maal solemnly cries a song that serves as a metaphor for the fallen king. Göransson isn’t simply ticking off the diasporic boxes; he’s rooting them in an emotional context. The sadness adds gravity to the piece’s later half: Regal brass decorates a wide shot of Wakanda, signifying the glory he’ll have rule over.
The movie’s main villain, Erik Killmonger, is given that same amount of care and development. Not only is he a foreigner to the nation despite his familial ties; his worldview barely intersects T’Challa’s, who puts his loyalty to his nation over Killmonger’s desire to empower black people outside of the continent. The piece of music named after him embodies the inner conflict that drive his actions. The tambin flute appears as a ghostly presence, its windy notes puncturing with the urgency of an ancestral cry from the afterlife. But the theme resolves with trap hi-hats that now dominate hip-hop. The change-up and its familiarity re-centers Killmonger as an African-American, whose generations-old plight pits him against Wakanda’s isolationism.
So when Killmonger brings these elements with him to Wakanda, he becomes the disruptor. The Black Panther’s righteousness doesn’t do him much good at first, though. The royal horns and drum that once marked T’Challa’s presence—signifiers of his pride—are reduced to gasps in the pivotal second-act scene where his rival destroys him in ritual one-on-one combat, at times quieting altogether to emphasize the scene’s brutality. Killmonger’s venomous out-of-placeness is further harped on as we see him cooly marching toward the throne, as the camera flips upside down and the hi-hats rollick once again. Yes, his role as an outsider comes from being a villain. But how much of a home is Africa, really, for African-Americans when they’ve been systematically detached from the motherland for centuries?
Despite the emphasis on African instrumentation, the score’s classical elements don’t exist solely as accouterements: The orchestra delivers its traditional magnificence while the African signatures humanize it. The most significant example is that string phrase that rises in parts of “Ancestral Plane”—an emotive section that expresses a tension and surrender, like a fist unclenching in divine humility. That theme is featured when T’Challa visits the mythical ancestral plane as part of his ritualistic duties as the new king. When he gazes at the beautiful, purple-hued universe, the music helps the audience share in his reverence but it never feels like it’s manufacturing that emotion.
It’s a testament to Göransson that he gives the score’s most resounding moments over to the African diaspora. Near Black Panther’s end, T’Challa takes the wounded Killmonger to a cliff so the tragic warrior can gaze upon Wakanda’s majesty. The orchestra gives the scene a climactic weight, but it eventually recedes to push Baaba Maal’s weeping croons to the forefront. There’s triumph mixed with a sense of mourning as he sings to this beautiful, fictitious land. Alas, the sun must set on Wakanda as well. | 2018-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Marvel Music / Hollywood | February 22, 2018 | 7.6 | 7b9cf542-0e0e-482a-b1b8-a0cb28fd0c33 | Brian Josephs | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-josephs/ | |
Accompanied by the 12-person Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the Norwegian metal-jazz guitarist explores motherhood and mayhem on nine action-packed songs full of overdriven riffs and warring counterpoints. | Accompanied by the 12-person Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the Norwegian metal-jazz guitarist explores motherhood and mayhem on nine action-packed songs full of overdriven riffs and warring counterpoints. | Hedvig Mollestad / Trondheim Jazz Orchestra: Maternity Beat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hedvig-mollestad-and-trondheim-jazz-orchestra-maternity-beat/ | Maternity Beat | Hedvig Mollestad’s music is like a particularly extravagant geyser that spews periodically when not bubbling away underneath the surface. Her sound sits at the heavier end of the metal-jazz continuum, a space the Norwegian guitarist has explored extensively with her eponymous trio on seven albums over the past 11 years. Maternity Beat, Mollestad’s latest collaboration with Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, continues the narrative experimentation of her recent solo releases Tempest Revisited and Ekhidna, this time making motherhood the object of focus.
Writing and arranging a double album of compositions for the 12 players of Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, plus Mollestad herself, is a significant undertaking, but it’s also ambitious in the range of themes it incorporates: parenthood, the global migration crisis, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. What groups the various ideas in Maternity Beat together is, unsurprisingly, motherhood—particularly its connection to emotional states. From there, Mollestad digs deep in her toolkit for interesting ways to convey her concerns—take the slightly disconnected voices on “Her Own Shape,” a parable of parenthood, or the urgency of an onlooker’s cries going head to head with passive drones on the striking opener “On the Horizon Part 1.” Rather than distilling her ideas too neatly, Mollestad leaves them murky, making her socially engaged themes inextricable from their musical surroundings.
The sound of Maternity Beat is similarly knotty, exploring dissonance, harsh noise, and crunching grooves on nine action-packed compositions. Mollestad described creating the project as being “as thrilling as jumping off a cliff,” and the feeling of inching your toes over the edge is clear from the first listen. In “On the Horizon Part 2,” a multitude of instabilities—uneven meters, warring counterpoint, thumping grooves, and overdriven guitar riffs—loosely connect to create a landscape constantly moving in different directions. Frenzied figures balance on top of that unstable ground, with scorched-earth improvising from saxophonist Martin Myhre Olsen, and, on “Donna Ovis Peppa,” violinist Adrian Løseth Waade.
Balancing the full-blooded moments are more tranquil corners like “Little Lucid Demons,” a quaint étude for small ensemble and Laurie Anderson-like automaton voices; it expands out into a luxurious groove with a stretched melody that nods to John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra. “Look for swing, look for flow, look for beat, then take it away,” the voices half-sing in stereo. But rhythm never totally disappears in Mollestad’s music, which maintains a constant heartbeat even in minimal moments.
Mollestad’s pieces fare best when they marry dark and light in one picture, like the bizarre gothic dirge “Do Re Mi Ma Ma,” with its surreal touches of cartoonish humor, weary whole-ensemble exhalations, and dense trio improvisations shared between Mollestad, organist Ståle Storløkken, and drummer Torstein Lofthus. It’s the most vivid of Mollestad’s musical portraits, throwing strong colors onto her massive canvas; less convincing are the pieces rendered in pastel (“Her Own Shape”) or monochrome (“All Flights Cancelled,” borrowed from Mollestad’s 2021 trio album Ding Dong You’re Dead). The latter song’s immediacy—as Mollestad faced the prospect of an international touring season scuppered by COVID-19—fades as it’s translated across projects and timeframes.
The album’s two framing tracks, “Maternity Beat” and “Maternity Suite,” come right at the end, and travel to the project’s extremities. “Maternity Beat” sits in a calm yet eerie space, where Mollestad delivers prolonged harmonic trickles, waiting for ensemble respite that only appears in snippets. “Maternity Beat” follows abruptly with big rock textures, Mollestad’s raucous soloing, and general noisy joy, as the band gets its chops around busy, boppish lines. Heard as one continuous 19-minute piece, the two songs encapsulate an artist whose most interesting work resides at the edges. | 2022-11-18T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-18T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Rune Grammofon | November 18, 2022 | 7.2 | 7b9e175b-f9cf-4c25-8013-65616d97b73c | Hugh Morris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hugh-morris/ | |
The unearthing of these odd compositions from the East Coast ambient group creates a three-hour stream of instrumental riches, whether you’re looking to find samples or get lost in a trance. | The unearthing of these odd compositions from the East Coast ambient group creates a three-hour stream of instrumental riches, whether you’re looking to find samples or get lost in a trance. | Entourage: Ceremony of Dreams: Studio Sessions & Outtakes, 1972-1977 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/entourage-ceremony-of-dreams-studio-sessions-and-outtakes-1972-1977/ | Ceremony of Dreams: Studio Sessions & Outtakes, 1972-1977 | If you’ve ever heard (or even heard of) the Entourage Music and Theatre Ensemble, there’s a strong chance you’ve listened to Four Tet. Nearly two decades ago, the British producer was rifling through stacks of records in a London flea market, digging for samples among the castaways. He happened upon The Neptune Collection, an unknown-to-him 1976 release from the Folkways label. With the record’s enormous green-and-purple vortex at the center, the quizzical band name on the flanks, and Folkways’ proud pedigree in tow, Four Tet took a chance.
The album’s first cut, “Neptune Rising,” immediately rewarded his risk. In fact, its second little guitar riff—so high-pitched and plaintive it sounds like a harp being played with a bottleneck slide—became the coruscating core of “She Moves She,” the undeniable anthem of Four Tet’s 2003 LP, Rounds. Entourage had called it quits twenty years earlier, but a former collaborator heard the track during a student’s dance performance, recognized the indelible hook, and alerted guitarist Wall Matthews, one of Entourage’s surviving members. He met Four Tet, accepted (with some snark) his explanation as to why he hadn’t cleared the sample, and welcomed the trickle of cash and cachet that came. It was Entourage’s posthumous, largely nameless flirtation with very minor fame.
But now, Entourage has another potential avenue out of obscurity. Since 2005, Tompkins Square Records has revived the reputations of at least a dozen overlooked guitar pickers and folk singers, excavating essential listens from the private-press graveyard. For the three-disc set Ceremony of Dreams, the label and Matthews waded through much of what Entourage recorded but didn’t release on its two captivating Folkways albums. The result is a three-hour stream of instrumental riches, whether you’re looking to find samples or get lost in a trance. Ceremony of Dreams confirms what Four Tet’s sample from so long ago suggested: Entourage really does sound that cool.
It’s important to note that Entourage was not a New York or Los Angeles band. Instead, they thrived in relative cultural isolation—first in the recesses of a Baltimore disco, then in a string of small college towns and coastal cities through New England. A bit of a performance art collective, they often accompanied dance and theatrical productions or were joined onstage by dancers. On and off in different incarnations between 1970 and 1983, Entourage paralleled or presaged several vital artistic movements with a stunning sense of clarity and resolve. These 30 tracks alternately conjure the ecstatic minimalism of John Cale and La Monte Young, the billowing clouds of Arvo Pärt, the aleatory intrigue of Derek Bailey, and the strange guitar beauty of Sandy Bull. Entourage weaves the melodies of Iraq, the moodiness of country & western, and the open-ended quests of what would become “jam bands” into all of these strains.
Forty years later, it still feels genuinely adventurous. Ceremony of Dreams is a strange box set—fitting, you know, given the eccentricity and oddity of its subject. Neither of Entourage’s two LPs, which can be downloaded and nabbed on CD through Folkways or bought for outlandish collector prices online, are included. If you want to hear the version of “Neptune Rising” that Four Tet sliced, it’s not here. Instead, you find two different interpretations—an early version where the bit Four Tet bought is less prominent and an alternate take where everything feels muted and smoothed, as if the song is somehow being transmitted through a dream.
Most of these 30 tracks are outtakes, alternate takes, or partial demos of tunes later completed by the full band. There are three consecutive versions of “The Shores of God,” a slippery saxophone-and-piano fantasy that brilliantly balances at the edges of soft jazz and new age psychedelia and showcases the finesse of Entourage founder Joe Clark. With warped electric bass and endless piano glissandi, the finished version, unreleased until now, feels like Weather Report conjuring and chiding Debussy. A rendition for horns and bowed bass reveals the magisterial harmonies and bold vibrato at play, while a piano-only take shows the Keith Jarrett-like impulses lingering beneath it all. More than the crowded and frantic version that ends The Neptune Collection, this take on “Tarbox Poltergeist” shows that Matthews was one of the most dashing acoustic soloists of his day, worthy of mention even now alongside the likes of Bert Jansch. A fragment of the glorious “Euphoric Bells” seems not simply to hang in the air but to become the air itself, suggesting it has and will forever exist. Because so little is known about Entourage at all, this composite of odds and ends feels revelatory from start to finish—an addendum that becomes the core by virtue of its very existence.
The songs on Ceremony of Dreams may make you ponder the history of cultural appropriation and its role in Entourage’s music. Written by a motley crew of college professors and white bohemians, these songs undeniably lift from Iraq’s maqam tradition and India’s ragas, from the barebones blues and brassy bebop. But they feel like composites of enthusiasms, made not with a mind for exploitation so much as exploration. These songs are uniformly uncanny and singular, suggesting that Entourage’s biggest worry was always trying to build something new from parts it already loved. It’s only appropriate then that most of us only stumbled upon Entourage when a young electronic magpie did the same with pieces from one of its songs, simply because he loved the sound. At last, Ceremony of Dreams gives us the bigger picture. | 2018-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Tompkins Square | March 31, 2018 | 7.6 | 7ba10f51-916b-45e3-8eb6-ec744a6667ed | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The New York rapper is known for his breathless flows and punchy hip-house beats. His second album is just as slick, but this time there’s a little tenderness. | The New York rapper is known for his breathless flows and punchy hip-house beats. His second album is just as slick, but this time there’s a little tenderness. | Cakes da Killa: Svengali | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cakes-da-killa-svengali/ | Svengali | Cakes da Killa is ready to step on anybody’s neck to get what’s his. He established himself in New York’s booming queer rap scene in the early 2010s, bringing sharp flows and a brusque, ego-shattering voice to the hip-house beats that quickly became his hallmark. His music is loose and snappy with a strong sense of form, gliding across eardrums like beads of sweat on the foreheads of club kids at The Limelight during a humid Sunday morning. And while Cakes’ sophomore album Svengali is no stranger to pulse-quickening BPMs and steamy come-ons, these songs are less noisy, more willing to groove and simmer instead of quake.
Though the project was directly inspired by jazz greats like Yusef Lateef and Alice Coltrane, Svengali isn’t a jazz album in form or content. But judging by the videos and single artwork, Cakes is clearly influenced by his forebears, and interested in connecting his modern style to that lineage: “Arched back on loan from my ancestors,” he hisses on the opener “W4TN.” With Svengali, he reaffirms his status as a world-class rapper and cements his place in a long line of queer Black artists holding shit down. The community he’s a part of has been a driving force of U.S. popular music for at least a century: The ballroom and house scenes that have recently ensnared some of the biggest pop stars in the world—especially this year—are easy examples, and they, like most genres born toward the end of the 20th century, all have roots in jazz. Plus, it’s not breaking news that many of the genre’s early greats, including Tony Jackson, Josephine Baker, Ma Rainey, and Bessie Smith, were queer too.
The jazz clubs and speakeasies of the Harlem Renaissance have been replaced by the cyphers and ballrooms that Cakes came up in, and now he’s here to spit. He’s namechecked rappers like Busta Rhymes, Lil’ Kim, and Cam’ron as inspiration in the past, and he shares their fierce commitment to technique and rhythm. “W4TN” feels like a moody inversion of Busta’s “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,” as if reimagined by Kevin JZ Prodigy; the digital shuffle of producer Sam Katz’s beats never throws Cakes off the trail of a sudden fling that could turn into something more. Katz—who produced every song on Svengali—creates an understated version of the four-on-the-floor chaos the duo has been pumping out since at least 2013. When Katz attaches fuzzy, sampled hi-hats to the fading synths of the title track, Cakes zig-zags through them on his way to a hook-up at the bar. Whether he’s club-hopping at an upscale lounge (“Luv Me Nots,” “Drugs Du Jour”) or traversing the explosive drums and keyboards that propel “Sub Song,” Cakes adapts, quickly finding a flow to demolish. In contrast to the current wave of Jersey club rap, which mines rap out of danceable beats and prioritizes its own breathlessness, Cakes’ style is all about making it through the eye of the storm unfussed.
His delivery is supremely confident, but parts of Svengali scan as the most vulnerable and tender of his career. Cakes’ knack for storytelling manifests in a loose narrative throughline, a flash of lust that evolves into deeper feelings. On “Luv Me Nots,” he plays the role of the svengali longing for devotion even while he’s busy seducing his next victim. The reprised version of that song, which appears toward the end of the record, softly chronicles how the walls surrounding his heart come crumbling down. Eventually, the forceful ballroom pleas of “Think Harder” put an exclamation point on his desire. The voicemail interludes that appear across the album hint at a specific object of his affection, but the story still works as a progression from player to simp. An instrumental overture and climax bookend each side of the album, giving Cakes’ struggle for romantic control an epic scope.
Cakes da Killa doesn’t have much left to prove. He’s released 10 projects in as many years and established himself as a local icon, one who’s well-known enough to have appeared on Netflix’s rap competition show Rhythm and Flow back in 2019. Even with all those achievements, Svengali feels like a milestone he’s been working toward for years—a smooth balance of anxiety and aggression, love and lust, confidence and vulnerability. Whether he’s pleading for love or manipulating it in the shadows, Cakes’s decisive presence ties it all together. He’s like a bandleader of the jazz era he reveres, putting on for the divas and icons of his time. | 2022-11-03T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-11-03T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Young Art | November 3, 2022 | 7.8 | 7ba66a39-b741-4854-b9fa-1320e97cb606 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
Manchester post-punk musician Julie Campbell’s third album is dense with possibilities, whiplashing between past and future. The maximalism isn’t big-picture, but granular: busy, hyperreal instants by the millions. | Manchester post-punk musician Julie Campbell’s third album is dense with possibilities, whiplashing between past and future. The maximalism isn’t big-picture, but granular: busy, hyperreal instants by the millions. | LoneLady: Former Things | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lonelady-former-things/ | Former Things | As LoneLady, Julie Campbell achieves a certain paradox: quiet maximalism. She makes music firmly in the post-punk tradition, but unlike many landfill nu-New Orders doing the same, her work is expansive, not reductive. Time and again, she likens her work to psychogeography, what she’s called an “edgeland”: the information overload of memories, possibilities, and associations beneath any patch of ground. The shudders and spikes of her music convey a world that’s threatening in its sharpness, like it’s got an AR overlay. The maximalism isn’t big-picture, but granular: busy, hyperreal instants by the millions.
Campbell’s debut, 2010’s Nerve Up, was tense and cerebral, each song sounding about to snap. The 2015 follow-up Hinterland projected that tension out onto her Manchester hometown: confronting reminders of the city’s industrial past in every imposing or abandoned building, then projecting onto them her own bygones. “I actually like things crumbling into disrepair and ruin,” she told NME. “I still daydream about owning a big, crumbling mill. I wouldn’t renovate it: I’d just let it crumble slowly around me.” But not only mills can crumble. Former Things dwells on interior and exterior threats, but especially on those found in memory. Nothing is just itself; everything Campbell sees contains loss and has room for more. The album was recorded at a former rifle-shooting range, and every song sounds like she’s still anticipating the guns.
Originally envisioned as a techno album and recorded on vintage synths, Former Things is packed with Campbell’s busy, weaponized arrangements. The lyrics, too, are deliberate and dense—she’s one of those uncommon songwriters whose words work equally well on paper. On past albums she’s delivered her lyrics staccato and frantic, as if the thoughts were coming urgent and fast. On Former Things, the way she exerts control—clipping her voice short, making it ricochet—has a way of mimicking digital quantization via old-fashioned vocal cords. “(There Is) No Logic,” in particular, sends her voice out into a playground of sampling and echoing.
Any playgrounds here, though, are haunted. The business of the arrangements is Campbell’s way of crowding out “threats—everywhere I look, everywhere I turn.” This is the chorus of “Threats,” and in the breaks in the arrangement are ad-libs that sound like echoes of grinding teeth. On “Fear Colours,” Campbell gives herself watery, distorted backing vocals that sound more metallic than human. The samples are harsh and cutting like intrusive thoughts—one recurring sound is a buzzing razor. The title track comes closest to levity, but it, too, is about mourning childhood. The cinematic strings in the chorus could almost be dreamy, if they weren’t interrupted and cut off by the polyrhythmic tremors of the arrangement—constant reminders of what’s crumbled and ruined.
Recurring throughout “Time Time Time” is a synth-chime loop much like the one in Alan Parsons’ “Sirius,” circular to the point of obsession. Campbell’s arrangement keeps returning to it, stopping it short, twisting the melody around, the exact way she turns over the memories in the lyric. The digital manipulation of “(There Is) No Logic” gives way to raw vocals and rawer fears: “Every heartbeat has a number...Curiosity will kill you, and your body knows it.” When the crowded headspace of the arrangement finally quiets on “Terminal Ground,” funereal synth chords lie beneath. The nihilism would be clear without the words, but Campbell adds to the finality: “Your dreams…Where are they now?/Forgotten/Break out/Break your flesh down to a terminal ground.” On this, the final track, she herself has become a crumbling building.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | July 7, 2021 | 7.7 | 7ba76525-b31f-4271-a501-afa1b796e8a2 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
In the 1990s, the Cornish electronic musician Luke Vibert offered a pranksterish take on drum & bass under the Plug moniker. This collection of recordings from 1995-1998 foreshadows the kitchen-sink work of Rustie and James Ferraro. | In the 1990s, the Cornish electronic musician Luke Vibert offered a pranksterish take on drum & bass under the Plug moniker. This collection of recordings from 1995-1998 foreshadows the kitchen-sink work of Rustie and James Ferraro. | Plug: Back on Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16184-back-on-time/ | Back on Time | The vaults of electronic mischief spun from the fingertips of Cornish musician Luke Vibert are apparently well-stocked. Like his fellow West Country dweller Aphex Twin, Vibert appears to have a dearth of unreleased material yet to see the light of day. These days most musicians and music fans have some form of useless archive-- the simultaneous rise of the mp3 and computer-based sequencing software guaranteed that a surfeit of recorded music would lay dormant on hard drives across the globe. Back when Vibert was starting out, at some point in the early 1990s, he seems to have been a digital junk soothsayer, amassing a great body of work while the rest of us were tooling away on Prodigy message boards and getting to grips with AOL for DOS. Unlike the rest of ours, his binary debris actually seems to have some value.
In 1995, Vibert released a series of EPs under the name Plug, which served as a catchall moniker to present his typically twisted take on drum'n'bass. An album, Drum 'n' Bass for Papa, followed a year later, around the time he was being courted by major labels. Trent Reznor's Nothing Records released Drum 'n' Bass for Papa in the U.S., handily packaging it with the prior EPs. As the popularity of the genre waned, Vibert wisely bailed on Plug, instead choosing one of his many other aliases to work under. But he couldn't shake what once seemed like a one-off fudging of popular genre tropes. In 2006, an EP titled Here It Comes emerged, comprising four unreleased Plug tracks. Now we've got another clearing of the vaults, this time in the shape of a full-length LP comprised of Plug recordings Vibert made from 1995-1998.
The original Plug records skirted under the radar of most serious drum'n'bass heads. It lacked the pile-driving ferocity of most Metalheadz releases and/or the jazz-tinged seriousness of Good Looking's output. There were other shades of drum'n'bass, of course, but very few of them touched on humor, which remains a common touchstone for many of Vibert's projects. It's unlikely he was looking to hold down a residency at the Blue Note in pre-hip Hoxton (ironically, the same venue where his current label, Ninja Tune, hosted their legendary Stealth nights). Instead, he always seemed happiest working in his own sphere, which, for Plug, meant blurring the lines between the bloodless white-knuckle ride of drum'n'bass and the easy listening boom that was gathering pace around the mid 1990s.
Back on Time is barely separable from Drum 'n' Bass for Papa; it's essentially more of the same. Vibert's breakbeats still writhe and skitter, methodically contorted around his eccentric choice of samples. On "A Quick Plug for a New Slot", a lumbering beat slugs lethargically into the mix before a pinging sitar line forces everything to lurch into a sprightlier clip. The excellently titled "Come on My Skeleton" feels like it's straining under the weight of its own excesses, with fat slabs of industrialized sound vying with twists of an opera singer climbing up into her higher range. The latter ends with Vibert pulling a rabbit out of the hat in the form of a straight-laced man claiming, "you might also become aware of your anus or genitalia." Even on this older material he's an expert at diffusing tension in that way, always ready with a banana peel to slip under the mix in case things are getting a little too serious.
That pranksterish approach is the point where most people either get on or off board with Vibert. On Back on Time, it works to his advantage, largely thanks to his ability to balance out his humorous inclinations with an unnerving ability to sequence it all over an impressively brutal infrastructure. On "Back on Time" he's able to filter John Barry-esque string parts through indecipherable vocal bellowing and a beat that floods the mix with its tinny timbre. Even the relatively subdued "Mind Bending" ends up stacked high with junk, with Speak & Spell-style speech synthesis vying for space with jerky analog loops and a wild-eyed raver shouting, "fucking excellent acid house." That form of maximal japery foreshadows the work of Rustie and James Ferraro, partially explaining why this material sounds fresh again. It's a kitchen sink-like flood of sound, always on the verge of resembling a gigantic curveball being forced down your throat, but with Vibert pulling back from the humor brink at all the right moments. | 2012-01-20T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2012-01-20T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | January 20, 2012 | 6.5 | 7bbb739e-8319-4f84-9e56-04cc883c0978 | Nick Neyland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nick-neyland/ | null |
Roosevelt's debut is a cocktail of disco, French touch, Ibiza house, yacht rock, and electropop that evokes some crowded Tiki-torch dancefloor lost on the Mediterranean coast. | Roosevelt's debut is a cocktail of disco, French touch, Ibiza house, yacht rock, and electropop that evokes some crowded Tiki-torch dancefloor lost on the Mediterranean coast. | Roosevelt: Roosevelt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22225-roosevelt/ | Roosevelt | By any reasonable measure, summer 2016 is turning out to be a challenging time for people seeking even a modicum of contentment with the world. From our social media feeds to the 24-hour news cycle, we’re being fed a steady diet of abject misery, and it’s beginning to take its toll on even the most trivial aspects of our culture. Take for example, an annual ritual pop music fans typically heartily anticipate: The Song of the Summer, when one hit single above all others is crowned as the inescapable feel-good chart-topper of the year. For the first time in what seems like decades, the airwaves are barren of such a mood stabilizer, and while the factors contributing towards such an absence may be varied and complex (the continued destabilization of the music industry; streaming media creating a niche listening culture rather than an overarching mainstream; the general sense of apathy gripping the nation), it has left an undeniable void.
However, this vacuum may be one reason why Roosevelt’s self-titled debut album feels like a balm from its first track. Roosevelt sounds like an almost scientific approach to a summer dance record; a cocktail of disco, French touch, Ibiza house, yacht rock, and electropop that evokes some crowded Tiki-torch dancefloor lost on the Mediterranean coast. Even the artwork plays the part: Roosevelt (aka Cologne-based producer/DJ Marius Lauben) stands awash in purple light, his name displayed in a sharp, 1980s cursive. It looks like something you’d find on a poolside coffee table of a Malibu mansion after a massive rager, slightly stained with suntan lotion and margarita mix.
Germany isn’t known for its tropical exports, which is probably why there’s an underlying moodiness threaded throughout Roosevelt, a sense that the album’s sunny disposition may be as fleeting as summer itself. The lead single “Colours” begins with buoyant bongos and a dry, upbeat piano melody, before Roosevelt’s slightly wispy voice floats into the mix. “When you left/You took your colors with you,” he sings over a building disco beat, a wisp of melancholy drifting through an unbridled party. It’s a trick Roosevelt uses often on the album, tempering a rush of adrenaline with a dose of Teutonic sobriety.
The fact that Roosevelt is being released on Joe Goddard’s Greco-Roman label is no surprise, as it shares a sort of spiritual kinship with some of Hot Chip’s more bombastic moments, while mimicking some of their nerdy charm. Every song on the record contributes to this air of reverie, a testament to Roosevelt’s strength as a producer, as one track languidly slips into the next. If anything, it can get a little too laid back—it’s the kind of record that's so uniform it ends before you realize it.
That being said, tracks like “Fever” do an impressive job of highlighting what is probably Roosevelt’s most impressive talent: finding subtle ways to reinvigorate some of dance music’s most widely-abused tropes. Nothing has been more overused in the past five years than four-to-the-flour, punchy keyboard stabs (think every single Calvin Harris song since 2009), but when “Fever” opens with them, it feels fresh, not like a quick production trick that's been used thousands of times. It’s not a stroke of genius, but it’s cleverly deployed, and touches like this elevate the album and give it a slightly tongue-in-cheek edge.
The album ends with “Close,” a mid-tempo comedown, constructed around a knowingly cheesy Casio beat. It’s the song that's the most indebted to Roosevelt’s 1980's soft rock influences, his voice flirting somewhat perilously with R&B inflections, wrapped in a super thick, elastic bassline. “The days are turning black/You’ll be sorry when you realize/There’s no turning back” he croons, forebodingly—and the message is clear: the sun’s rising, the party’s over, time to clean up, head back to reality. | 2016-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | City Slang / Greco-Roman | August 15, 2016 | 7 | 7bbd4acc-6f1e-4892-8bd8-53c71658a91f | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
This acknowledged inheritor of Miles Davis and Teo Macero's experiments in electric jazz and studio-aided collage composition creates a stunning new LP. | This acknowledged inheritor of Miles Davis and Teo Macero's experiments in electric jazz and studio-aided collage composition creates a stunning new LP. | Jon Hassell: Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13247-last-night-the-moon-came-dropping-its-clothes-in-the-street/ | Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street | The jazz trumpeter Jon Hassell's embrace of electronic effects and extensive post-production has positioned him curiously. He is an acknowledged inheritor of Miles Davis and Teo Macero's experiments in electric jazz and studio-aided collage composition, and yet the ambient nature of his work often lands his discs in the new age racks. Hassell studied with Stockhausen and Pandit Pran Nath, played on the first recording of Terry Riley's In C, and collaborated with the likes of La Monte Young, Talking Heads, David Sylvian, and Ry Cooder. He's also the inventor of something he calls Fourth World, "a unified primitive/futuristic sound combining features of world ethnic styles with advanced electronic techniques"-- a phrase that's hard to shake free, in 2009, of associations with Putumayo compilations, or Burning Man. It's difficult to think of another contemporary jazz musician whose reputation encompasses such opposing poles: conceptual rigor on the one hand; easy listening on the other.
Hassell's new album, Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street, does in fact make for easy listening-- profoundly warm, immersive, relaxing listening. It's electric-blanket music, isolation-tank music, lucid-dreaming music that moves as assuredly as if by the power of your own suggestion. I've been tempted to call it "yoga for the mind," except that the phrase sounds way too glib, too slack, for music this rigorous. But it's also a puzzle, a non-Euclidean rendering sourced from small-ensemble sessions and recomposed via digital editing. It's as hard to separate out the music's discrete pieces as it is to discern between its structure and sense of drift.
Much of the album's pleasures are immediate and visceral. This is as sumptuous as "ambient" music gets. The album opens with a glowing song, "Aurora", that sounds exactly like its title suggests, with scratchy, glowing drones of uncertain provenance taking on a daybreak shine as Hassell's trumpet rises like a heat mirage in echoing, overlapping lines; there's a faint echo of dub in the bass. "Time and Place" is slow, spelunking funk, descending ropey bass lines through chambers where ambient shimmer illuminates melodic figures as lifelike as cave drawings: bluegrass violin, panting organs, and of course Hassell's reverberant horn melodies, which slide around the edges of the song's key signature, highlighting its contours in slippery relief. A dubby pulse echoes the percussive rattle of Hassell's Earthquake Island and, on a more contemporary note, the Moritz von Oswald Trio's Vertical Ascent, which might not be surprising, given that von Oswald has professed his admiration for Hassell's work. The track leads almost seamlessly into "Abu Gil", where violin and electric keys blow its modal structure wide open. One of the album's centerpieces, the 13-minute song is grounded in more loping percussion and a pinging bass line that wobbles like a taut clothesline; Hassell's trumpet is refracted through delays and a harmonizer effect, throwing shadows in fourths and fifths as it slinks, catlike, around the changes.
You might not notice any of these things on your first or even tenth listen. The measured pacing, especially on the slowly unfolding title track, lulls you into a state that can be described only as hypnotic, as reassuringly resolving string phrases lay out the soft, spongy ground over which Hassell drifts and soars. Like any bird on the wind, Hassell knows how and when to conserve his energies; he lies quiet for long stretches, letting reverb carry his melodies. Often, the line between cause and effect is blurred beyond recognition, leaving only a suggestion of breath lingering in the air. The music's gaseous feel serves to highlight more solid forms, like blocky keyboard chords, that sit like squat, rounded ruins poking through the forest canopy.
The title comes from a poem by the 13th century Persian Sufi poet Jalaluddin Rumi: "Last night the moon came dropping its clothes in the street/ I took it as a sign to start singing,/ Falling up into the bowl of sky." Some 700 years later, it proves to have been an exceptionally prescient description of Hassell's own malleable approach, melting geometrical structures with blur and bent pitches, turning breath to wind and cheating gravity with every updraft.
But if part of the music's pleasure is its liquid physicality, an equal measure derives from its conceptual base. Formally, it's hard to say exactly what to call this stuff: jazz? Electro-acoustic improv? Ambient dub? All those terms apply in some measure. Rather than a record of single performances, the album is stitched together from fragments of both studio sessions and live recordings-- although "stitched" is an inexact metaphor for joints this smeared and seamless.
As Hassell describes it in his liner notes, "The music presented here is a montage of the last years of concerts and the changing cast of the group I call Maarifa Street-- all musicians who have contributed their personalities-- the way an actor does to a film-- to this living, morphing process that occasionally gets set down as a 'record.'" The slippage in his hyphenated phrases approaches the horizontal rush of the record itself, ideas overlapping, subjects blurring, dependent clauses assuming a commanding role. His touring group Maarifa Street is here a core ensemble including Peter Freeman (bass, guitar, percussion), Jan Bang (live sampling), Rick Cox (guitar), Jamie Muhoberac (keyboard), Kheir-Eddine M'Kachiche (violin), Dino J.A. Deane (live sampling), Eivind Aarset (guitar), Helge Norbakken (drums), and Steve Shehan (percussion), with a few other players occasionally rotating in for a single track. The album's sleevenotes also credit Thomas Newman and Rick Cox for the title track's repeated string phrases, Eivind Aarset for "a beautiful loop" in "Blue Period" and ambient dub producer Pole for a sample used in an unspecified track. (Bringing things full circle, the composer Miles Evans-- son of Miles Davis' collaborator Gil Evans-- is credited "for the atmospherics" in "Abu Gil".) That might look like a lot of names in a row, but I think they bear repeating, for Hassell clearly means to impress upon us that this is a collective effort. Even Arnaud Mercier and his live-sampling software, Cognition, get a mention-- suggesting the degree to which the album's creation was not only a collaborative process, but one where the easy assumptions about chops and genius don't apply. Wrapping your mind around this music is about as easy as grabbing a fistful of river, but that's precisely what makes it so rewarding. | 2009-08-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-08-05T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental | ECM | August 5, 2009 | 8.5 | 7bbf7d2d-984d-43b7-bfb5-757143a77d99 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Latest from the hardcore-prog band runs the thematic gamut from the death of rock radio to the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. | Latest from the hardcore-prog band runs the thematic gamut from the death of rock radio to the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. | ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead: Tao of the Dead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15101-tao-of-the-dead/ | Tao of the Dead | Tao of the Dead, the seventh LP from embattled hardcore-prog studio junkies ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, is something of a double-concept album, running the thematic gamut from the death of rock radio to the work of comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell. It is split into two sections-- well, suites-- divided by key. There's a limited edition that comes complete with an extra half hour of music and a graphic novel. There's that cover. Considering, if I told you Tao of the Dead was the band's most stripped-back, least bombastic affair in ages, would you believe me?
Trail of Dead pared down to a four-piece for the 10-day Tao sessions, re-shifting their focus back to guitar and peeling away plenty of the ostentatious orchestral-psych flourishes that’ve bogged them down in the recent past. Save the quarter-hour you'll spend with its five-part closer, Tao of the Dead seems to chop its recent predecessors' average per-song runtime roughly in half. Worlds Apart and especially So Divided-- the nadir of the Trail of Dead catalog-- dragged on with excessive runtimes and twice-too-many choruses and elaborate instrumental scaffolding that, tarp removed, revealed a house of cards.
Rather than blowing out the back end of every song with such a movement, Tao of the Dead maps its grand ambitions over its full length; songs slip by quickly but not without notice, and certain motifs reappear throughout, lending the disc a somewhat hallucinogenic disorientation. Mostly, though, they move; the clipped construction helps, as does the Dark Side of the Moon-style seamlessness between cuts. But the songs themselves-- out front with the melodies, easy on the extraneous racket, alternately lovely and bruising-- are among the most delicate and memorable the band have unleashed. And, smartly, in shifting the focus back to the tunes themselves, they've pushed the grand payoff to the end, once they've really earned it.
Opener "Let's Experiment" gives way to "Pure Radio Cosplay", a sweaty rocker with an almost Stonesy underpinning that laments the death of rock radio, a clever inversion considering it's the band's most radio-ready track in years. Conrad Keely's rough-hewn, gun-to-the-head howl is, like almost everything, pitched down somewhat here on Tao, evincing notes of near-prettiness at times, but he spits out "Cosplay" like he really can't believe something like Nickelback exists while he languishes in semi-obscurity. Yet the sour, why-not-us vibe of World's Apart couldn't be farther from the fantastical worlds Keely touches on here; his lyrics, as they often do, seem dwarfed by the music, but the few he dangles out in front seem to emerge from Keely's full immersion in Tao's mythos. He didn't just namedrop Yes' Relayer and Rush's Hemispheres in pre-interviews because there's little or no pause between songs; each conjures a fully-formed universe between your ears, a quality Tao not only aspires to but frequently achieves.
As "Cosplay" winds down, Keely jumps in with "Wanna do another?," and off they go to "Summer of All Dead Souls", elegantly oscillating between space battle to acoustic plea without overselling either. "Cover the Days Like a Tidal Wave" lays a spoken-word missive over some undulating chords. Despite its title, "The Wasteland" is a lovely, sinewy psych-grunge number, gliding nimbly from mellotron to megawatts. And "Spiral Jetty" feels like a the start of something overcooked that, in the past, Keely and company might’ve drawn out. Here it doesn't hit the two-minute mark, closing out with a bit of dazzling feedback, then easing into the sumptuous "Weight of the Sun (Or the Post-Modern Prometheus)". These aren't epics in miniature, exactly; they move through sections and shift tone gracefully, but individual tracks rarely overstay their welcome, instrumental passages rarely getting more than a few seconds to themselves. When the reprise of "Cosplay" swings around again two-thirds of the way through the record, it's a surprise every time: shouldn't that've felt longer?
Tao, smartly, farms out most of its monolithic hugeness to the record's last two-- well, six-- tracks. But not before "Ebb Away", the loveliest track Trail of Dead have made since "Crowning of a Heart" from The Secret of Elena's Tomb EP nearly a decade ago. A little guitar tumble, remarkable in its understatement, gives way to a crunchy alt-rock chorus that sees Keely letting go of attachment and doing as its title suggests. It'd make for a helluva closer, but Tao of the Dead isn't about to let anybody off that easy. Onward and upward they go into kosmische whirl "The Fairlight Pendant", guitars encircling like three Can records playing at once. It gets to be a little much after a few times through, but I suppose it wouldn't be a Trail of Dead record without some overblown throwback jam, a slack "Pendant" happily picks up. But there's still the little matter of "Strange News From Another Planet", the five-part, key-of-F, half-a-"Family Guy" closing suite. "Strange News" is a bit like the last three Trail of Dead records in microcosm, lots of movement, with a tendency to drift. The track goes from a lurching alt-rock swirl to sampling a documentary about teenage homelessness in Seattle to a Source Tags-style hardcore pummel and back around again. Some will find the grandiose "Strange News" the most thrilling bit of Tao; others may take it as a separate piece entirely, saving it for later or skipping it outright.
So much of Trail of Dead's post-Source Tags & Codes output has felt desperate to recapture that now-classic set’s bluster and heart, only to favor one over the other to the detriment of both. That album’s teetering-on-the-brim mix of beauty and furor seems now like lightning in a bottle, the sort of thing you’d spend your life trying (and failing) to replicate. Tao of the Dead does feel, in its songs and structure alike, like the first post-Source Tags record not cooled in the giant shadow of their decade-old triumph; more patient, more potent, more dynamic, less overloaded, the band deftly charting out their "Flight of the Navigator" death trip, the skewed alt-prog fantasia between their ears come hurtling to life. Set your controls for the heart of your bong. | 2011-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Richter Scale / Superball | February 11, 2011 | 7.2 | 7bc13ae0-a7fb-45ff-812f-5d2168727ebb | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Simian Mobile Disco have survived past the death of their microgenre ”bloghouse.” Their latest album is a study in dance music rather than a practice, a suite that demands to be heard in one sitting. | Simian Mobile Disco have survived past the death of their microgenre ”bloghouse.” Their latest album is a study in dance music rather than a practice, a suite that demands to be heard in one sitting. | Simian Mobile Disco: Welcome To Sideways | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22627-welcome-to-sideways/ | Welcome To Sideways | For many groups, it can be just as difficult to grow out of a specific time or place as it is to shed the preconceptions attached to one hit track. Simian Mobile Disco, the production duo of James Ford and Jas Shaw, reached crossover success in the mid-’00s, as part of a brief yet strangely prolific microgenre that has been described as everything from “new rave” to the cringeworthy moniker “bloghouse.” Disappearing pretty much as soon as it was conceived, and despite giving birth to some fairly decent music, bloghouse, like so many frivolous electro genres before it, fell almost immediately out of favor with the tastemakers and cool kids who tend to be the arbiters of such things (consider that the Justice remix of Ford and Shaw’s previous band Simian’s most successful song somehow became the title of Zac Efron’s ridiculously uncool DJ drama We Are Your Friends). As a new decade began and EDM started to slowly encroach on mainstream electronic music, other acts that came up at the same time as SMD, like Justice, Kavinsky, Boys Noize, and Digitalism, began to lose their footing, their more pop-influenced aesthetic pushed out by a harsher, sweatier style of techno.
The success of SMD lies in their singular approach to this problem. Instead of trying to hold onto the style of their defining debut, Attack Decay Sustain Release, and its relatively vocal-heavy, DJ-friendly string of dancefloor bangers, each of their subsequent releases has showcased a different side of their considerable analogue production talents. Their discography runs the gamut of what techno has to offer: Their sophomore release, Temporary Pleasure, harked back to the radio-friendliness of late-’90s big beat, whereas 2014’s Whorl was entirely recorded at an intimate show in Joshua Tree, CA and reworked as an experimental, improvisational piece. As it turns out, SMD’s initial wave of popularity was more of a happy fluke than a measuring stick for the rest of their career.
Welcome to Sideways lies on the clubbier side of SMD’s output, but as more of an instrumental exercise in sustenance and restraint than the needle-drops and fist-pumps that have become synonymous with tech house. The album opens with the simple 4/4 beat of “Happening Distractions,” the building block on which Welcome to Sideways constructs its minimal melodies and heady, spacious sequencing. Good electronic music is almost always a method of addition rather than subtraction, and all of the tracks on the album begin as skeletal imprints of sounds and ideas before they take full form. Other early tracks like “Far Away From a Distance” and “Bubble Has No Answers” mimic the build-ups of SMD’s harder past releases but in a drawn-out and dream-like state—when the beat does drop halfway through these mini-odysseys, it’s muted and disconnected, like hearing a raging party from beneath a tranquil Ibiza swimming pool.
However, this is far from a party record. Clocking in at just over an hour in length, Welcome to Sideways is a study in dance music rather than a practice, one of those albums where skipping to a desired track is useless, as its meant to be experienced as a whole suite. “Remember in Reverse” begins with a soothing loop that’s gradually overcome by stacked glitches and fades until it reaches soaring altitude, and the seven-and-a-half minute closer “Drone Follows Me Everywhere” is SMD at their most oppressive, one pounding beat layered with a lead blanket of dark synths. For an act that has seen it’s biggest dividends producing easily consumable techno-pop, this variation might seem like a risk, and if Ford and Shaw hadn't already built a sturdy reputation as analogue technicians, it would be. But SMD have been doing this for a long time, and know how to toe the thin line between hypnosis and boredom. This album may not be their most compelling release to date, but it remains the work of two uniquely complementary musicians set on an ever-evolving path. | 2016-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Delicacies | December 10, 2016 | 6.8 | 7bc7ccb9-694b-45cc-9b2e-4b2464987a3f | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
Annie’s first album in about a decade, written and and recorded in a haunted house, collapses decades into an evocative blur. | Annie’s first album in about a decade, written and and recorded in a haunted house, collapses decades into an evocative blur. | Annie: Dark Hearts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/annie-dark-hearts/ | Dark Hearts | More than a few of us, these days, have been keeping an unusual, deliberate focus on our memories as they form: which ones we'd keep, which ones we’d prefer to destroy, whether any were worth keeping at all, and how they’ll come out decades later. What we might be left with, the research suggests, are “smudged reproductions”: memories recalled through a fogged-over lens, hazier than life. Dark Hearts, Annie’s first album in about a decade, is formed entirely of these smudged reproductions. The Norwegian singer is best known for crafting pop at an arch, ironic remove, but her new album recalls the song that, until now, was her outlier: “Anthonio,” a song conceived as an imagined perfume commercial. Dark Hearts, written with The Sound of Arrows’ Stefan Storm and recorded in a haunted house, is a whole album of this: fever-dream pop.
Opener “In Heaven” sets the mood: a slow-dance ballad heard through a funeral shroud. The low strobing synths and processing on Annie’s voice melt away as the complications disappear from the lyrics, leaving a swooning chorus. It’s ’80s cheese, but it’s cheese with the finest presentation: the ABBA-esque melodies of “Corridors of Time,” the Burt Bacharach sway of “It’s Finally Over,” the last-prom-dance synths throughout, and at the Gouda apex, the entirety of “The Streets Where I Belong.” Over an “Every Breath You Take” guitar chug, Annie recalls an affair, then sweeps away the fourth wall for her dream lover to play guitar hero: “Take it away, Johnny!” Almost every song finds Annie reminiscing about the past, or more precisely, casting her past self in a movie that she can soundtrack. The hometown she recalls isn’t beachy Norwegian Kristiansand but Hollywood at its most seedy-glam. The bad boys she courts are recalled in the softest focus. She recalls hearing songs often—never just a song, but their song.
Decades collapse into an evocative blur. Annie and Storm’s two most cited inspirations are Twin Peaks in 1990 and David Cronenberg’s car-fetish flick Crash in 1996; in between lies the ’92 of “Forever ’92,” a year, Annie’s said, that has stayed with her. Also hanging around are the nuclear fears that preoccupied the 1950s and 1960s, themselves interpreted through the ’80s. The LA-pocalyptic 1988 film Miracle Mile is all over Dark Hearts: it provides the name of one song, the source of another song’s samples, and acts as the spiritual precursor, thanks to its moody soundtrack by Tangerine Dream. There’s also a meta nostalgia at work: taken together, these inspirations sound a lot like the last decade, via the apocalypse-pop of the early 2010s, then via Random Access Memories, Italians Do It Better, and other synthwave soundalikes.
Dark Hearts is best at its most artificial. The moments that aim for “realness” seem less so: the dusty acoustic Americana (Annie-mericana?) outro to “Miracle Mile,” or the title track’s jagged arrangement and stabs at seriousness (“an inquiry into family relations,” she said, stretching just a bit). Far better is “American Cars,” which has no resemblance to the rugged real things but does recall American car commercials, if scored by Badalamenti and Moroder. In a different song “break free and then never look back” might come off badass, but as delivered in Annie’s sotto voce and surrounded by Storm’s sighing backing vocals, it’s a pure mood. “Mermaid Dreams” is half spoken word and all melancholy. “The Untold Story” is so heavy with “Live to Tell” synths that the production almost fully clouds over Annie's voice telling that story—which, perhaps, is the point.
Toward the end comes the apocalyptica that’s almost expected in 2020: a Skeeter Davis riff in “Countdown to the End of the World,” then that end of the world delivered via “The Bomb,” the closest thing on Dark Hearts to a full-on dance song. But both tracks are less dramatic than hazy; the former clarifies that doomsday is really just “an ordinary day,” and the latter, while full of air horns and trance synths and sampled cries about nuclear war, is more sedate groove than banger. It’s the end of the world, and everyone’s only kinda feeling it. The most telling lyric on Dark Hearts is one of the Miracle Mile samples: “Forget everything you heard, and go back to sleep.” Who among us doesn't prefer dreamland lately?
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | self-released | October 15, 2020 | 7.1 | 7bc7ebe0-610e-49c0-9516-65527be1ce7c | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
The Nashville-based singer-songwriter’s fifth album breaks through to a spare, unvarnished, and occasionally volatile style of indie rock that feels in step with the newly sharpened edge to her lyricism. | The Nashville-based singer-songwriter’s fifth album breaks through to a spare, unvarnished, and occasionally volatile style of indie rock that feels in step with the newly sharpened edge to her lyricism. | Madi Diaz: History of a Feeling | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madi-diaz-history-of-a-feeling/ | History of a Feeling | Madi Diaz spends much of her fifth album, History of a Feeling, spent and screaming, in the throes of a breakup, ready to take up the mantle of your messiest friend. The Nashville-based songwriter is crying on the M train, kicking down her ex’s door, and refusing to let the past go. In her own words, she is “not really looking to get healthy,” and at her angriest, as on opener “Rage,” she has no care for eloquence whatsoever: “Forgive and forget/Fuck you, fuck that.” Never mind the high road: The narrator of these songs is totaled on the low road, a smoking wreck a few miles south of the nearest pit stop.
After a handful of emotionally nondescript early records, History of a Feeling breaks through to a spare, unvarnished, and occasionally volatile style of indie rock that feels in step with the newly sharpened edge to her lyricism. Although inspired by a uniquely chaotic time in its creator’s life—the album chronicles Diaz’s breakup with a partner who also began transitioning around the same time—History of a Feeling is really a record sharply focused on the self, the ways we respond to stress and pain and the passing of time. The breakup acts more as a way for Diaz to map her own emotional landscape: the way she can be cruel and kind in the same breath, her tendency to oscillate from petulant and puerile to mature and measured, her ability to slip from romantically lovelorn to platonically devoted. It’s the rare record that captures how visceral it can feel to work through, and truly understand, your own feelings.
After dropping out of the Berklee College of Music, Diaz spent the better part of the last 15 years in Nashville and Los Angeles, working as a writer and session musician. With credits on records by Kesha, Elle King, and Bleached, among others, Diaz has the resume of an industry lifer: The vast majority of her work, aside from her four prior solo records, has been for soundtracks and commercials, working on material used in everything from Lucifer to Love Island. But where pedigreed songwriters have a tendency to turn out solo records that are mealy, mushy, or just generally overcooked, on History of a Feeling, Diaz steps away from the conventions of hired-gun songwriting with ease.
Her songs often succeed because of how little is done to them. Every single song on History of a Feeling is driven by a strong, indelible vocal melody memorable and polished enough to sit on a far more commercial record. Rather than toning down her natural affinity for melody, Diaz and producer Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Bon Iver) pull everything else back. The vocal melody is often the only moving part in these songs. On “Man in Me,” Diaz’s clarion voice—a titanium box lined with velvet—takes the song to the rafters with just dissonant guitars and gently arpeggiating piano. It’s a song about trying to work through perceived deception, though it’s not played as a tearjerker because Diaz is smart enough to know that the song, and its inhabitants, deserve something more complicated.
The skeletal ballad “Woman in My Heart” doesn’t play Diaz’s high-gloss vocal melody for cheap pathos. Where a lesser artist might go for easy catharsis, Diaz lurches into a bluesy, unrelenting stomp. “Think of Me” works within similar musical boundaries—fragmented guitar chords sit atop the cavernous thud of a bass drum—but Diaz’s delivery conjures a vastly different mood. Her words tumble out like ill-advised texts; you can practically see her typing in a fury, first slowly— “I hope you fuck her with your eyes closed/And think of me”—before letting the rest flood out as one unwieldy phrase: “I hope you fuck her with your eyes closed/Put the shame off with some benzos/Swallow the feeling while you walk home/And think of me always.” In an instant, Diaz’s vitriol is revealed as a plea, a coping mechanism to hide her own lingering feelings.
