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Without flashy bars or marquee features, Jack Harlow’s third album aims for clarity with soft, expensive beats and cloyingly intimate storytelling. | Without flashy bars or marquee features, Jack Harlow’s third album aims for clarity with soft, expensive beats and cloyingly intimate storytelling. | Jack Harlow: Jackman. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jack-harlow-jackman/ | Jackman. | When the cover art for Jackman. dropped, people did not know what to make of Jack Harlow standing there, arms crossed and chest bare. I certainly didn’t. Maybe it’s that Jackman. is as stripped down as the artist: Devoid of features and sparsely populated by hooks. He’s rapping over samples that he definitely could not afford in 2018. Instead of telling us how rich he is now, he lets the luxurious production speak for itself. The confrontational opener “Common Ground” was admittedly predictable: Harlow takes aim at out-of-touch music critics and culturally appropriating white kids. Divine hymnal harmonies from ’90s R&B girl group Jade’s “When Will I See You Again (Intro)” set the contemplative tone. A music video would probably have him rapping from a pulpit.
For three more tracks, Harlow chronicles his come-up and whines a bit more over soul samples. Trends and other people’s opinions mold his records. The internet said he was too cornily commercial, so for the duration of this album, he positions himself as a very serious rapper. Flexing his skills pays off in lines like, “No security, my brothers gon’ step, Will Ferrell” but also flounders: “My homeboy just beat cancer/I call my ex, no answer.” You win some, you lose some! It’s non-threatening in an “Ivy League frat boy bumping Nas to prep for his econ final” kind of way.
Halfway through Jackman., Jackman gets gritty. His candor on “Gang Gang Gang” is gripping. “My friend pulled me to the side like, ‘Did you hear about Marcus?’” Harlow narrates a reunion among childhood friends. “‘A bunch of girls say he raped them in the back of some Target.’” You can hear his boyish naivité rupture as he processes this shocking information. He questions blind loyalty and his role in abuse apologia. It’s raw. It’s self-interrogative. Perhaps he’s pandering to shut down accusations of his vacuousness. Maybe he has grown as a person.
It certainly is a level up from his Shemar Moore impersonation on Come Home the Kids Miss You. Jackman. takes creative risks in social commentary that often pay off. “Blame on Me” showcases Harlow’s narrative flexibility, rapping touchingly about the effects of toxic masculinity on the psyches of men and boys through multigenerational perspectives. It redeems the previous track “It Can’t Be,” where Harlow attempts to shut down the white-privilege allegations by listing evidence of what he thinks are his admirable morality and unparalleled drive. Imagine an 8 Mile battle rap scene if it were directed by Scooter Braun. Like most songs, its sanctimonious rambling is alleviated by a groovy sample.
Harlow claims that he’s not really into personas. That’s not entirely true. “No Enhancers” and “They Don’t Love It” scream Thank Me Later-era Drake. Over pop-rap beats, he’s in the club brooding over how he probably won’t find his wife there. In recent years, when rappers adopted what has become known as “therapy rap” to discuss sociopolitical topics, it served as a marker for personal and artistic maturity. The chameleon that he is, Harlow hops on this wave to manufacture some depth in his discography.
Like his upcoming role in White Men Can’t Jump, his flows and sonic choices are remakes—his greatest tracks come straight from Drake and Kendrick’s playbooks. Yet the 25-year-old proclaims himself “the hardest white boy since the one who rapped about vomit and sweaters.” Harlow’s white male angst isn’t violent or self-flagellating. Those lanes are occupied by Eminem and Macklemore. For a while, he was content being a charismatic goober trying to top the charts. The one thing of value he contributes is his truth. It might make him unlikeable but it adds dimension to a former cardboard cut-out. | 2023-05-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2023-05-02T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Generation Now / Atlantic | May 2, 2023 | 6.4 | 8c44d842-01ab-49b1-8031-020b4c05d568 | Heven Haile | https://pitchfork.com/staff/heven-haile/ | |
On this tightly curated EP, the insightful R&B singer revises the elements intrinsic to her work, providing new meditations on Blackness, womanhood, and love. | On this tightly curated EP, the insightful R&B singer revises the elements intrinsic to her work, providing new meditations on Blackness, womanhood, and love. | Mereba: AZEB EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mereba-azeb-ep/ | AZEB EP | Last year’s grief compounded by the ever present horrors of systemic racial violence seemingly turned everyone into a sage of their own experience. And so what of artists who were preternaturally revealing and insightful, before the world split wide open? Artists like Mereba, whose previous work has intentionally leaned towards transformation and vulnerability: Her sleeper hit “Black Truck” could have been a foreshadowing of all the havoc and the personal and communal revelations that people shared and prayed over in 2020. On AZEB, her latest EP, she’s back with soulful, well-paced verses that soften the existential and painfully direct inquiries she makes of her listeners.
“World feels like a war/Tell me what living’s for/Baby it’s gotta be love,” are the first lines off the EP’s quiet but persistent single, “Rider.” With a video starring Black lovers and friends traveling across arid plains, windswept and reckless, the song lunges for the healing power of intimacy. Even when a community is faced with violence, love for ourselves and our own has kept us, if not alive, then tender and open to the possibilities of rebirth. On “Rider,” Mereba delivers a striking rendition of the fine balance that Black people daily juggle; as we fight to assert and remember that we matter, we are also falling in love and lust, dealing with the dramas of fickle hearts and losing ourselves in the sensuality of those who make us feel safe and cared for. If anything, AZEB’s overarching theme is that with the world at war, love will have to matter so much more for most of us to come out alive.
On “Beretta,” over strumming guitar and lightly layered vocal riffs, the Alabama-born singer, who was raised across the U.S. and in Ethiopia, sings of a love that moves mountains solely in its reciprocity. “Baby boy let’s stick up the world for this cheddar/I’m the getaway and you’re the Beretta/We are renegades/The blood of the brave in our DNA,” with a well-timed emphasis punctuating the last word with ellipsis, and then an exclamation point—continuous and absolute. Like Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA,” Mereba posits that courage and survival are part of the Black lineage, while simultaneously beckoning to the ride-or-die bond of Jazmine Sullivan’s “#HoodLove”; she’s loyal to her person as they move through the world, carrying just the necessities they need to live and be loved. On “Beretta,” Mereba also returns to the jagged pain of “Rider,” but this time with a promise, singing, “I would win a war for this one/’Cause it’s love.” In the subtle ways she ties her songs to each other, Mereba shows herself to be a storyteller, approaching her work as a singular, but expanding range of thoughts, voices and movements.
The standout track has to be “Aye,” a finger-snapping, slightly bouncing side to side, face curled up in satisfaction type of groove. If you know, you know—there’s nothing more exhilarating and gratifying than having your people lift you up with a rousing round of ayeees while you win at whatever it is you’ve set your mind to achieve. Whether yelled or even whispered, the word transmits acknowledgement and echoes with pride and support. “Aye” starts off like an anthem for the mildly buzzed and perpetually chill before breaking off into reminders that speak of peace, but warn of retaliation if that peace is disturbed. “Aye, aye, it’s a war like every day/Keep my gold up in my safe/They won’t bring me to my knees/Got me fucked up/Got my bucks up/With my Chucks on/And my blunt tucked.” It’s a melodic distillation of soul pioneer Erykah Badu’s salient tweet from years past. Mereba will always choose peace, but will take notice if you step to her sideways and without respect: “I’m nonviolent, it’s a crime if you get close to my safe though/Slow ya pace.” OK?
In a year when everyone became a sage, Mereba learned to holster her defenses alongside her incense. Her brooding rhythms are now paired with caustic, pointed wit and an even more open heart, carving space for serenity, release, and warmth. “Gold” and “My Moon” are Mereba as longtime fans have known her; she’s a romantic, looking to the stars for answers and honeyed enough to ease the fury that surfaces on tracks like “Another Kin” and “News Comes.” The former is a haunting elegy where Mereba turns notes into wails that tear through the suffocation of despair. The latter is an anthem for the forward-looking liberation work done far from voyeuristic eyes, which is constant, yet often thankless: “Still, we fight when the screen’s closed,” she sings. “Still, we fight ’til the light’s on.”
As a tightly curated body of work, AZEB is a masterful lesson in editing. It’s never about the number of tracks, but the foundation anchoring the stories, experiences, and characters woven together to form a cohesive and clear outlook on the state of the world. It reveals her growth as an artist, while illuminating an artistic practice rooted in a sparse evocative lyricism. To listen to her work is to look forward to the creations that will come as she continues to reform, rewrite, and revise her art. As articulated by writer Kiese Laymon, revision is “a dynamic practice of revisitation, premised on ethically reimagining the ingredients, scope, and primary audience of one’s initial vision.” On AZEB, Mereba has taken the same ingredients that are intrinsic to her work—Blackness, womanhood, the diaspora, love—and rendered a new offering. Lucky for us, she graciously allowed listeners to be privy to the labor it takes to begin again.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-06-01T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Interscope | June 1, 2021 | 7.5 | 8c50dea8-05b3-47eb-b957-5dbb92357772 | Tarisai Ngangura | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tarisai-ngangura/ | |
The Books' fourth album and first full-length in five years finds their knack for finding strange and wondrous samples intact. | The Books' fourth album and first full-length in five years finds their knack for finding strange and wondrous samples intact. | The Books: The Way Out | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14459-the-way-out/ | The Way Out | The Books have a terrific sense of humor-- and it makes The Way Out, an album built on eccentric vocal samples, a good-natured discovery instead of a cheap piece of mockery. Imagine if a blog had posted these clips of goofball hypnotherapist and meditation consultants, or found a tape of a boy and a girl swapping violent threats with each other: You'd chuckle and move on. But when the Books use these samples, they give them integrity. You find yourself engrossed with people who are alien but also familiar. The flotsam and jetsam of American culture aren't a cheap joke to the Books, but a source of endless discovery and joy.
