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Los Angeles rapper Blu's career trajectory runs counter to that of an artist working to infiltrate hip-hop’s mainstream. NoYork!, a mysterious album that first circulated two years ago, has gradually developed an underground following and now gets a physical release. | Los Angeles rapper Blu's career trajectory runs counter to that of an artist working to infiltrate hip-hop’s mainstream. NoYork!, a mysterious album that first circulated two years ago, has gradually developed an underground following and now gets a physical release. | Blu: NoYork! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17794-blu-no-york/ | NoYork! | After a well-received debut album (2007’s Exile-produced Below the Heavens) and a placement on XXL’s annual star-making “Top 10 Freshmen List” paid off in a major label deal with Warner Bros, Los Angeles rapper Blu plotted a career trajectory that seemed to run counter to that of an artist working to infiltrate hip-hop’s mainstream. He didn’t pine for the A-lister referrals and feature circuit ubiquity that lubricate the most well-oiled artist rollouts. He didn’t hobnob with hitmakers or kowtow to the will of radio. Instead he launched into an exploratory series of experiments: a romance-themed solo EP that introduced him as a quirky but capable producer, a one-track dump of inscrutable rough mixes for an album he lost, a Madlib-produced album Madlib denies involvement with, and a spattering of beat tapes. Much of it arrived defiantly unmastered under pseudonyms on Bandcamp, and none of it sounded like the triumphant follow-up to Below the Heavens, whose legacy now stalked Blu’s every endeavor.
It wasn’t until Blu had successfully conditioned his audience to quit telegraphing his next move that he made his power play: reports from 2011’s traveling hip-hop festival Rock the Bells said that Blu showed up to his set handing out copies of something called NoYork! that may or may not have been the ill-fated Warner album. (Blu denies doing it, but the Warner deal dissolved several weeks later.) However NoYork! slipped out, it was a hard left turn in a career full of them, but one that reinvigorated his artistry instead of adroitly maintaining a low profile as previous releases had. Over the last year or so, Blu has been remastering and reissuing some of the odd curios of the Warner era, and NoYork! has finally gotten a physical deluxe edition release via Blu & his producer buddy Mainframe’s New World Color imprint.
If this is the album Blu intended to give Warner, it’s a maverick move. NoYork! finds Blu tapping a cadre of California instrumental hip-hop luminaries and decamping into the hyperkinetic synth haze and shambolic percussion of the Los Angeles beat scene. NoYork!’s team of Low End Theory mainstays load up the album’s front end with squelching synth workouts like Dibia$e’s “SLNGBNGrs”, which arrives like Pac-Man on power pellets and rides a corroded keyboard groove to a chaotic finish, the dizzying synth undulations of “Soupa”, and the double-time borderline Nintendocore of Daedelus’s jungle-informed “Hours” and Flying Lotus’s “Everything’s OK”. Later, Knxwledge and Sa-Ra affiliate Shafiq Husayn bring us home from the arcade with a series of productions full of airy jazz loops, but as a whole NoYork! is a manic trip into an 8-bit k-hole.
NoYork! manages to duck other releases’ air of intentional self-sabotage thanks to Blu’s renewed lyrical attack. Where releases like 2011’s j e s u s were off-putting because the rhymes tumbled out in fractious fits and starts, oftentimes more chants than verses, NoYork! strikes a balance between the verbose storytelling of Below the Heavens and the studious weirdness of his recent work. “Everybody Nose” details a childhood hip-hop obsession that turned into a rap career, then devolves into a list of beloved 1980s clothing lines and rappers in verse three. Blu bounces wistful rhymes and love raps off sung choruses from Jack Davey and Suzi Analogue early on and then coldly juggles words with friends on the album closing West Coast rap summit “Doin’ Something”. Elsewhere singsong refrains about hating work hold court with nonsensical homages to the cadence and storytelling MF Doom. NoYork!’s rhyme experiments are rangy but self-assured, and Blu finally sounds more invested in making great rap than throwing the mainstream rap audience off his trail.
Billing this physical release of NoYork! as a deluxe edition is a bit misleading, though. It’s actually shorter than what’s been circulating on the net for the last year and a half, losing the Madlib and Samiyam productions (and the feature from psych rap recluse Edan) that padded out the album’s hazy comedown side but gaining a sleek digipak and a poster. The mixes don’t appear to have changed either, and it’s now apparent that the aged tape hiss feel of a few of these songs was an intended effect and not the result of them being unfinished, as was the case with many 2010s Blu releases. This version of NoYork! doesn’t offer any new revelations about the record, but as the physical document of that time a gifted rapper blew off a promising record deal to geek out in the studio with friends and then came out with one of the defining documents of his scene, it’s still a win. | 2013-03-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-03-27T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | New World Color | March 27, 2013 | 8.1 | 7d326e0f-9c83-4b9c-b781-924f6921ed39 | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
Alynda Segarra’s powerful eighth album exudes a glorious irreverence. Their self-described “nature punk” songs are both intimate and immense, and they’ve never sounded more honest or self-possessed. | Alynda Segarra’s powerful eighth album exudes a glorious irreverence. Their self-described “nature punk” songs are both intimate and immense, and they’ve never sounded more honest or self-possessed. | Hurray for the Riff Raff: Life on Earth | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hurray-for-the-riff-raff-life-on-earth/ | Life on Earth | Fifteen years ago, Alynda Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff chose their band name to celebrate outsiders who threatened the status quo: “the riff raff” being “the weirdos and the poets,” they once said, “the rebellious women and the activists” whom society disregarded. These were the people who kept Segarra going as they carved an itinerant path from their fractured Bronx upbringing to their longtime home in New Orleans, from the Lower East Side hardcore matinees of their youth to their escape hopping freight trains. Their voice traveled, too, growing from the forthright grace of Gillian Welch through the brash fortitude of Bruce Springsteen or Joe Strummer: a person talking straight to you. Where Segarra invoked Whitmanian transcendence on 2014’s “The Body Electric”—a feminist indictment of the murder-ballad tradition from their Americana breakout, Small Town Heroes—they directly triangulated the past, present, and future on their 2017 masterpiece, the rallying cry “Pa’lante.”
In that anthem describing the immigrant experience in America, Segarra ferociously called out to those “who had to hide,” who “lost their pride,” to “all who came before,” carrying the fight forward. The song is cracked open, traversing a continuum of historical struggle that is ongoing. Watch the 2021 documentary Takeover—about the NYC chapter of Puerto Rican revolutionary coalition the Young Lords and how they occupied the South Bronx’s Lennox Hospital in 1970, seizing it as “The People’s Hospital”—and when “Pa’lante” soundtracks its final moments you will see not only what art is capable of but what it is for.
Segarra’s eighth album is titled Life on Earth, seeming to ask, by its final notes: How will you spend yours? They transform their sound with glowing synthesizers and sunstruck hooks to answer this call. Segarra has made powerful records in the past by working within vernacular traditions, or constructing autofictive characters and concepts, like on 2017’s The Navigator, where they sought to reclaim their Puerto Rican identity. But Segarra has never sounded more honest or self-possessed than on Life on Earth. They have found a fresh collaborator in indie-rock producer Brad Cook (Waxahatchee, Bon Iver) and opened a new chapter. Dressed like a Fabulous Stain on the album’s cover—the inside typography evoking anarcho legends Crass and reading “BLESS ALL BEINGS RUNNING FOR THEIR LIVES”—Segarra has, in some sense, circled back to the raw openness of their earliest homespun releases. They once identified as a folk singer, but their sound now exudes a glorious irreverence, maybe a way of saying that old traditions, or at least their present iterations, cannot serve the current crises, which these songs consistently take on.
In these self-described “nature punk” songs, Segarra isn’t writing about the natural world so much as writing through it. They use their new sonic tools to channel the plant wisdom of the 2017 activist text (and stated influence) Emergent Strategy, namely the urgency of seeing all life as intertwined, and forming networks of solidarity by favoring “critical connections,” as author adrienne maree brown writes, over “critical mass.” Their biomimicry also often simply rocks. Segarra names the elements—the air and moon, flora and water, bees and butterflies—and channels their unruly beauty into the songs’ unvarnished surfaces and sing-shouting abandon. Beyond the open strums of “Rhododendron,” Segarra collages images of “night-blooming jasmine,” “naked boys,” and a “police barricade,” the kind of soul-steadying tune that can validate and alleviate pain in a single bar. “Everything I had is gone,” they sing. “I don’t know what it’d take to carry on.” Songs about flowers are still songs about survival in Segarra’s world.
Listening to Segarra’s stories, connections come alive, honoring another tenet of Emergent Strategy: “Transform yourself to transform the world.” Accordingly, Segarra threads Life on Earth with songs of self-reckoning, where electronics quake like new life about to spring. “Trying to avoid running into my ex on Broadway,” they sing on the brooding, skyscraping “Pierced Arrows,” knowing it takes work to not look back. On the lonesome “Nightqueen,” they sing of betraying their own heart in favor of an “addiction to freedom,” which proves futile. When they insist, over the slinking beat of “Jupiter’s Dance,” that they “can’t start a fire without my heart”—the restless spirit of Springsteen never too far off—it seems to say: access to one’s own emotions is the ultimate spark.
Life on Earth’s first track finds wolves appearing at the front door of an unsafe home. “You got to run, babe/You know how to run,” Segarra sings, a line inspired by their own youth that could also serve as an epigraph to their continued narration of the immigrant experience in America, particularly dehumanization at the hands of ICE. On the devastating title track, Segarra depicts a “girl in a cage with the moon in her eye,” who sings, “Life on Earth is long,” which is to say that it is hard; the benevolent world of this ballad makes it almost bearable. The lightly rapped “Precious Cargo” is a stark reminder that it was none other than Woody Guthrie who set Segarra on their train-hopping artistic path a decade and a half ago. Over a cool trip-hop beat, the song shares the story of a man swimming across a river with his children, of a border crossed, a family torn apart; of shivering on a cold jail floor with a foil blanket and calling out to Allah. In 2019, Segarra personally visited ICE facilities in Louisiana with Freedom for Immigrants, and worked to free two men from these inhumane jails. At the end of the song, as Segarra calls out the names of Southern towns with ICE centers, their words give way to those of one of the detained men: “Immigrants are suffering,” he says. “This song is my life.” “Precious Cargo” makes witnesses of us all.
“I am asking you to, as bell hooks says, FALL IN LOVE WITH JUSTICE,” Segarra wrote in a searing open letter to the folk community in 2015. Life on Earth exudes a prayer-like love for humanity, as Segarra’s depiction of resilience extends to memories sparked by “a terrible news week” on the penultimate “Saga.” “I was a kid, I was lonely,” they sing. “He pushed me down on the concrete/Oh, I can’t speak.” Trauma, once lodged, works to silence us from within, the song suggests; breaking free is a triumph, emboldening each note of “Saga.” That’s especially true of its final moments, where Segarra incants, heartbreakingly: “Nobody believed me.” “I’ll just make it through this week,” they sing, “And I’ll get out alive.” Segarra follows in the lineage of Fiona Apple, Sharon Van Etten, and other modern songwriters who have processed abusive relationships in daring songs. The brassy conviction and even biting humor of “Saga,” and Life on Earth, is proof of regaining control.
Segarra, who is 34, has said they spent much of their 20s feeling like they were born in the wrong era, wishing and demanding more of folk musicians who too often remained silent on issues, particularly racial injustice. But within our seasons of uprising, and an increasingly inclusive and critical culture, Segarra has found more to relate to. Where The Navigator’s “Pa’lante” included a 1969 recording of the late poet Pedro Pietri’s Nuyorican epic “Puerto Rican Obituary,” Life on Earth samples the voice of a contemporary, poet Ocean Vuong, whose books and interviews form treasured survival guides, and whose work also narrates the immigrant struggle in the United States. Appearing midway through “Nightqueen,” Vuong’s words, originally recorded for the “On Being” podcast, give Life on Earth its title; when his tearful voice enters the frame, it’s chilling. “As a species, as life on Earth, we’ve been dying for millennia,” Vuong says. “But I don’t think energy dies. It just transforms.” Vuong’s voice glides in over droning synths and the gentle buzz of horns, and feels as adaptive and generative as the plant life that inspires Segarra. This is yet another connection, another way forward.
Among its powers, topical music can make us feel with unforgettable intensity what we already essentially know about the time in which we live, reorganizing our priorities, clarifying the questions we ask of the world and ourselves. Life on Earth leaves questions lingering inside of you. Segarra’s melodies, some so beautiful that they seem to have existed forever, make them stay.
Buy: Rough Trade | 2022-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | February 18, 2022 | 8.3 | 7d34ae09-2df6-46a5-afac-3f4b2561ea8d | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
A veteran of Sun Ra’s band of astral travelers, saxophonist and bandleader Marshall Allen carries on the jazz legend’s legacy of uplifting spirits and upending musical expectations. | A veteran of Sun Ra’s band of astral travelers, saxophonist and bandleader Marshall Allen carries on the jazz legend’s legacy of uplifting spirits and upending musical expectations. | Sun Ra Arkestra: Living Sky | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sun-ra-arkestra-living-sky/ | Living Sky | According to a recent study in the journal Science, astronomers have solved Saturn’s enduring mysteries: Its rings are far younger than we thought; its “missing moon” accounts for its “puzzling tilt.” On the new album Living Sky, alto saxophonist Marshall Allen sounds much younger than his 98 years. Under his direction, the Sun Ra Arkestra carries on the mission of its namesake—a pianist, composer, bandleader, and poet who often claimed to be from Saturn—by playing jazz from a marvelously slanted perspective.
A lovingly packaged, remastered reissue of The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra—the jazz legend’s first release, recorded in 1961—recently reminded us of Ra’s earliest moves away from conventionally organized songs. Here were the first stirrings of a more organic and collective approach, fusing jazz and other traditions into an Afrofuturist form that still sounds singularly prophetic. As Ra, who died in 1993, said in the 1974 film Space Is the Place: “We work on the other side of time.”
Living Sky follows on the heels of last year’s Swirling, which had been the first new studio release from the Arkestra in 21 years. The new one sounds as buoyant as its predecessor, yet more moodily mysterious. It continues a process of mining Ra’s rich legacy while also presenting new music meant to further his intent, which was always as much about uplifting spirits as upending musical expectations. (Living Sky was recorded during the pandemic and, like most of Ra’s output, can be heard as both a challenge and a balm.)
Allen, who played on Futuristic Sounds, and has been immersed in Ra’s music for more than 60 years, is the clearest embodiment of that aesthetic. On “Chopin,” (based on Frédéric
Chopin’s “Prelude in A Major”) his alto saxophone issues squeals, smears, and arcing figures that sound as oddly pleasing as on the version Ra recorded live in 1990 on Pleiades: A Jazz Symphonique. Gone are Ra’s stately, blues-tinged piano intro and synthesizer. This new version moves to the same Afro-Latin groove, but it’s more drone-like and slowed into something like a polyrhythmic lullaby. As throughout the album, there are subtle and delicious shifts of foreground and background: here, Vincent Chancey’s high-pitched French horn, muted trumpets, and sweet-toned strings move about like, well, planets in orbit.
Ra first recorded “Somebody’s Else’s Idea” in 1955 as a simple theme atop an ostinato with a bebop interlude. He remade it, indelibly, in 1970, the theme now a chant, the song a statement of personal empowerment via lyrics sung with declarative force by June Tyson. Now, it once again becomes an instrumental, loosely swinging and vaguely processional, with baritone saxophonist Knoell Scott wordlessly chanting the theme over shifting tones. Some tracks coalesce and then drift off, much like cloud formations, as with “Day of the Living Sky.” Here, Allen plays the kora, a harp-like instrument, employing it not for flowing lines, as in traditional West African music, but instead plucking urgent, bent tones and strumming soft-voiced figures. Two Allen compositions accumulate force in forthright fashion, with steadily growing intensity. “Marshall’s Groove” fairly oozes over cymbal strikes and a slow-walking bassline for nearly half its 11 minutes before settling into the swinging groove, its interlocked reed, horn and string statements nodding to Ra’s jazz and R&B roots. “Firefly,” a gently swaying ballad, gets thrown gloriously askew by dissonant strands of harmony and streaks of soloing from Allen’s alto saxophone.
Ra’s Arkestra and his compositions were always mutable organisms, his every performance animated more by ideas about collective rituals than by repertoire. Only two of these seven songs were composed by Ra, yet his presence and his ideas seem to burrow beneath or hover above them all. The 19 musicians gathered make music dotted with the sonic details of Ra’s past. If they can’t quite recapture the full force or stark originality that characterized their lodestar during his lifetime (who could?) they can and do evoke his broad range of moods and colors, which seem to befit this moment. And they get us to lean in and listen, with just the right tilt. | 2022-10-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-10T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Omni Sound | October 10, 2022 | 7.3 | 7d352610-1fce-4c1e-944b-15c0ff25f43b | Larry Blumenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-blumenfeld/ | |
On his second solo album, the former Drive-By Truckers member sticks with what he does best, offering detailed and evocative songwriting in a bar-band setting. | On his second solo album, the former Drive-By Truckers member sticks with what he does best, offering detailed and evocative songwriting in a bar-band setting. | Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit: Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12683-jason-isbell-and-the-400-unit/ | Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit | The first time most of us heard Jason Isbell was on "Outfit", his initial offering on the Drive-By Truckers' 2003 album Decoration Day, the group's first with the Alabama native. An extraordinarily perceptive and sensitive song, especially coming from a 24-year-old, "Outfit" finds a working-class father lending advice to his rock star-wannabe son, narrating along the way his own story of teenage rebellion curtailed by the adult responsibilities he ultimately came to cherish.
"Don't sing with a fake British accent" was one of dad's more memorable dictums, and regardless of how true-to-life "Outfit" may have been, it's a charge Isbell has taken to heart. During his five-plus years with the Truckers, Isbell impressively gained a songwriting reputation on par with the band's longtime principals, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley. Yet while Hood's unconventionally hoarse yelp attracted twang-wary indie fans and Cooley's gunslinger drawl was irresistible no matter how you felt about country, Isbell's booming, manful voice irredeemably marked him out as the least hip of the Trucker singers for the duration of his stay. Being the overweight guy in the group for a spell probably didn't help either.
Even when Isbell slimmed down considerably, however, he still retained the voice of a guy who takes ham with every meal. When Isbell sings it's not hard to picture an artless blooze belter at some sadly anonymous roadhouse. Now add in the fact that since leaving DBT he's delved much more deeply in musically treacherous blues-rock waters than his erstwhile mates. What it all amounts to is a guy who has just released his second solo record in less than two years and who nonetheless seems destined to be eternally underrated. His occasional bar-band leanings may cause some to miss that Isbell is an invigorating songwriter and one of the better lyricists of his generation.
Indeed, Isbell has had trouble catching a break. His 2007 solo debut, Sirens of the Ditch, mildly disappointed some of his staunchest admirers with its lack of historical or regional specificity, spoiled as they were by the likes of DBT songs like "Outfit", "Decoration Day", "Danko/Manuel", and "The Day John Henry Died". Yet what Isbell's achieved over the course of that album and his self-titled newest is no less admirable for its paucity of proper nouns, finding unique ways to approach sex, politics, and isolation while delivering rousing, hooky rock'n'roll. So while "Seven Mile Island" does reference a real place, and "However Long" definitely does seem to reflect an Obama-spurred sense of societal optimism, they're not the album's real lyrical standouts. That honor belongs to the ruminative "Streetlights", which shows us an itinerant musician calling home from some faraway bar, and especially "Soldiers Get Strange", an utterly spellbinding snapshot of a serviceman who comes home from overseas and finds a return to marital sex and "toeing civilian lines" to be a psychological impossibility.
Many of the songs on Isbell's sophomore release don't necessarily aim for (or achieve) such profundity, yet they still compel through sheer verve and Isbell's unwillingness to let an unhip sound or idea discourage him. Sure, "Blue" sounds like Los Lonely Boys filtered through RHCP's "Under the Bridge", but it's still a damn fine song, Isbell showing off his ability to at least be evocatively oblique when he's not exactly hitting his lyrical mark. And if you're going to ape 1960s Stax soul, you might as well dive in headfirst like Isbell does on "No Choice in the Matter", an unrepentant throwback that nonetheless nails the warm horns and spindly guitar sound of a classic Otis session perfectly. Sometimes all that's needed is a big, singalong-ready chorus-- they're never as easy to craft as you think, yet Isbell delivers on "Sunstroke", the barnburning "Good", and especially "Cigarettes and Wine". The latter is just as much about faded male vitality as it is sex, drugs, and drink, and is hence destined to be a crowd-pleaser with those ruefully eyeing receding hairlines and spreading paunches. Yep, the only "hip" here is the aching one that's sooner or later going to need replacing. | 2009-02-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2009-02-18T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Lightning Rod | February 18, 2009 | 7.4 | 7d3a641f-8548-4ff4-8c78-0d880107e6a4 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
The hotly tipped 20-year-old singer-songwriter debuts with a cool, confident record that occasionally blends into pleasant monotony. | The hotly tipped 20-year-old singer-songwriter debuts with a cool, confident record that occasionally blends into pleasant monotony. | Arlo Parks: Collapsed in Sunbeams | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/arlo-parks-collapsed-in-sunbeams/ | Collapsed in Sunbeams | After releasing her debut single “Cola” in 2018, 20-year-old London poet Arlo Parks won the approval of virtually every possible tastemaker. Michelle Obama put her on a playlist; Hayley Williams nearly included her as a tour opener, and Phoebe Bridgers covered Radiohead’s “Fake Plastic Trees” with Parks on piano and harmonies. While prepping her debut album, Parks collaborated with festival favorites Glass Animals and R&B newcomers MICHELLE. It’s not hard to see why she has so much support; Parks’ songwriting is affectionate and friendly, never straining too hard, always cool and collected. Nearly every song has a message of comfort—on the opener, she sings, “You shouldn’t be afraid to cry in front of me,” while the chorus of “Hope” goes, “You’re not alone/Like you think you are,” over light trip-hop. In a vacuum, any one of these songs are charming, but on Collapsed in Sunbeams, they all blur into a pleasant sort of monotony.
As a songwriter, Parks uses pop culture references and proper nouns as shorthand to set scenes, hoping to build “a complete world that people can immerse themselves in.” This is often endearing; the pre-album single “Cola” mentioned Gerard Way, and the clunkiness of “I’d lick the grief right off your lips/You do your eyes like Robert Smith” on “Black Dog” just makes the song feel more intimate. In a lot of instances, those attempts at immersion get so repetitive that they ironically serve as distractions. There are so many names—Charlie, Caroline, Millie—that it’s hard to keep track, and there are so many references and words of affirmation that it’s hard to remember who said what to whom. It doesn’t help that songs like “Hurt” (the Charlie one) are aimless sketches about aimless characters, where the point is that the references and platitudes don’t add up to anything.
Parks’ eclectic influences show up in her lyrics (Thom Yorke, Nujabes, and Jai Paul all get name-drops), but not her music. Whether the producer is Paul Epworth or usual collaborator Gianluca Buccellati, everything sounds too sweet. Every other song has a dry drum kit with atmospheric vinyl cracks and floaty keyboards. Even the moments that change things up feel undercooked: “Just Go” is extremely light disco, while “Porta 400” opens with a string sample that almost immediately disappears in the mix. The distorted bass of “For Violet” sounds like it might lead to something darker, worthy of the Massive Attack on Parks’ playlist, but within 45 seconds Parks is back to geniality: “Wait/You know when college starts again you’ll manage!”
“Violet” is one of a handful of moments where the comforting atmosphere starts to crack—it hints at a more compelling album actively at war with its own themes. The breakthrough “Dog” depicts helping someone through a mental health crisis (“At least I know that you are trying/But that’s what makes it terrifying”), but on “Violet,” she gives up on helping, instead repeating, “Nothing’s changing and I can’t do this, I can’t do this.” The best songs flip the formula altogether, finding universality in specific themes instead of dressing up universal themes in specific imagery. Early single “Eugene” adds a layer of complexity and heartbreak to a traditional pop subject: Parks’ character falls for a straight girl, a painful variation on unrequited love where reciprocation is inherently impossible. On “Green Eyes,” the love is reciprocated, but ends after two months in fear of homophobic attacks. When Parks inevitably offers a platitude—“You gotta trust how you feel inside and shine”—there are actual stakes to give those lines some meaning.
Repeated listens further reveal the weight missing from the production and melodies: When she stands up for herself on penultimate track “Bluish,” there are few pop-culture references or proper nouns, just simple and effective lines like “never had the chance to miss you” and “please let me out of you.” Sunbeams could use more of that directness. Otherwise, it’s easy to imagine someone walking into a coffee shop, nodding their head to the supportive chorus wafting over the speakers, and never thinking about it again.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Transgressive | February 1, 2021 | 6.7 | 7d3a7ff9-d6b9-44b7-aad6-ace07b373a1a | Hannah Jocelyn | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hannah-jocelyn/ | |
One of several recent drummers to combine electronic processing with instrumental chops, Booker Stardrum swings like a pendulum between chaos and order. | One of several recent drummers to combine electronic processing with instrumental chops, Booker Stardrum swings like a pendulum between chaos and order. | Booker Stardrum: Temporary etc. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/booker-stardrum-temporary-etc/ | Temporary etc. | It might seem counterintuitive for a drummer to embrace electronic music. After all, some say drum machines have no soul, while others still insist that groove boxes will put drummers out of business, even if that idea is less prevalent than it was 30-odd years ago. But electronic music is a fundamentally time-based art, and no one understands the intricacies of clockwork better than drummers, a species with a heightened perception of the relationship between muscle and millisecond. A raft of drummers have recently fused their instrumental practice with electronic processing, putting a percussive spin on electro-acoustic composition, from the laptop-aided layering of Greg Fox and Eli Keszler to the drill ’n’ bass mechanics of RRUCCULLA.
Add to that roster the impeccably named Booker Stardrum, a member of Cloud Becomes Your Hand and a collaborator to Lee Ranaldo and Nels Cline. Stardrum’s second album, Temporary etc., slips and slides between propulsive stickwork, programmed sequencing, and glowering metallic drones—like 2015’s Dance And, never settling in any one terrain for long. But where Dance And often dissolved into post-punk mulch that obscured the origins of Stardrum’s sounds, Temporary etc. wipes away some of the dirt and leaves his signature in sharp relief.
The distance between the two albums is immediately apparent with Temporary etc.’s “Drim Dram II” and “Drim Dram III,” variations on a theme established on his debut album. Where Dance And’s “Drim Dram” submerged incessantly tumbling toms in a muddy swirl, “Drim Dram II” and “Drim Dram III” are crisp and kinetic, with the cartoon brightness of vintage Raymond Scott. Rapidfire patterns mirrored between drums and electronic tones mimic popping popcorn. If it’s not always clear how Stardrum is generating these hybrid sounds, the force of his wrists and forearms is the unmistakable driver behind his flexible timekeeping.
“Wisp” approaches the kit as a kind of action painting, almost athletic in its bold strokes and brusque gestures. In “Five Finger Cloud,” boomy toms and brushed snares circle each other warily, sketching out polyrhythms that are devilishly difficult to parse while Jon Hassell-like pads and gentle sax add dimension. When he hones in on the groove, Stardrum’s pockets are as deep as Jeff Bezos’. But his atmospheres are just as compelling as his beats. The opening “Dome Ship” conjures a hazy mix of church bells and a horn section, gradually giving way to a freight train’s relaxing clatter. Descending synth riffs and voluminous reverb add a soothing quality to the grinding rhythms and machine-shop whine of “Swimming,” like a kind of industrial lullaby.
Sometimes, Stardrum abandons rhythm entirely. During the beatless “A Passage or Time in a Hanging Truth,” softly stacked horns bend in pitch, like light through water. He smears the keening sounds of European sirens until they vibrate with the microtonal hum of Ligeti or Xenakis—it’s like the THX “Deep Note,” overcome by seasickness. On the seven-minute highlight “Trash Island,” he begins with a collage of scraped and battered drums and cymbal hits. Without warning, the drums stop, only to reveal glistening organs before the scratching and bashing returns. And on it goes, swinging like a pendulum between chaos and order, violence and idyll—cycling, turning in circles, as only a drummer knows how. | 2018-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | NNA Tapes | December 20, 2018 | 7.7 | 7d42dcb0-8ddf-45f1-9bd0-06af97c95600 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Centering her own voice for the first time, Caroline Shaw proves to be a master of collapsing boundaries, whether between her performer-composer roles or the corporeal and the immaterial. | Centering her own voice for the first time, Caroline Shaw proves to be a master of collapsing boundaries, whether between her performer-composer roles or the corporeal and the immaterial. | Caroline Shaw / Sō Percussion: Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caroline-shaw-s-percussion-let-the-soil-play-its-simple-part/ | Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part | Caroline Shaw’s itemized accomplishments are many: she’s composed celebrated works for vocal and string ensembles, helped to shape Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, and in 2013, she won a Pulitzer Prize in music for Partita for 8 Voices, becoming the youngest person ever to do so. Though her definitive Partita is a stunning display of human voices in motion, Shaw has never been the lead vocalist herself on an album; she appears most often as a composer, violinist, or ensemble member.
But with Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, her second album of the year with the exploratory New York ensemble Sō Percussion, Shaw centers herself in a project that captures her earthy inspirations while flexing her capacity for sparkling compositions. Across 10 songs, Shaw gathers some common threads of her music—rhythm and air, literary inspirations, hymns—into a singular work that feels like a gentle invitation to listeners who may not yet recognize the strength of her combined powers.
Shaw is a master of collapsing boundaries, whether between her performer-composer roles or the corporeal and the immaterial. Her voice as a singer and composer shines in these songs, each one like a renewed announcement of Shaw’s “place in the family of things,” as Mary Oliver put it. Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part unfolds like the edge of the woods at twilight: As skittering rhythms clink into place, “To the Sky” swells upward and erupts with the exuberance of wildflowers. “Other Song” glides in on a draft, building up a tumbling overlap of percussion and electronic flickers. Marimbas and steel drums resonate like heavy raindrops, while other percussive rustles bring to mind the dry overlap of wind and cicadas whispering in the trees.
Shaw dissolves the idea that heaven and earth are separate, mutually exclusive places; instead, they are connected by the sky, sand, soil, and sea that she often invokes. She begins from the leap of “To the Sky” before touching back down to the ground on the title track; she returns to the shore from “The Flood Is Following Me” with the knelling “Cast the Bells in Sand.” Sō Percussion are most often serene, but some of their lightest touches are most dramatic. With lyrics culled from James Joyce’s Ulysses, the sound of scraping stones on “A Veil Awave Upon the Waves” triggers a sharp prickle of physical awareness as Shaw contemplates the vacuum of waiting.
Ulysses likewise appears in “The Flood Is Following Me,” and Shaw’s allusions to distant, seemingly unknowable characters stretch further still. “A Gradual Dazzle” borrows its lyrics from Anne Carson’s poem “Room in Brooklyn,” inspired by the Edward Hopper painting of the same name. Hopper, a famous interpreter of solitude, depicts a lone woman facing a blue-and-brick skyline as sunlight spills in through three windows. Shaw carefully stitches these solitary creatures into a sense of belonging, sheltering them in her open and unencumbered compositions.
Throughout her work—including on January’s Narrow Sea, with Sō Percussion, Dawn Upshaw, and Gilbert Kalish—Shaw draws on old Christian hymns, recasting them in a fresh spirit. With “To the Sky,” Shaw transforms an 18th-century song from the Sacred Harp hymnal into a jubilant, sweeping piece that exudes wonder. She closes the album with “Some Bright Morning,” a song from the more recent annals of hymnody. “Celestial shore” has long been one of Christianity’s cooler turns of phrase, and Shaw makes good use of its imagery. Smoothing the music into lightly droning waves, she sounds as though she’s singing from the edge of the horizon, turning hope for eternal release into a reflection on the scale of eternity itself.
Shaw’s deft way of distilling the secular from the sacred also works in reverse. Strip the drum track, and ABBA’s “Lay All Your Love on Me” cuts close to a grandiose pipe-organ choral arrangement; Shaw’s sparse reinterpretation invokes the divine qualities of a great pop song. It feels akin to a benediction, even as it rings with a kind of light desperation. Such is the quality of devastating loves, as described in hymnals and Hot 100 singles alike: surrendering some of your flesh and blood in earnest, knowing that it could invite profound betrayal.
Whether inverting an old song or sculpting a whirlwind from dust, Shaw’s work highlights the divine in the ordinary. With Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, she reaches toward the peaceful bewilderment of feeling ensconced in the great web of everything, the mysterious force which exists in the words of a 300-year-old hymn, the open canvas of the sky, the pop song leaking through the radio. These things are not apart from us, she suggests; when we tune into the right wavelength, it is we who are a part of them.
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. | 2021-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Nonesuch | July 6, 2021 | 7.8 | 7d4344e7-5c40-479b-8d8a-844cdbcd765a | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
This 40th anniversary three-disc reissue of the second Ramones album is littered with alternate mixes, all attempting to achieve a precise balance of muscle and effervescence. | This 40th anniversary three-disc reissue of the second Ramones album is littered with alternate mixes, all attempting to achieve a precise balance of muscle and effervescence. | Ramones: Leave Home | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ramones-leave-home/ | Leave Home | For the Ramones, Leave Home was an aspirational album title. Despite the critical hosannas, the Ramones didn’t sell many copies of their 1976 debut, a situation that made the make-believe brothers from Queens restless to break out of their borough and conquer the world. The solution seemed easy: take the couple grand extra Sire gave them for a second album and record a colorized version of their first album. All the essential elements remained in place—the songs still zip by at the speed of light, every hook ramming into the next—but everything seemed bolder and louder than what came before, as if the problem with the debut wasn’t the formula but the execution.
Stardom eventually would happen for the Ramones, but the hits they craved never materialized. If anything, Leave Home marked a step backward in that regard, peaking at 148 where Ramones went to 111. But by falling short of the group’s grand ambitions, the album crystallized the conundrum at the heart of the Ramones: no matter how badly they yearned for hits, they couldn’t help but sound like variations of their basic selves.
Maybe this consistency is part of the reason why Leave Home often gets dismissed with the praise that it merely offers more of the same. To an extent, that’s true: often, it seems like the Ramones are determined to deliver an answer to their debut, writing responses to their glue-sniffing escapades, Nazi flirtations, and horror film infatuations. They even cherry-picked another old frat-rock hit (1960’s “California Sun”) to reiterate that their heart lied in the music made before the Beatles. But viewing Leave Home through that prism undersells how the record sounds and feels very different from its predecessor.
Part of the Ramones’ charm is how they seemed like renegades from an underground comic book—a degenerate answer to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, celebrating all the glories that slithered out of the sewer. On the debut, all this filth still seemed nasty, but there is a slight shift in tone on Leave Home that pushes the band toward caricature. Some of that derives from the album’s comparative thematic lightness: The group may still be huffing fumes, but they’re not selling their bodies on a street corner; the inherent scuzz and sleaze no longer feels quite so dangerous. Instead, the band sell their rebellious stance with a smile, turning a freak show taunt into the rallying cry of “Gabba gabba, we accept you/We accept you, one of us.” Elsewhere, the band shows hints of heart—they’re advocating for the woman subject of “You’re Gonna Kill That Girl,” and their griping about Sire on “Swallow My Pride” reveals some of Joey’s soul—but those moments are overshadowed by hooks so oversized they seem cartoonish.
Like before, the hooks are extrapolated from singles that cluttered the AM airwaves in the ’60s and early 1970s, and if the trash aesthetic doesn’t seem as artful here as it does on Ramones, blame it on the decision to try for a hit. Never mind that the Ramones’ version of a hit was decidedly low-rent—all the group wanted was to play the catchy parts as loudly and quickly as possible—because the Ramones could never differentiate between what would appeal to a larger audience and what was best left unsaid. They’d throw away their most immediate melody on “Carbona Not Glue,” a song that couldn’t make it on the album due to legal reasons, and they’d play their sweetest harmonies with the intensity of a buzzsaw. Sure, the record sounds beefier than what came before, but the group didn’t write straight rock songs for Leave Home because they were besotted with pop. They churn out bubblegum garage and ragged love songs, camouflaging their fizziness with brawn.
To that end, it makes sense that the 40th Anniversary Deluxe edition of Leave Home is littered with alternate mixes, all attempting to achieve a precise balance of muscle and effervescence. The great majority of the unreleased cuts on this three-disc set are devoted to slight variations on the original trackings. A new mix by the album’s engineer Ed Stasium gives the record a heavier bottom end and trims some of its trippy phasing. There’s also a bunch of raw mixes that were knocked off during the group’s first days at Sundragon studio, all followed by a plethora of alternate mixes cobbled together from original elements Stasium discovered during the assembly of this reissue. While none of these variations are startling, they are clarifying. Every one is labelled after one of the group’s obsessions—“Psychedelic,” “Bubblegum,” “TV Track,” and “Doo Wop”—highlighting how thoroughly the group was rooted in the junk culture of the ’60s.
The deliberate intent of all that studio dithering is brought into sharp relief through the inclusion of an April 2, 1977 gig at CBGB’s, a show performed about three months after the album’s release. It’s a different set than the one included on the 2001 expanded reissue of Leave Home, which housed a concert given at the Roxy in Hollywood on August 12, 1976, about two months prior to the tracking of Leave Home. And while the live recording suffers from some dodgy audio, it’s a welcome tonic to the onslaught of mixes that demonstrate how even the most primitive of rock stars could never stop fiddling with faders.
On top of the live show and mixes, this deluxe edition rounds up the rest of the stray songs surrounding the release of Leave Home. Notably, “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” and “Babysitter”—songs added to the respective U.S. and UK releases of Leave Home when “Carbona Not Glue” was pulled from the record under the threat of a lawsuit from the titular cleaning company—and the B-side “I Don't Care” are added here. Alongside the proper album, the result is about 40 minutes of astounding music. The Ramones were masters of minimalism but, oddly enough, they benefit from this plethora of vaguely differing mixes. These extra tracks underscore just how much work it is to make something simple sound effortless. | 2017-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | July 22, 2017 | 9.5 | 7d462cd5-e209-4f7b-97b9-a14f5001ae10 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | null |
Captured by the ubiquitous NYC Taper, this 2016 live collaboration from harpist Mary Lattimore and keyboardist Elysse Thebner Miller is magic. Over two extended pieces, the duo is perfectly ascendant. | Captured by the ubiquitous NYC Taper, this 2016 live collaboration from harpist Mary Lattimore and keyboardist Elysse Thebner Miller is magic. Over two extended pieces, the duo is perfectly ascendant. | Mary Lattimore / Elysse Thebner Miller: And the Birds Flew Overhead | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23267-and-the-birds-flew-overhead/ | And the Birds Flew Overhead | Mention the harp, and it conjures images of angels aloft at the gates of heaven. Despite a CV that includes the likes of Thurston Moore, Kurt Vile, and Sharon Van Etten, the harpist Mary Lattimore has her work cut out for her, as far as escaping the tendencies of such history to position the instrument as merely a placid, New Age-friendly sound. Her music can be deeply relaxing, but her strings never feel escapist.
For all the images of clouds and light-filled vistas that her chosen instrument can imply, Lattimore’s work is evocatively tethered to life on earth, be it the “Wawa by the Ocean” on the Jersey Shore that she once frequented or “Jaxine Drive” on the opposite coast. While And the Birds Flew Overhead is specific—a recording of a 2016 live performance between Lattimore and keyboardist Elysse Thebner Miller during Three Lobed Recordings’ “Sweet Sixteen” series of concerts at King’s Barcade in Raleigh, N.C.—the two extended pieces evoke a more ethereal state. Recorded by the ubiquitous NYC Taper and pressed by Wooden Wand on their Footfalls label, Overhead captures a magical live performance, one that might’ve evaporated otherwise.
Improvisations between two stellar players tend to fall into two camps. In one, the players stake out their respective territories, feel each other out, and then attempt to find some middle ground. The other, which is far rarer, involves a subsummation of ego wherein they instead move like longtime figure skating pairs, gliding as one towards a higher ground. The press release for Overhead cites Cluster and Fripp & Eno, duos who also moved as one, but the comparison that holds the most water is Raul Lovisoni & Francesco Messina’s Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo, a late 1970s album of Italian minimalism that also uses harp and synthesizer to sublime effect.
The opening moments of “Grips on a Baby” reveal Lattimore and Thebner Miller already perfectly in sync and ascendant. Thebner Miller’s slow-morphing chords provide a gentle foundation while Lattimore’s plucked strings rise and billow like gauze curtains, or like a tiny set of chimes, nudged on by the wind. The serene vibe established, I wish it were possible to give a blow-by-blow of what transpired over the next 18-minutes—but the two move so effortlessly that even the most-discerning ears will find themselves unplugging and simply going along with their drift.
Strings gurgle like a wellspring underfoot, mechanized purrs arise like an outboard motor from across a great lake. Whether listening back to a Soundcloud link or to the sidelong vinyl, there always seems to be an unaccounted-for length of time, the soundwaves on the former all orange and the latter nearing the label. Soon there’s the sound of applause, marking the sudden end of a seemingly infinite journey.
“Victor, 1993 (End of a Holiday)” is a briefer trip, but it’s no less immersive. Lattimore’s rings rap against the wood of her 47-string Lyon and Healy harp, giving the piece a more percussive element; she then deploys electronic effects to add psychedelic eddies to those strings. As the piece continues, Thebner Miller’s droning chord organ mirrors Lattimore’s melodic figures and the two move at a more stately pace, slowly allowing space to emerge between the notes before the piece draws to a close.
There’s been no shortage of music from Lattimore released in the past two years. But this album is a breathtaking example of a spontaneous musical performance that pulls off that rare feat of transporting its audience nearer the gates of heaven. | 2017-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Footfalls | May 27, 2017 | 7.8 | 7d4af70e-b508-4820-b0ce-c843b44f879c | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
The Detroit indie rocker’s second album fluctuates between alt-rock and garage pop, turning up her amp and doubling down on her uncompromising style. | The Detroit indie rocker’s second album fluctuates between alt-rock and garage pop, turning up her amp and doubling down on her uncompromising style. | Stef Chura: Midnight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/stef-chura-midnight/ | Midnight | Sometimes empowerment arrives by way of motivational speeches or transformative adventures, and sometimes it arrives in anger. It did for Stef Chura, the Detroit-based indie rocker funneling passive-aggressiveness into music. “There are some conversations that I need to have that I haven’t,” she told her local alt-weekly. “Instead, I put them in songs.” Whereas her jangly debut full-length, Messes, wrestled with sadness—a close friend had died suddenly, an event that convinced Chura it was time to take the leap into music—its follow-up, Midnight, wrings catharsis from annoyances. By turning up her amp and doubling down on her uncompromising vibrato singing style, Chura defines her Saddle Creek debut in the image of the emboldened ’90s alt-rock feminists that came before her. She’s blossomed so much as a musician, she even surprised herself.
Chura has mastered the art of playfully selling herself short, but Midnight should put an end to that. When she sings, she sounds as self-assured as PJ Harvey and as liberated as Alanis Morissette. Producer Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest contributes bass, guitar, organ, and synths, but if it weren’t for his duet on “Sweet Sweet Midnight,” you’d likely forget all about him in the shadow of Chura’s commanding presence. It helps, of course, that she’s blowing off steam. On “All I Do Is Lie,” an exoneration of an ex-lover, and “Method Man,” a romp through the vexations of a one-sided relationship, her raspy voice pierces through spiraling noise pop. “Scream” confronts the suppression of feminine anger and finds its own solution in elongated, cacophonous hollers. It’s unfiltered and raw, the sound of someone who no longer gives a fuck. The vocals on Chura’s debut had a snuffed quality; here she and Toledo push them to the forefront, though they would’ve demanded the spotlight anyway. Even her quiet croon on lo-fi piano ballad “Trumbull” is engaging, as if overhearing a friend who’s unaware she’s not alone.
As she fluctuates between alt-rock and garage pop, Chura finds exhilarating ways to exorcise her angst. She busts out solos that teeter between full-volume shredding and coolly indifferent fret-sliding, waving her guitar like a middle finger. On the bluesy “Degrees,” she waits until the end half to burst through the door with a classic rock tone, scaling her way up the guitar neck in a headbang-worthy moment. Elsewhere, like on “They’ll Never,” she opts for a cleaner, air guitar-worthy solo reminiscent of the Strokes. Chura sounds her best when letting loose on all fronts. So it comes as a surprise when she counteracts her own brisk songwriting with album closer “Eyes Without a Face,” a crisp, double-tracked Billy Idol cover that forgoes a memorable ending for a leisurely, dragged-out conclusion.
Several of Midnight’s most rewarding tracks—“Jumpin’ Jack,” “3D Girl,” and “Method Man”—are treasured but shelved demos finally seeing the light of day. Perhaps this helps to explain how Chura manages to sound so much like a modern-day Morissette: She’s fed up, she’s plugged in, and she’s confident enough in her craft to morph these ideas into the anthems she imagined. Midnight is a growth spurt without the usual growing pains. Toledo contributes subtle handiwork throughout, but no studio trickery could replicate Chura’s intensity. From her fuzzed-out garage guitar tone to her grainy music videos, she’s bringing back the ’90s rock truism that angst is transformative—so long as you get it out. | 2019-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Saddle Creek | June 12, 2019 | 7.6 | 7d4b117e-86c1-45f2-bac9-b4010fec2b76 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Inviting guest vocalists into his fold for the first time, the London tuba player delivers a collection of taut pop songs deeply rooted in Afro-Caribbean soundsystem culture. | Inviting guest vocalists into his fold for the first time, the London tuba player delivers a collection of taut pop songs deeply rooted in Afro-Caribbean soundsystem culture. | Theon Cross: Intra-I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/theon-cross-intra-i/ | Intra-I | Over the past half decade, Theon Cross has reconstituted the tuba’s image in the popular imagination. Whether bolstering the Shabaka Hutchings-led Sons Of Kemet, providing the oomph for Kano’s live shows, or in his own role as bandleader and solo artist, he’s elevated the instrument from bulky backing brass (or, worse, comedy prop) to core constituent. His debut album, 2019’s Fyah, added a booming rumble to the conversation, exhibiting deft interplay between tuba, sax and drums. On Intra-I, his horn is central to the party. Inviting guest vocalists into his fold for the first time, Cross delivers a collection of taut pop songs that’s deeply rooted in the annals of Afro-Caribbean soundsystem culture—spanning sweaty clubs, hall parties, and funeral rites.
“Roots,” graced by British-Zimbabwean MC Shumba Maasai and his deliciously rolled “Rs,” channels Roots Manuva and the late Ty in a revival of “bouncement” era UK hip-hop. “Play To Win” sounds like a live-action version of Dot Rotten’s explosive “Bazooka” instrumental—a beat that accepts few imitations. These nods to the past, and a repeated refrain of “Watch what the future holds, then aim higher” on “Roots,” resemble a motto of sorts for Cross and his contemporaries. But there’s a risk associated with having such clear touch points. The influence of soundsytem-rooted genres like soca, dancehall, UK hip-hop, and grime has been a sustaining feature of London’s ebullient young jazz scene pretty much since its inception; but what was once striking and new can easily slip into more superficial territory. However, Cross consistently avoids the sighing recognition that comes from watching yet another jazz player do a rendition of a grime song. Tracks like “We Go Again” and “The Spiral” funnel heavy, hip-swinging grooves through moody pop compositions, allaying any such fears of gimmickry.
Underlying the jubilation are moments of mournful contemplation. Cross’ father, whose taste and passion for reggae have had a lasting influence on the tuba player, passed away in 2020. “Watching Over (Bless Up Dad)” and “Forward Progression II” both pay tribute, the former with sermonic drones and the latter with a heavy-stepping, trumpet-led exaltation. Cross’ playing is charismatic, and the dense rumble he draws from his instrument is potent; he imbues these songs with unguarded emotion—conjuring the scuffle of feelings borne out, in the Caribbean tradition, at a Nine Nights wake.
In 2019, Cross spoke of the influence that parties at his grandmother’s home have had on his music—with zouk, soca, calypso, and reggae music filtering through from those moments to his later years. If the result of that was Fyah, then Intra-I is the soundtrack for a new generation of music lovers to grow with. Cross hasn’t just connected his instrument with the soundsystem culture that informs his music, he’s made it an integral component of that tradition. For this tuba player, the air kicked out by speaker cones is just the same as the breath he pushes through his mouthpiece.
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. | 2021-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Marathon Artists | November 1, 2021 | 7.5 | 7d4b972a-ff22-4f10-98c9-a1e154aea698 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
The Austin experimental musician’s grand, romantic ambient album is inspired by dreams’ blissful connotations and cryptic communications. | The Austin experimental musician’s grand, romantic ambient album is inspired by dreams’ blissful connotations and cryptic communications. | more eaze: oneiric | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/more-eaze-oneiric/ | Oneiric | Dreams can be revelatory, but there’s always a catch. Sometimes you find that the beautiful poetry that came to you in your sleep sounds like nonsense once you open your eyes and write it down. They end at inopportune times, just before you’ve reached your destination or climbed in bed with your crush. You don’t have much control; hence the fascination with “lucid dreaming,” which lets you find your own way around your dream world instead of being jerked around by your subconscious. And then there’s the simple fact that they’re not real and you eventually wake up.
oneiric, the new album by Mari Maurice as more eaze, is interested in that maddening unreality. Its title is an adjective related to dreams or dreaming, and its shifting synth pads and endless-city artwork bring to mind the vaporwave subgenre known as “dreampunk,” but Maurice seems just as inspired by dreams’ bliss-out connotations as the way they seem to communicate to us from the other side of a wall. These six tracks are permeated with voices that bubble just below the threshold of comprehension, and though you could spend a few spins of oneiric just trying to make out what they’re saying, Maurice uses them like Burial, Jan Jelinek or Philip Jeck use static: as a way of both enhancing the texture and heightening the emotional stakes. Maurice has cited an unrequited love as an inspiration for the album, and it’s poignant to picture the splintered language of dreams as a metaphor for never really knowing what to say to someone else.
oneiric derives much of its power from its arrangements, which feel grand and romantic even while hewing close to the ambient drift of previous solo releases Towards a Plane and Yearn. “a romance” sighs with strings, white noise, and undulating pads, occasionally interrupted by a weird, wet, loudly mixed noise that made me think of an accidental stomach gurgle during sex. “the neighborhood” is nearly silent for long stretches, yet its 11-minute length and the sheer beauty of the sounds that do show up—a candle-flicker of guitar in the first half, a blossoming house chord in the second—give this low-lying track the feel of an epic. “a romance” and “the neighborhood” make up more than half of the album’s runtime by themselves, and it’s easy to forget what you’re listening to for a while and let them coil away in your subconscious.
The middle of the album breaks away from the gauzy sweep of the first two tracks by paring down the track lengths to four or five minutes apiece and introducing noisier sounds like a computer-startup harp swell on “heartbreaker” and squealing Auto-Tune on “we don’t talk about it.” (The latter is the only moment on the album to suggest Maurice’s sideline in hyperpop, whose irony and pop-culture literacy oneiric otherwise rejects.) But the vibe picks up again with “crii,” an unnaturally slow minimal house track built around two uncertain little pinpricks of chord, its unquantized beat gradually building but never quite turning into a groove. It’s an almost-banger in the vein of Jan Jelinek’s “Tendency,” too subdued and lethargic for clubs but somehow carrying itself like an anthem.
“Each song is on the verge of communicating some deep truth but not quite being able to articulate it,” Maurice says, and this deliberate tilt towards abstraction is a far cry from the candid conversations and domestic samples (flushing toilets, various canines) that appear throughout her work both solo and with her best friend, claire rousay. oneiric’s reduced emphasis on recognizable sounds and relatable sentiments makes it a more interior album, one about specific states of mind experienced by its creator rather than the sad transience of the world. But as oneiric retreats deeper and deeper toward its own center, it’s hard not to get sucked up along with it. | 2022-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-06T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | OOH-sounds | April 6, 2022 | 7.4 | 7d506f52-4898-4450-b249-07b64daefcfa | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
The Las Vegas rock band’s fourth album is categorically soaring and sometimes pleasant, but it is so broad and hollow that it is difficult to feel anything these guys are feeling. | The Las Vegas rock band’s fourth album is categorically soaring and sometimes pleasant, but it is so broad and hollow that it is difficult to feel anything these guys are feeling. | Imagine Dragons: Origins | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/imagine-dragons-origins/ | Origins | Imagine Dragons have become a case study for rock music fading out of the zeitgeist. The rise of the Las Vegas rock band in 2013 coincided with the lull in the format’s popularity, yet, remarkably, they were a runaway success. Their breakthrough hit, “Radioactive,” stayed on the Hot 100 chart for a record-setting 87 weeks. They turned down their guitars and turned up every expensive synth pad known to man, and exactly one collaboration with Kendrick Lamar later, they were one of the biggest new rock bands in the country.
How did Imagine Dragons become so huge despite the fact that the average American couldn’t pick out a single Dragon in a lineup? Their sound is kind of like the machine learning output of the Lumineers, the Chainsmokers, and a SoulCycle playlist. After the breakout success of “Radioactive,” Imagine Dragons’ sophomore record, Smoke + Mirrors, topped the Billboard chart in its first week. Their third album, 2017’s Evolve, sold 147,000 copies in its first week, an incredible amount in the streaming era. It had the inescapable “Thunder,” a song that bored itself deep into the collective consciousness thanks in part to a mind-numbingly catchy chorus and ubiquitous Microsoft and Jeep ads.
Since Imagine Dragons scaled to a mass audience so quickly, their songs have had to stay just as huge. They make low-hanging-fruit music, which can be great in theory, but because of all the styles it stitches together, their songs something more distant and mutated. On their new album, Origins, Reynolds finds himself on the other side of the personal darkness that shaded Evolve, emerging with a more positive outlook, a world-weary curiosity now turned outward. Reynolds feels compelled to turn his attention to this modern life, outlining his grievances in language that feels almost too accessible: “How many artists fear the light? Fear the pain, go insane?” he asks on “Bullet in a Gun.” On closer “Real Life” he ponders, “Hey, turn your phone off, won’t you look me in my eye?/Can we live that real life?” Do we live in a society? Imagine Dragons are almost positive we do.
The music is categorically soaring and sometimes pleasant, because sometimes the algorithm finds you where you want to be found. The anthems—“Natural,” “Bad Liar,” “Machine”—lean heavily on the trusty loud-quiet-loud dynamic that buoyed the bands’ past hits. Reynolds, though, uses that tension to increasingly hollow effect. Stylistically, the singer tries on enough hats to differentiate Origins’ collection of music from the more homogenous Evolve, in particular, the Bleachers-meets-Coldplay pop of single “Zero,” a nod to soul music on “Cool Out,” and the “Wake Me Up”-core country textures of “West Coast.”
But with its tired aphorisms and eerily familiar sonic environments, it never adds up to be much of a comment on the music Imagine Dragons is referencing. Since their songs scan like a competent survey of the entirety of mid-aughts pop rock, there’s no real personality to identify within the songs. Origins wants to conversate with the current moment, but it never amounts to a coherent statement. In TV terms, it’s like a hoary crossover episode of “Black Mirror” and “This Is Us.”