The tension between melody and arrangement on History of a Feeling occasionally recalls Feist’s last two records, Metals and Pleasure: music that reverse-engineered the outcome of pop music without using its bells and whistles, eliciting feelings from the texture and tone of a sound more than the words. Those albums, like History of a Feeling, are combustible and earthy, made all the more functional for how unprocessed and unadorned they sounded. There’s proof that these songs would work with shinier production: “Resentment,” the centerpiece of History of a Feeling, first appeared on Kesha’s 2020 record High Road. That version used tricks of the trade—gossamer synths, a belting vocal performance, occasional shifts from second-person to first-person—to create emotional weight. And yet Diaz’s version, stripped-back and relatively at ease, hits so much harder. She makes even the most immovable feelings open up with just a little time and space.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Anti- / Epitaph | September 1, 2021 | 7.5 | 7bc8a326-bc15-45d9-bf3e-4ec70fd9fdbe | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
The first album Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy made together, 2014's Friend of Mine (released under the name DJ Dodger Stadium), perfectly replicated the melancholy-tinged, ecstatic mood of vintage house and techno. For Stand Up and Speak, the pair have rethought nearly every aspect of their collaboration, from the overall sonic identity all the way down to the way it was recorded. | The first album Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy made together, 2014's Friend of Mine (released under the name DJ Dodger Stadium), perfectly replicated the melancholy-tinged, ecstatic mood of vintage house and techno. For Stand Up and Speak, the pair have rethought nearly every aspect of their collaboration, from the overall sonic identity all the way down to the way it was recorded. | DJDS: Stand Up and Speak | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21552-stand-up-and-speak/ | Stand Up and Speak | The first album Jerome LOL and Samo Sound Boy made together, 2014’s Friend of Mine (released under the name DJ Dodger Stadium), so perfectly replicated not only the sound of vintage house and techno but its particular melancholy-tinged, ecstatic mood that they probably could have passed it off as a long-lost classic if they’d felt like it. So it’s commendable that on their second album, the duo (now going by the slightly less confusing moniker DJDS) decided to chuck the proven formula and try something new.
For Stand Up and Speak, the pair have rethought nearly every aspect of their collaboration, from the overall sonic identity all the way down to the way it was recorded. Instead of mining old records for samples like they did so effectively on Friend, they created nearly every element on Speak from scratch, going as far as hiring vocalists off Craigslist and recording live instruments.
Leaning on organic sounds and performances that aren’t computer-controlled gives the album a warmer feel throughout. The streaks of heartbrokenness that ran through Friend have mostly been scrubbed away and replaced by a more uplifting mood. There’s a hint of sadness in the chopped-up vocal melody that "In the Flames" revolves around, but it’s more than sufficiently offset by the nimble, burbling bassline behind it. The penultimate track "I Don’t Love You" is as much of a breakup anthem as the title suggests, but it’s less the "wallow in your own misery" type and more the "get out to the club and dance it off" kind, building over its succinct three-and-a-half minutes to an emotional and sonic climax that’s downright triumphal.
The pair also seem to have shifted their influences from club culture’s earliest, most underground days to the period shortly thereafter where it first began to make inroads into the pop mainstream—less Paradise Garage and more "Club MTV." References to late-'80s/early-'90s club pop and vocal house abound. Sometimes it’s explicit, like the vocal loop, syncopated synth-tambourine, and brightly digital-sounding piano riff that underpin the hooky "You Don’t Have to Be Alone." Sometimes it’s more subtle, just a touch of breakbeat on the snare parts and a hint of the same exultant mood that groups from Deee-Lite to Black Box rode to surprising crossover success.
Unfortunately, the pair’s willingness to mess with a proven formula doesn’t translate into a more satisfying experience. For every "You Don’t Have to Be Alone' or "I Don’t Love You"—instantly memorable anthems that pretty much every type of dance DJ could find room for in their sets—Speak offers one or two tracks that just don’t generate a spark. And unlike Friend, which still stands up as a solid front-to-back listen, their use and reuse of the same few production techniques—most noticeably two-bar vocal loops and snare rolls—gives the album the feel of a couple great singles packaged with the half-baked demos that led up to their creation. Speak isn’t exactly a step forward or a step back, but more to the side, onto a new path with plenty of potential, as well as room for future improvements. | 2016-02-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Loma Vista | February 4, 2016 | 6.7 | 7bcb40a5-4929-4c05-8317-bd18ef485143 | Miles Raymer | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-raymer/ | null |
Exquisitely compiled yet baldly functional mix from the Ghostly International star. | Exquisitely compiled yet baldly functional mix from the Ghostly International star. | Matthew Dear: Fabric 27 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/487-fabric-27/ | Fabric 27 | Audion is Matthew Dear's alias for raw, sawtooth techno. Audion tracks lack the micro-edit punchiness of his work as Jabberjaw, are beefier than his barely inflected percussion clinics under the False moniker, and are missing the glitch-pop hooks of the stuff he releases under the name his parents gave him. Suckfish, the Audion album, is all about basslines that have been rubbed down with coarse sandpaper and spiraling arpeggios that make people strip off their shirts on the dancefloor but get irritating when parked on your hinder for 70 minutes.
Audion doesn't quite have the brand name appeal of the Matthew Dear stuff, which crossed over to indie kids on the back of Dear's wet, fey vocals and the hiccoughing funny noises that pass for hooks in the world of microhouse. This is probably why the marquee for Fabric 27 is so unwieldy. Anyone expecting the hummable end of the Dear-ly spectrum will be disappointed as Fabric 27 is neither happy nor sad, angry nor euphoric, ugly nor pretty. Fabric 27 is baldly functional in a way that makes you question what that function is, at least when removed from the club and reformatted for the living room, the iPod, whatever.
Techno has been pumping out music that could be derided as pointless off the floor since it was first declared passe in the early 1990s. The difference is that the marketing of techno has shifted from, well, not being marketed at all to being written up in places like, say, I dunno, Pitchfork. The slick packaging and widespread dissemination of the Fabric series is designed to appeal to people outside the techno cognoscenti. Some Fabric mixes-- Michael Mayer's springs immediately to mind-- are guaranteed to find a wide-ranging audience with their equally wide-ranging track selection, shifts in tempo, and petty indulgences like hooks and vocals and overt melodies.
I'm sure heard on a club soundsystem, with sub-bass rearranging your body chemistry, Fabric 27 would work. (An hour plus isn't really enough time for hypnosis to take control.) It's itching, rippling minimalist muzak, beats bobbing in a lagoon of bass mucous. If you're not listening very closely, the tracks will slink by unnoticed, transitioning from one burbling minimal workout to the next. Like the Ivan Smagghe Fabric mix from 2005, Dear's mix will be embraced by people who think looking for possible variations in a seemingly unceasing, unchanging matte black bottom end the most enthralling thing in the world. Everyone else will just hear a same-y techno mix.
Maybe the fault lies in Dear cutting up two or three tracks into a new whole. This is what DJs have been doing since disco, and as long as Jeff Mills is still alive I wouldn't write it off in a techno context. But Mills' multi-turntable hacking has a fury and drive utterly lacking in what I'll be succinct and call the post-Ableton/Hawtin era. Instead of butt-bumping chops and delirious edits with the frayed edges still visible, you get three minimal techno tracks that sound like...a single minimal techno track. This smooth, toothless mixing may be technically impressive but it's also pretty boring.
Techno purists are probably grimacing at the mere mention of "functional" as a pejorative. Maybe instead of your beanbag chair or on the stairmaster, you need to listen to it on the highway wreathed in fog at 5 a.m. Some old techno sawhorses still hold, I guess. | 2006-05-02T02:00:41.000-04:00 | 2006-05-02T02:00:41.000-04:00 | Electronic | Fabric | May 2, 2006 | 6.2 | 7bcbe693-f438-42ae-b812-ffcd853f2992 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
Originally formed as a cover band/side-project by longtime friends (and Louisville punk scene veterans) Catherine Ann Irwin and Janet ... | Originally formed as a cover band/side-project by longtime friends (and Louisville punk scene veterans) Catherine Ann Irwin and Janet ... | Freakwater: Old Paint | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3184-old-paint/ | Old Paint | Originally formed as a cover band/side-project by longtime friends (and Louisville punk scene veterans) Catherine Ann Irwin and Janet Beveridge Bean, Freakwater was renowned for its strict adherence to bare-bones Appalachian musical forms. Their first couple of releases helped jumpstart the alt-country movement in the early 90s, boasting little more than the cheaply recorded acoustic guitars and vocal harmonies of the two frontwomen, augmented by sparing use of stand-up bass, pedal steel, dobro, and other stylistically appropriate instruments. But this stark, almost severe attention to form was not merely an academic exercise. There was a bucket-load of heart-wrenching humanity there, too.
A lot of that is due to Irwin herself. Other performers have mined this uber-authentic vein from a certain distance, gingerly handling traditional themes (salvation, drunkenness, poverty) and song-structures like sacred library texts to be presented as if under glass. By contrast, Irwin comes across as the genuine article-- a musically homely, inexpert oddball, the updated embodiment of the tragic eccentrics that have always populated this kind of musical landscape. It never sounds like she had to study how to sing or write this way. Her songs and her singing sound convincingly lived-in.
Also contributing to the human factor is the car-wreck compelling, between-the-lines story that is related solely through the interplay of the two women's voices. Countless other long-standing vocal duos have rung the harmony bell with more crystalline clarity, but few have wrestled so explicitly to define a real-world relationship in song. This subtext allows Bean and Irwin to transcend their vocal limitations and gives the music an emotional, in-the-room immediacy that is simply not available to more accomplished practitioners.
Old Paint, originally released in 1996, was Freakwater's high-water mark as a going concern. For the second time, it paired them with madwoman-in-the-attic production specialist Brad Wood, who was still basking in the afterglow of his work with Liz Phair. Bassist Dave Gay was now permanently on board as the third band member, and steel player Bob Egan, who would later spend some time in Jeff Tweedy's revolving door, was on hand to provide the color commentary. Bean and Irwin were more than ready, with an album's worth of supremely evocative original songs-- for the first time, the few, well-chosen covers on a Freakwater album were there to lend context to the original songs, and not the other way around.
The first lines of Old Paint's opening "Gravity" announce Freakwater's worldview quite clearly: "I wasn't drinking to forget/ I was drinking to remember/ How I once might have looked through the eyes of a stranger." A couple of songs later, on "Gone to Stay", things have only gotten worse, as Irwin sings, mournful but clear-eyed, "There's nothing so sure as a razor blade above your wrist." By "Hero/Heroine", the situation is downright hopeless, with some nasty Stones-ish slide work and bleary observations like, "Everyone who gets drunk will not write a good book." There are some moments of redemption as well, from the jet-black humor that propels the buoyant "Waitress Song" to the heavenly cello that levitates the haunting cover of Loudon Wainwright's "Out of This World".
So much discussion about bands like Freakwater hinges on questions of authenticity. As Old Paint demonstrates, that's pretty much missing the point. Specific styles of music are important, of course, because they carry certain traditions across generational lines. But on a personal level, they're really just empty vehicles. No musician can get anything of substance from a particular musical style-- it's what the musicians bring of themselves that matters. On Old Paint, Bean and Irwin gave so generously of themselves that style and substance became virtually indistinguishable, and that's an achievement worth drinking to remember. | 2004-04-06T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2004-04-06T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Thrill Jockey | April 6, 2004 | 8.5 | 7bd5af77-7979-475c-8a31-f5a3d34c7fcc | Pitchfork | null |
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The genial Louisville rapper doesn’t have much of an identity, but he has a natural, low-stakes charm. | The genial Louisville rapper doesn’t have much of an identity, but he has a natural, low-stakes charm. | Jack Harlow: Confetti | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jack-harlow-confetti/ | Confetti | Jack Harlow is from Louisville, Kentucky, but without the defiant “I’m a Kentucky boy til’ death” shoutout on 2018 breakout “Sundown,” you wouldn’t know it. His fourth full-length project in just as many years, Confetti sounds like it could be made by any 21-year-old that grew up with access to Hot 97: He reflects on driving around his city listening to The Blueprint on CD and raps over samples of Usher’s “U Don’t Have to Call” and Trey Songz’s “I Invented Sex.” His music has no identity. But he has a natural charm and energy that helps you overlook the fact that you’ve heard countless albums like this before, just by different names.
Prior to Confetti, Jack Harlow’s big singles were 2017’s “Dark Knight” and the aforementioned “Sundown.” The self-confident bounce of the former earned him his current record deal with DJ Drama and Don Cannon’s Lil Uzi Vert-cursed Generation Now label. The more polished “Sundown” boasts a Neptunes-influenced beat from his frequent collaborator 2forwOyNE that complements his low-key swagger. Both songs balance a light, teen-movie party atmosphere with warm reflections on his hometown.
This is Jack Harlow’s sweet spot, and when he remains there, he cranks out enjoyable DJ-set filler. Album intro “Ghost” is upbeat enough to ignore Harlow’s painful one-liners (“I got all the whipper-snappers and the lil’ rascals”) while serving as a reminder that DJ Drama’s “Gangsta Grillz” tag is timeless. On later tracks like “Heavy Hitter,” Harlow’s natural charisma elevates typical first-record-deal topics like dating women who use him to build their LinkedIn connections. The light-spirited “Walk in the Park” would’ve made sense on the back half of an Aminé or KYLE project.
But like so many emerging rappers, Jack Harlow seems to think that for his music to take the next step, he has to sing. On the Da Honorable C.N.O.T.E-produced “Sunday Night,” his fun-loving personality is lost in the minute he opens his mouth: “I know that a ‘you up’ text would be fucked up, but I’d be lying if I told you I ain’t wanna,” he sings weakly. He talks about relationships so impersonally that he might just be reciting the plot of the last television series he binged. His vocals suck the life out of his coming-of-age reflections on “Goin Back Down,” and his Louisville tales only come to life when he connects with his hometown hero Bryson Tiller for the sappy duet “Thru the Night.”
Jack Harlow’s music is harmless. If you come across any of Confetti’s standouts on a Spotify playlist, you won’t be moved to complain or click over to his artist page. At his best, he can make above-average slappers like “Heavy Hitter” and “Ghost,” and that’s enough to keep him afloat. Well, that’s until the next Jack Harlow comes around, with a new name, representing another underappreciated city, and then we can have this conversation all over again. | 2019-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Generation Now / Atlantic | September 28, 2019 | 5.6 | 7bd60010-9293-427f-9d73-3229ba396751 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On an often chilly album full of unexpected collaborations and smeared with apocalyptic terror, the 80-year-old art-rock legend grapples with the need for human connection. | On an often chilly album full of unexpected collaborations and smeared with apocalyptic terror, the 80-year-old art-rock legend grapples with the need for human connection. | John Cale: Mercy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-cale-mercy/ | Mercy | When an icon returns after a lengthy absence, it’s tempting to feel a kind of condescending compassion. My god, one might think, he’s still doing it at 80. And when he returns in the enviable company of bright young(er) things, it’s tempting to feel cynical: Look who’s trying to stay current. Spare all that for John Cale. He who, in co-founding the Velvet Underground, built the bridge between European art music and American rock’n’roll with his inimitable viola drone; who managed to corral early iterations of the Stooges, Patti Smith, the Modern Lovers, and Nico into the studio and keep them there long enough to capture on tape all their world-changing energies; who introduced Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” to Jeff Buckley, and after him, vicariously, to a deluge of lessor idol tryouts; who has himself released more than three dozen albums of chamber pop, post-punk, post-rock, and beyond, on his own and in collaboration with fellow icons, arguably more famous than him (frenemies Lou Reed and Brian Eno, gurus like La Monte Young), whom he often shows up—John Cale doesn’t need your charity.
In a 60-year career full of unexpected twists, Cale arrives with another: MERCY, an album informed by R&B and smeared with dream-pop haze and orchestral rumblings of apocalyptic terror. Yes, there’s a dream team of collaborators that reads like a festival main stage: Weyes Blood, Sylvan Esso, Animal Collective, Dev Hynes, and Tei Shi. Electronic producers Actress, Laurel Halo, TOKiMONSTA, and Seven Davis Jr. offer avant-cred. Fat White Family also appear. None stand a chance of upstaging Cale, and none try. MERCY is Cale’s album alone, haunted and reckoning with a turbulent past that, day by day, looks more peaceful than the future.
His voice remains unmistakable, a walnut burl with cracks in the grain. The stentorian register that Cale used to wield with authority is absent. Chart the distance between its apotheosis, 1973’s classic “Paris 1919,” and MERCY standout “Time Stands Still.” In both songs, Europe has collapsed (this time, it’s “sinking in the mud”), and in both, the Church comes to save the day. Fifty years ago, Cale could imagine himself as the religious force. “I’m the church/And I’ve come/To claim you with my iron drum,” he sang, his voice like cold steel. Today, he just mourns the church’s “savagery” in a voice wafting through a cathedral of Sylvan Esso’s echoes and murmurs. The drums are uncertain, doubling back like leather heels approaching and retreating on a hard stone floor. Only in the bridge does that old voice return, and instead of enlightenment, there’s environmental chaos. Roses battle poppies for the sun, and “monsoons (are) happening everywhere, even in your own backyard.” Vanishing footsteps signify love and loss in the gorgeous “Noise of You”; Cale, suspended in blankets of synths and vintage keys the exact color of a dusk snowstorm, longs to hear them once again. “Was so long, long ago,” he hollers. A string section flutters tremendously, a scarf that could form a noose.
On MERCY, memory is treacherous. “Not the End of the World” sparkles with a reassuring grandeur, but each time his processed, multi-tracked voice repeats the title, it feels more like a lie. Incendiary “The Legal Status of Ice” raises a bitter toast to polar bears stranded on an iceberg; Cale intones, “Ding dong, the witch is dead,” over a tundra of frosty guitars and cracking drums, and the witch might well be us. In other moments, it’s the past that’s bewitching. “Night Crawling” stumbles around with neo-soul swagger, getting nowhere (relatively, for this very downtempo collection) fast. “I can’t even tell when you’re putting me on/We’ve played that game before,” he chants, trapped in a loop of looking back to reconfirm he’s still trapped in a loop. Centerpiece “Everlasting Days” starts out elegiac, and then Avey Tare and Panda Bear join Cale in dismantling the entire idea of a requiem. Breakbeats remind you they’re named for destruction, words shatter into mere syllables, and the motives behind the making of amends are thrown like snapped branches into a bonfire of historical proportions. It’s brutal.
Warmth is rare. “I Know You’re Happy” attempts a kind of late-Motown bop, but flops rather elegantly into first recriminations and then earnest desperation. In the luminous “Moonstruck (Nico’s Song),” he tells his old collaborator, “I have come to make my peace,” as soft synth pads echo her old harmonium wheeze. One wonders what Nico, who made some of the world’s most beautiful songs while embracing some very ugly politics, would think of Cale calling her “a moonstruck junkie lady, staring at your feet.” Or what another doomed icon, Marilyn Monroe, would think of his ode to her, the seven-minute “Marilyn Monroe’s Legs (Beauty Elsewhere),” which sets numerological and phenomenological musings against a shivering screen of bleeps, rustles, and moans. It’s more Cronenberg than Warhol, but at least not as creepy as Andrew Dominik’s recent Blonde.
Somehow, though, alienation isn’t all. MERCY is a revelation of the need to connect. It’s a need that doesn’t waver as one ages, as the deaths of your loved ones hasten. Cale utterly embraces that need’s every facet. In the title track, Laurel Halo’s remarkable sound design ballasts Cale’s plea for someone to “lift me up,” an act of generosity in a song about hoping for one. In a pair of the album’s most devastating songs, Cale’s old pal the piano comes out: For a moment, it’s there in the bluesy intro to “Story of Blood,” a crisp, dizzying duet with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering, which suddenly bursts into some heavenly headspace between SZA and Slowdive. Cale rages against those betrayed by their bodies. “Bring them with me into the light,” he and Mering sing to each other, shouldering a burden built for two. And when the soul fails, connection is a mortal issue. “Out Your Window” closes the album with, mostly, Cale at the piano, invoking Paris 1919. For all its complexities, MERCY ends with Cale vowing to save a troubled friend’s life. “If you jump,” he promises, “I will break your fall.” Not stop, not catch, but break. Cale’s here, once again and for now, still not making things easy on anyone. | 2023-01-24T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-24T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Domino | January 24, 2023 | 7.8 | 7be02688-4801-44c0-b9ba-31da76ebe7f4 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Newly mixed reissue of the modern classic-- an experimental electronic record that uses digital bits to refract and bend ideas about warmth in pop music-- features two bonus cuts, including a previously unreleased track. | Newly mixed reissue of the modern classic-- an experimental electronic record that uses digital bits to refract and bend ideas about warmth in pop music-- features two bonus cuts, including a previously unreleased track. | Fennesz: Endless Summer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9760-endless-summer/ | Endless Summer | Revisiting Christian Fennesz' 2001 album Endless Summer six years later brings to mind one of my favorite single lines from a critic. In 1963, film writer/maker Jonas Mekas asserted in his Village Voice column that 8mm film, including amateur footage rediscovered and presented in a different context, was the future of the medium. He mentioned reels with sunsets casually shot in Arizona by vacationing New Yorkers and said that "time is laying a veil of poetry over them."
That notion kept running through my head while returning to this record, despite the different context. Time has indeed laid a veil of poetry Endless Summer, not that it needed it. It's aged very well, but there's more going on hearing it in 2007 than just revisiting a good record. From the beginning, this album was about memory, decay, and reference; it wondered how deeply an original idea could become distorted and still retain its content. Fennesz used digital bits to refract and bend ideas about warmth in pop music, and his work has been mellowing in history's dark cellar. Which is to say, *Endless Summer * sounds even better now.
It also sounds very 2001 somehow, and not just because it basically soundtracked the second half of that insane year for me. There's something almost naïve going on in some of these tracks, despite the music's careful construction. For all the guitar/computer interface we've heard since, nothing has sounded as naked as the simply strummed chords of the title track. They sway in front and force you to hear the strings and body in a new way because of their presence on an experimental record issued by Mego. Fennesz had it down conceptually. He borrowed the chords from the Sandals' 1964 instrumental "Theme From the Endless Summer" and immersed the changes in 10 feet of crashing water, a wall of prickly sound that drives your face into a sharp layer of broken seashells. And that is the entry point.
Even when the guitars hang back a bit and let the processing provide most of the texture, there is still song structure and melody. The opening "Made in Hongkong" serves as a transition from the world of his previous record, the striking but comparatively challenging Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56' 37" Minus Sixteen Degrees 51' 08", meeting that blizzard of noise halfway with rolling chords and bits of a tune and then carrying the heavy stuff into this warmer, more welcoming place. "A Year in a Minute" is a canny exercise in stasis, pointing to film drama in a drone piece that seems to shoot beams of sound toward the sky like a rotating klieg light. "Caecilia" is as nakedly pretty as Fennesz has allowed his music to get to date, all delicate quivers, the feeling of excited nervousness made into sound. And then there are the few merely good moments that keep the original Endless Summer from perfection. The CD-skipping exercise "Before I Leave" is pleasant but insubstantial, and the static-heavy, organ-driven 10-minute closer "Happy Audio" is terrific but seems to come from a slightly different disc.
I'm not crazy about the idea of reissuing records in a new edition only a few years after they first come out, even if the album in question is a "classic" like this one. Fennesz, it seems, knew what he was doing when he designed his original track list, and the two new bonus tracks here won't add much to the legacy. "Badminton Girl", originally released in 2001 on a Fat Cat split, is quite nice but sounds a bit like a sketch for "Made in Hongkong", without the constant sense of change. The previously unreleased "Endless" is of even less consequence, consisting of just a quiet hum without much in the way of mood.
No matter, Endless Summer still works fantastically well and if this reissue allows a few new people to enjoy it, all the better. It wasn't just Fennesz' artistic breakthrough, but the breakthrough for a new style of electronic music that found a way to channel the latest developments in software into something that worked the way music has always worked and had appeal beyond just the genre heads. It was also Pitchfork's No. 2 album of 2001, which is sort of amazing. The only downside is that it set the bar too high, to a place none of the many followers since have managed to clear. | 2007-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2007-01-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Mego | January 10, 2007 | 9.4 | 7bf20435-554c-4b6e-91c4-b9e8aa6f355a | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Leslie Bear’s second album could be about any ordinary American suburb, but the emotion behind her airy dream-pop makes it entirely personal. | Leslie Bear’s second album could be about any ordinary American suburb, but the emotion behind her airy dream-pop makes it entirely personal. | Long Beard: Means to Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/long-beard-means-to-me/ | Means to Me | Leslie Bear’s second album as Long Beard is a narrative of home, albeit a nebulous one; across the 10 songs on Means to Me, the New Jersey dream-pop musician never refers to her town by name. She doesn’t illustrate tree-lined streets, or her favorite hangout spots, or the house she grew up in. The only landmark she cites is the local CVS, outside which she had her first kiss. On paper, this could be a record about any ordinary American suburb.
The four years since Bear’s debut, Sleepwalker, have taken her all around the country: She quit her corporate job and toured with Japanese Breakfast before returning to her native New Brunswick to earn a computer science degree at Rutgers. She’s not referencing home as a place, but rather home as a feeling—or a lack thereof. Bear isn’t as concerned about winding up in New Brunswick again as she is about the disorientation caused by her time away. She’s grappling with the bittersweet nostalgia and alienation of migrating in reverse. Although the geographical setting of Means to Me is ambiguous, the closeness Bear conveys makes it entirely personal.
Like her contemporaries Hatchie and Jay Som, Long Beard builds her music from wistful vocals and jangly guitars. On Sleepwalker, the dreamy effects often reverberated to the point of oblivion. Means to Me finds more stable footing: Bear’s enunciations are clearer, her instrumentation more active and forward-moving. Highlights like “Getting By,” “Sweetheart,” and the title track are tethered by steady percussion while still maintaining her celestial, atmospheric aura. The lucidity makes Bear’s anecdotes easier to grasp: Her high school sweetheart is now married, and as she resettles in this anonymous town, she finds her surroundings plagued with reminders of a love that dissipated a decade ago.
Means to Me can feel one-dimensional, so preoccupied with the opinions of others—people whom Bear’s narrator hasn’t seen in years—that there’s hardly any room for catharsis or self-reflection. “Aren’t you better off without me rooted in your town?” she echoes on “Snow Globe.” “Still hoping you would talk to me/Through the colder months of fall/But you never called,” goes opener “Countless.” “I don’t know why I come/Just to see if you’ll have me,” she wonders in “Monarch.” Depleted, she likens her heart to an “empty bottle.” She writes about feelings of uncertainty and rejection but rarely goes deeper, offering little insight to her own growth and never explaining why she returned home in the first place.
But in its layered textures and unguarded lyricism, Means to Me testifies to Bear’s upward trajectory as a writer and musician. Though she doesn’t give much clarity to her intentions, her emotions are transparent. She’s endured the kind of upheaval that could easily distort someone’s identity, yet hers is surprisingly apparent as she recalls these lovelorn memories. Patiently channeling pain and turmoil into airy, gorgeous dream-pop, she makes a nameless location—somewhere that might be almost anywhere—feel intimate and particular.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Double Double Whammy | September 20, 2019 | 7 | 7bf45509-6619-4701-bbec-523c6e51d4d9 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
The London singer-songwriter, formerly of Goat Girl, teams with producer Joel Burton and a host of musicians on a sharply observed, sumptuously arranged album of idiosyncratic folk. | The London singer-songwriter, formerly of Goat Girl, teams with producer Joel Burton and a host of musicians on a sharply observed, sumptuously arranged album of idiosyncratic folk. | Naima Bock : Giant Palm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/naima-bock-giant-palm/ | Giant Palm | Naima Bock begins “Every Morning,” the stunning third track from her debut solo album, Giant Palm, in conversation with herself. The song’s first lines arrive in call-and-response, with a group of backing vocalists cast as the nagging doubts inside the singer’s head, voicing their interrogations in spectacularly rich harmony. Bock’s responses are comparatively understated. We gather that we’re in the aftermath of some sort of breakup, seemingly initiated by the singer herself. Her responsibility for the split doesn’t lessen her grief, an apparent contradiction that her plainspoken lines acknowledge without apologizing for. “Hello, darling,” the chorus of voices begins. “Yes, I’m mourning,” Bock answers.
Are you crying?
Every morning
Is it for them?
So it is
But you left them
So be it
By the end of the exchange, Bock’s voice has begun to merge with the others. They soar upward together when they reach the line about leaving, with one soprano in the backing ensemble seeming particularly determined to burst through the clouds. Even after repeated listens, this moment comes as a minor shock, the melody’s sudden ascent suggesting a certain exultation about the departure that mingles unspoken with the sorrow of the lyrics. Later, a three-word refrain, set to a slightly flattened version of the same ascending melody, deepens the ambiguity at the song’s heart: “I lie sometimes.”
Working in collaboration with arranger Joel Burton and over 30 instrumentalists, Bock recorded Giant Palm after a period of retreat from making music in public, having departed the buzzy London post-punk band Goat Girl in favor of a quieter life off the road. She continued writing songs but had no particular plans to make an album until Burton convinced her to collaborate. It was a fortuitous union. Burton’s contributions to Giant Palm—a kaleidoscopic array of orchestral instruments and electronics—are so significant that the pair considered coming up with a new band name rather than releasing it as a Bock solo album.
Bock, who is of Brazilian and Greek heritage and spent time living in Brazil as a child, might have eventually released a remarkable album even without Burton’s intervention. Her songwriting pairs terse observations with audacious melodic turns, conveying ideas that the words on the page only hint at. She has clear power as a singer but rarely overemotes, favoring a restrained and vernacular style that evokes bossa nova singers like Astrud Gilberto and Nara Leão on one hand and UK folk revivalists like Shirley Collins and Bert Jansch on the other. (In addition to performing her own material, Bock is also a member of Broadside Hacks, a collective of young London musicians who aim to revitalize traditional English music for a new generation, much the way Collins, Jansch, and their ilk did decades before them.) It’s easy to imagine a version of Giant Palm featuring just Bock’s voice and guitar—or a more straightforward folk-rock band—that’s plenty stirring on its own.
Instead, Bock and Burton called in favors with every crack musician in their contacts lists and labored to ensure that Giant Palm sounds very little like the average singer-songwriter album. The swooning strings are reminiscent of Jim O’Rourke’s orchestral-pop masterpiece Eureka (another singer who is allergic to bombast, incidentally); the vocal harmonies and proudly fussy touches of flute and soprano sax recall the Zombies’ classic psych nugget Odeyssey and Oracle; the eerie electronic ambience of “Dim Dum” suggests Radiohead and Robert Fripp; the juxtaposition of folky modal melody and jazzy rhythm section on “Toll” bring to mind Pentangle and Astral Weeks. Despite these divergent points of historical reference, Giant Palm is a holistic and distinctly contemporary work, always rooted in the landscape of the present, never coming across as postmodern pastiche.
Bock is a deeply idiosyncratic songwriter, and Burton is thoroughly attuned to her peculiarities. As “Natural” winds down, Bock warns a prospective partner of her tendency to get sick of the people she lives with, but leaves open the possibility that she will love them anyway. Just as you settle into this happy ending, she twists it again: “There’s no point in pushing through/If we grow our separate ways.” The last word lands on a chord utterly foreign to the gliding progression that’s carried the song so far, jarring and sour and spelling doom, its dissonance heightened by the sudden appearance of tightly clustered woodwinds. On “Enter the House,” another tale of domestic discord, she pleads with someone to commit to her or let her go. The coda revisits the conceit of “Every Morning,” with lead and backup vocals representing the two sides of a dueling consciousness. “I hear a voice calling out to me/It cries ‘Come home, Nai,’” Bock sings. “You can’t go home,” the singers behind her answer, the peppiness of their melody seeming to mock her for ever thinking she could. What began as a straight-ahead country-folk tune ends as something far stranger.
Giant Palm is a breakup album of sorts, though the natures of the partnerships are not always clear. “Campervan,” at least, nods in the direction of Goat Girl: “Looking for a campervan/Looking for a different band,” goes its lurching waltz-time refrain. Bock is particularly adept at capturing a mixture of crushing sadness and bubbling excitement that can arise from striking out on your own, with neither feeling ever ruling out the possibility of the other. The path she chooses is one of quiet self-possession, mirroring the controlled burn of her singing voice. She elucidates it most vividly on the magisterial title track. “Life’s giant palm lifts me to the sky/And for a while I forget that I cannot fly/So I float high, high above it all,” she sings, a rising synth line further evoking her climb.
“Campervan” espouses a similar sentiment: “In wind and rain I’ll find my birth/And when I can I’ll go alone/In silence I will make my home.” The song, too, finds a home in silence, with a pause for breath before each chorus that lasts just long enough to seem slightly unreasonable, a deliberate and unsettling incursion on the otherwise placid atmosphere. You can practically see Bock in those moments, alone at the mic or eyeing the players assembled around her, gathering her strength and waiting for the music to propel her skyward again. | 2022-07-05T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-05T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | Sub Pop | July 5, 2022 | 7.8 | 7bf5de79-37e2-4233-94cf-5da561b83d3c | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The first rapper on Jack White’s label, known mostly for the publicity stunts in his past, loves conceptual art, ’90s hip-hop, and grand statements | The first rapper on Jack White’s label, known mostly for the publicity stunts in his past, loves conceptual art, ’90s hip-hop, and grand statements | SHIRT: Pure Beauty | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shirt-pure-beauty/ | Pure Beauty | SHIRT is living in the shadow of a publicity stunt. Back in 2014, the New York City spitter mocked up a fake New York Times website including a purported article that lauded his music in grandiloquent terms. The ruse spread across the Internet, but ultimately backfired. He became a poster boy for the struggle rapper movement—that is, up-and-coming MCs so desperate for attention that they’ll attempt any gimmick to secure column inches and blog mentions.
Self-inflicted though it was, this labelling was unfair to SHIRT. He’s a bright writer who’s blessed with a husky voice, and he relays his robust flow in commanding and ear-catching ways. Besides, in SHIRT’s world, the New York Times prank wasn’t a cheap shot, but a high-minded homage to the poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s controversial ideas on the artistic use of repurposed information. Since then, he’s continued to promote his work with a performance artist’s mentality. In 2016, he eschewed the Internet altogether to premiere “Summer Not Coming” by driving an F-150 truck through New York City while blasting the song all day. More recently, SHIRT re-enacted conceptual artist David Hammons’ famed 1983 attempt to sell snowballs on a New York City block corner. Back on Twitter, he posted a photo that seems to get to the essence of how he sees himself as not merely an MC, but an artist with loftier, extramusical goals. In the photo, a faceless mannequin’s head wears a do-rag, with a single line of commentary: “Do-rag in the MOMA—it’s my time.”
Pure Beauty, SHIRT’s first album since signing with Jack White’s Third Man Records, shares that interest in elevating the experience of listening to him rap into something bigger. On the project’s jump-off single, “Flight Home,” SHIRT rhymes over bruising synth lines and viscerally thudding kick drums from Dutch EDM producer and DJ San Holo. He compares himself to the Lox rapper Sheek Louch on a quest to cop Picasso paintings, pivots to address a verse to “all the immigrants and refugees,” and ends his tirade with the declaration, “This rap shit still a sport to me/Kaepernick jersey on, that’s a hero of mine/Stand for something that you zero in on.” The song is accompanied by a video in which SHIRT raps atop a truck emblazoned with giant Nike and Adidas logos—painted on by hand, then left unblurred in the video, even though (as a press release proudly notes) the companies were not consulted on their use. The visual gambit falls uneasily between a critique of hip-hop’s relationship with corporate sportswear brands and, once again, a flimsy attempt to muster up attention. Pure Beauty plays out in a similar fashion, committing wholly to neither SHIRT’s appealing raw rap chops nor his grander concepts.
The songs that bookend the tracklist drive this point home. The album opens with “Snowbeach,” titled in reference to the sought-after Polo Ralph Lauren jacket made iconic by Raekwon in the Wu-Tang Clan’s “Can It All Be So Simple” video. SHIRT and his guest Chase chisel weighty lines into producer Ricky Dubs’ low-slung, bluesy beat, with the host threatening, “I could run up in this gallery with the mask on.” He has the same sort of street-smart, razor-sharp flow that Rae himself perfected on the fabled Purple Tape, and the song emerges as the album’s most concrete demonstration of SHIRT as a beast with bars who’s also self-aware enough to spit, “Most my music not streaming like I’m Prince!”
But then the 11-track album ends with “Mise En Abyme,” a near-eight-minute recording of the French artist Marie Matusz talking about the creative process. If you keep going, you’ll eventually find a scant two-part rap from SHIRT hidden two-thirds of the way through the song. But it’s a frustrating listen even once, despite the hypnotic, celestial beat from Steel Tipped Dove. For his closing lines, SHIRT raps, “Parties in pyramids, left my tag on the wall/Beats echo off the stone, I be repping for y’all.” It’s a solid point—sometimes there’s more value in leaving a legacy in the physical foundation than the artistic ether. | 2018-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Third Man | February 12, 2018 | 6.3 | 7bf92e07-867a-4c36-97c7-6c62b318a40a | Phillip Mlynar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/phillip-mlynar/ | |
Setting aside his penchant for elaborate concept records, the UK producer zeroes in on what makes his productions so singular, balancing immaculate sound design with compelling club rhythms. | Setting aside his penchant for elaborate concept records, the UK producer zeroes in on what makes his productions so singular, balancing immaculate sound design with compelling club rhythms. | Leon Vynehall: Rare, Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leon-vynehall-rare-forever/ | Rare, Forever | Leon Vynehall loves a good story. Back in 2014, the UK artist’s breakthrough mini-LP, Music for the Uninvited, was rooted in childhood memories of the mixtapes his mother used to play in the car, while 2016’s Rojus drew parallels between a night of partying and the mating rituals of tropical birds. Two years later, he went fully conceptual with Nothing Is Still, a beautiful album that folded in elements of ambient and classical while recounting the tale of his grandparents’ emigration to New York in the 1960s. The self-described “multimedia experience” also included a series of short films and a novella.
His latest full-length takes a notably different path. Rare, Forever has no grand narrative or elaborate backstory. Speaking about the album, Vynehall has said, “I wanted to write purely from the standpoint of free expression: whatever came to me is what I’d go with.” Yet Rare, Forever isn’t some sort of rudderless mish-mash. After a decade in electronic music, Vynehall sounds more confident than ever before, and while a few Easter eggs—including an ouroboros-like sigil and a mysterious character/entity named Velvet—have been scattered across the new LP and its artwork, the record is primarily a potent showcase of his talents.
Rare, Forever opens with the forlorn strings of “Ecce! Ego!,” signaling that the orchestral pomp of Nothing Is Still hasn’t been discarded completely, but as the record unfolds, it quickly becomes clear that the LP’s contents owe a lot more to smoky jazz clubs and noisy DIY spaces than the symphony hall. With its lush strings, “Farewell! Magnus Gabbro” is perhaps the most “classical” track on the album, but the song’s hovering distortion and elongated tones sound more like something a William Basinski/Kevin Shields collab might have cooked up. Vynehall happily dirties up his sound across Rare, Forever, and while the record won’t ever be mistaken for a Hospital Productions release, it does contain tracks like “In>Pin,” which runs a disjointed spoken-word collage through a labyrinth of angular skronk, and “Worm (& Closer & Closer),” a poignantly scratchy, gravel-voiced update on UK street soul. “Alichea Vella Amor” continues down this soulful path, pairing tape hiss and a hypnotic vocal loop with searching saxophones, and moody album closer “All I See You, Velvet Brown” is even jazzier, its late-night horns eventually giving way to a textured bath of haunted static and thoughtful prose (borrowed from poet Will Ritson’s “Harbouring”).
Despite these forays beyond the confines of the club, Vynehall has always had a knack for crafting tastefully anthemic house music, and his latest album is bound to be celebrated as his return to the dancefloor. The lively “Snakeskin ∞ Has-Been” is sharper and darker than old favorites like “It’s Just (House of Dupree)” and “Blush,” but the song’s whirring rhythms have obvious big-room appeal. The manically chirping “Dumbo” is even heavier, with burly rhythms that nod to both the contemporary hard-drum circuit and the carnivalesque spirit of old UK funky bangers like Roska’s “Squark.” But it’s “Mothra” that provides the LP’s most obvious hands-in-the-air moment: A little more than halfway through, the track goes practically silent, drops a dramatic vocal snippet, and then swings back into its confident strut. It’s a trick right out of the post-dubstep playbook that brings to mind Joy Orbison’s most gratifying work.
Even without any overarching narrative, Rare, Forever still feels like a triumph. At its core, the LP is a straight-up flex, the work of an artist who has learned to distill his many influences and experiments into a coherent, singular vision, and Vynehall himself is the protagonist of this particular tale. (It’s telling that he opens the record with “Ecce! Ego!,” which literally means “Behold! Me!” in Latin.) There are few producers in the electronic music realm who can capably translate the “here’s some tracks I made” approach into a compelling album—folks like Floating Points and Four Tet come to mind—and it appears that Vynehall is ready to be welcomed into that cohort, perhaps with glorious album centerpiece “An Exhale” as his coronation theme. Combining the beatless trance of artists like Barker with the woozy melodies of M83, it’s both jubilant and pensive, like looking out at nature’s expanse after trekking up a mountain. After making his own proverbial climb in recent years, Vynehall can rightly sit back and take in the view.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ninja Tune | April 30, 2021 | 7.8 | 7bfe328b-3eab-43c5-8132-924ebea738f4 | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
The Swedish composer sidelines the gothic pop of previous releases in favor of lush and sorrowful wordless soundscapes, performed entirely on the pipe organ of a local church. | The Swedish composer sidelines the gothic pop of previous releases in favor of lush and sorrowful wordless soundscapes, performed entirely on the pipe organ of a local church. | Anna von Hausswolff: All Thoughts Fly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/anna-von-hausswolff-all-thoughts-fly/ | All Thoughts Fly | In the 16th century, the Italian arts patron Pier Francesco Orsini commissioned a statuary park in the town of Bomarzo as he was mourning the death of his wife. Sacro Bosco, dedicated in her memory, features a collection of stone monsters, including the Roman underworld god Orcus, his eyes wide and mouth open in terror. The park’s haunting beauty captivated the Swedish musician Anna von Hausswolff, whose fifth album, All Thoughts Fly, is titled after an inscription on the Orcus statue’s mouth. Unlike her song-based previous albums, All Thoughts Fly is instrumental, performed entirely on pipe organ. Its lush soundscapes find transcendence in the eerie and the sorrowful, much like Sacro Bosco itself.
The pipe organ has been an important element in von Hausswolff’s gothic pop across four previous albums, which sometimes sounded like the fantasy all-star band Kate Bush and the Bad Seeds. “The Marble Eye,” a lone solo organ piece from 2018’s Dead Magic, now sounds like a test run for All Thoughts Fly, which surrounds the listener with the organ’s funereal tone. Von Hausswolff recorded it in a church in her Gothenburg hometown, on a painstaking replica of a baroque-era instrument. Her dissonant drones, flurrying melodies, and uncanny, almost electronic-sounding effects guide listeners on a bleak ambient journey through an abandoned castle at dusk.
Von Hausswolff uses the organ’s full expressive range, exploring new sides of the instrument on each song without ever disrupting All Thoughts Fly’s essential solemnity. “Persefone,” a simple dirge, sounds like Stars of the Lid performing at a funeral procession. The title track allows some light to come in, using repeated overlapping rhythmic figures to create a dreamlike land akin to Terry Riley’s minimalist classic A Rainbow in Curved Air. When it finally ends, 12-plus minutes in, it feels like coming out on the other side of a crying fit: pure release.
On “Sacro Bosco,” von Hausswolff recreates Orsini’s garden with her instrument. High notes wail of impending doom, while a low growl seems to signify Orcus’ voice, outlasting the song’s ornate textures just as the statue has endured through centuries. It’s the heaviest moment on an undeniably heavy album—one that that fits right in with the metal-oriented catalog of Southern Lord Records, despite little resemblance to labelmates like Power Trip and Sleep.
The voiceless hymns of All Thoughts Fly don’t leave you longing for the singing of von Hausswolff’s previous albums. No turn of phrase could match the tension she creates with the call-and-response buildup of “Theatre of Nature,” as her melodies converse heatedly with each other. She allows the organ to sing for itself: songs of love and loss, decay and eternal life.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Southern Lord | September 28, 2020 | 7.7 | 7c049c1e-ad67-4f6a-a405-390231908d3f | Chris O'Connell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-o'connell/ | |
The Chicago rapper and producer Chris Crack built his reputation as a solo artist off of a couple of infectious and irreverent mixtapes. His latest, Public Domain 4, is an extended, lightly psychedelic tour through backseat smoke sessions, liquor store lines, and other peoples' girlfriends' bedrooms. Featuring Tree and Vic Spencer. | The Chicago rapper and producer Chris Crack built his reputation as a solo artist off of a couple of infectious and irreverent mixtapes. His latest, Public Domain 4, is an extended, lightly psychedelic tour through backseat smoke sessions, liquor store lines, and other peoples' girlfriends' bedrooms. Featuring Tree and Vic Spencer. | Chris Crack: Public Domain 4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20919-public-domain-4/ | Public Domain 4 | Chris Crack has been angling for prominence in the many-tentacled Chicago underground hip-hop scene for a few years now, and these days, the rapper and producer is playing local support for acts like Slick Rick, Mystikal, and Can Ox. Crack built his reputation as a solo artist off of a couple of infectious and irreverent mixtapes—2013's Kitchen in the Bassment, last year's Kickin' It Wit TW, and a couple of collaborative projects with noted "soultrap" architect Tree—which set up the basic parameters of his style: wall-to-wall soul samples (and maybe not much else), a cutting, nasal delivery, and bars that sound as spontaneous as they are aggressive. Like like-minded fellow Chicago MC and frequent collaborator Vic Spencer, Crack pumps out constant musical product—an overwhelming amount of loose, often-hookless rap songs. It's hard to keep up with and organize; songs are tweeted only once, and downloads come with no artist tags and different titles.
From his freestyling strings of verse, to the unimpeded, personable directness of his delivery, to the au naturale quality of his production, Crack's music is intended as comfort food. He's not aiming for perfection from song to song, but to access and inhabit a specific atmosphere and posture consistently: His own. On every level, this is music that is about just living, moving forward and getting by, told from the perspective of a proverbial Lothario and party-hunting nomad, loose in the city at night.
Public Domain 4—which is, despite his constant SoundCloud one-offs, Crack's first full-length project of this year—feels like an apt and well-rounded representation of his personality. The title is a tribute to the legendary series of mixtapes by Harlem icon Max B (Crack even channels Bigavell directly in his detuned hook for the Tree and Spencer-featuring "Again"). The tape is a strikingly smooth listen—an extended, lightly psychedelic tour through backseat smoke sessions, liquor store lines, and other peoples' girlfriends' bedrooms. Crack juggles snaking, off-the-dome flows with more regulated, motormouth patterns: Southern-styled flows you can set your watch to. The vinyl-treated backdrop (coming mostly courtesy of Crack's extra-talented affiliate and soul buff Tmthy Trtl) either lies back to give the rapper space, or feeds his fire.
For the most part, Crack manages to be engaging without locking into clear narratives or hitting on much in the way of revelatory wisdom. The best moments come when he edits his goofiness a bit to arrive at sharper, more quotable lines: "I kick it colder than a snowblower/ Chi-town, mid-December with my Colt open/ With no shoes, Devin the Dude on Pandora/ Rays feeling my aura, I be worse than a Taurus." (Indeed, Crack himself could reasonably turn up on that station, as a modern-day RIYL.)
Crack's music works best if you kick back with it, tune in and out, half-following trains of thought and embracing the diversions. He appreciates fine liquor, Willie Hutch, and good conversation, and he's not too big to rhyme "Jacuzzi" with "booty." Imagine you're shooting the shit with an old friend—your most low-maintenance one. These raps have nothing profound or "new" to offer in their particulars, but the music in sum seems to embody how one might always prefer life to always be. In actuality, unfortunately (to paraphrase a noted self-help writer), it's 90% maintenance, 5% grief, and only 5% that Chris Crack sort of vibe. So ride the wave while you can. | 2015-08-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-08-07T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | August 7, 2015 | 7.2 | 7c062d63-0f08-4c20-9209-335bf643d54a | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
Covering his prime years as Stax Records’ ace in the hole, this four-disc set presents Hayes as a complex, compelling bandleader, producer, and songwriter who reshaped the dimensions of soul. | Covering his prime years as Stax Records’ ace in the hole, this four-disc set presents Hayes as a complex, compelling bandleader, producer, and songwriter who reshaped the dimensions of soul. | Isaac Hayes: The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/isaac-hayes-the-spirit-of-memphis-1962-1976/ | The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976) | In the late 1960s Isaac Hayes helped save Stax Records. After its considerable success earlier in the decade, the Memphis record label hit hard times that almost destroyed its modest empire. In December 1967 Otis Redding—the label’s biggest act and one of the most popular R&B singers in the world—was killed in a plane crash alongside most of the Bar-Kays. In April 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel, converting what had been a hideout and meeting place for the house musicians into a symbol of the nation’s escalating racial tensions. Meanwhile, Stax’s owners had been renegotiating the label’s contract with Atlantic Records, which had distributed nearly every Stax release; they were horrified to discover a clause that gave ownership of the entire back catalog, along with control of its second biggest act, Sam & Dave, to Atlantic. Stax had no funds and no way to get funds. One of the biggest success stories of the decade looked like it might meet an ignominious end—just another indie gobbled up by the New York giants strengthening their grasp on the market.
Instead, Al Bell—Stax’s African-American president and co-owner—concocted an ambitious plan. He would create “an instant catalog by releasing nearly 30 albums and singles simultaneously,” writes Robert Gordon in the liner notes to the electrifying Isaac Hayes box set The Spirit of Memphis (1962-1976). Among them were records by Booker T. & the MGs, Eddie Floyd, and Rufus Thomas as well as Hot Buttered Soul, the curious second solo album by Stax pianist, songwriter, arranger, producer, and now singer Isaac Hayes. He had come to the company as a keyboard player in Floyd Newman’s band, eventually teaming up with a local kid named David Porter to write some of the biggest soul hits of the decade, including “B-A-B-Y” for Carla Thomas and “Hold On I’m Coming” and “When Something Is Wrong With My Baby” for Sam & Dave. He’d already recorded a solo album, Presenting Isaac Hayes, which had gone nowhere, but the label gave him full artistic control for a follow-up.
Hot Buttered Soul is an odd record, but at the time it must have sounded almost aggressively unmarketable: four songs spread over two sides, only one of which was credited to Hayes himself. Side one opens with a 12-minute psych-soul cover of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk On By,” and side two closes with an epic cover of Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” prefaced with several minutes of Hayes just talking. It sounded like nothing Stax had ever released, and under normal circumstances it might not have even been released. But Stax was desperate for product—any product—that might keep the company alive.
Hot Buttered Soul marked a turning point for Stax, for Hayes, and for American popular music. Selling more than one million copies, it dominated the pop, jazz, R&B, and easy listening charts for more than a year. It also established Hayes as one of the biggest artists of the era: an exemplar of black sophistication and masculinity, a figure who rejected the fashions of the decade as too staid but embraced the pop songs of the ’60s as the scaffolding for his R&B experiments. Hayes was an outsize figure: bald yet bearded, his muscular frame accentuated by tight pants and chainmail vests. When he accepted his Oscar for “Theme from Shaft,” he stood at the podium in a blue tuxedo with a fuzzy collar and oversize bowtie.
His musical and sartorial flamboyance has at times overshadowed his legacy in the decades following his heyday. To subsequent generations he is a punchline (“They say that Shaft is a bad motherf—” “Shut yo mouth!”) or perhaps a trendy sample source (particularly for 1990s trip-hop). Others may know him as Chef from “South Park” or simply as another name on a long list of celebrity Scientologists. Even more than the recent reissues of Hayes’ records, The Spirit of Memphis presents him as an endlessly complex and compelling artist, one who mixed genres freely and viewed soul music as a vehicle for mind-bogglingly ambitious gambits. Hayes spent the first years of his career learning the rules of pop songcraft, then spent the rest of his life exploding them.
That trajectory lends The Spirit of Memphis a unique narrative thrust that distinguishes it from so many single-artist box sets. It opens with a disc of songs predating his solo career, when he was playing in the house band, producing records, and writing songs for nearly every Stax artist. Porter was the lyric guy, while Hayes wrote the arrangements. Because he had no formal musical training and could not read or write music, he talked the musicians through their individual parts and directed the band while recording. The grooves on Floyd Newman’s “Sassy” and Booker T. & the MGs’ “Boot-Leg” have lost none of their elasticity over the last half-century, and “I’ll Run Your Hurt Away” shows how sensitive Hayes was with singers; rather than try to compete with Ruby Johnson’s sublime vocals, the piano and horns provide a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, underscoring every growl and whisper.
Hayes’ velvety baritone may be his most recognizable instrument, but it doesn’t show up until three songs into the second disc, which collects his singles for Stax subsidiaries Volt and Enterprise. Even then, he mostly moans and beatboxes his way through “Precious, Precious,” off Presenting Isaac Hayes. According to the liner notes, the album was recorded while Hayes and the MGs were drunk on celebratory champagne, which lends the songs their slightly askew sensibility. The second disc portrays him as an artist with an ear for luxuriant and witty arrangements. The Bacharach-David hit “The Look of Love” becomes a crushed-velvet boudoir jam, somehow both macho and gentle. “Theme from Shaft” builds itself from the ground up, starting with a hi-hat rhythm and adding wakka-chikka guitar, bass, strings, and flute. Each instrument subtly ratchets up the tension and colors in the cinematic universe of Gordon Parks’ blaxploitation film.