The Way Out is the fourth LP-- and the first in half a decade-- by the collage art/folktronica/post-New Age/indescribable duo of guitarist/singer Nick Zammuto and cellist Paul de Jong. Their new album is experimental for sure, but just like their early works, it wasn't designed for slow chin-scratching. It works best when it works like a joke: A strange sound or sample clicks in your ears, and then you're on to the next one.
Is "A Cold Freezin' Night", a track featuring a recording of one kid threatening to torture another to death, a commentary on how early and how easily little kids assimilate violent fantasies and gender roles? You could read it that way, but mostly I just enjoyed the jolt of recognition: It's a striking example of the way kids talk to each other when nobody else is listening. Likewise, "Beautiful People" is pretty straightforward: It's a tribute to Zammuto's favorite irrational number, which is a pretty geeky thing to do, but Zammuto connects that number to God, and so he makes it a hymn. Back it with a disco beat and tack on a meticulously constructed brass fanfare at the end, and you have a Books pop song-- one of the only ones they've written.
The band's good humor stops us from mocking "I Didn't Know That", where kids and adults shout, "I didn't know that!" with unironic gusto. My guess is that the samples come from a kid's television show, but the source doesn't really matter. The Books take the speakers and high-five them again and again, with a boisterous melody and a verse that features distorted, hiccupping vocal snippets arranged into musical phrases and emerging as a kind of scat singing. Which, you know, is something you would normally just get up and perform, but instead they do it this way, and it must have taken them a long time to put it together.
When the Books actually get up and make jokes, they tend to shoot themselves in the foot. And maybe that's the point: they want to say they're not trying to sound prophetic. Don't take this so seriously. But they score a misfire at the end of "Chain of Missing Links", which features a self-help guru who's trying to lead us to a higher consciousness. He soothes us and seeks out our pain-- "You're old and used up at the atomic level"-- and while he sounds silly, the music plays along with him. It complements his message, matching the tension and the transcendence in his words. You almost start to wonder if he's onto something. But the track ends on an easy joke, editing the speaker to make a crack about eating brains, and the music leaves him looking foolish. It seems kinda cruel.
The album is book-ended with excerpts of these self-help records, and the funniest thing about that is that the Books really are a boffo meditation band. As smart and complex as they are, their albums are also super-serene, and they could function as New Age music for people who are too skeptical for the real thing. After all, it's soothing to hear two guys digest and synthesize a mountain of information and pass back an orderly whole-- something that most of us information worker-types try and fail on a daily basis.
The Way Out is a step forward for the band, as producers and in Zammuto's case, as a singer: dig his glowing lead vocal on "All You Need Is A Wall". But it's not their best record. Even "Beautiful People" can't match the subtler beauty of The Lemon of Pink's interplay between analog and digital sources, where a glitch and a handclap can form a percussion part, and a vocal line can blend seamlessly with bowed cello. The second half of the album flags, and while it has some eerie moments, "The Story of Hip Hop" is a one-joke song. (They start with a children's story about a rabbit, and guess what kind of a beat they add?) That stuff was fun on their debut, 2002's Thought for Food, but today those easy jokes seem like a waste of their skills. Better to seek out the greater mystery of those weird and splendiferous sounds, and those voices that seem so close and so unknowable in the same breath. | 2010-07-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2010-07-20T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Temporary Residence Ltd. | July 20, 2010 | 7.7 | 8c553654-a9fe-4cd4-8933-046b68c06d6b | Chris Dahlen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/chris-dahlen/ | null |
If you were in your late teens and lived near Chicago between 1996 and 1999, chances are, you were a ... | If you were in your late teens and lived near Chicago between 1996 and 1999, chances are, you were a ... | Hey Mercedes: Everynight Fire Works | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/3847-everynight-fire-works/ | Everynight Fire Works | If you were in your late teens and lived near Chicago between 1996 and 1999, chances are, you were a Braid fan. Too young to have caught Smashing Pumpkins before they mutated into arena-rock dinosaurs, and too rambunctious to chin-stroke along with McEntire and O'Rourke, the angst-filled masses turned to Braid. You could count on the Champaign foursome to play through the area once every month or two, filling up the Metro or the Fireside Bowl with bobbing heads and squinty rock-out faces. Melodramatic lyrics, Fugazi-esque start/stops, time signature chaos, and an excellent balance of hardcore mentality and catchy melodicism-- what more could a Midwestern eighteen year-old ask for?
I know because I was there, pumping my fist to "First Day Back" with the rest of you. And that's why I can't decide whether I'm disappointed or just plain angry about the vanilla ice-cream blandness of Everynight Fire Works. See, Hey Mercedes is 75% of what once was Braid-- their answer to "Saved by the Bell: The College Years," if you will. When Braid broke up in early 2000, I took comfort in the fact that three-quarters of the band would continue on under a new moniker, without the services of guitarist/screamy-guy Chris Broach. Their first, self-titled EP was an unimpressive effort, but live shows featured a number of unrecorded songs with potential.
Then Hey Mercedes broke from Polyvinyl Records, the home of such respectable Midwesterners as AM/FM and Aloha, for Vagrant Records, the home of critically acclaimed artists like... hmmm... help me out here... Snapcase? Well, anyway, given Vagrant's habit of churning out slick pop-punk product for chain-wallet accessorisors that just came down off a bad Blink-182 bender, the warning flags were raised.
And indeed, these warning flags proved accurate upon the release of Everynight Fire Works. Under the increasingly commercial-minded guidance of J. Robbins, every rough edge is polished up to a shimmering, radio-friendly gleam. Close your eyes, and you can imagine most of these songs on MTV, maybe with the band in funny wigs and playing to a house full of underwear-clad teenagers.
Still, Robbins helmed the boards on Braid's final and finest full-length, Frame and Canvas, so the blame cannot rest solely with him. Frontman Bob Nanna seems determined to dumb down his songs to reach a wider audience, trading in the polyrhythms and unusual dynamics of old for power chords, power chords, power chords. Sure, there's a few stutter-steps in tracks like "A-List Actress" and "The Frowning of a Lifetime," but more common are songs like "Our Weekend Starts on Wednesday" and "What You're Up Against," which roll along with little variation in tempo or volume.
The one-dimensional nature of the album leads me to say words I never thought I'd utter: I miss Chris Broach. While his contributions to Braid albums often seemed limited to emphatically yelling "yeah!" every once in a while, Hey Mercedes is sorely lacking the hard vocal counterpoint Broach would play to Nanna's sensitive guy act. Also absent is the intricate instrumental interplay between Broach and Nanna, as guitarist Mark Dawursk adds little to indicate that Hey Mercedes even needs two six-strings.
Frustratingly, a couple songs still manage to strike direct hits on my old Braid-lovin' soul. "Every Turn" features the kind of acrobatically catchy vocal Nanna used to specialize in writing, with a great, crunchy chorus tailor-made for the at-home rockout. Album closer "Let's Go Blue" layers a tiny little riff over a chugging chord progression, and works well until resorting to that most tired of devices, the bass and drums breakdown.
81.8% of Everynight Fire Works, however, inspires nothing more than a yawn and bittersweet nostalgia. The mediocrity reaches its apex with "Quit," five minutes so lacking in hooks and creativity that it feels ten times as long, even before the textbook false-ending and buildup coda.
Of course, it's completely possible that I've just outgrown the target audience for Nanna & Co. Somewhere in Suburbia, I'm guessing there's a fifteen year-old kid just now discovering Hey Mercedes and thinking they're the greatest thing ever. More power to little Ricky-- he could be listening to a lot worse. And maybe my dissatisfaction means I'm actually disappointed and angry with myself, for outgrowing that rockin' inner teenager and becoming a crotchety old foge.
No, wait, that's not right. I'm disappointed and angry about Hey Mercedes' impossibly middling debut album. Sorry, don't know what got into me there. | 2002-02-06T01:00:02.000-05:00 | 2002-02-06T01:00:02.000-05:00 | Rock | Vagrant | February 6, 2002 | 3 | 8c55b560-4a46-421b-859f-9f1d38525b59 | Rob Mitchum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/rob- mitchum/ | null |
The Baltimore band’s full-length debut uses slowcore not just as a variant of indie rock, but also a framework to make real-deal pop songs that make boredom sound utterly desirable. | The Baltimore band’s full-length debut uses slowcore not just as a variant of indie rock, but also a framework to make real-deal pop songs that make boredom sound utterly desirable. | Us and Us Only: Full Flower | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/us-and-us-only-full-flower/ | Full Flower | One of the more recent, unexpected, and ironically exciting trends in indie rock has been the embrace of music that, objectively speaking, is intentionally predictable. There are remnants in the recent work of (Sandy) Alex G and Girlpool, and it’s the foundation of up-and-comers like Wild Pink, Hovvdy, Clique and Peaer—that of slowcore and its descriptively-named patron saints Duster and Low, with its rubbery tempos, small note clusters, and drowsy vocals. For some, it’s a daring aesthetic choice, testing and rewarding patience, going against assumptions of modern listening habits. For others, it’s an excuse to avoid hooks and clarity. The latter is certainly not the case with Us and Us Only on their Topshelf debut Full Flower. For the Baltimore band, slowcore not just a variant of indie rock, but also a framework for real-deal pop songs.
They also have a rare sense of humor about themselves in this realm, or at least a self-awareness. Their most recent EP was named Bored Crusader and if you zoom out far enough, Full Flower could be heard as his continuing adventures, a concept record about sleepwalking or even a commissioned soundtrack for an imaginary 44-minute film of someone under the covers, deciding whether or not to stop hitting the snooze button. “I wanna go back to bed,” Kinsey Matthews sings rather convincingly, three times within the two minutes of opener “sun4u” and the next two tracks offer advice of how to handle boredom—and these are the catchiest here.
