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The Kenyan artist’s new release is a stunning portrait of the electromagnetic sounds and hidden noises of his hometown. In its swelling electrical currents lies a thesis about the richness and drama of everyday sounds. | The Kenyan artist’s new release is a stunning portrait of the electromagnetic sounds and hidden noises of his hometown. In its swelling electrical currents lies a thesis about the richness and drama of everyday sounds. | KMRU: Natur | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kmru-natur/ | Natur | Every city has its own sound—literally. Beyond whatever music might get played there, every place on earth emits a set of frequencies that is completely unique. For Joseph Kamaru, these identities are as distinct as skylines. “Soundscapes reveal a lot about how people think and behave,” he recently told Resident Advisor. He notices them when he goes somewhere new and explores them in his music. Often, they make him think of his home city, Nairobi.
Kamaru moved to Berlin in 2020. Since then, he’s recorded over a dozen records that position him as a master of esoteric sound: a blend of ambient, drone, noise, and field recordings, defined by tactile sound design and an emotional palette that runs from haunting to serene. In 2022, he composed what would become As Nature, a live show inspired, as he put it in an email, by “the electromagnetic sounds and hidden noises in Nairobi that are so present that the inhabitants of the city become connected with them.” He played it again and again at experimental events across Europe, tweaking it until he formed an intense bond with the music. “I became it,” he says.
Natur, which arrives on the UK label Touch, is the album version of that performance. In its attempt to capture ineffable qualities of his home city, it is also a personal record. It is, like much of Kamaru’s music, subtly political as well, shifting the focus to an East African city in an art form dominated by Western bias. More than anything, though, it shows his unique way of hearing the world around him in extraordinary detail, and shaping those impressions into a surreal musical work.
A single, 52-minute piece, Natur bobs and weaves through crackling noise and balmy ambience. For Kamaru, the sound of Nairobi at night is all about electricity, from the hiss of open transformers to electrosmog—sounds inaudible to the naked ear but captured by Kamaru’s electromagnetic microphones—all set against a darkness deep enough to be broken by low-lit iPhone screens. In its calmer sections, Natur serves up whispers, birdsong, footfalls and muffled crowds, humid drones and barely-there melodic loops. In its more chaotic sections, frequencies wail, whoosh, and crash. Above all, they buzz. At times the album feels like a gallery of the countless distinct forms electrical buzzing can take.
Ambient as much of it is, the result is the opposite of background music. Natur is a voltaic odyssey, a ghost train rumbling, twisting and floating through this aural rendering of Nairobi at night. Kamaru has written about what he calls “activated listening,” a closely intentional form of listening that Natur demands of its listeners from its opening section, a swelling wave of electrical currents that crests just before it short-circuits. Perhaps because it took shape as a live performance, this is a dynamic, ever-evolving composition, one that moves through a sequence of scenes as distinct as they are abstract.
Take the passage about 15 minutes in, when a barrage of white-hot frequencies mercifully gives way to a haze of soothing, natural sounds. Kamaru follows this pattern for much of the record’s first half, swerving through a thicket of noise, then slipping, at just the right moment, into a stretch of relative serenity. After a while, the two modes blur together into something droning and hypnotic.
Every moment along this drifting path is bursting with vivid detail. Layered together or presented in turn, Kamaru’s sounds are carefully sculpted and lovingly displayed, artifacts of the invisible world his work explores. It’s usually hard to tell field recordings—presented as-is or embellished in the studio—apart from sounds entirely of his creation. Still, the record demonstrates something Kamaru senses more easily than the rest of us, which is the richness and drama of everyday sounds. Natur helps us hear what he hears. | 2024-07-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2024-07-30T00:01:00.000-04:00 | Electronic / Experimental | Touch | July 30, 2024 | 8 | 0684d451-9f06-4f41-8d7d-06e4f79ffd3b | Will Lynch | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-lynch/ | |
On his second album, Vince Staples teams with producers like SOPHIE, Jimmy Edgar, and Flume on a collection of sleek club-rap bangers. But his eye for detail and observational skills remain intact. | On his second album, Vince Staples teams with producers like SOPHIE, Jimmy Edgar, and Flume on a collection of sleek club-rap bangers. But his eye for detail and observational skills remain intact. | Vince Staples: Big Fish Theory | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/big-fish-theory/ | Big Fish Theory | Vince Staples always has plenty to say, and he isn’t shy. Having taken on the entire
world and become something of an internet talking head, he’s now ready to figure out where, exactly, he fits into rap, and how rap fits into society at large. His sophomore album, Big Fish Theory, peers into the fishbowl of the fragile rap ecosystem and considers how “rappers are perceived and perceive themselves,” as he puts it. The result is a sleek rave-rap record that casually probes celebrity and class, a release that is half celebration of rap stardom and half critique of the often toxic culture it breeds. Staples is as clever as ever, but now the beats travel faster than his racing mind.
The driving force behind Big Fish Theory is tempo; Staples exudes manic energy, departing from the unnerving calm that marked earlier releases. In the run-up to the album, he referred to the project as futuristic, and even labeled it Afrofuturism for a while, though he later claimed he was trolling. But the record is truly progressive and unconventional—“When the Vince Staples is playing, it’s 2029, bro,” he said on Beats 1. “Vince Staples is coming once again with the brand new sound.” While the sound in question is mostly retrofitted dance music that slopes to suit rap cadences, there’s something radical in how swiftly and easily he scales these craggy bops with fractured verses. And there’s a certain boldness and adventurousness to following your weirdest project with your cheekiest one.
Summertime ‘06 was frequently grayscale and amelodic, an elaborate configuration of whale horns, discordant strings, and clanging, metallic rhythms. Big Fish Theory leans toward electronic club music (house and Detroit techno, especially), assembling an unlikely cabal of beatmakers including chief collaborator Zack Sekoff (a regular on the L.A. Beat scene), SOPHIE, Jimmy Edgar, GTA, and Flume, among others. The new album is smooth where Summertime ‘06 was jagged, foregoing the disquieting noise for something more functional, finding sophistication in streamlined motion, like an art installation set up in a nightclub. Even though the two albums are stylistically different and have conflicting agendas, Big Fish Theory feels like a natural progression. Amid the gleaming productions, he’s still exploring darkness.
Staples’ 2016 EP, Prima Donna, opened with a budding rap star dying by suicide before tracing the path that led him there, and Big Fish Theory further explores the theme. Amy Winehouse speaks in the opening seconds of “Alyssa Interlude” (via an excerpt from a 2006 interview), setting the tone: “I’m quite a self-destructive person, so I guess I keep giving myself material,” she concludes, a sobering look into her process. Winehouse has long been a source of inspiration for Staples (the documentary Amy was the initial spark for Prima Donna), and he has openly criticized the public’s treatment of the late singer. The symbiotic relationship and resulting tension between a tortured artist and their audience weighs heavy on Vince’s mind (See: the “Señorita” video or the Prima Donna short film). These weighty questions seep into Big Fish Theory, where he sneaks in outcries like “Propaganda, press pan the camera/Please don’t look at me in my face/Everybody might see my pain/Off the rail, might off myself.” Suicide comes up elsewhere on the record. There are references to Basquiat and he calls himself the new River Phoenix. Amid the partying and paper-chasing, there are flashes of darkness and melancholy: “How am I supposed to have a good time when death and destruction is all I see?”
There’s a chorus of other voices swirling around Staples on Big Fish Theory, but they mostly serve the larger sonic mosaic, echoing and amplifying Staples’ perspective. Guests generally appear in the margins, prove their usefulness, then vanish quickly—Damon Albarn sings for a few seconds, there are some hypeman-style vocals from A$AP Rocky, some garnishing R&B harmonies courtesy of Ray J, Kučka provides a quick interlude, Juicy J drops swag chants. They each play their roles well or at worst become part of the backdrop, aiding the general flow and texture of the album. But frequent collaborator Kilo Kish serves sort of secret weapon: her ability to move wispily through a song without disruption is key to several moments on the record, as on the entry on “Love Can Be…,” the softly, sweetly-sung coda on “Homage,” and the evaporating murmurs that lead “Crabs in a Bucket” into “Big Fish.” The biggest drop-in is Kendrick Lamar’s turn on the flossy “Yeah Right,” which delivers pyrotechnics as he and Vince dismantle tropes on rap’s inherent boastfulness.
Songs on Big Fish Theory don’t operate the way we’re accustomed to Vince Staples songs operating. Staples has long traded on incisive and detail-oriented reporting, centering his observations and occupying all space in the mind’s eye. He is known for writing heavy, plainspoken confessions packed with detail. Here, the songs run on high-powered verses that tumble and split to accommodate the current, and his rapping is noticeably fleeter and more efficient. For other rappers, adjusting to the new mode might be awkward, but Staples’ lyrical precision allows him to cover just as much ground in fewer steps. The economy of his language makes for pithy dialogue (On “745”: “Eyes can’t hide your hate for me/Maybe you was made for the Maybelline/Spent so much tryna park the car/Barely got a tip for the maître d’”) and sharp, first-glance impressions of those in his orbit, adding bite-sized nuggets like “paid a pretty penny for my peace of mind.” Each passing stanza is a marvel of concision.
Across 36 minutes, Vince Staples crams slinky disclosures on class and entitlement into infectious and eccentric club bangers. He leaves us with thoughts on fame’s corrupting influence and love’s power, all from a rising rap star who understands his reach and the limits of his celebrity. Big Fish Theory is a compact rap gem for dancing to or simply sitting with, an album that is as innovative as it is accessible; if not a glimpse into the future, then it’s at least an incisive look at the present. “This is Afrofuturism y’all can keep the other shit. We’re trying to get in the MoMA not your Camry,” Vince wrote, half-joking, in a since-deleted tweet. The funny thing is, Big Fish Theory might just be equipped for both. | 2017-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Blacksmith / Def Jam | June 23, 2017 | 8.7 | 06884c2c-c18a-40b0-afd8-6778ebe73bae | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The Roots' latest is also their leanest and most stylistically cohesive LP to date. Guests include Joanna Newsom, Dirty Projectors, Phonte, Blu, and Jim James. | The Roots' latest is also their leanest and most stylistically cohesive LP to date. Guests include Joanna Newsom, Dirty Projectors, Phonte, Blu, and Jim James. | The Roots: How I Got Over | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14386-how-i-got-over/ | How I Got Over | Above everything else that defines them, the Roots are capital-P Professionals. That's why they're perfect for their "Late Night" job. They don't fit there because, as critics would say, they're easily digestible; they fit because they're versatile and consistently operate at a high level. They're encyclopedic music scholars who're proud of their chops but don't flash them at the expense of an accessible hook. They never compromise, even though they're refined enough to help set the standards for grown-man class in hip-hop. And it's possible to listen to their last few albums without being reminded they're big-idea concept records, even though their themes leave an impression fairly quickly.
So after all the delays and discarded material (whatever happened to that "Peaches En Regalia" cover?), How I Got Over has emerged as a particularly efficient album. It's the Roots' shortest (a lean 42 and a half minutes), one of their most lyrically straightforward, and a work of strong stylistic cohesion. A decade's worth of personnel changes notwithstanding, it's clear that this is the same braintrust that made "The Next Movement" sound so vibrant 11 years ago; the two most prominent instrumental components remain ?uestlove's in-the-pocket drumming and the Ahmad Jamal/Donny Hathaway resonance of Kamal Gray's keyboards. And on the mic, Black Thought maintains his usual level-headed authority, continuing to come across at his best like a down-to-earth version of Rakim.
But what makes How I Got Over work is its sense of purpose. After the jaw-clenching stress rap of their last two excellent Def Jam releases, Game Theory and Rising Down, this record operates as a slow-build mission statement on how to overcome. Everything hinges on the title track, a stirring anthem built from a congas-and-organ backbone that sounds like a funkier, livelier inversion of Steely Dan's "Do It Again". As a showcase for Dice Raw and Black Thought's unexpectedly tender singing voices-- as well as the latter MC's ability to elevate simple sentiments with his delivery-- it feels like the group's usual rigorous standards being met. But it isn't exactly an accurate indication of how the album itself turns out sounding.
Instead, it's a pivot point, where everything before its halfway-mark appearance is the tunnel and everything afterwards is the light. How I Got Over is sequenced with a distinct idea of mood progression, changing from defeated, malaise-stricken piano-ballad dirges to defiant statements of survival and resilience. Black Thought's tough lamentations on early tracks "Walk Alone" and "Radio Daze" pick up where the more introspective moments of Rising Down left off. And even if he pushes a few metaphors past the breaking point or coasts on stating the obvious for a line or two, he doesn't suffer from a lack of relatability.
Once "How I Got Over" breaks through the first half's well-crafted melancholy and transitions into its more resolute second half, the sound shifts from glowing downtempo neo-soul to something more energized. "Right On" pits Joanna Newsom's lilting voice and harp against one of the most commanding drum breaks on the album; John Legend is artfully deployed as both a ghostly sample (the cathedral-sized "Doin' It Again") and an intense live vocalist ("The Fire"); "Web 20/20" upends the minimalist snare-driven charge of its Tipping Point namesake and mutates it into a jury-rigged, elastic-ricochet revamp of snap music. Black Thought ups his mood over the course of things as well, and by the time they reach the record's unlikely final hook-- "Hustla"'s Auto-Tuned crying-baby-- he's turning struggles into strengths for the sake of his next generation.
A lot has been made of the indie rock collaborations on this album, particularly the appearances by Newsom, the Monsters of Folk on "Dear God 2.0", and the wordless a cappella chorus from Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian, and Haley Dekle of the Dirty Projectors on the intro track "A Peace of Light". But their crossover efforts land firmly on the Roots' side of the equation, integrating into their Soulquarian aesthetic instead of nudging them the other way. Meanwhile, the guest MCs do just as much to round out How I Got Over's personality. The recurring satellite members that bolstered the ranks on Rising Down reprise their roles here (an on-fire Dice Raw, the low-key sharpness of Truck North and P.O.R.N., the obligatory show-stealing Peedi Peedi appearance). "Right On" and "Hustla" make for a couple of good showcases for promising Philly-via-ATL up-and-comer STS, who's molded his semi-drawl into an agile flow. And there's a couple of fine verses from Little Brother's Phonte and some absolute revelations from L.A. phenom Blu, both of whom sound vital even when they spend most of their time describing their anxiety.
How I Got Over has its title for a reason. It alludes to the gospel standard popularized by Clara Ward, and has a similarly spiritual-minded cast to it as its namesake's tribute to the power of belief in helping people reach the promised land. Maybe it's not as explicitly religious, but it regularly alludes to some form of higher power, whether it's God or a more secular sense of things that are simply out of civilization's control. And that's the compelling thing about the Roots on this album: They're not afraid to show humility and frustration when confronted with struggle, operating on the same level of humanity as the people who listen to it. For all the Roots' tight professionalism and clockwork consistency, for all their late-night TV exposure and their status as alt-rap icons, they're not superhuman. But the fact that they know this, that they can make a whole album about coming to terms with it-- that makes them powerful. | 2010-06-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-06-25T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Def Jam | June 25, 2010 | 8.1 | 068ad297-69ac-4169-9802-101b338da83b | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
George Fest: A Night to Celebrate the Music of George Harrison is a live double album with the ramshackle, collaborative warmth of a Traveling Wilburys set. It features contributions from Britt Daniel of Spoon, Brian Wilson, the Flaming Lips, Brandon Flowers of the Killers, George's son Dhani, and many more. | George Fest: A Night to Celebrate the Music of George Harrison is a live double album with the ramshackle, collaborative warmth of a Traveling Wilburys set. It features contributions from Britt Daniel of Spoon, Brian Wilson, the Flaming Lips, Brandon Flowers of the Killers, George's son Dhani, and many more. | Various Artists: George Fest: A Night to Celebrate the Music of George Harrison | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21607-george-fest-a-night-to-celebrate-the-music-of-george-harrison/ | George Fest: A Night to Celebrate the Music of George Harrison | Team George—now that’s a fierce genus of Beatlemaniac. They’ve inspected and cast aside the iconoclast cool of John, girded themselves against the snug, romantic haze of Paul. (A basic lack of sociopathy steers them from Ringo trutherism.) Harrison’s tribe is possessive because he, along with Bowie and Morrissey, was one of rock’s great shepherds of outsiders—a gentle mascot for those who also feel a bit too curious, a little too sensitive when held to bright lights. His consistent relegation to second-tier creative status inside the Beatles—one of the most famous yet undermined faces in the world, plunked courtside next to two massive egos—gave his songwriting a special undertow of empathy that his bandmates never touched. Those who identify with his dark-horse journey are a motley, loyal breed.
A similar reverence runs through George Fest: A Night to Celebrate the Music of George Harrison, a live double album with the ramshackle, collaborative warmth of a Traveling Wilburys set. Taped at L.A.’s Fonda Theatre in September 2014, the evening cribs together a varied roster—including Brian Wilson, the Flaming Lips, Norah Jones, Britt Daniel of Spoon, Brandon Flowers of the Killers, and Harrison’s dopplegänger son, Dhani Harrison—for campfire spins on familiar Beatles and solo fare. It’s an amiable, unofficial sort of sequel to The Concert for George, which was held at Royal Albert Hall in 2002 with Paul and Ringo, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, and Billy Preston—but this time, it’s staffed largely with Dhani’s peers. (He co-produced the charity event, which will also be released on DVD.)
Like most tributes, it’s not a particularly exploratory evening, but the parish is earnest. Song allotments are logical, and most artists hew closely to Harrison’s vocal cadences and cryptic guitars. Britt Daniel lends some yowling panache to "I Me Mine" (off Let It Be) and the underrated folk singer/model Karen Elson adds a reedy quaver through "I’d Have You Anytime," the delicate opening of Harrison’s stellar triple album All Things Must Pass (and a bromantic ode to Bob Dylan). Norah Jones, daughter of one of Harrison’s most influential collaborators, the late sitarist Ravi Shankar—and a lovely voice who never quite gets her due for melodic winsomeness—adds subtle inversions to "Something," an evening standout. Dhani Harrison, a truly uncanny vocal and visual heir, spurs on some of the night’s liveliest moments with the White Album eccentricity "Savoy Truffle" and the more contemplative solo missive "Let It Down." Those not following along on the tracklist might furrow their brows to the billowing chorus of "What Is Life"—that is, indeed, "Weird Al" Yankovic, crooning the euphoric All Things Must Pass hit utterly straight, not even tweaking the lyrics into "Hobbit Strife" or anything.
The evening’s highlight, not least for rarity: Brian Wilson, tackling Harrison’s contentious classic "My Sweet Lord," with support from fellow Beach Boy Al Jardine, Ann Wilson of Heart, and others. It’s fair to say Wilson wouldn’t have his legacy today without Harrison and the Beatles—his watershed Pet Sounds was an attempt to outshine their Rubber Soul, and the friendly ensuing arms race beget Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the Smile sessions. There’s welcome ardor in Wilson’s scratchy delivery; he sounds more enlivened than in many other recent projects, including much of his last studio album and the Beach Boys’ 50th anniversary tour. (As he recalls boyishly in the film’s trailer, of a moment several decades prior, "When I heard ‘My Sweet Lord,’ I just about croaked!")
There are a few stumbles—Cold War Kids’ yodeling, slack delivery of "Taxman" sounds borderline drunk, and the Black Ryder’s "Isn’t It a Pity" is a bit static for such an elegy. No one touches "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," a surprising omission; maybe Dhani is sick of hearing it mangled every time he pops into Guitar Center. But as an act of low-impact celebration, George Fest is a fine affair. More noise for the Quiet Beatle is welcome anytime. | 2016-02-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2016-02-24T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Vagrant / Hot | February 24, 2016 | 6.8 | 068b135a-036d-48d1-bca0-e694a4d36f4d | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | null |
null | Oh come on, it's just *Pet Sounds*. Despite the fact that two or three generations of music fans will secretly believe you have no soul if you don't announce your allegiance to it, despite that you probably already own it (in some cases, two or three times over-- if I could only remember where I put my 24-carat gold CD version), or that you may even have written an article for Pitchfork years ago making fun of anyone who dared criticize it, well, that's no reason to feel any pressure to make sure it's displayed prominently for guests, or worry | The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds: 40th Anniversary | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9371-pet-sounds-40th-anniversary/ | Pet Sounds: 40th Anniversary | Oh come on, it's just Pet Sounds. Despite the fact that two or three generations of music fans will secretly believe you have no soul if you don't announce your allegiance to it, despite that you probably already own it (in some cases, two or three times over-- if I could only remember where I put my 24-carat gold CD version), or that you may even have written an article for Pitchfork years ago making fun of anyone who dared criticize it, well, that's no reason to feel any pressure to make sure it's displayed prominently for guests, or worry that you haven't met your monthly "God Only Knows" listening quota.
Despite (or because of) the "pressure" to adopt pro-Pet Sounds stances in today's high-powered world of hanging out with your friends or staying home and getting high whilst listening to "Let's Go Away for Awhile", I'd wager most people are only too happy not to discuss the merits of the oft-oft-reported Beach Boys masterpiece. Certainly, regardless of what I write here, the impact and "influence" of the record will have been in turn hardly influenced at all. I can't even get my dad to talk about Pet Sounds anymore.
This isn't so bad. Beyond my personal preference for the records immediately following Pet Sounds (1967's Smiley Smile to 1971's Surf's Up in particular), I'd argue the actual sound of much modern music purportedly influenced by the Beach Boys is closer in execution to what the band did in the wake of Pet Sounds (and for that matter, Smile). "Influence" is a loaded concept here, because there's no foolproof way to measure how someone might channel inspiration from a single record, Pet Sounds or otherwise; however, much more certain is the feeling that very few musicians are making active decisions to "try to top Pet Sounds." In this light, just as with other perennially lauded pop/rock records, Pet Sounds is as much tautology as musical document. (Interestingly, this also seems to have been Brian Wilson's attitude beginning in mid-1967.)
Forty years after release, then, while the album's initially disappointing (at least to Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys) chart showing has been vindicated by a perpetual reservoir of new fans and adoring critics - not to mention still being commercially viable enough to support recent live productions and similarly perpetual ways of reissuing the music-- talking about the music, or how the music makes you feel isn't much easier than it was in 1966. Very famous people waste no time in offering testimonials to Pet Sounds' greatness, but (probably wisely) stick to short statements about how important the record was to them as artists and musicians, or just how beautiful its music is.
Pet Sounds was made during the period in 1965-66 when Brian stopped touring with his band, preferring to stay home and work on tracks. His decision to work with lyricist Tony Asher for most of the songs freed him further to focus on music. This not only translated to backing tracks of considerably more nuance and subtlety than even Brian's recent apexes "California Girls" and the Beach Boys Today! LP, both from 1965, but similarly well-crafted chord progressions and choral arrangements. Almost predictably, as the deserved praise for the vocal arrangements may never wane, I've heard more fine things said about the instrumental tracks recently than any other aspect of the record. In any case, the technical achievements of the record (only given further support by the stereo issue of the record in the late 90s) have tended to overshadow the emotional and spiritual ones, at least in my lifetime.
This anniversary issue of Pet Sounds, including both the mono and stereo version of the record, and a bonus DVD with several documentary features, surround sound mixes and promo clips, will be of immediate interest to longtime fans for obvious reasons (of which "collecting" isn't necessarily the least important). In particular, the "Pet Stories" feature, with recent interviews with Brian, Asher, session drummer and Beach Boy pal Hal Blaine, and even an illuminating cameo from Elvis Costello, sheds light not only on the original sessions and song origins, but on all concerned parties' attitudes about the music now. Also very cool is the footage of Brian and famed Beatles producer George Martin listening to the original tracks; at one point, Martin twists a few knobs and Brian is convinced he’s finally perfected Pet Sounds!
Also included in the set, of course, is the album; mono and stereo mixes of Pet Sounds, recapping the tracklist from the 1999 CD issue. The most famous songs-- "God Only Knows", "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "Sloop John B", "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)", "Caroline No"-- are no less gorgeous than they have always been. The hymnal aspect of many of these songs seems no less pronounced, and the general air of deeply heartfelt love, graciousness and the uncertainty that any of it will be returned are still affecting to the point of distraction. Currently, there is a minor surge in support for the record's two instrumentals "Let's Go Away for Awhile" and the title track, though later efforts like "Diamond Head" and the quasi-instrumental "Fall Breaks Into Winter" (not to mention its parent track, "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" from the Smile sessions) seem both more idiosyncratic and intrinsically interesting to me.
As it happens, Brian's instrumental arrangements for the album, while again justly praised (especially by other musicians), were related to concurrent productions by Juan Garcia Esquivel, Les Baxter, Martin Denny, and a host of other exotica producers, in both the kinds of instruments used, and the stylistic appropriation of, say, percussion and string instruments from other countries. In fact, Brian was the only one of these people not producing music in stereo at the time, which might explain why it took so long for bands (and not just the Stereolab kind) to borrow as much from his instrumental tracks as from his vocal ones, which cut through mono mixes much more effortlessly than the backing tracks.
So, the unfair question is: Do you love Pet Sounds enough to buy it again? Before you answer, here's a fairer one: How often do you need help recalling the emotions Pet Sounds provokes inside you? If you haven't lived with the record day in and day out, chances are, it's still a pretty fresh experience, and I'd recommend this set with absolutely no reservations. However, if the music is practically family to you already, I'd say check out the DVD stuff when you can, keep your current version, and watch the album's effects wind and rewind their way through lives and cultures in the meantime. | 2006-09-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2006-09-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Capitol | September 8, 2006 | 9.4 | 068b9dcf-87cb-40ba-ab84-e73c4d02e103 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
With their reputation as one of America's most formidable live acts wholly assured, Thee Oh Sees explore the possibilities of the studio and more lustrous modes of psychedelia on Putrifiers II. It's a convenient gateway into the garage rock vets' dense discography. | With their reputation as one of America's most formidable live acts wholly assured, Thee Oh Sees explore the possibilities of the studio and more lustrous modes of psychedelia on Putrifiers II. It's a convenient gateway into the garage rock vets' dense discography. | Thee Oh Sees: Putrifiers II | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17029-putrifiers-ii/ | Putrifiers II | At this past July's Pitchfork Music Festival, the scheduling gods played a cruel joke on fans of fuzzed-out San Francisco garage-rock by placing scene vets Thee Oh Sees and their prodigal-son pal Ty Segall on competing stages with overlapping set times. The irony was not lost on Thee Oh Sees' frontman John Dwyer, who, despite getting their show off to a righteously arse-kicking start, jokingly begged to the crowd after three songs "don't leave!" as Segall's set time approached. This simple, self-deprecating plea effectively delineated the difference between these two like-minded, furiously prolific acts.
Segall, after all, is in the midst of a banner year that's seen him release two albums-- including his best to date, Slaughterhouse-- with a third on the way, and he's still young enough that his whimsical, impulsive approach to recording forms a media-friendly narrative of the punk wunderkind realizing his true potential. On the other hand, Thee Oh Sees are the latest, albeit the most durable, in a long, 15-year lineage of Dwyer-helmed projects, and one whose consistency-- in terms of both quantity and quality-- makes for a somewhat less sexy story. Dude releases a shit-ton of records because, after all these years in the game, he's still restless and resourceful.
That said, Putrifiers II is Thee Oh Sees' first album of 2012, which is a weird statement to be typing considering that we're well into September. (Though given the band's ceaseless output, it's not too far-fetched to imagine that a Putrifiers I was recorded and scrapped somewhere along the way.) Thee Oh Sees' records have more or less charted the band's evolution from Dwyer's solitary psych-pop project to brute-force hypno-punkers. Now, with their reputation as one of America's most redoubtable live acts wholly assured, Thee Oh Sees use Putrifiers II to explore the possibilities of the studio and more lustrous modes of psychedelia. It's not exactly uncharted territory for Dwyer and company, but where Thee Oh Sees are prone to segregating their more refined pop sensibilities from their gonzo-rock rave-ups (as their two 2011 releases, Castlemania and Carrion Crawler/The Dream, respectively illustrate), Putrifiers II reconciles these two modes, providing a more complete, elaborate picture of this band's many capabilities and strengths.
Which is to say: If the sheer enormity of Thee Oh Sees' dense discography has proven too forbidding for you to delve into, Putrifiers II is a convenient summary/gateway, opening with a killer shot of the band's patented echo-drenched fuzz-punk delirium ("Wax Face") and closing with a baroque, string-swept lullaby ("Wicked Park"), while traversing all points in between. But even as Putrifiers II turns more melodic and mellow, broadening the band's sonic scope with strings and woodwinds, it retains the nervy irreverence: With its shrieking cello line and opium-den ambience, "So Nice" unabashedly kneels before the shiny leather boots of the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs" and, as such, becomes a knowing allegory for the master/slave dynamic that plays out in the original.
If the drawn-out title-track dirge and the moonlight-strolling "Will We Be Scared?" (the sort of warped, revisionist 50s-style ballad Bradford Cox has made his stock-in-trade) threaten to curb the mid-album momentum, they prove to be effective calm-before-the-storm set-ups to the mighty "Lupine Dominus", which manages to condense everything that is great about Thee Oh Sees into three thrilling minutes: Dwyer and Brigid Dawson's eerily androgynous harmonies cooing a disarmingly childlike melody, and a car-crash tangle of guitar/organ noise, all hitched to a steely Krautrock pulse. It feels like the sort of song that, after so many years of exploratory recordings, could very well define the true sound of Thee Oh Sees. Or it's the sort of peak moment that could give Dwyer reason to tear it all down and radically redefine his band once again. At the very least, we know it likely won't be long before we find out. | 2012-09-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-09-12T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | In the Red | September 12, 2012 | 8.1 | 068c3168-99ac-45fc-8182-cab73590810c | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
Ex-Blur frontman Damon Albarn ditches the idea of writing pop songs a cartoon band might front and makes one of his most gorgeous pop records in years. | Ex-Blur frontman Damon Albarn ditches the idea of writing pop songs a cartoon band might front and makes one of his most gorgeous pop records in years. | Gorillaz: Plastic Beach | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14008-plastic-beach/ | Plastic Beach | Forget the cartoon characters. Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett's animated misfits have always been mainly interesting as a concept, and on much of the third Gorillaz album, Plastic Beach, it feels like Albarn and co. are ditching the idea of writing pop songs a cartoon band might front anyway. The one-time Blur frontman has transcended some of the post-modern artifice of this project, and created the group's most affecting and uniquely inviting album. Joke's over, Gorillaz are real.
So why make this a Gorillaz album in the first place? It wasn't meant to be one. Hewlett, the celebrated Tank Girl co-creator, told The Observer last July, "Gorillaz now to us is not like four animated characters anymore-- it's more like an organization of people doing new projects." The project was to be called Carousel, presented by, but not performed by, Gorillaz. It never panned out. So Albarn devised Plastic Beach, a loose enviromental-song cycle warning against disposability. It's a noble conceit, if a transient one.
Along with a typically diverse band of collaborators, Albarn dips into Krautrock, funk, and dubstep, as well as the weary, more melodic music he's been perfecting for much of last decade-- sort of an electronic take on baroque pop. Albarn also sounds more comfortable as a leader here than he has in some time. On the standout "On Melancholy Hill", he recalls the swooning strains of one of his heroes, Scott Walker. And when he shares or cedes vocals, he has the good sense to turn things over to luminaries like Lou Reed (magnificently dry-throated on "Some Kind of Nature") and Bobby Womack (good on first single "Stylo", better on the twangy "Cloud of Unknowing"), while effortlessly integrating them into the sound.
Handling most of the production himself, Albarn has reversed the good fortune of the first two Gorillaz albums. With Dan the Automator on their 2001 self-titled debut and Danger Mouse on 2005's Demon Days, the group was adept at fusing giddy pop with hip-hop, inserting De La Soul, Del the Funky Homosapien, or a yippy Miho Hatori into some of their best songs ("Clint Eastwood", "Dirty Harry", "Feel Good Inc.", "19-2000"). Those songs crashed in from all places with little mind to sequence or balance, and the result was two fairly unfocused records saved by some decent alt-rap.
On Plastic Beach, things are the other way around. The rap moments here feel almost needlessly idiosyncratic amidst the lusher treatments. Snoop Dogg's appearance on "Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach" is an incongruous introduction to an album that has nothing to do with Snoop Dogg. De La repeat themselves on the faux jingle "Superfast Jellyfish". Grime MCs Kano and Bashy compellingly play pass-the-baton on "White Flag", but only after disrupting an absorbing intro and outro by the Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music. Only on "Sweepstakes" is Mos Def able to assimilate into the production.
Albarn is more natural when working in the kind of ornate Village Green Preservation Society-style pop that dominates Plastic Beach. His collaborations with Little Dragon, "Empire Ants" and "To Binge" are two of the most arresting things here-- they're airy, elusive, and amazingly beautiful. It's been years since Albarn has written anything as blatantly gorgeous. If he had to work past the animated pretense to rediscover it, all the better. Why be a cartoon when you can be a real person? | 2010-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2010-03-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Virgin | March 10, 2010 | 8.5 | 069062f9-a215-4967-8e94-3d3ef33807ec | Sean Fennessey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sean-fennessey/ | null |
The rapper’s second greatest hits compilation collects some nice singles, but mostly feels like the portrait of a wayward artist who’s spent the last 13 years going in every direction. | The rapper’s second greatest hits compilation collects some nice singles, but mostly feels like the portrait of a wayward artist who’s spent the last 13 years going in every direction. | Eminem: Curtain Call 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eminem-curtain-call-2/ | Curtain Call 2 | In his prime, controversy was Eminem’s secret sauce. As a white rapper with bottle-blonde hair and boy-band looks who liked to joke about indoctrinating children with antisocial thoughts, Slim Shady was the straw man onto which square America projected its most deranged insecurities about the fragility of its youth. He was so good at his job that by the time he dropped Relapse—his 2009 comeback record following years of heavy pharmaceutical use—his most violent bars now just felt like the work of an institutionally entrenched artist playing the hits. After all, millennials who’d listened to Eminem’s early records in middle school were by then in various stages of young adulthood, and most of us turned out fine.
So as he entered his second decade of fame, Eminem adopted a new identity: an extremely famous, super-intense dude who rapped really complicated raps. But beyond this basic foundation, he became a chimera, his body of work an assemblage of often disparate personas, subject matter, and sounds. At times, he’s chased trends and tried to reinsert himself into the zeitgeist; at others, he’s retreated inwards, reflecting on his legacy or finding yet another way to recreate past selves. That his music lacks perspective or personality beyond the fact that listeners immediately know that it’s Eminem rapping hasn’t hampered him from becoming the best-selling singles artist of all time, and it certainly hasn’t kept him from continuing to be a reliable hitmaker. But these qualities make Curtain Call 2, a double-disc compilation of his post-comeback greatest hits, feel like a portrait of an artist who’s spent the past 13 years going in every direction.
Eminem has made some great music during this era—tracks like Revival’s “Offended,” an off-kilter lyrical workout over a tightly wound Charles Bradley loop; his guest spot on Nas’ “EPMD 2,” in which he delivers a reverent ode to the golden age of hip-hop; Relapse’s “Deja Vu” which combines the fearless inventory-taking of 12 Step programs with blistering internal rhymes. There’s probably a Spotify playlist out there that’s scrounged up the best of Em’s latter-day catalog and uses it to make a case that, despite one lackluster album after another, Eminem is still capable of reminding us why we used to stan the guy who coined the term “stan.”
But rather than panning for gold in the mud, Curtain Call 2 contents itself with being a damningly accurate reflection of what Eminem’s been up to lately. He gives us goopy pop songs like “Lighters” and “Nowhere Fast,” and maudlin deconstructions of toxic relationships like “Love the Way You Lie” and “Headlights.” There are anthems for personal uplift and/or weightlifting (“Not Afraid,” “Cinderella Man,” and “Phenomenal”) and the Rick Rubin and DJ Khalil-enabled dalliances with rap-rock (“Berzerk,” “Won’t Back Down”). It’s topped off with a song about killing people (“3 a.m.”) and one about how tough it is to be Eminem (“Walk on Water”), with some r/hiphopheads-baiting fast rap (“Rap God,” “Godzilla”) thrown in for good measure. Listening to 34 tracks of this stuff in a row—especially considering that Eminem was one of the last major rappers to cut overtly homophobic language out of his rhyme book—is a grim experience. By the time Ed Sheeran shows up on Disc 2, his vocals feel like the sweet release of death.
In his best work, Eminem ushered listeners into his world and forced them to engage with his music on terms that he set. He could “murder a rhyme, one word at a time,” or interrupt a string of “vile, venomous, volatile” invective to make a bunch of chainsaw noises. He cultivated a sense that everything he did was a dart shot into the eye of a culture industry that decried him while profiting off his infamy. Though post-comeback Em was never going to be the cultural firebrand he once was, there was no reason he needed to let go of his auteurist vision. Yet after the relatively insular Relapse, he increasingly farmed out hooks to a rotating group of singers with varying abilities to not make his own voice sound like nails on a chalkboard by comparison. He also stopped rapping over instrumentals custom-tailored for him by either Dr. Dre or longtime collaborators the Bass Brothers, instead leaning on his own productions or sourcing tracks from whichever beatmakers the rest of the industry was using at the time. This all had the effect of making Eminem sound generic, and it coincided with the accelerating pace of his raps, creating more opportunities to toss dreadful puns and abject filler into his songs.
Despite showcasing some of Eminem’s stylistic growing pains, Curtain Call 2 isn’t completely lined with duds. “Godzilla” has always been a jam, in part due to Em’s vocal chemistry with his posthumous guest Juice WRLD, but also because it’s a song where Eminem actually sounds like he’s having fun. “Fast Lane,” off Eminem’s Hell: The Sequel EP with Royce Da 5'9'', approaches the standard of quality that the duo established for themselves the first time around. Now that it’s a few years removed from radio ubiquity, “The Monster” finally has room to luxuriate in its massive Rihanna-driven hook. As for the new material on here, it’s fine. Eminem raps way harder on “The King and I” than seems necessary for a track originally featured on the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s movie about Elvis, yet it’s nice to hear him actively engaging with an artist with whom he’s drawn pointed comparisons over the years. And if you can ignore its Bored Ape Yacht Club tie-in music video, his reunion with Snoop Dogg on “From the D 2 the LBC” offers one of Eminem’s best self-produced beats in years, as well as an opportunity to hear two legends try to out-rap each other.
In an illuminating 2017 interview with Vulture, Eminem admitted that at times he’s vexed by his own audience, attempting to “give them the old Eminem” only to feel that his fans believe “he’s too old to be rapping about that kind of shit.” (By now, he’s so many years past his cultural peak that he recently admitted that he literally forgot about Dre.) As he’s aged, Eminem has further disappeared into his craft, putting together verses so intricate that rapping along with them is almost physically impossible. Where he once deployed his skill strategically, he now uses it as an end unto itself. Take “Rap God,” whose Max Headroom-indebted music video currently sits at just under 1.3 billion YouTube views. The song set a Guinness World Record for the most number of words contained in a hit single, cramming 1,560 of them into approximately six minutes. You don’t have to know the slightest thing about hip-hop in order to understand that what he’s doing in the track is astonishing, but “Rap God” is less a work of art and more a piece of content you consume because of the sheer fact that it exists, like a TikTok of a dude expertly navigating the world’s longest parkour course.
It says a lot about Eminem’s run in the 2010s that he sounded most on-task in “Killshot,” a diss track against Machine Gun Kelly, of all people—and it’s equally telling that though Em won the battle by lyrically grinding the Cleveland upstart into a pulp, all the once and future king of pop-punk had to do to win the war was rap “his fuckin’ beard is weird” and then stick out his tongue like a demonic Bart Simpson. When Eminem released the first Curtain Call in 2005, it was a fitting victory lap for a guy who’d spent the better part of six years reshaping American culture. The hits lining Curtain Call 2, meanwhile, feel more like that same rapper running up the score just because he could. Eminem turns 50 in October, and as he enters the next stage of his career, he’s more than earned the right to be himself in his music. If at this point his listening public has only the haziest sense of who he actually is, that could prove to be an asset. Perhaps when he releases Curtain Call 3, it will tell the story of how we got to know Eminem all over again. | 2022-08-05T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-08-05T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Shady / Aftermath / Interscope | August 5, 2022 | 6.2 | 0692cf8f-9522-4b43-a09e-90031ec9c056 | Drew Millard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/drew-millard/ | |
The third installment in McCartney’s home-recorded series is less adventurous and revelatory than its eponymous predecessors, but still contains moments of genuine wonder and weirdness. | The third installment in McCartney’s home-recorded series is less adventurous and revelatory than its eponymous predecessors, but still contains moments of genuine wonder and weirdness. | Paul McCartney: McCartney III | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/paul-mccartney-mccartney-iii/ | McCartney III | There are many Paul McCartney albums, but only a precious few get to call themselves McCartney albums. McCartney III is the surprise third entry in a series that began with his 1970 solo debut McCartney and seemed to end with 1980’s McCartney II, two dramatically different records born of dramatically different circumstances that were nonetheless united by a DIY methodology. Unlike the other records in Macca’s solo discography, these were true one-man-band efforts, clearinghouses for the rough song sketches and home-recording experiments he’d never bring to his proper releases. And both were flawed-yet-fascinating portraits of a perfectionist embracing the purity of imperfection. So the appearance of that roman numeral in the title of McCartney III is loaded with significance, a promising indication that what we’re getting here is the man, not the myth. This is especially exciting news for that generation of fans who hold “Temporary Secretary” in a greater esteem than Sgt. Pepper’s.
The novelty of McCartney and McCartney II had a lot to do with the context in which they appeared: the former was a purposefully ramshackle response to the studio-sculpted grandeur of the Beatles, the latter a synth-shocked antidote to the arena-rock bombast of Wings. But while they were solitary efforts, those records were still plugged into the sounds and conversations of their times. McCartney was rooted in the agrarian, anti-psych aesthetic of contemporary groups like the Band, while McCartney II showed Macca having a go at the new wave and early electronic music seeping into the mainstream. On these albums, McCartney wasn’t so much the all-knowing auteur as a sponge soaking up the prevailing styles of the day and squeezing them out, without a care if he made a mess.
McCartney III, however, has no such guiding principle—other than the fact it arrives in a year when McCartney, like many of us, was stuck at home with a whole lot of extra time on his overly sanitized hands. Following a decade where he actively pursued modern-pop relevance through collaborations with Mark Ronson, Ryan Tedder, and Kanye West and Rihanna, McCartney III finds its maker shacked up at his Sussex farmhouse, tuning out the radio to indulge his every scatterbrained whim. With no desire to engage with the contemporary musical landscape or absorb new influences, McCartney III is less adventurous and revelatory than its eponymous predecessors. Mostly, it reiterates his well-established fondness for acoustic ditties, ruminative piano ballads, and hot-rod rockers. And yet it still offers intriguing evidence that, even when sticking to his usual lane, a septuagenarian multi-millionaire pop star comfortably ensconced in his rural estate can still get up to some pretty weird shit when no one’s looking.
The opening “Long Tailed Winter Bird” is the perfect microcosm of everything that’s both inspired and indulgent about this project. Armed with a needling, Celtic-tinged, folk-blues acoustic refrain, McCartney coolly ratchets up the tension, locking into a distorted guitar break while mischievously cooing “do you, do do do you miss me?” It’s a rare treat to hear him lean into something so gritty and tense, but the song is ultimately all warm-up with little payoff—“Long Tailed Winter Bird” flies in circles for over five minutes, always teasing that it’s about to grow into something more peculiar and powerful, yet never quite getting there.
Still, “Long Tailed Winter Bird” is practically “Yesterday” compared to the album’s eight-minute centerpiece “Deep Deep Feeling,” which tries to recreate the mesmerizing sprawl of McCartney II-era oddities like “Secret Friend,” but with more belabored results. Starting out as a torch song about the disorienting effects of love, the track is slowly deconstructed through a random barrage of ominous orchestration, disembodied harmonies, sputtering cod-reggae rhythms, and guitar squeals that sound like they drifted in from a Dire Straits record. But this would-be descent into madness is outfitted with a safety net, too self-consciously “crazy” to feel strange. A similar fate befalls the similarly titled “Deep Down,” another addition to the growing canon of exceedingly horny late-career Paul McCartney songs that essentially gives “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road” an ‘80s synth-funk makeover but rides it out for three times as long.
As was the case with the first two McCartneys, III’s eccentricities are best put to use when they’re supporting Macca’s endearing melodies rather than corrupting them. Fortunately, McCartney III has enough radiant moments to outweigh its stumbles. “Find My Way” betrays a very 2020 sense of unease—“You never used to be afraid of days like these/But now you’re overwhelmed by your anxieties”—but offers a pick-me-up in the form of “Savoy Truffle”-style buzzing brass, playful noodling, and a breezy, drum loop that could’ve been pulled from Beck’s bag of tricks. With its glammy, Super Furry Animals-scaled sweep, “Seize the Day” is even more explicit in its optimist’s mission. In an age of cruelty-is-the-point politics, an innocent platitude like “It’s still alright to be nice” practically sounds like fighting words.
As much as the legend of the McCartney series is rooted in its off-kilter sensibility, its most resonant moments remain the simplest and most heartfelt. McCartney III honors that tradition with “The Kiss of Venus,” a romantic lullaby playfully delivered in his higher register and sprinkled with harpsichord pixie dust, but underpinned by a warning not to get too lost in love: “If the world begins to shake/Will something have to break/We have to stay awake.” And on the album’s closer, “Winter Bird/When Winter Comes,” we get a startling reminder that McCartney’s genius doesn’t merely lie in his talent for orchestrating side-long suites, but in his seemingly effortless ability to dash off a casual acoustic sing-along about farm animals and make it feel both instantly familiar and mythical. “When winter comes, and food is scarce/We’ll warn our toes to stay indoors,” he sings of his critters’ annual hibernation ritual, while also calmly bracing us for what’s shaping up to be some dark months. Now more than ever, the McCartney series isn’t simply a sketchbook dump for its maker—it’s a sneaky vent for some of his most unifying impulses.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-12-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol | December 23, 2020 | 7.2 | 06942cb3-894f-4f87-aaaa-345aa46bbaa1 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
With festival-ready hooks and trap-inspired production, Lykke Li delivers another record about an unraveling romance and the fraught sexuality of its final moments with diminishing returns. | With festival-ready hooks and trap-inspired production, Lykke Li delivers another record about an unraveling romance and the fraught sexuality of its final moments with diminishing returns. | Lykke Li: so sad so sexy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lykke-li-so-sad-so-sexy/ | so sad so sexy | Every track on Lykke Li’s last album, I Never Learn, was a torch song of generous proportions, a thorough sweeping-up of the singer’s shattered heart with reflectively grand production. On so sad so sexy, she immediately extinguishes the flame. “If you like the feeling of a hard rain falling,” she lilts on the opening track in a delicate, descending staccato, “I have a seaful/I can give you an ocean.” Hope springs anew in this refurbished world, but it is not warm; Li’s light voice is pitch-shifted into metallic strips on the song, braided into frosty harmonies over a cybernetic trap-pop beat produced by Rostam. It’s dark dressing for a glimpse of promise, reflective of that hard-fought moment, post-heartbreak, when we assert our abundances, the ones we carry away even with our heads bowed. But there is violence here, too: Li wants a love that feels torrential, isn’t there danger in trying to flood the empty spaces in someone else?
Many of Li’s gifts, including her distressed brand of longing, are on display in so sad so sexy. The hooks are still broad, primed for festival stages with more downcast pop hues. In the four years since the Swedish singer released I Never Learn, she lost her mother and became one herself. But as the title of so sad so sexy suggests, the album is singularly focused. This is another record about an unraveling romance and the fraught sexuality of its final moments. Its glum synths should provide more fodder for the “sad pop” label that has dogged Li for a decade (however reductive and sexist the idea of a female pop star bearing large emotions may be). so sad so sexy may sound like the tagline of a gritty Zoolander reboot, but it is entirely in keeping with the self-seriousness Li has always shown; it is a worthy and even old-fashioned stance that passions needn’t be diluted with irony or self-effacement. But even so, Li cuts a rigidly sober figure for a pop singer.
Trap beats update Li’s heartburn all throughout so sad. Jeff Bhasker, a former producer for Kanye and Rihanna (and partner to Li and father to her child), shows the heaviest hand in the tracks he co-produces. In particular, the slinking “deep end” dices up Li’s much-employed vocal reverb so lines like, “I’m in it, swimming in it/I wasn’t gonna love you, now I’m so fucking deep” land like shrugs, not sobs. The alienation ballad “two nights” piles on the piano and hi-hats before wafting over to the rapper Aminé for a bafflingly Seussian verse (“I’m never bummy or scummy/You’re paranoid like a bunny,” he argues helplessly). Trap, also, seems to bring out inexplicable impulses in Li, too; in the daydreaming “jaguars in the air,” she doesn’t explain this odd visual beyond a blanket escapism: “Vacation forever, baby/I know we gon’ make it someday,” she trills before tirelessly repeating the title to little effect.
All this 808 bass grounds Li’s voice, but it makes for a dull canvas. It peppers nearly every song, amplifying when her lyrics slide from intuitive to broad to cliché. Li surely pulls from awful memories to sing that breakup sex is “so sad, so sexy”—hardly a lie, but not a particularly insightful read, either. She has been far shrewder before, like on her second record, 2011’s Wounded Rhymes, which offered drama in the delivery of beguilingly intimate scenes. Here, she has some similarly pensive moments, but more lines feel glossy and unformed to the point of parody. “Baby don’t you cry/Sex money feelings die/Ladies on my right/Sex money feelings die,” she sings on, yes, “sex money feelings die,” a sullen goth cousin to Lorde’s “Homemade Dynamite.” You can’t argue the truth of being “better alone than lonely here with you,” but there is little here in the songwriting to lift it above a tired sentiment.
The flip side of universal heartbreak, Li knows—as this pain continues to ballast her career—is that personal injury can scan as generic. On so sad, her traumas are too often muted by abstraction and unspecificity. Li is clearly an artist of stormy passions—four albums in, she still seeks the flood of love before she reaches for the life preserver. But by experiencing that same torrent of emotions again and again, it is beginning to lose its impact. | 2018-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-06-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA / LL | June 13, 2018 | 6.4 | 06969a44-3021-48e7-b1d3-255f24e42be1 | Stacey Anderson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stacey-anderson/ | |
Beyoncé is on a roll. Her latest, another “visual album” with corresponding videos in the mold of her 2013 self-titled set, renders infidelity and reconciliation with a cinematic vividness. | Beyoncé is on a roll. Her latest, another “visual album” with corresponding videos in the mold of her 2013 self-titled set, renders infidelity and reconciliation with a cinematic vividness. | Beyoncé: Lemonade | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21867-lemonade/ | Lemonade | On her sixth solo album, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter starts rolling mid-scene: She’s just realized that her husband is cheating on her. The surrounding context is familiar to anyone who follows popular culture. Beyoncé and Jay-Z are the most famous musical couple on the planet, and Beyoncé in particular is in a great place. With 2013’s Beyoncé, MJ-level talent met pop-perfectionism in a moment that defined album-cycle disruption; moreover, it was a victory lap Bey took as pop feminism’s reigning goddess. Jay-Z, on the other hand, is a rapper who used to rap brilliantly and sometimes still sounds good when he really tries, but his music has become secondary. Over the course of their eight-year marriage and long courtship before that, Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s private relationship seemed to play out in song, in concert, and of course, in the tabloids. But Beyoncé’s “smile pretty and give no interviews” approach to public relations over the last couple of years, combined with “the elevator incident” and subsequent speculation about the state of their marriage, and followed by their public makeup (see: VMAs 2014, On the Run Tour), has suggested that something has changed, but that Beyoncé would prefer we not know the specifics.
Lemonade shatters this theory. If the album is to be considered a document of some kind of truth, emotional or otherwise, then it seems Beyoncé was saving the juicy details for her own story. Because nothing she does is an accident, let’s assume she understands that any song she puts her name on will be perceived as being about her own very public relationship. So what we think we know about her marriage after listening is the result of Beyoncé wanting us to think that. With its slate of accompanying videos, Lemonade is billed as Beyonce’s second “visual album.” But here that voyeuristic feeling manifests while listening rather than viewing, given the high visibility of Bey and Jay. The songwriting is littered with scenes that seem positively cinematic, so it helps that you can imagine these characters living them: Beyoncé smelling another woman’s scent on Jay-Z, her pacing their penthouse in the middle of the night before leaving a note and disappearing with Blue. Lemonade is a film as well, yet the album itself feels like a movie.
It’s not until the record's second half that you realize Lemonade has a happy ending. At first you might think that Bey is using the album to announce her divorce from Jay’s cheating ass. Because she doesn’t scold, “Don’t you ever do that to me again”—she drags her very famous, seemingly powerful husband publicly, in the process giving the world a modern-day “Respect” in “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” On the “7/11”-style banger “Sorry,” she turns his side-chicks into memes, which will inevitably become “better call Becky with the good hair” sweatshirts that Beyoncé can sell for $60 a pop. Best revenge is your paper.
If you’ve ever been cheated on by someone who thought you’d be too stupid or naive to notice, you will find the first half of Lemonade incredibly satisfying. If you have ears and love brilliant production and hooks that stick, you'll likely arrive at the same conclusion. The run from “Hold Up” to “6 Inch” contains some of Beyoncé’s strongest work—ever, period—and a bit of that has to do with her clap-back prowess. The increasingly signature cadence, patois, and all-around attitude on Lemonade speaks to her status as the hip-hop pop star—but this being Bey, she doesn’t stop there. Via the album’s highly specific samples and features by artists like Jack White and James Blake, Lemonade proves Beyoncé to also be a new kind of post-genre pop star. (Let us remember a time, not very long ago, when Bey and Jay attending a Grizzly Bear show with Solange made headlines.)
Both of these attributes—a methodical rapper’s flow, an open-eared listener’s frame of reference—meet on the slowed-down stunner “Hold Up,” where Beyoncé borrows an iconic Karen O turn of phrase via Ezra Koenig, a touch of Jamaican flavor via Diplo (again), and a plucky Andy Williams sample to fight for her man while chiding him for doing this to her (!), of all people. From there, Bey’s just like, “fuck it—big mistake, huge” and gets (Tidal co-owner) Jack White to join her in dueting over a psychedelic soul jam and a Zeppelin sample as she scowls, “Watch my fat ass twist, boy, as I bounce to the next dick, boy.” As she accuses her husband of not being man enough to handle all of her multitudes, fury frays her voice. Even on an album stacked with some of Beyoncé’s best recorded vocal performances to date, “Don’t Hurt Yourself” has her belting to a whole other dimension—specifically, that of Janis Joplin and late-’60s Tina Turner. This won’t be the last time Bey dips into the classic vinyl on Lemonade, either: see “Freedom,” which manages to both: A) speak poignantly to Civil Rights as much as personal plight, B) sound like an Adidas commercial; this means it’s the logical choice for next single, assuming Beyoncé is still releasing those.
Bey’s genre-hopping doesn’t always sound quite as transcendent as “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” however. Though certainly memorable (not least because it finds her name-checking the Second Amendment), “Daddy Lessons”—where a country guitar-line meets New Orleans brass in service of her Southern roots—is the least interesting chapter sonically, though the parallels it draws between Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s own cheating father still make it crucial in the context of Lemonade’s narrative. It’s hard to see how Beyoncé could have done without any of these scenes to tell the story (not even “Formation” in the end-credits), and though the specific sounds may not be as forward-thinking as those of her 2013 self-titled, there are clear reasons for every musical treatment she has made here. Lemonade is a stunning album, one that sees her exploring sounds she never has before. It also voices a rarely seen concept, that of the album-length ode to infidelity. Even stranger, it doesn’t double as an album-length ode to breaking up.
Yes, after Beyoncé makes nearly half an album’s worth of glorious rage songs directed at an unfaithful partner, she gives it a little time and remembers that she was raised to value hard work and spirituality. And so, she can’t give up on her marriage, the same one she spent her last two albums (mostly) celebrating. Beyoncé even kind of sells it, surmising with a tear-inducing sincerity on relaxed-fit soul jam “All Night” that “nothing real can be threatened.” It’s an easy platitude to make, but it’s also an extremely Beyoncé way of looking at things. For a perfectionist who controls her image meticulously, Beyoncé is obsessed with the notion of realness. That’s the biggest selling point of an album like Lemonade, but there’s a quality to it that also invites skepticism: That desire to basically art-direct your own sobbing self-portrait to make sure your mascara smears in the most perfectly disheveled way. But who cares what’s “real” when the music delivers a truth you can use. | 2016-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B | Parkwood Entertainment / Columbia | April 26, 2016 | 8.5 | 069b212f-4fca-4315-9f17-19738fcd8b95 | Jill Mapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jill-mapes/ | |
Illegal Art, home of Girl Talk, celebrates sampling pioneer Steinski, who took hip-hop's tradition of reformatting existing material and made it a postmodern funhouse. | Illegal Art, home of Girl Talk, celebrates sampling pioneer Steinski, who took hip-hop's tradition of reformatting existing material and made it a postmodern funhouse. | Steinski: What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11524-what-does-it-all-mean-1983-2006-retrospective/ | What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective | The more you think about it, the more ironically fitting it is that one of the biggest watershed moments in hip-hop history-- the controversy over sample rights and sonic appropriation-- was made by a 32-year-old TV commercial producer. Steve Stein was far from a dilettante; as one half of the megamix-specialist duo Double Dee and Steinski, he was already deep enough into the embryonic genre to change the game with his first release, 1983's epochal sample-slayer "Lesson 1 (The Payoff Mix)". A track they put together for a remix contest (which they won handily), "The Payoff Mix" was a rework of G.L.O.B.E. & Whiz Kid's "Play That Beat Mr. DJ" that didn't just wrap the Tommy Boy electro joint around the appropriate references to "Rock It" and "Last Night a DJ Saved My Life", but threw in all kinds of Casablanca soundbites and dance instructor lessons and Little Richard vocals, too. Never mind that they weren't virtuoso DJs and actually put the whole thing together using an 8-track recorder and a tape deck; this took hip-hop's tradition of reformatting existing material and made it a postmodern funhouse.
For a generation raised on the 30-second educational mini-films of "Sesame Street" and the fleeting stimulus of channel surfing, Steinski's own recipe for ricocheting attention spans was a natural fit: lay down a beat, switch it up a bunch of times to keep things jumping, weave in a bunch of thematic, sometimes smart-assed clips of TV news voice-overs or political speeches, and damn the lawyers. It was already well-known how legally dicey and largely unreleaseable his music was back in March 1986, when critic Robert Christgau wrote a Village Voice article referring to this music with the headline "Great Dance Records You Can't Buy", but he got right to the heart of Steinski's soundbite technique when he dubbed him "a perpetually disillusioned optimist who still assumes that the sounds and images rippling through the American consciousness are, forget copyright, every American's birthright."
Not long afterwards, Steinski would release "The Motorcade Sped On", a dance record about the JFK assassination that was difficult to get into the American consciousness-- unless said American was able to subscribe to the NME, where it was given away as a flexidisc. In fact, with most of Steinski's material previously only available in bootleg form, the 2xCD best-of What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective does a great service in collecting all his prime material in one place-- not just the bulk of his solo work, but the entirety of his 2002 BBC/Solid Steel rough mix Nothing to Fear, widely considered one of the best mixes of the last several years.
Nothing to Fear might be the surprise highlight of this collection, even accounting for all the classic stuff on the first disc. It's nice to hear Steinski do his thing for more than just a few minutes at a time, and at just under an hour, it's got a lot of crazy notions, elbow-ribbing and sharp gags packed into its running time, even as it maintains a deep focus on also acting as something danceable. The recognizable (Blackalicious' "Swan Lake"; Nelly's "Country Grammar"; De La Soul's "The Art of Getting Jumped") segues easily into the arcane; there'll be a number of times you'll hear a naggingly familiar yet unplaceable old-school b-boy break, and it might wind up driving you nuts. It's all bolstered by a succession of punchlines and soundbites that nudge each other out of the way even as they create a multi-generational stream of consciousness: there's Glengarry Glen Ross, "Rocky & Bullwinkle", and Groucho Marx; there's preachers, comedians, and a self-aware drop of Louis Farrakhan exclaiming to the attendees of Jack the Rapper's 1980 convention that "white people are in the business of mind control"; there's foley-room clips of "Star Trek" sound effects and pratfall bone fractures; there are recontextualized koans and truisms: "this is a special magic," "wait a minute-- are you guys actually gonna go through with this thing?", "the airwaves are sacred." Steinski doesn't shy away from his elder statesman status on this mix (one semi-appalled ident: "he's old enough to be my father!"), but the old-school-meets-new-school feeling makes his early-fifties age irrelevant; so much gets thrown at you through this mix that its allegiance to any kind of specific signifiers-- coasts, styles, eras, generations, anything deeper than "hip-hop in general"-- is practically nil.