If the organizing principle falls apart on the third disc, that’s fine, because the music attains its own force, its own momentum. In addition to more covers—including songs byAl Green, Jerry Butler, the Moonglows, and of course Bacharach-David—there’s a short live set that was recorded in Chicago but sounds like Vegas. Perhaps even more enticing is a handful of studio jams on the fourth disc, including a rambling deconstruction of Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine” and the notorious half-hour detonation of “Do Your Thing.” That song, which appears on the Shaft soundtrack in an extremely abbreviated version, shape-shifts almost constantly, mutating from an R&B stomp into a film score into a psych-rock exploration into something like a free-jazz foray. Hayes and his band stretch the song until it snaps, then keep on playing for another twenty minutes to see what lies beyond the melody and lyrics.
The Spirit of Memphis stops in 1976, the year after Stax declared bankruptcy and Hayes signed with Polydor amid accusations that Stax had withheld royalties. He never hit the same heights again (although 1995’s Branded is a fine late-career peak), but he did remain a constant presence in pop culture until his death in 2008. Living up to its title, “Do Your Thing” is a fitting climax for The Spirit of Memphis, as it reveals Hayes to be a an artist who saw soul as a world-devouring music: one that could not only speak to African American desires and aspirations, but could swallow up any other sound and be molded into any shape he could dream up. | 2017-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Stax / Craft | September 25, 2017 | 8.6 | 7c198793-3381-443b-8471-ca8962b66ee9 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
The fingerstyle experimentalist’s new album bends guitar, mouth bow, field recordings, and electronic detritus into vast tapestries of pliant drone. | The fingerstyle experimentalist’s new album bends guitar, mouth bow, field recordings, and electronic detritus into vast tapestries of pliant drone. | Daniel Bachman: When the Roses Come Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daniel-bachman-when-the-roses-come-again/ | When the Roses Come Again | “Recording is something I’m not terribly excited about,” Daniel Bachman admitted in 2017. “Things never come out the way I’d like them to.” The Fredericksburg, Virginia, fingerstyle prodigy had been making records for eight years at that point, beginning when he was just 19. But he’d been touring for even longer, since shortly after having his head “split open” by discovering John Fahey and Jack Rose at the tender age of 16. The music that Bachman plays—folk, ragtime, and blues, much of it very old—is a conversation between past and present, writer and interpreter, performer and audience. It’s a living thing. It’s easy to see how he might feel that sealing it off in the studio was a surefire way to see it die on the vine. But in recent years, Bachman has found a new approach to recording, approaching the studio as an instrument in its own right. Old yarn, new loom: On albums like Axacan, The Morning Star, and Almanac Behind, he wove folk and bluegrass together with bells, field recordings, and staticky scraps of radio into vast tapestries of pliant drone.
Bachman continues that method on When the Roses Come Again, though to call its place of origin a “studio” might be a stretch. He recorded the album on his laptop during a week’s worth of improvisations, eight hours a day, in a cabin where he worked as a carpenter’s assistant. He built or modified many of the instruments he used. He fashioned an Appalachian mouth bow, a single-stringed instrument of African origin, and de-fretted a banjo; he also availed himself of sound-making apps on his phone. Yet the overall feel is less turbulent than on the sprawling Axacan or the apocalyptic Almanac Behind. The focus has returned to the sounds of his guitar and banjo, which weave, snakelike, through shimmering fields of harmonium and electronic squeal.
Like all of Bachman’s work, When the Roses Come Again is all instrumental. In contrast to the dazzling pickwork of his early albums, much of the playing is tentative and muted, warily teasing out halting melodies from the greater tangle. There are no real songs to speak of—just scenes, which flow together as seamlessly as fields glimpsed from the window of a moving train. The album is clearly meant to be experienced as a single piece of music, and the pacing is immaculate. Introductory passages of pentatonic riffs and electronic pedal tones give way to gravelly mouth bowing and cascading sheets of feedback; noisy peaks ease off into spidery banjo and guitar. The recording’s fidelity sounds like a tape that’s been rescued from a truck at the bottom of a lake; the mix of drone and noise suggests a lineage with Henry Flynt, Tony Conrad, Flying Saucer Attack, and Wolf Eyes. (The mouth bowing, meanwhile, had me thinking about Tuvan throat singing and Attila Csihar’s work with Sunn O))).) Halfway through, the album rises to a feverish climax of squeaking and rattling—could there be a jackhammer in the mix?—that sounds like someone playing banjo along to a beaten-up copy of Metal Machine Music.
When the Roses Come Again feels like a companion to The Morning Star and Almanac Behind, the third record in a loose trilogy. Both of those albums were preoccupied with cyclical movements: The Morning Star, informed by the chaos of the Trump presidency, took cues from the 24-hour news cycle; Almanac Behind, a response to the climate emergency, depicted natural cycles being thrown out of joint. (Almanac Behind was even designed to be playable in an unbroken loop.) When the Roses Come Again zooms out to consider the cosmic cycle of existence. In a note accompanying the release, Bachman writes of his interest in capturing “the spiritual machinery” of birth, death, and rebirth: the seasonal course of his garden, the “churning of centuries” within his own family.
As is often the case in Bachman’s music, the album’s deeper conceptual meaning is never made obvious, but the songs’ titles may be a hint. Each one—“Neath the Shadow, Down the Meadow”; “Leaves Lying on Each Side”; “By the River, Flowers Shiver (Fading Dying in Their Pride),” etc.—is taken from the lyrics of an old bluegrass song, “When the Roses Come Again,” which the Carter Family wrote and first recorded in 1933. The titles follow more or less the order of the lines in the original song, and, much like the album’s song breaks, their relationship to the music might appear arbitrary. But those dying flowers and budding blossoms suit the album’s cyclical give and take. The meaning of the Carter Family’s song is ambiguous; a tale of a sorrowful leavetaking, it could be interpreted as a love song, but it is also heavy with deathly foreboding. It contains traces of Christian allegory, but also fainter fragments of much older, wilder ways of marking time. The song’s lyrics offer something like a spiritual scaffolding for Bachman’s questing melodies and unruly drones—a way of making sense of squalling vacillations that even their creator may not completely understand. | 2023-11-30T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-11-30T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Three Lobed | November 30, 2023 | 7.9 | 7c232e4a-a931-4f10-9bad-e6b9edda8070 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
The former grime wunderkind's third record features his most Americanized production yet and a Yank-luring guest turn from Houston rappers UGK; shame it's not for sale in U.S. stores. | The former grime wunderkind's third record features his most Americanized production yet and a Yank-luring guest turn from Houston rappers UGK; shame it's not for sale in U.S. stores. | Dizzee Rascal: Maths + English | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10309-maths-english/ | Maths + English | The back cover of the new Dizzee Rascal CD is a rear shot of the onetime grime wunderkind flipping the bird over his shoulder. Note the number of fingers raised: One, the American-style middle finger, rather than the "V" more traditionally associated with obscene hand gestures in the UK. Whether or not it's an acknowledgment of his American audience, however, is almost irrelevant: Stateside fans can't walk into Target or Best Buy and look at the back cover firsthand. XL has limited American sales to digital distributors. That they made this decision for Dizzee's crucial third album, Maths + English-- a record that features his most Americanized production yet and a Yank-luring guest turn from Houston rappers UGK-- is a bit perplexing. Even if this decision turns out not to be a significant constraint on his American sales (or, let's go crazy here, somehow improves them), it says a lot about XL's lack of faith in the U.S. market for grime's international ambassador: Given how the notoriously fickle audience back home has gotten tired of waiting three years for the followup to Showtime and has gravitated towards the dubstep of Burial and Skream, Dizzee's best prospects for an expanded fanbase may well be across the pond.
Given his career arc, it's not impossible to see a precedent for a potential American breakthrough. With Boy in Da Corner as his scene's import-buzz breakthrough album, Showtime the self-conscious more-of-the-same-but-bigger effort, and now Maths + English as his post-genre American-mythos statement, Dizzee could very well be doing for hip-hop what many UK artists have done for rock: Reinvent its British adaptations on American terms and vice-versa. First single "Sirens" supposedly started as a KoRn pastiche, but it finished as the ungodly offspring of "Straight Outta Compton" and "99 Problems" (with a bit of Chemical-née-Dust Brothers' "Song to the Siren" thrown in). And album opener "World Outside" offers turbocharged ambiance, glassy percussive clinks, subwoofer-stressing bass, and a chorus that ends "There's a world outside of the ghetto, and I want you to see it/ I can see it, I can see it, I can see it."
It's easy to wonder if Dizzee is talking about more than one type of ghetto. You could hardly call the album on the whole "grime" without a qualifier or two, and only one track has a direct and uncontaminated lineage to his solo career's origins five years back: The belligerent touch-tone chirps of last track "U Can't Tell Me Nuffin", which shows up long after anyone who bothers to listen to the record in sequence will have discovered he's not making Boy in Da Corner anymore. And while it's impossible for any album where Dizzee's East London dialect figures prominently to be fully Americanized, there's a lot for the States to latch onto.
"Pussyole (Old Skool)" is the personification of this particular trans-Atlantic exchange: While the chorus hinges on a derisive term seldom heard in the States (at least past the second syllable), the beat is so instantly recognizable as the backbone of a beloved circa-88 club-rap smash that early leaks were described as riding the "It Takes Two" beat. (In a neat production twist, it also incorporates the sample source that was used in the intro to "It Takes Two", Galactic Force Band's 1978 astro-disco obscurity "Space Dust", but features an entirely different, more propulsive section of the original song.) There's other, newer-school forays into Southern turf: The spare, punchy post-No Limit synth strings and drum machine beats of "Hardback (Industry)", which sounds like it could've easily fit somewhere on Ludacris' Back for the First Time, the Timbaland slickness of flosser's anthem "Bubbles" and 2-step b-girl club banger "Flex", and the aforementioned UGK summit "Where's Da G's", which pulls off the admirable feat of sounding like grime when Dizzee's on the mic and Southern bounce/g-funk during Bun B and Pimp C's verses. The tail end of the album has its share of fellow Brits mopping things up guest-wise-- Lily Allen dominates the grating music-hall pseudo-ska "Wanna Be", while the Arctic Monkeys' Alex Turner turns in a decent performance warbling the chorus of "Temptation"-- but they don't set the tenor like the album's club-rap front half does.
The other major change in Dizzee's music-- some might say concession-- is his lyrical approach, which does less to cloak his rudimentary rhymes with busy pachinko-machine production and double-time verses. This is hardly a fault; like the circa-87 incarnations of Schoolly D or KRS-One, Dizzee's strength lies in the ability to wring ferocity out of uncluttered, straightforward verses. He shines when he gets philosophical about the police's role in the community on "Excuse Me Please", recounting the sickness and unease that came when robbing a couple on "Sirens", and seething with frustrated disappointment over the duplicity of an ex-friend (a maybe/maybe-not allusion to former Roll Deep mentor Wiley) on "Pussyole", but even the more well-worn hip hop subjects-- paranoia, phonies, how to survive the music industry-- flow viciously in a manner that's just about as good as anybody alive when it comes to completing the sound of a production. It works in a way that can't properly be evoked by just quoting lyrics; transcribing Dizzee's verses would be like printing the guitar tabs for "Theme From Shaft", reducing a point-blank gut-punch of a sound to its deceptively simple base elements. You could try, of course, and that'd make a track like "Suck My Dick" look like imbecilic bullshit -- "I don't give a shit who likes it/ I don't give a shit who don't/ Don't tell me to change my fuckin' attitude because I won't" -- but you'd miss the exaggerated schoolyard nyeah-nyeah inflections, the Lemmy-bassline cadence, and the sense of adolescent mischievousness that keeps it from becoming a self-serious, tiresome fuck-you tirade. You'd also miss the fact that those lines are accompanied by a bar of "Yankee Doodle Dandy"-- he could be catering to American sensibilities on this album, but he's not caving into them. | 2007-06-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-06-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | XL | June 15, 2007 | 8.4 | 7c25ea2b-edcd-46bf-8610-e411083316b8 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | 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 Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ first film score, a groundbreaking collaboration that gave The Social Network its icy, unsettling tone. | 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 Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ first film score, a groundbreaking collaboration that gave The Social Network its icy, unsettling tone. | Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross: The Social Network | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/trent-reznor-atticus-ross-the-social-network/ | The Social Network | David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network opens with the wound that drove Mark Zuckerberg to create the largest social network and media company in human history. As the camera pans across the rooftops of Harvard University, Zuckerberg jogs past smiling students to his dorm, where he is grimly determined to create something, anything, that will get his mind off of being savagely dumped by his girlfriend, Erica Albright.
The scene has become so iconic it hardly matters the whole thing is ersatz. First off, the Harvard of the film is Johns Hopkins—the university refused to grant Fincher filming privileges. Mark Zuckerberg is of course Jesse Eisenberg, playing a character written by Aaron Sorkin, who’d never used Facebook before writing his screenplay and who based his portrait entirely around one book, Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires. And Erica Albright—the girl who delivers the immortal line, “It’ll be because you’re an asshole”—never existed. Zuckerberg has protested in interviews that he built Facebook simply because he “liked building things.”
But if the film has settled into a cultural parable—Facebook as revenge of the jilted nerd—it’s in large part because of this scene, which is when we hear the first notes of the film’s score. An upright piano, luminous and recorded very closely, plays a simple figure, reminiscent of Brian Eno’s “1/1” from Music for Airports, or perhaps Eno’s startup music for Windows 95. Backed by the busy chatter of tremolo strings, the piano theme drifts through the noise like a ghost. It’s dark, light, winsome, menacing— the film’s entire world telescoped down and reduced into 40 burbling seconds. Then, just as the camera pans up to the dorm, a deep, dark synth note resounds, glaring out at you with yellow eyes. At this precise moment, the credits reveal the composers’ names: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
The Social Network represented a pinnacle for everyone involved: For Sorkin, who had created The West Wing and churned out some high-profile screenplays (A Few Good Men, The American President) but hadn’t been given his A-list moment in the sun. For David Fincher, who had already redefined American movies at least twice but hadn’t yet been handed the reins to a prime piece of Oscar bait. For Justin Timberlake, whose impish grin and Satanic cuteness personified the emerging Silicon Valley rock-star ethos and expanded his portfolio into “movie star.” For Eisenberg, whose performance inverted the usual karaoke-style rules of biopics: He sounded nothing like the real Zuckerberg, but his is probably the face most people see when they imagine Facebook’s creation.
No one, however, had their career trajectory altered so completely as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The Social Network only won three Oscars: Best Adapted Screenplay, for Sorkin’s magnificent contraption of a script, Best Film Editing, and Best Score. It was Reznor and Ross’ first-ever score, and they nailed the majority of it the first time they sat down to work.
When Fincher asked Reznor if he wanted to work together, he blanched at first and said no. Reznor had just come off of touring with Nine Inch Nails, had just gotten married, had never scored a film before. Uncertain of his ability to tackle a new discipline, he approached his friend and longtime collaborator Ross, who encouraged him, and then the pair started bouncing sounds back and forth in the studio and sending files to Fincher. They were unsure if the music they were making would be too harsh, too dark. They made about 16 tracks, each between three-and-a-half to eight minutes long.
The sketches they sent Fincher were meant as a mood board, a sampler. “Hand Covers Bruise,” that tremolo-and-piano track that wound up serving as the film’s de facto theme, was track seven on the playlist, and neither Reznor or Ross attached much significance to it. But Fincher’s sound editor Ren Klyce took those cues and populated the movie with them; the first draft became the score. When Fincher brought Reznor and Ross to screen a rough cut and those piano notes wafted out over the credits, Reznor got goosebumps.
Fincher knew exactly what he wanted when he hired Reznor. Without the music, the film shrugs off its shadows and shifts into a standard Sorkin workplace dramedy. There would be no menacing undertones to the increasingly ridiculous saga of the Winklevoss twins, clinging to their vision of “Harvard Connect,” pursuing Mark Zuckerberg across campus and then through the courts, stopping in for a chat with Larry Summers. On paper, the movie is chatty, funny, frothy, observant—Reznor described the 40-minute rough cut he saw, with rock songs temped in, as “kind of feel good, John Hughes-ish.” The music is Blade Runner, The Shining; the sound of one young Harvard nerd inventing dystopia in his head.
At all moments, you can peek under the music and see the alternate film—antic, weightless—playing beneath it. When Divya Narendra (played by Max Minghella) discovers that Zuckerberg, the shrimpy programmer he hired to build his Harvard Connect website, has launched Facebook, he falls backward out of his chair during an a capella rehearsal—a patented touch of Sorkin screwball. But as he jogs out into the night, a nightmarish sound enters the track, a melted scream straight out of György Ligeti’s “Lontano.” The tone clusters were generated not with string sections, but with an analog synth called a Swarmatron, which generates peeling skin-from-flesh glissandi that make you forget you are essentially watching one Harvard kid jogging in a dinner jacket.
Likewise, when Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield) and Zuckerberg are seduced by a pair of (probably mythical) Facebook groupies, the screen fills with a positively evil din, clotted and blaring and full of inhuman shrieks, turning the transparently silly scene into something like a pagan ritual. Even in the airier tunes, like the aptly titled “Intriguing Possibilities,” those dark bass notes keep chugging throughout, suggesting that there’s always somebody, somewhere, that might not be too thrilled with what all these intriguing possibilities represent for them. Try to imagine the famous boat race without Reznor and Ross’s infernal retooling of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” beneath it. The creeping dread that pervades the movie, the intimations of existential rot, only exist in The Social Network because Reznor and Ross put them there.
The Social Network OST was the birth of Reznor’s third act: His film scoring career, which went on to more or less define the tone of the next decade, began when David Fincher took a flier on him. It’s a credit to Reznor and Ross’ partnership that in all the work they’ve done together since—recreating the sound of a 1930s Bernard Herrmann orchestral score for Mank; the tranquil idyll of their work on mid90s—they’ve never quite visited this sound world again. The closest they came was in the music they composed for the Pixar film Soul, specifically the scenes set in the Great Before. Tellingly, the dramatic milieu is cheerily blank, bright, officious, manipulative—purgatory as Silicon Valley campus.
If Eno’s famous line about ambient music was that it was “ignorable as it is interesting,” Reznor and Ross explored the flipside of the coin, making music just busy enough to be stimulating. If you worked at a desk wearing headphones at some point in the past decade, you are familiar with that point in the morning when your mind and fingers race while the rest of you atrophies, an edge that signifies the pleasant rush of the morning is about to curdle. Pieces like “In Motion” feel like tasting that dread, and playing it while working is delightfully perverse, like partaking in the thing that you know is complicit in killing you. One of the titles here does all the interpretive work for you: “The Gentle Hum of Anxiety.” Eno made music for airports; The Social Network OST is Music for Shared Workspaces.
The “Hand Covers Bruise” piano theme reappears twice on the soundtrack, each time sounding diluted and further away. Onscreen, it serves as a sort of leitmotif for whatever human and decent qualities might be swimming around inside the Zuckerberg character—whenever those piano notes resurface, they mark another melancholy signpost in his downward moral trajectory. One of them is during the famous cross-examination scene (“Do I have your full attention?”). Just as Zuckerberg’s eyes turn into darkened slits and he unleashes the full measure of his dry contempt, that deep bass synth note resounds again
The dark synthesizer note underneath the piano figure tells us everything we need to know about the story after the story of The Social Network. The film is a relic from an era when people still mostly used Facebook to reconnect with their exes, to look at pictures of their high school friends’ kids. Nobody was talking, yet, about how social media use contributed to increased depression, anxiety, and above all, loneliness. As of July 2010, Facebook’s user base was 500 million—still larger than the populations of the United States, Mexico, and France combined, but not yet eclipsing the number of adherents to Christianity, as it does today. Facebook was merely a fabulously successful company, and we observed billionaires in our cultural midst with awe and bemusement, a bunch of little Charles Foster Kanes pining away for their little Rosebuds. Compared to what Facebook (now Meta) has become, Fincher’s portrait looks so quaint it’s practically sepia-toned.
But the music’s icy grip foretells developments lying just around the corner. In 2011, shortly after Fincher’s film was released, Zuckerberg went to the Federal Election Commission and asked for “an exemption to rules requiring the source of funding for political ads be revealed.” The music knows about the Cambridge Analytica scandals, and about January 6th, which was incited and stoked chiefly on Facebook. That deep synth note is the sound of militia members actively recruiting for, organizing, and executing the storming of the Capitol entirely on Facebook, even posting pictures and streaming the event live there. And it’s the sound I hear whenever I watch the real Zuckerberg, saucer-eyed and vacant instead of narrow-eyed and contemptuous, testify once again in front of a group of performatively angry senators before reporting back to Facebook headquarters.
The Social Network misses all of this, focusing on the corporate hurly-burly of who owns what, who screwed over who. In the final scene, Rashida Jones—a plucky junior partner—tenderly delivers the movie’s final verdict on Zuckerberg (“You’re not an asshole, Mark. You’re just trying so hard to be.”). She departs, and then, as Zuckerberg turns to his laptop, pulls up the Facebook profile of the apocryphal Erica Albright, and requests to be her “Friend,” the strains of the Beatles’ “Baby You’re a Rich Man” play. The truest version of the movie would have closed on a Reznor cue—blank, pistoning, uneasy, both wide-open and completely empty. | 2022-07-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Experimental | The Null Corporation | July 24, 2022 | 8.7 | 7c289032-a70c-4e5c-b3df-8a13168a7e57 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
A new reissue of the ill-fated shoegazers’ 1998 album reminds us that even as their fortunes were fading, they remained undeterred in their pursuit of psychedelic bliss. | A new reissue of the ill-fated shoegazers’ 1998 album reminds us that even as their fortunes were fading, they remained undeterred in their pursuit of psychedelic bliss. | Swervedriver: 99th Dream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/swervedriver-99th-dream/ | 99th Dream | The story of Swervedriver is the story of ’90s alternative rock as told in four acts. There was the buzz-building debut, 1991’s Raise, which put the Oxford band at the crest of the first shoegaze wave alongside Creation labelmates My Bloody Valentine and Ride. There was the flirtation with American major-label crossover success on 1993’s Mezcal Head, which saw them touring with Smashing Pumpkins at their Siamese Dream pinnacle. Then there was the big swing for Britpop glory on 1995’s Ejector Seat Reservation, which failed to impress the bean counters: A&M declined to release it in the U.S., prompting Creation to drop the band in the UK. As if that wasn’t dispiriting enough, in 1997 the band would get picked up by another American major, DGC, only to get dumped before they could release a record with them. So for their fourth album, 99th Dream, Swervedriver joined the ranks of former ’90s hopefuls who were forced to make a return trip to indieville. They self-released the record on their own Sonic Wave Discs imprint in the UK and through Zero Hour in the U.S.; a band that once called Oasis and Soundgarden labelmates was now rubbing shoulders with college-rock survivors like Steve Wynn and proggy misfits like Space Needle.
By the time of 99th Dream’s release in 1998, Swervedriver were positioned outside not just the major-label ecosystem, but virtually every alt-rock movement. Most of their shoegazer peers from the dawn of the decade had broken up (or entered their eternal hibernation phase); grunge was dead and gone; the Britpop bubble had burst; and fans of left-field guitar bands were delving into post-rock or exploring electronic music. So on 99th Dream, Swervedriver committed to simply being the truest version of themselves: a band whose effects-pedal fetishism was matched by its affinity for sundazed melodies. And while they may not have envisioned 99th Dream as a swan song, the album’s wistfully nostalgic lyrics and comedown vibe made it the most existential in their catalog. “I’m not waiting for the world,” singer-guitarist Adam Franklin declared on the anthemic Beatles-’68 reverie “She Weaves a Tender Trap”; months later, Swervedriver broke up.
When stacked against Swervedriver’s previous releases, 99th Dream largely abandons the artsy ambitions and widescreen production of Ejector Seat Reservation for a more back-to-basics approach, but retains the melodic finesse they had honed over the years. The opening track functions as a microcosm of their career up: The “Misirlou”-like intro provides a loud echo of the trash-Americana fascinations that fueled Swervedriver’s earliest work, but that frantic high-octane fanfare gives way to a rhapsodic, gently swaying sing-along bathed in waves of wah-wah. 99th Dream may have marked Swervedriver’s return to the underground, but in their heads, they were still playing a sundown set at Glastonbury.
And who knows: With more robust label support and better timing, 99th Dream’s crown jewel, “These Times,” could’ve been Swervedriver’s “Live Forever.” The song initially appeared as a rough ’n’ ready rave-up on a 1997 DGC promo that made the media rounds right before the band got dropped. But in advance of 99th Dream’s proper release, the song was retooled with a cleaner, steadier treatment more befitting of its reflective lyrics. Franklin’s no stranger to quoting his favorite artists in song—from the Creation to Burt Bacharach—but in this case, the references take on a more poignant, personal dimension. When he sings, “We drank all your wine/With the Stooges high and a Bunnymen-style,” he could be reminiscing about a first date spent getting drunk and listening to records, or his band’s own halcyon days.
Even when Swervedriver went nuclear on their early records, Franklin always kept his cool as a vocalist, and by 99th Dream, the band’s sound had fully adapted to his zen wavelength. Once a group that tried to approximate the roar of a hotwired Mustang peeling down an interstate, the Swervedriver heard on 99th Dream were more about (as the title track puts it) “space travel rock’n’roll”—specifically that moment where the rockets detach and the pod is left to float. Following a taut opening stretch featuring some of the most accessible, easygoing songs in the Swervedriver canon, 99th Dream drifts into the outer cosmos with “Electric 77,” which begins as a woozy ballad before Franklin and guitar foil Jimmy Hartridge unleash their full noise-pedal arsenal. Appropriately, it’s a song about an exploding spaceship called Stellar Caprice, a name repurposed as the title for an instrumental sequel, which turns their signature squall into lounge jazz with flamenco flourishes.
While this outre mid-album suite seems to have a warping effect on the songs that follow (like the Dalí-clock desert-psych vibes of “In My Time”), 99th Dream’s closer, “Behind the Scenes of the Sounds and Times,” places Swervedriver’s melodic and exploratory instincts in perfect harmony once again, yielding a seven-minute thriller that forges the missing link between Daydream Nation and Definitely Maybe. For many years, this song was presumed to be the final Swervedriver track on the final Swervedriver album, the perfect cap to a roller-coaster career. Of course, that perception changed once Swervedriver returned to the stage in 2008 and started releasing albums again in the 2010s. Still, 99th Dream has retained a underdog status in the Swervedriver discography. It’s always been the least visible of Swervedriver’s ’90s releases, no thanks to its lack of major-label distribution, proudly out-of-step aesthetic, and the fact that the band didn’t even survive its promotional cycle. It’s also the only Swervedriver that’s been heretofore unavailable on streaming services.
But this handsome three-disc reissue reminds us that, even as their fortunes were fading, Swervedriver remained highly industrious, never wavering in their quest for psychedelic rapture. While 99th Dream might’ve sounded conventional to former shoegaze heads who were getting their minds blown by Mogwai and Godspeed You! Black Emperor, this new edition includes a blistering live set—recorded that year at New York’s Mercury Lounge—where the band toughens up the newer material p to hold its own against sturdy warhorses like “Sandblasted.” At this stage in the game, Swervedriver were essentially playing to the die-hards, so they could afford to get semi-hits like “Duel” out of the way early and climax with sprawling, enthralling versions of deep cuts like “Kill the Superheroes” and “Duress.” As the latter gets sucked into its fuzz-blasted abyss, Franklin starts ad-libbing Bowie’s “Golden Years.” “Don’t let me hear you say/Life’s taking you nowhere,” he repeats—no doubt a useful self-help mantra for a band that had been beaten down by the industry and was summoning the strength to carry on.
But if the Mercury Lounge recording captures one of shoegaze’s most powerful bands in its ear-damaging element, the complementary collection of non-album singles, demos, and outtakes might convince you that Swervedriver actually aren’t a shoegaze band at all, at least in the modern sense of the term. They were more like a ’60s psych-rock act armed with ’90s guitar gear. Right up to the end of their initial run, they were still seeking out novel ways to thread pop hooks into trippy textures, yielding the flower-powered flashbacks of “Butterfly,” the musically blissful/lyrically spiteful “Straight Thru Your Heart” (aka the 1998 B-side “Hate Yr Kind”), and the amusing sing-speak oddity “Canvey Island Baby,” which imagines Jarvis Cocker getting sorted for E’s and whizz and joining the Stone Roses in response. The latter song would turn up in more subdued form and with a completely different lyrical structure on Franklin’s 2007 debut, Bolts of Melody, and fellow 99th Dream castaway “Carousel City” would also enjoy a second life on 2010’s I Could Sleep for a Thousand Years, making the bonus-disc portion of this set a bridge between Swervedriver Mk I and Franklin’s subsequent solo endeavors. Taken as a whole, this repackaging of 99th Dream transforms the record from a neglected emblem of Swervedriver’s demise into a towering monument—not just to their well-acknowledged interstellar guitar overdrive, but to their chronically underrated craftsmanship. | 2024-01-20T00:30:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-20T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Outer Battery | January 20, 2024 | 8 | 7c2935ec-3455-4db5-8aea-23087c9a0e57 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Paying tribute to the late bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik in a 2022 live recording, this European jazz quartet turns an understated 1961 single into a thundering, hourlong rave-up. | Paying tribute to the late bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik in a 2022 live recording, this European jazz quartet turns an understated 1961 single into a thundering, hourlong rave-up. | أحمد [Ahmed]: Wood Blues | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ahmed-wood-blues/ | Wood Blues | On a cold spring night in 2022, the jazz quartet أحمد [Ahmed] set up at one end of the long, narrow warehouse space of Glasgow’s industrial-chic Glue Factory. Their muse and namesake Ahmed Abdul-Malik was there in spirit. The setlist consisted of only one song: the late jazz musician’s “Oud Blues,” which runs to about four minutes in the original 1961 version. By the time أحمد [Ahmed] finished with it, they had been playing for nearly an hour.
Wood Blues is a recording of that phenomenal performance—at once a cover song, an avant-garde improv session, and a driving, swinging jazz concert. أحمد [Ahmed] have been honing the conceit for a decade: Every show, they choose an Abdul-Malik composition and turn it inside out. Pianist Pat Thomas discovered the little-known bassist and oudist in the 1980s and immediately recognized his significance. Born Jonathan Tim, Jr. in Brooklyn to immigrant parents, Abdul-Malik changed his name to assert his Islamic identity and Sudanese lineage. His family was from the Caribbean, not Sudan, but he reached back further, reclaiming his diasporic African heritage. As a bandleader, Abdul-Malik incorporated Arabic instruments—qanun, darbuka, a violin tuned to fourths and fifths—into his ensembles. His late ’50s and early ’60s albums like Jazz Sahara and East Meets West ushered in the new form of modal jazz alongside landmark recordings by Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
Thomas wanted to revive Abdul-Malik’s music, to turn a footnote into a headline. Saxophonist Seymour Wright shared his interest and joined Thomas’s trio اسم [ISM], with bassist Joel Grip and drummer Antonin Gerbal, to form أحمد [Ahmed]. Together, they’re something of a supergroup, each player a star in a different constellation of the European improvised music scene. They only perform live, with no practice or advance planning. But from their separate cities—Thomas and Wright in London, Grip in Berlin, Gerbal in Paris—they’re always thinking about Abdul-Malik. When they play one of his songs, all that thinking comes out in a torrent of sound.
Wood Blues is at once thrillingly violent and fervently faithful in its transformations of Abdul-Malik’s material, altering the original beyond recognition yet keeping its spirit alive. The recording begins with the audience chattering as Grip plays the walking bassline of “Oud Blues.” Thomas adds melodic piano flourishes and Gerbal lays down a shuffling beat. Wright supports with short percussive clicks from his saxophone, then extends those clicks into bursts, trading licks with Thomas, who bangs on the keys with increasing force. There’s a shift in the room as the audience goes quiet. Piano and sax merge into a single pummeling attack. Gerbal keeps time with a steady tom-tom pulse, and Grip carries the melody through the fray. The moment can’t last long, and soon the band is propelled by a frantic rhythm, Thomas pounding the piano, Wright blowing with frightening power, the crowd now shouting, screaming, dancing.
The keys to أحمد [Ahmed] are repetition and movement. Everybody plays at once through the whole concert, and everyone repeats themselves. But variations drive the music ineluctably forward. Gerbal and Grip lock into a swinging beat, responding to one another with a sort of ESP honed over more than a decade as a rhythm section. Thomas plays clusters instead of chords, dropping blocks of sound like a hammer on an anvil. Wright offers blasts of notes rather than flowing solos, a message in frenzied, honking Morse code that urges the others onward. By the end of the hour, they’ve moved through jazz, blues, and discordant free improv to arrive somewhere entirely unfamiliar.
All this leads them into some strange territory on Wood Blues. At times, Thomas turns his hands over and strikes the keyboard with his fists, causing the body of the piano to resonate like a bass drum. On his more daring excursions, Wright makes his saxophone into a vocoder, or a car alarm, or Woody Woodpecker. Gerbal’s drums can sound like an avalanche of crockery. Yet somehow the album always grooves, never losing sight of Abdul-Malik’s original composition in all the chaos. In the end, this is a celebration of “Oud Blues,” not simply an excuse to test their limits.
After the concert, Thomas is spent. Gerbal is soaked in sweat. Grip’s hands are bleeding. Wright is unable to speak, with lips and tongue like jelly. Soon each player will head home, not to see one another until it’s time to do it all again. But they’ll continue to think about this night, and this song, and Ahmed Abdul-Malik, plotting new courses through jazz and its hidden histories. | 2024-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Astral Spirits | April 13, 2024 | 8.2 | 7c2937b7-70a7-46e4-86f0-315eb67bbe87 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
In 1973, Goats Head Soup marked the end of the Stones’ imperial era, capturing them as they transitioned from the World’s Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Band to just a really good one. | In 1973, Goats Head Soup marked the end of the Stones’ imperial era, capturing them as they transitioned from the World’s Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Band to just a really good one. | The Rolling Stones: Goats Head Soup | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-rolling-stones-goats-head-soup/ | Goats Head Soup | In the period spanning 1968’s Beggars Banquet to 1972’s Exile on Main Street, the Rolling Stones’ title of “World’s Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Band” was less a boastful marketing slogan and more of a plainly self-evident job description. If the Stones started out as rambunctious kids with a press-hyped bad-boy image, by the turn of the ‘70s, the band had acquired a truly sinister aura, the kind of malevolence that had amassed rap sheets, body counts, and iconoclastic admirers eager to feed off their black magic. Not only had the Stones outlasted their rivals in The Beatles, they had become a band that could seemingly do no wrong, even when they were doing things that were very wrong.
But if Exile on Main Street represented a seance-like communion with their most sacred old-school influences (blues, gospel, country), Goats Head Soup was where the spell was broken and the Stones had to contend with the fact that they were a veteran band entering their second decade amid a rapidly changing musical landscape. Glam rock was setting new standards for provocation and transgression, while the fiercest, grittiest street music was coming from the world of funk. So on Goats Head Soup, the Stones landed somewhere between the New York Dolls and Isaac Hayes, straining to push themselves to new heights of campy outrageousness while seriously engaging with the contemporary Black music of the day in a way that would have a lasting effect on their rhythmic DNA.
Even though work on Goats Head Soup began with producer Jimmy Miller mere months after Exile wrapped up, the conditions of their creations couldn’t have been more different. Exile may have been famously been recorded in the humid, moldy basement of Keith Richards’ French villa, but those extreme conditions created a sense of freewheeling, all-in camaraderie that—for all its heroin-hazy atmosphere—exuded a genuine sense of joy, an all-night bender where everyone’s wine glasses are overflowing and so are the toilets. Goats Head Soup was a far more disjointed experience, its recording locations—Kingston, London, Los Angeles—indicative of a band that was starting to drift apart.
Following his marriage to Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías, Mick Jagger was becoming the toast of the society pages and firming up his place in the A-list celebrity establishment; Keith Richards, by contrast, was holing himself up in a Swiss rehab clinic to put the brakes on a worsening heroin habit. As a result, the once-telepathic songwriting team of Jagger-Richards was becoming more like Jagger-or-Richards. “I think Mick and I were a little dried up after Exile,” Richards wrote in his memoir, Life. “After Exile, such a beautifully set up list of songs that all seemed to go together, it was difficult for us to get that tightness again.” So, true to its title, Goats Head Soup became something of a potluck where each threw their random ideas into the cauldron in the hope they’d blend into something palatable.
As Jagger recently quipped to Rolling Stone, Goats Heads Soup may be the first album recorded in Jamaica to include “not the slightest influence of reggae on any of the tracks.” But while that may be true on a superficial level, the record is definitely running on island time, as the band casually wade through the piano-blues romp “Hide Your Love” and the Funkadelic-style swamp-soul chant “Can You Hear the Music” with a palpable lack of urgency. And coming off Exile’s rip-this-joint energy, the rave-ups on Goats Heads Soup can’t help but feel a little staid: “Silver Train” steadily rolls on the same track as Exile’s superior “All Down the Line,” while the X-rated lyrics of “Star Star” (a.k.a. “Starfucker,” a.k.a. the Stones’ raunchiest song this side of “Some Girls”) seem to be overcompensating for its basic “Roll Over Beethoven” backbeat. On tracks like these, we hear The World’s Greatest Rock‘n’Roll Band settling for just being a pretty good one, the menacing shit-kickers of old curdling into good-timey toe-tappers. Even when Jagger summons his old friend Lucifer via the deliciously evil voodoo riff of “Dancing With Mr. D,” he ends up closer to “Monster Mash” than “Sympathy for the Devil,” trading in that song’s politicized fury for puerile B-movie graveyard hijinks.
However, Goats Head Soup’s best tracks are so good, they not only carry the album, they make it sound like nothing else in the Stones’ catalog. While the lurid urban-crime narratives of “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)” read more like TV Guide cop-show synopses than probing social commentary, the combination of Jagger’s raging vocal, Billy Preston’s apocalyptic clavinet riff, and a hair-raising brass refrain give the song an unmatched intensity among Stones singles of the era. (The obvious influence of blaxploitation funk would also loosen up the group for their oncoming disco years.) And if the mid-’70s may not have been a peak for the Stones as a rock band, it was a golden period for Stones ballads, as heralded by the still-sumptuous “Angie,” which is arguably both the most genteel and desperate song in their canon, and the mold from which future tearjerkers like “If You Really Want to Be My Friend,” “Memory Motel,” and “Fool to Cry” would be cast.
But it’s a pair of album cuts, each tucked into the No. 3 position on their respective sides, that makes Goats Head Soup worthy of classic status, despite the album’s flaws. Richards’ countrified reverie “Coming Down Again” is the sobering counterpoint to Exile’s saloon-door swinger “Torn & Frayed,” as if he were surveying the scene of that album’s basement bacchanalia the morning after, wondering, “Where are all my friends?” Even better is the exquisite “Winter,” a dazed daydream of a song where Jagger’s uncannily Van Morrison-esque vocal is left to float atop Mick Taylor’s snowdrift guitars and swirls of regal orchestration. For all their stylistic fluidity, the Stones have always been a verse/chorus/verse kinda band, but “Winter” is a rare moment where they put feeling over form, letting themselves unravel in elegantly wasted fashion. When you think of the many bands who’ve channeled the disheveled spirit of ‘70s Stones—Primal Scream, The Replacements, early Wilco—the target was usually Exile on Main Street, but in their own beautifully damaged ways, they wound up a lot closer to Goats Head Soup.
This record features another excellent ballad that has thus far gone unmentioned here—because, on the album proper, it’s trapped inside a rambling, clavinet-powered arrangement that tries to pass it off as a soul-funk workout. But “100 Years Ago” always seemed like a song that deserved a better fate, and the outtakes disc in this deluxe reissue does it justice through a raw, utterly compelling piano demo that anticipates the stark, ivory-pounding punk romanticism of Patti Smith. It’s no overstatement to say that, had the song been originally released in this form, it’d be considered a classic of the period. But its inclusion here highlights just how much tinkering and second-guessing went into Goats Heads Soup, as does a looser alternate take of “Dancing With Mr. D” that sounds like it was cut by Neil Young and the Stray Gators.
The Goats Head sessions famously yielded songs that wouldn’t surface until 1981’s Tattoo You; those demos aren’t featured here, but we do get three previously unreleased tracks that suggest the record could’ve gone in an entirely different, more party-hearty direction. While the jolly “All the Rage” verges on cruise-ship-commercial frivolity, “Criss Cross” is the sort of cowbell-clanging boogie that Royal Trux spent half of their existence chasing, and the Jimmy Page-assisted “Scarlet” poses a question—what if the Stones decided to groove more like Zeppelin?—that would go unanswered until the second Black Crowes album.
If these Goats Heads Soup rarities betray the album’s indecisive, scatterbrained origins, the reissue’s third disc—an oft-bootlegged but greatly enhanced recording of a Brussels show from October ’73—finds the Stones still very much at the top of their game as a live act. In sharp contrast to the rough ‘n’ tough 1970 live set, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, the Brussels concert sounds like it could’ve been recorded earlier this year—and that says as much about the pristine remastering job as how well it captures the Stones’ mid-’70s transformation into the crowd-pleasing, showbiz-savvy revue that would top Forbes music-biz listicles for decades to come. The extended sax solo on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” the call-and-response crowd participation on “Midnight Rambler,” the breakneck, scribble-outside-the-lines jamming on “Street Fighting Man”—this is a document of the Stones’ arena-rock playbook being written in real time.
Tellingly, the Stones sequester the selections from Goats Head Soup together into a four-song mini-set, as if they needed protection from seasoned warhorses like “Gimme Shelter” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” By the end of their 1975 tour, only one (“Star Star”) remained, and by the time of their 1981 stadium jaunt, practically any trace of Goats Head Soup had been erased from the setlist. This would suggest Goats Head Soup’s true significance is that it marked the moment where a new Rolling Stones record ceased to be a game-changing cultural event, and more like a fresh pile of coal shoveled into the engine room to keep the show on the road. But if Goats Head Soup revealed the first real chinks in the Stones’ armor, its eternally wounded ballads turned that fallibility into a virtue. Ultimately, Goats Head Soup remains fascinating for how it makes the Stones seem a little less mythical and a lot more real.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | September 16, 2020 | 8 | 7c2f3486-52a8-46c3-9fa8-7905a2dcc34c | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
The teenage Tallahassee rapper fast-tracks a summer-ready debut mixtape that’s in touch with his Florida roots. | The teenage Tallahassee rapper fast-tracks a summer-ready debut mixtape that’s in touch with his Florida roots. | Luh Tyler: My Vision | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/luh-tyler-my-vision/ | My Vision | Since the mid 1980s, when 14-year-old rapper Roxanne Shanté’s diss track “Roxanne’s Revenge” sent the New York rap world into a frenzy, teenage rappers have been prone to blowing up fast without trying all that hard. That happened in the fall to Tallahassee’s Luh Tyler, who was 16 when a couple of breezy, punchline-fueled singles recorded directly into his iPhone suddenly made him the talk of Florida’s hip-hop scene. He raps about three core concepts—getting girls, getting high on weed, getting money with the guys—with a conversational flow and the raspy voice of Marge Simpson. Early singles, like his theme song flip “Law & Order Pt. 2” and the ode to Instagram influencer “Jayda Wayda,” are boyish and grown at the same time.
Now 17, Luh Tyler arrives with his fast-tracked debut mixtape My Vision. It easily could have been overstuffed with label-purchased features and trend-chasing one-offs, but it’s kept relatively organic with beats that lean on the bounce of Florida rap and only a couple of out-of-state visitors. “Can’t Move Wrong” is a highlight: Assisted by Broward County’s Trapland Pat, Tyler coasts on the skittering beat with regional specifics like the thick bassline and bits of steel drum. Meanwhile, his lyrics are low-key one-liners that stick out based on how they’re said: “Pull up to the club, rock the stage, got your bitch amazed” is given life by the way his scratchy vocals drag out “amazed.” He channels similarly chill energy in “Santa” with Pompano Beach’s Loe Shimmy, which isn’t as vibrant as their November collab “A Day in the NOYA,” but their shared iciness gels. Previously released day-in-the-life joints “Back Flippin” and “Fat Racks Pt. 2” still sound bright and beachy, even if they’ve been worn out in my headphones—and even though “Fat Racks” didn’t need a BabyTron redux.
My Vision would be even better if Tyler cared more about the minor but important particulars that elevate storytelling. His lyrical vagueness makes me appreciate non-sequitur wizards like Flint’s Rio Da Yung OG and central Florida’s Goldenboy Countup, who fill each line with so many details that the ordinary becomes colorfully wild. Tyler isn’t as naturally animated, but bars like, “Niggas hoes, on my trail, nigga, they like, ‘Oh he rapping’” on “Moncler on My Coat” are still too fuzzy. Whose girlfriends are they? Is it the rapping itself or the rap lifestyle that’s impressing them? Is this interaction happening in person or in the comments? The closest he gets to fleshing out his world is “You Was Laughing,” a slightly reflective look at what he’s been through during the grueling grind of the past, uh… six months.
But hey, these are songs for and about chilling, and they serve their purpose well—most specifically the two tracks that bring in producer Polo Boy Shawty, a pioneer of the hazy, summer-ready plugg sound. His work on the laid-back intro “My Vision” makes me dream of Tyler’s version of Tony Shhnow’s Plug Motivation mixtape. And on “Hit the Top,” Tyler doesn’t have much going on outside of rolling blunts and going to Rolling Loud, but the trippy rhythm paired with his cloud of punchlines delivered in that middle-aged cigarette smoker voice makes doing absolutely nothing sound cool as shit. You don’t need to be a teenager to get behind that. | 2023-04-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-04T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Motion Music / Atlantic | April 4, 2023 | 7 | 7c32fc4f-953b-4cde-aaf5-eb89b5eb2279 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
The singer and activist’s second album hides behind well-trodden pop star guises. Even when the lyrics point towards desperation, there’s no frisson. | The singer and activist’s second album hides behind well-trodden pop star guises. Even when the lyrics point towards desperation, there’s no frisson. | Hayley Kiyoko: Panorama | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hayley-kiyoko-panorama/ | Panorama | The term “lesbian celebrity” was once an oxymoron. Openly lesbian musicians, most famously the signers and signees of the Washington, D.C. label Olivia, often worked in an insular and separatist manner, making and distributing music among themselves while maintaining a keen skepticism of the mainstream. Not until the 1990s did lesbians start to become a visible, marketable demographic, a commercial watershed marked by events like k.d. lang holding Cindy Crawford on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1993 and Ellen DeGeneres coming out on television in 1997. More recently, the banner of proud lesbian cultural icon has been taken up by Hayley Kiyoko, the former Disney actor turned pop singer. For almost a decade, Kiyoko has helped to forge a consistent place for women who love women within pop’s contemporary mainstream, tethering her success to a politics of visibility and representation. Across her self-directed music videos, Kiyoko has brought underrepresented identities into her mainstream ambit.
Unfortunately, lesbian celebrities are still scarce, and as such, Kiyoko is often called upon as a delegate for queer women. In the choreographed intimacy of her videos and her recently publicized relationship with former Bachelor star Becca Tilley, she provides a public template for the private lives of young fans. Each June, she appears for timely cover stories, granting gracious soundbites about self-love and queer joy. Today, there’s a striking disconnect between the radical community figurehead of Kiyoko’s interviews and the steamy vapidity of her music. Her lyrics tend toward well-worn and impersonal platitudes, and you’ll have to dig beyond the music itself for any sense of transcendence or revelation. You’re more likely to find poignancy and power in fan comments on Kiyoko’s Instagram account than in her lyric book.
Her second album Panorama—inspired by a shift toward healthy, conscientious living after a period of years dogged by mental and physical health issues—intends to display Kiyoko’s personality beyond the pablum. Instead, its theme of embracing the journey and the struggle, rather than the destination, feels as bromidic and remote as a commercial for therapy. Kiyoko hides behind well-trodden pop star guises: From “Found My Friends”’ supersized take on E•MO•TION-era Carly Rae Jepsen to the metrically perfect pilfering of Taylor Swift’s hiccupy flow on “Well…,” the pop genre is in control of Kiyoko rather than the other way around. Instead of defining a unique sound, Panorama carries the unmistakable metallic tang of reverse engineering.
Kiyoko’s 2018 debut Expectations was filled with euphoric walls of sound that made your heart feel as though it were in congruence with the world, reminders of her theater-kid youth spent listening to Arcade Fire and Coldplay. This time, she collaborated with Danja, the superproducer famed for his work with Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, who encouraged her to make her vocals more prominent. Panorama has fewer such cinematic moments, but when they appear—as on “Found My Friends”—the production makes ample space for Kiyoko’s voice. This isn’t necessarily a good thing. Kiyoko isn’t the strongest or most distinctive singer; more nose than diaphragm, her vocal personality tends to make everything sound like an anti-emergency. This has suited her music in the past, as on the 2018 single “Curious,” where she played the role of an ex-lover trying to appear disaffected by her former girlfriend’s new relationship. But when she attempts a dramatic, emotionally sincere vocal line, she misses the mark. As her voice wades flatly into the stacked nighttime-drive chords of “Found My Friends,” it feels like speeding into a traffic jam.
The unintentionally anhedonic delivery squanders the album’s more galvanizing moments. “Loving you is all I wanna know,” she sings through the sputtering embellishments and weeping violin of “Supposed to Be,” with all the urgency of a hotel receptionist. Even when the lyrics point toward desperation, there’s no frisson. Here, Kiyoko has achieved the previously unimaginable: a lesbian love song that feels devoid of intensity.
It’s a shame that Panorama’s artistry doesn’t match Kiyoko’s accolades. But she shines on the album’s best songs, “Sugar at the Bottom” and “For the Girls,” a pair of summery, percussion-driven jingles that make use of a bass-as-lead approach. Both revolve around slick hooks rather than soaring choruses, in a way that’s commensurate with someone like Dua Lipa, who crams syllables into a tight metrical structure, turning tongue-twisters into refrains. Kiyoko’s voice sounds absorptive rather than detached, and for a moment, the most interesting thing about her is the music she’s making. | 2022-08-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Empire / Atlantic | August 2, 2022 | 5.6 | 7c393ab6-5ed8-4753-b109-29d69580399d | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Interpol re-group on Matador and record a bleak, depressive album about disillusionment and being at the end of one's rope. | Interpol re-group on Matador and record a bleak, depressive album about disillusionment and being at the end of one's rope. | Interpol: Interpol | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14641-interpol/ | Interpol | The impressive thing about Interpol has always been the refinement of their sound, its remarkable sense of purpose. Sure, when the band debuted, a huge share of conversation revolved around the other acts they sounded like. But no matter how familiar any of the parts were, the band had welded them together into a whole that was instantly recognizable and easy to grasp-- they'd carved out the simple, narrow box of how an Interpol song worked, and they could put it across clearly, quickly, and thrillingly. Maybe the suits they wore were supposed to say something about style, but they also said something about professionalism: This was a band with a clear agenda, and they were all business about it, every last detail engineered to work. And it did work, which led the band to great success and only one little problem: Their box is a small one, and it's been difficult for them to sneak out of it.
That dilemma's surely not lost on them. This self-titled album is their last recorded with Carlos D.-- the bass player whose sense of pacing was the secret motor of their best work-- and one of the good things about it is that it's very honest. It's an album about exhaustion, confusion, the hollowness of success, the bitter feeling of having few options worth chasing, and the realization that endlessly satisfying your own desires can turn you into a pretty shitty person. Paul Banks' lyrics seem preoccupied with what kind of man he's turned out to be, from the declaration, "I'm a good guy," to a song actually subtitled "The Man I Am". He kicks off the album by announcing that he's found success, but he doesn't sound remotely pleased about it.
Elsewhere he's pleading for someone to just tell him what to do, because his own desires are leading him in the wrong directions. The songs keep skirting away from hooks and tension in favor of still air, exhausted drizzles of guitar, and portentous piano figures; the big hooks and builds they do try out seem all the more half-hearted and workmanlike, surrounded as they are by the sound of a band wondering why it bothers trying anything in the first place. The whole thing sounds like the eighth day of an endless party where everyone's already slept together, burned themselves out on drugs that used to be fun, and developed systems of grudges and resentments that make it barely worth talking to one another. And yet the party goes on and there they sit, sighing bitterly while confetti pours down and the drinks go around.