“Kno” shows how insistent this style of music can be in spite of its soft touch, its repetitive twinkles as enveloping as shoegaze, but crisp and refreshing as a cold drink of water. It’s all in Matthews’ voice, an unusually piquant, lemony tone that cuts through its surroundings even when it doesn’t grip a melody all that tight. Though he barely reaches above a whisper—save for a startling scream at the end of “Lawn”—Us and Us Only are a band of five people playing in neatly manicured spaces, which makes unexpected production choices or stylistic shifts feel more profound.
For a few minutes in the middle of Full Flower, Us and Us Only reveal an unexpected freak-folk tenderness, as the string-swathed piano and acoustic guitar interludes "Veiled/Forming" and “way2loud” could pass for Devendra Banhart sketches. Meanwhile, “My Mouth” emerges from its murk with a slow-burning sensuality and limber groove more reminiscent of Wild Beasts than any of their DIY peers.
Though their work ethic and principles put them within that DIY realm, Us and Us Only’s sonic operating principles are slippery. Full Flower is technically their first album, but they’ve been knocking around since 2009, releasing four EPs that veered from sample-based experimentation to the doomier variation of slowcore that marks the album’s more conservative second half. After the lulling balladry of “way2loud,” the title track and “Lawn” move towards emo tempo shifts, soaring guitar leads, and distorted aggression. They are perfectly fine indie rock songs, yet a curious regression when Full Flower is more compelling and successful trying to be a “sleeper hit” in as accurate of terms as possible. | 2017-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-07-24T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | Topshelf | July 24, 2017 | 6.7 | 8c5a7fb9-38e1-49e4-9450-e09762f700f4 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Reissued for its 50th anniversary, American Beauty is undoubtedly the Dead’s most beloved studio album, a pure and potent representation of their style and philosophical outlook. | Reissued for its 50th anniversary, American Beauty is undoubtedly the Dead’s most beloved studio album, a pure and potent representation of their style and philosophical outlook. | Grateful Dead: American Beauty / The Angel’s Share | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/grateful-dead-american-beauty-the-angels-share/ | American Beauty / The Angel’s Share | To an outsider, Grateful Dead fandom can look like a religious calling. Consider the hours spent in contemplation of their famously lengthy jams, the lexicon of shibboleths and symbols that are inscrutable to the uninitiated, the seemingly prescribed style of dress, the reluctant messiah figure in Jerry Garcia. Actual religious groups even attached themselves to the endless tours that provided this community with its gathering places. If you attended one of the Dead’s carnivalesque stadium shows in the late 1980s—when hippie nostalgia, spectacle-driven TV news coverage, and a bona fide MTV hit converged to make their crowds much larger than they’d ever been in the hippie era—you might have encountered the Peacemaker bus. Filled with longhaired evangelicals who followed the band in hopes of drawing its listeners into a cultish Christian sect known as the 12 Tribes, the Peacemaker had two floors, a groovy paint job, and a faintly eerie slogan emblazoned on the back: “We know the way, we’ll bring you home.”
That line comes from “Ripple,” the sixth song on American Beauty, Grateful Dead’s fifth and greatest studio album. But as Pitchfork contributor Jesse Jarnow notes in Heads, his wonderful history of American psychedelia, the Peacemaker’s motto was a perversion of the original. The musicians of the Dead, as well as Robert Hunter, the eremitic poet who wrote many of their lyrics, were temperamentally averse to dogma of any kind. On “Ripple,” a crystalline acoustic ballad with a hymnlike melody, they don’t profess to have the answers. “You who choose to lead must follow,” Garcia sings in his plainspoken tenor atop a cascading mandolin, then finishes with the line the 12 Tribes appropriated: “If I knew the way, I would take you home.” Were the Dead a religion, this would be one of its core tenets. Devotion and uncertainty are inseparable; no one knows the way, but we can try to get there together.
Released in November 1970 and reissued for its 50th anniversary this month, American Beauty is a pure and potent representation of Dead-ness as a philosophical outlook. Earlier in the year, with Workingman’s Dead, the band made an abrupt about-face from the murk and discord of previous albums toward the bluegrass and folk that had captivated Garcia in his early days as a musician, with some Buck Owens and Merle Haggard thrown in for good measure. American Beauty, which came just five months later, uses a similarly earthy palette, but its concerns are quite different. The songs of Workingman’s Dead, filled with archetypal characters of the American West, involve a fair amount of rambling and gambling. American Beauty is more like a guided meditation, or a solitary swim in a cool, clear lake.
Bassist Phil Lesh earned a rare songwriting credit for “Box of Rain,” the heartbreaking opener, whose melodies he wrote to sing to his father as he died of prostate cancer. Hunter’s dreamlike titular image might stand for the ephemerality of the present moment, or of life itself. Again, the band goes out of its way to avoid presenting its wisdom as something certain or compulsory: “Just a box of rain/Wind and water/Believe it if you need it/If you don’t, just pass it on.” Hunter conjures similar impossibilities across the album: lights that no eyes can see, tunes that play on harps unstrung, ripples emerging in water without pebbles to cause them.
Decades before mindfulness became a corporate buzzword, the Dead were devoted to being here now. According to Garcia, an acid-fried visit to the Watts Towers a few years before the American Beauty sessions informed this approach, albeit in an inverted way. The guitarist was inspired not to toil in solitude for his legacy, like Simon Rodia building his folk-art monuments in southern Los Angeles, but to live in the world as it unfolded. “If you work really hard as an artist, you may be able to build something they can’t tear down, you know, after you’re gone,” he said later. “But hey, what the fuck? I want it here. I want it now, in this lifetime...I also don’t want to be isolated. I don’t want to be an artist suffering in a garrett somewhere, you know what I mean? I want to work with other people.”
This commitment to coming together and being present manifested most clearly in the Dead’s live performances, communal explorations of the moment that only survived for posterity because of bootleg tapers, the sect of Deadheads who documented the band’s fleeting magic, like catching rain in a box. But they also show up on American Beauty, in subtler ways. “Friend of the Devil,” a narrative told from the perspective of an outlaw on the run, might have been a straightforward piece of Americana if not for the way the band played it. Joined by bluegrass-jazz mandolin virtuoso David Grisman, they refuse to sit still and simply strum the chords. Instead, each player pursues his own melodic path through the changes, which emerge in crystalline polyphony. Each line wanders freely, but complements the others; none could support Garcia’s lead vocal alone, but their latticework holds him high.
Across American Beauty, the band accomplishes such feats without straying from the bounds of country-folk songcraft, encoding their collective interplay within verses and choruses rather than jamming, per se. The album’s simplicity and campfire warmth make it approachable to newcomers even as it embodies the spiritual yearning that turns people into lifelong followers. It is an ideal gateway drug.
The reissue comes packaged with a 1971 concert recording, and arrives in tandem with American Beauty: The Angel’s Share, a collection of demos and outtakes that will hardcore fans will lap up, but newcomers to the album should probably ignore. For anyone in between, The Angel’s Share is a useful reminder of the work that goes into sounding so free. Garcia, Lesh, and rhythm guitarist Bob Weir struggle hard with their vocal harmonies in the “Brokedown Palace” demo, an uncomfortably intimate window on their process, which hardly anyone needs to hear more than once. Drummer Bill Kreutzman stumbles over a flashy drum fill to start “‘Til the Morning Comes,” an intro the band abandoned at some point between the demo and the final version. The Angel’s Share comes in an album-length edition with one demo for every song, as well as a 56-track version containing 20 different takes on “Friend of the Devil” alone. For all their emphasis on spontaneity, these songs didn’t actually emerge from thin air.
American Beauty contains the final studio performances of keyboardist and singer Ron “Pigpen” McKernan. His bluesy shout and rough-hewn charisma made him the Dead’s de facto frontman in their earliest years, but his role in the band receded in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, as he grew dissatisfied with their drift toward experimentation and away from the driving rock’n’roll that was his forte. In 1973, months before the Dead started work on American Beauty’s studio followup Wake of the Flood, he died at 27 from complications related to his heavy drinking, leaving his bandmates devastated. The twangy and good-natured “Operator,” his lone lead vocal and songwriting credit on American Beauty, is the album’s outlier, content on Earth without reaching for anything resembling the divine.
Though American Beauty is undoubtedly the Dead’s most beloved studio album, by fans and skeptics alike, most of its songs were never major staples of their live sets, making it something like an island in the stream of their larger canon. One exception is “Truckin’,” the album closer, an easygoing ode to the open highway that became an anthem for Deadheads and for freaks and hippies more generally. It can be difficult to apprehend how the Chuck Berry pastiche of “Truckin’”’s verses relates to American Beauty’s zen worldview, until you get to the song’s spacious bridge, which spawned one of those catchphrases so ubiquitous as to seem without origin:
Sometimes, the light’s all shining on me
Other times, I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long, strange trip it’s been
In the scheme of things, Grateful Dead were only just getting started in 1970; the trip would get much longer and stranger still, and Pigpen was not the last member they’d lose along the way. The “Truckin’” bridge offers a brief pit stop for reflection on the past, but the point is to keep going, city to city, moment to moment. In concert, “Truckin’” regularly stretched past 10 minutes; on record, it is a modest 5:07. It ends with a fade, a tantalizing glimpse at a jam that might go on forever—six brothers truckin’ down the road together toward home, whichever way that is.
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. | 2020-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-10-31T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | null | October 31, 2020 | 10 | 8c5b64fa-8313-4e43-98a7-3776c283173f | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Tia Cabral’s second album retains the great mysticism of her songwriting. The unsettling synth textures and soundscapes fly around her soulful voice, making something beautiful out of sheer terror. | Tia Cabral’s second album retains the great mysticism of her songwriting. The unsettling synth textures and soundscapes fly around her soulful voice, making something beautiful out of sheer terror. | SPELLLING: Mazy Fly | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/spellling-mazy-fly/ | Mazy Fly | There’s a song on SPELLLING’s debut, 2017’s Pantheon of Me, where the vocalist and musician Tia Cabral moans over a high-pitched, murderous guitar refrain, one that sounds like tiny gremlins fiending for blood: “I’m not going back to him.” She repeats herself, slightly changing the plea, as layers of ghostly vocals spill over each other. “I’m not going back to the grave.” Again, more desperate than before, she wails, “I’m not going back to the grave.”