A greater insight into Steinski's style and sonic identity is, of course, available on the first disc, ranging from straight-up b-boy anthems into unnerving, borderline avant-garde looks into some of America's bleakest moments. By 1985 Steinski and his partner Double Dee had crafted two additional "Lessons" to augment "The Payoff Mix". "Lesson 2 (James Brown Mix)" is self-explanatory: At a time when the 808 still ruled rap production, it was an unusual and prescient idea to string together a track interweaving some traditional hip-hop touchstones ("Apache", "Double Dutch Bus") with a number of different fragments from several of James Brown's funk hits; all that remained was for the Bomb Squad to perfect the science. "Lesson 3 (History of Hip Hop)"-- from 1985; talk about your unfinished story-- cements the historical import of the genre's breakbeat aspect via a smartly hijacked JFK quote ("the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans"), a nod to Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" and go-to breakbeats like Dennis Coffey's "Scorpio" and Herman Kelly & Life's "Dance to the Drummer's Beat". And the two reunion tracks that Double Dee and Steinski made together after over a decade apart-- 1998's hyperactive, elastic, almost completely transformative old-school funk-party remix of Bambaataa's "Jazzy Sensation" and 1999's quick-cutting, label-spanning ultramix "Voice Mail (Sugar Hill Suite)"-- reveal a certain giddiness over being able to work with classic material again.
But while there's plenty of strength in his later material-- the velvet scuzz of Coldcut-collaborative phone-sex pastiche "I'm Wild About That Thing", the sinister bop-funk of "Vox Apostolica", "Ain't No Thing", which expertly stitches together selections from Stones Throw's The Third Unheard: Connecticut Hip-Hop 1979-1983 comp-- Steinski's most daring work is in controversy-courting, culture-jamming political needling. The juxtaposition of as-it-happens news clips with pop debris in "The Motorcade Sped On"-- the intro to "The Tonight Show", the first note of the Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night", and the cowbell of the Rolling Stones' "Honky Tonk Women" slowed to a slump-shouldered skulk-- is tasteless in theory, but the sense of panic and confusion that Steinski puts together through repetition and multi-layered, often-clashing sounds manages to give it an unnerving gravity. 1992's "It's Up to You (Television Mix)" builds on a catchy loop of the Jackson 5's "It's Great to Be Here" and creates one of the few anti-Gulf War protest songs of the era, transforming Bush's speech into a pop hook ("Regrettably, we now believe/ That only force will make him leave") and interspersing quotes from Jello Biafra ("don't hate the media, become the media!") and Mario Savio's famous 1964 address to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.
And then there's the last track, the previously-unreleased "Number Three on Flight Eleven", which weaves audio of Betty Ong's cell phone call from United Flight 11 on 9/11 into an unsettling, ambient Eno-esque dirge-- the only track on this compilation that's legitimately difficult to listen to. "Lesson 2" answered this collection's titular question with a quote from Fab 5 Freddy's "Change the Beat" ("this stuff is really fresh"), but it's also deep. And probably illegal, too, but that just makes it an essential crime. | 2008-05-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2008-05-30T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Electronic / Rap | Illegal Art | May 30, 2008 | 8.7 | 069c0daf-8c7f-4965-b8f7-476909281974 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The two urbano superstars bro down over trap and dembow beats on a goofy but incredibly fun summertime album. | The two urbano superstars bro down over trap and dembow beats on a goofy but incredibly fun summertime album. | J Balvin / Bad Bunny: OASIS | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/j-balvin-bad-bunny-oasis/ | OASIS | As Alejandro “Sky” Ramirez wrote J Balvin’s verse on “Un Peso”—a standout on his new collaborative album with Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny—the Colombian musician recalled an old song from the Argentinian rock band Los Enanitos Verdes that his family used to drink and party to back in his hometown of Medellín. Their 1994 hit “Lamento Boliviano” was drenched in self-medication and singer/bassist Marciano Cantero’s romantic pathos offered the kind of lyrics that get screamed back at you when sung to packed stadiums: “Y yo estoy aquí, borracho y loco (And here I am, drunk and crazy)/Y mi corazón idiota, siempre brillará” (And my idiot heart, always shining). For J Balvin, Sky flipped part of the original hook to turn Balvin from the heartbroken to the heartbreaker: “Y tu corazón idiota siempre me extrañará” (“And your idiot heart will always miss me”). Over the course of a single day, what began as a half-serious gag—what if we got Cantero in the booth?—ended with a phone call from the Argentine asking for stems. “It was kind of a joke in the studio,” Sky told Rolling Stone. “But they take the jokes very seriously.”
“Un Peso” captures the appeal of Oasis; frothy music made by serious talents. The reigning princes of urbano spend much of the album’s 31-minute runtime promoting tropical hedonist pursuits: too-tiny bikinis, excessive alcohol consumption, ostentatious displays of wealth, and unprotected sex. They bro down over dembow beats and pack as many dancing women as possible into their music videos. It’s goofy, but incredibly fun—a soundtrack for beach BBQs and ad hoc fire-hydrant water parks, summer vibes made manifest.
The risk of not taking yourself too seriously is that plenty of the lyrics reveal themselves to be cringe-worthy upon close inspection—“Voy pa’ adentro como Pelé (¡Gol!),” or, “I’m going inside you like Pelé (Goal!),” Balvin sings on “Mojaita”—and much of the record can best be described as ’manos being ’manos. When Bad Bunny sings lines like “Ese booty es un paraíso como Bora Bora” (“The booty is a paradise like Bora Bora”), you can almost hear him smirk. It’s par for the course for the handful of the duo’s pre-Oasis collaborations, and whether you find this charming or gross likely hinges on your capacity for the crassness prevalent in much of urban music of any language.
Of the two stars, it’s the 25-year-old Bad Bunny whose voice looms largest on Oasis. His nasal Auto-Tune croon christens every song he appears on, regardless of the style he’s working with. The 34-year-old Balvin, ever the chameleonic wave-rider, is more content to go with the flow. Balvin verses can often feel like guest features on his own records—look no further than Beyoncé’s star turn on the “Mi Gente” remix—or as in the case of “Un Peso,” are sometimes written by someone else.
To be fair, few can do the sadboi vibes quite like el conejo malo. Bad Bunny has mastered the moody lament, soundtracking the comedown from the club in addition to the perreo anthems. The latest example is Oasis standout “La Cancion,” a jazzy, romantic ode that slows down the classic dembow riddim and showcases a lonely trumpet reverberating within the arrangement’s ample negative space—a production choice directed by Bad Bunny himself. It’s reggaetón, it’s romantic, and it’s jazzy, combining familiar elements into something fresh and new.
Most of the production is handled by Sky and his mentor Marco “Tainy” Masís, the legendary Puerto Rican reggaetón producer who helmed much of Bad Bunny’s phenomenal X100PRE and J Balvin’s Vibras. The production crew seamlessly weave together acoustic elements (“Yo Le Llego”’s upright bass, “Un Peso”’s ukulele, “La Cancion”’s trumpet), trap-style synthesizers, and dembow beats into a coherent pan-Latin aesthetic. This is the sound of the new urbano latino.
Bunny and Balvin even tip their cap to Africa—the original source of nearly all the sounds miscegenating on Oasis—tapping Nigerian Afrobeat all-star Mr. Eazi for “Como Un Bebé,” their take on a “Banku” bop, the smoothed-out signature style Eazi named after the heavy Ghanian comfort food. It’s a fitting end to a record devoted to celebrating good times, a healing balm providing temporary relief from the violence and oppression that they’ve addressed in their communities. When Bad Bunny implores us to “Baila pa' mí” (“Dance with me”), we comply, powerless to resist. | 2019-07-03T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Pop/R&B | Universal Music Latino | July 3, 2019 | 8 | 069e810a-5ece-411a-9121-c4402ba087a5 | Matthew Ismael Ruiz | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/ | |
For Vol. 8 of RVNG's FRKWYS series, New York's Blues Control teamed with Brian Eno-associated zither player Laraaji for a collaborative LP that moves from disco to cascading kalimba, weightless ambiance, and gurgling noise. | For Vol. 8 of RVNG's FRKWYS series, New York's Blues Control teamed with Brian Eno-associated zither player Laraaji for a collaborative LP that moves from disco to cascading kalimba, weightless ambiance, and gurgling noise. | Blues Control / Laraaji: FRKWYS Vol. 8 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16056-frkwys-vol-8/ | FRKWYS Vol. 8 | In Father James Martin's recent book, Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life, he notes that some of Jesus' parables had a wry sense of humor underlying them, albeit the context (crucial for any comic) has been lost over centuries of translations. But if you think of it, a camel squeezing through a needle's eye is Monty Python-level absurd. The New Age artist Laraaji (born Edward Larry Gordon) understands such a spiritual dichotomy, offering workshops not just in deep listening but also in deep laughter. His blog even summarizes his skill-set as so: "Celestial Music Performances and Seriously Playful Laughter Workshops."
For most music fans, Laraaji remains best known for recording an ambient album with Brian Eno after the latter happened upon the artist improvising on zither in Washington Square Park. The resultant record, Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, catapulted Laraaji into the upper echelons of that then-nascent genre, even if albums like 1978's Celestial Vibration (reissued by Soul Jazz) and 1987's Essence/ Universe transcend all musical nametags, vitamin stores, lucid dreaming practices, and crystal healing sessions to send its listeners up into the ether.
And like other similarly inclined noisemakers (including but not limited to Emeralds, Oneohtrix Point Never, White Rainbow, and Hatchback), when New York's Blues Control began to explore psychedelic music from the chakra-relaxing end of the musical spectrum, it led them directly to Laraaji's back catalog. Similarly inclined to melodic improvisation, percussive playing, hazy instrument treatments, and sprawling soundscapes-- as evidenced on previous albums like Local Flavor and*"Puff"*-- it makes a strange sort of sense that Blues Control would reach out to Laraaji for a collaborative album released as part of the RVNG label's ongoing FRKWYS series.
Sonically, it makes for an exquisite follow-up to the previous entry. Recorded in an upstate studio over the course of a single winter's day, the four tracks that constitute the LP (not to mention the sprawling bonus tracks available via digital download and-- in a nod to the New Age genre-- cassette) feel of a piece. Blues Control's telltale murk is evident from the start of "Awakening Day", somehow discombobulating and evocative, full of echoing percussion and effervescent melodies from Russ Waterhouse's six-string and Lea Cho's electric keyboard. It actually takes a while before Laraaji's strummed zither rises to the surface, only to have the elegant track slowly dissolve into sounds of running water and trickling percussion.
Laraaji's effects-laden strings kick off the 11-minute exploration "Light Ships", as do his bellowing vocal improvisations. Piano and zither ebb and rise like oceanic tides, but soon that deep voice of Laraaji's turns into echoing laughter. Another belly laugh emanates from Laraaji on the half-hour bonus track "Somebody Scream", and there's also a chuckle as the droning closer "Freeflow" fades from view. From where does such mirth arise? There are no definite answers, but surely the body-moving drum shuffle that leads into "City of Love" will startle more than a few listeners as the collaboration somehow moves from Earl Young-worthy Philly disco into cascading kalimba and weightless ambiance into the sort of noise gurgle that Blues Control are expert at. Across the four tracks though, it soon becomes hard to distinguish the two separate entities at play, which by this point is to be expected. As the FRKWYS series continues to make evident, the perceived generation gap between bustling avant-garde noise musicians and their more steadfast New Age elder statesmen is-- funnily enough-- narrow indeed. | 2011-11-21T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2011-11-21T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental / Rock | Rvng Intl. | November 21, 2011 | 7.8 | 069f7d1e-b356-4c9d-8ca9-0a622c64d8d4 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
Recorded live in Chicago and then rearranged in the drummer/producer’s studio, Highly Rare channels an electric night of raw improv into a shapeshifting form halfway between hip-hop and free jazz. | Recorded live in Chicago and then rearranged in the drummer/producer’s studio, Highly Rare channels an electric night of raw improv into a shapeshifting form halfway between hip-hop and free jazz. | Makaya McCraven: Highly Rare | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/makaya-mccraven-highly-rare/ | Highly Rare | Two winters ago, Danny’s Tavern cheated death. The bar on Chicago’s North Side seemed doomed for demolition; headlines called it official, and event organizers spread word of formal farewells. It was saved at the 11th hour by an outpouring of public testimonial and an owner’s promise to fix its deteriorating roof. Playing out in the year before the iconic nearby venue Double Door was shuttered, it was a major victory for Chicago music. A winter night at Danny’s can feel like stepping into a long-exposure photograph: The place glows, both by spare candlelight and from the memory of all the music its walls and dancefloors have soaked up in the past three decades. Tucked into the middle of a quiet residential block, it rarely hosts live-band performances, yet it’s a premier place to listen.
All of this is essential context for the new mixtape by the Chicago drummer and producer Makaya McCraven. Recorded at the bar on a below-freezing night last November, 12 days after a nightmarish presidential election, Highly Rare finds McCraven and his band leaning into the winter night to deftly explore sanctuary, silence, and a looming sense that the roof might be caving in on all of us.
McCraven is a beat architect whose craft is threefold. He’s a drummer and bandleader first, but his voice doesn’t really materialize until after sounds are laid to tape—in this case, a Tascam four-track. As a producer, McCraven sifts through, chops up, and reassembles the improvisations of his own band, which here comprises three fellow top-talent players from the local recording company International Anthem. Manipulating their spontaneous takes, he transforms the improvised raw material into a carefully edited statement made out of free-form parts.
The finished product is somehow both more rhythmic and elusive than its origins. Highly Rare finds a dark aisle between free jazz and hip-hop and traverses it restlessly, breaking down the division between the two forms. On “Above & Beyond,” the record’s foremost feet-mover, Nick Mazzarella’s alto sax jumps between precisely inflected phrases and throaty wails into the void. The next track, “Venus Rising,” begins with McCraven’s skittering drumbeat quietly underscoring bleary-eyed groans from Mazzarella’s sax and Ben LaMar Gay’s cornet—then slowly wakes up, hoists itself up via Junius Paul’s bass, and snowballs into anxious chaos until the room spins.
McCraven’s touch isn’t limited to his arrangements, as he loops and shifts pieces around; it’s also audible in the finishing touches he puts on these sounds. His window-rattling beats sound magnetically attracted to the lo-fi nakedness layered on top of them. “Left Fields” grows from a thin-sounding seed of Gay chanting in circles over his own diddley bow, stretching out over 11 and a half minutes and eventually latching onto a booming four-on-the-floor infrastructure. Though the components were his to begin with, it’s as if McCraven is building music out of found objects—objects not planned in their particulars, but borne of the perfect environment, process, and night.
Night, above all, lights the way for Highly Rare. A track entitled “Icy Lightning” features Gay repeatedly calling out the titular phrase, which in its taunting cadence can easily be heard as a more ominous “I see lightning.” It’s a curiously fitting moment. McCraven moves confidently through a bleak landscape on Highly Rare, confronting nightmares by having fun in their face, toying with rhythmic conventions and taunting them with his gifts. | 2017-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-13T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | International Anthem | December 13, 2017 | 7.6 | 06a00fcd-3ce1-42c4-8dce-c2e523e5bfae | Steven Arroyo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/ | |
Best Coast's Jon Brion-produced second album finds the band leaning toward alt country and working in a more stripped-down mode, with Bethany Cosentino's voice front-and-center. | Best Coast's Jon Brion-produced second album finds the band leaning toward alt country and working in a more stripped-down mode, with Bethany Cosentino's voice front-and-center. | Best Coast: The Only Place | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16609-the-only-place/ | The Only Place | Yearning has been at the root of a lot of great singles. Pop music articulates desire, and you don't think about how much you want something unless you can see it dangling in front of you, just out of reach. Crazy for You, the first full-length by Bethany Cosentino and her Best Coast collaborator Bobb Bruno, got a lot of mileage out of yearning. Her songs structures were basic; her production consisted of the reverb-heavy, fuzzed-out nods to 1960s pop; and her lyrics found her pining for boys and feeling sad about being alone. There was nothing profound about Crazy for You, but there was something affecting; Cosentino was able to tap into a very specific kind of angst and articulate it in the simplest possible terms. Sometimes you want a song to untangle complex feelings and help you figure out how to get through what ails you. And sometimes you're lonely and bored and sitting there thinking about how you wish your cat could talk. For those moments, Best Coast was there.
It helped that Crazy for You was a little sloppy. Some music hides behind reverb and fuzz, but for Best Coast, the relaxed imprecision of the sound kept the music grounded. The rote chord changes and melodies and predictable lyrics (you've never heard "crazy" rhyme with "lazy" until you've heard Cosentino do it) were bumped around just enough by the messy production to keep things interesting. Best Coast's new album, The Only Place, is another story. Produced by Jon Brion, the sound is dry and comparatively spare; the guitars jangle and twang rather than fuzz; and Cosentino's voice, still strong and clear, is front and center. After their garage-rock beginnings, Best Coast are making a bid for alt-country singer-songwriter territory à la Neko Case, a musical sphere where the nuts and bolts of songwriting and storytelling are paramount. But it proves to be a poor fit. While shifts away from atmosphere and in the direction of personality and songwriting are often a sign of growth, here the clarity and sonic directness accentuate Best Coast's weakest quality: lyrics.
In every instance where there's an obvious choice to be made, one clearly dictated by the formula of a song structure or rhyme scheme, that's the one Cosentino makes. This lack of care makes the record hard to identify with. It feels robotic instead of relatable, and when your medium is straightforward singer-songwriter pop, that's a serious issue. The problems were apparent out of the gate with the title track, a love letter to California: It has no specificity and comes off like a tourism jingle. "We got the ocean/ Got the babes/ Got the sun/ We got the waves" is a couplet Mike Love would dismiss as shallow. It doesn't help that Cosentino has a strange aversion to bridges; it's hard to channel the classic songwriting forms of the 50s and 60s if you never write a middle eight. Virtually every song is verse/verse/chorus/verse/chorus/verse/chorus, and the resulting album feels longer than its 34 minutes.
You might be thinking, "Hey, you could say the same thing about the Ramones," and there's something to that. "Complicated" does not equal "better." But as a whole, The Only Place strains for maturity and sophistication. There are songs about feeling alienated ("I don't want to be how they want me to be" is a nice line) and overwhelmed ("Last Year") but there's no spirit to match the ambition. What's odd about all this is the presence of Brion; in interviews, Cosentino has indicated that he pushed her to work, to move from writing instinctually and try and create something outside of her comfort zone. But there's little evidence of stretching here. And with its slow and mid-tempos and generally plodding delivery, there's no energy to balance out the blandness.
The album does have its charms. Cosentino is still in fine voice, and she continues to have a warm and agreeable persona. The songs here are reasonably catchy and tend to stick with you with repeated plays. Cosentino also has a decent ear for pastiche. She channels 1970s AM gold on "Dreaming My Life Away" and adds some nice backing vocals to the "Stand by Me" chords on "How They Want Me to Be". The closing ballad "Up All Night", which appeared a couple of years ago in blown-out, lo-fi form, has the same feel as Santo and Johnny's immortal "Sleep Walk". You can almost see the wheels turning here: the same descending chords, some darkly romantic atmosphere. If the original is called "Sleep Walk", how about we call this one "Up All Night"? That sort of thinking permeates The Only Place, a grinding sense of marks being hit while inspiration is in short order. | 2012-05-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-05-16T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Mexican Summer | May 16, 2012 | 6.2 | 06a22692-4870-4c68-bbc7-2894003b8e62 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Atlanta rapper Young Thug marries the hook-bending sensibility of Future, the pill-addled yawp of Danny Brown, and the playful irreverance of Lil B with the guiding aura of Lil Wayne's experimental period. When he finds the right balance on 1017 Thug, it makes for some of the best, most fun-loving rap of the year. | Atlanta rapper Young Thug marries the hook-bending sensibility of Future, the pill-addled yawp of Danny Brown, and the playful irreverance of Lil B with the guiding aura of Lil Wayne's experimental period. When he finds the right balance on 1017 Thug, it makes for some of the best, most fun-loving rap of the year. | Young Thug: 1017 Thug | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17891-young-thug-1017-thug/ | 1017 Thug | In a landscape where Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame have proven to be, at the very least, reliable dispensers of either captivating displays of slurry brilliance and/or music that makes you want to slam your hand through a cinder block, Brick Squad's own Young Thug stands out as an unquantifiable wild card. His style-- which marries the hook-bending sonic sensibility of Future, the pill-addled yawp of Danny Brown, and the playful irreverance of Lil B living together under the guiding aura of Lil Wayne's experimental period-- is hard to define, and he uses this mystique in memorable ways. But, more often than not, he doesn't quite put that enticing package together. David Drake called Thug's 2012 mixtape I Came From Nothing 3 a "a dense, ambitious attempt to cultivate an entirely new rap style" while also calling it "frequently frustrating, shifting from eye-openingly original to inconsequential from track to track." Much of the same can be said about Thug's newest entry, 1017 Thug.
If it weren't for the moments Thug does puts the puzzle together, 1017 Thug could be easily dismissed as an erratic experiment-- many songs never get started and don't stick, and the ones that do get something spinning sometimes don't end up anywhere memorable. The thing is though, when Thug finds the right balance, it makes for some of the best and most fun-loving rap of the year, songs with multiple entry points that can't help but splatter and seep into the corners of your brain. Three songs, in particular, take you to these dizzying highs, "2 Cups Stuffed", "Nigeria", and "Picacho". That trio of tracks is essentially a crash course in what constitutes a brilliant, potential-flexing entry from Thug, especially when couched between more phoned-in thought bubbles like "Condo Music" and messy, meandering joints like "Shooting Star".
"2 Cups Stuffed" is without a doubt 1017 Thug's Wake-The-Fuck-Up moment, a song that builds from an unshakeable, wheeling hook into Thug's chanting, delirious demand for syrup. "Uno! Dos! Cups stuffed! UNO! DOS! CUPS STUFFED!" It's repetitive in the way that a hammer's thud might be repetitive. It's great.
Following up the annoying-by-design "Murder" is "Nigeria", a watery, Gucci-featuring track that sounds like Thug is calling from the corner of the club, maybe even the bathroom stall, maybe underwater. "Nigeria", an ode to the potent Nigerian strain of marijuana, gives Thug license to travel around the globe, to Jamaica, to Siberia ("Also cold in Siberia," Thug shivers). It's a good example of the tension Thug creates, batting the trope around in a playful way, while at the same time seeming a little dangerous and unhinged, adrift in the fog of drugs and his nasal fiending is the only thing cutting through the mist. It's something else.
Curious synths provided by producer Jay Neutron lead you into the bizarro universe of "Picacho", a pastiche where Young Thug envisions walking up to peers in the club and bellowing "Pikachu!," maybe even while wearing that red ballcap Ash wears. It takes its title from either the most well-known Pokémon, a cat/rat mixture that doubles as a tesla coil, or from the phenomenon of mixing up yellow-colored cough syrup with the more common purple-colored stuff. I'm not sure it matters.
"Picacho" is a good example of just how far Thug will stretch his voice and cadence, sometimes even leaping into a register that Mel Blanc didn't know existed. It's probably the best thing on the mixtape. It's pretty incredible.
One of the strangest things about 1017 Thug is just how flat the more high-visibility collaborations fall; none of the tracks produced by Brick Squad load carriers Lex Luger or 808 Mafia leave a mark, and even Gucci's appearance on the standout "Nigeria" proves that he and Thug aren't exactly cut from the same patterned leather. 1017 Thug, at its height, excites the imagination; if Thug can sensibly pour these influences and touchpoints into songs like "Picacho" and "2 Cups Stuffed", can radio omnipresence be that far behind? It might take more mixtapes than it should to find out. | 2013-04-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2013-04-02T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rap | null | April 2, 2013 | 7.4 | 06a82c1f-531a-4222-956e-12c47fce70bd | Corban Goble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/corban-goble/ | null |
Sade's 1992 album is a luxurious world of its own. Their most monolithic album is an ocean of quiet storm, R&B, and jazz-pop that surrounds Sade Adu's timeless expressions of desire and heartache. | Sade's 1992 album is a luxurious world of its own. Their most monolithic album is an ocean of quiet storm, R&B, and jazz-pop that surrounds Sade Adu's timeless expressions of desire and heartache. | Sade: Love Deluxe | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23069-love-deluxe/ | Love Deluxe | In the mid-’80s, a new kind of jazz-pop emerged in the UK, mostly assembled by former members of post-punk and new wave bands. They blended jazz, bossa nova, soul, and some of the swollen negative space of dub into a sleek and buoyant composite. The sound was streamlined and modern, inasmuch as anything that scans as “modern” is just an effectively redesigned past. It was initially embodied in records by Working Week, the Style Council, Everything But the Girl, and—the only band included in this brief genre that, as of 2017, still records and plays together—Sade.
Sade began as a reduced lineup of the Latin jazz band Pride. Stuart Matthewman auditioned for Pride after reading an ad in a magazine seeking a saxophone player for a “fashion conscious jazz-funk band.” At the audition, he met Sade Adu, then one of Pride’s backup singers; after Matthewman joined the band, he and Adu started writing together. As Pride eventually fragmented, the band Sade solidified, with the final lineup including bassist Paul Denman and keyboardist Andrew Hale. During the sessions for their first record, Diamond Life, they would listen to Gil Scott-Heron, Marvin Gaye, and Nina Simone, and try to synthesize the sounds into a more seamless design. Often the mixture would produce crisp staircases of soul, like “Your Love Is King,” or liquid-crystal pop-funk, like “Hang on to Your Love.” Sometimes they slipped into a less material space; in live performances of the Diamond Life B-side “Love Affair With Life,” Hale’s piano, Matthewman’s saxophone, and Adu’s voice are held together by the song’s vast margins, given a ghostly shape by its silences. They were capable of producing a floating, haunted kind of music, and over time their attentions and their albums grew more absorbed by it. Just two albums later, on 1988’s Stronger Than Pride, songs like “I Never Thought I’d See the Day” and “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” seem to flow out of and recede back into a gently-constructed nowhere.
As their first U.S. Top 10 hit “Smooth Operator” described the jet-setting lifestyle of a debonair, dangerous, Don Juan-type, Sade came to signify a kind of cosmopolitan exotica—where one could travel to distant places on luxury airplanes, absorb an endless, glossy flow of champagne, and slowly sift through a hangover in a hotel bar. Their music was a portal through which one could effortlessly simulate such an experience, a virtual vacation in which the more severe physical edges of reality had been dissolved. Sade had also acquired, through their numerous love songs, the reputation of a generally romantic band. In reality, Adu’s songs are less romantic in form than they are glassy vehicles for a more introspective melancholy, seamless projections of love, devotion, and heartbreak that also seem to have just barely escaped the inner depth that produced them.
In 1992, Sade returned to the studio after a short break following their tour for Stronger Than Pride. They worked for four months, a shorter and less dislocated session than the ones that generated some of their previous recordings, and the album they made, Love Deluxe, is their most monolithic in sound. It is made of inhales. The album title comes from Adu’s concept of love: “The idea is that it’s one of the few luxury things that you can’t buy,” she said in an interview at the time. “You can buy any kind of love but you can’t get love deluxe.”
It’s this sense of blissful abstraction in which the album swims, a total slipstream of feeling and experience and longing in which one can lose themselves and their contexts. The band plays with an almost fluid dynamism, audible in the oceanic churn of Matthewman’s guitar on “No Ordinary Love,” or in the way Hale’s synth work tends to add long, drowsy auras to his piano chords. Matthewman is, in interviews, often quick to diminish the actual abilities of the band, and suggests they are guided less by supreme talent than by interplay. “I think one of the reasons we’ve been successful at what we do is that we’re all decent musicians, but we’re not great musicians,” he said. “I think we all play really well together.”
Sade had played against drum machines before, but Love Deluxe was the first time they recorded an album almost entirely without a live drummer, and the particular yawn and lurch of the programmed beats on Love Deluxe somewhat align it with the parallel development of trip-hop. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines had come out just a year earlier, and the distance between snare hits on songs like “No Ordinary Love” and “Cherish the Day” seems to open a space in which lushness and dread merge. (Trip-hop feels like a spiritual continuation of jazz-pop, but with the dub element having swallowed and warped everything else beyond recognition; it produced its jazziness less through polished holistic productions than through the harsh collision of samples.)
There’s also crispness, a vacuum-sealed quality to the percussion that links it to the Dallas Austin-produced R&B of the mid-’90s, e.g. Madonna’s “Secret.” The drums act as a skeleton around which the rest of the notes pulse, drift, and fuse into an immaculate surface, all of which feel like sensitive responses to the lunar gravity exerted by the band’s eponymous singer. The arrangements bend around Adu’s voice, its narcotic pull, the way that its range sounds finely sifted out of other potential vocal material, perfectly decanted.
By 1992, Adu had arrived at a particular economy in her expressions of desire and heartache; “No Ordinary Love” is a song about a relentless, almost sacrificial devotion, which seems to consume and replace the person giving it. “I gave you all that I had inside and you took my love/You took my love,” she sings as the band designs a kind of pulsing, amniotic fog around her vocal. In the music video, Adu plays a character that resembles the Little Mermaid; she sits on the ocean floor, reading a wedding magazine among great muscles of coral and fluttering plantlife. Lured by a sailor to the surface, she evolves legs and a wedding dress, and walks down a dock while throwing handfuls of rice over herself. She enters a dive bar, orders a glass of water, and pours salt into it, a visible gesture of survival which disconnects her from the people around her. She never encounters the sailor above water. It’s a perfect visual embodiment of a Sade song, in that it conveys the total isolation of desire, Adu’s mermaid caught not exactly in love, but in the continuum of fantasy and abstraction. In the end, she sits by the dock, consuming water from a bottle.
On Love Deluxe, Adu also writes her own character studies, though distinct from her earlier attempts in “Smooth Operator” and “Jezebel”; here she’s so thoroughly embedded in the perspectives that it becomes hard to distinguish her, or even them, from the feelings conveyed. “I collect ideas in my head all the time,” Adu said in an interview at the time. “The things that most depress you are often the things that you write about.” In “Feel No Pain,” she describes the suffocation and paralysis of unemployment; “Pearls” focuses on the trials of a woman in Somalia and the dignity of survival; “Like a Tattoo” forms itself out of the perspective of a war veteran Adu met in a Manhattan bar. “I remembered his hands,” she sings, “And the way the mountains looked/The light shot diamonds from his eyes.” It’s hard to tell whether Adu is remembering the soldier, or if she’s the soldier remembering someone he killed, or if the perspective has totally collapsed and is flowing back and forth unconsciously, less a documentary of something that happened than a kinetic sculpture of it, depicting an emotional vastness that floats somewhere beyond experience.
“Like a Tattoo” and “Pearls” are the most amorphous compositions on Love Deluxe; given their spartan instrumentation—one drumless, the other buoyed by strings—they feel as if they’ve been severed from their greater contexts and are floating in their own darknesses. But this darkness swells throughout the record, and marbles even the luminous compositions with shadow; it flows into Matthewman’s saxophone, which fills the margins of “Bullet Proof Soul” with smoke; it causes me to be unable to tell whether the guitar in “Cherish the Day” is spilling honeyed light into the song or is instead weeping.
Of course, this darkness could be native to the grammar Adu revisits most: love. This is a love with its genome completely unfolded, so that even when she sings of incandescent romantic delight, as on “Kiss of Life,” one is able to catch a glimpse of its origin, whether in loneliness, desire, or obsession. Conversely, in songs like “Cherish the Day” and “Bullet Proof Soul,” one is able to apprehend love’s expiration point, what it inevitably shores up against: its death. “It’s not hard to find love, it is to keep it,” Adu once said. “It’s something which is like [one of] the more mysterious things in life. It’s like death and it’s like birth, and it can’t really be completely explained.” | 2017-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Epic | April 9, 2017 | 9.3 | 06aa23f8-b4b7-416a-aa9e-6e6ea1cfed8c | Ivy Nelson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ivy-nelson/ | null |
Best known for his music’s starring role in films like Amélie, the composer aims to become the auteur here—maybe a little too much. | Best known for his music’s starring role in films like Amélie, the composer aims to become the auteur here—maybe a little too much. | Yann Tiersen: ALL | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yann-tiersen-all/ | ALL | Yann Tiersen doesn’t make music exclusively for films, but his sound is so visual and highly dramatic that you would be forgiven for misconstruing his body of work as one big soundtrack. His résumé galvanizes the impression: Tiersen’s earliest albums drew heavily from screen and stage, his debut even based on Tod Browning’s 1932 weirdo classic, Freaks. The title track of his next album wound up on the The Dreamlife of Angels soundtrack, while another song appeared in the Juliette Binoche film Alice et Martin. And, of course, there’s the whimsical French film Amélie, wherein director Jean-Pierre Jeunet culled music from Tiersen’s first three albums and put it before millions. “The hard part was making a selection,” Jeunet said around the time the movie was released, “because all Tiersen’s tracks worked with the film’s images.”
Following the austere piano and field recordings of 2016’s EUSA, the swooping gestures of ALL might again lead you to imagining crane shots and heart-stirring montages. For the album, Tiersen not only played every instrument but also traveled to far-flung locales to capture very specific field recordings, including booking a transatlantic flight so as to return to the spot along California’s Lost Coast where a mountain lion once chased him. He recorded a violin part there. If that sounds precious, that has been Tiersen’s method since the start. Gorgeous and overstuffed, ALL features Tiersen’s tearjerker melodies and his tendency to crowd them from all sides.
A lovely piano line introduces “Tempelhof,” followed in the background by kids at play. The piece takes field recordings from Berlin’s shuttered airport, which now houses the country’s largest refugee shelter; these displaced children still able to play makes for a bittersweet sound. If you needed to score a scene where a parent looks from a window and gazes at their growing child, this would be catnip. But midway through the piece, Tiersen adds all sorts of curlicues, from fuzz guitar and gongs to birds and weird radio frequencies, elements that dampen the song’s wistful impact. Tiersen often veers toward overstatement, as when synth squiggles, drones, harmonized vocals, jaw harp, nylon guitar, zither, baby cries, bird calls, electronic effects, strings, and finally a choir dogpile the otherwise elegant interplay between piano and shortwave radio on “Pell.”
In addition to this panoply of instruments, Tiersen uses lots of vocalists singing in Swedish, Faroese, and Tiersen’s native Breton. The voices suggest solemn hymnals, even when the lyrics are to be felt rather than understood, as on the stirring climax of “Koad.” They sing, somewhat nonsensically, “Where is the life now? The truth in pieces… How can we live like this?” Likewise, why does Tiersen need a full choir to count in the background of “Bloavezhioù” as church bells clang?
Through nature-based song titles and instruments mixed with field recordings, ALL conveys an overarching theme of environmentalism and humanity’s place in the wilderness. When “Beure Kentañ” gives way to nearly three minutes of bird sounds, for instance, it’s as lovely as what you’d encounter on a hike. But then there’s “Usal Road,” the one where Tiersen hauled his recording rig to the site of the mountain lion encounter; such indulgence obliterates the music’s solemnity.
ALL’s loveliest moment comes on “Heol,” where whispered lyrics in Breton tell a parable about a locked castle and “the golden key of language” that opens it. With each new sound, from twanging guitar and orotund choir to brass fanfare and dizzying strings, Tiersen builds tension, rising toward a peak wrapped with light. It feels positively uplifting—and also destined for an e-commerce commercial preaching connectivity. | 2019-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Mute | February 21, 2019 | 5.8 | 06acfac3-efbb-4325-b063-3a7d1d7e4be0 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | |
The UK folkie's Wiliam Orbit-produced LP gets the remastered, reissued, and expanded treatment, and it turns out to be a pleasant surprise. | The UK folkie's Wiliam Orbit-produced LP gets the remastered, reissued, and expanded treatment, and it turns out to be a pleasant surprise. | Beth Orton: Trailer Park: Legacy Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12898-trailer-park-legacy-edition/ | Trailer Park: Legacy Edition | Believe it or not, Beth Orton originally wanted to name this album Winnebago, but of course, rights issues quickly squashed that idea. The title she ended up with, she remarked in a 1996 interview, ended up working just as well: "Trailer Park conjures up the same kind of filmic American images, images of transience and dislocation... and funnily enough, when we shot the video for the first single (in an actual trailer park)... I had all these odd, rather desperate people coming up and giving me their entire life-stories in a second. Even though I didn't want them to." That image of Orton-- pitched as a new brand of British folkie-- shooing away actual "folk" while frou-frouing up their surroundings to sell to upmarket downtempo audiences, is a good one to accompany Trailer Park. Certainly much more appropriate than the cover image they decided on: Orton in Chucks, for some reason plopped down in a parking lot.
The disconnect between how Beth Orton was pitched to us and the way her music actually sounded was as vast as the barren landscape she fetishized. Instead of a lonesome troubadour traversing the desolate American West from carpark to carpark, Orton was a Norwich-born theatre chick who found herself in the midst of a rapidly-changing mid-90s UK pop scene. William Orbit spotted her in a theatre production and tabbed her to lend her plush, lonesome vocals to the opening track of the third iteration of his Strange Cargo series in 1993 (he'd also produce the since-disowned Japanese-only Superpinkymandy, technically her solo debut). From there, Orton fell in with an even higher-profile crowd: After closing out the Chemical Brothers' game-changing 1995 debut on "Alive Alone", she was scooped up by Tom and Ed's buddy Jeff Barrett, and his Heavenly imprint (at the time, most known for Saint Etienne and Manic Street Preachers) set about casting Orton in her first starring role.
While so many of the supporting cast has faded from immediate memory, Trailer Park holds up surprisingly well, and the remastered tracks still reward headphone scrutiny. Even more than a decade later, "She Cries Your Name" still sounds great, with Orbit's luxuriously gloomy string arrangement-- especially the way the cello's low-end signals the entrance of the chorus like stage curtains parting-- and the deft production hands of UK electronic scenester Andrew Weatherall and Bad Seeds' Victor Van Vugt providing the perfect context for Orton's cozy, impressionistic Americana sketches. Twelve or so years after I dismissed it as resolutely Lilithy I'm struck at how Orton's vocals on several of these tracks are much less Sarah McLachlan than Zombies' Colin Blunstone, and how the best moments of Trailer Park find a similar middle-ground between spooky and reassuring.
Another surprise: the trip-hop rip-offs hold up the best here, and reward the remaster the most. Granted, "Tangent" and "Touch Me With Your Love" wouldn't exist without Massive Attack and Portishead, and Orton's vocals are nowhere near the level of Shara Nelson or Beth Gibbons, but that wasn't the point, either. Those basslines and atmospherics (and "Touch Me"s spoken-word) are jazz club and coffee-shop, not Jamaican dub or hip-hop, and Orton wasn't only safe from harm, harm isn't even a consideration here-- she's on her way home, she's having short and happy dreams. "Galaxy of Emptiness" is still over 10 minutes long, and still hopelessly romantic, and it still sounds as good in the background during dinner as it does on headphones after a few glasses of wine. Save the spliffs for Dummy and Blue Lines.
But how great would it have been if "I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine", Orton's cover of the Ronettes' wonderful, Spector-produced original, would have seen the same sort of space-jazz reimagining, instead of the folky evisceration it got on Trailer Park? As much as the promotional campaign wanted to pitch Orton as a hollow-box singer-songwriter, "Sunshine", "Don't Need a Reason", and the James Taylor-esque "Whenever" remain the most generic and skippable tracks. Her Natalie Merchant side, however, retains its rewards in "Sugar Boy", "Live as You Dream", and the adorable "Someone's Daughter".
Putting nostalgia aside, the main question to ask of the "Legacy Edition" of Trailer Park, as with any re-release, is why? Aside from the obvious "the CD industry is dying quickly, let's squeeze every last drop out of it," do you need the original, nine B-sides and a three-song 1997 EP (all for around $22)? If my instincts are correct, anyone who's read this far has still got the first version-- maybe it's packed away somewhere, maybe it's hidden on purpose-- or at least selected tracks compiled on random mixtapes. At least for an afternoon, especially while the spring is springing, save your cash and spend some time with the original artifacts. It just might surprise you, too. | 2009-04-07T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2009-04-07T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Legacy | April 7, 2009 | 6 | 06aef1c0-827b-47bb-b98d-0e5ab496ac9c | Pitchfork | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pitchfork/ | null |
In a crowded—and excellent—year for West Coast hip-hop, G Perico stands out as one of the most promising newcomers. | In a crowded—and excellent—year for West Coast hip-hop, G Perico stands out as one of the most promising newcomers. | G Perico: Shit Don’t Stop | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22486-shit-dont-stop/ | Shit Don’t Stop | G Perico hails from deep in South Central Los Angeles—east of the Forum, west of the Watts Towers. On his breakthrough mixtape, Shit Don’t Stop, the blue-draped, Jheri-curled rapper bounces between L.A. landmarks real and imagined, haunting the bar at the Ritz-Carlton on Olympic, surveying his subjects from a stoplight on Western. More importantly, Perico channels some of California’s most colorful legends (Suga Free, Too $hort, DJ Quik, even Eazy-E), and rolls those influences into one sneering, swaggering whole. To that end, Shit Don’t Stop follows YG’s Still Brazy in providing a natural endpoint for decades of disparate rap threads that unspooled up and down the 5 freeway.
Perico’s most obvious analogue from recent years is 100s, the Berkeley rapper whose Ice Cold Perm mixtape and (especially) IVRY EP pushed pimp rap back into vogue. But 100s (whose music has mutated and who now goes by his given name, Kossisko) treated the profession as something abstract, a fever dream fueled by pager beeps and curl activator. By contrast, Shit Don’t Stop pulls the pimp into real life—not exactly an everyman, but a member of a larger, sometimes grim world. On “Million Dolla Mission,” he’s not above the law, but he makes it work for him anyway: “They booked me at the station, but I ain’t never stay/I’m a real boss, all my bail money’s paid.”
In that vein, the record’s closing song, “Streets Don’t Love Us,” is a lament for murdered friends and indicted peers, lurking Feds and nascent third strikes. It grounds Perico’s work by detailing all the forces conspiring against him; it also colors the more joyous songs by warning that the “blue Pumas, all suede” might disappear at midnight. All of this is bolstered by a story that’s already entered L.A. rap lore: earlier this year, Perico was shot in front of a recording studio in South Central. Instead of acquiescing to a lengthy hospital stay, he opted for a crude cleaning of the wound in his hip, and made it to his scheduled performance that night, blood still dripping down his leg.
And yet Shit Don’t Stop is a potent reminder that, despite the way gangsta rap is caricatured in the press and by detractors, the genre can be relentlessly fun. On “Nothin’ but Love,” Perico raps about jumping bail as if he was going to the gym; on “Dream Nigga,” he threatens to steal your girl and make her bring food stamps to pay for dinner. The second verse of “I Got Business” details a 4 a.m. encounter, where Perico reluctantly has sex with a woman (“I ain’t even ‘bout to hit it long/I just wanna give you yours and then get mine”) and then chastises her for not being courteous enough to call beforehand.
Though he’s a capable, occasionally exceptional songwriter, G Perico’s strongest asset is his voice. It clearly owes a debt to Quik and Suga Free, but it’s employed in a series of modern cadences (see: the first verse in “Dream Nigga,” where he slips into the same flow Nef the Pharaoh has been resurrecting upstate). He doesn’t break the structure of bars the way Suga Free did, but he’s nimble enough that he can hit technical passages while keeping his overwhelming cool.
Given that sort of smart, selective reverence, G Perico casts himself as a torchbearer who isn’t all that concerned about torchbearing. These are songs for long, sweltering cookouts, perilous house parties, and the maddening freeway trips in between. (As aggressively regional as Shit Don’t Stop is, it does take a stab at Master P’s “I’m Bout It, Bout It,” which, while most famously repurposed by Dipset in the early 2000s, has also been a testing ground of sorts for young rappers like Florida’s Robb Bank$). In a crowded—and excellent—year for West coast hip-hop, G Perico stands out as one of the most promising newcomers. | 2016-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | So Way Out Tha Innerprize | October 11, 2016 | 7.5 | 06af11a2-12ad-4c7b-9c35-39a538b42a70 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | null |
Armed with a blood-freezing voice, the 19-year-old Londoner Archy Marshall recorded his haunting early songs on a malfunctioning laptop, first as Zoo Kid then as King Krule. His Rodaidh McDonald-produced debut for True Panther/XL sounds roomier and warmer, but it's the same chipped-brick urban landscape Marshall prowled through on his previous work. | Armed with a blood-freezing voice, the 19-year-old Londoner Archy Marshall recorded his haunting early songs on a malfunctioning laptop, first as Zoo Kid then as King Krule. His Rodaidh McDonald-produced debut for True Panther/XL sounds roomier and warmer, but it's the same chipped-brick urban landscape Marshall prowled through on his previous work. | King Krule: 6 Feet Beneath the Moon | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18414-6-feet-beneath-the-moon/ | 6 Feet Beneath the Moon | The 19-year-old Londoner Archy Marshall has the pale, fine-boned features of Ron Weasley and the rough shout of someone sent to crush your kneecaps. Unsteady, urgent, and skirting tonelessness, it leaks out of him in hair-raising bursts, a poorly kept secret in his birdlike body, and it heightens the emotional stakes of his music before you've internalized a word he's sung. On his earliest recordings, first under the name Zoo Kid and then King Krule, he assembled a haunting, singular sound out of nothing but that voice, accompanied by some hard-strummed jazz chords on a broken-sounding electric guitar, some quiet, sputtering drum loops, and a blank wall of reverb. He sounded profoundly alone, but it was a jagged sort of aloneness, full of raw, exposed nerves and devoid of the comfort that solitude brings. "My heart got hold of my head and ripped it to its seams," he sang on "Bleak Bake", a representative sentiment.
Marshall recorded those early songs on a malfunctioning laptop; now he's on True Panther (and XL Recordings in the UK), working with producer Rodaidh McDonald. 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, his full-length debut, sounds roomier and warmer, and you can hear the music echo into the expansive room tone that McDonald brings to his work. But otherwise, this is the same chipped-brick urban landscape that Marshall prowled through on his EP. The music's surface swarms quietly with breaks, but nothing sounds busy or crowded, the way collage or pastiche-based music often does. It is muted and watery and stark, with a few intriguing elements dancing up near the top of the mix's surface: The drum track on "Ceiling" that sounds like a broken sprinkler; the muted jazz loop of "Bathed In Grey," the chirping "I just want you to know" vocal sample in "Will I Come."
Marshall's voice is pushed further to the forefront, and he explores its gnarliest crags and catches. Something in Marshall's stance reminds me vaguely of Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock; like Brock, Marshall's words seem to escape his gut like odd-angled shapes that hurt him as they exit. Also like Brock, he sounds warily intelligent, and though he projects a surly air, his songs are tender at the root. The lovely, drunken ballad "Baby Blue" turns on velvet, indigo guitar chords and a gently swooning vocal melody. Marshall has name-checked Chet Baker in interviews, and you can hear in "Baby Blue" what Baker's influence means to him: The song is flickering, low-lit, and romantic in a knowingly dime-store sort of way.
His lyrics occasionally play with clichés, and the way they emerge mangled from his vocal chords. "When positivity seems hard to reach/ I keep my mouth shut/ Because when you're going through Hell/ You just keep going," he yowls on "Easy Easy". The lyrics read terribly, but even these "Hang in There" clichés are intriguingly dented by the sound of his voice. He loves rap, and some of the word tangles here suggest an interest in the way rappers get to fling around vivid clumps of language: "The brain lives on but the vibes are dead/ Corrosively tread through emotionally spoonfed purpose," from "Neptune Estate".
There are some departures here, and they don't work well: a re-recorded version of the old Zoo Kid "A Lizard State" brings in a manic horn section to crash the party and Marshall punches up some of the least appealing lyrics he's ever written with an extra pinch of Tom Waits, yowling "Where's the fucking fat bitches" and "I'm gonna tear you apart from the inside to the out." Some of his earlier material is included ("Out Getting Ribs" and "Ocean Bed") and it still rings out as some of his strongest work.
The only issue with 6 Feet Beneath the Moon is that Marshall's sound is still a little inchoate, and you get a few compelling ideas rattling around loosely like pocket change, searching for a joining place. Over the course of 6 Feet's 52 minutes, the sound loses some of its essential mystery. Marshall still has a blood-freezing voice, someone to pay attention to, but 6 Feet Beneath the Moon doesn't feel like his Big Statement, not yet. | 2013-08-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-08-29T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | XL / True Panther | August 29, 2013 | 7.3 | 06b5d617-dee9-48fa-ade2-c5dd770903d8 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Radiohead renaissance man Jonny Greenwood makes his Hollywood film score debut with this soundtrack to director Paul Thomas Anderson's latest outing, set in a desolate California town circa 1920. | Radiohead renaissance man Jonny Greenwood makes his Hollywood film score debut with this soundtrack to director Paul Thomas Anderson's latest outing, set in a desolate California town circa 1920. | Jonny Greenwood: There Will Be Blood OST | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11007-there-will-be-blood-ost/ | There Will Be Blood OST | The first hint that Jonny Greenwood might make a gifted composer came in 1997, when, bored with the syrupy, provincial strings that dominated the tail-end of Britpop, he channeled Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki for the arrangement on OK Computer's "Climbing Up The Walls". Essentially a wall of quarter notes played against each other, that noisy squall stood out in dramatic opposition to the "Bittersweet Symphony"s of the world. Where the traditional rock approach had always been to use strings to amplify melody and opulence, Greenwood was using them to create discord and ambience; in other words, he was playing orchestras like he played his guitar.
While his interest in what he's since referred to in interviews as a "wrong" string sound manifested in later Radiohead highlights like "How to Disappear Completely" and "Pyramid Song", his compositional talents didn't become readily apparent until his imaginative score for 2003's sweeping documentary Bodysong. A lush mixture of strings, pianos, percussions, electronics, and otherwise unrecognizable textures, *Bodysong'*s sprawling fourteen tracks allowed Greenwood to indulge in a level of experimentation and free-jazz complexity that wouldn't have otherwise fit on a Radiohead record.
Since then, Greenwood's graduation to mainstream film work has been pretty much inevitable, but even still, he'd probably be the first to admit that a Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love) project represents a pretty plum debut. Regardless of how you feel about Anderson as a director, few of his contemporaries manage to weave original music into the fabric of their films quite as devotedly. To score an Anderson project is to have a starring role in it; that this particular film-- a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's Oil!-- is set in a desolate California town circa 1920 only makes the task that much bigger.
After his initial contact with Anderson, Greenwood apparently wrote hours and hours of music for the film; in the end, the duo pared the score back to a very tidy 33 minutes, a small portion of which was lifted from Greenwood’s 2005 BBC-commissioned suite Popcorn Superhet Receiver. Nonetheless, this is all new ground for Greenwood. If the fidgety Bodysong was proof that he isn't ever likely to be short of ideas, There Will Be Blood feels tighter, more disciplined, and lonelier than anything he's done before.
Piano, percussion, and Greenwood's beloved Ondes-Martenot all feature, but it's the strings that take center stage here. While Greenwood has always been vocal about the originators and inspirations behind a lot of his techniques (Penderecki, Gorecki, and Messiaen come up often), There Will Be Blood's string arrangements nonetheless sound vanguard and exploratory in the context of Hollywood film scores. From the goosebump-inducing glissandos on opener "Wide Open Spaces" to the spiralling staccatos on "Future Markets" to the creeping dissonance in "Henry Plainview" (there's that "wrong" sound again), Greenwood's alien, experimental sensibilities lurk around each corner. | 2008-01-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2008-01-02T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Experimental | Nonesuch | January 2, 2008 | 8.1 | 06b6cee4-8509-49c9-a1fc-0494dc922064 | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
The first EP of a forthcoming trilogy from the pop icon is all over the place. It misuses her talents and makes for a largely unrewarding listen. | The first EP of a forthcoming trilogy from the pop icon is all over the place. It misuses her talents and makes for a largely unrewarding listen. | Miley Cyrus: She Is Coming EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/miley-cyrus-she-is-coming-ep/ | She Is Coming EP | Everyone who’s paid attention to pop music this decade, even just a tiny bit, has likely had some small piece of their brain melt away, replaced forever with Miley Cyrus Discourse. The moments are there still, probably forever: Twerking. Foam fingers. Weed. Molly. Dolly. Nicki: “Miley, what’s good?” Happy Hippies. Dead Petz. Liam Hemsworth. Robin Thicke. The time she told Billboard she was done with hip-hop because it was “too much Lamborghini, got my Rolex, got a girl on my cock”; then walked that back after realizing it sounded ever so slightly insulting toward the genre she’d flung herself at; then released a few soft-rock singles so studiedly contrite it’s a wonder she didn’t go Mandy Moore and offer past buyers refunds; then declared herself “over it” before the album even came out.
Why so fickle? Sales, partly (it’s easy to be over an album when the singles underperform) but also an underlying restlessness, especially with anything uncontroversial. In retrospect, the money quote in that Billboard story was near the beginning: “People stare at me anyway, but people stare at me a lot when I’m dressed as a fucking cat.”
On She Is Coming, Miley Cyrus is not literally dressed as a fucking cat, but figuratively she might as well be. Nary a minute passes where she doesn’t remind us that she’s nasty, evil, unholy, obscene, a witch, a freak. She Is Coming is the first of three EPs that, along with the forthcoming She Is Here and She Is Everything, will eventually become a full album. EP trilogies like this are increasingly common, providing fans (and streaming services) with a steady drip-feed of new content, and providing labels with live A/B testing of musical styles: redefining yourself live without having to commit. Miss the days of Mike WiLL Made-It? He’s back, with more guest rappers. Relieved when Miley abandoned rap for chaste country songs? Mark Ronson follows up last year’s “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” with another one. Fan of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”? Ru is on “Cattitude.” The stylistic whiplash is kind of like Charli XCX’s Pop 2, except not for experiments but for the many ways Miley Cyrus is back on her bullshit.
We’ve heard Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz; this is Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Horse. “Unholy” is a book-report summary of “We Can’t Stop”; “Mother’s Daughter” is like Katy Perry’s “Swish Swish” and “Dark Horse” cooked together with a sprinkle of heartland corn. “Cattitude” is a RuPaul song that Cyrus crashes in a pussy hat; she may call herself nasty upwards of a dozen times, but she leaves the actual nastiness to RuPaul. Then, looming in the middle of the album, is the Ghostface Killah-featuring “D.R.E.A.M.” If you have even a glancing familiarity with the Wu-Tang Clan original, you know what’s coming. (Actually, you can probably think of about three things the D might stand for, each worse than the last.)
But after an over-languid beat—the “C.R.E.A.M.” sample and Ghostface don’t come in toward the end, as if consciously distancing themselves from the song—and a truly puzzling first verse (“You’re in my bed uninvited/It’s fine ‘cause I’m in the mood/Hope you don’t mind if I spike it”) the only surprise is how anticlimactic it sounds when Cyrus sings the inevitable: “Drugs rule everything around me.” Cyrus has one of pop’s lustier, more robust voices, but here and elsewhere she rushes and swallows her lines, as if somehow ashamed.
For a six-track EP, She Is Coming is remarkably repetitive, but it does manage a few OK spots. “Mother’s Daughter,” produced by Andrew Wyatt (Miike Snow), has a decent enough beat and the bridge gets in a good hook, albeit one nicked off Frank Ocean’s “Swim Good.” Swae Lee and Mike WiLL manage some late-summer languor on “Party Up the Street,” particularly the sumptuous “Downhill Lullaby” strings at the end. And while Cyrus isn’t exactly doing the most on “The Most,” it’s the best she's coasted on a country-ish arrangement since “The Climb.” But there’s the thing, the elephant in the room: The Cyrus family got its largest infusion of goodwill in decades after Billy Ray Cyrus joined the remix to “Old Town Road,” which has been No. 1 for nine weeks now. Not only is a 57-year-old more believably at the nexus of rap, country, and virality, but he’s also charting higher. SHE IS COMING, the title proclaims; problem is, people are already there. | 2019-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | June 5, 2019 | 4.6 | 06b8ec09-388a-4ce8-b450-db3bb85dd8d5 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | |
Two-disc deluxe version of the legendary indie band's Geffen debut adds outtakes, B-sides, rehearsals, and demos. | Two-disc deluxe version of the legendary indie band's Geffen debut adds outtakes, B-sides, rehearsals, and demos. | Sonic Youth: Goo [Deluxe Edition] | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7349-goo-deluxe-edition/ | Goo [Deluxe Edition] | Never let it be said that Byron Coley (storied zinester cum storied music critic, and renowned Friend of Thurston) isn't above street-teaming when the occasion calls for it. That there's also a brief essay/anecdote by Sonic Youth's A&R; guy inside this Deluxe Edition package of Goo doesn't keep Coley from doing his civic duty, heaping praise upon this album's shoulders via wonky descriptors like "Mountain-on-Ketamine" or "a puzzle ballad about the road to oblivion." However, amidst all the polysyllabic polish, Coley offers a bit of truth: "[S]ome long-time fans were already croaking that the band was moving in a rockist direction, leaving behind the avant-noise roots that had marked their early history. Of course this was a load of happy horseshit. Sonic Youth had been rocking the fuck out from the git-go; they were just doing it in a language that most people didn't understand."
Indeed, if 1991 was the year punk broke, then 1990-- the year Sonic Youth supposedly bit the wax tadpole-- was when punk decided to step off the ledge. No doubt there were folks at the base of the wall, trying to cushion the impact. And, of course, they all ended up with egg on their face, and Goo in their lap. Fifteen years later, things have and haven't changed -- hair bands abound, but instead of Aquanet and spandex, they accessorize with chain wallets and MySpace accounts. And while Sonic Youth will never be ready for their close-up, there's stuff getting play on the radio stations that doesn't sound all too different from the more accessible moments offered on this here album. An album which, of course, doesn't sound all too different from the stuff SY was offering the kids prior to cashing Geffen checks, aside from those oh-so-important production values. Byron says howdy.
Thanks to the wonders of remastering, the gaudy glory of Goo is brought to the forefront. Thurston and Lee making like Lou and Sterling on "Tunic", the seven-second radio-dial montage leading into "Mote", the bombastic hissyfit at the end of "Mildred Pierce"-- all new-to-you, brought to you now in hi-def quadrophonic Technicolor! And thanks to this being the Deluxe Edition, you can compare and contrast the bright and shiny Goo against the storied and mythic Goo demos, which sound like, um, demos. You might prefer the ramshackle charm of "Animals" over the hit-it-and-quit-it tightness of the finished product ("Mary-Christ"), but you have both here, so there's no need to really choose. My ears prefer the Hollywood 70mm treatment over the handheld shaky cam cuts, but there's something to be said for the three-minute fuck-you danging at the end of "Blowjob" (aka "Mildred Pierce"). Also, the instrumental version of non-album cut "Lee #2"-- a gentler, twangier Sonic Youth-- has it all over the previously unreleased version that makes the mistake of adding words.
As for the non-demo bonuses, they're there. The kick to be had listening to Thurston and Kim talk beat over snippets of Goo (as part of some flexidisc promo)-- woot to the Watt shoutout, T-- but there's a good reason it's at the end of the second disc. Elsewhere, the Youth cause a ruckus, cover the Boys Beach and Neon (with Lee, of course, playing the part of Brian Wilson in the former), and there's a bit of that catchy rockist stuff that some of the fans probably still can't stand. "Can Song" is three minutes of dirty booting that's hard to resist. That Thurston felt the need to preface the track-- now called "The Bedroom", previously released as a concert-recorded B-side-- with a question about your mom being a skinhead is something best left between him and his therapist. Old transgressive habits die hard, I guess, just like punk supposedly did, way back when Sonic Youth deigned to pitch and shift their rock and roll to a decidedly bigger demographic and fuck it up for everyone. And fuck it up they did, thank God. | 2005-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2005-10-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Geffen | October 13, 2005 | 8.5 | 06bd379e-fc27-4fcc-b2c6-c47e2394d021 | David Raposa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/ | null |
On their latest album, the ensemble that made their name in scrappy performances on the sidewalks and street corners of New York City and Chicago turns muted, spare, warm and still. | On their latest album, the ensemble that made their name in scrappy performances on the sidewalks and street corners of New York City and Chicago turns muted, spare, warm and still. | Hypnotic Brass Ensemble : Book of Sound | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/hypnotic-brass-ensemble-book-of-sound/ | Book of Sound | Hudah, Cid, Baji, L.T., Yosh, Rocco and Clef and Smoove—eight sons of the jazz trumpeter, astral jazz pioneer, and black American icon Phil Cohran—grew up on Chicago’s South Side living apart from their peers. They were raised as vegans. They wore homemade clothes and hand-me-downs to school. And they lined up sometimes before dawn every morning for practice. Cohran taught his sons to play their horns young, in some cases shortly after they learned to walk, and they would line up as a family for “long tones,” where they emptied all the breath in their bodies into their horns, generating one rich drone that greeted the sunrise.