The problem is that the music feels that way, too-- and who'd have thought that this band, of all bands, would miss the mark on a bleak, depressive album? Plenty of great records have been made from this end-of-the-rope feeling; I'm pretty confident the members of Interpol own a few by the Cure. And it'd be the height of arrogance to suggest that Interpol should be making records about feelings other than the ones they have. It's just that, as a listener, it's easy to get the feeling that any other version of this band-- happy Interpol, smarmy Interpol, pissed-off Interpol, the tense-and-edgy Interpol of their debut-- would be more entertaining to listen to than the tapped-out, unsure act that shows up here, sounding like people who have come to loathe certain motions but can't stop going through them.
The good news is that they're too skilled, experienced, and important to make a record that's just a mess, and for a while there's nothing so terrible about this one. In its first half, songs are carefully assembled; "Summer Well" packs some gorgeous hooks; the band's rhythm section is always a treat; and if nothing else there's always that singular Interpol atmosphere, the pure sound of a group a lot of us will always like hearing. That sound is compelling enough to keep someone searching for a secret payoff to this record, some dark heart to sink into. The problems here, though, aren't in execution-- they're more existential. Cross over into the wrecked second half, and every song makes this sound more like an album that's not really ready to seethe, not really cathartic, not really full of painful hopeless beauty or any of those other things that make bleak records worthwhile. With every listen it just sounds like more of a fucking drag. For a moment, "All of the Ways" seems like it's prepared to lean into its own feelings of helplessness, and turn into the kind of desolate, bottomless song that feels good to fall into-- but then Banks can't help trying to sing it into something grand, trudging hopelessly through the same old routine. The ninth day of the party.
It's too bad. The album is asking honest and important questions about disillusionment. What do you do when you can have too much of what you want? What do you do when you get it and find you don't want it anymore? How do you manage your own desires and turn out a decent person? The songs might be more enjoyable if they seemed to present some glimmer of an answer, or at least some consolation-- if it could convince you that this, this music right here, was the payoff for all the agonizing, not just another job that's barely worth doing. | 2010-09-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-09-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | September 14, 2010 | 4.6 | 7c3b4ec7-a4bc-4e0e-8396-2dda177ded8c | Nitsuh Abebe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nitsuh-abebe/ | null |
Crammed Discs asks 26 non-African artists-- including Animal Collective, Andrew Bird, Deerhoof, Oneida, and Shackleton-- to take on Congotronics. | Crammed Discs asks 26 non-African artists-- including Animal Collective, Andrew Bird, Deerhoof, Oneida, and Shackleton-- to take on Congotronics. | Various Artists: Tradi-Mods vs. Rockers: Alternative Takes on Congotronics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14841-tradi-mods-vs-rockers-alternative-takes-on-congotronics/ | Tradi-Mods vs. Rockers: Alternative Takes on Congotronics | In 1987, a French record label called Ocora released a cassette called Zaïre: Musiques Urbaines á Kinshasa. It was a set of four half-hour performances by four different bands, recorded in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), in 1978. It was the first time Kinshasa street music ever made it out of Africa, but the timing wasn't quite right; pre-Internet, word of mouth could only spread this music so far. And it was up against a mainstream world music industry that didn't prize rawness or real African soundworlds. It went out of print, but if you can find it, it is very worth hearing.
But that music couldn't stay hidden forever. In 2004, producer Vincent Kenis curated an album by one of those street bands that had been recorded in 1978, Konono Nº1, for Crammed Discs (they also recorded a live LP for Terp that year). Konono in 2004 sounded almost exactly like Konono in 1978-- a bracing mix of headlong rhythm and interesting texture, created by found-object percussion and crudely electrified likembe thumb pianos. This time, the timing (and let's be honest, the marketing) were much more fortuitous. Konono Nº1 crash-landed in the Western indie rock and avant garde worlds and were embraced wholeheartedly, and Crammed embarked on a series of "Congotronics" releases aimed at building a broader picture of Kinshasa's vibrant street music scene, which is comprised of bands from ethnic groups around Congo who amplify their traditional music to be heard over the urban din.
Their latest Congotronics project takes a different tack. There's no doubt that Congotronics has had an impact in the West, and Crammed's Marc Hollander (who long ago was Kenis' partner in the band Aksak Maboul) asked 26 artists to contribute their own personal takes on Congotronics, and contributed one himself under his old Aksak Maboul banner. These artists took a variety of approaches: some wrote original music, some covered actual Congotronics songs or used parts of them as raw musical material, some sampled the source material, and others wrote music modeled on a specific piece. Each song is credited to the artist "vs" the Congotronics act that inspired the song (usually Konono or Kasai Allstars), and it's a hugely diverse, double-disc grab-bag by a group of contributors from Europe, the U.S., and Japan.
Some tracks are related to their inspiration more in spirit than anything else. A good example is Tussle's spectacular funk workout "Soft Crush", which has a very loose relationship to Konono Nº1, dropping ethereal thumb piano patterns into its otherwise relentless stomp. Bear Bones and Lay Low's "Kuletronics" is like Congotronics via the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, directly quoting Konono Nº1's "Kule Kule", but transposing the likembe groove to odd, throbbing bass sounds and sprinkling the mix liberally with pinging sound effects and filtered, echoing noises. It's interesting to hear the inherent similarities between things that seem as disparate as, say, Konono and Andrew Bird. Bird's pizzicato violin loops on "Ohnono/Kiwembo" are nothing too out of the ordinary for him, but it's amazing how well the interlocking patterns he creates reflect an affinity with the band's likembe patterns.
There are plenty of other highlights, from Shackleton's 10-minute, spaced-out "Mukuba Special", which features vocal interjections sampled from Kasaï Allstars, to Jherek Bischoff's very literal, amazingly heavy orchestral arrangement of "Kule Kule". AU's "Two Labors" is a crazy pile-up of as many likembe rhythm patterns as possible playing at breakneck speed, while Oneida sucks the music into its own noisy psychedelic world. Juana Molina is one of several who adds vocals and lyrics of her own, bouncing her own melody off the patterns of Kasaï Allstars, whose call and response chants she samples into her own composition.
Hollander has afforded each artist the chance to talk a little bit about his or her contribution, and reading the range of thoughts behind the tracks here makes for an interesting companion activity to listening. There are certainly ways a project like this could have gone wrong-- everybody avoids the biggest one, which would have been for a Western artist to try and perform the chants in the original music-- but the artists involved were given enough free reign and seem to have enough genuine appreciation for the music that the final result is a very pleasing listen that captures some of the spirit of the music without outright imitating or caricaturing it. | 2010-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-11-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | Crammed Discs | November 10, 2010 | 8.1 | 7c3b7c27-08ba-484a-b241-69f277be7476 | Joe Tangari | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joe-tangari/ | null |
The second album by the French producer Gesaffelstein brings in big pop collaborators like Haim and Pharrell. | The second album by the French producer Gesaffelstein brings in big pop collaborators like Haim and Pharrell. | Gesaffelstein: Hyperion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gesaffelstein-hyperion/ | Hyperion | As Gesaffelstein, the French producer Mike Lévy has built a reputation for snarling, fiery electronic music derived from techno. In his hands, the insistent 4/4 pulse assumes a sinister shape, like “Killing Eve”’s Villanelle moving through a packed club with a shiv at the ready. For much of his career thus far, the 31-year-old has released nasty-sounding music through a small Montreal record label, but his profile skyrocketed after co-producing Kanye West’s titanic Yeezus cuts “Black Skinhead” and “Send It Up.”
At its most ferocious, the still-inimitable Yeezus sounded like a thousand car-crash videos auto-playing in the same browser window—precisely why Lévy’s highway-pileup sonics fit in so well. A Gesaffelstein banger isn’t something you can simply walk away from; you practically require the Jaws of Life to extricate yourself. His rude and rumbling 2013 debut capitalized off his Yeezus moment (even though, technically speaking, it had been recorded two years before) with über-aggressive singles like “Pursuit” and “Hate or Glory” and moments of simmering ambient reflection that nodded to another dimension of his palette. He elaborated on this subtler side with his work on the Weeknd’s My Dear Melancholy,; “I Was Never There” slowed a G-funk whine to a creeping slither, and “Hurt You” gave off a muted glow similar to the Weeknd’s Daft Punk collab “I Feel It Coming.”
The aesthetic connections between Lévy and Daft Punk don’t end there; for one, they’re labelmates now. Some of the hardest-hitting Gesaffelstein material resembles a ’roided-out take on the brutalist house and hip-hop that Daft Punk explored on Homework. The second Gesaffelstein album and first for Columbia, Hyperion, is Lévy’s attempt to channel the more accessible side of the robot duo, featuring futuristic pop with vocal collaborations ranging from the Weeknd and Pharrell to Haim and Toronto synth-pop duo Electric Youth (of Drive soundtrack fame). Hyperion feels more meticulously crafted than Aleph, sequenced to evoke a journey not dissimilar to Daft Punk’s own pop-as-Epcot ride Random Access Memories from 2013.
Even with a decade of experience under his belt, though, Hyperion suggests that Lévy isn’t quite ready to make the professional leap that the album supposedly represents. Its strongest tracks are immediate, both in impact and sequencing; the title track whirrs and oscillates with lovely synths spiraling into eternity, while “Reset” is the platonic Gesaffelstein experience—wonky, hip-hop-inflected electronic music with its own respiratory system, sounding as if angry turbines learned how to breathe. The Weeknd collab “Lost in the Fire” marks the pair’s most effective team-up to date: Abel Tesfaye’s MJ-isms blend so seamlessly with Lévy’s inky backgrounds that it might take a listen or two to suss out the rank homophobia of Tesfaye’s typically drab lyrical attempts at lasciviousness.
Hyperion’s other guest spots aren’t as successful—evidence that his jet black range could use a wider color palette. The relative failure of these crossover attempts is more damning considering that the artists in question have more effectively collaborated with mainstream dance figures in the past; the stiff, mid-tempo Electric Youth cut “Forever” doesn’t come close to achieving the weightless glory of their iconic “A Real Hero” with French producer David Grellier’s College project, while Haim’s contributions to the misty “So Bad” lacks the impact of their performance on Calvin Harris’ 2015 single “Pray to God.”
Even “Lost in the Fire” and the Pharrell-featuring “Blast Off”—two songs featuring frequent Daft Punk collaborators—can’t help but come across as budget-level attempts to replicate past glories from other artists. If it seems unfair to judge Hyperion’s weaknesses against the work of Lévy’s supposed peers, it’s equally frustrating that he hasn’t yet given us a real idea of who he is as an artist. He didn’t invent the rough-and-tumble approach to techno that most know him for, and the churning instrumentals of Hyperion would’ve sounded at home amidst the grab-bag Aleph—proof, maybe, that while he has consistency on his side, true artistic evolution remains out of Lévy’s reach. | 2019-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | March 12, 2019 | 5 | 7c40d70b-632c-458a-89ae-533e7bb6b838 | Larry Fitzmaurice | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/ | |
Bristol's Flying Saucer Attack were a murky and beloved cult band that mixed shoegaze guitars with the drifting throb of krautrock to create extreme feelings of isolation and alienation. These albums, now reissued on vinyl by Drag City, find them at the moment in the mid-'90s when their sound hit its stride. | Bristol's Flying Saucer Attack were a murky and beloved cult band that mixed shoegaze guitars with the drifting throb of krautrock to create extreme feelings of isolation and alienation. These albums, now reissued on vinyl by Drag City, find them at the moment in the mid-'90s when their sound hit its stride. | Flying Saucer Attack: Further / Chorus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21587-further-chorus/ | Further / Chorus | In their own small way, Bristol's Flying Saucer Attack were as '90s as Nirvana and the Beastie Boys. They emerged early in the decade in an independent music world that was expanding its reach; information, then as now, was zipping around the world, but when FSA debuted, it was mostly traveling on paper. Indeed, the band, consisting at first of Dave Pearce and Rachel Brook (the latter also was a key member of the excellent Movietone), and later of Pearce alone, owed a great deal to the zine world that had blossomed in the '80s and was in this pre-internet moment in full flower.
One influential zine in particular, Ptolemaic Terrascope, founded and based in the rural west of England, championed FSA early, positioning them in a dark, drone-y, goth-derived scene that included Windy & Carl and Roy Montgomery along with Bristol acts like the Third Eye Foundation and Amp. During this period, you could be an impossibly murky and impenetrable lo-fi psychedelic band obscure enough that even devoted indie music fans had never heard of you, but still play a Peel Session, release singles and EPs on 7-inch vinyl (this when turntables were considered by most a hopelessly passé marker of the clunky analog era), and find yourself with a modest and devoted international cult. These two records, now reissued on vinyl by Drag City, find Flying Saucer Attack at the moment in the mid-'90s when their sound hit its stride.
Flying Saucer Attack were less about invention and more about combining disparate ingredients in a new way. Their most distinctive feature on first listen is the thick blanket of feedback and distortion that overwhelms almost everything else. The roots of this technique were clearly in the Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, but where JAMC fetishized bubblegum pop, FSA applied hyper-distortion to British folk and the drifting throb of krautrock. So where the noise of JAMC and later shoegaze bands amplified the catchiness of their simple melodies, FSA blew up the abstraction, and where the best shoegaze noise generally hinted at an enveloping ocean of sensuality, FSA used similar techniques to wallow in feelings of extreme isolation and distance. This was music you used as insulation, raw material to thicken the space between you and the world, and these qualities were reinforced by the proudly D.I.Y. nature of the records; “home taping is reinventing music,” read a line on the spine of Further.
Further from 1994 is arguably the quintessential Flying Saucer Attack album, with a little bit of everything—evocative instrumental miniatures, folky near-songs, extended spatial explorations—that made them good. There's plenty of fingerpicked acoustic guitar amid the white-noise din, and the bassy pulse of analog noisemakers floats in and out, evoking the spaciness of early '70s synth music. Pearce's voice, a husky tenor indeterminate pitch, is as buried as a voice can possibly be, but despite his extreme limitations as a vocalist, he manages to communicate melancholy, alienation, and loneliness. “Still Point” features lead vocals by Brook, her slightly warmer tone breaking the illusion that Pearce is the last person in the world. The ballad “Come and Close My Eyes” is structured enough that you could almost see someone covering it, while “To the Shore” is a gnarly instrumental that moves from a cymbal tap to churning sonic violence and back to delicate acoustic guitar over the course of 12 minutes.
Chorus from 1995 is a collection of singles, B-sides, and a Peel Session, but Flying Saucer Attack's general approach was so narrow it feels like a proper album. The two main differences are a uniformity of song length, befitting the 7-inch format, and, at places, a growing technological sophistication, as if Pearce was learning how to squeeze more out of his 4-track. The precise layering of the rumbling distortion and simple melody on “Popol Vuh III” demonstrate considerable craft, and “Beach Red Lullaby,” another Brook lead and a gorgeous acoustic folk song, sounds like a genuine product of another time, an accompaniment to a grainy art film that Pink Floyd might have soundtracked several decades earlier. There's a track called “Feedback Song,” demonstrating just how much Pearce embraced his defining aesthetic, and later in the collection, as if that wasn't enough, we get “Feedback Song Demo.” But despite the repetition and the feeling of deja vu, Chorus hangs together and makes for a richly rewarding 40-minute listen; Flying Saucer Attack are living proof that you only need a couple of ideas as long as they're good ones. | 2016-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | April 7, 2016 | 8.5 | 7c440a13-9875-4b0e-8cdf-489bb408eca9 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | 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 high-stakes saga of Max B and French Montana’s 2009 mixtape, a modern classic of New York rap. | 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 high-stakes saga of Max B and French Montana’s 2009 mixtape, a modern classic of New York rap. | Max B / French Montana: Coke Wave | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/max-b-french-montana-coke-wave/ | Coke Wave | It was the winter of 2007 and New York rapper Jim Jones had the biggest single of his career with “We Fly High,” a defining moment of an era where nearly everyone across the five boroughs wanted to ride around in pink Range Rovers and wear durags under their MLB fitted caps like a lost member of Dipset, the irreverent Harlem rap crew. In New York City public schools, on television, and even on the Giants’ roster, reenacting the jump-shot motion from the music video while shouting the song’s signature Ballin’! ad-lib from the top of your lungs was common practice. Before “We Fly High,” Jones was surely Dipset’s third in command, behind people’s champ Juelz Santana and their leader Cam’ron, who mentored Jones by convincing him that if he rapped about the hard life he lived, the money would come. Jones did just that with “We Fly High,” and the result was country-wide recognition and a guaranteed spot in New York rap lore. But while Jones was on BET’s 106 & Park with a chain around his neck and diamonds in his ears, the song’s co-writer, Max B, was sitting behind bars.
A decade earlier, a teenage Max B, born Charly Wingate, had been sentenced to eight years in prison for robbery. He spent his time locked up working on a character that he described as a combination of The Notorious B.I.G. and 2Pac, called Biggavelli—Max B for short. When Max was released in 2005, he met up with his childhood friend from the same building in Harlem, Cam’ron, who’d become immortal two years earlier, the moment he revealed his all-pink outfit in the “Dipset Anthem” music video. “Yo flee, you know I rap now,” Max said to Cam. “Let’s get this shit clickin’ like Dorothy’s heels.” Cam laughed him off, so Max met up with Mike Bruno, a hungry individual from the same block. Bruno saw it all in Max: the charisma, the swag, the endlessly quotable way he spoke. He introduced Max to Jim Jones, who was looking to form his own clique under the Dipset umbrella.
Jones put Max to work on Jones’ second studio album, Harlem: Diary of a Summer. Released that August, Max’s contributions to the album are undeniable. He shifted Jones’ style to a midpoint between the soulful chipmunk samples synonymous with Dipset and the menacing gutter raps of 50 Cent’s G-Unit crew. On “G’s Up,” Max is a star, with a memorable hook that outshines Jones’ stiff verses. Max’s two other credited features on the album use a rough melody that elevates typical street braggadocio into absurdist hood poetry: “Max B look like Derek Jeter on the shortstop/I’ll put the heater to ya’ soft spot,” he says smoothly on “Confront Ya Babe.”
But while Max B’s songwriting was elevating Jones’ career, Max was relegated to the shadows. In a later Doggie Diamonds video interview, as Max counts wads of cash wearing dark shades and jeans held up by a designer belt, and repeats his signature Maxisms like “wavy” and “owww,” he vents about his frustrations with Jim Jones. “I did eight years in the can, when I came home, my job was to come home and do this shit and go somewhere.” He unleashed his cartoon character-like persona, clearly tipsy from the brown liquor he usually sipped like apple juice, his Katt Williams-like perm swaying in the wind. “Not be working for a nigga in the studio, writing songs, while he the only nigga lookin’ hot, he the only nigga...spendin’ $5,000 on his bitch.” His requests to release solo material of his own were continuously pushed aside by Jones. Instead, Jones was focused on forming his ByrdGang collective—headlined by Max and the late Far Rockaway, Queens rapper Stack Bundles—and having them work on his third album, 2006’s Hustler’s P.O.M.E.” Max’s exasperation led him down a path that played out like an inept crook subplot in a Quentin Tarantino script.
Gina Conway was an ex-girlfriend of Max, who had recently returned to New York after spending time in North Carolina. According to testimony given by Conway, she was being pursued by a real estate and credit card fraudster by the name of Allan Plowden. One day in September of 2006, Plowden brought Conway back to his hotel room, where, in an attempt to impress her, he showed off a Louis Vuitton bag filled with an estimated $50,000 in cash. Later in the evening, Plowden and his business partner, David Taylor, went clubbing. Instead of joining them, Conway immediately called Max to brag, and the two began to orchestrate a robbery.
Max’s plan was to have Conway steal the money while Plowden was at the club. When Conway arrived, accompanied by Max’s stepbrother Kelvin Leerdam, Plowden was unexpectedly in the room. They woke him up at gunpoint. Unable to find a sufficient amount of money, Conway and Leerdam ordered Plowden to call Taylor. When Taylor arrived, Leerdam pointed the gun at him and after a struggle, the gun went off, killing Taylor. Conway and Leerdam escaped with all the money they could find, but when the police arrived, Plowden told them about Conway. When Conway was found not long after, she said that Leerdam killed Taylor and that Max set up the robbery attempt. Max was arrested and his bail was set at $1.5 million.
At almost the exact same time as Max’s arrest, Jim Jones released his third album, Hustler’s P.O.M.E. The project was Jones’ breakout moment and Max was featured on seven tracks, with writing credits on others. Despite Max’s pleas, there were no signs of Jones or the ByrdGang label coming to bail him out; he sat in jail while Jones went national.
After months behind bars, Max’s manager put up property to front his bail, but he still needed cash to cover the remaining amount—rumored to be around $120,000. Pretending to be Max’s white knight, Jones came up with an idea: Max would sign over his publishing rights to Jones in exchange for cash. Out of desperation, Max agreed. In the summer of 2007, Max B was released and Jones assumed he had his songwriting guru back in his employ to work on his next album and the upcoming ByrdGang group project. Max’s solo album remained on the shelf and he couldn’t profit off of any music released without Jones’ approval. With his trial looming large, Max finally reached his breaking point.
Like a comic-book origin story, Max B turned into a New York City vigilante. He gave interviews on DVDs and WorldStarHipHop that were more like wrestling promos, often drifting into the third person. Put a camera in Max B’s face and it was guaranteed he would clown rappers across the city he didn’t care for: Prodigy, Papoose, Hell Rell, and, especially, Jim Jones. During this time, Max went on a mixtape run that was equally as definitive as his interviews: Public Domain 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Million Dollar Baby 2, and Wavie Crockett. But Max B’s opus wouldn’t arrive until he developed a bond with another rapper who had a similar wish to make Jim Jones’ life hell.
French Montana was from the South Bronx, at the time most known for founding one of hip-hop’s most popular DVD series, Cocaine City. Inspired by the Smack DVD series, Cocaine City became notable for a glimpse at the street life through interviews with legends like Pee Wee Kirkland, guests like 50 Cent and Remy Ma, music videos, and freestyles (though the purpose of the series was to simply give French’s nascent rap career a platform).
At some point in 2003 or 2004 outside of a studio at the border of Harlem and the South Bronx, French was shot in the back of the head. He survived, and his attempted murderer was killed in the incident by friendly fire. According to French in a 2009 interview with DJ Vlad, he said that his beef with Jim Jones started when he found footage on DVDs of the Diplomat commenting on his near-death experience. In the Spring of 2008, while completing his mixtape Live From Africa, French was looking to record a Jim Jones diss track and to make it sting, he knew who to turn to.
“Waavvy,” also known as “Fuck Jim Jones,” is the first collaboration between Max B and French Montana. “Why don’t you tell me why you don’t love Max B no more, because yo’ nigga not workin’ for free,” wails Max B on a hook that sounds like it was recorded with a bottle of Grey Goose in hand. After the release of the track, Max B and French became inseparable. In true New York fashion, a city where hate is stronger than love, they bonded through a mutual disgust of Jones. Together, they stalked Jim Jones through the streets of New York, named a stuffed puppy after the Diplomat before stomping on it and running it over with a truck, accused Jones of attempting to blackball their careers, and constantly referred to a misogynistic incident involving Jones’ wife that became known as “She Touched It in Miami”—you know, normal things that friends do. It was all building to the release of Coke Wave, a joint mixtape they promised would be a classic. They were right.
Executive produced by Dame Grease, Coke Wave was released in February of 2009. Like Max B and French, Grease felt that New York’s household names weren’t giving him the respect he had earned—he emerged in the ’90s producing for The Lox, Mase, and contributing a majority of the production on DMX’s It’s Dark and Hell is Hot. Grease’s beatmaking on the mixtape unifies the capriciousness of both Max B and French and is the factor that brings their colorful imaginations to reality.
On “We Run NY,” Grease interpolates Sting’s “Englishman in New York” into a celebratory Uptown head bopper. “I Warned U” is similarly spiritual, as the trio spin Marvin Gaye’s “I Want You” into a soulful ballad for anyone that has ever worn a Pelle Pelle jacket and NBA jeans. “I warned you/The right way/I warned you/Now look what you made me do,” French belts on a woozy hook, maybe the best that has ever left his mouth. Max B surfs over the production with a swag that justifies every third-person DVD monologue he’s ever done.
The mixtape’s centerpiece is “Coke Wave,” a track that shows what the three are capable of when it’s all clicking. Max B sounds like he’s hungover singing a lullaby about drug dealing and heartbreak, French Montana’s relaxed delivery is like having a conversation with an incredibly high mob boss, and Grease’s funky production is timeless. No matter what sound Dame Grease laces them with, Max and French never step out of character; they’re going to talk about moving weight and bad decisions they made after sipping too much Remy Martin.
French Montana is the grounding presence, Dame Grease may be the glue, but it’s hard to be enamored by anything outside of Max B’s animated street poetics. If you close your eyes long enough, his stories can make you wake up on a stoop on Lenox Ave. in 2009. He can painfully howl over a cinematic Young Los beat made for fare evading (“Here It Is”), he can make songs for the backroom of an NYC strip club (“Stake Sause”), or emotionlessly describe a day cruising through the city avoiding the NYPD and rivals looking for a payday (“It Gotta Be”).
Coke Wave arrived during a time in New York where the city was in a desperate search for who was to be next after Dipset and G-Unit. But instead of sticking to New York’s hardened street rap, Max B and French Montana made the next wave whatever they wanted. They could hop on a classic Dr. Dre instrumental and infect the beat with the spirit of New York summer. Or could go back in time to the shiny-suit ’90s era to show off their ageless bravado and toss some subliminals at Jim Jones while they’re at it: “Backtrack two years ago I was with niggas straight hatin’,” Max says—you can picture him cackling in the booth with a plastic cup at his side after spitting that one-liner. There were no rules.
In the months following Coke Wave, Max B’s trial reached a verdict. Gina Conway testified, Max B did not, and he was found guilty on nine of the 11 charges including felony murder, aggravated manslaughter, and conspiracy. On September 3, 2009, Max was sentenced to 75 years in prison. One of the final songs he recorded while free was “Never Wanna Go Back,” a rare time where he addressed his situation in the music. “I never wanna go back in there/Life just isn’t fair,” he sings painfully, losing the optimism that made Coke Wave feel celebratory.
Over a decade since Coke Wave, Max B’s legacy has only grown. Some of that credit belongs to A$AP Yams, who introduced a younger generation to Max B’s music and injected his spirit into the A$AP Mob. But more so it’s been because of French Montana who has never stopped saying “Free Max B,” as murky reports of sentence reductions surface every year.
In 2010, Max B was officially released from his obligations to Jim Jones. His debut album finally arrived in 2011, titled Vigilante Season, of course. The album is no Coke Wave, but feels like the closing of a chapter that Max B had been desperate to complete since the days when he first conceived the Biggavelli character. “We all gon’ die, but who gon’ leave a legacy, who gon’ be remembered the biggest,” Max B said in an interview with Hood Affairs shortly after his fallout with Jim Jones. He spent his short-lived freedom trying to cement a legacy; Coke Wave is that moment. | 2020-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B / Rap | DJ Whoo Kid | January 19, 2020 | 8.5 | 7c4526c0-c8c7-4c8b-b8dd-1566e1938cd3 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
On their second album as a trio, Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman build fresh narratives from the fabled history of folk music. | On their second album as a trio, Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson, and Josh Kaufman build fresh narratives from the fabled history of folk music. | Bonny Light Horseman: Rolling Golden Holy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bonny-light-horseman-rolling-golden-holy/ | Rolling Golden Holy | On Bonny Light Horseman’s 2020 self-titled debut, singer-songwriter Anaïs Mitchell, Eric D. Johnson (of Fruit Bats), and producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman moved their modern weft across the warp of folk traditions past. Borrowing pieces from old-time songs, their interplay between convention and innovation could have ended as a one-off project, especially after the collaboration earned them a Grammy nomination for Best Folk Album. But the kismet of their creative commune seemed too good not to keep exploring, so they set about writing original songs. Their second album, Rolling Golden Holy, imagines what contemporary stories might look like when framed in the Anglo-American folk tradition. Entwining themes from broadsides and British ballads, musical styles from Appalachia, and touches of modern production, they deliver new tales, new colors, and new patterns.
In 1957, folk scholar George Malcolm Laws classified broadside ballads into topics like “Lovers’ Disguises and Tricks,” “Faithful Lovers,” and “Unfaithful Lovers.” While these categories apply to plenty of genres, Bonny Light Horseman delight in building fresh narratives from the fabled history of folk music. The duet “Comrade Sweetheart” evokes an early 20th century setting, when the blue-collar struggle for justice made its way into songs from Woody Guthrie and later Pete Seeger. Johnson and Mitchell pledge their love and fidelity, promising to care for one another in their fight for larger causes.
The songs on Rolling Golden Holy trace a variety of love stories, with Mitchell and Johnson trading off leads like they do perspectives. “Gone by Fall” reflects on love that will end when the seasons change. The song’s brightly plucked guitar contrasts the sorrow ruminating at its center. Johnson takes lead vocals, while Mitchell’s soft touches add flourishes of nostalgic sweetness, as though the present were already a potent memory. “Exile” declares grandiose passions in an effort to win back a lover. Johnson’s and Mitchell’s voices plait in and around one another. “You know I’d fly right into the eye of the hurricane for you,” they sing against a fluttering banjo, while Mike Lewis’ bass and JT Bates’ drums juxtapose that soaring interplay with a grounded heft.
Johnson’s rollicking banjo and Lewis’ saxophone begin the joyous “Sweetbread,” in which Mitchell defiantly shuns a wild-hearted lover who won’t commit. Instead, she imagines a satisfying independence. “Sweetbread when I’m hungry/Red liquor when I’m dry/I take a lover when I’m lonely/Blue sky, lord, when I die,” she sings euphorically with Johnson backing her. In an updated version of Anthology of American Folk, Harry Smith might well apply one of his famous descriptions: “SELF-SUFFICIENT WOMAN LETS GO OF NE’ER DO WELL; VOWS TO EAT, DRINK, AND BE MERRY.”
Not all of the compositions work so seamlessly. “Fleur de Lis” calls to mind a lineage of ballads that employ nature as a metaphor, like “The Fair Flower of Northumberland” or “The Rose of England.” A beating synth and electric guitar scaffold the nestled dulcimer, but the song ends up curling around itself, leaning too heavily on folk’s repetitive patterns for an ultimately staid effect. It detracts from the album’s compelling momentum, feeling closer to a loose stitch. Mitchell, Johnson, and Kaufman may have started with a fascination for certain traditions, but it’s their collaboration—and the potent exchange of those talents—that makes Rolling Golden Holy gleam. | 2022-10-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-14T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock / Folk/Country | 37d03d | October 14, 2022 | 7.3 | 7c47f85a-e6b6-475c-b4e2-32cb1395b6bf | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
On their second album together, London DJ Gilles Peterson and Brit-funk pioneer Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick pay tribute to an overlooked strain of UK dance music. | On their second album together, London DJ Gilles Peterson and Brit-funk pioneer Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick pay tribute to an overlooked strain of UK dance music. | STR4TA: STR4TASFEAR | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/str4ta-str4tasfear/ | STR4TASFEAR | In the early 1980s, before house music hit like a hurricane, many of the hippest dancers in the UK were wigging out to Brit funk, a home-grown take on jazz-funk that leaned on disco, drum machines, and slap bass, perfumed with the faintest flavor of of reggae, courtesy of artists like Central Line and Freeez. A Brit-funk revival has shown signs of sparking into life over the past few years, via scattered compilations and sporadic media interest, but it has never really caught fire. Now UK duo STR4TA set their sights on the neglected genre, and it’s hard to think of anyone better suited to the task.
STR4TA’s members are Jean-Paul “Bluey” Maunick, a member of Brit-funk pioneers Light of the World and, later, acid-jazz mainstays Incognito, and Gilles Peterson, a London DJ and radio icon whose support for jazz-funk never wavered, even as its influence in clubs was decimated by the electronic sounds arriving from Chicago and Detroit. On STR4TASFEAR, their second full-length, they are joined by keyboardist Peter Hinds, who played with both Light of the World and fellow Brit-funk legends Atmosfear; UK neo-soul pioneer Omar; and Rob Gallagher, once of Galliano, a band that typified all that was wrong and right about the acid-jazz movement that snatched the crown from Brit funk at the start of the 1990s. (You can hear shades of Brit funk in Brand New Heavies and Jamiroquai, acid jazz’s biggest global stars.)
As unashamed revivalists, STR4TA were always unlikely to push the musical envelope. STR4TASFEAR, much like their 2021 debut, Aspects, could largely have beamed in directly from 1985, with few nods to the anything that came after. The band’s sound is a mixture of jazzy chord changes, disco-ish keyboard trills, a sticky web of noodling basslines, and drums that sit somewhere on the fence between disco’s 4/4 pulse and the more complex cadences of funk and jazz, to which they add the occasional honeyed vocal. But STR4TASFEAR leans more heavily on drum machines than its predecessor, in homage to the electro/street-soul movement that Brit funk evolved into, influenced, or lived alongside (depending on who you believe), with songs like “When You Call Me” and “Night Flight” suggesting a tentative step into ’80s electronic.
At times, STR4TASFEAR feels like it is begging to be pushed into the specialist’s corner. “Why Must You Fly” opens with a bassline so thumb-slappingly complex that you practically have to fight your way through it, hacking away at the low-end tangle like the dense arboreal layers of a tropical forest. And opener “Galactic Fanfare”’s garish glissando synth soloing hangs a sign over the album’s entrance, warning that herein lie exceptionally groovy jazz-funk monsters. Resolutely prog, rather than punk, STR4TASFEAR is not an album for listeners who fear musical virtuosity or the occasional instrumental folderol that comes with it.
Maybe that sounds uninviting. But a love of extended bass grooves never did Thundercat any harm, and fans of DāM-FunK or 1970s Herbie Hancock will find plenty to admire in this finely crafted and refreshingly easygoing album. STR4TASFEAR operates in a world entirely impervious to musical fashion, spiriting worries away with serene chord changes and cosmic vibes. Meanwhile, the drum-machine songs, especially “When You Call Me,” have the irresistible TR-808 slink of Marvin Gaye’s classic “Sexual Healing”—the sound of the lascivious future as glimpsed from the near past.
In this context it is refreshing, and perhaps unsurprising, that STR4TASFEAR’s strongest moments come from its younger guests. Emma-Jean Thackray, the Northern English bandleader whose 2021 album Yellow was a revelation of psychedelic jazz, sings on album highlight “Lazy Days,” her energy and bite driving a song whose pop dynamism betrays its indolent title. American trumpeter Theo Croker, meanwhile, adds spacey melancholy to “To Be as One” and “Soothsayer,” his haunting trumpet lines billowing around the mix like smoke from a dying campfire.
STR4TASFEAR confidently sets out its goals and, as an extremely well-produced pastiche—absolutely no bad thing—pays loving tribute to an overlooked period of British music. But in bringing in younger guests who are less in debt to a specific vision of the past, STR4TA briefly transcend their roots, making a case for Brit funk as a musical genre that can still look to the future, rather than one mummified in the past. | 2022-11-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Brownswood | November 28, 2022 | 7 | 7c48a8f0-7004-4f0a-9c87-18d41a408485 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Public Image Ltd.'s second reunion album is solid not because of the songs, but because John Lydon is their singer. At their best, PiL construct sturdy grooves and momentum-building loops that Lydon sprays his voice all over like graffiti splattering a wall. | Public Image Ltd.'s second reunion album is solid not because of the songs, but because John Lydon is their singer. At their best, PiL construct sturdy grooves and momentum-building loops that Lydon sprays his voice all over like graffiti splattering a wall. | Public Image Ltd: What the World Needs Now... | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21058-what-the-world-needs-now/ | What the World Needs Now... | John Lydon doesn’t seem like the jealous type. But I like to imagine that when he relaunched Public Image Ltd. six years ago, he saw the extended careers of peers like Mark E. Smith or David Thomas—iconic singers who can make interesting music with pretty much anyone—and thought, "Shit, I can do that too." He’d likely snort at the suggestion, but whatever his motivation, the two latest PiL albums are similar to recent Fall and Pere Ubu efforts: They’re solid not because of the songs, but because of the singer.
What the World Needs Now… is an improvement on 2012’s This Is PiL primarily because Lydon’s vocal theatrics and calisthenics are even more entertaining this time. He rants, spits, croons, screams, gulps, and whispers, all with equal commitment. In the process he injects tension into even the most predictable music. And much of What the World Needs Now… is musically predictable, but not in a bad way. At their best, PiL—again like the Fall—construct sturdy grooves and momentum-building loops that Lydon sprays his voice all over like graffiti splattering a wall.
The moments when the music matches the intensity of Lydon’s singing are exhilarating. Fiery opener "Double Trouble" is so cartoonishly angry it sounds like a Sex Pistols parody, until you realize Lydon’s in on the joke (the lyrics recount a mundane argument with his wife over toilet repair). Even sharper is the delirious "Know Now", where it sounds like Lydon got dizzy trying to keep up. This synergy works on some mellower songs too, such as the shuffling "The One" and the soaring "Spice of Choice".
Other mid-tempo tunes on What the World Needs Now… don’t fare as well. The line between compelling repetition and tedious wheel-grinding is pretty thin for this group, and though Lydon always battles valiantly to breath life into flatter songs, he can’t save them all. Things never quite fall apart completely, though it does become tough to find a heartbeat inside the fuel-deprived "Big Blue Sky". It doesn’t help that the tune’s disengaging loops and arena-rock choruses last for over eight minutes.
Those kinds of struggles come during What the World Needs Now...'s second half, which makes the album feel a bit like a five-mile race run by a sprinter. Things end on a pointed note, though, as Lydon solves the riddle of his own album title: "What the world needs now/ Is another fuck off!" Anyone ensnared by Lydon’s past work will find enough here to hope he and PiL continue to seek those kinds of answers. | 2015-09-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-09-15T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Cargo / Red Eye | September 15, 2015 | 6.8 | 7c5384fa-de2c-46d9-966a-c9c8e8cf5e6e | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
The Kyoto-born, Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist uses his nonchalant flow and the sharp instincts he acquired playing saxophone as a kid to craft a dynamic, introspective jazz-rap debut. | The Kyoto-born, Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist uses his nonchalant flow and the sharp instincts he acquired playing saxophone as a kid to craft a dynamic, introspective jazz-rap debut. | Sen Morimoto: Cannonball! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sen-morimoto-cannonball/ | Cannonball! | The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Sen Morimoto started playing the saxophone when he was ten years old. It’s his proto-instrument, the one that shaped his core understanding of how music is made. On his dynamic jazz-rap debut album Cannonball!, he brings the instincts it taught him to every element of his music, delivering a swinging, adventurous experience on each of the record’s nine tracks.
Saxophonists are often capable of hopping from note to note faster than any of their jazz-band counterparts, which means that, at its best, their music is characterized by dynamism and velocity. Those who know how to handle the instrument take advantage of its pace to explore as much territory as possible over the course of any given composition. That approach is reflected in the phrasing of every instrument on Cannonball!—the keys, the drums, the synths—and, more generally, in its impressive breadth of tones, moods, and subjects. The record moves like a kite in steady wind, dipping, swaying, and wrinkling in unexpected and deeply satisfying directions.
Motion is a defining feature of Morimoto’s artistry: Born in Kyoto and raised in Massachusetts, he came into his own after moving to Chicago several years ago. Now, he’s an active participant in a Windy City scene that also includes the Pivot Gang rap collective and the singer KAINA, who is featured on Cannonball!, and he’s spoken openly about the way that artistic community has inspired him. While his raps are centered mostly on his own ideas and feelings, Morimoto’s impressive flow and nonchalant delivery contribute to the impression that he takes the music, but not himself, seriously.
“This Is Not,” the second track on Cannonball!, gives the album’s first indication of his musical and emotional range. It opens with staccato stabs of guitar and drums, paired with vague, restless lyrics that exude frustration. Then, about a minute and a half into the song, Morimoto has an outburst. “I thought everything was simple as sugar and water,” he sings, and suddenly his irritation with the world turns into irritation at his own naivety. In the aftermath of that line, the song transforms radically, until it’s bursting with sweet harmonies. The celerity and elegance with which the moods of his compositions shift is remarkable. The album’s final track, “People Watching,” opens joyously, with fleet-footed sax and chimes, then turns slow and pensive before launching into a jaunty melody. It’s a six-minute song, but all of those shifts take place within the first 21 seconds.
At his best moments, Morimoto’s speed and range is matched by lyrics that move easily from abstraction to specificity and from the personal to the observational, usually over drums that zip breathlessly along as if rolling down a hill. The title track transitions from pure imagery—“deep end, cannonball, shallow smile, evil moon”—to personal declarations: “I want to dance until I feel all right again.” Aside from KAINA, Cannonball! has only one credited feature, from rapper Reason Being, whose deft flow powers the terrific “Picture of a Painting”—a song that reimagines the “most photographed barn in the world” scene from DeLillo’s White Noise for the Instagram age. It’s one of the most pleasant pieces of music on the record, but as if to dilute that pleasant feeling, Morimoto’s lyrics are cutting: “Everyone’s so salty I think I can almost taste it.”
The artist’s sense of humor brings some levity to his sulkier declarations. On “This Is Not,” in the midst of declaring that “nobody can sit with me and no one can belittle me” he breaks to tell his listeners that “my keyboard is broken so this song is missing middle D.” But because his lyrics seem to emerge spontaneously, maybe even thoughtlessly, they sometimes provoke an eye roll, reaching for depth that isn’t really present. “When was the last intelligent conversation you had that didn’t have you lost?” he asks on “How It Is”—and his persona is so appealing, so breezy and light, that it takes a second to realize that this is a silly thing to say.
Rap-influenced jazz and jazz-influenced rap are, of course, everywhere these days; Morimoto’s music will surely sound familiar to fans of GoGo Penguin and BADBADNOTGOOD. But at this early stage of his career, his most direct predecessor is Ish Butler, whose group Digable Planets made jazz-rap songs in a stirring, thoughtful mode that Morimoto’s music most closely resembles. In a 2014 interview, speaking about his more recent project, Shabazz Palaces, Butler said that the duo’s music incorporated jazz in that they relied on “capturing instinct and improvisation and impulse and letting it stand.”
That improvisational approach helps to explain Morimoto’s occasional lyrical shortcomings, and also why they aren’t that irritating. He is young, and his music reflects that, bouncing with the earnest energy and romance of young bohemianism. Cannonball! sounds fresh every time you press play. It may be unpredictable, but most of its choices work out just fine. | 2018-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | 88rising / Sooper | May 19, 2018 | 7.7 | 7c5a83d3-8c2f-4739-89ec-8692258e9a38 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
Andrew Butler returns, sans DFA, sans Antony, and sans the rich sound of 1970s disco, with a record built on the principles of Chicago house circa 1987. | Andrew Butler returns, sans DFA, sans Antony, and sans the rich sound of 1970s disco, with a record built on the principles of Chicago house circa 1987. | Hercules and Love Affair: Blue Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15050-blue-songs/ | Blue Songs | Be warned, right off, that the Hercules and Love Affair on this album is not quite the same act as the group on 2008's Hercules and Love Affair. The band's songwriter, producer, and creative director, Andy Butler, remains in place, as does DJ/vocalist Kim Ann Foxman, but the others who lent their talents to the debut-- including singers Antony Hegarty and Nomi Ruiz, DFA producer Tim Goldsworthy, and !!! bassist Tyler Pope-- are replaced by a new team on a new label. Among the recruits are vocalists Aerea Negrot and Shaun Wright, and Bay Area producer Mark Pistel, whose previous credits include the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and industrial acts Meat Beat Manifesto and Consolidated.
So be it; HLA was always a producer's group, and besides, Butler's taking a distinctly different tack on this album. Where Hercules and Love Affair built on the lush, rich sound of 1970s disco, Blue Songs is much more a house record-- specifically, house as it was understood around 1987, when Chicago sounded like the center of the musical universe. Its strongest tracks aim right at that target. "My House", in particular, is both a convincing pastiche of the heyday of Marshall Jefferson and Frankie Knuckles and a commentary on it from a remove of 20 years. ("My house is in order," goes the hook; how did nobody manage to think of that pun at the time?)
As the album rolls on, though, Butler fails to recapture the chemistry he had with previous vocalists. Negrot and Wright are not quite anonymous, but lack the dynamic presence of previous contributors. While it's interesting to hear how his style works in a pop-house context, Kele Okereke of Bloc Party's guest appearance on "Step Up" falls flat, and the song's chorus ("Baby, you might just be like this/ Baby, this might be who you are") is hardly juicy enough to bring the track to life on its own. Nearly every dance track here still has something to recommend, like the mock-serious Grace Jones impression on "Answers Come in Dreams", or the swooping bass that introduces "Falling". "Visitor" distinctly recalls what Marshall Jefferson was doing when he went by the name Hercules on the 1986 single "7 Ways". But apart from "My House", nothing here feels like a complete package, and especially not the way "Blind", "Athene", "You Belong", and "Hercules Theme" did last time.
Two slower songs in the middle of the album nearly derail it. "Boy Blue" has the incantatory, repetitious tone of house, but it's arranged around acoustic guitar and woodwinds and outstays its welcome considerably. It's followed by an earnest chillout-room tune called "Blue Song", featuring Butler's own voice rather aggressively high in the mix. Butler has talked about wanting to demonstrate his "ability to write more than a four-to-the-floor dance track." The thing is, he's really good at writing four-to-the-floor dance tracks, and the other stuff is nowhere near as interesting.
Blue Songs closes with a meandering, beatless six-minute cover of another Jefferson production, Sterling Void's 1987 house single "It's All Right". That song was also covered, much more famously (and effectively), by Pet Shop Boys in 1989, which means that making it a part of this album album can't help but call up comparisons to the PSBs' version. (HLA also spell the song's title as "It's Alright", like the Boys.) Is Butler commenting on the relationship between house and pop music? Is he reclaiming house from some version of the mainstream? Is he just underscoring his own sources? It's hard to tell: So much of the album is straining to be more than just an homage to the club sounds of the late 80s that it ends up being a bit less. | 2011-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2011-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Moshi Moshi | January 31, 2011 | 6.6 | 7c5b2547-eeaf-438e-9c77-0d52501b5d4e | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
With regal harp strings, droning synths, and kinked guitar lines, the Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist’s full-length debut establishes her as a loose but imaginative composer. | With regal harp strings, droning synths, and kinked guitar lines, the Los Angeles multi-instrumentalist’s full-length debut establishes her as a loose but imaginative composer. | Nailah Hunter: Lovegaze | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nailah-hunter-lovegaze/ | Lovegaze | Nailah Hunter angles her compositions toward the spiritual realm. A pastor’s daughter, she once said that her upbringing left her with a “residue of Christian faith,” but her music draws more upon the tenets of astrology and mysticism. The Los Angeles-based artist was singing in choir when a harpist joined their performance one year; she was transfixed by the instrument’s ethereal tones and regal beauty (“Even in the way that it looks, the crown is pointed to the heavens,” she said in an interview with KEXP). As a harpist for sound baths and meditation sessions, Hunter’s relationship with the instrument has not only shaped the way she composes, but how she approaches the tedium of daily life; she is a firm believer that the frequencies emanating from the harp have healing properties.
Hunter’s six-song EP Spells, released in 2020, was written to conjure reflection and tranquility, twisting elements of ambient, experimental, and new age into gilded strands. For her debut full-length Lovegaze, the musician sketched out songs on a borrowed Celtic harp in a small city on the southern coast of England, later enlisting London producer Cicely Goulder to sharpen and shine their edges. Across the 40-minute album, Hunter emerges as a dexterous player and loose but imaginative composer. Rather than succumbing to the often corny tropes of new age music—mawkish melodies, pan flutes, chimes—she cleverly incorporates elements of contemporary R&B, pop, and jazz.
“Through the Din,” with its looped and layered vocals, circular beat, and icy synth tremors, recalls early Portishead, while Hunter’s falsetto glimmers through its moody ambiance, like headlights cutting through fog. Goulder fleshes out the song, supplying strangeness and complexity with a cascade of piano keys that ground Hunter’s skyward harp. Hunter could easily play it safe, swaddling the listener in major scales and good vibes, but Lovegaze suggests she’s interested in augmenting form and genre.
Hunter’s compositions are spacious and dynamic, fine-tuned with Goulder’s meticulous production choices. She handles every plucked harp string, every silken filament of Hunter’s voice, with the utmost delicacy. On the title track, Hunter and Goulder fuse baroque balladry with abstract jazz, smearing Hunter’s harp chords and stacked harmonies with reverb and letting crisp snare rhythms snap at the surface. The off-kilter details—kinked guitar lines, askew trills of alto flute—contrast Hunter’s willowy voice, accenting its elegance without overwhelming it.
Hunter is even more restrained on the album’s second half, which includes “Cloudbreath,” an iridescent, rippling instrumental of harp, flute, and synthesizer. The pared-back arrangement and production on pieces like “Bleed” and “Adorned” draws the ear to Hunter’s subtle yet evocative lyrics. On the latter, Hunter drapes her voice over droning, organ-like synths and sleek ribbons of saxophone. “Far from remorse/It’s the pain you adorn,” she sings. Her efficient phrasing positions psychic wounds as medals, or all-new limbs to tend to. Singing the line “pain you adorn” repeatedly, Hunter gestures at our compulsion to feed personal suffering with constant, damaging attention.
Dark little crevices, tucked into the calming expanses of Lovegaze, add a lyrical complexity that’s missing from the album’s first half. The finest example is the spare and intriguing “Into the Sun.” Part medieval dirge, part demented nursery rhyme, the song is stretched across a scaffolding of harp plucks and Hunter’s earthiest register. “I dream of beheadings/And goose feather bedding on fire,” she sings, climbing from a crackling low to a gauzy falsetto. “A sword through the eye/For an endless supply of beginnings.” The arcane, violent imagery bristles against Hunter’s sparkling strings, forging instant tension and intrigue. In these vivid passages, Hunter endures the pangs of change in order to transcend her pain, luminous and unburdened. | 2024-02-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Fat Possum | February 2, 2024 | 7.9 | 7c5be888-c312-40c2-b4af-16596f673a91 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Gracefully navigating the intersection of folk-rock and country, the gentle-voiced songwriter turns detailed images of domestic tranquility and promise into reflections on disappointment. | Gracefully navigating the intersection of folk-rock and country, the gentle-voiced songwriter turns detailed images of domestic tranquility and promise into reflections on disappointment. | Doug Paisley: Starter Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/doug-paisley-starter-home/ | Starter Home | For a decade, Canadian singer/songwriter Doug Paisley has turned quiet, specific moments into inquiries on life’s larger struggles. On his 2010 breakthrough, Constant Companion, Paisley used the inevitability of endings to explore understanding oneself, the only possible “constant companion.” For 2014’s Strong Feelings, he mulled death and its uneasy relationship with life, or how their juxtaposition ripples into every wave of existence. And now, on his fourth album, Starter Home, Paisley details the chasm that separates what poet Seamus Heaney described as “getting started” and “getting started again.” These songs examine how the person you are never truly aligns with the person you want to be, especially when you stumble upon a sticking point that’s hard to move past.
Paisley knows the subject well: As he told Exclaim, Starter Home required that he begin again (and again), ultimately recording at four different studios, including those of Cowboy Junkies’ Peter Moore and acclaimed folk musician Ken Whiteley. The results grace his earlier alt-country sound with softer folk touches, putting him in the realm of Kris Kristofferson or even Canadian predecessor Gordon Lightfoot. Paisley understands that personal lyrics don’t have to read like a diary excerpt—that specificity creates universality.
At the start, for instance, he details a young couple’s starter home. “Bring your dreams and your family,” he sings like the real estate sign out front reads, signaling the potential of this simple, scrappy beginning. “Maybe in time we should’ve moved on,” he offers during the closing verse, his voice dimming with quiet reflection. Michael Eckert’s pedal steel adds a wistful glow to the moment’s frayed introspection.
Paisley uses the language of physical space to communicate interior spaces. He stitches needlework scenes that sit uneasily in embroidery hoops—quaint on the surface, a shadow cast across the sides. Despite the jaunty country inflection of “Mister Wrong,” his voice darkens ever so slightly, his cadence quickening as he enumerates the ways he’s going to disappoint. “A home and family, vacation by the sea/On the Christmas tree, I’ll only let you down,” he sings, his voice gasping during “I’ll,” the confession giving him pause. Make enough promises, and more than a few will go broken. The sentiment arises, too, on “Waiting,” where Paisley resigns himself to a similar fate. Expectations can become chokeholds, so “This Loneliness” looks at them askance, as if the past were a mirror Paisley must confront reluctantly. Jennifer Castle adds stark backing harmonies here, her voice rounding out his. But there’s a note of hesitation in the way Paisley sings, an expression of his misgivings about what should have been.