This kind of moment—where intimate songwriting on delicate subjects intersects with bone-chilling horror—is the hallmark of SPELLLING’s short music career so far, one that began in earnest in 2015 after a close friend died and Cabral received a strong vibration that she should pick up music again, a practice she’d neglected at an early age in favor of visual art. With a mystic’s talent for conjuring images of wicked deeds, torturous love, and supernatural powers, SPELLLING released her debut, a paean to the terrifying landscape between dreams and waking life.
Her second record, Mazy Fly, is borne of this same legacy. In 2017, Cabral told KQED, “Nothing I make is ever going to be perfect. And I relate to that as it not being the goal. The goal is just to let it out, the process.” Luckily, Cabral trusted that creative instinct, allowing the album—her first full-length release for Sacred Bones—to pulse with moments as haunting and witchy as on her debut. On Mazy Fly, imperfection is less obvious, but in its place, Cabral has unlocked confidence, clarity, and texture. If Pantheon of Me was more of a horror B-movie, Mazy Fly is set to be her critically acclaimed arthouse film.
A list of Cabral’s influences might read like a free association performed while on LSD: goth rodeos, carousels, clown makeup, witching spells, the Knife, Massive Attack, Solange, Whitney Houston, Mars Attacks!, TRON, Roald Dahl’s The Witches. “Under the Sun” features a high-pitched synth line that sounds child-like—a nightmare carnival—alongside an expansive and surprisingly romantic addition of violin. “Real Fun” tells the story of aliens coming to earth to dance to Billie Holiday and “Billie Jean,” which actually does sound like real fun until the song devolves into a black-metal inspired decrescendo. “Haunted Water” gives voice to the ghosts of slaves who were forcibly brought across the Middle Passage during the Atlantic slave trade. There is even saxophone on Mazy Fly, which might seem like an ill-advised decision until you hear the instrument tiptoe in and out of experimental jazz lines on “Afterlife,” just another spectacularly strange detail to throw Cabral’s songs a few steps off kilter. These songs reveal Cabral’s ability to let herself breathe, even if that means experimenting with—or dancing around the fire with—new and unfamiliar textures.
There are moments where Cabral’s follow-up feels intentionally more structured, like on “Dirty Desert Dreams,” which highlights drums by Janak Preston in a song that could fit neatly on any slasher-flick soundtrack. “Hard to Please (Reprise)” sounds like a Solange B-side (“I try too hard to please” could easily be a Solange pronouncement), and it’s a chance for Cabral to really showcase her vocal capabilities. It’s the kind of track that will convert more pop-minded listeners. Even the heady “Golden Numbers,” a dreamy love song—written in a mostly major key on warbling guitar and with feathery harmonies—is more like a siren song than a straightforward admission to openness. Wooing us to shore, Cabral sings, “I’m ready to love/Count on my golden numbers.” The warble in her voice hints at more sinister intentions.
“Secret Thread” is one of the only songs that might put off listeners who came to SPELLLING early on, if only because it feels like predictable, fairytale-like storytelling at first. But on this record, nothing is exactly what it seems, and happy thoughts can easily turn sour. “Secret Thread” devolves at its finale into a church organ-led, mosh-worthy waltz, like Alice in Wonderland meets Suspiria. (Add those to SPELLLING’s list of influences.) Mazy Fly sees Cabral committing to creating even wider landscapes and fields of vision, which could feel scary for fans who followed her from her debut. But Cabral explodes our ideas about texture and terror on Mazy Fly as she snuggles into a deeper connection to her own songwriting, making an album that connects on a more concrete wavelength. Whatever rabbit hole (or bonfire or wormhole or spaceship or grave) Cabral wants to lead us down this time, we can trust we won’t disappear forever. | 2019-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-02-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Sacred Bones | February 22, 2019 | 8 | 8c5c95b6-4f2f-46aa-8351-d037956970c8 | Dayna Evans | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dayna-evans/ | |
Exploring the concept of “queer time,” classically trained musician Isabelle Thorn crafts a prodigiously ambitious, suite-like album that never quite rests. | Exploring the concept of “queer time,” classically trained musician Isabelle Thorn crafts a prodigiously ambitious, suite-like album that never quite rests. | Dear Laika: Pluperfect Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dear-laika-pluperfect-mind/ | Pluperfect Mind | When undergoing gender transition, one may develop an alternative relationship to time. With long waiting lists and a multitude of setbacks, the patient can feel they’re dangling between an imagined, increasingly abstract future and a past that no longer belongs to them. Waiting to inhabit a body that finally feels like one’s own—and being made to keep waiting, and waiting, and waiting—can change one’s disposition towards the past, present, and future. It is a kind of “queer time,” a temporal reality that Dear Laika explores on Pluperfect Mind, an album she wrote at the beginning of her transition, while isolated in England’s North Wessex Downs.
Dear Laika is the moniker of the classically trained musician Isabelle Thorn. As a child in the South of England, Thorn sang in church choirs and listened to classical music, two influences that have followed her to adulthood. Today, the 23 year old sounds equally inspired by the austere romanticism of post-minimalist composers like John Adams and Max Richter as she does modern glitch artists like Vladislav Delay and Markus Popp of Oval. There’s a touch of avant-pop in her music too, like if the Guggenheim commissioned late-career Kate Bush to write an experimental opera.
Following a batch of one-off songs and self-released albums, Pluperfect Mind is Dear Laika’s debut for the experimental label NNA Tapes. It is a prodigiously ambitious, suite-like album that collages into a canvas of unusual breadth: a polytonal patchwork comprising field recordings, thunderous chorales, darkwave vocals, and abrupt cuts. Its disorientating compositions burn, unfurl, explode, distort, clarify, slow down, and accelerate—often within the same song—mirroring the wavy contours of queer time. Her lyrics, while often poetic and archaic, also address this liminal state head-on: “Where are my memories? Where is my childhood? Where is my tomorrow?”
Pluperfect Mind begins violently, grabbing you by the throat with what sounds like string instruments inside an industrial shredder. The enormous sound recedes, and Thorn’s piano begins to tinkle lightly, like wood chips made of violin. The sound of nature—birdsong, barking dogs, rumbling thunder—is a leitmotif throughout the record, filling its delicate atmosphere. This vacillation between machinic violence and naturalism is a recurring dynamic, one that echoes the feeling of Thorn’s queer time. “I count the months for flesh to rectify/By time-lapsed clouds against a frozen sky,” she sings over a digitally synthesized new age choir on “Phlebotomy,” marking the discordance between her inner rhythm and that of the natural world.
Thorn’s voice is pure and choirgirl-like, a more holy and less sultry companion to FKA twigs’ expressive, crystalline vocals. Whether she’s layering her parts as intricately as a choirmaster, or letting them breathe during a solo, Thorn emits a precise emotional force. On “Guinefort’s Grave,” the rhythm of her breath and the subtle panic in her voice make it sound as though she is paddling a small boat against a tsunami.
Thorn’s music works in fits and starts, obscuring time’s arrow with glitches and distortion. But on “Asleep in Wildland Fire,” her prepared piano—a technique that involves placing screws between the instrument’s strings to temporarily alter its sound, popularized by John Cage and more recently used by Kelly Moran—plonks ahead in perpetual motion. “I am ready, I am ready, I am ready,” Thorn screams, signalling both her actualization and the restoration of linear time. Rather than letting her narrative resolve neatly, the album’s final two songs explode with chaotic beauty, like a spinning weathervane. A chapter has closed, but Pluperfect Mind never quite rests.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-11-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-11-11T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | NNA Tapes | November 11, 2021 | 8 | 8c5e08d0-c80d-4d75-85ee-37893816bda7 | Emma Madden | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-madden/ | |
Lissie's debut boasted some venerable personnel—collaborators of Tom Waits and Modest Mouse, among others—and her impressively yarling voice, which got her discovered. My Wild West, her first album on her own label, is full of sturdily crafted but MOR songs. | Lissie's debut boasted some venerable personnel—collaborators of Tom Waits and Modest Mouse, among others—and her impressively yarling voice, which got her discovered. My Wild West, her first album on her own label, is full of sturdily crafted but MOR songs. | Lissie: My Wild West | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21468-my-wild-west/ | My Wild West | Lissie Maurus’ debut Catching a Tiger boasted venerable personnel—collaborators of Tom Waits and Modest Mouse, among others—some very pretty production flourishes that rewarded close listens, and the impressively yarling voice that got Lissie discovered, but in retrospect it’s easy to see how it got overlooked. Lissie, despite beginning her career working with the likes of DJ Morgan Page, sits squarely in the Hotel Café roster that’s nurtured the careers of the likes of Sara Bareilles, Ingrid Michaelson, and a pre-sales-singularity Adele—a substantial yet critically shrugged-at genre better known these days as "songs you probably heard on 'Grey’s Anatomy' or something once." This isn’t a criticism so much as fact: Had Catching a Tiger or follow-up Back to Forever been released in the '90s, when this sort of thing was as mainstream as pop got, Lissie might have been a star and would have deserved it. These days, unless you overload your pop with sugar like Rachel Platten or Sia, score a self-consciously "authentic" (and possibly uncredited) topline on, say, an Avicii song, or happen to be a man like Ed Sheeran or James Bay, pop-folk is a genre with a limited future.