It was a meditative practice that you can hear take up root in the often boisterous and molten-hot music they make now, as Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. On Book of Sound, their latest album, the group that made their name in scrappy performances on the sidewalks and street corners of New York City and Chicago turns muted, spare, warm and still. It is their first without drums on Honest Jon’s label, and it is also the group’s most open tribute to the legacy of their father, whose interest in Afrocentric philosophy and astral jazz runs like a river through American culture. Cohran passed in June of 2017, and Book Of Sound is, at its warmest and best, a living, breathing document of his philosophy.
The music rings with the familiarity of family and the reverence of loving disciples, and much of it overtly references their family lives. The track called "Morning Prayer” is literally that, a drone around F based on the morning drone the sons played each day. It fans out like sun rays through Venetian blinds. Bits of chant and additional instrumentation are provided by their mothers, Aquilla and Maia. “Kepra” moves with the moves with the rhythm of breath, and “Now” mingles their own voices with the sounds of their horns.
The compositions are clean and uncluttered, with one or two melody lines interlocking and circling each other over an unchanging bassline, a structure that establishes and builds rather than twists. The brothers play in even-breathed tones that dilate like gas lamps or hover like Rothko paintings. The goal of these pieces is replenishment and clarity, not surprise. The rich changes of “Midnight” evoke a sense-memory fingerprint somewhere between Duke Ellington’s “Autumn Leaves” and John Coltrane’s “Naima,” and they raise more goosebumps the more they repeat, cresting in feeling as Aquilla’s spiraling soprano enters the mix.
Not all of the pieces on the album soar as high or reverberate as deeply. A few, like “Purple Afternoon” or “Heaven and Earth,” simply sit still for a few minutes, not quite accreting meaning or power as they do. But they are small moments, and they feel like worthwhile dead spots in an album this intimate, this bare, and this generous. | 2017-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-12-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Honest Jon’s | December 9, 2017 | 7 | 06c5874e-a30a-4abb-b9a0-1ead6f753d2a | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | |
After a decade of home recorded releases on smaller labels, Ariel Pink jumps to 4AD and makes the best record of his career. | After a decade of home recorded releases on smaller labels, Ariel Pink jumps to 4AD and makes the best record of his career. | Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: Before Today | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14324-before-today/ | Before Today | Most people who follow Ariel Pink were introduced to him by 2004's The Doldrums, the first non-Animal Collective release on that band's Paw Tracks label. From the beginning, Pink was presented as an outsider, a recluse who obsessively recorded at home and had compiled hundreds of unheard songs. The notion that he was a supremely strange person making music in his own world was fully supported by the string of albums, singles, and EPs that followed. First, there was the music itself, which saw Pink using an ultra lo-fo recording set-up to re-imagine cheesy AM radio jingles and lost new wave tracks as surreal, art-damaged pop. His music could be bizarre and disturbing, with warped voices and dark subject manner evoking loneliness, bad drugs, and alienation; it could also be sweet and even sincere, celebrating the pleasure of a well-rendered verse melody and a good chorus.
Then there was the fact that the recordings themselves had apparently been excavated from a cache of material from another time: The vast majority of the music he's released since 2004 was written and recorded years earlier, mostly between 1998 and 2002. So a certain amount of mystery was part of the package, and the recordings weren't giving anything away. His releases never struck me as possessing the level of genius his most ardent supporters hear in them, but that was OK, because he didn't seem like he was setting out to make masterpieces.
Something unusual has happened to Ariel Pink since he first started sharing those tapes with the wider world, though. Think of it like the cliché about The Velvet Underground & Nico, but on a smaller, more craft-y scale: His records didn't reach a lot of people, but many of those who heard them were inspired to start home recording projects of their own. So as different kinds of lo-fi music bubbled up from the indie underground in the last couple of years-- from more placid chillwave to roughed-up garage rock to abstract instrumental music-- and many of these bands were talking about his influence, all of a sudden Ariel Pink started looking way ahead of the game. And now, he's been given a chance to do something few artists working on his scale ever do: record an album more or less professionally for a large independent label and enjoy all the increased attention such a leap provides. He did not waste the opportunity.
Oddly, the difference in fidelity isn't what sets this record apart from earlier Ariel Pink releases. While much of the tape hiss that marked those records is gone, along with the degraded audio quality that came off those old, decaying cassettes, this is still a pretty modest-sounding LP, recorded simply and cleanly but not, from the sound of it, expensively. Haunted Graffiti, which began as an abstract concept, has also turned into a full band featuring experienced members who've spent years playing in established independent acts, and each took care to get their various parts right. The vocal harmonies overlap just so, the guitar fills are in the right places, the drumming is tight and precise, and bassist Tim Koh in particular colors the songs with striking rhythmic and countermelodic depth. It turns out that these details make a big difference, even while the album adheres to the hazy overriding aesthetic of Pink's earlier records. The fact that this is, in a sense, Ariel Pink's first group of songs created to be released together and presented as a whole-- as an album, rather than as a collection of songs recorded years ago-- sets the table for a new focus.
We know from interviews that Ariel Pink grew up absorbing throwaway pop from the 70s and 80s, finding a way to make it all fit into his cracked worldview. Something overlooked about those songs, though, is that the people writing them were pros who knew something about intros, codas, and middle-eights, how a certain kind of chord change can cause the turnaround to the chorus to hit a little harder. Ariel Pink's best songs are surprising, and there's a real sense of musical delight on Before Today; the sections sound logical but never predictable, and there are wild bridges and short bits that emerge seemingly randomly but wind up taking the song somewhere unexpected. So "L'estat (Acc. to the Widow's Maid)" goes from a rollicking organ-led opening section to a catchy call-and-response chorus hook the Monkees might have liked to a short double-time instrumental section to a jubilant coda, and all the while the stitches never show. Songs like "Little Wig" have so many interesting interlocking parts that they can almost feel proggy, despite their relative brevity and tight pop structures.
Since a number of these songs exist in earlier versions on other records, it's easy to hear how they benefit from Before Today's more worked-over approach. "Beverly Kills" was a fine song in its original incarnation on the 2002 edition of Scared Famous (it also appeared on last year's Grandes Exitos comp), but it has so much more power here. Opening with roller-rink keyboards, a popping bass, and car chase sound effects, it feels loose and casual until the falsetto vocals snap into place, sounding suddenly like Philip Bailey on a lost Earth, Wind & Fire jam. The delicate soft rock of "Can't Hear My Eyes", also heard twice before in slightly cruder forms, benefits greatly from just a few more dabs of production mousse. It's a song that wants to be slick, bringing to mind carefully layered singles by Alan Parsons Project, complete with swells of synthetic strings and a smooth sax interlude.
And then there's "Round and Round", one of indiedom's most unifying and memorable songs in 2010, which is barely recognizable from its early four-track incarnation as "Frontman/Hold On (I'm Calling)". It's another song of smartly integrated units of melody, any one of which might be built out into a great song of its own, but which together become something astonishing. Its circular bassline doubles with low-chanted voices that build up tension and mystery, a connecting section that opens the song up with a high-pitched plea, and an interlude section with a ringing phone and some jazzy keyboards, all of which build to the massive sing-along chorus. "Round and Round" was mastered at Abbey Road, and not a cent of that cost was wasted. It is endlessly replayable.
Alongside these grabbier tunes are tracks that retain the uncanny, otherworldly sense that has been a constant thread through Ariel Pink's music. Best among these is "Menopause Man," which goes from grim deadpan verses to a fascinatingly beautiful chorus that sounds beamed in from another era, yet remains elusive and difficult to place. But even given the varied style and tone on Before Today-- there's a queasy instrumental and a faithful cover of the 60s garage rock song "Bright Lit Blue Skies"-- it feels of a piece and uniformly strong, and there's so much going on that it only seems to improve the more you listen to it.
It's a rare feat for artists to maintain a truly unique sound while taking their music in a direction that appeals to a wider audience. For those who've been following along for a few years, this is a groundbreaking record that condenses and amplifies Ariel Pink's most accessible tendencies. But the brilliant thing about Before Today is that no prior knowledge of his catalog is required. Newcomers can dig into this record and absorb all of these weird and wonderful songs now, and save the backstory for another day. | 2010-06-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-06-07T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | 4AD | June 7, 2010 | 9 | 06c6c72c-90e8-4b7f-a1f9-76f32516b050 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
A few months ago, A$AP Rocky's career seemed mired in purgatory as his major label debut continued to be pushed back. But LongLiveA$AP actually delivers on and even exceeds the promise of 2011's LiveLoveA$AP mixtape, preserving Rocky's immaculate taste while smartly upgrading his sound. | A few months ago, A$AP Rocky's career seemed mired in purgatory as his major label debut continued to be pushed back. But LongLiveA$AP actually delivers on and even exceeds the promise of 2011's LiveLoveA$AP mixtape, preserving Rocky's immaculate taste while smartly upgrading his sound. | A$AP Rocky: LongLiveA$AP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17505-longliveaap/ | LongLiveA$AP | A few months ago, A$AP Rocky's career seemed mired in purgatory. The 24-year-old Harlem rapper had a spectacular 2011, snagging a still-crazy $3 million deal with RCA based on early buzz and then silencing skeptics with his breakout LiveLoveA$AP mixtape. But throughout 2012, LongLiveA$AP repeatedly failed to materialize. It was slated for July 4th, then September 11th, October 31, and eventually, sometime in December. When the final pushback happened, into the dead zone just after the new year, it began to feel like RCA was attempting to quietly jettison their investment from the corporate hull.
But LongLiveA$AP delivers on and even exceeds the promise of LiveLoveA$AP. Like that mixtape, the album is a triumph of craft and curation, preserving Rocky's immaculate taste while smartly upgrading his sound. A third of the record remains close in style to LiveLoveA$AP while most of the collaborations follow in the steps of last spring's "Goldie", which stamped producer Hit-Boy's signature Mini-Boss Musik with a screwed-up hook and gumball-spitting flow that marked it as unmistakably Rocky's. Plenty of rap-industry heavies appear on LongLiveA$AP, and they mix well with Rocky's younger comrades. More importantly, the French-braid gold-teeth kid named after Rakim never cedes the center. For someone often criticized for his lack of depth, A$AP Rocky keeps delivering in the face of skepticism.
Even the most dubious ideas succeed on LongLiveA$AP. For example, A$AP Rocky's team-up with Skrillex, "Wild for the Night", bombs your cortex with screaming lasers, stadium-sized reverb, and a reggae-derived organ lope, and the beat feels like being on the receiving end of a perfectly executed Tekken chain combo. It seems like it should be impossible to rap over, but Rocky’s sweat-free double-dutch is an easy fit. Santigold handles the chorus hook on “Hell”, one of two Clams Casino beats on the album, and it feels just as unforced.
A$AP Rocky sounds natural in every setting; along with his command of rhythm and cadence, this is his greatest gift. Whether he's showing off double- and triple-time bounce in the T-Minus-produced "PMW (All I Really Need)" or dodging RZA-styled string chops on "1 Train" alongside a collision of hot rappers including Action Bronson, Big K.R.I.T., and Kendrick Lamar, Rocky sounds utterly at home. Even when he stomps through a queasy Odd Future-style battlefield on “Jodye”, he fully owns the mold. That kind of malleability is crucial to pop stardom, and make no mistake, pop stardom is what Rocky's gunning for. His lyrics, a riot of lifestyle brands and other desirables, can feel like standing in front of a closet of prohibitively expensive designer goods: There isn't much to feel unless you consider "like three million bucks" a feeling. But besides the Girbaud jeans with hologram straps and reflectors, the Margielas with no laces, the Escada and Balenciaga and Audemars Piguet, there's a lot going on in Rocky's head.
Late-album track "Suddenly" bears a co-producing credit from "Lord Flacko," aka Rocky himself. In it, a drumless vocal sample fights its way to the surface through layers of aquatic muffling, teasing a titanic beat-drop that keeps not arriving. The song is almost all intro: When the beat finally hits, it only lingers for a few bars before disappearing again. Over this master class in tension and release, Rocky summons childhood memories in calm, expansive strokes: "Everybody have roaches, but our roaches ain't respect us," he cracks, flashing a previously unseen storytelling flair: "We had cookouts and dirt bikes and dice games and fist fights/ And fish fries and shootouts like one Sig with two rounds/ In one clip, left two down, that's four kids/ But one lived, left three dead but one split/ That one missed, that one snitched." The song is a forceful reminder of his birthplace and heritage.
Rocky’s New York story has partly been a story of how there is no coherent New York story anymore: Bay Area rappers like the Jacka convincingly channel the gray Queensbridge fatalism of Mobb Deep and Cormega while in Harlem, Rocky soaked up styles happening hundreds of miles away-- Houston screw music, UGK, Bone Thugs. But beneath the 90s-baby trappings, Rocky is a certain breed of Harlem rapper incarnate-- flashy, ambitious, and affably determined to cross over. The flamboyance and singsong rhyme patterns of the Diplomats are an obvious primary color. But reaching further back, to another Harlemite with a deceptively catchy flow, agreeable air, and penchant for colorful clothing, and you find another kindred spirit in Ma$e. Like Ma$e, Rocky tucks steely edges behind a goofy smile. He has the same unerring instinct for balancing pop smarts and street edge and a similar disregard for New York orthodoxy. He’s also consistently dismissed as a lightweight. It's true, Rocky may not be the answer to New York rap's savior complex. But he is undeniably a hit-maker and a major new rap star for a city that sorely needs one. And with LongLiveA$AP, he's beaten expectations twice. | 2013-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2013-01-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA | January 2, 2013 | 8.5 | 06cd4e9f-781b-40e2-8a7e-e183313d6a8c | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The MPC wizard’s ethereal synths are the perfect complement to Harmony Korine’s over-the-top spectacle, playing up its impressionistic textures and humanizing its hallucinatory violence. | The MPC wizard’s ethereal synths are the perfect complement to Harmony Korine’s over-the-top spectacle, playing up its impressionistic textures and humanizing its hallucinatory violence. | AraabMuzik: AGGRO DR1FT (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/araabmuzik-aggro-dr1ft-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | AGGRO DR1FT (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | It’s the end of the world, and everyone is fighting for loot drops. The chorister singing the requiem is Harmony Korine, who since Gummo has found increasingly kaleidoscopic ways to depict the beauty and horror of a society eating itself. If Spring Breakers vaulted his perverse visions into the mainstream bacchanal of red Solo cups and multi-floor EDM ragers, his latest film flips the script for a more isolated age. AGGRO DR1FT, shot entirely in eye-dilating thermal vision, is a nightmare of few words: Miami assassins hunt each other down, praying for an end to the violence as motion-capture demons haunt the skies above them. Cartoonish side characters dispense assignments with the mechanical exaggeration of Grand Theft Auto NPCs. Pole dancers spark firecrackers up and down their bodies while dissolving into a quagmire of robotic A.I. slush. Travis Scott shows up. Either you’ll think the whole thing is mind-numbingly tasteless, or you’ll find a sick truth in its garish absurdity.
AraabMuzik’s voided-out score is key to the film’s hypebeast ego-death aura. Tapping the Rhode Island producer for a project like this may seem like a throwback—he hasn’t really seen the spotlight since his days sharing festival billings with Zedd and Clams Casino (even if his trance-meets-trap 2011 debut, Electronic Dream, still sounds as euphoric as ever). But listening to his music for AGGRO DR1FT, it’s hard to fathom that he and Korine didn’t link up sooner. AraabMuzik’s bottle-service transcendence clearly inhabits the same universe as Spring Breakers, a molly-fueled fantasy reaching longingly toward the heavens. Rather than sliding his usual rapidfire MPC finger drumming into the picture, however, AraabMuzik ventures into new realms, luxuriating in a pure synth soundscape that renders Korine’s dystopian hellworld one tone at a time.
Drawing on the language of gaming and experimental film, AGGRO DR1FT deals mainly in impressionistic texture (it has more in common with one of Phil Solomon’s PlayStation elegies than the shoot-em-ups it pretends to be). AraabMuzik’s soundtrack similarly hits on the most basic sensory levels. Apparently texted to Korine in bits and pieces without seeing the movie, AraabMuzik’s score is collected as a series of loops often lasting a minute or less, alongside a handful of slightly longer tracks that take more room to stretch their legs. In the film, Korine slows these snippets down, speeds them up, and stretches them out until they glow like magma. Perusing them all at once creates the same sensation as scrolling through levels on a mission select screen.
Color is Korine’s primary weapon in AGGRO DR1FT, and AraabMuzik’s lush sketches provide deeper pigmentation to his infrared hallucinations. “The Summoning” sets the scene with morbid laser-beam synths that hover in a threatening mist; “17th Symphony” moves queasily between blurry pianos and aching chords, warbling like a ghost drifting through a graveyard. The gothic grandiosity of AraabMuzik’s church organs and bitcrushed Gregorian chants charges the madness onscreen with a bizarre sense of consequence. In one scene, the crackling loop of “The Abyss” circles round as our main assassin is telepathically tormented by a winged psychopath, imbuing the monster’s cries of “Why can’t you kill me?” with doomed gravitas.
Though AraabMuzik’s trance-y temperament contributes to the film’s clubby milieu, he pulls from far outside his wheelhouse to establish AGGRO DR1FT’s apocalyptically surreal environment. “En Route” slithers through a subterranean march that’s equal parts Jon Hassell and Lustmord, and “The Beloved” lifts everything skyward as he draws out a Constance Demby-worthy new-age drone (complete with angelic choir). The longer tracks, in particular, benefit from having time to sink deeper into the muck: The swelling brass of “The Apex” simmers with a science-fiction military suspense straight out of Metal Gear Solid, while “Theory,” with its alien sound design and distant, clanging percussion, captures an eerie tunneling feeling that anyone who’s gotten lost playing Metroid will know all too well.
Harmony Korine has built a formidable body of work out of playing in the garbage. You’d be hard-pressed to find another director with the audacity to premiere their film in a strip club, then follow it up by announcing a first-person thriller about baby-headed home invaders (with Burial supplying the soundtrack, no less). Testosterone is at war with itself in Korine’s movies, but he avoids coming off like a complete chud by knowing when and how to embrace sincerity. That’s where AraabMuzik’s lavish music comes in—not only fleshing out AGGRO DR1FT’s otherworldly tableau, but humanizing its emotions. When “King’s Arrival” appears in a late scene, it soundtracks our main assassin shooting a man in the head, who mutters as he bleeds out, “You fucking got me.” It might seem like mere video-game logic: murder taken to the point where even a victim can only shrug, as if they’d just been tagged ‘it.’ But when the hitman takes yet another life, his next target seems more crestfallen, whispering as they die, “I’ll see you in the next life.” AraabMuzik’s searing, funereal chants swirl in horror, turning what might otherwise look like nihilism into something more like a prayer for a way out. | 2024-08-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-08-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Milan | August 7, 2024 | 7.6 | 06cfb34f-bdc8-4770-be21-0c63b0c379a1 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
Armed with field recordings and ancient folklore, the peripatetic electronic musician pauses to construct a resonant, mysterious portrait of the rugged Welsh landscape. | Armed with field recordings and ancient folklore, the peripatetic electronic musician pauses to construct a resonant, mysterious portrait of the rugged Welsh landscape. | Flora Yin-Wong: The Sacrifice EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flora-yin-wong-the-sacrifice-ep/ | The Sacrifice EP | Until now, Flora Yin-Wong’s work fed primarily on the metropolis. Her debut mixtape, City God, was a club take on urban Chinese folk religion. In 2020, Holy Palm careened between samples of Tokyo and Crete and Paris; its companion book, Liturgy, traced a journey across the world to sites of urban curiosity and ancient myth—a gas fire in the Karakum Desert that has burned for half a century, a Malaysian palace of a thousand gilded horses, the faceless ghosts of Japan. On The Sacrifice, Yin-Wong retreats into isolation in the North Wales wilderness. She’s still preoccupied with the intersection of modernity and mysticism, but in the stillness of her solitude, she finds a single locus and approaches with meditative intent.
Inspired by the folklore of the Mabinogion—a collection of some of the earliest Welsh prose stories—Yin-Wong captures a resonant, primal picture of the terrain. The title of dissonant opener “Hanging a Thief” recalls the fable of Lord Manawydan’s attempt to hang a shapeshifted field mouse for eating his grain. Ambient DJ and musician Rachel Lyn’s sonorous narration carries across “Willow Bends,” The Sacrifice’s sole vocal piece, as she describes a nameless myth that’s as intrinsic to the land as its waters. When an ominous rush undercuts the words, “It was as if you could see me across the lake,” it imbues them with secrecy and dread; as Lyn meditates on “these ancient and contemporary currents, carrying their secrets from upstream,” the water she describes is heard in discordant, hostile echoes. Occasionally, its circulation is subtly broken by static, like white foam on waves.
The field recordings of The Sacrifice are reverent towards the totality of their mother environment. From whipping wind to the silence of abandoned mines, Yin-Wong’s samples are visually situated in the landscape, highlighting contrasts between the remains of industry and the pristine wilderness. Atonal piano keys mix with ghostly vocalizations on “Unhappy Disclosures,” suggesting humans in discordance with their environment; “Hanging a Thief” wars between violent, fluctuating screeches of white noise and the wide, unbroken synth tone beneath them. Battered by metallic clanks and otherworldly growls, closer “The Sacrifice” captures an intense, glacial loneliness so broad and chasm-like that it becomes claustrophobic.
The Sacrifice feels like something of a pause for Yin-Wong, a sub-chapter in her endless, restless journey. The EP is less composed than the delicacy of Holy Palm, but more exhaustive in the exploration of its subject. Though Yin-Wong is stationary, her subject is transitional, like the EP’s namesake; originally The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a medieval misprint led to the commonly accepted collective name The Mabinogion, while The Sacrifice represents a further modernized adaptation of the title. Yin-Wong’s choice of the latest branch in the stories’ evolution reflects something increasingly lost to human words over time, yet still alive and ever-shifting.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Experimental | First Light | December 3, 2021 | 7 | 06d4c7e4-baca-46c9-8f6d-a5776b2d0e85 | Zhenzhen Yu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zhenzhen-yu/ | |
The Chicago-born rapper-producer’s new mixtape is woozy but tight, flaunting its open infatuation with all kinds of rap. | The Chicago-born rapper-producer’s new mixtape is woozy but tight, flaunting its open infatuation with all kinds of rap. | ICYTWAT: Have Mercy on Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/icytwat-have-mercy-on-us/ | Have Mercy On Us | On paper, a style rooted in Playboi Carti-inspired vocals and Memphis hip-hop bounce sounds like the most played-out shit ever. But the singles and mixtapes that Chicago’s ICYTWAT has released since 2021, when he was officially reborn as a rapper after making his name as the producer of the now defunct mid-2010s rap clique Divine Council, have deconstructed these influences instead of imitating them. It isn’t the first time he’s pulled off that feat: The instrumentals he cooked up for Divine (as well as one of the essential pre-mixtape Playboi Carti songs) had the brightness of Bastard-era Tyler, the Creator chords and the zaniness of Metro Zu psychedelia, yet he was well-versed enough in those sources to dissect instead of copy them. With a darker sound in tow and his rapping at the forefront, ICYTWAT has brought that sharp ear, attention to detail, and rap fandom to his new mixtape Have Mercy on Us.
Half of the fun of Have Mercy on Us is observing how ICYTWAT has reshaped and unraveled rap of the distant and recent past. There are traces of Project Pat’s Mista Don’t Play: Everythangs Workin and Gangsta Boo’s Both Worlds *69, as well as Chief Keef’s Back From the Dead 2, Bankroll Fresh’s Life of a Hot Boy, and so much more. The feeling is similar, if less complex, to watching Kill Bill or listening to A$AP Rocky’s breakthrough LIVELOVEA$AP, two bodies of work that unabashedly stitch together dozens of popular and obscure references. That’s what really makes them original: They are love letters to the art that molded them.
Rocky is a mentor of sorts to ICYTWAT, who is an affiliate of AWGE, the Harlemite’s purposely vague label, or creative agency, or group of chic friends who shop together. ICYTWAT partially credits the brooding Memphis pulse of his refashioned sound to A$AP putting him onto ’90s underground favorites, like Skinny Pimp and Lil Yo (now known as Yo Gotti). But that’s not the only backbone of Have Mercy on Us. On “In My Glo,” producer Yahnest’s Flockaveli-era Lex Luger bells and mean bassline collide with ICYTWAT’s shrieking ad-libs, which make him sound like the melting witch in the Wizard of Oz. The crackling haze of “Shame Pt. 2” resembles an homage to one of Raider Klan’s trunk-rattling early-’90s Three 6 Mafia tributes, and his slow-moving cadence gives off shades of SpaceGhostPurrp, even if there are some struggle bars mixed in. Dig through “Waitlist” and you’ll uncover Lil Wayne in the lighter flick, Juicy J in the ad-libs, and Madlib in Yahnest’s woozy beat. Thrillingly, and like Carti, he can rattle off gibberish about money and blowjobs while still conveying emotion: Here, he sounds stressed the hell out. He’s not exactly amazing on the mic, but “Jinn Music” gets at what he does well; it’s cool and off-the-dome, but still tight.
Underwhelmingly, the mixtape isn’t self-produced. Beats from Yahnest, Siddhivalik, Polarbwoy, and others are consistently rich and layered, but much like Pi’erre Bourne, ICYTWAT says more in his beats than he ever could in his bars. Luckily, ICYTWAT doesn’t fall into the same trap as Pi’erre’s Cardo-produced misfire, because the Chicago artist chooses producers who seem to share his musical foundation. His vision is intact, even if it could have been more effective if he was behind the boards. What sets Have Mercy on Us apart from other loud, barreling Playboi Carti-inspired projects of this fly-shit-only mold, like Ken Car$on’s X or Destroy Lonely’s No Stylist, is that those releases think it’s uncool to be referential. They so desperately wish to exist beyond comparison—sometimes even beyond the confines of rap—that they come across as incurious. Have Mercy on Us isn’t afraid to be openly infatuated with rap, making it all the more refreshing. | 2023-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-20T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Siddhi | April 20, 2023 | 7.4 | 06d9e3d2-5072-4981-94e1-d5ac0342b6c8 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Twenty88 is the chosen name of the duo of rapper Big Sean and R&B singer Jhené Aiko. As a pair, they complement each other well, and the battle-of-the-sexes theme manages to work on the strength of their chemistry. | Twenty88 is the chosen name of the duo of rapper Big Sean and R&B singer Jhené Aiko. As a pair, they complement each other well, and the battle-of-the-sexes theme manages to work on the strength of their chemistry. | Twenty88: Twenty88 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21805-twenty88/ | Twenty88 | Twenty88 is the chosen name of the duo of rapper Big Sean and R&B singer Jhené Aiko. In an interview about the group's inspiration with Flaunt, Aiko said, "It's a '70s aesthetic, but we're in the future," citing the A.I. psychological thriller Ex Machina as an inspiration. What materialized was an album of sex jams about dysfunctional relationships, which begs the question, what exactly do they think Ex Machina is about? Nonetheless, it makes sense that Sean would see his reflection in the shiny metal alloy of a sci-fi flick since his raps are often mechanically engineered—setup, setup, punchline, repeat. But on Twenty88, he is about as human-sounding as he's ever been, thanks in large part to Aiko.
As a pair, Aiko and Sean complement each other well; the former once called Drake her "musical soulmate," but that distinction is probably better suited here. The L.A. singer-songwriter has a mewing voice that nestles just into the casing of her rap counterpart's cadences. They pen verses in a similar fashion, too, curt and to the point, usually only rendering love interests as incomplete sketches; her method is to vilify and his is to write around his subject, but they are usually on the opposite end of the same conclusion: I'm right.
This is most evident on "Selfish," where they take turns putting the blame on one another, trading accusations over stringy guitar licks that loop through skipping production. The KeY Wane, Amaire Johnson, and Cam O'bi-produced opener, "Deja Vu," finds the two viewing a shared past through different lenses. This is why, when it's connecting, their collaboration works: it turns two self-centered POVs into a whole.
In that way, the album is a logical extension of the other Sean-Aiko collaborations—"Beware" from Hall of Fame and "I Know" from last year's marginally better Dark Sky Paradise. But on those songs, Jhené Aiko stayed mostly in the margins. The idea here is to juxtapose male and female perspectives, not with the hope of finding some type of balance or a middle ground, but simply to see that both voices are equally represented, and when one of them isn't spouting cliches ("What's the difference between real love and fake love/ The same difference between real titties and fake ones/ You can feel the difference," from "Talk Show") it's fully functional.
Big Sean is still fully capable of reverting back to old bad habits, and on Twenty88, he bring his fair share of clunkers ("You know that year you said I lost my marbles"/ Well I guess I turned them all to marble floors," on "Memories Faded"; "You the real real, no GMO," on "2 Minute Warning"). He's prone to rambling, will drag schemes out too long, and he isn't afraid to overcommit. But he strings together enough solid stretches to keep tracks moving. Still, Aiko is often the saving grace, holding songs together and delivering the better verses. She sells all of the longing on "On the Way," which writhes in carnal anticipation. Her warm harmonies melt into the backdrop of the thrusting "Push It." On "2 Minute Warning," she forms a chorus with famed R&B duo K-Ci & JoJo, and manages not to get swallowed up, as the song hits another gear and Sean marches through with barreling raps. They come perilously close to venturing full-on into vapid battle-of-the-sexes territory, but manage to survive on their chemistry. | 2016-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Def Jam | April 7, 2016 | 6.5 | 06dc9d5c-c500-466d-ac5a-56912a3ec5db | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
On their Ralph Waldo Emerson-referencing latest album, Wooden Shjips guitarist Erik "Ripley" Johnson and keyboardist Sanae Yamada seem anxious to bolster their sound while still remaining sinister, groovy, and far-and-fuzzed-out. | On their Ralph Waldo Emerson-referencing latest album, Wooden Shjips guitarist Erik "Ripley" Johnson and keyboardist Sanae Yamada seem anxious to bolster their sound while still remaining sinister, groovy, and far-and-fuzzed-out. | Moon Duo: Circles | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17121-circles/ | Circles | Moon Duo don't exactly make music one would categorize as outdoorsy. For Sanae Yamada and Wooden Shjips axe-grinder Erik "Ripley" Johnson, their compellingly crafted brand of chemically treated krautrocking has felt positively subterranean, taking tried-and-true pop song templates and blasting them to smithereens with looping doses of gleefully woolly droning and guitar noise. Their previous LP, Mazes, made sure not to let too much light in, but also made plenty of accessible strides that suggested the pair wasn't only interested in being another black-light band. So it's with their follow-up, Circles, that Moon Duo seem anxious to bolster their sound while still remaining sinister, groovy, and totally far-and-fuzzed-out. Circles is a reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay of the same name, which, among other things, explores the idea of the titular shape's prominence in nature. With much of the album's conception taking place in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, there is a crisp lightheadedness that pervades much of the music here, thanks in part to its layered, rhythmically indulgent production. It's an uncharacteristically varied, psych-y noise-pop record that just plain sounds and feels great.
If there is a whiff of Gaia's presence anywhere on Circles, it's somewhere in album opener and lead single "Sleepwalker", which would otherwise sound like a regular Moon Duo track-- its shimmering, steely buzz still firmly intact-- except that the choruses ("I can see you," Yamada and Johnson croon together) feel practically star-bursted. You might think they took the transcendental thing to heart, if it weren't for the following three cuts, which account for what may be the best material of Moon Duo's career. While the repeated refrain of "I Can See" may seem exultant, what's presented instead is a foreboding amalgamation of 60s bubblegum pop and dread, like music made by a go-go booted Grim Reaper. "When You Cut", the best track from 2011's Mazes, alluded to Moon Duo's interest in becoming some sort of deranged dance band, and with this suite of songs, they pull it off in a variety of truly delectable ways. "Circles" is the most footloose thing the band has offered yet, surprsingly sunny, with Johnson actually pulling off solos that only your pleated-khaki'd, Chuck Berry-worshipping uncle would dare noodle out. In some parallel universe, Vincent and Mia could have won an even bigger trophy thanks to it. "I Been Gone" is oppositely desert-parched but no less urgent, like the soundtrack to a lost motorcycle diary. These songs pack a considerable wallop, which actually isn't much of a feat for Moon Duo. What is surprising is how thrillingly lucid they are.
It's a tough little cluster to follow, for sure, and while the back half of Circles offers its share of surprises (check out the pedal-heavy moonshiner jam "Free Action"), Yamada and Johnson do feel it necessary to explore the further reaches of their established sound, playing with the same grimy, lock-step formula they're so fond of. But as if part of some winking in-joke, there's the one-two punch of "Sparks" and "Dance Pt. 3", both of which boast virtually the same chord progression at nearly the exact same speed. It's either a humorous nod to the fact that, yeah, Moon Duo can get a little monotonous, or simply a sativa-induced oversight. It's kind of endearing either way. But despite the fact that "Sparks" has an almost mystical, campfire-lit vibe to it and "Dance Pt. 3" passes for above average, early Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, both songs block off a crucial chunk of space that could've used a more dynamic pair of songs, and kept the record's exciting sequencing in tact.
As a testament to just how fun Circles really is, though, it's a pretty forgivable hiccup, seeing as the songs are still pretty good. Besides, if it's quality boilerplate Moon Duo you're in for, look no further than the excellent eight-minute closer "Rolling Out". Like so much billowing smoke, it sounds like a party at the moontower turned cult ritual sacrifice, with more than enough space for Johnson's acid-damaged guitar to wail all over it. But "Rolling Out" is uncharacteristic of Circles on the whole, and part of the reason why it's a record that feels like something of a step up for the band. What seems like such a consistently pleasurable but perhaps stubbornly inflexible formula is consistently subverted in intriguing ways. It's a balance hard struck, being both varied and a little chaotic, yet somehow delicately balanced. Just like Emerson's view of the universe, Moon Duo's is equally "fluid and volatile." Sort of like nature herself. | 2012-10-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-10-03T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Sacred Bones | October 3, 2012 | 7.6 | 06dd0915-7c45-42d9-be1c-17f7c8c9907c | Zach Kelly | https://pitchfork.com/staff/zach-kelly/ | null |
On their gloomy new record, the psych-rockers the Amazing grab hold of a small range of emotions—depression, regret, angst, longing—and hang on for dear life. | On their gloomy new record, the psych-rockers the Amazing grab hold of a small range of emotions—depression, regret, angst, longing—and hang on for dear life. | The Amazing: Ambulance | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22144-ambulance/ | Ambulance | The Amazing emerged in 2009 as blissed-out psych-folk nostalgists. Their influences—which they wore openly and proudly, like treasured thrift-store finds—all dated to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s: Hendrix, Cream, Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, pre-Buckingham/Nicks Fleetwood Mac (whom they gleefully covered on their self-titled debut). This likely had something to do with their record collections, and the fact that the Amazing shared members with fellow Swedish psych-rockers Dungen, including the group’s phenomenal guitarist, Reine Fiske. The musicianship was certainly impressive—and the vibe appropriately stony—but the whole thing felt a bit slight.
The Amazing re-emerged four years after 2011’s Gentle Stream as an almost entirely different band. On 2015’s Picture You, the reference points had jumped 15 to 25 years into the future to encompass indie and alt rock from both sides of the Atlantic—the Cure, Red House Painters, the Smiths—and the music had grown starker, bleaker, and more wrenchingly beautiful. With his brooding, impressionistic tenor, singer Christoffer Gunrup sounded far more at home amid rain-drenched city streets then the sun-dappled backcountry lanes of his band’s early years.
*Ambulance *double-downs on the gloom, dispatching entirely with the riff rock that still tickled the edges of Picture You. This is mood music in the best sense of the term: insular, all-enveloping and deeply sensuous. The Amazing grab hold of a small range of emotions—depression, regret, angst, longing—and hang on for dear life. *Ambulance *is a long walk home from the bar in the dead of winter.
All this is insinuated, never spelled out directly. Gunrup sings in English, but soaks his words in reverb and harmony, leaving them largely indecipherable (and he never reveals his lyrics to the press). The phrases that peak through the fog—“Not today, not tonight, but soon,” “I know you had to let go,” “the made-up stories and the fucked-up lies”—paint a bleak enough picture, but it’s the tension and foreboding suggested by the music itself, and the super-lush, wide-angle production, that brings Gunrup’s dramas to life, gives them meaning and specificity. The endlessly chiming guitars are so warm and thick with reverb you could cut them with a steak knife, particularly on “Tracks”—essentially one long guitar solo, deconstructed over nearly seven minutes (Mogwai would be proud)—and the glacial, epically sad “Through City Lights.” You can practically feel the breeze blowing through “Floating,” a sparkling track that recalls the shoegaze-country twang of the sorely missed Mojave 3. As ever, lead-guitarist Reine Fiske and drummer Moussa Fadera, with his jazzy little snare fills, are the band’s stars.
It’s only when the Amazing veer off the chorus-heavy Anglo-rock path that the spell is broken. The funky noir thriller “Blair Drager,” though enjoyable on its own, sounds entirely out of place here—*Ambulance *is not a record you should be nodding your head to. And the album sputters to an anticlimactic finish with two ruminative acoustic tracks that ramble and shuffle from one section to another with little purpose.
Much like Mark Kozelek, Gunrup wears his bad humor like a badge of honor, and there’s more than a whiff of self-pity hanging over *Ambulance. *But as you tend to do with Kozelek, you forgive Gunrup for his self-obsessions, and love him anyway. The dope-happy, free-spirited version of the Amazing came across like a band playing dress-up with clothes a couple sizes too big. Now the shoes fit: The group has never sounded richer, fuller, or more confident in their own narcotic powers. Misery suits them. | 2016-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | July 23, 2016 | 7 | 06e38e8d-f773-46e9-896f-f152c4e1d5bd | John S.W. MacDonald | https://pitchfork.com/staff/john-s.w. macdonald/ | null |
The debut album from the South Carolina producer and singer is a delicate, nourishing statement of ambient, operatic R&B. | The debut album from the South Carolina producer and singer is a delicate, nourishing statement of ambient, operatic R&B. | Niecy Blues: Exit Simulation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/niecy-blues-exit-simulation/ | Exit Simulation | Janise Robinson spent the pandemic reading a sci-fi novel that encapsulated their feeling of disconnection and left them seeking the comfort of a separate plane of existence—“the permission to imagine leaving,” as a bio notes. Exit Simulation, her first full-length album under the name Niecy Blues, is a layered dream state of prismatic guitar and synths with her strong, floaty harmonies at its nucleus. In a nourishing statement of ambient, operatic R&B, Blues searches for deeper meaning as she stumbles gracefully towards enlightenment in a free-flowing yet focused album that opens up like night-blooming jasmine.
The title track is soothing, layers wisping over each other with the delicacy of chiffon; when she sings “I get tired, I get tired,” it’s not a complaint but an observation of serene gentleness, as though she is granting herself leeway to lie down. She exhibits power in softness, small guitar melodies drifting into dub-style drums as she whispers, “It’s easier to lie.” That power resides within their voice and how carefully they can control it. It’s obvious she can sing with brawn when she wants, as she does on “U Care,” but on Exit Simulation she generally keeps her honey tones under an ambient shroud, a measure of restraint that keeps the album on an even keel. “U Care” ends with a sample of what sounds to be a church service, with a man backed by gospel harmonies belts powerfully; she has dedicated the song to her “grandaddy Willie Wrisper who has transitioned out of this earthly plane,” and describes the track as an “exploration of sorrow… of going under… then drowning… then hearing the faintest whisper. I just needed a whisper.”
Exit Simulation’s gauzy nature mimics the liminal space of prayer, during which a person appeals to that which cannot be seen, but felt. It is meditative but has explosive moments of joy. “Soma” unfurls into an impressive bit of full-band jazz improv, including vocals and saxophone from the Chicago musician KeiyaA, and gorgeous flute and keyboard trills from Aisha Mars and Qur’an Shaheed, respectively. Through it, she sings a mantra in crescendo: “Easy come, easy go/I want it to flow,” perhaps invoking a Buddhistic songwriting process, and then, “If it’s not meant to be, I’ll allow it to leave and be at peace.”
Robinson grew up in a religious home in Oklahoma, “sneaking around and listening to secular music,” and became a musician who has the range and temerity to have played Celie in the musical version of The Color Purple. Though they may have rejected organized religion, as documented in their 2021 track “Bones Become the Trees,” signs of the personally beatific are everywhere. On “Lament,” she crafts a two-minute cavern of echoing synths and then responds with a successive track, “Violently Rooted Reprise,” which shifts the earlier track “Violently Rooted” and presents her angelic voice as a cleansing moment. “I’m still around,” she sighs, then exhales into jubilance; her harmony arrangements sometimes recall those of Elizabeth Fraser (“Exit Simulation”) or Solange Knowles (“1111”), and her penchant for submerging her voice into opaque beats and barely-audible guitar strums is a great argument for gospel and R&B come into the realm of ambient (or ambient’s surer rise in the realm of R&B).
It takes a courageous musician to pull off this kind of ambient album, an intimate work excavated from the artist’s interior. On “Analysis Paralysis,” the only song where her vocals are turned up louder in the mix, it’s like she’s letting her subconscious anxiety take over the silence, showing how a person’s doubtful voice can sometimes drown out a quiet confidence. Her voice rasps, and it’s like shooting back into your body after being adrift on the astral plane. By the final track, when she hews to slightly more traditional songwriting structure—verses, chorus, guitar—for what feels like the first time, it’s luxurious, elegant. It’s the sound of transformation—perhaps for Niecy Blues but definitely for the listener. | 2024-01-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2024-01-02T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental / Pop/R&B | Kranky | January 2, 2024 | 7.9 | 06e63d3c-e9fb-4846-8f3b-6bc50ad2da2b | Julianne Escobedo Shepherd | https://pitchfork.com/staff/julianne-escobedo shepherd/ | |
Beyoncé’s historic Coachella set is preserved as a stunning live album that captures an artist at her peak, flexing her catalog and shining a light on the genius of Black artists that came before her. | Beyoncé’s historic Coachella set is preserved as a stunning live album that captures an artist at her peak, flexing her catalog and shining a light on the genius of Black artists that came before her. | Beyoncé: Homecoming: The Live Album | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/beyonce-homecoming-the-live-album/ | Homecoming: The Live Album | Six solo albums in, six years after the surprise release of her self-titled album, three years after the groundbreaking Lemonade, one year after the rap album she delivered with her husband, and we’re starting to get it. We’re starting to understand Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as a musician with unparalleled range, depth, and power: acknowledging her rapperly talents, her breathless musical ambition, her ear and eye for synthesis and abiding love for Black culture. With the release of Homecoming: The Live Album, the 40-track companion to her headlining sets from last year’s Coachella released as a documentary film with Netflix, we glimpse the artist at work during her peak—in voice, physicality, and confidence—reimagining and remixing her own catalog, decentering herself to shine a light on her influences and foundations.
#Beychella redefined what was possible for a music festival. On stage, over 200 bodies undulated in unison but miraculously, every body moved in its own way. They filled out a set of risers constructed into a pyramid, built to look like the bleachers of a football stadium at a Black college or university. Filling the structure was an orchestra that included a drumline and a full brass band that introduced themselves with the steady refrain of the Rebirth Brass Band’s “Do Whatcha Wanna.” Male dancers stood in a trembling line like Black fraternity pledges, female dancers dressed as majorettes, background singers formed a choir of unified sound and movement, folding their bodies into Beyoncé’s intricately aggressive choreography.
It was an old-fashioned revue, a cacophony of talent. It was a defiant celebration of complex, diasporic Blackness. Woven into Beyoncé’s performance was a genealogy that hat-tipped the Clark Sisters, Big Freedia, Nina Simone, Fela Kuti, and James Weldon Johnson. I was home on the couch when I saw a grainy live stream of the first weekend’s show, dazzled, mouth agape, proud: Here was Beyoncé practicing Black studies in front of a broad audience, digging into the long, living archive of Black ephemera. The Netflix film gives you the performances as Beyoncé wanted them seen, with close-ups of bedazzled costumes and their pastel colors worn by bodies of all sizes. You see the sweat of rehearsals and Beyoncé’s exacting physical regimen to get herself back into performing shape after the 2017 birth of her twins. You see the underlying ethos that guides her work in the form of quotes and music cited from the poets, writers, and artists like Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, who conjured worlds that demanded and centered an abundant, fecund Blackness.
Homecoming is an important document of those performances, with careful mixing and engineering that render each track with stunning lucidity. We hear, for example, Kelly Rowland’s feathery soprano during the three-song suite of Destiny’s Child hits; it allows us to linger for a moment on the group’s legendary chemistry and three-part harmonies. Homecoming doesn’t stand on its own as an album experience separate from the film. It probably doesn’t need to. Beyoncé and her sister Solange increasingly rely on visuals to paint a fully embodied and populated vision that includes music. Homecoming, an accompaniment to a concert film, feels as if it wasn’t ever meant to be experienced in isolation. Still, it could be one of Beyoncé’s most important releases for how it illuminates both her past and her future.
Beyoncé’s core musical vocabulary is the rhythm and bounce of a tune. She’s a classicist who believes in a song’s structure—choruses, bridges, meticulous verses, extended vamps, key changes. Her uptempo songs like “Crazy in Love,” “Countdown,” and “Love on Top” are some of the most inventive, dexterous pop and R&B music of the past couple of decades. For nearly the entire 110 minutes, she isolates these adrenaline-spiking cuts, amplifying their kinetic energy with marching-band arrangements. The extended version of B’Day’s 2006 single “Get Me Bodied” is a highlight here, as is 2005’s “Check on It.” Both are supercharged booty thumpers, more than a decade old that sound newly baptized in the world of Homecoming: the clarion calls of trumpets and whoomps of sousaphones, the foot-stomping on the risers and the off-mic “ayys” of the dancers that are sprinkled throughout. The arrangements amplify the relationship Beyoncé’s music has to the inherently percussive body.
Still, Beyoncé’s a singer first, and it’s thrilling to hear her full-throated, low-end brassiness with so much clarity. She’s still got the flexibility to play in her upper ranges, but the musicality at the bottom of her range, where she belts the early notes of the rare ballad in this collection, “I Care,” is stunning. She growls through Lemonade cuts like “Sorry” and “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” but also whispers and coos through the early notes of “Partition.”
The recorded versions of Homecoming’s interludes and transitions draw out the Black pop musical history Beyoncé cites and interpolates. “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” and “Swag Surfin” are important moments, but so are those when she employs TRU’s “I’m Bout’ It, Bout It” UGK’s “Something Good”—regional classics of the Black South. She doubles down on her archival work, her career-long project of interpreting Black music and big-upping Black Houston and Black Louisiana. (The only new piece of music on Homecoming is a bonus studio cover of Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly’s 1981 “Before I Let Go,” an evergreen Black jam that gets every generation moving.) The moments feel like nods to the audience she so deliberately centers. The film captures this phenomenon of a mutual, pointed gaze with its frequent close-ups of Black audience members, who were few and far between at the actual shows. Her rapport with the crowd is loose, filled with “I see you’s” that are left in the recording and further punctuate that Beyoncé was hoping to make a specific statement to a specific group of people.
The album sounds communal, like a revival meeting in a small, sweaty tent that leaves you lifted and fortified. It’s as much about Beyoncé as it is about the people who made her and the people who sustain her. As I was listening, my upstairs neighbors, two young Black women, were also listening at full volume. My friend in Miami was texting me hot takes, while my sister, who’d attended the show on the second weekend, was tweeting about how much the white people in the audience seemed to just not get it. Every Beyoncé event is a gospel you want to tell somebody about, but this one doubles down on this feeling of communion. She’s singing songs you already know, and connecting them to other songs you remember, too. She’s drawing on her past, looking back, but also looking squarely back at us.
Black women and rock’n’roll pioneers like Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Etta James, and contemporary queens of rhythmic music like Janet Jackson and Missy Elliott have not received sufficient credit for their innovations. Beyoncé, famously, was the first Black woman headliner of the nearly 20-year-old festival. In a space where she was not obviously welcome, she made an enduring impression. A home. Then she made it about something other than herself. She brought an entire lineage into the room.
Within a few months of each other, both Knowles sisters released projects that reimagined home as a soulful Black utopia, rooted in the best of its abundant past but queerer, more holistic, self-aware, embodied, and feminist than before. Homecoming is a wondrous, rapturous collage that reveals how Beyoncé has made a career of playing, dipping, and diving in the “great pool of Black genius”: the genius of her forebears, her contemporaries, and her own. For her entire life, she’s brought the mainstream over to her. Where will we all go next? | 2019-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country / Pop/R&B | Parkwood Entertainment / Columbia | April 19, 2019 | 9.3 | 06e69259-17b7-49e8-ae75-16ad2986d27b | Danielle Jackson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/danielle-jackson/ | |
Featuring lightweight lyrics and moody melodies, the latest mixtape from the Atlanta rapper is a solid entry point to his revamped style. | Featuring lightweight lyrics and moody melodies, the latest mixtape from the Atlanta rapper is a solid entry point to his revamped style. | Johnny Cinco: Pop It Don’t Stop It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/johnny-cinco-pop-dont-stop-it/ | Pop It Don’t Stop It | At first, Johnny Cinco was a beneficiary of the powerful Atlanta rap machine, then he got lost within it. Around 2013, he recorded a somewhat typical early 2010s ATL turn up joint, “They Gave the Wrong Young Nigga Money,” that lit up the city’s famed strip club Magic City, scoring him a record deal with the original iteration of Kevin “Coach K” Lee and Pierre “P” Thomas’ Atlanta-based imprint, Quality Control. Led by Migos, the label quickly became a hub for hot Atlanta upstarts, but the financial disappointment of the trio’s debut album in 2015 forced Coach K and P back to the drawing board. Ultimately they decided to trim down the roster, and one of those cuts was Johnny Cinco, who has been operating in the independent shadows of Atlanta ever since.
This might sound like the story of a rapper screwed by the industry, but I don’t entirely believe that’s the case. Johnny Cinco’s music at that time was fine but unremarkable–he simply laid a slightly narcotized melodic delivery over the trendy sound of the moment. In the last couple of years, though, beginning with his 2020 mixtape Hood Drake, his sound has bloomed behind moody vocals that have become more melodic and ATL trap production featuring lush R&B brushstrokes.
His latest tape Pop It Don’t Stop It is a solid entry point to his revamped style. Centered around a cool vibe, it takes the form of a hazy blur of sing-raps. A continuous stream of lightweight lyrics reflect this laid back mood. “Lotta losses hell it come with it/Lotta sacrifices made me who I am, ain’t nothin’ to this,” raps Cinco like he’s mid-shrug on the opening line of “Don’t Think We Lying.” It’s lifestyle rap that’s not problem free; he gets stressed out, and sometimes things don’t go as planned. On “No More Talking” he’s living large, but sounds bored of it. Over a Roy Ayers sample drowned out by the rattling hi-hats on the title track, he gives vague lines different shades of emotion with tiny melodic tweaks.
Because the mixtape’s sound and themes are so repetitive, it occasionally feels slight. On “Never Average,” his vocals slip into a dull robotic register, and on “Baffled,” his weak lyrics don’t sustain a more stripped down approach. But since all the songs are so short and breezy, the lackluster ones fly by innocuously.
This consistency in sound and themes are also what gives the tape its atmosphere; Cinco’s mantra seems to be I’ve been through some shit and I’m still here chilling. The song that best represents that is “Rags to Riches,” a piano-driven joint with sputtering drums, where every line feels delivered with a sigh of relief: “I’ve been ballin’ way too long, this shit here don’t make no sense.” He feels like a regular dude. Nearly a decade in, Johnny Cinco has found his niche in lowkey, grounded lifestyle raps. | 2022-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Sak Religious | May 11, 2022 | 7 | 06ec51b5-11ed-4086-982b-6c39d3bd5500 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ | |
Two albums—one a collection of luminous ambient textures and club grooves, the other an eclectic set of experiments from over 20 years ago—illustrate Kieran Hebden’s range and creative development. | Two albums—one a collection of luminous ambient textures and club grooves, the other an eclectic set of experiments from over 20 years ago—illustrate Kieran Hebden’s range and creative development. | Four Tet: Parallel / 871 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/four-tet-parallel-871/ | Parallel / 871 | For the past few years, if you wanted to discuss one of the most mysterious projects in electronic music, your best bet was to copy/paste. Beginning in 2017, someone started uploading music under the alias ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ—a bewildering string of glyphs that, as far as anyone can tell, appears to be gibberish. Between 2017 and 2020, six digital releases appeared, all featuring titles rendered in dingbats type that sometimes spilled down the page like rogue MySpace code, running roughshod over the digital hedgerows of Spotify’s walled garden. The alias was widely understood to be an alter ego of Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden. He had first alerted listeners to the project by adding one of its songs to his ever-growing Spotify playlist; the music sounded like him, too, with bell-tone shrapnel and digitally frayed harp scattered over punchy breakbeats and downy beds of ambient tone. Some listeners discovered early on that a few of these cryptic tracks were in fact deep cuts from Four Tet’s catalog; then, last May, the project’s sixth release contained songs that Hebden had included in a now-deleted SoundCloud dump the month before. With Parallel, one of a pair of new albums that Hebden surprise-released on December 24 and 25, he officially brings some of that mystery material back into the Four Tet fold.
Five of Parallel’s untitled tracks previously turned up on various ⣎⡇ꉺლ༽இ•̛)ྀ◞ ༎ຶ ༽ৣৢ؞ৢ؞ؖ ꉺლ releases, and in some ways the surprise ends there. As was the case with last year’s Sixteen Oceans, most of these tracks represent Hebden’s mastery of the Four Tet sound more than they do an attempt to break out of his wheelhouse. That’s no knock against them: “Parallel 2,” from 2018’s / ̡ ҉ ҉.·๑ඕั ҉ ̸ ̡ ҉ ҉.·๑ඕั ҉ ̸ ̡ ҉ ҉.·๑ඕั ҉ ̸ ̡ ҉ ҉.·๑ඕั ҉ ̸ ̡ ҉ ҉.·๑ඕั ҉ ̸ ̡ ҉ ҉.·๑, is as potent a distillation of Hebden’s unique style as you could ask for. Though the elements are familiar—plucked strings, handcrafted breakbeats, sunset radiance—the results are unusually effortless, with a gliding feel evocative of the ambient techno of the 1990s. “Parallel 4,” from 2019’s ʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡(ƟӨ)ʃ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡ ꐑ(ཀ ඊູ ఠీੂ೧ູ࿃ूੂ✧ළඕั࿃ूੂ࿃ूੂੂ࿃ूੂළඕั✧ı̴̴̡ ̡̡͡|̲̲̲͡ ̲̲̲͡͡π̲̲͡͡ ɵੂ≢࿃ूੂ೧ູఠీੂ ඊູཀ ꐑ(ʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡(ƟӨ)ʃ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡, reflects Hebden’s longstanding fascination with the syncopated rhythms of UK garage; arraying ribbon-like vocal cut-ups and chiming synths over a booming, crackling groove, it’s at once wistful and ecstatic, expressing emotions that aren’t easily defined or contained. And “Parallel 8,” which turned up in last April’s SoundCloud dump as “128 Oceans” and then reappeared a month later on ooo ̟̞̝̜̙̘̗̖҉̵̴̨̧̢̡̼̻̺̹̳̲̱̰̯̮̭̬̫̪̩̦̥̤̣̠҈͈͇͉͍͎͓͔͕͖͙͚͜͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢ͅ oʅ͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡͡( ؞ৢ؞ؙؖ⁽⁾˜ัิีึื์๎้็๋๊⦁0 ̟̞̝̜̙̘̗̖҉̵̴̨̧̢̡̼̻̺̹̳̲̱̰̯̮̭̬̫̪̩̦̥̤̣̠҈͈͇͉͍͎͓͔͕͖͙͚͜͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢͢ͅ ఠీੂ೧ູ࿃ूੂ, is a stunning hybrid of dub techno and deep house, as polished a club track as Hebden has ever made. Sixteen Oceans’ polish sometimes robbed the music of its energy, but “Parallel 8,” lush and verdant, breathes like a living thing.
Parallel’s most remarkable track is its epic opener, a meditative synthesizer etude. Longer even than either of the two side-long pieces comprising 2015’s Morning/Evening, the nearly 27-minute piece consists mostly of a single synthesizer pattern that slowly morphs in tone and timbre as it goes through its paces. For extended stretches, it burbles quietly away in the background, breaking through to the fore only when its tempo shifts or volume rises. Emotionally, it’s a blank slate: It might sound sad if you’re feeling down, or centering when you’re at peace. Six minutes before the end, it dissolves into pure drone, until a high, clear voice emerges from the shadows, singing something like a melismatic hybrid of R&B and Indian raga—a warm, cleansing finale. The album’s final two tracks also experiment with ambient music, massaging birdsong and meandering piano into off-the-cuff pieces that feel both low-key and low-stakes, but also pretty representative of where Hebden is as an artist these days: direct, unguarded, and determined to follow his own muse.
Like Parallel, 871 arrived without advance notice. On Spotify, it appears under Hebden’s 00110100 01010100 alias, as did 2013’s 0181. That album collected unreleased songs from between 1997 and 2001; 871 ventures further back, to the period between 1995 and 1997. Unlike 0181, which took the form of a 38-minute mixtape full of stops and starts, the new record is presented as a collection of serially numbered standalone tracks, but the material here is stranger. There are blasts of overdriven electric guitar, effects-pedal experiments steeped in line noise, and even a folk song played on hard-panned acoustic guitars. At the time, Hebden was still playing in Fridge; he wouldn’t release the first Four Tet EP until 1998. There are glimmers of the palette that would come to define Four Tet’s work, but mostly these pieces show the influence of the decade’s mischievously experimental spirit. Track 5 smolders like Flying Saucer Attack remixing GAS; the breakbeats and ringing guitars of track 18 have an unmistakable shoegaze feel. One song even sounds a little like a rudimentary take on DJ Shadow—and, in the process, offers a glimpse of the beat-oriented work that would take shape on 1999’s Dialogue and 2001’s Pause. Several of the most interesting cuts suggest that, like many of his ’90s peers, Hebden was listening to a lot of Neu! and BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and translating those signals into chugging pulses wreathed in squealing oscillators. The highlight is track 10, a nine-minute excursion in swollen low end and buzzing drones that sounds like it could have come from the 1995 compilation Macro Dub Infection, the era’s pivotal collision of ambient, post-rock, and dub.
Listeners who were familiar with this terrain in the ’90s—Other Music regulars, subscribers to The Wire—may find 871 a welcome flashback to a moment in left-field music where anything felt possible and almost nothing was set in stone. Fans of Four Tet’s sleeker work may be taken aback by the roughness of these pieces. But, combined with the most exploratory moments of Parallel, 871 fleshes out a wide-angled portrait of Hebden’s creative practice. It’s been years since he played by industry rules; he puts out what he wants, when he wants, under whatever name (or alphabet) suits his whim. These two sprawling, unpredictable albums, released just nine months after the carefully constructed Sixteen Oceans, validate Hebden’s trust in his instincts. At its best, Four Tet’s music thrives on immediacy, honesty, and candor, and these records have it in spades.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-14T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | null | January 14, 2021 | 7.7 | 06eda535-18a6-4bde-a5dc-c62b2449a8ae | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Returning with a new band assembled via open auditions, Billy Corgan's first album in five years under the Smashing Pumpkins name finds him recapturing some of his inspiration. | Returning with a new band assembled via open auditions, Billy Corgan's first album in five years under the Smashing Pumpkins name finds him recapturing some of his inspiration. | The Smashing Pumpkins: Oceania | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16742-oceania/ | Oceania | You will not tell Billy Corgan what to do. The Smashing Pumpkins leader's two-decade career has been wildly erratic, full of potholes and detours, but this ironclad rule has remained. "I was into Black Sabbath and it just wasn't cool, but I didn't give a shit: My band was going to sound like Black Sabbath because I fucking wanted it to and I didn't give a shit what some idiot fuck thought," he spat at Julianne Shepherd 2005, apropos of nothing, around the release of his solo album The Future Embrace. The quote, with its fascinating blend of indomitable will and boiling spite, is pure Corgan. For better or for worse, this energy is his fuel: He will reach transcendence, goddammit, with or without you.