In the poem “I Hear the Traffic,” Leonard Cohen writes, “Another day/To rise and fall/Make a buck/Start and stall.” He lets the final word hang, something to be overcome. If there’s a sense that stalling is fatalistic, Paisley overcomes it. “I look out my window, there’s so many ways it can go/There’s no way to know,” he sings at one point, repeating that last bit again and again, turning it over until it becomes a mantra with its own rhythm. Ultimately, that’s what stalling reveals, Paisley suggests: There’s no rhythm, no living, without the pause. | 2019-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | No Quarter | January 7, 2019 | 7.7 | 7c5e4a89-8c71-495b-98e0-0098f29b1296 | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
The California rapper takes stock of his life on an introspective album that balances melancholy and bliss over lush, sampled loops and opulent live-band instrumentation. | The California rapper takes stock of his life on an introspective album that balances melancholy and bliss over lush, sampled loops and opulent live-band instrumentation. | Maxo: Even God Has a Sense of Humor | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/maxo-even-god-has-a-sense-of-humor/ | Even God Has a Sense of Humor | During his last visit to New York City in the early days of the pandemic, California rapper Maxo decided to undergo an artistic process called lifecasting. The brainchild of conceptual artist John Ahearn, the casting is more intensive than your average portrait: Sitting in a recliner with breathing tubes up their nose, subjects are covered in a pasty, clay-like material made of alginate similar to the kind used when creating dental molds. The process requires 20 minutes of complete stillness; the sitter’s clothing is cut off, forming part of the structure of the cast. Maxo went through this three separate times, left alone with his thoughts as the alginate blotted out most of the light and sound around him. Afterward, he was left with three larger-than-life sculptures of himself: one in a football jersey with slicked-back cornrows and a long, weary face; one smiling in a white tank top and pulling a fitted baseball cap over his head; and one in his trademark flannel, arms crossed, face as stoic as a local landmark.
These three statues grace the cover of Even God Has a Sense of Humor, Maxo’s second album for Def Jam, and reflect the dueling senses of melancholy and bliss at the core of his music. As a rapper, Maxo is blunt and plainspoken, eschewing clever wordplay for storytelling and edifying clarity. LIL BIG MAN, his 2019 Def Jam debut, explored the uncertainty, excitement, and ennui of Black life in one’s early twenties. That record often evoked the self-reflection of flipping through a photo album: It focused largely on making sense of the past, Maxo too in his own head to fully contemplate the future. Now that he’s closer to 30, he’s sifting through the embers of his misfortunes while keeping the life he’s built for himself intact. “I’m just trying not to burn everything I touch,” he says at the end of “Free!”
Even God Has a Sense of Humor is powered by an urgency to make sense of the dizzying way time ebbs and flows. Dallas singer Liv.e’s hook on the serene “Both-Handed” epitomizes the album’s spirit: “What if the meaning don’t exist, babe... What if we/Never figure it out?” Maxo’s writing can hop from hyper-specific to vague, sharpening and blurring focus as he sees fit. Take early highlight “Nuri”: He briefly hovers over the memory of a trip to Senegal with his mother and ponders advice from a family friend before obliquely mentioning failed dreams and stacks of money. Whether he’s clear or hazy, his delivery carries the verses nearly as much as the words do. On “48,” over Madlib’s pristine loops of guitar crackle and drums, the way he raps “I’m tryna fly, it’s like feet to the floor” summons the image of Maxo with his chest puffed out, like his foot got stuck in a crack during liftoff. Later, on the brief interlude “FUCKZU,” Maxo croons softly to impart powerful messages with the electricity of whispered spells: “You got the power of a God/Nigga, fuck what they told you.”
As often as Maxo changes perspective and tone, his stories are uniformly gripping. The album’s thematic throughline finds redemption in all manner of tragedy—trauma, breakups, calls for racial injustice that go unanswered year after year. Songs are composites of vignettes tethered together and experienced all at once, as though Maxo were Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan. “Face of Stone” is a man-in-the-mirror moment in which Maxo calls himself out over his own emotional distance and begs himself to break bad habits. “Who Gives Me Breath” is a whirlwind of harrowing memories scattered across the pitched-down groove of producer lastnamedavid’s beat: time with an imprisoned family friend cut off by the jail phone; liquor “dark as my skin” swirling in a glass; comparing his gratefulness to be alive in the booth to pouring blood out on the floor. Whether blessed or in mourning, there isn’t a single moment on Even God Has a Sense of Humor that doesn’t feel like a matter of life and death.
Maxo’s growing worldview is matched by a suite of expansive beats that walk the line between the sample-based loops cherished by the modern rap underground and handsome live-band instrumentation. Arrangements from drummer Karriem Riggins and multi-instrumentalist Beat Butcha sit next to gossamer chops and loops from lastnamedavid and Mutant Academy member Graymatter. They run the gamut from traditional (“Who Gives Me Breath”) to psychedelic (“What 4”), and all flow smoothly into each other, thanks to executive producer Dom Maker, of Mount Kimbie. None of these beats seamlessly combine multiple styles in the way that redveil’s Learn 2 Swim or Oddisee’s To What End do, but putting soul, jazz, gospel, and rap in conversation with each other is a risk that pays off in a beautiful, understated way.
That the album never loses its footing is a testament to Maxo’s will as a rapper. In the nearly four years since LIL BIG MAN, he’s gone from being a wide-eyed but cynical everyman in the vein of Blu, unsure if he’d even make it to 24 years old, to a bulwark for his family and a leader of a flourishing rap scene. Life hasn’t gotten any easier, but his words have become sharper, cutting closer to the heart than ever. Even God Has a Sense of Humor doesn’t offer concrete answers to life, the universe, and everything. It’s the kind of music you make when you’re happy just to wake up to a life worth untangling. | 2023-02-28T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-28T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | February 28, 2023 | 8 | 7c6155c1-5b13-497d-8027-2e449b469468 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
The Puerto Rican duo moved back to the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria, and their joyful and melancholic new album takes stock of their changed home. | The Puerto Rican duo moved back to the island in the wake of Hurricane Maria, and their joyful and melancholic new album takes stock of their changed home. | Buscabulla: Regresa | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/buscabulla-regresa/ | Regresa | Home is a complex concept for Puerto Ricans. The island from which we hail is both part of the United States and not; as an unincorporated territory, its residents are citizens but can’t vote, can move freely between the island and the mainland yet are still seen as immigrants. Like many Puerto Ricans, Buscabulla’s Raquel Berrios and Luis Alfredo Del Valle left the island and made New York City their home, seeking opportunities otherwise unavailable to them. And they’re not alone; there are more Puerto Ricans in the greater New York area than in the capital of San Juan. But for everything that New York has to offer that Puerto Rico does not, there are parts of Puerto Rico that can’t be brought up north; the white sand of the beaches, the sounds of the jungle, the local traditions that stretch back centuries. For some, the only solution is to come home.
Berrios and Del Valle moved to New York City separately to pursue their dreams, met at a house show, formed a band (its name is Puerto Rican slang for “troublemaker”), and started a family. But while they made their lives in the city, their spirit never left Puerto Rico, and the first two Buscabulla EPs were colored with deep longing and existential displacements. “Frío este duele” (“this cold hurts”) Berrios sang on “Frío,” their collaboration with Helado Negro, from EP II, yearning to warm her blood under the sun of her hometown. Once a record deal gave them the cushion to make the leap, they left New York six months after Hurricane Maria had battered their home. As thousands of Puerto Ricans fled the ravaged island for the States, Berrios and Del Valle headed in the opposite direction, packing up their life and moving back with family in tow. Regresa is the story of that return.
But the home they returned to was not the one they had left, nor were they the same people who had once absconded north for creative pursuits. Many of their close family and friends had left or passed away, and vulture capitalists had already descended, seeking “economic opportunity.” The songs they wrote and recorded at their home studio in Aguadilla, a coastal town on the western side of the island, were joyful but melancholic. Regresa maintains their brand of tropical synth pop, but while their first records could be cheeky, poking fun at Latino machismo, this LP probes deeper questions of life and identity.
The first song they wrote after arriving in Puerto Rico was “Vámono,” an indignant march inspired by local marching bands as well as Beyoncé’s Coachella set. Its video features traditions from their respective hometowns: vejigante masks from Carnaval de Ponce (where Del Valle is from) and the Festival de Las Mascaras of Hatillo, from whence Berrios’ family hails. It expresses the urgency of their journey—“Viene vamonos que es tarde ya” (“Come on let’s go it’s already late”) Berrios sings—as well as the overwhelming terror of what’s next (“Quien me va ayudar?” or “Who will help me?”).
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, Berrio and Del Valle made much of the record in isolation, but they found ways to inject fresh energy. Patrick Wimberly (Chairlift, Solange, Blood Orange) mixed the album and contributed additional production, and Nick Hakim’s pre-COVID-19 visit to their home bore fruit in the form of several songs, including contributions on “El Aprieto,” English vocals on “Volta,” and a co-writing credit on “Mio,” a screed decrying the political and corporate influences that are turning the island into a tax haven for the one percent. An orchestral arrangement from Helado Negro’s Roberto Carlos Lange gives an otherworldly tint to “Club Tú y Yo,” a romantic ode Del Valle wrote for Berrios.
But it’s the contributions of the famed 71-year-old Puerto Rican actress and singer Nydia Caro that keep the album from veering into darkness. The song marks the shift from angst to acceptance: “Light comes after the greatest darkness/You can't see the stars if you don't have a dark night/Let the darkness be your impulse towards Light,” Caro murmurs. Buscabulla’s Puerto Rico may be a paradise lost, an oasis devastated by an apocalypse. But from the moment they returned, they’ve been picking up the pieces and rebuilding; their home, their community, and themselves. After years of yearning from 1600 miles away, they’re home, and they finally sound whole.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Ribbon Music | May 12, 2020 | 7.7 | 7c62d351-2acc-41b2-804a-8f5570f7429c | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
The Philadelphia band returns as a three-piece on a pandemic-era EP that introduces subtle shifts in sound and structure. It’s their first release that’s as tender as it is tough. | The Philadelphia band returns as a three-piece on a pandemic-era EP that introduces subtle shifts in sound and structure. It’s their first release that’s as tender as it is tough. | Mannequin Pussy: Perfect EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mannequin-pussy-perfect-ep/ | Perfect EP | When Mannequin Pussy released their excellent third record Patience in the summer of 2019, they were hardly prepared to take its title so literally. After years of slowly building a fanbase off the crackling energy of their first two albums, the Philadelphia punks had signed to a new label, Epitaph, and released their most clear-eyed, expansive record to date. Critics lauded it as their breakthrough; there were Coachella dates and a second round of touring set for 2020. But then, of course, their plans were put on hold.
For a band rooted in the mutual catharsis of screaming to a live audience, the idea of remote concerts seemed antithetical. “Livestreaming shows feels really fucking lame to me. I don’t want to do a performance for a computer,” frontwoman Missy Dabice said at the time. Instead, the band waited until summer to record a few sessions in person with Patience producer Will Yip (as well as founding member Thanasi Paul, who has since left the group). The resulting EP, Perfect, continues the sophistication of its immediate predecessor while introducing subtle shifts in sound and structure. Though capturing the full venom of Dabice’s screams required a proper studio, Perfect is the first Mannequin Pussy release that’s as tender as it is tough.
That range is most apparent on “Control,” a dialogue between id and ego that’s keenly aware of the balance between an explosive refrain and the tension of its build-up. It manifests not only in the contrast between Dabice’s quietest vocals and the crash of Kaleen Reading’s drums, but in lyrical content: Verses vacillate between reluctant acceptance of reality and the total entropy simmering beneath. The only real sense of control, Dabice suggests, is the freedom to lose it entirely.
Perfect makes brief yet ambitious departures from their previous sound, introducing bassist Colins “Bear” Regisford as a co-lead vocalist. Mannequin Pussy is undeniably a politically motivated band, but “Pigs Is Pigs,” written by Regisford about his outrage and fear of police violence as a Black man in America, marks the first explicitly political statement in their music. “It’s fucked!” he spits, his urgency palpable over charged guitar riffs. It’s a wholly new sound that already feels natural, reinforcing that this band is about energy and vehemence as much as Dabice’s pitched yelps.
Mannequin Pussy thrives on disrupting traditional hierarchies—it’s possible, their music argues, to be bloodthirsty one minute and crave intimacy the next, even to contain both feelings at once. But rather than attempt to marry these opposites in the span of a song, as on Patience, they play out in two different modes: On “Perfect,” a bratty, gnarled, “happy slut bad-bitch” ripper, Dabice demands to be called beautiful until the idea itself seems poisoned. It’s immediately followed by “To Lose You,” a bright jangle-pop anthem about missing a lover that reveals a far softer side. The contrasts play against each other without ever quite reaching the transcendence of synthesis, but still sum to a nuanced portrait.
In a first for the band, Perfect ends almost as quietly as it begins. If “Darling” sounds like a new direction, it derives its melancholy from the past: Dabice first wrote it five years ago, reworking it in the studio at the suggestion of the band. Yip programmed the drums, while Dabice added a layer of shimmering synths. Relaxing their posture as never before, they unspool into languid guitar and featherlight vocals. It’s like a lullaby after a nightmare, a weightless feat for notorious heavy hitters. After a year of unplanned hibernation, Mannequin Pussy have emerged less precious about their roots and eager to grow new branches.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misspelled the name of Colins Regisford, and incorrectly indicated that Thanasi Paul did not perform on Perfect. It has been updated.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-28T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Epitaph | May 28, 2021 | 7.2 | 7c69dc55-256d-40f3-b657-6bfd0baf8d4a | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The UK trio's first album since 2011 finds new life in the smooth surfaces of house music. | The UK trio's first album since 2011 finds new life in the smooth surfaces of house music. | Friendly Fires: Inflorescent | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/friendly-fires-inflorescent/ | Inflorescent | Friendly Fires debuted in 2008, in the long shadow of Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm and the shorter shade of the “Gossip Girl” soundtrack. They went on hiatus just three years later, exiting at precisely the moment when the band’s hazy blend of disco and effervescent funk was primed for a mainstream takeover (Walk the Moon, Mike Posner). They’ve spent the years since 2011’s Pala collaborating with a litany of pop producers who lean into the band’s more electronic tendencies—Disclosure, FaltyDL, Dusky. Inflorescent, then, is a bit of an inversion for the band: Rather than live-sounding danceable post-punk, they’ve found a new home in the smooth digital surfaces of house music.
The shift towards synths and strings doesn’t exactly come as a surprise—their last album was filled with drum machines and reverb-washed pianos to counterbalance every gritty bassline. And though frontman Ed Macfarlane has also tossed out the idea of a Friendly Fires piano house album, Inflorescent feels more indebted to French filter disco, from the syncopated loops that kick off the Disclosure-assisted “Heaven Let Me In” to the oscillating Bowie-esque guitars that open “Can’t Wait Forever.”
Perhaps because so much time has passed, it feels like a seamless progression; they sound lighter and more fleet-footed, and no less diverse than before. “Silhouettes,” with its “ba-ba-ba” refrain to its laser-like synths, recalls the ebullient jazz of Todd Terje, while “Lack of Love” evokes the chill of Balearic house. Nothing sounds unnatural, or too far from the band’s previous work, but the pretense of “rock” is out of the picture.
It can sometimes seem as though Friendly Fires are playing catch up for a post-EDM scene that largely sprung up in their absence. The cooing vocals and build-up/drop patterns grow a little tiring across the album despite their careful production, because they’re working in well-trodden territory in a post-Flume landscape. But there is a winning warmth to their music. Perhaps this is due to their dismal environs—“We need to have a miserable view to feel like we want to transport ourselves somewhere else,” Macfarlane recently said, contrasting the airiness of their music with their rainy hometown of St. Albans. Only someone who desperately wants to escape can make a fantasy sound this alluring, after all. And in the dog days of August, a cool jet of European house offers a welcome respite. | 2019-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Casablanca / Polydor | August 20, 2019 | 7 | 7c6df333-a74b-422f-a5ef-e178da9d5e2e | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Guitarist William Tyler returns backed by an all-star band that notably includes Wilco’s Glenn Kotche and Megafaun’s Phil Cook, summoning a wide range of moods and telling stories without vocals. | Guitarist William Tyler returns backed by an all-star band that notably includes Wilco’s Glenn Kotche and Megafaun’s Phil Cook, summoning a wide range of moods and telling stories without vocals. | William Tyler: Modern Country | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21916-modern-country/ | Modern Country | William Tyler is not a traditional storyteller. Having played guitar alongside some of Nashville’s most distinctive songwriters (Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner and Silver Jews’ David Berman), he has clearly learned a good deal from them about establishing his voice, structuring narratives, and building tension. But Tyler—whose solo albums are purely instrumental—works in a field all his own, composing increasingly intricate and immersive narratives with just his playing. Tyler referred to his 2013 Merge Records debut Impossible Truth as being a “’70s singer-songwriter record without vocals,” and he develops that vision even more fully on its follow-up, Modern Country. Backed by an all-star band that notably includes Wilco’s Glenn Kotche and Megafaun’s Phil Cook, Tyler is able to summon a wide range of moods, from plaintive pastoral folk to a particular kind of k**osmische American music that fuses Brad Cook’s spacey synths and Luke Schneider’s gorgeous pedal steel like a slow, steady breeze on a hot summer day.
Even with all the talent in the room, Tyler’s guitar remains front and center. In “Kingdom of Jones,” his close-mic’d fingerpicking is breathtaking. The clear, constant sound of his strings rattling and his hand sliding across the neck highlight just how intimately produced and carefully performed these songs are. While quieter moments like these feel like a natural progression from Tyler’s early solo guitar work, other songs demonstrate how complex his signature style has become. Of course, there are enough sprightly, rubbery guitar licks to remind you that this is a guy whose official website also functions as a carefully curated Grateful Dead video blog. Still, Tyler puts an emphasis on both words in the album title. The compressed, layered solos in the first half of “The Great Unwind” recall prime-era Mark McGuire, while its triumphant, chugging second half actually brings to mind prime-era Mark Knopfler. First single “Gone Clear,” meanwhile, is Tyler’s most dazzling composition yet: a six-minute stunner that plays like Jim O’Rourke’s *The Visitor *reimagined to soundtrack a ballet.
Tyler’s thematic inspirations are equally far-reaching. “Kingdom of Jones” is dedicated to the Mississippi county whose anti-slavery stance during the Civil War put them at odds with the rest of the Confederacy. The lilting, starry-eyed “Albion Moonlight” is named for the title character of Kenneth Patchen’s American classic The Journals of Albion Moonlight (a character who coincidently posits that “Man has been corrupted by his symbols” and that “Language has killed his animal”—arguments put into practice by the band's quiet, evocative performances). Like his holographic figure on the album cover, Tyler lets himself become a part of his surroundings throughout Modern Country, encouraging his listeners to explore for themselves.
“The cultural geography of this vanishing America is what I sense as a slow fade,” spoke Tyler’s disembodied voice in a trailer announcing the album’s release: the kind of grandiose mission statement that might seem over-the-top were it not coming from an artist whose music is so radiantly full of ideas. He continued, “*Modern Country *is a love letter to what we are losing in America– to what we’ve already lost.” The beauty of the album lies in the fact that Tyler is able to pay homage to these foundations not with bitterness or cynicism but with awe, appreciation, and even hope. | 2016-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Merge | June 2, 2016 | 8 | 7c6e9a91-7dc5-43fe-97a2-37ecd998c0ed | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Reissues of early recordings reveal a blistering, primordial version of Fucked Up, steeped in the tight-knit Toronto punk scene they called home. | Reissues of early recordings reveal a blistering, primordial version of Fucked Up, steeped in the tight-knit Toronto punk scene they called home. | Fucked Up: Epics in Minutes / Demo 7" | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fucked-up-epics-in-minutes-demo-7/ | Epics in Minutes / Demo 7" | There are two ways to listen to Epics in Minutes, Fucked Up’s newly reissued compilation of early recordings. You can approach it as a codex that hides the keys to the prog-punk maximalism the Toronto band would ultimately embrace on albums like 2008’s The Chemistry of Common Life and 2011’s David Comes to Life, or you can hear it as a no-frills collection of hardcore ass-beaters. That each method feels equally valid is a testament to what a killer band Fucked Up were from the moment they started playing together—even before they figured out exactly what kind of band they wanted to be.
The Epics in Minutes tracklisting draws on five recording sessions from 2002 and 2003, and this reissue bundles it with a 7" of ultra-raw material from an even earlier demo tape. The primordial version of Fucked Up that appears on these tracks is steeped in the tight-knit Toronto punk scene they called home. They shared members with hard-hitting, elemental hardcore bands like No Warning and Career Suicide, and the songs they were writing at the time fit comfortably alongside those of their peers. This Fucked Up is blistering and direct, without any superfluous flourishes adorning the pummeling drums, driving bass, tightly wound guitar, and Damian Abraham’s throat-shredding vocals. Within a few years, the counterintuitive pleasure of hearing Abraham’s jagged yawp clash with the band’s bright melodies would become a calling card for Fucked Up. Here, his singing just makes sense.
The song that best highlights the power of early Fucked Up is the ACAB anthem “Police,” still a pit-opening live staple nearly two decades after its release. It’s built around an onomatopoeic siren of a guitar riff, a subversive nod to the cops excoriated in its lyrics. Abraham recounts the litany of indignities he’s faced at the hands of the Toronto P.S.: “Sleeping on the bench, they punch me in the chest/Trying to get some sleep, they throw me in the Jeep.” It’s a righteously angry song, but it isn’t dour in execution. There’s a nervy energy to the band’s playing that makes all that piss-and-vinegar fury sound like a total blast. By the time the closing refrain hits (“I can’t stand the police in this fucking city”), everyone without a badge is screaming along.
“Police” is formally straightforward, but the way Mike Haliechuk and Josh Zucker’s guitar parts interlock and play off Sandy Miranda’s sturdy bass lines hints at the deeper, richer melodic vein the band would unearth on later releases. An even stronger hint comes in the form of “Baiting the Public,” which would appear in expanded form on the band’s first proper LP, 2006’s Hidden World. On Epics in Minutes, it’s a brawny diptych of infectiously catchy, sub-three minute hardcore songs, with perniciously sunny melodies underpinning its relentless forward momentum. In retrospect, it’s obvious that the band who put these songs on a 500-run 7" was destined for something grander.
You have to squint a lot harder to find the seeds of Fucked Up’s final form in the Demo 7". Its confrontationally lo-fi production obliterates any hidden melodic nuance, but it’s unmistakably still Fucked Up. Even more so than Epics in Minutes, it sounds like something you’d be impressed by halfway through an eight-band matinee, jotting a note in your phone to look it up afterward. That’s just as precious as the music that more readily suggests Fucked Up’s evolution. Before they were Polaris Prize winners and critical darlings, they were part of a scene, one band among many pouring their hearts into hardcore and hoping somebody would listen.
Buy: Rough Trade
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-24T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Metal | Get Better | January 24, 2022 | 7.3 | 7c6f0a36-c6b8-4016-896d-cc91d7d0ebd3 | Brad Sanders | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brad-sanders/ | |
On their final album, the Japanese psych rockers push beyond the horizons of their previous records. The songs are compact in comparison to their side-long odysseys, but they continually keep you guessing. | On their final album, the Japanese psych rockers push beyond the horizons of their previous records. The songs are compact in comparison to their side-long odysseys, but they continually keep you guessing. | Kikagaku Moyo: Kumoyo Island | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kikagaku-moyo-kumoyo-island/ | Kumoyo Island | Kumoyo Island is a full-circle moment for Kikagaku Moyo, but the circle continues to widen. Earlier this year, the long-haired Japanese psych-rock unit announced an indefinite hiatus to follow the release of the LP, their fifth and final album. They’ve accomplished a lot in their decade as a band, earning fans worldwide thanks to sprawling, spellbinding live performances with two guitars and a sitar, and launching a label, Guruguru Brain, to document a growing crop of Asian psych acts. Returning to the studio in Tokyo where they recorded their earliest material, Kikagaku Moyo were given an unrestricted time limit, and the quintet used this opportunity to venture outside of its already expansive comfort zones. The result is a farewell album that feels like both a reinvention and a culmination.
Kikagaku Moyo began in 2012 as the duo of drummer/vocalist Go Kurosawa and guitarist/vocalist Tomo Katsurada. While spending time in the U.S. during college studies, they attended their first DIY house shows, which contrasted strikingly with venues in Japan charging musicians $300 to perform a 30-minute set. This inspired them to write lyrics in an imaginary language of invented syllables in the attempt to make their music universal, as they played early gigs busking under cherry-blossom trees and outside of train stations. Go’s brother Ryu was asked to join after he returned from India to study the sitar, while bassist Kotsuguy was invited when they found him recording the sound of vending machines for his drone project. This fusion of classical training and playful experimentation is partly what makes the band stand out from legions of stylistically constrained, retro-cosplaying psych acts.
Recent releases have included Kikagaku Moyo’s 2018 album Masana Temples—a relatively mellow collection of songs produced by Portuguese jazz guitarist Bruno Pernadas—and 2021’s Deep Fried Grandeur, a live collaboration with Ryley Walker. Kumoyo Island stands out from both with its busy instrumental arrangements and newfound embrace of Japanese cultural traditions. Taking its name from a wafer sweet, opener “Monaka” augments min'yō folk music with slinky electric guitars. “Yayoi Iyayoi” is a rare song from the band with lyrics in Japanese, beginning as a gentle lullaby before switching into minimalist garage rock. Midway through, it changes once again, adding chiming percussion and airy gang vocals before the riffs soar into the stratosphere. These songs are compact in comparison to the band’s side-long odysseys, but they consistently keep you guessing at what’s coming next.
“Dancing Blue” is one of the funkiest jams Kikagaku Moyo have laid to tape, layering a chicken-scratch wah-wah riff over handclaps and chanted vocals. Unlike other songs on the album, it maintains a consistent mood across its six minutes, making for a nice contrast with the more complexly structured patchworks. “Cardboard Pile,” on the other hand, fades in with a heavy, Boredoms-style groove that sounds like it’s already been building for several minutes, then abandons it completely. The song’s second half cycles through Tuareg-like guitar riffs and regal blasts of brass inspired by the funk music that Kikagaku Moyo encountered during their trip to Lisbon to record Masana Temples. The horns are a natural addition to the band’s wanderlusting sound, and could provide thrilling hip-hop sample fodder in the hands of an adventurous beatmaker.
“Meu Mar” continues to blur the boundaries between cultures. Originally written by Brazil’s Erasmos Carlos, the song’s Portuguese lyrics were first translated into English, then to Japanese. No matter what language the band sings in, “Gomugomu” is a psychedelic pop wonder, shifting between key changes as it bobs down a lazy river of warbling riffs and wailing guitar harmonies. Other short songs like “Daydream Soda” and “Field of Tiger Lilies” feel more like interludes than proper compositions, but they provide a welcome respite from the furious riffage. “Maison Silk Road” sails the album to a blissful ambient conclusion, with heavenly piano chords and curlicues of sitar that circle back to the sound of the band’s 2013 debut.
Kikagaku Moyo’s name translates to “Geometric Patterns.” This came to founding member Go Kurosawa during an all-night jam session when he was so tired that he began seeing grids of shapes when he closed his eyes. It sounds psychedelic, but it’s also something of a misnomer in terms of the band’s unstructured approach, which entails never taking more than two takes for any given song. “Even if someone makes a mistake, that’s the real us and mistakes can sometimes turn into really interesting peculiarities,” Kurosawa has said. As one of the most consistently thrilling representatives of a global psych community, Kikagaku Moyo continue to make unpredictable choices, even on an album that didn’t need to be more than a celebratory victory lap. Kumoyo Island is the apex of their journey, introducing new musical territories while surveying just how far they’ve traveled. | 2022-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Guruguru Brain | May 9, 2022 | 7.8 | 7c788e24-a9b3-4519-ac6a-900a36933b6a | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
At their best, YACHT gave us Devo's wit, Blondie's grace, and Tom Tom Club's playful energy, all wrapped in a knowing grin and a clever concept. Four years since their last album, YACHT has changed. | At their best, YACHT gave us Devo's wit, Blondie's grace, and Tom Tom Club's playful energy, all wrapped in a knowing grin and a clever concept. Four years since their last album, YACHT has changed. | YACHT: I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21181-i-thought-the-future-would-be-cooler/ | I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler | Claire L. Evans is as fascinated by and enamored with ideas of "the future" as she is skeptical and critical of them. She's an ardent "science fiction apologist," a busy writer, an editor at VICE's science and tech journal Motherboard, and a co-creator of 5 Every Day, an app that provides users with "a no-nonsense events calendar and exploration engine" in and around Los Angeles. She's smart as hell, bursting with talent, and pretty damn cool, to put it plainly, someone you can't help but pay attention to when she speaks. Her Twitter is patently great.
Evans is also a member of YACHT, an erstwhile solo project started by Jonah Bechtolt in 2002. Over the course of two albums for James Murphy's DFA label, 2009's See Mystery Lights and 2011's Shangri-La, the pair shared vocal and songwriting duties, crafting disco-touched pop songs exploring cosmic anomalies, hallucinatory excursions, and utopian ideals. It never mattered much that the basis of their sound started as an homage to LCD Soundsystem—hell, even the music video to "Summer Song" was an homage—because their attitudes and charisma elevated the music. At their best, YACHT gave us Devo's wit, Blondie's grace, and Tom Tom Club's playful energy, all wrapped in a knowing grin and a clever concept.
Four years later, YACHT has changed, sort of. Evans, now the sole lead singer, is pictured alone on the cover of I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler, and the title makes clear that she now has something to say. It all seems promising on paper: Evans' credentials posit her as a strong, intelligent voice, and YACHT's punky dance-pop would ostensibly sit well within the latest '80s resurgence. And yet not quite.
For one, although her tone has shifted drastically, the music has remained as upbeat as ever, even goofy in places. At the beginning of I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler, Evans sings, "I only learned who I loved when I left them all in the past," and by its end she's shouting, "Give me entertainment! Death by entertainment!" It makes for a jarring match. When we're told of "mediated war zones and countries full of death" over breezy post-disco grooves and light Rhodes chords in "Matter", it's like a friend making an off-color joke over text—you're pretty sure they're being sarcastic, but it definitely didn't sound that way.
There is some solid songwriting on Future. The juxtaposition of bubblegum new wave and tender synth-pop in "Don't Be Rude" feels effortless and inventive, and "Miles & Miles" is a rousing throwback to those DFA albums. Bechtolt's co-production with Rob Kieswetter recalls Midnite Vultures electro-funk on "Hologram". But for every decent takeaway, we're confronted with "I Wanna Fuck You Til I'm Dead" or the spastic, vibe-killing chorus of "Ringtone", nonsensical amalgams that range from tactless to tone deaf to straight obnoxious. They're YACHT's uncanny valley: lifelike approximations of late-'90s power pop, early '00s Top 40, and blog-house mp3s that somehow aren't lifelike enough.
I Thought the Future Would Be Cooler has good intentions. As Evans told LA Mag, "The central thesis is not that we're disappointed that we were promised jet packs. It's more like, I don't care about jet packs if we still don’t have basic human rights." Songs comment on our increasing tech obsessions, societal violence and inequality, and future fatigue with effusive hooks, lending each decidedly familiar arrangement a fresh immediacy thanks to upgraded production values. Their messages, however, are in turns vague ruminations, condescending truisms, or just foregone conclusions for anyone with an interest in current events. Future is YACHT's would-be critique of our pre-dystopian, post-Internet culture, but it rarely comes off as more than a charismatic cover band singing us yesterday's news. | 2015-10-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-16T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Downtown | October 16, 2015 | 5 | 7c793b66-780c-40e1-85f3-aec4e1700299 | Patric Fallon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patric-fallon/ | null |
I Sell the Circus—Robert Pollard's restorative 15-song debut as Ricked Wicky—boasts a consistent, hi-fi spin on the beery arena rock that Pollard has spent the last 15 years alchemizing. | I Sell the Circus—Robert Pollard's restorative 15-song debut as Ricked Wicky—boasts a consistent, hi-fi spin on the beery arena rock that Pollard has spent the last 15 years alchemizing. | Ricked Wicky: I Sell the Circus | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20208-i-sell-the-circus/ | I Sell the Circus | Before Guided by Voices, before Boston Spaceships, before the Circus Devils, Go Back Snowball, Acid Ranch, Psycho & the Birds and all the rest, there was Ricked Wicky. Well, sort of; when a then-teenaged Robert Pollard dreamt up his very first band from his Dayton bedroom, the name Ricked Wicky shone down from the imaginary marquee. Through dozens of bands and hundreds of records, Pollard—whose inhuman output rarely leaves him holding much in his back pocket for very long—held onto Ricked Wicky. Why he'd resurrect it now—with Guided by Voices' second act retreating into the rearview—isn't hard to figure: though they managed six LPs in four years' time, you increasingly got the sense Pollard's famously overactive mind was starting to wander. So, after a few shaky years and far too many diminishing returns, Pollard's looking to cast off expectations, refocus his efforts, and get back to what got him here in the first place.
Ricked Wicky finds Pollard joined by a few familiars—right-hand man Todd Tobias and Earthquake Glue-era GBV drummer Kevin March—and one complete newcomer to the Pollard fold: Nick Mitchell, a Dayton guitarist who Pollard stresses is "no relation" to ex-GBV axeman Mitch. Nearly all of I Sell the Circus, Ricked Wicky's restorative 15-song debut, was laid down on analog tape at Dayton's Cyberteknics; the sound is clean, crisp, and most of all, consistent, a comparatively hi-fi spin through the beery arena rock, prog-addled balladry and post-R.E.M. jangle that Pollard's spent the last 15 years alchemizing into something all its own. I Sell the Circus isn't a particularly surprising record, but in Pollard's recent catalog, it's among the most satisfying: 15 would-be anthems and stumbling serenades, no muss, little fuss.
I Sell the Circus bounds out of the gate with a five-song stretch to rival that on any Pollard record of the last half-decade: the sunny "Well Suited", the strutting "Death Metal Kid", the spry jangle of "Guts", the champagne-on-an-empty-stomach stumble of "Cow Headed Moon", and the slick, swaggering "Piss Face". Delicately accented—a dab of pump organ here, a sliver of slide guitar there—and blithely catchy, this five-song run is post-millenial Pollard at his finest: nimble, lively, just mercurial enough.
While it starts off strong, Circus does get a little paunchy around the midsection."Uranus Flies" isn't much more than shits and giggles, while "Even Today and Tomorrow" only differentiates itself from the dime-a-dozen proggy Pollard ballads that pepper Pollard's every release only through Nick Mitchell's stately steel-string runs. Pollard passes the mic to Mitchell (who, God bless him, sounds for all the world like Bob Pollard just before) for the egghead-baiting "The Intellectual Types"; sure it's dumb, but it's just the right kind of dumb.
Pollard being Pollard, certain quirks are inevitable: throwaway lyrics, overstuffed tracks, underwritten hooks, flagging energies. But the overall impression one gets from Circus is that of engagement: Pollard clearly wants this thing to work, wants to find a few guys to play with who he doesn't feel held back by, and despite the occasional foible here and there, his dedication to Ricked Wicky's cause rings out throughout nearly all of I Sell the Circus. One regal instrumental ("Tomorrow"), another hall-of-mirrors ballad ("Rotten Backboards"), and several more-than-serviceable rockers later, and Circus goes out on a high—"A Real Stab", a stirring slab of straightahead power-pop that seems to gather strength as it charges towards the finish line.
Pollard could've kept GBV going: if nothing else, the money's probably better. Or he could've peeled off a few picture-perfect pop songs for any number of washed-up rockers without an idea between them, collected a few fat royalty checks, and spent the rest of his days holding court at home in Dayton. And he could've just as easily retreated into weirdness, content in the knowledge that the loyal servants of the Fading Captain would continue to lap up just about anything he had to offer. Instead, we get Ricked Wicky: recognizably him, but with what—after a few rocky years—feels like a renewed sense of purpose. If Circus isn't a front-to-back triumph, it's got enough juice in it to forgive the occasional misfire. Whether Ricked Wicky proves an ongoing Boston Spaceships-style reboot or just another nifty diversion remains to be seen; we'll know more in June, when their second album's due. For now, though, he's done teenage Bob proud. | 2015-02-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2015-02-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Guided by Voices Inc. / Fire | February 12, 2015 | 6.9 | 7c816160-4c2b-492c-af85-a26001febec1 | Paul Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-thompson/ | null |
Citing Gwen Stefani and Grimes as influences, the L.A. duo’s heartfelt take on bubblegum is a sensitive sort of bombastic pop that wants you to be sensitive, too. | Citing Gwen Stefani and Grimes as influences, the L.A. duo’s heartfelt take on bubblegum is a sensitive sort of bombastic pop that wants you to be sensitive, too. | Magdalena Bay: A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/magdalena-bay-a-little-rhythm-and-a-wicked-feeling-ep/ | A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling EP | Magdalena Bay take pity on bubblegum. From their L.A. apartment, bandmates Mica Tenenbaum and Matt Lewin create the kind of pop songs that, at first pass, appear destined for radios and stadium tours the world over. As influences, they cite not only Gwen Stefani and Britney Spears, but celebrity pop songwriter Julia Michaels and the elaborate, pop-inspired production of Grimes’ Art Angels. Over the past three years, they’ve released a string of EPs and singles that embrace the bratty, shimmery sound of ’00s pop radio hits. On their latest EP, A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling, the band’s DIY approach culminates in their most confident project to date, a sensitive sort of bombastic pop that wants you to be sensitive, too.
As bass-heavy as Charli XCX and as melodically minded as Carly Rae Jepsen, these songs are not unlike the hyperactive computer pop popularized by PC Music. What sets Magdalena Bay apart is the gentleness of their lyrics and spacious, mood-building production. “Airplane,” the EP’s balmiest moment, is about the pressure of the rat race: the craving for a hectic work week, the urge to “[bend] over backwards” as your “heart breaks.” Tenenbaum tries to detach, reassuring herself that “I’m breathing, I’m feeding my soul.” Such a sincere, thoughtful sentiment seems almost misplaced against the song’s irreverent synth fireworks, but the result is endearingly camp—the playful, theatrical sensibility that serves as a vehicle for genuine sensitivity. In the words of Susan Sontag, “Camp is a tender feeling.”
Of course, the duo’s source material is more ostentatious: Their favorite eras of ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s pop were defined by incandescent production and ridiculously earnest style choices. Magdalena Bay’s self-conscious, homegrown approach is less interested in imitating bubblegum pop than pushing the limits of its meaning. “How to Get Physical” calls back to Olivia Newton-John’s legendary ’80s banger, which Dua Lipa also mined for her recent single “Physical.” But where those songs demanded that we “get physical,” Tenenbaum is more coy, wondering “how to get physical when you’re not made for dancing.” The track itself is sugary and ecstatic, like diving into a vat of fruit punch—you can hear the liquid sloshing as she sings about “cheap wine taking over me.” It’s that pairing of campiness with attention to detail that prevents these songs from sounding like flat emulations of No Doubt circa 2002.
A Little Rhythm’s slick vocal hooks, glimmering synths, and final crescendos are the same tools Top 40 pop writers use to craft a hit—and the same conceits PC Music and its ilk aim to subvert—but here they’re used to different effect. “I feel your breathing in my bedroom when I’m by myself,” Tenenbaum murmurs on “Oh Hell,” against a backdrop of hovering synth and sticky 808 kicks. The lazy tempo, glittery flourishes, and washed-out, doubled vocals aren’t the stuff of mainstream radio. Magdalena Bay aren’t performing a simple genre flip, or attempting to appeal to the masses; they’re building something personal and seeing how big it can get. Rather than obscuring emotion, their manufactured sound invokes its own kind of nostalgic joy. A Little Rhythm and a Wicked Feeling is a reminder that exaggeration or artificiality don’t have to mean soullessness; pop music is supposed to be a loud, flashy monument to earnest, embarrassing emotion. Listen to it shamelessly, euphorically, with love in your heart. | 2020-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Luminelle | March 20, 2020 | 7.5 | 7c845014-8985-4fba-b361-d330ed2002fa | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
A split EP between the prepared-piano composer and the noise musician explores their shared affinity for sounds that balance beauty with unease. | A split EP between the prepared-piano composer and the noise musician explores their shared affinity for sounds that balance beauty with unease. | Prurient / Kelly Moran: Chain Reaction at Dusk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/prurient-kelly-moran-chain-reaction-at-dusk/ | Chain Reaction at Dusk | If all you had to go on was a passing familiarity with Kelly Moran’s delicate prepared-piano music, you might have scratched your head at her participation in Hospital Productions’ annual noise hoedown Hospital Fest, where she appeared in December 2018. The New York pianist and composer looked like an outlier on a bill that included the thrash-metal titans Power Trip, Japanese junk-metal noisemaker Linekraft, and Autoerotichrist, whose R. Mason ended his set covered in his own blood. But spend time with Moran’s 2018 album Ultraviolet and you might hear something extreme and uncompromising in its own way, its plucked strings and inky pools of electronics imbued with a prickly tension that remained stubbornly unresolved.
A similar spirit runs through Chain Reaction at Dusk, a split album between Moran and Hospital Productions proprietor Dominick Fernow, aka Prurient. The pair met in 2018 when both were booked to support Oneohtrix Point Never at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, bonding over a shared interest in drone and noise synthesis and the avant-garde piano compositions of John Cage and Erik Satie. This record, recorded in 2018, in advance of Fernow and Moran’s U.S. tour with Merzbow, demonstrates the artists’ clear affinity with one another. Both artists dig into the pulsating repetitions of systems music to strike a balance between contemplative beauty and anxious disquiet.
As on Ultraviolet, Moran’s side melds prepared piano with granular synthesis. Her three tracks often feel like an extension of the territory she explored on that album—particularly “Helix III,” which bumps the intensity of Ultraviolet’s “Helix” up a couple of notches with the addition of chiming synthesizer arpeggios. Moran’s pieces here often draw on the qualities of religious or spiritual music: “Hymn” commences with droning church organ before Moran mixes gentle piano progressions with flurries of shimmering struck notes. “Red Storm,” meanwhile, strikes a similarly numinous tone. In places it resembles a gleaming, hi-fi version of Laraaji’s hammered dulcimer music, or the brittle, trance-like improvisations of Michael O’Shea: music aligned with new-age tropes, but presented with a dark, ambiguous hue.
It’s tempting to think of Prurient’s side of Chain Reaction at Dusk as a response to Moran’s music, although given the ground Fernow has covered with his longest-running project, it’s difficult to say that for sure. The fiery extremity that often characterizes his work is largely absent, though this isn’t a complete curveball. Recorded using a bank of vintage analog synths and sequencers, its two tracks feel broadly in line with the music Fernow was making circa 2011’s Bermuda Drain, a fully realized album—albeit one that proved divisive among the noise-bro contingent of his fanbase—in which Fernow dug into melodic electronic music, inspired by the minimal techno he encountered while on tour in Europe.
“Tokyo Exorcist” echoes some of the religious connotations of Moran’s contributions, its liturgical synth bringing to mind kosmische explorers like Klaus Schulze or Tangerine Dream. It would probably work neatly as the soundtrack to a gory Italian giallo, and Fernow’s dour spoken-word interludes—and the occasional tolling of a distant bell—further contribute to the atmosphere of spooky disquiet. We get a little more of the classic Prurient sturm und drang on “Help if I May Ask,” which commences with a firehose of white noise that finally abates to reveal a canvas of pallid synths and cryptic vocal asides, layered until incoherent. Towards the track’s end, Fernow treats the faithful to some trademarked Prurient vocal pyrotechnics. But the music remains muted and atmospheric, and the effect is more starkly enticing because of it.
Split records often sit awkwardly in their respective artists’ discographies. But Chain Reaction at Dusk works because it feels like it was designed to form a coherent whole. Moran and Fernow may come from different worlds, but they are also adept at moving between them, and this record stands as a reminder that a shared sensibility often offers a more interesting meeting point than a space merely delineated by the strictures of genre.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Hospital | January 11, 2021 | 7.3 | 7c8481f3-87a4-4efb-9cec-2772cadae9e8 | Louis Pattison | https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/ | |
On his second full-length album, the guitarist and producer’s songs are engorged and confident, powered by deft performances and focused storytelling. | On his second full-length album, the guitarist and producer’s songs are engorged and confident, powered by deft performances and focused storytelling. | Steve Lacy: Gemini Rights | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-lacy-gemini-rights/ | Gemini Rights | Steve Lacy once called his commitment to DIY songwriting and production “the bare maximum.” The phrase—and the TED Talk it appeared in—championed humble tools like the jailbroken iPhone on which he recorded his 2017 solo debut as assets rather than limitations. If he could land a spot in the Internet’s lineup, score Grammy nominations, and book recording sessions with Solange and Ezra Koenig just from fiddling around in GarageBand—all as a teenager—why would he depend on professional studios and equipment to create? The motivational pitch struck a chord with aspiring musicians, but Lacy’s solo work had its limits.
Although his snippets, demos, and beat loops impressively melded rock, funk, and R&B into rich blends, the songs rarely amounted to more than appetizers. Lacy’s best and fullest works (Ravyn Lenae’s Crush EP, the Internet’s Hive Mind) tended to be collaborative, his cowriters and bandmates fleshing out his sprawling ideas. His second album, Gemini Rights, affirms the value of collaborators to the guitarist and producer’s process. These songs are engorged and confident, powered by deft performances and focused storytelling rather than raw talent.
Lacy reset his approach to recording to make the album. After he struggled to write using his tried-and-true phone and laptop setup, he found success working in studios alongside other artists and professional engineers. The change in venue and method shows at every level. Where lyrics often functioned as placeholders in his past music (see “Something something something” from “Basement Jack”), here they are rooted in experiences. Gemini Rights was inspired by Lacy breaking up with a boyfriend, and the songs mine the turbulence of that headspace even as Lacy sings of other lovers.
He sashays between relief, regret, longing, and resentment. “If you had to stunt your shining for your lover, dump that fucker,” he croons on “Static,” dour guitar and keyboard melodies gleaming in the background. On “Mercury” his voice swings from delicate, dolce murmurs to an impassioned Auto-Tuned singsong. “Oh, I know myself, my skin/Rolling stones don’t crawl back in,” he sings, his emotions as mixed as his metaphors. The writing doesn’t always succeed at being intimate, but it is at minimum expressive, a change likely attributable to the singer Fousheé, who is credited on half the songs.
Lacy foregrounds his voice more than he has previously, harmonizing with himself and his sisters on “Helmet,” dueting with Fousheé on “Sunshine,” and cooing in an airy falsetto on “Give You the World.” The falsetto is his shakiest and least personal instrument, skewing mechanical on “Amber” and “Cody Freestyle” in ways that pantomime big feelings rather than articulate them. Although he’s often compared to Prince and Stevie Wonder, Pharrell and Solange are more apt reference points—they also struggled to harness their voices early in their careers.
Lacy’s lower, more talky notes are fuller and more playful, complementing his fluid guitar work. Highlight “Bad Habit” pairs bright guitar riffs and funk synths with pleading vocals, Lacy voicing his shyness with a knockout earworm on the chorus. On “Helmet,” theatrical adlibs and a plump bassline fill an otherwise defeated moment with warmth. “I tried to play pretend (Oh-oh)/Tried not to see the end (Ah-ah)/But I couldn’t see you the way you saw me/Now I can feel the waste on me,” Lacy sings. He’s more interested in understanding the failed relationship than litigating it.
As Lacy zooms in on particular feelings and moments in his tales of modern heartbreak and courtship, he tends to sound detached and distant even when he speaks in first-person, and not in a dissociative way. There’s little tension or depth to the songwriting even when it flares with color, a longstanding shortcoming in his artful but often straightforward music. Gemini Rights does not set out to resolve that tendency, but the album turns toward the path. For the first time, Lacy’s virtuosity is in service of his vision rather than the extent of it. | 2022-07-20T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-20T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | July 20, 2022 | 7.1 | 7c86776d-87fe-47c7-a0d8-1403bb7ced5f | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
Jack Dangers ambles on in an almost hypnotic fashion through modern electronic music. | Jack Dangers ambles on in an almost hypnotic fashion through modern electronic music. | Meat Beat Manifesto: At the Center | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5196-at-the-center/ | At the Center | Meat Beat Manifesto main man Jack Dangers has made a career out of continually being at the forefront of electronic music. From his early industrial-tinged material with then-collaborator Johnny Stevens, to explorations of trip-hop, house, jungle, dub, and beyond, Dangers has never remained in one place for too long. At the Center, his first full length of all-new material since 2002's RUOK?, continues the evolution by combining his signature break-beats and samples with jazz provided by flutist Peter Gordon, drummer Dave King, and keyboardist Craig Taborn.
From start to finish, At the Center covers a wide range of moods. The disc begins with "Wild", a slow, slinking number that builds layers of breaking beats, flute, and organ. It slides almost seamlessly into "Flute Thang", which lives up to its name with extensive flute soloing over piano arpeggios and short guitar bursts. "Bohemian Grove" has a middle-eastern flair, with prominent sitar over string swells, while, "United Nations Etc. Etc" evokes Daft Punk with a muffled, bouncy bass line and twisting keyboard noodling. Finally, the disc's closer, "Granulation 1", is a creepy combination of haunting background surges and off-kilter piano, leaving the listener quite a distance from where he or she began.
The album ambles on in an almost hypnotic fashion, sidling from track to track, switching between purely instrumental tracks and ambient soundscapes with vocal samples. Two such tracks, "Want Ads One" and "Want Ads Two", feature a comical voice-over reading want ads from a newspaper over atmospheric noise. The combination of styles creates balance, and it keeps the listener from getting too comfortable with the disc as a whole. The bulk of the album is jazz-fused, however, and the musicians play off of each other superbly, never stealing the spotlight, but never coming off as tacked on either. For this record, at least, Meat Beat Manifesto sounds as much like a band as a single musician, something Dangers has never really done before.
The real strength of At the Center is just how contemporary it sounds. Dangers never succumbs to the temptation to phone it in, and he never relegates himself to simply giving in and playing generic pop music. For an artist to consistently push the envelope for over 15 years is a marvel, yet Meat Beat Manifesto can easily stand shoulder to shoulder with the current round of lap-top composers, most of whom are building off of his work in the first place. | 2005-09-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2005-09-14T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thirsty Ear | September 14, 2005 | 7.1 | 7c8d0699-38b2-448a-95c3-a5f5aae3a89a | Cory D. Byrom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cory-d. byrom/ | null |
A clearinghouse of pre-jailtime work, Weezy's latest album is neither a hint of what's to come nor a clear reminder of why we care so much in the first place. | A clearinghouse of pre-jailtime work, Weezy's latest album is neither a hint of what's to come nor a clear reminder of why we care so much in the first place. | Lil Wayne: I Am Not a Human Being | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14711-i-am-not-a-human-being/ | I Am Not a Human Being | Lil Wayne is not back. Not yet. As of this writing, he's due to be released from the Eric M. Taylor Center at Rikers Island on November 4. But even when he switches from inmate #02616544L to Dwayne Carter, free man, will he return as the world beater who stunned us with mixtapes like Dedication 2 and albums like Tha Carter III or will he continue to explore (um) riskier sonic territory á la Rebirth? And, considering his penchant toward exuberant rhymes and a lifestyle blissfully unaware of the word "no," will we ever see the same Wayne that stomped straight into the camera rapping "I'd rather be pushin' flowers than to be in the pen sharin' showers," in the "A Milli" video? On July 22, 2007, just hours before he would be caught with the .40 caliber pistol that would eventually land him in jail, I saw Wayne end a triumphant NYC show at the famed, fancy Beacon Theater by blaring Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" through the speakers. That night he was funny and dangerous and unpredictable. So: Even when Wayne ends his eight months of forced containment, will that Wayne really be back?