Such are the concerns of "Hollywood," the first track proper on My Wild West, a theatrical piece of goodbye-to-all-that with the sort of "Lean on Me" piano riff and carefully studied lyric that could only be dreamed up by someone who’s spent too long in audition rooms. Its main flaw is familiarity. Each city generates its own artform templates for people leaving it, and just as New York’s is thinkpieces, Los Angeles’ is songs. You still can stand out from the California-sized morass of these songs; it just takes exuberant panache, a couple killer lines (the current champion: "fuck California, you made me boring"), or even just a career-long dedication to writing Hollywood songs until you win over the cliché by pure attrition. Lissie’s song is thoroughly competent, yet says nothing beyond L.A. being a place where dreams happen or don’t, and where "running wild" means maybe not telling your mother you’ve gone clubbing a few times.
My Wild West, Lissie’s first album on her own label, is full of these sturdily crafted but MOR songs. The titular conceit—complete with "overture"—threatens an album of self-conscious cowpunk à la Miss Derringer, or perhaps the Americana equivalent of Eat, Pray, Love. Fortunately, the album’s neither of those but comfort-food acoustic pop; unfortunately, this makes it significantly less interesting. Lissie’s voice has settled into a sedate, plainspoken croon, somewhere between Sheryl Crow and Ashley Monroe, or at times like Sia when she sounds like she’s gulping down a faceful of air with every syllable.
And while Lissie remains a fine songwriter—the overture in particular is actually pretty compelling in a spaghetti-western way—she takes few risks here. "Wild West" is, on the one hand, an eminently competent single, one that builds from quiet, prayer-like verse to a full-throated folk-rocker where the kick drums stomp and the guitars practically yodel. But it’s also a worn formula, up to and including that wearisome "hey!" the Lumineers injected into seemingly every folk or pop song of this decade. Similarly, the brass-and-acoustic "Hero" conjures up a nice dustscape that, when it leads only to "I could've been a hero, I could've been a zero," comes off as a mere set piece, with tumbleweeds blown by wind machines. (Also: "I want my 40 acres in the sun" is maybe not the most appropriate metaphor.) "Sun Keeps Risin’" even drops in a couple dozen instances of a stock coyote sample to belabor the metaphor, which is cool unless you’ve heard that exact sample somewhere else. (And if you have, you’ll spend the entire song trying to think of where, as the music slips too easily into the background.)
Like most of Lissie’s albums, My Wild West is most compelling at its most messy and raucous. "Daughters" has one of Lissie’s most passionate vocals and a wonderfully crunchy bridge; it’s one of two tracks on the album that feel exciting. The other is "Go for a Walk," a weird, meandering little track, mostly solo acoustic save for a few playful electric guitar skips. It’s reminiscent of Fiona Apple’s "Waltz (Better Than Fine)"—another track toward the end of its album that feels unplanned and refreshing, like a slice of life that just happened to get set to music. It’s the closest thing on My Wild West that sounds like "going rogue in the wild, wild West," anyway; leaving Hollywood behind is one thing, but better yet is leaving behind the old familiar sets. | 2016-02-11T01:00:04.000-05:00 | 2016-02-11T01:00:04.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Cooking Vinyl / Thirty Tigers | February 11, 2016 | 5.8 | 8c64953b-e607-4251-9cd4-e75f7f83ddce | Katherine St. Asaph | https://pitchfork.com/staff/katherine-st. asaph/ | null |
Occasionally corny and self-serious, Cordae's redemption tale shows a promising voice bursting into the mainstream. | Occasionally corny and self-serious, Cordae's redemption tale shows a promising voice bursting into the mainstream. | Cordae: The Lost Boy | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ybn-cordae-the-lost-boy/ | The Lost Boy | The YBN Crew’s origin story is already the stuff of internet legend, even though the group formed just five years ago. Nick Simmons was born in Birmingham and met Jay Bradley, of Galveston, while playing Grand Theft Auto V. They bonded out of a shared love of rap music and live-streaming video games, eventually recording their first freestyles in XBOX Live group chats as YBN Nahmir and YBN Almighty Jay, respectively.
In 2017, Nahmir and YBN Glizzy met Cordae Amari Dunston online, and Dunston immediately became the elder statesman of the crew. While the group found viral success with Nahmir’s “Rubbin Off the Paint,” the vision they presented on last year’s YBN: the Mixtape was that of a three-headed monster led by Cordae.
With The Lost Boy, Cordae makes good on the promise hinted at on YBN: The Mixtape, turning in a front-to-back redemption tale. It is Cordae at his most humble. It’s occasionally corny and self-serious. But its 15 tracks show a star slowly finding his voice and bursting into the mainstream.
Through this lens, the Chance the Rapper-assisted “Bad Idea” makes sense on multiple levels. Over an interpolation of Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway’s “Be Real Black For Me,” Cordae takes cues from Chance on the chorus, cooing “Don’t you cry/It’ll be alright.” It’s a ghost-of-Christmas-past tale: Cordae imagines what it would be like to never come home again, the adoring family members he would never see. There’s strength in community, he seems to be saying, and it’s a message that permeates the record.
On first single “Have Mercy,” Cordae turns his gaze outward. Over a “Mask Off”-inspired flute sample and 808, Cordae begins, “Sweet lord please have mercy/Baby Jesus please save us.” It’s a call to join, and in the hands of a less-deft rapper, this sort of proselytizing would come off as saccharine at best, invasive at worst. But Cordae seems to come only from a place of appreciation, bursting with joy at a newfound life that formerly looked bleak.
The Lost Boy splits its time between thankfulness and victory laps. On “RNP,” Cordae basks in the glow of success over a sermonizing Anderson .Paak chorus and bouncy J. Cole production: “Smiling ‘cause I’m young, rich, black, and I’m handsome/Not to mention wealthy/Ass on the healthy.” It is, undoubtedly, a dumb line, and the track is one of the record’s clear misses, mistaking puns for cleverness and energy for quality.
On the flip side, he sounds surprisingly assured next to Pusha-T on “Nightmares Are Real.” He goes toe-to-toe with the veteran, even encouraging Push to find grace in the building blocks of his career: “I can tell you how I started in this rap shit/Eighth grade backflipping on a mattress.”
Despite the glossy guestlist, The Lost Boy remains Cordae’s show. At 15 songs, it could have used an edit, another voice in the room telling him to tone it down. But still, it’s an assured debut. Cordae raps about life with the patience of a pro but the wide-eyed wonder of a newborn. It’s a delicate balance, and he occasionally stumbles, but it’s promising to even watch him try. | 2019-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-07-29T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | ART@WAR / Atlantic | July 29, 2019 | 7 | 8c6ecaa3-c581-41fb-b286-bbd380c18ee8 | Will Schube | https://pitchfork.com/staff/will-schube/ | |
For the first installment of its proposed seven-album anthology of the late composer’s work, the California collective breathes new life into his ecstatic minimalist masterpiece. | For the first installment of its proposed seven-album anthology of the late composer’s work, the California collective breathes new life into his ecstatic minimalist masterpiece. | Wild Up / Christopher Rountree: Julius Eastman, Vol. 1: Femenine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/wild-up-julius-eastman-vol-1-femenine/ | Julius Eastman, Vol. 1: Femenine | Has there been a more compelling story of musical redemption in the last decade than that of Julius Eastman? Born in New York in 1940, Eastman was a precocious teenage pianist and commanding vocalist who emerged as an ambitious young composer. He resided at the borders of minimalism and jazz, the academy’s confines and the city’s downtown crucible. Eastman was also a Black gay man living by the credo “be what I am to the fullest” in a scene that neither looked nor acted like him. After stints working at Tower Records and living in Tompkins Square Park, he died alone in 1990 following reported struggles with addiction, mental illness, and eviction.
But especially since Frozen Reeds’ indispensable 2016 excavation of his early-’70s masterwork, Femenine, Eastman has seemed newly omnipresent, vaunted not only for his ecstatic minimalism but also for his prescient rejection of genre and high/low divides. Over the past decade-plus, there have been a book, a trio of box sets, a DJ/rupture tribute, major newspaper profiles, and multiple versions of Femenine by chic new music ensembles. The Los Angeles Philharmonic paired Eastman’s music with that of Arvo Pärt in August, while the New York Philharmonic will present his work in January, a reappraisal that might have astonished the hometown provocateur. The New York Times even gave this groundswell a name: Eastmania.
No organization has committed more fully to this public reintroduction than Wild Up, a radical California chamber collective of composers, performers, and improvisers whose imagination and ambition seem boundless. They intend to spend the next six years arranging, recording, and releasing an exhaustive seven-volume anthology of the Eastman pieces that survived his piteous end.
They begin with Femenine, the work that has not only been the most publicized for years now but is also something like Eastman’s thesis, the piece where so many of his interests and loves collide in a transcendent hour of nonstop sound. Eastman premiered Femenine in 1974, the same year Steve Reich began writing Music for 18 Musicians and Philip Glass unveiled Music in 12 Parts, three years before Rhys Chatham conceived Guitar Trio. Femenine stands among these pulsating minimalist landmarks but also apart from them. Eastman’s loose score works more as a suggestive framework, allowing whatever musicians are playing Femenine to take liberties with everything besides its rhythms. With a cast of 20, Wild Up run with this mere suggestion of direction: On record, Femenine has never sounded more vital, immersive, or necessary.
A play-by-play accounting of this or any version of Femenine can go one of two ways: Very little happens or changes for the entirety of these 70 minutes, or so much happens in the course of just 30 seconds that trying to chronicle it all would be tantamount to documenting your body’s every skeletomuscular twitch. A choir of sleigh bells rings when Femenine begins, amassing like cicadas at the start of a summer night. A vibraphone soon joins, its enchanting melody instantly indelible. Both persist for the entire piece, gradually fading out toward the end. These double ellipses suggest we’ve heard but a sample of a saga with no beginning or end, glimpsing a cycle that will soon resume.