Although Origins leans far too heavily on Instagram-quote culture—the idea that any snippet of thought, removed from context, can build a base of inspiration—Reynolds is a passionate and versatile singer. It courses through his veins. In June, HBO released a documentary called Believer, which follows Reynolds as he learns about LGBTQ Mormon youth and their struggles to find an identity within an oppressive church. In Believer, Reynolds tells a story with a powerful message—the film showcases Reynolds as a likable, empathetic figure who works hard to earn a new point of view. Listening to Origins, you wouldn’t know that this was the same person behind the music, that this was the same person singing, “Nothing ever comes without a consequence or cost, tell me/Will the stars align?” with such embarrassing conviction. Reynolds has a story to tell, but the music fails to be the ideal delivery system. | 2018-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Kidinakorner / Interscope | November 14, 2018 | 5.3 | 7d569ce3-5ce2-46bb-92b1-13895206cbc1 | Corban Goble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/corban-goble/ | |
It Follows is a horror movie with a compelling score by Disasterpeace, aka Rich Vreeland, an electronic artist who’s best known for a series of video game soundtracks. | It Follows is a horror movie with a compelling score by Disasterpeace, aka Rich Vreeland, an electronic artist who’s best known for a series of video game soundtracks. | Disasterpeace: It Follows OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20427-it-follows-ost/ | It Follows OST | It Follows is a classic boy-meet-girls story, only the boy is using a fake name, the girl doesn’t know, and after they sleep together it turns out he’s passed more than fluids—specifically, a curse that makes her the target of an unstoppable, unmerciful demon. The demon takes human form; it can’t be seen by anyone but the cursed, and those who’ve previously borne the curse. (It only targets one person at a time.) It doesn’t run—it walks, stopping only when it’s in range for a vicious attack that leaves the victim’s limbs snapped, and their pelvises crushed by coital rage. It can’t open doors, but it knows how to knock. It’s the dark presence behind one of the more gripping horror movies of recent memory, as well as a fantastic argument for abstinence.
The soundtrack is handled by Disasterpeace, aka Rich Vreeland, an electronic artist who’s best known for a series of video game soundtracks. It Follows is his first film score, and he’s worked diligently to build a cohesive world of ominous moods. There are several recurring motifs: a booming percussion that comes like the monster pounding on the door; a shrill klaxon signaling when danger is near; a pattern of corrupted synths chugging into motion like some futuristic train on its way to the junkyard. A window shatters. A cluster of digital hornets buzz and whine. A jet turbine spins into motion, the air supercharging to an agonizing din, only to die down and leave the room sapped of tension. It’s a score that announces when something is about to happen, only to suddenly upend expectations and leave the room on edge.
It Follows wouldn’t exist without John Carpenter’s movies, and neither would the score. "Title" sounds like an update of Carpenter’s Halloween theme, as a lonely piano line is slowly enveloped by gothic dread. The melody is echoed on "Detroit", the arpeggiated tones brushing up against the sublime as the synthesizers drone from underneath. This is where you’d maybe dock Vreeland and the filmmakers a point for originality, except It Follows comes at a precarious moment for the American horror movie. Everything is either point-of-view or torture porn, and frankly, if someone wants mine a source as fertile as Halloween, they should go right ahead.
Like all OSTs, It Follows makes the most sense when you’ve seen the movie it’s made for—and you should see it, especially if you can watch horror movies in genuine terror of what’s about to happen. But it can work in other contexts, and a quick scan of Vreeland’s work shows he isn’t a one-trick composer leaning on his Casio. I’m most familiar with his score for "Fez", a video game that’s "Super Mario" meets M.C. Escher, in which a pixellated alien explores a slowly decaying cartoon world. "Fez" is a playful, adventurous game in which a sense of whimsy is frequently juxtaposed with the solitude of the unknown. Vreeland’s score conveyed those moods, just as his work for It Follows captures the paranoid fervor aroused by finding your normally comfortable surroundings transformed into a danger zone. Is it your friend you’re looking at, or the monster? How about now? | 2015-04-01T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-04-01T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Experimental | Milan | April 1, 2015 | 7.3 | 7d5e7af3-2845-4a2b-a760-282cea6dc86d | Jeremy Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/ | null |
The Mountain Goats' 2003 LP All Hail West Texas is a lonely album, a product of idle time and summer boredom recorded alone, quickly, in an empty house. A new reissue on Merge includes thorough liner notes from John Darnielle and unreleased material. | The Mountain Goats' 2003 LP All Hail West Texas is a lonely album, a product of idle time and summer boredom recorded alone, quickly, in an empty house. A new reissue on Merge includes thorough liner notes from John Darnielle and unreleased material. | The Mountain Goats: All Hail West Texas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18288-the-mountain-goats-all-hail-west-texas/ | All Hail West Texas | All Hail West Texas is a lonely album, a product of idle time and summer boredom recorded alone, quickly, in an empty house. John Darnielle wrote most of the lyrics in the margins of the stapled, mimeographed handouts given to him in the orientation sessions at his new health-care job in Ames, Iowa. It was 1999. Every day he’d come home at three to an empty house, dishes crowding the sink (his wife was away at hockey camp) and pass the solitary evenings leafing through his handouts and editing the day’s work. When a melody came to him, he’d grab his guitar, mute the TV and hit the red button on a dying, decade-old boombox that had documented hundreds of similarly fractured, bleating folk songs since he began recording as the Mountain Goats in 1991.
There were obstacles to recording this way-- sometimes the tape ran out mid-song, very occasionally the phone rang-- and once they were resolved, the composition in question had sometimes already fallen out of Darnielle’s favor. “In those days, a song got exactly one day in which to either resolve its issues or be cast forth from the company of its brethren,” he writes in the reissue’s liner notes. The lucky survivors, though, have a palpable immediacy. Most of the takes you hear on All Hail West Texas were recorded within hours (or, when the juices were really flowing, minutes) of being written.
There’s a common misconception that all Mountain Goats records were recorded this way, but that’s not exactly true. Up until All Hail West Texas’s release in 2002, they were more like compilations-- collage-like assortments of bedroom recordings, live shows, occasional duets, radio broadcasts and four-tracked one-offs. The subject matter was sometimes bleak (especially the many songs that charted in stinging detail the doomed relationship of the fictional Alpha couple) but these variedly textured means of recording lent the albums a feeling of motion: Darnielle seemed more like an eccentric, town-to-town troubadour than an elusive bedroom-folk hermit. But not so on All Hail West Texas. Recording in suburban solitary confinement and exclusively on the boombox gives All Hail West Texas a cohesion and an echoing sense of isolation-- the perfect atmosphere for 14 songs about crushed dreams (“The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton”), long-distance longing (“Source Decay”), and occasional moments of piercing joy (“Jenny”).
While recording All Hail, Darnielle did have a companion of sorts: his Panasonic RX-FT500, a temperamental machine so crucial to the album’s overall vibe that he credits it as a “second performer” in the liner notes. It had been out of commission for about two years (listening to the RX-FT500’s contributions to the Mountain Goats’ discography chronologically is kind of like listening to an alt-folk Disintegration Loops: you can practically chart its slow, gradual decay), but that fateful summer, it came back from the brink of death for an encore performance. “What you have with you now,” Darnielle writes on the inside sleeve, “[Is] the sound of a long-broken machine deciding, on its own and without the interference of repairmen or excessive prayer vigils, to function again.” And perhaps more than any other Mountain Goats record, you get a sense of this feeling in his voice, too: urgency, finality, and a twinge of superstition-- as though he’s not sure the “record” button will still be working by the next take.
The first people we meet are Jeff and Cyrus, a pair of pentagram-doodling teenage metalheads with big dreams for their still-unnamed two-man band (though they’ve been arguing over a few possibilities: Satan’s Fingers, the Killers, the Hospital Bombers). They’re the stars of album opener “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton” a song that, if not the definitive Mountain Goats song, at least deserves an undisputed mention in the top 5. This isn’t a statement you throw around lightly about a band this prolific, but “Denton” feels like a dizzyingly succinct crash course in everything that makes the Mountain Goats great. In just two-and-a-half minutes, Darnielle pulls off three whiplashing tonal shifts. It starts off seeming like a light, funny song about a couple of high school goofballs, but then-- with a simple, unexpected pivot in the chord progression—things turn suddenly poignant: the band and the boys’ friendship is abruptly interrupted when Cyrus gets sent to a boarding school-- or, as the now-ominous “Hospital Bombers” suggests, could it be a psychiatric facility?-- “where they told him he’d never be famous.” In its closing moments, though, it becomes defiant, triumphant battlecry: “When you punish a person for dreaming his dream/ Don’t expect him to thank or forgive you/ The best ever death metal band out of Denton/ Will in time both outpace and outlive you.” It’s brilliantly structured and smartly crafted, but it wouldn’t be half as stirring if it were recorded with more polish. “Denton” is an imperfectly sung ode to all the songs that don’t get sung because of the people who put into the singers’ heads that the only songs worth singing are the perfect ones.
As advertised on its otherwise blank cover, All Hail West Texas is comprised of “fourteen songs about seven people, two houses, a motorcycle, and a locked treatment facility for adolescent boys.” The specificity of the narrative here is something of a joke: this was Darnielle’s first attempt at a concept album and-- somewhat paradoxically-- it succeeds mostly because of how loose the concept is. None of the other recurring characters get the first-name introductions that Jeff and Cyrus do, and it’s hard to follow which songs are about which of the seven people, or where one person ends and the other begins.
But that’s the point-- and even the brilliance-- of All Hail West Texas. Darnielle finds the common humanity in the people he’s singing about, whether it’s the injured high school football star who accidentally sells acid to an undercover cop (“Fall of the High School Running Back”), the blissfully happy couple in “Jenny” or the thoroughly miserable one in “Fault Lines”. There’s no shortage of contenders for “most devastating moment on All Hail West Texas”, but my vote goes to the half-second beat between tracks 8 and 9, the tender “Riches and Wonders” (“We are strong, we are faithful, we are guardians of a rare thing…/ And we dance like drunken sailors, lost at sea, out of our minds”) and the searing pre-break-up travelogue “The Mess Inside” (“We went down to New Orleans one weekend in the spring/ Looked hard for what we’d lost/ It was painful to admit it, but we couldn’t find a thing”). Are these two songs about the same couple? The suggestion that they could be-- that the potent feeling captured in “Riches” is too often something fleeting-- stings worse than knowing for sure.
As the Panasonic RX-FT500’s swansong, All Hail West Texas (which finally came out, first on cassette, in 2002) does mark the end of something fleeting, too. Later in 2002, Darnielle released the excellent Tallahassee-- not only the first “hi-fi” Mountain Goats record, but also the first in a series of concept albums that stick to much clearer narratives. But in the retrospective ruminations prompted by Merge’s new CD/LP reissue of this album, it feels less like a turning point in Darnielle’s career than an undeniable sweet spot. Mountain Goats fans are generally divided between the lo-fi diehards who champion the unpolished virtues of the early stuff and the people who prefer the more finely crafted later records. But All Hail West Texas (as well as the highlights of the previously unreleased material included with the reissue, like “Answering the Phone” and the proto-Tallahassee sketch “Indonesia”) is the best of both worlds: a snapshot of the moment when Darnielle had honed his lyrical and melodic sensibilities well enough to write songs as good as “Jenny” and “The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton”, but also perhaps before he actually realized how good and enduring these songs actually were.
Revisiting All Hail West Texas over two decades into the Mountain Goats’ existence makes a central irony in their story all too clear: it’s not a lonely record anymore. A handful of these songs remain the most iconic in the Mountain Goats catalog, which-- thanks to Darnielle’s cult fanbase that seems to be steadily, improbably increasing with each year-- means that some of the lines that echoed off the empty walls that summer in Ames, Iowa have now been screamed by thousands and thousands of different people. When Darnielle put most of these songs to tape in 1999, even to his fans he seemed like someone who’d end up a committed but obscure lifer on the indie cassette circuit; it was hard to imagine there’d ever be a wide audience for the kind of eccentric, homespun music he was making. But remember: people underestimated Jeff and Cyrus, too. | 2013-07-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-07-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Merge | July 23, 2013 | 9 | 7d5f4b32-86ad-428d-95b0-dcabb5f2000e | Lindsay Zoladz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/lindsay-zoladz/ | 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 singular sound and the one-chord wonder of the iconic bluesman’s 1966 album. | 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 singular sound and the one-chord wonder of the iconic bluesman’s 1966 album. | John Lee Hooker: It Serve You Right to Suffer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-lee-hooker-it-serve-you-right-to-suffer/ | It Serve You Right to Suffer | The sound is solitary, pitch black, endless road. The backing band consists of three decorated jazz sidemen from New York: guitarist Barry Galbraith, bassist Milt Hinton, and drummer Panama Francis. The producer is Bob Thiele, head of the foundational jazz label Impulse! Records. The idea is to keep the tracklist down to just eight songs and let each one inhabit a mood, unencumbered by commercial demands for a single.
They booked just one day in the studio. John Lee Hooker arrives on November 23, 1965. He is in his mid-to-late 40s—his official birth records were destroyed in a fire—and he has been playing the blues for most of his life. After spending his formative years travelling, working odd jobs, and performing live, Hooker had his first hit single with “Boogie Chillen” in the late 1940s when producer Bernard Besman recorded him alone at the microphone with an electric guitar. A second microphone was placed in a wooden pallet beneath his feet to capture the sound of his foot stomping to the rhythm.
Ever since the release of that song, the avenues of his career seemed wide open as he searched for a way to recapture that spark. He recorded with different labels under pseudonyms to avoid a breach of contract with any of them. He released acoustic and electric albums; he played with small bands, horn sections, and second guitarists. Some of his ’50s work for the label Vee-Jay was among his most influential and inspired legions of rock’n’roll artists to come. Ry Cooder once described his music like cats quietly growling at each other in a cage: “It’s the sound of something disturbing,” he explained, “but you don’t know quite what it is.”
Hooker had also tried playing with jazz musicians. In 1960, he released That’s My Story, an elegant set featuring members of Cannonball Adderly’s ensemble on brush-stroked drums, upright bass, and subtle rhythm guitar. “Everybody wanna hear my story,” he sang in the title track, which he recorded acoustic without any accompaniment. He then listed a basic itinerary of places he had called home: Mississippi as a child, then on to Memphis, Cincinnati, and eventually Detroit. “I had a hard time,” he concluded in his low, purring voice. “Now I’m doing alright.”
Some more details: Hooker was the youngest of 11 children. His father was a sharecropper and Baptist preacher who had trouble relating to his son, a sensitive kid with little interest in physical labor or clergy work. When his parents separated early in his childhood, he chose to live with his mother, Minnie Ramsey, and her new husband, William Moore, a local blues musician. Inspired by Moore, Hooker left home at age 14 to pursue a career in music. Throughout his life, he cited Moore as his greatest influence, expressing regret that his stepfather didn’t live to see his style catch on.
Hooker’s own style of guitar playing has been imitated but never matched. As opposed to the 12-bar blues that became a form of mainstream, post-war party music, Hooker’s blues is often based on just one chord pulled to its limits. With his right hand and foot, he keeps the rhythm: the thumping bedrock for his lyrics, which he delivers in an emphatic speak-sing, shaped by a childhood spent listening to church sermons and local blues singers.
Because there is little melodic progression in the songs, Hooker adds the dynamics with his left hand as he navigates the fretboard. These riffs, responding to and anticipating his vocal melodies, become the central element of his work, at its most free-form and traditional. In the latter category is 1962’s “Boom Boom,” Hooker’s signature song that only takes five seconds to lodge into your head. He based the chorus on something a bartender said to him before a show and turned it into a song to play at that venue. When he noticed the instant response, he knew it would be a hit.
Hooker’s operating principle is instinct. In the case of songs like “Boom Boom,” it turned him into a pop artist, writing music refined to its most pleasurable, immediate purposes: no tension, all release. You can hear in these songs an attempt at getting the crowd to their feet, banding together and forming a small utopia. One of his enduring nicknames is the “King of the Boogie.”
In another sense, Hooker’s music is loneliness embodied, evoking a deep melancholy and longing. In a style that influenced Malian guitarists like Ali Farka Touré and Afel Bocoum, he glides up and down the neck of his instrument, sometimes throwing the whole thing out of tune with the force of playing. It sounds dissonant and chaotic, passionate and uncompromising. “As much as it was a joy to perform with him,” Keith Richards once observed, “you would really have to become him in order to play along."
No band understood this strange self-sufficiency more than the jazz ensemble on It Serve You Right to Suffer, Hooker’s lone album for Impulse!. Much of the material was music that Hooker had recorded before, all presented in new, skeletal renditions, as if he was testing the restraint of these virtuosic musicians. (“Just relax,” he instructed them, “as though you were in an easy chair at home, taking a coffee or something.”) As opposed to the acoustic arrangements on That’s My Story, this group decided to plug in, and they played with a ragged, sputtering electricity, constantly on the edge of darkness.
It presents a fascinating challenge. Take “Bottle Up & Go,” one of the more upbeat moments. Drummer Panama Francis and guitarist Barry Galbraith find their rhythm quickly because Hooker sketches it out for them: Francis follows the pulse of Hooker’s right hand, while Galbraith mimics the melodic patterns of his left. On the bass, Milt Hinton has to fend for himself. You occasionally hear him reaching for a chord change that never comes, pivoting forward only to be met with the brick wall of Hooker’s picking and singing.
When everything clicks, it is like falling into a trance. “Country Boy” is an eerie story-song whose narrative might take place during the same travelogue from “That’s My Story.” A man trudges between towns, late at night, in the dead of winter. As Hooker accentuates his lyrics with incidental flourishes high up the neck of his guitar, the rhythm section follows steadily like snow from a dark sky. Hooker sings about lying down from exhaustion on the highway; the band seems to know how he feels.
The sadder the subject matter, the slower they play. In “Decoration Day,” Hooker sings about grieving while the rest of the world celebrates, oblivious to his pain, “just like the flowers that come in May.” The music is inconsolable, led by Francis’ shadowy brushes on the snare. The isolation in Hooker’s lyrics spans the record and makes even the more riotous moments—the desperate yelps as the band roars into action at the end of “You’re Wrong,” a cover of the Motown hit “Money” with trombonist Dicky Wells—feel slightly unnerving.
Unsurprisingly, It Serve You Right to Suffer was not a commercial success, and in the span of Hooker’s vast discography, it never caught on as one of his classics. (The ’90s slowcore band Spain, however, have cited it as an inspiration.) In the late-’80s, Hooker reignited his career with the star-studded comeback album The Healer, and he began to embrace his role as an icon, leaning into the fuller, uplifting side of his work that more directly inspired rock music.
The joyful catharsis of his sound, however, does not exist without its rock bottom, and much of Hooker’s career plays as a battle between these poles. There are blues musicians whose darkness defines them, and there are the ones who find the happy ending they deserve. “I believe in paradise,” Hooker said in 1997. “It’s here on earth.” Among his final releases were albums called Mr. Lucky, Chill Out, and Don’t Look Back. He spoke frequently about retiring but never ended up doing it. He owned several homes in California. He became a Jehovah's Witness and died peacefully in his sleep, well into his 80s.
Late in life, Hooker still enjoyed performing live, often accompanied by famous devotees like Van Morrison, Carlos Santana, and Bonnie Raitt, who once called Hooker’s music “one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.” Most setlists included a shapeshifting song he formally referred to as “Serves Me Right to Suffer,” a slow-crawling ballad that seemed to resonate more as time passed. During a ’90s performance with Ry Cooder, Hooker sang about living in a memory while the camera captured tears falling from behind his dark sunglasses.
Hooker selected that song as the title track and closer for his 1966 album. But he made one pivotal change. While the version he performed live was a self-lacerating inner monologue, he now delivered it in the second person, directing the message outward: “Serve you right to suffer,” he sings. “Serve you right to be alone.” In the final moments, Galbraith strums his muted strings like an engine failing. The beat is slow, the pauses between Hooker’s words long and pained: “You can’t live on... that way… in the past... Them days is gone.” Then he hums a sad, little melody before the music fades abruptly and unceremoniously. He kept the lights low in the studio. It must have felt dead quiet. But outside, the world was loud and merciless as ever, already moving on.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2020-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz / Rock | Impulse! | November 15, 2020 | 8.6 | 7d6d882b-2e41-4646-9834-951743134553 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Balancing unassuming ambient and downtempo experiments with lush, floor-filling house and electro, the London DJ’s debut album sounds refreshingly carefree. | Balancing unassuming ambient and downtempo experiments with lush, floor-filling house and electro, the London DJ’s debut album sounds refreshingly carefree. | Shanti Celeste: Tangerine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shanti-celeste-tangerine/ | Tangerine | There’s always been a certain sweetness to Shanti Celeste’s productions. Since 2013, the Chilean-born, London-based artist has filled her tunes with colorful melodies and breezy rhythms, so that even her biggest floor-fillers have felt impressively light on their feet. “Strung Up,” from 2015, was a glistening homage to upbeat ’80s electro, while 2017’s “Loop One” layered swelling pastoral pads over a sturdy kick drum and clacking percussion.
Although Celeste doesn’t shy away from heavier offerings in the DJ booth—her sets are often punctuated with riotous bits of jungle and rave—her penchant for melody and buoyant beats has also colored her curation of Peach Discs, which has quietly been one of electronic music’s strongest imprints over the past two years. Celeste now operates the label alongside Berlin-based Brit Gramrcy, and while she produced Peach Discs’ first release, she’s largely allowed the music of others to define its subsequent run. Aside from records by more established artists like Call Super and Ciel, there have also been gems from up-and-comers like Chekov, Fred, and Videopath.
This year has seen an uptick in Celeste’s own output. Earlier this year, she dropped Soba Dance, a collaborative EP with Bristol stalwart Hodge. Although its three tunes hinted at the thundering percussion often found on the latter’s records for Livity Sound and Berceuse Heroique, Celeste’s playful spirit is all over the record. On Tangerine, she’s allowed that spirit to run free, delivering an effervescent LP that also represents a significant expansion of her sound.
Like many dance-music artists, Celeste has chosen to pepper her first full-length with forays into ambient music, but Tangerine is one of the rare cases in which those efforts don’t feel like forgettable filler. Opener “Sun Notification” is a gently bubbling new-age cut, its soothing melodies rising and falling like the tide. At the other end of the album is “Moons,” a more introspective tune that blends soft synths, the gentle sound of rainfall, and a welcoming sense of calm; the song could soundtrack a quiet visit to a Buddhist temple. “Slow Wave,” on the other hand, takes a different path toward serenity, weaving snippets of Celeste’s own voice into a blissful canopy atop a soft, barely-there drum beat.
Celeste also experiments with her beat-based tracks. “Voz (Instrumental)” almost sounds like hip-hop, its punchy percussion and vaguely Middle Eastern melody bringing to mind classic Timbaland. Upping the tempo significantly is “Want,” a bouncy cut with a klaxon-like synth stabs, an infectiously shuffling beat, and some delicate keys; in less than six minutes, it manages to reference ’90s jungle, rave, and IDM without coming off as derivative.
That ability to freshen up established sounds and styles is one of Celeste’s biggest strengths. At this stage in her career, she’s a skilled DJ who instinctively knows what works on the dancefloor, which helps explain the effortless appeal of songs like “Infinitas” and “Sesame”; although they are, at root, relatively standard house tunes, they’re also unusually lively, bounding along with bright melodies and swinging rhythms that nod to old-school Jersey garage. “May the Day” tackles electro, and its inventive drum pattern and murky swirl of gurgling acid are unlike any of Celeste’s previous work within the genre.
“Aqua Block” perhaps best captures the album’s invigorating spirit. Bursting with energy, the track rumbles along with the enthusiasm of a toddler chasing a butterfly, its pastel melodies impishly darting to and fro. At a time when so many of Celeste’s peers are delving into dark, distorted sounds, she’s chosen to walk a lighter path. It’s not easy to sound this carefree, yet it appears to come naturally to her. | 2019-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Peach Discs | November 22, 2019 | 7.3 | 7d70b78e-77ed-40a0-a632-ef074e46253b | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
Sharing members with Dungen, this Swedish group alternates between moody acoustic folk rumination and various permutations of stoner-friendly rock. | Sharing members with Dungen, this Swedish group alternates between moody acoustic folk rumination and various permutations of stoner-friendly rock. | The Amazing: The Amazing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13882-the-amazing/ | The Amazing | Despite sharing two members (three if you count jack-of-all-trades contributor Frederik Swahn), the Amazing and Dungen don't sound overly similar. In the quickest, dirtiest sense, the Amazing trade Dungen singer and sole songwriter Gustav Ejstes for former Granada frontman Christoffer Gunrup, and where Ejstes sings entirely in Swedish, Gunrup opts for English. The two men don't share all of the same influences (though they do share some), and that's where the groups diverge, because if there's one thing Ejstes and Gunrup have in common, it's a keen faithfulness to their particular sources of inspiration. The Amazing's reference points aren't nearly as broad as Dungen's, but each project succeeds by reproducing vintage sounds so lovingly and masterfully that a lack of originality ceases to matter.
Most people first caught wind of the Amazing late last year via the wonderfully lissome single "Dragon", the majority of which is given over to misty, moody acoustic folk rumination in the vein of Nick Drake. Almost half of the album explicitly mines this same terrain. The achingly sensitive, fingerpicked fragilities "Beach House", "Is It Likely", and "The Strangest Thing" may skirt the line that keeps out soggily simplistic pushovers like Damien Rice and David Gray, but Gunrup's alluring lyrics and the sheer loveliness of the instrumentation ensure they stay on the non-douchey side of the divide.
The element of "Dragon" that leaps out on first listen is its beautifully fluid twin-guitar refrain that evokes the easy-bake grooves of the Allman Brothers Band and the Grateful Dead. This sun-dappled style crops up again at various points on the album, and, in a more general sense, the parts of the record that don't find Gunrup conjuring up Drake's pink moons and northern skies instead see the band exploring various permutations of stoner-friendly rock. Opener "The Kirwan Song" features a sublime interpolation of Fleetwood Mac's "Sunny Side of Heaven", penned by the eponymous Danny Kirwan and recorded just as the Mac were transitioning from jam-friendly blues-rock to soft-focus pop. Fittingly, Gunrup and co. take Kirwan's original, intimate instrumental and blow it up to stadium size, complete with thunderous drum rolls from Dungen kitmaster Johan Holmegard. That's just a warm-up for the massive, molten "Code II", a roiling monolith of wicked, doomy guitar shards and more skull-rattling drumming.
The hazy, heavily treated "Dead" could pass for mid-period Flaming Lips, but it's on the penultimate "Had to Keep Walking" that the Amazing really kick into interstellar overdrive. As the song cycles through a cerebral, ruminative groove, it touches on post-rock before melting into a keyboard-laden head trip ripped straight from the Tangerine Dream and Pink Floyd playbooks. As far-flung as Dungen may be, they're clearly not going to be able to exhaust every avenue of album-era revivalism all by themselves. | 2010-02-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2010-02-12T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Subliminal Sounds | February 12, 2010 | 7.3 | 7d72360a-0e75-4b90-8da5-7914c23d37d7 | Joshua Love | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-love/ | null |
At seven tracks and 24 minutes, Jennifer Lee's (aka TOKiMONSTA) Fovere is a brief, rounded project that does not ask very much of its listener. | At seven tracks and 24 minutes, Jennifer Lee's (aka TOKiMONSTA) Fovere is a brief, rounded project that does not ask very much of its listener. | TOKiMONSTA: Fovere | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21659-fovere/ | Fovere | In an era when music is primarily distributed digitally, the distinction between an EP and a mini-album can be significant. An EP could easily be a throwaway project—a place to store songs that didn't quite fit a proper full-length thematically or sonically. A mini-LP, though, connotes the same wholeness and completion as any given album, just shorter. At seven tracks and 24 minutes, Jennifer Lee's (aka TOKiMONSTA) Fovere is just that: a brief, rounded project that does not ask very much of its listener. With its quick runtime and tight structure, it is neither groundbreaking nor entirely lacking inspiration. Though prone to drift into the background, Fovere is certain, reliable, and mostly enjoyable.
A disciple of Flying Lotus (and the first woman signed to his Brainfeeder label), Lee began her career as an L.A. beatmaker, content to get lost in her own universe of kicks, samples, and smooth instrumentals. On 2013's Ultra-released Half Shadows, she largely maintained her warped ethos, but added vocalists (like Kool Keith) to the tracks. Then on 2014's mini-LP Desiderium, Lee began crafting songs with room for singers to perform. With that transition, her music gained some space, but lost the hip-hop-indebtedness of earlier work. The project was not particularly memorable, nor was it terribly distinct from that of other producers creating club-ready tracks that were still cool enough for solo listening. Not even a then-unheralded Anderson .Paak made much of a lasting impression.
Fovere finds Lee continuing her transition away from DJ and toward bona-fide producer status. Whereas Desiderium had three guest vocalists on its seven tracks, Fovere has five. (Lee samples her own "Hemisphere" with Gavin Turek on opener "I'm Waiting," too, making it more like six out of seven.) Nevertheless, their lyrics are largely ignorable. A suddenly empowered .Paak, the exception to the rule, turns in a commanding performance on "Put It Down" (which also features KRNE), but everyone else is just an agreeable element in a pop-ready electronic track.
There is hardly a daring track on Fovere. "Put It Down" is its most impressive, but neatly fits Lee's previously laid framework, simply a couple notches up on the intensity scale, complete with Skrillex-ian drops. "Penny" is a potentially strong ballad hamstrung by nonsensical songwriting. Closer "Wound Up" cues up some house sounds, a genre in which Lee sounds more like a visitor than an innovator. Even if it's lacking highs (or lows), Fovere is strong enough to be pleasant. It doesn't ask to be grappled with nor taken at much more than face value, but it finds Jennifer Lee further cementing herself as a viable pop composer. | 2016-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-03-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Young Art | March 9, 2016 | 5.5 | 7d7c58c8-c558-4098-abb0-3b9c25ecb90c | Matthew Strauss | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-strauss/ | null |
New York psych rocker Ryan Jewell channels the subterranean sounds of the ’70s—kosmische, prog folk, space rock—into infectious, wildly inventive songs. | New York psych rocker Ryan Jewell channels the subterranean sounds of the ’70s—kosmische, prog folk, space rock—into infectious, wildly inventive songs. | Mosses: T.V. Sun | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mosses-tv-sun/ | T.V. Sun | Ryan Jewell is a first-call utility player in the rock underground who has long shown flashes of all-star potential. But neither his extensive list of collaborations with Ryley Walker, Neil Hagerty, Steve Gunn, Psychedelic Horseshit, et al., nor his micro-indie releases, whether solo or with his band Mosses, can totally prepare you for the eclectic excellence he flexes on T.V. Sun.
Intimations of T.V. Sun can be heard in the transcendently twangy, Sandy Bull-like “Mono Lake Improvisation,” from Mosses’ 2014 album Attic Dundee, and in the cosmic pastoralia/space-rock klang of 2015’s Ouroboros. But Jewell and main musical partner Danette Bordenkircher—who contributes piano, vocals, and flute to the new record—have polished their variegated influences into compositions that show a deep appreciation of ’70s subterranean rock and electronic music while flooding the stereo field with their own distinctive sounds. Their inspirations may not be a mystery, but Jewell and Bordenkircher’s musical taste is impeccable, and Mosses’ inventive song structures and tonal palette swiftly rebut any charges of derivativeness.
“Tall Bearded Iris Speckled” raises the curtain on a band frolicking in verdant British prog-folk fields. After an intro of disorienting cascades of guitar, keyboards, and martial paradiddles, Jewell and Bordenkircher’s vocals evoke the archness of Tyrannosaurus Rex and Six Organs of Admittance. “There’s a lightness on the dark side of light/There’s a darkness on the light side of dark,” they sing, establishing their paradoxical, nature-observing bona fides. Eve Lenker’s fuzz bass and Jewell’s churchy organ lend the song the air of a Soft Machine fantasia.
With brilliant perversity, Mosses follow with “T.V. Sun,” whose introverted, methodical funk comes riddled with scat vocals and skeletal drum machine, bolstered by chunky funk beats from Troy Kunkler that hark back to Can timekeeper Jaki Liebezeit at his early-’70s peak. Over this, Jewell’s glinting guitars speak in elliptical tongues. The song’s frequent structural morphing and textural variety epitomize Mosses’ approach—not in an ADHD manner, but rather as the product of restless, organic creativity.
Mosses may be based in Highmount, New York, but their minds often flash back to ’70s Germany—a sage decision, musically speaking. “Time in Yer Mind” boasts the frightening propulsion of Can’s “Mother Sky” while also throwing in hysterical ululations that pay homage to the main riff of Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine.” For good measure, they close the song with the sort of calamitous clangor that’s made Acid Mothers Temple a household name among LSD devotees. If you ever wanted to hear a Teutonic facsimile of the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner,” “MSR” will satisfy you with its orotund motorik drums and controlled euphoria. It’s the album’s obvious single, quasi-jokey vocals and all.
On “Ahh Auspicious,” Mosses strive for the grandeur of German kosmische-volk ensembles such as Emtidi and Between, attaining blissful elevation via Arjun Kulharya’s sitar and Bordenkircher and Meg Baird’s drifting vocal harmonies. LP closer “You Can’t Fall Off a Mountain” is a tangent from all that’s preceded it, even before Robbie Lee contributes an alto-flute solo that veers into the psych-jazz territory of Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider-Esleben. Coupling the regimented arpeggios of Harald Grosskopf with the carbonated burbles of analog-synth madman Conrad Schnitzler, “Mountain” feels like T.V. Sun’s obvious highlight, without being ostentatious about it.
The radical tone shifts on this album suggest the musicians are having great fun, and that infectiousness translates to the listener. It helps that Jewell packs so many ingenious ideas into each song that he makes many of his contemporaries seem like underachievers. T.V. Sun proves that not all musical nostalgias are created equal. As highbrow and esoteric as Mosses’ reference points are, the songs that spring from them express a vitality that bridges eras. | 2020-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Anyway | April 10, 2020 | 7.6 | 7d7e807d-70b6-4a9f-a0a1-cb3c28bbbc97 | Dave Segal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dave-segal/ | |
The Cleveland band craw carved out a space where post-hardcore, technical metal, math rock, and experimental noise all flow together under a hazy smog of something that resembles jazz, but isn't always clearly definable as such. Listening to their first three albums for the first time today is like traveling to a remote, untouched location and discovering strange wildlife and fauna that have evolved in genetic isolation. | The Cleveland band craw carved out a space where post-hardcore, technical metal, math rock, and experimental noise all flow together under a hazy smog of something that resembles jazz, but isn't always clearly definable as such. Listening to their first three albums for the first time today is like traveling to a remote, untouched location and discovering strange wildlife and fauna that have evolved in genetic isolation. | craw: 1993-1997 Box Set | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21330-craw-1993-1997-box-set/ | 1993-1997 Box Set | Listen to enough music, and go to enough shows, and you're bound to stumble across an unknown artist that blows you away and makes you wish you had the means to put their music in front of every serious listener you know. Sure, there's a perverse thrill in digging on something that few other people know about, but it can actually be painful to harbor a lifelong love for band that's been all but erased from history.
That might sound a tad dramatic to you, but it's a safe bet that it doesn't sound that way to Hank Shteamer, the producer and driving force behind this three-album box set. (Full disclosure: Shteamer is an occasional contributor to Pitchfork). As a 16-year-old, Shteamer's mind was so thoroughly blown by the Cleveland quintet craw that no other music has affected him in quite the same way since. He currently plays drums in STATS and Aa, serves as senior music editor at rollingstone.com, and continues to chart connections between metal and jazz via his interview blog, Heavy Metal Be-Bop. With this box, listeners get an opportunity to re-trace Shteamer's steps through the band's first three albums. (craw's fourth and final LP, 2002's Bodies for Strontium 90, is still available via Hydra Head.)
If you've never heard craw's work, you'd have every reason to be skeptical about how it might hold up in a climate where even groups like the Dillinger Escape Plan and Gorguts have a hard time keeping up with the accelerated mutation they inspired in other bands with their classic output. Indeed, Lost Nation Road, craw's 1994 sophomore LP, includes a song, "Bypass," that drifts uncomfortably close to the silt-coated riverbed that Tool illustrated so memorably on 1993's landmark Undertow. "Bypass" is immediately followed by "Botulism, Cholera + Tarik," a chaotic saxophone orgy (courtesy of guest horn players Matt Dufresne and Marcus Rosinski) that recalls the expulsive spirit of Mr. Bungle splattered with a little John Zorn for good measure.
Other than those two moments, however, this set demonstrates over and over how craw found their way to their own musical island, and listening to these three albums for the first time today is like traveling to a remote, untouched location and discovering strange wildlife and fauna that have evolved in genetic isolation. If you were forced to categorize this music—or, more aptly, to describe it in terms that people will understand—craw carved out a space where post-hardcore, technical metal, math rock, and experimental noise all flow together under a hazy smog of something that resembles jazz, but isn't always clearly definable as such.
Craw specialized in shifting, nonlinear song structures where rhythms, riffs, harmonies, and atmospheres seep into one another—a stark contrast from the enduring metal/post-hardcore standard where bands flash their chops by stringing together part after part after part. Craw actually had more in common with Pony Express Record-era Shudder to Think and These Arms Are Snakes than they ever did with Botch or Converge, and an unhinged semblance of jazz permeates their material like a spectral presence. Of course, their music sounds more fitting of a psychiatric ward than the urbane lounges—or even the piss-stained lower-Manhattan sidewalks—that jazz was heavily associated with in the '90s.
As much as bands like Candiria and Shining deserve credit for transplanting horns into their respective takes on street-level hardcore and black metal, craw were clearly aiming for a creative dimension you can't arrive at by stylistic gene-splicing alone. Neil Chastain, who played drums on the first two albums, helped shape craw's warped sense of structure by applying concepts he'd discovered in the music of Neubauten and Edgard Varèse. Likewise, guitarist and self-described "math and science geek" Rockie Brockway used a numbers-based system to write riffs. But those things don't necessarily do justice to the sound that craw came up with. "We were trying," Chastain recalls, "to dig through your comfort layers and make you feel something." The realization that this band was searching for something intangible lurks at every turn, but as you grow more familiar with craw's vocabulary, that "something" remains as vague and hard to pinpoint as it must have sounded to people's ears in the mid-'90s. And it is that mystery that ultimately pulls you in.
Shteamer recalls that at the six or seven craw shows he attended, there were fewer—"sometimes far fewer"—than 20 people in the room. Unsurprisingly, he brings a missionary's fervor to documenting the band's history via an accompanying 200-page book that comes stuffed with interviews (conducted by Shteamer himself), a complete catalog's worth of lyrics, and an abundance of photos, show flier and album artwork (much of it courtesy of famed cover artist Derek Hess), handwritten notes, a complete gigging history as best as everyone can remember it, and miscellaneous ephemera including a merch order invoice. According to Shteamer, even the most diehard experi-metal aficionados have never heard of craw, but this box presents as thorough an opportunity to play catch-up as one could ever hope to get for any artist, let alone a band that makes Barkmarket and Thought Industry look like household names by comparison.
The lyric sheets and voluminous interviews included in the book give listeners plenty of perspective on frontman Joe McTighe's way with words, but suffice it to say that his images walk the fine line between demented and acutely aware—much in the same way schizophrenics can appear at once utterly detached from "reality" while speaking with intuitive precision about their surroundings. McTighe's reference to the car-bombing of real-life environmental activist Judi Bari is as captivating as it is uncomfortable to stomach—and just one of many examples that set his lyrics in a class by themselves. Likewise, even through his barking/gurgling/whispering style, McTighe's words are almost always intelligible. Some heavy bands—the majority of them, arguably—play heavy music to aggress, to go fists-up and balls-out into life. For others such as craw, heaviness represents a barrier behind which one retreats and stews in observation of the outside world.
Early on in their career, craw moved away from a riff-based approach and began writing as an ensemble. It shows, more or less, from note one of this set. Musicians in particular should find craw's approach to structure especially illuminating, even though, when taken as one entire chunk, it's sometimes difficult to tell one album apart from another. It doesn't help that Steve Albini's thoroughly unremarkable recording style fails to capture the raw immediacy of a band in the room while also forcing the band to shy away from using the studio as a means to create the atmosphere and "album feel" that its material rightfully called for. Luckily, though, there are times when the audio mix recalls the charming timbre of the cassette demos that were common during craw's years of activity.
In any case, long before you arrive at 1997's Map, Monitor, Surge it becomes obvious that craw didn't fit any of the commonly accepted storylines that media outlets like this one depend on and, essentially, manufacture. And unlike, say, Helmet or the Jesus Lizard, craw didn't benefit from a media climate that embraced their exotic other-ness and allow them to exist in multiple camps simultaneously. Who knows what other factors played into craw's career trajectory, but looking back it's easy to imagine that this band was more or less destined for obscurity.
In the best sense of the term, craw's music is an acquired taste. Immediately on hitting play, one understands that this was not a band that got to the point quickly or shied away from making long, drawn-out albums. Sometimes, though, more does end up being more. And this box provides an appropriately exhaustive vehicle for taking the time it requires to sit with and digest a body of work that's still revealing itself to a lifelong fan like Hank Shteamer so long after the fact. Listening back, you have to wonder how many other trailblazing groups have existed that you'll never know about. But as you work your way through 1993-1997, you do get the distinct impression that none of them sounded quite like this. | 2016-01-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-01-08T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | null | January 8, 2016 | 8.3 | 7d84f5f0-912e-46f5-905f-e7c8a88ed955 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The dance-pop icon selects her favorites remixes from a back catalog stuffed with club reworks, but her picks offer a curiously distorted look back at her history on the dancefloor. | The dance-pop icon selects her favorites remixes from a back catalog stuffed with club reworks, but her picks offer a curiously distorted look back at her history on the dancefloor. | Madonna: Finally Enough Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madonna-finally-enough-love/ | Finally Enough Love | Few pop superstars have borrowed as much from club music as Madonna. Her decades at the top of the charts have been bolstered by a canny ability to co-opt contemporary dance sounds without scaring off the mainstream. Finally Enough Love is supposed to represent the singer’s own favorites from her extensive remix catalog. It’s an intriguing premise, promising a candid look at what this musical magpie makes of her excursions into club culture. Sadly, the compilation’s selling point also turns out to be its Achilles’ heel, with Madonna making what can only be seen as some pretty weird selections from her remix archive. (This first edition of the album has been whittled down to 16 tracks; a bounteous 50-track companion, Finally Enough Love: 50 Number Ones, titled in reference to the singer’s 50 Billboard chart-toppers, follows in August.)
Toward the start of her career, Madonna worked with a small number of remixers from her inner circle, like John “Jellybean” Benitez, who was the resident DJ at the Fun House club in New York where Madonna used to dance. As demand for remixers grew, she called on an increasing number of producers from further afield, and many of them, frankly, were not particularly worthy of the honor. These lesser names are over-represented on the second half of the album, which trails off dramatically.
It’s heartening, in a way, that Madonna has thrown in a load of her Y2K-era remixes simply because she likes them. But Eddie Amador’s leaden and infuriatingly sexless “Club 5 Edit” of Hard Candy’s “Give It 2 Me” probably isn’t even Eddie Amador’s favorite late-period Madonna remix, while the jubilant and cheeky “Music” deserves so much better than Washington, D.C. duo Deep Dish’s dull-as-Deep-Dishwater “Dot Com Radio Edit.” The fact that workaday Israeli DJ and producer Offer Nissim appears twice across the album’s 16 tracks, while the Pet Shop Boys’ fantastically chiseled take on “Sorry” only turns up on 50 Number Ones, is a cultural facelift akin to Cecilia Gimenez’ scandalous attempts to clear up the Ecce Homo fresco.
At their worst, there is something rote and functional about the mid-to-late-period remixes that dominate the second half of Finally Enough Love, as if Madonna needed something to get played in the fashionable New York clubs from which she emerged, and didn’t care all that much about how she did it. The fact that Madonna ostensibly cherishes these songs enough to pick them out of the business-house bin of history isn’t enough to rescue them from ignominy.
The other baffling call on Finally Enough Love is the decision to include remix edits rather than the full remixes themselves, when often the whole point of the remakes was to create extended jams that would work for dancefloors and DJs alike. The version of “Into the Groove” included on Finally Enough Love, for example, is the “You Can Dance Remix Edit,” a truncated take on the magnificent eight-minute-plus remodel that Benitez and True Blue producer Patrick Leonard created for You Can Dance, Madonna’s 1987 remix album; the decision is akin to buying a dog that loves to swim, then locking it in the laundry room.
The “You Can Dance Remix Edit” of “Into the Groove” (which this compilation makes available digitally for the first time) is glorious even in its truncation, with instrumental effects, stuttering vocals, and occasional rhythmic flourishes offering a sparkling alternative flavor to one of Madonna’s most iconic hits. But it invites damning comparison with Madonna’s previous work. You Can Dance was an essential Madonna release for the way it showed how a huge pop act could live in parallel to the club underground; Finally Enough Love feels more like a collection of footnotes. (In the case of 50 Number Ones, a very long and tangled set of footnotes.)
Questionable curatorial choices aside, there is plenty of incredible music on Finally Enough Love. “Everybody,” “Into the Groove,” “Like a Prayer,” and “Express Yourself” may appear as rather stingy remix edits, but they are still “Everybody,” “Into the Groove,” “Like a Prayer,” and “Express Yourself”—four of the best singles of the 1980s, and near-perfect examples of how club culture can be directed toward the mainstream without sacrificing its sass or vigor. Shep Pettibone’s canny, percussion-heavy remix of “Express Yourself,” meanwhile, goes a long way to explaining why he was the remixer of choice for ’80s pop megastars, capable of teasing out a club groove with a few well-placed tweaks while maintaining the integrity of the original song.
Shuffling forward in time, David Morales’ “David’s Radio Edit” of “Deeper and Deeper” and Junior Vasquez’s “Junior’s Luscious Single Mix” of “Secret” are scintillating examples of the early-1990s New York house sound: all tough, swung beats, perky keyboard lines, and perfectly coiled tension. And Stuart Price’s raucous “SDP Extended Vocal Edit” of “Hung Up” (a song he produced in the first place) is a wonderful example of how 2000s Madonna connected with the European dance underground on her fantastic 2005 album Confessions on a Dance Floor.
Sadly, it’s not quite enough. Finally Enough Love is good when it should be spectacular; frustrating when it could be fantastic, a mixed bag where we deserved solid gold. You could accept the odd strange song selection, maybe, but Finally Enough Love makes the erstwhile Queen of Pop feel inexcusably boring at times—which is the one thing Madonna at her prime would never countenance. | 2022-06-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-06-28T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Warner | June 28, 2022 | 6.5 | 7d8726dd-4753-4b46-aa3c-e38101eb45b9 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
With their third album, the Montréal band TOPS have sharpened their hooks and clarified their aesthetic. These slyly-produced soft rock tunes carry a plush atmosphere and vintage warmth. | With their third album, the Montréal band TOPS have sharpened their hooks and clarified their aesthetic. These slyly-produced soft rock tunes carry a plush atmosphere and vintage warmth. | TOPS: Sugar at the Gate | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tops-sugar-at-the-gate/ | Sugar at the Gate | When they formed in 2011, TOPS were among a crop of Montréal indie bands involved with Arbutus Records, a label that came into prominence after releasing Grimes’ early albums and co-releasing 2012 breakout Visions with 4AD. Following Grimes’ success, watchful eyes turned their sights to her peers, looking to crack the code in the city’s scene. Among their compatriots—Blue Hawaii, Sean Nicholas Savage, Braids, and Majical Cloudz—TOPS were the most aligned to conventional notions of rock and pop, a throwback AM-rock band amid a sea of indie-tronica. Their fuzzy, honey-dipped songs were straight out of the school of Fleetwood Mac and Mazzy Star: eminently listenable, easy to digest, romantic, and catchy. For their third record, Sugar at the Gate, the band relocated to Los Angeles and recorded at a former brothel in Jewel City. Sugar at the Gate mirrors this sordid and light-filled clime—which is wholly appropriate for a band that has always been a lot sunnier than the city they hail from.
TOPS is anchored by the singer Jane Penny, whose voice embodies the deep nostalgia that the band’s music projects. Something about her style feels anachronistic—contemporary rock music always draws on previous eras, be it 1990s indie or 1980s punk, but rarely do singers have such a vintage warmth. Her soprano luxuriates in its own imperfections, and some sly production allows it to sound fuzzy and blown out, mimicking the feeling of a cassette you found at a garage sale. In fact, the whole album bears this considered lo-fi sound: like vaseline rubbed along a camera’s lens to give a photo an old-timey aesthetic, the songs on Sugar at the Gate are perfectly old feeling. Take, for example, “Petals”—with its strutting guitar riffs, sweet choruses, and rinky-dink synths, it would not have sounded out of place on drive-time soft-rock radio circa 1977. It’s the kind of rock song that would be perfect for a David Lynch film, smokey and slightly kitschy—absolutely redolent of the past.
If anything, Sugar at the Gate represents the perfection of a formula; TOPS are workmanlike in their insistent repetition. It’s hard to distinguish one song from the next, and instead they flow into each other like syrup falling from a glass bottle. This is in part due to David Carriere’s impossibly catchy guitar riffs and Riley Fleck’s understated drumming. In tandem, the two create a plush atmosphere for Penny’s singing. Carriere’s guitar lines are simple and well-executed—generous in their grooves, but filled with static, recalling Jim Reid at one moment and Lee Ranaldo the next. This especially evident on songs like “Dayglo Bimbo,” which channel Sonic Youth at their poppiest.
But Sugar at the Gate proves that TOPS are not out to reinvent the wheel. Lyrically, none of the lines Penny and Carriere write are all that memorable. Even in surreal moments (“I was hypnotized by why/We could not kill the light”), they mostly kowtow to convention (“It’s time to start again/I know I’ll never win”), writing standard-fare love songs. What sets TOPS apart is their consistency—across three records, they've sharpened their clean hooks and clarified their aesthetic—making soft rock songs that sound good on repeat. Overall, Sugar at the Gate is a compact record from a band chugging along smoothly, unspooling sweet rhythms like it is finally their job. | 2017-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Arbutus | June 14, 2017 | 7.4 | 7d87f05f-71ec-4cb0-9dba-ed2807563848 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
This thoughtful, earnest, cerebral MC might be a prototypical "rapper liberal arts kids like," but he's also ferociously on-point and prodigiously skilled. | This thoughtful, earnest, cerebral MC might be a prototypical "rapper liberal arts kids like," but he's also ferociously on-point and prodigiously skilled. | Mr. Lif: I Heard It Today | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12930-i-heard-it-today/ | I Heard It Today | If Kanye West came into the game as "the first with a Benz and a backpack," then Mr. Lif was surely "the first with dreadlocks and Harry Potter glasses." The thoughtful, earnest, and unapologetically cerebral Bostonian might be a prototypical "rapper that liberal arts kids like," but he's also ferociously on-point and prodigiously skilled. His last full-length, Mo'Mega, winningly mixed warnings about government conspiracies and mind control with disarming odes to his unborn children and truly unexpected feminine-hygiene advice. On new album I Heard It Today, he takes this autobiographical tack a step further, fashioning each song as a sort of unfiltered blog-entry reaction to the news as it happens. He wrote, recorded, and released to blogs the songs on the record over the course of fall 2008, as the economy plummeted, election fever set in, and Barack Obama won the Presidency. Lif's intentions-- to heat up his politics with personal immediacy-- are admirable, but the result, unfortunately, recreates a bit too successfully how it might feel to read a Mr. Lif Huffington Post column.
The successes and failures divide pretty evenly into songs that benefit from the sense they were spilled out in one long breath and ones that feel like they were written on a napkin minutes before recording. "Welcome to the World" and "What About Us?" were penned, as Lif tells us in the liner notes, as responses to the collapse of the world economy and the bailout plan, respectively, and they are sincerely aggrieved, gut-level blasts that benefit from the surging beats (by some dude named, no joke, Batsauce) that nicely recreate the sort of muscular apocalypse-rap Lif was rhyming over on the Emergency Rations EP. Other songs fall prey to the Cornel West rap-album-as-seminar problem, where Lif get so worked up he sort of forgets he's supposed to be rapping: "It hurts that even our most prestigious leaders cannot shun what these centuries of hatred have done" or "They were willing to give people with bad credit loans because they knew within a few years, we're out of our homes and they can buy up all the same properties" might be salient points, but they don't exactly make for natural-sounding lines.
Which brings us to the other problem: Lif's always had passion and verbal dexterity to burn, but his lyrics typically don't offer much that you can't gather from your first Propagandhi album or an Alan Moore graphic novel. It doesn't help that he still insists on saying things like "We should use our mind power to collapse the walls." He also remains touchingly convinced that his decision to wear dreadlocks is controversial in any way, shape, or form: "While I'm walking down the street, I see it all the time/ People looking at me like my dreads are a crime/ They signify the fact that I refuse to conform/ And I rock 'em real thick, cuz I'm allergic to the norm." His most thoughtful moment on I Heard It Today comes on "Head High", where his indignation cools a bit and and he gets reflective: "It hurts me to the marrow when I drive through the ghetto/ And see my peoples caught up in a life that won't let go/ And what's weird is/Few of them will hear this/ Melody I'm pouring from my heart so fearless." It's moments like these that make Lif so appealing: he might be touring the Seven Sisters college circuit for the rest of his career, but he embraces his turf wholeheartedly and raps with palpable zeal and conviction. Unfortunately, the ratio of thoughtful zeal to clunky screed this time around is decidedly not in his favor. | 2009-04-16T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-04-16T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Bloodbot Tactical Enterprises | April 16, 2009 | 5.3 | 7d936dec-f240-4318-bfc6-105bdb385ff1 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
These unearthed recordings of an early solo piano performance showcase the composer’s ecstatic approach to melody and repetition. | These unearthed recordings of an early solo piano performance showcase the composer’s ecstatic approach to melody and repetition. | Katrina Krimsky: 1980 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/katrina-krimsky-1980/ | 1980 | Katrina Krimsky unleashes a vibrant spectrum of colors from just a few looping melodies. The pianist’s compositions and improvisations build from small, repeated phrases, creating dreamy patterns in their interweaving. Her light, fluid music draws from her experiences performing in eclectic corners of the 20th century avant-garde—notably playing works by electronic trailblazers like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luc Ferrari and minimalist pioneers Terry Riley and La Monte Young. When she turned to composition in the 1980s, her pieces naturally emerged as a hybrid of contemporary styles, finding a sublime depth within every pattern she dreamt up. 1980, an unearthed solo piano recording from a June 1980 concert in Woodstock, New York, introduces the effervescent oscillations that would become Krimsky’s signature, showcasing the artist as she began to solidify her compositional voice.
Krimsky performed the music of 1980 while visiting Woodstock’s Creative Music Studio, which at the time was a hotbed for musical exploration. The evening marked a turning point in her musical practice—it was an early performance of material she composed and improvised, rather than material composed by others that she later interpreted. It also provided a lens into the lattice-like compositions that she’s written throughout her career. Across three tracks, Krimsky presents three different ways of creating a trance from undulating melodies, making music akin to her minimalist counterpoints and Keith Jarrett alike. With each return, her motifs take on a different mood—what may have at one point felt cheery might turn ominous—displaying how a change in perspective can affect a sequence of notes, not unlike meditation. In the liner notes for the release, Krimsky describes her love of patterning as a “search,” a means to an end of finding resonance. As her ostinati inch closer together, she writes, “It makes me free, another dimension happens.”
In the opening seconds of the 42-minute “Soundscape,” Krimsky lays out a rippling motif that loops throughout as other moody tones swirl around it. Though her gentle style often feels pastoral, here, there’s a hint of tension driven by the music’s rumbling, low notes; they chug along like a train that’s late to the station, picking up tension with every repetition and every trill. Krimsky examines her themes from every angle; gradually, a bright-hued, higher-pitched melody derived from the earlier motif emerges, presenting a new take on what we’ve already heard. And while much of her music ends up feeling ecstatic, she also touches on darker emotions, which make the bright spots feel even sunnier. She pauses, stretches notes, lets them sit awhile and ruminate. In a few moments on 1980, her oscillations even drop out, revealing dissonant, faraway clangor. It’s brief—her melodies return, stronger, brighter, within minutes—but their absence underscores how she explores each color and texture.