The last few years have borne sad witness to this worldview's inevitable end point. When Jimmy Chamberlin, the band's lone remaining original member, departed in 2009, saying only, "I can no longer commit all of my energy into something that I don't fully possess," Corgan became the last one standing. His announcement that he would be keeping the Pumpkins name and recruiting new members was hardly surprising. The Pumpkins had always been Corgan's dream, after all, the other members mere action figures recruited for its realization. Even the ridiculous band name, which the other members wore with the ease of an ugly sweater hand-picked by their mom, was a remnant of Corgan's boyhood vision. "The name of the band is a stupid name, a dumb bad joke and a bad idea, OK?" original bassist D'arcy Wretzky snapped to the Washington Post back in 1993. "Billy named the band before there even was a band. He was like, 'I'm gonna have a band and it's gonna be called this.'"
Now, Corgan has surrounded himself with a new crew, one presumably more excited to be sporting the team jersey. Mike Byrne (drums), Nicole Fiorentino (bass), and Jeff Schroeder (guitar) were assembled via "It could be you!" open auditions: Nineteen-year-old Byrne, for example, was a freshman at the Berklee School of Music when Corgan recruited him. This crew is charged with the unenviable task of making the first record since 2007's Zeitgeist to bear the Smashing Pumpkins name. Given the conditions, they do the best job possible.
In terms of sheer sound, Oceania hits its mark: It succeeds, at least, in seeming Pumpkins-y. The towering slab of guitars, the sense of hurtling forward motion, the alt-rock-meets-Les Mis sweep, are present, and help make Oceania Corgan's most worthwhile work in years. Opener "Quasar" features plenty of pile-driving riffing, and you can hear the new members working overtime to justify their spots: Byrne's drums have some of the fluid propulsion of Chamberlin's, and Schroeder's leads are ear-catching but unshowy. When Corgan's thin, keening voice enters over the mass of sound, you believe, for a moment or two.
But the songs themselves lack the soaring melodies Corgan used to grace them with, and his voice is a little rougher, coarser. The arrangements suffer from a whiff of generic, corporate-rock slickness. Would that this record actually had some of the thick-caked doom of the Sabbath records Corgan built his tower out of. The entire album, meanwhile, suffers from rote, obvious lyrics, which lean heavy on the "I'm always on your side"/ "Everything I want is free"/ "There's a sun that shines in me" School-of-Rock madlibs approach.
It's also difficult not to notice he's repeating himself: The introductory riff to "Quasar" is nearly identical to that of "Cherub Rock". The power ballad "The Celestials" recalls "Disarm", while the open-hearted, dramatic plea at the center of "Violet Rays" ("I'll leave with anyone this night/ And I'll kiss anyone tonight") is an almost-direct quote from Mellon Collie's "In the Arms of Sleep". "Pale Horse" echoes the chord progression of "Thru the Eyes of Ruby". This is the classic Pumpkins sound, but an echo of itself; its spirit is somehow enervated.
What you do hear on Oceania is a reawakening of Corgan's ambitions. The album feels bigger and covers more ground than anything he's done in a decade: There are neon electronic interludes, folk-rock breakdowns, songs that morph from wintry ballads to grim rock stomps. "Pinwheels" starts with a flitting-hummingbird synth line, layers of droning cello, and George Harrison-style guitar before collapsing into a lovely folk-rock breakdown with softened, cascading female background vocals. Uptempo rocker "The Chimera" has an infectious chorus, and the title track churns darkly through multiple sections without losing momentum.
Oceania is reportedly only the middle section of a larger, looming 44-song epic bearing the Terry-Brooks-fantasy-series title Teargarden by Kaleidyscope. It's exhausting to imagine this record sitting inside something three times its length. But Corgan thinks only in epics-- double albums, boxed sets that come in suitcase packaging-- and this generosity is the upside of his world-conquering ambition. Corgan made Oceania available with no advance copies or radio singles, an attempt to preserve the pre-digital "everyone all at once" album experience he fondly remembers. This gesture, like many of Corgan's, combines astronomical rock-star hubris with a kind of weird largesse: He very badly wants to give his audience something enormous, undeniable, and life-changing.
But this impulse has a dark side. Like Corgan recording countless vocal takes of "Zero" and grading them with a series of check marks. Or recording all of Siamese Dream's bass parts because he could complete them in fewer takes. Corgan used to be able to absolve his personal failings in rock'n'roll, but rock'n'roll can only do so much. His new band might not question him very much, and they may play better or more professionally, than his old crew. But Oceania suffers a kind of rock-star-dictator airlessness. "I'm all by myself/ As I've always felt," Corgan sang, on Siamese Dream's "Soma", surrounded by his bandmates and newly ascendant. "I'm alone, so alone, but better than I ever was," he sings, sadly, on Oceania's title track, surrounded by a hired-via-contest crew of strangers. You can always be more alone. | 2012-06-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-06-19T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Caroline / EMI / Martha's | June 19, 2012 | 6.3 | 06efada9-f601-4c1f-b3e2-9fcf76609c71 | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
Brooklyn trio Parlor Walls subvert the dichotomy between rock and jazz. They approach aggression with an agility that’s rare no matter the style of music. | Brooklyn trio Parlor Walls subvert the dichotomy between rock and jazz. They approach aggression with an agility that’s rare no matter the style of music. | Parlor Walls: Opposites | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22959-opposites/ | Opposites | When the Bad Plus made their major label debut with These Are the Vistas in 2003, they generated heaps of praise for their supposed ability to capture a rock band’s energy in a jazz trio format. But their hamfisted mistranslations of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Iron Man” were hardly revelatory. Between, say, the Lounge Lizards in the late ’80s up through to Neneh Cherry’s 2012 collaboration with Swedish-Norweigan saxophonist Mats Gustafsson’s trio the Thing, you can point to dozens of artists who have subverted or even nullified the dichotomy between jazz and rock. Brooklyn trio Parlor Walls sit in this lineage.
On their first full-length, Opposites, Parlor Walls convey urgency with a forcefulness that’s both convincing and sophisticated. Like the Thing, core members Alyse Lamb and Chris Mulligan use repetitive phrases that speak directly to the gut—“riffs,” for all intents and purposes. But where the Thing’s meaty sound verges on street tough (in a good way), Parlor Walls approach aggression with an agility that’s rare no matter what style of music you look at.
Frontwoman Lamb’s guitar sounds as if it was run through a classic Fender Twin-style amp, a reverb-heavy tone that instantly evokes early rock’n’roll and rockabilly/surf twang. But the makeup of her chords has little in common with those forms. Even as Lamb slashes and wails with her guitar strings, her playing hovers at the music’s outer edges, creating a cavernous ambience for Mulligan’s synth parts, which essentially perform the same function as a bass guitar. Mulligan’s drums tumble with the steady clang of a cement mixer—they’re loud, assertive, and colorful—but it’s his synth parts that actually drive the music and sustain its foundational groove. Meanwhile, nimble saxophonist Kate Mohanty plays a role akin to a rock guitarist’s, supplying the most hummable licks in tandem with Mulligan’s synth lines.
Likeminded groups like Denmark’s Selvhenter and England’s Get the Blessing have shown over the past decade that it’s still possible to uncover new shades of darkness by using jazz instrumentation in unconventional ways. Parlor Walls follow suit with Opposites and, in the process, lend new definition to the term “heavy.” Even without vocals, the album’s mood would stand out, but Lamb’s singing adds weight to the tension and intensifies what the other instruments are doing like a lit match held inches away from a puddle of gasoline.
A multifaceted vocalist, Lamb tends to be highly tuneful and dextrous. Still, her phrasing lands somewhere between taunting and alarm, and there are moments where she channels the spitfire edge of riot grrrl-era punk. She matches her vocals with appropriately complex lyrics that can be read a number of ways. Her verses percolate with obvious references to emotional ruptures, but she stops short of spelling them out. Her images pack a punch nevertheless: “Cover me/To my knees/Keep me warm/Put me at ease/But you only feed me when you’re full,” she sings on “Cover Me.” Imagine having amnesia and speaking to someone who, you infer, has a bone to pick with you. At times, that’s what this album feels like.
Meanwhile, the guitar and sax flit like moving shadows cast by strobing red and blue siren lights outside your window. All of these elements combine to create a sinister vibe that rides the line between pleasant and imposing. On “Play Opposites,” Lamb asks, “Hey, why don’t we go/And play opposites?/Burn it to the ground/There ain’t nothing left.” And on “Hesitation,” she sings, “Come through, I’ll leave my light on/Rearrange my shapes/We can imagine partition/Then see it all fall away.” Lamb probably wasn’t referring to the supposed “partition” between jazz and rock, but it’s just as well that we let it fall away. Other bands have given us reason to do the same for years, but that doesn’t make Opposites any less extraordinary. | 2017-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Northern Spy | March 15, 2017 | 7.5 | 06f34312-b1d3-46e6-b016-f4dacc626f9b | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The London baroque-rock band's sophomore album-- produced by Ben Allen (Merriweather Post Pavilion, Halcyon Digest)-- finds the group aspiring to darker and difficult territory. | The London baroque-rock band's sophomore album-- produced by Ben Allen (Merriweather Post Pavilion, Halcyon Digest)-- finds the group aspiring to darker and difficult territory. | Fanfarlo: Rooms Filled With Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16407-fanfarlo-rooms-filled-with-light/ | Rooms Filled With Light | I'm glad the term "charm offensive" exists because otherwise I'd be at a loss to find a concise way to pinpoint why it's so hard to fully endorse Rooms Filled With Light, a record of bells-and-whistles baroque-rock that superficially has nothing wrong with it. On the follow-up to 2009's sleeper hit Reservoir, Fanfarlo bring forth songs that are capably performed, professionally produced, and have the kind of perky melodies and implied optimism that would suggest the London quintet get along really well with each other. I'd have no reason to dissuade you from Rooms Filled With Light if time and money weren't limited resources in determining whether a record was worth a listen*.* Which is sort of the problem: None of this can counter that Rooms Filled With Light most often feels "good" only because it's "not bad," existing at the center of a galaxy of bands used as exemplars of "boring indie," but only serving as a mirror that reveals their idiosyncracies, where Fanfarlo simply have good intentions and risk aversion.
Strange then, since Fanfarlo seem to aspire to darker and difficult territory than Reservoir, a record whose success ultimately felt like the result of new Arcade Fire and Beirut albums' being only theoretical at that time. They trade po-faced folkiness for influences of distinguished new wave haircuts and the production touch of Ben Allen, who of course helmed Merriweather Post Pavilion and Halcyon Digest, but more relevantly, a shockingly vital album from former UK bantamweights Bombay Bicycle Club. Though minor cosmetic changes, they result in Rooms Filled With Light's playing out as the sonic equivalent of deciding to major in Economics, mildly ambitious, but ultimately pragmatic about having a set path to success. This strategy pays off in the subtly ingratiating first half: "Deconstruction" is "angular" done by squares, its new romantic pulse and wobbly surf guitar chords never shaking it too far from its sweet, *Neon Bible-*lite center. Likewise, Fanfarlo usually like to ease into their hooks, so the hearty chorus of "Lenslife" is a genuine surprise in its urge to stand up and be counted while "Tunguska" ekes into Dexys territory with its woozy saxophone arrangements and spirited harmonies.
But as Room Filled With Lights crosses a Peanuts-styled piano interlude ("Everything Turns") into a Side B of songs as familiar and interchangeable as their titles ("Feathers", "Bones", "Dig"), you just come away thinking that the demand for fussy orchestral indie of this type is constant, whereas Fanfarlo are simply supply. From where does the love of Fanfarlo spring when Rooms Filled With Light never shoots for the power of populism nor something wholly individual? The cracked-whip cadence Simon Balthazar employs over the staccato violins on "Replicate" and "Tightrope" is too similar to Win Butler to not be a distraction, especially since he can't commit to sounding truly unhinged or making bold declarations rather than pat musings ("We have a better chance on paper/ So we catalog our lives"). So when Balthazar pleas to "break it up into pieces/ Throw away what we don't understand" on "Deconstruction", the conservatism of the latter half rings more true despite a propulsive, downstroked bassline. Meanwhile on "Feathers", Balthazar repeats, "It is the same/ And the river is the siren/ And the rock before the time you washed up feeling nothing at all," enough to suggest he meant it as a singalong, but it fails to generate urgency. That, and the song piggybacks the same exact melody as Neon Indian's decidedly roustabout "Terminally Chill".
Look, I know this kind of stuff is easy to dismiss as lame prima facie, especially if you can't possibly imagine perfectly reasonable listeners who don't need to go to SXSW to have confidence in their opinion that a dude tapping at a sampler while standing perfectly still is bullshit most of the time. And I agree with Larry Fitzmaurice's assessment from the festival that it's important to have music you "like" rather than the false binary of "this rules" and "this sucks." But it seems to me that you seek out music you love, whereas likable music simply finds you. And so Rooms Filled With Light is friendly and nondescript, but so are the vast majority of the people you unconsciously encounter on a daily basis-- Rooms Filled With Lights is Jenny from a couple of cubicles over who wears cool shoes and watches "30 Rock", it's the guy who always nods hello when taking the treadmill next to you on Thursdays, it's the waiter at your local coffee spot who doesn't conduct himself like he'd rather be anywhere else on earth. Do they make things more pleasant? Sure, and I wouldn't rush to turn off the radio if "Deconstruction" came up either. But would you voluntarily spend 45 minutes with these people? Why haven't you? | 2012-03-22T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2012-03-22T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Rock | Canvasback | March 22, 2012 | 6 | 06f4dea1-8518-4112-81bc-7767a6c4bc68 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
On his first project under his DJ Blackpower alias, the Bronx rapper’s beats grow colder and his lyrics become more heartfelt as he continues to grieve the loss of his mother. | On his first project under his DJ Blackpower alias, the Bronx rapper’s beats grow colder and his lyrics become more heartfelt as he continues to grieve the loss of his mother. | dj blackpower: BLP 2020 “King of the Night” EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-blackpower-blp-2020-king-of-the-night-ep/ | BLP 2020 “King of the Night” EP | MIKE’s music is centered around grief and the healing that comes after. His rich voice, captivating and full of emotion, has become one of his greatest assets as a rapper, keeping you attuned to his even most gut-wrenching songs. BLP 2020 “king of the night” is the first project to be released under his producer alias dj blackpower. In a follow-up to the excellent Weight of the World, the Bronx rapper’s beats grow colder and his lyrics become more heartfelt as he continues to grieve the loss of his mother.
It’s no secret that MIKE is a talented producer. Outside of his own projects, he’s supported AKAI SOLO and Mavi with his soulful loops as well. MIKE whittles samples down to only their most essential bits; original songs and speeches are nearly unrecognizable in their new pitch-warped and chopped-up forms. BLP 2020 is entirely self-produced, aside from “Marge Simpson” and “rootin4?,” which feature BSTFRND and keiyaA, respectively, as co-producers. When MIKE’s words begin to press down on you, the beats start to feel heavier. When he asks “All that hoping ain’t ya hands tired/What’s the culprit, is it angst, pride,” on “bad News,” the pitched-down vocal loop and drums crackle beneath his gravelly baritone.
With a runtime of 16 minutes, BLP 2020 is one of MIKE’s shortest projects to date, but that’s by design. MIKE’s work is meant to be replayed. You’re rewarded for listening closely and trying to unpack his most complex bars. But nothing stings quite like the times he makes it all too clear. “My armor ain’t fit for mourning, the wind make my face ache,” MIKE defeatedly says on “Piercing thru the Night.” It sounds like he’s choking up, trying to hold back tears. MIKE’s control of tone is remarkable: His groggy delivery on “Marge Simpson” and the clear-headed, even tone of “Mhm!” feels like two completely different rappers.
Even when it seems like MIKE’s barely keeping his head above water, he always finds his way back to the surface. “My papa think he know the stress I give him hollow truth/The sorrow beatin’ on your head, you drink the sorrel juice,” he confidently raps over the cheery strings of “Sorrel Juice,” one of the few moments on the EP that approaches an emotional breakthrough. That feeling is abruptly cut short in the transition to “STAY HUNTING,” which represents an immediate return to a bleakness that matches the rest of the project. The EP closes with the somber “haha-haHAAA!,” which shares a sample with “fortune teller,” a loosie from earlier this year. It’s the kind of self-referencing nod only an obsessive fan would catch.
Even as the production on BLP 2020 ventures into darker territory, MIKE’s powerful expressions of joy and growth shine bright. In the years since his breakthrough mixtape, May God Bless Your Hustle, MIKE’s songwriting has only gotten tighter, while the world described in his music seems grimmer. BLP 2020 seems like it might only be a short rest stop for MIKE as he works through his most distressing thoughts — it isn’t meant to stand next to a fully fleshed-out project like Tears of Joy. But MIKE shows that he can still find new ways to express his vulnerability as he grows older. There’s nothing in his way anymore.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 10k | November 5, 2020 | 7.3 | 06f6b082-802b-4c30-ae9a-0bfd818cbf85 | Brandon Callender | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brandon-callender/ | |
The North Carolina producer L'Orange's latest project finds him collaborating with Kool Keith. One of its charms is hearing L'Orange adapt his sound to fit the mercurial Kool Keith's style, who seems to be floating through the music, then going silent as it swirls around him. | The North Carolina producer L'Orange's latest project finds him collaborating with Kool Keith. One of its charms is hearing L'Orange adapt his sound to fit the mercurial Kool Keith's style, who seems to be floating through the music, then going silent as it swirls around him. | Kool Keith / L'Orange: Time? Astonishing! | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20817-time-astonishing/ | Time? Astonishing! | The North Carolina producer L'Orange has spent the last few years slowly building a signature sound, rooted in the past yet wholly his own. You can trace a line between his MPC rips of vinyl back to Madlib's zonked-out tapestries on Madvillainy, and Daedelus' surrealist lounge music for The Weather. But over the past few years, and especially in 2015 through projects like The Night Took Us In Like Family (the latter made with L.A. rapper Jeremiah Jae), the man who bears the same name as Gilbert Bécaud's 1964 French chanson has cobbled something unique. On his best work, he stacks his snatches of vocals into something approaching a narrative, adding bebop and exotica tones and keeping rhythmic tension from slumping.
His second project this year finds him collaborating with Kool Keith on Time? Astonishing! Structurally, it's an adventure, heavy on vague metaphysics and B-movie ramblings about space travel. One of its charms is hearing L'Orange adapt his sound to fit the mercurial Kool Keith's style. He abandons the ornamental quirkiness of The Night in favor of yearning melodies, like the melancholy guitar loop of "Twenty Fifty Three", or the choral harmony and dusty jazz piano od "Meanwhile Back Home". The vocal samples are still there, though. On "This New World", he layers "underwater" effects onto a snippet of Flavor Flav asking, "What goes on?" and makes it resemble an outtake from Parliament's "Aqua Boogie".
As for Mr. Keith, listeners will note parallels to his vaunted Dr. Octagonecologyst, especially when it comes to the bludgeoning, Automator-inspired bass thump of "Dr. Bipolar". However, Time might hew closer to Keith's criminally underrated 2006 collaboration with Tom C, Project Polaroid, which also found him speaking in a halting delivery, underlining the weight of his words. Here, it seems as if he's floating through the music, then going silent as it swirls around him. His restrained performance pays the most dividends on "The Wanderer", where he bends together incongruent images in his familiar Bronx drawl: "The structure of combat is like Wrestlemania contracts/ Genetics make the eye contact/ Shaggy mister boom back denim/ I have nothing to prove in slacks." Then there's his bizarre battle rap on "I Need Out of This World": "Come again if you're a male with a fitted wearing a toupee/ I can get you an inside job wearing daishikis."
Keith's deliberate opacity and "upper-class penmanship" is trailed by a panoply of guests. On "The Traveler", he drops a tantalizing verse—"See the cerebrum, how fast I'm passin'"—and then cedes the spotlight to J-Live, who "disappear like I never here." Mr. Lif hijacks "Twenty Fifty Three" with Boston-accented super-scientifical madness. Open Mike Eagle tackles "Meanwhile, Back Home" alone, with Keith nowhere to be heard. Blu, MC Paul Barman (of all people), and MindsOne—individually, they range from serviceable to splendid. But cumulatively, they distract from the chemistry between the album's two main performers. Then again, perhaps Kool Keith and L'Orange are satisfied with conjuring a mood of amusingly hallucinatory hip-hop that lasts just over 30 minutes, and then evaporates like a pleasurable high. Whether it will be remembered as Time passes remains to be seen. | 2015-07-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-07-23T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Mello Music Group | July 23, 2015 | 6.8 | 06f9d0b1-6df7-4a16-b515-f5e83b1cc1db | Mosi Reeves | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mosi-reeves/ | null |
The young English singer and songwriter’s funk-inspired synth pop is appealingly goofy, but too often, he sounds caught in a bland impersonation act of his own making. | The young English singer and songwriter’s funk-inspired synth pop is appealingly goofy, but too often, he sounds caught in a bland impersonation act of his own making. | Yellow Days: A Day in a Yellow Beat | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/yellow-days-a-day-in-a-yellow-beat/ | A Day in a Yellow Beat | Since age 17, George van den Broek has performed goofy bedroom pop as Yellow Days. Now a 21-year-old Surrey resident with an endearingly discomfiting rattail-esque hairdo, van den Broek exudes self-assured, weird-band-teacher energy. “What I say goes, because that’s how it should work. I’m the artist, man,” he told Vice in 2018. A Day in a Yellow Beat, his third album and first for Sony/RCA in North America, is the tonal equivalent of those wooden “This Way to the Beach” signs that a certain kind of mom hangs in her kitchen: sunny but a bit contrived.
“Intro/Be Free” makes the album’s funky, ’70s aspirations explicit, placing a sample of Yellow Days’ hero, Ray Charles, lamenting the sameness of modern pop musicians over a wry-but-rosy synth line. It’s a sweet introduction, and a good example of what makes Yellow Days appealing—he’s self-aware and doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously, a classically charming combination. But charm alone isn’t enough to make good music, and too often on A Day in a Yellow Beat, Yellow Days sounds caught in a bland impersonation act of his own making.
Although his sensitivity to mental health and commitment to creating “upbeat existential millennial crisis music” lands him in the contemporary bedroom-pop category, Yellow Days pays clear homage to Black R&B and funk icons. There’s a little Marvin Gaye in his vocal delivery, some sense that his production is what you might hear if you ran Funkadelic through Google Translate. He’s quick to credit his references, but A Day in a Yellow Beat lacks the corresponding vision and feeling. These songs gesture at depression in a broad way, occasionally urging you to be free, carry on, and believe in the good of the world. At some points, the lyrics are so one-dimensional that it’s difficult to distinguish them from the most saccharine radio pop. “I want you to stay/Please don’t go,” Yellow Days croons over and over amid the celestial reverberations of “You,” a song too uninteresting to justify lazy writing.
Still, there are some satisfying, earworm-y moments. On “Who’s There,” guest vocals by Shirley Jones of the R&B trio the Jones Girls create a smooth surface that contrasts the sultry inkinesss of Yellow Days’ musings. “Keep Yourself Alive” has a nice whine to it, like a sputtering pickup truck persevering towards the sunset—it’s happy and honeyed, urging you to enjoy yourself and “keep it alive.” Yellow Days is at his best in his most joyous moments, like on “The Curse” or “Be Free,” where a clear love for performance reverberates off of confident, emotive vocals.
But it’s not enough to tip the balance of the album from imitation to innovation. There’s no question that van den Broek is an energetic and capable musician, but those qualities feel irrelevant when they show up in songs that might appear on a bad Shuggie Otis covers album. Anyone can make music that sounds like soul, but not all music has one.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Sony / RCA | September 22, 2020 | 5.9 | 06f9d2e6-2a36-4ee2-8d16-ad4122ef7658 | Ashley Bardhan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ashley-bardhan/ | |
In a vaporous swirl of voice and emotions, Massachusetts songwriter Woodson Black asks a profound question: Music can always make you feel better, but can it ever make you healed? | In a vaporous swirl of voice and emotions, Massachusetts songwriter Woodson Black asks a profound question: Music can always make you feel better, but can it ever make you healed? | Haux: Violence in a Quiet Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/haux-violence-in-a-quiet-mind/ | Violence in a Quiet Mind | You don’t need to pore over the lyrics or backstory of Haux’s Violence in a Quiet Mind to grasp that it’s about depression. It’s right there in Woodson Black’s high, hushed voice, which quakes with swallowed sobs. It’s in his disorienting arrangements—the guitar too close, the drums and synths too far away, constructing a world in which everything intrudes but nothing can be touched. It’s in the persistent unease that haunts his gentle songs, and how even their crescendos suggest a filament flaring brightest the moment before it burns out.
Of course, it’s also in the lyrics, which teem with solitudes and stings as Black reviews painful childhood memories through the lens of lasting vulnerability they instilled. “You’ll never be safe, you’ll never be whole,” he admonishes on “Hold On,” wrenching the syllables through the tiniest aperture of breath. Then, over the course of a subdued but captivating album, he sets out to prove himself wrong. Violence in a Quiet Mind deals with death, addiction and generational trauma, yet it feels uplifting, not depressing. It asks a profound question: Music can always make you feel better, but can it ever make you healed?
Black, who lives in the Berkshires, grew up in rural Massachusetts. His previous work as Haux consists of two EPs, where his R&B-flecked indie electro-pop was easy enough to situate among The xx and Active Child. But Violence in a Quiet Mind is harder to pin down. It has something of the Antlers’ fragile pageantry, of Mas Ysa’s mottled glow, of Bon Iver’s digital forestry. If you remember when Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart made small, harrowing, beautiful songs like “Fabulous Muscles,” then Black might be his benevolent twin. But such comparisons only touch on the immersive, subtle sound that Black has developed with producers Jamie Macneal and Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman).
Most of the songs are built around close-mic’d acoustic guitar figures, which Black clads in gauzy synths as if he’s dressing a wound. The guitars are plain but rich in character, emphasizing a woody tone and the texture of calluses scraping ridged strings. They serve as material facts for Black to cling to in the vaporous swirl of his voice and emotions. Sparse percussion, provided by Dean Sharenow and Joe Montague, steals in discreetly if at all, while Bartlett’s piano picks a broken path through the shifting patterns of light and shadow. The quiet intensity is never broken, lending small fluctuations large effects, yet Black nudges all this focused stasis toward change, which depression makes a synonym for relief.
When Violence begins with “Hold On,” it’s like all Black can muster is miles of reverb and wisps of music, tenuously held together with stray pins of desperation and will. The next few songs fill out the interior definition, and halfway through, the album hits a new stride. On “Heavy,” probably the crowd-pleaser—you can already hear him doing it solo for encores—the bass and percussion, no longer subterranean rumbles and gusts, slip into a pocket with some swing and romance. The Rhye vibes develop further via the propulsive dream-folk of “Craving,” which flourishes into “Eight,” a lovely duet with Rosie Carney that evokes long-shut curtains being thrown open.
Music can be many kinds of medicine: analgesic, anesthetic, emetic. But even as it soothes, Violence in a Quiet Mind is more concerned with demonstrating how it feels to get better. It takes patience, attention, and self-awareness, qualities Black’s music amply displays. As he pours his tempests into chipped ceramic songs, we can identify with being small, delicate vessels with large, volatile contents, and whether or not we connect with Black’s personal story, we can all use his incantation of forgiveness on the insinuating “Killer” for our purposes. It turns out music can heal, in a way—as a lifeline through and a tally of the work it takes to heal yourself.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-18T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Color Study | July 18, 2020 | 7.8 | 06fa5daa-9524-49bb-9197-1b6500dd75b3 | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | |
One of the last revival-style emo bands standing sings about boredom and getting older on their frankly audacious second album. | One of the last revival-style emo bands standing sings about boredom and getting older on their frankly audacious second album. | Gulfer: Dog Bless | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gulfer-dog-bless/ | Dog Bless | There are albums that use their opening remarks to savagely waylay the listener with the grand scope and vision of what they’re about to experience. Gulfer’s second full-length, Dog Bless, is the opposite of all that, if you take Vincent Ford at his word. “I’m not going out/I’m staying right here in my basement/I’m just gonna chill and maybe write a song about it,” are the first lines he sings on “Secret Stuff.” The Montreal quartet spends the next half-hour discussing boredom, growing older, and whether writing songs about boredom and growing older will ever amount to much of anything. Sometimes they add some beer-buzzed group harmonies, and their jittery melodies are often punctuated by a flurry of two-handed tapping or the rhythm section making as many stutter-steps and backflips as many times as possible while staying in 4/4. All of which underlines the real point Ford is making on “Secret Stuff”: Gulfer is one of the last revival-style (aka “2011”) emo bands standing, and their frankly audacious and righteous belief is that this form of music is something you can spend a lifetime growing into and growing old with.
The emotional tenor of Dog Bless is of a piece with Gulfer’s previous work, honoring the genre’s tradition of communicating with itself. “I never thought I’d be so tired at my age,” Ford sang on the 2013 EP Transcendals, and five years later, “Secret Stuff” pledges, “I’ll stay the same old man.” On “Jurassic Spark,” another song from that 2013 EP, he admitted, “It’s just fun being bored and high/I still enjoy to be ignored sometimes.” This time around, though, that nonchalant quality has the potential to curdle into stubbornness and shame: “I’m stuck in the house/I’m always high/The bottom line is, ‘amaze me again,’” he sings on “Fading.”
Gulfer have said that “Fading” was inspired by watching elderly men play bocce and smoke cigarettes in the park, as satisfied as anyone could be about their station in life. Dog Bless strives towards that level of self-acceptance, while struggling to find the beauty and humor in servicing a cult audience after a span of time in which many promising bands completed their entire career arcs. Phrases like “I sometimes recall that no one gives a shit,” “Whatever it takes to be alive,” and “We got annoyed by everyone” are vented and repeated until they transmogrify into inside jokes.
As suggested by the theme of “Doglife,” three years of your twenties can feel seven times as long, and where Gulfer’s earlier work could get by on sheer energy, Dog Bless manages to show its work without feeling overdone. “Doglife” and “Baseball” have moments that could have been repurposed as foolproof hooks, but the band would rather not. The memories those songs speak on are meant to be fleeting, overpowering, and unexpected.
And of course bands in this realm tend to be short-lived. Even beyond the emotional and physical intensity, this kind of music is often just a tough sell outside of house shows: Typically, there’s too much math, not enough heart, too much tapping, not enough riffs, too much yelping, not enough tunes. Gulfer’s genre has never once been considered cool. But they’ve stuck with a variant of indie rock that sublimates that self-doubt without undermining itself, perfectly suited to soundtrack the mental push and pull of advancing age. They’re good at alternately embracing stasis and rejecting it, trying to will something exciting into existence and being OK if the process doesn’t bring results—the three interludes of melancholy chillwave synths are called “Blessed.”
All these thematic depths are more or less summed up in that first verse of “Secret Stuff,” especially in the way Ford says it. Every time he sings the word “I,” it’s in that corrugated-but-not-metal melodic scream that’s served as emo’s version of the millennial whoop or vocal fry as a genre identifier. (I dunno, the Kinsella Croak?) Yeah, he’s saying “I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I”, but it’s meant to be doubled and tripled until it means something broader, closer to “we.”
It’s the kind of sound that re-emerged when Gulfer was first getting started, when, as one of Ford’s peers has put it, “Everything went back into the basement.” (Another musician from this scene described it as “Really bad, wussy emo rock 10 years after it was relevant.”) The self-deprecation inherent in those statements courses throughout Dog Bless, but so does the love. When Ford sings “Secret Stuff,” it’s a tribute to Gulfer themselves, and also the fallen in Algernon Cadwallader, Snowing, Hightide Hotel, the Brave Little Abacus, Marietta, the Clippers, Everyone Everywhere, Joie de Vivre, Donovan Wolfington, You Blew It!, and countless others who sparkled and faded so records like this one could live. | 2018-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-03-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Topshelf / Big Scary Monsters | March 20, 2018 | 7.4 | 06facb08-e86c-463c-9735-f0a294babdda | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
With a newly pared down sound, Austra’s latest synth-pop record concerns itself primarily with the dark side of “the personal is political.” But it is essentially optimistic, and presents solutions. | With a newly pared down sound, Austra’s latest synth-pop record concerns itself primarily with the dark side of “the personal is political.” But it is essentially optimistic, and presents solutions. | Austra: Future Politics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22796-future-politics/ | Future Politics | The past year has seen a wider move towards the genre of “tiny utopias”: small, invented idylls that, unlike the colossal world reconfigurations common in speculative fiction, are built to human scale. Whether polemic or meditative, they share a vision: a world better than our own and also within reach. It is, of course, obvious why one might want this now, might long to crawl out of this orange apocalypse and into a utopia. Art might not, as the myth goes, get better during bleak times, but bleak times do make people cling harder to the art they’ve got.
Electronic artist Katie Stelmanis has always made political art, blatantly or subtly, from her time with riot grrl band Galaxy to her more muted project, Austra. But since 2013’s Olympia, politics have gotten more, well, urgent. Stelmanis is Canadian and wrote Future Politics before the election results and before fascism started winning, but the album’s Inauguration Day release is now looming, inescapable subtext. “I was kind of worried it wouldn’t be something that people would be interested in, or connect to... [but it’s] become more relevant than I could’ve ever imagined,” she told CBC.
Future Politics doesn’t depart from Austra’s sound so much as filter it. Stelmanis’ band, and its sound, are pared down, producing straightforward, minimal music akin to club artists like Marie Davidson or Kate Wax, or perhaps Björk’s electronic work. Even Stelmanis’ voice, capable of great force, sounds less operatic than deliberately hollowed-out, as in the tentative melodies of “Beyond a Mortal” and “Gaia” or the collapsing coloratura of “I’m a Monster.”
Austra fills the extra space by surfacing the themes formerly held in the band’s subtext, though occasionally stated, like Olympia’s “I Don't Care (I’m a Man).” While writing this album, Stelmanis was into science fiction and political manifestos—in particular, the Accelerationist Manifesto and Marge Piercy’s canonical Woman on the Edge of Time, a novel whose utopian visions reach its main character amid abuse and institutional detention. “It needed to have a purpose other than just my own ego,” Stelmanis said. And while Future Politics isn’t impersonal—throughout it runs an undercurrent of loss, partly the result of personal and professional departures in Stelmanis’ life—the album concerns itself primarily with the dark side of “the personal is political,” the slow parallel rot of self-contained depression and political turmoil. When the definition of disordered thinking resembles, so closely and measurably, a world increasingly disordered and unmoored from fact, what do you even do? How do you think? How do you begin to conceive a way out?
It’s fitting that the first track of the album is a question: “What if we were alive?” Stelmanis sings over synth pads and unsettled chords, like closing credits for a bittersweet ending. “Freepower,” like its near-namesake, presents a twitchy, unsettled mix and a plea for the personal. The title track is a driving sequencer track shaped like an anthem, but gets only as far as a battle cry: “future politics.” There’s still mourning in the present to get past, after all, and the midsection of the album dwells upon it. “I’m a Monster” begins like the bridge of a club track, the sort with tears-on-the-dancefloor and throbbing backing vocals, but where that track would provide release, there’s only hollowness: “I don’t feel nothing anymore.” “Gaia” dwells upon loss as well; the track most reminiscent of Björk, it’s like a cut from a less optimistic Biophilia, where the environment’s full of more death than life.
Despite all this, Future Politics is essentially an optimistic album, and presents solutions. First: self-care is important. “Deep Thought,” a minute-long, a cappella harp palpitation at the end of the record, is reminiscent of dream pop or chillout, or even ASMR—soothing genres. Second: make connections. “I don’t think it’s possible for me to write in a major key,” Stelmanis said (partly in jest) while touring Olympia, but “I Love You More Than You Love Yourself” accomplishes this musically and metaphorically, taking an idea last seen in dull dance backfill and turning it into an ode to redemptive love. “Utopia” has the album’s lushest arrangement, a whirlwind of chiming trance synths, cheery octaves and airy background vocals, and its most indomitably romantic lyric: “I only want to hold your hand my own damn life/I can picture a place where everyone feels it too.” It’s got the highest notes and most triumphant melodies of the album. It’s music to be escaped into, whether on dance floors or alone somewhere, filled with a little less despair. | 2017-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic / Rock | Domino | January 21, 2017 | 7.4 | 0702294e-778c-4ad4-8903-424ce3668c20 | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
Far from the accessible pop record it's been touted as, the iconoclastic singer's latest outing rarely revisits the celebratory spirit of its first single, despite welcome guest spots from Timbaland, Antony, Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale, and Konono No. 1, among others. | Far from the accessible pop record it's been touted as, the iconoclastic singer's latest outing rarely revisits the celebratory spirit of its first single, despite welcome guest spots from Timbaland, Antony, Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale, and Konono No. 1, among others. | Björk: Volta | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10204-volta/ | Volta | If you wanted to find the last time Björk really let her hair down on a record, you'd have to look all the way back to 1995's Post. From "Army of Me" (its video found her driving a tank and wearing gold teeth) to "It's Oh So Quiet" to "I Miss You", that record sired some of the most vibrant songs of her career. It's a side of her we've only caught in brief glimpses ever since. In the course of moving back to Iceland after a letter bomb scare in 1997, engaging in psychological warfare with Lars Von Trier on the set of 2000's oppressively bleak Dancer in the Dark, falling in love with Matthew Barney in 2001, giving birth to her second child in 2002, and of course, just getting older, Björk's output has become increasingly austere and inward-looking. The unhinged, mischievous screamers that were once her calling card are now mostly a thing of the past, replaced by songs that more closely resemble holy moments than sing-alongs.
But in her pre-game interviews for Volta, Björk hinted that it might finally be time to flip the switch back. "All I wanted for this album was to have fun and do something that was full-bodied and really up," she told Pitchfork-- one of a handful of interviews to feature descriptors like "fun" and "poppy" and "accessible." Disappointingly, it turns out that Timbaland and the Technicolor artwork were red herrings-- Volta is not Björk's pop record. Figuring out what it is, actually, is a much more difficult task; where even her most divisive albums have managed to push her artistic boundaries, Volta feels limp and strangely empty-- almost unfinished.
Its emptiness is doubly disappointing when considering the caliber of guest performers involved. In addition to Timbaland, Volta features Antony Hegarty (of & the Johnsons fame), improv drummer Chris Corsano, Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale, Konono No. 1, Malian kora player Toumani Diabate, Chinese pipa player Min Xiao-Fen, and a 10-piece Icelandic brass band. Some of that guestlist goes wasted; Chippendale is banished to slow-build purgatory on the brooding Antony duet "The Dull Flame of Desire", while Konono No. 1 are reduced to fighting for space with 37 other elements in the already overstuffed "Earth Intruders". Even Timbaland's contributions feel oddly apathetic; aside from "Earth Intruders", which pales in comparison to any Timbaland/Björk collaboration you'd hear in your head, neither of his other productions bear much of his imprint at all. With its distorted, squelching rhythms, "Innocence" sounds, ironically, more like the work of longtime collaborator Mark Bell, and "Hope"s scampering percussion and spindly kora lines, while interesting, are marred by an atrocious lyric about terrorism: "What's the lesser of two evils?/ If a suicide bomber made to look pregnant/ Manages to kill her target or not?"
For a record ostensibly about tribalism and reconnecting with our animal sides, much of Volta plods. Insulated with samples of running water, long, mournful horns, and gently plucked pipa, "I See Who You Are" is a tranquil lullaby without much of a melody at all. "Vertebrae by Vertebrae" rests on a looped horn sample not far from Peter Thomas' "Bolero on the Moon Rocks" (sampled by Pulp on "This Is Hardcore"), but Björk can't take it anywhere, instead filling its five minutes with runs from her catalog of preferred vocal shorthand scribbles. On the heels of those two songs, the rhythmless "Pneumonia"-- which finds Björk utterly adrift melodically-- is an even harder sell.
There are, of course, a handful of lovely parts as well. While I have problems with the way "Earth Intruders" sounds-- muddy, clunky, overcompressed, and not nearly as aerodynamic as you'd expect a Björk/Timbaland track to sound-- its charm comes through with time. With lyrics pulled from a Russian poem made popular by Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker (how's that for pop!) and regal, curling horns reminiscent of the crescendoing strings in Henryk Gorecki's 3rd Symphony (uh, ditto), the 7½-minute Björk/Antony duet "The Dull Flame of Desire" is a darkly elegant setpiece that beautifully showcases both voices. Ultimately, though, it's the industrial jackhammering of "Declare Independence" that steals the show. Built around a wriggling synth lead, some brash EQing, and white-hot swaths of digital noise, it's a gloriously messy few minutes-- one of her most transcendent tracks to date.
In the end, though, those golden moments are too few and far between, and the slow, unfurling, lingering moments too long. If the critical and fan response to this album reflects that of the fascinatingly eccentric (but largely maligned) Medúlla, I'll be curious to see how she responds. Until then, Volta is mostly proof that Björk is as fallible as the messy, unpredictable humanity she celebrates, and that even her definition of "pop" is avant-garde. | 2007-05-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-05-08T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic / Pop/R&B | Atlantic / Elektra / One Little Indian | May 8, 2007 | 5.8 | 07028e87-23c9-4a73-8e38-aedc09a2494d | Mark Pytlik | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/ | null |
The California pedal steel guitarist makes inventive use of space and place on a quietly mournful album where lost forests and shuttered venues endure in intangible anonymity. | The California pedal steel guitarist makes inventive use of space and place on a quietly mournful album where lost forests and shuttered venues endure in intangible anonymity. | Chuck Johnson: The Cinder Grove | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chuck-johnson-the-cinder-grove/ | The Cinder Grove | Depending on the hands and feet of the beholder, a pedal steel guitar can be an instrument of ecstatic heavenly worship or honky-tonk hellraising—or both. A pedal steel is a paintbrush, a tool for filling wide-open spaces with sagebrush and starlight. In any form, pedal-steel music often suggests a sense of weightless drift, a honeyed suspension of gravity as a player glides a stout, shiny little tone bar over electrified strings.
Following several albums focused on fingerpicked guitar, Chuck Johnson turned his attention toward the pedal steel on 2017’s liquidy Balsams. He’s spent the intervening years applying it in other realms, building duets with Marielle Jakobsons in Saariselka and cutting a record with synth-and-bass-clarinet duo Golden Retriever. He approached his newest solo project, The Cinder Grove, hoping to explore spaces and memory, spiraling through more ambiguous realms with less concrete thematic associations. The record stretches deeper into a pool of contemplative, ambient-leaning pedal-steel records that’s expanded significantly since Balsams.
Based in Oakland, California, Johnson makes inventive use of both space and place on The Cinder Grove. He developed his own digital toolkit for the project, culling echo and reverb effects from performance recordings he’d made in Oakland DIY spaces since rendered defunct by capitalism and other disasters. But Johnson’s processing techniques aren’t one-to-one recreations of a pedal steel played in various rooms. They’re impossible to untangle from other effects, from the notes themselves, and from another treatment designed to simulate the “reverberation of a redwood forest.” The Cinder Grove embeds sense memories, walls and trees enduring in intangible anonymity.
These five elongated pieces feel more mournful than Johnson’s other pedal-steel work, though they rarely stray from a sublime sense of calm. “Red Branch Bell” is the most elegiac, with cello, violin, and viola parts bringing a somber complement to Johnson’s steel-and-synth foundation. The long, slow notes feel as though each is helping draw out the next. When the track fractures around its halfway point, quiet electronic feedback connects with mildly dissonant layers that lie together like hazy memories. But “The Laurel,” which lifts upward with the ease of clouds clearing from the sky, offers relief.
Playing to the pedal steel’s strengths of subtlety, The Cinder Grove’s mood slides toward grief without any hard signaling. The restorative serenity of Balsams may have transmitted a sense that “everything’s going to be alright,” but The Cinder Grove acknowledges that sometimes it isn’t. Losing a creative space isn’t simply losing a set of walls and floor, it’s the collapse of an entire little universe. On the way to “Red Branch Bell,” Johnson wanders through soundscapes that explore voids without over-emphasizing their darkness. Sadness feels almost effervescent as “Constellation” floats by with cosmic dreaminess, while silvery ripples balance with lower drifts on “Seritony.” The modulating notes that open “Raz-de-Marée” are the record’s only demanding tones, sweeping like a lighthouse beam through the fog before slipping into full pedal-steel cascades.
Though loss is The Cinder Grove’s central theme, the album carries with it a tacit reminder that devastation doesn’t always mean total destruction. The worst fires reduce everything to ash. But cinders aren’t quite so far gone: Something combustible is left behind. They’re the smallest surviving pieces, unlikely fragments of hope. Like a pedal steel ringing out another clear, sterling note, they offer the promise of redemption.
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. | 2021-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-02-10T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | VDSQ | February 10, 2021 | 7.6 | 07048ec9-174a-463c-8424-501212b233f5 | Allison Hussey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/allison-hussey/ | |
The French indie rock stalwarts’ fun and fizzy seventh album rejuvenates a proven formula while protecting its true feelings behind glass. | The French indie rock stalwarts’ fun and fizzy seventh album rejuvenates a proven formula while protecting its true feelings behind glass. | Phoenix: Alpha Zulu | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/phoenix-alpha-zulu/ | Alpha Zulu | How does a band as definitively springy as Phoenix find inspiration? When the French quartet released their debut more than 20 years ago, their meticulous production and candy-sweet hooks seemed dually primed for festival stages and dimly lit cocktail bars. Before the breakout success of 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, Phoenix were that band your indie-head friend said should be huge, man—and when they got huge, headlining Coachella and lending their hit “1901” to a Cadillac commercial, your friend still rode for them. Phoenix hasn’t had to risk artistic integrity for mainstream appeal or reinvent their style to remain relevant—their ebullient, effortless pop-rock is enduringly of-the-moment, sophisticated enough to appease purists and safe enough to appear in a lingerie advertisement.
Six albums and a couple decades in, though, it’s fair to wonder if Phoenix’s trusted formula can spark the flame it once did. While 2017’s Ti Amo featured all their familiar flourishes—buzzy bass, bubblegum synth, pleasure-packed choruses—the record felt stale, stuffed with empty calories. How many more times could Thomas Mars chant a sing-along hook that really resonated, or noodle a riff that hit like the ones on Wolfgang? On the band’s seventh studio album, Alpha Zulu, Phoenix’s euphoric synth rock sounds as good as it ever has, the songs gushing with renewed enthusiasm and glittery production. They occasionally color outside the lines of their standard style, but mostly they stick to the script—they know what works, so why change now? Though emotionally distant and structurally predictable, Alpha Zulu’s a fun, fizzy record that’ll undoubtedly find a home on strobe-lit dancefloors across the world.
Writing and recording amid COVID-19 lockdowns, Phoenix didn’t want Alpha Zulu to be defined as their pandemic album. Driven by “the possibility of playing [the album] live someday,” they made songs destined for jam-packed crowds and expensive light shows, work that will slot seamlessly into their existing setlist of hits. No new song is likely to inspire more fervor on the road than the Ezra Koenig-assisted “Tonight,” the band’s best song since Wolfgang. Coursing with punchy percussion and bright, shuddering guitars, “Tonight” evokes a bygone era when Vampire Weekend and Phoenix were at the forefront of a new wave of innovative, idiosyncratic guitar pop; Mars and Koenig sound like a pair of cool dads reliving their glory days. The fun continues on the club-ready “All Eyes on Me,” where Mars delivers one of the album’s most memorable hooks over muscular bass, pulsing synths, EDM risers, and tinkly harpsichord. Even when the writing contains traces of melancholy, Alpha Zulu is nothing if not a good time.
As is typical for a Phoenix record, the lyrics are tertiary to the sticky melodies and lustrous production. It’s not that the writing is vapid; Mars has always been more of a mood generator than a storyteller, conveying tension and emotion through small, cryptic details and fluttery vocal cadences. Alpha Zulu has no discernible raison d’être, just glimmers of vulnerability that burst into view when you least expect them. Take “Artefact,” where Mars croons an incisive line about marital inertia: “I’m looking for an artifact/A piece of me that’s still intact…What part of me can still attract you?” If you squint hard enough, Alpha Zulu seems to be about reestablishing connection in a post-lockdown world, whether that be connection with ourselves, our partners, or the strangers we scream with at concerts. Yet I found myself craving more songs like “Artefact,” moments where Phoenix wed their precise songcraft with more legible meaning. Otherwise, the deluge of chanting hooks—like the ones on the title track or “The Only One”—start to deflate into gibberish.
Phoenix recorded much of Alpha Zulu at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a wing of the Louvre and a place whose “eerie and a little bit dystopian” energy invigorated the group’s creative process, according to Mars. In interviews, the band recalls the strangeness of performing beside medieval paintings and Napoleon’s throne. And after a while, the songs on Alpha Zulu begin to mimic the experience of observing objects in a museum—you can admire all you want, but please don’t touch. Just look at the album centerpiece “Winter Solstice”: Over a four-on-the-floor kick and neon-sheathed synths, Mars sings about finding it “hard to connect” with others amid limitless technological distractions. The sugary downtempo drops offer a brief respite from Mars’ gloomy demeanor, but the sentiment feels mostly gestural. When the song ends, the worries fade and we’re welcomed into another sun-streaked gallery, nodding and muttering “wow” while suppressing a yawn. | 2022-11-10T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-10T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Loyauté / Glassnote | November 10, 2022 | 7.1 | 07058d46-a59f-41a3-aa9f-a3919818df1f | Brady Brickner-Wood | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brady-brickner-wood/ | |
The Philadelphia emo trio’s debut EP packs in a career’s worth of evolution, pulling from ’90s Midwest twinkle, Guitar Hero shredding, and the online angst of an emergent fifth wave. | The Philadelphia emo trio’s debut EP packs in a career’s worth of evolution, pulling from ’90s Midwest twinkle, Guitar Hero shredding, and the online angst of an emergent fifth wave. | Johnny Football Hero: Complacency EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/johnny-football-hero-complacency-ep/ | Complacency EP | Almost as soon as emo’s fifth wave announced its existence, critics countered that it wasn’t real—this was not an actual, flesh-and-blood scene, but an online confabulation, as if any movement that coalesced throughout 2020 could be otherwise. Naturally, the primary qualities of this wave are the inevitable results of being Very Online: time and memory compressed to the point of near suffocation, high and low influences ever more tightly commingled, allegiances formed between acts with seemingly little in common besides mutual followers. Bands that predate 2017 are now cast as elder statesmen. The exuberant Philadelphia trio Johnny Football Hero is a quintessential product of this weird new era—named after a Nada Surf lyric, they lay claim to Sunny Day Real Estate and crabcore icons Attack! Attack! in the same sentence, describe Dogleg’s barely year-old Melee as an aspirational model, and cram a career’s worth of evolution into the six songs of Complacency.
Singles “Cap’n Oblivious (Deficit)” and “Sister Hellen” are fluent in contemporary online argot: separating the healthy expression of anger from internalized angst, rhyming “therapy” and “anxiety.” The commiseration of the group vocals makes the ascending melodies sound sarcastic, and the shifty song construction opens up side missions within verse-chorus structure. You might find yourself reflexively pounding on your desk or steering wheel, but Johnny Football Hero counterbalance the immediate familiarity of their sound with surprising and judicious flexing of technical chops. James McGill’s tenor emerges from the vocal dogpiles with scenery-chewing flair, reframing Johnny Football Hero as a band drawn as much to the musical theater roots of their MySpace-era favorites as the lineage of post-hardcore. There are nimble, hammer-and-pull leads and flurries of tapping that owe an inevitable tithe to American Football (“Aurora” all but quotes the “Never Meant” riff), but McGill’s technique is even more indebted to Guitar Hero as a gateway to mainstream shred.
Complacency sounds like a band realizing their confidence in real time: navigating the hairpin melodic turn before the chorus of “41,” figuring out who gets to pick up the extra percussion that turns “Cap’n Oblivious (Deficit)” into proof of the permeability between sasscore and dance-punk. It manifests even in the relative restraint of “Complacency, Pt. 1,” the sort of strangulated slow build that typically pops up around track five on a 1990s Midwest emo classic. At first, “Pt. 1” serves notice to Johnny Football Hero’s range, though not their ability to unify emo’s various waves, especially as it leads right back into “Sister Hellen” shouting down group therapy and underemployment. But soon after, “Complacency, Pt. 2” offers a more perfect union, rhyming “tomato, tomahto” with “La Villa Strangiato”—note that this isn’t one of Rush’s popular songs, but a 12-part suite subtitled “An Exercise in Self-Indulgence.”
Johnny Football Hero are happy to call themselves out on their dorkier impulses, happier to embrace them. This is their truest show of allegiance to the fifth wave—or, on a smaller scale, to their peers responsible for this July’s “DIY Super Bowl.” The Philadelphia emo scene’s first major post-lockdown gig inspired much shaky, heartwarming iPhone footage of virtual Emo Nite favorites like Guitar Fight From Fooly Cooly and Ogbert the Nerd—bands whose very names read like a playful rebuke to unrequited bids for respectability. In that way, Johnny Football Hero is above all true to themselves: a band named after a hit single about the futility of trying to be popular.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-13T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Knuckle Down / PennPop | August 13, 2021 | 7.4 | 0705ab85-0fdb-49bc-a9cf-80407cff7330 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
The 12-lane Connector plows through Atlanta like the Nile of pavement. Along its fenced banks lie the majority of the… | The 12-lane Connector plows through Atlanta like the Nile of pavement. Along its fenced banks lie the majority of the… | Outkast: Speakerboxxx/The Love Below | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11796-speakerboxxxthe-love-below/ | Speakerboxxx/The Love Below | The 12-lane Connector plows through Atlanta like the Nile of pavement. Along its fenced banks lie the majority of the city’s attractions. Turner buildings, blossoming with neon network logos, lure Yellowjacket grads from the adjacent campus cluster with the sweet nectar of Powerpuff Girls money. Across the way, the Varsity serves grease between buns, communicating with an enigmatic fast food lexicon that rivals rhyming Cockneys. Tourists walk the overpass to the ghostly Olympic park, built on the graveyard of Techwood projects, in the shadows of Vick’s pastel dome. Hipsters and reluctant yuppies settle in the gentrified Five Points and Cabbagetown, giving their quaint subdivisions more verdant “___________ Park” monikers. And finally, there’s Turner Field, reverberating collective October sighs, before the highway splits back into its tributaries in East Point, the cultural fountainhead. The hip-hop id to New York’s ego: the home of Outkast.
Lauded retroactively in 2000, upon the release of Stankonia, for a formula that had been perfected by teenagers on 1994’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, Outkast charged up the public with silly amounts of reserved anticipation for this double-disc marathon. Since dropping that debut nearly 10 years ago, Outkast’s singles have charted a steady incline of genre-defiance and pop virtuosity. But now, in the wake of the commercial and critical smash that yielded such classic tracks as “Ms. Jackson,” “B.O.B.,” and “So Fresh, So Clean,” Big Boi and André 3000 have, for the first time, chosen to work in separate corners, like Beatles after India. Here, on the resulting Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, the two wander down the blacktop from East Point, each plotting their own distinct course: André, like I-85, shoots off to the airport and sky-high trips before dipping into the Mardi Gras marshes of New Orleans, while Big Boi rolls deep down I-75 into south Florida, home of booty bass and baby blue.
The consensus in rock circles had unfairly anticipated that The Love Below would reign supreme over Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx, since André was the one with the guitar in the fuzzy boots. As it turns out, his Prince-mimicking fusion looks a lot better on paper than it sounds in your ears. On too many songs, André repeats space-playboy choruses over repetitious, unfinished digifunk. As the brief orchestrated outro to “Pink and Blue” suggests, each track feels like it’s missing something—strings, guitars, harmonies, organic instruments, and, oh right: Big Boi. André does have his moment, though: “Hey Ya!” glitters and towers like the silver Westin hotel over an ’80s Atlanta skyline, blending Flaming Lips–like synth-bass and ebullient acoustic guitar with the rebellious joy of “Little Red Corvette”—and like all classic songs, it introduces new vernacular with a genius that transcends product placement. Even indymedia.org feeders will shout “Polaroid!” while miming spanking at this fall’s Not-Dog cookouts.
Of the few other tracks on The Love Below that come close to reaching “Hey Ya!”’s apex, the one that most succeeds is “Spread,” which showcases trumpets and piano weaving through a rubber bassline and scattering rimshots. Its chorus has André putting on his Camille voice, while the verses contain some of the only moments on the album in which he actually flows. When he does, he’s tight enough to pose the question of why he decided to cut back on rapping at all—particularly since, frankly, he ranks just above Pharrell Williams on the “brilliant but mosquito-throated crooner” list. Elsewhere, the quite literal “Dracula’s Wedding” boasts guest vocalist Kelis over whistling squelches, while Norah Jones’ lovely turn on the acoustic “Take Off Your Cool” hints at the true stylistic breadth André is capable of achieving. “Baby, take off your cool/I want to get to know you,” they both sing over plucks and strums. Heed your lyrics, André. (Except for that “become the master of your own bastion” nonsense.)
Big Boi’s Speakerboxxx coolly upstages its counterpart: Although it, too, provides the world with one earthshaking single, it differs from The Love Below in that it also manages to maintain a consistent level of brilliance and emotional complexity. Here, Big Boi effectively asserts himself as man who wants both a stripper pole in his home and his nostalgic place saved on the pew—“Unhappy” conveys that in its beat alone! Comparing the selection of Speakerboxxx to André’s limper Love Below, it’s clear who won this bet: machine-heavy, horn-driven funk stomps behind “Bowtie” and “The Rooster”; reverberating woodblocks (a trademark Outkast signifier since “Elevators”) starkly soundtrack pondering rhymes on “Knowing”; “Church” takes gospel into the 21st Century, accelerating aluminum Stevie Wonder disco-pop into Teutonic techno; propulsive kickdrums pump under drunken guitars, scratches, and a Jay-Z hook on the standout “Flip Flop Rock”; and “Ghettomusick”, the aforementioned earthshaking single, is, emotionally, a celebration and a lament, braggadocio and beatitudes. Musically, the record shifts from punk-cadenced, cellulite-quivering woofer booms to three-wheeled slow-jams and back before snake-charming with George Clinton keyboards.
Of course, there’s one department in which neither disc succeeds: Despite how forward-looking these albums can be, both members have failed to envision a future without skits and intros, which make up no less than 10 of the 39 tracks here. It’s one reason why Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, like no albums before, beg to be ripped, sieved and re-sequenced. Cutting out the dialog, along with The Love Below’s silicon-smooth, Rainbow Children–esque jazz and lulling middle-section, and Big Boi’s guest-laden, been-there street tracks, leaves one genius full-length that fits on a single disc. | 2003-09-22T01:00:01.000-04:00 | 2003-09-22T01:00:01.000-04:00 | Rap | Arista | September 22, 2003 | 8 | 0706ad15-429f-49b9-9ec9-913926ea2df8 | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | |
The Chicago-based jazz guitarist and Tortoise member heads a loose-limbed quartet that also includes Sam Barsheshet, Chris Lopes, and Chad Taylor. | The Chicago-based jazz guitarist and Tortoise member heads a loose-limbed quartet that also includes Sam Barsheshet, Chris Lopes, and Chad Taylor. | Jeff Parker: The Relatives | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6561-the-relatives/ | The Relatives | Although Jeff Parker is the one whose name is written in big letters out on the sidewalk blackboard, the Chicago-based jazz guitarist has always been savvy enough to recognize that-- in the words of De Niro-as-Capone-- nobody wins unless the team wins. As with his work in Tortoise and Isotope 217, Parker's playing as a bandleader is virtually egoless, and on The Relatives he remains steadfast in his willingness to temper and subordinate his instrument's voice in the broader interests of the group at large.
Such cooperative benevolence would seem misplaced if Parker hadn't the wherewithal to surround himself with such sympathetic players. Joining him here is his regular rhythm section of drummer Chad Taylor and bassist Chris Lopes (both of whom played on Parker's 2003 debut as headliner, Like-Coping) as well as Sam Barsheshet on Fender Rhodes and Wurlitzer. Here, the quartet move in a loose-limbed, baggy lockstep, with each member given an equal place at the table. If you were to approach this album blindfolded, you might easily assume Taylor or Barsheshet to be the ringmaster, so humbly does Parker deliver his sparklingly clean, unfussy guitar contributions.