The rest of Femenine is a dizzying dance of flutes and whistles, violins and synthesizers, piano and voices, which all take the form of perpetual motion machines. Tune out for a second, and a hundred notes seem to whiz past. Femenine works a little like GAS, gamelan, or any other iterative music: The details wedged into the recesses of these repetitive rhythms are what give it power. The music’s emotional dynamism has a pull like that of a particularly absorbing film.
Wild Up push the flexibility Eastman wrote into Femenine to its extreme. Nine soloists improvise against the basic structure. Near the top, pianist Richard Valitutto drifts through autumnal variations so bittersweet they suggest a Bruce Hornsby hymn; warm and sad, his notes offer an apology to Eastman, a tender promise that his short life will relish a long tail. Marta Tiesenga’s baritone saxophone later writhes like a wounded animal, grasping for any shred of comfort but finding none. Singer Odeya Nini grunts and wails, redlining her crystalline soprano until it could crack glass; she inhales pain to exhale it with fury.
Set against rhythms that are as regular as a heartbeat yet flit like an anxious mind, these improvisations collectively suggest a life’s complicated emotional range. The way the weeping flugelhorn and enraged vocals intertwine with one another, and with the effervescent little orchestra around them, mimics the way that at any given moment, whatever feeling is most pronounced is always pitted against whatever else might be bounding through your brain. In Femenine as in life, one mood seldom lasts.
“Pianist will interupt. Must return,” Eastman scrawled in blocky capital letters at the end of Femenine’s score, a command Wild Up borrow for the 10th movement’s title. Throughout their recording, in fact, the instrument plays a crucial role: After a horn launches into a paroxysm during the seventh movement, for instance, the piano cuts in with a clang, commanding its charge to fall in line. It’s as if the instrument is a reminder that this too shall pass, no matter what this happens to be. Femenine backs the joy of existing with the variegated torments of surviving. It feels in keeping with Eastman’s biography that the piece most responsible for his public resurrection is a sweeping survey of chaotic feelings—and an epic testament to perseverance.
We live in a moment that craves newness, that loves the idea of what’s next so much that much of Big Tech’s attention seems focused on content designed to vanish soon after it appears, like a restaurant that sells only smoke. But the same technology that has enabled our quick-hit culture has also fostered a golden era of archival excavation, where gems neglected due to systemic bigotry or mere circumstance are getting their overdue moments of light. Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Laurie Spiegel, Bill Fay: Their returns have thankfully complicated our reductive narratives of history, just as Eastman has done for minimalism.
Eastman’s moment arrived tragically late, of course, a quarter-century after his death went unnoticed by newspapers for eight months. But it’s hard to imagine a better corrective than Wild Up’s rendition of Femenine, which crackles with the absolute urgency of life but moves with the wisdom that it won’t go on forever.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-12-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2021-12-04T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | New Amsterdam | December 4, 2021 | 8.1 | 8c6fd333-f682-412a-8c3b-627f1efde1c6 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington return with a meticulous work of unexpected and even unprecedented familiarity—less a portal than a kiosk existing entirely within the boundaries set by their 2013 debut. | Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington return with a meticulous work of unexpected and even unprecedented familiarity—less a portal than a kiosk existing entirely within the boundaries set by their 2013 debut. | Darkside: Spiral | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/darkside-spiral/ | Spiral | For listeners drawn to Nicolás Jaar and Dave Harrington’s intimidating CVs, Darkside seemed like a normie pursuit: a visionary electronic producer and restless guitarist making a psych-rock album that sounds really good if you’re high. While the duo seemed like the types who’d never even need, let alone make, a dorm-room staple like their 2013 debut Psychic, Darkside proved their egghead credentials were compatible with the elevated populism of the Gateway Album. Even in the streaming era, budding tastemakers still might need Kid A or Nevermind as an entry point to IDM or classic indie rock and Psychic served as a grand terminal connecting dozens of far-off, cosmic vistas—whether it was Meddle, Future Days, or even Space Is Only Noise. Jaar and Harrington’s individual visions only grew more vast in the eight years leading up to Darkside’s return with Spiral, a work of unexpected and even unprecedented familiarity—less a portal than a kiosk existing entirely within the boundaries set by Psychic.
Lead singles “Liberty Bell” and “The Limit” cash in on Darkside’s ample goodwill, a sonic brand strong enough to be wholly their own even after only one album. Both tracks align with the feel and extravagant production values of disco and prog-rock, all set to a seductive, zombie groove. And though Jaar’s hollowed-out moan isn’t their strongest instrument, it provides a menacing air that would elude a straight reading of their lyrics (“The me in the sin awoke/You want sin in a rose,” “Submit to the grace/The waters erase”). Even if Darkside no longer sound as effortlessly innovative, there’s always a sinister, muck-turning churn like “I’m the Echo” to ensure they’ll never pass for pop or even chill.
Darkside are less decisive on whether Spiral should be fun or at least retain the impish humor that Jaar brought to Psychic’s “Paper Trails.” “Lawmaker” takes a straightforward narrative on a power-mad, doctor-turned-demagogue and I’m fairly certain (but not entirely positive) it’s not about Dr. Anthony Fauci; more troublesome is the song’s surprisingly unimaginative take on a mode of brooding goth-rock that could serve as bumper music for its prestige TV adaptation. Likewise, “Only Young” hints at Darkside fully embracing dry ice and fog machines, but it’s only a hint. Without fully committing to camp or at least an aspiration for showmanship, its reverb-soaked piano chords and blues scale soloing could pass for a nicely toasted JD & the Straight Shot.
It’s a cruel irony that Spiral’s timidity becomes its distinguishing characteristic. Throughout, Jaar and Harrington, so accustomed to pushing boundaries, are transfixed by minor shifts in the interior decor. “Narrow Road” points toward a more treacherous, unsteady path than Psychic opener “Golden Arrow”: Jaar’s vocals had always been utilized primarily as texture and here, they’re filtered until porous. Darskide forgo their typical 4/4 thump for a rhythm that judders and clanks like a lopsided washing machine. All of these production tweaks can be deemed “interesting” from a purely objective standpoint without serving the song in the slightest. Spiral is rife with truly dazzling sounds—“The Question Is to See It All” makes the most intriguing use of cutlery as percussion since “Spoonman,” “I’m the Echo” imagines a slap-bass made of industrial cable—the kind that silently shame anyone listening through laptop speakers instead of a proper stereo system. Or, it might just feel more like leafing through high-end fabric swatches or going to a cake tasting: samples of luxury operating in isolation, without context that could give it meaning. Most of the time, a beat separates Spiral from being a journey and simply trippy: when “The Question Is to See It All” and the title track ditch the drums, they seem to forget they’re even playing.
The strengths and weaknesses of Spiral are almost exactly the same as those of Psychic, begging an interrogation of that secret sauce that separates their relative quality. The momentum generated by their Daftside one-off, Psychic’s place in a 2013 zeitgeist defined by many other modern classics of nocturnal, extravagant synth-pop. Similar to the luminescent bubble on its cover, Darkside appeared as a whole on Psychic, an endlessly malleable entity with the kind of mystique that only gets enhanced by disappearing for nearly eight years.
Novelty also certainly played a role in Psychic’s success, not in its innovations but in the contagious thrill of discovery that often escapes artists after their debut. “It’s very, very pleasurable to make music with Dave because I feel like we get to play to our teenage selves together,” Jaar said in a recent interview, and for the five minutes of Spiral’s “Inside Is Out There,” Darkside’s dazzling layers of tactile percussion retrains the focus on the communal glee between two production scholars, beaming over a shared computer screen as they surprise even themselves. It’s convincing enough that the who behind their music matters less than the why. And then Jaar’s vocals come in, an interruption or an afterthought at best. It’s both a highlight and a microcosm of the way Spiral forecloses on the endless possibilities stirred by its predecessor for the safest one possible: Another Darkside Album.
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-23T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Matador | July 23, 2021 | 6.8 | 8c775815-9a8f-4888-b13f-fd9a693879c0 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
Though a couple of safe songs threaten to slow the momentum, the Chicago artist sounds more defiant and grounded than ever on her fourth album. | Though a couple of safe songs threaten to slow the momentum, the Chicago artist sounds more defiant and grounded than ever on her fourth album. | Tink: Thanks 4 Nothing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tink-thanks-4-nothing/ | Thanks 4 Nothing | This past Valentine’s Day, Tink hosted what was essentially a master class on overcoming heartache. At a Morehouse College event in Atlanta, fans lined up with blue baseball bats branded with the Chicago artist’s name and blissfully smashed them against the windshield of a car—just like you might do to a bogus ex’s ride. The whole affair was extremely in character for the 27-year-old rapper and R&B singer, who’s best known for her diaristic, bleeding-heart ballads. And even though she hails from a southern suburb, she’s the quintessential Chicago woman: direct, composed, bossed-up, glamorous but guarded. Her 2022 album, Pillow Talk, was her second full-length collaboration with Empire labelmate and beatmaker Hitmaka. On that record, he phased out the stagnant Timbaland instrumentals that once held her back, bringing a new level of sophistication to the singer’s music. Her latest album, Thanks 4 Nothing, contains Instagram caption-worthy bars, diamond-studded melodies, and smoldering duets, all delivered with poised swagger. Tink’s voice is more potent than ever, her power tucked behind her tongue like razor blades against the tableau vivant of Hitmaka’s lavish, thundering universe.
Over 14 tracks, the singer flows through heartbreak, eventually remembering her worth and finding a graceful sense of self-awareness. A narrative told from the perspective of her shadow side, she excavates the depths of her desires, and refreshingly, never feigns a linear healing arc. Her version of R&B goes beyond confessional and carnal needs—beyond reaching for perfection. On “Toxic,” she admits she’s fallen for someone waving enough red flags to get Chicago’s famed Bud Biliken parade started. An opulent, orchestral string arrangement lays the foundation for Tink to puff her chest as a “real bitch, not industry.” She gains vitality the more she unravels, her raps scorching the earth and clearing ground for healthy life to grow. “Fake Love” demonstrates this superpower to the third degree: “Dipped on me, contradicted everything you claimed to be/Heavy on the mood swings/Speak on how you cuff me to use me.” Here, she’s a sensitive desperado setting her aim on all who attempt to control her. It’s Tink at her bravest, unafraid to demand emotional safety.