Documenting the start of her journey as a composer, 1980 presents Krimsky’s work at its most stripped-down and exploratory as she works through the ideas that would go on to define her voice. In some cases, the distinct pieces on 1980 would even return later in her career. “Stella Malu,” the album’s upbeat finale, returned in a more melancholy form on 1982’s Stella Malu; in this version, Krimsky slows her melodies down, transforming its peppy rhythms into pensive, meandering swaths of sound. It’s another example of the staying power of her vivid approach—though they’re just a few repeating notes, Krimsky finds new angles within them, teasing out different harmonies and moods. Every time, she shows us that there’s more left to say. | 2023-02-27T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-27T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Unseen Worlds | February 27, 2023 | 7.6 | 7d93c7d2-a50d-45a5-ac4b-21f9163d9683 | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
The Chilean-born, UK-raised producer continues his work to breathe life into techno and meticulously break down the division between texture and rhythm. | The Chilean-born, UK-raised producer continues his work to breathe life into techno and meticulously break down the division between texture and rhythm. | Cristian Vogel: The Assistenz | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22303-the-assistenz/ | The Assistenz | If the grid is what gives techno its shape and its structure, then resisting the grid—warping its contours, cheating its grip, slipping through hidden cracks—is what gives techno its life. Syncopation, flux, slippage: These are all strategies for escaping the rigidity of the too-perfect beat, and all of these escape hatches have long been at the center of Cristian Vogel’s work. The Chilean-born, UK-raised producer has spent his entire career teasing out a fundamental contradiction: Repetition is both techno’s defining feature and its Achilles’ heel.
Vogel got his start in Brighton’s anarchic techno scene alongside artists like Si Begg and Subhead and in the mid-’90s on Berlin’s Tresor label, he began brokering a series of unstable truces between order and chaos. Compared to most techno, Vogel’s sounds have always been especially untamed. On landmark albums like All Music Has Come to an End and Dungeon Master, he favored squeals and squelches, a metallic scrape and glassy clank, all lending to an impression of greased ball bearings tossed on a dusty floor. It was techno that was designed to trip you up.
For the past decade, Vogel has focused his efforts on making music with Kyma, a complex software application and programming language geared toward generative processes and the real-time control of advanced sound design. Autechre are among Kyma’s best-known adopters, but its use extends far beyond experimental dance music; the WALL-E sound designer Ben Burtt used it to fashion the voices of the film’s robots, “performing” their pixelated pitch-shifting using a light pen and a tablet. In Vogel’s hands, the tools help him achieve a kind of rhythmic, loop-based music that is constantly morphing.
The Assistenz builds upon the sounds and ideas that run through 2012’s The Inertials and 2014’s Polyphonic Beings, juggling dub-techno, industrial crunch, and the queasy tones of academic computer music. A fine, grey dust seems to cover everything, and every beat kicks up tiny squalls of soot. He concentrates mostly on the tempo range between 130 and 150 beats per minute, forgoing four-to-the-floor rhythms in favor of lurching, uneven cadences. “Vessels” hurtles along like a ghost train just barely clinging to the rails, and though the force of the drums is unmistakably violent, it feels muted by the reverb that hangs over it. “Telemorphosis” has a similarly contradictory feel, with zapping electrical frequencies smothered by thick, noxious fumes. Part of his project entails breaking down the division between texture and rhythm: The deeper you listen, the more microscopic textural elements blossom into finely detailed patterns. To peer into the penumbra of these tracks is like getting lost in the inky tangle of an Albrecht Dürer woodcut. But Vogel isn’t above bashing out a spectacularly forceful groove, either. The shuddering electro of “Cubic Haze” is built around a gut-punching 808 whose every hit seems, like the bullets in The Matrix, to displace the air around it in tight, concentric rings.
The album is a pretty bleak affair. After all, it gets its name from a graveyard in Copenhagen, the city where Vogel recorded it. And if the album has a flaw, it’s that the mood is a little too uniform. Even given Vogel’s habit of changing up the flow mid-track only to drop out the beat and simply let everything breathe for a bit, the first four tracks pile up like a slow-motion car crash. Fortunately, the album’s back half is more varied. Immediately following “Cubic Haze,” the record’s rhythmic highlight, “Signal Symbol” offers a gorgeous stretch of luminous, beatless drones reminiscent of Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas material; at five-and-a-half minutes, it could easily go four times as long. Vogel brings his rhythmic interests and his ambient skills together on “Barefoot Agnete,” The Assistenz*’s* centerpiece and indisputable highlight. Throughout the album, faint murmurs can occasionally be picked out of the murk, but the haunting “Barefoot Agnete” is the only track to put the voice front and center. As a skeletal drum pattern beats out a ritualistic rhythm, a woman’s wordless voice is digitally liquefied until it burbles like a mountain spring. For eight minutes, nothing changes except the small contours of that voice as it trickles into the darkness, and it is absolutely spellbinding. | 2016-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Shitkatapult | September 14, 2016 | 7.4 | 7d98f414-b1ad-462c-a695-63e0e3b5fcf3 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The leader of indie rock band 31Knots teams with folkie Corrina Repp for a project that's not simply the sum of their parts. | The leader of indie rock band 31Knots teams with folkie Corrina Repp for a project that's not simply the sum of their parts. | Tu Fawning: Hearts on Hold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14857-hearts-on-hold/ | Hearts on Hold | To their credit, Tu Fawning are not simply the sum of their parts. The brainchild of Joe Haege and Corrina Repp, the band has little in common with either the sprained indie rock of his longtime group 31Knots or the muted folk excursions of her solo output. These two Portlanders have, however, lent their talents to each other's records in the past, and Tu Fawning grew out of Haege backing Repp on a European tour a few years ago before it expanded into a quartet of busy multi-instrumentalists. The most outstanding aspect of their debut full-length, Hearts on Hold, is how different this new act is from anything they've ever done. Guitar is only a walk-on; these songs are built on a foundation of droning horns, ambient sounds, and rumbling drums (mostly courtesy of percussionist Toussaint Perrault). Repp sings more forcefully and brazenly in this setting, drawing out her syllables languidly and paring down the lyrics to their barest syllables.
So, Tu Fawning is a means to indulge all the impulses that don't fit with their day-job acts-- an opportunity to start anew with a different set of rules, influences, and possibilities. Hearts on Hold certainly bears that out; its title is the only mundane thing about it. These songs are crammed with ideas and sounds, inventive and fluid as they bend and change shape. A baleful trumpet loop anchors opener "Multiply a House", forming an eerie backdrop whose simplicity reinforces its trip-hop potency. That horn will appear throughout the album, nodding alternately to Haege and Repp's love of early twentieth-century jazz and to cheesy neo-noir soundtracks (remember "The Salton Sea"?). Such associations are tempered by the percussion, which strictly regiments most of these songs. The simple time-keeping tap of "Lonely Nights" suggests the regular thrust of a pickaxe or shovel, which, along with the ominous call-and-response, evokes a field holler or prison work song.
Anchored to prominent drums and gloomy airs, Tu Fawning make a noise that might be best described as organic industrial. Yet, in this context the rigid rhythms of that genre sound stiff, convoluted, and-- perhaps most damningly-- premeditated. The musicians are so intent on creating and sustaining such dark moods that they dampen the songs rather than free them. "Just Too Much" struggles to live up to its title, to go off the rail and lead them into danger. Even as they build to a promised payoff, Tu Fawning rein everything in, creating a sense of timidity and truncation. It's a missed opportunity-- and not the only one on Hearts on Hold. The moody atmosphere is an end in itself for the band, but it would make a better starting point. | 2010-11-30T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2010-11-30T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Rock | City Slang / Provenance | November 30, 2010 | 6.2 | 7d9b7df1-76f2-4028-840d-c4973b75f735 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
The Canadian musician’s latest album is his most ambitious yet: a lush, cryptic, and creepy suite that questions the very concept of love. | The Canadian musician’s latest album is his most ambitious yet: a lush, cryptic, and creepy suite that questions the very concept of love. | Andy Shauf: Norm | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/andy-shauf-norm/ | Norm | God and the devil have preoccupied Andy Shauf’s work since the beginning. Sometimes, he paints sympathetic portraits; on 2009’s “The Devil,” he describes a lovesick Satan, clutching a bottle and weeping over the souls he’s ushered to hell. On the 2012 murder ballad “Wendell Walker,” the title character hears the voice of God urging him to rescue his wife from an affair by killing her lover. For over a decade, these visitations have helped to contextualize the complex characters in the Canadian songwriter’s elaborate storylines. His eighth album, Norm, is his most meticulous and beguiling, straying from his semi-autobiographical past work to span three perspectives and tactfully downplaying its philosophical quandaries with his lushest arrangements to date.
From the social anxiety of 2016’s The Party to the wistful bar-hopping of 2020’s The Neon Skyline, Shauf’s previous concept albums explored the humdrum lives of relatable characters. This time around, the narrators are more unknowable—and, sometimes, all-knowing. On lead single and album opener “Wasted on You,” Shauf writes from the perspective of God and Jesus as two bros brainstorming an idea for their new startup: Christianity. “What happens when they die?” God asks his son in the opening line. “Maybe eternal life? But only if they find me.” As if tossing out ideas in a sitcom writers’ room, Shauf breezes through concepts that have incited doctrinal wars. “Maybe I’ll send you down, give them a clue…. Then they’ll kill you.”
This isn’t a biblical outlier amid more down-to-earth material; it’s the album’s thematic root. With “Catch Your Eye” and “Telephone,” Shauf introduces the main character, Norm, a lovelorn stoner determined to turn his meet-cute fantasies into reality as he desperately stalks his crush from the grocery store. These brief half-encounters—running into her around town, calling her and quickly hanging up—escalate into an alarming routine. Soon, he’s standing outside her window, hiding behind a tree, or trailing her to the theater.
All the while, someone else is following the action: God. When Norm hides in the bushes outside his crush’s house, the Lord watches over him, making sure the leaves cover his shoulders. As the plot thickens with the introduction of the woman’s worried acquaintance and an open-ended, possibly nefarious car ride, Shauf’s romantic inquiries grow more open-ended and existential. By the end of the record, it’s difficult to say which characters come away together or even alive. “What if God didn’t understand what love was?” is how Shauf poses the album’s motivating question. “I wanted to make love songs that were disconnected from romanticizing love,” he told Stereogum. “If there’s a reality to it, it’s that we’re always getting it wrong.”
Narrative twists and divine intervention are not the only tools Shauf uses to complicate his story. Play Norm in the background and notice its unburdened, graceful tone, the easeful glide of the instrumentation. Shauf’s needlepoint vocal delivery, at times reaching a newly unlocked high register, is a highlight. Pastel synths glint through “Telephone” and “Don’t Let It Get to You” like highway lights, while clarinets flutter alongside piano on “You Didn’t See.” The light arrangements evaporate into the air like fragrance, but, weighted with the story’s spiritual ambiguity, each note feels worthy of obsession. Even at their most obscure, Shauf’s songs are as alive and full of mystery as the stranger beside you at checkout. | 2023-02-14T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-14T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Anti- | February 14, 2023 | 7.6 | 7da43f86-fbfa-483c-99b3-42a49cf483ff | Margaret Farrell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/margaret-farrell/ | |
The 30th-anniversary reissue of this dream-pop landmark includes a second disc of demos, capturing a celebrated band already eager to move onto new sounds. | The 30th-anniversary reissue of this dream-pop landmark includes a second disc of demos, capturing a celebrated band already eager to move onto new sounds. | Pale Saints: The Comforts of Madness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pale-saints-the-comforts-of-madness/ | The Comforts of Madness | In 1990, shortly after his dream-pop band Pale Saints released their acclaimed debut album The Comforts of Madness, bassist, vocalist, and bandleader Ian Masters was already feeling restless. During an interview with MTV’s 120 Minutes, he and his bandmates—drummer Chris Cooper and guitarist Graeme Naysmith—were asked if they had favorite songs from the album. Masters quickly batted the question aside. “My favorite’s always the new ones,” he told the unseen interviewer. “I get really bored of playing the same songs all the time.”
It’s exactly the kind of cheeky remark you’d expect from a young musician riding the wave of a successful album (it landed at number 40 on the UK charts). But Masters’ impatience illuminates his mercurial post-Pale Saints career as well as the capricious spirit of the songs on Madness. Newly remastered and reissued by 4AD in celebration of its 30th anniversary, the album feels volatile even at its most introspective. Throughout 11 tracks, the trio maintains a tricky balance between the sugar rush of their C86 influences and the hypnotic churn of psychedelia. Nowhere is that more obvious than on their cover of “Fell From The Sun” by the Paisley Underground group Opal. In Pale Saints’ version, the gallop of the original is rendered, by turns, as a Fairport Convention-like ramble and a speedy Wedding Present fuzzfest.
What this reissue makes clear is how much of Madness’ iridescent sound is the work of producers Gil Norton and John Fryer. The deluxe edition includes a second disc of demos recorded at Masters’ Woodhouse Studio. Those earlier recordings are much rawer and more direct, while revealing the strength of the bare-bones material. Fryer and Norton brought the band more in line with the 4AD aesthetic, coating Naysmith’s guitar in washed-out colors, adding layers of compression and some dub-style effects to Cooper’s drums, and finding ways to thread the songs together so that the vinyl sides flow seamlessly.
The band also allowed the producers to reshape some material. In demo form, “Insubstantial” splays out a bit more, with a meandering opening section. With Norton’s help, Naysmith’s shimmering lead comes to the fore, alongside a touch of hand percussion, providing a nice counterbalance to Masters’ wispy singing. Fryer pushes “Sight of You” away from pure Spacemen 3 worship toward its dream-pop pinnacle by dialing back the delay pedal and cranking its coiled bassline. Masters may have gotten bored with it eventually, but in this version of the song, he sounds invigorated.
As Masters promised, he and Pale Saints didn’t stick in this mode for long. The group added a second guitarist (Meriel Barham) and with their second album In Ribbons, steered into lusher, more measured compositions. After touring to support that record, Masters left the group, exploring more psych folk territory with Spoonfed Hybrid and ESP Summer, his project with His Name Is Alive’s Warren Defever. These days he makes what he calls “confusion jazz” as a member of the experimental duo Big Beautiful Bluebottle.
It’s a wonder anyone involved with Pale Saints could keep him still long enough to record Madness. Watching and listening as Masters has spun off in as many different directions as he has only makes this album feel even more special; a brilliant, vivid snapshot of an artist and a band at the very beginning of a fascinating and unpredictable journey.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | 4AD | January 23, 2020 | 7.6 | 7db3cfc6-a34c-4a27-a259-d0b7c44abb29 | Robert Ham | https://pitchfork.com/staff/robert-ham/ | |
The Lockhart, Texas band moves easily between folky Americana and Renaissance-esque ditties, conjuring strange stories as if through a Ouija board. | The Lockhart, Texas band moves easily between folky Americana and Renaissance-esque ditties, conjuring strange stories as if through a Ouija board. | Tele Novella: Merlynn Belle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tele-novella-merlynn-belle/ | Merlynn Belle | On Merlynn Belle, Tele Novella offer a ticket to a time-traveling ghost town tour. The Lockhart, Texas band’s second album shifts easily between style, genre, and time period, moving from folky Americana to Renaissance-esque ditties, from cabaret ballads to baroque pop and psychedelic rock, from the Old West to a previous century. Ultimately, Merlynn Belle is about grief, loss, and longing, conjuring its subjects as if through a Ouija board: We hear about a witch who dines on crystals, a beautiful girl who’s involved in a murder, and a shrine illuminated by candles where petitioners write their dreams on scraps of paper.
Merlynn Belle, Tele Novella’s first album for Kill Rock Stars, is also the first album as a duo for singer-songwriter Natalie Ribbons (formerly of Agent Ribbons) and multi-instrumentalist Jason Chronis (formerly of Voxtrot); Sarah La Puerta and Danny Reisch provide additional vocals and instrumentation. The band’s previous album, 2016’s House of Souls, explored Ribbons’ penchant for an uncanny story, but its macabre imagery was often covered in shimmery psych-rock guitars. Merlynn Belle trades House of Souls’ more polished production for the DIY feel of an eight-track cassette, setting Ribbons’ voice against a cornucopia of instruments including harmonium, autoharp, Optigon, vibraphone, and a yard tool known as the Garden Weasel. If House of Souls was one great vintage coat, Merlynn Bell holds the key to the entire costume department.
Ribbons steps immediately into her role as narrator on the album’s psychedelic country love ballad of an opener, “Words That Stay.” Her careful enunciation evokes a cabaret singer in the dust of a pink stage light, asking, “Where did you go?/Nobody knew you were gone.” Punctuated by flamenco-like guitar flourishes, she yo-yos between a raspy alto and a soft yodel that taps against her upper register. Here, and on “Paper Crown,” her vocals bring to mind Angel Olsen’s on Burn Your Fire for No Witness. Approached from a different angle, “Paper Crowns”’s eerie, lullaby-like melodies and Ribbons’ sing-song delivery suggest the unblinking smile of an animatronic figure. But for all its mystery, this song, like many of the others, ends with a charmed sense of resolve.
At times, Tele Novella push the stylistic boundaries a little too far and the album’s spell breaks. “One Little Pearl” sounds like accidentally wandering into a recital of medieval hymns; “Crystal Witch” evokes a beleaguered rock opera, with Ribbons singing, “No, no, get out, begone/No, no, you don’t belong,” as if she’s trying to remove a hex. But while it’s easy to imagine Tele Novellea’s rapid oscillation of styles leaving you carsick, Merlynn Belle is grounded by its evocative imagery and by Ribbons’ unique narrative voice. The final effect is less dizzying than it is intoxicating.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars | February 11, 2021 | 7.2 | 7db83d0b-6630-4e32-a44b-2a6e702a5db1 | Sophia June | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophia-june/ | |
Marrying the shimmery indie-dance of Saint Etienne and the Field Mice's starry-eyed earnestness, Swedish singer/songwriter Mikael Carlsson's full-length debut is a staggering monument to gentle loners everywhere. | Marrying the shimmery indie-dance of Saint Etienne and the Field Mice's starry-eyed earnestness, Swedish singer/songwriter Mikael Carlsson's full-length debut is a staggering monument to gentle loners everywhere. | The Honeydrips: Here Comes the Future | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10958-here-comes-the-future/ | Here Comes the Future | Pop history is full of loners, rebels, and social misfits. As introverted adolescents, Elvis Presley and Kurt Cobain both got bullied. You could argue that rock'n'roll itself began with James Dean. No one can ever seem to agree on a better starting point, anyway-- Ike Turner's "Rocket 88" in 1951? T-Bone Walker's "Rock Awhile" in 1949? Uhh, Trixie Smith's "My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)" in 1922?-- so it might as well be a guy who lived fast, died at 24, and inspired everyone from Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles to Morrissey and Ian Curtis. If most rock long ago ceased to seem rebellious, maybe it's because the macho cock-rockers of the 1970s and 80s ignored Dean's most revolutionary (possibly apocryphal) dictum: "Only the gentle are ever really strong."
Dean shows up on Here Comes the Future, Swedish singer/songwriter Mikael Carlsson's full-length debut as the Honeydrips. So does plenty of other pop history-- Joy Division's Curtis included. Like the Knife, Jens Lekman, and Sincerely Yours label chiefs the Tough Alliance, Carlsson is based out of Gothenburg, Sweden, where he used to sing lead for Dorotea, a punk-spiked indie-pop group in the style of the Television Personalities, the Wedding Present, or the June Brides. A few years ago, Carlsson started releasing CD-Rs and a 7" single under his current moniker, moving a bit toward the shimmery indie-dance of Saint Etienne. Embracing even more the Field Mice's starry-eyed earnestness, Carlsson has now built a staggering monument to gentle loners everywhere-- and one of the best twee-pop albums of 2007.
"Please, let's not talk about the past," Carlsson sings on Here Comes the Future's title track. It's hard not to, though. For one thing, Carlsson's reverb-bathed vocals have the aching imperfections of Lawrence, from too-often-overlooked 1980s UK pop act Felt. And he's constantly invoking the past, whether lyrically or musically. Acoustic-jangling "I Wouldn't Know What to Do" imagines the intimate scene from the Smiths' classic awkward-mixtape starter, "Reel Around the Fountain" (you know, "15 minutes with you") and admits that he'd spend it in... virginal confusion. The most Field Mice-like moment, "Wait for the Grief to Come", is as "difficult" as that band in the intensity of its romanticized frailty: "I don't want to socialize, not tonight or tomorrow night," Carlsson whispers, as distant electric guitar doubles his winding acoustic guitar figures, joined by glockenspiel and, eventually, whistling. Good grief, eh?
As much as Carlsson may remember the past, he never merely revisits it. "It Was a Sunny Summer Day" sets a lockstep New Order bass riff beneath sighing, autumnal synths, beating back Mancunian misery via fair-weather melody until the whole song suddenly veers off into a Brazilian Carnivale. Then there's the obvious Joy Division nod, "(Lack of) Love Will Tear Us Apart", a wistful falling-out-of-love song with crackling Euro-house drum programming, faraway multi-tracked vocals by Hanna Göranson of Gothenburg electro-pop duo Cat 5, and a faltering rap verse (!) from Carlsson. If this one never gets played at a middle-school dance, the industry is in worse shape than we thought.
Here Comes the Future is packed with what the pros still call "perfect pop", but despite clocking in at just 34 minutes, it works as more than a collection of singles. "The Strangest Dream" starts off with a glance backward, then sets the emotional stakes dangerously high: "Last night I had the strangest dream/ I met the boy who raped you," Carlsson sings over intricate acoustic guitar, emphatic bass, tambourine, and a "Be My Baby" beat that is thankfully understated. "Trying Something New" combines more early-New Order rhythmic drive with arena-sized guitars, gusting synths, and terse lyrics about "a place where you and I can go." On "The Walk", tambourine backs a traipsing tune about a visit from ever-present Death. Amid flutes and loungey chords, finale "In Some Distant Future" goes back to to the opening "dream" theme, again on a scale that's both epic and intimate. Carlsson dreams of post-apocalyptic archaelogists, digging for clues about our civilization. They find a list of his dream girl's lovers-- and on it, our narrator's name.
Dean finally makes his appearance on "Fall From a Height", a hypnotic dance track that's based, as Saint Etienne have done before, on a couple of spoken-word samples. Appropriately, this is Here Comes the Future at its most existential and its most romantic alike. Carlsson sings about literally falling to his death, then turns sappily metaphorical: "I think I'm falling for you." Meanwhile, the kid version of Woody Allen's Annie Hall character won't do his homework because he just found out the universe is going to end someday so now he knows everything is pointless, and Dean's interjecting out of Rebel Without a Cause: "If I had one day when I didn't have to be all confused, and I didn't have to feel that I was ashamed of everything. If I felt that I belonged someplace. You know?" Please, let's not talk about the past.
As with the Field Mice, the Honeydrips will be anathema to some, especially those who conflate bravery with balls, the avant-garde with equipment-measuring, or sex with conquest. It may be in humanity's animal nature to exploit every weakness and avenge every grievance, but our species' greatest hits have always suggested we were capable of something more. (Nietzsche might call that "slave morality," but whatever, he got syphilis.) On the Honeydrips' MySpace page, Carlsson quotes a line from one of Felt's best songs: "It's better to be lost than to be found." Here comes the end of the universe. | 2008-01-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-01-10T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Sincerely Yours | January 10, 2008 | 8.4 | 7db99b3a-929e-476c-9dda-4d4dbaac819d | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
Even if the title of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings' fifth album invokes one of the more state-of-the-art slices of 70s soul as delivered by the O'Jays, Give the People What They Want finds the group staying in their late 1960s lane. It's an album built less on advancement than resilience. | Even if the title of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings' fifth album invokes one of the more state-of-the-art slices of 70s soul as delivered by the O'Jays, Give the People What They Want finds the group staying in their late 1960s lane. It's an album built less on advancement than resilience. | Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings: Give the People What They Want | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18835-sharon-jones-and-the-dap-kings-give-the-people-what-they-want/ | Give the People What They Want | If you wanted to pick two stories that defined the kind of year Sharon Jones had in 2013, it's easy to single out the first: the pancreatic cancer that struck the singer in the initial run-up to her new album. It's an ailment that grounded one of the most vibrant stage presences in R&B, and it seemed like a cruel rebuttal to a career built on long-due good fortune and a spirit that took on and beat all comers. That she intends to tour again soon after her recent final chemo treatment is a good omen, and with luck the disease will be just a footnote to a long career. The other story of note is the cameo Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings had in Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street: there they are, the singer and her group, standing onstage in the role of a wedding band playing James Bond supervillain torch song “Goldfinger” at the reception of a Caligula-minded stockbroker. A movie where a 21st century band plays 1960s music in a scene set in the early 90s—that's the context they found themselves in, and there are few better ways to show off just how unindebted to time they are.
Placing Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings at a certain space in time seems easy aesthetically; few bands' version of 1968 have lasted as long or as effectively as theirs. With a virtuoso versatility that all parties involved have cultivated, it wouldn't be a huge shock—much less a disappointment—if they deigned to cross that Nixon-era threshold and fool around with some “Blow Your Head”/“Funky Worm” synthesizers or put a little B.T. Express-style proto-disco hustle in their backbone. But even if the title of Give the People What They Want invokes one of the more state-of-the-art slices of 70s soul as delivered by the O'Jays, Jones and company stay in their more vintage lane. They might be a bit tighter than they were on 2002's Dap-Dippin'..., and they cut a bit more cleanly through their old-school analogue recording methods, but this is an album built less on advancement than resilience.
And this is an album with plenty of the latter. It isn't a sound anyone should take for granted, since it's been well-established that the blue-flame intensity of Jones' voice and the Dap-Kings' evocative arrangements aren't exactly common stock and would legitimately bring down the house anywhere from Coachella to Wattstax. Both singer and band have gotten so versed in their mixture of classic Southern soul and occasional flourishes of Motown or Philly soul opulence—transitions they make with a masterful smoothness—that even a first listen will make a song feel lived-in, with an “always been there” familiarity that hasn't yet gone threadbare. Even the cover art is a direct nod of a throwback—a more ornate riff on the sleeve of the Chi-Lites' 1971 LP (For God's Sake) Give More Power to the People.
That lets slip another commonality of theirs with vintage R&B—the idea of soul as a vehicle for social commentary. The fun irony of Jones and the Dap-Kings playing the on-screen Jordan Belfort's wedding is that their songs' sense of grievance, justice, and populist power has rarely felt stronger. Opener “Retreat!”, with its martial-march tweak of the Holland-Dozier-Holland that gave us “I Hear a Symphony”, is a massive kiss-off to some arrogant somebody-or-other that can't help but crumble in the face of “a woman scorned”—though any lingering spite is drowned out by the sheer joy of Jones expressing the strength needed to overcome someone else's misdeeds. “People Don't Get What They Deserve” is that rare dose of idealism-deflating reality that doesn't drown in its own bitter cynicism; Jones' sprint-paced rapport with the backup singer Dapettes doesn't sound jaded and world-weary enough, and right on to that. And “We Get Along” holds the prescription to endure—help and relief might be a long time coming, but being able to keep on doing it in the face of strife is a source of inner strength in the meantime. It's implicit gospel that puts its faith in the people.
Give the People What They Want is a pretty short 10 songs, though its breezy half-hour leaves plenty that sticks and plenty more worth revisiting when it doesn't. The collection's balance of rousing barn-burners and slower, sweeter break-up/make-up ballads (like the sun-streaked bliss of “Slow Down, Love”) keeps it moving. And it's all briskly impassioned enough to make most skeptics brush off the old “have I heard this before?” questions, even if this is one of the more get-what-you-expect albums of the early year. It's like peeking into an alternate reality where an artist like Lyn Collins or Marva Whitney could have a decade-plus career without having to worry about changes in trends—and it's long since been clear by now that Jones belongs in their class. May she remain unstoppable. | 2014-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Daptone | January 15, 2014 | 7.7 | 7dc0eb95-887a-48e1-928a-9018da9a01d1 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
James Mercer takes his most recent album through the looking glass, flipping songs’ tempos and production styles on an eccentric mission of discovery. | James Mercer takes his most recent album through the looking glass, flipping songs’ tempos and production styles on an eccentric mission of discovery. | The Shins: The Worm’s Heart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-shins-the-worms-heart/ | The Worm’s Heart | What makes a song? Is it a series of notes, or is it everything around that core—the production choices, instrumental decisions and vocal inflections that bring a melody to life? Such is the question posed by The Worm’s Heart, the Shins’ sixth studio album. A year-late twin to 2017’s Heartworms, it arrives from a parallel universe where that album has been “flipped”: Slow songs become fast, fast become slow, pop turns to rock and rock turns to disco.
Faced with such an overhaul, it’s tempting to wonder if some simmering discontentment with Heartworms has been keeping James Mercer up at night. But that would be unfair: the Shins’ leader has always been a more experimental musician than he is given credit for, and Heartworms was a strong release, with a compelling production style that jumped between modern electronics, country warmth and good old-fashioned indie pop. For fans of that record—and it is hard to see non-devotees casually investigating The Worm’s Heart—the new album may initially prove hard to swallow.
For a start, it’s all over the place. Expecting stylistic consistency from a release like this may be a fool’s errand. But The Worm’s Heart takes Mercer’s eclectic spirit to groggy new heights, jumping in the first three numbers from the kind of slackened garage rock the Velvet Underground spat up on “Foggy Notion” (on “The Fear (Flipped)”) to a song that resembles LCD Soundsystem lost in the Christmas fog (“So Now What (Flipped)”) to a disco pop belter (“Heartworms (Flipped)”). Later, The Worm’s Heart offers us a piano-led torch song and a rather excruciating dash of rocksteady, neither a sound that anyone was especially clamoring for from the Shins.
The rocksteady number, “Half a Million (Flipped),” is the album’s nadir, strangling the song’s delicate melody with jaunty guitar chords out of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” Joining it in shame is “Mildenhall (Flipped)‚” which acid-washes the original’s laid-back country charm in the kind of beery rock drawl that bar bands revert to when they start running out of songs. “Name For You (Flipped)” is pretty horrible, too, drenching the goofy sweetness of the original in gloomy synths and distorted guitar.
Against these lows are two songs that rank among the very best in the Shins’ catalogue. “Cherry Hearts (Flipped),” originally a confused synth number, is transformed into a chest-beating rock anthem thanks to a fabulously Who-esque guitar riff. “Heartworms (Flipped)” goes the other way, mutating from a soporific, guitar-led daydream into an electrifying disco number that rouses like a long-lost ’80s hit, with a throbbing synth line and drums that stomp like Prince. Elsewhere, the impact of these transformations is less extreme. “Rubber Ballz (Flipped)” is an acoustic take on the Beatles-y Heartworms number that matches the original’s understated appeal, while both “The Fear (Flipped)” and “So Now What (Flipped)” end up feeling neither better nor worse than their 2017 editions, just different.
In the end, The Worm’s Heart proves the fairly obvious point that both song and surroundings are important, and reminds us that Mercer is an occasional master of both. It’s a pleasant oddity in the Shins’ catalogue—neither a dazzling reinvention of the original release (see: Massive Attack V Mad Professor’s towering No Protection) nor a hastily-assembled insult to the band’s creative work (like TRON: Legacy Reconfigured). If nothing else, it lets you cherry-pick the radical brilliance of “Cherry Hearts (Flipped)” and “Heartworms (Flipped)” for a playlist and forget the rest. | 2018-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Columbia / Aural Apothecary | January 23, 2018 | 6.6 | 7dc222c1-6a95-4637-ac53-ced467cedd0b | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Green is defined by the tweaks R.E.M. made to their creative process, by the restlessness that destroys many bands but somehow revitalized these four musicians. The 1988 album marked many firsts for the band-- their first major label effort, their first LP to go double platinum, the first to achieve popularity in the UK. | Green is defined by the tweaks R.E.M. made to their creative process, by the restlessness that destroys many bands but somehow revitalized these four musicians. The 1988 album marked many firsts for the band-- their first major label effort, their first LP to go double platinum, the first to achieve popularity in the UK. | R.E.M.: Green: 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18049-rem-green-25th-anniversary-deluxe-edition/ | Green: 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition | Eight years into a career that had started at a reclaimed church in Athens, Georgia, and ended up at Warner Brothers with an extremely artist-friendly contract, the members of R.E.M. were getting restless. They’d been touring almost nonstop throughout the 1980s and were understandably growing tired of their assigned instruments and their assumed roles in the band. So in 1988, when they holed up in a local studio to demo new songs, drummer Bill Berry called dibs on bass for one tune, while bass player Mike Mills moved over to keyboards. Peter Buck set aside his electric guitar and strummed a mandolin. Michael Stipe sang. According to Tony Fletcher’s massive band bio Perfect Circle, now out in its sixth edition in 25 years: “The process was partly an education, forcing themselves to learn to play equipment they’d often taken for granted, and partly to explore the inherent chemistry of the group, to see whether R.E.M. remained R.E.M. even when its characters changed their roles.”
The immediate result of this intraband game of musical chairs was “You Are the Everything”, a standout on their sixth album and major-label debut, Green. Against a chorus of nighttime crickets, Buck’s mandolin almost jangles, Berry’s bassline dances in the moonlight, and the effect is a curious Southern pastoral without precedent in R.E.M.’s catalog. The song would become crucial, however, to their future output, providing a musical and logistical blueprint for much of Out of Time and Automatic for the People-- the band’s most popular albums, which exploded their traditional drums-bass-guitar-singer line-up.
This alone would have been sufficient to establish Green as pivotal in R.E.M.’s catalog. Released on November 8, 1988-- the day Vice President George H.W. Bush was elected as the 41st President of the United States of America-- the album marks many firsts for the band. It was their first effort for a major label, and so understandably represented a gigantic risk. It was their first to go double platinum, which proves the risk paid off. It was their first to gain a popular foothold in the UK-- testament to Warner Brothers’ international reach. And yet, it’s that complete rethinking of the band’s line-up that defines Green 25 years later; listening to this newly remastered anniversary edition, it’s impossible to miss that sense of renewed purpose within the band, which both expanded and solidified their sound. If nothing else here sounds quite like anything R.E.M. had done in the past, it still sounded undeniably like R.E.M.
Green is an album of experiments. Freed from their usual roles, the band members tinkered with sugary pop, martial arena punk, fluttering folk rock, country flourishes, and dramatic dirges. Especially on the second side (referred to by the band as the “metal” side, referring not to the genre but to the element), these experiments collide for a set of songs as strong and as diverse as any sequence on previous albums. Stipe’s vocals overlap eerily on “The Wrong Child” to create an unsettlingly spectral roundelay. Against the military stomp of “Orange Crush” he sings through a megaphone that lends his vocals a corroded quality appropriate to the subject matter (namely, the degenerative effects of Agent Orange on U.S. soldiers). Foretelling the glam-rock attack of Monster, “Turn You Inside-Out” is a scabrous examination of the entertainer/audience relationship, while “I Remember California” grows so darkly ominous that it threatens to sink the Golden State in the Pacific.
Whereas Document, their final release for I.R.S. Records, sounded grimly solemn, Green is often positively giddy as the band try out new tricks and as Stipe grows more confident and charismatic as a frontman. The album contains some of the jauntiest and most upbeat tunes they had ever recorded, revealing a self-deflating sense of humor as well as a sophisticated self-awareness. “Pop Song ‘89” is a pop song about pop songs, with Stipe introducing himself (“Hi! Hi! Hi!”) before wondering, “Should we talk about the weather?/... Should we talk about the government?” Both subjects had figured prominently into his lyrics on previous albums, and R.E.M. were trying to figure out what to sing about next.
The joviality of tunes like “Get Up” and especially “Stand”, which dominated the “air” (or first) side, proved divisive, alienating long-time fans while attracting new listeners. Because MTV played the hell out of “Stand” and because this pop urge would culminate in the questionable “Shiny Happy People”, it’s all too easy to dismiss the pop songs on Green. They certainly haven’t aged as well as some of the other, graver tunes, but it’s intriguing to hear R.E.M. bring to the fore a playfulness that had previously only been shunted to the margins. Plus, there’s a certain charm to their unguarded goofiness, which seemed at odds with the band’s sense of purpose and Stipe’s cultivated enigma. And it extended to the packaging as well: the spot-gloss 4s on the over, the spiraling tree trunk on the CD, and especially the untitled closing track, which made it impossible to request at live shows. "Untitled" grows out of the same pop impulse that motivates “Stand”, yet the result is wide-eyed and big-hearted as Stipe delivers some of his most direct lyrics. The music is simple, shaky, even arguably unprofessional, as Buck lays down a rudimentary drumbeat and Mills interjects an emphatic organ riff. Even on a major label, R.E.M. were still trying to shirk the trappings of their newfound celebrity, to play with their own image, to bend the language of pop music to convey their own ideas rather than fix their ideas to the mechanics of pop.
Still, R.E.M. were professionals. In the studio they might have switched things up, but on stage they hunkered down into their individual roles and did their jobs with exciting efficiency. The success of first Document and then Green meant they were playing increasingly larger venues, and the long run of dates burned them out so much that they would decide not to tour for their next two albums. So the live bonus disc on this reissue, recorded at the Greensboro Coliseum in North Carolina (friendly territory for the band, as the crowd on this recording makes clear), shows R.E.M. at the height of their abilities as a live act, with a strong batch of songs and a relentless intensity. The tempos are quick, the dynamic rowdy-- almost impatient on “The One I Love” and “Life and How to Live It”. Songs from Murmur and Lifes Rich Pageant sound rejuvenated in this context, meshing naturally with the newer material; early versions of “Belong” and “Low” point the way forward. “This song goes out to… you,” Stipe says before the band launches into “You Are the Everything”.
Green is defined by the tweaks R.E.M. made to their creative process, by the restlessness that destroys many bands but somehow revitalized these four musicians. For that reason, this reissue of Green is incomplete: it lacks those original demos R.E.M. made in Athens, when they were still figuring out that they could shuffle the deck, exchange instruments and roles, redefine the band without changing its membership. On the other hand, the concert disc provides some valuable insight into the afterlives of these songs: how the band lived with them, how they played them, mutated them. On these live tracks, you can hear the old bar band that cut its teeth covering “Stepping Stone” and “Hippy Hippy Shake” on cramped stages in tiny clubs around Athens. In other words, R.E.M. at their greenest. | 2013-05-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-05-14T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Rhino | May 14, 2013 | 8.4 | 7dc77834-7e80-4e12-89d1-eb301cc550eb | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
This internet-enabled rap trio’s new collaborative album is a brief blast of unruly energy that bounces between 5G towers in New York, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and beyond. | This internet-enabled rap trio’s new collaborative album is a brief blast of unruly energy that bounces between 5G towers in New York, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and beyond. | Polo Perks / FearDorian / AyooLii: A Dog’s Chance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/polo-perks-feardorian-ayoolii-a-dogs-chance/ | A Dog’s Chance | Atlanta producer-rapper FearDorian first asked to join the NYC hip-hop collective Surf Gang six years ago. It didn’t work out—Dorian was then just 12 years old—but the young artist was undeterred, steadily racking up internet collaborations with everyone from digicore wunderkind d0llywood1 to skater-turned-lyricist Na-Kel Smith. Along the way, he co-produced tracks with Surf Gang triumvir Harrison and began sending beats to one of the collective’s OG members, Polo Perks.
Perks and Dorian make a sensible combination on paper, drawing equally from the 2020s SoundCloud underground and mid-2000s Warped Tour-adjacent detritus even as their music moves in different directions. Their union with Milwaukee lowend upstart AyooLii is less intuitive: The 23-year-old rapper’s songs tend to be simpler, better suited for moving asses on dancefloors than solitary listening. But like Polo Perks, AyooLii has never met a sample that scared him, and all three members of the trio work fast. Their new collaborative album is charged with this improvisatory spirit: a brief blast of unruly energy that bounces between 5G towers in New York, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and beyond.
On the freewheeling and frenetic A Dog’s Chance, familiar samples twist into endearingly bizarre shapes. Here, a warped fragment of chiptune band Anamanaguchi; there, a snippet of Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole. Our intrepid protagonists barrel recklessly through these landscapes, rarely hitting a dead end. Thanks to FearDorian’s steady hand behind the boards, A Dog’s Chance manages to zig on even the zaggiest beats. The lowend drums on “BackPack” are layered over a wisp of melancholic guitar; “Skatepark” scans as straightforward sample drill for three seconds until weaving snares snap that anticipation in half. Dorian’s production here cribs heavily from Milwaukee, setting the BPM via 1-and-3 handclaps, and moderately from Surf Gang’s hazy vision of New York drill, pulling just enough from his collaborators’ home turfs to ensure they feel at ease.
Yet the defining rhythms of A Dog’s Chance come from nu-jerk, the zany, burgeoning wing of the Gen Z underground that counts Xaviersobased, YhapoJJ, and FearDorian himself among its pioneers. Nu-jerk ostensibly retrofits the drum patterns of mid-2000s California jerkin’ music to modern synth loops—albeit with glitchier snares and blown-out 808s—and Dorian crushes these drums up against unusual palettes and patterns. The lowend/jerk hybrid “They Love Ayoolii” splits open to reveal a Jersey club style break, while Current Joys collab “Rockband Tees 08 Denims” treats Nick Rattigan’s sampled vocals and Polo Perks’ verses with equal respect, a nearly unintelligible mishmash that miraculously gels.
A Dog’s Chance stumbles where it retreads ideas. The maudlin “Carissa’s Weird” aims for catharsis, but its fusion of jerk drums and rock sample pales next to the stoic “Breeshwrld.” Oklou-sampling “BackPack” sounds watered down rather than wavy, especially when the atmospheric “Alicia Keys” arrives two tracks later. These songs aren’t bad, but they drag down the trio’s batting average.
FearDorian’s idiosyncratic flair is perhaps best understood through the highly recognizable samples heard on “PaperPlanesSoulja” and “Benice2me.” On the former, Dorian twists Diplo and Switch’s flip of the Clash’s “Straight to Hell” into endless rising action, building and building without release; on the latter, Dorian and Quinn chop and screw a fragment of Bladee into a stop-start shuffle. These “cheat code” samples feel tonally distinct from Jack Harlow singing Fergie or Kanye invoking the Backstreet Boys: less concerned with triggering nostalgia than with bringing their source material into the now.
The capricious production leavens AyooLii and Polo Perks’ raps, which stray just far enough from their solo work to avoid feeling static. Perks is the more grounded, his fine-grit bark loping forward with metered precision. “Yeah that nigga broke, he get no bread/How you wanna, uh, nigga go head,” he sighs on “Answers,” before craniometrically deducing a woman has good pussy. By comparison, AyooLii’s pinched yelps zip forward like a terrier with the zoomies. “This Glock’ll paint a picture, I’m an art director! Need a bitch with a booty like Ari Fletcher!” he crows on “Pinky.”
When playing against each other, as on lead single “Ricky Eats Acid,” Perks and AyooLii find a delirious synergy; on the brief occasions FearDorian steps in front of the mic, his slightly more melodic approach splits the difference between his teammates’ salt-of-the-earth raps and more aerodynamic Auto-Tune flows. And although closer “Left Right” leaves ample room for Dorian and Perks to get in their feelings, most of the tape is sunny and chipper, as if AyooLii burst into the studio and told them to stop dwelling on Midwest emo and touch grass at the skatepark instead. The net result is a breezy celebration of all the small wins along the path of regional semi-stardom. With friends like these, there’s no need to rush. | 2024-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-06-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 3500 | June 27, 2024 | 7.3 | 7dd31433-3ee7-42ee-ac6e-1b083ff7b914 | Vivian Medithi | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vivian-medithi/ | |
Filled with flute and birdsong, Björk’s 10th album is deeply personal, a discovery of googly-eyed romance, a rebuke of violent men, and a generous offering of love song after love song. | Filled with flute and birdsong, Björk’s 10th album is deeply personal, a discovery of googly-eyed romance, a rebuke of violent men, and a generous offering of love song after love song. | Björk: Utopia | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bjork-utopia/ | Utopia | Each music video for Björk’s 2015 album Vulnicura featured the Icelandic artist on camera alone. Through her use of virtual reality, you were beside her as she crawled out of a cave and danced at dawn lakeside; you swirled inside her mouth or moved into her sherbert-neon computer-generated body. It was intimate to see and feel her isolation, her heartbreak, and ultimately her healing as she sewed up a wound in her chest and walked away. The final statement of Vulnicura’s sweeping narrative about ending a relationship with her longtime partner was that after all this, Björk was finally alone.
It’s easier to create a utopia in isolation. If only we didn’t have this misbegotten, biologic desire to welcome someone else into our world. Another person? With me right now? I’m good, thanks. Yet most of us persist in this welcoming, an act that requires so much patience, compassion, and sacrifice because we believe that by co-organizing a perfect world for two, we might come closer to knowing love. Add to this small world a child and it seems like a miracle—a small paradise immune to the horrors outside of it. “If you feel this world is not heading the right way,” Björk said recently, “you have to be DIY and make a little fortress.” It’s within this matriarchal frame that Björk and her co-producer Alejandro Ghersi (aka Arca) created the challenging album Utopia. It’s a long, skittering discovery of googly-eyed romance, a rebuke of the violence inherited by men, and a generous offering of love song after love song, rendered musically with unerring elegance and passion.
The four decades of Björk’s music can be seen, simply enough, as a long trek to detail every last tendril of spiritual energy and spark of emotion that has existed in the world. Her relationship to feeling is particularly spatial, living within environments built Björk-tough for all the screams and whispers of history: emotional landscapes, hidden places, internal nebulas, mutual coordinates. Her shift from avant-garde pop star to immersive multimedia artist is not brand-building in a career sense—rather, it’s in service of having more tools for this restless excavation of human senses, their origins and futures. If this seems high-minded, it’s because it is, but it’s also because Björk’s music now exists on ever grander musical staffs, her lingua franca is that which is rarely broached in casual conversation: How does it really feel to lose someone? How does it really feel to start loving again?
The former was the focus of Vulnicura, a breakup album of strings and electric thuds that grounded her music for many listeners. But a crater of loss is easier to describe than the feeling that might begin to fill it, and accordingly, a denser fog hovers over the music of Utopia. “How to capture all this love?” she sings on the near 10-minute epic “Body Memory.” She knows it’s not easy, “like threading an ocean through a needle.” Her first single “The Gate” is a good starting point, though, the crossroads between old heartbreak and new wonderment. The chest wound she repaired becomes the “gate” through which this new love enters. Groups of flutes and synths zoom from one side of the song to the other, unconcerned with sub-basement beat gurgling beneath, or Björk savoring every consonant from elongated s’s to trilled r’s.
Utopia is Björk’s flute album much the way the darkly intimate Vespertine leaned on the celeste or Medúlla was composed mostly of human voices, or Volta had brass and Biophilia its choirs. But Utopia is, more accurately, an album of breath and wind. After a few plucks of harp on the first two songs—the arresting banquet of “Arisen My Senses” and the gentle touch of “Blissing Me”—Utopia lives almost entirely suspended in the air. Its orchestration is carried by a small flute ensemble, the Icelandic Hamrahlid Choir, Harmonic Whirlies, and a collection of birdsongs culled both from Iceland and Arca’s homeland of Venezuela. The arrangement on the album flits and flutters everywhere, hard to grasp, much like modern classical composer Olivier Messiaen’s serialist compositions or even his ones composed to mimic birdsong. All throughout the album we hear the singing of birds called the Montezuma Oropendola—the one that sounds like a Moog synth in a microwave—and the Musician Wren, whose call is one of a few birds that sings in melodies similar to human music. We hear all this breath rushing through metal, wood, plastic, cartilage, and muscle, all in largely minor, dissonant modes. At 72 minutes, this is the longest studio album of her career. Björk doesn’t find love with three chords and the truth, she finds love through an endless interrogation of every note there is.
Accompanying this airy, grandiose mood are, thankfully, a few moments of levity. At one point she offers that she is “Googling ‘love’”—a dizzying and delightful image—and she gets legit pissed off at how beautiful nature is: “This fucking mist/These cliffs are just showing off.” If the first half of Utopia crawls through the brambles of welcoming someone new, exchanging mp3s, warming the heart “on this log fire of love,” the second half reckons with a world that can’t fully support it. The pain of Vulnicura turns white-hot on “Sue Me,” a kiss-off to her ex-partner Matthew Barney who, in 2015, did sue her for custody of their child. It relies heavily on the bodily percussion of Arca, a martial kick drum whose provenance is closer to a battering ram on a dungeon door than Pro Tools.
The traumas of Björk’s past—affairs and “fuck-ups” are plainly stated on Utopia—are not used as a weapon so much as they become symbols of an impossibly broken system. She sings that “he took it from his father/Who took it from his father/Who took it from his father.” As ever, Björk becomes a hunter for the origins of her emotions and a ward for their future. “Let’s break this curse/So it won’t fall on our daughter,” she sings, “And her daughter/And her daughter/Or let this sink into her DNA.” She places all these words in her mezzo register, pushing them out from the bottom of her lungs.
A close collaborator of Björk’s, the singer ANOHNI (along with artists Kembra Pfahler, Johanna Constantine, Bianca Casady, and Sierra Casady) once etched into marble slabs 13 tenets of “Future Feminism” as part of an exhibition of the same name. The tenets are radical commandments crucial to reconstructing a better future driven by women and their care for the earth. It’s as if, by the end of the record, Björk descends from the mount with these tablets in arms for her final three songs. Here the fog of Utopia begins to clear, flutes uncluster, modes turn major, and Arca’s threshing abates. Not since the chorus of “Jóga” has such a feeling of release and catharsis come over a Björk record.
This feeling pours into “Future Forever,” the final track, one of the finest songs of Björk’s career. She sings: “See this possible future and be in it/Hold fast for love, forever.” What glowing simplicity her words now possess. They are irreducible in their meaning, like on “Tabula Rasa” when she sings this to her daughter: “My deepest wish is that you’re immersed in grace and dignity.” There is no image or metaphor underneath, just emotional mass. Björk’s lyrics have become the anvil that forges her voice and the music around it. They may arc and bend in odd new ways, but that text is unshakable. You take her at her word.
So when Björk finally describes her utopia, it already feels etched in marble. “Future Forever” has no flutes or electronics, just a synth organ, spare and holy. After the restlessness of the album, it floats in stasis. In it is an intimate and perfect world of matriarchal domes and musical scaffolding. She summons the love she has tried to describe, that ocean through a needle. “Now you mirror at me,” Björk sings at the end, “Who I used to be/What I gave to the world, you’ve given back at me.” The greatest love songs are measured by the depth from which they surface. If these words in Utopia seem unfathomable, a bit much, a little too real, perhaps it’s because our imperfect world was not built to support it. Björk’s utopia begins with someone else, and so does ours. | 2017-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | One Little Indian | November 27, 2017 | 8.4 | 7dd742ed-2f37-4a15-aa92-baf648492feb | Jeremy D. Larson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-d. larson/ | |
The start of an extended reissues series, these two albums find the essential trio of the aggressive German guitarist fighting through darkness to find any light. | The start of an extended reissues series, these two albums find the essential trio of the aggressive German guitarist fighting through darkness to find any light. | Caspar Brötzmann: Black Axis/The Tribe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/caspar-brotzmann-the-tribeblack-axis/ | Black Axis/The Tribe | The music of Caspar Brötzmann can sound terrifying—fitting, of course, for a guitarist who famously called his early and most important band Massaker. In the late 1980s, Brötzmann, long inspired by the bohemian indulgence of his West Berlin youth, launched the power trio as a radicalized rock platform for his unwaveringly confrontational approach to the electric guitar. As a teenager, Brötzmann began to feel the possibility in the instrument, the way its comely order of wood and wire could be wrestled into feelings of unease and chaos.
And moments of the trio’s 1988 debut, The Tribe, do seem mortally frightening. There is the frantic solo at the center of “The Call,” where Brötzmann’s rabid circularity suggests someone trying to claw their way out of some mise-en-abîme marvel. And there is the trio’s theme itself, “Massaker,” a hellscape of militaristic bass, brutalist drums, strangled guitar, and distant werewolf calls. It’s the kind of music that makes you look over your shoulder, ashamed to remember you’re merely wearing headphones.
But for all the ghoulish yells, suicide-cult references, and malevolent tones, Brötzmann’s music with Massaker is the stuff of transcendence, too, the sound of three musicians fighting through darkness in search of any light. On The Tribe and its follow-up, 1989’s beautifully aggressive Black Axis, Brötzmann and his rhythm section wield the spare parts of rock’n’roll like weapons of collective liberation, lashing back against the very torment they’ve created. Written and recorded during a moment of tentative but hopeful international promise, when at least one wall was on the verge of collapse rather than construction, The Tribe and Black Axis are an unapologetic offering of new possibilities in rock—punk in spirit if not in sound, free in feeling if not in execution. Issued stateside for the first time ever as part of an extended series of Brötzmann excavations by the heavy-etcetera bastion Southern Lord, these 30th-anniversary editions have put them back into circulation at a timely moment when their unapologetic rebelliousness feels inspired and inspiring.
The linchpin of the first two Massaker albums—and, really, every record Brötzmann has made since—is the overwhelming physicality of it all. On The Tribe, Brötzmann seemingly marauds every centimeter of his guitar’s neck during “The Call” in search of the perfect screaming note while the band keeps pace. The finale, “Bonkers Dance,” is as close as Massaker has ever gotten to a standard rock song, with lurid harmonies and a gothic chorus that attempts to slip between Bauhaus and the Birthday Party with all the ease of a bodybuilder fitting into a budget airline’s middle seat. The effort is audible, with Brötzmann grating his knuckles against the strings to enhance the violin-like squeals and machine gun click-clack of his guitar. Drummer Jon Beuth lashes away so hard you worry he may tear a muscle.
Beuth was gone by the time the band again entered Berlin’s famed FMP in March 1989 to cut Black Axis, replaced by the more athletic but impressionistic Frank Neumeier. He widens Massaker’s scope, alternately adding a deep funk wallop and an outbound improvisatory zeal. Here, on their best album, they are paradoxically more centered and sprawling, building a song just to beat it into bits. “Hunter Song” begins as an incredibly tense post-punk tirade, Brötzmann’s guitar pulled tight like piercing razor wire; you could imagine an edit being an industrial anthem. But it climaxes again and again in a belligerent three-piece rumble, every instrument locked into a paroxysm to rival the biggest wall of noise or the most ecstatic Albert Ayler outburst. It is a considered sort of rock upheaval, the song a feint for something much wilder.
They exemplify this ideal during “Böhmen,” an eight-and-a-half-minute instrumental triumph. At first, the rhythm section seems only to pound ahead, the frequency and intensity shifting ever so slightly. But the pulse escalates slyly, quickening with a sort of pregnant expectation. Brötzmann responds in kind, his guitar coiling from early atonal slashes into a skywriting riff, fighting through a fog of acrid smoke. What seemed at first existential torment is a moment of pure liftoff.
Since the start of his career, Brötzmann has suffered our impulse for categorization. Whether repudiating the impact of his father, the free jazz provocateur Peter Brötzmann, on his music or shrugging off associations with fellow raucous travelers, he has repeatedly contested convenient associations. A 1995 cover story about him for The Wire (“Burning Up!” it’s called, in reference to the cigarette dangling from his lips) is a futile 3,000-word exercise in forcing him to commit to being something—an idealist, a naif, a liberal, a renegade, a heavy metal musician, a part of any scene at all. But the lifeblood of The Tribe and Black Axis is just how much Brötzmann and his band resist easy codification. They claw and scrape at the divides between rock and jazz, funk and industrial, Hendrix and Haino, songs and chaos, dark and light, a power trio with a mind for breaking binaries. Even after three decades of shifting or failing genre boundaries, the effort here feels like an earthquake. | 2019-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-26T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | null | January 26, 2019 | 8.6 | 7dd7b82b-3f8d-4873-9720-764ea9554f13 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The pop-punk band ages gracefully on a heart-achingly earnest record about parenthood. | The pop-punk band ages gracefully on a heart-achingly earnest record about parenthood. | The Wonder Years: The Hum Goes on Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-wonder-years-the-hum-goes-on-forever/ | The Hum Goes on Forever | Even before he was a parent, Dan Campbell felt the crushing weight of adult expectations. “I’m 26/All the people I graduated with all have kids, all have wives,” he roared on 2013’s “Passing Through a Screen Door,” before bemoaning his doomed, lonely outlook: “Did I fuck up?” Nearly 10 years later, the Wonder Years’ frontman lives in a South Jersey suburb of Philadelphia with his wife and three-year-old son. But anxiety is like matter: It can’t be destroyed. Even after your worst fears don’t come true, they take on another shape. Now that Campbell has a child, there’s the other half of “Passing” to worry about: “I don’t want my children growing up to be anything like me.” On The Hum Goes on Forever, the Wonder Years write the impossible: a pop punk parenthood record that attempts to grow up without growing out of their hooks and heart-achingly earnest outlook.