Significantly less abstract and more song-oriented than many of Parker's past recordings (particularly noise-laden improv experiments such as Out Trios, Vol. 2, his 2003 collaboration with Kevin Drumm and Michael Zerang), on The Relatives he also shares songwriting duties with his bandmates, as well as tackling an ambitious cover of Marvin Gaye's "When Did You Stop Loving Me, When Did I Stop Loving You". The album opens with the laidback swank of Taylor's "Istanbul", where Parker's breezy acoustic guitar and Barsheshet's organ laze about sunning themselves on the rocks, before the driving, almost Meters-like R&B; fusion of "Mannerisms" arrives to shake them from their idyll. The melodic riffling of Lopes' "Sea Change" explores some of the same dusky film noir shadows that Tortoise haunted early in their lifespan, while on the title track Barsheshet conjures up a shimmering, humid glaze from the keyboards in a manner that fondly recalls Herbie Hancock's Sextant.
Unfortunately, there are occasions when the group skirt dangerously close to the same easy-listening tar pits that have ensnared so many post-rock fusionists. When Lopes introduces a flute on the turtleneck-clad jazz-pop of "Beanstalk", you may fear that you've inadvertently stumbled across Anchorman's Ron Burgundy playing an after-hours set down at the supper club. Thankfully, however, such missteps are few, and over the bulk of The Relatives these musicians sound positively ecstatic to be playing with and for each other (if one is to trust the large number of animated hollers they give one another during the course of the album). If you grant them some attention, I expect you'll find their enthusiasm to be infectious. | 2005-01-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2005-01-19T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Jazz | Thrill Jockey | January 19, 2005 | 7.4 | 0706afda-a5a6-4330-a553-59e8aa677927 | Matthew Murphy | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-murphy/ | null |
The hybrid jazz supergroup featuring Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, and more keeps it exquisitely sparse and supremely chill. | The hybrid jazz supergroup featuring Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper, Terrace Martin, and more keeps it exquisitely sparse and supremely chill. | Dinner Party: Enigmatic Society | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dinner-party-enigmatic-society/ | Enigmatic Society | Dinner Party offers incontrovertible proof that great music requires great restraint. The group comprises three of the most highly rated jazz musicians of modern times—saxophonist Kamasi Washington, pianist Robert Glasper and multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin—plus North Carolina producer 9th Wonder, who all hide their collective light under a band name that is bland to the point of ridicule. The instrumentation on Enigmatic Society, meanwhile, is exquisitely sparse, stripped back to passing glances and musical breeze.
Their third album is a small step forward from their self-titled 2020 debut. The group’s roots still lie in ’70s soul, ’90s hip-hop and R&B, and jazz but they have further refined this mixture on Enigmatic Society, dampening down their sound to an airy velvet exhalation. If the album has anything as vulgar as a declaration of intent, it would be the intro to “Breathe,” in which singer Arin Ray invites us to come in and chill and “Don’t worry about it/You’ve had a long day/Just don’t say nothing/I’ve got your shift today” in what may be the most seductively functional 20 seconds of music you will hear all year.
Enigmatic Society shows that small, concentrated voices can resonate loudest. Album highlight “For Granted” uses a fragment of Glasper’s piano, a tiny lick of marine melancholy whose slender strokes draw the audience closer in. Elsewhere, the piano chord sequence on “Answered Prayer” is punctured by the slightest suggestion of soprano saxophone melody, and “Watts Renaissance” employs subtle modulations in the song’s bassline to tickle the listener’s senses, the power, in each case, drawn from masterful understatement.
For all of the group’s backgrounds in jazz, this is far from a jazz album. The subtle but passionate experimentalism of Blonde-era Frank Ocean feels like a point of reference on “Secure,” where a warped and rather murky clip of piano and voice plays off against a crisp vocal line, creating the refracted emotional tug of a singer baring his soul to a display of funhouse mirrors. “Can’t Go” samples Hall and Oates’ much misused “I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)” and the wobbling funk of “Watts Renaissance'' resembles a G-funk era track zoned out on valium and swimming-pool chlorine. It’s an ostensibly unusual set of references held together by a lightness of touch and fantastically disciplined songwriting. “Love Love”—essentially early D’Angelo in the suggestion of silk pajamas—manages to convey the redemptive purity of being in love in just five lines of lyrics, brushed drums, and a gently unwinding chord progression.
That Dinner Party can subsume their collective technique and knowledge is a sign of the group’s ego-free dedication. There are moments on Enigmatic Society when the individual instruments shine—the ecstatic saxophone trills on “Watts Renaissance,” or the oceanic sweep of the piano chords that roll open “Answered Prayer”—but they have the wisdom to put the good of the song first, to the extent that Washington and Glasper sometimes feel like absent friends on their own album. (The versatile Martin is ever present, with production credits on all nine of the album’s songs, while 9th Wonder contributes to four.) This makes Dinner Party land in the top percentile of supergroups, where the whole is stronger than the sum of its parts. | 2023-04-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-20T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Jazz / Pop/R&B | Sounds of Crenshaw / Empire | April 20, 2023 | 7.6 | 0708cf5f-190f-47c5-ae33-bf0e7b2da8c1 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
A compilation from the prolific Water From Your Eyes songwriter offers an endearing tour through their introspective, constantly evolving body of work. | A compilation from the prolific Water From Your Eyes songwriter offers an endearing tour through their introspective, constantly evolving body of work. | Thanks for Coming: You Haven’t Missed Much | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/thanks-for-coming-you-havent-missed-much/ | You Haven’t Missed Much | Keeping up with Rachel Brown’s catalog can be overwhelming. In addition to their work as one half of the experimental indie-pop duo Water From Your Eyes, they’ve released 79 projects on Bandcamp since September 2012. You Haven’t Missed Much, Brown’s latest release under the name Thanks for Coming, is a welcome entry point. Akin to a greatest hits LP, the 14-track compilation spans all of Brown’s styles from twee, acoustic-led tunes to jangly bouts of distortion, including songs as old as 2015’s “Yr Kind of Cool” and as recent as 2022’s “Plagiarizer.” Like a retrospective exhibition of their creative process, it offers a flawed but endearing tour of Brown’s artistic growth and the lived-in charm of their songwriting.
Since Brown started releasing introspective indie-rock as Thanks for Coming just over a decade ago, the lineup has undergone several permutations, involving bassist and co-writer Linda Sherman, drummer and Water From Your Eyes bandmate Nate Amos, and more recent collaborators Charlie Dore-Young and Mike Kolb. Some of Brown’s most affecting material, however, is solitary. Originally included on 2022’s rachel jr., “My Name” is an exercise in gradual tension, building on a modulated bassline and a foreboding acoustic guitar. Although Brown layers in ambling percussion and synth pads, “My Name” fades like mist rising from a lake, never building to a climax and subtle enough to be overlooked.
On another solo recording, “U R Not Sick, Yr Electric,” Brown longs for the past and future simultaneously. “I’d give anything to go back to October,” goes their opening salvo, but by the next verse they’d “give anything to go right to November.” The compilation’s most poignant song, “Me, Missing You,” memorializes a relationship that’s failing purely due to shitty circumstances: “I know I’m hard to get a hold of/’Cause I’ve been held for far too long/But not long enough for the two of us.” Like Brown’s best lyrics, it’s a simple yet trenchant observation about lost love.
Given that You Haven’t Missed Much documents Brown’s work since high school, some of the inclusions feel underbaked. “Yr Kind of Cool” poses a series of repetitive questions (“Do you wanna touch my hair?” “Do you wanna make a joke?”) that yield little depth within the narrative of an age-inappropriate relationship. “Universe,” a song about romance in a computer simulation from 2018’s back at it again, could benefit from more thematic development. But even these weaker tracks provide context for Brown’s growth as a songwriter. Contrasting the typical concision and focus of a Thanks for Coming album, You Haven’t Missed Much plays like a mixtape from a friend eager to hear your thoughts. What it lacks in uniformity, it compensates for in warmth. | 2023-01-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-09T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Danger Collective | January 9, 2023 | 7 | 0709b140-0fd3-4d90-b08d-8bfdc4727722 | Grant Sharples | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grant-sharples/ | |
Composed for the Guggenheim Museum’s retrospective of Maurizio Cattelan, this 2011 performance showcases a band torn between its impulse to entertain and its personal mission to challenge. | Composed for the Guggenheim Museum’s retrospective of Maurizio Cattelan, this 2011 performance showcases a band torn between its impulse to entertain and its personal mission to challenge. | MGMT: 11•11•11 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mgmt-11-11-11/ | 11•11•11 | In 2011 MGMT were still fresh into a risky rebrand. After selling a million copies of their debut Oracular Spectacular, one of the biggest albums of indie rock’s blockbuster era, they swiftly pruned their audience with 2010’s contentious Congratulations, a record alternatingly defended as misunderstood or derided as a cop out. It may be both. Faced with the impossibility of recreating their debut’s success, the duo got ahead of the narrative: They weren’t the band that couldn’t write another “Kids.” They were the band that didn’t want to.
It was against that background of disappointed fans and unconvinced critics that MGMT were commissioned to write an original composition to accompany the Guggenheim Museum’s retrospective of installation artist Maurizio Cattelan. Beneath a canopy of dozens of suspended sculptures, cat skeletons, and taxidermied horses, the duo performed this set of all-new music twice, first at the exhibit’s November 10 private opening, then at its public debut the following day. “The art exhibition is done in a completely original way, so it deserves music which is completely original,” the band said.
The optics certainly worked for a band telegraphing its turn from pop in favor of art. At the time, MGMT were trying to tie their of-the-moment electro-pop to a deeper tradition of psychedelia; a few weeks earlier they’d covered a Pink Floyd deep cut on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and released a compilation of obscure psych music. And on their Guggenheim set, released 11 years later as the live album 11-11-11, they floated new ways to balance their melody-forward sensibilities with their artier, more exploratory instincts.
For a set intended for such a limited audience, there’s a lot of creativity here. At its most inspired, 11-11-11 teases what could have been a lost MGMT album, although in its mellower lulls and boxy acoustics the recording sounds more like what it is: background music for an art show. Generally the songs with vocals are the most formal. “Invocation” and “I Am Not Your Home” cast the oblique shadows of Radiohead, with Andrew VanWyngarden’s voice taking on shades of Thom Yorke’s alien sneer.
The set’s many instrumental pieces, meanwhile, frolic into sheer whimsy. “Forest Elf” plays like celestial on-hold music, while “Whistling Through the Graveyard” conjures old children’s Christmas music by way of circus calliopes and lost exotica records. There’s a generous amount of kitsch, which seems like an appropriate accompaniment for an exhibit of Cattelan, an artist whose work gestures toward the subversive but often scans as cartoonish caprice. The surf-country twang of “Under the Porch” could pass as the theme song to an imagined one-season 1960s Western.
11-11-11 inevitably takes on a different context than it would have if the band hadn’t waited over a decade to release it, since now we know how their arc played out. The duo’s most recent studio album, 2018’s Little Dark Age, marked a return to hook-forward pop fit for dance parties and after bars. As a record, it’s fine, but as a career move, it felt like a retreat. As taxing as MGMT’s left turns could be, they were never dull—they were one of the last big-ticket indie bands that took genuine risks. 11-11-11 invites nostalgia for when this band was still torn between its impulse to entertain and its personal mission to challenge. | 2022-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-22T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | MGMT | November 22, 2022 | 6.7 | 0709b650-ddea-4e14-8054-0857b34a1b29 | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
null | I was driving around with my father, letting him prattle-- unprompted and unabated--about the good ol' days in the country: working on the farm, driving the tractor, drinking Big Red, listening to the radio wafting out into the open fields. Having spent most of his days dreaming of a place of his own out there, where he could sit on the screened porch on a summer night, playing cards, drinking cold beers, listening to old Willie Nelson wavering as his hand played out, it seemed to come true almost ten years ago, when he had his own ranch house. And | Animal Collective: Campfire Songs | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1268-campfire-songs/ | Campfire Songs | I was driving around with my father, letting him prattle-- unprompted and unabated--about the good ol' days in the country: working on the farm, driving the tractor, drinking Big Red, listening to the radio wafting out into the open fields. Having spent most of his days dreaming of a place of his own out there, where he could sit on the screened porch on a summer night, playing cards, drinking cold beers, listening to old Willie Nelson wavering as his hand played out, it seemed to come true almost ten years ago, when he had his own ranch house. And yet, he finally confided to me that he had never, in all those years, drank a beer or played cards, much less sat out on the porch listening to Willie. It was one of the saddest admissions I ever heard from my old man.
I tried to be discreet when I listened to this Campfire Songs CD; I tried to make sure he was beyond earshot of this Animal Collective offshoot, as the vibrations would no doubt come to bear on all those dark, mosquito-filled evenings he missed. Recorded on somebody's porch in rural Maryland, Campfire Songs is supremely relaxed, intent on reveling in the blissful pastoralism longed for by Avey Tare and Geologist's "Good Country: (off of Danse Manatee), yet not by way of its tribal electronics and urban babble. Instead, we have awkwardly plucked strings and arrhythmic, strummed ellipses curving in and out of each other as they lay in the clearing, insects wandering through their hair as the leaves of the tambourine trees rustle on "Queen in my Pictures". The trio of voices, scarcely harmonized, creates a discernible motion, moving in and out of each other's throats, erecting a semblance of structure that stabilizes for a night, even if it's built on the flimsiest of timbres.
As they turn their meandering strums into "Doggy", Campfire Songs almost approach the eroding acoustic glow the Grifters tenaciously shone from Eureka, the embers burning low under the gray ash as the sounds of rain fall and hiss about their little circle. The flames slowly build back, fanned by banjo and mandolin, the sound billowing from smoky green sticks and crackling branches. Somewhere a plane circles, droning high overhead, revealing open space in the lo-fi recording.
"Two Corvettes" is more content to idle, absorbing the night air. Just when you think they're falling asleep, the acoustic guitars stumble back with a clenched rattling, their voices turning more animalistic, wailing just past the light of the fire. If the Oldham boys had clopped up in ostrich skin boots to Buzzy Linhart's loft space around 4am at Frank's to holler out "Come A Little Dog"-- still haunted by the coyote spirits that bellow up in the Hill Country-- they may as well have blazed over to this back porch instead. But when the Campfires start to channel "Taking Care of Business" while the katydids yammer in the distance, it hits you: these are city slickers out on a weekend trip.
These boys are taking Willie Nelso's golf balls and cracking them open, slowly unraveling the rubber band and nylon twine wrap until they arrive at the gooey gray center of it all, tentatively biting into the blue goop once dumped into Whiskey River. High on said toxins, they lose themselves in a drifting, imaginary suite, a patch of fantasy that made this city boy pine for a beautiful place out in the country. | 2003-03-31T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2003-03-31T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | Catsup Plate | March 31, 2003 | 7.1 | 070a82f7-48de-430b-9ad4-f081a6ac7fb3 | Andy Beta | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/ | null |
After more than five years spent battling media hypocrisy (and most of his family), hip-hop's most notorious white rapper returns with his first full-length since his well-received performance and Oscar-winning musical contribution to 8 Mile. | After more than five years spent battling media hypocrisy (and most of his family), hip-hop's most notorious white rapper returns with his first full-length since his well-received performance and Oscar-winning musical contribution to 8 Mile. | Eminem: Encore | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2772-encore/ | Encore | In 2000, Eminem was frequently vilified as a hatemonger, homophobe, and misogynist; in 2002, he was on the shortlist for Time magazine's "Man of the Year." America loves a tale of redemption almost as much as one of comeuppance, but at the start of the decade you'd have gotten pretty long odds on the media and cultural elite spinning the Marshall Mathers yarn as the former before the latter. And yet, somewhere between hugging Elton onstage at the Grammys and sending that guy in the Pistons jersey to pick up his Oscar, Em was feted by many of America's best-known cultural crits, columnist, and pundits: Frank Rich, Andrew Sarris, Maureen Dowd, Greil Marcus, Neal Gabler, and Paul Slansky (among others) either laid garlands at his feet or rhapsodized about the supposed transformation of the rapper/actor.
The epistolary weepie "Stan" and the survivalist self-helpisms of "Lose Yourself" played a part in the slow mainstream media embrace of Eminem, but it's that "slash" that seemed to complete the embrace. For whatever reason, a film career can do that-- maybe it's the ability for a lengthy narrative to be more explicitly mutli-dimensional or maybe it's just lazy thinking and knee-jerk reactionary assumptions about pop, but you're now as likely to see Em torn down on Vibe than The New York Times Magazine.
Well, Maureen, Andrew, and Greil, get ready to be excited; most of the rest of you-- the ones who've been held enthrall by Em's complex games of shifting his identity, challenging hypocrisy, baiting liberal guilt, and spitting deft rhymes with his labyrinthine flow-- prepare for disappointment: Encore is a fourth fascinating record from Eminem, but it's also easily his weakest and, in many ways, tamest album to date.
Eminem's reaction to respectability seems to have been to move in two different directions: introspection and reconciliation on the one side, and bodily fluid-obsessed humor on the other. Tracks in which Em offers confessions, explanations, and apologies for previous comments and his participation in high-profile beefs share time here with belching, farting, vomiting, and urinating. He's also scrubbed his lyrics of homophobia (instead, the fascinating and eyebrow-raising homoeroticism hinted at on The Eminem Show-- and literally fleshed out in his music video cross-dressing-- colors a handful of his songs here) and, save a few blasts at Kim, any elements of misogyny.
Therefore, if Encore is anything, it's a transitional record. After an image-confounding trio of pseudo self-titled records, the Eminem of Encore is wounded and weary; he's removing the layers of meta, still laughing and nodding but rarely winking, and not disappearing behind what The Village Voice's Frank Kogan once labeled Em's lyrical "trapdoors and escape hatches." Instead, the LP is the sound of a man who seems bored of re-branding and playing celebrity games, and often seems to be rapping only to entertain himself with little regard for any potential audience. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Despite the album's pronounced maturity/infantilism divide, it's a different dichotomy that characterizes the album's highlights: Here, Em is at his best when he's either more focused than even before or at his most scattered and playful. Unfortunately, most of the tracks that don't veer toward either extreme are plodding and unremarkable.
Much of the first third of the record features Eminem unloading his emotional weight. Childhood tale "Yellow Brick Road" is the closest thing to biographical narrative he's ever done, and his remorseful explanation of the situation around which he, as a hurt kid, lashed out in a few racially-tinged rhymes at a black girl is not only compelling but effectively diffuses Source editor Benzino's long-running attack campaign on the rapper. It's also Em's best exploration of living his life in the rare space between America's too-wide racial divide. Fittingly, it leads into "Like Toy Soldiers", a public hand-wringing over the feuds that Em and 50 Cent have been drawn into, the consequences of these battles, and-- most importantly-- the toll they've taken, both physically and emotionally. The martial beat is a bit heavy-handed, but it's counterbalanced by the pleasantly surprising chorus' sample of Martika's "Toy Soldiers", perhaps a nod to either Kanye's helium-vocaled samples or the 00s trend toward trance-pop covers of 80s hits.
Em also shines when he spins well off his axis, as he does on both the hilarious "Rain Man" and the R. Kelly/Triumph the Insult Comic Dog-baiting "Ass Like That", songs that both tell a lot of the same sort of celebrity- or redneck-oriented jokes as previous Em tracks, but have new punchlines and almost completely skip the need for structure. The songs sound more like mixtape or freestyle material than album tracks, and they're better off for it.
Outside of those tracks and a few lively guest spots from the usual suspects (50 Cent, Nate, Dre, Obie-- hey, where's Proof?), things get sketchy. "Mosh"-- sadly, not yet completely past its sell-by date-- seems more like a plodding dirge here among the spry string of tracks that surround it. "Just Lose It" is still most notable for dancing with paedo and homoerotic imagery: It's the one track here that seems as potentially multilayered as the best of The Marhsall Mathers LP, yet it's still more curio than anything else. On one of the two Kim tracks, Em confuses domestic violence with commitment, an awkward flirtation with the idea that you only hurt the ones you love. Elsewhere, with their relationship now more deteriorated than ever, poor Kim only rates a "you make me puke" where she once was murder ballad "worthy."
Sonically, the record is more of the same: simple minor-chord piano lines, Dre's elastic funk, Em's clicky and too-often weak drums. A "Crazy on You" sample is wasted on a weak track ("Crazy in Love") and the belching chorus of "My 1st Single" threatens to pulls the rug out from under an otherwise durable song. The advantage of Em going back to same musical well is that he's become so adept at riding these types of beats that his delivery and tangible personality are compelling almost no matter what the content of his rhymes; he even mixes things up with drastic shifts in cadence-- sometimes within the same track-- and occasional impersonations.
In the promotional run-up to Encore's release, Eminem has been dressed in his courtroom best, suits and wire-rims-- again, great for the Manhattan media, but another MOR flag. At 30-plus, he's also worried about his legacy, trying to mobilize his version of a live-free-or-die army, and the record even drops very vague yet odd hints at retirement. Em has specifically said that the curtain isn't coming down, but the almost afterthought with which the record is framed (packaged and titled more like an addendum to The Eminem Show rather than a follow up with a two-year gap), its jaw-droppingly weak single, and the smoke-and-mirrors of coasting on talent and skill indicates that he either needs a breather or a new well of inspiration. | 2004-11-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2004-11-11T01:00:01.000-05:00 | Rap | Interscope / Shady / Aftermath | November 11, 2004 | 6.5 | 070acee7-d72a-4999-a94b-f0eb1745f0e5 | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
After more than a decade away, the New York screamo band draws inspiration from keyboard-led, laser-show prog on this challenging and rewarding reunion album. | After more than a decade away, the New York screamo band draws inspiration from keyboard-led, laser-show prog on this challenging and rewarding reunion album. | Gospel: The Loser | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/gospel-the-loser/ | The Loser | If you’re going to take a 16-year break from releasing music, your new material might as well acknowledge it. Gospel came out of nowhere in 2005 with their ambitious prog-screamo debut, The Moon Is a Dead World, and then vanished back into the ether. The guys who returned last November with the single “S.R.O.” are not the same spry, melodramatic twentysomethings they were the last time we heard them, and they make no effort to conceal that. Vocalist Adam Dooling opens the song with the reluctant revelation you might have when you see a new wrinkle, feel a new ache, or wonder when your grays started outnumbering your other hairs: “He’s just an old soul living in a young man's body/Now is it a middle-aged man’s body/Or a slightly older man’s body?/He’s just an old man living in an old man’s body.”
It’s not just Dooling’s lyrics that hint at the years gone by; his voice, once an open-wounded wail, is now a ragged scar, full of a grit that usually precludes a band from being deemed “screamo.” Gospel arrived when the genre was in full swing, their debut building on the template of pioneers like Orchid and Saetia while taking the emotive sound to stranger places than commercially successful contemporaries like Thursday and the Used. Their connection to progressive rock was more in spirit than in practice—sure, they made a few epic-length songs and were fond of heady compositions, but there was no mistaking The Moon Is a Dead World for Close to the Edge, even during the parts Dooling wasn’t shredding his vocal cords. But The Loser, on the other hand? *Slaps car roof* There’s a whole lot of ’70s laser show prog in this baby.
Jon Pastir, credited with keyboards and guitars on Gospel’s debut, joined the band when all but one of the songs were written. The song in question, “A Golden Dawn,” just so happens to have the album’s wildest keyboard solo. In old live videos, Pastir hops on keys every now and then but mostly plays rhythm guitar—on The Loser, I’m not sure he ever even touches a guitar. His playing takes centerstage on the album, throwing it back to prog’s heyday with hi-sheen tones on “Hyper” that recall Rush’s synthy mid-’80s, a mellotron outro on “S.R.O.” reminiscent of early King Crimson, and on nearly every song, an overdriven organ that, apart from its association with ’70s AOR, also gives Gospel their first-ever connection to the genre of music with which they share their name. Although Dooling shreds like he still has a rhythm guitarist backing him up, Pastir is The Loser’s leading light—Rick Wakeman clad in flannel instead of a cape.
Ragged, middle-aged screamo and keyboard-led prog make for odd bedfellows, but somehow, Gospel pull it off. The dare-I-say jaunty “Tango” sounds like Drive Like Jehu covering Emerson Lake and Palmer’s jazzy “Bitches Crystal” but somehow doesn’t suck. Drummer Vinny Roseboom and bassist Sean Miller deserve credit for not letting this thing fly off the rails, with Roseboom in particular managing to keep his dizzying, fill-heavy style intact without adding to the sometimes-confusing chaos of overlapping guitar and keyboard wig-outs.
If you can vibe with The Loser’s jarring marriage of genres, there’s also a rewarding narrative in the lyrics. Dooling sets his sights on white dudes over a certain age. He seems to be talking about himself on the aforementioned “S.R.O.” lyric, but later in the same song, he offers some larger context: “But your father’s still around/And his straight white version of events/Isn’t how this shit goes down.” We get more of that sentiment on “White Spaces,” which contrasts that demographic’s fondness for ownership with their inability to own up to their wrongs (“For all you own/You won’t own this”), as well as “Metallic Olives,” which lashes out at flat earthers and longs for praxis. Closer “Warm Bed,” which is the closest the album gets to the prettier sounds of Gospel’s debut, ironically carries its biggest divorced dad energy. “Oh, let’s hear it for the boy,” Dooling sings, quoting the Footloose soundtrack, “How he makes a rotten man.” Gospel’s unorthodox approach makes their return feel even more poignant: In the past, their sporadic reunion shows have helped friends and family pay medical bills, and now, The Loser is something that will challenge aging screamo fans both musically and existentially. | 2022-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-05-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Dog Knights | May 26, 2022 | 7.6 | 0713f800-5629-4fe1-ae84-737f9991d3ec | Patrick Lyons | https://pitchfork.com/staff/patrick-lyons/ | |
The Detroit punks Tyvek flex their mastery over their multifaceted sound on their new album—these wordy, detail-stuffed songs are fast and staid, intense and gentle, paranoid and curious. | The Detroit punks Tyvek flex their mastery over their multifaceted sound on their new album—these wordy, detail-stuffed songs are fast and staid, intense and gentle, paranoid and curious. | Tyvek: Origin of What | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22584-origin-of-what/ | Origin of What | Tyvek have been going for over a decade, and at different points throughout the Detroit punks’ tenure, at least 22 people have counted among their ranks. Kevin Boyer’s voice, guitar, collaged cover artwork, and lyrics have always been at the band’s center, but he’s quick to point out the obvious—that each contributing member brings something unique to the table. “Tyvek is always changing,” Boyer told Maximum Rocknroll. “There’s always a period of relearning, half-retracing our steps, but we always find ourselves in a different place from where we left off.” They change their approach semi-regularly, but they don’t sound like a brand-new band with every release.
The band’s sound is fairly well-defined. It’s loud punk music, guided by Boyer’s shouted abstract poems. Sometimes the songs are faster, sometimes they’re more anthemic, sometimes they’re choppy, and sometimes they’re all over the place. It really depends on who’s playing. Beyond the more visible albums and singles released by bigger indie labels, they’ve put out piles of CDRs and tapes. Then there’s the sprawl of music released by the members’ other bands. Mountains and Rainbows and the Intended, for example, both had strong debut albums arrive this year. Members of Protomartyr and Saturday Looks Good to Me have played in Tyvek. The list goes on like that for a while.
Tyvek’s new album Origin of What is an acknowledgement of the band’s history; it features seven musicians from across the band’s lineups. Every new song shuffles the players, and other than Boyer, the only constant is Fred Thomas, who recorded the album and drums on 10 of the 12 tracks. Thomas and Boyer go way back: Thomas recorded a 2002 Boyer solo project, and more recently, worked on Tyvek’s On Triple Beams. These two anchors become important when Origin of What weaves between slower, paced material and all-out bashers. The opening two tracks “Tip to Tail” and “Can’t Exist” fall at the rowdier end of the spectrum, showing Tyvek at the height of their kinetic earworm powers. It’s also a one-two that shows a huge range in guitar tone—bleary echoing guitars linger in the background of the former while the latter is all crunch and distortion.
The faster, punchier stuff is counterbalanced by songs like “Origin of What”—a six-minute track with a more gradual, dense tread that addresses U.S. Steel and the decline of the Euro. Boyer has talked about the importance of the “subtle tics” in Tyvek songs, which is true—details and texture are always key to the character of their records. There's a moment on “Choose Once” when a once-prominent vocal is suddenly swallowed beneath the song’s huge primary guitar line, as if Boyer’s mic was kicked over. Then there’s “Tyvek Chant,” a song comprised of repeated screams and guitars that seem to come through an AM radio feed, abstracted by crackles and fuzz.
Several pieces on Origin of What show that the Tyvek operation is generally more subtle than their shout-along, high-speed rock‘n’roll masterworks might suggest. “Underwater Three Dub” is the most gentle point of the record—a collaboration between Boyer, Thomas, and Shelley Salant (who makes spacey, hypnotic instrumental guitar records under the name Shells). While this melody floats and shimmers, Boyer sings a mantra of sorts: “No limits. Smash limits.” Aided by the instincts of his collaborators, Boyer threads together these wordy, detail-stuffed songs that are fast and staid, intense and gentle, paranoid and curious. Punk can be uniform and boring. By spreading out and proving adept at several modes, Tyvek show that this music can be plenty inclusive—that there are no limits. | 2016-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-09T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | In the Red | November 9, 2016 | 7.8 | 0714703d-fa9f-48cb-99fe-147689c6401a | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
The NYC band’s first album in seven years is sluggish and slight, rendering their signature sound as background music. | The NYC band’s first album in seven years is sluggish and slight, rendering their signature sound as background music. | The Strokes: The New Abnormal | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-strokes-the-new-abnormal/ | The New Abnormal | Just as the clock struck midnight on a new decade, Julian Casablancas delivered the news that Strokes fans had been waiting to hear. “The 2010s, whatever the fuck they’re called, we took ‘em off,” he announced at the band’s New Year’s Eve show in Brooklyn. “And now we’ve been unfrozen and we’re back.” No matter where the last 10 years have left you—Angles defender, Voidz apologist, Meet Me in the Bathroom nostalgist who gave up hope a long time ago—it was easy to feel a trickle of excitement. After all, what Strokes fan wouldn’t want to believe this band’s spotty recent output was the result of a long-dormant period and not because, you know, they all hate each other and have a dozen other projects they’d rather focus on? And what better time to launch their comeback than a holiday marked by great expectations and even greater partying?
The New Abnormal, the Strokes’ sixth album and first in seven years, mostly just feels like a hangover. It’s sluggish and slight, and the strongest hooks are so familiar that they require additional writing credits for the ’80s hits they copy note-for-note (Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” in “Bad Decisions,” Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” in “Eternal Summer”). Of course, the Strokes have never been subtle with their references—that’s part of the fun—but they’ve become increasingly uninterested in the tight, classic songcraft that once felt entirely their own. With producer Rick Rubin, a presence so hands-off as to feel merely symbolic, their signature sound is rendered as background music, a set of bleary-eyed mood pieces, all hovering around the five-minute mark before fizzling out with a shrug.
A generous read is that it’s a style they have never attempted before: pushing their songs to their limits, maintaining a state of Zen in their machinelike interplay. In the nearly 20 years since Is This It, the Strokes have never quite found a way to successfully expand on their blueprint. There are the loungey, drum-less ballads you can expect to find about halfway through all their tracklists (“Ask Me Anything,” “Call Me Back,” this album’s first single “At the Door”). And then there are the proggy, metallic experiments that Casablancas now seems content to channel through Voidz, a project he has plainly admitted is where his passion lies. Historically, neither mode has led to anyone’s favorite Strokes songs. And so the best moments on The New Abnormal, like the genuinely pretty “Ode to the Mets,” feel like a step in the right direction. When everything locks into place, it’s like watching an old pinball machine light up, one level at a time.
Another small victory is that Casablancas’ falsetto has improved. What once felt like a novelty (at best) actually leads to some striking moments. The verses of “Eternal Summer” are sleek and exciting—that is, until the unfortunate Austin Powers impression of a bridge waltzes in to kill everyone’s buzz. “The Adults Are Talking,” with its steady build and soaring climax, adds to their legacy of great album openers. After his distracted performances on Angles and Comedown Machine, Casablancas now sounds tasked with keeping spirits light; from the slurred Sinatra croon in “Not the Same Anymore” to his pop-punk sneer in “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus,” he seems up for the challenge.
But the spark fades quickly, and you’re left with a set of promising ideas for Strokes songs with their fire stomped out. Casablancas has spoken about a politicized edge to his recent lyrics, but his allusions to the climate crisis (“Eternal Summer”) and body-shaming (“Selfless”) fail to inspire much urgency in his bandmates. And while their trademark fuzz once made their albums sound like well-loved mixtapes handed down through the decades, the same quality now makes you feel like they’re piecing together scraps. Disjointed songs like “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus” and “Selfless” literally grind to a halt and start over after each chorus, like they tried to figure out a better transition and then just gave up.
“You’re not the same anymore/Don’t want to play that game anymore,” Casablancas sings in a ballad near the end of the album. And why should he? No band deserves to be held to the standard they set in their twenties, and no fan should want to hear their heroes rehash old poses for a quick paycheck. The current democratic nature of the Strokes (the music is credited to “The Strokes,” while the first three records were credited exclusively to Casablancas) means that simply bringing ideas to fruition requires more compromise—that is to say, more work. It also means that a band who should be settling into their legacy is still suffering from growing pains. “There was never a feeling of: we fucking made it! Roll credits!”, Albert Hammond Jr. recently confessed about their rise to fame. “It was always this kind of half-anxious, half-exciting ‘What the hell is happening?’” For all its faults, The New Abnormal might capture how the Strokes are feeling: not ready to fade out, not primed for a comeback. Right now, they’re just way too tired.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | RCA | April 10, 2020 | 5.7 | 071738dd-d7f3-409e-ba0d-2eaf9f1bafbe | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Danny Brown's XXX was a concept album about desperation and Old is a concept album about existential confusion. Growing up might not be as dramatic a subject as burning out, but it's more relatable to most of us, and it's no accident that it resulted in the best and most resonant album of the rapper's career. | Danny Brown's XXX was a concept album about desperation and Old is a concept album about existential confusion. Growing up might not be as dramatic a subject as burning out, but it's more relatable to most of us, and it's no accident that it resulted in the best and most resonant album of the rapper's career. | Danny Brown: Old | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18565-danny-brown-old/ | Old | Danny Brown's XXX was a concept album about desperation; "If this shit don't work, nigga, I failed at life!" he wailed on the opening song. Old is a concept album about existential confusion. Danny Brown has not failed at life—he's independently successful, with a fervent fan base both inside and out of rap. Now he's got to sort out how to best continue living. It might not be as dramatic a subject as flaming out, but it's more relatable to most of us, and it's maybe no accident that it resulted in the best and most resonant album of Brown's career.
In preparing critics and fans, Brown went to great lengths to warn us not to expect another XXX—"If people are just looking for dick-sucking jokes, there isn't too many of them," he said back in January. "I listened to Old every day and thought, ‘I need to make this more entertaining," he told Pitchfork later. When I ran into him at SXSW and introduced myself, he gave me a quizzical smile: "I'm challenging ya'll with the next one," he joked, looking slightly uneasy. The irony of Old, of course, is that Danny Brown's version of a sober, measured, mature album still features plenty of lines about snorting crushed pills, throwing up in hotel sinks, and smoking so much kush you feel yourself falling off of the earth. Some things haven't changed.
The album is divided into a "Side A" and a "Side B," an act of aesthetic devotion that signals Danny Brown's unusual investment in the arcana of music fandom. Last year, he famously told a bewildered A$AP Rocky that one of his heroes was Arthur Lee before lecturing him on the merits of Forever Changes. The structure here suggests two LP sides, neatly divided, but one of the best things about Old is how mixed up it is—Brown's past, his present, his deranged side, his reflective side, his party songs and his nightmares. "Problems in my past haunt my future and the present," he moans on "Clean Up". The album is 19 songs, ranging across so much emotional terrain that it almost needs to be tackled in stretches.
Side A contains the heaviest, most harrowing material, but the demons he exorcises there don't stay put. Bad memories pop up everywhere on Old, including the louder, more festival-ready second half. The album's structure pokes at the notion of forward motion: At the end of the first track, an unrelentingly ugly crack-sale reminiscence taking place in an abandoned house in Detroit, A-Trak scratches in a hook from "New Era", a song off of Brown's 2010 release The Hybrid. An incident Brown alluded to on XXX's "Fields"—"mommy gave me food stamps, told me buy some Wonderbread/ On the the way, these niggas jumped me, left with knots in my head"—gets expanded to song-length on "Wonderbread" and then referenced again at the end of the album. The cumulative message is layered: 1) Stop asking for the old Danny Brown, because I've been working double-time trying to escape him, and 2) Stop asking for the old Danny Brown, because he's obviously still here.
There are multiple "old Danny Browns," as well: There's the kid from "Torture", whose mind "ticked off, desensitized to a lot of things" after watching "unk beatin on my auntie" and a fiend "damn near burn his top lip off." There's the crack-dealer, who Brown is similarly eager to dispense with: "This the last time I'mma tell it/ Wanna hear it? Here it go," he says on "Side B," before launching into the details of his old trade. And there's the drug abuser, whom he catalogs unsparingly on "Clean Up", ignoring text messages from his daughter while he gets high in a hotel room.
This is a complicated narrative to keep running but Brown is equal to the task. In his berserk originality, writerly flair, emotional impact, and old-fashioned craft, Danny Brown belongs in any conversation about the best rappers working, and he's at the top of his game here. His rapping is abrasive and visceral, but it's also musical, a quality he doesn't get much credit for because of his vocal tone. Listen to the way he rolls the word sounds "fucked up" and "knuckles" on "Dubstep" off of a perfect little woodpecker-stutter of percussion. Or his subdued performance on "Lonely" featuring a fluid, airy beat by Paul White built from two Morice Benin samples.
The production is richly textured, unlikely, and surprising, solidifying Brown's left-field taste. He bends your ear back rapping over conventionally gritty hip-hop tracks from Oh No and Paul White and tackles a range of things that most rappers would run from, including the Rustie-produced electro-squelch "Way Up Here", a cluttered, frantic beat that feels expressly designed to trip rappers up. Ab-Soul and Brown muscle the octopus-armed thing to the ground. He barks over airhorn-shrill party anthems like "Dip"and "Handstand" and broods conversationally on the Charli XCX-featuring "Float On". Brown has always made a compelling case for being weird, but he's never sounded this realized or confident in his weirdness before.
"Float On", which closes the album, is an "Elevators"-like lope, complete with woodblock knock, that finds Brown clearing away the static and bearing down on the only thing he's certain about: "Nothing else matter except my next rhyme," he murmurs. Remembering a time when he had "music in my heart, but my thoughts wouldn't listen," he prays to get old so that he can "see my influence on this genre of music." It's the humblest and most powerful wish I've heard on a record all year. | 2013-10-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-03T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Fool’s Gold | October 3, 2013 | 8.7 | 071798ec-0d0c-44c2-a683-1d1170546bae | Jayson Greene | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jayson-greene/ | null |
The soundtrack for a new Amazon Original series seeks to emulate the magic of Fleetwood Mac. More often than not, it ends up sounding like a Broadway tribute. | The soundtrack for a new Amazon Original series seeks to emulate the magic of Fleetwood Mac. More often than not, it ends up sounding like a Broadway tribute. | Daisy Jones & the Six: Aurora | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/daisy-jones-and-the-six-aurora/ | Aurora | In Daisy Jones & the Six, the bestselling novel inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s tumultuous history, Taylor Jenkins Reid writes an album’s worth of song lyrics to hint at her fictional band’s pathos. In the climactic “Regret Me,” frontwoman Daisy Jones delivers a devastating burn to her co-lead and songwriting partner, Billy Dunne: “When you think of me, I hope it ruins rock’n’roll.” It’s a terrible line, but in the book it’s met with shock and awe. Reid’s lyrics are packed with zingers capturing the vocalists’ romantic tension, a strain that ultimately spells the Six’s undoing.
“Regret Me” gets the full studio treatment in the Amazon Original series, an adaptation of Reid’s book. While the TV version of that song is outfitted with new lyrics, the barbs are similarly clunky: “Go ahead and regret me/But I’m beating you to it, dude.” Still, the soundtrack album accompanying the series, Aurora, is a can’t-lose proposition for producer Blake Mills. With crack session players and a fathomless budget behind him, he gets to chase his own Laurel Canyon masterpiece; the fictional conceit provides cover when he falls short. Contributors on this record include Marcus Mumford, Madison Cunningham, and Roger Joseph Manning Jr. The fact that they got the Jackson Browne to write music for the adaptation of a supermarket novel says more about the record biz than Amazon’s mockumentary possibly could.
At its most ambitious, Aurora approximates the incremental trajectories of Fleetwood Mac’s late-’70s work. “Let Me Down Easy” and “Regret Me” careen through striking melodic pivots, anchored by warm Rhodes keys and the vocal harmonies of actors Sam Claflin and Riley Keough, who play Jones and Dunne in the series. On “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb),” the acoustic chords and kick drum gather momentum en route to a soaring single-chord guitar solo. It’s a clear nod to Rumours’ “The Chain,” but the degree of intricacy—not to mention the bravura guitar work—makes for a rewarding homage.
Mills knows that trying to replicate Fleetwood Mac’s opus is a fool’s errand, so he hedges his bets. The title track is more redolent of the Nashville machine than Laurel Canyon, and the vocal duets betray a Broadway sheen. On “Look at Us Now,” Claflin’s exaggerated vibrato fails to compensate for underwritten lyrics: “I don’t know who I am, baby, baby, baby/Do you know who you are? Is it out of our hands?” There’s no symbolism or mystique, no white-winged doves or Rhiannons—it’s hard to imagine any of these adult-contemporary show tunes cracking the FM rotation, let alone in 1977.
For the most part, Keough and Claflin sing the way they act—sweet and earnest, with no discernible angst. Keough plays Jones as she appears in Reid’s novel: a tressed enigma with an ineffable darkness about her, drawn to Billy against her better instincts. Claflin never nails the California-by-way-of-Pittsburgh accent, but his hair looks great. Aurora’s finale “No Words,” an inane ode to writer’s block, typifies the series’ portrayal of music-making. The prosaic writing mirrors the chirpy dialogue, the throes of desire and rejection reduced to window dressing.
But Mills and the band really go for it on “The River.” A propulsive, full-bodied production, it deploys an unabashed melody and succinct metaphors, relishing a moody post-chorus and roomy instrumental breaks. The verse structure maximizes the vocal duet; for once, Keough sounds like a rock singer instead of an actor playing one on TV. As she vamps through the breakdown bridge, it’s easy to imagine her whirling around in one of Stevie Nicks’ bangled getups.
In Reid’s novel, Aurora is the soft-rock holy grail, an achievement that transforms American music and rends its creators in the process. The series is burdened by the same strictures as folk musicals Begin Again and Juliet, Naked, not to mention low-prestige cable dramas Vinyl and Dave: In dramatizing the creative process and the difficulty of genius, the work becomes secondary. Logistically, a narrative hinging on transcendent music is undone when the songs are just pretty good. The album struggles to apprehend Fleetwood Mac’s audacity, conflating a ‘70s rock pinnacle with easy-listening ballads. Aurora is bold only as far as tribute-band supergroups go. | 2023-03-07T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-07T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Atlantic | March 7, 2023 | 6.6 | 0719356e-c26a-4a7c-b45a-c68aa68ee875 | Pete Tosiello | https://pitchfork.com/staff/pete-tosiello/ | |
Justin Timberlake’s fifth album is a huge misstep for the pop star. It is warm, indulgent, inert, and vacuous. | Justin Timberlake’s fifth album is a huge misstep for the pop star. It is warm, indulgent, inert, and vacuous. | Justin Timberlake: Man of the Woods | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/justin-timberlake-man-of-the-woods/ | Man of the Woods | It’s remarkable how few ideas are contained within this hour-plus Blue Ridge Mountains mood board of an album. Man of the Woods is a misstep large enough to merit relitigating Justin Timberlake’s status as a pop superstar. How much of his career should we chalk up to fortune, privilege, and an essential malleability? Is working with Pharrell Williams and Timbaland—pantheon-level producers who collaborated extensively with Timberlake at or near the peak of their powers, and continue to do so—an act of creative genius, or just kismet? There may be no definite answers. But Man of the Woods’ failure invites the questions.
Timberlake wants to be thought of as an innovator. He struck gold at the beginning of his solo career with “Cry Me a River,” an icy amalgam of beat-boxing and Gregorian chants that’s still thrilling 16 years later. He had the gall to name an album FutureSex/LoveSounds and filled it with pop inventive enough to live up to the title. He embraced auteurist extravagance across the messy, occasionally brilliant halves of The 20/20 Experience. When he unveiled Man of the Woods, his first album in five years, he framed his new music as the product of an audacious fusion of Southern sounds. Its problems invite the listener to scrap this narrative and stitch together a different story. Forget the album’s trailer—in which Timberlake comes out of the closet as a fire-building, creek-wading, baby-clutching Jeremiah Johnson cosplayer—or the baffling videos for singles like “Filthy” and the Migos-meets-preppers joint “Supplies.” It’s all there in the music: warm, indulgent, inert, and vacuous.
Man of the Woods rings hollow with familial contentment: Timberlake’s wife, the actress Jessica Biel, sings or speaks on a handful of tracks, and closer “Young Man” comes complete with a cooing feature from Timberlake’s toddler. Even the credits have a no-new-friends feel: The majority of the album was made in tandem with the Neptunes, Timbaland, and Danja, the chief architects of his sound from Justified onwards. Instead of surging forward with a new vision for pop music, it leans on the sounds and genres that have become American comfort food: country, soul, funk, disco, gospel.
Matrimonial and paternal pride suit Timberlake nicely under the right circumstances, and they’ve certainly brought him success in the past. The 20/20 Experience highlight “Mirrors” is a genuinely touching tribute to a partner without whom Timberlake feels incomplete, and a treacly bit of disco cut from the Trolls soundtrack became one of the biggest hits of his career. There are a few endearing moments on Man of the Woods that operate in this mode, songs anchored by one soupçon of detail that keeps them from dissipating into pure meaninglessness. He recounts an awkward introduction on the swaggering “Higher Higher,” one that ends with Timberlake and his partner dancing to Madonna’s “Lucky Star.” The late-’70s Bee Gees throb of “Montana” is the perfect fit for a romantic—and potentially hallucinogenic—evening in the mountains. And while “Breeze Off the Pond” leans on a layered-harmony trick Timberlake’s been using for a solid decade, it also invites you to imagine him taking a stoned canoe trip soundtracked by “Tiny Dancer.” Timberlake is such an abjectly poor lyricist that scraps like these feel like manna from heaven.
Too much of Man of the Woods is musically and thematically shallow; at 66 minutes, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep. There’s a point midway through the album—right around the threadbare-shirt hymnal “Flannel”—where you realize “modern Americana with 808s” wasn’t just a cute tagline: That’s really the whole idea, and it quickly wears thin. Timberlake may have yanked back the reins on the interminable song lengths of The 20/20 Experience, but many of these tracks still manage to overstay their welcome by a minute or two. They don’t have the hooks or the dynamism to justify their continued existence: phrases get recycled, breakdowns feel like intrusions from completely different songs, grooves are sought but remain undiscovered. “Midnight Summer Jam” is a sub-Robin Thicke boogie with a sub-John Popper harmonica solo; “Sauce” is Beyoncé’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself” cut with a jug full of pond water.
And there’s no refuge from the lyrics, which in many places engender the same mix of emotions you’d confront upon walking in on your parents having sex. Timberlake never quite oozed virility—he topped out somewhere around “Hollister model breaking bad”—but this aspect of his persona has aged particularly poorly. The horny android moans and tiger growls of “Filthy” are sensual and elegant compared to “Sauce,” which invites you to imagine a partner’s “pink” pressing up against Timberlake’s “purple.” The title track features this charming depiction of foreplay: “But then your hands talkin’, fingers walkin’/Down your legs, hey, there’s the faucet.” He takes a break from amassing iodine tablets on “Supplies” to reminisce about an early morning flight home, “just to show up and hear your sounds (The multiple times!)” That last phrase is delivered with a puff of Auto-Tuned harmony and driven home when the beat cuts out for a split-second, which is just enough time for you to realize how excited he is about making his wife orgasm more than once. Whether or not the faucet is running at this point remains unclear.
This isn’t just prudishness at work, either. The songs that have nothing to do with coital bliss are just as lifeless. “Say Something,” a duet with beloved Nashville star Chris Stapleton, defies every attempt to discern some kind of through line or coherent message; the profound conclusion reached during the bridge is that “Sometimes the greatest way to say something/Is to say nothing at all.”
Father-to-son message “Young Man” is similarly devoid of any meaningful advice. According to Timberlake, here’s a short list of things a young man should know: stand for something; don’t back down; don’t act out; don’t stay down; you’re gonna break somebody’s heart, because “that’s what we do.” Other artists of Timberlake’s stature have written songs in this same vein imbued with anxiety, regret, and hard-earned wisdom. When they’re done right, they glow with the unconditional love parents feel for their children. “Young Man” is an insipid birthday card by comparison.
Timberlake is performing at his second Super Bowl halftime show as a solo artist this weekend. He’s returning to the stage as an old family friend, one unblemished by the “wardrobe malfunction” that kneecapped Janet Jackson 14 years ago. The incident is a microcosm of Timberlake’s career: At no point has his ascendance been interrupted by anything like negative consequences. He played a pivotal role in one of this century’s defining TV controversies and was happily invited back to the scene of the crime little more than a decade later. He rush-recorded and released a massive two-part album to fulfill contractual obligations and was welcomed back into the music industry with arms wide open. He wore a full denim suit and cowboy hat on the red carpet; he played a crucial role in The Love Guru. None of it mattered. When you skate through your life unscathed, you accumulate hubris. And it takes a lot of hubris to make an album like Man of the Woods. | 2018-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-02-02T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | February 2, 2018 | 3.8 | 07193c75-9b98-40e6-9b07-f9eed762b027 | Jamieson Cox | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jamieson-cox/ | |
The acclaimed jazz bassist’s latest project, a three-part suite inspired by meditation and healing practices, seeks to alleviate the stress and upheaval of a pandemic year. | The acclaimed jazz bassist’s latest project, a three-part suite inspired by meditation and healing practices, seeks to alleviate the stress and upheaval of a pandemic year. | Esperanza Spalding: TRIANGLE | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/esperanza-spalding-triangle/ | TRIANGLE | With her latest three-song suite, Esperanza Spalding follows a long line of Black artists who have sought to bring out music’s untapped potential for healing—from the rich oeuvres of John and Alice Coltrane to the John Coltrane Church that still stands over five decades later in San Francisco. Inspired by a far-reaching array of influences (Sufism, Black American and South Indian music), Spalding etched out early versions of the tracks and shared them with would-be collaborators. After consulting with music therapists, neuroscientists, and other practitioners, the resulting TRIANGLE suite is both meditative and operatic by design: Each “formwela” (song) not only elicits a different emotional response, but also attests to an intended outcome and benefit for the listener.
In recent years, Spalding’s albums have, in one form or another, delved into the connections between our physical and metaphysical selves: In 2016, Emily's D+Evolution lent a voice to an alter ego derived from her middle name, while each song on 2018’s 12 Little Spells corresponded to a particular body part. In the years since her breakout Grammy win for Best New Artist in 2011, Spalding has—like her predecessors—emerged as a vessel for boundless creativity and experimentalism. Her longtime bandmates (and fellow Berklee alumni), drummer Justin Tyson and pianist Leo Genovese, provide the ground required for her to soar and be more fully present in the music. With TRIANGLE, the 36-year-old singer and songwriter’s intentions are omnipresent, exploring the deeper, more tangible healing properties that music can provide.
The seeds for TRIANGLE were planted not long after the release of 12 Little Spells. Taking a leave from her work at Harvard, Spalding aided the renowned multi-reedist and composer Wayne Shorter, then in ailing health, and contributed the libretto for his opera (slated for release in fall 2021). Over six months, Spalding reportedly witnessed Shorter spring “back to life,” she told the New York Times, speaking to the restorative powers of music. Then, at the start of the pandemic, she found herself in Wasco County, Oregon, about 100 miles from her native Portland, where she was able to realize a years-old dream of opening an artists’ retreat. As she sat alone in a garden on the sprawling land, another glimmer for TRIANGLE came to her, and she began conceiving of different ways that music might alleviate the mounting stress of prolonged isolation during COVID-19.
“Formwela 1” opens with a mesmeric chant from Spalding, and soon “finds her center” with her upright bass and opening lyric: “Sink into the ground wide and steady while the burning/Flickers to a glow out the temple of your ear.” Accompanied by the musician and producer Phoelix on Rhodes, Spalding’s simple piano chords add further grounding to the track. Drawing from the elements of a meditation practice, the intended benefit is to root yourself, allowing whatever comes up to come up and to be receptive to it.
Countervailing the opening track, “Formwela 2” brings the listener into a more subconscious state of meditation. The intensity builds behind Ganavya Doraiswamy’s vocals, which are layered over Spalding’s hushed falsetto as she introduces her guiding mantras: “Remember the works of sun/Surrounding/Love/All grounding/Doesn’t mean it’s time to/Burn it to powder/Maybe now we learn to/Ride it out.” Her words feel especially evocative in connection with Portland, one of several cities nationwide that erupted in protest last summer following the killing of George Floyd. Spalding enlists the help of several percussionists—Steve Turre on conch shells, LaMont Hamilton on bells, James Greeley on bone whistle, and longtime collaborator Tyson on drums—offering her own version of nature and environment as a means to cope with the starkness of present-day society.
With the final track “Formwela 3,” we are drawn back to a conscious state, returning to reality once again. Arguably the most composed of the three tracks, there’s an overwhelming sense of abundance and release as Spalding’s mantric words grow in size and heft: “Wide atmospheres breathe and surround you/While we are stuck inside.” Each repetition of this closing mantra grows more palpable and lasting, achieving a powerful—albeit momentary—reassurance that life will eventually go on, that perhaps someday soon, it could even be better than before. The hopeful feeling is reaffirmed by Shorter himself, who emblazons the track with a fiery yet mindful dose of color on reeds.
Co-produced by Raphael Saadiq and recorded at his studio, TRIANGLE arrives via Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab, an online platform that promises to allow musicians, music therapists, composers, and others to incorporate therapeutic and healing sounds into their work. The convergence of jazz and spirituality, at one time, provided a platform for John and Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Weldon Irvine, and Pharoah Sanders, each imbued in an unbridled freedom to conjure untrodden and, often, intergalactic realms not previously taken by Black artists. As Esperanza Spalding now embarks on this new venture to help people through music, she rests on the shoulders of artists who made similarly bold attempts, while remaining mindful that even this form of self-care, especially today, is often considered a political act.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-09T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Jazz | Concord | April 9, 2021 | 7.8 | 07200c6a-c984-4b1e-a3d0-1ac6ae72db1d | Shannon J. Effinger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shannon-j. effinger/ | |
On the follow-up to 2014’s electronic departure, Celestite, the Olympia band stumble in the attempt to find their way back to classic black metal. | On the follow-up to 2014’s electronic departure, Celestite, the Olympia band stumble in the attempt to find their way back to classic black metal. | Wolves in the Throne Room: Thrice Woven | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wolves-in-the-throne-room-thrice-woven/ | Thrice Woven | Celestite, the fifth album from Wolves in the Throne Room, was a major departure for the Olympia, Washington, black metal group, foregrounding synths and drones and forsaking most traces of metal. Drummer Aaron Weaver reveled in the change, explaining how Detroit techno was black metal’s spiritual cousin and that their newly acquired gear didn’t always jibe with their rural surroundings. That proved to be a lot more interesting than the record itself, a poor imitation of German electronic music like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze saddled with a vague, esoteric veil that’s worn thin since their heyday. Thrice Woven is WITTR deboned. As welcome as it is that they’ve dropped Celestite’s pseudo-kosmische schtick, they’ve come back with a facsimile of what once was.
Returning to black metal lends a nostalgic feeling, though it’s unclear what exactly they’re nostalgic for. It’s not for Weakling, the San Francisco group that was their primary influence and for USBM as a whole, as WITTR have lost any warlike propulsion in their riffing. Most of Thrice Woven is spent crossing paths they’ve laid down and don’t seem enthusiastic to revisit. It’s still guitarist and vocalist Nathan Weaver’s show, even with the addition of Aldebaran guitarist Kody Keyworth. “Born From the Serpent’s Eye” starts off with some inkling a fire has returned, hinting at black thrash about three minutes in. But by “Angrboda,” Thrice Woven sounds tired, like WITTR imitating themselves. Even with choral vocal breaks, it’s doesn’t represent the intersection of sublime and feral that used to be natural. The album is dimmer than their previous works, but they’re not trying to return to USBM’s raw, buzzy, and confused beginnings. WITTR stood in opposition to rawness for the sake of rawness and to the bastardized European sounds that characterized so many American bands before them. At least, that’s what the optics suggested. Now, it’s not clear where they stand, or if they care about their own position.
Even their usual routine of bringing in notable West Coast musicians falls flat with Neurosis guitarist Steve Von Till contributing acoustic guitar and gravelly vocals on the doom-laden “The Old Ones Are With Us.” It’s their most high-profile guest contribution, and while he brings heft Thrice Woven needs, he can’t shift ennui on his own. Electronics, the focus of Celestite, are heavily scaled back, and in their supporting role they fail to uplift. There is a return to Celestite’s drone on “Fires Roar in the Palace of the Moon,” and noise is interspersed throughout “Angrboda,” but both songs’ synth work feels slight enough that if it were mixed out, it wouldn’t radically alter the songs. Faced between doubling down on a style that got a mixed reception or refining their old sound, WITTR instead go a middle route that’s almost as boring as it is reliable.
Thrice Woven lays out the harsh truth about WITTR: They’ve been eclipsed by the movement they spearheaded. USBM has expanded in many different directions, from injecting itself into the avant-garde to embracing America’s own folk music; one of their descendants is considered a capital-M Metal band that opens for Slipknot and Danzig. A decade ago, they released their second record, Two Hunters, where they strengthened the marriage of Weakling’s might with celestial beauty, coming out as a legitimate new black metal voice. “I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots” remains a modern classic for taking the Cascadian sound to heights only rivaled by Emperor and Viking-era Bathory, and there simply isn’t anything half as powerful on Thrice Woven. Innovators stop innovating at some point, and the strength of a metal band that’s at least a decade in comes from balancing small tweaks with consistency. They failed about reinventing themselves, and now they’ve failed at finding their way back. | 2017-09-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Artemisia | September 26, 2017 | 5.2 | 072016c5-2baa-41bb-a63b-f02ed9d3daa0 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
Coming after a 17-year hiatus, the second LP by American Football* *might be the most highly anticipated emo album ever made. | Coming after a 17-year hiatus, the second LP by American Football* *might be the most highly anticipated emo album ever made. | American Football: American Football | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22526-american-football/ | American Football | American Football were a band destined to flourish in a specific time and place—it just happened to come at the turn of this decade, 10 years or so after they stopped making new music. Earnest, energetic and often ignored by critics, late-90s, Midwestern emo—defined by American Football, Braid and the Promise Ring—was ripe for reassessment around 2010 and fittingly found its audience in a moment where indie shifted hard towards avant-R&B cool and college-quad chill. Regardless of when this new vanguard emerged, it’s proven incredibly resilient, with nearly all of its scene leaders releasing their best work in the past year. Unlike, say, freak-folk or dance-punk, emo in the 2010s doesn’t seem like a reactionary microtrend so much as the current prevailing sound of indie rock. And its single biggest influence is American Football’s sole, self-titled album of elliptical, post-rock and jazz-inflected emo, which transmogrified from one of the many short-lived and modestly revered offshoots of the Cap’n Jazz family tree (i.e., Friend/Enemy, Owls, Make Believe) to an essential part of the canon—steering the genre from Hot Topic and Warped Tour into headier territory. Earlier this year, Mike Kinsella told us American Football never intended “to be popular, or even be a band.” They’re unquestionably both now, and the second American Football might be the most highly anticipated emo album ever made.
Kinsella is too self-deprecating to milk whatever mystique American Football has accumulated; LP2 exists because the band enjoyed touring but was tired of having to play the same songs. He’s also too self-aware to not acknowledge that LP2 has expectations. “Where are we now?” he asks on the first new American Football song of the 21st century. “Both home alone, in the same house”—you know, like the one on both album covers. The title of each song here is the first line; on American Football, they were the last line. The think pieces write themselves.