But it’s the Chicagoan spirit she shares with her producer that leads to a crucial, heartstopping duet with Ty Dolla $ign called “Let Down My Guard.” Hitmaka assumes the role of a chemist, mixing soft trap percussion into blaring red-light special sirens. Glowing, sliding electric guitar lines accentuate a shared request between lovers: “If I let down my guard, would you give a thug your heart?” The structure evokes the ’00’s and ’90s R&B style of true collaboration, with Ty and Tink singing bar for bar. When Ty cries out, “Girl hold me down, on everything it’s overdue,” the line soothes, if not melts, the scars that come from running cold streets.
Later, Tink’s storytelling shines in her solo track “Gangsta’s Paradise,” in which she crushes on a hustler from the West Side of the city, petitioning to be his fantasy. It’s a side we don’t see much from Tink: She actually believes that the all-in bet she’s placing on her heart will hit. Underneath a spotlight, she reveals her hand, longing for a hectic, intoxicating romance that buds from getting the bag together. Could it get any more P-Valley than that?
Still, there are moments when Tink’s lyrics feel like conceptual misfires. “I’m the Catch” fundamentally works as another flex-on-my-ex coping mechanism, but when she raps about the “dirty-ass women” that her partner “entertains,” it’s hard to empathize. Integrity is supposed to be Tink’s forte; she often cites women’s empowerment as the primary purpose of her music in interviews, so the slippery slope of misogyny that infidelity brings out on this track is challenging to overlook.
It’s clear that the “proudly imperfect” spitfire is no stranger to standing up for herself. Following a three-year stream of acclaimed mixtape and track releases, Tink signed to Timbaland’s Mosley Music Group, an Epic imprint, in 2014. Creative disputes, which included the producer relentlessly projecting Aaliyah’s legacy onto her, would push back the 2015 drop of her debut album, Think Tink. Sadly, the completed album was never released, and the singer eventually parted ways with MMG and Timbaland.
These days, Tink’s autonomy is non-negotiable. While songs like “Someone on You” and “Ain’t Gotta Leave” slow down the record’s momentum with repetitive, safe song structures, they also feel like part of the trademark sound Tink has built for herself (even the first track’s spoken interlude, which echoes her past use of voicemails, feels true to form). She’s proving a point and building her career her way—label heads best move back. Tink is at her most dynamic when she’s having fun being defiant and rejoicing in her unwavering truth. Thanks 4 Nothing is not just Tink’s exhale, it’s her ecstasy, and her vengeance. | 2023-03-06T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-06T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Winter’s Diary / WD / Empire | March 6, 2023 | 7.6 | 8c78c571-8fb3-47ce-bd5b-d91213b82bab | Tatiana Lee Rodriguez | https://pitchfork.com/staff/tatiana-lee rodriguez/ | |
Working with the Yamaha Disklavier—a digital descendant of the player piano—the New York musician explores the tension between technical precision and emotional reverie. | Working with the Yamaha Disklavier—a digital descendant of the player piano—the New York musician explores the tension between technical precision and emotional reverie. | Kelly Moran: Moves in the Field | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kelly-moran-moves-in-the-field/ | Moves in the Field | Kelly Moran treats the piano as an object to be transformed. The New York musician wrings metallic clangs from its strings and slathers each note in sustain, until the instrument loses its telltale form and morphs into something psychedelic and dreamlike. She established her reverie-like style with 2017’s Bloodroot and further expanded it on 2018’s excellent Ultraviolet, in which fuzz-coated melodies magnified and shrank like the patterns of a kaleidoscope. With Moves in the Field, she strips her music down. Where she used to work with prepared piano, she recorded the new album on the Yamaha Disklavier, a digital descendant of the player piano. While continuing to explore the furthest reaches of her instrument, this time she turns inward, writing intricate melodies that evoke a sense of interiority.
Moran began working with the Disklavier in early 2020, when Yamaha loaned her one to try out while she was working on a piece with fellow composer Missy Mazzoli. The machine, renowned for its technical precision, taught her something unexpected: how to find emotional intensity in softness. She began her compositions by playing looping melodies on the instrument, then stepped away and played them back, listening to find space for gentleness. Finally, she played in real time along with those recordings, layering her fluid performance above the precise playback of the Disklavier. The results are more complex than she could have played on her own. The Disklavier allowed her to create layers and patterns that exceed the physical limitations of the most talented human pianist. But despite these complex techniques, Moran’s music feels anything but demanding. Instead, she lets warmth ring out, finding sweetness within the rapid-fire arpeggios facilitated by the instrument.
Moran’s music gradually unfolds over the course of looped melodies that feel both unhurried and like running up a hill, evoking the fast-paced twirls and grace of the ice skaters that inspire her. Much of Moran’s music is driven by technical prowess, but she still finds room for lightness. Opener “Butterfly Phase” foregrounds rippling, fast-paced phrases that interweave like the strands of a spiderweb; on “Superhuman,” she pairs sparkling melodies that flutter up and down the scales while a meditative melody stews underneath.
Though repetition and precision are at the core of her music, Moran focuses less on interlocking rhythmic patterns and more on forming sweeping melodies out of short phrases that evolve over time. “Dancer Polynomials,” one of the album’s most detailed tracks, pairs a brisk, soft melody that churns above a bed of pensive low tones. These two lines feel like they’re in opposition—one airy, one weighty—but they grow together, and by the end, they swirl into a heady union. Album highlight “Sodalis II” balances the emotion and technique that drive Moran’s music. The piece grows from a measured phrase and unfolds into a deep, resonant meditation, informed by Moran’s increasing emphasis on each downbeat and the slight pauses she takes before rolling a chord. As the music crescendos, she encircles its core with speedy riffs, until all the melodies crumble away, leaving a palpable feeling of catharsis.
While there’s messiness and depth in the emotions she explores, Moran writes wholly consonant music. There are few moments of dissonance or discord. Instead, she finds release in the delicate ways she strokes her piano’s keys and elongates tones and pauses between legato phrases. Tension lies in the way she breathlessly rushes through an arpeggio or holds onto a phrase for just a little bit too long, carrying it over into the next. Where experimental music often favors gnarly harmonies and knotty melodies, Moran’s approach is more subtle. Moves in the Field shows us that technique doesn’t need to be showy or daring—without sacrificing rigor or heft, it can also be tender. | 2024-03-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | 2024-03-29T00:02:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Warp | March 29, 2024 | 7.8 | 8c794d11-9f63-4c71-b189-fdac1aec60cf | Vanessa Ague | https://pitchfork.com/staff/vanessa-ague/ | |
Back in the mid-to-late 80s, I was a fan of the Boston Celtics. Actually, not so much the Celtics as ... | Back in the mid-to-late 80s, I was a fan of the Boston Celtics. Actually, not so much the Celtics as ... | Amalgamated Sons of Rest: Amalgamated Sons of Rest EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/148-amalgamated-sons-of-rest-ep/ | Amalgamated Sons of Rest EP | Back in the mid-to-late 80s, I was a fan of the Boston Celtics. Actually, not so much the Celtics as Larry Bird, the "Hick from French Lick". Bird was my favorite player and when he retired from basketball, I lost interest in the game. But one reason I liked him so much (besides the fact that he was one of the best players ever, and a fellow Hoosier) was that he brought out the best in others. And not just his teammates, but his opponents, too: fellow Celtics Kevin McHale and Robert Parish would have been good, but not great, without Bird, and Magic Johnson and the Lakers were undoubtedly at their best when facing the Celtics and Bird.
Maybe it was because I was thirteen or so at the time, but I was honestly excited when it was announced that professional players were eligible for the Olympic Team. "The Dream Team", it was called, with Bird and Johnson and all the other greats on the same team. No one else stood a chance, and the thought of Bird dishing it off to Isaiah Thomas or Magic... well, to my young mind it was like Neil Peart jamming with Joe Satriani. Of course, as good as this sounded at the time, I hadn't quite anticipated just how incredibly boring this would quickly become. I don't remember who they played in that first round of the Olympics or what the final score was (something like 278-29), but I do remember flipping to summertime re-runs of "227" after about two dozen fast breaks in a row.
You probably see where I'm going with this. Amalgamated Sons of Rest is a Dream Team of sorts, if your dreams include birds of prey, whoring, and/or traveling in gypsy caravans. Comprised of Will Oldham, Jason Molina from Songs: Ohia, and Alasdair Roberts from Appendix Out, the Sons o' Rest sound like a great idea on paper. Unfortunately, it also sounds exactly as you'd expect it to sound, and therein lies the problem.
Everything about this disc is a foregone conclusion, excepting who's going to sing bass on the three-part harmonies (usually Will). From the mix of traditional and original material, to the subject matter (death, longing, whaling), the mood (dejected, yet philosophical), and the instrumentation (acoustic guitar, some piano), the record reeks of coasting. Even the song titles ("Maa Bonny Lad", "The Gypsy He-Witch") could be approximated beforehand. Granted, no one was expecting anything revolutionary from this trio beyond what they've already accomplished with their own solo projects and full-time bands, but a little effort certainly couldn't have hurt.
Still, there are small pleasures, if only for completists. All three of these croaky crooners take two turns in the lead vocalist's rocking chair. On the remaining, uncredited song (the hidden track on the CD and the lone song on the etched side of the vinyl version) each members takes turns singing what could nearly pass for a children's song, with the chorus, "I will be good," repeated with increasing adamancy. It's by far the best offering here, not quite so serious as the other songs.