The Wonder Years take a serialized approach to songwriting, connecting characters across albums, with Campbell as an unreliable narrator. He writes about what, and who, he knows: his college dropout friends, his ex-girlfriends, specific locations in Philadelphia, down to the street number. There’s a new addition in the cast on The Hum Goes on Forever: His son, Wyatt, who stars as the album’s thematic center. There he is haunting Campbell’s nightmares on “Cardinals II”; his tiny gloves tucked into Campbell’s winter coat are a “reminder that I’m not alone.” And then there’s his very own “Wyatt’s Song (Your Name),” which measures his son in heartbeats, in first words, in breaths while he’s sleeping. Like the best the Wonder Years songs, it is both littered with specific details and so fervently emotional that it feels universal.
As he stares terrified into the future, Campbell also revisits proper nouns from the band’s past and tries to tie up loose ends. Colleen, who skipped town on 2011’s “Coffee Eyes,” still weighs heavy on “The Paris of Nowhere.” The song is a love letter to Philadelphia, with all of its potholes and junkyard fires. The Eagles won their first Super Bowl after the Wonder Years finished recording 2018’s Sister Cities, and Campbell makes up for lost time with nostalgic shrines to “St. Nick Foles.” There’s Madelyn, a dark, brooding companion on The Greatest Generation who now appears increasingly itinerant on “Oldest Daughter.” She’s sleeping in public libraries; Campbell is settled in the suburbs. He wants to send her a birthday gift and pictures of his children, but she doesn’t have a permanent address. When Campbell calls back to a line from that album—“We both know how this ends”—it echoes with the distance between who he was in 2013 and who he is now.
Among aging punks who felt old at 26, there’s an unspeakable fear of cooling off, quieting down, and hanging up the riffs. Sister Cities backed away from the outbursts and intensity in favor of fingerpicked melodies to mixed success. Their most recent release was a toothless 2020 acoustic rework of their catalog, complete with wispy string accompaniments. But luckily on The Hum Goes on Forever, the Wonder Years deliver the shredded vocals and taut palm-muted guitars that made them Warped Tour heroes without sacrificing the depth and nuance in Campbell’s writing. Opener “Doors I Painted Shut” begins with just Campbell’s voice and a guitar and builds anticipation by layering doubled vocals, guitars, and percussion until it surges into an appropriately Wonder Years refrain: “I don’t like me.” The exceptions prove the rule: “Laura and the Beehive,” with its quiet piano accompaniment, is strained and sleepy, especially on an album that demonstrates the band is still capable of sounding huge. “Wyatt’s Song” and “Oldest Daughter” would fit alongside the thrashing, high-energy anthems from their debut. This consistency is hard-earned, and their careful approach to making records has resulted in a discography that can age gracefully with them.
There’s a poetic symmetry to the arc of the Wonder Years, a band from the Philadelphia suburbs who wound up, a little older and questionably wiser, in a different Philadelphia suburb. Their incessant self-referentiality makes this growth all the more emotionally resonant: You can measure your life by the characters in Campbell’s songs, by a riff that returns as a motif, by a lyric that comes back again and again, slightly different each time. Campbell still sings “Passing Through a Screen Door” at shows. Which version of himself is screaming, “Did I fuck up?” For the Wonder Years, the past and present are always intertwined. | 2022-09-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2022-09-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hopeless | September 29, 2022 | 7.3 | 7ddd7962-fdda-4a3e-9ea6-35c18e5d61ff | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
The Toronto rapper’s debut is a long shot at cementing his legacy that is plagued by indecision and self-doubt. | The Toronto rapper’s debut is a long shot at cementing his legacy that is plagued by indecision and self-doubt. | Nav: Reckless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nav-reckless/ | Reckless | In 2016, Nav was a SoundCloud star—a producer/songwriter/performer triple threat who made moody, self-doubting anthems with lines perfectly suited for Instagram captions. He had a petty and unforgiving personality that you would expect from a then 26-year-old rapper who felt he was yet to get his due. But success came fast and soon that pettiness began to look a lot more like insecurity. He was scared of criticism and obsessed with securing the cool rapper image. It’s what makes his debut album Reckless anything but. Instead, it’s a project where the Toronto-bred rapper’s ability to make trend-capturing hits is constantly clouded by a fear of being rejected by the rap community.
Throughout these songs, Nav is uptight. He’s locked in a zone where he takes himself so damn seriously, he can’t take a step back and realize that everything going on in this drug-fueled, R&B-influenced, high school edition of Future’s HNDRXX is completely absurd. On the surface, Reckless should be a quotable bonanza where lines like “I taste codeine when I burp” pop instead of being bogged down by the seriousness. It’s an issue that Drake had to overcome on VIEWS when he also became determined on creating a project that defined his legacy.
On Reckless, Nav is consumed by this unnecessary anger. He delivers a screed against XXL on “Freshman List” for overlooking him on their annual fêting of young rappers (“I wouldn’t show up for the Freshman List/Your swag expired, you ain’t fresh like this”). Nav comes across paranoid, convinced that his self-justified indignation—which he tries to mask behind neverending lists of lavish life experiences—isn’t actually directed at unimportant issues. On the bouncy collaboration with Travis Scott (“Champion”), he is irritated by insane things like women who have over one hundred thousand followers on Instagram. On “Faith,” he is unsettled by the light admonishment he receives from his sibling after introducing their assumed underage child to weed and he takes the reasonable bashing hard. Subsequently taking Percocets in the rain while crying and calling himself a lame (“I’m off the perkys and I’m cryin in the rain/Right now I’m poppin’ but sometimes I wish I wasn’t lame”). Capturing the brooding and ridiculous tone feels like an episode of “Riverdale” that takes place in the SoundCloud universe.
And despite Nav’s CW-storytelling, he still comes away from Reckless as a better performer. Nav has always been a producer first and, uncoincidentally, much of his previous criticism has been directed at the monotone nasal-voiced droughts he often sinks into. Thankfully, Nav brings a few new vocal flavors here, most impressively the smooth sing-rap flow he hits midway through the album’s essential “Never Change.” Capturing the over the top despair that when combined with his newest robot-voiced melody and his self-produced lushness creates something that’s missing from much of Reckless and still offers the enjoyable lines of inner turmoil: “When they ask me if I’m good I say ‘ya’ but I’m not.”
But quickly Reckless transforms from enjoyable to uncomfortable. The humor is unintentional and once you realize Nav isn’t in on the joke, things just get pathetic and start to become the story of a rapper who wants nothing more than to be indelible but can’t overcome his self-doubt. And unlike Future who delves into many of the same topics but still maintains some sense of confidence or perseverance, Nav’s journey is without that self-awareness. He’s a rapper so consumed in his own self-seriousness that all of the fun that could be had is dragged down by the lack of genuine belief he has in himself. Nav is whining, hiding behind braggadocio and making it an album that brings the listener down to the same place as the should be hitmaker. By the end, Reckless feels like a Fast & Furious film directed by Quentin Tarantino. Why is there so much dialog? Just blow shit up, you’re good at that. | 2018-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | XO / Republic | May 23, 2018 | 5.3 | 7dde051a-92b9-436c-8ddd-1d14e64f0f0b | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Former Yura Yura Teikoku guitarist continues lap steel-dappled explorations of melancholy, funky kitsch. | Former Yura Yura Teikoku guitarist continues lap steel-dappled explorations of melancholy, funky kitsch. | Shintaro Sakamoto: Love If Possible | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22732-love-if-possible/ | Love If Possible | In Japan, the dream of the ’90s is alive. Or parts of it are, anyway, with CDs still making up the majority of music sales and a slow shift to a digital market. And there’s former Yura Yura Teikoku guitarist Shintaro Sakamoto, whose three solo albums over the past six years have embraced the sort of funky exotica and playful eclecticism—think Beck, or Cornelius, or Stereolab—that sounded futuristic at the turn of the millennium. For 2014’s Let’s Dance Raw, Sakamoto dialed back some of the grooving to make room for chrome bubbles of Hawaiian lap steel guitar. And on the new and equally beautiful Love If Possible, Sakamoto dials back the lap steel slightly, too, making space for even more space.
While marimba sparkles (“Foolish Situation,” “Presence”), Sakamoto duets with robot voices (“Purging the Demons”), and the lap steel glitters on nearly every song, the album's main reference point might be reggae. Though some songs flirt with outright roots grooves (notably “Another Planet”) and organs echo and diminish elsewhere (“Others”), it works mostly as an atmospheric strategy rather than as direct quotation. With longtime producer/collaborator Souichirou Nakamura acting as live echo technician on Yura Yura Teikoku’s tours—and returning as engineer for Love If Possible—Sakamoto is no stranger to the wonders of dub. But Nakamura and Sakamoto keep it restrained on Love If Possible, creating a wide-open sense, implying the untapped worlds waiting to be opened by the right echo technician.
Recording a dozen studio albums between 1992 and 2007, Yura Yura Teikoku played to large audiences in Japan, only touring outside the country (including the United States) for the first time in 2005. Evolving from an indie guitar trio to encompass psych-folk,, garage groovers, electronics, and much more, the wildly inventive Yura Yura could sometimes sound like a Japanese equivalent to Yo La Tengo, with whom they developed a late-career friendship. To longtime fans, Sakamoto’s solo projects might seem comparatively contained. Love If Possible and its predecessors play like careful articulations of a place Sakamoto has found and wants to stay in, with moments that gently recall his past, like the lounge-surf and quiet organ that colors “Feeling Immortal.”
After three albums in this mode, this now feels like a language of Sakamoto’s own, maturity only disguised as irreverence. In the untamed years of the late 20th century, artists like Beck and his shibuya-kei twin Cornelius flirted with kaleidoscopic vocabularies they might discard after a single usage. Retired from the road but still quite active as a musician, Sakamoto’s mission isn’t novelty, but an expressive palette he has carefully made for himself with a ship-in-a-bottle-like focus. | 2017-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Zelone | January 18, 2017 | 7.8 | 7dee6da5-ad46-4e3e-b59e-98e57f8c53b1 | Jesse Jarnow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-jarnow/ | null |
The dubstep disruptor returns with two albums—one of super-massive bass juggernauts, one of dizzy emo-rap—that make a surprisingly strong case for the Skrillex reboot. | The dubstep disruptor returns with two albums—one of super-massive bass juggernauts, one of dizzy emo-rap—that make a surprisingly strong case for the Skrillex reboot. | Skrillex: Quest for Fire | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skrillex-quest-for-fire-dont-get-too-close/ | Quest for Fire / Don’t Get Too Close | Skrillex is what tech folks would call a disruptor. For decades, there was only dance music: a patchy network of underground nodes and connections that made sporadic incursions into the mainstream. Then, sometime in 2010, yet seemingly overnight, there was Electronic Dance Music. It was as if Steve Jobs had clicked his little clicker and shown us the future.
Thousands of people used the word “dubstep” for the first time because of Skrillex. To this day, n00bs are still getting flamed on r/skrillex for not knowing who Benga and Coki are. (They are “the Croydon dub guys that started this,” as thanked by Skrillex after winning three Grammys in 2012.) Sonny Moore changed the definition of a genre, and the heads hated him for it. Here was an emo kid from Los Angeles with half a haircut, making $15 million a year from a corpulent mutation of real soundsystem culture so that raging frat dudes and lidded suburban teens could run amok on giant racetracks while a few industry suits cashed in.
The snobby response wasn’t just about the money, the perceived inauthenticity, or that EDM was such a straight, white, and male phenomenon. It was very much also about the music: the fairground drops, the skrrr-eechy synth leads, the idiotic samples, all the ways a bassline can be compared to an unwell digestive system. But Skrillex was the master of brostep, a technical wizard, and the most imaginative of the new breed of festival behemoths. Before EDM’s billion-dollar bubble burst, he’d hopped to safety in pop’s upper tier.
In the last decade he’s worked with industry giants (Diplo, Ed Sheeran) and edge-curious artists (Vic Mensa, Kelsey Lu), scored a Harmony Korine movie (Spring Breakers), briefly reunited with his old screamo band From First to Last, collaborated with Japanese megastar Hikaru Utada for the whimsical RPG Kingdom Hearts III, and somehow released a song with the surviving members of the Doors (“Break’n a Sweat”). Yet he hasn’t put out a solo album since 2014’s Recess, and by his own account, the last few years have been tough.
In 2022, he reached his “tipping point,” pulled out of two festivals, and stepped out of the public eye. After his mom died in 2015, he “drank the pain away” and last year found himself “with no drive and purpose for the first time.” Posting those tweets on his 35th birthday, he made it clear, however, that he had turned a corner, that he was ready for a new chapter. It is both apt and revealing, then, that one month later, Skrillex returns with two albums and four hyped DJ sets around New York City, including a last-minute sold-out show at Madison Square Garden—all in five days. More likely he’s been working out this move for a while, aiming for pop domination—but also underground cred, rap co-signs, and begrudging nods from Four Tet fans. And to do it, he’s lined up a deft pincer move: By dropping one album of super-massive bass juggernauts and one album of dizzy emo-rap, he intends to claim the whole territory.
In Quest for Fire, Skrillex goes in search of—obviously—the most fire beats in the land, plus a few of the sickest drops for good measure. Special guests are stuffed in tight, from headline-grabbing heavyweights (Four Tet, Missy Elliott, Mr. Oizo) to underground choices primed to surprise the music nerds—artists like Bristol bass sculptor Joker and experimental percussionist Eli Keszler.
Don’t Get Too Close, the more adventurous but marginally less successful of the two, scores the interior world of our hero’s adventure in a very-now merger of emo, rap, J-pop, memecore, video game music, and angsty boy-girl duets. Again, guests on every available surface: old bud Justin Bieber, rappers Chief Keef, Kid Cudi, and Swae Lee, and viral pop arrivals PinkPantheress and Prentiss.
In the years since Recess, he’s spent many days and nights sharpening his mind to the fundamentals of pop—not just the technical craft, at which he already excelled, but the real juice: what makes a melody stick, what makes a listener rewind. Knowing his eat-sleep-rave-repeat approach to the industry (“If I have any time off, I get antsy,” he once told Rolling Stone), there’s a sense that he’s working at his physical limits here, straining to deliver the “v99_final_FINAL.wav” of every good idea he’s had in a decade. More often than not, it works.
Quest for Fire is a huge evolution from the brash, stadium-sized ragers of Skrillex 1.0. He’s finally absorbed the fundamentals of dance music: basic stuff, like having a rhythm that makes you want to move your body. Everything rolls along like it’s actually going somewhere—not a flatulent dubstep waddle, but an aerodynamic gallop that brings to mind a deeper lineage of loud and obnoxious dance music, from the technical end of drum’n’bass to “proper” dubstep, Northern bassline, and Chicago juke.
The tracklist is patently bananas, like something tapped into his Notes app after a long night on the vodka-Red Bulls: what if 100 gecs’ Dylan Brady and d’n’b technicians Noisia? What if Missy Elliott and Mr. Oizo? So we end up with “Ratata,” Missy extending a line from “Work It” into a TikTok-friendly hook as Oizo’s mosquito synths buzz between pounding columns of bass. On “Supersonic (my existence),” Josh Pan’s mohair vocals are dwarfed by the sci-fi bass architecture erected by Brady and Noisia. East London legend Flowdan, an MC who’s been honing his sinister flow since the days of UKG, turns enemies to stone on “Rumble” and “Hydrate” while blessing the project with a splash of grime’s holy water.
Skrillex has given us loud, cartoonish, and bombastic before, but has he ever given us groovy? With “Butterflies” he might have made his first respectable house track, origami-folding Starrah’s loved-up vocals into Four Tet’s twinkly shuffle. Less respectable but no less appealing is “Leave Me Like This,” where a pitched-up Bobby Raps croons over a bassline house monster with one of the most stupid-glorious drops on the record. And the dark slopes of “Tears”—aided by the laser-clean finish of bass technicians Joker and Noisia’s Nik Roos—are the closest he’s come yet to “proper” dubstep.
There are some ill-fitting moments: “TOO BIZARRE (juked)” is indeed a juked version of Skrillex’s emo-punk collaboration with Swae Lee, Siiickbrain, and Dutch basshead Posij, now bouncing at a double-time pace that might buck the casual listener. Closing track “Still Here (with the ones that I came with)” is earnest fromage-garage in praise of the rave crew: sweet but naff.
Don’t Get Too Close, conversely, is intriguingly weird, likely to confound the older fans while opening new doors for Skrillex as a collaborator. Fundamentally, it’s an emo album: a nostalgic throwback to his teenage tastes, but also a producer’s response to the plate-shift we’re living through, where experimental music sounds like pop, pop sounds like rap, and rappers sound like emo singers. The mood is overwhelmingly nostalgic, a meditation on lost innocence achieved through endless juxtaposition. Trippie Redd’s post-Blink weyy-oh vocals are the foil to PinkPantheress’ bubbly 2-step raps on “Way Back.” Yung Lean and Bladee take the sadboi philosophy into celestial, harp-filled realms on “Ceremony” and “Real Spring”—two moments that suggest Skrillex can still confuse the hell out of anyone’s parents.
The generation gap melts away on “3am,” where 15-year-old bedroom-pop cherub Prentiss drops a kindergarten melody next to the enduringly youthful vocals of veteran rock singer Anthony Green. Things get really Back to the Future on the title track, as Bibi Bourelly and Skrillex inhabit their younger selves for a pining duet: “I’m on my PC/I see famous people/I think they’re like me/So why aren’t we equal,” pleads Skrillex, regressing: “Don’t get too close/Nobody knows me.”
Skrillex is 35 now, a ripe age for some mental processing. He’s not given any interviews to explain exactly what he was dealing with during his absence, but coming to a standstill after years of non-stop touring, sleep deprivation, and vodka is always going to be a shock, especially if you’ve been blotting out grief. When he was 16, Sonny Moore found out that he was adopted. He fell out with his parents but they reconciled; he talked about wanting to take care of them as they got old.
Time-travelling is certainly one way to process old feelings. In one interlude, he dredges up a goofy interview with Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz from 2005, where they pledge to celebrate their success by “getting girlfriends and going to Disneyland!” You might assume they were being sarcastic, but Skrillex is guffawing from the heart. This, after all, is the gushing dude who pinpointed his two-second cameo in Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph as the highlight of his career.
Skrillex will probably always make the kind of extreme and emotional music that appeals to angsty kids and nostalgic grown-ups. He’ll always be the emo guy on a hoverboard who wants to take his girlfriend to Disneyland, the guy who imagines himself as a sad-eyed 3D hedgehog (don’t get too close!). The endearing dweebiness runs eternal, as do other qualities. Perhaps he’s not capable of disrupting another industry in his lifetime, but with Quest for Fire and Don’t Get Too Close he’s still intent on shaking things up, fuelled by nothing but boundless enthusiasm. And when the dust clears, his mid-career rebrand—Skrillex 2.0, if you like—will rise from the rubble. | 2023-02-22T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-02-22T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | February 22, 2023 | 7.7 | 7df94ef8-996b-42ba-be82-0a5b7952581a | Chal Ravens | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chal-ravens/ | |
Packaged with demos, outtakes, and a new remaster, this 20th anniversary box set presents the California indie band’s wide-open third album as a prescient meditation on the need to escape. | Packaged with demos, outtakes, and a new remaster, this 20th anniversary box set presents the California indie band’s wide-open third album as a prescient meditation on the need to escape. | Grandaddy: Sumday Twunny | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grandaddy-sumday-twunny/ | Sumday Twunny | Jason Lytle is an unlikely spokesman for our electronic companions. As an amateur skateboarder growing up in the Northern California city of Modesto, the Grandaddy frontman aspired to a career working in the elements: a fireman, or perhaps a park ranger. Instead, a skateboarding injury forced him inside, where he befriended circuits and sequencers and rediscovered an early love for the guitar. Joined by bassist Kevin Garcia and percussionist Aaron Burtch, Lytle released a series of early Grandaddy EPs before the band put out their debut, 1997’s lovably unrefined Under the Western Freeway. Their breakout second album, 2000’s The Sophtware Slump, drew comparisons to the sci-fi surveillance state of Radiohead’s OK Computer. Combining the disillusionment of nearby Stockton, California slackers Pavement with kaleidoscopic synths and surprisingly poignant lyrics about broken vacuums, Grandaddy brokered an uneasy peace between the flagging post-grunge landscape of American indie rock and the impending digital dominance of electronica.
But after years of endless touring, Lytle and his bandmates were waning. It wasn’t just the physical trials of life on the road—they were tired of singing about dead humanoids and abandoned appliances night after night. For their third album, 2003’s Sumday, they went into Lytle’s home studio with a few explicit goals. “It had to be more optimistic and it had to be more concise,” guitarist Jim Fairchild recalled. The bar was low—their last album opened with a nine-minute epic about an alienated astronaut—but while song lengths averaged out at a much more reasonable four minutes, Lytle still revealed new anxieties about the future, even as he tried to unplug. For the album’s 20th anniversary, Grandaddy have released a box set that includes remastered recordings, four-track demos, and a collection of unreleased songs from contemporaneous studio sessions. Lytle’s ambivalent premonitions of our digital age, underscored by a growing listlessness in the face of capitalism’s death drive, sound both quaint and prescient in our hyper-mediated present.
Even at the time, Sumday stood apart from its predecessors. “Now It’s On” roars with a confidence and cautious hope that breaks from the existential woes of The Sophtware Slump and its wayward space cadets. “Once you’re outside you won’t want to hide anymore,” Lytle sings over a palm muted guitar, his rosy outlook finally catching up to his perpetually sanguine vocals. And though there are layers of pixelated texture on songs like “O.K. With My Decay,” analog instruments dominate the record’s sound, apt for an album about returning to nature. “Saddest Vacant Lot in All the World,” brimming with Grandaddy’s characteristic layer of ambient noise, demonstrates that Lytle can build worlds just as bleak as his digital dystopias from only a piano. The cassette demos, which for the most part keep the same shape and feeling as their fully realized versions, similarly showcase what his music might have sounded like if he fully explored this stripped-down setting: “The Go in the Go-for-It” is transformed from a buzzy, hunched over rock song to a plaintive ballad.
The reissue also includes a dozen songs from the cutting room floor, now released as their own album under the name Excess Baggage. Grandaddy obsessives, who have dutifully cataloged the band’s myriad unreleased demos and live performances, will recognize most of the material: “The Town Where I’m Livin Now” existed as a live cut for years before Lytle released an official version under his own name. Others like “Derek Spears” only existed in shaky YouTube videos. The tale of an itinerant eccentric down on his luck, it’s a peek into the lives Lytle observed in Modesto— “He says he made 90K a year before he hurt his back”—but he shelved the song because “the only people who really get this song are people who live in the Central Valley.” Other songs, like “Running Cable at Shiva’s,” sound right at home next to Sumday’s “Stray Dog and the Chocolate Shake,” with chirping keyboard synths and lyrics about the “slightly living dead.” The close-miked “Dearest Descrambler,” a song so thin it threatens to vaporize at any moment, crash lands with an evergreen economic anxiety: “Is it too late for me to master a trade?”
Compared to their contemporaries—Mercury Rev, Sparklehorse, the Flaming Lips—Grandaddy excelled at demystifying the terrifying unknown, even if that familiarity still bred contempt. Rather than foretelling a future of epic battles against robot armies or pianos crumbling into the sea, their songs described people in a world much like ours, existentially vacant and starving for meaning. Lytle’s androids weren’t paranoid, they were idle; his robots weren’t evil-natured, but lonely. He turned his lens at the inner lives of machines, finding their rusting husks as tragic as a washed up drunk at last call: limousines without a celebrity to chauffeur, factory robots toiling in the dark, emails crying out in our inboxes for the gaze of a weary human eye. Perhaps it was this ability to connect fears of the future with the quotidian angst of our daily lives that made David Bowie, progenitor of the lonely space age explorer, such a huge fan in his later years.
Where Grandaddy’s previous albums focused on our tactile, external interactions with technology, Sumday hinted at the ways it was beginning to change us from within. “The Group Who Couldn’t Say” follows a team of office workers who win a trip to the great outdoors, only to find themselves too stunned by nature’s beauty to speak. Even lyrics that should sound dated in our post-iPhone parlance—“Her drag-and-click had never yielded anything as perfect as a dragonfly”—are resonant in their sense of wonder. It speaks to the same thirst for escape that sends startup lackeys to Burning Man every year, but cloaked in hazy synths and soft “doo doo doots,” it remains a picturesque vignette rather than a superficial quest for salvation. On Sumday, Lytle presented a world where we become so accustomed to technology that its absence is felt more strongly than its omnipresence.
While Sumday presented an idyllic exit for Grandaddy, it also forecasted the beginning of the end. Touring and recording had taken its toll, and Lytle harbored a desire to escape the constant churn of album cycles. “I feel so far away from home,” he sang mournfully on “El Caminos in the West.” In interviews, he spoke about the band’s future with palpable exhaustion: “If I don't end up dying in the process, I might benefit from another life after music. I won't try to extend the dream until it becomes pathetic.” As he put it on “The Go in the Go-For-It,” the industry “tried to wreck” his head, and he wanted out. Sumday, then, is his journey to rediscover the world outside of his studio, the would-be park ranger moving through life like “wind blowing through the leaves.” | 2023-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-09-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dangerbird | September 2, 2023 | 8.4 | 7dfbdd58-ed9f-4fbb-9c4c-3aa189dc9507 | Arielle Gordon | https://pitchfork.com/staff/arielle-gordon/ | |
Collecting 12 years of solo piano recordings, the Berlin composer explores some of his quietest, most intimate material yet, in which the creaking of the pedal is often as audible as the notes. | Collecting 12 years of solo piano recordings, the Berlin composer explores some of his quietest, most intimate material yet, in which the creaking of the pedal is often as audible as the notes. | Nils Frahm: Old Friends New Friends | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nils-frahm-old-friends-new-friends/ | Old Friends New Friends | Nils Frahm is no stranger to minimalism, but on Old Friends New Friends, the Berlin-based pianist and composer homes in on every tiny detail. Over the course of the 80-minute solo piano record, he gives each note ample space to ring, relishing the pauses as much as the simple melodies. It’s telling that he opens the album with a hushed (but hardly silent) tribute to John Cage’s 4’33”: This is a subtle, introspective album that encourages us to listen to the minutiae as much as the whole picture.
Old Friends New Friends brings together 12 years of archival material that didn’t make it onto Frahm’s previous albums. Each track highlights his gentle piano playing. Rather than the cavernous, enrapturing sound he harnesses on albums like 2018’s All Melody, these recordings are closer to his other piano-focused albums, like 2015’s Solo, but still more pared down. He explores a range of shades of post-classical and ambient minimalism. But the music stays steady in its wistful atmosphere, centered on just Frahm, his piano, and the tactile quality of the recording.
At points, the piano is more of a background character than a protagonist. Frahm weighs silence and music equally, letting extraneous sounds ring as clearly as notes. During pieces like “Late” and “Berduxa,” his audible breath and the piano’s pedals become characters in the music, sounding with almost as much strength as the rounded tones he plays. It fosters a sense of presence, as if we were right there in Frahm’s living room. This coziness takes different forms across the record. On “Strickleiter,” Frahm’s gossamer melody sounds like a music box; on “The Idea Machine,” the piano sounds like it’s being run through a rickety old film projector, notes shrouded in fuzz. It feels as if we’re watching Frahm play on a black and white screen.
Nostalgia and intimacy suit Frahm’s compositional style, which relies on tugging at the heartstrings. But at times, the surfeit of feeling is overbearing. “Then Patterns” moves sluggishly, repeating a bright melody that seems out of place with the album’s gentle melancholy; “Forgetmenot” puts Frahm’s rolling piano melodies in the background, washing them out with static and echoes. “Weddinger Walzer” takes on a somber classical style, like a slowed-down waltz that’s meant to be in the background of a dinner party rather than stand on its own. In these pieces, Frahm’s tenderness turns sappy.
With pieces like “Iced Wood,” though, Frahm’s music goes deeper. This is one of the album’s moodiest tracks and most engaging moments. Here, Frahm swaps barely-there melodies for a richer sound. A low, distant ripple blossoms and fades away as the piano’s pedals gently tap alongside it. It’s in tracks like this that the music feels most three-dimensional, a reminder that simplicity doesn’t always need to forgo depth. Here, the piano grows from a thin whisper into a warm murmur with just a couple notes and a subtle change in dynamics. It’s in these tiny, almost undetectable changes that the music becomes radiant.
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. | 2021-12-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-08T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Leiter | December 8, 2021 | 6.7 | 7dfe1da8-29cd-4143-98a9-e42948212fbd | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
At 77 minutes, Metallica’s eleventh studio album delivers everything you could want from a Metallica album in 2023 and so much more. Too much more. | At 77 minutes, Metallica’s eleventh studio album delivers everything you could want from a Metallica album in 2023 and so much more. Too much more. | Metallica: 72 Seasons | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/metallica-72-seasons/ | 72 Seasons | At some point in the last 15 years, Metallica started sounding like themselves again. Certain hardcore fans might say it began with the Rick Rubin-produced Death Magnetic; the more skeptical among us started caring again eight years later with the old-school double album Hardwired… to Self-Destruct. On those albums, Metallica attempted a return to the thrashy tempos, elaborate song structures, and bitchin’ solos of their 1980s glory years, seeming to realize there was no longer any reason to pander to the current sound of rock radio, because Metallica is bigger than whatever goes on in that backwater these days. They release an album every seven or eight years, a relaxed pace that apparently suits them as they near their 60s. When they do put a record out, it’s like they’re making up for lost time, which is what gets them in trouble.
72 Seasons, at a marathon 77 minutes long, delivers everything you could possibly want from a Metallica album in 2023, and so much more on top of that. Too much more. Like Hardwired, its predecessor—the same length, incidentally—72 Seasons is both a thrill and a slog. The best riffs, like the galloping harmonized runs that arrive in the final minutes of “Roomful of Mirrors,” or the call-and-response between machine-gun power chords and jagged leads that open “If Darkness Had a Son,” have the spirit, if not always the magic, of Ride the Lightning or Master of Puppets. But no single song sustains that level of excitement for its duration. That’s a high bar, and they could have gotten a lot closer to clearing it with some editing. There is almost always some bridge, breakdown, or umpteenth repetition of the chorus that a given song would be leaner and meaner without. If a classic like “For Whom the Bell Tolls” can get in and out in five minutes, “Sleepwalk My Life Away” does not need to be seven.
One major difference between Metallica in 2023 and 1983 is the subject matter, which has taken a 180 since the cartoonishly nihilistic days of Kill ‘Em All and is now focused on getting past personal demons rather than following their lead. James Hetfield, who has battled his fair share, writes as if he’s just gotten out of a therapy session. His wellness talk works best when he manages to make it sound metal, as on “Shadows Follow”: “Now I know if I run/Shadows still follow.” It’s less convincing when he just strings together vaguely related words that happen to share the same suffix: dogmatic, traumatic, summarize, patronize. But it seems beside the point to critique 72 Seasons on the level of songwriting, per se. “Lux Aeterna,” the worst offender for dopey rhymes—“Anticipation in domination” is the opening line, and the rest of the song proceeds from there—features at least three different killer riffs and a Kirk Hammett solo that sounds like a motorcycle speeding through a portal into hell. Most importantly in the context of this album, it’s over in less than four minutes. It doesn’t really matter whether a Metallica song is finely wrought. What matters is that it kicks ass.
72 Seasons kicks ass roughly half the time. Not bad, all things considered, but it still leaves you with 30-plus minutes to sit through. The strongest songs tend to travel at the breakneck speed of vintage thrash metal; the weakest edge back toward the midtempo hard rock of Metallica’s ’90s albums. One upside to the excessive runtimes is that even the lackluster tracks might have at least one redeeming moment. Often enough, it’s Hammett’s lead playing. His solo on “If Darkness Had a Son” is like a miniature composition unto itself, with its own dramatic arc, from long bluesy bends to frenzied shredding. Elsewhere, he’s less deliberate, more impulsively expressive, slamming on the whammy bar and wah pedal in passages that have more to do with razor-edged texture than melody. After years of Metallica albums with little if any soloing, 72 Seasons is worth playing if only for the chance to hear one of metal’s greatest guitarists ripping in top form again.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a new Metallica album without a gripe about the production. For 72 Seasons, one potential issue is that the drums—bear with me here—sound too good. Too precise, really, with every snare thwacking and kick thumping at exactly the same volume, with exactly the same articulation, all at a tempo so locked in it seems inhuman. I wondered, almost as soon as I turned it on, with the hi-hat on the opening title track ticking along like a literal metronome, whether there might have been some drum programming involved. I turned to Reddit and found several fans vociferously debating the same question.
After early tragedy, massive success, artistic floundering, interpersonal drama, headline-making battles over technology, and a few on-camera group sessions with a professional performance enhancement coach, Metallica are a band painfully conscious of its own history. Who else would make a sequel to one of the least distinguished albums in their catalog, or construct a miniature second stage for their stadium tour to simulate the small rooms where they woodshedded their earliest material? Whether or not the drums were gussied up digitally, their airtight sound can give the sense of 72 Seasons as an overworked product of that same impulse. Even the simple proposition of Metallica sounding like themselves seems fraught with peril and cause for great deliberation, as if a single stray drum hit might make the whole thing come tumbling down. It is funny, and perhaps even a little comforting, after years of drummer Lars Ulrich getting grief for everything from his stance on file-sharing to the fact that the snare on St. Anger sounds like a trash can, that he would now face criticism for doing his job extremely well. If that guy can’t catch a break in 2023, at least one part of the classic Metallica dynamic still comes naturally. | 2023-04-13T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-13T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Blackened | April 13, 2023 | 6.4 | 7dff96a4-0ae9-442c-abdd-07a391c4a6f3 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
On their third full-length of 2017 alone, the Melbourne psych-rock band are surprisingly agile, incorporating soul, jazz, North African overtones, and pastoral English folk. | On their third full-length of 2017 alone, the Melbourne psych-rock band are surprisingly agile, incorporating soul, jazz, North African overtones, and pastoral English folk. | King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard / Mild High Club: Sketches of Brunswick East | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/king-gizzard-and-the-lizard-wizard-mild-sketches-of-brunswick-east/ | Sketches of Brunswick East | When King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard announced their plan to release five full-length albums in 2017, it was a potential sign that the increasingly prolific Melbourne, Australia seven-piece had lost its instincts for self-editing. Sketches of Brunswick East, the third full-length the band has released over the last six months alone, proves the opposite to be true. Among the most relaxed material the band has ever put out, the new album deviates from King Gizzard’s long-established formula of jam band-esque psychedelic rock with surprisingly agile detours into soul, jazz, North African overtones, and pastoral English folk.
It’s no surprise that Brunswick East would take the band down new roads, as it began quite differently than the last two releases. For this one, bandleader Stu Mackenzie traded ideas on acoustic guitars with Mild High Club mastermind Alex Brettin. Initially, Mackenzie and Brettin didn’t even have fully-formed songs on their hands, and they chose to develop those ideas casually in the studio as other King Gizzard members added parts of their own. If you listen to previous King Gizzard titles against last year’s sophomore Mild High Club effort Skiptracing, the directions of Brunswick East make sense.
Presumably, it’s Brettin’s laidback style that mellowed King Gizzard’s frantic demeanor. The album opens with acoustic piano courtesy of Brettin as drummer Michael Cavanagh joins in with a feathery, double-tracked part and Mackenzie does his best Genesis-era Peter Gabriel impression on flute. Right away, it’s clear that both acts benefit from each other’s presence. King Gizzard’s enthusiasm has always been undeniable, but it’s also a refreshing change to see the band ease back on its goofiness, which can verge on aggressive at times. In reverse, the members of King Gizzard prevent Brettin from coming off as lethargic.
Still, Brunswick East amounts to way more than just a hybrid of two signature styles, or even a mere consolidation of each party’s respective strengths. When Brettin forays into 1970s AM tropes on his own, he can come off as if he’s being ironic, the line between sincere homage and smirking ridicule as hard to gauge as the commentary on, say, a podcast about yacht-rock. But when working around Brettin’s ideas, Mackenzie and his bandmates never linger too long in any one genre. As a result, the songs on Brunswick East have an endearing mutant-like quality about them that, for the most part, prevents them from turning into revivalist clichés.
While the album title references Sketches of Spain, Miles Davis’ groundbreaking collaboration with Gil Evans, Brettin and King Gizzard thankfully don’t attempt a literal reinterpretation of that album’s iconic fusion of orchestral jazz, classical, and flamenco. Instead, they pursue its spirit of freedom. On “D-Day,” for example, Brettin, Mackenzie, and multi-instrumentalist Joey Walker all play microtonal instruments on a musical theme that blurs the line between fusion, Moroccan folk, and Southern rock in the vein of the Allman Brothers. At several other points—“Countdown,” “The Spider and Me,” “Cranes, Planes, and Migraines”—Brettin and the band walk a slippery tightrope between blue-eyed soul, bass-popping funk, and swooning, sun-kissed indie rock.
Some tracks just trail off, and players come and go throughout the album, piling-on piano, keyboard, guitar, and bass. (The revolving-door feels literal: Brunswick East is the name of the Melbourne neighborhood where the band’s studio/art-collective space is located.) On “Sketches of Brunswick East II,” a Fender Rhodes-like electric piano captures the timbre of Hawaiian steel guitar, and you can’t tell from the credits whether it’s Mackenzie or Brettin playing because both contribute electric piano to the tune. The whole album has a casual, freewheeling vibe, but it’s a testament to King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s unity that it holds together so well. | 2017-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Flightless / ATO | August 31, 2017 | 7.5 | 7e00a2d0-c9c3-4a98-b099-f609be645cf6 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | |
The English band’s second album explores big questions with a bucolic, open-ended new sound. Where once they surged forward, now they wander. | The English band’s second album explores big questions with a bucolic, open-ended new sound. Where once they surged forward, now they wander. | Squid: O Monolith | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/squid-o-monolith/ | O Monolith | Just a few years ago, Squid were frenzied, bugged-out chroniclers of urban anxiety. Emerging from London’s fertile new guitar scene and influenced by dystopian science fiction, their full-length debut Bright Green Field documented the suffocation of city life under increasingly untenable economic conditions, the surveillance state, and the UK’s slide toward far-right politics. They crammed a lot into that album, and for its follow-up, they explore the rest of their homeland.
O Monolith arose from a seated-only, socially distanced 2021 tour. The always-restless quintet used their return to live music as an opportunity to experiment, improvising onstage and workshopping ideas for these eight, free-flowing tracks. Then they decamped to England’s West Country to work at Peter Gabriel’s studios. The bucolic surroundings reshaped Squid’s music, resulting in an album that blooms and overgrows while chasing more abstract themes.
In just 42 minutes, Squid fire off in a lot of directions. Their core sound remains, with flares of distortion and full-throated freakouts erupting from wiry rhythms. But now floaty synths are just as important as corroded guitars, and their volcanic climaxes share equal space with songs that sputter, fade, and drift. Tracks like “Devil’s Den” or “Green Light” still work off Squid’s liquid-then-scabrous guitars, but the former also incorporates melodic cues from British folk traditions. Drummer and primary vocalist Ollie Judge’s squawk-sing yelp often leads the charge, but he deploys it more judiciously. For a band that has always been adventurous, Squid now seek a different kind of freedom: They no longer surge forward, but wander.
In doing so, they find ways to evolve their sound—sometimes by inverting it. One of Squid’s favorite tricks is forcing their songs to coil tighter and tighter until they burst. “Siphon Song,” one of O Monolith’s most striking moments, is a dreamlike flipside. A spacey, vocodered slow-burn, it plays like an elusive sigh before its alien refrain introduces one of the album’s most unshakable melodies. It’s a more shadowy rendition of the band’s typical intensity, mirroring its inspiration: the numbness of the 24-hour news cycle and “compassion fatigue.”
The rest of the album’s subject matter is characteristically dense and far-flung. Squid collapse the ancient and contemporary, depicting witch trials alongside scenes of police brutality. British folklore and the enigmas of the West Country creep in alongside even more esoteric interests. During a spate of pandemic boredom, Judge began reading about animism and imagined people being reincarnated as mundane objects, yielding “Undergrowth” and its story of being reborn as a dresser drawer. “If You Had Seen the Bull’s Swimming Attempts You Would Have Stayed Away” is as arcane as its title: an impressionistic meditation on rats, inspired by their long and contentious relationship with human society.
Judge has said he was trying to make a “spiritual” record, but also notes that his inherent cynicism attached a pessimistic lens. O Monolith raises bigger, more eternal questions about humanity’s relationship to nature, and Squid’s music becomes more open-ended while wrestling with them. This weaving quality means the music is unpredictable and often exhilarating, but the message is blurrier. Compared to the seething life of Bright Green Field, O Monolith doesn’t settle on many concrete conclusions—either in the societal commentary or its suggestion of where exactly Squid are headed. Fontaines D.C. adopted a moodier take on Britpop arena anthems; Black Midi became gonzo prog pranksters; Black Country, New Road embraced maximalist emo-indie. Fascinatingly, Squid are still somewhere off the map. | 2023-06-09T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-06-09T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | June 9, 2023 | 7.3 | 7e052169-d1ce-4365-b749-048a1f7373ef | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | |
The wonderful Arrangements, Vol. 1 draws on Parks' self-described "earliest studio adventures," featuring a dizzying cast of collaborators (Little Feat, Arlo Guthrie, Bonnie Raitt singing calypso) with his unifying hand presiding over the collision of styles. | The wonderful Arrangements, Vol. 1 draws on Parks' self-described "earliest studio adventures," featuring a dizzying cast of collaborators (Little Feat, Arlo Guthrie, Bonnie Raitt singing calypso) with his unifying hand presiding over the collision of styles. | Van Dyke Parks: Arrangements, Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15840-van-dyke-parks-arrangements-vol-1/ | Arrangements, Vol. 1 | In 2008, I had the opportunity to briefly interview Van Dyke Parks. It wasn't long after his collaboration with Joanna Newsom on Ys. brought him some fresh headlines, but I mostly asked about his long, itinerant career as arranger for three decades of rock musicians, from Brian Wilson and the Byrds to Rufus Wainwright and Frank Black. After amiably answering my questions, he signed off, semi-sardonically, with "Thank you, Jayson, for celebrating a position that perhaps serves best in its anonymity."
The remark seemed half self-deprecating jab, half mission statement: Parks has a career-long acquaintance with anonymity. His most well-known association is with a record that, for thirty-odd years, was famous for never coming out. His solo records, starting with 1968's confounding Harry Nilsson-meets-Charles Ives opus Song Cycle, are subjects of fervent cult adoration but known to few. His arranging work, meanwhile, has put an inimitable stamp on American pop, though the vast majority of music fans have no idea when they are listening to his work. He is the quintessential liner-notes hero, in other words, which makes the overview of Arrangements, Vol. 1, on his own label Bananastan, that much more gratifying.
The compilation is curated by Parks himself, drawing on what he calls "my earliest studio adventures in the 60s." The roster of collaborators represented here is dizzying-- Little Feat, Arlo Guthrie, Sal Valentino, Bonnie Raitt singing calypso-- and hearing Parks' unifying hand presiding over this collision of styles makes for a wonderful way to experience the art of his arrangements; their lushness, their invention, how they provide the texture and teeth to a composition. He opens with an arrangement ripped off the bones of the song it was meant to accompany: a mono single mix of Donovan's "Donovan's Colours". It's a gently instructive focusing tool for the rest of the album, training our ears to go to the margins, to pay attention to the filigree.
Not that Parks' arrangements need much prompting to be noticed. They don't exactly fade demurely into the background; they jostle and blurt, intruding brazenly into the songs they support. His arrangement for Sal Valentino's goofy zydeco number "Alligator Man" boasts not one vigorously sawing fiddle, but two-- on top of twinkling mandolins, a seasick tuba groaning low notes, snatches of saloon piano, and a piping saxophone. It sounds horrendously overcrowded on paper, but Parks has an uncanny instinct for how to densely populate a composition's every corner without choking it. The instruments are spaced evenly in the mix, and the result feels like a bustling table of gregarious friends instead of a crazy-making riot.
All of these embellishments, of course, were obsessively layered and re-layered onto increasingly overworked analog tape, and Arrangements, which kicks off with the sound of a rickety reel-to-reel firing up, is also partly a tale told by that tape. Parks' arrangements come through intriguingly warped, as if all the instruments on the track had been fished from a flooded studio floor, and the wobbly, dazed sound world that results, however accidental, is crucial to the record's appeal. The sumptuous string orchestra Parks supplies to Arlo Guthrie's take on the Appalachian standard "Valley to Pray", sounds gelatinous, a symphony viewed through a fish-bowl. The Mojo Men's "Sit Down I Think I Love You" would be a standard-issue mod-pop song in a simpler context, but Parks' arrangement sends the song stumbling through a haze of slide guitar and bandoneón that feels like linoleum curling in real time. It's nearly impossible to pick out every individual instrument from the soup on these songs (is that a harp? a celesta? a zither?), but the sound world is wonderfully dense and liquid, and it fills headphones like sunlight flooding a window.
The songs selected on Arrangements are uniformly fantastic. Bonnie Raitt's cover of Calypso Rose's racy "Wah She Go Do" is hilarious and startling, and Jimmy Cliff's "Sitting in Limbo" gets an improbably gorgeous reading by Dean Martin's son Dino. But trying to imagine them without Parks' additions, as the compilation encourages you to, is illuminating. Pop-song arrangements tend to hide in plain sight, and are usually practiced by spotlight-averse eccentrics who fit comfortably into neither the classical or the pop worlds. But the pop universe would be drained of color without them-- try to hear the Delfonics' "La-La (Means I Love You)" without its nimbus of strings, or, for that matter, the Beach Boys' "Surf's Up" without the distant horns and chimes. Arrangements is a joy to spend time with, but it also amounts to a pretty forceful argument for the lost art of arrangement itself, and for Parks as one of its unrivaled masters. | 2011-09-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2011-09-22T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Bananastan | September 22, 2011 | 8.6 | 7e0887b0-4b9a-43b1-8e11-9f88ba5a21ec | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
On three albums released from 1971 to 1973, Yoko Ono subverted pop forms and widened her vision, which at once grew more accessible and more explicitly feminist. | On three albums released from 1971 to 1973, Yoko Ono subverted pop forms and widened her vision, which at once grew more accessible and more explicitly feminist. | Yoko Ono: Fly / Approximately Infinite Universe / Feeling the Space | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yoko-ono-fly-approximately-infinite-universe-feeling-the-space/ | Fly / Approximately Infinite Universe / Feeling the Space | The first installment of Secretly Canadian’s Yoko Ono reissue series presented a creative partnership, with two albums credited to Ono and her husband John Lennon and a third featuring him in her Plastic Ono Band. The second set, comprising three Ono albums released between 1971 and 1973, shows her gradually breaking free from that association. Though Ono was at least Lennon's creative equal from the start of this series, it's fascinating to hear how, as he becomes less involved in each subsequent album, her vision widens and strengthens, both personally and politically.
This development coincides with Ono’s music becoming broader and more accessible. The 1971 album Fly is a natural followup to Ono’s 1970 Plastic Ono Band, filled with raucous freak-out jams and conceptual experiments, with lots of Lennon participation. Things take a turn on 1973’s Approximately Infinite Universe, which adopts rock, glam, and funk tropes for sociopolitical protest. Later that year, Ono made Feeling the Space during a split from Lennon, and she embraced pop music in a subversive work of feminist flag-bearing.
On paper, the most experimental of these three Ono albums, Fly, might also be the least ambitious. But there are still plenty of big ideas on Fly: one side is a 22-minute soundtrack to an Ono film consisting primarily of her uncategorizable vocals; “Toilet Piece” is a half-minute of flushing sounds; and all of side three consists of abstract soundscapes made with the Joe Jones Tone Deaf Music Co., a group led by one of Ono’s comrades in the art collective Fluxus. Still, by this point, Ono was already a well-practiced conceptual artist, meaning Fly is less about stretching than honing.
That honing is consistently interesting, especially on tunes that further the loose, charging avant-rock that Ono first launched with Plastic Ono Band’s bursting opener, “Why.” “Midsummer New York” and “Hirake” are spilling blues supporting Ono’s escalating screams, while on the 17-minute “Mindtrain,” her rhythmic chants ride a groove that evokes Can’s extended jams. Most mesmerizing is “Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for a Hand in the Snow),” Ono’s hymn to a daughter from her first marriage who essentially disappeared when her ex-husband won custody. The song’s only words are “Snow/Don’t worry/Kyoko,” but the way Ono stretches them into impressionistic shapes is hypnotizing, as are the sliding riffs from her backing band, which—for just this track—included Lennon, Ringo Starr, and Eric Clapton.
One song on Fly presages Ono’s next move. “Mrs. Lennon,” featuring Ono’s somber singing over Lennon’s slow piano chords, shows her growing interest in both conventional songwriting and glammy balladry. She extends that mode on Approximately Infinite Universe, infusing drama into piano-led tunes such as the majestic “Winter Song,” the hymn-like “I Want My Love to Rest Tonight,” and the impassioned “What a Bastard the World Is.” The latter, a breakup song that morphs into a political screed, is a gripping example of Ono’s strident attack. “You know half the world is occupied by you pigs,” she spits. “I can always get another pig like you.” Yet she can also be vulnerable and questioning, as on “I Have a Woman Inside My Soul,” which views personal identity as an elusive target.
The somber ballads on Approximately Infinite Universe are mixed with slow rockers, funky workouts, and show-tune style numbers (all played mostly by New York band Elephant’s Memory; Lennon appears on a few tracks under a pseudonym). There’s a breezy thrill in Ono’s omnivorous songs, performed with both committed seriousness and campy humor. Over the samba-ish beat of “What a Mess,” she sings, “If you keep hammering anti-abortion/We’ll tell you no more masturbation for men... If you keep laying on money and power/We’ll tell you meanwhile your sprinkler is out of soda.” Even funnier is the horn-propelled “I Felt Like Smashing My Face in a Clear Glass Window,” wherein Ono playfully grapples with her parents’ influence, eventually questioning their sanity as well as her own.
Ono’s parents show up again on Feeling the Space, when soft opener “Growing Pain” begins with the lines, “I’m a battleship/Frozen by my mother’s anger.” From there, Ono persistently explores feminist struggles in ways both poetic and polemic. Some tunes, like the lifting “Coffin Car” and the theater-worthy “Woman of Salem,” paint metaphoric pictures of life as a woman. But more often, Ono confronts problems with bold brashness, in songs with titles like “Woman Power,’’ “Angry Young Woman,” and “She Hits Back.” The latter succinctly explains Ono’s anger: “My ears get tired of listening all the time/They’ve been taking lots of garbage all their lives.”
Feeling the Space’s only weakness is the conventionality of the music, played by a rotating collective of seasoned session musicians. There’s a generic quality to the compositions here, which feature little in the way of noisy guitar, unpredictable structures, or sonic abstractions. But that can also be a strength: Ono’s decision to play things so straight after years of experimentation is rather daring. Setting radical diatribes to familiar sounds is a statement itself, living proof of what ’70s rock could’ve been if more voices were represented, and loudly so.
On one of Feeling the Space’s bonus tracks, a live version of “Coffin Car” recorded in 1973 at Harvard’s First International Feminist Conference, Ono talks openly about how she’s been perceived. “What I learned from being with John is that society suddenly treated me as a woman who belonged to a man,” she says. “Some of his closest friends told me I should stay in the background, I should shut up, I should give up my work, and that way I’ll be happy... I was lucky I was over 30 and it was too late for me to change.” It’s true that she was too strong to succumb to the opinions of others, but these three albums show how much she could change, at her own will, to follow her muse. In the process, she asserted her independence not just from Lennon but from expectation. By subverting pop forms, she extended her vision without compromising it. | 2017-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | null | July 14, 2017 | 8.7 | 7e09ae82-3a77-4993-a389-d049ab01f0f8 | Marc Masters | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/ | null |
On his latest mixtape, the Atlanta rapper uses his innate charisma and exacting eye for the details of the drug trade to court a national audience that has so far eluded him. | On his latest mixtape, the Atlanta rapper uses his innate charisma and exacting eye for the details of the drug trade to court a national audience that has so far eluded him. | Peewee Longway: Spaghetti Factory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/peewee-longway-spaghetti-factory/ | Spaghetti Factory | Peewee Longway was a star even before anyone had heard his music. In his recent autobiography, Gucci Mane recalls that the rapper “was always this little, funny, charming nigga whom people just seemed to gravitate toward” and that his widely respected “dealings in the streets” earned him a deal with Gucci’s 1017 label without so much as a demo. Five years, 11 mixtapes, and one official album later, the diminutive former hustler, who was raised a few doors down from Young Thug in the since-demolished Jonesboro South projects, is one of Atlanta’s preeminent rappers. But, beloved as he is in rap’s most influential city, he has yet to ascend to the same heights as his former neighbor. With his latest mixtape, Spaghetti Factory, Longway is still seeking the national renown that keeps eluding him.
He has two obvious strengths as a rapper: First, there’s his infectious charisma. He seems to have apprehended the crucial, if counterintuitive, lesson that gangster rap demands a sharp sense of humor. But there’s a fine line between making listeners giggle and becoming an exhausting punchline rapper, and Longway stays on the right side of it with lyrics that are plainly absurd and ribald. Central to the chorus of “Jumanji” is the frat-house refrain “rock out with my cock out.” On “Freestyle,” he’s both “shipping and handling through Amazon” and “putting dope dick on an Amazon.” “I Can’t Get Enough” follows up the line, “Iced out my teeth like I’m Mike Jones” with the spurious claim, “I don’t even talk with the lights on.”
Longway’s second great asset is his exacting eye for the material details of the drug business. He relishes the minutiae, single-mindedly monitoring stovetops, hoarding residue for addicted product testers, and wrapping brick after brick after brick. On “Crop It,” he sets the scene of a cannabis-and-poppy-growing operation: “Poppy seeds in the sun room/Ain’t answerin’ my phone ‘til June/October, November, December they bloom/We rewrap in black balloons.”
Unfortunately, that exacting eye doesn’t see much beyond avarice and black-market ambition. Spaghetti Factory is almost completely devoid of biographical or emotional details that would add depth beneath the songs’ charming veneer. Whether it’s due to studious avoidance of self-incrimination or a simple lack of artistic vision, this withholding is what separates Longway from Southern rap’s most compelling personalities. Kevin Gates, Boosie Badazz, and 2 Chainz flesh out their oversized personas with street names, sadness, mentions of their loved ones, memories, and worries—the bits that make them who they are.