But upon establishing this type of secret-handshake rapport with the diehard listener, the type for whom this is the equivalent of anxiously awaited, decades-spanning sequels m b v or Wildflower or Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...Pt. 2, “Where Are We Now?” pivots and speaks to the festival crowds and the 3,000-cap rooms. For one thing, there’s a chorus— something that American Football lacked altogether—a klieg-lighted, waltz-time sway with moaning guitar leads, the kind that typified Sunny Day Real Estate in their later prog phase. The 4/4 kick drum thump in the first verse of lead single “I’ve Been So Lost For So Long” works on a similar level—the crowd is going to clap along to this one, it’s “the hit” now. While the new wave of emo hasn’t yet produced a Jimmy Eat World-level crossover, these songs ask, why not American Football themselves?
Produced in spurts of Dropbox exchanges and playdates over the span of two years, but working on a strict deadline, LP2 stresses proficiency and immediacy. Play it back-to-back with the original, knocked out in a weekend with college graduation looming, and Kinsella’s stated belief that American Football circa-2016 is a massive upgrade doesn’t seem all that heretical. The production is bracingly bright and crisp compared to the overcast American Football, hitting like the first true fall chill after a muggy Indian summer. They’re also sharper songwriters than they were as University of Illinois undergrads—the twin guitars no longer intermingle with fuzzy friction, they’re gridlocked into Pinback-like metronomy on “My Instincts Are the Enemy,” while “Desire Gets in the Way” punches out of the somber Side B, almost indistinguishable from Kinsella’s punkier protegees from Into It. Over It.
Sturdy song structures, legitimate hooks, a full-time bassist (Mike’s cousin, Nate Kinsella)—some of this can be seen as troubleshooting for a bigger audience. But the aspect upon which every opinion on LP2 will hinge is that American Football has a *frontman *now. There are no instrumentals or even the extended passages of “Honestly?” and “Stay Home” that predicted the sweeping post-emo of The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die and Foxing. With his vocals pushed pop-star high in the mix, Kinsella is a dominating presence, and LP2 sounds suspiciously familiar. Nine songs of Mike Kinsella assessing his self-worth in taut, spare songs of spindly guitar and tenderized vocals, well—that essentially describes Kinsella’s long-running solo project Owen.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Owen albums are consistently pretty good, but there are nine of them: including one that came out not three months ago. The King of Whys is the first Owen release to follow the American Football reboot and whether or not that was responsible for a heightened interest in the project, the album was recorded with a full band and an outside producer who likes the same bells, whistles and trumpets—it’s the Owen record that sounds the most like American Football.
For fans who want a second masterwork as vindication for American Football, LP2 doesn’t exude the stakes it should, not when it’s so easy to see “Empty Bottle” and the Volcano Choir-esque “Settled Down” as possibly culled from the same well of inspiration that provides “I Need a Drink (Or Two, or Three)” and the “Holocene”-esque “Home Is Where the Haunt Is.” In a more tangible way, the rebrand of American Football as a straightforward songwriting outfit inevitably relegates their inventive musicianship to the periphery. Within limited pockets of space, “Give Me the Gun” reconfigures American Football’s history to place them as contemporaries and neighbors of Tortoise as well as acolytes of Steve Reich and the Blue Nile. Meanwhile, the spiraling codas of “Born to Lose” and “I Need a Drink (Or Two or Three)” are layered, nuanced, emotionally complex and in sharp contrast to the record’s clunkiest vocals (“dead eyes, why such vulgarity?,” “I can’t break this bender, to it I surrender”).
And as he is on Owen records, Kinsella is a high-variance kind of lyricist here. Kinsella admitted that he was writing lyrics for LP2 until the last minute and at points, it's questionable whether he would've been better off spending more effort writing or less. Stock phrases can work as mantras when they stay within their cadence (“Home Is Where the Haunt Is”) and other times, lyrics that read embarrassing from a guy pushing 40 can conceivably work in an arrested-development, Beach-Slang sort of way. Then again, James Alex’s sole purpose is to remain in his 20s; when Kinsella plaintively sings, “Doctor it hurts when I exist” and “I’m as blue as the sky is gray...I’m gonna die this way,” it’s unclear whether they’re meant to be taken at face value, or if we’re all supposed to see it as an emo elder statesman playing the role for laughs.
But this question doesn’t really change the nature of the band—American Football wasn’t some self-released obscurity in 1999 when Kinsella was best known as a former member of Cap’n Jazz and even then, “I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional” alone proves Kinsella doesn’t see sincerity and self-awareness as opposed. But even if the influences and underlying sentiments are quite similar this time out, American Football shouldn’t be expected to musically, or emotionally, express themselves the same way they did when they were in their late teens. Made by, and largely for, college-aged emo fans, American Football reflected a time when hours on end could spent staring off into the distance to consider the changing leaves and lost loves while “The One With the Wurlitzer” faded out. In 2016, the members of American Football have spouses, kids, publishing careers, office jobs, the things that makes nostalgia for a bygone moment an indulgence rather than a sustainable worldview. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, LP2 is by and for people who are lucky to find a half hour a week in which to get wistful. | 2016-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Polyvinyl / Wichita | October 26, 2016 | 7.7 | 072064a2-234f-4a6d-8b4e-0072b92cb637 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
The steely Dublin post-punk band infuse the bitterness and rage of The Fall with punch-drunk romanticism. | The steely Dublin post-punk band infuse the bitterness and rage of The Fall with punch-drunk romanticism. | Fontaines D.C.: Dogrel | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fontaines-dc-dogrel/ | Dogrel | In its original form, post-punk was essentially punk rock with the rock stripped out, putting a premium on rhythm over riffs, atmosphere over songcraft, and abstract lyrical impressionism over circle-pit chants. And on first pass, Fontaines D.C. seem like faithful students. Over the past year, they’ve swiftly staked out an elevated perch alongside IDLES and Shame amid a young class of groups from the Britain and Ireland who are embracing post-punk antagonism as a necessary response to modern-day discord. And in Grian Chatten, they have a frontman blessed with Ian Curtis’ intense stare and Mark E. Smith’s megaphone mouth, favoring a sternly delivered, free-ranging shout-speak that frequently veers far outside the lines of traditional pop-song structure.
But Fontaines D.C. are fueled by neither IDLES revolutionary fervor nor Shame’s festering disgust. They’re not raging against the current state of affairs as much as lamenting the local communities and culture in danger of being steamrolled by the march of modernity. As such, Fontaines D.C. are very much a post-punk band reclaiming a certain pre-punk innocence. Their origin story is so quaint and anachronistic, it verges on flaneur cosplay, with the quintet reportedly bonding over a mutual love of Joycean poetry and pub nights spent scribbling out and reciting verses to one another. That old-school approach finds its analog in a raw, robust twin-guitar attack that’s more jangly than jagged, nodding to ‘60s garage, surf, and early rock‘n’roll while projecting a confrontational fury.
Fontaines D.C. hail from Dublin, a fact that would be instantly obvious even if Chatten didn’t open Dogrel by emphatically declaring, “Dublin in the rain is mine/A pregnant city with a Catholic mind.” His unvarnished, melody-averse brogue is the band’s most distinctive feature, and his lyrics are loaded with the sort of regional-landmark references and vivid scenery that will send non-Irish listeners to Google Street View. But while Fontaines D.C. are eager ambassadors for Dublin’s past, they’re less enchanted with its present status as one of Europe’s most bustling tech hubs—and the widening income inequality that comes with it. The jackhammered opener “Big” centers around a bold declaration—“My childhood was small/ But I’m going to be big!”—that initially echoes another famous statement of purpose: Oasis’ “Rock N’ Roll Star.” But in a world where there’s no rock‘n’roll stardom left to aspire to, “Big” doubles as a cautionary caricature of blind ambition and aspirational greed.
The rest of Dogrel likewise walks the tightrope between surly and celebratory. “Too Real” hits the streets with a careening intensity rarely heard since The Walkmen’s urban-paranoia classic “The Rat,” but as guitarists Carlos O’Connell and Connor Curley shoot off feedback sparks like a getaway car scraping a guardrail, Chatten takes a surprise back-alley respite from the surrounding clamor, marveling at the wintry skies and garbage swirling in the wind. And if the staccato rumble of “Sha Sha Sha” depicts the very act of existence as just another clock-punching routine (“Now here comes the sun/That’s another one done”), the sweet, simple rattle of a tambourine appears partway through like a flower rising from a sidewalk crack.
Fontaines D.C. have cited fellow Dublin noisemakers Girl Band as a crucial influence, as much for their eccentric spirit as their abrasive sound. “Before that, the only way to sound Irish was to be fuckin’ ‘diddly-diddly-aye,’” Chatten recently told Noisey. “They modernized Irish music massively.” To wit, the band’s most heroic anthem, “Boys in the Better Land” may have been inspired by Chatten’s encounter with an Anglophobic Dublin cabbie, but it takes the form of a riotous, British Invasion-styled rave-up that frames distinctly local issues as universal truths.
Still, as a band defined by its love/hate relationship with its hometown, Fontaines D.C. can’t help but indulge in one hallowed Celtic-pop tradition: the Guinness-hoisting last-call ballad. Chatten fully embraces his inner Shane MacGowan on “Dublin City Sky,” a comedown closer that finds the singer plying his rigid voice around a sensitive, romantic serenade—and though it doesn’t yet feel like a natural fit, the poignancy is undeniable. Slow-dancing in some Chinatown bar, feeling “as drunk as love is lethal,” Chatten reminds us that the most effective means of psychological survival in a big, ever-changing city is to savor the intimate moments. | 2019-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Partisan | April 17, 2019 | 8 | 0721aa91-dea8-4dd3-b034-350bc9bfb43a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
With some modern flourishes, Kool Keith, Dan the Automator, and DJ QBert reconvene mostly for a boom-bap throwback to the ill and the grotesque style of their first 1996 outing. | With some modern flourishes, Kool Keith, Dan the Automator, and DJ QBert reconvene mostly for a boom-bap throwback to the ill and the grotesque style of their first 1996 outing. | Dr. Octagon: Moosebumps: An Exploration Into Modern Day Horripilation | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dr-octagon-moosebumps-an-exploration-into-modern-day-horripilation/ | Moosebumps: An Exploration Into Modern Day Horripilation | For a certain kind of hip-hop fan—say, those who proudly owned a Mo’ Wax T-shirt—the return of Dr. Octagon is big news. Although often seen as a Kool Keith solo project, Dr. Octagon’s 1996 debut album Dr. Octagonecologyst sprang from a collaboration between Keith, producer Dan “The Automator” Nakamura, and turntablist DJ QBert (with input from KutMasta Kurt). The group assembled an album that delighted rap fans with its left-field production and grotesque humor. Moosebumps is not quite the sequel to that record (that dubious honor falls to 2006’s disastrous The Return of Dr. Octagon), but Moosebumps certainly feels like it should be, as Keith, Nakamura, and QBert reunite to cook up a faithful reproduction of the Octagonecologyst sound.
Of the three, QBert’s work on Moosebumps is perhaps least essential but most instantly impressive. His brand of battle turntablism may have fallen out of fashion since 1996, a year when crabs, flares, and tears were part of stock hip-hop vocabulary, but he remains as sharp as ever, spraying the mix with frantic, jazzy scratches that enhance the music without overcoming it. “Bear Witness IV,” a woozy remake of Octagonecologyst’s “Bear Witness,” shows QBert at his freeform best, his dextrous work a reminder of how scratching can make the turntables just sing.
If QBert’s contribution is the whipped cream to the Octagon gateau, then Nakamura provides the cakey base. Nakamura uses dusty drum breaks, funk bass lines, horns, piano, and strings, peppered with just the right amount of weirdness, to recreate the surreal boom bap soundtrack style of Octagonecologyst. Those who welcome Moosebumps as an exercise in sentimentality will find Nakamura’s production to be a very satisfying retread of old ground—the haunting violin sound on “Operation Zero” raises happy memories of Octagonecologyst’s “Blue Flowers,” for example—but some of the best moments come when the producer switches things up a little, using sleazy guitar riffs on the swaggering “Karma Sutra” and a sun-swept ambient funk on “Flying Waterbed.”
On Dr. Octagonecologyst, Keith employed vivid non sequiturs, free association, and catchphrase-friendly punch lines as he brilliantly traced the adventures of a homicidal, sex-obsessed surgeon who can travel through time. On Moosebumps he returns to Octagonecologyst’s central character but the results are considerably less sharp, with moments of pointed comic brilliance like, “You wait for X-rays having sex with a neck brace” swamped by a lackluster opacity. Opening track “Octagon Octagon” is the worst offender, with Keith reeling off an increasingly exasperating list of Octagon products (“Octagon rice with octagon beans with octagon shrimp”) as he rips the momentum from under one of Nakamura’s strongest beats.
Nakamura says that Dr. Octagon has “always looked to the future.” But rather than a futuristic conquest, Moosebumps brings to mind a collection of recently discovered Octagonecologyst outtakes. Dr. Octagonecologyst was an album that offered a genuinely unhinged alternative to the 1996 class of hip-hop and Keith, Nakamura, and QBert have recreated its uniquely creep chemistry in style. And yet only a handful of the tracks on Moosebumps—“Operation Zero,” the ghoulish head nodder “Area 54,” and maybe “Flying Waterbed”—would have stood a chance of making it onto the group’s first album. Like Wu-Tang revivals and a good pair of Wallabees, Moosebumps will make aging hip-hop fans very happy. But new listeners are unlikely to come running at the good doctor’s call. | 2018-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Bulk / Caroline | April 7, 2018 | 6.7 | 0722a1ee-7dd5-4918-837a-2db73ac4cea1 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Latest from the Chilean producer, one of the central figures in minimal techno, is technically an EP, but its four percolating tracks stretch to nearly 50 minutes. | Latest from the Chilean producer, one of the central figures in minimal techno, is technically an EP, but its four percolating tracks stretch to nearly 50 minutes. | Ricardo Villalobos: Achso | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8508-achso/ | Achso | Here's a little fact to ponder: Google tells me the words "Ricardo Villalobos" appear in six out of the eight "Month in Techno" features Big Phil Sherburne penned for this site in the year 2005. I can't find anyone else who approaches that. Not Dominik "K-hole" Eulberg. Not Michael "International DJ Superstar" Mayer. Not Hans-Peter "Space Disconaut" Lindstrom. Apparently in 2005, the geist of techno swung to Mr. Villalobos, brittle zeit.
As the person most responsible for "ketamine house," sweet Ricardo has been chasing his personal white rabbit down any number of holes for the last few years now. (On record, of course.) Alcachofa redrew "jazzy house" with a broken piece of charcoal. Thè au Harem d'Archiméde approached drooling stasis through geologic repetitions. And in 2005 he seemed to have given up on the album format entirely, producing a series of singles that stretch right to the lip of the vinyl, unafraid of what goes on over the edge. Mssr. Sherburne has already commented that if you could get more than 15 minutes of decent sound on a vinyl single, Villalobos would just keep going and going and going.
Slipping out in the last weeks of December and at just a hair under 50 minutes, Achso is not an EP. The only thing that has kept it from receiving the same attention as Villalobos' two albums is form: a vinyl double-pack in an era where many music hipsters have given up even CDs. This is a shame because it might be his best work.
"Ichso" opens as a rustle of hi-hats, clipped male grunts, and a snaking, almost Native American melody. Less than a minute in, a more sure-footed and jacking rhythm drops. The melody becomes a chiming guitar pricking a handful of nylon notes, and back again. Then, after two minutes, he does the wholly unexpected and throws in a breakbeat-like kick, turning this swirl of tiny things nearly club-ready. A distorted chord clangs around five minutes in as the drums become more agitated and the guitar peals. Everything drops out at around seven minutes for a stretch of bass and drum that sounds like desiccated UK garage strafed by intermittent Death Star fire. By minute nine it's a sea of percussive onomatopoeia as the melody reappears. Then the whole thing slows to half time until fade out, a Timbaland rhythm pattern happily chewed on by Perlon grubs and mites.
That's just the first track.
And so it goes. "Duso" strings Orientalist guitar runs (that sound like they were recorded with an underwater microphone) through a now trademark Villalobos percolating groove, heavy on the hollow kick drum and gurgling off-beats. Halfway through he treats us to elephants stomping bubble wrap in an empty warehouse. Rusty screen doors shudder in the wind and dot matrix printers crank. "Erso" is a chiming sea of fizzy chirps and ISDN line noise like breakers against a shoreline. (Or, if I wanted to be reductive, a dancefloor Autechre.) At the four-minute mark, everything gets farty and it's the most cheerful thing the man has put his name to. "Sieso" is a percussive monster: Sizzles like grease popping from a frying pan, big ugly hammering klangs, contact mic'd dragonfly flutter, all held together by the thinnest Aphexian lunar melody that gorgeously modulates throughout. Patterns are constantly reshuffled, new ticks and tocks and tsssh's. More beats (or beat sounds) per bar than some dance producers manage in an entire career.
Achso is minimal because it doesn't announce itself with big riffs or overt melodies, and it's "minimal" because that's where it gets slotted in stores. But there's more going on in these four sides than the entire Get Physical catalog. I have no idea if these records would work in any club context; my instincts tell me no. But in a genre that often holds up anonymity as an aesthetic virtue, Villalobos records are as immediately recognizable as a Stereolab single, as considered as Morton Feldman, and as expansive as John Coltrane. Say whatever you will: He's the first true genius 21st century techno has produced. | 2006-02-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2006-02-01T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Cadenza | February 1, 2006 | 8.9 | 0723daa8-3cc2-462f-aaf7-f62a028f7c9e | Jess Harvell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jess-harvell/ | null |
The Boss returns, with the E Street Band in tow, for a surprisingly complex album that hides its disillusionment deep within its music, mingling it with a weary optimism that has not diminished with age. | The Boss returns, with the E Street Band in tow, for a surprisingly complex album that hides its disillusionment deep within its music, mingling it with a weary optimism that has not diminished with age. | Bruce Springsteen: Magic | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10733-magic/ | Magic | Bruce Springsteen occupies a unique place in American popular culture. He doesn't have the cachet that Bob Dylan has, yet he's much more approachable-- populist in practice, not just in theory. He has inspired pale imitators (Tom Petty, John Mellencamp), but has no peers to speak of. Unlike similar 1980s supercelebrities Prince or Madonna, he remains artistically viable and culturally relevant two decades after the height of his popularity. In the 1970s, he was never hip, but in the 2000s he has gained a considerable following among indie rock bands like the Hold Steady, the Killers, and the National, among many others. Because his music has lost none of its triumphant rock'n'roll kick-- no matter how many times you hear it, "Born to Run" always kills-- he has become today what Brian Wilson was 10 years ago: the indie ideal.
And yet, his popularity extends far beyond the indie realm. His mainstream audience remains fanatically loyal, making him one of the few artists that both you and your boss enjoy. Springsteen's success continues despite the constantly shifting ground that finds him on one side of certain cultural and political lines, then on another. His 2002 album The Rising was received as a post-9/11 salve, a paean to American resilience in the face of tragedy: The same people who died or lost loved ones in the attacks-- cops, firefighters, corporate grunts, their wives, husbands, families-- were said to be the very same people who inhabited Springsteen's earlier songs, now facing hard, cold reality. So it's forgivable if many heard the album they believed the country needed instead of the one Springsteen actually made.
Despite the nickname, the Boss has never inhabited his iconic status comfortably. Devils & Dust followed The Rising in 2005*,* trading the E Street Band's full sound for acoustic contemplation and spinning a much grimmer version of America that was full of unrealized dreams and insoluble injustices. We Shall Overcome, his album of Pete Seeger covers and his best late-career album, proved much subtler in its subversiveness, communicating an anti-establishment stance through decades-old tunes. That's nothing new for him: The E Street Band's enormous, exuberant rock'n'roll has always hidden darker currents of American realism, most famously on "Born in the U.S.A.", a song about disillusioned Vietnam vets that was hilariously co-opted by Ronald Reagan's 1984 presidential campaign as a theme song.
That's the secret power of Magic, Springsteen's 15th album in 34 years: The album hides its raw disillusionment deep within the music, mingling it with a weary optimism and a thoroughly committed lustiness that have not diminished with age. The result is a surprisingly complex album that recalls The River in its heartfelt populism, Darkness on the Edge of Town in its small-town scope, and Tunnel of Love in its mature take on love and sex. On "I'll Work for Your Love", which could be a cover of an outtake from the first half of The River, he tells a woman he's "counting the bones in your back like the stations of the cross"-- a concise fusion of the sexual and the spiritual. Where he once chronicled youthful abandon in the face of life's possibility, now his subject is the wonders of middle-aged contentment, as if he can't believe his own luck. It's a surprisingly durable subject, one that fits his outsize sound perfectly.
On the other hand, Springsteen's prickly angst makes songs like "Last to Die" and "You'll Be Comin' Down" sound like challenges to, rather than platitudes for, regular Joes. On second single "Long Walk Home", he considers the small(-town) satisfaction of having distinctive local landmarks and knowing everyone you pass on the street. That such pleasures are slowly dying makes the song both a romanticizing ode to an American ideal that may never have existed as well as a clear-headed lament that we no longer yearn for those securities. "You know that flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone," he sings, "who we are, what we'll do and what we won't."
If Magic revisits the subject matter of previous career crests, it unfortunately recalls The Rising in its sound: Brendan O'Brien returns to the producer's seat, once again shuffling most of the E Street Band to the music's margins and focusing his attention squarely on the Boss. In addition to drenching slower songs like "Your Own Worst Enemy" and "Devil's Arcade" in melodramatic and totally unnecessary strings, the producer too often glosses over the creaks and wear in Springsteen's voice-- like air-brushing a model's face to look younger-- when it's the imperfections that give him his particular authority. Springsteen should sound more like Tom Waits, less like 3 Doors Down.
But then there are the songs that get everything exactly right, like the gorgeous "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" and "Livin' in the Future". On the latter, the E Street Band are given freer rein to revive and even update the boardwalk strut and namesake shuffle of their early days. Clarence Clemons' sax is integral to the modified doo-wop groove, drummer Max Weinberg swings easily, guitarists Steve Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren trade out licks, and Patti Scialfa's tender vocals echo Springsteen's excited performance. While he doesn't have the youthful eye for detail and narrative he once had, Springsteen's more concise songwriting style allows for some nice observations and surprisingly playful comparisons. "Then just about sundown, you come walkin' through town," he sings on "Livin' in the Future", "your boot heels clicking like the barrel of a pistol spinning 'round." He-- and the E Street Band-- actually sound hungry and, yes, just a little pissed off. It's an angry song, with a rumbling undercurrent of dread ("Woke up Election Day, sky's gunpowder and shades of gray"), but damn if it doesn't sound awesome when you're speeding down a back road with the windows rolled down. | 2007-10-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-10-03T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | October 3, 2007 | 6.8 | 072c70e5-caf6-42a6-a77b-d1083b02d994 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | null |
Finally available on streaming services, the UK art-pop pranksters’ throwback rave anthems, jock-jam singalongs, and mischievous myth-making prove as enduring as they are audacious. | Finally available on streaming services, the UK art-pop pranksters’ throwback rave anthems, jock-jam singalongs, and mischievous myth-making prove as enduring as they are audacious. | The KLF: Solid State Logik 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-klf-solid-state-logik-1/ | Solid State Logik 1 | To be a follower of the KLF is to be a scholar, an acolyte, a digital monk treating zip files like illuminated manuscripts. Trawling forums and message boards for shards of the apocryphal mythos, sifting through various international versions of The White Room and multiple mixes of “3 A.M. Eternal,” finding hidden resonance in the absurdist symbolism of the number 23 or the sudden appearance of ice cream vans. KLF fandom is a secret language and a circle of rituals, intensely ironic but also deadly serious, like the music of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty itself.
This year opened, entirely unexpectedly, with the quiet release of Solid State Logik 1, a compilation of the KLF’s most heavyweight jams—an unexpected move from the group that fired blanks into the crowd at the 1992 BRIT Awards and then deleted their catalog. Drummond and Cauty have poked their heads out at various points over the years, most recently in 2017, to pay some kind of respect to the 23rd anniversary of their infamous ritual burning of a million pounds. But this wasn’t some Glastonbury cash-in reunion set; the K Foundation returned as a literal undertaking business, selling a “MuMufication” package to their devotees. For £99, you can purchase a custom-fired brick, which contains a slot for you to insert 23 grams of your ashes upon death; post-mortem, your brick will be joined together forever with other justified, ancient, and hopeful KLF fans in a “People’s Pyramid,” a bizarre but bittersweet literalization of how deeply music can shape one’s personal identity and relationships. Though music streaming might seem antithetical to the KLF’s anti-establishment mentality, the Solid State Logik compilation serves as a pyramid of its own, a step at preserving their paradigm-shifting experiments for the future.
Drummond and Cauty began gaining notoriety in 1987 with a series of releases as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu: bootleg hip-house records featuring Scottish-accented shout-raps atop extended, unauthorized interpolations of songs by ABBA, the MC5, and Whitney Houston, among others. But the KLF (allegedly short for “Kopyright Liberation Front”) quickly achieved crossover success as the Timelords, with an unabashed, unapologetic novelty. “Doctorin’ the Tardis” audaciously pasted together the Doctor Who theme and the pounding jock-jam beat of Gary Glitter’s “Rock & Roll, Part 2”—with a football chant thrown in for good measure, in case the masses didn’t dig it enough. Despised by the serious press, adored by pop audiences, the Timelords hit No. 1, then infamously wrote a how-to guide for others looking to mechanically engineer chart hits. With an iconography pilfered from Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus Trilogy, Drummond and Cauty set out to blow up the British pop-music industry from the inside, then withdrew—whether forever or for their promised 23 years remained to be seen. Everything else that followed has only contributed to the legend.
Most of the KLF’s body of work is centered around four pillars: “What Time Is Love?,“3 A.M. Eternal,” “Last Train to Trancentral,” and “Justified and Ancient,” each of which exist in various iterations, ranging from marginally different mixes to almost unrecognizable reinterpretations. Though the KLF were criticized in some corners for their creative recycling and meta-plagiarism, habitually releasing different versions of the same product, this kind of self-reference is maybe their most divinely inspired creative instinct. In some ways it mimics another three-named, post-hippie sci-fi writer: Philip K. Dick, who in his mammoth The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick reread and reinterpreted his own work with a Talmudic thoroughness, turning to his own writing for higher meaning as others might to scripture. By repeating and reworking sonic symbols and lyrical themes, the KLF constructed what sometimes truly feels like a religion: a cultish, albeit still tongue-in-cheek, worldview, with a body of psalms sung a little bit differently every service, and two pop prophets at the helm who ask you to follow them with faith into the darkness of the rave.
“Last Train To Trancentral - Live From The Lost Continent” is among their most euphoric and ascendant recordings—“what KLF is about,” as the song’s opening line states bluntly. It’s a bullet express direct from the future, a symphony of jangly breakbeats, blissful piano lines, robot voices, church bells, and train whistles. More than any of their other songs, “Trancentral” both sums up the era of its production and transcends it.
Compared to the hi-NRG of “What Time Is Love? - Live at Trancentral,” “America: What Time is Love?” is utter cacophony. It’s a century of American cultural imperialism on fast-forward, suturing together The Wizard of Oz, “Aquarius” from Hair, and the big riff from “Ace of Spades”—a comic-book montage that draws the line from John Philip Sousa marches to hair-metal guitars, all while Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple demands a pound of your sweat. “America: What Time Is Love?” expresses the same perverse fascination with mass-produced Americana as the more respectable but equally sample-heavy Chill Out, just accelerated to hell, pedal to the floor of the ice-cream van, stove turned all the way up.
The KLF only existed at extremes: chilled out or hyped up, jokingly cynical or politically serious. Even if to differing sonic ends, the duo’s ambient designs and sound-collage stadium house are built on the same principles of literal and figurative sampling, and exhibit a similar interest in the crass mass culture America has exported to the world. The closest American analogue to Drummond and Cauty’s worldview might be David Byrne, who is similarly awed and repulsed by commercial culture. The KLF are clearly having a laugh at the Top 40’s expense, but their fondness for Tammy Wynette is no joke.
Maybe the KLF’s most straight-up, stripped-down dancefloor cut is “It’s Grim Up North,” which indicates the more dour direction they might have been headed in, channeling the oxidized futurism of Northern England’s bleep-techno scene as Drummond bitterly rattles off the names of cities and townships in the region. Beyond this, Solid State Logik 1 holds particular interest for the evidence it contains of the KLF’s unrealized metal opus, The Black Room—described at various points in the early 1990s as “the complete yang to the yin of The White Room,” “electro turbo metal,” and like “Megadeth with drum machines.” The compilation closes, as is only appropriate, with a studio recording of the startling grindcore version of “3 A.M. Eternal” performed with Extreme Noise Terror as part of their piss-off to the music industry. It’s straight-up high-powered hardcore punk—completely new ground for the KLF, but for some wiry glitches and Drummond’s distinctive voice buried in the mix, and another curious hint at what rooms might have lain ahead.
But maybe, in some ways, it’s good that the KLF burned themselves to a crisp instead of fading away—they gave us a true machine-gun blast of creativity, like the Beatles’ brief decade but bolder and faster, before building their own wicker man and taking a flamethrower to it. These songs throw every musical idea at the wall, along with decades of pop-culture ephemera, and somehow it all sticks. It would have been entirely possible for the KLF to coast along on the merits of their public antics or imaginative music videos, but the singles themselves are undeniable gold. Though this compilation revisits their biggest hits in newly monetized form, finally giving in to the exigencies of the modern music business, the hymns of the Mu Mus will always belong more to the choir of believers who sing them than the music-industry televangelists who sell them.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-01-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | KLF Communications | January 23, 2021 | 8.1 | 072e21cd-d8aa-40a0-bf80-2075d8384444 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
After sessions last year with Japanese improv legend Keiji Haino, the powerful metal trio ripped its newest songs open, filling the negative space with improvisational gusto to become a stunning band. | After sessions last year with Japanese improv legend Keiji Haino, the powerful metal trio ripped its newest songs open, filling the negative space with improvisational gusto to become a stunning band. | Sumac: Love in Shadow | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sumac-love-in-shadow/ | Love in Shadow | Though he does not play a single note, the Japanese improvisational nonpareil Keiji Haino is partly to thank for one of this year’s most audacious metal statements. In the summer of 2017, Sumac—then a rather untested trio of West Coast metal veterans including guitarist and singer Aaron Turner of Isis, bassist Brian Cook of Russian Circles, and drummer Nick Yacyshyn of Baptists—traveled to Tokyo to record and perform with Haino after he unexpectedly accepted an unsolicited invitation to jam. For 40 years, Haino has crisscrossed the borders of rock, noise, blues, and even a cappella balladry, disregarding structural and linguistic conventions with a singularly surrealistic vision. On American Dollar Bill, he did much the same with Sumac, helping the trio splatter its volatile and involved doom against the studio wall, throw it down the stairs, and splinter it into shapes of joyous abstraction.
For Sumac, it must have been like seeing yourself in a cracked mirror and realizing there’s something fundamental about yourself you should change. Though the band had already written its third record, their time with Haino prompted them to reconsider the possibilities of open space and internal deconstruction, to ponder anew the room where a solo or breakdown might once have gone. Love in Shadow is both daring and daunting, with Sumac disrupting their customary marches with frayed instrumental improvisations that feel as if they may fall apart and building 15-minute opuses with assorted blocks of dead-ahead pummel and dissonant impressionism. They have hinted at this path in the past, particularly on 2016’s What One Becomes, their stormy and suggestive second album. But Haino and American Dollar Bill catalyzed Sumac’s progression toward Love in Shadow, a four-track, hour-long, monumental album that feels like the arrival of a band newly unbound.
Love in Shadow may at first feel unapproachable, like some steamroller you can only watch plow past. Or perhaps it sounds unseemly, like some gangly beast whose long limbs and bulky body don’t cohere. The first response is a symptom of a truly powerful trio, a band capable of shifting from athletic thrash to viscous doom with unwavering force; when “The Task” begins in italicized fury, for instance, you simply want to get out of its way. The second impression stems from the improvisational impasses where they trade rugged melodies for warped variations: When Turner shapes a spider web of piercing notes, à la Derek Bailey, toward the end of “The Task,” one wonders how it all fits together. All four pieces pivot between brute strength and ponderous retreats. After the seven-minute tirade that opens “Arcing Silver,” Sumac go nearly silent before conjuring emotional images without a word, much like Loren Connors. They sprint toward the end, as driving and relentless as they have ever been. The listener is left dumbstruck by whiplash.
Where the music can often seem like a slingshot, Turner pulls a narrative cord tightly through Love in Shadow, offering a stabilizing factor amid all the commotion. Rendered in language that laces eroticism with existential anxiety (and vice versa) and harkens to poet Octavio Paz, these songs address our dogged pursuit of, need for, and battle with love—or, as Turner phrases it, to find “our better blood” alive and flowing in someone else. Turner returns time and again to the vulnerability inherent in love, as if making a commitment turns us into supine beasts exposing our soft bellies to the whims of another. As he wrestles with these feelings, barking and bellowing one clipped phrase at a time, the band wrestles alongside him. As he faces some wall of worry, the band collapses into one of its paroxysms, looking for the answer. The longer you listen, the more cohesive and magnetic Love in Shadow becomes, revealing itself as a reluctantly romantic opera all clad in black. Here’s a record about love as you’ve never heard it.
The toil and triumph Sumac document and illustrate so gamely during Love in Shadow represent an accidental analogue for Turner’s own trajectory. Twenty years have passed since Turner cofounded Isis, a band whose fluid shifts between musical frames helped reshape a generation’s expectations of what metal could be. He did (and, to a lesser extent, still does) the same with his label, Hydra Head, and a string of bands that have all pressed against the boundaries of heaviness in peculiar ways—the spasmodic Old Man Gloom, the immersive Mamiffer, the radiant Jodis. Turner is as inquisitive and essential as any other figure in heavy metal in the United States this century, but his creative unrest and quest to issue his music on his own terms have long kept him at the edge of wider success. Here he is anyway, radically reinventing the possibilities of a band that has leapfrogged from good to staggering in a single record. Love in Shadow is a testament to perseverance in the face of uncertainty from a bandleader who has lived, worked, and loved by that ideal. | 2018-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-09-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Thrill Jockey | September 25, 2018 | 7.8 | 072f9d18-2301-4aca-8a72-ffa98558353d | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
After a solid stretch of singles and remixes, this UK squelch-pop group aims to make a successful transition from producer to album-oriented act. | After a solid stretch of singles and remixes, this UK squelch-pop group aims to make a successful transition from producer to album-oriented act. | Metronomy: Nights Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12403-nights-out/ | Nights Out | Nights Out is the latest electro assault from the UK's growing brigade of squelch pop bands, joining the ranks of the Chap, Late of the Pier, and other synth sadists making NME giddy and audiophiles want to remove their frontal lobes. That's not to reduce Brighton's Metronomy to a fad, especially since they've proven their mettle on dozens of high-profile remixes and their own impressive singles. The transition from producer to album-oriented act, however, remains tricky for them. Their 2005 debut, Pip Paine (Pay the £5000 You Owe), incongruently forced together delicate dancefloor pop and harsh rock touches. And while Nights Out better corrals these influences, creating a much more cohesive album, it still suffers from a lack of consistency.
Metronomy singer/producer Joseph Mount describes this album as a soundtrack to a tumultous weekend, and sure enough, there's plenty of drink-fueled lust, driving, partying, and of course, dancing. It's no surprise, then, that two songs about cardiac health-- "My Heart Rate Rapid" and "Heartbreaker"-- contain the majority of the album's hooks. The former is a ramp-up to Metronomy's bacchanalian rager, its chipmunk vocals speeding up lockstep with the disco pulse. "Heartbreaker" immediately follows, squashing those increased serotonin levels, with Mount's effects-free vocal performance recalling Junior Boys vocalist Jeremy Greenspan's breathy bedroom croon. The resulting ballad, effective enough to tame the otherwise ADD production, provides an emotional comedown that also gives the listener's ears a breather.
Unfortunately, Metronomy can't maintain the momentum. Throughout the album, they sprinkle cute instrumental interludes that feel more like production exercises than effective segues. The vocals don't exactly carry their weight, either. With the exception of "A Thing for Me"'s excited cat calls, Mount douses his voice in self-conscious irony (and studio effects) to the point of near-total detachment. It'd be unfair to expect Metronomy to match the hooks of similar acts like Hot Chip or LCD Soundsystem, but even those groups manage to give the heartstrings an occasional tug, whereas tracks like "Back on the Motorway" or "On Dancefloors", two of the more tender moments here, simply seem to ponder how kooky 80s music was.
Then again, these drawbacks don't make Nights Out any less appropriate a soundtrack to clubbing adventures, pub crawls or one-night stands. Although uneven, some of these random spurts seem to disorient intentionally, like “Side 2”, the dark intermission track that ushers in the album's, uh, darker second side. Yet the frenzied first half showcases Metronomy's strengths right off the bat: glitzy glam rock guitars butting heads with stubborn electro beats, neurotic disco paeans, and loads of synths. Nights Out may turn in a little too early, but for about three songs, it wrests synth pop supremacy from Metronomy's many competitors. | 2008-11-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2008-11-13T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Because | November 13, 2008 | 6.6 | 0733d355-bc02-4f00-82d4-efae53036b91 | Adam Moerder | https://pitchfork.com/staff/adam-moerder/ | null |
Phil Elverum returns with the latest piece in the epic, ongoing existential puzzle he's been constructing for nearly 15 years. | Phil Elverum returns with the latest piece in the epic, ongoing existential puzzle he's been constructing for nearly 15 years. | Mount Eerie: Wind's Poem | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13299-winds-poem/ | Wind's Poem | At this point, some 13 years after those first Microphones cassettes and eight years since the watershed The Glow, Pt. 2, we tend to know what to expect from Phil Elverum. The production will be cavernous and downright primordial, the instruments resounding as though carved from bone and strung with wool. Natural and elemental imagery will abound. And, of course, we'll be treated to Elverum's unmistakable, unsophisticated, ever wonder-struck mumble. Yet Elverum has a way of playing with those expectations. And, more to the point, knowing what to expect can make us underestimate, which can in turn lead to surprise. If last year's Lost Wisdom outing with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire served to remind us that, stripped of all the scuzz and sonic bramble, Elverum is a damn good songwriter, then Wind's Poem now reminds us that with all his characteristic production dressings in place-- surprise!-- Phil can still be a force of nature.
Poem has been touted as Elverum's "black metal" album, and Phil has made no secret of his relatively newfound affinity for Xasthur and other lynchpins of the unholy genre. Yet apart from opener "Wind's Dark Poem", a slice of bona fide hellfire, any outside influence here feels wholly absorbed into the fabric of what is every bit a Mount Eerie concoction. Even "Wind's Dark Poem" retains the singer's characteristic vocal delivery and cadence, and other loud ones-- "The Hidden Stone", "The Mouth of Sky"-- smack as much of the chunky, bowel-rattling heavy riffage of The Glow, Pt. 2's "I Want to Be Cold" and "Samurai Sword" as anything else. All of which makes Elverum less chameleon and more collector of sounds, assimilating them as he sees fit to suit his grand artistic vision. A vision, as he also told us, that's been there all along: "I think I've always been drawn to things that sounded massive, or at least created this feeling of an immense vibe."
And massive and immerse are certainly two ways to describe Wind's Poem-- though they hardly tell the whole story. To better do so we might divide the 12 tracks that comprise the record into two rough camps: the loud and thoroughly rattled, noted above, and the renewed and becalmed, chief among them "Summons", "Ancient Questions", and the epic lullaby "Through the Trees", which effectively swallows whole any hell raised by "Wind's Dark Poem". The story, then, emerges from the way these songs alternatingly devour or are born from the smoldering ashes of one another, clear skies giving way to ferocious muddle, which in turn begets light and insight anew. The lyrics, appropriately, deal in fundamental dualities. "My Heart Is Not at Peace" and "Summons" each posit wind as both "destroyer" and "revealer," "Ancient Questions" pits doubt against a sense of purpose, and closer "Stone's Ode" is divided into two distinct movements, one assured and awash in the clarity of day, one less so and detailing the onset (literal and metaphorical, one assumes) of night.
What makes Wind's Poem among the most compelling and fully realized Mount Eerie releases to date is the record's ability to satisfy several types of listeners on several contextual levels. The iTunes shuffle junky, for starters, can excerpt almost any selection here and find something to marvel at on its own terms. The Elverum obsessive will waste no time seeking god in the details, the recurring musical and thematic touches, and the intertextual puzzle created across the artist's catalog. Even considering the most basic mechanics of the album format, Poem gets it right: a rock solid opener that draws the listener right in, an effective closer that recapitulates lyrical and musical motifs from across the record, fine pacing, well-balanced dynamics, and the overall sense that one has completed a journey and emerged in a slightly different metaphysical place by the end of those 55 minutes. But then, too, there are the 11-and-a-half-minute second track, the pure pulsating noise cut, and other outliers, as if to remind us that despite any concessions made to the listener-- and Phil has moved well beyond the often formless experiments of the early Microphones releases-- this is still by no means a record to be digested lightly. And thank goodness for that. | 2009-08-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-08-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | P.W. Elverum & Sun | August 14, 2009 | 8.2 | 0734f354-8a17-415d-b8c7-b95894499f5c | Matthew Solarski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-solarski/ | null |
Released in 1994, the warm and mellow sound of Madonna’s sixth album has its seductive charms, but of all her work, it remains a curious non-event in the pop star‘s wildly eventful career. | Released in 1994, the warm and mellow sound of Madonna’s sixth album has its seductive charms, but of all her work, it remains a curious non-event in the pop star‘s wildly eventful career. | Madonna: Bedtime Stories | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/madonna-bedtime-stories/ | Bedtime Stories | Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.
Bedtime Stories, the confused, the misunderstood. The early ’90s found Madonna at peak levels of media saturation. Inescapable! Seven years of hits compiled on The Immaculate Collection, Madonna featured on virtually every award show, Dick Tracy paraphernalia in the McDonald’s Happy Meal. I saw her name on a religious pamphlet: “We Christians must reject the mainstream acceptance of the ethics and morals of Marx and Madonna.” I saw her in The Far Side, her Gaultier-ensconced breasts puncturing an inflatable life raft in a cheap sexist gag. She was less a musician and more a holy ghost. Bedtime Stories was the first Madonna album that felt like a non-event, an asterisk to her omnipresence, another hot day in a heat wave.
And as such, this album has been difficult to assess as an art object. Madonna was, in 1992-1994, an artist under siege. Sex, her soft-core porn coffee table book, had been called obscene; it has been subsequently been reassessed as a smart and entertaining post-feminist grand jeté. Her previous album Erotica, with its diversity and effective New Jack Swing tourism, was received generally well and is now considered among many of her acolytes to be her masterpiece. But Bedtime Stories is, if we must go full Pepsi Challenge with Erotica, a blurry non-event of an album.
Closing track and hit single “Take a Bow” is a kind song, lush in production and sentiment, and deservedly hung around the charts longer than any other of her singles. Babyface’s appearance here, at the height of his own artistry, is frankly lovely. It is for many fans, myself included, Madonna at her most sensitive and brave.
Bedtime Stories’ final single, “Human Nature,” in contrast, did poorly on the charts, and yet is one of her most effective grooves, with her anti-slut-shaming slogan, “I’m not your bitch, don’t hang your shit on me” thwocking its way through Jean-Baptiste Mondino’s amazing video. It is handily one of Madonna’s best songs.
Conversely, the album’s most successful worldwide single, “Secret,” beloved by many, just meanders—even upon its release I recall my young ears being distracted by the single edit’s monotony when it appeared on radio playlists. On the album proper, the track drags interminably over five-plus minutes. Listening again now, it sounds like a lesser version of subsequent album Ray of Light’s “Frozen,” the dry crumbs of “Secret”’s acoustic guitar tracks waiting to be muted and replaced with William Orbit’s thrilling, tensile production.
Most infamously, we have “Bedtime Story.” Like many other former teenagers falling head over heels for Björk’s first solo album, I recall staring incredulously at the B. Guðmundsdóttir credit when it appeared in Madonna’s liner notes. The song itself is unimaginably disappointing—sterile and static, a less-daring second cousin to “Violently Happy.” Björk’s detached science-textbook approach toward a love-song, which works so well when paired with her own mystic Icelandic aesthetic, doesn’t sit well alongside Madonna’s enthusiastic consumerism. Perhaps the song has some appeal, decades later, now that we’re familiar and tolerant of the sound of Björk-on-autopilot. Perhaps we view it affectionately as a blueprint for her subsequent masterpieces on Ray of Light. Ultimately it remains, to my ears, Madonna’s first truly embarrassing flop.
And most of the rest of the album never really achieves any level of indispensability. Several attempts at New Jack balladry have lovely moody productions married to unremarkable songs or performances. Opening track “Survival,” as carefully constructed as it is, sounds, well, much tidier than Madonna’s contemporaries. The “Inside of Me” sample of Aaliyah’s “Back & Forth”—out the same year—just reminds me as a listener about how 1994 was the year of Toni Braxton, Salt-N-Pepa, and Janet Jackson; far more exciting music than this.
The deep cuts on the B-side of Bedtime Stories have their fans. Babyface is here, Massive Attack’s string arranging collaborator Craig Armstrong is here also, with an expensive sounding moment, and there’s a cute Herbie Hancock sample on “Sanctuary.” But these songs, for me, are undone by all having nearly identical melodies and moods to “Secret.” What attempts to be sultry and smooth comes off as beige and un-fascinating; my mind wanders and my time is wasted. When Madonna plays tourist with gay culture, with Broadway, with Hollywood, with UK jungle, she is able to keep things (usually) deferential and still interesting, and often, achieve transcendence. But here, she sounds woefully out-of-her-depth as a songwriter and singer when slinging these square attempts at R&B balladry.
It is a compliment to the artist that only here, over a decade into her career, on her sixth studio album, does she, for the first time, let this listener down. Take “Human Nature” and put in on a golden record, play “Take a Bow” at my funeral, and let the rest of this sleepy album be forgotten; it is, to my ears and memory, Madonna’s first truly inessential moment. | 2017-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Maverick / Warner Bros. | August 16, 2017 | 6.5 | 0735d66a-2abd-4312-adf0-bdbdfdfdc5f5 | Owen Pallett | https://pitchfork.com/staff/owen-pallett/ | null |
Phil Elverum lost his wife—an artist and the mother of his child—to cancer. His new album is a meditation on her memory, but also on what it means to keep living. | Phil Elverum lost his wife—an artist and the mother of his child—to cancer. His new album is a meditation on her memory, but also on what it means to keep living. | Mount Eerie: A Crow Looked At Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22970-a-crow-looked-at-me/ | A Crow Looked At Me | No subject has been more badly exploited by art than death. How often have you found yourself in the middle of a good book or movie, warming up to its world, making the magical passage through which its characters’ lives become temporarily real only to be sped into artificial reverence by someone dying? Gosh, you think: Death: That’s big. This must be a pretty meaningful experience. Death is reduced to a sympathy-extraction device, what the New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani once described as “literary ambulance-chasing,” designed to crowbar into the hearts of an audience just as they were thinking about changing the channel. Real death, meanwhile, moves ominously through the world of the living like a tide, gathering in waves that break without warning or reason, paroxysms of grief followed by yet more shapeless life. Fake death pops. Real death remains a slog.
Onto this tightrope walks Phil Elverum, a hermetically introspective songwriter who records under the name Mount Eerie. In spring of 2015, Elverum’s wife Geneviève was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a disease that kills 80% of patients within a year. According to the American Cancer Society, nearly all people with pancreatic cancer are over 45; two-thirds are over 65. Geneviève died three months after her 35th birthday. A year and a half earlier, she had given birth to her and Elverum’s first child, a girl.
A Crow Looked at Me, Elverum’s ninth album as Mount Eerie—and 13th overall, counting his earlier music as the Microphones—mentions Geneviève in nearly every song, sometimes by name, sometimes through cold, negative space. It’s almost as though Elverum has nothing better to talk about. Which, of course, he probably doesn’t.
Elverum’s recent albums—2015’s Sauna, 2012’s double feature of Clear Moon and Ocean Roar—were heavy on ambiance and fuzz, sonic embodiments of things through which we can’t see. Crow is spare and clean, mostly voice and some guitar, the sound of coffee in winter. You can almost hear the floorboards creaking. In a recent interview, Elverum called it “barely music.” Given the floss-thin line between his art and experience, you could take it as the album’s intended genre: Barely music.
Over the past few years, there have been a handful of albums similar to Crow, or at least with a similarly autobiographical premise: Sun Kil Moon’s Benji, Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell, Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree, stark, diaristic albums haunted by literal death, grief on record. Indie culture tends to prize this kind of undecorated directness as a stand-in for truth, as though nobody has ever spoken clearly and lied.
But listening to Crow, the songwriter I kept thinking of was Chan Marshall, whose early music as Cat Power felt confessional but surreal, painfully direct but impossible to pin down. Like Marshall, Elverum’s sleight of hand is that standing naked doesn’t make him any easier to see. If anything, Crow’s cold spaces and plainspoken delivery lull the listener into an illusion of solid ground even when it’s not there, laying everything on the same emotional bandwidth, from meditations on geese and forest fires to descriptions of his wife’s jaundiced skin. He never tells you how to feel, or more surprisingly, when.
Elverum’s early albums as the Microphones captured the solipsism of one’s 20s, where even small feelings are uncontainable, not the internal flicker of neurons but plate tectonics, the saga of raging rivers and moons and stars. Here, one’s inner world was always swallowing the outer one, not just a life among many but an allegory of heaven and earth. That the music was so obsessively layered, so obviously the product of a single mind only cemented the underlying metaphor: Elverum wasn’t just the center of his universe, he was its creator.
Real life—its unpunctuated hum, its customer-service lines—has a way of knocking that out of you. Over the past several years, Elverum’s point of view has become earthbound to the point of mundanity. Sauna, from 2015, featured an entire song about walking to the bookstore and seeing a pumpkin. Refreshingly, the pumpkin was not presented as a metaphor for anything; it was a pumpkin. Or, if it was a metaphor, it was only for the accumulation of stuff with no particular meaning or attachment to narrative, for that rare, seamless mindset where things are what they are. Crow’s sharpest line is in its third act: “Conceptual emptiness was cool to talk about, back before I knew my way around these hospitals.”
Most of the time, though, Elverum’s ground isn’t so solid. Crow isn’t so much about sickness or death but the hallucinatory stupor of grief, a state where everything—toothbrushes, flies, crows, and sunsets—flickers with suggestion and memory, as though Geneviève’s spirit had been scattered back into the universe like seeds. One understands Elverum’s temptation intuitively: After all, he can still hold her toothbrush.
So simple, so tactile, so deceptively real are these songs. Their cumulative effect is that they become wobbly with metaphor, forcing the listener into the kind of magical thinking that transforms everything in the living world into a sign of the dead, only to snap back into a reality that for better and worse means nothing. Halfway through the album, Elverum’s daughter asks if mama swims, to which Elverum replies that yes, she swims all the time now, because they scattered her ashes over water.
The album’s most breathtaking line is its last. “Sweet kid, I heard you murmur in your sleep. ‘Crow,’ you said. ‘Crow.’ And I asked, ‘Are you dreaming about a crow?’ And there she was.” In a single moment, the mechanics of these songs—the way dreams refract life, the way grief resurrects the dead without logic or warning—becomes blindingly clear. Then, either because Elverum is polite, or because he’s tired, or because there is nothing more to say, he ends with the image of his wife lingering like something glimpsed through a rainy window, blurry, then gone.
It would be easy to hear this album as sad. Certainly the facts of Elverum's story are. But facts aren’t art and art isn’t real, at least not the way cancer is. For an album so firmly anchored by death, Crow is suffused with life: The geese, the forest fires, the crows, the grocery-store lines where Elverum stumbles through awkward conversation with people from town. Tragedy hasn't stopped him from noticing the world; if anything, it seems to have pried his eyes open for good. As for the question of sadness, I defer to a quote attributed to Anton Chekhov that art should “prepare us for tenderness.” I have two very young children of my own; one of them is sleeping on my chest while I write. Listening to Crow, I find myself imagining what life would be like if I had to raise them without their mother. Think along these lines for any longer than a few seconds and you, like I, may find yourself rebounding from sorrow to a state of almost infinite gratitude. Take a good look, Elverum says: Most of this is beautiful and none of it is guaranteed. | 2017-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | P.W. Elverum & Sun | March 24, 2017 | 9 | 073ba438-49ff-4f40-93f6-0262d59a9d55 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
The Detroit rapper teams with the producer Sterling Toles for his most forward-thinking, experimental, and personal album. | The Detroit rapper teams with the producer Sterling Toles for his most forward-thinking, experimental, and personal album. | Boldy James / Sterling Toles: Manger on McNichols | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/boldy-james-sterling-toles-manger-on-mcnichols/ | Manger on McNichols | This year has been good to Boldy James. February’s The Price of Tea in China was something of a return to the Detroit rapper’s roots—another LP with longtime collaborator the Alchemist, in an effortlessly classicist style—but his victory lap, Manger on McNichols, branches into new territory.
Boldy’s toolkit is simple—a clear-cut flow, and an ear for lived-in phrasing—but he uses it to construct a rich simulation of Detroit, rendering a version of the city that’s tangible even to listeners who have never visited the real place. The landscape Boldy paints is overwhelmingly, almost oppressively dark: “I never been to the joint, but that’s just how it is when you live in Detroit,” he raps on “Detroit River Rock.”
Though Boldy has long had a knack for self-reflection, his writing is even deeper and his focus more intense on Manger on McNichols. It’s not just Detroit that’s depicted in detail—Boldy also writes his way through some of his most traumatic memories. He’s at his most introspective on “Mommy Dearest (a eulogy),” a stream-of-consciousness internal monologue about Boldy’s tortured relationship to his mother inspired by a single line from Biggie’s “Suicidal Thoughts” (“I know my mother wish she got a fucking abortion”). The album’s darkest and most despairing cut is sequenced to effortlessly flow into its most triumphant; “Birth of Bold (the christening)” rises up in glory from Boldy’s painful origins, a joyful declaration of perseverance.
In a podcast interview sampled on “Mommy Dearest,” Boldy credits his newly personal vision to the encouragement of producer Sterling Toles, a longstanding presence in Detroit’s underground scene but not a known quantity among rap heads like the Alchemist. Alc’s beats are seamless and refined, a perfect vessel for Boldy’s casual charisma, but they remain a little predictable, in the way all classic hip-hop beats are the product of a specific formula. Sterling’s productions, on the other hand, feel like full-fledged compositions, knotted and jazzy and complicated, capable of existing without Boldy’s voice but better because of it.
Toles’ work contains the familiar soul samples, segments of sermons, organ swells, and scratches, but his beats go beyond jazz-rap into something closer to true jazz. Flutes, alto sax, and live percussion linger on the edges of “Welcome to 76,” and a mournful cello drones throughout the record.” Sterling’s beats aren’t consistent digital patterns but living things, fluttering and freeform, backed often by live drums. His confident bass playing provides as much a backbone to the record as Boldy’s charismatic voice. Sometimes the drums are late to kick in, letting Boldy’s flow function as the beat (“Detroit River Rock”); sometimes there are no drums at all, just bass, bold flows, and noodling synth lines (“Requiem”).
Sterling’s compositions float in the neutral zone between hip-hop, jazz, and electronic. “Birth of Bold (a christening)” is a Vocoder-inflected G-funk jam until around 45 seconds from the end, when a galloping bassline kicks in and the whole thing transforms into a cosmic Flying Lotus-type beat. On “BB Butcher,” the high-BPM breakbeat approaches the hurried intensity of drum ‘n’ bass. As instrumental tracks, Sterling’s contributions often seek to unsettle, reflecting the anxiety Boldy describes in his lyrics, but it’s his ensemble of bells, xylophones, and glittering keys that provide the album’s few points of uplift.
In his full-length collaborations with single producers, Boldy James lets himself be pushed creatively in a way few rappers ever do, ceding a certain amount of control to the direction of a single creative voice. Sterling Toles isn’t afraid to make complicated beats, and Boldy isn’t afraid of them, and the resulting fusion is unrestrained and inventive in a way few rap records are.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap / Jazz | Sector 7-G | July 28, 2020 | 7.7 | 073c0923-a4c4-40a4-94e3-485eafa3738b | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
Anna Meredith has already been composer in residence at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and currently occupies the same position at the Royal Philharmonic Society. Black Prince Fury is her first solo EP; a visceral, rhythmic set that recalls Moondog's cross-genre miniatures. | Anna Meredith has already been composer in residence at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and currently occupies the same position at the Royal Philharmonic Society. Black Prince Fury is her first solo EP; a visceral, rhythmic set that recalls Moondog's cross-genre miniatures. | Anna Meredith: Black Prince Fury | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17400-black-prince-fury/ | Black Prince Fury | After a performance of early 20th-century English composer William Walton's first symphony during a recital in Liverpool earlier this year, the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain stood up, set their instruments on their chairs, and, for about 10 minutes, proceeded to act like synchronized cavemen. They hissed, they clapped, they drummed on their bellies, and moved in ways that you generally don't see in concert halls. The piece was called "HandsFree"; the composer was Anna Meredith, a Scottish woman in her mid-30s. You don't need to know who Walton was or what his first symphony sounds like to understand how a bunch of teenagers yelling after it might prove refreshing.
Black Prince Fury, Meredith's first EP as a solo musician, is playful, spirited, visceral, and smart. Aside from the pummeling brass section of "Nautilus" and an AOR rock sample in "Never Wonder" that is too good to spoil, the EP sounds like it was made entirely with drum machines and synthesizers all cut to sound flat, bright, tough and tiny-- the aural equivalent of plastic toys. It's easy to grab a hold of due to how much emphasis Meredith puts on rhythm. They aren't hummable, but they are drummable, snappable, and other impact-related forms of participation. Half the time it sounds like the real joy here for her was creating situations where she could play Tetris with her own polyrhtythms-- once brainy, always brainy.
In her track review of "Nautilus", Laura Snapes compared Meredith's music to that of Björk, Planningtorock, and These New Puritans, for whom Meredith has opened on tour. To my ears, Meredith's real ancestor is Moondog, a New York street musician who also made tough, puzzling miniatures that drew as freely from the pop and jazz of his time as they did from what might have been more readily identified as "classical music." (Meredith has already been the composer-in-residence at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and currently occupies the same position at the Royal Philharmonic Society.) Like Moondog, the character of Meredith's music is triumphant and warlike, but the scale of it is cartoonishly small-- most of the time it only sounds like the work of a few people working in a living room.
And like Moondog (or like the electronic producer Max Tundra, or James Blake's first EPs) Meredith's music feels dense, busy and isolated, but essentially fun, as though it was designed first and foremost to amuse the people making it. At 18 minutes, Black Prince Fury is just a toe or two in the water; whether she'll make more is unclear, but considering how deadeningly self-serious the worlds of classical and electronic music can be, a few more teenagers drumming on their bellies would be a nice thing. | 2012-11-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2012-11-06T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Experimental | Moshi Moshi | November 6, 2012 | 7.2 | 073f8b53-3d2b-425b-b573-73b6d026fe93 | Mike Powell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/ | null |
Things Fall Apart was a turning point for the Roots, the record where they figured out what kind of band they could be. Both its themes and its eclectic mix of sounds resonate in the current moment. | Things Fall Apart was a turning point for the Roots, the record where they figured out what kind of band they could be. Both its themes and its eclectic mix of sounds resonate in the current moment. | The Roots: Things Fall Apart | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22132-things-fall-apart/ | Things Fall Apart | In 1999, the Roots were in limbo. The Philadelphia hip-hop band had released three critically acclaimed albums but were still considered something of a novelty act, featuring a big guy with a big Afro on drums (?uestlove), a sharp but unshowy MC (Black Thought), two beatboxers (Rahzel and Scratch), and a stellar live show—all anomalies in the gilded age of Puff Daddy and the million-dollar sample clearance. The Roots had by this time amassed a faithful cult following, but none of it translated to mainstream success. They were selling more records and slowly moving beyond their dedicated base of jazz and traditional rap purists, but their career wasn’t headed anywhere in particular.