As we prepare to find out, we first get I Am Not a Human Being, an album's worth of material recorded before his jail stint and featuring some tracks originally intended for his proper return LP, Tha Carter IV. The record is supposed to act as a reminder of his existence and a precursor to his freedom. And, since it's a genuine hip-hop record with Wayne rapping most of the time, it helps to put his guitar-torturing, choke-throttling Rebirth incarnation to rest. I Am Not a Human Being is the latest in a long line of songs and videos Wayne has appeared on since entering Rikers on March 8; we've seen green-screened versions of him in clips with Eminem, along with his Young Money cohorts Drake and Nicki Minaj. These appearances are meant to show his resiliency and relevancy but oftentimes come off a little depressing-- since he's usually standing in front of an obviously phony and confined backdrop, the videos emphasize his absence more than anything else. I Am Not a Human Being draws a similarly conflicted response. He's there but he's not there.
We get Wayne spouting classic Weezy-isms-- explicit sex, cartoonish gunplay, and allusions to the intricacies of the digestive system abound-- over at-least-decent original beats, several of which attempt to replicate the space-snap wallop of his biggest hit, "Lollipop". But there's a lingering sense that the rapper is not in top gear; his flow is often slow and static, his wordplay lively yet less energized than what we're now used to. When he says, "I been fly so long I fell asleep on the fuckin' plane," or, "So far ahead of them, I feel outdated" in this context, the lines could be taken as a boasts or sighs. And while Wayne was presumably aware of his impending jail term during the recording of some of these tracks, you'd never know it. The most real-life anxiety shown is on the title Run-D.M.C.-style track, when he admits, "Still get a stomach ache every time I see cops." It's a far cry from his "A Milli" invincibility: "Tell the coppers: 'Hahahaha!'/ You can't get him, you can't stop him."
There is one distinct upshot. The finest three songs on I Am Not a Human Being all feature the man who has quickly become Wayne's best-ever counterpart, Drake. The two rappers' contrasting qualities-- Wayne is coarse and random and hoarse while Drake is smooth and exact and clear-- bring out surprising sides of each other. On the sweet-soul track "With You", the Pretty Toney-style beat and Drake's croon draw out Wayne at his most human. Meanwhile, the superhero-synth track "Right Above It" would seemingly fit well on an idealized Tha Carter IV with Drake rhyming breathless as Wayne handles the Auto-Hook. The two have teased at a full collaborative album and, considering the tracks here-- along with worthy past collaborations like "Miss Me" and "I'm Goin' In"-- it has the potential to be one of those rare dream projects that lives up to its promise.
Speaking of Drake, he had this to say about I Am Not a Human Being when talking to MTV recently: "I think it's just a lotta Wayne songs that... you know, it's just that pre-... it's that pre-... it's that stuff that people wanna hear-- but I think Carter IV is gonna be on another level." Not really a sticker-ready quote. His hesitation is justified-- this release has neither the conceptual, lasting power of Tha Carter III nor the inspired spontaneity of Wayne's best mixtapes. And since it was recorded before such a traumatic, life-changing event, it's likely to serve more as a clearinghouse than an indication of what's to come. In one of the more lucid moments in the must-see documentary The Carter, Wayne-- then 25-- looks into his crystal ball and says, "[When I'm] 28, 29 you'll be lookin' for a Lil Wayne album to be full of rap-- the best rap. Full of singin'-- the best songs, not the best singin'. Full of music. Not just whatever you look for now." Wayne has already done better versions of almost every song on I Am Not a Human Being, which was released on his 28th birthday last week. It's not exactly what we're looking for now. | 2010-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Cash Money / Universal Motown / Young Money Entertainment | October 5, 2010 | 6.7 | 7c901ac5-92cb-48d8-940f-f28f85f008bb | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
Issued suddenly through Bandcamp on New Year’s Day, the three-song Hyperion EP is a succinct, explosive encapsulation of the Brooklyn black metal band's evolution and progression during the last decade. This band keeps improving incrementally, avoiding major statements of reinvention or re-emergence in favor of doggedly refining what it is they’ve done from the very start. | Issued suddenly through Bandcamp on New Year’s Day, the three-song Hyperion EP is a succinct, explosive encapsulation of the Brooklyn black metal band's evolution and progression during the last decade. This band keeps improving incrementally, avoiding major statements of reinvention or re-emergence in favor of doggedly refining what it is they’ve done from the very start. | Krallice: Hyperion EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21422-hyperion-ep/ | Hyperion EP | In a Brooklyn metal scene that can sometimes seem too precious, drunk on high drama and revisionist approaches, Krallice have emerged as workaday heroes. In only eight years, they've issued five LPs, a single, and an EP of sometimes absurdly rich, long-form black metal. Krallice’s records have served as their manifestos, their music as their answer to every online "hipster metal" kerfuffle in which they’ve been unwillingly implicated.
This isolationist approach came into focus last July, when Krallice self-released the excellent and compact Ygg Huur online with no advance notice or industry assistance. Though the move felt logical after 2012’s independently issued Years Past Matter, Ygg Huur’s hype-free entry still felt like a statement about the ability of signal to transcend noise. The new Hyperion, actually recorded two years before Ygg Huur, supplies the exclamation mark for that thought. Issued suddenly through Bandcamp on New Year’s Day, the three-song follow-up is a succinct, explosive encapsulation of Krallice’s evolution and progression during the last decade. The EP format prevents the band’s trademark intricacy and density from ever crossing into exhaustion; from the feedback-laced beginning to, 24 minutes later, the celestial end, Hyperion always thrills.
Taken together, these three songs speak to vastly different approaches to the band’s black metal background. "Assuming Memory" recalls Krallice of yore, its 10-minute expanse sweeping from a ruminative opening to pirouetting solos to a soft-focus close that drifts into a shoegaze haze. The title track, on the other hand, mirrors the concision of Ygg Huur. Krallice ricochets between sets of complementary riffs and rhythms, as though trapped among the overclocked paddles of a pinball machine.
But it’s between these two bookends, during "The Guilt of Time," that Krallice hits a new compositional apex. It's so sly and subtle that it's easy to miss it. After about three minutes of rather conventional surges and stops, the band settles into a drift and lingers there before emerging above a sustained blast beat, Colin Marston and Mick Barr's guitars soaring above the rhythm section as though it were a ski jump. The guitars hold that position, locked inside a piercing little back-and-forth riff; meanwhile, Weinstein breaks his beat to pound out syncopated drum phrases that suggest warped snippets of military marches or maybe even a funk band. What sounds like a sustained, full-band blast beat, then, is actually a reinforced feint. This is a new level of hyperactivity for Krallice and one of the most thrilling, difficult two-minute clips of the band’s career. After you notice it, you have to hear it again and again, standing back to marvel at the sheer audacity of the moment.
A little less than three years passed between the release of Years Past Matter in 2012 and Ygg Huur last July. It was the longest break in Krallice’s career, as they’d issued at least an album every year (except 2010) since their self-titled debut. Now, though, they appear to be back on pace, and the consecutive successes of Ygg Huur and Hyperion reinforce what (aside from the songs themselves) has long been most admirable about Krallice. This band keeps improving incrementally, avoiding major statements of reinvention or re-emergence in favor of doggedly refining what it is they’ve done from the very start. Hyperion’s lyrics are loaded with references to astral objects, solar bodies, and mythological figures. But this is the work of a delightfully earthbound and centered band—part of a scene, sure, but apart from it, too, more focused on the work itself than the worry around it. | 2016-01-15T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-01-15T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Metal | self-released | January 15, 2016 | 8.3 | 7c939c1e-b431-4020-a030-8ecb1dd1b859 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The Kompakt proprietor releases the third volume in his flagship mix series, featuring tracks by Cortney Tidwell, Massive Attack, and more. | The Kompakt proprietor releases the third volume in his flagship mix series, featuring tracks by Cortney Tidwell, Massive Attack, and more. | Michael Mayer: Immer 3 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14425-immer-3/ | Immer 3 | It's only produced two previous chapters over the last eight years, but it wouldn't be a stretch to hold up the Immer series as a blueprint for the rushy, melodic, and morose brand of minimal that Michael Mayer and Kompakt have perfected over the last decade. Part of that is just simple math. Unless you count the minute shifts in Kompakt's aesthetic over the years as part of Mayer's creative legacy, the rangy German hasn't exactly been prolific. Sure, there was that memorable Fabric mix, the Speicher series of full-lengths and 12"s, the retrospectively unremarkable solo album Touch, the immediately underwhelming Superpitcher collab Supermayer, and other one-offs and quick-draws. But spread over 12 years, and for a guy who is still routinely held up as a genre figurehead, that's actually not so much.
Better to point to the more intangible things that Mayer developed and honed during that period: his taste, his tempo, his belief in techno as a more fluid, utilitarian, and lovelorn instrument. It's this underlying aesthetic that's informed his best work, his most inspired live sets, his most fruitful signings-- basically the dude's entire legacy-- and nowhere has that been more directly vocalized than in these mixes. They might not happen any more regularly than the World Cup, but it's hard not to feel like the Immers are Mayer's most personal works, the best distillates of everything he loves most.
So it's reassuring to know that Immer 3, still dutifully, almost stubbornly, works within the same parameters as its predecessors. Comprising an Ewan Pearson refit of Cortney Tidwell's possibly overplayed-by-now "Don't Let Stars Keep Us Tangled Up", Closer Musik's twerky "Departures", and the DJ Koze remix of Ben Watt's "Guinea Pig (Vocal Variation with Julia Biel)", Immer 3's opening trio is predictably slow to get off the ground. It isn't until the grinding chords and everything-but-the-kitchen-sink electro house of Tim Paris' wonderful "Edges of Corrosion" that the tempo moves into aerobic territory. Mayer standbys Smith N Hack and Poker Flat alum Raudive provide a stretch of lonely electro leading into the record's highlight: a Gui Boratto remix of Massive Attack's "Paradise Circus". Boasting Hope Sandoval on vocals, a sequence of perfectly interlocked rhythms and melodies, and some of the most desolate piano chords this side of Max Richter, "Paradise Circus" is basically Mayer catnip. It'd be beautiful anywhere, but in these surroundings, it feels especially potent.
Things get a bit lighter after that; Popnoname's "Hello Gorgeous" trades in early-80s synth-led quirk while Superpitcher's exclusive Charlotte Gainsbourg remix ("The Operation") marries her cold, Gallic pop sensibilities with his full-bodied production ethic to striking effect. The mix's other standout moment comes with Culoe de Song's "The Bright Forest", a lush bit of almost-downtempo that ratchets up the drama with syrupy strings and a meandering piano lead. Since the only signature piece missing by this point is some suspiciously earnest Europop, enter Kinky Justice's "New Day" to close things out.
There's an abundance of rhythmic texture and eddying female vocals and broody strings and disco accents, all of it wrapped up in a familiarly understated presentation that prizes atmosphere and accent above force and momentum. It's heady and subtle and stylish and worryingly comforting in that it doesn't sound massively different from anything Mayer was doing in 2002. In fact, by the brute force of his own persistence, he's managed to give this sound the sort of longevity-- and by extension validity-- that a lot of early-Kompakt skeptics never thought it would enjoy. Maybe it even explains the title: Immer means "always." | 2010-07-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2010-07-06T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Kompakt | July 6, 2010 | 7.8 | 7c9845e4-bf94-4141-a1ac-24862fecf73b | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
The smoky-voiced R&B multi-instrumentalist charts the ups and downs of a relationship with the help of guests like Jay Electronica and Floating Points. | The smoky-voiced R&B multi-instrumentalist charts the ups and downs of a relationship with the help of guests like Jay Electronica and Floating Points. | Rosie Lowe: YU | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rosie-lowe-yu/ | YU | The Leeds-based singer Rosie Lowe debuted in 2013 with “Right Thing,” a brooding R&B-soul hybrid that made the aftereffects of a breakup sound like being submerged in a sensory deprivation tank. Her atmospheric 2016 LP Control explored the emotional give-and-take of modern dating, and despite being cloistered by a few too many glazed, anonymous synths, there were quietly compelling songs (see: the body-image treatise “Woman”) to bear out Lowe’s songwriting finesse. For follow-up YU, Lowe improves on her formula by expanding her circle. Calling on a diverse group of collaborators ranging from Jay Electronica to Floating Points, she assembles a warm-blooded pop/soul/funk hybrid that charts the ups and downs of a relationship.
Lowe’s lyrics can sometimes scan as overly simplistic, as on the icily aimless “Valium,” but her songwriting blooms when she leans on more fantastical metaphors. Early highlight “Pharoah” struts on a swaggering bass line and a hypnotic organ sample from Pharoah Sanders’ 1977 “Memories of Edith Johnson,” while Lowe conjures Egyptian gods and goddesses: “My hair is Nu/My face is Ra/My eyes are Hathor/But worlds apart.” On the simmering “Mango,” she plays Eve seducing Adam, ratcheting up the double entendres: “I adore the selection you bring/It’s your platter that makes my tastebuds ring/…And I’ve been looking for some fruit for my tree.”
Her gravelly, soaring voice is supported by Lowe’s longtime producer Dave Okumu, who adds dynamic, rubbery synths that feel like HD upgrades of his work on Control. On the disorienting highlight “ITILY,” a sweeping synth line underpins Lowe's moony thoughts of an affair: “Don’t wanna come on strong but he has gone out/And he won’t be home for another three hours.” The warped effect mimics the head rush of forbidden romance, with the repetition of the one-line chorus (“I think I love you”) drilling in its obsessive side-effects.
YU’s guest features occasionally come across as half-baked. The pop-minded “The Way,” driven by a jaunty bass guitar, is a bright spot until Jay Electronica settles into a long-winded, tacked-on guest verse addled by clumsy references to UK landmarks as well as the groan-inducing couplet, “Show me the way like Glinda Good Witch/My heart’s so tired like BFGoodrich.” Elsewhere, she casts a who’s-who of singers to fill in as a Greek chorus to better effect: Jamies Woon and Lidell, Kwabs, and Jordan Rakei make up the head-spinning, processed backing vocals on “Birdsong,” which also features a skidding, Jai Paul-ian electric guitar.
YU comes to us via Paul Epworth’s Wolf Tone Records, which may account for its vague sense of boutique-y, almost-too-tasteful A&R-ing (Epworth has steered Adele and Florence and the Machine’s music to similarly refined ends). Yet Lowe’s sophomore album retains a distinct point of view, with her folkloric sensibility and forward-thinking production shining through despite some smoothed-over platitudes. Lowe is only growing as an artist, and YU heralds a bright future. | 2019-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-05-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Caroline International | May 7, 2019 | 7.1 | 7c9c274b-0fca-413b-84b7-22ba3d49a601 | Eric Torres | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/ | |
The posthumous ambient music of the mercurial genius featured on “S-Town” is a peek into the sounds of his quiet and fascinating life. | The posthumous ambient music of the mercurial genius featured on “S-Town” is a peek into the sounds of his quiet and fascinating life. | John B. McLemore: Witness Marks: The Works of John B. McLemore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-b-mclemore-witness-marks-the-works-of-john-b-mclemore/ | Witness Marks: The Works of John B. McLemore | Since its release on March 28, 2017, the podcast “S-Town” has been downloaded over 40-million times, a figure that suggests just how many people have heard about the John B. McLemore, the mercurial genius from Bibb County, Alabama. In 2012, shortly after McLemore first connected his computer to the internet, he contacted Brian Reed, a producer at the documentary radio show “This American Life” to investigate what he believed to be an alleged and covered-up murder in his hometown. The real story, as Reed and “S-Town” point out, was McLemore—a renowned antiquarian horologist (an old clock repairman), an architect of intricate hedge mazes, an amateur expert in climate science, and an eloquent autodidact. Reed detailed McLemore like a character ripped from the pages of a Southern Gothic novel but in the middle of reporting his story, John B. McLemore killed himself by ingesting his own tincture of potassium cyanide.
From an extensive Reddit fan community to a mountain of essays dissecting the ethical and aesthetic merits of the show, “S-Town” has produced its own cottage industry of errata and commentary in the year since its release. And perhaps the most unusual finding from McLemore’s life comes from the ambient musician and painter Tor Lundvall. Right around the time McLemore was in contact with Brian Reed, he was also emailing Lundvall to express admiration for his work and to ask him if he could upload a mix of Lundvall’s work (including his own remixes and original compositions) to YouTube.
Lundvall consented, and he and McLemore began a two-month-long exchange of emails and letters. One of the exchanges included five ambient pieces McLemore composed—using manipulated field recordings collected around his property along with synths, drums, and piano—in 2003. Lundvall only learned of McLemore’s death after “S-Town”’s release when he revisited the Youtube mix and saw commenters eulogizing McLemore. Since that discovery and after listening to “S-Town,” Lundvall and Dais have decided to make McLemore’s music public, and that collection, Witness Marks, provides a fascinating new way to understand the life of the most interesting man in podcasting history.
Witness Marks’ five pieces come with an important set of listening instructions: McLemore wrote that it “requires a nearly Isolated listening environment...It should be heard After Midnight, in the Late Fall of the year, and, not surprisingly, a Very Long Attention span is a Prerequisite.” Comprised of field recordings and instrumentation, the songs range from 55 seconds to over 22 minutes. Each composition is dark, sprawling, intricate, but rough, and almost DIY. The album’s first six minutes, on its opener “Clock Chimes in the Mist” is this hypnotic collage of clock chimes and the interlocking of gears—giving a listener a meaningful peak into the personal emotion behind McLemore’s craft as a horologist. Taking the song’s title almost literally, slowly a kind of sonic fog rolls over the sounds of the clock, creating this undeniably spooky feeling. But it all breaks, and a chintzy synth line, drum machine, mournful piano, and later rain sounds slither their way into the scene. The piece hangs together, but the sudden, almost random shift in the middle shows McLemore might’ve been still learning how to sew together a song, and the seams in many of these pieces are still showing.
McLemore did show real chops as a fledgling ambient musician. On the album’s second track, his cover of Lundvall’s 2001 song “Dark Spring,” he creates an evocative backdrop with the sound of a thick rainfall and swirling noise that is soothing and just a little screwy—like encountering a Irv Teibel new age field recording if it was passed through a funhouse mirror. The collection’s best song, “His Darker Paintings,” is both simple and inventive: It’s just a manipulation of recordings of dried seedpods being shaken like a rain stick, mixed with insect chirps and other environmental sounds. And right towards the end, those noises disappear and a creaky door opens, the sound looped over and over again, till the album ends, with the image and noise of a door left ajar being the last thing we encounter. It’s absolutely haunting.
Yet, even as I listened to the album over and over again, discovering new bits and pieces of sound each time, I kept feeling like looking at these songs on a purely musical level might be missing the point. The final lines from McLemore’s suicide note rang in my head each time I played Witness Marks: “Sometimes I just spent hours playing my records...Sometimes I sat in the dark and listened to the creaking of the old house,” he wrote. The album is the closest someone will get to hearing what McLemore heard on his farm—its field recordings of crickets, dog barks, clock machinery, and all the rest. As Ryan Martin, the co-founder of Dais notes, the album is attempting to “capture the universe” of McLemore’s home, and listening to Witness Marks, it’s hard to say he does not succeed.
In a way, Witness Marks is as tricky to critique as “S-Town”: As a personal work that might never have been intended to be consumed by a public audience. If we take the music for what is—without all its baggage—it is the work of an incredibly skilled amateur who showed great potential. But it is impossible to look at the work in a vacuum. As another accessory to “S-Town,” it gives the podcast’s giant audience a new way to understand McLemore. From that angle, like the show, it feels beautiful and painful all at once to listen to even one minute Witness Marks. | 2018-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Dais | February 26, 2018 | 6.8 | 7ca14c9b-fe61-4309-bc9c-b0315b480dd8 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | |
The Australian producer trades the moody house of his breakout hit, “Winona,” for big-room techno suggestive of the kinds of clubs he has gotten used to playing in recent years. | The Australian producer trades the moody house of his breakout hit, “Winona,” for big-room techno suggestive of the kinds of clubs he has gotten used to playing in recent years. | DJ Boring: Like Water | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-boring-like-water/ | Like Water | In the fall of 2016, YouTube tastemaker Slav posted a video of a track by someone called DJ Boring. It quickly went viral; currently, it has more than six million views. With its soft pads and acid glow, “Winona” is moody and midtempo, with an undeniable if familiar vibe—maybe undeniable because of its familiarity. Some tracks become instant classics because you’re not sure if you’ve heard it before, or want to hear it again, or both—so you rewind. “Winona” became a standard in the “lo-fi house” scene, which took up the expressive techno of Larry Heard sort of how Boards of Canada took up the eerie crispness of RZA. It stood out not only because of its emotional efficiency, but also its star: a teenaged Winona Ryder, beloved once again after her magnificent performance in the first season of Stranger Things. In a sample from a TV interview, she says: “It is difficult to be judged… I remember one casting director… who stopped me and said: You are not pretty enough to be an actress. You have to find something else that you want to do.” When heard on a bedroom laptop, her words sounded like a welcome call-out of misogyny. When heard at, say, 5 a.m. while rolling on a dark, crowded dancefloor, they could feel like falling into Narcissus’ pool, but also a call to change, somehow. The ambivalence is as affecting as the 909 groove.
Since releasing the track on DJ Haus’ E-Beamz label, DJ Boring, also known as the Australian-born, London-based Tristan Hallis, has put out increasingly direct dance music on Shall Not Fade sublabel Lost Palms and his own Vienna. His new Like Water arrives on Ninja Tune’s vital Technicolor imprint, joining the ranks of club faves like Peggy Gou, Octo Octa, and Hieroglyphic Being. Its four tracks sound like the big rooms Hallis was playing in before all the rooms closed; the songs were engineered for the eye-popping A/V set he created with New York-based visual artist Amir Jahabin. If his previous work played with sentiment, this EP is pure sensation.
Like “Winona,” the opening title track features vocals, but here it’s just a gurgling voice repeating, “Like water.” Is it a metaphor? The sound palette is pretty wet, with drippy percussive hits and a flowing melody. Or is it a command? It’s banging enough to work as a set crescendo, that moment after which your pals stumble to the bar for refreshment. (It’s definitely a moment when combined with Jahabin’s video, which swaps the neon colors of rave-standard fractals for pastels, the geometric forms for sleeves of French fries, and the clichéd trains-and-tunnels content for a deeply strange road trip starring grinning risographic blobs.)
“Another Day” is even splashier, with echoes of the early swing of Herbert, the swagger of Cajmere, and the teeth-grinding brightness of Orbital. Indeed, Boring’s current sound as heard on the EP carries the torch for those torch-spectacled brothers, among the first to move techno from the club to the stadium, for better and worse. “Stockholm Syndrome” might convince the EDM hordes to stop selfie-ing and dance, but given the possible collapse of festival culture, it may never get the chance. Whatever. It starts out dewy, a kind of dubby techno that gradually solidifies into bright Chicago house, as if dried by the sun—the sound of brighter days ahead.
The EP’s highlight is its closer, “Seems Like Yesterday,” whose nostalgic title fits in with its sound, an assemblage of blasts from the past: Depeche Mode’s pop-concrete samples of hammers and sticks, and the happy-sad rush of Eurodisco, for sure. But mostly, well, trance. While Lorenzo Senni has occupied himself deconstructing it for Warp, and Boring’s labelmate Octo Octa, along with Eris Drew, propose it as a pleasure principle, on “Seems Like Yesterday” Boring refreshes trance’s potential for high-speed romance. Its “yesterday” is the millennial poise of DJ Sasha, whose epic “Xpander” is a kind of template. Boring repeats a simple melody for seven minutes or so, but it widens and grows. Halfway through, a shivering synth crystallizes a hook. If “Winona” was a teenage crush, “Seems Like Yesterday” is young love in all its stupid glory. Its heart is on its sleeve, in its synths. Gloriously, there’s no difficulty in it at all.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Technicolour | June 13, 2020 | 7.2 | 7ca2d180-f2ee-4304-bdd0-0cb4bc85ce68 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
The Bay Area producer’s debut—an unconventional blend of footwork, IDM, ambient, and bass music—is lively, dynamic, and above all, original. | The Bay Area producer’s debut—an unconventional blend of footwork, IDM, ambient, and bass music—is lively, dynamic, and above all, original. | Xyla: Ways | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/xyla-ways/ | Ways | When, toward the beginning of 2020, Xyla began crafting the tracks that would become her debut album, she was in what she has described as a “vulnerable” place. After six years in San Francisco, where she had moved from Houston to study French horn at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, she had spent a few months in Berlin, soaking up the city’s electronic-music scene. It was a heady time: She clubbed by night and made music by day, gathering inspiration from the unfamiliar city around her. But upon her return to the Bay Area, her spirits came crashing down. She was jobless and mourning the loss of close friends. The fog was thick, the air cold, her outlook bleak. “I was kind of alone and depressed and I’d wake up and all I would do was produce,” she told KQED. “It was the only thing I had the energy to do.”
The remarkable thing about Xyla’s debut album, Ways, is that it doesn’t sound like the product of depression. An unconventional blend of footwork, IDM, ambient, and UK bass, it is lively, dynamic, and above all, original. These are familiar influences, but she has put them together in unusual ways. Ways often feels like a tug of war between competing impulses, chief among them rhythm and atmosphere. The album opens with a characteristic touch of subtle drama: Synths flicker like fluorescent tubes, teasing the promise of imminent action. Instead, they disappear into rising aquamarine chords over the course of the first minute, and the rhythm seems to dissolve. But this moment of stillness is her second fake-out in quick succession: she quickly slams home a crackling, electro-inspired machine beat. It’s exhilarating and soothing in equal measure.
A similar sense of balance distinguishes virtually everything here. “Feel” begins with another UK-influenced groove, crisp and swinging, then relaxes into billowing synth pads while hints of processed voices flit about the edges. “Now” plays a snippet of sampled vocals off pinwheeling arpeggios and an undulating acid line; it feels like a club track where all the hard surfaces and sharp edges have been swapped out for soft, cottony shapes.
The album reaches its emotional peak with the jazz-sampling “Narcissus.” Hi-hats tap like nervous fingers drumming on the kitchen table, and the way the beat stops and starts reinforces a curious mood that’s both ruminative and distracted. Her arrangement captures a curious heart-in-mouth feeling—not quite a fight-or-flight instinct, but a sense that something needs to change, if only the exit strategy would reveal itself. Then, after a few seconds of silence, it does just that: Her drum programming straightens out and plunges ahead, haloed by gentle chimes.
It’s tricks like this that make Ways feel like more than just a smartly produced stylistic hybrid. She makes particularly good use of the double-time cadences of footwork, drum’n’bass, and UK bass: Oscillating between slow passages and fast, her tracks seem to gather strength and then sprint forward, only to fall back into reflective repose. The music’s bright harmonies and airy dimensions suggest cautious optimism, cool fortitude. However low Xyla may have felt while making the album, each of these tracks feels like a signpost to a better place.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Leaving | December 11, 2020 | 7.7 | 7ca32c1b-1c62-4783-98a6-6fee75429103 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Spanning glam, soul, country, and '70s AM rock, the latest from the indie pop group is a deceptively wry, wickedly tuneful testament to the fragile beauty of faith, in deities as well as in pop. | Spanning glam, soul, country, and '70s AM rock, the latest from the indie pop group is a deceptively wry, wickedly tuneful testament to the fragile beauty of faith, in deities as well as in pop. | Belle and Sebastian: The Life Pursuit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/639-the-life-pursuit/ | The Life Pursuit | Every religion began as a cult. In their early years, Belle and Sebastian possessed near-totemic powers for their small but impassioned band of disciples, as fervent as the followers of similarly wistful, self-deprecating, and sometimes sexually conflicted artists like the Smiths, Felt, and Orange Juice a decade prior. The common sacrament was pop, with true believers bearing witness in their communal alienation, badges, battered cassettes, and fanclub memberships. The Scottish group only heightened that devotion by shrouding themselves in mystery-- not answering questions, not appearing in proper photographs, not available in stores.
On sixth proper album The Life Pursuit, Belle and Sebastian want to teach the world to sing, in however imperfect harmony. Where the recent live re-recording of 1996's If You're Feeling Sinister draped their most appealing songs in apposite finery, the band's latest extends their newfound confidence to content as well as delivery, and stands as the finest full-length by Stuart Murdoch and his shifting collaborators since that distant pinnacle. About his early-90s recovery from chronic fatigue, Murdoch told a recent interviewer, "Spirituality and songwriting were my crutches." Spanning glam, soul, country, and 70s AM rock, this record is a deceptively wry, wickedly tuneful testament to the fragile beauty of faith, in deities as well as in pop.
Belle and Sebastian seem to have found new life in their evolution from shy bedsit savants to showy pop adepts. The Life Pursuit's lavishness renders the burgeoning bubblegum of 2003's Trevor Horn-produced Dear Catastrophe Waitress merely transitional, rewarding the Job-like righteous after the trials of the band's mid-career disappointments. Recorded in Los Angeles with Tony Hoffer, who oversaw Beck's divisive Midnite Vultures, the album runs over with flute, horns, call-and-response vocals, and even a funky clavinet (on soul survivor "Song for Sunshine"). The playing, meanwhile, is surprisingly chopsy, down to the breezy guitars and Hammond organs-- a far cry from the days when indie meant never having to say you tried.
Faith, after all, takes work, and if in one sense The Life Pursuit is about belief in the redemptive power of music, it's also a manifestation thereof. On opener "Act of the Apostle, Part One", a girl with a seriously ill mother imagines an escape, plays the Cat Stevens hymn "Morning Has Broken", and contemplates an endless melody before stumbling upon the album's central question: "What would I do to believe?" Ostinato bass, splashy piano, and Sarah Martin's gentle harmonies point the way. Toward the end of the album's loose storyline, on "For the Price of a Cup of Tea", the heroine seeks solace in "soul black vinyl," as Murdoch channels an irrepressible Bee Gees falsetto.
In between the opener and "Act of the Apostle, Part Two", nine tracks later, The Life Pursuit sets aside the nascent narrative to offer several of Belle and Sebastian's catchiest pop songs yet. "The Blues Are Still Blue" and "White Collar Boy" both incorporate glossy T. Rex boogie, Murdoch delivering one of his most indelible hooks on the former and uttering an uncharacteristically soulful "huh!" on the latter. Early mp3 preview "Another Sunny Day" sounds more like earlier Belle and Sebastian, setting country/western guitar licks to a sunny but sad love song that ambles past soccer, midges, Eskimos, and haunted hearts. First single "Funny Little Frog" slyly relates a love that turns out to be from afar, tellingly comparing the feeling to a sound from the narrator's "thro-at." Sharing its efficient Motown guitar style is the lone Stevie Jackson contribution, "To Be Myself Completely", which happily holds its own, observing, "To be myself completely/ I've just got to let you down."
Still, there's little to fault about this album's songcraft, and Murdoch is also at his best detailing some of his famously quirky characters. "Sukie in the Graveyard" makes room for a pristine guitar solo, organs, and horns in a loose, animated tale of a runaway. On melancholic centerpiece "Dress Up in You", Murdoch at first seems to be describing an encounter with a groupie, but ultimately is revealed to be singing from the point of view of a woman to a former rival-turned-star.
Of course, the album also wrestles with the struggle to have faith in God. To be sure, Murdoch's Christian beliefs have been central to his songs since long before you could say "Sufjan." The religious references here have more in common on their face with the Godspell gab of Waitress's "If You Find Yourself Caught in Love" than the sardonically wrought church scenes of "The State That I Am In" or "If You're Feeling Sinister". Amid atypically fancy guitarwork and Martin's breathless scat on "We Are the Sleepyheads", Murdoch recalls, "We talked about the things we read in Luke and John." With the feel of Paul McCartney doing Tin Pan Alley, "Act of the Apostles, Part Two" finds Murdoch returning to the girl from the introduction. "The bible's my tool/ There's no mention of school," he sighs, then merges the album's twin motifs: "My Damascan Road's my transistor radio." Converted to pop, she was converted to Jesus.
Though the music may be even shinier and happier than on Waitress, the girl's religious impulses don't resolve themselves nearly so blithely. Midway through "Part Two", the album climaxes when she determines to find "the face behind the voice": Synths flutter like stomach butterflies as the melody from "Part One" returns and the young protagonist attempts to attend a church service, only to be told to "bugger off." Next she places her hopes in music alone, spending the night with a man who makes her "the village joke." Closer "Mornington Crescent"-- named for a London Underground stop and a laughably complex strategy game-- sketches a final fall from grace, giving itself to sin and countrified guitars out of "Wild Horses".
Only a few bands have managed to successfully reinvent themselves a half-dozen or so albums into their careers. Granted, Murdoch's is a very different group today than the one that caught the ears and hearts of pop-music zealots a decade ago, with different members and a newly unrestrained sound. "Make a new cult every day," Murdoch once sang, but of course, Heaven's Gate and Waco compounds aren't for everyone. The Life Pursuit is a baroque pop cathedral, welcoming the faithful and newly converted alike. | 2006-02-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2006-02-05T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Matador | February 5, 2006 | 8.5 | 7ca96995-5a9b-4ea0-b19d-555f9ffebeb8 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The Swedish folkie's third album is the first to feature multi-tracking. He's still driven by his wandering spirit, but these songs have the feel of someone exploring a nature trail in his own backyard. | The Swedish folkie's third album is the first to feature multi-tracking. He's still driven by his wandering spirit, but these songs have the feel of someone exploring a nature trail in his own backyard. | The Tallest Man on Earth: There's No Leaving Now | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16711-theres-no-leaving-now/ | There's No Leaving Now | Around the time he put out his sparse and arresting second album, 2010's The Wild Hunt, Swedish singer-songwriter Kristian Matsson also released a cover of "Graceland". Matsson's music as the Tallest Man on Earth gives off an uncanny, hard-to-place air, caught between his native surroundings and the American folk he reveres. But to hear him tackle that familiar melody put some of the strange and hard-to-pin-down appeal of his music into focus. Rough, loud, and unabashedly nasal, Matsson's voice sounded like it was stripping off the song's varnish and hewing each line into something jagged enough to impale you in the heart.
The best songs on The Wild Hunt, like the rollicking strum of "King of Spain" and the wistful piano ballad "Kids on the Run", had that same directness of melody and threatened just as many splinters. Like so many folkies before him, Matsson assumed the role of the wandering troubadour ("I live until the call, and I plan to be forgotten when I've gone," he declared with early-Dylan aplomb on the title track), and his songs, in contrast to folk tradition, didn't so much conjure a distinct sense of time or place as they did a general feeling of restlessness and ever-forward movement. Keeping with the music's sage simplicity, the loneliness of the bare, echoing instrumentation felt decidedly practical: How can you assemble a reliable backing band when you're sleeping under a different tree every night?
It's clear from the title of Matsson's latest, There's No Leaving Now, that things are a little different this time around: He's putting down his roots. Recorded mostly at home over a leisurely five-month stretch, Leaving is more diffuse and relaxed than his earlier albums. It's also his first foray into multi-tracking: He's added woodwinds, drums, and additional fingerpicked guitars to the mix, giving his songs a fuller sound, albeit one that's still characteristically ragged. The intimacy of tracks like "Revelation Blues" and "To Just Grow Away" forgo the urgency of Dylan and Woody Guthrie channeled on The Wild Hunt for a gentle, pastoral domesticity that sounds closer to Arthur Russell in acoustic mode. Though lyrically still driven by Matsson's wandering spirit and kinship with nature, There's No Leaving Now is an adventure close to home, the sound of someone exploring a nature trail in his own backyard.
Still, the most somber and impassioned songs are the ones that stand out. The title track is a wrenching ballad in the vein of "Kids on the Run", while "Bright Lanterns" shakes an angry fist at nature's indifference to even the tallest of men ("Damn, you always treat me like a stranger, mountain"). The simple, affecting "Little Brother" features the album's strongest vocals, and it derives its power from its lyrical clarity ("Why are you drinking again, little brother/ When your rambling's the hardest part of loving you?"), a quality often absent from Matsson's songwriting. His lyrics can feel like a knotty tangle of ambiguous nature imagery and trail wisdom when you take the time to pick them apart. When he sings, "But the lesson is vague and the lightning shows a deer with her mind on the moor/ And now something with the sun is just different since they shook the earth in 1904," he loses the thread, fittingly, somewhere around "The lesson is vague."
That was true of the lyrics on The Wild Hunt, too, but it was harder to be bothered by their lack of specificity when they were lobbed at you with such urgency. There's No Leaving Now dials everything back a few notches: Matsson no longer sings every line like it might be his dying words. On that transfixing "Graceland" cover, Matsson's voice had only two settings: dead quiet and pushed way into the red. There's No Leaving Now finds him instead exploring the spectrum in between those two extremes, and while its good to hear his sound evolving, the results are mixed. It's a pretty and intimately rendered collection of folk songs, but those moments of jarringly direct, piercing emotion are few. | 2012-06-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-06-12T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Dead Oceans | June 12, 2012 | 7.1 | 7cb000f2-1403-4d6b-bdd3-aa55697de977 | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | null |
The first thing you notice is the rhythm section: large, lumbering drums and hydraulic bass flexes on the nine-minute "First ... | The first thing you notice is the rhythm section: large, lumbering drums and hydraulic bass flexes on the nine-minute "First ... | The Secret Machines: Now Here Is Nowhere | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7057-now-here-is-nowhere/ | Now Here Is Nowhere | The first thing you notice is the rhythm section: large, lumbering drums and hydraulic bass flexes on the nine-minute "First Wave Intact", the lead-off track on The Secret Machines' awkwardly titled debut album, Now Here Is Nowhere. The rhythms are military-precise, locked-in and steady, but they're less heavy metal than Heavy Metal: The band sounds as though they're scoring an intergalactic space battle, or perhaps something more terrestrial, like the lurching onslaught of a thousand warbeasts.
Or maybe it's just the march of the marketing behemoth behind Now Here Is Nowhere, which is one of the first major label albums to be released for commercial download before its official street date. In Phase 1 of the assault, the album was posted on the band's website and on select retailers like iTunes, along with a free five-song EP (containing the well-worth-it outtake, "Cannon"). For Phase 2, Reprise released an early version of Now Here Is Nowhere in a "babypack"-- a simple sheaf of cardboard with minimal graphics and a low price. And now, we've arrived at the final phase of the master plan-- the album's actual release, for which the label presumably hopes all those people who downloaded it or bought the tyke-size version will either spring for the "real" album or at least have told all their friends about it.
It's too early to tell whether this three-pronged attack will actually succeed, but if it doesn't, it won't be the band's fault. Veterans of Dallas-area groups like UFOFU and Tripping Daisy, these three New Yorkers-by-way-of-Texas-- drummer Josh Garza and brothers Ben and Brandon Curtis-- build a classic rock front to launch a full-out musical assault. Garza's imperturbable drums stand strong against Brandon Curtis' guitar explosions and Ben Curtis' psych-rock keyboard scribbles. Early reviews of Now Here Is Nowhere have likened the band to 70s-era Pink Floyd, a comparison that is limited but not unwarranted. "Pharaoh's Daughter", for example, turns on an elegant Dark Side of the Moon chord change and a volley of "Us and Them" voices in the chorus.
But The Secret Machines are no nostalgia act: "Pharaoh's Daughter" counters the Floyd references with a drumbeat practically quoted from Isaac Hayes' cover of Bacharach's "Walk on By". Plus, they deploy a strategy similar to that of The Flaming Lips and Grandaddy: Not only is Garza more Steve Drozd than John Bonham (which could be a compliment), but The Secret Machines create songs that are just as spacey and concept-heavy, if not quite as quirky, as those on Yoshimi and The Sophtware Slump. "Leaves Are Gone" lolls along on the delicate ebb and flow of Brandon Curtis' keyboard cascades, forming a quiet counter to more aggressive songs like "Sad and Lonely". "Light's ON" boasts a better new wave hook than just about anything else to come out of NYC this year, crackling with a palpable paranoia as Curtis decries the intrusiveness of a Big Brother-like observer: "Somewhere there's a record of your whereabouts/ Everywhere you go you leave a trace.../ The light's ON/ We don't know just who our friends are." But there are forces allied against these threats, people who thrive in the underground: "The light's ON/ And we're waiting for the signal."
The nervous lyrics and jittery energy of "Light's ON" underscore the pervasiveness of the military imagery on the album, revealing a directed-- if not entirely legible-- political agenda. On "Pharaoh's Daughter", Curtis describes a brewing rebel movement in life-during-wartime language: "We dressed in uniforms left over from the war/ A tourniquet, an iron vest/ Our emblem was a star." A lone star, perhaps.
Now Here Is Nowhere pulses with a sexual tension that matches the swagger of the Texas-size drums on songs like "Nowhere Again", when Curtis sings, "There's a woman in the mirror in a fiery state/ As she motions to me I start turning away/ She's lifting her dress up/ Trying to keep up." While this erotic energy threatens to undercut the political tensions on the album, it actually humanizes and intensifies them.
The meaning behind all this political and sexual intrigue is a little vague. The "Now" and the "Here" of the album title apparently describe America during its war on terrorism, but beyond that, the album's most specific statement is that rock music, regardless of influences or labels, can still be a subversive agent in society. Although the sound is bombastic, the message is subtler and variable from one listener to another. Now Here Is Nowhere may sound like a full-on assault, but it's actually a covert spec-ops infiltration, as the name Secret Machines suggests; the band step loudly but carry a concealed weapon. Politically, this reticence could have been a cop-out, but aesthetically, it leaves the album open for interpretation, which means it should have a longer life than the current administration. | 2004-05-20T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 2004-05-20T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Warner Bros. | May 20, 2004 | 8.2 | 7cbb5e0f-7c4b-4e04-9999-f7ad99dc365e | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Texas singer delivers a smooth, risk-averse R&B album whose nostalgic trappings aim for timelessness. | The Texas singer delivers a smooth, risk-averse R&B album whose nostalgic trappings aim for timelessness. | Leon Bridges: Gold-Diggers Sound | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/leon-bridges-gold-diggers-sound/ | Gold-Diggers Sound | Gold-Diggers Sound, the title of Leon Bridges' new album, is also a tribute to the place it was recorded, a newly swanky hotel/bar/studio in East Hollywood called Gold-Diggers. It’s good branding for Bridges, who has always presented himself and his music as timeless, which is to say, of a better time, somewhere back in the sepia-toned 20th century. The sense of place suggested by a studio on Santa Monica Boulevard would seem to harken back to that time, and it sets the tone for Bridges’ Hollywood record, which is what this album seeks to be.
What does that mean, beyond the title? Vocal stylings that occasionally sound like those of Frank Ocean; lilting, drawn-out vowels; and an understated delivery that can bely the power of Bridges’ show-stopping voice. Mastering from Daddy Kev, co-founder of the Low End Theory and a Los Angeles musician’s musician par excellence. And features from the talented multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin and pianist Robert Glasper, both of whom helped out on To Pimp a Butterfly, that maximalist portrait of the city.
Gold-Diggers Sound is far from maximalist. In the tradition of Bridges’ work, it’s a smooth, risk-averse R&B record, pleasant to the ear and lacking in any songs that would shake up one’s impression of the Texan soul singer. But it’s an album made with extraordinary care, and while it sometimes flirts with tedium, Bridges’ voice and producers Ricky Reed and Nate Mercereau’s subtle instrumental choices keep many of its songs out of the valley of the bland.
The opening pair of tracks offers a sampler of the record’s quiet strengths. “Motorbike” opens with guitar plucking and quiet drumming, with Bridges allowing his voice to roughen briefly as the song rounds a corner into its first chorus. “Born Again,” which was written in Texas, is sumptuous, with swirling sax from Martin and keyboard from Glasper flattering Bridges’ range.
The impact of both songs, as well as a third, the twinkling mid-tempo jam “Steam,” is blunted by Bridges’ restraint. This is a musician for whom so much is effortless. As a result, there is frequently no sign that he is trying, that he is fully committed to what he is singing. Why, when “Motorbike” reaches that first chorus, do we not get the catharsis of release, hearing what his voice can really, truly do? Why, on the breathtakingly pretty lament “Why Don’t You Touch Me?,” does Bridges decline to give himself over completely to a hook that demands something more than hypercompetence? He seems reluctant to fully express the emotions that the songs on Gold-Diggers Sound gesture toward.
Lyrically, this may be Bridges’ best-written record, with motifs worth paying attention to. A notable one is time—more specifically, time stopping, which makes sense when one remembers that Bridges was living, and for some time trapped, at Gold-Diggers. “Don’t Worry,” a well-structured song on which he sings full-throatedly, with a nice feature from Atia “Ink” Boggs, mentions a clock stopping. “Motorbike” makes passing reference to a similar idea, which is explored most fully on “Sweeter,” a Martin feature on which Bridges questions why so little has changed since the 1960s: “I thought we moved on from the darker days/Did the words of the King disappear in the air like a butterfly?” While the song, released shortly after the murder of George Floyd, is focused on injustice, it really lingers on the idea of being replaceable. A line on “Why Don’t You Touch Me?” does the same, while adding a new thought: “I’m dressing to the nines and your eye’s straying.”
We know, thanks to a recent article in Texas Monthly in which Bridges was admirably candid, that the singer struggles deeply with his own self-worth. On Gold-Diggers Sound, he appears at times to realize that the perfect aesthetic—the right vintage clothing, or even the right studio—may not be the route to self-realization. But Texas Monthly also showed the way that Bridges uses nostalgia as a source of self, to bolster his self-esteem. (“Nostalgia is the antidote,” he tells the reporter.) And on this album, every time it feels as if he’s close to breaking out—and the album’s best songs are replete with moments in which Bridges seems a hair’s breadth away from true passion—he recedes into the background and lets the technical expertise of his studio players, or that timeless-seeming studio itself, take over. For listeners, Bridges’ nostalgia, frequently expressed as seamless sonic perfectionism, doesn’t function as an antidote, but as a shield. The props don’t distinguish him. They only disguise him further.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Columbia | July 23, 2021 | 7 | 7cbf9355-e144-45d3-b7e7-2130ae1da4e8 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
On its Thurston Moore-boosted debut, the Miami quartet offers an enchanting swirl of indie rock, dream pop, and acid-funk odysseys whose relaxed mood belies a restless philosophical spirit. | On its Thurston Moore-boosted debut, the Miami quartet offers an enchanting swirl of indie rock, dream pop, and acid-funk odysseys whose relaxed mood belies a restless philosophical spirit. | Seafoam Walls: XVI | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/seafoam-walls-xvi/ | XVI | Amid the avalanche of best-of-the-year lists, you might have missed Thurston Moore’s Top 30 albums of 2021—likely because it was buried on the Tumblr of his old New York noise-scene compatriot, J.G. Thirlwell. As to be expected from such a seasoned underground archivist, Moore’s list is a cassette-heavy, Spotify-resistant assembly of veteran free-jazzers, experimental sound artists, radical rappers, and new-school avant-guitar contortionists. But in the top slot is an album that, in this context, practically qualifies as a pop record—and it’s one that Moore was so smitten with, he and his partner Eva Prinz just had to release it themselves on their Daydream Library Series imprint.
Where Moore has often used his various platforms to champion proudly inaccessible artists operating on the fringes of the fringe, the debut album from Seafoam Walls, XVI, is the sort of record that could easily appeal to anyone who likes their indie rock on the cerebral side, whether you came of age in the era of Thrill Jockeyed post-rock, chillwave, DeMarco-core, or alt-R&B. In a nod to bandleader Jayan Bertrand’s Haitian heritage, the Miami quartet self-classify their sound as “Caribbean jazzgaze,” a descriptor that might suggest something more visceral than what actually transpires on XVI. For the most part, Seafoam Walls’ songs present a serene swirl of enchantingly chill guitar lines, pitter-pattered drum programming, and Bertrand’s vaporous vocal melodies. But that seemingly relaxed vibe belies a restless creative and philosophical spirit that frequently pokes through the surface mist.
Seafoam Walls began in 2014 as a solo vehicle for Bertrand, who had previously combined Haitian music with indie guitar aesthetics in the more traditional, folk-oriented outfit Kazoots. His vision for Seafoam Walls had already come into focus with the 2016 release of “You Can’t Have Your Cake and Ego Too (Happy Birthday)”—a dose of self-help psychedelia that, half a decade later, receives a proper re-recording on XVI with bassist Joshua Ewers and beatmaking multi-instrumentalist Dion Kerr. This new version retains the original’s essential tension between isolation-tank tranquility and hyperactive rhythmic tics, however, Bertrand wisely ditches the original’s deep, gothic vocal delivery for a higher honeyed croon that adds a more empathetic dimension to his agitated lyrics. Dream pop is normally treated as a sanctuary of sound, a chorus-pedalled cocoon from your problems, but Seafoam Walls remind us that, in our daily lives, therapeutic escapism is an often unattainable luxury. Beneath the dewy guitar textures of “You Can’t Have Your Cake and Ego Too,” Bertrand sounds off on dysfunctional relationships and the inability to have open, honest conversations within them, before delivering a motivational mantra—“fuck her, fuck him, fuck them, fuck all our egos”—that renders the song a gossamer lullaby with a hardcore heart.
Even as Bertrand zooms out to lament America’s cycle of gun violence (“You Always Said”) and the deadening effects of 9-to-5 work culture (“Program”), it’s easy to imagine the songs on XVI as being just a Mark Ronson remix away from turning into Tame Impala-level bliss-pop hits. But the beauty of Seafoam Walls is that, even as their songs adhere to clearly defined melodic and rhythmic lines, Bertrand and co. constantly rearrange and overlay them in unpredictable patterns, making shape-shifting acid-funk odysseys like “A.I.” and “See” feel both intricately constructed and improvised on the spot. By the time we reach XVI’s euphoric, island-bound instrumental closer “Rushed Rain,” we’re a million miles from the dank NYC no-wave scene that first spurred Seafoam Walls’ No. 1 fan into action some 40 years ago. And yet, Bertrand and Moore are ultimately making music from the same place: their eyes closed, their bodies at one with their effects pedals, and their wandering spirits eager to visit all the unexpected places their beautiful noise will lead them.
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 | Jazz / Pop/R&B / Rock | Daydream Library Series | January 18, 2022 | 7.5 | 7cc40b28-41af-4b3e-b5f2-01dfacf79003 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
With his group Natural Information Society, Joshua Abrams crafts simple loops, primarily with a three-string African lute called the guimbri. Their fourth album takes on a Zen quality. | With his group Natural Information Society, Joshua Abrams crafts simple loops, primarily with a three-string African lute called the guimbri. Their fourth album takes on a Zen quality. | Joshua Abrams / Natural Information Society: Simultonality | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22964-simultonality/ | Simultonality | Joshua Abrams makes music about time and patience—music that, as he put it, “offers the possibility of slowing down.” With his group Natural Information Society, he crafts simple loops, primarily with a three-string African lute called the guimbri. A plethora of sonic elements—including guitar, harmonium, autoharp, and all kinds of percussion—gather around him like moss crawling up a wall. The result is a sound that moves forward while simultaneously seeming to freeze time.
The restraint of Abrams’ work matches his long-arc career, which he began in Philadelphia as an early member of the Roots. Moving to Chicago, he formed Thrill Jockey group Town & Country and became ensconced in the city’s jazz and indie scenes. Many of the people he met there, including Cairo Gang’s Emmett Kelly and Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, have performed in Natural Information Society, a rotating collective that recently solidified into a working unit.
You can hear the effect of that consistency on Simultonality, the fourth Natural Information Society album in seven years (alongside an excellent collaboration with Bitchin Bajas). The group moves together like a carbon-based machine, loose enough to allow for surprises but always focused on one goal. Over tracks that often last eight minutes or more, their focus takes on a Zen quality, as Abrams’ loops become so entrancing they seem to create their own private dimension in space-time.
Much of that time-expanding effect derives from Abrams’ unique choice of instrument. With its rubbery, resonant tone, the guimbri traditionally has been used for healing and trance ceremonies, which can sometimes last for upwards of eight hours. And so Abrams’ simple figures can continually hold attention across long stretches because his tone is so rich and multi-layered. Throughout Simultonality, his playing forms the foundation of each song, offering his bandmates a core around which they can circle, fly, digress, and connect.
As a result, the music on Simultonality coaxes you to quiet your mind and focus your attention, but it doesn’t necessarily move slowly. The majority of the songs here surge forward at an energetic clip, with some even sounding nervously excited. On opener “Maroon Dune,” Abrams’ pounding two-note cycle spawns guitar strums and drum rolls that intensify the song even though the pace doesn’t quicken. A shuffling rhythm instantly propels the 12-minute “Sideways Fall,” powering the group through thick sonic terrain (a perfect analogue to the rolling train tracks in the tune’s accompanying video.)