It’s understandable to plead the fifth when federal agent DJ Vlad shines a light in your face and asks if you’re a Crip, but that doesn’t have to mean eliding essential parts of yourself from your art. As recognizable as he is on record, with his high-pitched dope-boy checklists, and onscreen, with his gold rictus and “get money gut” (as Waka Flocka Flame once dubbed his own belly), Longway remains a mystery. He might have seen every view from Atlanta’s curlicue Spaghetti Junction, sold every drug from Schedule I to IV, and loaded every caliber of ammunition into clips—but we still don’t know what effect any of it had on him. Longway may only find the audience he seeks, and that his talent deserves, when he steps back from the trap-house stove. | 2018-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Empire / MPA Bandcamp | April 27, 2018 | 6.7 | 7e0d5c70-f708-4ebe-a8ed-088c67dae7a2 | Torii MacAdams | https://pitchfork.com/staff/torii-macadams/ | |
The Norwegian space disco producer follows last year's surprisingly sticky Ragysh EP with a refreshingly clean four-track EP composed with an ARP2600 analog synthesizer. | The Norwegian space disco producer follows last year's surprisingly sticky Ragysh EP with a refreshingly clean four-track EP composed with an ARP2600 analog synthesizer. | Todd Terje: It's the Arps | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16173-its-the-arps/ | It's the Arps | In the parlance of the increasingly vocal menswear blogging community, Todd Terje is "having a moment." A combination of serendipity and opportunism, a moment is a flash of triumph, unplanned and difficult to reproduce. To offer some perspective, cargo pants are also having a moment. Like Terje productions (as opposed to remixes), cargo pants disappeared for a few years mid-decade; now they're back, and they look (sound) better than anyone remembers. Hell, it was only six months ago when, upon asking a friend if he had any interest in a Terje DJ tour stop in Chicago, I received the following curt reply: "No. I don't want to listen to a bunch of space disco shit." But Terje's three-song Ragysh EP-- the one that included year-end chart barnstormer "Snooze 4 Love"-- dropped and proved surprisingly sticky.
This month he follows that with It's the Arps, a four-track EP on "space disco shit" mothership Smalltown Supersound, composed with an ARP2600 analog synthesizer. The first line of Vintage Synth Explorer's ARP2600 entry is, "The ARP 2600 is without a doubt one of the finest analog synthesizers ever." Terje has always been a sound-- and not a retro-- fetishist. Why else devote his precious remix work to nu-disco bench players and classic rock mammoths in equal measure? It's no surprise then that he'd be tempted by a mystical artifact such as the Arp, which, like many old synthesizers, looks like the kind of rune-encrusted rock-toy that his music's implied spaceships set out in search of. (The former astrophysics student is a rumored future space traveler.)
Terje's own productions-- like those of labelmate Lindstrøm-- favor knob-twiddling disco, like Giorgio Moroder without the pop-vocal instincts. He's confident and gifted enough to throw away an all-time piano loop on a Bryan Ferry remix. On It's the Arps, he trades the sturdy eight-minute structures of Ragysh for a baggier and more colorful sound. "Inspector Norse" would be a pro-forma space-disco jam in lesser hands-- it has that bulbous bassline, the tint of humor-- but Terje transforms it into a daytime noir, one that spreads its pinging notes wide. The star of the show is the two-track "Swing Star" suite, part one a wicked treadmill of double-time sequences over blocky bass and hiss-y drums. It's synth music as roadside fireworks: Light the fuse and back away quickly. "Swing Star Pt. 2" explores the same chord progression but with a cleaner palate, and the result is a light-breeze boogie that feels like a comedown. (The fourth track "Myggsommer" is a narrow miss, a vine-y synth doodle that suggests vintage synth flippancy can be as precocious as vintage guitar-tone exercises.)
This might've been lost in the space disco explosion a half-decade ago, but with his contemporaries wandering off into prog, kraut, and sundry other forms of out-music, the clean lines and easy momentum of It's the Arps are really refreshing. And Jesus, it's fun. The trouble with moments, of course, is extending them. Terje has the imagination. An upcoming Roxy Music remix suggests Terje will be a more consistent presence, which is fantastic: I'd really like not to be comparing him to fedoras in 2017. | 2012-01-16T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2012-01-16T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Smalltown Supersound / Olsen | January 16, 2012 | 7.6 | 7e0ec45f-a204-46a7-9daf-150ed8fcb153 | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
BIS: 001-020 collects a track from each release on Tim Sweeney's Beats in Space label, making for a groovy, lightly psychedelic compilation that might sound best at a deck party, or the beach. | BIS: 001-020 collects a track from each release on Tim Sweeney's Beats in Space label, making for a groovy, lightly psychedelic compilation that might sound best at a deck party, or the beach. | Various Artists: BIS: 001-020 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21809-bis-001-020/ | BIS: 001-020 | Even at its most inclusive and open-minded, the underground dance community still aspires to a certain cool factor—man or woman, gay or straight, just, please, don't be a dork. This is one of the reasons Beats in Space's Tim Sweeney is a comforting presence: In addition to being one of New York's best DJs and longest-tenured tastemakers, he comes off on his weekly WNYU radio show—broadcast every Tuesday night at 10:30pm since he walked in as a student in 1999, and meticulously archived on his website—like, well, a bit of a dork. His casual demeanor and idiosyncratic interview style, in addition to his musical curiosity, lends his show an irrepressible friendliness that is unusual in dance music culture.
It's a vibe that has carried over to his record label of the same name, under which he's released 20 records—mostly 12"s but also a couple of albums—since 2011. Sweeney's tastes run wide and deep, and he's been in on the ground floor of every important trend in underground dance music during the last 15 years (he notably interned for DFA and has regularly DJ'ed with James Murphy). He's kept his label stylistically diverse but with a few common threads: groovy, lightly psychedelic tracks that might sound best at a deck party, or the beach. Balearic would be a good catchall, though Sweeney's choices represent a very New York iteration—basically disco and its stepchildren—that includes various shades of electro, italo, house, and punky funk.
BIS: 001 - 020 collects a track from each of the label's releases offering an easy, if slightly daunting (there's nearly 150 minutes of music here) overview of the label. The collection doesn't offer any household names; certainly given his connections and status Sweeney could've recruited higher profile producers. What's on offer here is really Sweeney's vision, the humid urban tropics his selections conjure.
In practice this is everything from the bratty guitar stomp of the Hidden Fees' "So What"—as fine a replica of mid-2000s DFA clamor on offer in 2016—to the sprawling acid bass of Secret Circuit's "Afterlife." BIS: 001 - 020 doesn't offer a discernible flow or progression; it's a great record to jump in and out of, or to set to random and cook dinner to. Many of the tracks contain the kind of charming off-key vocals that helped differentiate, say, Ze Records disco tracks from gaudier major label productions. The compilation's more traditional dance tracks—Matt Karmil's Four Tet-ish "So You Say" and Crystal & S. Koshi's roiling "Break the Dawn"—offer chopped vocals, never straying far from an easy tunefulness.
BIS: 001 - 020 is never less than good, but it also falls somewhat short of essential. Labels like International Feel and Permanent Vacation have offered similar thrills for years. It's possible to parse out the peculiarities of Sweeney's taste but there's a certain irony in appreciating Sweeney on a granular level. What has made his radio show so special is that there is no one easy summation of it; its value increases as you return week after week (or archived stream after archived stream), listening to an ever widening variety of DJs and styles. Beats in Space the radio show remains an essential resource for fans of dance music; Beats in Space the label is a fun, friendly capsule of Sweeney's favored style. | 2016-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Beats in Space | April 20, 2016 | 6.8 | 7e173e91-959b-4db7-8d48-71253e68b6df | Andrew Gaerig | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/ | null |
Meg Remy is a narrative savant and her glorious, danceable new album is a righteous collection of razor-sharp songs, full of spit and fury, a high-water mark for political pop music. | Meg Remy is a narrative savant and her glorious, danceable new album is a righteous collection of razor-sharp songs, full of spit and fury, a high-water mark for political pop music. | U.S. Girls: In a Poem Unlimited | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/us-girls-in-a-poem-unlimited/ | In a Poem Unlimited | Early in Naomi Alderman’s 2017 novel The Power, teenage girls gain the ability to produce an electric charge with their bodies. This “electrostatic power” is channeled through a set of muscles at the collarbone called a skein. It allows women the ability to change their circumstances, and the way that individuals grapple with their new authority is a primary concern of the novel. Alderman’s book is one of a series of new works of art that are helping to, in the words of the writer Rebecca Traister, adjust “American ears to the sound of female anger—righteous and defensive, grand and petty.” Another, one that shares many qualities with The Power, is Meg Remy’s striking new album as U.S. Girls, In a Poem Unlimited.
Remy, an American expatriate who lives in Toronto, has been making music under the name U.S. Girls since 2007, but the moniker used to be a kind of joke. Her music was so idiosyncratic, even, at times, solipsistic. Responding to those qualities early in her career, Artforum called her “a woman who clearly spends a lot of time in her apartment with the shades drawn.” And reviewing her 2012 album GEM, the last released before she signed to 4AD, Pitchfork said of U.S. Girls that “you can tell without peeking at the liner notes that this is a project born of solitude and isolation.”
But by the time her 2015 record, Half Free came out, Remy had begun to open the band to external voices. And three years later, U.S. Girls has become a cacophony. In a Poem Unlimited, at once the most accessible and sharply violent U.S. Girls album to date, is the product of more than two dozen collaborators, many of them members of the Toronto funk and jazz collective the Cosmic Range. Not a single song was written by Remy alone; two were even written without her input. And yet, the glam and surf rock, disco and pop, (glorious, danceable pop!) on the record speaks to a unified vision, one of spit, fury, and chuckling to keep from crying.
Though it is unmistakably a record about women’s anger in its various shades and forms, Remy signals her awareness of male canons throughout (its title comes from Hamlet and the song “Rosebud” is a clear reference to Citizen Kane.) Those landmark texts are there to be turned inside out: Remy is interested in creating new mythologies, fertilizing stale old ground to nurture a different sort of harvest. The shuffling funk of “Pearly Gates,” for instance, turns a story of quotidian male cluelessness into a religious allegory, asking how a heaven controlled by men could ever be safe.
That might sound to some like a facile observation. But none of the songs on Poem can be folded neatly into a box. Remy remains a narrative savant wedded to the thrill of the unexpected, the razor under the tongue, and she fills her songs with cryptic passages and unexpected allusions. Making a record without psychological depth (or music fit to accompany it) might cause her to break out into hives. The album’s first track, the foreboding, psychedelic “Velvet 4 Sale” sets up a woman’s revenge tale. With its breathy ad-libs and spiraling, almost-Western cinematic synths, it would slot nicely into the soundtrack of Kill Bill: Vol 2, and it includes that most phallic of all musical passages, the guitar solo. The song, co-written with Remy’s husband, the musician Max Turnbull, begins in media res: “You’ve been sleeping with one eye open because he always could come back, ya know? And you’ve been walking these streets unguarded waiting for any man to explode.” It ends (spoiler alert!) with a woman instructing another on how to ensure that her male target is dead.
Hamlet, too, is nominally a revenge tale. But just as revenge becomes a portal to the many layers of Shakespeare’s play, so too do does In a Poem Unlimited soon migrate to more complex scenarios. On the extraordinary “Rage of Plastics,” Remy explores, with sax and surf guitar, the bubbling resentment of a woman whose job at an oil refinery has made her infertile. And good luck solving the riddle contained within the funky dirge “L-Over,” a song about ditching a mysterious lover, an animate being with no heart. With few exceptions, these are stories about how women react after being done wrong. But the reactions are so varied that it feels as if each belongs to a different individual, and the album comes to feel like an entire community in tense conversation with itself.
The musical vocabulary of U.S. Girls has also become so expansive that it can be difficult to pin down. There are flashes of Marc Bolan and Frank Zappa, ’70s psychedelia and Terry Riley’s ambient extravaganzas, but new to Remy’s palette is a disco-driven pop, stoking a wild celebratory spirit barely restrained by traditional verses and choruses. “Incidental Boogie,” “Rosebud,” and most especially “M.A.H.,” the album’s spiritual and intellectual centerpiece, glow with the spirit of Madonna, or ABBA with bayonets concealed under those flowing white robes. Remy has talked about pop as a form of bait, to draw listeners in to her more complex ideas. “M.A.H.” barely disguises an anthem of righteous anger directed toward an old romance. “As if you couldn’t tell, I’m mad as hell,” she sings in her wiry alto. “I won’t forget so why should I forgive?” She’s used the best, catchiest song on the record, you come to realize, to rail against an unlikely antagonist: Barack Obama.
Because Obama, for Remy, is just another avatar of male authority, the kind that she takes on without scruples. On “M.A.H.” she accuses the 44th president of fraudulence, charming half a country while continuing to wage its wars and eavesdrop on its citizens. Remy spelled her more broad skepticism of political power out in a 2016 interview, around the time she had embarked on making the record. “The violence that women experience on an individual basis from other individual men, in my mind it mirrors the violence that’s going on around the world,” she said. “It’s the same as the police brutality that’s happening in the States, it’s the same as the bombing of the Syrian people.” In telling the story of her relationship with Obama as a bad romance, she underscores the way that the most casual forms of male misbehavior are political. And on In a Poem Unlimited, Remy lives within their violence for 37 minutes, seeding it with her own ideas and the sounds of camp and disco records. Thirty-nine years after tens of thousands of people attended the Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park in Chicago, it’s as if she’s staged an album-long counterprotest, bringing the artifacts of the patriarchy to the stadium and burning them to ash.
The characters of In a Poem Unlimited exist far from a comfortable echo chamber. Their rage may be understandable, and expressed through Remy’s songs, but, as the album closes, her songs become skeptical, cautious, pensive, and even meditative. The album comes to resemble something like a time-spanning mirror. It anticipates the full range of the conversation that’s been raging in public since October, the complicated, multi-faceted and nuanced exchange that the opponents of the #MeToo movement keep pleading for, ignoring that it’s happening already. Each of its songs evokes an individual voice, an individual woman, an individual context and though their stories burn in different colors, each contains an ember of catharsis, a feeling that lasts throughout the album. It is the rare political pop record that looks toward the future and offers us something new. | 2018-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-20T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | 4AD | February 20, 2018 | 8.6 | 7e1e922e-4df6-482b-9464-c9bf3397e8c6 | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | |
Diplo's 2004 debut is given a 10-year-anniversary reissue. It's an odd release in his catalog: a trip-hop record, put out two years after obvious comparison points DJ Shadow and RJD2 had released albums that were tearing that genre's remnants to pieces. | Diplo's 2004 debut is given a 10-year-anniversary reissue. It's an odd release in his catalog: a trip-hop record, put out two years after obvious comparison points DJ Shadow and RJD2 had released albums that were tearing that genre's remnants to pieces. | Diplo: Florida | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20044-diplo-florida/ | Florida | It's a familiar ritual to anyone who's recently gotten deep into a veteran artist's catalog: at some point, a new convert's going to dig back far enough to find something that confuses the hell out of them. By the end of 2004, Diplo was already established as one of the brains behind electro-crunk hybridizers Hollertronix, and his name was attached to under-the-wire '04 best-of lists with the similar-minded M.I.A. mixtape Piracy Funds Terrorism, Vol. 1. And those are roots that even his most recent work, and that of the Mad Decent imprint, can be traced to in more or less a straight line.
But the debut solo album he released in the midst of all those identity-building works tends to throw people off. For the unfamiliar: Florida is a trip-hop record. Crucially, it's a trip-hop record from 2004, released two years after obvious comparison points DJ Shadow and RJD2 had released albums (The Private Press and Deadringer) that were tearing that genre's remnants to pieces. So where'd this morose, rarely danceable, sometimes weirdly beautiful record come from, and why does so little Diplo's done since sound anything like it?
The reissue titled F10RIDA takes a shot at giving some additional background to Diplo's come-up during the making of this record, a massive undertaking that includes a special BitTorrent partnership and a multimedia-minded take on archival materials. (Meaning mostly photos, email correspondence transcripts, remixes, unreleased material, and the component "stems" of the track "Into the Sun".) Alongside the promotional-kit feel to all this is the nearly 10-minute commentary Diplo contributed to Big Dada's SoundCloud, where he lays out his mind state at the time the record came together: rooted in an upbringing in both South and Central Florida, making self-taught loops on a cheap stolen sampler, taking inspirational cues from Shadow and DJ Premier and J-Swift, and trying to conjure up ethereal, spooky weirdness with limited means. What he came out with was inspired by "the truest thing I know"—where he lived, and what he took from those environs.
Diplo's Florida is a place to escape before it swallows you: the sun goes down even in the Sunshine State; it's a place of late-night post-job bus rides and weed-and-headphones rumination sessions. The album has the feel of a Southern Gothic elegy for an early life since abandoned, which makes the uncharacteristic nature of the record a bit more compelling. Bummer Diplo isn't a facet we see or hear much of, and even when the album is derivative and simple, if offers some insight into where his head was when he started.
But this is the work of someone who's not quite there yet, especially because his "there" isn't even mapped out. Wesley Pentz has been everything from savvy adapter to clumsy appropriator, but in the process he found a route into a distinct persona. Florida, meanwhile, is little more than the sum of influences. Given the Diplo we know now, it seems (proto)typical that even a primordial release of his would boast a Vybz Kartel appearance; the Nintendo-cartridge banger "Diplo Rhythm" makes his Major Lazer moves seem like a foregone conclusion in retrospect. It's a bit more surprising that this record would also have a guest spot by Freestyle Fellowship's P.E.A.C.E., right in the middle of an era where left coast indie rap was maybe the last thing your average Hollertronix party attendee would claim allegiance to. But the fact that it's a rubber band double-time over the Timbaland-tabla pastiche "Indian Thick Jawns" at least makes it a stealth classic in both artists' catalogs, one that plays to both their familiar strengths.
It's the atypical moodier stuff that's more mixed. Sometimes it's just a loop that sounds interesting until it doesn't. There's some ambition in the longer cuts, an urge to fit in all sorts of ideas and sources in tracks like the snare-riddled, soul-jazz gloom of "Way More" and the swampy, bleary-eyed nine-minute break parade "Works", which pulls strength from restlessness. It all comes together brilliantly in "Summer's Gonna Hurt You", a keyboard-driven Brit-prog lament that he rewires with intricate boom-clap drums. It's like he heard the thunderstorm breaks on Shadow's "Napalm Brain/Scatter Brain" and pledged to make a version informed by UGK.
There's more of that on the bonus material, the best of which comes from 2003's Epistemology Suite EP, triangulating early Funkadelic, sound collage, and Mannie Fresh snare rolls. Other material's a bit shorter on weirdness and personality. The remixes go even further in tracking a big muddy footprint all over the context of this record—I know things have changed for Diplo, and as goes Diplo so goes the pop world and all that, but hearing Metronomy rework "Diplo Rhythm" progenitor "Newsflash" into galumphing synth-horn overload or Derek Allen slather wubwub seizures all over "Summer's Gonna Hurt You" doesn't say much for progress. Diplo's music hasn't regressed over the last 10 years, and neither have his sensibilities. But sometimes it's best to let the weirdness stand on its own, make a special place for it, and wonder where else it could've been taken. | 2014-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-12-04T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Big Dada | December 4, 2014 | 6 | 7e2c0193-40d1-4f1e-b388-c27907760322 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
London's HÆLOS bring to mind a host of ’90s influences, from trip-hop to shoegaze, but they are able to channel the best parts of those early bands in a way that reflects the present moment. | London's HÆLOS bring to mind a host of ’90s influences, from trip-hop to shoegaze, but they are able to channel the best parts of those early bands in a way that reflects the present moment. | HÆLOS: Full Circle | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21605-full-circle/ | Full Circle | HÆLOS' debut LP, Full Circle, brings to mind the heyday of trip-hop and British electronic explosion. All of the genre’s biggest characteristics are here—ethereal vocals, muted breakbeats, swelling keyboards, and the occasional reverberating guitar. But Full Circle resolutely repurposes almost every aspect of ’90s trip-hop at no loss to its integrity or listenability. It’s both a total throwback and rooted in 2016, like a fermentation of ideas born 20 years ago and brought back to life with surprising potential.
Bandmembers Lotti Benardout, Arthur Delaney, and Dom Goldsmith all share vocal duties, and the harmonies they create add to Full Circle‘s richness. HÆLOS’ most obvious recent touchstone would be the xx, not only for their use of male/female vocals but their chilled-out, slowed-down love songs coupled with a melancholy aesthetic. This is most pointed on "Alone," where an echoing electric guitar is plucked while the band sing in unison "I won’t lie to you/ Because I know what love is." While these influences are often blatant, HÆLOS’ songs don’t suffer from the association. So while "Separate Lives" bears more than a passing resemblance to Olive’s "You’re Not Alone," with its looped bursts of synths, there’s enough of a spin on it that it’s able to walk the line between homage and imitation without much difficulty.
The centerpiece on Full Circle is "Oracle," a five-and-a-half minute comedown on a record of comedowns. It sounds like the blissful escapism of 808 State meets the urban desolation of Burial, with vocals coasting over the top—an absolutely perfect combination. "Cloud Nine" is another highlight, a mournful piano driving more of HÆLOS’ harmonies deep into a meditation of a breakup, and "Pale," a track with stuttering keyboard samples are undercut by massive breakbeat drums and Bernadout’s version of a diva vocal, ends Full Circle on a triumphant note. By wearing their influences on their sleeve while never slipping into gimmickry, HÆLOS are able to pull off an impressive trick, a debut record that both cements them in a genre and leaves then room to grow. | 2016-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | March 17, 2016 | 7.7 | 7e2d28ff-ed1c-495d-9764-61e19e3da2af | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
Detroit techno legend Robert Hood, under his Floorplan alias, invites his teenage daughter Lyric to coproduce Victorious, which is more open, more anthemic, and brighter than much of his past work. | Detroit techno legend Robert Hood, under his Floorplan alias, invites his teenage daughter Lyric to coproduce Victorious, which is more open, more anthemic, and brighter than much of his past work. | Floorplan: Victorious | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21996-victorious/ | Victorious | If you’ve read an interview with Robert Hood in the last few years, you'll see that the Detroit techno pioneer obsessed with one question: What is the difference between an energetic Sunday morning at church and the rapturous hours of dawn spent at the club? To him, they both aspire to the same physical and experiential ends. Be it dark room or wooden pew, you should find yourself swaying, head to the floor, singing praises to something beyond yourself. They both function, at some deeper level, in the realm of the sublime and the ecstatic. For the last decade he’s lived in rural Alabama and has been working as a practicing minister when he’s not on tour. While the lifestyles might suggest a radical disjuncture, he thinks that they have to inform each other. And the music he’s released under Floorplan has been his primary vehicle for exploring the more spiritual ends of his musical identity.
He’s appeared as Floorplan on and off since 1996, but a full album of work didn’t materialize until 2013’s Paradise, a kind of career retrospective for the moniker. Overall, Floorplan is a departure from his epochal minimal techno work, orbiting instead around disco, gospel, and house. He’s also released some of his most iconic tracks as Floorplan, including “Never Grow Old,” which is a template for what you can expect structurally and thematically: exuberantly looped chants and a professorial level of attention to detail, both in production and song craft. And now he’s invited his teenage daughter, Lyric Hood, to co-produce the second full-length Floorplan album, Victorious, a 75 minute long test of Hood’s spiritual dance music.
His daughter first joined him behind the decks as a sixteen-year-old, and after a spat of touring that included a rather heartfelt closing set at Dekmantel last year, she’s helped co-produce much of Victorious. You can sense the youthful energy she imparts all over Victorious, which benefits from hanging a tad looser than Paradise. It’s eleven tracks are more open, more anthemic, and brighter than much of what Hood has done in the past.
It opens with the six-minute “Spin,” a clinic on structuring a house-music single, fashioned from effortlessly timed cues, jump cuts, and studied progressions. There’s a moment in “Spin” when the beat becomes vaporous and then solidifies, giving you a sense of how physical Hood can make electronic music feel. This physicality is made even more clear in the particularly religious-minded tracks like “The Heavens & The Earth” where a hypnotic reading of the opening lines of Genesis is placed on top of a warm pulsating synth. The line between club and church is forcefully collapsed, and it’s well-argued case study for the spiritual goals for this kind of music.
For all the seamless transitions within tracks**,* Victorious* can feel a little incoherent as a whole. The tracks often end abruptly, closing their loops before they can pleasantly spill into the next moment. There is repetitiveness to the song structures that can feel predictable at a certain point. While you can sense something clunky about how these songs work as as a full unit, individually the tracks overcome the album’s shortcomings by not feeling overcrowded or overproduced. There is something delightfully dispassionate about the way they can reframe and reign in uncontrollable funk in “Tell You No Lie” or slyly weave a sermon in between the thumps of “He Can Save You.” But then other instances like “Ha Ya” can feel phoned in, and somehow the differences between each track can start still feel superficial on repeated listens.
Perhaps the biggest limitation to it all is that Victorious is in no way a headphone listen. It is constrained by site specificity. If there is a possible maximum-pleasure listening experience it will come from luxuriating in this music very loudly and perfectly articulated over multiple sets of speakers. Perhaps this is true of all dance music, but the thesis of Floorplan is especially grounded in a communal experience. In order to really have that ecstatic event Hood aims for, you simply cannot be behind a pair of headphones. Victorious is filled with moments that give you glimpses of the club in heaven, but like the afterlife itself, it’s always out of reach, distinct only in brief flashes and in feverish moments. | 2016-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | M-Plant | June 10, 2016 | 6.8 | 7e34bd40-6585-4575-b13b-6aae5738951e | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
The Chicago noise-rock/thrash/punk/metal/etc. trio continue to hate you, your band, and most other things. | The Chicago noise-rock/thrash/punk/metal/etc. trio continue to hate you, your band, and most other things. | Oozing Wound: High Anxiety | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/oozing-wound-high-anxiety/ | High Anxiety | The Chicago trio Oozing Wound have planted their flag in the spot where metal, punk, and experimental meet. Four albums in, they are firmly devoted to keeping that space both weird and uncomfortable. High Anxiety doesn’t stray from their aesthetic: it’s thrashy if not entirely thrash, it’s dirty and smeared at the edges, and they remain sick of your shit, with their definition of “your shit” an exponentially expanding, spiteful blob. Even without changing much, they’re still the freaks underground metal needs.
Whether or not you can understand any of Zack Weil’s shrieks in the opener “Surrounded by Fucking Idiots,” the bile in his guitar is easily understandable. They’re not interested in metaphors or dressing up their hatred in Latin and sigils. The second half of “Idiots” lurches into swampy riffing, a mutated take on a thrash breakdown. It’s more for throwing a bunch of aforementioned idiots off a cliff than for stage-diving, offering no release but annihilation. “Tween Shitbag” is equally incendiary, with Weil sarcastically yelling “Oh man I really love your band!”, a call back to the anti-industry screed “New York Bands” from their debut Retrash.
High Anxiety also recalls Voivod on “Die on Mars” and “Riding the Universe,” not just for their space themes but also how punky thrash and prog goofiness chop it up with one another. “Mars” throws some death metal in the mix, the intro guitar leads sounding like Bolt Thrower solos drifting into a trash-filled outer space. These songs are house shows as terrariums populated by metal dudes too strange for the pay-to-play clubs and punks who punish themselves in Ph.D. programs, and Oozing Wound makes the chaos coalesce. They’re serious, but not serious.
Oozing Wound have always been indebted to Midwestern noise rock like Wolf Eyes and Destroy All Monsters as much as weird thrash — their slogan “the world’s fastest noise rock band” passes muster. The most noise rock moment on High Anxiety is actually the longest and slowest song: “Birth of Flat Earther” plods and drags like AmRep at its most high-gain and high-strung, with no blast beats to energize the grim proceedings. “Earther” also hints at weariness that looms over High Anxiety: they’re still dishing out hate, but it’s starting to get to them. The record was almost called I Know It’s Only Rock and Roll but I’m Tired of It, a longer yet less opaque title. If you were surrounded by fucking idiots all day, you would be exhausted, too. | 2019-03-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | March 18, 2019 | 7.3 | 7e361cae-54c7-42f2-8241-b6bcecfee35c | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
Documenting the South Carolina stop of the Carrie & Lowell tour, this audiovisual album takes a record that thrived on simplicity and adorns it with glowsticks, but each track retains a subtle beauty. | Documenting the South Carolina stop of the Carrie & Lowell tour, this audiovisual album takes a record that thrived on simplicity and adorns it with glowsticks, but each track retains a subtle beauty. | Sufjan Stevens: Carrie & Lowell Live | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23249-carrie-lowell-live/ | Carrie & Lowell Live | “I got so little pleasure out of writing and recording the album that I feel like I’m due some enjoyment,” Sufjan Stevens said before embarking on the full-band tour behind his heartbreaking 2015 record Carrie & Lowell. The 11 songs on Carrie & Lowell featured multiple backup singers and instrumentalists, but they retained an almost voyeuristic sense of intimacy, exploring the ways death affects our lives. Stevens mostly shied away from seeking resolution, instead focusing on the shame, regret, and loneliness that can accompany grief. The emotional core of the record came at the end of a song called “Fourth of July.” As the music faded around him, Stevens sounded alone and inconsolable, repeating a simple truth: “We’re all gonna die.”
That moment transforms on Carrie & Lowell Live, an audiovisual document from the South Carolina stop of the album’s tour. Here, Stevens lets the outro of “Fourth of July” build instead of dissipate. If not quite a happy ending, it’s at least a cathartic one—his mantra now backed by pummeling drums and a chorus of voices. This transformation underscores the difference between Stevens’ records and his shows. While even his most elaborate albums feel hushed and solitary, his concerts are communal experiences. On stage, he’ll dress up his band as cheerleaders and strap a giant pair of wings on his back; he’ll take dancing cues from Justin Bieber and cover a hit song by Drake. Carrie & Lowell Live—while highlighting the starkest, saddest songs Stevens has ever written—reflects that side of his personality like no other release. This juxtaposition makes it a compelling listen and a fitting companion to a deep, multifaceted record.
On Carrie & Lowell, tracks segued into each other with haunted anti-solos: ghosting away to reveal one isolated melody or instrument. On the live album, Stevens takes the opposite approach, expanding and amplifying every moment. The wispy pedal steel coda to “Death With Dignity” is sung in unison by his whole band with the force of a prayer, while the second half of “Should Have Known Better”—a chintzy keyboard melody on the record—gets turned into an escalating anthem with a round of vocalists. “All of Me Wants All of You” and “Carrie & Lowell” are both embellished with long, spacey synth solos, while “Blue Bucket of Gold” gets its own 18-minute reprise. The effect is somewhat jarring: taking a record that thrived on simplicity and adorning it with glowsticks. But it’s a testament to Stevens’ songwriting that each track retains its subtlety and beauty in this context.
The Carrie & Lowell tour highlighted the album’s unique place in his catalog, featuring every song from the record and only a small sampling of earlier material. Those additions are whittled down further here to just an interstitial track from Michigan—the wordless “Redford (For Yia-Yia and Pappou),” used as an intro—and two selections from 2010’s dystopian, electronic opus The Age of Adz. The Adz songs sound surprisingly at home alongside Carrie & Lowell’s more autobiographical material, and not just because of the new synth makeovers. “Futile Devices” arrives near the end of the set and adds an element of desperation to Stevens’ struggles to express his feelings, recounting memories of sleeping on couches and watching a loved one crochet. In “Vesuvius,” Stevens refers to himself in the third person (“Sufjan, follow your heart/Follow the flame or fall on the floor”), and it feels like a pep talk: a reminder that there’s more ground to cover, more life to live.
Stevens once made an important distinction between Carrie & Lowell and his earlier work, stating, “This is not my art project; this is my life.” The live album feels a lot more like an art project—especially the film accompaniment, with its psychedelic light show and collage-like projections of home videos. During the performance, Stevens rarely addresses the audience; instead he mimics the record’s seamless flow and lets his songs speak for themselves. One of his only remarks arrives during the closing rendition of “Hotline Bling” with singer/songwriter Gallant, and it’s a simple bit of levity (“Let me see your best Drake impression,” Stevens says, “Something like this...”). At the end of his set, he’s no closer to finding peace or answering the questions that torment him throughout these songs. But he’s surrounded by friends, and he’s enjoying himself. | 2017-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Asthmatic Kitty | May 3, 2017 | 7.7 | 7e4581eb-621b-47d1-bbed-7b8c7c366784 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | null |
Uniform is the industrial metal duo of vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist/programmer Ben Greenberg. Their fevered, relentless sophomore record is the sound of clawing for survival and sanity. | Uniform is the industrial metal duo of vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist/programmer Ben Greenberg. Their fevered, relentless sophomore record is the sound of clawing for survival and sanity. | Uniform: Wake in Fright | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22737-wake-in-fright/ | Wake in Fright | Uniform—the duo consisting of vocalist Michael Berdan and guitarist/programmer Ben Greenberg—started out obsessed with trying to make industrial order from punk chaos. Their debut, Perfect World, sounds like sinister master planning in its title alone; in some alternate universe even worse than ours, its cover would be a chic totalitarian symbol. In a short time, they’ve gotten angrier and let the chaos they tried to control run free. Perfect laid out what a gray dystopia would look like; their sophomore album Wake in Fright is Uniform fighting back, leaning more heavily towards their hardcore and metal heritage.
Opener “Tabloid” sounds like Big Black embracing thrash, capturing the precision of a machine coming into conflict with the immeasurable energy of bodies flying through a crowd. Their last record featured a collaboration with Coil’s Drew McDowall; this song shows their ideal touring partners may be Power Trip. Greenberg’s abrasive industrial tone sounds elastic when applied to honest-to-evilness metal riffs, finding a flexibility in rigidity. Even so, he beats you down with select riffs instead of throwing them all out. Such is the case with “Bootlicker,” where thrash gets locked into a snarling loop; if Tom Araya was on vocals, it would be the best Slayer song in years. (Greenberg also nods to Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman’s reckless, borderline free soloing at the end of “The Killing of America.”)
While it seems simplistic to equate “faster material” with “more urgent,” that’s Fright’s key strength. Greenberg has never sound angrier or more excited (and often, both), and the same can be said for Berdan. “The Light At the End (Cause)” is their most relentless track yet, the moment where both Greenberg and Berdan let a loss of control be their guiding force. It could be replicated by a proficient drummer, but it would sacrifice its jackhammer oppressiveness.
They haven’t abandoned their slower industrial tracks, but flipping the ratio between those and hardcore works in their favor. “Night of Fear” is most like Perfect, aided by the tension between the militaristic drums and Berdan’s shouted urges to deprogram. “The Lost” is their first attempt at warping the poppier side of their industrial influences; it is their most danceable song, loosely speaking, a dimmer take on Cold Cave’s goth-via-hardcore. In terms of club potential, it leans closer to Prurient’s “You Show Great Spirit,” more of an unforgiving blacklight shone on after-hours sleaze. It is also liberating because it allows a light of joy in, however small, which is more radical than an onslaught of persistent negativity.
Uniform couldn’t have predicted the future when they were making Fright, even though Perfect was itself a world-building exercise, but this is the kind of record we need now more than ever. They’re not more vicious by circumstance; their own uncoupling just happens to better reflect our future. Perfect was more of a reinvention for Greenberg, then fresh out of the Men, then it was for Berdan, whose screams didn’t sound much different than they did in Drunkdriver. With Fright, both have found new sides to themselves: Greenberg tapped into his inner metal kid, but Berdan has taken the self-apocalyptic energy of his past and turned it into a weapon for redemption and moving forward, much like Negative Approach did in the ’80s. Salvation may seem to be out of reach at this point, but that’s no reason to claw towards to it; the exercise may be the only thing to keep us sane in the years coming up. | 2017-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Sacred Bones | January 16, 2017 | 8 | 7e4791cf-9cbb-4187-864f-05c4b2c80da2 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | null |
A synthesis of outerborough album rap, Five-Percenter ideology, and Southern Gothic interiority, the Memphis native’s latest album is a somber reflection on the place that made him. | A synthesis of outerborough album rap, Five-Percenter ideology, and Southern Gothic interiority, the Memphis native’s latest album is a somber reflection on the place that made him. | Lukah: Why Look Up, God’s in the Mirror | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lukah-why-look-up-gods-in-the-mirror/ | Why Look Up, God’s in the Mirror | Like anything else, underground rap scenes are subject to algorithmic gerrymandering. Upload a few loosies and SoundCloud will nudge you in the direction of your kin; the Venn diagram of Your Old Droog and Tha God Fahim’s Spotify listeners promises such synergy that collab tapes become imperative, geography and style be damned. There’s a sense of inevitability, of artists grappling for pieces of a diminishing pie, a concession that recommendation algos know rappers better than they know themselves.
Which makes more precious those rare anti-scene triumphs—Grief Pedigree and Haitian Body Odor, YEN and Private Stock—records by grown men who, having toiled in isolation and obscurity, emerge as full-fledged auteurs from shadowy corners of the internet. These albums are not indebted to individual cities or eras; their brilliance doesn’t translate to vinyl or visual media. They are vestiges of an earlier, slower internet, one where solitary travelers could not only find their own likeminded comrades, but in the process find themselves.
In the wake of Three 6 Mafia’s improbable Top 40 breakthrough, Memphis native Lukah tried his hand at crunk and became active in the city’s battle rap community. It wasn’t until 2018’s Chickenwire that Lukah, then approaching 30, settled upon an insular sound: less Southern, more Gothic. Around that time, a San Diego producer named Walz encountered his music online and began submitting beats unsolicited, fifteen of which Lukah selected for Why Look Up, God’s in the Mirror.
Memphis rappers have long conceived of the city as a portal: in Three 6’s case, a portal to a mystical underworld; in 8Ball & MJG’s case, a portal to their smoked-out pimp fantasies. Although Why Look Up contains more on-the-ground reporting than the records of his forebears, Lukah derives symbolism by casting an impartial eye toward South Memphis. The weight of history bears upon his birthplace, where residents occupy the homes and fates of their ancestors. “What was once community met its own demolition/They ask why the guns and drugs? Destruction is our addiction,” he rhymes on “The Way to Damascus.” Why Look Up’s interrogation of Memphis is an inquiry into the Black community, undertaken as a case study in lieu of Nas and Kendrick’s survey methods.
Lukah favors commentary over self-examination, his rhetorical questions echoing like spectral voices in a William Styron interlude. “You ever had your reflection reply in conversation?” he asks on “Stygian”; one imagines the candlesticks in Scarface’s four-cornered room. On the penultimate song “Colored One,” the question is posed through another lens: “You ever had the ghost of your shadow follow your every step?” The shift in perspective is the difference between “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” and “I Seen a Man Die”—the former is a man who fears death, the latter is a man who knows it intimately.
On “Glasshouses,” the boundaries between setting and character are blurred beyond recognition: “I’m from the side where education is no longer a vision/People don’t give a fuck, ‘cause we fill up their prisons/On my side we honor codes, but we don’t honor the isms/Where the brothers want better, but we lack the ambition.” Lukah is a blunt lyricist with combat-ready delivery, conveying his environs in a manner more experiential than visual. In true Southern Gothic fashion, the locales and their inhabitants define one another in equal measure.
Still, Why Look Up is an album of and from the internet, which allows Lukah to flit between diarist, torchbearer, and scholar. On “The Seine,” his vocals bear whiffs of Big K.R.I.T.’s muddy Panhandle declension, whereas “Luncheon on the Grass” recalls Shyheim and Freddie Foxxx’s Avirex-battened flows. There’s no logical or temporal reason Boldy James would appear on this record, but “Stigmata” is a pitch-perfect duet, Boldy’s preternatural cool permeating Lukah’s impeccably patterned syllables. “Ermine” pairs Lukah with Estee Nack, a flamboyant Dominican rapper from Massachusetts, and again the chemistry is immediate—these guys rap their asses off.
The project’s ambiance is reminiscent of Cormega’s The Realness and The True Meaning, early-2000s soliloquies that sound like they were composed in a bunker. Walz’s beats evoke Havoc’s disquiet with none of the Alchemist’s cute flourishes, a calm surface belying shark-infested depths. Shifty keyboard trills are weighted by domineering snares, punctuated with slight variations in tempo—the soupy layers of “Luncheon on the Grass,” the beat switches on “Immaculate Conception”—approaching the album’s final act. The muted arrangements are apt for Why Look Up’s somber reflection, even if Lukah’s more animated collaborators sound like they sped past their interstate exit.
The album’s linchpin is “Colored One,” which in context plays like a response to Kendrick Lamar’s “Mortal Man,” the 2Pac-interpolating finale of To Pimp a Butterfly. The lyrics are at once descriptive and prescriptive, submitting a cautious autonomy where “Mortal Man” preaches solidarity: “Losing sleep at night, but then again, the god has never slept/And never asked for help, ‘cause Black men weren’t taught to self-reflect/Move through life cycles with traumas we’re expected to accept/Come fly in my shoes, and you’ll see why our ancestors wept.” Where “Mortal Man” closes with 2Pac predicting a race war, “Colored One” remains inward-facing. The final sound bite is Charlamagne tha God—himself a firebrand for the clickbait era—telling an interviewer, “I call myself tha God for a reason. I’m a Black man, and not even just a Black man. I’m God’s creation, God put me here to be something great.”
Why Look Up is a synthesis of outerborough album rap, Five-Percenter ideology, and Southern Gothic interiority. These are traditions that can only be received as articles of faith, and when Lukah retreats into the politics of self-reliance, he is the sentry of a precinct left to fend for itself. When push comes to shove, he knows what’s worth protecting.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | FXCK RXP | November 16, 2021 | 7.6 | 7e47b3ea-f84f-42b2-80d3-e2623f7acb16 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
The composer and multi-instrumentalist Kelly Moran draws inspiration from John Cage’s “prepared piano,” extending the practice with electronic keyboards and melodic ingenuity. | The composer and multi-instrumentalist Kelly Moran draws inspiration from John Cage’s “prepared piano,” extending the practice with electronic keyboards and melodic ingenuity. | Kelly Moran: Bloodroot | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23174-bloodroot/ | Bloodroot | Working under the influence of John Cage’s music seems like a tough gig for a composer. Cage’s maxims about creativity have always been seductive in their revolutionary openness, which is why plenty of artists who don’t sound much like him have benefitted from his lectures and articles. But for those who draw specific assistance from his own sound production methods, the pitfalls are steep. Once any contemporary pianist starts putting metal bolts and scraps of plastic into a piano’s body, odds are they’re going to sound overly indebted to Cage, the father of the “prepared piano.” If you’re going to follow him down that particular route, you better be able to make your “prepared piano” sound distinct. On Bloodroot, the composer and multi-instrumentalist Kelly Moran clears this high bar with plenty of room to spare, thanks to two different kinds of insight: one technological in nature, the other more poetic.
In the first case, Moran expands the “prepared piano” into the electronic-keyboard realm. Moran’s acoustic instrument produces odd, flinty, or rattling timbres, similar to Cage’s. But by pre-recording some plucks and sweeps of the prepared piano's strings, Moran has created an electro-acoustic hybrid instrument that lets her layer various effects with disarming smoothness. While one hand is playing a percussive line on the acoustic piano, another hand can trigger playback of an e-bowed string’s silken drone, or else a harp-like string swoop. Other contemporary composers have used traditional pianos in tandem with sampling keyboards. But Moran’s application of the practice to the world of “prepared piano” is a smart extension of the practice. This recalls how Cage himself once approvingly quoted the abstract expressionist painter Willem de Kooning: “The past does not influence me; I influence it.”
Moran doesn’t always rely on technological savvy—she can flat-out compose, too. The album’s first two tracks find her performing all-acoustically. The opening miniature, “Iris,” unhurriedly allows pairs of notes or short arpeggiated figures to ring out. The sounds are delicate and unusual. After these individual pitches are established, Moran then serves up three stark, thick chords that combine some of those tones—while also adding in new notes from a lower octave. Inside a couple of minutes, a listener can start to trust that this composer-performer will use her unfamiliar tools to create richly dramatic arcs.
During “Celandine,” Moran’s melodic ingenuity shines. After a rising prepared-piano figure has wormed its way into your consciousness, the pianist allows gorgeous, mournful progressions to flower underneath that repetitive top line. When the harmony shifts, a listener gets to try out several new lenses on that same emotional field, before returning to the original view. (As a long tour over some forlorn emotional landscape, the track threatens to beat Radiohead at their own game.)
From there, Moran starts to let her sampling kit loose. “Freesia” begins with a fast-cycling motif that points toward the composer’s stated fascination with metal. A couple minutes later, Moran takes a hard aesthetic turn, courtesy of a sampled drone chord, which she then improvises over. Heard on this pinched-sounding piano, Moran’s patient, languid lines foster airs of mystery and ritual.
The most consistent pleasure on Bloodroot is listening for the ways these odd songs produce their unlikely hooks. The string-strums and tight clusters of augmented notes that open “Hyacinth” don’t initially commend themselves to long-term memory, but as stray lines emerge from the haze, the replay value of the composition becomes clear. Mastered by Krallice’s Colin Marston, the recordings on Bloodroot capture the textural diversity of Moran’s schemes. And in the end, the occasional similarity to Cage’s prepared piano doesn’t seem like the most important takeaway. The real news is that Moran can sound equally as free, and just as unencumbered by the weight of history, as her own idol. | 2017-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Telegraph Harp | April 20, 2017 | 7.8 | 7e49ad77-f322-45ab-9f2c-ddee7db5c529 | Seth Colter Walls | https://pitchfork.com/staff/seth-colter walls/ | null |
The jazz multi-instrumentalist wants to unite the world in song. But his new album collapses the wide-ranging possibilities of global music into something for everyone and no one. | The jazz multi-instrumentalist wants to unite the world in song. But his new album collapses the wide-ranging possibilities of global music into something for everyone and no one. | Jon Batiste: World Music Radio | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jon-batiste-world-music-radio/ | World Music Radio | Jon Batiste has long been a household name, thanks in large part to his star-making turn as the affably hip bandleader on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. But last year’s surprise Grammy win for his 2021 album We Are catapulted him to a new level of fame and cultural relevance. That record’s hopeful message of community and shared humanity—set to a joyous blend of soul, jazz, funk, R&B, and hip-hop—offered an antidote to the emotional burnout of grappling with America’s festering socio-political fissures. Drawing from the rich cultural lineage of Black music as well as personal history—not only does Batiste come from New Orleans musical royalty, his grandfather was a union organizer—We Are’s fist-pumping positivity sounded vital and essential, even at its corniest.
Now Batiste wants to take his brand of musical activism international. For his sprawling new album, World Music Radio, he enlists a globe-spanning crew of collaborators for an ambitious experiment in planetary genre-blending. Their mission? To create pop music that so effortlessly transcends national, cultural, and genre barriers that it is, as the press release puts it, “meant for everyone.” If that sounds like the sort of money-printing holy grail modern music executives dream of, well, that’s because it sort of is. But for Batiste, it’s more about tapping into music’s power to find common ground between disparate—often divided—communities. If we can get kids in, say, Dhaka to jam to Latin trap and Catalonian folk, he seems to think, then maybe it will remind us that we are all, in the end, human.
So Batiste puts his extensive compositional chops—and his thick Rolodex—to work, blending his amorphous jazz-soul with timbres and rhythms from all across the world. Soaring gospel choirs sit comfortably alongside Latin drums; improvisational jazz and French spoken word share space with Michael Jackson-esque pop-funk; K-pop idols and Colombian pop stars trade bars over reggaeton beats. Batiste ties this musical mish-mash together with a familiar conceptual conceit: packaging the album’s 12 tracks as an all-night radio show, hosted and curated by alter ego Billy Bob Bo Bob, an interstellar DJ with a penchant for hokey aphorisms (“Be who you are… because everyone else is taken”).
When it works, Batiste’s cultural cross-pollination can be electrifying—as when the crescendoing organ of “Worship” segues seamlessly into propulsive Latin-tinged electro-funk. But far too often, especially when he strays away from sounds that have already made inroads at U.S. Top 40 (Latin trap, Afropop), it comes across as window dressing, as if the unfamiliarity of these sounds and textures can make up for the inherent blandness of the songwriting. All the undeniable virtuosity of Batiste—and the pop polish delivered by a production team that has worked with stars like Drake and Doja Cat—cannot distract from the record’s fatal conceptual flaw: the contradiction between its celebration of cultural difference and its overarching goal of proving that, at least on a musical level, we are all the same.
It’s an intuitive idea, and plenty of studies seem to offer support for the idea of music as a “universal language.” There are examples on a broader, socio-cultural level—say, a person’s ability to tell a piece of music apart from random sound, or gauge mood and tone (the link between minor chords and sadness, for example). But what lures us into creating complex webs of meanings and connections with a particular song or melody depends as much on who we are as it does on the music itself. It is our unique, diverse, fragmented selves—a lifetime’s collection of experiences, cultural inheritances, and learned responses. Music all over the world may have its shared characteristics—its universalities—but seeking a universal listener means losing other, distinguishing characteristics in turn.
In his attempt to create music that appeals to everyone, Batiste strips the disparate sounds and styles he borrows of the cultural contexts and specificities that make them so powerful. What’s left is just a layer of aestheticised sound, grafted onto a musical skeleton of unambiguously American pop lineage. In an interview with The New York Times, Batiste said that he aims to “expand the diameter of popular music.” But World Music Radio achieves the opposite, collapsing the wide-ranging possibilities of global music into the form of the American pop song. Batiste sands away all the rough edges that make encounters with truly “foreign” music so thrilling: alien melodic progressions that violate our learned expectations, the exhilarating wrong-ness of an unfamiliar rhythm, the sudden expansion of our imagination of cultural possibility.
You’ll find none of that on World Music Radio. Batiste’s idea of universal music is so averse to cultural specificity—except the Afro-American traditions he’s rooted in—that listening to it can feel like a sterile game of spot-the-style. This aversion extends to the lyrics too, though that might be a generous description for Batiste’s banal affirmations of kumbaya solidarity. “Speak to me nicely,” he pleads on tropical-pop-by-numbers cut “Raindance,” while the English-Spanish-Korean reggae-pop of “Be Who You Are”—featuring guest verses from JID, Camilo, and NewJeans—never escapes the drag of its painfully sincere titular exhortation. The nadir of this motivational-poster lyricism is hydro-homies anthem “Drink Water”—featuring Jon Bellion and Fireboy DML—with its insistent reminders to, you guessed it, drink water. When Batiste does get a little more specific—reminding us that he loves Black folks, white folks, Asians, Africans, Republicans, and Democrats on “Be Who You Are”—he betrays a perspective that, despite the grand one-world rhetoric, remains solidly American.
Unsurprisingly, it’s only when Batiste turns inward, toward the personal and the biographical, that World Music Radio finds solid ground. Piano ballad “Butterfly”—written for his wife Suleika Jaouad, who is recovering from a second battle with cancer—may be primo schmaltz, but it is elevated by the heart Batiste puts into it. Arena-sized love-rocker “Wherever You Are” similarly soars on the incandescent passion of his full-throated voice. There are too few displays of such engaged, emotional songwriting to make up for the album’s surfeit of awkwardly assembled clunkers: the high-budget Muzak of “Clair de Lune” (featuring, of all people, Kenny G), the inadvertently hilarious country-gospel of “Master Power,” the synth-cheese overload of the sickly sweet “Calling Your Name.”
On interlude “Goodbye, Billy Bob”—the album’s closing statement of sorts—Batiste’s galaxy-trotting griot says, “Love you even if I don’t know you.” Which is a lovely sentiment, really. But to love someone is to want to know them, to try and understand what makes them tick. To love a piece of music is to try to know the person who made it and the cultural, personal, and emotional contexts within which it was made, however imperfect and subjective that knowledge may be. It is that attempt at knowing—finding connections and commonalities with the part of themselves that an artist puts into their work—that really gives music its power to remind us of our shared humanity. Barring a few notable exceptions, World Music Radio is so beholden to its premise—so enfeebled by Batiste’s insistence on universality—that it offers up few opportunities to get to know Batiste himself: his stories, his struggles, his euphoric victories and devastating losses. That absence leaves the record feeling hollow, like a pretty house where no one lives. | 2023-08-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-18T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | Verve / Interscope | August 18, 2023 | 5.6 | 7e4e1e91-a94a-45b8-ac52-e101eded487c | Bhanuj Kappal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/bhanuj-kappal/ | |
The Japanese avant-rock trio pair on their latest release with famous dub producer Adrian Sherwood, whose mixing-desk manipulations blow the trio's sound wide open. | The Japanese avant-rock trio pair on their latest release with famous dub producer Adrian Sherwood, whose mixing-desk manipulations blow the trio's sound wide open. | Nisennenmondai: #N/A | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21626-na/ | #N/A | In the beginning, the Japanese avant-rockers Nisennenmondai made no secret of their influences. Tracks on 2004's Neji EP bore titles like "Pop Group," "This Heat," and "Sonic Youth," and for good reason. On guitar, drums, and bass, the trio whipped up a ferocious, muscular racket scarred with pockets of deep silence—a post-punk template shot through with the ghosts of dub and free noise.
Over the years, they've moved away from the prickly aggression of their early records and toward a sleeker, more measured form, one equally informed by Krautrock's steady burble and minimal techno's crosshatched textures. It's as if they started out brandishing a misshapen lump of scrap metal and have proceeded to hammer it out into a long, linear shape, perfectly proportioned. And I do mean long: Their tracks routinely run to 10 or 12 or 14 minutes, and they increasingly feel less like individual songs than outtakes of a single continuum. After touring their 2013 album N, they decided that the material's metronomic clatter had evolved enough that it merited a re-recording for a new release, N', in which it's not so much the songs that have changed as the air and the light around them. In its rigor and regularity, all of the trio's work this decade sounds like a tribute to Agnes Martin's grid drawings. It's the tiny variations within their repeated structures where the crucial differences happen, where life dwells. Nisennenmondai might be the world's most disciplined jam band.
Their new album, #N/A, proceeds directly from their last two. Its opening track, "#1," might as well be a continuation of N and N''s respective openers, "A" and "A'." It sounds like a teletype in a hurricane. But they're also stretching out and exploring new territory here. Where "#1" and "#5" are quickstepping as ever—somewhere near 150 BPM, a tempo that requires gargantuan feats of concentration and muscle control to rein in their tightly interlocking rhythms when they play live—they slow down slightly on "#2." At under four minutes long, "#3" is both one of the shortest songs they've done in ages and also the one that comes closest to approximating actual techno, with undulating drones that sound uncannily like Richie Hawtin and Steve Bug's ultra-minimal anthem "Low Blow," from 2002.
But there is an important shift on the new record: the addition of On-U Sound's Adrian Sherwood, the British producer and dub wizard, whose mixing-desk manipulations blow the trio's sound wide open, from two dimensions into three or four. His addition helps them shift even further from the associations that usually cling to the typical rock-trio lineup—aside from Sayaka Himeno's diamond-tipped hi-hats, nothing here sounds like what it actually is. Masako Takada's guitar swerves between hollow drones and whippoorwilling trills and a porous, soft-hard spray like a sandblaster full of nail clippings. Yuri Zaikawa's bass is either pure rhythm or pure shadow. Together, they all sound like exploding clockworks, and even more so when Sherwood lassoes individual sounds and whips them to and fro.
Against the trio's unflinching sense of discipline, he represents something closer to chaos; to their ceaseless repetition he brings unpredictability. In "#5," gunshots ring out, and so does a typewriter bell; it's unclear what those sounds really are, or where they may have come from. Summoned or not, through the magic of dub, they simply appear. Sherwood's manipulations remain relatively restrained on the five studio cuts, but on two live tracks, he really goes to town, twisting delay knobs and reeling off serpentine licks that magnify the aberrations of the trio's straight-ahead groove. There may be no artist more committed to the line as a creative medium than Nisennenmondai; projected through Sherwood's spacetime-distorting lens, their vision of infinity becomes all the more engrossing. | 2016-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-01T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | On-U Sound | April 1, 2016 | 7.8 | 7e4edebd-871e-487e-9b45-b367b0545d20 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
After an illness, Will Wiesenfeld channeled his pent-up frustrations and desires-- for escape, for artistic growth, for transformation, for death, for self-actualization-- into Obsidian, a significantly darker record than Cerulean. | After an illness, Will Wiesenfeld channeled his pent-up frustrations and desires-- for escape, for artistic growth, for transformation, for death, for self-actualization-- into Obsidian, a significantly darker record than Cerulean. | Baths: Obsidian | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18065-baths-obsidian/ | Obsidian | Will Wiesenfeld wanted his second album as Baths to be nothing short of an out-of-body experience. While creating, producing, and performing Cerulean by himself may have been a declaration of independence at one point, he soon felt trapped and limited behind his MPDs, unable to fully connect with crowds, and mislabeled as a "DJ." More crucially, his physical frame was failing him. Last year, a debilitating bout with E. coli rendered him incapable of eating or getting out of bed, let alone creating new music. After slowly convalescing, he channeled all of these pent-up frustrations and desires-- for escape, for artistic growth, for transformation, for death, for self-actualization-- into Obsidian. And by doing so, he didn’t just create his second album. He made an evil twin.