Reflecting these tensions, the Roots opened their fourth studio album, Things Fall Apart, with dialogue from a scene from Spike Lee’s 1990 film, Mo’ Better Blues, in which characters Bleek Gilliam and Shadow Henderson—played by Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes, respectively—debate the state of jazz music. Gilliam doesn’t want to sacrifice his creative vision to pander to crowds, and he thinks black people should come to his shows simply because he’s making black art. “That’s bullshit,” Henderson quips. “The people don’t come because you grandiose motherfuckers don’t play shit that they like.” The clip seemed to acknowledge the Roots’ reputation: They were too smart for their own good, too self-aware, and they were getting in their own way. It was as if, from the very beginning, the band sought to be misunderstood, to find somewhere to hide from the mainstream.
As unique as the Roots were—they were a hip-hop band, after all—their music still had traces of what was popular at the time. Their 1995 album Do You Want More?!!!??! featured the sort of laid-back jazz feel that Digable Planets had perfected the year before on Blowout Comb. The Roots’ follow-up, 1996’s I**lladelph Halflife, was more aggressive and confrontational, taking lyrical and sonic cues from the Wu-Tang Clan. But the group was searching for something different. Before the release of Things Fall Apart, they had positioned themselves as a sort of remedy for the excesses of Bad Boy’s empire, which in those days became an all-too-easy target for the backpacker set. In their satirical 1996 video for “What They Do,” the Roots mocked the sort of rap video stereotypes popularized by director Hype Williams, thumbing their collective nose at champagne bottles and mansion parties. Acts like the Roots wanted to give listeners the “real shit,” but while they and others criticized Bad Boy’s gravitational pull, their art-rap aesthetic was its own form of marketing. They just hadn’t figured out what they were selling. While the Roots thought of themselves as the anti-establishment alongside acts like OutKast and the Fugees, those groups sold millions of records when the Roots were struggling to go gold.
By 1997, before the sessions for Things Fall Apart began, drummer and bandleader ?uestlove was exploring new opportunities beyond the Roots. He was more concerned with recording D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Common’s Like Water for Chocolate than he was with his own group. It wasn’t that he wanted to leave the Roots, but still, his outside projects created resentment amongst band members who questioned his focus. “In my head at that time, the notion of a Roots album was a distant third,” ?uest wrote in his 2013 memoir, Mo’ Meta Blues. He was spending time with Voodoo engineer Russell Elevado, learning new ways to manipulate sound to give his own music a more granular, less studied feel. He wanted to be a heralded producer like DJ Premier and J Dilla, but his band’s work felt remarkably clean—even sterile__—__in comparison. The best rap of that era had to feel at least a little gritty: Though the Notorious B.I.G. was signed to Bad Boy, his 1997 album Life After Death had plenty of dark, violent narratives. The Wu’s massive double album, Wu-Tang Forever, was full of woozy street bangers, courtesy of the group’s production team, with the RZA at the helm. Realizing he needed to improve as a producer, ?uest learned how to play drums “dirty,” taking Dilla’s lead and dragging his percussion just a bit to make the beat seem off-kilter.
The genesis of Things Fall Apart can be traced back to a hangout ?uest had with Premier, Dilla, and D’Angelo, where he played them a rough version of a Roots song called “Double Trouble” and got disinterested head-nods in return. Determined to bolster the track, ?uest recorded drums to two-inch tape, looped it back through the soundboard, and tweaked the EQ to give it a feeling of distance. “It was a turning point in my understanding of my own career,” ?uest wrote in his memoir. “I knew that the other guys respected me as a drummer… but I also wanted them to respect me as a producer and a songwriter.” In its finished form, “Double Trouble” is arguably the centerpiece of Things Fall Apart; rapper Black Thought finally had a hard-charging instrumental to match his verbal dexterity, and guest Mos Def matched him bar-for-bar.
Things Fall Apart is where the Roots figured out who they were—it wasn’t “just another Roots record,” and if the group was going to fail, they were going out their own way. “Table of Contents (Part 1)” illustrates their new willingness to take risks: The breakbeat is messy and the mix is intentionally pinched and lopsided, but the track’s feeling of chaos is an ideal table-setter, opening the record on a tense and uncertain note. On “Step Into the Realm,” the drum loop fades in and out, but the rhythmic instability makes the rappers’ audibly distorted vocals sound even more urgent. If the Roots’ first three albums mastered the meeting point between jazz and rap, this was the first time the band went psychedelic, opening up new possibilities sonically and lyrically.
D’Angelo’s 1995 album Brown Sugar and Erykah Badu’s Baduizm from 1997 were the blueprint for new-school soul music, and Things Fall Apart applied those ideas to hip-hop proper. In this aesthetic space, artists with different approaches could find new ways to be creative together, and a new movement was being born. “You Got Me,” the lead single from Things Fall Apart, found a crooning Badu next to rapper Eve from the Ruff Ryders over a lilting guitar figure and strings. The classic arrangement and eclectic mix of voices, paired with ?uestlove’s typically propulsive and cutting backbeat, sounded both old and new, looking backwards and forwards simultaneously. The Roots were pushing the limits of their sound, establishing a lane for D’Angelo, Common, and Badu to do the same. By building a musical community and mastering the art of collaboration, they figured out how to cross over and keep their soul intact.
Things Fall Apart was the Roots’ most successful record, and after years in the shadows, they were finally getting radio airplay and touring as headliners. The album went gold two months after its release and hit platinum in 2013. In addition to its commercial success, it served as a launching pad for new voices, like Roc-A-Fella rapper Beanie Sigel, who debuted as a guest artist on “Adrenaline!,” and Eve, whose “You Got Me” appearance was her most prominent feature at the time. The relatively unknown Jill Scott wrote the chorus for “You Got Me” and was slated to sing on the track until MCA Records pushed for a bigger name (Badu) to appear in her place; soon, Eve and Scott would release their own platinum-selling albums.
Despite being a breakthrough for their band and their scene, the Roots didn’t immediately build on Things Fall Apart’s success. Powered by D’Angelo’s sultry “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” video, Voodoo became a phenomenon, and ?uest spent most of 2000 on tour as the singer’s drummer. By the time the Roots re-grouped, ?uest’s closest peers were pushing their sounds to new places. D wanted to learn guitar; Common and Dilla wanted to experiment with electronic textures. The Roots responded by moving away from the movement they helped create; their follow-up record, Phrenology, was essentially the anti-Roots album, with a heavy emphasis on rock. And while it alienated the Roots’ core fanbase, Phrenology performed well, pushing the group further into crossover territory. The Roots became a more regular presence on TV and radio. Soon after, Rahzel and Malik B. left the group for good. In 2006, Dilla died at age 32 from complications of lupus, and the Roots’ album of that year, Game Theory, kicked off a series of releases with a darker tone, including 2008’s Rising Down, 2010’s How I Got Over, and 2011’s undun. Having secured a gig as Jimmy Fallon’s backing band—first on “Late Night,” then on “The Tonight Show”—the Roots finally and completely entered the mainstream. But they used the freedom to experiment and make the music they wanted.
Things go in cycles, and the approach the Roots pioneered came back around. In 2015, the “next movement” the Roots mentioned on Things Fall Apart seemed to arrive. Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly—a densely lyrical and allegorical exploration of Blackness and struggle, set to a live-jazz soundtrack featuring dozens of collaborators—is hard to imagine without this album in its rearview. Artists like Robert Glasper, Thundercat, Terrace Martin, and Kamasi Washington channel the same creativity as the Roots, D’Angelo, and company, banding together to push rap, jazz, soul, and more into atmospheric new places. The spirit of Things Fall Apart is in the air.
Looking back on it now, this record feels like both a love letter and a fond farewell to the Roots’ early days, acknowledging that they needed to evolve to stay relevant. And some of the album’s continued relevance is painful. Its closing poem, “The Return to Innocence Lost,” details the fate of a young man seemingly doomed to fail since birth. He dies tragically, leaving nothing but thoughts of a life that could’ve been. Nowadays, black men are dying at the hands of police with alarming frequency, and we’re left to mourn the dead in hashtags and shared articles, wondering what’s next—or who’s next—in this seemingly endless war. Things Fall Apart imparts a similar tone, even if the band didn’t address those issues directly. The black and white cover art, taken in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn in 1965, depicts a young black woman running from a waiting police officer, her face twisted in fear. The scene is sadly familiar 50 years later. As the Roots teetered between fame and purgatory, virtue and failure, Things Fall Apart captured the intensity of a group with everything to lose and the world to gain. | 2016-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | MCA | August 28, 2016 | 9.4 | 074100f8-c5aa-4d32-a8df-60a66aade2c8 | Marcus J. Moore | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/ | null |
The Velvet Underground’s six-disc deluxe edition, including long-sought-after live material from 1969, offers a complete portrait of a period when the Velvets’ populist ambitions were being matched by their exceedingly prolific output. | The Velvet Underground’s six-disc deluxe edition, including long-sought-after live material from 1969, offers a complete portrait of a period when the Velvets’ populist ambitions were being matched by their exceedingly prolific output. | The Velvet Underground: The Velvet Underground – 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20015-the-velvet-underground-the-velvet-underground/ | The Velvet Underground – 45th Anniversary Super Deluxe Edition | Many recording artists release a self-titled debut album, while some opt to release a self-titled album later in their career, and others even go on to release multiple self-titled albums. But the Velvet Underground are the only band to have released multiple self-titled debuts.
Technically, their first album was 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico, a bracing collision of Brill Building pop classicism and avant-garde noise terrorism that, by the time White Light/White Heat was released in 1968, had progressed to all-out warfare. The tension at the heart of these two records has often been attributed to the oppositional approaches of its principal songwriters—professional popsmith Lou Reed and viola-scraping iconoclast John Cale—though this reading has always been reductive. After all, Cale delivered one of White Light/White Heat’s few moments of serenity ("Lady Godiva’s Operation"), while Reed unleashed the album’s most brutalizing shock 53 seconds into "I Heard Her Call My Name". But for Reed, the only logical response to White Light/White Heat’s anti-pop extremism was to ricochet back in the other direction, a move that would force Cale out of the Velvets and present Reed with the opportunity to lead a different kind of band.
The romantic myth about the Velvets—the commercially ignored, ahead-of-their-time proto-punk innovators proudly out of step with the peace'n'lovey-dovey pop of the day—often overlooks a crucial quality about the band: they actually wanted to be popular. And in light of disappointing sales for their first two albums on niche jazz imprint Verve, they traded up to parent company MGM in 1969 with the intention of being a proper rock band that makes records for big labels in Hollywood and stays at the Chateau Marmont.
From the very first second of The Velvet Underground, everything about the group had changed from where they left off with the epochal squall of White Light/White Heat’s "Sister Ray". Reed and Sterling Morrison’s amp settings were dialed down from 11 to 1; Maureen "Moe" Tucker’s thundering thump was softened into a breezy brushed-snare sway; and Reed’s ding-dong-sucking snarl was replaced by the melancholic whisper of Cale’s successor Doug Yule. It’s like returning from a holiday only to find your rat-infested apartment building had burned down and been replaced with a white-picket-fenced bungalow. And even though the song Yule was crooning, "Candy Says", marked Reed’s first explicit character reference to the Warhol Factory scene that birthed his band, it ultimately underscored the Velvets’ increasing remove from its hazy decadence: A devastatingly intimate portrait of then-transitioning Factory regular Candy Darling, "Candy Says" is the sobering soundtrack for that inevitable moment when all tomorrow’s parties turn to morning-after, makeup-smeared, self-loathing introspection. (The album cover reinforces the reflective mood: though shot at the Factory, the Velvets look more like they’re hosting a small gathering friends in their living room, their '67-era striped tees and fuck-you wraparound shades replaced by comfortable sweaters and sensible collared shirts.)
If The Velvet Undergrounddialled down the aggression and abrasion of its predecessors, it undercuts the mellow approach with some of the rawest songwriting of Reed’s career, and a plainspoken candor as startling as his past meditations on smack and S&M. His blunt language drives a spike into the album’s gentle jangle to unleash a maelstrom of emotions, where ecstatic moments of spiritual reawakening ("Beginning to See the Light") are answered by cruel reality checks ("I’m set free/ To find a new illusion"), where the love of his life becomes someone else's ("Pale Blue Eyes"), where a Jewish guy feels so fucked up, he starts praying to Jesus. Even the seemingly easy-going choogle of "What Goes On" is routinely upset by Reed’s admissions of anxiety ("One minute born/ One minute doomed"). By that token, the simultaneous-poetry experiment "The Murder Mystery" feels less like an anomalous WTF throwback to the Velvets’ avant-garde roots than the sound of the album’s slow-stewing inner turmoil coming to a boil.
This interiority complex was crucial to Reed, to the point of him taking the original recordings engineered by MGM house producer Val Valentin and remixing the entire album to bring the already unguarded vocals to the fore. This so-called "Closet Mix"—featuring an entirely different, more cerebral take on the blues soliloquy "Some Kinda Love"— initially appeared only on the album’s first U.S. run; it would later resurface on the 1995 career-spanning box set Peel Slowly and See. This 45th-anniversary package not only revives Reed’s Closet Mix alongside a new crystalline mix by Valentin, but also a third mono version that could very well be dubbed the Armoire Mix, thus making the transition out of White Light/White Heat feel a little less abrupt. (For one, the once-blissful fade-out organ drone on "What Goes On" now sounds like a ray-gun burrowing into your skull.) Which mix you prefer depends on just how cozy you want to get with the Velvets: would you rather they engage you in a private, face-to-face conversation (Valentin’s mix), whisper in your ear (Closet Mix), or take up residency inside your brain (the mono mix)?
But The Velvet Underground’s six-disc deluxe edition has a purpose beyond just encouraging audiophiles to A/B different versions of the same songs. Rather, it’s a complete portrait of a period when the Velvets’ populist ambitions were being matched by their exceedingly prolific output, and the notion of what we now consider to be the archetypal Lou Reed song—be it a tough, streetwise rocker or tender, empathetic ballad—was being more clearly defined. Shortly after The Velvet Underground’s March 1969 release, the band had recorded enough new material at New York’s Record Plant for a fourth album; souring relations with MGM, however, resulted in those sessions being shelved. This material has, of course, surfaced in various iterations over the years (be it on mid-'80s compilations VU and Another View, the Peel Slowly and See box, or in revised form on various Reed solo albums), and has proven as canonical as the band’s officially released work. But this set is the first to present it as a proper, logically sequenced, stand-alone album, kicking off with the locomotive charge of "Foggy Notion" and ending with an instrumental version of "Ride Into the Sun" that, here, feels less like an unfinished demo than a strategically placed closing-credits theme.
It’s no coincidence that these songs count as the most upbeat and playful the Velvets produced; as Yule observes in David Fricke’s liner notes, "There was a type of song that Lou wrote that was not thematically important to him, but was fun to put together, that had a lot of rhythm—a good tune when you needed something to open up an audience." The last two discs of this set—pulled from two November '69 shows at San Francisco club The Matrix—present a glorious opportunity to experience this engagement process in action. This period of the band’s onstage evolution has been documented on the 1974 double-album 1969: The Velvet Underground Live and the no-fi bootleg comp The Quine Tapes, but never with such cohesion and clarity. (The Matrix—owned by Jefferson Airplane singer Marty Balin—boasted a professional four-track console at its mixing desk.)
While San Francisco’s hippie haven may have seemed like enemy turf for the Velvets, the city was essentially the band’s home away from home for much of '69, The Matrix their Factory West. And the rollicking performances betray their desire to out-jam the jam bands, and expose the rock ‘n’ roll heart beating through even the Velvets’ most transgressive songs. The cornerstone is a "Sister Ray" to end all "Sister Ray"s, though its 37(!)-minute roller coaster journey from a molasses-slow blues to heart-racing rave-up is hitched to a relaxed West Coast groove that ventures far away from the original’s distortion holocaust. And the Velvets take such liberties in stretching out and reshaping their most concise songs ("Waiting for the Man", "Lisa Says", "There She Goes Again"), that the faithful rendition of first-album freak-out "Heroin" practically sounds formalist in comparison. (That said, even when in crowd-pleasing mode, Reed was already plotting future provocations: Prior to kicking into a distended early version of "Rock & Roll", Reed strums a droning warm-up chord, and marvels, "imagine a hundred guitars doing that at once!")
Alas, the obvious joy with which the band whip through the Matrix setlist obscures the sad truth about The Velvet Underground: that the Velvets’ concerted "pop" album turned out to be the biggest commercial flop of their career up to that point, not even able to scrape the bottom reaches of the Billboard 200, as its two more caustic predecessors barely managed to do. When the band sing in unison, "How does it feel to be loved?" at the end of the Matrix take on "Beginning to See the Light", Lou ad libs, "somebody tell me, PLEASE!" with an amplified sense of desperation that indicates he never thought he’d know the answer. But just as The Velvet Underground’s hushed tones and tempered tempos demanded a greater sense of patience from listeners, its acceptance proved to be a protracted, gradual process that took decades.
The band’s first two albums prefigured punk, goth, and contemporary noise, but The Velvet Underground anticipated the sound of popular indie rock from the late-'80s onward, through the barb-wired chime of Galaxie 500, Pavement, Yo La Tengo, and countless others; the entire Stereolab discography can be heard in the outro of "What Goes On" alone, while even the Moe Tucker-sung confection "After Hours" (and its '69-session counterpart "I’m Sticking With You") single-handedly spawned all things twee. Brian Eno famously quipped that everyone who bought The Velvet Underground & Nico started a band, but The Velvet Underground's stunning simplicity and unflinching honesty presented an even more accessible model of DIY aspiration, free of Warholian conceptualism and Cale’s classically schooled chaos. The album remains both an open invitation and a dare—to face Reed’s hard truths or, better yet, to reveal your own. | 2014-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2014-11-24T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Interscope / Polydor | November 24, 2014 | 10 | 07417a0a-3362-4319-b210-cf48f6d2d062 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On Eels’ 12th album, Mark Everett trots out his reflexive self-loathing and elementary rhyme schemes one more time, with no clear reason why. | On Eels’ 12th album, Mark Everett trots out his reflexive self-loathing and elementary rhyme schemes one more time, with no clear reason why. | Eels: The Deconstruction | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/eels-the-deconstruction/ | The Deconstruction | Eels diehards can sit this next one out. Not The Deconstruction, because this album is very much for you—but the following question: At some point in the 22 years between “Novocaine for the Soul” and Eels’ twelfth album, Mark Everett lost you, so what could he do to bring you back? Explore topics other than his reflexive self-loathing and the women he tasks with pulling him out of it? Defy his maniacal dedication to the kind of elementary rhyme schemes that would get laughed out of a battle rap in 1983? Evolve beyond the cynicism and clutter that I’ll forever associate with the countless Beck clones I heard while working at the Gap in 1998?
The thing is, if any of that came to pass, the result would be virtually unrecognizable as an Eels album. The Deconstruction is extremely an Eels album. It opens with a listless melody that’s stuck between classic rock stations (“Space Oddity” and Pink Floyd’s “Brain Damage”), as Everett huffs, “The deconstruction has begun/Time for me to fall apart.” The why, the how, and the what of this mission statement go unsaid, but it leaves little to the imagination for anyone who’s followed Eels to this point.
Everett has described the album as a reaction to a “world [that’s] going nuts,” and so his typically misanthropic leanings have been juxtaposed against childlike flits of whimsy or coffee-black observations of varying degrees of wit. The Deconstruction spans his recovery from heartache and becoming a new man—not a new musician, mind you, but a new man. He’s got a woman, and on “There I Said It” and “Sweet Scorched Earth,” she gives him the power and perspective to overlook all the negativity in the world. No one would begrudge him the happiness couched in “Today Is the Day,” but the song is a contrivance of burbling synths, plastic beats, and E’s own dead-eyed growl. The remainder of the record refuses to delve into any emotion more complex than pity or self-doubt (save for “Be Hurt,” the only moment where Everett takes a break from blaming himself and musters the courage to embrace pain), until we arrive at “You Are the Shining Light,” which really requires no further explanation.
Only the most astute Eels historians will notice that the previous paragraph is almost entirely made of reconstituted sentences from Pitchfork’s reviews of two other recent Eels albums, with the appropriate songs from The Deconstruction swapped in. Having saved myself the effort, I guess I can see the appeal of Everett’s ruthlessly economical songwriting process, but what good does it do the listener?
In the style of 2000’s “Mr. E.’s Beautiful Blues” and 2001’s “Fresh Feeling,” this album’s single “Today Is the Day” is meant as a deployment of Everett’s secret weapon, suggesting yet again that the snark is just a cover for his true self, a romantic who can be won over with a pop melody and a bumper-sticker cliché. As with Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day” and the Cure songs that still get played on the radio, there can be real pleasure in hearing a mean-mugging miserablist express legitimate joy. But Everett is either unwilling or unable to modulate his vocals, and so he has to rely on outdated signifiers of “happy music” (joy-buzzer synths, cloying power-pop guitars and handclaps) to differentiate “Today Is the Day” from the rest of The Deconstruction. The effect is not even remotely believable.
It’s enough to make you reassess the entire existence of this project, particularly in relation to its one towering peak, 1998’s Electro-Shock Blues. Not that singing about death makes that album more inherently worthy of esteem, but that’s what it took to get Everett out of his own head, to provide his otherwise interchangeable musings with an urgency greater than filling out 45 minutes of an album. If the stakes are any lower, we end up with the hopelessly vague likes of “The Epiphany” and “Today Is the Day”—interstitial music for the sitcom of his own life.
And yet, somehow he’s still at it. He’s managed to transcend the Beck comparisons to a mythic status of his own in Los Angeles, somewhere in the galaxy of Tom Waits, Randy Newman, Daniel Clowes, and Marc Maron: an uncompromising eccentric, patron saint of junkyard dogs, a curmudgeon softened by his pop craftsmanship. In part this is a testament to just how much mileage Everett has gotten out of the mid-’90s archetype where a beard and ironic detachment are equivalent to intelligence. When given the slightest bit of scrutiny, The Deconstruction produces no eccentricity, pop smarts, orchestral creativity, or emotional revelation. This album comes off like a hustle rather than a noble failure, and that’s what makes it more pernicious than the likes of Boarding House Reach, Man of the Woods, and Virtue: Unlike at least some of those guys, Everett knows exactly what he’s doing. | 2018-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | E Works / PIAS | April 13, 2018 | 3 | 0745cdeb-4b7c-4533-accf-dba803e78934 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Mono No Aware collects new ambient music that reflects our present moment. Each piece of the 80-minute compilation has its own unique identity, yet together it feels like the work of one mind. | Mono No Aware collects new ambient music that reflects our present moment. Each piece of the 80-minute compilation has its own unique identity, yet together it feels like the work of one mind. | Various Artists: Mono No Aware | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23111-mono-no-aware/ | Mono No Aware | Ambient music is always there, but the ways in which it intersects with culture is always shifting. In the 1970s, when the term first emerged thanks to Brian Eno, ambient existed as a corollary to space rock and psychedelia— solitary “head music” for the golden age of post-Dark Side of the Moon headphone listening. In the ’80s, as baby-boomers got older and busier, some of it became new age, a lucrative albeit niche market where the music was as crystalline as the rainbow reflected from the underside of a compact disc. In the ’90s, thanks to the rave-era chillout space, ambient returned to its druggy roots as collective listening, a sonic environment that facilitated shared consciousness expansion. And as that decade progressed and the millennium turned, ambient music came to be seen as a direct expression of technology’s state of the art, showcasing the ability of the newly fast computer to create sounds the likes of which no one had ever heard. Along these paths, ambient music is given meaning by what is happening around it—it’s a function of how the sound exists in the always-changing now.
Years on from its home hi-fi beginnings, ambient is now most likely to circulate on cassette, CD-R, or via streams on YouTube or Bandcamp. The communities that have grown up around it and nurtured it exist online, so creators and listeners are likely to draw inspiration, create, share, and discuss the music in the digital space. Mono No Aware, a new compilation assembled by the Berlin-based experimental label Pan, situates ambient music in this present moment. The set, assembled by Pan label head Bill Kouligas, is an invigorating survey of what’s going on in some of ambient’s obscure corners. Mixing selections from artists who come from all over but are mostly little-known outside of experimental music circles, Mono No Aware manages to be simultaneously an introduction to new voices and a deeply satisfying 80-minute mix that hangs together as an album.
Where ambient music was once dominated by auteurs—Eno, Richard D. James, GAS, Stars of the Lid—it’s now increasingly becoming the province of low-key producers working in relative anonymity who let the work speak for itself. Each track on *Mono No Aware *is distinctive enough to represent a personal approach, but there are clear connections between them that make the mix feel like a unified whole. A rustling noise lends a given track a kind of “floor,” an earthy grounding absent when purely digital tones hang in a silent space. Small scrapes, tape hiss, and hushed knocks and clangs wind through the album, offering a tactile sense of hearing music in a room. In “Exasthrus (Pane)” by M.E.S.H. (Berlin-based artist James Whipple), clouds of synths are mixed with the sound of feet moving across the floor and rain beating against glass, creating an enveloping nocturnal scene with an undercurrent of tension. “Eliminator” by Helm (London’s Luke Younger) sounds like music enclosed by a copper pipe, the drones echoing in the distance and escaping in a cloud of mist. Kouligas himself contributes “VXOMEG,” which starts with a blast of noise and then transforms into a kind of rusted-out wind chime, the sound of industry meeting the natural world. A strong feeling of space pervades, as tracks function like individual rooms in a sprawling building waiting to be explored.
The human voice is another thread winding through the set; we hear bits of conversation in different languages, snippets of song, whispers that hint at secrets but never quite give them away. “Held,” from the French producer Malibu, shifts between glowing drones, crunching footsteps, and a voice, soft and even, that sounds like it’s coming from someone under hypnosis. Yves Tumor’s “Limerence” combines a synth pulse and voices that move from joking and playful to pleading and desperate, evoking an early Harmony Korine film with its vérité power. The voices make Mono No Aware terrestrial, rather than abstract or alien; this isn’t music for imaginary worlds, but what surrounds us as we live in the here and now. While the environments are clear and evocative, they always seem populated by the living, and human emotion is never far outside the frame.
The music on Mono No Aware tends to amplify the subliminal, rather than evoking easily nameable states like “sadness” or “joy.” A given piece might have a tint of low-level anxiety, a sprinkling of menace, hints of relaxation or peace. But the music's subtlety, the record is ultimately a vehicle for exploring feeling, rather than just something nice for the background. The tracks feel like little mysteries to puzzle through, an invitation for active mood engagement. And the fact that so many different artists are brought here to participate in a singular expression of an ever-evolving genre makes it extra rewarding. Earlier this year Pitchfork interviewed Yves Tumor, and he was cagey about the details of his life, including his name and place of residence. “A lot of people are confused about my actual whereabouts, but that’s OK,” he said. For the duration of Mono No Aware, all that matters is that he found himself here, and he’s saying something. | 2017-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Pan | April 4, 2017 | 8.6 | 074ab997-cc6f-4212-83d4-7817cfdca494 | Mark Richardson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/ | null |
Gathering vintage compositions from 27 tape reels, this expansive new collection highlights the brief but fertile period, more than 50 years ago, when avant-garde electronic music took root in India. | Gathering vintage compositions from 27 tape reels, this expansive new collection highlights the brief but fertile period, more than 50 years ago, when avant-garde electronic music took root in India. | Various Artists: The NID Tapes: Electronic Music From India 1969-1972 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-the-nid-tapes-electronic-music-from-india-1969-1972/ | The NID Tapes: Electronic Music From India 1969-1972 | One night in 1969, 20,000 people gathered at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, in the Indian state of Gujarat, to witness a vision of the future: the Moog synthesizer. An audiovisual spectacle called Soundscape was taking place across campus, and students and faculty members played the instrument while those in attendance marveled at the cutting-edge technology. American composer David Tudor had arrived in India earlier that year; during his three-month residency, he installed the synthesizer, which had been shipped from New York in wooden crates, along with a Dual Ring Modulator, a Bode Frequency Shifter, and tape machines, and led workshops on the instrument. Like the European electronic music studios established in the 1950s, the NID’s space would become a hub for exploration, hosting students of various stripes to experiment with its tools’ endless capabilities.
The first overview of this short-lived but groundbreaking period comes in the form of a tremendous new compilation, The NID Tapes: Electronic Music from India 1969-1972. The artist Paul Purgas discovered, reassembled, and digitized its 19 tracks from 27 tape reels, and the results are thrillingly varied. Across tape collages and soundtracks, improvisations and field recordings, the overarching feeling is one of restless curiosity. Gita Sarabhai’s two pieces—both simply titled “Gitaben’s Composition”—are emblematic of these studio investigations. Her first contribution features playful, cartoonish warbles reverberating in the ether. The latter takes us straight into the void, casting lambent, oscillating tones into a monolithic drone.
Sarabhai was a musicologist and revered musician who came from an influential family that pushed for modernist changes in the country. The pedagogical philosophies they favored infused the principles of Maria Montessori and the Bauhaus with ideas of holistic training via Mahatma Gandhi. It was Sarabhai who oversaw Tudor’s residency, and even prior to this international exchange, she would play records from her personal collection—Western composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, Indian musicians like Ravi Shankar and Kesarbai Kerkar—over the PA system during the NID’s lunch hours. This stylistic mélange animates Atul Desai’s “Compositions,” whose commingling of percussion and effervescent bleeps channel his desire to seek naad—the ever-vibrating “essence of sound.” This isn’t so much a transition from past to present as an expression of music’s liberatory potential: Given the rigors and hierarchies inherent in learning the sitar or sarod, for example, the Moog symbolized a more egalitarian avenue for ecstatic stimulation of the mind, body, and spirit.
On an All India Radio broadcast from 1970, Desai, a Hindustani classical vocalist and composer, and the filmmaker I.S. Mathur extolled the avant-garde composer Edgard Varèse; their reverence for the early-20th-century experimentalist is evident in Mathur’s own pieces. The desire to blend environmental sounds with electronics is the central premise behind the impish “My Birds,” while “Soundtrack of Shadow Play” is an invigorating slab of musique concrète in the lineage of Varèse’s Poème électronique. Without the actual theatrical performance to view, its recordings of balmy Indian percussion transform into acousmatic abstractions amid a sea of calming electronic tones. Elsewhere, Mathur’s “Once I Played a Tanpura” captures a scorching solo on the titular instrument. And for those wanting to feel stressed beyond belief, “Shadows of the Show” intermittently recalls the hypnotic illusion of a Shepard tone, continually rising in pitch and intensity as if continually on the verge of exploding.
The NID Tapes directly challenges Western conceptions of Indian culture. Three years after the Beatles drew from Indian classical music for Revolver, an architecture student named Jinraj Joshipura looked not to old musical forms but to the next century, composing science-fiction pieces inspired by James Bond flicks and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. His two “Space Liner 2001” tracks aim to capture previously unheard sounds, and their unadorned electronic thrumming embodies the empty expanse of the cosmos. The second of his compositions is like a foley artist’s work for an imaginary film—with patience and quietude, he captures the minimalist noises that would accompany an astronaut’s trek through outer space.
The tracks unearthed on The NID Tapes are often sparse in this way, and all the more striking for it. Take S.C. Sharma’s “After the War,” whose synths waver at various tempos to create textural and rhythmic complexity. Expertly mixed to take advantage of stereo imaging, its layered blips and clangs echo the full-body immersion associated with raga. Most mind-blowing are his “Dance Music” compositions. They loop in dizzying fashion, carrying a sinister undercurrent far removed from the cheeseball charm of Moog pioneers like Perrey & Kingsley or Dick Hyman. “Dance Music II” and “III” do have a subtle air of whimsy, placing them as a precursor to Charanjit Singh’s 1982 LP of acid-tinged disco. “Dance Music I,” especially, is an all-timer: Taking shape from winding, low-pitched pulses, it feels like the primordial ooze from which dub techno evolved.
Alongside these works by Indian artists is one by Tudor himself. His 1969 piece “Tape Feedback With Moog” is representative of the elemental power that defines this compilation. For three minutes, he explores gnarly cacophony, weaving a more immediate and economical tapestry of noise than what he made with Anima Pepsi and Pepsibird in the following year. If there is a track that captures the world-building of Tudor’s more characteristic work, it is Desai’s “Recordings for Osaka Expo 70,” whose tape-processed sounds form a kaleidoscopic survey of traditional Indian music. “This music must reach the masses,” Desai said more than 50 years ago about these innovative electronic investigations. “And the listeners must be made to realize the vast potential of this sound world.” His demanding tone feels warranted: The NID Tapes is eye-opening and rich, its discoveries too revolutionary to ignore. | 2023-10-09T00:01:00.000-04:00 | 2023-10-09T00:01:00.000-04:00 | null | The state51 Conspiracy | October 9, 2023 | 8 | 074c8690-7a2d-4ddd-838e-2ce608208f0f | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
The Maryland rapper’s latest album soars on a sense of melancholic triumph, ordaining a new star to watch in the process. | The Maryland rapper’s latest album soars on a sense of melancholic triumph, ordaining a new star to watch in the process. | Redveil: Learn 2 Swim | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/redveil-learn-2-swim/ | Learn 2 Swim | As a rapper-producer, redveil didn’t just hit the ground running—he jumped in the deep end of the pool with no life jacket. At 11 years old, the Maryland native began making beats on Fruity Loops after hearing the Internet and Tyler, the Creator’s “Palace/Curse” for the first time. Those beat-making sessions eventually led to piano lessons, which clashed with the gospel, funk, and old-school hip-hop his parents would play around the house. As his rap palette expanded, so did his musical voice. A sense of wide-eyed adventure cushions the anxiety of his early song flips and projects like 2019’s bittersweet cry. Drums and warped samples pop across expansive synth backdrops while redveil—very much a teenager—attempts to piece himself together in the maelstrom. That initial tinkerer’s spirit would become more refined on 2020’s Niagra, where his writing grew as meticulous and thoughtful as his beats. Niagra was the moment where his appreciation for artists like Tyler, Earl Sweatshirt, and Logic evolved past homage into a solid vision, familiar and fresh as a pair of retro Air Jordans.
To see a 16-year-old artist with such control and focus is impressive on its own. That Learn 2 Swim feels like a quantum leap in both quality and vision is remarkable. For starters, the stakes are much higher than before. redveil’s rapidly expanding fanbase—he has more than a million monthly Spotify listeners—stands in contrast to a world-weariness brought on by teenage ennui and a strong sense of family values. “Fuck the acclaim/I just want my people never touching the pain again,” he bellows on opener “together.” His wants are earnest without being naive, a genuine effort to push through a murky past on the way to a brighter future. Lyrically and musically, Learn 2 Swim soars on this sense of melancholic triumph, ordaining a new rap star to watch in the process.
redveil is a child of Earl Sweatshirt in the way he jams as much meaning as possible into the fewest words. But his writing is more playful and less cryptic, his syllable counts waxing and waning on a dime. Notice how he changes speeds throughout the winding verse of lead single “diving board” or his stagger-stepped cadence across the harrowing first verse of “mars.” Here, and on songs like “automatic,” his acuity for closing the gap between positive and negative memories is on full display: “Getting lessons and accepting them the only way you grow/Remember days I wanted to cock a Smith and Wesson, let it blow/And nonetheless so far I’m a testament of staying afloat.” These intimate thoughts are blown up to macro-scale often, the scars just as important to him as the victories they denote.
Newfound success has redveil reflecting on his upbringing in Prince George’s County, Maryland, and the choppy waters he weathered to end up here. Some of his friends, like the ones mentioned near the beginning of “pg baby,” are fellow grinders working to “never see another autumn.” Others, like the nameless person at the start of the second verse of “shoulder,” are brief vessels of regret that color memories of Motorola phone screens. These experiences enrich his personal stories, lessons from each of them pushing him further toward his goal.
That clarity is complemented by a lush suite of beats. Learn 2 Swim is entirely self-produced, and redveil’s production chops have expanded to match the occasion. Samples, synths, and piano are still his musical bread and butter, but the sense of scale to each of these beats is massive. Both “new info” and “morphine (da ways)” start with loops and steady drum programming before breaking open to reveal booming 808s in their last seconds, fleshing out the experience without overwhelming it. The love for melody and chord progressions he inherited from Tyler manifests in gossamer piano keys that dot nearly every song. Those chords are the lifeblood of tracks like “diving board” and “better,” descending like a sunshower against a pink horizon line at dusk.
It’s even more impressive when he combines these sounds, like the piano keys simmering below sampled cymbals on “better” or the latticework of synths, drums, and vocal samples that make up the second half of “automatic.” redveil seamlessly weaves different types of rap production together, channeling the orchestral pomp of live-band hip-hop, the gooey sample loops of the modern underground, and the synthetic flair of the mainstream into something fresh. By challenging perceptions of what rap can be, he’s created audio dioramas that blend and melt into each other in stunning fashion.
The duality of redveil’s production style dovetails with the redemptions and new beginnings at the heart of his stories across Learn 2 Swim. If you listen closely, you can hear the same sincerity that informed the music of his early influences. But redveil is no copycat. He has Tyler and Earl’s respective confidence in Black self-expression without the hard personality and musical edges that defined their early work; he shares Logic’s passion for the craft and history of rap minus the try-hard True Schoolisms that sap energy from his persona. Learn 2 Swim is luminous and forward-thinking, using the embers of redveil’s personal and musical past to fuel his trip to greater heights. | 2022-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | April 21, 2022 | 8 | 074c90a0-7108-4125-8e1c-31889e580768 | Dylan Green | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dylan-green/ | |
In 1982, Kate Bush’s daring and dense fourth album marked her transformation into a fearless experimental artist who was legibly, audibly very queer, and very obviously in love with pop music. | In 1982, Kate Bush’s daring and dense fourth album marked her transformation into a fearless experimental artist who was legibly, audibly very queer, and very obviously in love with pop music. | Kate Bush: The Dreaming | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kate-bush-the-dreaming/ | The Dreaming | In 1978, Kate Bush first hit the UK pop charts with “Wuthering Heights” off her romantic, ambitious progressive pop debut The Kick Inside. That same year, her more confident, somewhat disappointing follow-up Lionheart and 1980’s Never for Ever had a grip of charting singles that further grew her UK success without achieving mega-stardom—she barely cracked into American college rock. What is truly amazing between the first chapter of her career and the new one that began with 1982’s The Dreaming is how consistently Bush avoided the musical world around her, preferring to hone and blend her literary, film, and musical inspirations (Elton John, David Bowie, and Pink Floyd) into the idiosyncratic perfection that was 1985’s Hounds of Love. The Dreaming is the artist statement that cleared the way.
The Dreaming was a turning point from Kate Bush, pop star to Kate Bush, artist: a fan favorite for the same reason it was a commercial failure. Part of the Athena myth around Bush is that she arrived to EMI at 16 with a huge archive of songs, and from this quiver came most of the material for the first four albums. The Dreaming was her first album of newly composed work and for it, her first real chance to rethink her songwriting praxis and to produce the songs on her own. Using mainly a Linn drum machine and the Fairlight CMI—an early digital synth she came to master in real time—she cut and pasted layers of timbres and segments of sound rather than recording mixing lines of instruments, a method that would later be commonplace among the producer-musician. At the time, it was still considered odd, especially for a first-time producer, and especially for a young woman prone to fabulous leotards.
The result was an internal unity, a more well-paced album than anything she’d done prior. The songs are full of rhythmic drive, moody synth atmospheres, and layered vocals free of the radio-friendly hooks on earlier albums. The sounds that kept her tethered to rock—such as guitar and rock drum cymbals—are mostly absent, as are the strings that sweetened her prior work. The fretless bass—often the masculine sparring partner to her voice—is still omnipresent. The instrument that connects this all, as always, is the piano, that plodding Victorian ringmaster of Bush’s weird carnival. Considering that the same new-wave combo of drum machines, synth leads, and girlie soprano drove fellow Brits Bananarama to the top of the charts in the same year, it’s easy to hear how far Bush went to tune out the zeitgeist. Accordingly, critics didn’t quite understand it, radio mostly ignored it, and the label hated it. But the album gave Bush the space to build her dream world, and once she figured out what sounds and character should be there, she could make pop again, her way.
The Dreaming really is more a product of the 1970s—which actually sort of began in the late ’60s and extended through most of the ’80s—when prog rock musicians sold millions, had huge radio hits, and established fan bases still rabid today. But the album also came out in 1982, and it only cemented the sense of Bush as a spirited, contrarian of Baroque excess in a musical moment defined largely in reaction to prog’s excess. It’s exactly that audacity to be weird against the prevailing trends that made Kate Bush a great feminist icon who expanded the sonic (and business) possibilities for subsequent visionary singer-songwriters. While name-checking Emerson, Lake & Palmer or Yes is relatively unheard of in today’s hip hop, indie, or pop landscapes, Kate Bush’s name was and is still said with respect. Perhaps it’s because unlike all those prog dudes of yore, she’s legibly, audibly very queer, and very obviously loves pop music, kind of like her patron saint, David Bowie.
On The Dreaming, Bush’s self-proclaimed “mad” album, her mind works itself out through her mouth. Her cacophony of vocal sounds—at least four on each track—pushed boundaries of how white pop women could sing. Everything about it went against proper, pleasing femininity. Her voice was too high: a purposeful shrilling of the unthreatening girlish head voice; too many: voices doubled, layered, calling and responding to themselves, with the choruses full of creepy doubles, all of them her; too unruly: pitch-shifted, leaping in unexpected intervals, slipping registers until the idea of femme and masculine are clearly performances of the same sounding person; too ugly: more in the way cabaret singers inhabit darkness without bouncing back to beauty by the chorus in the way that female pop singers often must.
All this excess is her sound: a strongly held belief that unites all of the The Dreaming. Nearly half of the album is devoted to spiritual quests for knowledge and the strength to quell self-doubt. Frenetic opener “Sat in Your Lap” was the first song written for the album. Inspired by hearing Stevie Wonder live, it serves as meta-commentary of her step back from the banality of pop ascendancy that mocks shortcuts to knowledge. A similar track, “Suspended in Gaffa,” laments falling short of enlightenment through the metaphor of light bondage in black cloth stagehand tape. It is a pretty queer-femme way of thinking through the very prog-rock problem of being a real artist in a commercial theater form, which is probably why it’s a fan favorite.
“Leave It Open” is a declaration of artistic independence hinging on the semantic ambiguity of its pronouns (what is “it” and who are “we”?). Here’s the one solid rock groove of the album, and it crescendos throughout while a breathy, heavily phased alto Bush calls and high-pitched Bush responds in increasingly frantic phrases. “All the Love” is the stunning aria of The Dreaming—a long snake moan on regret. Here she duets with a choirboy, a technique she’d echo with her son on 2011’s 50 Words for Snow. The lament trails off with a skipping cascade of goodbyes lifted from Bush’s broken answering machine, a pure playback memento mori.
The other half of the album showcases Bush’s talent for writing narratives about historical and imagined characters placed in unbearable moral predicaments. This is often called her “literary” or “cinematic” side, but it is also her connection to character within the Victorian-era British music hall tradition, a bawdy and comic form of working-class theatre that borrowed from American vaudeville traditions and became the dominant 19th- and early 20th-century commercial British pop art. As much as she’s in prog rock’s pantheon, she’s also part of this very-pre rock‘n’roll archive of cheeky musical entertainment.
When it works, her narrative portraits render precise individuals in richly drawn scenes—the empathy radiates out. In “Houdini” she fully inhabits the gothic romance of lost love, conjuring the panic, grief, and hope of Harry Houdini’s wife Bess. Bush was taken by Houdini’s belief in the afterlife and Bess’s loyal attempts reach him through séances. Bush conjured the horrified sounds of witnessing a lover die by devouring chocolate and milk to temporarily ruin her voice. Bess was said to pass a key to unlock his bonds through a kiss, the inspiration for the cover art and a larger metaphor for the depth of trust Bush wants in love. We must need what’s in her mouth to survive, and we must get it through a passionate exchange among willing bodies.
In her borrowing further afield, her characters are less accurately rendered. This has been an unabashedly true part of Bush’s artistic imagination since The Kick Inside’s cover art, vaguely to downright problematic in its attempts to inhabit the worlds of Others. On “Pull Out the Pin” she uses the silver bullet as a totem of one’s protection against an enemy of supernatural evil. In this case, the hero is a Viet Cong fighter pausing before blowing up American soldiers who have no moral logic for their service. She’d watched a documentary that mentioned fighters put a silver Buddha into their mouths as they detonated a grenade, and in that she saw a dark mirror to key on the album cover. While the humanizing of such warriors in pop narrative is a brave act, it’s also possible to hear her thin arpeggiated synth percussion and outro cricket sounds as a part of an aural Orientalism that undermines that very attempt.
Then there’s “The Dreaming,” a parable of a real, historical, and contemporary group of Aboriginal people as timeless, noble savages in a tragically ruined Eden that lectures the center of empire about their (our) political and environmental violence. Bush narrates in a grotesquely exaggerated Australian accent over a thicket of exotic animal sounds, both holdovers from music hall and vaudeville’s racist “ethnic humor” tradition, a kind of distancing that suggests that settler Australians are somehow less civilized and thus more responsible for their white supremacist beliefs than the Empire that shipped them there in the first place. In telling this story in this way—without accurate depictions of people, and without credit, understanding, monetary remuneration, proper cultural context, or employment of indigenous musicians—she unfairly extracts cultural (and economic) value from Aboriginal suffering just as the characters in the song mine their land. As a rich text to meditate on colonial, racial, and sexual violence, it is actually quite useful—but not in the way Bush intended.
The closer “Get Out of My House” was inspired by two different maternal and isolation-madness horror texts: The Shining and Alien. In all three stories, a malevolent spirit wants to control a vessel. Bush does not let the spirit in, shouts “Get out!” and when it violates her demand, she becomes animal. Such shapeshifting is a master trope in Kate Bush’s songbook, an enduring way for her music and performance to blend elements of non-Western spirituality and European myth, turning mundane moments into Gothic horror. It’s also, unfortunately, the way that women without power can imagine escape. The mule who brays through the track’s end is a kind of female Houdini—a sorceress who can will her way out of violence not with language, but with real magic. At least it works in the world of her songs, a kingdom where queerly feminine excess is not policed, but nurtured into excellence. | 2019-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-19T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | EMI | January 19, 2019 | 7.7 | 074cf145-c715-4052-8ad9-9b1bee969b32 | Daphne Carr | https://pitchfork.com/staff/daphne-carr/ | |
On his first of two solo albums planned for this year, Jack White earns his eccentricity. An illogical fusion of blues-rock and carnival prog, this music is genuinely, imaginatively weird. | On his first of two solo albums planned for this year, Jack White earns his eccentricity. An illogical fusion of blues-rock and carnival prog, this music is genuinely, imaginatively weird. | Jack White: Fear of the Dawn | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jack-white-fear-of-the-dawn/ | Fear of the Dawn | Even when Jack White is the only credited musician on Fear of the Dawn, it sounds like there are six of him. Aside from the absence of Meg White, nothing has separated White’s solo projects from his work with the White Stripes more than his embrace of overdubs, which has ballooned his once streamlined garage-rock into ever bulkier, more cartoonish iterations of itself. Excess has become White’s driving muse, and he’s never piled it on thicker than he does on Fear of the Dawn, a chaotic, illogical fusion of blues-rock and carnival prog that contains some of the most outlandish stylistic experiments of his career.
White has already made an album as indulgent as this, and it was awful. Inspired in part by the skronkiest corners of Prince and Sly and the Family Stone’s discographies, 2018’s Boarding House Reach was far and away his worst record because it neglected everything that made his best music so immediate–the brute-force riffs, the effortless ditties he materialized as if pulling them from some forgotten public domain. Every Jack White album sounds like he’s winging it to some degree, but Boarding House Reach was the first that felt like he was writing around a total absence of songs.
The first of two LPs White has planned for 2022, Fear of the Dawn doesn’t completely correct that problem. Too often, White still sounds more interested in vamping than in writing something catchy to vamp over. But his first solo record in four years distinguishes itself through sheer commitment to the bit, as well as White’s most unrepentantly heavy set of songs since 2007’s Icky Thump. The raging opener “Taking Me Back” debuted last fall alongside a trailer for a new Call of Duty game, White’s fuck-shit-up guitars an apt soundtrack to the game’s numbing montage of bullet spray, flamethrowers, and explosions. It’s pure meathead music, and White matches its spite with some fittingly nasty lyrics, the latest in his long line of bracing songs about divorce and pipe dreams of reconciliation. “Are you taking me back?” he sneers when an ex drops off some mail, as if trying to force the very answer he doesn’t want to hear.
At times, Fear of the Dawn conjures nu-metal, with all the peculiarities that tag can carry. With its thrashing guitars and go-go shimmy, “The White Raven” imagines Rob Zombie scoring a remake of a Gidget beach party movie. Elsewhere, White shout-raps his way through the brusque rocker “What’s the Trick,” one of several songs where he slashes at his guitar like it’s a set of turntables, almost Tom Morello-esque, even as he disregards Rage Against the Machine’s famous mantra of “no samples, keyboards, or synthesizers.” All three are slathered over the record, often to surrealist effect.
“Hi-De-Ho” samples Cab Calloway’s “Hi-De-Ho Man,” stretching and looping Calloway’s famed chant until it almost becomes a bizarro parallel of Megan Thee Stallion’s “ody-ody-ody” “Body” hook. The song is all tic. Its only verse is a Q-Tip feature where he free-associates about Stevie Wonder and Mariah Carey and jokes about only half-remembering A Tribe Called Quest’s time on Jive (is there anything more on-brand to rap about on a Jack White album than record labels?). Gaudy as it is, that track is downright tasteful compared to the cosmic schlock of “Into the Twilight,” which samples not one but two Manhattan Transfer songs. Like the dubby “Eosophobia,” which plays like a mashup of Augustus Pablo and Jefferson Starship, the song feels born from the headspace of a musician who’s spent entirely too much time digging for inspiration in dollar bins.
Late on Fear of the Dawn, there’s a song that stands out simply for how conventional it is. “Morning, Noon and Night” is little more than a fuzz riff and groove pulled from Zombies/Animals-era classic-rock, but after so much shtick, it’s a relief to hear White go to town over something so low-concept. And yet, shtick is Fear of the Dawn’s animating purpose, and as braying as the album’s stylistic experiments can be, the record is better for them: It has an audacity and entertainment factor that White’s last few were sorely missing. The gambits are more preposterous but also more intentional and more elaborate in their ridiculousness.
Listening to Fear of the Dawn, it’s hard not to marvel at the disconnect between White’s public image as a traditionalist scold—the blues purist yelling at everybody to put away their cell phones from the top of his personal vinyl pressing plant—and the absolutely unmoored, borderline absurdist record he just made. When an artist tries as hard as White to be eccentric, the last thing anybody wants to do is give them the satisfaction of acknowledging it, but here he’s earned it. Fear of the Dawn is fucking weird: not obligatorily weird or try-hard weird, but genuinely, imaginatively weird. | 2022-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2022-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Third Man | April 7, 2022 | 6.5 | 07500c49-9f5c-40a1-a986-26b75fe4e41f | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
Performing with her jazz ensemble, the New York guitarist makes music that hangs in the balance between composition and improvisation, structure and dissolution. | Performing with her jazz ensemble, the New York guitarist makes music that hangs in the balance between composition and improvisation, structure and dissolution. | Mary Halvorson: Cloudward | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mary-halvorson-cloudward/ | Cloudward | Mary Halvorson’s guitar tone contains within it a microcosm of her entire practice as a composer and bandleader. She gives the impression, through her ingenious use of a particular delay pedal, that her instrument is inhabiting two states of matter at once, or making an imperceptibly slow transit between them: now dry and unadorned, definitively guitarlike, almost uncanny in its naturalism; now liquidy and unstable, with digital processing freeing every static pitch from whatever invisible forces are holding it in place. Sometimes, you get one state or the other, but mostly you get both. Each note takes on the character of an ice cube left out a little too long, glistening solidly in the material of its own dissolution.
Cloudward, the MacArthur-winning New York jazz musician’s latest album, is also like a document of edges melting away. Halvorson composed the music for Amaryllis, the ensemble she first assembled for her 2022 album of the same name: Patricia Brennan on vibraphone, Nick Dunston on bass, Tomas Fujiwara on drums, Jacob Garchik on trombone, and Adam O’Farrill on trumpet. (Laurie Anderson also appears for a scraped-violin cameo on the clamorous “Incarnadine.”) In “The Tower,” dramatic chord changes give way to atonal free improvisation so gradually as to obscure the differences between the two modes. And from pools of amorphous improv arise moments of surprising order: Two instruments might converge suddenly in a shared melodic line, or slyly imitate each other’s articulation, then nonchalantly diverge again. Of course, nearly all jazz carries some tension between compositional rigor and expressive freedom. But Halvorson is unusually attuned to the porousness of these putative borders. Though I can’t help but wonder whether certain fragments of structure were outlined in advance or created spontaneously by the players, such questions of category may be the wrong ones to ask of music so preoccupied with the liminal moment of becoming.
Halvorson puts her idiosyncratic instrumentation to good use on Cloudward. Brennan’s vibraphone and Garchick’s trombone are particularly well suited to the album’s dissolving sensibility: the former with its pointed percussive attack and flickering sustained resonance; the latter with its sliding articulations of each note. For a jazz guitar album, it contains few guitar solos, a dynamic that only serves to emphasize the holism of Halvorson’s playing and composing. The sonorities of her collaborators’ entwined voices so thoroughly reflect her own that she can recede to the background for extended stretches without compromising the music’s identity.
One notable exception is “Desiderata,” the album’s most rock-oriented piece, across whose middle section Halvorson explodes with a solo that begins like a buzzsaw and ends like a supercomputer going haywire. On a record whose every moment is so delicately balanced, it is a rare and exhilarating passage in which wild abandon decidedly wins out over careful control. Likewise, “Unscrolling” reaches its climax with an arco bass solo that nearly abandons pitch entirely in favor of the tactile sound of bow on strings. Dunston’s playing is powerful, but the solo’s impact owes as much to Halvorson’s instinct for the deliberate arrangement of passages that other out-jazz bandleaders might leave to the intuition of the moment. Just as Dunston is reaching a peak of feverish intensity, rather than rise to meet him as many improvisers would, the accompanists abruptly drop out, leaving him to howl alone.
There is something curiously absolute about Cloudward, whose eight pieces seem chiefly to express their own elegant systems of order and disorder, rather than reaching outside themselves to convey particular emotions or images. At their best, they find real beauty in stillness, continuous change, and the occasional sudden rupture. But that self-contained and inward quality—prizing the solid purity of a good idea over the intoxication of a sensuous surface, and avoiding gushy sentimentality like the plague—can make their beauty difficult to articulate. The deeper you dig into your bag of figurative language, the further you may stray from faithfully describing what the music is putting across. I could say that the twisty guitar and vibraphone lines that envelop “Ultramarine” are like vines growing unpredictably over the song’s rigid scaffolding, or try a more literal approach, examining the way their increasingly dense chromaticism inflects and complicates the otherwise simple underlying harmonic structure. The poetic license of the first risks obscuring the music’s hard reality; the clinical distance of the second risks reducing it to bare formula. The truth, as ever with this beguiling album, is somewhere in between. | 2024-02-02T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-02T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Jazz | Nonesuch | February 2, 2024 | 7.8 | 0752fdf4-b33d-4d73-b3ec-4b2d47b3db73 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
The latest reissue of this fantastic and bracing artifact is a 3xCD model, augmented with the other extant YMG studio recordings (and fascinating Simon Reynolds liner notes). | The latest reissue of this fantastic and bracing artifact is a 3xCD model, augmented with the other extant YMG studio recordings (and fascinating Simon Reynolds liner notes). | Young Marble Giants: Colossal Youth and Collected Works | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10527-colossal-youth-and-collected-works/ | Colossal Youth and Collected Works | There really ought to be more bands like Young Marble Giants, which doesn't mean that there ought to be more bands that sound like Young Marble Giants. They came out of the nowheresville of Cardiff, Wales; they didn't particularly have a local scene to buoy them up, or a niche to fit into. What they had was an aesthetic that was totally theirs, a sound and style that essentially had no antecedents. Play any six seconds of any YMG song and you'll know exactly who you're listening to, and probably be thunderstruck by its unsentimental beauty of tone.
In a year when everyone was trying to make a big noise-- but isn't that every year?-- YMG switched tactics, forcing their audience to lean in to hear them. It's not simply that they were quiet, although substituting a drum machine that sounded like it had a thick quilt on top of it for a human drummer was a radical move at the time. They weren't even all that quiet-- they were just in love with negative space, and their lyrics were so much about things unsaid that the space was formally appropriate. Stuart Moxham flicks at his guitar like a card-shark snapping out an ace, amplifying the impact of his pick on the strings as much as the notes themselves; his brother Philip Moxham bangs at his bass, then lets the sound decay. Alison Statton's not an affectless singer, exactly, but her chief weapon is understatement. She knows how angry Stuart's songs are, and just barely hints at that fury, in a voice that suggests someone finding the courage to say something she's needed to say for a while and has only one chance to get right.
What's sort of shocking about their sole album, actually, is how full of rage it is, and how many ways the band manages to translate that rage into something that's not the way the rock idiom usually expresses it. Colossal Youth ticks like a not-yet-exploded bomb. In theory, "Include Me Out" is a mighty garage-rocker, something the Stones or Count Five could've played with a sneer and a great big beat; the Giants strip it of virtually all its audible violence, reducing its rhythm to a muffled thump. "Credit in the Straight World" is a vicious little song about the relationship between subculture and mass culture, and it's all tension, no release, with a riff that keeps landing a half-step above where it should resolve. (The caterwauling Hole cover of it, from Live Through This, demonstrates that you could fill in all the space in Stuart Moxham's songs and still have something impressive.)
There's another space in the center of these songs, though: a pervasive sense of lost youth, toward which most of their fury is directed. "Young" and "youth" turn up in the band name and album title (both were taken from a description of a classical statue), and Statton was only 20 when they got together. But Stuart Moxham's fixation on a moment of perfection he could feel slipping away-- "Salad Days" is another song title-- is the reason it's poetically apt that the band only made one, exquisite record.
The poetic version, of course, doesn't quite fit the facts. This latest reissue-- we also reviewed the previous one-- is a 3xCD model, augmented with the other extant YMG studio recordings (and fascinating Simon Reynolds liner notes). There's not much else in the vault-- two singles (one of them instrumental), a compilation track, a five-song BBC session and a bunch of demos and rehearsal tapes originally issued in 2000 as Salad Days. Aside from the vocal single's apocalyptic fantasy "Final Day" and cryptic lament "Cakewalking", they add almost nothing of substance to the band's legacy. Colossal Youth is such a bracing artifact, even now, that it begs for context; the other two discs demonstrate that the album is really all the band had to say, and the way they said it best.
Which isn't quite true either. Statton and the Moxhams, fortunately, didn't give up music after Young Marble Giants split up, and there are worthwhile passages in all of their later discographies. (Start by hunting down Weekend's '81 Demos EP.) The five days when Colossal Youth was recorded, though, were the moment when they were sailing painfully and angrily into maturity, staring into a darkness illuminated a flicker at a time by a fire behind them that they knew couldn't last.
NB: While this record is currently out on Domino UK, our U.S. readers can find its Domino U.S. release in shops or through digital retailers on September 11. | 2007-08-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2007-08-10T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Rough Trade | August 10, 2007 | 9.3 | 075322e4-3b53-4806-b64b-a9e5c8cf5c91 | Douglas Wolk | https://pitchfork.com/staff/douglas-wolk/ | null |
The lo-fi pop singer’s first label release is an EP whose careful songwriting and intriguingly flat vocals should quiet naysayers who dismissed her as a one-hit fluke. | The lo-fi pop singer’s first label release is an EP whose careful songwriting and intriguingly flat vocals should quiet naysayers who dismissed her as a one-hit fluke. | Clairo: Diary 001 EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/clairo-diary-001-ep/ | Diary 001 EP | Claire Cottrill has been sharing her music online since she was 13. Beginning with acoustic covers of Maroon 5 and Frank Ocean, then evolving into thoughtful, probing guitar songs about the complexities of high school relationships, the 19-year-old musician’s creative coming-of-age took place entirely on the internet. But it wasn't until 2017—when she uploaded the video for “Pretty Girl,” a song originally released on a compilation album from the blog Le Sigh—that Cottrill completed her transformation into Clairo: a web-native, lo-fi pop singer with an ear for playful synth tones and an intriguingly flat vocal affect.
Comprising footage of Clairo dancing awkwardly in front of her webcam in the style of multimedia artist Molly Soda, the “Pretty Girl” video quickly racked up millions of views, catching the ears of Chance the Rapper's manager and The FADER's in-house label. Like any young woman whose music suddenly becomes popular, the Massachusetts-born singer attracted legions of naysayers who dismissed her as a one-hit fluke or an industry plant. But “Pretty Girl” and the other songs on Clairo’s new EP, diary 001, exhibit the kind of subtle charms that only arise after years of careful labor. Listen deeply enough, and you’ll realize there’s more to her overnight success than one lucky hit.