Abrams and his group don’t spend all of Simultonality in high gear. One track, “St. Cloud,” consists primarily of gentle bells and chimes, the musical equivalent of a trickling waterfall. And on closer “2182½,” Natural Information Society swerve into straight-up jazz, supporting the contemplative sax strains of Ari Brown as if they were a mid-period John Coltrane ensemble. It’s a nice glimpse of the diversity this group is capable of, infusing traditional structures with meditative qualities. But overall, Simultonality advances Abrams and Natural Information Society’s signature sound, one that gets even more unique the further it grows and expands. | 2017-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-06T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Eremite | April 6, 2017 | 8.1 | 7cd25326-6199-4595-982d-32bbf3338c45 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
A Head Full of Dreams is Coldplay’s chance to reassert the eager-to-please exuberance that Ghost Stories deliberately downplayed and prove that Adele isn’t the only artist who can mobilize a monoculture in 2015. | A Head Full of Dreams is Coldplay’s chance to reassert the eager-to-please exuberance that Ghost Stories deliberately downplayed and prove that Adele isn’t the only artist who can mobilize a monoculture in 2015. | Coldplay: A Head Full of Dreams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21321-a-head-full-of-dreams/ | A Head Full of Dreams | On the very first song on their very first album, Coldplay introduced themselves with a heartfelt declaration: "We live in a beautiful world." Fifteen years and some 80 million albums sold later, the British quartet haven’t elaborated on that philosophy—they’ve just amplified it. Where massive success has a tendency to make bands more jaded and aloof, Coldplay only seem more gobsmacked and in awe of life itself. Their songs aren’t just designed to uplift, they’re often about the very sensation of being uplifted. But on the band’s seventh album, A Head Full of Dreams, the band’s relentless campaign to raise our spirits is liable to induce altitude sickness.
Of course, there’s a perfectly logical reason for the album’s oversold optimism—A Head Full of Dreams is a reactionary retort to 2014’s Ghost Stories, a low-key response to a high-profile split that literally wore its (broken) heart on its sleeve. The new album, by contrast, is Martin’s unconscious recoupling record, the sound of a freshly single man stepping out onto the dancefloor to lose his mind and find new love. "You make me feel like I’m alive again," he sings atop the slinky disco of lead single "Adventure of a Lifetime", a lyric that succinctly sums up the spirit of the record like a movie poster tagline.
A Head Full of Dreams is Coldplay’s chance to reassert the eager-to-please exuberance that Ghost Stories deliberately downplayed, and prove that Adele isn’t the only artist who can mobilize a monoculture in 2015. Though written off by detractors as middle of the road, Coldplay’s centrist position is what ultimately makes them so singular—they’re the only rock band that could (and would want to) wrangle Beyoncé, Noel Gallagher, Tove Lo, Norwegian Top 40 architects Stargate, Kendrick Lamar producer Daniel Green, alt-rock lifer Nik Simpson, and “Gimme Shelter” scene-stealer Merry Clayton on the same record. A Head Full of Dreams is emblematic of Coldplay’s burning desire to be all things to all people, rolling up symphonic Britpop bluster, club-thumping bangers, dentist-office soft rock, finger-snapping R&B, and even some trippy touches that remind you of a time when this band just wanted to be as popular as Mercury Rev.
But the album has bigger ambitions. By weaving a spoken-word reading of an inspirational 13th-century Persian poem and a sample of Barack Obama reciting "Amazing Grace" into the mix, the album essentially conflates Martin’s post-rebound optimism with an all-encompassing, heal-the-world mission. His relentless need to take us higher feels most genuine when we get a sense of what got him so low in the first place. "Everglow" and the Tove Lo collab "Fun" bring ultimate closure to the Gwyneth saga with a pledge to enduring friendship (and, to prove it, the former track features Martin’s ex on backing vocals). And despite bearing a title that isn’t going to dispel their poor-man’s U2 rep, "Amazing Day" is a sweet ode to blossoming, post-divorce romance that channels the winsome charm of early singles like "Shiver". Best of all is "Birds", a shot of taut, Phoenix-styled motorik pop that provides a rare moment of intensity on an album that’s all about arm-swaying, Super Bowl-crashing bombast.
Even when A Head Full of Dreams hints at experimentation, it inevitably drifts back onto predictable paths. The title track eases us into the album on a glistening groove but halts its momentum for a now-obligatory "woah oh oh oh" breakdown that sounds like it was focus-grouped into the song. When Martin sings "I feel my heart beating" on "Adventure of a Lifetime", the arrangement drops out, save for a throbbing bassline that mimics the sound of, well, take a guess. And the readymade, gospelized charidee-anthem-in-waiting "Up&Up" sees many of the aforementioned guests get together to sing, "we’re gonna get it together," before Gallagher delivers a send-off guitar solo that essentially turns the track into Coldplay’s Perrier Supernova. At one point in the song, Martin asks, "How can people suffer/ How can people part/ How can people struggle/ How can people break your heart?" He doesn’t profess to understand the root of all our problems, but he’ll do his damnedest to provide a cure anyway.
For all the record's eclecticism, Coldplay remain a band that put the "us" in "obvious," blowing up the simplest sentiments for maximum appeal. Nearly every song is about ascension and transcendence, be it through intoxicants (the Beyoncé-assisted "Hymn for the Weekend"), rocket ships (the unlisted, listless slow jam "X Marks the Spot"), out-of-body experiences (bonus track "Miracles"), large ocean waves ("Fun"), rooftop stargazing ("Amazing Day"), winged creatures ("Birds"), or just sheer force of will ("Up&Up"—and this from a band that’s already written a song called "Up With the Birds"). But Martin has a tendency to sing of extraordinary, mind-expanding experiences in muddled metaphors ("My army of one is going to fight for you … my heart is my gun") and rote "high"/"sky" rhymes. And with his many wide-eyed ruminations on stars and moons and hearts and diamonds, it can sound like he gets his lyrical inspiration from a spoonful of Lucky Charms. Martin recently told the Wall Street Journal that he wanted "Hymn for the Weekend" to be the sort of single that would soundtrack a bottle-service bender at a nightclub and, essentially, that spirit of bonhomie permeates the entirety of A Head Full of Dreams. Except too often, the album’s pat platitudes place us on the other side of the velvet rope, left to ponder the sight of some self-satisfied people having the time of their lives. | 2015-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Atlantic / Parlophone | December 4, 2015 | 4.8 | 7cdb97b2-008c-4fef-a427-bf389eb29b25 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Dev Hynes' third album as Blood Orange is a searing and soothing personal document, striking the same resonant chords as Kendrick Lamar’s *To Pimp a Butterfly or *D’Angelo’s Black Messiah. | Dev Hynes' third album as Blood Orange is a searing and soothing personal document, striking the same resonant chords as Kendrick Lamar’s *To Pimp a Butterfly or *D’Angelo’s Black Messiah. | Blood Orange: Freetown Sound | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22052-blood-orange-freetown-sound/ | Freetown Sound | In July 2015, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, British singer/composer Dev Hynes released “Do You See My Skin Through the Flames?”, an 11-minute assessment of race and self-worth at a time of intense struggle between blacks and law enforcement. “This is not from my forthcoming album,” Hynes asserted, “just some things on my mind.” The cover art depicted an elegant black figure—his back straight, his fingers clutched deep into his own flesh. The image showed strength; on the song, Hynes unpacked the yin and yang of everyday life as a black person: “I’m proud of my name, I’m proud of my dad, I’m proud of my family, but it’s very strange to have to carry that… we all carry that, every black person carries that.” To live black is to live conflicted. There’s the urge to live freely and be accepted, even if the world at large is still uncomfortable with people of color. We feel an innate sense to protect our own kind and hold each other close. We are prisoners of perception; our culture pillaged, our style and vernacular mocked and imitated, only to be told we’re not good enough to be equal.
Freetown Sound, Hynes’ third album as Blood Orange, arrives days after Baltimore police officer Caesar Goodson Jr., who drove the van in which 25-year-old Freddie Gray was fatally injured, was found not guilty on all charges against him. That same day, a grand jury in Collin County, Texas, decided there wasn’t enough evidence to indict former McKinney police officer Eric Casebolt for slamming a black teenage girl to the ground at a pool party. June 25th would’ve been Tamir Rice’s 14th birthday, but he—a black preteen—was shot by a Cleveland police officer who thought Rice pulled a handgun from his waistband. Earlier this month, 49 people died in what’s being called the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, after a gunman walked into a gay Orlando nightclub and opened fire. And just last week, the United Kingdom—where Hynes is from—voted to leave the European Union, sparking chants of racism from liberals.
Freetown feels shaded by all these events, even if public outcry over racial injustice has dissipated slightly over the last year. Hynes offers a broad view of black culture, using vocal clips and spoken-word poetry to craft a multifaceted narrative of historically underserved people. “Black can get you over, black can sit you down,” says a sampled voice toward the end of “With Him,” from Marlon Riggs’ 1994 documentary, Black is...Black Ain’t. On “Love Ya,” we hear author Ta-Nehisi Coates outline a very real conflict facing most minorities: figuring out what to wear—and how to wear it—as to not intimidate others. “How was I gonna wear my pants?” he recalled. “What shoes was I gonna wear? Who was I gonna walk with to school?” Most people take these things for granted, but as a minority, your fashion sense can be seen as a threat. “Hands Up” references the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida, where George Zimmerman—a neighborhood watch volunteer—shot the unarmed teenager and claimed self-defense. “Keep your hood off when you’re walking…” Hynes warns. “Sure enough, they’re gonna take your body.” Throughout Freetown, he speaks directly to those who look like him—the overlooked and under-appreciated, the persecuted and misunderstood—consoling his community while highlighting our collective grace. “Chance” treads the same ground as D’Angelo’s “The Charade,” using self-hurt to dissect racial inequality. “All I ever wanted was a chance for myself,” Hynes moans through a voice steeped in sadness.
Formerly known as Lightspeed Champion, Hynes used to play in punk-rock band Test Icicles before moving on to create folk/pop hybrids. 2011’s Coastal Grooves—Hynes’ first album as Blood Orange—combined new wave and electro-soul, even if the results just barely scratched the surface of what we hear from him now. Freetown is more expansive than 2013’s stellar Cupid Deluxe, but it moves quicker, packing funk and ‘80s R&B into a coherent set. Between his nuanced baritone and creative approach, the album resembles a Saul Williams release, as something overtly political and complex while pulling in many different genres. Songs like “Desirée” and “Best to You” are especially nostalgic, employing festive soul grooves and tropical dance. “Juicy 1-4,” “But You,” and “Thank You” take tonal cues from Michael Jackson, mimicking the optimistic glow of ballads like “Human Nature” and “Man in the Mirror.” In a good way, Hynes is able to pull from these musicians while crafting an aesthetic that’s uniquely his. He takes on a director’s role at times, stepping aside vocally and allowing his features to shine. Hynes mostly sings with and writes for women, which adds another layer of dignity to his art. Nelly Furtado takes the lead on “Hadron Collider” and Blondie frontwoman Deborah Harry sounds perfectly at home on “E.V.P.,” a rubbery funk instrumental seemingly plucked from that band's discography.
The album title pays homage to Freetown, Sierra Leone, the country’s capital city and hometown to Hynes’ father. The recording feels communal despite its political themes, whether he’s sampling particular African dialect, or giving poet Ashlee Haze space on “By Ourselves” to salute femininity. On these and other songs, the words are searing and soothing, almost always at the same time. My in-laws—also from Freetown—speak reverently of the villages and family and friends who still live there. They reminisce about the beach and the sense of togetherness they felt. They acknowledge the extreme poverty and the 2014 Ebola outbreak, but say it’s still a land of true beauty, holding a deep spiritual connection you have to feel for yourself. You sense that warmth throughout Freetown Sound, even if the music doesn’t pull directly from the sounds of the area.
Freetown scans as a capital-B Black record, hitting the same social chords as Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, and Kamasi Washington’s The Epic. Like those albums, Freetown resonates with everyone sagging under the weight of systemic oppression. “My album is for everyone told they’re not black enough, too black, too queer, not queer the right way … it’s a clapback,” Hynes told Entertainment Weekly in a recent interview. Freetown represents the innermost workings of a man wading through his own insecurities, holding his flaws and weaknesses up to the light for everyone to see. He’s trying to make sense of himself, his race and sexuality, while taking a hard look at what this world has become. The future isn’t so hopeless, but we won’t make it if we don’t forge the path together. | 2016-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Domino | June 30, 2016 | 8.8 | 7ce1571c-4895-48e8-8b3f-792340bed1a0 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
St. Vincent, Kurt Vile, Sharon Van Etten, Iggy Pop, and more contribute to this tasteful if predictable cover album, faring best when their own identities shine through the music. | St. Vincent, Kurt Vile, Sharon Van Etten, Iggy Pop, and more contribute to this tasteful if predictable cover album, faring best when their own identities shine through the music. | Various Artists: I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to the Velvet Underground and Nico | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-ill-be-your-mirror-a-tribute-to-the-velvet-underground-and-nico/ | I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute to the Velvet Underground and Nico | The Velvet Underground & Nico is one of rock music’s sacred texts. More than 50 years since its release, its heady cocktail of ostrich-tuned proto-punk, droning viola, and streetwise poetry has lost little of its potency. Part of the fun has always been finding new details within the VU’s history, and now there’s more to sink your teeth into with Todd Haynes’ upcoming documentary and a star-studded tribute to the band’s 1967 classic. The track-by-track cover album I’ll Be Your Mirror is the final project from the late producer Hal Willner, a longtime friend of Lou Reed. The artists Willner invited to the project span large-font festival headliners and up, leaving little room for unpredictability. People have been reinterpreting these songs and smoothing out their transgressive edges for decades, but the best of these covers prove that there are still surprising places to take them.
R.E.M. kept the VU’s torch burning during the 1980s, covering three of their songs, thus making Michael Stipe a natural choice to take on the opening “Sunday Morning.” It’s a pleasure to hear his voice alongside Bill Frissell on guitar, as synths and clarinets lend the song a patient and regal air. Elsewhere, Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen slow “Femme Fatale” to the pace of a mournful movie trailer, while Andrew Bird and Lucius transform “Venus in Furs” into twee orchestral pop. The latter ode to sadomasochism no longer sounds especially sexy or dangerous, but the eerie harmonies combined with Bird’s frenetic violin are an effective update nonetheless.
The album’s other team-ups vary in success. St. Vincent and pianist Thomas Bartlett’s take on “All Tomorrow’s Parties” is a far cry from her more radical covers, like her shredding take on the Pop Group. Instead, its spacey ambience and spoken-word vocoder is closer in spirit to “O Superman,” the signature song of Reed’s partner, Laurie Anderson. Thurston Moore, Bobby Gillespie, and Fucked Up drummer Jonah Falco tackling “Heroin” is a thrilling prospect on paper, but after chasing the dragon for seven minutes, it never really connects. Iggy Pop and Matt Sweeney’s “European Son,” on the other hand, is a feedback-laced freakout that sounds just as unhinged as the original.
The artists who fare best on I’ll Be Your Mirror emphasize their own strengths. Dublin post-punk band Fontaines D.C. inject “The Black Angel’s Death Song” with enough yammering snarl to sound like an Irish Mark E. Smith. King Princess puts a queer spin on the toxic jealousy of “There She Goes Again,” while Kurt Vile’s “Run Run Run” lets a choogling outro ride far beyond the original’s rolling chug. The biggest letdown is Matt Berninger’s straightforward stab at “I’m Waiting for the Man,” which has neither the jittery pulse of the original nor the forceful delivery of Nico’s own cover from the early ’80s.
After decades of similar covers, it shouldn’t be surprising that the best songs on I’ll Be Your Mirror are the ones where artists imprint their own identity on the music, rather than aping a band that already inspired countless strains of rock, punk, and experimental music. And while it’s hard to imagine how anyone involved with the VU’s album would feel about this tasteful tribute, its very existence still speaks to the force of the original vision. After all this time, artists are still peeling back layers of the banana.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Verve | September 27, 2021 | 7 | 7ce19192-693c-455a-81d5-5bd00a7c89c6 | Jesse Locke | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-locke/ | |
The pop punk band Basement's latest album is less Warped Tour and more KROQ Weenie Roast: the depressive offspring of Mineral and Jimmy Eat World. | The pop punk band Basement's latest album is less Warped Tour and more KROQ Weenie Roast: the depressive offspring of Mineral and Jimmy Eat World. | Basement: Promise Everything | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21489-promise-everything/ | Promise Everything | A Tumblr search of the band Basement's name reveals scores of viral fan-made content, from lyrically-inspired tattoo sheets to manicured shots of attractive young fans rocking their new merch. The Suffolk band's anguished romanticism continues to resonate with fans, primarily because it’s packaged in brooding rock tunes just sweet enough to get stuck in your head, but woozy and frequently dissonant enough to avoid sounding overproduced. After a two-year break, they’ve returned even more eager to explore that melodic direction with their third full-length, Promise Everything. It’s less Warped Tour and more KROQ Weenie Roast: the depressive offspring of Mineral and Jimmy Eat World.
Andrew Fisher’s fluid baritone is easily Basement’s best instrument. It’s plush on the ears, complementary to the guitars, and distinctive in its quivering tone—but on Promise Everything, it becomes the band’s crutch. The frontman relies on little more than his scratchy melisma to fuel the album, wringing every sustained note he can out of vaguely-worded howlers like "All I need for flight/ Is feeling from inside" and "Tear my heart off my sleeve/ And tell me you believe in me."
His bandmates don’t help things, churning out garden-variety grunge riffs as if on autopilot (now and again, they’ll toss some atonal notes into the mix, a bit of catnip to distract from the incessant mid-tempo buzz ballads). When the title track’s chorus rolls around —if your eyes haven’t rolled back in your head first, that is—it’s smirk-inducing: "When I’m high, I’m high/ When I’m low, I’m low." It’s low all right: no manic energy in sight, a cardinal sin on an album rooted in aggression.
Occasionally, the dull roar manifests in some solid rock songs. Awash in knotted fretwork and lilting melodies, "Brothers Keeper" is as good a kick-off–or maybe a kiss-off?–as any, a textured introduction to the album’s acrid ambivalence (epitomized in the chorus' don’t-call-me-I’ll-call-you refrain: "Feelings come and go/ I will let you know.") The fuzzy torch song "Aquasun" delights as well, swathing a vulnerable chorus in bleary, blanketed guitars that recall Disc 2 of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Lastly, there's "Submission," the best show of songcraft by far: At last, the band perk up a bit and play with contrast, pitting airy oo-oo-oos against palm-muted guitars, screams against whispers, lover against lover. But while these standouts quash fears of Basement's creative stasis, they're stilll not enough to give them the gravitas of a great band. | 2016-01-28T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-01-28T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | Run for Cover | January 28, 2016 | 5 | 7ce2c701-9676-45ec-b81b-aa88051dc6a5 | Zoe Camp | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zoe-camp/ | null |
Still not old enough to legally drink in most states but old enough to go to war, suburban-Chicago garage-punks the Orwells are fully aware they’re reinventing a wheel that’s been essentially worn down to the rim. Their first major-label outing suggests that the Orwells clearly have loftier ambitions than cracking the Midwest garage circuit. | Still not old enough to legally drink in most states but old enough to go to war, suburban-Chicago garage-punks the Orwells are fully aware they’re reinventing a wheel that’s been essentially worn down to the rim. Their first major-label outing suggests that the Orwells clearly have loftier ambitions than cracking the Midwest garage circuit. | The Orwells: Disgraceland | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19417-the-orwells-disgraceland/ | Disgraceland | When the Orwells appeared on "Letterman" last January, they did exactly what any upstart rock ‘n’ roll band making their network television debut should do: make complete asses of themselves. The suburban-Chicago quintet chugged through the first verse of their single “Who Needs You” without incident—but by the second verse, frontman Mario Cuomo (no, not that one) stopped singing as if defying some non-existent CBS lip-sync policy, splayed himself across the floor in front of his monitors to perform a couple of yoga bridge poses, and curled up on the couch to become Dave’s most non-communicative guest since Joaquin Phoenix. If the point of the spectacle was to show just how little they give a fuck about impressing the public, it failed miserably: not only did Dave and Paul Shaffer enthusiastically applaud the performance, they begged the befuddled band to keep playing, before Shaffer just took matters into his own hands. In that moment, you can see the daunting challenge the Orwells are up against: to authentically reinvigorate a style of music that, after nearly 50 years of perpetual garage-rock revivals, can now be so easily neutered into geezer-embraced showbiz shtick.
Still not old enough to legally drink in most states but old enough to go to war, the Orwells are fully aware they’re reinventing a wheel that’s been essentially worn down to the rim. As if the Black Lips-inspired juvie-punk of their 2012 debut, Remember When, didn’t make their allegiance to snot-rock tradition obvious, the album was laced with samples of old Elvis interviews and 1950s-era preachers railing against the delinquent effects of rock ‘n’ roll. (Interim B-sides, meanwhile, were given titles like “Open Your Eyes (A Misfits Ripoff)”.) The King connection continues with the band’s first major-label outing, Disgraceland, though this time, the Orwells clearly have loftier ambitions than cracking the Rust Belt garage circuit. With the alt-rock production dream team of Dave Sitek, Chris Coady, and Jim Abbiss behind the boards, the goal appears to be nothing less than supply their generation with an Is This It to call their own—a midwest-slacker answer to the sort of urbane, effortlessly cool rock ‘n’ roll records the Strokes stopped making 10 years ago.
For their part, the Orwells have cleaned up their act quite nicely, scraping away the surface scuzz to foreground Matt O’Keefe and Dominic Corso’s radiant but not-too-glossy guitar lines, while filling out their sound just enough to justify the big-budget production. Cuomo’s lyrical concerns, however, remain as puerile as ever—Disgraceland essentially constitutes a repetitive Groundhog Day-esque cycle of boozin’ and cruisin’ for “a handful of ass.” Not graced with an especially melodic voice, Cuomo doesn’t so much sing his songs as barge into them—on “Norman,” the chasm between his belligerent delivery and the song’s “Just Like Honey”-ed sway is so wide that it's like he’s doing karaoke to his own band. But Cuomo knows how to exploit his limited range to rousing effect, from the Jim Morrison-esque howls that give the simmering psyched-out eruptions of “The Righteous One” some extra heat, to the excitable anti-authoritarian kiss-offs that transform “Who Needs You” into the Orwells’ own “Last Nite” (in the no-tomorrow, rather than yesterday-evening, sense).
“Who Needs You” is also one of a handful of songs here that hints at another of Cuomo’s favorite indulgences—firearms—betraying the more sinister side to modern-day teenage kicks. As he admits at one point, “My daddy’s got a 12-gauge/ I hope I don’t find it,” an uncannily topical line that’s all the more striking given that it pops up in “Gotta Get Down”, an upbeat bubble-grunge highlight that proves, even if the Orwells don’t become the next Strokes, there’s no shame in being a 21st-century Spacehog. Ultimately, they're at their most engaging when maintaining an ironic distance between subject matter and tone: in contrast to the song’s congenial jangle, “Bathroom Tile Blues” sees Cuomo already expressing his ennui toward a hotel-trotting, model-shagging rock-star lifestyle he has yet to actually achieve. But Disgraceland also proves there’s a fine line between writing songs about being bored and just being boring: the atypically stern lead single “Let It Burn” is nihilism-by-numbers with a hookless chorus, while “Dirty Sheets” offers nothing more than love-’em-and-leave-’em lechery. And yet, in contrast to the instant messianic complex so many would-be rock saviors seem to acquire, Cuomo is refreshingly honest about his band’s shortcomings. As he sings, “From the east and to the west, we ain’t the worst, we ain’t the best.” By that measure, Disgraceland is truth in advertising. | 2014-06-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2014-06-02T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Atlantic / Canvasback | June 2, 2014 | 6.2 | 7ce30320-29e9-4421-898c-5f795b2fc4a0 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On the former DNA guitarist’s first album in 13 years, Arto Lindsay conjoins abstract noise and tropicália, clamor and glamour, into something unusually beautiful and distinctly his own. | On the former DNA guitarist’s first album in 13 years, Arto Lindsay conjoins abstract noise and tropicália, clamor and glamour, into something unusually beautiful and distinctly his own. | Arto Lindsay: Cuidado Madame | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23082-cuidado-madame/ | Cuidado Madame | Arto Lindsay is the least known romantic to ever pick up a guitar, in part because he has never learned to play it. Since yowling his way through the seminal no wave outfit DNA, Lindsay has united his vocation and avocation: abstract noise and tropicália balladry. His career is a fascinating and often rewarding study in contradictions. As half of Ambitious Lovers for much of the 1980s, Lindsay didn’t sing so much as talk delicately, examining the structure of a song like a prowler testing a window over Peter Scherer’s keyboard blasts over several albums.
If his impatience registered as energy in search of a sound, then matters settled on his 1996 solo debut O Corpo Sutil: The Subtle Body. Like David Bowie and Everything But the Girl at the time, Lindsay fell in love hard with drum‘n’bass. On exquisite albums like Mundo Civilizado (home of one of the loveliest Al Green covers I’ve heard), the politest of percussive skitters collided against Lindsay’s guitar, which had lost none of its capacity to repel. By integrating clamor into lissome structures, Lindsay tested the possibility of violence in erotic play; his lyrics avoided smut but his guitar reveled in it.
For Cuidado Madame, his studio first album since 2004, Lindsay has changed not a bit: 11 songs, most less than four minutes long. While musicians his age are supposed to record back-to-basics albums, he’s still skronking up his balladry, still won’t leave his plaints well enough alone. A goddamn racket is his idea of a roots move. Take “Uncrossed,” on which Patrick Higgins’ acoustic plucks share headphone space with the pops and scratches of Paul Wilson and Kassa Overall’s programmed tumult. Mediating is Lindsay himself, armed with lines like, “Come unbridled here/Slide from grammar to glamour” sung in his tentative Winnie the Pooh coo. From Grammar to Glamour—how’s that for an Arto Lindsay memoir title?
Tuneful and sometimes absurd, Cuidado Madame honors its title: tangle with this 63-year-old with the proto-Harry Potter glasses and he’ll unleash poesy or, better, his guitar on you. “Grain by Grain,” its first and best track, is a whole erotic city whose commotion is unceasing. “I love my hand writing your name/On your belly,” Lindsay sings over atonal squeals and a glass-smooth synthesizer line. Song after song depicts lovers dividing and dissolving into each other yet the band’s approach is to sever them; the tension is frustrating and beautiful. Melvin Gibbs’ popping bass figures and Wilson’s staccato piano lines compete for attention in the aptly titled “Tangles,” while those in search of a more traditional Lindsay experience will find “Arto vs Arto” a delight—two minutes of six-string scratches over which Lindsay wheezes, grunts, and quite possibly hyperventilates.
Neither refinement nor fulfillment, Cuidado Madame serves as a refutation. Lindsay’s lyrics are spare and precise enough to work on the page—and that’s a rare compliment. But even if they were woolier, his band’s rabid imagination won’t let these songs congeal into boutique hotel background music. Treating genre as map rather than legend, Lindsay inhabits an ever-shifting space of modern cool that confuses appreciation with amalgamation. From Grammar to Glamour—he's more right than we thought. | 2017-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Northern Spy | April 17, 2017 | 7.5 | 7ce39847-4c96-4d10-b7d0-33062847f872 | Alfred Soto | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alfred-soto/ | null |
Matthew Dear has proven himself one of the more prolific new artists of the year. In 2003 alone, he's ... | Matthew Dear has proven himself one of the more prolific new artists of the year. In 2003 alone, he's ... | Matthew Dear: Leave Luck to Heaven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2526-leave-luck-to-heaven/ | Leave Luck to Heaven | Matthew Dear has proven himself one of the more prolific new artists of the year. In 2003 alone, he's released a pair of EPs on Spectral Sound (the more house-oriented arm of Ann Arbor's Ghostly International label), recorded for Richie Hawtin's Plus 8 imprint (as False) and Markus Nikolai's Berlin-based Perlon label (as Jabberjaw), and now finally delivers his debut full-length, Leave Luck to Heaven. It's no wonder that Dear allows his work to be represented by a wide range of labels, from Ghostly's electro-pop, to Plus 8's minimal techno, to Perlon's tech-house-- his music blends elements of each of those genres.
So, yeah, more eclecticism, then? Not really, Leave Luck to Heaven is more like alchemy. Instead of genre-hopping from track to track-- substituting some sort of focused vision and sound for a lack of ideas dressed up as a surfeit of them-- Dear boils down his wide-ranging influences and combines elements of his own more catagorizable work. The result is his most satisfying release to date and (along with Ricardo Villalobos' Alcachofa) another techno-dub record that deftly straddles the line between home listening and the dancefloor.
Comparisons to Hawtin and Villalobos arguably flatter to deceive at this point in Dear's career, but they're far from unfounded. In a sense, Dear is creating sounds that blend the same elements that Hawtin used as building blocks on his Final Scratch-assisted mix CD Decks, EFX & 909. And, like the Chilean Villalobos, Dear takes cues from the Teutonic trends toward mixing the spatial qualities of dub with traditional house beats while retaining an outsider's ear.
As a result, Leave Luck to Heaven is an attractive listen for causal electronic listeners. Its ebb and flow of soothing melodies and lubbing beats-- and its blend of vocal and instrumental tracks-- keeps things lively and creates a sense of balance and dynamics. When the record peaks it's often when Dear stays closer to Detroit techno roots such as the invigorating stripped-and-clipped jaunt of "Just Us Now" or minimal second-wave melody of "The Crush". Elsewhere, gently snapping beats and gracious stabs and eerie washes of synths color Dear's deceptively complex rhythms, creating palpable sensations of tension and release on tracks such as "An Unending" and "You're Fucking Crazy", each of which twitch and hum with hollowed-out nervous energy.
The vocal tracks, sung in gentle falsetto, veer closest to machine-age electro and the deep, rolling basslines of Detroit's second-wave techno. They also provide the highlights of the record: "It's Over Now" and "Dog Days". The former brings life during wartime to the disco. It takes the infectious repetition and sense of communality of the dancefloor, and alternates between sarcastically joining calls to arms ("I don't want to feel left out") and hoping that that isn't the bomb that brings us together ("Why can't we work it out?"). "Dog Days" is better still, a flat-out infectious electro-pop gem, a rope-skipping sing-song of synthetic horns, Dear's cyclical vocals and a see-saw of pulsating tones and beats. "Tell another story," Dear repeats, enthusing the beat to go on and on-- which it does for six head-bobbing minutes. It could have gone on for another six. In a year in which Dear has written his share of stories, "Dog Days" is the standout chapter. | 2003-11-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2003-11-04T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Electronic | Spectral Sound / Ghostly International | November 4, 2003 | 7.8 | 7cebcf10-685e-4c8d-bb22-d1ce8530ece4 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
Accompanied by a newly published journal, this collection of synth odds and ends offers the rare opportunity to hear directly from an undersung icon of San Francisco’s gay disco scene. | Accompanied by a newly published journal, this collection of synth odds and ends offers the rare opportunity to hear directly from an undersung icon of San Francisco’s gay disco scene. | Patrick Cowley: Mechanical Fantasy Box | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/patrick-cowley-mechanical-fantasy-box/ | Mechanical Fantasy Box | Before his death in 1982, the producer and musician Patrick Cowley was best known for electronic disco productions that defined San Francisco’s gay hi-NRG scene. He was one of the first entertainers with national impact (if not the first) to die of AIDS (his “Menergy” and “Megatron Man” hit the top of Billboard’s club chart in 1981). The party line is that his “career began to rise as his health failed him” (words cribbed from his Bay Area Reporter obit), and the music he made in his final year had a starry slickness to it suggesting even better things to come. The last song he cut with Sylvester, “Do You Wanna Funk?,” would go on to become his most widely known, somewhat ironically, after its inclusion in 1983’s Trading Places. That movie was a vehicle for Eddie Murphy, who told virulently homophobic jokes in his standup at the time; his landmark special Delirious, from the same year, opens with an extended bit about “faggots.” In the ’80s, Murphy was a mainstream icon; Cowley was an all-but-forgotten cult figure. The disparity in the cultural volume of their voices is a small illustration of how gay history worked for decades.
Josh Cheon, former member of the queer DJ collective Honey Soundsystem and mastermind behind the reissue label Dark Entries, has worked to flesh out Cowley’s legacy with an archival series of posthumous releases. By now, he has shepherded more releases into the world than were available when Cowley was alive. Cheon’s excavation work has exposed less frenetic, ambient-leaning and weirder sides of Cowley’s music. The three previous solo Cowley releases on Dark Entries largely contained material he composed for gay porn flicks—sleazy synth work whose sheer oddness could easily have been lost on consumers who had, ahem, other things to focus on.
The latest compilation, Mechanical Fantasy Box, was released on what would have been Cowley’s 69th birthday. It spans the years 1973 to 1980 and has less of a conceptual framework than earlier collections, offering 12 previously unreleased odds and ends mostly sourced from 10-inch reels of Cowley’s synth work juvenilia. It’s unclear if Cowley ever intended this material for release, and as such, will likely appeal most to fans hungry for more excavation of Cowley’s legacy. While not without its charm, Mechanical Fantasy Box is the last place those unfamiliar with Cowley’s work should go exploring.
“His early process was often shooting in the dark and seeing what happened,” wrote early Cowley collaborator Maurice Tani, and there is a sense of playfulness to Mechanical Fantasy Box. An arpeggiated squiggle flirts with the right ear in opener “Out of Body (Intro)” before hard-panning to the left as other synths whistle and clunk like a swimmer hitting his head on a boat underwater. Many of the songs contain one, if not several, high-pitched and twitchy sounds that repeat anxiously, but there’s an overall sense of motion here—these aren’t looped compositions, they’re sound designs that mutate over time as parts fade in and out. The best example of this is “Moving Bodies 1,” which starts out dissonant to the point of seeming hostility before, out of nowhere, it all coheres into an unlikely groove.
“Right Here, Right Now” is the Mechanical Fantasy Box cut with the most bodily immediacy, pummeling through its arpeggiated bass line, drums that pop and sizzle, and synths that mimic cosmic phasers. It’s the closest thing to hi-NRG here, though a little too fast and woozy to be a proper dance track. The amusingly titled “Lumberjacks in Heat” has the insistence of a John Carpenter score with the terror-prog energy of Goblin’s Suspiria main theme. It doesn’t sound like sex music to me, but Cowley had a voracious appetite and a vivid imagination; if anyone could make this work in a sexual situation, it was probably him.
I get this sense, mind you, after reading the sex journal Cowley kept (at times sporadically) from 1975 to 1980, which Dark Entries is publishing and releasing in tandem with this new compilation. It’s also called Mechanical Fantasy Box, after Cowley’s somewhat oblique term for San Francisco’s public sex scene during the first wave of mass gay liberation in the United States. In brief, sometimes poetic snapshots of his encounters, Cowley evinces a poignant shamelessness about loving sex with men.
To hear him tell it, Cowley was enthralled by the sex he was having—so many great asses, so many great cocks, and such prowess. “I could never take the fuck I give,” he brags. In addition to the graphic sex, his writings contain sprinklings of romance and momentary ambivalence regarding his fast lifestyle (“The churning, crowded heat of men in a sexual banquet crowds in on me and the forced-by-circumstances emotion-lacking atmosphere drives me away”). There’s also a real sense of the brotherhood that the ritualistic scene could foster for a lapsed Catholic like Cowley: “I’m on my knees worshipping Phallus. All around me are the other similarly engaged. I feel the one-ness of our activity. Silent yet all things understood.”
Some passages are breathtakingly moving coming from someone who had no idea that his life would be taken from him in a few short years. “This is a sweet sex and the feeling flows with the juices. Let the feelings flow. The longer you love, the longer you live,” he wrote in 1976. In ’77, he recalled telling a partner, “I know I’m going to be 50 yrs old and be able to look back and say, ‘I spent what I had to spend and used what was mine to use as it was intended.’” Cowley, who didn’t live to see 33, then wrote, “I loved it up.”
The book is also the rare opportunity to hear directly from Cowley; because interviews with him are not easily accessible online, much of what there is to learn about his life comes only through secondhand accounts of the people who knew and loved him (and many of them, of course, have also since died). To his fans, he’s existed as a myth. The one-two punch of the Mechanical Fantasy Box release and the journals represents a balanced portrait of the way Cowley lived, to hear some tell it. “He really didn’t have much of a social life. It was just music and the baths, music and the baths,” said Cowley collaborator Frank Loverde, quoted in Joshua Gamson’s 2005 biography The Fabulous Sylvester. Though this sounds like quite a social life to me, this quote suggests that Cowley did not compartmentalize his sexuality. It was imbued in his essence.
There’s a legendary story, recounted both in Gamson’s book and a 2016 New York Times piece on the Cowley revival, in which an AIDS-ravaged, wheelchair-bound Cowley looks down from a balcony at the Galleria at a dancefloor filled with revelers at a tribute party thrown in his honor, and says, “Those stupid queens, don’t they know?” And indeed, even a few years ago, Cowley’s accounts of the storm might have read as prelapsarian, even tragic. But in an age when proper access to antiretroviral therapies can keep people from contracting HIV and keep people with HIV healthy, Patrick Cowley’s sex journal is a voraciously readable historical document, a seminal text in every possible manner of the phrase. Over 40 years ago, Cowley was a forbearer of the kind of unapologetic sexual liberation that’s currently throbbing through many queer urban centers. His transmissions have made it all the way to the future to culture that is defined in no small part by the potentially lessening grip of HIV, a culture whose history is now becoming a mandatory component of some states’ public-school curricula. “It seems that life is there for the taking and I took my share,” he wrote in his journal. Even today, Cowley is as insatiable as ever.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-10-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Dark Entries | October 24, 2019 | 7.3 | 7ceeade4-994a-4dbf-a6b4-285ff11cb0b9 | Rich Juzwiak | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rich-juzwiak/ | |
Darcy James Argue's big band meets “The Daily Show” in an ambitious, wholly fascinating look at American politics and propaganda. | Darcy James Argue's big band meets “The Daily Show” in an ambitious, wholly fascinating look at American politics and propaganda. | Darcy James Argue's Secret Society: Real Enemies | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22299-real-enemies/ | Real Enemies | Composer Darcy James Argue has often found joy in quixotic ideas. Starting a big band, more than half a century after they fell from popularity, is clearly one. Giving that group the name Secret Society and titling an early collection of compositions Infernal Machines only added more attitude to the enterprise. His pluck aside, Argue’s calling card thus far has been an ability to combine his love of jazz’s past with more contemporary sonics like indie-influenced electric guitar and bass, as well as arrangement tricks culled from his study of classical music. He’s clever without being arch, a syncretic creator who avoids obvious imitation.
Real Enemies is his most varied album yet, and his most thematically ambitious. Because it was originally conceived as a multimedia stage show for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, it has both the length of a play as well as a dramatic conceit, as it promises an exploration of “the paranoid style in American politics.” (That famous 1964 essay by Richard Hofstadter is quoted, in a slightly adapted form, toward the end of Real Enemies, in a narration by actor James Urbaniak.)
This is a savvy choice of topic, and not just because of our era of “post-truth politics,” or due to the range of conspiracy theories that have found purchase among different voting coalitions. The central masterstroke of Real Enemies is its realization that instrumental music can prove a useful forum in which to explore the shadowy manipulations of propaganda and state secrecy. The overtly American sound of a big band—particularly one updated with aspects of other modern song styles—becomes an ideal way to channel both vintage Cold War scaremongering and contemporary unease over cell-phone data harvesting. In this way, Real Enemies often shows how moods can wield more influence than words (or logic).
Argue and his band leave few conspiratorial airs unexploited in this giddy, often explosive 78-minute suite. There are discordant touches of noir (inspired by scores of politically cynical ’70s films like The Parallax View), as well as minor-key warnings that reference Philip Glass’ writing for the Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War. And there’s plenty of music that feels original to this idiosyncratic composer and his well-drilled ensemble.
Coming after a quiet, unsettling introduction, and a strutting follow-up track that suggests a detective pursuing a case, “Dark Alliance” is the album’s first mind-blower. In this brilliant piece of hybridism, Argue creates an opening groove from a vintage-sounding synth line and rhythm guitar funk strumming, both of which call to mind early-’80s rap. (A clip of Nancy Reagan’s anodyne anti-drug speechifying—“say yes to your life”—confirms the era under review.) Then there is a shift to Latin jazz: specifically, an adaptation of composer Luis Enrique Mejía Godoy’s “Un Son Para Mi Pueblo,” an anthem written in celebration of the Nicaraguan Revolution. Argue’s pivot here isn’t random—instead, it’s a narrative choice that points to the contradiction between the Reagan administration’s domestic “war on drugs” and its simultaneous eagerness to undermine the Nicaraguan Revolution by working with the Contras. A government review later conceded that the CIA turned a blind eye to cocaine trafficking by its allies during this particular foreign policy episode. (And the title of the song is a reference to a controversial series of articles that first raised this issue.) The slickness of all this commentary wouldn’t be half as powerful if the musical execution was less than stellar, but the Secret Society displays their startling virtuosity in these genre shifts.
Elsewhere, Sebastian Noelle delivers an electric guitar feature full of spindly menace during the medium-tempo introduction of “Trust No One,” just before a clip of onetime Senator Frank Church discussing the ill effects of CIA narratives planted in foreign media. Once the government audio-drop is over, the full band digs into some powerful ensemble writing by Argue, while Carl Maraghi’s bluesy baritone sax solo carries an even greater sense of alarm. In “Best Friends Forever”—a piece about the military industrial complex—the martial, Glass-style triads lead to an alto sax solo from Rob Wilkerson that at first seems darkly resigned, until Argue’s introduction of a bass-drum thump prompts lines that sound more like combat heralds.
Argue mixes references to conspiracies that actually happened with glimpses of infamous false rumors (like the “birther” controversy directed at President Obama). On “Casus Belli,” Argue composes swinging music as a comic counterpoint to some of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s grimmer assertions. If the pairing of text and score sometimes seems a bit flip, it’s useful to recall that matters of grave political importance don’t always inspire the seriousness that they deserve from the public, either.
Despite all these references, the album’s goal isn’t to be any sort of history lesson. Instead, it’s a stylish evocation of the wild (and sometimes seductive) incoherence that flows from crises in which key evidence is either obscured or invented. Given this, Real Enemies feels, at its root, like a plea for greater civic trust and more rigorous thinking. For all its crazy quilt patterns and disparate musical inputs, there are telling hints of this suite’s carefully considered structure: The minimalist patterns of “Best Friends Forever” are echoed later, in “Apocalypse Is a Process,” while the synth from “Dark Alliance” is brought back during “Never a Straight Answer.”
The album’s liner notes offer visual collages and context clues for each of the album’s 13 tracks, providing a hint of the original multimedia stage production. But the suite doesn’t really need them, as it’s sufficiently engrossing and cogent all by itself. You’d almost think it impossible for a big band album to do all this in 2016—but here’s all the evidence, right out in the open for you to inspect. | 2016-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | New Amsterdam | October 3, 2016 | 8.3 | 7ceecad4-8fb8-48bb-91a9-54d59e0e5f74 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The title can work both ways. For the band, "all that you can't leave behind"\n\ implies facing up ... | The title can work both ways. For the band, "all that you can't leave behind"\n\ implies facing up ... | U2: All That You Can't Leave Behind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8329-all-that-you-cant-leave-behind/ | All That You Can't Leave Behind | The title can work both ways. For the band, "all that you can't leave behind" implies facing up to their platinum salad days of the Edge's trademark echo shimmers and Paul "Bono Vox" Hewson's Lexus-honk vocals. For the general public, the title reifies our struggle to leave behind the image of Bono hatching from a disco lemon, dressed in that rayon six-pack t-shirt. For a band settled into four-letter pseudonyms from their 1980 debut, breaking up never seemed like an option. From day one, U2 was a rock constellation-- a warplane-- and we expected epics. It's an early affair, a hazy infatuation, that has since bloated into comfortable taking-for-granted. As with all ubiquitous products, the familiarity of logos, slogans, and icons eventually supplants whatever original feelings we may have had.
U2 are, indeed, a universal product, much like the Catholic Church Bono humbly admires. The swoosh on The Edge's skully cap, and the golden arches of Bono's glasses spring to mind. Song titles and lyrics on All That boldly declare familiar, safe dogma and generic commandments, such as "Grace", "Peace on Earth", "I believe in you," "Won't you take me, take me please," "I know it aches, and your heart breaks," etc. This new batch of songs heralds a conscious and welcome revocation of dance-inflected bubbleglam, but scales back too far. In searching so hard for their souls, U2 have hacked away their flesh and skull, leaving a lobotomized approximation of glory.
"Beautiful Day" opens with bombast after a cheeky keyboard tease, and peaks with Bono's cracking voice in the shouted coda: "What you don't have/ You don't need it now!" And so the album climaxes at 3\xBD minutes. The gospel ballad, "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out Of", maintains the buzz admirably, again peaking in the coda with Brian Eno's faux-brass keyboard belts. Elsewhere, Eno's fingerprints remain undusted. The album could have benefited from more of him; apparently, it takes Brian Eno + Berlin to = renaissance.
"Elevation" slaughters hope with reckless chops of the hackneyed sword, as Bono commits songwriting faux pas #1: rhyming "sky" with "fly" and "high." The details will be spared, but you can work it out. Damn you, God and aerodynamics, for making altitude a necessity for flight, in the sky, which happens to be above us. As the album's sticker proclaims, "Walk On" is locked and loaded as the second single. Epic midtempo should always follow punchy power-rock, you see. Nice, but unexciting. Here, Bono seems dead set on ruining U2's return with clichés. Minutes after the aforementioned poetic gaffe, he returns with, "A singing bird in a cage/ Who will only fly/ Fly for freedom." That little bird is you, guys! Free yourself from your cage! For freedom!
The record stomps around in this valley before mounting another two-song peak with "In a Little While" and "Wild Honey". On the former, the vulnerability of Bono's "vox" makes a welcome return from minute 3:30 to inject some heartfelt emotion into the tingling doo-wop. "That girl!/ That girl!/ She's mine," Bono bellows with larynx scratches, evoking the dead spirit of Van Morrison. "Wild Honey" similarly ob-la-dis like a giddy Van, and somehow escapes the shame of Bono declaring, "I was a monkey." Testament to the band there.
But it's back into the dark nadir until the album's closer. Bono joins hands with Sinéad O'Connor in healing the world on the tepid carol, "Peace on Earth". "Jesus, can you take the time/ To throw a drowning man a line," Bono asks. Hey, if the world is so dark, take off your sunglasses. Bono's Healing Heart takes a "look at the world" on the next track, and discovers that people "feel all kinds of things." Indeed.
But not even Tom Waits' grizzled pipes could salvage the atrocity of "New York". Over one of the best musical beds he's ever been offered, Bono weaves a Hallmark lover's tale, in the city where "Irish, Italians/ Jews, and Hispanics/ Religious nuts [and] political fanatics/ [Stir] in the stew/ Happily/ Not like me and you." Subtle breakbeat drumming and glistening guitar be damned, Bono will ruin a song. And so the story goes for the entire album-- one of the band's finest, if not for the tweeting and hooting of The Fly and his grating lyrics. Beautiful day, certainly, but the rest of the week was all jetlag and rain. Can't The Edge sing, too? | 2000-10-31T01:00:06.000-05:00 | 2000-10-31T01:00:06.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope | October 31, 2000 | 5 | 7cf2aa04-e9ab-4e39-af8f-7127e0c8af20 | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
Grievances is the third full-length by San Francisco’s Kowloon Walled City, a post-metal group fronted by Scott Evans. It's a glorious trainwreck of AmRep-style noise rock sculpted into minimalist shapes, with a structure that becomes a metaphor for hollowness of all kinds. | Grievances is the third full-length by San Francisco’s Kowloon Walled City, a post-metal group fronted by Scott Evans. It's a glorious trainwreck of AmRep-style noise rock sculpted into minimalist shapes, with a structure that becomes a metaphor for hollowness of all kinds. | Kowloon Walled City: Grievances | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21149-grievances/ | Grievances | No one but a person who’d experienced abject powerlessness and the passive acceptance of degradation could have created Grievances. It’s the third full-length by San Francisco’s Kowloon Walled City, a post-metal group that Scott Evans fronts as both singer/guitarist and producer. Wearing that many hats in a band suggests a position of authority, but you’d never guess that listening to Grievances. Evans subsumes his riffs within vast, oppressive swathes of empty space. He submits his voice to a process of industrialized monotony. His guitar doesn’t gently weep—it curls up, plays dead, and still isn’t able to halt its cataclysmic spasms.
Yet Grievances sounds anything but weak. Kowloon’s last album, 2012’s Container Ships, showed a shift toward refinement that felt more like a half measure, but here, Evans and crew have hit on something profound. It isn’t a concept album per se, but it does have an overarching theme: the psychic, social, and spatial anxieties of the modern workplace. But Grievances isn’t about run-of-the-mill disgruntled employment as much as it’s a haunting meditation on humanity’s disassociation from the product—or, in our increasingly cyber-centric world, the service—of its labor.
"You sell it like a poet," Evans howls on "The Grift", the centerpiece and high point of the album. It’s an accusation of self-commodification, seemingly aimed both inward and outward. It’s more than that, though; as a trainwreck of AmRep-style noise rock is sculpted into minimalist shapes, that structure becomes a metaphor for hollowness of all kinds. "The fiction sells," Evans reiterates, and when he slams the "confidence game" of modern interpersonal commerce, his sardonic use of "confidence" is even more lacerating than his sly insinuation of melody.
At just over three and a half minutes, "The Grift" is the runt of the album. Song lengths stretch onward from there, including Grievances’ title track, which crawls along for nearly seven minutes’ worth of forlorn rage. While Evans levels the charge "No love/ No memory/ Just admit it", fellow guitarist Jon Howell locks into a pneumatic, dehumanized groove that sputters out in gasps of dead air. Bassist Ian Miller chugs and claws; drummer Jeff Fagundes (replaced by Julia Lancer since this recording) puts the brakes on spacetime. If Godflesh and Codeine had ever conspired to hybridize, it might have come out like this: bleak but bare, mechanistic yet melancholic.
Grievances is inalienably heavy, but it’s not sludge in the conventional sense. On "Your Best Years", the distortion is more clotted than fuzzy, with immaculate slabs of dissonance left dangling overhead. But it’s "Backlit" that sums up the huge step forward Kowloon has taken with Grievances. Arid and static at first, it builds into a monument to grim resignation that feels weathered and ancient right out of the gate. "Wear out your weaknesses," Evans half-commands, half-implores; later he adds, "Wear all your weaknesses." Resistance is futile, but in that steadfast futility there is strength. | 2015-10-15T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-10-15T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Neurot | October 15, 2015 | 7.8 | 7cf48a80-ed90-4e91-aff6-7ed3f8bb311d | Jason Heller | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-heller/ | null |
For more than a decade, the Glaswegian indie-pop band Camera Obscura have made consistency a virtue. Their fifth album, featuring guest vocal harmonies from Neko Case and Jim James, clears out the symphonic pomp of 2009's My Maudlin Career to double down on classic beach music and soul underpinnings. | For more than a decade, the Glaswegian indie-pop band Camera Obscura have made consistency a virtue. Their fifth album, featuring guest vocal harmonies from Neko Case and Jim James, clears out the symphonic pomp of 2009's My Maudlin Career to double down on classic beach music and soul underpinnings. | Camera Obscura: Desire Lines | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18185-camera-obscura-desire-lines/ | Desire Lines | For more than a decade, the Glaswegian indie-pop band Camera Obscura have made consistency a virtue. Their songs stick to comfortingly familiar forms, and every single one is about love. Not many bands could build a devoted indie following by plowing such a narrow, unflashy vintage row. But not many bands have a singer like Tracyanne Campbell, whose plainly beautiful voice is sluiced through a series of refined lilts, catches, and gulps that have come to trigger a nearly Pavlovian adoration in fans. This constant musical sweetness is balanced by Campbell's eye for the dark clouds reflected in every silvery lake, and even her most starry-eyed love songs tend to be shot through with presentiments of doom.
Camera Obscura's distinctive outlook on generic terrain becomes apparent only via intimate familiarity, like how every forest trail looks the same except the one you've walked a hundred times. A cursory pass over their catalog might make it sound like all one piece, where a baseline loveliness is spiked with absurdly disarming highlights such as "French Navy". But a dogged, calculated growth can be traced from record to record. The folksy early-Belle & Sebastian style of Biggest Bluest Hi Fi (produced by Stuart Murdoch) was perfected, and tinged with dreamy 1950s rock, on the classic Underachievers Please Try Harder. The departure of vocalist John Henderson tilted the band away from cuddly duo songs and toward more lonesome, focused showcases for Campbell's vocal performances on Let's Get Out of This Country and My Maudlin Career, which bloomed with stronger electric instrumentation and bolder shades of country, orchestral pop, beach music, and soul.