While Obsidian maintains some aspects of Cerulean, namely, its lap-pop intimacy and Wiesenfeld's unsteady, quavering vocals, the shock is in hearing him make a complete heel turn, fearlessly operating like someone absolved of personal repercussion or culpability: He pursues every gnarly musical idea, every perverted lyric. Cerulean gave no indication as to how much range Wiesenfeld could cover working exclusively in purple and pitch black. Over the sickly, chain-gang lurch of “Worsening”, Wiesenfeld's weary recitations serve as both an introduction to his newly florid, morbid poetry, and Obsidian’s thesis statement-- “Birth was like a fat black tongue/ Dripping tar and dung and dye/ Slowly into my shivering eyes." As to be expected from someone whose body was recently powerless over the most basic functions, Wiesenfeld sees death in everything. Tall rock shelves and an overcast atmosphere are viewed as exits to the afterlife on “Miasma Sky”, an advance single that gave the impression that Baths’ idea of pop was a suicidal version of what the Postal Service do. He can’t prevent himself from being sucked into the ground as the molten, heavy metal banger “Earth Death” creates its own gravitational pull.
Throughout, the songs on Obsidian are physical in a literal sense, mimicking the human motion of the characters described therein. The collation of disparate layers on “Worsening” is simply astonishing, so many parts going in gawky, arrhythmic directions to form a fearsome, fluid whole. The illicit love affair on “Ironworks” moves to a limpid Satie-like piano figure of incapacitating beauty, containing all the sadness, longing, and tenderness the two feel for each other. Meanwhile, the stunning breadth of Obsidian becomes apparent as “Incompatible” skulks forward, non-quantized rhythms emphasizing the fumbled communication and resentments of an ice-cold relationship.
The physicality and darkness aren’t just borne out of a 24-year-old’s first brush with death. Obsidian is in some aspect a “grown up” record in that the characters find themselves in adult situations. But they aren’t mature by any means. In fact, the sexual conduct is fueled by as much nihilism as the apocalyptic conjuring. This is really where Obsidian feels less like a typical artistic “leap” than a bold leap of faith. Vocally, Wisenfeld was a bit player on Cerulean, and often would whisper sweet little love notes: “Please tell me you need me,” “I still smell you, distance aside.” On “Ironworks,” he likens himself to “Sweet swine/ In Victorian doorways/ In tempestuous foreplay,” and that’s as cute as things get.
Otherwise, it’s brutal stuff: anonymous sex is pursued and consummated in a manner as merciless and cold as the mechanical animal beat of “No Eyes”: “It is not a matter of if you mean it/ But it is only a matter of come and fuck me.” Even more unsettling is “Incompatible”, which is of a piece with “No Eyes”, the same poisonous self-seeking and carnal misconduct brought much closer to home. Wiesenfeld deftly sets the scene by utilizing the connotations embedded in the unflattering aspects of cohabitation-- a shared toilet seat, an unmade bed with “covers in divisive heaps.” From there on out, he plays a manipulative, abusive, loveless lover where the sexual demands (“Nights you roll over and introduce yourself/ Nurse this erection back to full health”) are somehow less cruel than the gutwrenching asides you might hear at the dinner table: “You don’t do anything with your life /I could prod your hurt all night.” While the narrator admits, “I was never poetic and I was never kind,” only half rings true for Wiesenfeld.
These wouldn’t be shocking lyrics within the catalogs of Xiu Xiu or Perfume Genius, who, if not peers, are certainly precedents for the immersive, ornate, and homoerotic songwriting Baths engages in here. But provocation is a main goal for Jamie Stewart and Mike Hadreas, who maintain deadly serious and combative personae on and off-record; they push buttons and boundaries, but in doing so, they allow their work and its subject matter to be considered “outsider art,” easily spotted and easily avoided. Though Wiesenfeld is very open and candid about his sexuality, the predominant image he’s cast is that of a constantly smiling, muttonchopped young man who gushes about anime and Skyrim on Twitter. In that sense, the gregarious and genial Wiesenfeld has created a more subversive work by getting uncomfortably close to pop, confronting closed minds with what they don’t want to believe-- that the supposedly impure or deviant behavior described in “No Eyes” or “Incompatible” or “Ironworks” isn’t relegated to any race, class, gender, or sexual orientation, that it can’t be simply ignored or pinned on the outwardly misanthropic. Whether it’s repressed or engaged with as powerfully as it is on Obsidian, the dark matter lives inside all of us. If you hear Obsidian and think, “I didn’t know he had it in him,” what sticks is how he makes you wonder if you have “it” in you as well. | 2013-05-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-05-28T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Anticon | May 28, 2013 | 8.6 | 7e54c674-ee9a-4446-ab57-f1c31971e7b6 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | 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 Prodigy’s testosterone-fuelled U.S. invasion. | 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 Prodigy’s testosterone-fuelled U.S. invasion. | The Prodigy: The Fat Of the Land | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-prodigy-the-fat-of-the-land/ | The Fat Of the Land | Before the turn of the millennium, a multiracial trio of British ravers topped the American charts with “Smack My Bitch Up,” a smash that, depending on your point of view, was either revolting or revolutionary. It was one part scatological genius Kool Keith of the legendary Ultramagnetic MCs; one part beloved SP-1200 sampler; one part Rage Against the Machine. The men responsible were the Prodigy, icons in their native England rave scene. The idea of a rave icon hadn’t really worked yet in America, in part because the movement of more or less anonymous producers rejecting the star system while taking drugged-up dancers on days-long trips didn’t easily fit into market capitalism. Clearly, there was potential in this electronic hedonism. But it would take a troll to make it pop.
Born in 1971, Liam Howlett grew up in the naff suburbs of Braintree, a county in Essex, a region still lampooned to this day. He cut his teeth on hip-hop: His first concert was Afrika Bambaataa and Word of Mouth at Wembley stadium. In 1986, he went to London, but after a disastrous run at a rap career, he returned to Braintree and like so many white men of his English generation, necked an E at a rave and found his path.
Howlett DJed parties throughout England’s fabled Second Summer of Love in 1988, when acid house and its culture of carefree hedonism took over the country. He spent the next year or two also learning to make music on a Roland W-30 Sampler Workstation and Moog Prodigy. One night, Howlett was DJing a beach party when a wanderer and rave regular named Keith Flint praised his set and asked for a mixtape; Howlett gave him one, and some demos. Since Flint’s upcoming trip to Thailand was canceled due to a bust for weed possession, he suggested Howlett form a band with him and his friend Leeroy Thornhill. Howlett had written the word “Prodigy” on that tape, as a boast or a tribute to his faithful Moog, or both. The name took.
At the time, a clutch of rave anthems had already sold well in the UK, but they sold better when turned into novelties. In 1991, the Prodigy arrived with their own lark, “Charly,” mixing standard hardcore piano riffs and a few sped-up rap staples with eerie samples from a 1973 PSA in which a treacly young boy is policed by an actual cat named Charly. Techno was getting harder and darker, with brutal offshoots like gabber gathering steam. This kind of cartoon rave was, well, fun, especially when heard in the throes of ecstasy.
But the novelty of “Charly” was tailed by copycats until there could be said to be an entire “toytown techno” scene, breakbeat-powered and helium-voiced. If you’re looking for what the Intelligent DanceMusic dudes categorized themselves against, it was this. The cat was an albatross around Howlett’s neck. Mixmag infamously put him on the cover holding a gun to his head above the words, “Did Charly kill rave?”
Undeterred, Howlett went on building tracks entirely by himself, culminating in a hit debut album, 1992’s Experience and its five hit singles. He followed it with a kaleidoscopic concept album, 1994’s Music for the Jilted Generation, which changed the channel from children’s television to the nightly news. Jilted was in part an attack against the UK’s muddled but malevolent Criminal Justice Act, which increased police power nationwide and, in a rave crackdown, sought to outlaw the playing of “repetitive beats.” Liner notes set the agenda—”How can the government stop young people having a good time? Fight this bollocks”—which was seconded by Les Edward’s interior spread, of a bunch of hippies with a giant sound system, flipping off the cops. Howlett spent months touring the album in America with a full-on rave spectacle, Flint and Thornhill and new MC Keith “Maxim Reality” Palmer in tow to hype the crowd.
American critics adored Jilted, but the growing number of domestic dance fans mostly didn’t. “The Prodigy’s full-dress tour (matching tracksuits and choreography) didn’t impress many U.S. rave kids, who wanted things stripped down,” writes Michaelango Matos in his comprehensive The Underground is Massive: How Electronic Dance Music Conquered America. Matos quotes one of them shrugging off Flint, who “runs around, makes weird faces, sticks out his tongue, and basically has an epileptic seizure.” Jilted didn’t even make the Billboard 200. But there was gold in those antics, just waiting to be mined.
The mid-’90s in America was a time of testeria, a masculinized panic at the small steps toward equality made by women, the LGBTQ community, and people of color. Men experienced even the threat of a slight slip in status like a slap to the face. In a 1993 essay for Newsweek called “White Male Paranoia,” the writer David Gates made their case: “Generations of white males judged women and minorities not by what they did but by what they were. Turnabout is fair play. White men are now beginning to say: only fair play is fair play.” Talk about a jilted generation.
Fin-de-siècle pop culture played along. Proto-incels mistook Chuck Palahniuk for Charles Atlas, as if Fight Club’s ironic exegesis of the closet were actually macho boosterism. “Friends” and “Seinfeld” lionized developmentally arrested males who chafed at the inconveniences of their white and almost entirely heterosexual world. Perhaps relatedly, there was a feeling that rock’n’roll, like straight white men, was in dire straits. After grunge, what was left for men and their guitars? Hip-hop took over as a force of cultural rebellion, and however brilliant and multi-faceted its examination of capitalism and power and race, women struggled to be heard. A woman wouldn’t top the Billboard Hip-Hop charts as part of a group until the Fugees in 1996; a woman wouldn’t do it herself until Foxy Brown in 1999.
Dance music was certainly male enough to make it in America, though it wasn’t exactly macho. Howlett abandoned the “U.S. rave kids” who thought they were poseurs and injected the poison of toxic masculinity. “Firestarter” arrived in March of 1996, announcing the debut of Keith Flint as frontman in a black and white video through which his charisma shown in Technicolor. He mugged and acted the fratboy fool, wearing a stars and stripes sweater, ball-bearing necklace, an inverted Mohawk, and some Alice Cooper eyeliner. If men couldn’t be kings, court jesters still got the mic.
”We’ve always said in interviews we didn’t want to be a techno band,” he told The Face in 1996. “We want to be an alternative dance band with energy….I wanted to make something more anarchic.” The end result was somehow less anarchic than his earlier work, but certainly more accessible. It was also unlike another next-big-thing, the Chemical Brothers, who had slowed back down rave’s hyperspeed breaks into rap tempos decorated with classic rock guitars like scarves across table lamps.
But Flint brought real chaos. “I’m a firestarter, twisted firestarter,” he snarled, drunk on the Molotov mocktail of noise. His bad-boy schtick was about as dangerous as Bart Simpson, but then it had only been a few years since the first President Bush had called the “The Simpsons” a threat to the nation. Crucially, Flint invited the audience to join in the chant: “You’re a firestarter, twisted firestarter!” America accepted. England might have clutched their pearls over the dangers of pyromania—when the video aired on “Top of the Pops” the BBC received even more complaints than when the Sex Pistols and Siouxsie cursed their way into legend—but “Firestarter” launched a major-label bidding war won by Madonna. When her Maverick imprint released The Fat of the Land that summer, it debuted at the top of the charts.
Fat is an album of jock jams in JNCOs. “Breathe” rides a synth line like a surf guitar, with Maxim squealing and groaning lyrics like “psychosomatic, addict, insane,” over a beat that swings like a Red Hot Chili Pepper’s tube sock. “Climbatize” has the nerve to further inflate the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” adding a thrilling Incredible Bongo Band beat and cinematic atmospherics sourced from Egyptian Empire’s breakbeat classic “The Horn Track.” It’s a fun tribute; for all their rebellious posturing, Prodigy respected their dance music forefathers. And imitated their rock ones: “Narayan,” featuring the singer of Kula Shakur, is a slightly soggy take on Revolver’s “Tomorrow Never Knows.” It’s not surprising that The Face overheard Noel Gallagher praise Howlett as “the only credible songwriter in dance music.”
The album’s real highlight is “Mindfields,” a Jenga of drums that threatens to topple but instead just gets bigger and stronger and heavier. “Open up your head, feel the shell-shock,” Maxim commands. The kind of wobble that would return as dubstep just tenses and flexes at this moment in time, never quite dropping; the arrangement is a master class in dynamics, ready to explode.
What actually exploded was the album’s third single, “Smack My Bitch Up.” Maverick convinced the boys to take the word off the back cover, but Kmart and Walmart stopped selling the album anyway. Gloria Steinem called its lyrics “hate literature.” The newly woke Beastie Boys asked Prodigy not to play the song during their joint appearance at the Reading Festival. They refused, announcing from the stage with a pout, “We do what the fuck we want.” Jonas Åkerland’s video fanned the flames; a schlock treatment filmed in first-person, its cheap plot twist argued boys might be boys, but women can be, too. Still, MTV banned it and then caved to calls of censorship, airing an edited version late at night.
In his rave history Generation Ecstasy, Simon Reynolds described with admiration their “apolitical update of punk offering post-grunge kids an aerobic workout for their frustration and aggression.” But Prodigy were political, and not only because there’s no such thing as apolitical, or because Jilted raised its own flags. Fat was an attempt to make rave butch again, even though it never really had been in the first place. “Everyone really happy and on a good vibe and speaking to each other…I found it boring,” Howlett told SPIN in 1997. “I wanted to go out and be moody again.”
And you didn’t have to take Prodigy literally to take them seriously. “Change my pitch up/Smack my bitch up,” could be moodiness couched in misogyny; it could be castration anxiety; it could be the Ramones singing, “Beat on the brat with a baseball bat/oh yeah, oh yeah, uh-oh.” It wasn’t satire, a la Aphex Twin’s contemporaneous “Come to Daddy,” which inflated chauvinism until it burst. Flint was a troll: He was serious if you said he was joking and vice versa, all just to get under your skin.
Howlett’s response to all the fuss hinged on a dubious read of hip-hop and the timeless male privilege of faux idiocy. “Like with Public Enemy,” he told SPIN. “I'm not into what Chuck D was talking about. I liked it on a dumb level—the beats, the way his voice sounded. I wanted to hear Flavor Flav going, ‘Yeah, boyee!’ I wanted to hear the dumb aspects of his music, that's what I was into.”
”I have a philosophy,” Howlett prophesied in that SPIN article, “that our music works on a really dumb level, which is the level that most people understand.” Today, The Fat Of the Land is easy to swallow, even if mix of party-on and patriarchy leaves a strange taste in the mouth. As usual, Kim Deal knows the score. “Firestarter” was, after all, built on women’s work: that charmed and pissed-off “Hey!” throughout belonged to Anne Dudley, one of the virtuosos behind Art of Noise; the song’s raucous guitar line belonged to Deal, whose Breeders track “S.O.S.” birthed it. “Since I own, like, a quarter of [”Firestarter”]…I root for them since they used a song of mine,” she told the A.V. Club in 2009. “It’s like I’m in the biology club and they’re in the football team, you know?” With The Fat Of the Land, they packed the stadiums. | 2018-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | XL / Maverick | August 19, 2018 | 5.9 | 7e54cde1-44e1-4820-a846-bf84f0d87dda | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
On his new nine-song EP Venis, the Drake-cosigned Toronto singer Ramriddlz displays all the poise of a nerdy kid brother learning how not to speak to women, one spectacular embarrassment at a time. | On his new nine-song EP Venis, the Drake-cosigned Toronto singer Ramriddlz displays all the poise of a nerdy kid brother learning how not to speak to women, one spectacular embarrassment at a time. | Ramriddlz: Venis | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21788-venis/ | Venis | The ascendant buzz of Toronto singer Ramriddlz is a testament to the enduring magnetism of his city's current chief cultural ambassador, Drake. In a little over a year, Ram went from total obscurity as a graphic design student to consultation with Drake's manager and OVO Sound co-founder Oliver El-Khatib, thanks to "Sweeterman," a horned-up jingle about convincing a girl to smoke weed with him. The song is a summer breeze, comforting waves of keys ebbing and cresting as Ram mumbles clumsy come-ons through a thicket of AutoTune. Drake, ever the eagle-eyed revisionist, scrubbed the teenage-pothead chaff off the lyric sheet and presented "Sweeterman" as a straightforward bedroom jam for the inaugural edition of his Beats 1 OVO Sound Radio show. Ramriddlz soldiered on without his signature song, releasing a marginally well-received EP called P2P —"Pussy Too Pink," natch—to capitalize on the sudden windfall of media attention.
Ramriddlz has returned this month with a new nine-song project called Venis, and like P2P, which arrived with a suggestively vaginal kaleidoscope of a rose as artwork, the cover art here—a digital rendering of a juicy peach in water—relays exactly where this kid's head is. Venis is full of gooey bedroom talk, delivered in an affected patois that combines humid dancehall temptation and plaintive Toronto sound malaise. In capable hands, this is a platinum combination, but Ramriddlz is hammy, amateurish, and touristic in his approach. His lines are forced and leaden. In "Play" alone, there are three clunkers that rank among the year's worst. ("You said I'm cheesy and you lactose," "Let's get wavy by the ocean," "I'm rolling and I'm getting stoned / Baby I'm a rolling stoner.") Another song called "Baeby" actually petitions for oral sex with a withering "Hakuna matata."
Venis displays all the poise of a nerdy kid brother learning how not to speak to women one spectacular embarrassment at a time, but just as exasperating as the lyrics, which are somehow even more bantamweight than "Sweeterman," is Ram's shaky grasp on melody. On the low end, he employs a soothing Drake-ish croon, the same one being run into obsolescence by scores of adopters around Toronto and beyond. It's Venis' saving grace on highlights "Left, Right" and "Bodmon," cuts where the singer leans back as his producers carry him to the hooks. But these peaks are too often offset by the shrill bleat at the other end of his register, a grating wobbly tone processed within an inch of humanity by pitch-correcting software, one assumes, because Ram can't quite nail the actual notes. When he sails up an octave in the second verse of the single "Hey Mr. RamRod" to ask a girl to let him in the "kitty kat," it sounds like he's trying to strangle one instead.
Ramriddlz doesn't bring much to Venis that any number of other singers couldn't, provided the right strains of bud and shamelessness. The real treat, then, is the music tasked with washing out his voice, shared between "Sweeterman" maestro Jaegen, Hoodie Allen collaborator RJF, and 1Mind. Together, they bring a respect for the architecture of modern dancehall that their singer can't quite hack. Where these songs float, it is because of the ultralight sonics underfoot, not the unsure fake patois over top. 1Mind's soaring "Baeby" airlifts Ram by way of a pulsating groove not even a string of bad puns and fake Jadakiss ad libs can quell. "Venis" pulls a dizzying hard left into downcast house in its last minute as the singer prattles on, Auto Tune so thick he may as well be another synth in the mix. Really, this is a producer's project.
How much this music successfully entertains is directly rooted in how easily the center attraction can be tuned out, because on Venis, Ramriddlz's shtick wears gratingly thin. Though there are moments when he locks into his production and fires off easy hooks and turns of phrase, a numbingly foolish lyric pops up every couple lines. The aim is slackness, the more adroitly sexual end of the dancehall spectrum, but by and large, this stuff isn't sexy, unless Ram's promise of semen that tastes like Chick-fil-A Polynesian sauce sounds like a good time. If Ramriddlz is going to last beyond the quick, bright heat of a choice Drake cosign, it'll be by honing songwriting smarts to match the lush production he lucked into. Venis volleys between the vapid and the bizarre in search of the absurdist magic of "Sweeterman," when what was really needed was refinement. | 2016-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 29, 2016 | 4.5 | 7e551dbb-edf0-4644-bb4e-9d84aff8166f | Craig Jenkins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/craig-jenkins/ | null |
The UK duo’s ambitious second album has an alluring and unclassifiable sound. Rarely has a hybrid of new wave and experimental electronic music led to such an introspective place. | The UK duo’s ambitious second album has an alluring and unclassifiable sound. Rarely has a hybrid of new wave and experimental electronic music led to such an introspective place. | RAP: EXPORT | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rap-export/ | EXPORT | The elements of EXPORT sound familiar, but the way they have been put together is anything but. Because the album draws from deeply rooted subgenres like dub techno, gabber, shoegaze, and post-punk, it could have been simply a record collector’s ultimate fetish object, but its ambitions extend far beyond ticking off the boxes of yesterday’s niche sounds. RAP’s Thomas Bush and Guy Gormley have joined sounds and ideas generally thought to be incompatible in ways that fundamentally deepen the mystery of each one.
The effect the UK duo achieve is neither explicitly futuristic nor obviously retro. Its path slices through the sooty gloom of Margaret Thatcher’s early reign and the hangar-like raves of Rotterdam a decade later, yet it sounds explicitly now, even though it doesn’t sound much like any other electronic music being made at the moment. And although EXPORT draws energy from momentous youth movements of yore and is shot through with field-recorded scraps of contemporary city life, it feels less like an album about communal experience than a record informed by life under headphones.
That RAP are not well known deepens the intrigue. So does their name. Cut loose from its most obvious connotation, it floats untethered from meaning, like a word you’ve repeated so long it begins to sound like nonsense. The available information about the group (which is not much) pales against the moving, enigmatic qualities of the music itself—like the way a searching piano etude collapses into a what might be a smartphone recording of roosting birds, or a gentle folktronic ballad is cut short by the oppressive din of public transport.
But there are breadcrumbs scattered throughout the duo’s catalog that lead to this singular achievement. Bush—a visual artist whose work has encompassed typography, stone engraving, and baking—released a strange, morose album of lopsided synth pop last year in which, depending on how you squinted, you might also detect strains of post-rock, goth, or African music. Gormley, a photographer and curator, has the lengthier discography. As Enchante, he has been putting out dance 12"s since 2011, steadily developing a woolly style of left-field house. As a co-founder of Jolly Discs, the label behind EXPORT, he has also had a hand in most of the label’s records, cycling through a handful of ideas with a small set of collaborators. Along the way, this insular crew’s often inscrutable aesthetic has morphed and drifted, but it snaps sharply into focus here, even if it remains difficult to name.
RAP’s debut album, 2015’s Let’s Get Serious, felt largely like a pastiche of early-’80s synth pop, but EXPORT is unique. The album’s sullen opening chords sketch out a dub-techno feel but offer little indication of how far and how quickly the album will travel. Over 34 minutes, its eight tracks flow almost like a DJ set. “Baptism,” the opening song, steadily gathers force, whipping clanging chords and trap snares into a pensive whirlwind that builds and builds. “Ruin” picks up the pile-driving beat and wraps it in a strange, eerily bright melody that sounds like Seefeel tackling medieval folk. The bass drum falls away for a while, but the rave-tested pulse returns for “No Mixer,” in which steel-drum synths play unabashed trance melodies over a bass drum that lands with the weight of a medicine ball. Caught between proto-techno and post-everything, these songs have a dizzying way of collapsing eras together.
If that were all there was to EXPORT, it would be plenty, but what makes the album truly exceptional are the duo’s vocals, sung in an untutored baritone. There’s an uncanny resemblance to vintage new wave that contributes to the music’s strangeness: Heard without context, you might wonder if these are old songs that were decades before their time. The lyrics are less important than the simple sound of their voices—flat and smooth, like stones at the bottom of a river. In “Young Persuasion,” their gnomic commands (“Veer away from tradition/Turn away for an act of young persuasion”) mirror the agile bassline’s rise and fall; in “Static,” their call-and-response refrain takes on the quality of an internal dialogue, rounding out the melancholy depths of their sound.
That interiority defines the album. This is hardly the first record in recent memory to combine post-punk influences with contemporary electronic production, but what distinguishes EXPORT is the way RAP use their unlikely fusion as a way of accessing untapped feelings: Rarely have beats like these led to such an introspective place. The closing “NSEW Ravers” is a bittersweet blend of house beats and indie guitars that sounds a little like Hot Chip filtered through Burial’s nostalgic gaze. “To the north, south, east, west/All I ever wanted was a bit of perspective,” they sing, their voices layered and low, and then the hi-hats peter out and the keyboards die away, leaving us with another audio snapshot captured on a handheld recorder: steady footsteps, barking dogs, and wind whipping across the surface of the microphone. It’s not entirely clear where we have ended up, but, looking back over a landscape entirely of their own invention, it’s a hell of a view. | 2019-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-03-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Jolly Discs | March 14, 2019 | 8.4 | 7e55dc7c-9389-41ad-8e27-2a23160fb25e | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Though 40 years have passed between albums, roots reggae legend Max Romeo's latest picks up right where the classic Lee “Scratch” Perry-produced War Ina Babylon left off. | Though 40 years have passed between albums, roots reggae legend Max Romeo's latest picks up right where the classic Lee “Scratch” Perry-produced War Ina Babylon left off. | Max Romeo: Horror Zone | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22106-horror-zone/ | Horror Zone | If you’ve not heard Max Romeo’s 1976 classic Lee “Scratch” Perry produced War Ina Babylon, please do so before taking a listen to Horror Zone. It will clearly demonstrate that this is not a comeback album. Though it has been 40 years, this record is simply picking up where *War *left off: an exhilarating collection of roots and reggae. Romeo, he of more than two dozen albums and countless singles—the most famous of which being the Jay Z-sampled “Chase the Devil”—has been making and performing music in Jamaica and around the world for half a century, and that same number of years could be applied to many of the contributing artists on this record as well as the equipment used to make the thing.
To capture just the right feel, the recording process required the use of Boyle’s Rolling Lion Studio, in pure 1970s Black-Ark style. And for those who are interested in the ins and outs of equipment, the liner notes indicate just what types of compressors, consoles, and mics were used to capture these songs that were tracked live—just as was done nearly 50 years ago. Three veterans of Lee Perry’s Upsetters anchor the album in the era: Saxophonist Glen Da Costa, trombonist Vin Gordon, and keyboard stalwart Robbie Lyn. Da Costa and Gordon are also veterans of the famous Alpha Boys’ School as well as Bob Marley’s band. On top of all this, famed artist Tony Wright, who has worked with artists from the Ramones to the Meters to Marley, was called on to paint the cover—he’d painted the image for War Ina Babylon.
In addition to all this attention to historical detail is the fact that each tune is as pointed lyrically and as full musically as any album from the period many call reggae’s golden era. Kicking off with Romeo asking the question “What if I tell you that the world is in trouble?,” the whole of the record provides examples of this trouble and lays bare many of the causes and effects of corruption, colonialism and ongoing war.
Each of the nine songs on the record has an accompanying deep, heavy dub version that clearly demonstrates both inspiration and involvement of Scratch (and he’s credited for vocals and classic effects on three of the dubs). The echo of guitar on the “What If Version,” for instance, seems to let the song breathe, filling in spaces with delay and dings of a xylophone that sounds more like the ring of a distant toy piano. It’s playful and haunting at the same time.
This collection actually started out as a Kickstarter project by British producer Daniel Boyle. Boyle had more than a little success back in 2013 with a Kickstarter that made Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Back on the Controls possible. Not only was that record also recorded in the same studio with all the vintage gear, but it was nominated for a Grammy. Given the equal attention to every detail on Horror Zone, it wouldn’t be surprising if the Romeo/Boyle connection would lead to a repeat. Horror Zone demonstrates that there is a reason roots and culture sounds remain strong, and that in troubled times we need conscious voices more than ever. Who better to comment than the man who offered to “chase the devil out of earth?”
CORRECTION: In an earlier version of this review, Horror Zone was incorrectly referred to as Horror Show. | 2016-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Global | Nu-Roots | July 21, 2016 | 8 | 7e565344-e796-45dc-b60e-cd4d8af08fa6 | Erin MacLeod | https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-macleod/ | null |
Lyrically moody, musically sumptuous, and dramatic, this L.A. band's debut has commercial prospects-- it shows a surface-level familiarity with early 00s critics lists. | Lyrically moody, musically sumptuous, and dramatic, this L.A. band's debut has commercial prospects-- it shows a surface-level familiarity with early 00s critics lists. | The Airborne Toxic Event: The Airborne Toxic Event | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12191-the-airborne-toxic-event/ | The Airborne Toxic Event | I probably couldn't get anyone here in Los Angeles to admit it, but the city lacks a flasgship upstart indie band and wants one in the worst way-- one both a little fresher than Spin cover stars Beck and Rilo Kiley and with more mainstream potential than the bands from the Smell. The onus would likely fall on the folkier, cuddlier Silver Lake/Los Feliz scene, but over the past three years it feels as if the area's bands have failed to rise to the occasion.
It's no surprise that many are betting the house on the Airborne Toxic Event-- their debut album is lyrically moody, musically sumptuous, and dramatic. Their name is even a transparent DeLillo reference, and every one of the 10 tracks sounds like it can be preceded with radio chatter. The Airborne Toxic Event have done their homework. But unless you're a certain French duo, homework rarely results in good pop music, and The Airborne Toxic Event is an album that's almost insulting in its unoriginality; while the sound most outsiders attribute to Los Angeles has been marginalized to Metal Skool and the average customer at the Sunset Boulevard Guitar Center, TATE embodies the Hollywood ideal of paying lip service to the innovations of mavericks while trying to figure out how to reduce it to formula.
Throughout, the Airborne Toxic Event show a surface-level familiarity with early 00s critics lists, but aren't able to convey what made those much-lauded recods emotionally resonant. Can't convert unthinkable tragedy into cathartic, absolutely alive music like Arcade Fire? Just steal the drum pattern from "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)"? Can't connect with the listener with the same fourth-wall busting intimacy as Bright Eyes? That's when you trot out the run-on sentences and get all tremulous when you mean it, man. And that's just the first song. Not privy to the Strokes' accidental poetry and concise songwriting? Get a distorted microphone. Want a hit as big as "Mr. Brightside", but take yourself too seriously to conjure a semblance of juicy melodrama? Grab a half-assed disco beat and boom, you're now ready to write the limpdicked cuckold behind "Does This Mean You're Moving On?"
And while it's understandable that a debut should owe such enormous debts, what really rankles is the unrelenting entitlement that assumes cred via sonic proximity-- it's the musical equivalent of showing up to a bar with a bad fake ID and throwing a hissy-fit when you get carded. While lead singer Mikel Jollett can alternately sound like Paul Banks, Win Butler, Conor Oberst, or Matt Berninger, what ties the LP together is quite possibly the most unlikeable lyric book of the year, rife with empty dramatic signifiers, AA/BB simplicity, and casual misogyny. If Social Distortion did Bruce Springsteen instead of callow Johnny Cash fan fic, you might get the lock-limbed anti-rock of "Gasoline", but my god-- "We were only 17/ We were holding back our screams/ Like we tore it from the pages of some lipstick magazine." Before you can comprehend just how clichéd and yet somehow meaningless that line is, by the next hook he's replaced "screams" with "dreams" and "lipstick" with "girlie," before he's "only 21 [and] not having any fun." Then something about "bullets from a gun."
If only that were the low point. It pains me to pan "Sometime Around Midnight" on concept alone because, man, we've all been there. Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before: There's a club if you'd like to go...except maybe when you go home and cry and want to die, and it reduces you to putting your thoughts on paper in rhyme form. The next morning, you thank god no one's seen it but you. The Airborne Toxic Event aren't so private, alas. As the ill-fated narrator sees his ladyfriend in a "white dress" "holding a tonic like a cross" while "a piano plays a melancholy soundtrack to her smile" (what bars do these guys go to?). He imagines holding her naked "like two perfect circles entwined." After five minutes pass, she leaves with "some man you don't know" and then your friends look at you "like you've seen a ghost." There's a possibility this is just a po-mo exercise, writing a song about writing a song about how some girl not wanting to fuck you is some sort of epic human calamity, but judging by the out-of-nowhere string section that opens the thing for the first minute, I doubt these guys are playing. It begins a stunning about-face that finds the band spending the rest of the record trying to be Jimmy Eat World.
In a way, The Airborne Toxic Event is something of a landmark record: This represents a tipping point where you almost wish Funeral or Turn on the Bright Lights or Is This It? never happened as long as it spared you from horrible imitations like this one, often sounding more inspired by market research than actual inspiration. Congrats, Pitchfork reader-- the Airborne Toxic Event thinks you're a demographic. | 2008-09-17T01:00:03.000-04:00 | 2008-09-17T01:00:03.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rock | Majordomo | September 17, 2008 | 1.6 | 7e56db24-319e-4de4-be97-d6a2ef89dd7d | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Everyone in hip-hop roots for Atlanta rapper Key! His summery follow-up to last year’s break-out 777 offers more evidence why. | Everyone in hip-hop roots for Atlanta rapper Key! His summery follow-up to last year’s break-out 777 offers more evidence why. | Key!: SO EMOTIONAL | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/key-so-emotional/ | SO EMOTIONAL | Underground star Key! has a reputation as a rap trendsetter, championing talent like iLoveMakonnen, 21 Savage, and Playboi Carti early on in their careers. The 28-year-old is also known for his experimental and pioneering flows and adlibs, both delivered with insane ease. He was at his best on last year’s 777, his break-out collab with Kenny Beats. It’s an album that is a triumphant victory lap, navigating the unpredictable highs and lows encountered on his journey to adulthood. On the brief but substantial new release SO EMOTIONAL, he comfortably sticks to the fundamentals that have carried him through his career while leaning into a poppier pocket, and it works brilliantly.
The ability to sound at home on virtually any beat or production style is core to Key!’s artistry. His gut-hitting, honest bars sound just as at home on the scrappy, melody-driven cuts of his days with cult Atlanta rap outfit Two-9 and early solo tapes, as he does on the sparse-sounding 2014 cuts that exposed him to larger audiences, like the OG Maco collaboration “U Guessed It” and his guest verse on Father’s “Look At Wrist.”
On SO EMOTIONAL, the versatile rapper gets deep and let’s loose. A whirlwind, its eight tracks are super fun, as he raps through the extremes of romantic desire. By tapping a few different producers, he’s able to deftly hop in and out of different sonic realms in a tight space with signature ease.
The playful and anthemic opener “MOTHERLESS CHILD”, which showcases him flexing the high reaches of his singing voice, would be a welcome and actually cool replacement for play at a major sports event, with its catchy and sing-a-long hook of “We want what we want/We want it now.” “WHY” laments a taunting lover while sounding like the surprise contender for radio-ready poolside-pop-punk hit of the summer. Produced by Key!’s longtime collaborator TrapMoneyBenny (who’s now best known as one of the producers of Drake’s “In My Feelings”), it highlights the growth and versatility of two of the foremost soundcrafters of the first Soundcloud rap era.
The gloomy but urgent “YES OR NO” is an earnest pondering on where he and a love interest stand, that gets super real super fast, “I gotta love me/So I can love you.” Project stand-out “FALL HARD” is a banger reminiscent of an amusement park theme song on which an anguished Key! stretches words over cute video game-y synths to mirror the feeling of falling, and blasts the heart rate of the project up a notch. Through this track, produced by Philadelphia’s Oogie Mane of the quietly rising Working on Dying collective, and the spaced-out and spooky “HARD SOFT,” produced by Atlanta-via-Baltimore producer 14GOLDS, Key! reinforces that he’s still got his ear on the pulse of what sounds are bubbling.
Ultimately, at 19 minutes, the project is a travel-sized highlight reel and re-affirmation of Key!’s versatility in this moment of his career, and is a blast to listen to all the way through. It’s the kind of tape that has you choosing a new favorite song every few listens. Over the years, Key! has earned the title of rap’s unsung hero, and with 777, was able to step into high gear to prove that he’s your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper for a reason. Through SO EMOTIONAL, he solidifies he’s still tapped into that energy creatively and is continuing to innovate and set new blueprints for all that popular rap can be today. And by simultaneously communicating the distinct highs and lows of love so viscerally, he created one of the best summer love/summer heartbreak soundtracks of the year. | 2019-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Hello! | July 13, 2019 | 7.6 | 7e5a922f-54ca-445a-978f-275bf59d5900 | Nazuk Kochhar | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nazuk-kochhar/ | |
Featuring Skrillex, Rick Ross, Grimes, Kehlani, Lil Wayne, and many (many) others, the Suicide Squad OST feels as grim and stapled-together as the movie. | Featuring Skrillex, Rick Ross, Grimes, Kehlani, Lil Wayne, and many (many) others, the Suicide Squad OST feels as grim and stapled-together as the movie. | Various Artists: Suicide Squad: The Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22137-suicide-squad-the-album/ | Suicide Squad: The Album | John Ostrander began publishing the modern *Suicide Squad *series in May 1987, two months after Ronald Reagan broadcast his fatherly confusion about all that money sent to Nicaragua’s Contras. Gathering second-rate supervillains for a covert-ops team was both a reaction to the cynical politics of the era and an editorial necessity—you can show Captain Boomerang committing atrocities Batman never could. Movie soundtracks often feel similarly calculated: Some antiheroes get coerced into serving their government, and others form an unlikely partnership for the *Spawn *OST. You have an excuse to bury your worst material, or an opportunity to reconsider it. Following in the tradition of Judgment Night and Blade II, the *Suicide Squad *album tries to bring musical strangers to happy disagreement.
The affection holds, for a moment. If Skrillex had a secret origin, it would probably involve rock, techno and rap pooling in mutant coils at some point during the late ’90s, so pairing him up with Rick Ross for “Purple Lamborghini” is almost intuitive. And Ross sounds more energetic than he has in a while, the bass clawing down to his lowest frequencies. “Sucker for Pain” is credited to “Lil Wayne, Wiz Khalifa & Imagine Dragons w/Logic & Ty Dolla $ign ft. X Ambassadors,” a gloriously generic pileup of royalty negotiations featuring Dragon man Dan Reynolds moaning: “I wanna chain you up, I wanna tie you down/I’m a slave to your game.” That’s just called being a switch.
The best contributions here go to approximate extremes. The R&B singer Kehlani delivers lyrics as measured intimacies, and on “Gangsta” her voice slows to a mantra: “You got me hanging from the ceiling,” her high notes sounding both captivated and frustrated. With its whispered taunts, its guitars testing the constant drum machine like a blade, “Medieval Warfare” is Grimes’ most direct attempt to salvage the aesthetic of nu-metal. Panic! at the Disco’s Brendon Urie has the voice to bring off “Bohemian Rhapsody,” but that also encourages their cover’s reverence (for a moment I wondered whether the backing vocals were sampled from the original). The pleasure of “Bohemian Rhapsody” is its indifference to anybody else’s notions of taste, brandishing worthy historical references as preposterous camp, giving the metalheads pseudo-opera. Meticulously recreating that feels somewhat misguided, like annotating a joke.
According to anonymous-but-entertaining reports, Warner executives panicked after the first *Suicide Squad *teaser blew up online—instead of that hyper-saturated splatter, the actual film consisted of interchangeable paramilitary types looking drab in the rain. They hired back the trailer company to help with a different parallel cut, using familiar music cues to staple the final hybrid together. Listening to the *Suicide Squad *soundtrack resembles that experience, minus most of the hits. What you find is portentous covers, gun effects borrowed from a Joker toy, and Twenty One Pilots, a band whose singer addresses the microphone like his loyal pet rat. They don’t even rise from irritating to villainous, unless you have the misfortune of programming a modern-rock radio station.
The presence of Eminem’s “Without Me” is telling: Once a wrecker of civilization, now the bully who couldn’t even go after ‘NSync collectively. *Suicide Squad *wants to show you around its twisted mind so badly you would think the mortgage just defaulted. The earlier Batman films reckoned with far more vivid forms of ugliness, whether the brutalist pandemonium that Tim Burton and Anton Furst devised or Joel Schumacher’s daubs of neon, but then they also had reference points beyond existing nerd media. (And *Batman Forever *had “Kiss From a Rose.”) The new superhero universe is a cosmos of templates, endlessly elaborating on itself—which makes a soundtrack like Suicide Squad like the background music in a PowerPoint. | 2016-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Atlantic | August 9, 2016 | 4 | 7e5d65db-15da-4ada-b66b-381a85f6ed72 | Chris Randle | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-randle/ | null |
A timely reissue of this prescient Midwest emo band’s back catalog—including their second and best album—shows how they transformed sadness into searching euphoria. | A timely reissue of this prescient Midwest emo band’s back catalog—including their second and best album—shows how they transformed sadness into searching euphoria. | Rainer Maria: Look Now Look Again | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rainer-maria-look-now-look-again/ | Look Now Look Again | Rainer Maria met as 21-year-olds in a college poetry class; their feverish romanticism only spun out from there. Formed in 1995 at the University of Madison-Wisconsin, the trio—singer and bassist Caithlin De Marrais, singer and guitarist Kaia Fischer, drummer William Kuehn—named themselves after Rainer Maria Rilke, the Austrian poet with an acute understanding of sadness and its powers. As the textual glimmer of Midwest emo was taking shape, Rainer Maria’s particular approach to its artful expressiveness was especially thoughtful, searching, melodic, and diffuse. “Someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad,” Rilke wrote, an essential truth that Rainer Maria the band seemed to innately understand more than most of their emo peers. Sadness could be a means of becoming, of transformation, a way forward.
Released in 1999, Rainer Maria’s second and best album, Look Now Look Again, is the sound of three artists collectively undertaking the profound task of self-possession. Newly re-pressed to vinyl alongside the rest of Rainer Maria’s full-lengths, this barebones reissue includes only its glowing music. Still, the timing is auspicious: Look Now Look Again is one of the greatest albums of emo’s revered second wave, and it is evermore relevant as women’s vulnerability has become the center of independent rock at large. In 1999, Rainer Maria were more punk than American Football, more graceful than Braid—both eventual label- and tourmates. They were more feminine, in membership and feeling, than anything in emo’s history. “Centrifuge” refers, by name, to progesterone.
At 35 minutes that feel half as long, Look Now Look Again is viscerally engulfing. Open-tuned guitars evoke pastel shades. Sensitive drumming swells from a wisp to a crash in every chorus. De Marrais and Fischer turn shouts into conversations, their voices creating the achingly beautiful friction that comes with making fire from sticks. When they locate mountainous hooks, they push to the centers of them, carving their way to their raw cores and sewing their screams to the sky.
Rainer Maria had been a band for four years by the time they released Look Now; De Marrais and Fischer had been a couple just as long. “Most of the songs are about our relationship,” De Marrais admitted to SPIN, casting its narratives of fraying romance into stark relief. But De Marrais and Fischer also sing of electricity and sunsets, of driving with the windows down, of making out and tea. The catharsis of their momentous breakdowns drown out any twee preciousness. At times, their brash emo harmonies sound less like the Promise Ring’s blown-out gang vocals than Sleater-Kinney’s ecstatic entanglements on the iconic “One More Hour”—that is, if those ex-lovers were still trying to hold the pieces together. “And I’m certain, if I drive into those trees/It would make less of a mess/Than you’ve made of me,” De Marrais sings on “Broken Radio,” a definitive emo moment.
This bookish trio seemed to know and express feelings the way the Earth knows seasons. Look Now’s tectonic first two tracks made that clear. “Rise” winds open in slow, concentric circles, as its elliptical lyrics hint at the intuitive process of discerning when one is ready for something. De Marrais sings of prematurely picking “carnations” and “skinny daisies,” and the lyrics translate the spark of a new beginning: “I’m laying in the soil/Is it time for me to rise?” The song ends with chiming bells, as if marking an epiphany in motion. “Planetary,” meanwhile, pours down with the feeling of a colossal unknown, of wanting something more beyond the horizon, beyond yourself. De Marrais quietly describes this splendor—“The skyline is two gazes long”—while the song crawls and then bursts into bracing euphoria. Rainer Maria narrate the psychic fireworks that happen while you’re figuring out who you are and where you want to be.
The infatuated tenor of Look Now Look Again peaks with the record’s tender climax, “The Reason the Night Is Long,” which contains as enormous a hook as Rainer Maria ever found. It’s like Cummings or O’Hara in its dazzling ease: “Oh the reason the night is long/Is very simple,” goes its glittering refrain, a sentence that is left to hang gorgeously until their blistering shout that “Nothing I can do with you is wrong” crisscrosses it in the chorus. The song was written when Fischer left De Marrais alone, working a night job translating German insurance policies. It evokes the physicality of desire, of insides twisting. Rainer Maria were dreamers and romantics in a way that, especially here, still feels timeless.
In his 2003 history Nothing Feels Good: Punk Rock, Teenagers, and Emo, writer Andy Greenwald passingly refers to Rainer Maria as “kinda-sorta emo.” That ambivalence is telling. Perhaps Greenwald glossed over Rainer Maria because women’s plaintive vulnerability is not shocking in our culture, even if it has been repulsed by men since Joni Mitchell’s Blue in 1971. As Rainer Maria continued, they indeed became more aligned with indie rock broadly, even moving to Brooklyn in late 1999. But Look Now Look Again remains an undeniable classic of a time when emo broadcasted an ethic of intelligence.
Should its title be taken literally, Look Now Look Again is a fitting directive in 2018. Rainer Maria and this emo masterpiece set a precedent for bands including Rilo Kiley (who once opened for them on tour), Camp Cope (who have received no shortage of comparisons), and even Paramore (whose “Franklin” is clearly indebted to their sound). During “The Reason the Night Is Long,” Fischer sang, “Maybe this dim time is just twilight.” The line is about lovers, of course, but it could also apply to artists who were more ahead of their time than they could have known. Rainer Maria have arrived at their magic hour. | 2018-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl | November 29, 2018 | 8.3 | 7e5fe4f9-c4d4-4a23-a5eb-5b45377df4a4 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
NYC singer Ian Isiah's The Love Champion features beats that would turn Tricky Stewart's head, guest spots from Le1f and Mykki Blanco, and charismatic vocals drowned in AutoTune. Backed by producers like Sinjin Hawke, Brenmar, and ShyGuy, it's hard not to see parallels with Kelela's Cut 4 Me. | NYC singer Ian Isiah's The Love Champion features beats that would turn Tricky Stewart's head, guest spots from Le1f and Mykki Blanco, and charismatic vocals drowned in AutoTune. Backed by producers like Sinjin Hawke, Brenmar, and ShyGuy, it's hard not to see parallels with Kelela's Cut 4 Me. | Ian Isiah: The Love Champion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18805-ian-isiah-the-love-champion/ | The Love Champion | Underground electronic music artists used to admire the futuristic finesse of modern R&B from a distance, making endless bootleg edits of tracks to fit into their DJ sets. More and more, though, they're getting in on the game themselves. Hotly-tipped NYC label UNO and heretofore unknown singer Ian Isiah are the next entrants, with a mixtape full of beats that'd turn Tricky Stewart's head and charismatic vocals drowned in AutoTune. Backed up by a host of well-loved producers like Sinjin Hawke, Brenmar, and ShyGuy, it's hard not to see parallels with Kelela's Cut 4 Me. Isiah is another relatively new singer finding his personality in music cribbed from a thriving underground he's long been associated with (in this case, loosely, NYC's GHE20 G0THIK crew). Lacking Kelela's smouldering personality and her clever songwriting, Isiah instead resorts to a loving pastiche of artists like The-Dream and Trey Songz—which, when it works, is hard to deny.
The first we heard from Isiah was April's stark ballad "Mindfuck", but that one didn't predict the brittle AutoTune-core of The Love Champion. Subtlety evidently isn't part of Isiah's vocabulary, and it's difficult to gauge how self-aware he is of his own absurdity. Chanting "pop that juicy on me" like a mantra on "Sweat", he sounds too earnest to be joking. Thankfully for him, that earnestness ends up his saving grace—his honey-hued voice manages to elevate most of his cringe-worthy phrases. When he croons "trippin on the x/ makin' sweet sex" over a near-silent backdrop on "Private Party", it's more sensual than its blunt language should be able to get across. But then not even he can save the awful "Dynamite", a mess of a song centred around trills of "booty, booty/ you a cutie" that feel like they were flown in from the bridge of a different track.
Isiah finds a sweet spot with AutoTune on Love Champion that's gently experimental without descending into Lil Wayne-esque blubbery, though it could still get on your nerves if you're not one for its inhuman tones. The way he cascades and layers his vocals on tracks like "Showtime" or the stunning ballad "So High" is surprisingly bewitching, like an art in itself. Not to mention that he's a capable singer on his own, mining an entirely different vibe than Future's warbly emo-rap—but like that rapper and his hordes of imitators, the plugin also gives those ballads an alien, almost otherworldly tin. His battle cry "I just wanna be high with you" sounds almost transcendent here.
As much as Isiah relies on his trusty studio helper, however, The Love Champion leans even harder on his cast of producer friends, who offer up a gently progressive selection of beats that sway and dip perfectly with his voice. Sometimes it's hard to tell to who's supposed to be the star—more often than not he's given a prime amount of space for his elaborate countermelodies, but a slinky Sinjin Hawke percussion drop or Brenmar break is never that far behind. UNO's secret weapon Gobby even shows up on the gorgeously gossamer title track, one of the relentlessly weird producer's prettiest productions.
It's the lesser-known Shy Guy who stands out above the rest. His "That Body" struts with all the easy gliding bombast of a Just Blaze track, has Isiah's most effortless vocals and is even blessed with an unusually effusive (albeit brief) Mykki Blanco verse. The rapper's throaty voice cuts right through Isiah's computerized croon, and with guest spots from him and Le1f, you can tell that Isiah keeps interesting company. His own art still seems content to revel in precedent rather than break down boundaries, however. With endearing but bordering-on-self-parody lyrics, lush production, and a high-pitched voice, Isiah lives in the shadow of The-Dream much like The-Dream lives in the shadow of R. Kelly. But unlike our beloved Terius, Isiah has yet to find his own voice. If nothing else Love Champion, marks a solid starting point rather a true takeoff. | 2013-12-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2013-12-12T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | UNO | December 12, 2013 | 6.6 | 7e62e1d7-8a39-47bf-8975-d5e63b08322c | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
On Diarrhea Planet's third album, arena-rock ambition clashes with D.I.Y. scuzz–and a vocalist coup may be in order. | On Diarrhea Planet's third album, arena-rock ambition clashes with D.I.Y. scuzz–and a vocalist coup may be in order. | Diarrhea Planet: Turn to Gold | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21945-turn-to-gold/ | Turn to Gold | When asked recently about Diarrhea Planet’s ambitions for their new album, guitarist Jordan Smith fantasized about a Grammy win, saying it would be "the biggest practical joke on the music industry of all time." Whether or not that’s really his dream, it comes at a pivotal moment for his cringe-inducingly named band. At a certain point in the telling of a long joke, the audience needs to know the punchline–so when will Diarrhea Planet reveal theirs?
On their third record, Turn to Gold, it feels like either the band has taken their schtick too far or their commitment to it hasn’t gone far enough. Here we find the group—a stellar and gleefully cheesy live act—trawling much of the same hair-metal and pop-punk territory they covered on their last EP and second album, I*’m Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams*, albeit with shinier production.
Though the songwriting is largely similar to Diarrhea Planet's past efforts, their ambitions do appear to have grown somewhat, particularly on the album’s bookend tracks; the instrumental intro “Hard Style” sets a brawny rock tone, nodding to such heart-on-sleeve punk peers as the Dropkick Murphys and Titus Andronicus. The closer, “Headband,” clocking in at nearly eight minutes, is a proper send-‘em-to-bed colossus of multiple parts, tempos, and tones, and is more experimental and sophisticated than anything else on the record. While it lacks some of the easy melodies found elsewhere Turn to Gold, its depth suggests the band may actually have a goal beyond taking the piss.
Another standout is the lovely, Ted Leo-esque “Bob Dylan’s Grandma”—a heart-pounding song about adolescence and musicianship that rings more pure than anything they’ve done before. There’s a not-so-subtle reason it sounds better than everything else on Turn to Gold: it’s sung by guitarist Emmett Miller, who has a natural pop-punk yawp. It’s the only track that doesn't feature the band’s two main singers, Smith and Brent Toler, whose thin voices and limited ranges are deficient for the type of over-the-top instrumental pyrotechnics the group favors. Hearing them front such otherwise flamboyant music is like pairing a vintage Gucci dress with a pair of old Birkenstocks.
The true intentions of Diarrhea Planet remain as murky as ever on Turn to Gold. If the band wants to be a slick, proudly ridiculous arena-rock band, as the record hints, why not go all-in like their predecessors The Darkness and recruit a truly talented vocalist like Justin Hawkins? (Hey, even Mark Hoppus would do.) Or, if they want to keep the shambolic D.I.Y. energy they began with, why don’t they take the production back toward something rougher, looser?
It’s easy to imagine that when Diarrhea Planet are onstage in their screaming, sweating glory, all of this matters much less to them, because that’s the medium they thrive in. (Grateful Dead fans will surely recognize this argument of “but they’re so much better live, man!”) And if Diarrhea Planet’s goal is just to be a memorable, messily great live band, they’re well on their way. But if they want their records to live on, they need to decide what they're trying to achieve, and figure out how to deliver it more effectively offstage. | 2016-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-06-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Infinity Cat | June 15, 2016 | 6.4 | 7e65b51e-e373-4b3a-9cac-dd9fb0f8c77a | Benjamin Scheim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/benjamin-scheim/ | null |
The latest from the experimental producer/songwriter dives into the warrens of memory and trauma with a collection of anxiety-ridden and often beautiful vignettes. | The latest from the experimental producer/songwriter dives into the warrens of memory and trauma with a collection of anxiety-ridden and often beautiful vignettes. | Ricky Eat Acid: Talk to You Soon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22455-talk-to-you-soon/ | Talk to You Soon | The music of Sam Ray’s Ricky Eat Acid project has always elicited a kind of déjà vu. Whether it’s his journal-entry song titles or the way his music sounds like field recordings of a mental thunderstorm, the experimental producer/songwriter tricks you into thinking you are hearing extracted elements of your own past. Describing the inspiration of a mix he curated in 2014, Ray mentioned his fascination with a “paranoid, summer-y feeling that something familiar isn’t as familiar as it looks at first glance.” Though his sizable discography has often mined regret and retrospection, Talk to You Soon is the most severe account of an emotional haunting. It explores the idea of how personal upheaval perverts both memory and the comfort of nostalgia.
There is a strange paradox about the way we remember things. As Israeli neuroscientist Yadin Dudai explained it on a 2007 episode of Radiolab: “If you have a memory, the more you use it, the more likely you are to change it. So, if you never use your memory, it is secured.” Such is the way that Ray explores this fixation of the past. On several songs, lyrics are cast as repeated chants that assume different meanings from their first utterance to their final. Where “Nice to See You” transforms from robotic to sincere with its eponymous phrase, “This Is as Close to Heaven as I Get” degrades from blissful to sinister over the course of a dozen repetitions of the song’s titular statement. The beautiful, far-too-short midpoint of the record, “Know,” interpolates the unfinished clause “Before I know you” into various phrases, including the forlorn “It seems to me, that you’d be happier/Before I know you.” By playing with these repetitions, *Talk to You Soon *asks at what point does gazing inward turn from self-reflection to distortion.