With its over-the-top keyboard tones and limping vocal melody, “Pretty Girl” taps into the same bitter irony wielded by PC Music’s Hannah Diamond and, on certain songs, Drake. Clairo sings gently about modifying herself in service of a male partner: With little emotion in her voice, she pledges to “wear a skirt for you” and “shut up if you want me to.” What scans initially as a lightweight indie-pop song in the vein of Frankie Cosmos or Steve Sobs quickly reveals its barbed underbelly. Clairo exaggerates the easygoing aspects of her sound to better lubricate her indictment of misogynist expectations. There’s power in a woman singing that she won't shut up, but the creeping numbness of Clairo’s forced docility has its own kind of pull.
Other songs on diary 001 see the singer exploring different facets of romantic entanglement in the Tinder age. “You're just one click away/From something real or fake,” she sings on opener “Hello?,” a muted duet with Irish rapper Rejjie Snow. A keyboard tone that approximates the timbre of the human voice dances around her vocals, threatening to dissolve any boundary between the fake and the real. “B.O.M.D.” (which stands for “boy of my dreams”) indulges a childlike giddiness about a new flame. “I wanna stay up forever,” Clairo sings, like a kid at a sleepover, while PC Music's Danny L. Harle saturates the backing track with computer-generated chirps, finger snaps, and whip sounds. Even when she's gushing, Clairo maintains her vocal cool; she's a skilled singer, perfectly on-key but deliberately unshowy, as though she's monitoring her own affect to ensure she doesn't give too much away.
The sound Clairo has been tracing since she swapped out her guitar for GarageBand comes into bloom on diary 001’s clear highlight, “4EVER.” Over a round funk bassline and chintzy synths, she bounces her voice across the EP’s most urgent melody. At the pre-chorus, she jams as many syllables as possible into each line: “Is it ever gonna change?/Am I gonna feel this way forever?/Are you gonna be around for me to count on, yeah?” But by the chorus, she’s stretching out the last syllable of “count on” until it fills a whole measure. The densely packed language mirrors the anxiety of the lyrics, while the shift to a single, languid word offers some reprieve. It's a smart way to cut the tension, and it lends the track an addictive sheen. Clairo may pursue a carefree, low-investment aesthetic on her first label release, but over time, her songs reveal the depth of her craft. She has worked hard to make it sound this easy. | 2018-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Fader Label | May 31, 2018 | 7 | 0753fea2-1f9c-4978-80c2-cea75c195bf3 | Sasha Geffen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/ | |
Myth, it has been said, is the buried part of every story. On April 23rd, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot finally emerges ... | Myth, it has been said, is the buried part of every story. On April 23rd, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot finally emerges ... | Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/8676-yankee-hotel-foxtrot/ | Yankee Hotel Foxtrot | Myth, it has been said, is the buried part of every story. On April 23rd, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot finally emerges into the light of day, having spent the last year interred in its own cluttered mythology: a hermetic studio gestation, with the inscrutable guidance of Chicago ex-pat/kindly wizard, Jim O'Rourke; internecine squabbles; conflict and resolution with American media behemoth AOL Time Warner; the release portentously slated for September 11th, but mysteriously delayed; the indecipherable short-wave radio prophecies; and, eventually, the hero's welcome, with the first stirrings of spring. It's all there: the miracle birth; the unlikely hero; the, um, benevolent mentor; the primordial menace; good over evil. Joseph Campbell would be pissing himself if he weren't dead.
The miraculous birth narrative of Wilco's fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, is already old hat: banished from straightedge AOL Time Warner imprint Reprise on the cosmically short-sighted judgment of label executives who deemed the album a "career-ender," Wilco streamed Yankee Hotel from its left-wing website to millions before signing with weirdo progressive AOL Time Warner imprint Nonesuch. Long is the way and hard that leads up from AOL Time Warner into the light, I guess.
But the unique circumstances of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's long deliverance make for more than just pointless disc jockey chatter before spinning "Heavy Metal Drummer." The long delay and streaming audio conspired to ensure that everyone in the world has already heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in part, if not in its entirety. Vast digital pre-circulation, corporate controversy, and buzz like a beard of bees have rendered all reviews afterthoughts at best.
But myth is always an afterthought, and these days, the motif I like chewing on best is, without question, that of the Unlikely Hero. Who would have predicted an album of this magnitude from Wilco? As much I love the band, the fact remains that they were together for five years before they produced anything that could stand with Uncle Tupelo's March 16-20, 1992 or Anodyne. AM is rather forgettable, while the expansive Being There, though frequently inspired, travels on paths blazed by Tom Petty on Damn the Torpedoes, if not The Flying Burrito Brothers.
1999's dolorous Summerteeth was exponentially more sophisticated than anything that came before it, though its heroin innuendoes, shades of domestic abuse and nocturnal homicidal impulses sat somewhat ill at ease alongside the album's lush and infectious pop arrangements. Of course, Summerteeth was a strange and majestic, albeit dark, deviation from the alt-country genre Jeff Tweedy co-invented. But since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it has retroactively become more of a harbinger of things to come. Upon being pressed by the Chicago Sun-Times about abandoning alt-country, Tweedy dismissively bequeathed the old Wilco sound to Ryan Adams. And you can never go home again.
So does Yankee Hotel Foxtrot justify the controversy, delay and buzz? Everyone, I think, already knows that the answer is yes; all I can offer is "me too" and reiterate. And after half a year living with a bootleg copy, the music remains revelatory. Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative, noisy and somehow serene, Wilco's aging new album is simply a masterpiece; it is equally magnificent in headphones, cars and parties. And as anyone who's seen the mixed-bag crowd at Wilco shows knows, it will find a home in the collections of hippies, frat boys, acid-eating prep schoolers, and the record store apparatchiks of the indiocracy. No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us.
But for all the talk of terminally hip influences-- Jim O'Rourke, krautrock, and The Conet Project-- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot still conjures a classic rock radio station on Fourth of July weekend. And this extends beyond the alternating Byrds/Stones/Beatles comparisons that pepper every Wilco review ever written; Yankee Hotel Foxtrot evokes Steely Dan, the Eagles, Wings, Derek & The Dominos and Traffic. The slightly disconnected, piano-led "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," is delicately laced with noise, whistles and percussive clutter, like some great grandson of "A Day in the Life." The muted, "Kamera" strums along darkly with acoustic and electric guitars; the twittering electronics in the background don't quite mitigate the tune's comparability to the clever and precise (though now largely neglected) jazz-inflected blues-rock of Dire Straits' stunning debut.
The cone-filtered and anthemic country psychedelia of "War on War" could have been jammed straight out of a hot "Bertha" at a 1973 Grateful Dead show. The violin and coked-up country lounge of "Jesus, etc." recalls some mythical seventies in true love and cigarettes. The sharp, stuttering guitar solo that rips open "I'm the Man Who Loves You" could have come directly out of Neil Young's hollow body electric circa Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. For all its aural depth and layering, Yankee Hotel tends to come off as earnest as yesteryear's FM radio. Wilco gets the benefit of O'Rourke's gift for cutting straight to the guts of every style, without the burden of his trademark contempt for the subject matter at hand.
And Tweedy seems to be coming into his own as a lyricist. I still wince when I hear him sing, "I know you don't talk much but you're such a good talker," on Being There. The brooding introspection of Summerteeth made for a handful of elegant lyrics, most notably the skeletal beauty of "She's a Jar," where "she begs me not to miss her" returns as the stinging "she begs me not to hit her," transforming a wistful love song into something gently bruising. But on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Tweedy becomes what I think he always was: an optimist and a romantic.
His declaration of wanting to salute "the ashes of American flags," is less cynicism than, perhaps, the devoted liberal's nostalgia for an honest patriotism (check out the array of properly lefty links at wilcoworld.com if you don't believe me). "All my lies are always wishes," he sings, "I know I would die if I could come back new." In "Jesus, etc.," there's a cascading simplicity when he sings, "Tall buildings shake, voices escape, singing sad, sad songs to two chords/ Strung down your cheeks, bitter melodies turning your orbit around." Sad, celestial and lovely. The final declaration on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of abiding dedication: "I've got reservations 'bout so many things but not about you." There isn't a truer word to be had.
On Summerteeth, Tweedy yowled about "speakers speaking in code" and I thought of that refrain from "I Can't Stand It" when I first heard the words "yankee-hotel-foxtrot" uttered by the disembodied English woman on the sublimely creepy box-set of shortwave radio transmissions, The Conet Project, which is sampled sporadically throughout this record. And in a deeper, more deliberate world, perhaps we could trace that thread to unravel the secret wonder of Wilco's new album. But I don't think there's any secret; and I don't think there's any code. Beneath the great story of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, there are all the tropes and symbols and coincidences of a little mythology; but under that is a fantastic rock record. And why tell you? You all already knew this. | 2002-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2002-04-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | April 21, 2002 | 10 | 075856a7-7436-4d83-b9c1-65b39279109f | Brent S. Sirota | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-s. sirota/ | 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 Earl Sweatshirt’s debut mixtape, the keystone to Odd Future’s success. | 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 Earl Sweatshirt’s debut mixtape, the keystone to Odd Future’s success. | Earl Sweatshirt: Earl | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earl-sweatshirt-earl/ | Earl | Tyler, the Creator leaps onto Jimmy Fallon’s back and hangs there like a hyperactive kid at the zoo. It’s 2011: Instagram is in its infancy; young people are choosing the internet over television en masse for the first time; Tumblr has nearly tripled its audience in a year. Tyler just performed “Sandwitches” with Hodgy Beats on NBC’s “Late Night”—both representing the collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All—and this mischievous URL rap tag-team turned Studio 6B into a scene from The Ring. Entire verses of the song wouldn’t be performed on TV that night, but the omission of one lyric in particular felt impactful: “Free Earl, that’s the fucking shit/And if you disagree, suck a couple pimple-covered dicks.”
This was the crest of Odd Future mania: Tyler had released “Yonkers” (which Kanye West called the best video of the year) only days before, and the enigmatic Frank Ocean dropped his debut mixtape nostalgia, ULTRA without warning the night the “Fallon” episode aired. Rap’s monied old guard, JAY-Z and Diddy, were in a bidding war over the young crew. The media began nitpicking the collective’s grisly lyrics and struggling with the ethics of taking trolls at face value.
Despite a growing public profile, the kids of Odd Future were too caught up in their fringe internet communities to really notice; too busy squabbling with rap blogs that wouldn’t post their songs, or responding to fans’ questions on formspring, or relishing very online achievements like “going platinum on YouTube,” or literally predicting future VMA wins on Twitter. But looming larger than the collective’s rapidly expanding reputation was the silhouette of Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, an enigma known to OF onlookers as Earl Sweatshirt. He’d been AWOL throughout the group’s breakthrough with little to no explanation. “I wish Thebe was here to share this moment with us,” Tyler tweeted right after the “Fallon” performance. Even in his absence, Earl was still the wind in their sails.
So much of the hysteria surrounding these Los Angeles punks stemmed directly from “Earl,” the title track from the 16-year-old Earl Sweatshirt’s self-titled debut mixtape, released by Tyler for free on Tumblr in March 2010. Earl was slickly sinister yet designed to draw out a visceral reaction—American Psycho meets “Jackass.” And “Earl” was its lynchpin: gorgeously crafted sesquipedalian stanzas with gags about jacking off to Asher Roth vids right next to depictions of killing and eating people, the words scraping up against each other like fractured bones. In its semi-viral music video, under the glare of a grainy fisheye lens, Earl and his OF cohorts use a blender to concoct a drug smoothie out of weed, pills, cough syrup, and malt liquor before puking it all up. They skate, loiter, faceplant, and spit out blood and teeth. The juvenile, almost slapstick images betrayed the seriousness of Earl’s violent claims, as if watching an unaired “Loiter Squad” pilot. But the gambit had worked: Adults were mad, ergo teens loved it.
In Earl’s inexplicable absence, his comrades began cryptically roaring “Free Earl” while vaulting into the crowd at their sold-out shows, creating even more buzz and mystery around the already surging, inscrutable collective. (The chatter online was that Earl’s mom caught wind of the “Earl” video and had shipped him off to boot camp, a perceived totalitarian move that only fed his legend among Odd Future’s rabble-rouser fanbase.) Everyone wanted to know why the boy genius was missing. By the time he’d been found, Odd Future had already used his echo to become an indomitable rap force—and Earl had already become someone else.
Unbeknownst to most of his faithful, Earl Sweatshirt was the son of world-renowned poet Keorapetse Kgositsile and UCLA law professor Cheryl Harris, a union that seemingly prophesied his eloquence. According to the 1995 poem, “Poet — for Thebe Neruda,” written by Kgositsile’s friend Sterling Plumpp as both a tribute and a baptism, Earl was marked as a bard-king-in-waiting at birth: “You were born with blues With an ANC [African National Congress] imprint on them,” it said. “How you gon do anything but rule?”
But after Earl’s parents separated when he was a child, his father became a dark cloud forming just on the outside of his life. Earl’s early self-indictments tied his misfit motivations directly to an estranged relationship with his dad. “I’m half-privileged, think white and have nigga lips/A tad different, mad smart, act ignorant/Shit, I’ll pass the class when my dad starts givin’ shits,” he explained on “Blade” from the 2010 Odd Future tape Radical. “But as long as our relationship is turdless/I’mma keep burning rubber and fucking these beats with burnt dick.”
By chance or by choice, Earl had followed in Kgositsile’s footsteps anyway, fulfilling Plumpp’s vision. He picked up rapping in eighth grade, releasing a mixtape on Myspace under the name Sly Tendencies called Kitchen Cutlery. His raps were more sinewy then but no less of a marvel. It wasn’t until after Tyler discovered those Sly songs that Earl’s verses took a turn for the diabolical, positioning him as “the reincarnation of ’98 Eminem,” as he put it on Tyler’s Bastard cut “AssMilk” in 2009. He idolized Tyler almost as much as he did Em, and Tyler recognized instantly what the rest of the world would soon know: Earl Sweatshirt was a wunderkind. He liked to compare Earl to Nas’ Illmatic, and he wasn’t that far off base.
Earl had been recruited into a fraternity of mutineers who treated Supreme like haute couture, who made Eminem’s Relapse their unholy bible, who worshipped Lil B and skate pro Jason Dill as gods. They were contrarians goading moralists into reacting to their stunts, drawing life from the discomfort of others. For them, watching the squirming responses to their provocations was proof of a hopelessly stuffy society. “We’re not trying to offend or intrigue people,” Syd told Interview in 2011, one of many attempts to explain how a queer black woman could surround herself with so many perceived homophobes and misogynists spouting rape fantasies. “It’s more of a social experiment. We make fun of society on a daily basis, and people take it so seriously. They’re proving us right.” But more important than the jokes themselves was the fact that they were sharing them, finding fellowship and bonding into a collective.
One of the foundational tenets of Odd Future was mining power from being fatherless and building a chosen family in their little Thrasher community. Earl found Tyler’s IDGAF attitude empowering, and emulated it. In each other, they found brotherhood, making it their aim to “scare the fuck out of old white fucking people that live in middle fucking America.” (Ironically, their early audiences were usually majority white.) For Earl, that meant saying the sickest shit he could possibly think of with a straight face, screaming internally while he measured out multisyllabic scenes of torture and cannibalism.
In Sterling Plumpp’s ’95 poem to Thebe Neruda Kgositsile, he wrote, “Words are bullets here. Words are periods here. This is the end of a sentence,” and that’s exactly how Earl uses them: to perforate; and with resolution.
The verses on Earl are unspliced one-shots that impact instantly and then peel apart gradually. While many wordy rappers assemble bars as if reading from a schematic or like they’re noodling through a bowl of alphabet soup, Earl’s raps are idiomatic yet undiluted, technical yet unpredictable. He can be a methodical writer or a shapeshifter: On “Kill” he’s first trampling, then sinuous, then supple; chilling, then surgical, then irreverent. More interesting than his penchant for colorful dismemberment, or the incel logic on songs like “Luper,” is just how uncomplicated he makes complexity look.
Earl was the keystone to Odd Future’s success. It’s where their anarchist slogan—“Kill people. Burn Shit. Fuck School.”—first appeared. It’s the source of their edge, constructed on myths of the boy whose music was so dangerous his mother wouldn’t let him make it anymore. But more essential than any of that was its author: This prodigiously gifted kid, the son of a UCLA law professor and a world-famous poet, who had unleashed this almost otherworldly display of technical skill from the ether into an unsuspecting (and frankly unprepared) universe. His knack for storytelling was obvious, only his stories were night terrors about stalking, assaulting, and killing women. It was a jarring juxtaposition: his stoic manner, his beautiful wordplay, and his ugliest ideas, all underscored by dueling intentions—to taunt and to purge. There was a blatant disconnect between the rage in his words and the affectlessness of his demeanor, which at points made him seem either like a sociopath or a tempestuous virtuoso completely spent of energy from wrestling his inner demons. Over beats from Tyler and Left Brain, Neptunes paeans transposed for horror scores, he spun the most breathtaking nightmares.
Of course, some of the more vile diatribes on Earl were simply the result of a rapper employing shock-rap tactics and pushing the boundaries of acceptability, but the tape also showcased an angry kid who didn’t yet have the language of grief trying to process his feelings. He’s talked since about not having the capacity, at 16, to really rap about anything real, unable to use that piercing wit of his to look inward. “There was never a moment where I was trying to fucking perpetrate like I was some [rapist],” he told GQ. “That was my way of screaming, because I don’t yell.” Through these quiet atrocities of the imagination, he was gnashing his teeth.
Being 16 is being old enough to know better but young enough not to care, which is the sweet spot for an aggrieved imp spewing poison back into the world just to feel something. His raps bared that animosity in them. Plenty of the ire was aimless, but much of it was stoked by feelings of fatherlessness. His later verses on the subject, which are more clear-headed, present a tragic portrait: A father and son, both gifted orators, unable to really understand each other. On Earl, there are glimpses of him converting his anguish to rage, so as not to be consumed by sorrow. “Product of popped rubbers and pops that did not love us/So when I leave home keep my heart on the top cupboard/So I will not stutter when I’m shoutin’ fuck you, son,” he raps on “Stapleton.”
Somewhere along the line, raging on songs turned to causing real-world mischief. And so, just on the cusp of Odd Future’s swelling success, soon after the “Earl” video was released in May 2010, Earl’s mother sent him away to reform, and to heal—first to Second Nature, a wilderness program, for a few weeks, and then to Coral Reef Academy in Samoa, a therapeutic rehabilitation experience for at-risk boys. “He was really very clearly going through a rough patch emotionally,” Harris told The New York Times. “He was struggling.”
While Odd Future followers chanted “Free Earl” at shows and plastered the words across forums online, vilifying the rapper’s mom in the process, Earl was hearing stories of abuse from survivors, first-hand accounts of the kind of gruesome things he’d been rapping about. It changed him, made the things he’d been saying in songs real. And so he vowed to never be so blasé about the suffering of others again. “I’m a fan of macabre shit, you know what I’m saying? But not like that. At the end of the day, I’m not some evil guy,” he told GQ in 2013. “There was nothing you could do when you’re looking at a fucking little girl that’s been horribly abused.”
When he returned from Coral Reef in 2012, after being found out by Complex, it seemed like trying to fit his new self back into his old life came with major growing pains. Assimilating back into Odd Future proved difficult after more than a year of therapy; not just because he’d become something of a mascot to the fandom, but also because he’d always been the crew’s catalyst, the sorcerer among mortals. (“Tyler always treated him as sacred,” Odd Future manager Christian Clancy told The Times. “They all did.”) Tyler was the architect, but there was never any doubt who the best rapper was. Upon arrival, Earl was already one of the most purely talented rap writers of all time, bar none. He was a scalpel wielded by the collective to carve OFWGKTA into the collective consciousness. But now, he was seeking a different legacy.
In less than two years, he went from hailing “Earl” as a shining treasure, the track he thought he’d never be able to surpass, to shunning the song as something he couldn’t even listen to, likening its sound to skinning a knee. He performed alongside his friends at first but didn’t sign to Odd Future Records. The tug-of-war between his mother and best friend, compounded by the cultish fandom that rose up while he was overseas, had blemished his OF residency and made things awkward, alienating him from a makeshift family that was already beginning to dissolve. The riff had grown into a chasm. He was back, but he was already gone. | 2018-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | OFWGKTA | August 12, 2018 | 8.3 | 07595829-b687-4a9a-b97b-7a79cb608a39 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The British-Congolese rapper’s ambitious new mixtape proves there’s fertile ground to be found in the interplay between grime, UK drill, and velvety Afropop. | The British-Congolese rapper’s ambitious new mixtape proves there’s fertile ground to be found in the interplay between grime, UK drill, and velvety Afropop. | BackRoad Gee: Reporting Live (From the Back of the Roads) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/backroad-gee-reporting-live-from-the-back-of-the-roads/ | Reporting Live (From the Back of the Roads) | BackRoad Gee recently joked about creating his own dictionary. His explosive raps are peppered with so many repurposed words that they’ve taken on new meaning. Often onomatopoeic, they function as more than sound effects or ad libs—they’re critical components of the verses. Take “brukutu.” Add a “u” between the first two consonants, and it’s a popular West African sorghum-based beer. In BRG’s hands, though, it could emulate the deadly spray of a weapon, as in his career-defining verse on Pa Salieu’s “My Family.” Or, as he makes clear at the start of his latest mixtape Reporting Live (From the Back of the Roads), it can be self-referential.
The British-Congolese artist’s unabashed will to twist, bend, and break language however he sees fit has made him one of the most exciting voices out of the UK. Though only a few years into his career, his bellowing tone and trademark phrases—which include forceful uses of “woof,” “vroom,” “skrrt,” and the wonderfully inexplicable “urrdum” and “mukta” (there’s a Sanskrit explanation for this, but to BRG, it’s a “personal interpretation”)—allow him to fluidly inhabit the various shades of Black British music. His latest mixtape—and best work yet—reads more like an album in both its versatility and cohesion. It’s an ambitious effort that feels more revelatory than exhaustive, proving there’s fertile ground to be found in the interplay between the raucous energy of grime, the sinister textures of UK drill, and the velvety melodies of Afropop.
BRG’s first two projects—2019’s Mukta Wit Reason and 2020’s Mukta vs Mukta—had brief moments of magic, like the latter’s breakout hit “Party Popper,” but for the most part, they fell prey to bloated tracklists and uninspired production. On Reporting Live, a markedly more refined BRG commands every beat. The first half is a well-paced journey through the annals of street music, with nods to UK drill, grime, and the liminal space between the two. Lyrically, he pays dues to the ends and the shadowy back roads that earned him his name, switching between aggression, sincerity, and moralism. “Look at the things that we done/Enough is enough,” he declares unflinchingly at the top of the mixtape. From the nihilistic terror of “Fxct It” to the tragic realizations of “Dark Place,” BRG’s struggle to change his life is endearing in its flawed humanity, making his gains all the more encouraging. By the time he reaches “Fear Nuttin,” a solemn bridge between the mixtape’s two parts, he’s traded physical protection for a spiritual kind: “Don’t fear nuttin, only Allah/Previously, we had guns in the car.”
The second half—which features Stylo G, Stefflon Don, NSG, and Olamide—leans into the sexier and more romantic corners of dancehall and Afropop. There are a couple of exceptions, including standout “Crime Partners,” featuring fellow genre-blender Pa Salieu. While its rhythmic trot and tender saxophone might induce you to vibe out, the stark lyrics (“My nigga got shot in his head and walked it off”) say otherwise and provide a clear-eyed counter to the “baby, oh” love songs and feel-good vibes that dominate Afropop. Afroswing pioneers NSG are formidable partners on the gritty grooves of “Ancestors.” On “Nyege Lewa,” BRG and Ms. Banks turn the Pan-African hall party classic “Premier Gaou” into a slinky sex song. And by the time Olamide’s voice chimes in on the bubbly “See Level,” it feels like BRG is on a well-deserved victory lap, as he croons in pidgin with the energy of a wealthy, unbothered African uncle.
Though BRG has cited Burna Boy, DMX, 50 Cent, and Koffi Olomide as influences, he’s probably most indebted to artists closer to home. His idiosyncratic vocals and inventive wordplay bring to mind grime great D Double E (who he hopped on a remix with last year) while his charisma, versatility, and ability to straddle the needs of the street and the club are reminiscent of J Hus. The latter’s crossover success was widely heralded as the greatest manifestation of the bridge between street raps, dancehall, and Afropop, giving the blended sound mainstream legitimacy. In Hus’ stretches of inactivity (partially due to incarceration), the non-committal style returned to the margins while UK drill stepped to the fore. BRG’s latest project could reassert the dominance of hybridity, making space for all of the UK’s great Black music to shine at once.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-23T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | null | November 23, 2021 | 7.7 | 075a1e69-a5f0-4f3a-b4f4-4d72fc059de6 | Jessica Kariisa | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jessica-kariisa/ | |
With Woman, Justice attempt the sort of analog nostalgia trip Daft Punk pulled off on Random Access Memories. Have the enfants terribles of French house grown up? | With Woman, Justice attempt the sort of analog nostalgia trip Daft Punk pulled off on Random Access Memories. Have the enfants terribles of French house grown up? | Justice: Woman | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22644-woman/ | Woman | Justice’s 2007 debut album, †, was expertly engineered for breakthrough success, delivering massive hooks with all the subtlety of a jackhammer. That said, they also had an impeccable sense of timing. Shortly after reigniting public interest in their catalog with the landmark Alive 2007 tour, Daft Punk—Justice’s direct antecedents—largely powered down until the release of 2013’s Random Access Memories. It’s difficult to overstate how much Justice benefitted from this timing, riding a renewed wave of interest in French house just as it was cresting, then stepping into a world hungry for Daft Punk as their closest analogues: two enigmatic French dudes forcing electro-disco through the sieve of hard rock dynamics. They certainly made the most of the opportunity on the live circuit, with ear-splitting arena tours that predicted the rise of pyrotechnic technicians like Skrillex and Deadmau5. Still, for all their success, Justice always felt like Daft Punk’s understudies: cruder, grimier, more willing to dredge rock’s cheesiest depths in search of a big hook.
That formula worked well in 2007 but now that Daft Punk is active and operating at pop’s highest echelons, does the world still need Justice? That’s the question the scruffy duo have been attempting to answer ever since. To their credit, they’ve hardly stood still: 2011’s Audio, Video, Disco found the act taking a hard left turn toward prog in order to distinguish themselves. Woman, their latest, marks yet another tonal shift away from the leather-clad sonics of their debut and toward the brighter sounds of pop and disco.
They’ve stored away the crates of vinyl once and for all, padding out their synthcraft with live instrumentation and vocalists. As with previous Justice albums, Woman is full of earnest vocals, rubber-band basslines and weepy strings, only this time everything sounds much warmer and looser. Intentional or not, it’s hard not to see the parallels to Random Access Memories’ pop classicism and militantly analog approach. Just as Daft Punk did, Justice attempt to envelop the sounds of disco and funk in a full on, unironic embrace. And while they remain more willing to violate the rules of good taste (as always, all the faders are at 10 and they continue cramming everything into the midrange), Woman still feels about as “electronic” as RAM does: it largely scans as AM pop, just with more modular synths.
Justice being Justice, they can’t resist trying to land a few big singles and these songs tend to be the least adventurous on the album. “Safe and Sound” and “Stop” both attempt to recreate the winning formula of “D.A.N.C.E.”: stargazing choirs, layers of synths, a generous helping of slap bass. At best though, these songs feel like paint-by-numbers versions of Justice’s early singles. In between these throwbacks, we get a lot of middle-of-the-road pop: generically funky melodies, cheesy guitar solos, forgettable vocals, lyrics that are downright embarrassing. It’s not quite offensive but that’s also kind of the problem—much of Woman sounds like music designed by committee, better suited to soundtrack a car commercial than to actively engage the listener (incidentally, Justice do have a pretty strong track record when it comes to landing commercial and video game placements).
There are a few moments on Woman where Justice break from the script and most of them are far more memorable than the rest of the record. “Chorus” opens up with drone-y blasts of static that pop up again in the track’s airy back half. “Heavy Metal” kicks off with an Iron Butterfly meets Van Halen organ solo before segueing into a disjointed chorus that recalls Ed Banger’s heyday. “Alakazam !” goes all in on the record’s guiding sound: it’s a straight up four-on-the-floor disco number grafted on to the sort of grungy synth bassline that these guys wield so well. If you’re going to embrace corniness, why not really go for it?
While it’s hard to fault them for wanting to explore new terrain, as with Audio, Video, Disco, Woman’s focus largely plays against the pair’s strengths as songwriters. There’s a restraint on display that, coming from Justice, feels more like a lack of commitment. Is Woman more subtle and loosely composed than their previous records? Sure. Are those qualities desirable in a Justice album? Perhaps not. Ever since their emergence, electronic traditionalists have been wringing their hands over these guys but until now there was at least one thing you could never accuse Justice of being: boring. | 2016-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2016-11-29T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Ed Banger / Because Music | November 29, 2016 | 5.2 | 075c0e1f-f4d4-4443-a52d-47d3ec8d3eff | Mehan Jayasuriya | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mehan-jayasuriya/ | null |
French producer Mr. Oizo has been around for 15 years, but people may have first encountered him with the release of the music video for "Ham", starring John C. Reilly. That song comes from his new album, The Church, his first for Brainfeeder, a collection that takes the electronic sounds of the moment and warps them in a fun-house mirror. | French producer Mr. Oizo has been around for 15 years, but people may have first encountered him with the release of the music video for "Ham", starring John C. Reilly. That song comes from his new album, The Church, his first for Brainfeeder, a collection that takes the electronic sounds of the moment and warps them in a fun-house mirror. | Mr. Oizo: The Church | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20028-mr-oizo-the-church/ | The Church | The French producer of the grotesque, Mr. Oizo (pronounced Wahzo) has been around for about 15 years, but many people may have first encountered him last week, with the release of the music video for "Ham", starring John C. Reilly. That video, directed by Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric, starts out as an extremely on-the-nose parody of Black Friday, but by refusing to let up on the gas, Wareheim manages to bring it to an interesting climax in the form of a Mexican Standoff, a la The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.
The video is at once strange, annoying, compelling, and obvious, which makes it a perfect vehicle for Mr. Oizo’s music. His new album, The Church, is his first for Brainfeeder, but it’s very much in tune with his methods for the past decade, taking the electronic sounds of the moment—in this case, trap, post-dubstep, and electro—and warping them in a fun-house mirror. Oizo, whose real name is Quentin Dupieux, has been compared to his fellow Frenchmen, Justice, many times in the past, and there’s definitely something there. But his music also bears thinking about in relation to newer artists; now that PC Music has emerged, Oizo almost feels like a long-standing, supervillianous nemesis to that candy-brite collective.
Does that mean that Dupieux has long been ahead of his time? Certainly. His music exists to disturb the natural state of things; he makes use of the dissonance of Inga Copeland but substitutes her icy cool for off-the-wall juvenilia. His love of the puerile is probably the most obvious element of his sound. Take "Dry Run", which, though it bears some resemblance to "Turn Down for What", substitutes that ubiquitous mantra with the goofy-voiced and terrifying plea to "scream for daddy."
This kind of cartoonish menace appears many times throughout *The Church. "*Mass Doom", a standout here, could soundtrack "Adventure Time" if the show were produced by the Joker—a sense of foreboding lurks within its impossibly cartoonish sound effects. "iSoap'"s got a nice groove which soon gets torn apart by a brassy loop plaguing you with its endless repetition like water torture.
The best tracks on the record are the ones confident enough to place their weirdness in the foreground. With the bizarro trap of "Bear Biscuit" (which even includes some DJ Rashad-like sampling at its tail) and the straightforward thump of "Ham", Dupieux seems to put all his cards on the table and the result are the two most compelling songs on the record.
But what’s most frustrating about Mr. Oizo is that, despite all his rule-breaking, his songs quickly start to feel shallow, as if he’s run out of ideas. "Memorex", the shortest song on the record, is one loop and a squeaker for the entirety of its running time, and once you get over their more irritating aspects, most of the songs here feel just that simple.
Then again, striving for anticlimax is a form of the avant garde. The title track ends the record, and when cloaked in words, Mr. Oizo’s aimless clowning becomes explicit. The song tells the story of a group of friends who get bored and steal cars. Many times throughout the song, it feels as if the group will do something terrible, particularly when the music drops and they go to the church. But nothing especially violent happens. The track is all suggestion. Despite the genuine fear that Oizo manages to build-up with this and other tracks on The Church, he does it all through the power of suggestion. Nothing ever really happens. | 2014-12-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2014-12-04T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Electronic | Brainfeeder | December 4, 2014 | 4.9 | 075c63cf-738a-4cee-9621-fb9f998891ec | Jonah Bromwich | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/ | null |
The 13 tracks on NO LOVE DEEP WEB thrive on paranoia and aggression, feelings threaded together by the sense that everything could be ending right now. For the second time this year, Death Grips have released a record that's both ruthless and rewarding. | The 13 tracks on NO LOVE DEEP WEB thrive on paranoia and aggression, feelings threaded together by the sense that everything could be ending right now. For the second time this year, Death Grips have released a record that's both ruthless and rewarding. | Death Grips: NO LOVE DEEP WEB | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17216-no-love-deep-web/ | NO LOVE DEEP WEB | For a moment, forget about the cock on the cover: The most arresting and totemic image of this week's Death Grips debacle and/or coup actually arrived about five hours before the brazen California trio released its second major-label LP, NO LOVE DEEP WEB, online, for free and under an anything-goes Creative Commons license. Shirtless so as to expose the web of tattoos on his body, Death Grips frontman MC Ride stands with his back to the camera, his middle fingers foisted high and a cigarette tucked into his left hand. But he's balancing on a balcony, high up in what appears to be a rather well-furbished neighborhood, his toes hanging just over the ledge. He's tempting fate and taking the chance to make the strongest statement possible, even if he (and the photographer overhead) had to risk a fall to the death to get it. In fact, the only incident that might have given the riot-act release of NO LOVE DEEP WEB more currency in the media would have been an accidental death. At the very least, it would have kept at bay the conspiracy theorists calling Death Grips' Monday move a publicity stunt performed in conjunction with Epic Records. "Too soon," you'd say.
At the risk of appearing moribund, that phenomenon of big stunts and instant exits largely defines NO LOVE DEEP WEB, not just in release style but also in musical makeup. These 13 tracks thrive on paranoia and aggression, feelings threaded together by the sense that everything could be ending right now. With his voice squeezed above a heavy thud and electro chirp, MC Ride rolls the dice again, as he did on the balcony's ledge: "My life on a limb about to break." Across these 46 minutes, Ride creates a series of memento mori scenarios (and even goes so far as to invoke that phrase) and dares them to destroy him. As he puts it, "Fuck this world/ Fuck this body."
The record's most obvious example is "World of Dogs", which opens with the repetitive hook "It's all suicide" over Zach Hill's death-jazz drums. Crushed by its own quest for redemption, the grueling pace and noose-necked premise-- "Die with me/ Blow out the lights, take your life/ Ride the falling sky with me"-- make the song more grim than most black metal in 2012. The hook of "Lil Boy" is an invitation to burn brighter and faster, while the mortality-obsessed and especially corrosive "Lock Your Doors" includes a falling-from-life scream convincing enough to be sampled from a horror film. A minute later, Ride pictures the flame of a candle like the sand slipping through the hourglass: "Light the candle, burn the wax/ Before me dies, in scorch uprise/ Can't deny it, no way back." It's as if NO LOVE DEEP WEB was written and recorded knowing that its ultimate fate would either kill or catapult Death Grips. Essentially, the risk becomes the biggest reward.
After all, Death Grips' rage for some unnamed and very big system is written all across these tracks, and not just in the horror-house din of "Lock Your Doors" or the militaristic march of "No Love". MC Ride weaves networks of anxious and sometimes fatalistic visions; his phone's been tapped, and phantom footsteps sound just outside the door. At one point, he's stuck in a closed-circuit surveillance system, and he's the only one who can't watch. "Tongue cut out the mouth of reason, and chucked off the river's edge," he manages in one particularly manic span, again acknowledging the end waiting just at the other side of the precipice.
He lashes out, becoming the bully with a vivid imagination and an aggressive lexicon. "Lil Boy" taunts the effete, while "No Love" (likely and hilariously Epic's would-have-been "single") teases the bloated form of stereotypical industry executives: "Fuck do you do? Fuck a man with hips for hulu." Ride buys up guns, threatens homicide, evades the law, pursues his prey, and, by his own admission, teeters toward the edge of crazy. He's most fierce on "Deep Web", an industrial-strength boomer that finds him ready to fight and flee. "I'm the coat hanger in your man's vagina," he stammers, unleashing a line vague enough to offend most everyone. It's the sort of thing you could imagine him shouting from the top of the balcony Sunday evening, spreading the bad news like heavy mortar fire.
With his schizoid panoply of voices and hyperlinked lyrics, MC Ride remains Death Grips' fountainhead and most polarizing figure. But the production of Zach Hill and Flatlander lives on the same line of danger as their leader. They afford Ride perfect platforms for his effrontery. Closer "Artificial Death in the West", for instance, is the longest track here, pushing toward the six-minute mark. Ride raps like he's stuck between failure and the future, so the music matches those "hopeless premonitions" with synthesizers suggesting krautrock tripping toward its own oblivion. "Hunger Games" explores a similar fascination with the end while the beat ruptures into ill-shaped bits. It's the sound of a troubled mind trying not to fall apart.
Loud and punishing, the sonics of NO LOVE DEEP WEB suit MC Ride's mix of hysteria, rage and exhaustion. Perhaps Epic has concerns about Death Grips' ability to make a marketable record; as Death Grips are arguably the most challenging act on a major label right now (or last week, at least), that much is founded. But their ability to integrate every part into cohesive tracks-- in other words, to marry their sound to their fury-- is rare. After a string of shows in the spring, Death Grips canceled all subsequent dates to finish NO LOVE DEEP WEB. That's a questionable career move, but the effort and attention show here at every turn.
Death Grips exist within a cloud of hyperbole, from the maximized minimalism of their savage beats and the extreme unrest of their barked lyrics to the escalating gauntlet of their album covers and their blooming disregard of industry standards. To summarize, NO LOVE DEEP WEB-- a record ostensibly paid for by a label owned by one of the biggest companies in the world but released for free on the Internet-- features an erect penis inked with the title in sloppy Sharpie script on its cover. One of its most undeniable hooks reads, "She shoot pussy through your chest, you die." Everything about this trio seems extreme.
Especially when perceived as posturing for publicity, those appearances make it difficult to realize and articulate the issues that Death Grips make so urgent. But this is a trio of itinerant transgressors, making impossible demands on the boundaries of rap and punk and rock'n'roll and questioning to the core not only what constitutes a proper release but also the standard models for turning music into money. For now, at least, NO LOVE DEEP WEB is an extraordinary outlier in most every sense, an album with no definitive home or home turf aside from the millions who will likely download it.
So, are Death Grips publicity-crazed assholes who never saw a situation that couldn't be turned into a stunt, or are they real-life renegades who infiltrated the industry only to know they'd soon rip through its bowels? Frankly, at a time when what's for dinner can become a cause for publicizing yourself, and when one industry might shut down another to restore historically accepted order, they're nothing if not a lot of both. For the second time in one year, both on a large label and on their own, they've released a record ruthless and rewarding enough to animate that image. | 2012-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2012-10-05T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rap | self-released | October 5, 2012 | 8.2 | 075f8929-d67d-42e9-8eaf-d297ac79700c | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | null |
The now-forgotten British author Horace Vachell introduced polo to the Pacific Coast when he relocated to Southern California in 1882 ... | The now-forgotten British author Horace Vachell introduced polo to the Pacific Coast when he relocated to Southern California in 1882 ... | Morrissey: You Are the Quarry | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5437-you-are-the-quarry/ | You Are the Quarry | The now-forgotten British author Horace Vachell introduced polo to the Pacific Coast when he relocated to Southern California in 1882. Purchasing a large cattle ranch near Arroyo Grande, which he renamed Tally-Ho, Vachell bred ponies and even socialized in the costume of the sport. His greatest acclaim came from the 1905 novel The Hill, an aristocratic Icarus fable in which the son of a Liverpudlian merchant attends the elite Harrow boarding school, rising to cricket prominence before his evitable downfall and dismissal due to class difference. On his adopted home Vachell wrote, "In addition to the family fool, the Englishman to be found on the Pacific Slope include the parson's son, the fortune teller, the moral idiot, the remittance man, and the sportsman."
One could lob three of those labels at Steven Morrissey, the most unremittingly Albion presence in modern Los Angeles, but he remains an entirely unique breed of Englishman in home or Hollywood. Bitter, witty, hypocritical, contradictory, self-aware, sardonic, and nostalgic, Morrissey's persona-- in person, or in song-- is never one-dimensional or quickly read. Consider the "I" in his songs to represent "Morrissey" with peril.
The media and his audience have consistently misinterpreted Morrissey's lyrics and statements. Everyone from the Warlock Pinchers to the Windsors levied opinions at his persona. The trend continues with You Are the Quarry. The record is not an anti-American treatise, an encomium to England, an epistolary revelation, or even a bold comeback, and magazines who claim such are lazy and reading off the kit. Laden with brilliant contradictions, press baiting rouse, dark comedy, and real human complexity, You Are the Quarry simply stands as the most entertaining and lushly melodic work of Morrissey's solo career, one of the most singular figures in Western pop culture from the last 20 years.
In an epitomatory 1989 interview with Greenscene Magazine, Morrissey castigated those in chinchilla coats. "It's disgusting. They're disgusting," he spat. "If I see someone wearing fur I ask them to take it out of view." In the same interview, he pointed out that synthetic shoes "look silly" and confessed to wearing leather footwear, as there's "no sensible alternative." The first scenario seems unlikely and makes for a comedic envisioning (At the Savoy: "Excuse me, madam, but that rabbit shawl must be taken out of public view"), while the second statement reiterates that Morrissey never forsakes his role as photo-ready icon and dapper fashionist for a few cows.
Similarly, when he puts his hands on the hips of Liverpool and Hull to slowdance with England in "Come Back to Camden", the lyrics should be taken with the whole of the Winsford Rock salt mine. Obviously, a "discoloured dark brown staircase," a "slate grey Victorian sky," and "the taste of the Thames" fail to paint a whimsical postcard of home. Even those who've never choked for air while riding the 15 down Fleet Street can read the sarcasm without a spider map. Yet those weeping synthetic strings (violins and cellos use catgut and horsehair, by the way) flash "I miss you" in garish American neon.
When Morrissey humorously mocks Americans with, "You wonder why in Estonia they say, 'Hey, you, big fat pig, you fat pig,'" we laugh because most Americans don't know what Estonia is, let alone where it lies on the Baltic; fat Americans travel to Tucson not Talinn. Each of You Are the Quarry's 12 songs contains an equally delicious line. In "Let Me Kiss You", which incidentally features the most romantically melodic quasi-Marr guitar, Morrissey pulls the mask off an ostensible smooching ballad with the desperate gob of, "And then you open your eyes and you see someone you physically despise but my heart is open." Those artificial maudlin strings that sweep back in afterwards seem like the most appropriately feeble yet crushing sound on the record. The supposed ode to his Hispanic fans, "First of the Gang to Die", even contains poetic and dreadful images like solar illumination sparkling in cement reservoirs and on human bone.
Two songs drive home Morrissey's modi operandi. On "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores", the fear of being a suburban meatsuit and an opposing love of cheap pop thrills drives him to an ending refrain of sincerely conveyed cliche with "Take me in your arms and love me." The album closes with the quiff quivering mammoth, "You Know I Couldn't Last". Morrissey's tommy gun is pointed directly at the pop stars who take their passing charge with less zeal and erudition than himself. Robbie Williams and Jason Mraz would never use "gelignite" and "evil legal eagles" in a chorus, or dare stick their neck out for the critics. "The teenagers who love you, they will wake up, yawn, and kill you," he croons. At his most biting he sounds most relaxed. At his most self-deprecating he sounds most energized. By the time the title comes up, after "there's a cash register ringing and it weighs so heavily on my back," it's again clear that "I" is not the first person. But it could be.
Like fellow Southern Californians Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman, Morrissey shows no fear of offending or wrapping emotions in black humor, while exhibiting a deep passion for classic songwriting forms. Few-- possibly none-- would call the police "uniformed whores" and mockingly thank Jesus for bestowing him with love for which there is no receptacle on an album bulging with desire and soppy diapason. With a producer to match the vocal boldness of Morrissey, the record could have been pushed, musically, in a futuristic cinescope folk direction similar to recent The Flaming Lips. Flutes and piano and electric squelches peep through the sidewalk of simple lulling rhythms, acoustic guitar, and synthesizers. Jerry Finn, a Hollywood hack, knows only to throw all the parts out there with money stuffed in the panties. Prancing the choice embellishments in polo gear and avoiding standard rock mixing would have made the album perfect.
That's a rather considerable caveat to tag on the end on a review, but if you're listening to Morrissey albums for riffs and licks you're missing the point. Any instrumental bed under such incandescent personality and booming voice would pale. Envisioning the songwriter at work brings to mind a woman picking at an acoustic or a fellow hunched over a piano with a drink. The genesis of Morrissey music remains ambiguous both physically and in intent.
You Are the Quarry sounds effortless, and seemingly anything that pours from Morrissey's mouth comes wrapped in well-formed wit and melody. Some may want him to simply yearn for his homeland, or a woman, or a man, or bitterly attack pop stars or American culture, as this is seen as some sort of bold personal statement, but personalities rarely run down such black and white divisions. Creating an emotionally muddled, cantankerous, baroque, funny, longing, introspective, world-critiquing album is the most personal act a man like Morrissey makes. It trickles down to the logo on the cover, the resuscitated Attack imprint, a vinyl reggae label that has no relation to his music, yet reflects the taste and scholarship and attitude of man who began his career in music writing geeky teenage letters to NME begging for better New York Dolls coverage.
Often during the course of writing a review, as the CD plays again and again for the 13th and 14th times, a critic finds himself convincing himself more and more that the record is essential. Morrissey's nature inherently emboldens those looking to make a statement, and now that he's on the mark, I similarly feel the need to stick out my neck for his record. Then again, Horace Vachell eventually sold the ranch and moved back to England. You can go home again. | 2004-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2004-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Attack | May 19, 2004 | 8.9 | 075fb021-cdb2-4734-b83e-98377844dfe6 | Brent DiCrescenzo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brent-dicrescenzo/ | null |
On its second album, the London band folds classic pop tropes into its songwriting—just the latest surprise from a group that has always kept listeners on their toes. | On its second album, the London band folds classic pop tropes into its songwriting—just the latest surprise from a group that has always kept listeners on their toes. | Sorry : Anywhere But Here | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sorry-anywhere-but-here/ | Anywhere But Here | Where the vocals of Sorry’s Asha Lorenz and Louis O’Bryen used to stand stark and alone, on the north London band’s second album, Anywhere But Here, they’re frequently buffeted by a wave of bubblegum backing vocals, framing bitter musings and anxious hooks in dreamlike oohs and ghostly aahs. These wordless accompaniments, lifted right from the classic pop songwriting toolbox, might have once seemed too conventional for a band like Sorry. Their breakthrough songs were better known for growls, gulps, and electronic gurgles. But on Anywhere But Here, they fold these gestures toward pop history into their music with reverent sincerity, without losing their ability to surprise.
With her tongue characteristically in cheek, Lorenz said in a 2021 interview that the band was tilting toward “more song-y, ’70s arrangements,” and elsewhere they’ve cited the influence of songwriters like Carly Simon and Randy Newman. Anywhere But Here—which was produced by Lorenz and O’Bryen along with Bristol producer/engineer Ali Chant and Portishead’s Adrian Utley—might sit more comfortably alongside the punk-pop of Mica Levi’s Micachu and the Shapes, or Alex G’s off-kilter romanticism, than “You’re So Vain.” But it manages to weave classic techniques into the band’s strange world with a humor that never skids into distanced irony. The results make for some of Sorry’s most accomplished songs to date.
Sorry have long toyed self-consciously with musical clichés, but on Anywhere But Here, their pastiches are injected with real pathos. “Screaming in the Rain” is a forlorn duet on which both O’Bryen and Lorenz sound genuinely vulnerable, their voices flickering gently over threadbare guitar and a gloomy piano outro. Lorenz, in particular, brings a bodiliness to her performances: There’s the long, ragged breath she takes after imagining someone else putting their arm around her ex in “Key to the City”; the alteration between haunted whispers and halted, plosive intonation on “Willow Tree”; the way, on “Again,” her voice dwindles as she sings, “The world shone like a chandelier/And I was lost for good.” These visceral details tell a story, even when she’s projecting a disaffected tone—as when she cries on “Key to the City,” “I don’t care!”
Likewise, the magic of Sorry’s instrumentation lies in the tiniest and most jarring details. They’ve always created a vast amount of space in their productions, letting the most incongruous and compelling elements take the foreground. The spare “Baltimore” starts off eerily, with a few lone jabs at piano, a creeping guitar riff, a wobble of bass. Like the strutting “Step,” it lurches back and forth between quieter verses and choruses that build to a loud and frantic conclusion.
There’s never enough time to get comfortable in a Sorry song; it can be tricky to predict what’s coming next. The album’s weakest cuts are those that deploy familiar motifs like the quirky strums and city-life observations of “There’s So Many People That Want to Be Loved.” But at their best, Sorry wed hooky melodies and piercing earnestness with unsettling moments that shake you awake. Take the flourish of opera that adds drama to the downbeat “I Miss the Fool,” or the fact that “Closer” is less about physical or emotional intimacy than it is about feeling the slow creep of mortality (“Closer to the ether, closer to the worms,” Lorenz and O’Bryen sing sweetly in muted harmony). The jarring way they marry these unlikely elements, and their disarming lyricism, is often funny—but it’s never a joke. Where 925 was thrillingly inventive, but often kept the listener at a cautious remove, Anywhere But Here uses deeply felt storytelling and intimate vocals to usher us much closer. | 2022-10-12T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-12T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | October 12, 2022 | 7.5 | 076114c3-de6a-4dda-83bd-cc02f8ca0378 | Aimee Cliff | https://pitchfork.com/staff/aimee-cliff/ | |
The Philadelphia R&B singer’s stark, lightly poetic songs splay out the intimacies and contradictions of her raw emotions. | The Philadelphia R&B singer’s stark, lightly poetic songs splay out the intimacies and contradictions of her raw emotions. | Orion Sun: Hold Space For Me | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/orion-sun-hold-space-for-me/ | Hold Space For Me | Tiffany Majette wanted to be an astronaut; instead, she turned to music. As Orion Sun, she writes songs that hover and drift along, tenderly excavating past traumas and recent relationships. The 24-year-old singer and producer has orbited the Philadelphia R&B scene in recent years, opening performances by neo-soul crooner Daniel Caesar and eclectic rapper Tierra Whack. A 2017 mixtape, A Collection of Fleeting Moments and Daydreams, floated between outer-space imagery and drum-heavy introspection. On her debut album, Hold Space for Me, she unfurls her personal history, singing about learning to fall in love while grieving and about losing her childhood home. She describes her writing process as tapping into a kind of “darkness,” but there’s an airiness to her glistening jazz samples, quasi-trap beats, and tossed-off raps about Kanye.
The sparse production relies on Orion Sun’s voice to carry the emotional weight of each track. She’s most successful when she’s stark, frank, and lightly poetic: “I pray to God, wherever he resides/If loving her’s alright,” she sings in a soft, undulating voice on “Trying,” a glimmering ballad about a queer relationship. Her simplicity doesn’t always achieve its goal; after 10 repetitions of “it feels so good to know you,” you’re numbed to the romance of the words. The album wants to soothe, but its meandering vocals and slow, weary chords start to feel like a drain.
So when Orion Sun suddenly bursts out with a rap, it’s a welcome change of pace. Her occasional verses are fun, though sort of corny: “I feel like A$AP Rocky, bitches on my jockey, all up in my face, hockey,” she raps on “El Camino.” On “Golden Hour,” she finds a staccato, sing-song flow, and while the lyrics are never as strong as her more straightforward ballads, the twinkling synth and shimmering production effects complement her delivery. Towards of the end of the song, she sighs, layered vocals reverberating as she revels in her new-found success. “They’re fucking with me now,” she murmurs, genuinely shocked.
At times the album feels ill-equipped to handle the capital-E Emotions, performing metaphors so theatrical they invoke cliche. “Grim Reaper,” a song about a friend’s death (“Where do you go/When your soul leaves the physical?”), fades into the chirp of a disconnected phone line; the song ends with a fuzzy, shoveling sound, like someone scraping through dirt. At other points, she turns to underwhelmed interjections, like the “Oh shit” and “What the fuck’s going on?” of the opener. Each song builds a small space for raw emotions, splaying out their intimacies and contradictions. But once the feelings pass, they default to easy takeaways—love is cozy, death is sad, time is fleeting—and palatable chords.
On the album’s best track, “Coffee for Dinner,” Orion Sun interpolates The Weeknd, lilting a G-rated take on the Canadian superstar’s clammy sex chronicle “Often.” With vivid imagery and yearning vocals, she carves a space for herself out of the up-ended song, responding to the hedonism of the original with a gentleness that anchors the record. Her songs search for a smoothness that feels like safety, always taking a breath before unfolding.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mom+Pop | March 30, 2020 | 6.5 | 0762030f-2ac4-4ec0-afe4-2ee314477800 | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
In an attempt to give the world a true blockbuster rap album, the Houston rapper delivers a shiny, empty spectacle loaded with pop superstars who rarely make an impact. | In an attempt to give the world a true blockbuster rap album, the Houston rapper delivers a shiny, empty spectacle loaded with pop superstars who rarely make an impact. | Travis Scott: UTOPIA | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/travis-scott-utopia/ | UTOPIA | In Circus Maximus, the 75-minute documentary/brain poem that accompanies Travis Scott’s new album UTOPIA, our hero Travis gets into a scuffle with a tentacle creature and headbangs in an open field. He then climbs a mountain to seek an audience with Rick Rubin to confess a deep-seated fear that has been gnawing at his very soul: Do I still have the ability to rage?
This is Travis’ idea of getting vulnerable. Since he released his inescapable album Astroworld five years ago, Travis has fully embraced his persona as the ultimate hooligan, even after tragedy put that character under fire. In 2021, while he performed one of his raucous sets at his hometown Astroworld Festival in Houston, 10 people were killed and thousands more were injured during a sudden crowd crush. While Travis remains a defendant in several civil lawsuits, he was not held criminally responsible for the incident and has seemingly moved on, or pretended it never happened. Spoiler alert: He does still have the ability to rage. And to get that across, here is UTOPIA, a big, empty rap blockbuster that lives in the shadow of other bigger, less-empty rap blockbusters.
Specifically, those by Kanye West. That probably won’t be a surprise to anyone who has ever heard any song by Travis Scott, who’s been a Ye disciple since the days of getting some production credits on Yeezus a decade ago. But UTOPIA veers from heavy inspiration into Travis pretty much trying to Single White Female him. Well, that’s impossible, because even with the moody AutoTune warbling of 808s & Heartbreaks, the grand maestro vibes of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the icy electro synths of Yeezus, and the famous-friend-apalooza of The Life of Pablo, Travis is missing arguably the most important aspect of Kanye. Even at his most wild, most narcissistic, and most famous, Kanye still felt shit. Raw no matter how much he tinkered, layered, or absorbed. Unafraid to look like a fool, or at least convinced that he was so cool that it didn’t matter if he did. In the Circus Maximus film, the visuals are at times so pristine and polished that Travis looks like a cyborg; UTOPIA sounds a lot like that, too.
Sometimes, the marquee features and shiny production are good at masking the fact that Travis is an emotional blackhole on the mic. The digitized lilts over Blonde-inspired fogginess on “My Eyes” sound nice enough, especially when sprinkled with dreamy riffing from Sampha and Justin Vernon. The rage beat on “Fe!n” is played-out, but Playboi Carti’s new vocal trick (sounding like he has bronchitis) soaks up the attention and just lets Travis do a bunch of ad-libbing. Future is strong over the orchestral beat of “Telekinesis,” and I like when he raps, “Countin’ so much money till my skin peel.” SZA is here, too, sounding good and sounding like she’s collecting a check. But again, at his peak, Kanye was able to draw showstopping features out of collaborators—these are nothing more than fleeting thrills.
Travis needs those knockout guest appearances because nobody expects him to carry an album himself. The bar for him as a rapper is already low; he’s here for the vibes, not the skill, and that’s fine. But what happens when the vibes are off? UTOPIA is a more expensive model of his previous albums, but it doesn’t sound like he’s leveled up because his life is so different now that when he tries to act like it’s not, he comes off as fake as hell. (His romantic breakups and reconciliations have been endless tabloid fodder; his future as a bankable mainstream act seemed uncertain after the Astroworld Fest disaster.) That’s not asking him to suddenly be a lyricist, but one of the basic attributes we expect from rappers is to be real with us, or at least convince us that they’re not purely bullshitting. Mild edginess like “I got Ye over Biden” on “Skitzo” or blank moshpit-ready tracks such as “Topia Twins” just come off as deflections. It’s scared rapping, hiding behind the spectacle.
Even more so than his past projects, UTOPIA has rapid beat switch-ups, stacked credits, and cinematic songs for no other reason than he thinks that is what signals an event album. “Modern Jam” features some embarrassingly uninspired stripped-down rapping by Travis. But oooh the mildly funky beat is co-produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk! “Meltdown” is diet “Sicko Mode.” But oh man Drake dissed Pharrell’s new office job! (OK, it was kind of funny.) On “Delresto (Echoes),” the shimmering and buffering noise gets topped with Beyoncé’s wails. Never mind that she’s going through the motions like Robert Downey Jr.’s guest appearances in minor Marvel movies. This Beyoncé feature is about as deep as his nods to his Houston roots go, and still, it’s Beyoncé. Rap is such a regional culture, even for the megastars. Whether it’s Drake with Toronto, or Kendrick with L.A., or Lil Baby with Atlanta, a connection to their home grounds them as they become international superstars. Travis still had that on Astroworld, where the chopped-and-screwed Big Hawk sample on “Sicko Mode” or the homage to his hometown “R.I.P. Screw” went a long way in making him feel like a real person. UTOPIA’s global ambitions sacrifice that little bit of realness he had left.
So it’s not even surprising that “K-Pop” exists, a diabolically stupid plan to create the most popular song in the world. You have Travis, the Weeknd, and Bad Bunny fusing their croons together over a sauceless Afropop rhythm on a track where the title supposedly isn’t a reference to the Korean pop genre to game extra clicks, but has the same effect. The algorithms will love it, congrats on the hit song. Surprised he didn’t round out the chart-chasing by hitting up Morgan Wallen.
For all its blinding star power, every moment on UTOPIA should feel seismic, or at the very least impactful. Think of Quavo’s melodic fantasia on “Oh My Dis Side,” or Nav’s ice-cold breeziness on “Beibs in the Trap,” or even Drake’s “Sicko Mode” verses which were basically implanted into your brain permanently after one listen. Now, without those, all he has to back himself up is the production. Yet even that is so safe. He waters down the cutting-edge sounds of the past and, in the process, flattens his Southerness to the point that he feels like he’s from nowhere.
To Travis’ credit, rap needs blockbusters, too. Many of the genre’s great albums of the year are so completely absorbed in regional movements that they aren’t even cutting through the noise (see: Sexyy Red’s Hood Hottest Princess and Veeze’s Ganger). But it also would be nice to have a water-cooler monocultural event, a conversation piece that you can talk about with anyone, anywhere. We need those albums that end all the widespread fear-mongering that rap is on a downward spiral just because it’s struggling to get a No. 1 hit this year, rap albums that become so ubiquitous in pop culture that when you look back at that moment in your life it will be inextricable. There are fewer moments like that in art in general anymore, but to get there, the hollow spectacle of UTOPIA is not enough. You want something to grab onto beyond that, an idea, a feeling, honesty. You want music with a vision that can make you feel like your world, or the world, is different, even for a moment. | 2023-07-31T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-31T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Epic / Cactus Jack | July 31, 2023 | 5.7 | 076873ae-25a8-4aa4-a950-c28be3858b77 | Alphonse Pierre | https://pitchfork.com/staff/alphonse-pierre/ |
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