Desire Lines is the first Camera Obscura album that doesn't seem to bring much new to the table, though it's hard to complain when they have vocal melodies as infectious and thoughtful as those in the verses of standout "William’s Heart". Here, Camera Obscura clear out the symphonic pomp that overgrew Maudlin to double down on classic beach music and soul underpinnings. Jeremy Kittel's strings swoop through a 30-second intro and then out of earshot for most of the album, discreetly reappearing to add translucent harmonies to the stirring ballad "Cri De Coeur" and the jubilant deep cut "I Missed Your Party", where Motown goes to the sock hop courtesy of a horn arrangement by Mark Gonzales. Neko Case and Jim James add unpresumptuous vocal harmonies to several tracks, easing into the low-key setting. The flicker and caress of Kenny McKeeve's tastefully reverbed guitar never gets much rowdier than on the rollicking trifle "Do It Again"-- sadly not a Beach Boys cover, but with some of that same nostalgic feel. There's not a bad cut here, though it's hard to imagine what a bad Camera Obscura cut would sound like at this point.
It isn't tough to write lyrics about the very beginnings and endings of relationships, when feelings are large and roles are relatively clear-cut. Campbell's gift is to capture the murkier middle regions, especially at transitions or reckonings-- times of acute vulnerability, a quality her voice seems custom-built to transmit. In the first proper song, "This Is Love (Feels Alright)", she draws a scenario that is purely flirty and romantic; the kind of helpless, unthinking giving-in that eventually leads to the hard questions posed on the stunning "Fifth in Line to the Throne": "How am I going to tell my king that I don't trust his throne anymore?" Campbell sings, caught once again, like a moth in a screen door, between staying and going. She's wonderful at lightly sketching the complex dynamics between people who won't say what they both know. "I've been cool with you," she confides on "New Year's Resolution". "The sooner you admit it, I will, too."
On the same song, Campbell makes two resolutions: to "write something of value" and to "kiss you like I mean it." The two are directly related for a songwriter who captures hot feelings in cool songs, and perhaps nod to the relatively long four-year wait for Desire Lines. More deeply satisfying than extraordinary*,* it seems unlikely to displace anyone's favorite Camera Obscura record, but neither is it a negligible entry in one of the smartest and most loveable discographies in contemporary indie-pop. | 2013-06-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-06-07T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | 4AD | June 7, 2013 | 7.5 | 7cf818c4-5ece-433d-8f03-414d0aca80ff | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
The Orwells recognize the need for a space where the ground rules of Weezer’s “In the Garage” still have merit, where knucklehead behavior is allowed and encouraged, so long as no one gets hurt. | The Orwells recognize the need for a space where the ground rules of Weezer’s “In the Garage” still have merit, where knucklehead behavior is allowed and encouraged, so long as no one gets hurt. | The Orwells: Terrible Human Beings | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22867-terrible-human-beings/ | Terrible Human Beings | The Orwells are five dudes from the suburbs of Chicago playing a codified style of garage rock, like so many suburban dudes before them. But despite what you may have read about the impending obsolescence of groups exactly like this one, the Orwells signed to a major label before they turned 21 and were quickly thrust towards enviable font size on festival lineups and a career-making performance on “Late Show With David Letterman.” There’s clearly an under-served audience for a band like the Orwells, and Terrible Human Beings caters to their needs and lets everyone else know they can fuck right off. These guys wisely recognize the need for a space where the ground rules of Weezer’s “In the Garage” still have merit, where knucklehead behavior is allowed and encouraged, so long as no one gets hurt.
“Told me ‘Act your age’/That’s why she’s underage,” Mario Cuomo shouts on “They Put a Body in the Bayou,” which will only raise an eyebrow if you’ve never read a single thing about the Orwells up to this point. The two things most people know about the Orwells is that they are young and they like to start shit, twin concerns summed up nicely on the chorus: “Good boys come in last/Bad girl by my side/Poppin’ pills on the fly/Cold grave when I die.” Considering their sound, their look, their name, the zippy hooks and laddish malfeasance—and not even counting the BBC and NME namedrops on “Ring Pop”—the Orwells probably would’ve been called rock’n’roll’s new saviors at least twice over by this point if they were British.
They might as well be, with Jim Abbiss behind the boards here. He was one of the three heavyweights responsible for producing their 2014 album Disgraceland**, along with TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek and Chris Coady (Beach House, Future Islands). Abbiss, meanwhile is best known for helming the Arctic Monkeys’ canonical debut, as well as Kasabian and Editors albums you probably haven’t heard if you’re American. He knows how to get a song to sound like it belongs on satellite radio, but this just leaves Terrible Human Beings in a netherworld between the Black Lips pisstakes of their earliest work and the Black Keys commercial ambitions of their present.
Terrible Human Beings can still be cherry-picked for catchy singles bound for algorithmic playlists, but it’s impossible to overlook how much of the Orwells’ appeal is bundled into their persona as enfants terribles. And since there’s absolutely no way for them to generate the violent potential of their live shows here, Cuomo has to bring it second-hand: “Heavy Head” is a weirdly sanitized hostage narrative, and the song called “Black Francis” includes a nod to California street gangs plucked directly from Pixies’ “No. 13 Baby.” The borrowed menace is awkward on many levels, but it mostly underlines how wholesome these guys feel in 2017. This is an album called Terrible Human Beings with a naked woman on the cover, but like so much of what lies herein, they suggest malevolence without much to show for it.
Rock music doesn't have to be “dangerous” to be thrilling, of course. Rock music is still relevant, in large part because it can do other things besides conveying suburban angst—it can comfort, confound, speak for marginalized voices or give people the energy to get the fuck out of bed. But the Orwells aren’t here for any of that. “I don’t think it’s going to bring rock back,” guitarist Matt O’Keefe said about the record. “I just think it’s a rock record that maybe some people will enjoy.” It’s best to take O’Keefe at his word—if you don’t expect too much from them, you might not be let down. | 2017-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Atlantic | February 14, 2017 | 5.8 | 7cfaa7b8-df86-4fed-aea4-30ca2ed03cc7 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Sharon Van Etten invites a handful of artists to cover songs from her 2010 album epic. These new versions—played by Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams, and more—reveal the music’s healing power and complexity. | Sharon Van Etten invites a handful of artists to cover songs from her 2010 album epic. These new versions—played by Fiona Apple, Lucinda Williams, and more—reveal the music’s healing power and complexity. | Sharon Van Etten: epic Ten | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sharon-van-etten-epic-ten/ | epic Ten | Sharon Van Etten opens her second album, epic, in a register of grounded wisdom. “To say the things I want to say to you would be a crime/To admit I’m still in love with you after all this time,” Van Etten declares on “A Crime.” She weaves her verse into a tangle of seduction and toxicity before landing on a clear thought that becomes a promise and a refrain: “Never let myself love like that again.” Van Etten sings herself into and out of these seven self-preserving words. Each syllable becomes a life raft for anyone who needs it.
epic’s seven songs of survival and becoming marked the firm arrival of then-29-year-old Sharon Van Etten from New Jersey to Brooklyn and the forefront of indie rock. With a lingering twang from five turbulent years in Tennessee, epic was her first time playing with a full band, and she sounded newly poised. In interviews, she spoke openly about the partner she’d left behind, who discouraged her songwriting and worse. “I had just come from an abusive relationship [...] and I was really lost,” Van Etten says in a short documentary that accompanies this 10th-anniversary epic reissue. “I played music because it made me feel better.”
Her healing path brought complexity and depth to epic—where there’s a grave narrative, there’s an empowered hook; where there’s horror, there are peace signs—and this revelation rings through every note. There’s comfort in her radiant harmonizing with folk singers Meg Baird and Cat Martino, in the intensity and warmth of her melodies, in the sunstruck instrumentation that builds on the best of Tusk-era Fleetwood Mac, and the harmonium that graces “Love More”—it’s all relief. Van Etten was building her confidence and learning to trust other people, a process she said extended to her studio collaborators, including members of She Keeps Bees and the War on Drugs; her label, Ba Da Bing, where she was an intern-turned-signee; and the community at Zebulon, the Williamsburg venue where these songs first took flight. As Van Etten states in the epic Ten film, letting people in is a difficult step in moving forward as a survivor, but a crucial one. epic is the sound of interconnection and growth.
When epic turned 10 last year, Van Etten decided to honor this pivotal moment by inviting even more people into it. She assembled a covers album featuring foundational artists of her life, like Fiona Apple and Lucinda Williams, as well as eventual peers like Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner, who helped amplify her profile in 2010 when they covered “Love More” live (before the album was even out). It’s a testament to Van Etten’s craft that her songs bloom in so many contexts, from Vernon and Dessner’s ripping rock take on “A Crime” to St. Panther’s sleek R&B remake of “One Day.” The gnarled cover of “Peace Signs” by UK pub-rockers IDLES is not listenable per se, but that might be the point—their version underscores the essential aggression of brutal lyrics like “I told you I could no longer see,” the marching rhythm and stakes of Van Etten fighting back. “I am not afraid,” she sang on “Peace Signs.” “I am something.”
There was already a disarming openness to epic, and the best covers find new horizons in these songs still. Courtney Barnett, accompanied by Vagabon, lays bare the shattering narrative of “Don’t Do It,” urging a friend to hang on. Shamir reimagines the impressionistic drone of “DsharpG” as an incandescent ballad, layering glittering acoustic guitars over a low-end rumble, spinning out their virtuosic vocals, pitching the whole song skyward.
Two towering epic Ten recordings play like tacit acknowledgments of influence. The original “Save Yourself” is animated by Lucinda Williams-style no-bullshit resolve and her same defiant skepticism, which makes the experience of hearing Williams croon it herself doubly thrilling. “Don’t you think I know you’re only trying to save yourself?/Just like everyone else” is about as empathic as an eye roll gets. To be broke, adventuring, outsmarting your heartache—these are big Lucinda themes, and they echo through “Save Yourself.” Like many great songwriters, Van Etten grew up listening to Williams, and this cover sits at the center of a timeless creative equation: when you listen to an artist, you are always, to some degree, listening to every artist who inspired them to be one. Or as Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker reflects of her college years in the liner notes to epic Ten: “Sharon’s words, melodies, and rawness, became my words, melodies, and rawness, and permeated the sea of moments I was living in, making them more bearable [...] Her way of writing changed my way of thinking.” epic Ten charts this musical-emotional continuum in both directions.
If you were a fan of Van Etten before epic, maybe you remember the excitement of seeing that distant, grainy live clip of Justin Vernon covering “Love More” in high falsetto in 2010, knowing this important artist would soon be reaching many more people. Maybe you also remember that in 2010 it was less common for a woman in indie music to be talking unguardedly about her experience of being in an abusive relationship. Van Etten put this reality and its aftermath at the heart of “Love More,” a five-minute hymn of resilience that is the anchor of epic and her songbook. “You chained me like a dog in our room,” she sings in her low register over the gentle harmonium drone. “You were high, when I was doomed.” Van Etten has called “Love More” her “most revealing song” about this exceedingly difficult time, and said it was also about “two friends who pretty much saved my life when I was at my lowest point.”
It’s hard to imagine a more apt meeting than Fiona Apple and “Love More.” Apple has been galvanizing listeners to speak their truths with conviction since she was a teenager in the 1990s—when Van Etten was also a teenager, listening to Apple in her bedroom. “Love More” is filled with a raw emotional strength and honesty that is practically synonymous with Apple, who channels it here with otherworldly bolt-cutting power.
For the first time on a recording, Apple plays the ashiko hand drum—an instrument that, like Van Etten’s harmonium, you pull close to your body. The harmonium is traditionally used in Indian devotional music, and it creates healing vibrations; the reverberations of the ashiko drum have a similar visceral resonance. Apple puts gravity into her arrangement, fortifying Van Etten’s words: the elongated “chained,” the clipped “high,” the booming “doomed,” as if to say she understands them. Apple has always been open about the fact that she is a survivor. In her “Love More” cover, every careful note is a potential expression of solidarity.
Van Etten and her collaborators made “Love More” float on what she once called “a river of harmonies,” which reaches its widest opening in Apple’s cover. If Van Etten’s “Love More” evokes sun finally pouring through a window, then Apple’s is the renewed clarity of stepping out into the light. “Love More” is a song about regaining control of one’s life, the finale to a feminist album about reclaiming one’s voice and returning to love in the wake of trauma. Apple’s cover makes these ideas lucid and real, in her taut a capella vocalizing and her rapturous self-harmonies. It’s an anthem for anyone who has embarked on that journey. Joining “Why Try to Change Me Now” and “I Want You” in the pantheon of classic Fiona Apple covers, her “Love More” contains a powerful alchemy of both autonomy and connection, of inner strength as well as the assurance that anyone who has survived is not alone. As Apple communes with Van Etten’s words—“She took the time to believe in what she said/She made me love, she made me love, she made me love more”—she offers abiding proof.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Ba Da Bing | April 19, 2021 | 7.8 | 7d02b99a-019b-4aaa-b2b6-a9ed069af957 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
Inspired by the FX drama Pose and the flush of new love, the London indie trio uses its third album to cosplay as the house band of a fantasy discotheque. | Inspired by the FX drama Pose and the flush of new love, the London indie trio uses its third album to cosplay as the house band of a fantasy discotheque. | Girl Ray: Prestige | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/girl-ray-prestige/ | Prestige | For Prestige, their third album, London indie trio Girl Ray dabble in the art of the concept album. The idea emerged as singer-guitarist Poppy Hankin, bassist Sophie Moss, and drummer Iris McConnell were crammed in a bus on a post-Brexit tour of Europe at the start of 2020. Hankin had just binged Pose, the FX drama about New York City ballroom culture, and she began recording demos inspired by its soundtrack to battle her malaise and distract herself from her faraway girlfriend. As she sketched out each song, Hankin imagined them blaring at an imaginary nightclub called Prestige. Girl Ray are the house band of this fantasy locale, pumping out nu disco until dawn.
Beyond the immediate influence of Pose, Prestige is steeped in the current disco-pop resurgence, steering Girl Ray away from their twee roots and new-wave experiments. Roused by the music of Jessie Ware and Róisín Murphy, as well as Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, Hankin penned hi-def tracks stacked with twangy bass and prickly, Chic-like guitar. Falling in love was another catalyst for Hankin’s newfound poptimism, and the lyrics are all wine and roses—joyous, but terminally cliche at times. On the mid-tempo “Give Me Your Love,” Hankin recalls “Searching for your hand/Walking in the sand,” while on “Love Is Enough,” she spills out this couplet: “Time will tell my love/On the wings of a dove.” Three songs contain “love” in the title, lit up like a marquee, and the word is uttered some two-dozen times across the album’s 42 minutes. Fortunately, Hankin’s breathy, droning voice helps divert from the Hallmark language, as does her melodic expertise.
Each track is sparkling and memorable, and likely to lodge itself in your hippocampus. Playing “True Love” at top volume feels like whirling around a roller disco, where hot pants and synchronized clapping are mandatory. A liquid Moog solo from Mark Bencuya twists and turns like Mountain Dew coursing through a curly straw, a sweet and slick finish to the bubbly tune. The ’70s-flavored pop cut “Easy” takes a cue from Warren Zevon, pairing brightly pulsing piano with bulbous bass and spare drumkit a la “Werewolves of London.” Hankin wrote the song on a trip to New York, where she wandered the streets solo and shot billiards. On “Hold Tight,” Hankin’s foggy tenor floats over congas and Wurlitzer as she asks her crush to “get a Coke and sit on the wall.”
Hankin has said she’s more accustomed to writing about unrequited romance, which might be why her happiest songs can verge on treacly. But on “Tell Me,” she wades back into familiar waters. The song is spring-loaded with funk bass and soars on a falsetto chorus soft as feathered hair. “Baby fill my cup,” she pleads, adding, “reading your mind is like foreign TV.” Hankin wrote the track with producer Ben H. Allen, and the pair chose to focus on a withholding partner—a theme that contrasts with Prestige’s abiding air of bliss. The synth-driven “Begging You Now” is another rare case. Hankin admits to getting “jealous fevers,” and hints at codependent behavior. It’s a refreshing dose of reality on a record crammed with sunshine melodies and candy-heart prose.
Just as many of Prestige’s love-inspired songs bleed together thematically, a good chunk of its tracks sound awfully similar, and that can be a problem. “True Love,” “Up,” “Everybody’s Saying That,” and “Love Is Enough” bob to the same Chic formula: skanking guitar, twangy bass, canned strings. It’s a solid formula, but the textural sameness makes more idiosyncratic tracks like “Give Me Your Love” stand out. The song was recorded with Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard and Al Doyle, who let Girl Ray ransack their studio toys and tinker with a vocoder. They adorned the song with steel drums and hand bells, layering in robot vocals and synth arpeggios. It’s a fruitful collaboration, one that nudges Girl Ray out of their comfort zone. At Club Prestige, even the house band needs to shake up their setlist to keep people dancing. | 2023-08-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-04T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Moshi Moshi | August 4, 2023 | 6.7 | 7d0c8e29-eee3-43fc-97d4-c03a8124b775 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Phish is not known for their studio work. But for a group of musicians whose sole value has always been the simple pleasure of making music, everyone here sounds noticeably vacant. | Phish is not known for their studio work. But for a group of musicians whose sole value has always been the simple pleasure of making music, everyone here sounds noticeably vacant. | Phish: Big Boat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22451-big-boat/ | Big Boat | The best of Phish’s music aims for transcendence. It’s at the heart of any jam band, or really, any kind of improvisatory outfit: an attempt to find language beyond language, to go somewhere you could not go alone. It’s why the length of any given Phish song in concert might stretch deep into the double-digits, and why their loyal legion of fans feel an instinctual desire to see as many of their shows as possible. Despite their massive audience, Phish remain a countercultural force, and their goofy, shroomy jams resonate as an aural rejection of the monotonous sobriety of suburban adolescence. For much of Phish’s fans, the band is akin to the class clown who’s also the smartest kid in the room. Their energy is infectious and vital; when you’re with them, you feel better about yourself. It’s an escapist fantasy.
On Big Boat, the band’s thirteenth album, Phish openly promise salvation from the get-go. In “Friends,” the dumb-as-rocks, vaguely triumphant opening number, drummer Jon Fishman forecasts the coming of the Lord, descending upon the Earth in “some fiery fashion.” But Fishman offers an alternate exit, escaping to the hills and collecting his like-minded compatriots aboard the titular “big boat.” As an opener, it offers a mission statement not dissimilar to My Morning Jacket’s “Victory Dance,” an enthusiastic, if overly simplistic song aimed squarely at the already-initiated. Keyboardist Page McConnell bashes dramatically along his keyboard, like a parody of Roy Bittan on Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell, as Fishman’s toms roll and Trey Anastasio’s fingers glide along his fretboard. Incessant and noisy, “Friends” opens Big Boat with the promise of a Phish album armed with purpose and energy.
That is not the album that follows. Big Boat is at times overwrought and half-assed, gratingly silly and embarrassingly self-serious, both tedious and underwhelming. In other words, it’s a new Phish album. Even still, the lowest points of Big Boat manage to sink lower than just being bad-for-Phish; Big Boat is made even worse by not sounding enough like Phish. The turgid prog-pop of “Waking Up Dead” could be mistaken for any number of anonymous, post-Phish, local jam acts. “Tide Turns,” with its nauseating Jimmy Buffett sleaze, doesn’t even fail for Phish trying to sound like a soul group; it’s more akin to members of Phish begrudgingly joining a wedding band. Somewhere along the way, you get your expected share of underwritten ballads, overly complicated funk wipeouts, and multiple tracks whose runtimes come suspiciously close to the 4:20 mark.
If you love Phish, the release of a solid studio album has likely never been a requirement to stay onboard, even when their releases were fun and relatively consistent, like 1996’s Billy Breathes. Had Big Boat never been released, the live staple “Blaze On” would still find its way to their blissed-out crowds, as it has on the last several tours. And while “Blaze On” is no latter-day classic like, say, “So Many Roads,” its inclusion here and on their setlist does represent an example of Phish updating their repertoire without resorting to the tried-and-true album-and-single cycles they’ve always existed squarely outside of.
As such, Phish exist in a number gray areas. They are an indie-minded band with mainstream appeal; a classic rock group who rejects the genre’s radio-focused populism; an enormously competent outfit who use their expertise to promote their euphoric brand of anti-intellectualism. If Phish were to embrace their unique position in the industry, one could imagine them penning albums that were, if not definitive, then at least approaching coherence, like modern-day Wilco. Instead, Big Boat is another failure in a discography full of them. Without a unifying identity, it whiffs on nearly every statement it tries to make. For a group of musicians whose sole value has always been the simple pleasure of making music, the members of Phish sound noticeably vacant in these recordings.
Still, none of the album’s weaknesses (like McConnell rhyming “losing my interest” with “just scanning Pinterest”) would be half as disappointing if Phish weren’t almost aging gracefully. The last several years have had some undeniable high points—from the simple, nostalgic rock of 2009’s Joy through 2014’s Fuego, easily the band’s most inspired record since the ’90s. On Big Boat, they come up with a few winning moments. Trey’s guitar solos throughout the otherwise rote balladry of “Miss You” are genuinely moving in a way his humdrum vocals and plainspoken lyrics could never be. McConnell’s “I Always Wanted It This Way” is the album’s peak, a defiant Motorik jam that wouldn’t sound out of place on a 21st-century Yo La Tengo album. The album closes strikingly with “Petrichor,” an immaculately arranged prog opus. It might not be a track to convince the naysayers (or even, with its thirteen-minute runtime, to necessarily warrant a second play). But it’s the only moment on the album when Phish shows—and not just tells—that transcendence is possible, and that they’re willing to go there with us. | 2016-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Jemp | October 7, 2016 | 5.3 | 7d185082-e243-45ae-96eb-8143b3ea4d27 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
The boisterous UK trio adds polish to its organ house and bassline rap, balancing lyrical economy with over-the-top boasts and catchy choruses. | The boisterous UK trio adds polish to its organ house and bassline rap, balancing lyrical economy with over-the-top boasts and catchy choruses. | Bad Boy Chiller Crew: Charva Anthems EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bad-boy-chiller-crew-charva-anthems-ep/ | Charva Anthems EP | Rowdy bassline rap trio Bad Boy Chiller Crew were tipped for stardom in 2020, with a UK-wide tour and plans to travel the world, but things obviously didn’t quite pan out that way for MCs Kane, Clive, and GK. Instead, the Crew regrouped on their new sprawling farmstead outside of their hometown of Bradford, in the Northern UK county of West Yorkshire, and channelled lockdown boredom into what they do best: making bangers and going on benders. Since last year’s aptly titled Full Wack No Brakes, there’s been the twinkly 2-step of “Needed You” and a nudging, winking Christmas single called “White White Christmas,” as well as lager-assisted tattoo roulette and a digger-powered slip ’n’ slide. Earlier this month, a steady groundswell helped nudge them into the UK Top 40 with the wildly catchy lead single from Charva Anthems, “Don’t You Worry About Me,” a song that sounds like an alcopop tastes: sweet and fizzy, with a neat bit of bite. If you have enough of them, you’ll feel great and then a little bit sick.
Having been snapped up by a major label, the Crew have polished up their organ house and bassline sounds, and some of the references have had an upgrade too—more Grey Goose than Smirnoff, BMWs swapped in for dirt bikes—but mostly the ingredients stay familiar: namely, getting licked and moving quick. “Forget Me,” “Don’t You Worry About Me,” and “Get Out My Head” all follow a similar formula. There’s an outsourced female vocal chorus that sounds instantly familiar on first listen (most of them are lifted, royalty-free, straight from Splice), which is paired with punchy, sidewinding verses. It’s a setup that works best when the chorus is kept brief and aloof, letting the snappy verses do the heavy lifting (“Up late, got flake,” from “Clothes,” is economical lyricism at its thriftiest).
Kane, the best MC of the three and a remarkably understated talent in his own right, takes center stage across the EP. His persona is the most reserved—more chiller than bad boy, you might say—but he’s still endlessly entertaining, and switches flows with the ease and frequency of British weather. Clive’s no slouch either, and GK has bags of charisma; not many people can carry off a lyric like “These lot know I’m a dog like Marley/Drive like Ken and I fuck these Barbies.” Like a hangover fry-up, it just works. Most of the time, anyway.
“She’s My World” is a bit of a dud, with its awkward chorus and out-of-place (if catchy) Auto-Tuned elements. The beat is a plodder, and the heartfelt crooning is forgettable in the same way that drunken rows at kicking-out time tend to be consigned to history by the morning after. But the group have been open about their intentions to reach a broader, more commercial audience, and break out of an otherwise hyperlocal music scene. Their transparency, unlikely star power, and undeniable ear for a hooky flow are probably why so many people are willing them on already. Some new fans might need a glossary—10 points (or pints) to anyone in the U.S. who knows what a charva is—but with gear this moreish, the boys from Braddy might just make good on their global ambitions this year.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Relentless / House Anxiety | May 17, 2021 | 6.9 | 7d18fc6a-1edc-49ba-ae4e-95ebcf8b8663 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
Cobbling together styles from Top 40 and the dance underground alike, Vol. 2 raises the question: Can a microgenre that’s all self-consciously hyper-“contemporary” veneer sustain itself long-term? | Cobbling together styles from Top 40 and the dance underground alike, Vol. 2 raises the question: Can a microgenre that’s all self-consciously hyper-“contemporary” veneer sustain itself long-term? | Various Artists: PC Music, Vol. 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22650-pc-music-vol-2/ | PC Music, Vol. 2 | Three years out from PC Music’s inception, it would be rash to deny the label/genre/cultural microphenomenon’s influence—not just in terms of the sheer number of think-pieces generated in its wake, but in the trickle-down of its aesthetic signatures. Take, for example, the breathy single “3 Strikes” by maybe-Kylie Jenner-fronted teen-pop act Terror Jr. The song’s otherwise unimaginative pop skeleton (lilting beat, insipid lyrics) is rendered magnetic through chilly vocal manipulation and melodic elements, which are at once dreamlike and austere. In other words, it sounds like an A.G. Cook production on a fistful of downers. This is not to mention the expertly-constructed hype around the band itself: an anonymous female vocalist, a debut via a lipgloss advertisement—straight from the PC playbook.
Gradually seeping into the mainstream is par for the course for electronic music subcultures, but Cook and company are a bit more insistent in the totality of their goals. By one description, 2016 is the year that PC Music “grabbed the mainstream by the throat and made it take notice.” But listening to the PC Music, Vol. 2 compilation, I felt less subsumed and more worn out. Is it feasible for a microgenre that’s all candy-coating, all self-consciously hyper-“contemporary” veneer, to expect to sustain itself long-term? And, while this perhaps overestimates the sincerity of PC Music’s mission, is it possible that such mainstream-seizing objectives are built around a faulty understanding of how culture flows?
In any event, PC Music, Vol. 2 collects 10 tracks, most previously released, which follow the blueprint laid out by last year’s Vol. 1. Though the tracks clock in at varying degrees of hyperactivity (GFOTY’s full-throttle “Poison” perhaps the worst of the bunch for the high-BPM-averse), each reaches for anthem status. The productions cobble together and iron over a mix of styles appropriated from both the dance underground and Top 40, with results that are structurally varied, but with a uniform surface. Among the better offerings is easyFun’s “Monopoly,” whose bouncy hook is propelled by clean synths and infantile vocal manipulation. Felicita’s “a new family” seethes, horror-film whispers emerging from underneath the sort of crunchy torrent of sound favored by so-called post-club producers. Some songs bridge directly into a stylized take on radio pop—Danny L Harle’s Carly Rae Jepsen-featuring “Super Natural,” for example, a disquietingly innocent hit that could easily have been underwritten by the Disney Channel. If this compilation evidences any real evolution in the PC Music sound, it’s in this assimilated direction: less sinister, more widely marketable.
As a conceptual project that embraces HD aesthetics wholesale, PC Music has always felt dated to me; it’s in this context that comparisons to post-internet art—variously unflattering to either camp, depending on your vantage point—seem most apt. Its desire to comment on the hypermediated nature of being young today is similarly tiresome: lyrics often conjure a lonely girl on her phone, waiting for a notification to advance the plot, a rather flattened image of sexuality and longing. Can’t we agree by now that, however smooth our screens, technology tends more often to reveal and amplify an inherent messiness in human relationships? This is not to mention the genre’s overwhelming whiteness, or its tendency to treat women as avatars, recurring points that rather definitively undermine PC Music’s critical capabilities.
But a masterfully constructed pop song can be indelible, and if you peel back the ill-advised art-project histrionics, there are a handful of those here. Harle’s “Broken Flowers,” first released in 2013, is an excellent piece of cyborg house, addictive but never overwhelming. “Only You,” by Chinese pop star Chris Lee—one of the biggest-ticket names and a rare non-white collaborator, it is worth noting, for a group of producers so transparently indebted to East Asian pop culture—builds at a treacly pace, as the minimalist structure fills with textural scrawls that cut the sweetness. It’s this, not the messaging, that is worth hanging onto. | 2016-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-30T01:00:00.000-05:00 | null | PC Music | November 30, 2016 | 6.2 | 7d1931b8-958c-45ba-a504-36d8a6ef4ac6 | Thea Ballard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/ | null |
Singer and songwriter Maya Bon’s bedroom-pop dirges are both intimate and removed, filled with understated yet strangely meaningful detail. | Singer and songwriter Maya Bon’s bedroom-pop dirges are both intimate and removed, filled with understated yet strangely meaningful detail. | Babehoven: Nastavi, Calliope | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/babehoven-nastavi-calliope/ | Nastavi, Calliope | Maya Bon paints quotidian misery with a palette of callbacks and namedrops. On “Crossword,” a ghostly, plinky standout from Nastavi, Calliope, her latest EP as Babehoven, she acknowledges feeling guilty for not replying to her long-absent father’s emails before noting that someone named Ella is whimpering. Two tracks later, we learn that Ella is a dog. Reveals like this, alongside specific references to the names of people in Bon’s life, make Nastavi, Calliope feel like a nesting doll of autobiographical remembrances. Subtly and unsubtly, her lyrics allude to minor tragedies that she and those around her have suffered and survived.
Even more than 2020’s Demonstrating Visible Differences of Height EP, Nastavi, Calliope’s midtempo bedroom-pop dirges sound muffled and foggy, both intimate and removed. Bon’s collaborator and co-producer Ryan Albert returns on bass, drums, and some guitar and vocals; together, they create an ideal backdrop for Bon’s diaristic lyrics, typically delivered in a mumble-sing that highlights their understated yet meaningful details. On “Orange Tree,” a song primarily focused on someone named Robin, Bon introduces another character—Joey—who gestures vaguely at some sort of shock. His story is never completed, and the loose end dangles off the song’s compressed arrangement like a frayed rope.
Bon uses specificity to sketch outlines with ample negative space. A lyrical highlight of “Orange Tree” comes in a passing mention of the once-omnipresent online game Words With Friends, which Bon uses as an excuse not to do anything else. It’s an endearingly slapdash inclusion that feels inextricable from an earlier lyric about using puzzles to avoid communicating with her father on “Crossword.” By the EP’s end, Bon’s narrator is preparing to see her dad for the first time in more than a decade. On the only upbeat tune, the dreamy “Alt. Lena,” a friend named Lena tells her that she’s brave to meet him again. Lena, Bon tells us, loves chocolate milk, sex, boobs, fire, swimming, “sipping beer on hot days.” Though she reminisces fondly about their experiences together, these surface-level qualities are all we learn about Lena herself; Bon fleshes out the character only enough to support her own story.
“Alt. Lena” is an outlier; Nastavi, Calliope more often feels resigned, even glum. “It’s hard to talk about it being a bad week/When it’s been a bad week/For a long time now,” Bon sighs on opener “Bad Week,” sounding as though her week has lasted a year at least. It’s the rare instance when her lyrics seem to speak not just to her personal sphere but to the wider world as well—evoking how, for many people, 2020 seemed to drag on indefinitely. It’s one of her few references that’s equally bleak and humorous, and Nastavi, Calliope’s cloudy rearview mirror would shine brighter with a few more laughs. But, as Bon clearly understands, these moments of levity are hard-won.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-12T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | July 12, 2021 | 7 | 7d1af03b-0072-47aa-8535-aec7c79a3ce8 | Max Freedman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/max-freedman/ | |
Natalie Mering’s fourth album is a grand, sentimental ode to living and loving in the shadow of doom. It is her most ambitious and complex work yet. | Natalie Mering’s fourth album is a grand, sentimental ode to living and loving in the shadow of doom. It is her most ambitious and complex work yet. | Weyes Blood: Titanic Rising | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/weyes-blood-titanic-rising/ | Titanic Rising | In the face of catastrophe, Natalie Mering always finds serenity. Throughout her fourth record as Weyes Blood, tides are surging, trees are falling, the internet is ruining romance, capitalism is pushing workers to the brink of exhaustion, and reality is breaking her heart. In the wake of all this, Mering continues to search the stars for salvation. Belief—in oneself, in another, in myths—is Titanic Rising’s only request. “I want to make sure everybody feels like they deserve to be alive,” she told Pitchfork. “I hope you could have a smile during the apocalypse.” Building on the psychedelic chamber-folk of 2016’s Front Row Seat to Earth, these convictions push the 30-year-old songwriter towards her most ambitious and complex work yet.
Titanic Rising approaches these modern-day problems through a distinctly sentimental lens. Mering has referred to herself as a “nostalgic futurist,” and here she leans into that title by examining the strange ways technology has shaped modern romance through the earnest lyrics and golden, gigantic arrangements of 1970s pop songwriters. But unlike Joni Mitchell or the Carpenters, whose love affairs were clouded by plain old anxiety and desperation, Mering’s love affairs are clouded by algorithms. As she seeks true love on the jaunty “Everyday,” Mering’s desire for companionship bursts forth like a geyser. When she bellows “I need a love every day” over a baroque clavinet, it’s with a herculean determination.
Even at her most optimistic, Mering grounds herself in reality. On the majestic opener “A Lot’s Gonna Change,” Mering yearns to return to the purity of childhood, a time when the world seemed to swell with wonder and possibility. But she cuts her fantasy short and admits that since progress is impossible to escape, why not focus on what matters right now? Later on “Mirror Forever,” she is her most blunt: “No one’s ever gonna give you a trophy/For all the pain and things you’ve been through/No one knows but you.” This advice comes off as almost gravely urgent and upholds Titanic Rising’s acceptance of difficult truths.
Midway through the album, Titanic Rising moves into the murky realm of the subconscious through its instrumental title track, like a sunbeam finding its way to the ocean floor. On the subsequent “Movies,” Mering sounds as if she is singing from the album cover’s sunken bedroom, her voice wobbly and distended. As phosphorescent synthesizers swirl around her, Mering ponders cinema’s emotional shaping of our collective psyche, ultimately finding acceptance in the fantasy. “Movies” might be a melodramatic outlier on the record, but the song exemplifies the way Mering considers the world: as a constant renegotiation of self and place. If the record’s first half was built on swooning dreams, the second half faces the world with a melancholic but hopeful heart.
The truth that lies beneath Titanic Rising is that love blossoms and love wilts. This law of nature is mirrored in the emotional arc introduced by “A Lot’s Gonna Change.” “Everyone’s broken now/And no one knows just how,” she murmurs on the monumental “Wild Time.” The songs are more stoic and elegant even when Mering sings of apocalyptic imagery like a “million people burnin’.”
But Mering’s business is not of misery, but of faith. She suggests dystopian images, but insists that with action, beautiful results are possible. Titanic Rising comes full circle with the instrumental closer “Nearer to Thee,” which borrows the string arrangement from “A Lot’s Gonna Change.” The song’s title alludes to the hymn that the Titanic’s house band supposedly played as the ship sank. Here, as it was then, Weyes Blood can’t help but offer one last breath of hope as she gazes towards an uncertain future. | 2019-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sub Pop | April 5, 2019 | 8.5 | 7d1bfca4-c3eb-45bc-bf04-54befa674181 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
Harry Styles hides himself inside of a mystic pop-rock record that keeps us away from who he is as a songwriter and fledgling rock star. | Harry Styles hides himself inside of a mystic pop-rock record that keeps us away from who he is as a songwriter and fledgling rock star. | Harry Styles: Fine Line | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/harry-styles-fine-line/ | Fine Line | In a Rolling Stone profile earlier this year, Harry Styles recalled how he kept watching this interview with David Bowie on his phone for inspiration. In the clip, Bowie offers this chestnut about creativity: “Always go a little further into the water than you feel you are capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. When you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
Styles was invoking his own artistic process, illuminating the lengths to which he hoped to travel on his second solo album, Fine Line. He was also demonstrating the invincible oblivion of even our most charming pop stars. For Styles, Fine Line is the sound of an artist plumbing the abyss. For us, it’s the sound of a celebrity sticking his toes in the sand. It’s ostensibly his freedom record, one that indulges his every musical and psychedelic whim. It is also removed enough from One Direction to finally not be judged in relationship to them (unlike his spare and often lovely self-titled debut from 2017). By corralling a new flock of influences—from ’70s power pop and Laurel Canyon folk-rock to the sort-of soul of Coldplay—Styles showcases his gift for making music that sounds like good music.
Which is to say the actual sound of Fine Line is incredible, and most songs have at least one great moment to grab hold of: the clusters of background harmonies on “Golden,” the synth sweeps throughout “Sunflower, Vol. 6,” the strange and alluring pre-chorus on “Lights Up,” a song that embodies Styles’ fluorescent charm, his swagger, his desire to be both weird and adored. He has talked recently about his fear of making music after he left One Direction, the pressure of finding a radio single. But to hear him sing sun-warmed, folk-tinged acoustic rock backed by only a handful of musicians is refreshing. There were easier, more callow roads for him to take.
While the music wades into the mystic, his songwriting, pointedly, does not. Fine Line, in part, deals with Styles’ breakup with the French model Camille Rowe, but he renders their romance in the primary colors of needing you, missing you, and remembering you. Emotional beats rise and fall with all the stakes of a refill on a glass of water. Styles doesn’t have the imagination of Bowie or another pop-rock touchpoint here, Fleetwood Mac, who took their lives and transfigured them through cosmic fantasia or Victorian grandeur. Styles’ attempts at this mode worked slightly better on his more austere debut, but in this rainbow-parade of psychedelic pop, the dullness is cast into sharp relief.
The same Styles who sang the unforgettable line, “Even my phone misses your call, by the way” just one album ago, can’t muster a memorable flourish, a vivid image, or the same diaristic self-dramatizing wink as Taylor Swift. Instead, feet firmly planted on the shore, Styles simply summarizes and apologizes and reflects as if he were just telling this story to his mates. During the stretch of ballads that comprise the middle third of the album, he sings, “I’m just an arrogant son of a bitch who can’t admit when he’s sorry,” and, “What if I’m someone I don’t want around?” What these earnest text messages reveal about Styles is that he has a desire to do right, to be a good person, or at least to be seen as one. And that’s it—we remain no closer to understanding him as a songwriter or solo artist.
The musicians here—including songwriters Kid Harpoon and Jeff Bhasker, producer and multi-instrumentalist Tyler Johnson, guitarist Mitch Rowland, among others—summon a retro live-band sound, no producer tags, no chart-storming aesthetics. But Styles treats them more like a collection of instruments than an actual band, which makes the anonymous two-minute guitar solo at the end of “She” seem pretty meaningless on a Harry Styles solo record. Even more infuriating is “Treat People With Kindness,” an awful chimera of Jesus Christ Superstar and Edgar Winter Group’s “Free Ride” that confuses hand-claps with happiness. Each song is a new outfit for Styles, hoping one will carry his reality-competition voice and illuminate his reality-competition lyrics.
There are glimpses, like in “Canyon Moon,” of the sort of intimate connection Styles hopes to forge. It’s one of those running-with-a-kite-down-a-grassy-hill songs, covered in ringing acoustic guitars that evoke his bright smile. “Cherry” rises out of the cliche and into something darker and lasting and Swiftian: “I noticed that there’s a piece of you in how I dress/Take it as a compliment.” Styles is here, buried underneath the fame and the fear. I hear his sweetness, his charm, his elegance. But mostly I hear a guy who’s still afraid he’ll never make a David Bowie record.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Erskine / Columbia | December 13, 2019 | 6 | 7d1cdb04-bd04-4877-9954-bb84866e745e | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
The British composer works with multiple detuned pianos on this hauntingly elegant record of dreamlike miniatures. | The British composer works with multiple detuned pianos on this hauntingly elegant record of dreamlike miniatures. | Max de Wardener: Music for Detuned Pianos | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/max-de-wardener-music-for-detuned-pianos/ | Music for Detuned Pianos | On Music for Detuned Pianos, the British composer Max de Wardener (best known for his work with Gazelle Twin and Mara Carlyle) shows he is not one to take the easy path. The ten pieces on this wonderfully stubborn album are performed by jazz pianist Kit Downes on acoustic piano, an instrument that is notoriously disinclined to unorthodox tuning. The painstaking process resulted in two years of technical challenges and constant re-tuning.
De Wardener used four different types of detuned pianos, each detuning inspired by a different American composer, alongside those tuned to the conventional, equal-tempered scale. On two album highlights—“Doppelgänger” and “Deranged Landscape”— de Wardener tuned the same piano twice, in slightly different ways, then overlaid the recordings, emphasizing the music’s otherworldly feel. De Wardener later added a sprinkling of electronics—the synth washes on “Redshift,” the shade of distortion on “Color Cry”—to give body to the work without overwhelming the acoustic ambience.
Perhaps the best compliment you can pay this hauntingly elegant record is that it never feels like the product of back-breaking toil. After laborious preparation, many of the pieces themselves were recorded in single solo takes, with de Wardener leaving the piano space to weave its unfussy melodies in a way that is reminiscent of Erik Satie’s deathless Gymnopédies. There’s something enchantingly dreamlike about Music for Detuned Pianos, as if the music has been nudged from reality rather than torn from the here and now. “Blueshift,” for example, starts with a jaunty, nautical piano motif which slowly sags out of tune like vinyl left in the sun.
The shadow of Richard D. James hangs heavily over this album. Songs like “Foxtrot” and “Deranged Landscape” suggest the itchy horrors of Selected Ambient Works 2 rendered in echoing acoustics, the physical reality of the piano reinforcing the nature of the unease. “Bismuth Dream,” meanwhile, shares an air of unsettling melancholia with Aphex’s most straightforwardly beautiful piano piece, “Avril 14th.”
At times—notably the slightly dull opening halves of “Spell” and “Star Song”—Music for Detuned Pianos sails too close to convention. But the album partly draws its weight from these oppositions: Music for Detuned Pianos is classical but experimental; relaxing but unnerving; background music that demands your attention. In leaving these discrepancies unresolved, de Wardener and Downes have created an album of immediate impact and lasting emotional depth, a pleasing mess of contradictions that is as beautiful as it is misshapen. | 2020-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Village Green | March 21, 2020 | 7.7 | 7d22654d-5fe2-4c85-bcb0-98db4374bc3a | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Titled after a game of computer solitaire, the Queens musician’s second album uses avant-pop songwriting to capture the nuances of tedium, to strangely captivating effect. | Titled after a game of computer solitaire, the Queens musician’s second album uses avant-pop songwriting to capture the nuances of tedium, to strangely captivating effect. | Lina Tullgren: Free Cell | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lina-tullgren-free-cell/ | Free Cell | It’s virtually impossible to lose a game of FreeCell. Unlike other forms of solitaire, 99 percent of the deals are solvable. It’s a game of choice and organization. You put down one card, then another, until—like writing a sentence or a song—you’re left with a larger sequence. The Queens musician Lina Tullgren developed a FreeCell habit while on tour, using the game to compartmentalize time while experiencing the swimmy delirium that comes with waking up in a new city every day and having to connect with a new room of strangers in a different time zone. With elements of 1990s slowcore, quaggy indie-rock, and experimental composition, Free Cell successfully captures a dissociative feeling that lies somewhere between boredom and nausea, like sitting in a sauna. It does so with deliberate calculation. While their 2017 debut, Won, felt loose and irregular, with melodies that changed like moods, Free Cell is an exercise in construction and pattern-based songwriting rather than improvisation.
Tullgren was encouraged to play music from a young age by their mother, a classical flautist; after splitting their adolescence between the fiddle and guitar, Tullgren has finally permitted the two to meet on Free Cell. They’re assisted by Brooklyn-based composer Simon Hanes, whose Italian romantic influences—Rossini comes quickest to mind—seep into the music.
The album begins slowly, as Tullgren sings the opening line one syllable per second: “Staring into my golden dreams.” Their guitar picks out a slacker’s riff as strings begin to wince. “Picking up a game to make me proud,” they intone (presumably having won another game of FreeCell). As Tullgren ever so slightly increases speed with each lyric, Hanes’ arrangement takes on strings, horns, brass, and distortion. Free Cell sounds as though it’s hooked onto a pendulum, swinging feverishly between beauty and distortion, vigour and lethargy. Any breakouts of prettiness are either followed by unlovely noise or gibbering riffs going nowhere. Any instance of vitality is tempered by disaffection. It’s a continual frustration that presumably puts the listener within Tullgren’s state of mind—persistently waiting for a moment of relief and clarity that never fully arrives.
Tullgren’s songs are fraught with tension, like elastic bands threatening to snap—but they fall slack just as you expect to get hit in the eye. “Something is slowly, slowly, slowly,” they sing with quickening fervor on “Soft Glove 1” and “Soft Glove 2,” but instead of bursting, the rhythm relaxes back to its starting place.
“Golden Babyland,” is the only song on Free Cell that doesn’t unfurl gradually, but rather coils itself into a tight spring. Over a taut, irresistible guitar riff, Tullgren turns boredom into destruction: “In the kitchen melting Legos,” they sing, mimicking the liquefied sound of their guitar. It’s a well-wound pop song that seems to be the album’s outlier, until two minutes in, when the song unreels itself into aimless ugliness. Instead of capping off a neat tune with a satisfying ending, they forgo beauty—something they clearly distrust—for the sake of conveying their mercurial state. Tullgren taps at their guitar in a kind of frantic inertia, undoing the twists of the song’s first half. While it’s split almost perfectly into two-minute segments, the second half feels noticeably longer.
Free Cell has a way of drawing out the minutes. The album plays at the same rate as a long afternoon, when boredom turns to drowsiness. The result isn’t so much an exercise in the ability to withstand tedium, but a study of the nuances of torpor, which often grips with a captivating haze. “Guess I gotta blend some time,” they sing on “Saiddone,” collapsing the concept until it’s nonsensical: “Sometime it’s right now, sometimes it’s next week, sometime October.” Tullgren suspends meaning, shaping vowel sounds so ambiguous that it’s almost impossible to comprehend the words until the end of each sentence. The effect puts the listener in a soupy headspace. Listening to Free Cell feels like standing up too quickly—when all the world feels like it’s on playback half a second too slow. | 2019-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Captured Tracks | August 27, 2019 | 7.3 | 7d256105-4bc5-413a-91d3-067c4c62e800 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
The Portland, Ore., noise-metal transgressors third record continues the duo’s tradition of exaggerated malevolence. On the whole, Christ, Redeemers is the most dense, belligerent and focused music that the Body has ever made. | The Portland, Ore., noise-metal transgressors third record continues the duo’s tradition of exaggerated malevolence. On the whole, Christ, Redeemers is the most dense, belligerent and focused music that the Body has ever made. | The Body: Christs, Redeemers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18630-the-body-christs-redeemers/ | Christs, Redeemers | The Body excel in inducing discomfort. You need not listen to a sole note by the Portland, Ore., noise-metal transgressors to know as much: The press photos for their 2010 breakthrough, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood, depicted drummer Lee Buford and guitarist Chip King poised in a window, rifles and binoculars pointed outside in anticipation of incoming targets. The cover of a recent and masterful EP, Master, We Perish, featured a grimacing skeleton bent backwards atop a pile of stone, what’s left of his frame splitting at the midsection. On albums, they've covered songs about dead cops and Sinéad O’Connor’s Thatcher-indicting and race-baiting “Black Boys on Mopeds”; on the stage, King’s small army of amplifiers and Buford’s cannon-shaped drums become the instrumental equivalent of meat tenderizer. In a recent interview with Tiny Mix Tapes, Buford summarized the Body’s extra-musical antagonism with two swift sentences: “I don’t really like most people in the world, or trust them. The guns are less of a thug or violent thing and more of a separation between us and society.”
*Christs, Redeemers—*the Body’s third record and first for the decidedly non-metal Thrill Jockey—continues the duo’s tradition of exaggerated malevolence. As with All the Waters, the action opens with the all-female Assembly of Light Choir singing a hymn of solemn despair. This time, though, they’re sucked into a gyre of noise, slivers of static slowly accreting into a sea of volume. Indeed, on the whole, Christs, Redeemers is the most dense, belligerent and focused music that The Body has ever made. In less than three minutes, “Failure to Desire to Communicate” plows through a near-hardcore rumble before downshifting toward hypnotic, hazardous doom; “Shrouded” buries King’s cries in a blanket of static, at least until Buford’s drums overload the entire frame. Where no song on All the Waters lasted for less than four minutes, only half of these get to that point at all. These relatively brief numbers function as black holes, then, sucking up everything the Body has ever done—the horrific samples and suffocating noise, the guitar so low it sound like a bass and the drums so big they sound like artillery blasts, the lyrics about how “the pain of living holds no victory” and the curdling bleat that delivers them—into impenetrable, intimidating cores. Christs, Redeemers finds the Body at the apogee of their brutality.
Yet the same focus and force that make Christs, Redeemers so heavy are the same attributes that make it less terrifying than its predecessors. In the past, The Body’s uneasiness has depended as much on unpredictability as it has on excessive volume or irate pleas. The Body have thrived on a certain sort of stylistic mania, sonic evidence that the guys holding the guns in those photos might actually be completely insane. During All the Waters, for instance, they played along with a sampled-and-fractured clip of a congregation speaking in tongues, with knee-deep noise and King’s howls battling back with believable animosity; during “Worship”, the closer of this year’s earlier EP, they applied their damaged aesthetic to a 10-minute post-rock mold, building the cacophony into a climax that gave way to a slow-motion comedown.
But Christs, Redeemers feels comfortable and somewhat safe, with song structures that are practically standard and a few techniques repeated often enough to become predictable. The Assembly of Light Choir, for instance, starts to feel like a compositional crutch, with their hall-of-terror harmonies augmenting the despair on half of the record’s tracks in much the same way a coffee-shop guitarist might use a Hammond organ to add gravity to heartsickness. Much the same applies to the album’s ample string sections, their melodrama mostly filling space and time and plainly replicating a feeling that’s already established. All of these tendencies collide for “An Altar or a Grave”, a string-swept doom plod that slinks through a madrigal-choir midsection only to arrive at a coda where King and Buford simply turn up and check out. It’s an obvious string of choices for a band whose sort of audio terrorism has forever hinged on making listeners aghast with surprise—as Buford might put it, on separating their music from others’ society. The most successful statements on Christs, Redeemers balance momentum with instability. “Denial of the Species”, for instance, pushes the hangman guitar, haunting choir, and ghoulish strings beneath a beat that borders on techno. It’s a tease for an onslaught of distortion that never comes, a climax denial buried in a record that typically delivers the promised payload. Once again, it’s the image of the Body projected in sound.
At the very least, this new-found concision and direction might prove useful for the Body in the short-term: This is their Thrill Jockey debut, after all, a chance for them to find freaks within a much broader audience. Why not focus, then, on the most familiar and surefooted side of the band—that hellish, disturbing blitz of doom, noise, and nastiness? Likewise, with the samples and choirs now tucked safely and violently into the kernels of these songs, perhaps they’ll speak more readily to metal audiences, by which they’ve often been overlooked or mislabeled. But the Body haven’t mattered only because they’ve been loud, distorted, and mean, the troika of qualities that Christs, Redeemers spotlights most capably. They’ve mattered because they were able to twist that mess of metallurgh into spaces where it didn’t necessarily belong, into studio experiments with electronics and dynamics and effects that underlined their wrath in unlikely ways. That’s not lost on Christs, Redeemers, but like the terror it once necessitated, it is certainly diminished. | 2013-10-15T02:00:05.000-04:00 | 2013-10-15T02:00:05.000-04:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | October 15, 2013 | 7 | 7d30c705-7af6-4c90-b433-333ad31aaf87 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
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