While Ray’s previous Ricky LP, Three Love Songs, was an ambient record indebted to the KLF’s warped field recordings, Talk to You Soon feels more like impressionistic vignettes about the disparate feelings born out of trauma. From the moment the swirls of “‘hey’” introduce a dizzying volatility, complete with string arrangements from Owen Pallett, there is a nagging sense of discord. It’s the sonic equivalent of when someone says, “Hi, how are you?” and you say “Good!” even though you are moments from a nervous breakdown. The rest of the album roils on from there, and even if we are temporarily distracted by IDM-indebted beats or palliative synth glows, anxiety always looms in the margins.
Ray’s piano playing has much to do with *Talk to You Soon’s *unraveling nerves. On “Spinning About Under the Bright Light in Bliss,” a gentle swell abruptly turns to percussive jabs. The underlying progression remains, but it is beleaguered by shrill notes as though Ray’s left and right hands are at war. “In the Grocery Store,” with its spectral melody, sounds impossibly distant from its mundane namesake and more akin to the title theme of The Exorcist. It’s these discrepancies that remind us that the world inside your head and the one you inhabit can be so unaware of each other. It doesn’t matter if you are in a supermarket, or fucking, or even having a good day—your mind can rebel at any moment.
The closest Talk to You Soon comes to a complete psychotic break is the anarchic “As We Speak,” which features abrasive screaming from LA-based post-metal outfit Wreck and Reference. Unlike the unnerving electronics that whirred before, this track is a melting point of hoarse howling, crashing drums, and the wailing of an alarm siren. The acute panic attack lasts for a minute before yielding to an adrenalized heartbeat and veering into nervous percussive twitches. This moment is so abrasive, so intense, that the remainder of the album feels exhausted from its own introspection.
Though maybe that’s the point Ray is trying to make here. Nominally, the final two tracks, “On a Good Day” and “‘ok’,” suggest that perhaps we have finally reached some calm after emotional tumult, but their languor recalls the dreary effects of overthinking. Can there be any respite for someone who lives so thoroughly inside their own mind, who is prone to over-analyzing and distorting the past? Although Ricky Eat Acid excels in making supernaturally empathetic music, these final moments of Talk to You Soon are especially isolating, a final warning to the listener that when gazing inward becomes pathological, it casts an endless pall. | 2016-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-11-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Terrible | November 4, 2016 | 7.3 | 7e7480ab-7fc4-4816-bead-c269e471c82f | Matt Grosinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-grosinger/ | null |
Twenty years into her career, after a hiatus of more than a decade, the Chicago footwork producer finally releases her debut album, taking apart her hometown’s club genres and recombining them in captivatingly original ways. | Twenty years into her career, after a hiatus of more than a decade, the Chicago footwork producer finally releases her debut album, taking apart her hometown’s club genres and recombining them in captivatingly original ways. | Jana Rush: Pariah | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jana-rush-pariah/ | Pariah | Many DJs in Chicago get started at a remarkably young age, and Jana Rush was just 10 when she first started mixing. Obsessed with Chicago’s house music stations, she called up WKKC 89.3 FM one day to ask how she could become a DJ. Her training began at those studios, where, under the guidance of local legend Jam Master K and the producer Gant-Man, she learned how to mix. By the time she was 13 she had started producing, and before she turned 18, she had already released a split 12” with ghetto house scion DJ Deeon and a solo record called Wicked. She counted Paul Johnson as a mentor and DJ Rashad as one of her peers, but the realities of making a living would take her away from music for more than a decade.
Pariah, Rush’s debut LP, arrives over 20 years since her first release, and in that time she’s been a firefighter, a CAT scan technician, and a chemical engineer at an oil refinery. Last year, she emerged from her hiatus to release the MPC 7635 EP, which introduced her particular take on footwork. Rather than the smoother, soul-infused style practiced by Rashad, RP Boo, and their cohort, her acrobatic drum programming and stark industrial atmospheres are more closely aligned with Jlin.
Where Rush differs from most of her peers is the decidedly drowsy nature of her version of footwork. All these songs move at characteristically rapid BPMs, but Rush’s production isn’t focused so much on speed as it is on atmosphere: A chunk of the tracks on Pariah are closer to very fast ambient than anything approaching dance music. Songs like “Divine,” “CPU,” and “Chill Mode” are shorn of anything more than a synthesizer, an unfussy vocal sample, and drumming. With those tools, she’s able to create seriously calming moments on Pariah, which particularly stand out in between the more furious pieces. The blistering, gabber-inspired rhythms of “No Fuks Given” and the appropriately titled “Frenetic Snare” are real workouts, and Rush is keen on offering some form of comedown.
While her label and the press have billed her album as a footwork record, Rush’s relationship with the genre, and with Chicago dance music in general, is much more fluid. Perhaps her most defining aspect as a producer is her ability to melt things down into their most concentrated forms—pulling out the pulse of acid house or the shuffle of jungle, for example—and marrying them together in her songs. Take “??? ??,” the album’s most confounding song. She builds the entire track from what sounds like a rusty pipe being played like a flute; its rinky-dink chords snake around languid drum rolls, church pianos, and a brass band.
Yet, as a result of the wide breadth of her style, the album can feel more or less shapeless, as each track flows into the next, trying new tricks and tropes on for size. “Break It,” the track that immediately follows “??? ??,” is a more classically inclined take on footwork and juke—just an increasingly speedy drum line cushioned by repetitions of the song’s title. Just a little later we get “Old Skool,” which, in line with its name, is retro house with soul samples and saxophones. But she’s such a studied and precise producer that even these more straightforward pieces are still arresting. As a result, Pariah, stylistically speaking, is more like a historical survey of dance music: Across its 12 tracks, Rush doesn’t so much break apart genre as reconstitute it in her own image. | 2017-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Objects Limited | July 25, 2017 | 7.9 | 7e7ef757-ac2a-4cd4-808b-580075344046 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
With a joyous new album, the New York jazz-punk quartet responds loudly and triumphantly to existential terror. Its follow-up EP lets their true feelings show. | With a joyous new album, the New York jazz-punk quartet responds loudly and triumphantly to existential terror. Its follow-up EP lets their true feelings show. | Sunwatchers: Oh Yeah? / Brave Rats EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sunwatchers-oh-yeah-brave-rats-ep/ | Oh Yeah? / Brave Rats EP | Like a squad of beaming cheerleaders, New York quartet Sunwatchers spend much of their working lives cultivating pure joy. Especially on their fourth album, the devoutly playful Oh Yeah?, they deal in sax-and-guitar melodies so bright and rhythms so relentless they feel eternal. They pirouette through opener “Sunwatchers vs. Tooth Decay” with the gusto and precision of a professionally choreographed laser-light spectacle. Halfway through “Love Paste,” which lifts from a gleeful klezmer dance into an instrumental hook so big it could have belonged to Yes circa 1972, they shout “Whoo!” in gleeful unison. Hearing this sort of unbridled, earnest enthusiasm just feels good.
However radiant, though, Sunwatchers have forever ferried political messages of resistance and persistence. “Sunwatchers stand in solidarity with the dispossessed, impoverished, and embattled people of the world,” they broadcast on the cover of their second album, a credo they’ve repeated with every subsequent release. Their mascot—the Kool-Aid Man, absurdly clad in Braveheart body paint—lorded over Uncle Sam’s mutilated corpse on 2019’s Illegal Moves. They fantasize in interviews about making the music that destroys capitalism and vow in liner notes to “forge an atmosphere of radical empathy and acceptance.”
Sunwatchers’ rippling music works, then, much like American gospel or hardcore: It fights the power by flexing solidarity and responds loudly and triumphantly to existential terror. Oh Yeah? is vivid and boisterous. Burrowing between chiptune’s glee and doom metal’s glumness, “Thee Worm Store” conjures images of a video-game hero barely escaping the clutches of a particularly baleful boss. “Brown Ice” feels like the score for a movie montage where ardent young revolutionaries make their final preparations to overthrow the government, gathering supplies and scheming by lamplight.
They’ve never been better than on “The Earthsized Thumb,” an extended anthem for overcoming the seemingly insurmountable. For the first 13 minutes, Sunwatchers repeat and revolve around a single bracing theme, circling it like an obstacle they can’t overcome. But then alto saxophonist Jeff Tobias has had enough. He screams into his horn like Sunwatchers’ inspiration Albert Ayler, his tone providing the call to arms. The band springs into action for the odyssey’s final quarter, beating the theme into submission with a synchronized assault. It’s impossible not to feel emboldened by it.
On Brave Rats—a subsequent six-track EP, consisting of alternate versions and live renditions of old favorites, plus a few catalog obscurities—Sunwatchers relax their guard, or at least the need to sound so triumphant. Yes, they erupt into a jubilant clatter during “Everybody Play!” and dance through Sonny Sharrock’s “Blind Willie” with the élan of Akron/Family during those fleeting moments when they seemed like the country’s next great jam band. But mostly, they allow the anxiety and pessimism they typically funnel into rapturous hooks and ecstatic waves of improvisation to stand alone. It’s like watching a seasoned pop star dazzle a sold-out arena, then collapse backstage and confess how they really feel.
“Sazx,” a rhythm-less duet for Tobias’ yearning horn and Jim McHugh’s jarring guitar, suggests a nightmare driven by a waking loop of self-doubt so extreme it haunts you in your sleep, too. Closer “Pedal One,” a scrap from an old soundtrack, pulses like Steve Reich slowed by Dilaudid, drugging the urban busyness of his work until it scans as dread. Even the magnetic hook and road-trip esprit of “Brave Rats” can’t camouflage the despair in Tobias’ brittle saxophone tone or the menacing keyboard notes that line the track like rusty razor blades.
The first several times I heard Oh Yeah?, I pined for something like one of the bummers on Brave Rats, a song that made clear the complex emotions and revolutionary urges at play. Sunwatchers have touched on that feeling in the past, particularly with Illegal Moves. But as the weeks passed and the world changed, the album’s sense of unfettered joy—of shouting down misery simply by playing together—became reassuring to revisit, a reminder of the energy a band and audience can share in a crowded concert hall. A studio album that moves with the delight of a live explosion, Oh Yeah? is even more welcome at a time when that kind of catharsis is temporarily out of stock. | 2020-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | May 4, 2020 | 7.6 | 7e86bc85-d349-4fcd-851b-829590591917 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5ea8934d895a1b000858e6d4/1:1/w_800,h_800,c_limit/Sunwatchers_Oh%20Yeah?.jpg |
On her first album of all original songs, the folk polyglot seeks livelier rhythms and vocal styles infused with jazz, country, and zydeco. | On her first album of all original songs, the folk polyglot seeks livelier rhythms and vocal styles infused with jazz, country, and zydeco. | Rhiannon Giddens: You’re the One | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rhiannon-giddens-youre-the-one/ | You’re the One | As much archivist as poet, Rhiannon Giddens has spent her prolific career “taking back the tools” of Black musical traditions, as scholar Francesca T. Royster writes in Black Country Music, in an effort to restore them to the American canon. Her classically trained voice and virtuosity on both minstrel and modern banjo have infused her stories—many of them historically rooted—with an urgency that pangs into the present. It’s work she has undertaken independently and collectively (with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Our Native Daughters, and through collaborative albums), and explored through multiple forms—song, ballet, opera. This boundless approach has earned Giddens a MacArthur “Genius” grant, a Pulitzer Prize, and two Grammys.
On You’re the One, Giddens’ first solo album in six years, she seems more interested in playing a variety of parts than fully inhabiting any one. Each song feels like a costume she dons for the duration of the track—and the changes are many. She’s often ventured from the shores of American folk to touch the waters of blues, soul, and gospel, but this time the shifting itself seems to be the point as Giddens stretches her reach further. Even so, You’re the One never coalesces with the clear vision or poignancy of her previous work.
Across an album of entirely original tracks, Giddens seeks livelier rhythms and finds them in the zydeco-peppered “You Louisiana Man,” the country-blues stomp “Way Over Yonder” (co-written with Keb’ Mo’), and “Hen in the Foxhouse,” where heavy percussion and prowling melodic flourishes hang like a haze. More than accelerating the tempo, Giddens seems to delight in exploring different vocal styles. There’s an element of Bonnie Raitt on the bluesy “Foxhouse,” though near the end she nimbly jetés to a jazzy scat. Elsewhere, she channels the swaggering bravado of Big Maybelle on “You Put the Sugar in My Bowl” and the coiffed pining of Ella Fitzgerald on “Who Are You Dreaming Of.” On both, her voice warbles with the weight of desire.
Given the textural complexity Giddens achieved first with T Bone Burnett (on her solo debut, 2015’s Tomorrow Is My Turn) and later with Dick Powell (on 2017’s striking Freedom Highway), the production on You’re the One feels a little too pristine. This time, Jack Splash (Alicia Keys, Solange, Valerie June) helmed the project, opting for overly polished choices that hem in Giddens’ performances. Soft strings and twinkling chimes entwine “Wrong Kind of Right,” turning the R&B lament into a middling affair, while an anodyne arrangement of guitar and drums make “If You Don’t Know How Sweet It Is” more orderly than the damning refusals Giddens issues to a badly behaved partner. The writing doesn’t help either. “I treated you like a king/Maybe that’s the reason/Soon enough you grew to think/That Christmas was all season,” Giddens sings, landing the line more like a half-hearted shove than the jab she intended.
There are signals of more interesting possibilities on “Yet to Be,” a propulsive jig featuring Jason Isbell. Its lyrics follow the love story between a Black woman and an Irish man, with Giddens’ and Isbell’s resonant voices braiding together into a physical force. Once their baby enters the narrative, the track shifts into the softest exhale, an airy flute soaring like their aspirations. “Yet to Be” shows Giddens at her best: allowing the musical textures to enliven and elaborate the story she’s telling, drawing on threads from the past to communicate a pressing immediacy that feels all her own. | 2023-08-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-08-18T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Nonesuch | August 18, 2023 | 6.8 | 7e9b94bb-4ec1-4c67-a4ca-1a470fd4b519 | Amanda Wicks | https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-wicks/ | |
Five years after a landmark compilation that helped introduce the then-emergent sound of UK Afrobeats, London’s Moves Recordings takes stock of a half-decade of innovations in Black British music. | Five years after a landmark compilation that helped introduce the then-emergent sound of UK Afrobeats, London’s Moves Recordings takes stock of a half-decade of innovations in Black British music. | Various Artists: MOVES: 5 Years of Culture - Afrobeats / Rap & Drill | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-moves-5-years-of-culture-afrobeats-rap-and-drill/ | MOVES: 5 Years of Culture - Afrobeats / Rap & Drill | Four years ago, London-based independent Moves Recordings set out its stall with MOVES: The Sound of UK Afrobeats. It did exactly what a good scene-setting compilation should do: It provided a way in for the curious listener, pitched a broad tent for a still-evolving sound (J Hus, an early figurehead, released his debut album in the same month), and pointed to where it might go next. The compilation was curated by Afro B, an early champion of Afrobeats as it blossomed out of West Africa and was picked up by diaspora communities in the UK.
A year later, his song “Drogba (Joanna)” would emerge as an anthem. The track still rings out around stadiums today, and its instantly recognizable, shoulder-rolling “Jo, Jo, Jo” chorus makes a fitting opener for this new collection from the label that helped make it a hit. Where The Sound of UK Afrobeats explored the way UK rap and Afrobeats were cross-pollinating in the mid-2010s, this two-part, compartmentalized, and serviceably titled retrospective draws firmer boundaries: twenty tracks on 5 Years Of Culture: Rap & Drill, and 19 on 5 Years Of Culture: Afrobeats. It’s a fine stamp on an agenda-setting half-decade for the label.
Each half offers a thorough survey of two distinctly Black British scenes that have exploded in the past five years, from fringe concerns to chart-bothering, arena-filling, star-minting phenomena in their own right. This is an opportunity to flex: There aren’t many small independent labels that can boast hits from Wizkid, Davido, Mr Eazi, Chief Keef, Tiwa Savage, and Eugy in their catalog. But the release also offers a picture, if not a warning, of how quickly music now moves. The path from the incubation of a newish sound—the label’s first release in 2016, which features on Rap & Drill, was a remix of Belly Squad’s Snapchat-fueled, student-party sleeper hit “Banana”—to its uptake, replication, and eventual stagnation, thanks to speculative splashes from major labels with budgets to blow, is now something that can take months, not years. This is especially the case for the now-tired genre that became known as Afroswing (pioneers like Yxng Bane and the aforementioned Belly Squad are well represented here). UK drill’s turn has come too—look no further, if you can bear it, than Ed Sheeran’s summer swoop on the scene.
Yet, and this is credit to Moves’ canny A&Rs, there’s very little that sounds dated on this collection. The rap and drill selection, in particular, pokes out the spaces that remain for innovation: the pentatonic scales on TPL, JoJo, and Omizz’ “Skrr Reverse”; Offica’s Nigerian-Irish flow; Fizzler’s grimey skip and slide. The best moments on the Afrobeats side are those raw offerings from the likes of Medikal and Naira Marley that are shorn of any commercial gloss and put movement firmly first.
Given Moves’ proven knack for identifying what’s next, it’s a shame there’s not more of that on show. Despite packing in nearly 40 tracks, this double-comp only features a handful of new songs—two, from Lavish and A92 on the rap release, and a Eugy remix on the Afrobeats side—which makes you wonder what the difference is between this and a Spotify playlist. It could be questioned, too, why the label plumped for two separate, lengthy collections instead of shaving down to a single, more finely curated release. (The answer is most likely a mixture of pride and streaming numbers.) Less stringent titular confines might have opened up space to explore the label’s interests in other areas, such as amapiano or the emergent “freebeat” sound, or even its roster of angsty emo-rap acts, like BVDLVD, that have threatened to take off but never quite escaped their concentrated suburban fanbases.
But then, 5 Years of Culture never claimed to be a crystal ball. In another five years, who knows where we’ll be? You can be assured that Moves won’t treat that question as rhetorical. Listen carefully, and they’ll let you know before we get there.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | null | MOVES | January 3, 2022 | 7 | 7e9e81a0-91d8-4074-b32b-90c8a5710634 | Will Pritchard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-pritchard/ | |
The more Alejandro Ghersi gives of himself, the larger his music as Arca grows. His latest feels both intimate and expansive, a connection between his melodic past and a chaotic future. | The more Alejandro Ghersi gives of himself, the larger his music as Arca grows. His latest feels both intimate and expansive, a connection between his melodic past and a chaotic future. | Arca: Arca | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23063-arca/ | Arca | This album began long before Alejandro Ghersi became Arca. In the nascent stages of his career, Ghersi made dreamy synth pop songs as a teenager in Venezuela under the name Nuuro. These love sketches, sung in Spanish and English, showcased an upbeat singing voice and brightly colored electronic landscapes redolent of Postal Service or Passion Pit. What he did as Nuuro and what he now does as Arca couldn’t seem any more different. Arca’s sound is one of chaos and contortions, further defined by the unsettling visuals of morphing bodies suspended in space he made with longtime collaborator Jesse Kanda. But when Ghersi debuted his newfound (or perhaps rediscovered) singing voice on Arca, it felt like a wormhole opened up—one that connected his prehistoric past to his visions of the distant future.
“Piel,” the first song Arca released from this album, felt shockingly new. He hums at first, intimating the cadence of a bedtime lullaby, easing a listener into the song. Then, seconds later, he sings towards the heavens, and acidic drips of distortion, bass, and chorus rumble in the background. The melody feels worn and romantic, and his voice slinks along to the beat like an old prayer. Finally, the music dissolves into a puddle of oozing beats and jumbled clanks. When you listen to “Piel,” there is no question you’re hearing an Arca song. And when you go searching for the answer to why that is, you keep digging into Ghersi’s timeline, trying to figure out how he could make something that feels so ancient and so otherworldly.
The 13-songs on Arca don’t represent an about-face for Ghersi, or even a reinvention. Rather, it imagines what would happen if he intermingled the music of his past (the pop songs he made, the Schumann and Mendelssohn he studied) with the radical noise and boundary-shattering pop he’s invented as Arca. Booming organs, mournful pianos, and classical instrumentation share space with a kaleidoscope of outré production. This juxtaposition is made even more clear by his voice, which proudly wears all of its imperfections: every cough, wheeze, and difficult breath is captured. That he’s using his voice at all is, for Ghersi, an act of time-travelling in itself. He says that his relationship with his voice on this album felt like “communing with [his] teenage self again.” He combines paradoxes and contradictions to create an experience that doesn’t feel like it’s part of our space-time continuum, but a separate universe he’s making on the fly.
The discoveries Ghersi makes on Arca allow him to write his most relaxed and intimate songs. His work is still mysterious, but not as opaque—it doesn’t keep you at an arm’s length, instead he offers up his pleasures more readily. Take for example the three-song sequence of “Coraje,” “Whip,” and “Desafío.” “Coraje,” is the album’s simplest song—Ghersi’s take on the piano ballad. The keys plink away as Ghersi searches for notes high and low. He even sounds like he’s crying at one point—moaning and whispering—his delivery becoming more watery as he reaches the finale. Seconds later, on “Whip,” he rips you from this emotional moment with a minute-and-a-half long track that’s mostly just the sound of a bullwhip rapidly moving back and forth. Then, on “Desafío,” he channels all the pop music he’s written for Kanye, FKA twigs, Björk, Kelela, and others into a single point. It’s warm, impossibly catchy, but densely detailed. It begins with the sound of an air raid siren, but then it cracks open, and Arca unleashes this joyous synth melody and airy drums. He sounds at ease, dancing between notes as he talks about the touch of lover feeling like the kiss of death (“Tócame de primera vez/Mátame una y otra vez”—“Touch me first time/Kill me again and again”). It’s as close to a straightforward pop song Ghersi might write under the name Arca, and it’s outstanding.
Throughout Arca, Ghersi strings together moments like these, finding beauty in contrast. And it’s not just because there is something dazzling about how different each moment feels from one to the next. There’s something legible, more direct about all of this. Hearing him castigate a lover on “Fugaces” (“¿Por qué me mentiste?”—“Why did you lie to me?”) or just saying something as simple as “I miss you” on “Anoche,” is something Ghersi hasn’t done before. Some of these songs sound like they were delivered as if he was right there in the room with you. Even if he claims many of the lyrics were improvised, there is still a strong intention—he’s reaching out and offering his hand. This close-quarters proximity gives these songs a pulse, a warm human heartbeat that seemed buried in all the noise of his older songs.
Ghersi recently revealed that he chose the name Arca because it was an old Spanish word for a “ceremonial container.” Arcas are “empty spaces” that can be filled with meaning. He has never been one to believe in anything as concrete as identity or category, but there is a sense on Arca that he’s looking back at what he’s done in order to reach something else altogether—he’s filling up his box with all the best possible versions of himself: past, present, and future. It’s all for the sake of imagining a world better than the here and now. | 2017-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | XL | April 5, 2017 | 8.5 | 7ea9d327-8c5b-43e4-b4f3-295ec90f7389 | Kevin Lozano | https://pitchfork.com/staff/kevin-lozano/ | null |
I could fill an entire paragraph right now simply repeating the name Weezer. Oh, Weezer, Weezer, Weezer. Oh, Weezer. How ... | I could fill an entire paragraph right now simply repeating the name Weezer. Oh, Weezer, Weezer, Weezer. Oh, Weezer. How ... | Weezer: Weezer (Green Album) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8611-weezer-green-album/ | Weezer (Green Album) | I could fill an entire paragraph right now simply repeating the name Weezer. Oh, Weezer, Weezer, Weezer. Oh, Weezer. How sad I am for Weezer. Let's backtrack. This requires a lot of personal history to be revealed-- total stream-of-consciousness memory recall. We'll start in 1994. In 1994, I was ten years old. Rock music was a new and relatively unknown concept to me. By rock music, I mean rock music: distorted guitars, hard-hitting drums, the harshness of grunge and rock. It had already broken onto mainstream radio, but I was too young to pay attention. I was a weird kid, busying myself with Talking Heads and Laurie Anderson records.
The girl who lived next door (and who also happened to take care of me on occasion, when my parents were out) was probably around 12 or 13 at the time. I thought she was beautiful. It resembled a crush, although it probably wasn't. And occasionally, we would listen to CDs. She brought over her very small collection-- mine was already three times as large. There was a blue disc amongst her discs. She pulled it out and pressed play. My world was blasted apart. She clearly loved this, and I had no idea what to think. "Undone (The Sweater Song)" was her favorite. It was one of those rare 'brand new' experiences I'm lucky enough to be able to remember. Not long after, I obtained a copy of my own. It was my favorite album for a very long time. I ordered lyrics from the fan club through the mail. I memorized the handwritten words while listening to the album on repeat. "My Name is Jonas" was pure beauty, and "Only in Dreams" was pure power. It still is.
Somehow, I didn't manage to pick up Pinkerton until 1999. I'd kind of forgotten about Weezer for a year or two, and then suddenly I remembered them. At first, I wasn't terribly impressed, clearly being more familiar with the sound of grunge and angst. And then I listened to it a second time and was knocked out all over again. I went back to "the blue album," this time understanding the intricacies of the sound-- what makes the songs so warm and effective. Its simple brilliance slapped me; it sounded as fresh as it did the first time I ever heard it. So naturally, as news of Weezer recording began to circulate late last year, I was overjoyed. How would they follow-up the blistering, angry Pinkerton?
And then, months later, Weezer released "Hash Pipe." It was on the radio one day a few weeks ago. I listened to it. I listened to the whole song, from beginning to end. And when it ended, I said no. I said no no no no no. No! Weezer! NO!! Where has Rivers Cuomo gone? What has he done? What has happened to Weezer?! WHERE ARE THE REAL WEEZER?!! My heart was broken. Really. This is going to sound like hyperbole, but I hated music at that moment. For just a moment, I lost faith completely. It was an overblown reaction, granted, but even after I realized how ridiculous I was being, I still felt a hatred. The song was abysmal, no two ways about it. It wasn't awkward. It wasn't charming. It didn't have dueling guitar solos with soaring and intricate harmonies. And what it wasn't made it what it was: stale, polished, emotionless.
The new self-titled Weezer album, as it turns out, is average from beginning to end. There are maybe one or two decent melodies out of the ten songs here, and the only change in tone comes with "Island in the Sun," the album's only truly enjoyable song and its catchiest hook. It's the first and only moment of even moderate pleasure in the record's brief yet far too long 28-minute length. But even with this singular change in volume and mood, Weezer lacks the sense of dynamics and intricacy that Pinkerton-- and especially their debut-- held in spades. There's no power to these songs, and even less depth.
It's a de-evolution back through Pinkerton, through the blue album, and beyond. Like "Hash Pipe," it doesn't seem genuine anymore. But The Green Album doesn't generally sound like the canned, artificial angst of "Hash Pipe"; it has a sunny disposition, with songs like "O Girlfriend" and "Glorious Day." An actual line from the song "Smile," for instance: "Open up your heart and let the good stuff come out." It's unoriginal, moronic and tacky, and that's all there is to it. Nothing under the surface. Disappointment.
I was bitter. At Rivers, at Weezer, at Geffen and Interscope. This was one of my favorite bands. They were the only band whose fan club I have ever joined. They had significance. They opened musical doors for me. This album is not that Weezer. But I had to write a review, so I did a little research. And I read that, after the complete failure of the angst and emotional extremes of Pinkerton in the music world, Cuomo felt as if his goal to be a rockstar was completely obliterated. So he locked himself in his room for a year, with no outside contact, and when he came out, his work suddenly had no emotional content.
He's now afraid that fans of the band will hate the new album and lose touch with him and the group. He genuinely realizes that all of the feeling in his vocals and lyrics are gone, and he realizes that it's probably a phase. And I suddenly share his fear. So maybe the real Weezer-- the Weezer I know and love-- can come back now. After this phase ends and the album goes platinum, maybe they'll feel better about themselves. I'm going to go upstairs now to listen to the album that is 1994 to me, the album that is still new and marvelous to me after seven years, and fall asleep content. | 2001-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2001-05-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Interscope | May 14, 2001 | 4 | 7ebf4e20-73ce-49bf-b831-2e06ce6b3d51 | Pitchfork | null |
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Though detailed and accomplished, Steve Reich’s latest work dully reaffirms his place as a centrist in a field of extremists. | Though detailed and accomplished, Steve Reich’s latest work dully reaffirms his place as a centrist in a field of extremists. | Steve Reich: Pulse/Quartet | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/steve-reich-pulsequartet/ | Pulse/Quartet | During the last two years, each of the United States’ four masters of musical minimalism—Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass—turned 80. They are all still composing, performing, and proselytizing for their own aesthetic visions. Their bodies of work are reminders that the “scenes” shaped by critics or mere circumstances are rarely cohesive; they are disconnected threads, sewn together by necessity or dumb luck. To this day, for instance, Young remains the philosophical ascetic, the one who told The Guardian in 2015, “I’m only interested in putting out masterpieces” despite having not released a record for nearly two decades. Riley is the imaginative mystic, the avuncular sort whose sense of play and exploded psychedelia has made him a multigenerational pied-piper. Glass is the crossover king, a composer whose twin senses of delicacy and bombast led to exquisite études and (for better and worse) that indelible Koyaanisqatsi score.
Reich has long sat squarely near the middle: A bit like Young, he is perennially devoted to a small clutch of consistent ideas, forever in pursuit of the perfect pulse or pointillist exhibition. But like Glass, his popular appeal owes something to his openness to diverse settings, whether that be the cascade of voices in Tehillim or Pat Metheny’s guitar in Electric Counterpoint. He seems a flexible ideologue, then, a centrist in a field of extremists. But Pulse/Quartet—Reich’s first major release since Radio Rewrite, his pallid exposition on two Radiohead songs—reaffirms that position in the dullest possible way: through technical challenges meant to push his familiar approach to new ends.
Pulse is one of Reich’s works for a large ensemble—four violins, two violas, two flutes, and two clarinets, all undergirded by the persistent plunk of the piano and electric bass. For 15 minutes, Reich weaves interpretations of a single theme above a static pulse, hoping to form a tapestry from a nice melody resurfaced with rich harmony. It is, well, pleasant. Pulse feels like the score for a short film about the heroism of an office worker’s rote existence, where a daily merry-go-round of busy work means nothing significant ever happens.
Time and again, Pulse reaches for some grand shift or climax just to settle back down and repeat the same idea through a slightly different framework. It is an interesting compositional exercise best reserved for the classroom, a sitcom-long shrug that’s pretty enough to be called beautiful and boring enough to be called tedious. And as the rubber band of an electric bass plucks away in the distance, one wonders what Reich’s music might sound like if he saw the low-end as more than a metronome. Pulse offers no clue.
Written for two pianos and two vibraphones, Quartet is a multiplayer pinball game of rapid-fire key changes and rhythmic acrobatics, where mallets on metals and hammers on strings bound off one another like permanent foils. Reich truncates the classic quartet form, dropping the middle minuet in order to create hyperactive bookends for his “Slow” second section. The result, writes Timo Andres in the liner notes, is like “one of those ‘Reich remixed’ albums, but this time the DJ is Reich himself.”
The sentiment is correct: Quartet moves constantly in at least one dimension, whether speeding up or shifting keys or dropping to a near-whisper. It suggests a real-time mixtape, spliced together from the influences on and highlights of Reich’s career. There are evocative moments, too, especially when the pianos and vibraphones lock into deep, passing grooves that reflect spirited conversation, not circumstantial crosstalk. But as with Pulse, its desired effect is minimal, a wash of motion that leaves the listener largely in the same place—in awe of Reich’s expertise and the indefatigable instrumental skills of the Colin Currie Group, but unfazed by the busy rush of so much sound.
Context does Pulse/Quartet no favors. Reich has rarely been a pure stylist or technician, even if his landmark Music for 18 Musicians hints otherwise. Instead, he’s often wrestled with big, burdensome issues—the struggle for civil rights in the United States, the arbitrary indiscretion of tragedies such as the Holocaust, the assassination of Jewish journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan just after 9/11, and the events and implications of 9/11 itself. Reich’s sociopolitical spine has distinguished him from his minimalist peers, making his work matter in ways many have not risked. But Pulse and Quartet feel plucked from a vacuum, a place where flickers of dissonance yield to waves of redemptive harmony and where the chord always comes back to sparkle. In a world of increasing entropy, these are two too-tidy self-reflections, Reich on what made Reich great.
It’s not necessarily the burden of the composer to make music that speaks to or for these times, of course. Pulse, after all, premiered exactly a week before the popular vote lost another presidential election; Quartet came two years earlier. But, if anything, Pulse/Quartet recalls the balm and spark provided by Reich’s most provocative stuff and demands you long for it—that is, the politically and historically charged work that made Reich’s place in the center seem so undaunted and daring. | 2018-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-03T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Nonesuch | February 3, 2018 | 4.9 | 7ec57c3c-090c-44c2-bc12-fbd023349c40 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Back in 1995, Everything But the Girl's Tracey Thorn broke into the electronic mainstream as the guest vocalist on ... | Back in 1995, Everything But the Girl's Tracey Thorn broke into the electronic mainstream as the guest vocalist on ... | Everything But the Girl: Temperamental | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2855-temperamental/ | Temperamental | Back in 1995, Everything But the Girl's Tracey Thorn broke into the electronic mainstream as the guest vocalist on Massive Attack's "Protection." When the song became a monsterous club hit, it almost seemed as if the folk duo saw dollar signs. Suddenly, we were hit with Walking Wounded, the first Everything But the Girl full- length to be comprised entirely of smooth, soulful electronic music.
Sadly, their formula didn't work on a grand scale basis. It's not that it was a bad concept-- actually, it could have worked out quite nicely. The problem is, the jungle- style percussion is rarely varied, and when you've been hearing the same speedy breakbeat four times a measure for upwards of five minutes, it comes out sounding stilted, uninspired and sterile.
Despite extreme advances in the sound of electronic music in the three years since Walking Wounded was released, Temperamental sticks with the same sound Everything But the Girl offered up in 1996. The stuff probably still works as well as Walking Wounded on the dance floor at the local sportsbar, but for casual listening, it's incapable of holding interest.
The thing about this band is that they're not a bad band-- they work fine as an updated version of Sade. Their problem is, they're just so average. I mean, songs like "Hatfield 1980," "Downhill Racer," the album's standout, "Lullaby of Clubland," and the closing track, "The Future of the Future (Stay Gold)," a collaboration with EBTG- contemporaries Deep Dish, could work as singles. But at the end of 60 straight minutes of this record, you feel like you've just spent half your life in an upscale women's clothing store. | 1999-09-28T01:00:02.000-04:00 | 1999-09-28T01:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Atlantic | September 28, 1999 | 5.3 | 7ed9f57e-f478-4dfb-88a8-219a5942664f | Ryan Schreiber | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-schreiber/ | null |
Over their 10-year career, Ra Ra Riot have swung between extremes, from the literary baroque pop of their breakout The Rhumb Line to the electro-pop of Beta Love. On their new album Need Your Light, they find a sweet spot, finding a bright synth-pop sound not far from Passion Pit. | Over their 10-year career, Ra Ra Riot have swung between extremes, from the literary baroque pop of their breakout The Rhumb Line to the electro-pop of Beta Love. On their new album Need Your Light, they find a sweet spot, finding a bright synth-pop sound not far from Passion Pit. | Ra Ra Riot: Need Your Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21523-need-your-light/ | Need Your Light | Over their 10-year career, Ra Ra Riot have presented two extreme versions of themselves. On one end there is their 2008 breakout The Rhumb Line, an orchestral pop record distinguished by collegiate literary references and scarred by trauma. On the other is 2009’s "Can You Discover?," a synthy, Auto-Tuned reworking of one of their debut’s tracks by Discovery, a collaboration between frontman Wes Miles and former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij. In between these two poles, Ra Ra Riot have struggled for balance. Their sophomore record The Orchard played it safe, not falling too far from the tree of its predecessor, while their 2013 foray into electro-pop, Beta Love, explored an abundance of new sounds but lacked cohesion.
On Need Your Light, they finally hit the sweet spot. Working once again with Rostam, they key back into the chirpy, buoyant electronics of "Can You Discover?" and blend them with the string-heavy compositions of The Rhumb Line. The result could sit comfortably next to Passion Pit. On Beta Love, Miles’ vocals occasionally drifted into uncanny-valley territory, but Need Your Light brings him back down to Earth. On "Water," Miles’ falsetto constricts as he sings "Don’t punish me for what I feel" and then tightens even further to near-desperation as he imagines crawling out the back door, ripping off his tight clothes, and leaping into the water. "I Need Your Light" (also by Batmanglij) is the record’s biggest showstopper, with Miles’ voice repeating the title until it swells from a wisp into a belting, burning swan song.
But rather than feeling like outliers, the Rostam-produced tracks fit in well with the remaining eight songs produced by Ryan Hadlock, which lean toward a more traditional Ra Ra Riot mix of tight instrumentation embellished with processed flourishes. All the synths are large and loud, the violins glittering, and any memories of calm are quickly overshadowed by the music's insistent "dance yourself clean" imperative. "Instant Breakup" blooms slowly, hand claps and heavy drums creeping in before twisting into a synthy sugar spiral. The chorus of "Every Time I’m Ready to Hug" is an invitation to dance until your limbs are tangled.
Thematically, most of the 10 tracks on Need Your Light suggest taking a leap of faith—in this case, putting trust in love. The lyrics tilt towards the anthemic and dramatic: "'Cause I can’t see nothing without your light," "Love will get me up again," "I wanna know that love can change you." "Absolutely"’s lyrics, however, resemble a painful drunken New Year’s proclamation: "It’s the year of/ Absolutely being/ Absolutely nothing/ Absolutely crushing/ Absolutely everything/ Absolutely loving." On a bright record full of balanced sweetness, it’s the only moment that cloys, a reminder of the missteps that brought Ra Ra Riot here. | 2016-02-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2016-02-19T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Barsuk | February 19, 2016 | 6.8 | 7edd7bef-4a17-4d0f-adad-014272447c21 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | null |
Channeling her field recordings and sound collages into richly melodic slowcore overlaid with Auto-Tune, the Texas musician opens up a new expressive frontier in her work. | Channeling her field recordings and sound collages into richly melodic slowcore overlaid with Auto-Tune, the Texas musician opens up a new expressive frontier in her work. | claire rousay: sentiment | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/claire-rousay-sentiment/ | sentiment | Texan experimentalist claire rousay’s foray into melancholic, folk-inflected pop might surprise fans of her tactile collages of everyday sounds like jingling keys, overheard conversation, and suggestive murmur. Those better acquainted with the full extent of her sprawling catalog of self-described “emo ambient”—which spans hyperpop, text-to-speech recordings, and an unfinished Elliott Smith cover—might simply see this as another left turn. In fact, on sentiment, rousay brings together strands from her previous work into a revealing self-portrait, channeling her experimental musical language into the kind of earnest pop she evidently loves but until now has mostly shared as one-offs, swapping her habitually atmospheric ambient pieces for shorter, more melodic, lyrically driven slowcore songs.
Where a softer focus and everything perfect is already here were made up of abstract, shifting collages, sentiment has a stable core in her spare guitar playing and yearning vocals, to which she applies heavy Auto-Tune. Despite sentiment’s more conventional singer-songwriter mode, though, rousay doesn’t entirely abandon her avant-garde leanings, using found sounds and field recordings to enrich the album’s texture, depth, and storytelling. The result opens up a new expressive frontier in her work, finding original, affecting ways of exploring despair and desire.
Depression figures heavily in sentiment’s lyrics. The album begins with a harrowing confession: “It’s 4 p.m. on a Monday and I cannot stop sobbing.” The line, read by Theodore Cale Schafer, comes from rousay’s phone—an analog twist on the text-to-speech experiments on it was always worth it. sentiment’s frank, conversational lyrics build on a similar nexus of dread and black humor. Heavy drinking (“Blacking out ’til I feel okay” she sings on “it could be anything”) features throughout. Self-loathing proliferates: “I hate me too,” she sings on “lover’s spit plays in the background.” The album is full of sexual longing but links romance to feelings of inadequacy: “Spending half of my whole life giving you head, just in case you need to forgive me one day,” she admits on “head.” Exploring the “infinite void” described in “4pm,” rousay finds a dense tangle of memories, confessions, and emotions.
rousay’s concern across sentiment is not so much that these feelings will overwhelm her, but that they might be crushed into numbness—“an even worse reality,” as her note in “4PM” concludes. The album’s steady, lethargic pacing mirrors rousay’s dejection; “asking for it” swells dramatically before quickly petering out, as if it has lost its will.
rousay explores anhedonia most affectingly through her voice, using Auto-Tune to give it a robotic quality. Inspired by Young Thug and Sparklehorse, she used the effect on last year’s single “Sigh in My Ear” as well as on Bandcamp uploads like “meg,” “a bullshit creative (dressing room demo)” and “new monkey (unfinished elliott smith cover).” The vocal effect was stark and incongruous in these one-offs, seemingly applied mainly for its striking sound. In sentiment, however, by crushing rousay’s emotive outpourings into a neutral, dehumanized monotone, the effect becomes a powerful conceptual device, exploring the way despair can give way to numbness and exhaustion.
rousay’s use of found sounds, previously heard in collages like everything perfect is already here, throw rousay’s feelings of isolation in stark relief as she grapples with the tension between her innermost thoughts and the anonymous bustle of life around her. Her private reflections, run through cold, alienating vocal processing, clash with warm and lively field recordings from public spaces, like the chatter, birdsong, and crunching footsteps in “sycamore skylight.” Disconnected from this outer world, rousay attempts to “convince everyone that I’m ok.”
Despite the album’s overwhelmingly interior air, rousay is not alone on sentiment; a number of guest musicians help introduce color, expression, and textural variety. Her guitar playing is simplistic—she learned the instrument for this album—but it’s buoyed by expressive string performances. On “it could be anything,” the crescendoing violin of Mari Maurice (aka more eaze) is glorious, if short-lived, as is the fencing between cellist Emily Wittbrodt and violinist Julia Brüssel on “iii.” But even these guests’ contributions aren’t quite enough to rescue later tracks, especially closer “ily2,”from the album’s restricted pacing and palette.
Still, sentiment remains deeply moving, poignant, and original. Channeling avant-garde techniques into melancholic folk-pop produces an album of tremendous psychological and emotional complexity, where the interior world is—even at its most desolate—full of vibrant, complicated life. | 2024-04-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-24T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Electronic | Thrill Jockey | April 24, 2024 | 7.6 | 7ede3687-f561-4891-b06f-171496dd6c35 | Alastair Shuttleworth | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alastair-shuttleworth/ | |
The Decemberists may have built their rep on historical backdrops and quaint theatricality, but their third full-length trades much of that in for more ambitious narratives and dynamic playing. Picaresque captures the band in peak form, packing in exotic instrumentation that creates a lush and evocative backdrop to Colin Meloy's story-songs, which here are more colorful-- and more topical-- than ever. | The Decemberists may have built their rep on historical backdrops and quaint theatricality, but their third full-length trades much of that in for more ambitious narratives and dynamic playing. Picaresque captures the band in peak form, packing in exotic instrumentation that creates a lush and evocative backdrop to Colin Meloy's story-songs, which here are more colorful-- and more topical-- than ever. | The Decemberists: Picaresque | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2243-picaresque/ | Picaresque | Re-sleeve that album cover! Disregard those silly liner-note photographs! Never you mind the Decemberists' attempts at theatricality-- Picaresque is the band's least stagy, most serious, and most accomplished effort yet. It's also as good a follow-up to Her Majesty the Decemberists any devoted fan could hope for. On that previous effort, head insurgent Colin Meloy proclaimed, "I was meant for the stage," and indeed the songs sounded like production numbers performed by eager actors in a cramped playhouse. That album still retains its considerable charm, but the Decemberists sounded less like a band than a traveling troupe at the behest of fickle royalty.
Picaresque easily dispels such limitations. Here, as he plaintively proclaims on "The Engine Driver", Meloy is "a writer, a writer of fictions." As its title suggests, the album collects a compendium's worth of well-crafted story-songs, most of which sound more literary than theatrical (the nearly nine-minute "Mariner's Revenge Song" excepted). In other words, the Decemberists are no longer the indie rock version of the Max Fischer Players; these songs are content to be songs, not one-acts, and the music is music, not sonic scenery. As a result, Picaresque sounds similar to Castaways and Cutouts and their live shows: The music is more dynamic and all the more evocative for not attempting to romantically conjure the past and filter it through Meloy's imagination. Despite some historical backdrops, most of these narratives are set in the here and now, a milieu that suits the band very well.
The spring in the band's collective step here may be somewhat aided by Chris Walla's crisp production, but I imagine it's mostly the achievement of the band itself, who sharpened their teeth on last year's mini-LP The Tain and now tend to Meloy's songs like bodyguards trotting alongside the presidential limousine. Chris Funk packs an arsenal of exotic instruments, brandishing his bouzouki, hurdy-gurdy, and dulcimer like firearms, and Rachel Blumberg, in her farewell performance (she has left to concentrate on her band Norfolk and Western) proves a capable foil for Meloy, her voice blending nicely with his on "From My One True Love (Lost at Sea)" and "The Mariner's Revenge Song". She also adds thunderous momentum to the opening "The Infanta", a heartbreak pulse to the quieter parts of "On the Bus Mall", and an athletic shuffle to "The Sporting Life", and her hi-hat decorates "We Both Go Down Together" like jewels on a lover's necklace.
In developing into such a formidable flock, the Decemberists not only have far outstripped those ridiculous comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel that dogged Her Majesty, but have also allowed Meloy to widen his lyrical scope and hone his ambitious narratives. He remains enamored with tawny historical verisimilitudes, which inform the devastating "Eli, the Barrow Boy", "The Infanta", and "The Mariner's Revenge Song" (the latter of which, legend has it, was recorded live around a single mic). But much of his chosen subject matter sounds startlingly contemporary, even if these songs still confront the familiar theme of impossible love.
A cousin to Belle and Sebastian's "The Stars of Track & Field", "The Sporting Life" views the roaring crowds, disapproving parents, unfaithful girlfriend, and disappointed coach from the vantage of an averse athlete lying injured on the field, and "The Bagman's Gambit" conjures a compromised U.S. government, a D.C. where everyone is for sale, as a backdrop for the story of a government official in love with a spy. Meloy's acoustic guitar is delicate here, while the band churns a car-chase momentum climaxing in a nightmarish freakout that sounds like Manchurian Candidate dementia triggered by "A Day in the Life".
Perhaps the best song he's written, "On the Bus Mall" is Meloy's own private Idaho full of boy gigolos amok in the city, and he evocatively contrasts their innocent affection ("Here in our hovel we fused like a family") with the grittiness of their lives: "You learned quick to make a fast buck/ In bathrooms and barrooms, on dumpsters and heirlooms/ We bit our tongues/ Sucked our lips into our lungs 'til we were falling/ Such was our calling."
The one standout, the apple among the oranges, is "16 Military Wives", which on first listen doesn't seem to fit the Picaresque aesthetic. It's not a story, but a protest song that uses a slick horn line and Meloy's loosest vocals yet (I distinctly hear a "whoo!") to tally the mathematics of war-- plus dollars, minus lives. But it's the sequencing that allows Meloy to work this aside into the album's larger mission: Following "To My Own True Love (Lost at Sea)", about futilely awaiting a lover's return, it becomes clear that the narrator could be one of the "five military wives" left widowed by "14 cannibal kings" while "15 pristine moderate liberal minds" look on helplessly. This is a new side of the Decemberists: angry, impassioned, and more in touch with the world than ever. | 2005-03-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2005-03-23T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars | March 23, 2005 | 8.3 | 7ee04677-610a-49bf-9a1e-3a2633b4b88d | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Mixing art-punk, industrial, and techno, the outstanding New Orleans four-piece emerge with a blistering vision of punk as possibility. | Mixing art-punk, industrial, and techno, the outstanding New Orleans four-piece emerge with a blistering vision of punk as possibility. | Special Interest: The Passion Of | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/special-interest-the-passion-of/ | The Passion Of | In 2018, Special Interest located the middle ground between no wave and Nina Simone. The quartet’s debut album, Spiraling, began with a song—tough, anthemic, guttural, and glammy—called “Young, Gifted, Black, in Leather.” Evoking Simone’s Civil Rights Era anthem and the cool cultishness of their VHS-referencing band name, “Young, Gifted, Black, in Leather” fittingly opened with the High Priestess of Soul herself: “I want to shake people up so bad that when they leave a nightclub where I performed, I just want them to be to pieces,” goes the sample, and then the band follows in Simone’s high stakes. “The law is on my back/Every night,” Alli Logout shouts out. “The law is on my back/That’s why we fight.”
In this current moment of razing systems and exposing histories, Special Interest is attuned to the future. “We are on the brink of a major collapse of everything,” Logout said in a 2019 interview. “I think what we are doing speaks to that. I want complete, total destruction of everything.” Perhaps when Logout screams “trust no wave” on “Young, Gifted, Black, in Leather,” it meant just that: Trust that your impulse towards destruction is for a reason.
The Passion Of is the sound of art-punk, industrial, ambient, techno, and glam imploding on themselves. It’s vicious and physical, blistering at the edges of Maria Elena’s serrated guitars, Nathan Cassiani’s bass playing, and Ruth Mascelli’s blown-out synths and cavernous drum-machine beats—The Passion Of is made of sparks. Logout’s holler can pivot from playful to taunting to gnarled to vulnerable in an instant, and their pen is consistently ablaze, whether writing about sex and longing at end times or gentrification and the militarization of cities. The second track is a scorcher called “Disco III,” a ferocious blur of pain and ecstasy in the lawlessness of night, examining “sodomy on LSD!” “Disco III” follows Spiraling’s “Disco” and “Disco II,” which says a lot. At the core of their careening, rattling, irreverent noise, Special Interest honor and channel the Black and gay legacies of dance music and infuse them into their 2020 vision of punk as possibility.
The animating “NO” of punk hits different with Special Interest: “What happens when there’s nothing left to gentrify and genocide is on your side?” Logout yelps in syncopated shouts on “Homogenized Milk,” describing the violence of such uprooting. Special Interest’s chaos is twisted but clear, a blustering push forward, asking inexhaustible questions, notably on the mesmerizing technoise banger, “All Tomorrow’s Carry.” It’s another lucid narrative of gentrification and displacement, about partying with an eye to the police state: “I watch the city crumble/Arise from the rubble/Another tawdry condo,” Logout observes in a cold post-punk speak-sing. “But would you bat an eye/Waiting for war machines to pass you by?” This is the horror of real life that many choose to overlook. Special Interest insist that you see it.
The whole of The Passion Of seems to take place after dark, in the shadows, but it burns red. Amid the ugliness there is palpable joy and lust that embodies a liberationist ethos. “And I laugh/And I cry/Boo hoo hoo/Ha ha,” goes “Don’t Kiss Me in Public,” like turning the breadth of human feeling itself into an art concept. “A Depravity Such As This” is the record’s purest techno moment, a contorted buzzsaw banger of shrieked four-on-the-floor wreckage. And nowhere is the emotionality of The Passion Of more felt than the aching ballad “Street Pulse Beat,” as Logout describes pleasure out of reach: “I can’t take you there/Where desire unfolds,” they sing, “Maybe I don’t know myself/But to know you now I know.” “Street Pulse Beat” bears out a rare sensitivity; its punk build makes its infatuation, desperation, and noisy euphoria sound like a secret.
If there is a thread to this music, it is survival. That considerable power comes into granular focus on The Passion Of’s monumental closer, “With Love,” which roils like a siren call. Logout narrates the stark realities of navigating life in a Black queer body—of “our fathers in cages,” of “the legacy of poverty within me,” the tyrannies of a world in which “We can’t breathe/In the fantasy of freedom/Choked out from me”—before envisioning an abolitionist future, “to free the millions from the mass cages.” Amid the song’s shrill metallic roar is the “the sweet smell of the rot of society” giving way to “agency and honesty/Joy with autonomy” and “the bliss of infinite love.” They illustrate a world collapsed and reborn.
“The words I write that are bubbling inside of me could have been written yesterday or five years into the future,” Logout recently said in an interview. “They are not my own, they are from those I carry inside my DNA and from my friends I listen to, learn from, and struggle with.” In the lyrics to “With Love,” they quote the autobiography of activist Assata Shakur: “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” This insurrectionary song, and The Passion Of in full, heed Shakur’s revolutionary call. The song continues:
A glimmer of light through grief
Like from the deepest depth of the sea
We welcome you to join us
As our tongues bleed this decree
Lucid the veil we see
The spirits they stand with thee
With passion aroused we call
For tomorrow the people take all
By nature, punk offers a moment of ignition. But for Special Interest, there is also a horizon.
Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music. | 2020-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Thrilling Living / Night School | July 3, 2020 | 8.4 | 7ee28d1e-8cdf-4681-9247-b3e1f1b5c703 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | |
On her dazzlingly detailed new album of experimental post-footwork, the Indiana producer pushes extreme rhythmic precision so far that it begins to feel psychedelic. | On her dazzlingly detailed new album of experimental post-footwork, the Indiana producer pushes extreme rhythmic precision so far that it begins to feel psychedelic. | Jlin: Akoma | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jlin-akoma/ | Akoma | Rigor is a virtue for Jlin. The Gary, Indiana producer and composer born Jerrilynn Patton is the kind of artist who watches Whiplash and identifies with the teacher, who’s argued that “you shouldn’t create simply because it sounds good to you,” who rejects loops and builds her fearsome post-footwork beats from scratch. It’s surprising, then, to learn that she left a few “mistakes” in her 2017 opus Black Origami; “I like feeling vulnerable,” she told Tone Glow. But while that album seemed to fly off the rails in exactly the way the creator desired, her new album Akoma radiates cool, simmering control. There’s never any doubt that each percussive element and textural glint has landed precisely where Patton intended, yet this samurai-precise music is as unpredictable as a shroomy Ricardo Villalobos odyssey. There’s a delightful contrast at play: Despite the record’s un-psychedelic qualities, the way it yanks the synapses could make you swear you’re seeing colors.
Akoma is technically Jlin’s third album, and her first new solo LP since Black Origami, but the breadth of her craft has expanded vastly in the time between. She scored Autobiography, a dance piece by Wayne McGregor, and pushed her sound into gnarlier realms of tech-noise on her Embryo EP; most auspiciously, she became a Pulitzer finalist for Perspective, a collaboration with Third Coast Percussion. It feels like a miraculous journey for a producer who started out making beats while working 96-hour weeks at a steel mill—and who emerged from a hyper-regional Black dance subgenre that’s been underground for such a long time the 36-year-old Patton recalls hearing footwork at a neighbor’s house when she was four. But Patton’s always been that good, ever since she debuted on the seminal Bangs & Works Vol. 2 compilation with “Erotic Heat”; Pitchfork’s Jonathan Williger was right to question in his review of Perspective why it took collaborating with a classical ensemble for the Pulitzers to take notice.
Akoma wears its classical bona fides on its sleeve, not least with guest appearances by Philip Glass and the Kronos Quartet. Neither of them is really asked to do much: Glass’s spider-fingered études fill the gaps between the drums on “The Precision of Infinity,” while Kronos saw away madly in the distance on “Sodalite.” It’s funny that Jlin’s actual collaboration with a string quartet is so much less string-heavy than “Summon,” a sort of warped chamber piece that seems perpetually poised to collapse like some delicate paper structure. For that matter, Björk is a ghost on “Borealis,” which came from a proposed collaboration whose parts Jlin salvaged for her own purposes. These luminaries’ names seem present in the credits for the same reason Patton decided to name one track after an Egyptian goddess and another after her “Grannie’s Cherry Pie” (actually a cobbler, it turns out): These figures are as much collaborators as inspirations and exemplars, pushing Patton to give her best.
There are enough beat-switches, breakdowns, switcheroos, and change-ups on any given track to give “Bohemian Rhapsody” hives. “Speed of Darkness” and “Open Canvas” are the two longest and most compositionally impressive cuts, the former assembling and reassembling itself out of pockets of silence, the latter something of a free-jazz riff on earlier Midwest dance classics like “Percolator.” Four-on-the-floor kicks appear, disappear, and leave nothing but triplets and pockets of empty space, and it’s a safe bet that if a song settles into anything resembling a groove it’ll splinter apart just as rapidly. The underlying structural logic governing these tracks isn’t always easy to suss out, but there’s no doubt that it’s there; this music is always developing, never meandering, repeating elements only when necessary.
Patton’s music draws from a wide range of sources in addition to electronic and classical music. Her love of HBCU marching bands carries over from Black Origami, and the arrangements should inspire nods of recognition (and memories of grueling rehearsal) from anyone who’s ever been in or written for drum corps. Sometimes Akoma sounds like fife-and-drum blues or AACM jazz or African music, even when it’s written in the language of footwork, where whip-crack 808 and 909 snares are the norm. She even includes a few more traditional juke cuts like “Auset” and “Grannie’s Cherry Pie” to show what she’s capable of in a more conventional mode—and how far she’s come from Bangs & Works. Footwork has always drawn from omnivorous sources (check out Traxman’s face-melting AC/DC flip), but Jlin’s work is lighter on samples than most productions in the genre, and her inspirations are deeply woven into the music’s rhythmic DNA rather than left floating on top.
Jlin’s music is light on melodic and harmonic elements, which can make it a non-starter for those who require something pretty to latch onto. What’s going on in the foreground often exists to perfume the background, as on “Iris,” where the distant ghost of a cell phone ringtone snakes through a near-overwhelming barrage of drums and a vicious acid bassline that sounds like someone grasping a large flying insect. Those accustomed to thinking of percussion as an inherently auxiliary instrument will have to readjust their expectations, as will anyone looking for a casual listening experience and unwilling to enter an almost prey-like state of alertness. Jlin’s world is not always an easy one to navigate, but the endorphin rush her music provides just might inspire a listener to add a little more challenge to their life. | 2024-03-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-28T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Planet Mu | March 28, 2024 | 8 | 7ef1ecfa-df80-46b1-8802-8c18069b796e | Daniel Bromfield | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/ | |
Tom Jenkinson continues to hop through styles and sounds, here taking on French soft-rock, disco-pop, and techno-rock. | Tom Jenkinson continues to hop through styles and sounds, here taking on French soft-rock, disco-pop, and techno-rock. | Squarepusher: Shobaleader One: d’Demonstrator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14767-shobaleader-one-ddemonstrator/ | Shobaleader One: d’Demonstrator | If anything exemplifies Daft Punk's ascension to both commercially viable template and honest-to-god artistic inspiration, it's Squarepusher chiming in with his take on the robots' sound. Put simply, it's hard to imagine Shobaleader One: D'demonstrator existing without Daft Punk and the generation of French producers the duo inspired. If the album's not a wholesale rip-off of DP's aesthetic-- there's a little too much of Squarepusher's fidgety programming and fusion-esque bass acrobatics for that-- then it certainly feels like a very thorough homage in places. From sound (vocoder-dependent disco-soul with occasional moments of robot-rocking out) to image (robot masks, though paired with Sunn O)))'s druid robes), this record owes monsieurs Banglater and de Homem-Christo at least a nod of respect.
Or who knows, maybe Tom "Squarepusher" Jenkinson grew up listening to the same records as DP and just got around to making this album after a couple-dozen creative detours. (Smooth 1970s jazz isn't a million miles off from the soft-rock schlock DP transmuted on Discovery, after all.) But Jenkinson has never been shy about grabbing whatever sounds are in the cultural air and abusing them for his own ends. (See for example the entirety of his early career as breakbeat culture's supposed enfant terrible.) Sometimes this shameless snatching from other artists/genres has led to some thrilling perversions of hot trends, as with his earliest jungle-biting broadsides or 2001's UK garage nose-tweak "My Red Hot Car". Unlike those amped-up records, though, Shobaleader One just sounds lifeless. There's little thrilling, or perverse, about it, as if Jenkinson wanted to make a French pop-dance record without fully embracing the airy funk or noisy bombast that makes the Gallic innovators' music fun.
Squarepusher's usual bass frippery becomes sluggish when slowed down to a synth-pop pace-- too much "virtuosity," not enough boogie. And when Jenkinson takes on the brutal low-end cut-ups of the Ed Banger label, the results are a little too restrained to stand up. French house and synthetic R&B at Squarepusher's usual frantic tempos might have been enjoyably wacky enough for a few spins, but for some reason Jenkinson decided to play it straight, with very mixed results. Shobaleader One's not tuneful enough to pass for pop, not funky enough to satisfy a club, and lacks the wildstyle (if sometimes infuriating) excess of Squarepusher's other records. Whether hard or soft, there's nothing here that you can't hear executed with more joie de vivre by a half-dozen Frenchmen. | 2010-10-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-10-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | October 19, 2010 | 4 | 7ef1fcc9-8fd2-4cec-ab9a-8752dc2f2d66 | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
On her solo debut, the double bassist largely lets her instrument play a supporting role for her distinctive soprano vocals, working through deep feelings via quietly adventurous songwriting. | On her solo debut, the double bassist largely lets her instrument play a supporting role for her distinctive soprano vocals, working through deep feelings via quietly adventurous songwriting. | Carmen Q. Rothwell: Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carmen-q-rothwell-dont-get-comfy-nowhere/ | Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere | As a proficient double bassist that has appeared on a considerable list of records, Carmen Q. Rothwell knows her instrument inside and out. A skilled player is often recognized for technical virtuosity, but an underappreciated aspect of mastering your instrument is having an intuitive understanding of its strengths. On her debut album as a solo artist, Rothwell forsakes flashiness in favor of letting the bass do what it does best—play a supporting role. Rothwell allows her voice to take the lead, which seems appropriate for a collection of songs where she’s talking through her feelings. Amid struggles of a romance slowly grinding to a standstill and her late father’s protracted battle with cancer, she wrote through her pain and created an eye of tranquility in the center of a storm of emotion. Calling to mind the airy sweetness of Blossom Dearie and the extended techniques of Meredith Monk in equal measure with her distinctive soprano, Rothwell has created something informed by her experience with jazz, but with a strong experimental bent.
Don't Get Comfy / Nowhere neatly divides itself between its two themes, a suite of three songs representing each. “Don’t get comfy,” Rothwell sings on the opening track, bringing you into the unease of her love affair: “Something is amiss.” Rothwell plucks sharply at the strings at sparse intervals, leaving each note plenty of space to ring out. More layers of Rothwell’s thinly transparent vocals enter the fray, repeating the same phrase out of phase with the others. You hear her inhale and breathily sigh, every utterance bearing the gravity of words not spoken lighty. In contrast, on “Blissful Ignore,” she lifts that weight and floats like a feather in the wind. “I’d adore staying a lifetime in your mind’s affections,” she chirps, selling herself on the temporary solace of denying an impending collapse. Her bass comes alive, punctuating her syllables as if following behind her like a specter—a reminder of the anxiety beneath those hollow words.
“Nowhere”—the most structurally simple, but perhaps the most evocative track—begins the side of the album where Rothwell grapples with her father’s passing. Her bass thumps like a steady heartbeat as she sings, “You can go any time/Wouldn’t it be sweeter to follow the light?” A more frantic, irregular bassline cuts in, and the vocals speed up along with it, simulating the tumult of the moment right before a painful loss. The track inches to a crawl right before it ends—the pulse returns, but it’s even slower than before. It almost feels as if you’re intruding on a private moment, standing in the doorway as Rothwell sits at her father’s bedside.
Rothwell ruminates on the aftermath of her emotional journey on closing track “Will I Find,” asking, “Will I find a way to say I love you too?” It’s about the closest the album gets to a “song” in the traditional sense, conjuring up shades of something you might find in a book of jazz standards. The bass supports the intonation of her vocals once again, but it feels different this time—looser and gentler, as if it’s singing along with her. There’s a lyrical simplicity that matches the album's musical simplicity, but that isn’t to say that it lacks depth. Each track is built around a plainspoken refrain, like a nagging feeling you can’t get out of your head. Don't Get Comfy / Nowhere speaks to the intensity of strong emotion, which requires neither florid language nor flamboyant displays of virtuosity to be universally understood.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-17T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Ruination | August 17, 2021 | 7.5 | 7ef4bb07-af1b-45e0-ac10-303603f2e939 | Shy Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shy-thompson/ | |
The rapper and producer team for a set of elaborate compositions with energetic, unpretentious writing. | The rapper and producer team for a set of elaborate compositions with energetic, unpretentious writing. | Jay Worthy / Harry Fraud: You Take the Credit, We’ll Take the Check | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jay-worthy-harry-fraud-you-take-the-credit-well-take-the-check/ | You Take the Credit, We’ll Take the Check | To hear him tell it, Jay Worthy’s origin story would render him a digital-era 2Pac. At 17, the Vancouver native relocated to Compton, where he ingratiated himself with gang members and music industry figures alike. A chance run-in with A$AP Yams opened doors for Worthy’s fledgling rap duo LNDN DRGS; persistence and networking led to EPs with Curren$y, G Perico, and the Alchemist. His devotion to the West Coast canon—twinned with a knack for surrounding himself with the right collaborators—has resulted in one of the more overachieving rap catalogs of the last half-decade.
Starting with their 2015 debut, the LNDN DRGS tapes have occupied a space similar to Le$ and Larry June’s work: evocative soul samples and lifestyle raps so unembellished as to sound improvised. More recently, as on 2021’s G-funk homage The Ballad of a Dopehead, Worthy’s devoted himself to genre fare. His rigid flow and colloquial bars recall Mack 10, a modest Inglewood rhymer whose connections ensured access to Los Angeles’ most in-demand producers. Beat selection remains Worthy’s calling card, and on his latest album, You Take the Credit, We’ll Take the Check, New York producer Harry Fraud supplies a slate of elaborate compositions for Worthy and his guests.
One of the most distinguished—and distinctive—rap producers of the last decade, Fraud is still able to meet rappers on their own turf. The most cohesive tracks on We’ll Take the Check play like tributes to the LNDN DRGS sound forged by Vancouver producer Sean House. On “Tonight,” a Moog synth and smoky horn sample frame a summer night’s itinerary; the funk licks on “Winnipeg Winters” are crisp, but the capacious snare sounds like it’s playing through a wall. With his attention to technical detail, Fraud replicates the sunset-on-Sunset glow of 2015’s Aktive and 2019’s Affiliated, their whiffs of danger and anticipation. Kamaiyah’s animated melodies steal the show on “Good Lookin’,” but Worthy slides over the upbeat drum pattern, sketching a vibrant California cityscape in a succinct 12-bar verse.
Fraud’s more avant-garde arrangements yield mixed results. The Larry June feature “Pacific Coast Highway” flashes an intricate vocal loop, but the lethargic tempo and barely-there percussion leave the rappers sounding overmatched. “Almighty” abandons drums entirely, and despite Worthy’s energetic delivery, his first-person rhymes (“I’m from the hardest block, out in Compton where they shootin’ docs/Gangbangin’ so real, swear to God this shit will never stop”) aren’t as kinetic. Worthy’s unpretentious writing can make for a refreshing neighborhood-guy pragmatism, but his vocals lack depth in the absence of a bassline. The more understated beats on We’ll Take the Check would have been better suited for a more idiosyncratic rapper.
Which isn’t to say Worthy’s music is wholly uncomplicated. His painstaking mythology—a Compton transplant who’s paid his dues at every turn, a non-native evangelist of West Coast funk—has cultivated respect in his adopted hometown and recording studios on both coasts. He’s such a natural mover that his prodigious use of the n-word (Worthy identifies as South Asian) goes largely unremarked. His reputation as an artist and a hustler has granted him entree into some of rap’s most rarefied chambers; no one’s making him use that word.
Fraud is just the latest A-lister to endorse Worthy, and the give-and-take between headliners is the main attraction on We’ll Take the Check. On “Helicopter Homicide,” Fraud’s dusky minimalism foregrounds Worthy and Conway’s tales of woe; when Big Body Bes clocks in with a spoken-word rant, the song transforms into a work of abstract art. The syrupy guitar sample on “Believe” is a standalone triumph, and Worthy’s imagery (“It’s the dream, little homie, hotels and snow bunnies/Big rims on Lex bodies, we thuggin’ like John Gotti”) meets it with eager flamboyance. On We’ll Take the Check, a great producer approaches the top of his game with a rapper who mostly knows to pick his spots. | 2022-08-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-15T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Srfschl | August 15, 2022 | 7.1 | 7ef511a6-1dbf-446b-8c9a-49f4fbe322fa | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Milk Music are a product of the fertile Olympia scene and Cruise Your Illusion finds them pulling influences from post-punk, classic rock, and blues. Lead singer Alex Coxen is a candid lyricist who conveys both piercing emotional vulnerability and confrontational punk swagger. | Milk Music are a product of the fertile Olympia scene and Cruise Your Illusion finds them pulling influences from post-punk, classic rock, and blues. Lead singer Alex Coxen is a candid lyricist who conveys both piercing emotional vulnerability and confrontational punk swagger. | Milk Music: Cruise Your Illusion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17825-milk-music-cruise-your-illusion/ | Cruise Your Illusion | Too straight for hippies. Too far-out for punk. We're like the ultimate outsiders, Alex Coxen told this website in the fall of 2011. That is not just a stoned interview quip from the frontman of Milk Music, but rather a whole estranged state of artistic mind. These guys honed theirs at home in Olympia's freak scene-- a subterranean enclave of deep rock bands like Gun Outfit, Broken Water, Weird TV, Son Skull, Hysterics, Family Stoned (note that any or all may have broken up by now, Oly-style), groups with primitive web presences or none at all, mostly documented by one tiny label and an ink-stained, broadsheet zine. Olympia's had one of the most fertile rock undergrounds in America as of late, with Milk Music its paradigm and heart.
On the surface, Cruise Your Illusion begs to be defined by time and place. But the hissy 1980s and 90s rock of Dino Jr. and SST that Milk Music's earliest layers of thrashing, burnt fuzz recalled are now gone. There's temptation to color Milk Music an Olympia band, and yet Coxen's rapturous electric guitar leads feel more like the sound of transcending wherever you might be. And while you want to point out how Coxen's strangled, gold-hearted wail and sky-kissing solos are studiously indebted to moonlit 60s classic rock, his approach is direct and ecstatic enough to sound new. The songs have got real, heartfelt groove.
Coxen is also a candid lyricist who variously conveys the piercing emotional vulnerability of country blues or a confrontational punk swagger. Of his most affecting themes are sincerity, a free mind, and a world that repeatedly turns on him. Coxen winks at a cop, steals a car with a deluded bandit, hangs on a falling star. He's performative in his role of the outlaw rock eccentric-- journeying, daydreaming, and dancing around declarations of his creative intent.
"No, Nothing, My Shelter" is one of the best songs here-- a charming ode to Jimi and Elvis with a rock-as-saviour theme that goes for the vein of "Rock and Roll" or "Hey Hey, My My". It showcases delicate emotional heft and arresting imagery of a "crushed velvet moon," as Coxen sings open-hearted of an uprooted, nomadic existence. "I often grieve with Hendrix/ I often turn to the King/ In my suffering," he sings on one of Cruise's most striking hooks. "I've always been a dancing man/ To shelter the pain/ Whenever Jimi's playing." This is endearing stuff, and it helps that Coxen maps shining guitar leads you want to lose yourself in.
Elsewhere Coxen's more of a bratty punk vagabond. "Don't fuck with me, man/ I'm illegal and free," he demands on a charged anthem. It might come off as a bunch of talk if not for the fact that the music itself is unhinged and lawless. On "New Lease on Love" Coxen puts romantic lines alongside gutter slang, a recurring technique of juxtaposition from the school of Patti Smith. "Cruising With God", meanwhile, might be the record's most heartwarming song, carrying religious connotations appropriate for an off-the-grid guy who has clearly approached music as sacred. The entire first verse is a take-down of phony music journalists "From The L.A. Free/ To the NME," who all love Milk Music. "But even with the music on/ Baby you've got it all wrong," Coxen sings, confidently. "You haven't danced in so long." He lets out a shriek. It's sort of sweet.
Eight-minute closer "The Final Scene" is an astounding piece of music, with backwards guitar parts, subtle flecks of soft harmonica, and sharp melodies that are beautifully harmonized into something of a 1950s doo-wop burner. Coxen stretches out the raw urgency of his rasp and shades it, conveying skin-crawling melancholic feelings more so than specific thoughts-- he references Shiva's blissful dance, a laughing reaper, crumbling mountains, angels riding a moonlit hearse. It's grandiose and at times almost comically earnest, something you could picture Lee Hazlewood singing straight. But Coxen's howl is desperate and unguarded, the opposite of a cool-talker. The song feels half its length.
Cruise Your Illusion holds its ground, but there are sociological elements to Milk Music's story that make the experience of the record even more fun. In June they're touring with comrade acts Merchandise (from Tampa, Fla.) and Destruction Unit (from Tempe, Ariz.), all three of whom came up on the American D.I.Y punk circuit and have been wary of breaking through to wider popularity. They've instead favored a Sonic Youth-style embrace of counterculture and expanded musical vocabularies, thus amassing cult followings on their own terms. It's a moment that reminds me of Simon Reynolds introducing the post-punk era in Rip It Up and Start Again; "Young people have a biological right to be excited about the times they're living through," he wrote. Milk Music's message, ethos, and spirit speak well of our own. | 2013-04-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2013-04-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Fat Possum | April 8, 2013 | 7.8 | 7ef56231-6514-4095-bd6b-37aa7881a553 | Jenn Pelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jenn-pelly/ | null |
The songwriter’s most direct and brash album yet has no time for saxophones or keyboards. She gives specific, unpoetic examples and doesn’t mince words. | The songwriter’s most direct and brash album yet has no time for saxophones or keyboards. She gives specific, unpoetic examples and doesn’t mince words. | Ezra Furman: Twelve Nudes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ezra-furman-twelve-nudes/ | Twelve Nudes | Ezra Furman is a highly thoughtful interviewee, often at the expense of convenient, neatly packaged answers. Hearing the songwriter dish on religion, rock’n’roll, and the United States of America with frequent pivots and pauses isn’t so different from hearing the four albums she’s recorded post-Harpoons—the first of at least four different backing bands that Furman has led—which jumped around doo-wop, blitzing sax-inflected pop, and scratchy-edged garage. Furman gives the same impression in both contexts: She has a lot going on up there, and she seems to feel a responsibility to sort through it all. An impatient conversationalist might prod her to just spit it out. On her most direct and brash album yet, Twelve Nudes, Furman does exactly that, and spits in a few faces along the way.
By the time of last year’s Transangelic Exodus, Furman’s cinematic opus about going on the run with an illegally harbored angel lover, she had moved on from her latest backing band, the Boy Friends, which she once defined as “a punk-soul-garage band.” Her new, nameless backing band has pared down to just one of those descriptors: punk. It’s volume over verbosity on Twelve Nudes. She’s upset; she’s enraged; she “should not be alone, the way things are going”; she has no time for saxophones or keyboards, let alone silly band names—not in 2019, when equality appears to be the last priority of the powerful. She gives specific, unpoetic examples and doesn’t mince words: “The kind of sex you want is the kind they’d like to make illegal”; “You register to vote, they make it impossible.”
Three years ago, Furman offered solace to fellow Perpetual Motion People on “Restless Year,” when she offered that “If you can’t calm down, you can listen to this.” She calls back to that lyric directly on Twelve Nudes’ opener, “Calm Down aka I Should Not Be Alone,” to disclaim that she can’t offer such respite here: “I know you can’t ’cause I can’t calm down,” she shrieks, blasting three-chord, major-key floodlights into accounts of habitual panic-sweating and thrashing around in bed at night. What she can offer, however, is a kick in the pants. “If you’re really at the end of your rope/No, you don’t take the night off/Too many demons to fight off,” she barks later.
One thing that remains the same with Furman on Twelve Nudes: She likes using classic templates to sing about new changes. That’s settled once “Sympathy for the Devil” is lifted not even 35 seconds into the album, but it’s especially moving on the one song where Furman unclenches her jaw and pulls back—all the way back, so that we can see what’s beneath her fight. Her governing ambition, she sings, is that she just wants to be someone’s girlfriend. “I Wanna Be Your Girlfriend” adopts a chord progression not far off from that of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” and Furman reveals that she’s “been thinking about ditching Ezra and going by Esme” (she rhymes her new, Salinger-evoking name with “résumé,” as in the thing she’s been neglecting while “responsible friends” are updating theirs—a groaner, but an endearing one). She takes this breather, speaks her truth, exhales, and then it’s right back to our regularly scheduled rage. It’s a bold inclusion framed by a fine choice in pacing.
“I’m a shy person whose very presence has become a confrontation,” Furman said in a recent interview, 12 years after her debut with the Harpoons declared “I Wanna Be Ignored.” There’s been an evolution between that early song and the recent quote, as though Furman has accepted and now decided to embrace this confrontation. If confrontation is what they see, it’s what they’ll get, Twelve Nudes seems to say. If there is progress to be made for the marginalized, it won’t come without being loud. Furman musters her best rallying cry on “Evening Prayer aka Justice”: “If your frail human heart is still pumping/Then make this one night you remember,” she pleads. “Time to do justice for the poor.” Furman pushes her growl to its limits to get this out. She knows what time it is.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Bella Union | September 9, 2019 | 7.1 | 7f00ec58-739f-4b6c-9e47-b2376515287e | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
On their collaborative debut, the Louisiana sludge band and the Kentucky songwriter funnel gothic majesty and charred metal into moments of unlikely wonder. | On their collaborative debut, the Louisiana sludge band and the Kentucky songwriter funnel gothic majesty and charred metal into moments of unlikely wonder. | Emma Ruth Rundle / Thou: May Our Chambers Be Full | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/emma-ruth-rundle-thou-may-our-chambers-be-full/ | May Our Chambers Be Full | Thou want to make a new world. Sure, the Louisiana sludge militants sound obliterating—Bryan Funck screeches with anguish, as if a scab were being repeatedly ripped from the surface of the band’s music. But Thou have long hopscotched among labels, collaborators, and split-mates, creating a non-hierarchical network of partners. They do what they want, whether covering Nirvana in quasi-exhaustive fashion or weaving an exhausting web of side-projects. Even their New Orleans hub, Sisters in Christ, feels as much like some communal anarcho-outpost as a record store. In Kentucky, songwriter, painter, and bandleader Emma Ruth Rundle occupies a related role. She works in multiple groups while making her own transfixing chiaroscuro folk-rock, too.
Together, Rundle and Thou shape a grand world of their own. On their seven-track collaborative debut, May Our Chambers Be Full, gothic majesty and charred metal curl into moments of unlikely wonder. At their best, these songs pair the power of a rock-radio anthem with the gnarled eccentricity of their respective DIY roots. Chambers suggests a mutual-aid network: Rundle, an evocative singer with a kind of priestly command, supplies Thou with a central melodic ballast. Thou, one of the most dependably mighty bands to emerge from the South this century, add intensity and muscle. Funck’s serrated screams cut across Rundle’s resplendent tone like a hacksaw grinding against a diamond.
These bits are enthralling. Rundle and Funck volley verses back and forth, for instance, during “Out of Existence.” She initially gives in to the band’s relentless rush, allowing herself to be swept inside, while he climbs atop it, sneering from above like a gargoyle. But the guitars, interwoven like a cat’s cradle, swell beneath Rundle during the climax. The effect is transcendent, lifting you from your own gloom for 30 seconds, too. On “Magickal Cost,” Rundle rejoins Funck after the black metal tirade at song’s center, the superhero and arch-villain suddenly joining teams and making your hairs stand on end.
But Chambers as a whole feels much longer than its 36-minute runtime, even to the point of tedium. Wayward psychedelic blues solos and self-indulgent sections interrupt the momentum. “Into Being” spends two minutes searching for its finale through lysergic guitars or arcing harmonies. Aimless passages like these often make the songs feel like a mélange of moments that lose strength as parts pile on. After “Out of Existence” hits its pinnacle with Rundle, Funck takes another unnecessary verse. You’ve forgotten her blissful sting by song’s end.
This fatigue and vertigo stem from the glut of tools at their disposal—and, it seems, their lack of restraint with them. Everyone feels a little like Chekhov’s proverbial gun: If they’re here, they’d better get used. By album’s end, Rundle and Funck build a seesaw of sorts, too often vying for space within the same line or song. They almost crowd KC Stafford out of the otherwise spectacular “Monolith,” a neo-grunge blast that suggests new avenues for Thou. There are four guitars on every song here, reinforcing the sense that everyone must have something significant to say or play.
However exhilarating its discrete peaks, May Our Chambers Be Full is one of those common collaborations that’s more notable for what it says about those who made it than for the new material itself. You witness Rundle’s ability to command a formidable band. You sense Thou’s willingness to expose their melodic heart. Most important, though, you hear two acts committed to considering other ways of existing, or to outstripping our expectations not as an act of public evasion but as one of private exploration. Maybe that’s the essence of building a new world—the most inspiring aspect of May Our Chambers Be Full, even at its almighty heights.
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. | 2020-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-06T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Metal | Sacred Bones | November 6, 2020 | 6.9 | 7f06f1fa-1b89-4325-82ad-4182ddeabf7d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
The minimalist classical Tower of Meaning is the greatest outlier in Arthur Russell's recorded catalogue: the most uncharacteristic one-off project in a career that is full of them. | The minimalist classical Tower of Meaning is the greatest outlier in Arthur Russell's recorded catalogue: the most uncharacteristic one-off project in a career that is full of them. | Arthur Russell: Tower of Meaning | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21807-tower-of-meaning/ | Tower of Meaning | During his lifetime, Arthur Russell maintained only a very small cult fan base beyond the direct circles of artists who found his work so moving. Our understanding of the singer, cellist, producer, and composer's artistic identity, then, continues to evolve, as lost or cobbled-together releases trickle out via the Russell archival label Audika Records. Among the different versions of Russell, the eccentric disco obsessive and the confessional singer/songwriter remain his most familiar modes. The aspiring avant-garde classical music composer is less known, with the least recorded music to show for himself.
Yet Russell spent years of his life absorbed in this scene. During his composition studies at the Manhattan School of Music and Dartmouth University, he found inspiration in the work of the previous generation of downtown New York avant-garde composers—studying the early minimalist music of La Monte Young and Terry Riley, and the spare, pacifying orchestral works of Morton Feldman, John Cage, and one of his teachers, Christian Wolff. In works like his 48-hour-long experiment Instrumentals, he blended rock'n'roll influences with modern classical methodology. But the newly rereleased Tower of Meaning recordings capture a set of incidental theater music that bears an even clearer mark of those influences. Eschewing the pulsating, pop-influenced underpinnings of almost all of his other work, Tower of Meaning is the greatest outlier in his Russell's recorded catalogue: the most uncharacteristic one-off project in a career that is full of them.
And like many of Russell's creative ventures, there were other famous figures tangentially involved with this project. The pieces included on Tower of Meaning were written for a production of Euripides' Medea by legendary opera and theater director Robert Wilson in the early '80s. The collaboration was facilitated by Philip Glass, who worked with Wilson on seminal avant-music-theater work Einstein on the Beach in 1976. A fight between Wilson and Russell resulted in the music being axed from the program, and it went unheard until Glass released the tapes on his own Chatham Square label—in a run of 320—some years later. Ironically, outside of his landmark cello-and-vocal release, 1986's World of Echo, Tower of Meaning was the only finished and properly pressed "Arthur Russell" album during his lifetime.
Devoid of its dramatic context, and peppered with abrupt track ends that suggest lost tape reels, this music feels more in-process than many of Russell's "unfinished" music does—a skeleton to be filled in. Each of the seven tracks consist mostly of long, repeating strings of block chords, voiced by mixed string, wind, and brass ensembles. In later movements, a harp and hand drum, respectively, provide decoration in between the chords, perhaps suggesting the court music of the play's time period. Some of the harmonies have a brittle, dissonant quality; others feel open and cavernous; a few feel a couple of ticks away from pop music. The three types are mixed up thoroughly in these pieces, and it takes a while to become acclimated to this fidgety vocabulary.
But the most notable and challenging thing about the pieces on Tower of Meaning is their lack of arc or climax. Russell's misty but urgent song accompaniments have a similarly static quality, accumulating mass gradually and never drastically. But Tower of Meaning takes a very different approach to achieving a similar effect. The chords move in no consistent meter; there is almost no variation of dynamic across the album, and the chamber orchestra is stark and untreated with effects. Over time—consistent with most of Russell's work—this begins to create a pleasant, soothing effect, despite the sometimes-jarring nature of the harmony.
Ultimately, the approach finds overlap with that of ambient music. A few years prior to writing the Medea score, while at the Manhattan School, Russell told a skeptical composition teacher that he liked writing pieces that the listener could "plug out [from] and then plug back in[to] again without losing anything essential." On Tower of Meaning, it's easiest to do this during the culminating piece of the album, "Fragments From Tower of Meaning," which assembles chordal ideas from earlier tracks into a cyclical chamber orchestra piece, punctuated by a Pavlovian chime, which becomes more warm and enveloping across its 21-minute duration.
It would be tough to claim that Tower of Meaning is one of Russell's greatest efforts. Then again, it was not designed to be: It sounds very much like it was written as a functional component of Wilson's larger picture, not to be disseminated separately. Also, it has more of a clear grounding in a pre-existing musical lineage than anything else that Russell ever released. Yet Tower of Meaning works well within its own self-imposed boundaries. It has definite jolts of Russell's playful, try-anything-once mentality. Like most of his best music, it manages to position itself just slightly outside of convention, at a jaunty angle. | 2016-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Audika | April 21, 2016 | 7 | 7f0c040f-1685-4a0e-91a6-bb0419889320 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
Stephen McBean has always made music for the open road, but if you value your own safety, don’t listen to Get Back, his first record as Pink Mountaintops in five years, while behind the wheel—or for that matter, while doing anything that requires specific and steady motor skills. | Stephen McBean has always made music for the open road, but if you value your own safety, don’t listen to Get Back, his first record as Pink Mountaintops in five years, while behind the wheel—or for that matter, while doing anything that requires specific and steady motor skills. | Pink Mountaintops: Get Back | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19161-pink-mountaintops-get-back/ | Get Back | Stephen McBean has always made music for the open road. Black Mountain’s lofty mix of proto-metal, prog rock and regal folk suggested late-night drives in the fall, big guitars battling back the crisp autumn air. Meanwhile, Pink Mountaintops—his assumed solo act that’s wrangled together various full bands of collaborators during the last decade—scored perfect spring treks with the top down, as McBean delivered exclamatory anthems about love, friendship and sex. But if you value your own safety, don’t listen to Get Back, the first Pink Mountaintops record in five years, while behind the wheel—or for that matter, while doing anything that requires specific and steady motor skills.
The album’s first half is consistent enough, offering a bright-eyed romp through McBean’s record collection. Opener “Ambulance City” dances in a way that's reminiscent of Television, taut drums pushing at the backs of anxious, steely guitars, while McBean finds a path between Phil Spector and Mudhoney during “Through All the Worry” and dips into messy Springsteen love for “Sell Your Soul.” So the wreck, panic, and disaster set in around “North Hollywood Microwaves", during the song's soul-torturing second half. There's a seesaw of dipping saxophone and diving guitar bouncing between a rubbery bassline and repeated strings of non-sequiturs—and then the rapping starts: “I’ve seen rows of cocks/ And it’s looking like corn/ Waving in the wind, I’ve sworn,” rhymes Annie Hardy, frontwoman of Giant Drag and an occasional and unfortunate emcee.
She continues to shoot through a surreal sequence of images and admissions concerning “Ooey-gooey cum”—where it goes, where it comes from, how many gallons one can manage, how it gave her AIDS, how she now gets it from bears, and, of course, whether she prefers polar or black bears. “Cum talk, what the fuck?” she exclaims toward the end over John Wahl’s screaming, Zorn-style saxophone, and as a listener, it’s hard not to ask the same thing.
The trouble isn’t that McBean thought it best to include a rap verse on Get Back, or even that the only woman to appear on this album sets herself up as an automatic punchline. (J Mascis plays guitar on Get Back—can he rap about dicks, too?) And considering his inclusive stylistic approach, the rap's presence isn’t that surprising, really: while 2009’s Outside Love was a grand, romantic rock record with hooks as arching as the Smiths', earlier Pink Mountaintops material (particularly the project’s 2004 self-titled debut) experimented with beat machines, oblong structures, and sudden interruptions as though playfulness were half the point of the project. Why not add a few rap verses?
But “North Hollywood Microwaves” epitomizes the nostalgia-based indecision that generally plagues Get Back. This is McBean’s aging record, where he gazes at the golden years of his youth with wanderlust. He questions how he ever made it out alive, wishes to revisit those high-flying times, and asks if modern youth locked into “computerized segregation” will end up okay, too. He posits that 1987, when he would have been a late teenager, was “The second summer of love”, referencing the joy of doing dirty deeds along the kid-cruising strip of his midsize Canadian hometown. And he praises those old pals who persevered when the mayhem went bad: “I could understand how you’d rather split than take my hand,” he sings during one of the album’s best moment, with chiming bells and clanging guitars adding electricity to the sudden solemnity.
The sentiments are there, but McBean essentially handles these questions by flipping through his record collection. Whether it’s the lyrical references to Eddie Cochran, the Boss, and Richard Hell, or the way these songs sound like his handwritten copies of tunes by the Go-Betweens, Television, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the Amboy Dukes, there’s the overwhelming sense that McBean is mining the past for comfort in the uncertain present. “North Hollywood Microwaves”, an out-of-nowhere aberration in a relatively wide-ranging oeuvre, is McBean’s admission that he’s not sure if he’s even comfortable with his own leaden nostalgia. It’s not just that the rap is bad (it’s horrible, actually)—it’s that the edgy, subversive decision spotlights the antique stitches and seams that hold Get Back together, both conceptually and musically.
I’ve wondered how Get Back might be different without “North Hollywood Microwaves,” or at least without its rapped appendix. Doesn’t it seem unfair, after all, that a largely enjoyable rock ’n’ roll album with 10 songs should be dismissed because of one track’s blindsiding goof? It does, and there’s little doubt that, with no “North Hollywood Microwaves”, Get Back would be pushed toward the safe bounds of mediocrity. But even after a long spell without much of a sound from McBean, I’m still intrigued by his work, or at least the possibilities of what he might continue to make. If Get Back were just yet another decent, mid-tempo rock record, which it mostly is, it would be safe to assume that McBean has told us his story and taken his music to its alternately heaviest and most radiant places.
But Get Back still finds McBean trying to tap into something risky and surprising, even if the results are the sometimes-egregious misstep of a mid-40s rock musician obsessed with the letdown of aging. Still, the adventure—bear semen notwithstanding—makes me want to stick around long enough to give McBean at least one more chance for a road trip. | 2014-04-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2014-04-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rock | Jagjaguwar | April 30, 2014 | 4.9 | 7f16ee29-748c-44ab-affb-14283f35660a | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The short EP from the California singer showcases his ear for cool sounds, and every track puts his dynamic personality and oddly calibrated synths front and center. | The short EP from the California singer showcases his ear for cool sounds, and every track puts his dynamic personality and oddly calibrated synths front and center. | Cuco: Chiquito EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cuco-chiquito-ep/ | Chiquito EP | No teenager dreams of driving an SUV, but Omar Banos isn’t the type to take a functioning car for granted. On his debut EP as Cuco, the 19-year-old bedroom pop singer and sometimes kinda-sorta rapper pays tribute to his Honda CR-V, a compact utility vehicle mostly notable for its safety features. “Riding down the street in my Honda SUV,” he sings, “Picking up my homies in my CR-V.” There’s a long, inglorious tradition of outsiders rapping about mundanities that more traditional rappers would never touch, and usually the joke isn’t remotely funny (we see you, Lil Dicky). But Banos sells it, in part because he isn’t entirely joking. When you’re a teenager, cars are freedom, and Banos sings with a genuine affection for his that’s all too relatable.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t rap more, even though he’s passable enough at it that he could consider going that route: Rap is about fantasy, or at least striving for more, but Banos is fundamentally happy with what he already has. He spends his self-recorded Chiquito EP in a content daze, smoking the hours away, daydreaming about crushes, and enjoying the sun (he’s from Hawthorne, California, home of the Beach Boys). The idea of upgrading to a more glamorous ride never even crosses his mind.
Lots of Banos’ early press has kicked around the term “heartthrob,” and you can lose some real time parsing how much irony, if any, is in that word. Though nobody’s going to mistake him for one of the One Direction guys, he does have a sort of non-threatening, ’80s John Cusack thing going for him, and many of these songs cast him in the Lloyd Dobler role. A go-getter? Hardly. But boyfriend material? Definitely. He’s the classic “in loving with being in love” type.
Banos has an ear for cool sounds, and every track on Chiquito puts his oddly calibrated synths front and center. Mostly they’re just window dressing, though, a showy new way of packaging some time-tested bubblegum hooks. The trap drums and chopped-and-screwed effects that open “Sunnyside” are a fake out; the song itself is so faithful to the spirit of 1950s pop that it could be a cover of a forgotten Platters number, at least until it drifts off into flighty scribbles of smoked-out electric guitar at the end. The goopy, modernist synthesizers of “Summertime Hightime” make a statement, but they’re not nearly as memorable as Banos’ woozy delivery: “Summertime is the time I like to get high wit’ chew, it’s true,” he sings with a blissful drowsiness, sounding as if he’s pouring himself a bowl of cereal after a very satisfying nap.
Even his lyrics that aren’t overtly romantic sound like pickup lines. On the sticky-sweet “dontmakemefallinlove” he plays the lovable fuck up with clear glee, cheerfully singing “I don’t think I’m right for you, I’m just disappointing you.” It’s reverse psychology; the lyrics say “don’t date me,” but his puppy-dog delivery says “you should totally date me.” He delivers the EP’s most earnest serenades in Spanish on “Mi Infinita.” The translation may or may not do the line justice, but “When there’s a new romantic movie, I want to reenact those scenes with you” is a mighty endearing sentiment.
Banos makes nearly everything sound effortless. There’s only one track that feels forced, and curiously it’s the first one. The EP’s most conventional rap song, “Lucy” is fine for what it is, and if nothing else its production shows that Banos can do a decent Clams Casino impression. But compared to the spirited pop that follows, it sounds out of place and secondhand—its boast about feeling like John Lennon could’ve been ripped from the Soundcloud page of literally hundreds of struggle rappers. It’s the one moment on Chiquito where Banos sounds like he’s playing on somebody else’s terrain, and there’s no reason for it. An artist with this much personality doesn’t need to adopt somebody else’s. | 2018-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | self-released | May 4, 2018 | 7.4 | 7f1a1c26-a2f3-469a-95ab-6c1b172a6376 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The electroclash duo returns from a nine-year hiatus with a new creative brain trust in tow, but a few standout singles aren’t enough to redeem a plodding, repetitive album. | The electroclash duo returns from a nine-year hiatus with a new creative brain trust in tow, but a few standout singles aren’t enough to redeem a plodding, repetitive album. | Fischerspooner: Sir | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fischerspooner-sir/ | Sir | It’s 2018 and Fischerspooner have returned after a nine-year absence as an in-studio supergroup. Sure, why not? The group began as the performance-art project of frontman Casey Spooner and co-writer/producer Warren Fischer before finding surprising success as electroclash’s signature act. That genre’s celebration of artifice, coupled with the suspicion that it was all an art-school lark, created a mountain of critical skepticism that Fischerspooner have had a hard time surmounting ever since. Yet of their three previous albums, two displayed tremendous proficiency in the booth: #1, from 2002, remains a sexy, sleazy snapshot of its time and place, while 2005’s Odyssey convincingly refashioned their sound into muscular electro-rock. They really only blew it with the rickety dance pop of 2009’s Entertainment, and as another great prefab star once sang, two out of three ain’t bad.
For their comeback, Spooner and Fischer have joined forces with (among others) Chairlift vocalist Caroline Polachek, Beyoncé and Run the Jewels collaborator Boots, Saddle Creek Records’ in-house sound wizard Andy LeMaster, pop superstardom’s go-to engineer and mixer Stuart White, and freaking Michael Stipe. Speaking of comebacks, Stipe’s writing and production on the record constitute his first major musical outing since the dissolution of R.E.M. following 2011’s Collapse Into Now. As if in homage to the formation of this alt/indie/R&B Justice League, Spooner sculpted himself into a superhero’s physique, though with his long hair and soup-strainer mustache he looks less Marvel Studios and more like a human mash-up of the Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott characters from Road House. But the transformation has more to do with Spooner’s mid-life embrace of his own sexuality, which he addresses throughout the record with more candor and unapologetic lust than ever before. In fact, Stipe turns out to have been Spooner’s first boyfriend, way back in 1988, providing Sir with a juicy backstory to match all its attention-getting musical collaborations and stylistic shifts.
On the album’s singles and opening track, the results are pretty spectacular. “Have Fun Tonight” is its biggest electroclash throwback. It’s a stomping, threatening salute to nightlife's illicit lure that makes effective use of Spooner’s limited vocal palette by juxtaposing high-pitched come-ons with a repetition of the title phrase that sounds like an order issued at gunpoint. “Togetherness” is a slow-jam showcase for Polachek, whose co-lead vocals alternately soar, screech, and sigh with all the precision and control you’ve come to expect from her, while Spooner injects the sensual litany of his lyrics (“The back of your hand/My bottom lip/Down my throat”) with a palpable ache. The unexpectedly lush and lovely middle eight, meanwhile, makes Spooner’s description of his lover as a sharp-toothed predator “engineered for cruelty and charm” sound downright complimentary. The remaining singles—“TopBrazil,” a midtempo number with a sly melody that sounds like an Odyssey outtake, and “Butterscotch Goddam,” arguably the record’s horniest moment, which is saying something—provide their own pleasures, if not quite reaching their counterparts’ heights. Album opener “Stranger Strange” is an inviting slice of sexual psychedelia; its slow groove, crescendoing synths, and marvelously unhinged vocal yelps and yowls are the aural equivalent of parting the beaded curtain at the entrance to an orgy.
If you’re feeling generous and inclined to favor diaristic directness over sonic strength, you can add album closer “Oh Rio” to the list of highlights. Spooner juxtaposes his teenaged sexual awakening, flipping through Bruce Weber photos in the back of a bookstore, with a growing awareness of his own mortality, reducing a beachside tryst with a younger man to a series of wearying symptoms: “Hacking up a lung, flayed out in the sun/Sometimes dreams have to die.” Musically, there’s not much going on, but those words would be powerful coming out of anyone’s mouth, much less the guy who used to flagrantly lip-sync to “Emerge” twice per show, since it was their biggest hit. Add it all up and Sir would make a heck of an EP.
The remainder of the record, though, is just plain forgettable. The aptly titled “Everything Is Just Alright” sets the dreary tone near the top with a maddeningly repetitive chorus and the first signs that Spooner’s chronicles-of-an-aging-lothario lyrics will bear diminishing returns over time. (“I’m kind of buzzed, you’re kind of dumb,” I’m kind of bored.) Fully five different songs—“Discreet,” “Strut,” “Get It On,” “I Need Love,” and “Try Again”—trod the same tired ground of plodding beats, slovenly melodic structure, and phrases repeated like a nervous tic. Only “Dark Pink” distinguishes itself with a major-key melody and big ’80s horns, but it’s over before it can get anywhere interesting.
It’s hard to blame Spooner, Fischer, or Stipe for wanting to flood the zone after such prolonged absences from the scene. Yet Sir’s highs show that this peculiar team is perfectly capable of coming up with good ideas. The spirit was willing, but the editorial hand, which could have redeemed the project by jettisoning the filler, was weak. Sir starts sexy, finishes sad, and boasts a quartet of bangers in between. Unfortunately, that leaves you with more than half the album left to endure. | 2018-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-17T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ultra | February 17, 2018 | 5.8 | 7f1b51d6-3fd1-44ce-b8e0-ed31233b9925 | Sean T. Collins | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-t. collins/ | |
Not that anyone expected subtlety from Die Antwoord, but the South African trio's second studio album is id rap at its worst, lacking scope or imagination even in its excess. | Not that anyone expected subtlety from Die Antwoord, but the South African trio's second studio album is id rap at its worst, lacking scope or imagination even in its excess. | Die Antwoord: Ten$ion | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16270-tenion/ | Ten$ion | If you're unfamiliar, Die Antwoord operate on the principle of "zef," a philosophy of intentional ignorance and crassness. It's the latest in series of personas for rapper Ninja, né Watkin Tudor Jones, but even with that conceptual bent in mind, it's still hard to process Die Antwoord as an idea, especially on Ten$ion where they replace what made them sometimes intriguing and slightly subversive with tired and tropes and lazy lyrics. In some ways it's the worst of both worlds: We've seen and heard it all before, and now it's dumbed-down even further. The blunt simplicity of Ten$ion could be seen as the mastery and refinement of a fledgling aesthetic (stupid for the sake of stupid). But this is a step back. Whatever cultural interrogation Die Antwoord might have been performing with $O$-- and it was hard to tell-- is totally absent here.
Die Antwoord abandoned their deal with Universal because of perceived pressure to be "like everyone else out there at the moment," and it's immediately clear from Ten$ion opener "Never Le Nkemise 1" that their sound has gotten a whole lot more... expensive. Earlier tracks like as "Enter the Ninja" and "Wat Kyk Jy?" hinted at big-room ambitions but still sounded endearingly cheap and shoddy. But "Never Le Nkemise 1" begins with a blockbuster-worthy bit of string-led melodrama and pseudo-choral vocals and quickly slams down into a-- what else?-- dubstep throwdown, all fiery blazes of scorched-earth LFO threatening to drown out Ninja's screeches of "that's why we keep it motherfucking gangsturrrrr!"
Say what you want about this zany group of South Africans, but attention-grabbing early singles like "Enter the Ninja" at least showed a clever dimension to their sound, with quick-fire raps that were easy enough to get swept up in. But there's nothing remotely thought-out or careful about Ten$ion. Not that anyone expected subtlety from Die Antwoord, but this is id rap at its worst, and even their excess lacks scope or imagination.
By its very nature, the Die Antwoord project is style-over-substance, but Ten$ion goes out of its way to prove that point. The boasting shouts of "'EY SEXEE, 'EY SEXEE" on the chorus of "Hey Sexy" are hopelessly awkward, and Ninja's Ludacris crib, "Get out the bitch, get out the way," feels like an embarrassingly misguided attempt at relating this duo to mainstream hip-hop currency-- a decade too late. If their lyrics are emptier than ever ("I took drugs at the age of 13/ Jesus Christ/ What the fuck?"), their attempts at shock value ring disturbingly hollow. If you aren't getting a little restless by the album's ending stretch, "DJ Hi-Tek Rulez" might snap you out of a cock-eyed stupor with its gruff, digitally altered grunts of "DJ Hi-Tek will fuck you in the ass... You can't touch me, faggot," amid other violently homophobic slurs. There's no shortage of allowances made for this kind of stuff in hip-hop, on an album this silly and concerned with dumb, thoughtless fun, it's especially troubling. It doesn't sound anything like a joke in the impenetrably convoluted layers of irony and self-mythologizing that is Die Antwoord.
What are we left with then? Die Antwoord were stuck with the "rave-rap" tag from the beginning, and it wasn't too bad a description, emphasizing not only the trio's danceability and playfulness but also its stark-raving-mad, go-for-broke tendencies. But this time around, the emphasis is on the "rave." Which is great for the in-house production but detrimental to pretty much everything else. The songs here are even less collected than before, jumping from flashpoint to flashpoint in a frenzied hunger to see how many times they can climax in each four-minute chunk of energy. It's exhausting, and the fragmentary, dissociative scatter takes the vitality and primacy out of the music. For a band so obsessed with its own self-consciously humorous image, Ten$ion in part fails because it feels so strangely humorless.
So while they might have succeeded in their quest to bypass the constraints of major-label rules and pressures-- apparently Universal rejected the album for being too vulgar-- they've gone and picked the most unfortunate parts of their oversized, manufactured personalities to highlight. Ten$ion is proof that you need more than just aesthetic and press savvy to really get by. They might have left their potentially comfortable new home to forge their own path, but Die Antwoord sound like they have no idea where they're going. | 2012-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2012-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | ZEF | February 10, 2012 | 4.2 | 7f24ea01-4922-4080-98cb-470f792331d2 | Andrew Ryce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-ryce/ | null |
Armed with a fitfully expressive tenor voice and a crudely amplified nylon-string acoustic guitar, Newcastle singer-songwriter Richard Dawson often deals with death or disaster in his music. On his third album, Nothing Important, the subject matter feels personal, often uncomfortably so. | Armed with a fitfully expressive tenor voice and a crudely amplified nylon-string acoustic guitar, Newcastle singer-songwriter Richard Dawson often deals with death or disaster in his music. On his third album, Nothing Important, the subject matter feels personal, often uncomfortably so. | Richard Dawson: Nothing Important | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19904-richard-dawson-nothing-important/ | Nothing Important | Richard Dawson’s music often deals with death or disaster. The Newcastle singer-songwriter’s breakthrough album, 2011’s The Magic Bridge, features songs like "Grandad’s Deathbed Hallucinations" and "Man Has Been Struck Down by Hands Unseen", as well as a "Black dog in the sky/ Who pisses and slobbers all over the world." When looking for inspiration for his follow-up (2013’s concept piece The Glass Trunk) Dawson began with a database search for "death" at his hometown museum. The album’s a capella ballads, inspired by centuries-old news clippings, tell tales of mutilated horses, murder, and the moors. His latest LP, Nothing Important, is no less morbid in its talking points, but the tragedies described are less outlandish. The subject matter feels personal, often uncomfortably so, and Dawson always falls far from sentimentalizing or softening it.
The primary sonic forces on the album are Dawson’s brittle, crudely amplified nylon-string acoustic guitar—which recalls the timbre of UK free-improv giant Derek Bailey’s playing—and his fitfully expressive tenor voice, which, when not incited to the point of howling self-evisceration, evokes Robert Wyatt’s. On other albums Dawson has explored his disparate musical tendencies separately from one another: Experimental drones, folk sketches, imitation field cries, and free jazz diversions were relegated to separate tracks and even different releases. Nothing Important fulfills and extends the promise of this earlier work; incongruous stylistic elements are overlaid upon one another, and packed into unwieldy but tightly-wrapped packages (particularly, two dense, 16-minute long compositions).
The album’s lyrics begin with a birth, but the time stamp suggests that it is not Dawson’s: "I am born by Caesarean section at 9:30 AM/ In Princess Mary’s Maternity Hospital on the 24th May/ Sixty years ago today." In a handful of lengthy verses—often fit to iambic rhythms and lilting melodies reminiscent of 16th-century madrigals—Dawson sketches painful but faint memories, including the death of a baby and an uncle who reappears as a ghost. The choruses are explosive, and derail easily ("I am nothing/ You are nothing/ Nothing important"). Running through a laundry list of mundane, still-life images maddens the title track’s narrator to the point of surrendering: "Why do they remain so clear while the faces of my loved ones disappear?" Eventually Dawson’s voice trails off, and the instrumental themes which hold the piece together reappear briefly—fatigued and sluggish—and fade. Full of unlikely musical juxtapositions and bizarre imagery (dark omens like "a barracuda chewing on a chrysanthemum" or "a forking hairline seam of superglue through the Black Gate") "Nothing Important" is perhaps Dawson’s most ambitious and affecting composition to date.
"The Vile Stuff" is less nuanced: a slow-burning dirge based around a snippet of a sinister, raga-like melody. Dawson’s lyrics center on a group of classmates ("year 7’s") who suffer dire consequences after sharing a Coke-bottled slurry of mixed liquors on a fieldtrip. The humor here is pitch black, similar to that of an Edward Gorey picture book: Dawson’s narrator and his fellow transgressors suffer fractured skulls and cheekbones, stab screwdrivers through their hands, and hop into bed with their teachers. The song culminates in a blistering cacophony of bowed harp drones (courtesy of Dawson’s frequent collaborator Rhodri Davies), funereal percussion and feedback—the sound is only as discordant and unpleasant as adolescence.
Nothing Important is driven by an ongoing conflict between entropic impulsiveness and an almost classical sense of beauty and order. The music is frequently caught in a tug of war between melody and harmony. In the guitar instrumentals that bookend the album, for instance, Dawson always runs the risk of letting a particularly effusive riff overwhelm the chords and rhythms, and topple the whole musical edifice into a series of fragmented stabs and melodic shards. The lyrics, meanwhile, alternate visions of despair, pain, and anger with moments of reconciliation and acceptance. The ritual drama of falling and picking one’s self back up again (taking "responsibility," as Dawson prefers in interviews) plays out in every element of this music, and is key to its elusive power. | 2014-11-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2014-11-05T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Weird World | November 5, 2014 | 7.8 | 7f2bb5b7-0473-4214-aa39-85fa5b3fb4aa | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
The Los Angeles-based ambient musician’s EP is restful and restorative, using lo-fi tones and textures to create a work that subtly transcends. | The Los Angeles-based ambient musician’s EP is restful and restorative, using lo-fi tones and textures to create a work that subtly transcends. | Ana Roxanne: ~~~ EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ana-roxanne-ep/ | ~~~ EP | When Ana Roxanne recorded an EP in 2015, she wasn’t making a debut. ~~~ originated as a private project, the culmination of formal and informal musical training from church and school choirs to college to studying with a teacher of traditional Hindustani vocal music. Freshly rereleased by Leaving Records, the EP’s warm meditations feel unconnected to a particular time or place. Its title is utilitarian, the kind of placeholder symbols tapped out to keep a digital file at the top of an alphabetized folder. Its low, wavering hums and glassy plinks have a restful, restorative quality; it fades into the background or rewards close listening with equal ease.
~~~ sets a mood through pacing as much as through sound. The quiet recordings of ocean waves that open “It’s a Rainy Day on the Cosmic Shore” and “In a Small Valley” serve as long pauses, building the illusion of space into a short album like mirrors in a small room. The fuzzy, analog aquatics recall the Environments series of field recordings, originally released in the 1960s and 1970s and recently reissued by Numero Group as an app—a modern edition of an earlier generation’s serene, anonymous background sound. Such sound can aid in introspection or distract from it, depending on your priorities; by shifting field recordings towards melody and spirituality, Ana Roxanne invites contemplation.
When ~~~ incorporates vocals, they fall between a murmur and a soft melody, intimate without getting personal. “In existential mathematics, the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory,” instructs a man’s gentle voice on “Slowness,” before pausing to ask, “Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?” Synthesizers cycle and burble, a kind of ambient music that’s more USS Enterprise sound effects than seashores. Ana Roxanne’s intermittent use of her own voice helps unify the collection, an individual stamp on a humanistic style. On “Nocturne,” her ethereal croon is an overheard echo of the cathedrals where, as a young person, she came to understand music as a sacrament.
In its final third, ~~~ shifts outward, taking a turn toward pop’s past. “I’m Every Sparkly Woman” is a cover of a cover, draining the funk from the Whitney Houston version of Chaka Khan’s “I’m Every Woman” and recasting it as a whispy strand of melody over bubbling Moog arpeggios. Misty and distant, the song’s karaoke influence shines through in sound and ambiance: virtualized pop with the forlorn glow of an empty bar. But it’s still of a piece with the music that surrounds it: textured but uncomplicated, soothing without feeling narcotic, flashing glints of personality without leaving the chill zone. Ambient music has perhaps never been so readily available as it is right now; Ana Roxanne’s quiet soundscapes offer the promise of artisanship in an automated age. | 2019-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Leaving | April 20, 2019 | 7.3 | 7f319d1d-b848-4633-8757-3d89f6524320 | Anna Gaca | https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/ |
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