Oldham's single songwriting contribution, "Major March", is also notable, but for a different reason: it's one of the few songs here in which the members sound genuinely passionate about the project, which obviously makes for a solid track, but also serves to highlight the limitations of the rest of the disc. The execution is forceful and determined, with Roberts and Molina echoing Oldham's stark phrasing: "I have grown my hair out longer/ I have grown my beard out, too/ My skin is failing, my arms are frailing/ But you'd still know me, wouldn't you?" During this chorus, in particular, the firm course of direction and the impassioned delivery on the part of each member makes sparklingly clear what this record is lacking elsewhere: leadership. | 2002-11-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | 2002-11-05T01:00:01.000-05:00 | null | Galaxia | November 5, 2002 | 5.9 | 8c7dd562-402f-49ab-963a-b6a6cb19bd3e | Jason Nickey | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jason-nickey/ | null |
This collection of early recordings from the Texas thrash powerhouse makes it clear that their influences and focus set them apart from the thrash revival they followed. | This collection of early recordings from the Texas thrash powerhouse makes it clear that their influences and focus set them apart from the thrash revival they followed. | Power Trip: Opening Fire: 2008-2014 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/power-trip-opening-fire-2008-2014/ | Opening Fire: 2008-2014 | If you’re not from Texas, your first exposure to Dallas thrash resuscitators Power Trip possibly came through one of their two excellent studio albums, like 2017’s Nightmare Logic, a rare crossover moment for the metal underground. No shame: Their fury is unmatched in modern thrash. But if you were a hardcore fan or even a hardcore-curious metal kid in Texas, you’ve known what Power Trip can bring maybe for a decade now. Released digitally in April and now out physically, Opening Fire collects Power Trip’s earlier EPs and compilation appearances, made mostly before their 2013 breakthrough debut, Manifest Decimation. Their debt to New York hardcore is more apparent in these formative tracks, which offer an elemental look at how they came to define thrash this decade.
Power Trip bested a thrash comeback they never really joined. Crossover was a big part of the mid-2000s thrash revival, epitomized by Municipal Waste and Warbringer. But those bands lifted from the West Coast tradition of Suicidal Tendencies, Cryptic Slaughter, and D.R.I. Power Trip instead tapped NYHC—specifically, Cro-Mags’ metal-leaning Best Wishes. What’s more, lead guitarist Blake Ibanez and rhythm guitarist Nick Stewart borrowed from the tight playing of Canada’s Razor, evident in songs like “This World” and “Divine Apprehension.” Razor eschewed Slayer’s looseness and the prog overtures of Megadeth in the name of pure velocity. When Power Trip sped up, they became a visceral storm. This different batch of thrash influences set them apart, allowing Power Trip to become their own band.
Instead of moving chronologically, Opening Fire begins with Power Trip’s self-titled 2011 EP. On “Divine Apprehension,” sprightly, major-key thrash tics ride above the maelstrom. “Suffer No Fool” captures the essence of Power Trip—thrash with unspeakable fury, combined with slower breakdown sections so the kids can let loose in the pit, all in less than three minutes. “Apprehension” and “Fool” set the tone for Decimation’s breakdown-filled “Crossbreaker,” whose larger-than-life gang vocals have made the song a live staple. With these songs, Chris Ulsh, a formidable figure in Texas hardcore with Mammoth Grinder and Hatred Surge, joined Power Trip, then a few years old. He brings more fury and discipline to a band already brimming with both.
“This World,” from a 2014 compilation, sounds most like today’s Power Trip, with reverb crowning Riley Gale’s vocals and a beefy guitar tone riding alongside it. Meanwhile, an earlier version of “Hammer of Doubt,” a track that eventually made it to Decimation, signals the more relentless turn Power Trip would take, with Ibanez abusing his whammy bar as the band plows through fast verses. Though “World” and “Doubt” may be more familiar from Power Trip’s studio records, it’s telling to hear them in their infancy, stripped of some manipulated vocals, cavernous drums, and noise segues. What remains is an incredibly tight and energetic thrash band.
Fire’s second half revisits 2013’s The Armageddon Blues Sessions, a re-release of 2009’s Armageddon Blues, Power Trip’s first official release. They’re more blatant about their influences here, and these tracks thrive on the youthful charm of aping what you love. “Vultures” is their first experiment with Razor’s formula, and they almost nail it. “Armageddon Blues” and “Questions” brim with NYHC riffing and offer homages to Iron Age, the Austin group who served as spiritual mentors to Power Trip. Still, even here, Power Trip were wildly different and more serious than the Ed Repka-core that seemed to have arrived in droves. Opening Fire doesn’t just collect Power Trip’s roots, then; it demonstrates how they’ve used them to flourish more than their contemporaries, despite their delayed arrival. | 2018-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-12-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Metal | Dark Operative | December 22, 2018 | 7.7 | 8c7fe282-9e69-4fc4-b9f2-1d607a684a17 | Andy O'Connor | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-o'connor/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1994 debut by Bark Psychosis, a pioneering work of post-rock that fused guitars and electronics into soundscapes both meditative and menacing. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 1994 debut by Bark Psychosis, a pioneering work of post-rock that fused guitars and electronics into soundscapes both meditative and menacing. | Bark Psychosis: Hex | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bark-psychosis-hex/ | Hex | For Bark Psychosis, making their debut album was an act of obliteration. Over the course of a few singles and EPs in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the quartet—composed of vocalist and guitarist Graham Sutton, bassist John Ling, drummer Mark Simnett, and eventually multi-instrumentalist Daniel Gish—matured from teenagers obsessed with Napalm Death and noise rock to composers of patient and oft-improvisational pop music. But as they set out to work on Hex, they began to think about the whole enterprise differently. They were ready for the band to die.
“We’ve never been interested in rock,” Sutton told Melody Maker soon after the album’s release. “I’m even uncomfortable with the idea of being in a band. It seems such a juvenile thing. I’m trying to break it all up at the moment.”
Traces of this philosophy were evident in the music they’d made leading up to Hex. “Scum,” a 21-minute song recorded amid the pews and moldy carpets of the London church where Simnett worked and then released as a standalone single, sounds as if their early dreamy pop music had been reduced to misty echoes. Distant vocal sections are clouded out by celestial drones and noises that flutter and flip like heart palpitations. The band moves discursively between loosely defined sections, governed seemingly by the logic of daydreams.
It’s an approach that eventually led Simon Reynolds to call Bark Psychosis “post-rock.” Though the band has little in common, aesthetically or philosophically, with gooey sentimentalists like Explosions in the Sky and Sigur Rós who became popular under that umbrella, in a literal sense, the term fits. “Scum,” and, later, Hex, represented a full-on rupture with the structure and sound of rock. In place of yowling emotionality, Sutton offered sedate murmurs. For preening riffs, they substituted brittle, crystalline guitar figures. Instead of thunderous percussion, Simnett played economically and compactly, recalling the mechanical precision of the Can records and techno they were listening to at the time. Bark Psychosis learned to be meditative, mysterious, and elliptical in a way that felt almost confrontational. Each release became a provocation to meet the band on its own terms, to find whatever peace you could in its strange rhythms.
With Hex, Sutton—the band’s self-described “taskmaster”—sought to push these ideas even further. The group had long nurtured an obsession with the rigid strictures of techno, and the sequencer-based process that generated such ecstatic repetition, an approach they aimed to replicate on Hex. Jettisoning the four-guys-in-a-room-jamming process that birthed “Scum,” the band worked heavily with sampling, editing, and dubbing takes. The effect is subtle, but the resulting songs do share at least a philosophical link to the electronic music that inspired them. Hex’s compositions are hallucinatory and strange; they unfurl slowly, shifting gradually over the course of a track’s delicate sprawl until the opening moments are a distant memory.
Change is a major motivator in Sutton’s work, and Hex captures Bark Psychosis at a moment of intense upheaval, both in sound and in process. While making the record, they carted around a multitrack tape recorder to friends’ homes, various studios across the UK, and the church that had served as their rehearsal space for years. Sutton would later describe the process as “convoluted,” but it no doubt contributed to the hypnotic and disorienting effect of Hex, which unspools the textures and timbres of guitar pop into a singularly dissociative masterpiece.
Sutton and Ling met in 1983 at a private school in London, where they bonded over their love for bristling heavy music—Swans, Big Black, Public Enemy, Psychic TV—and a general disaffection with the environment. The name Bark Psychosis came to Sutton in a dream, he says: a fitting title for a band of teens playing Napalm Death covers, though less so for the drifting sounds they’d soon come to embrace. Sutton was kicked out of school in his final year and Ling dropped out soon after, leaving them with a lot of free time. Simnett joined the duo on drums as they began to pursue their experiments more deeply. Together, in a tiny room at the church, they started channeling all their discontent into noise.
Working on a track that would eventually become “The Loom,” Hex’s loping opener, Simnett has said, they found a common ground between Sutton and Ling’s love for heavy music and his own affection for prog rock. Early singles like “Nothing Feels” and “All Different Things” reflect the alchemy of this period. They’re placid on their face, with gentle guitar lines like reflecting pools for Sutton’s muttered, minimal lyrics. But they also demonstrate a dynamic intensity acquired from the heavier music their creators loved, their mannered arrangements coalescing and swirling until the surface tension breaks, spilling over in chaotic ripples. When Sutton first played “All Different Things” for Cheree Records, he blew out co-owner Vinita Joshi’s speaker setup.
At once severe and serene, these singles reflect an ethos that Bark Psychosis would carry with them throughout their catalog. They gasped out their songs as if an immense weight rested squarely on their chests, and surveyed the busyness of modern life with the melancholic eyes of two kids who’d spent years scratching out a living in a claustrophobic city. Sutton’s voice rarely rises above a labored whisper or tremulous mumble. Even at the record’s most spirited moments, there’s little sense of urgency or drive, just anhedonia and malaise. Few records capture so evocatively the dejection of realizing that the world isn’t everything you’d imagined it might be.
These generally antisocial feelings, along with the lingering resentments from a complicated legal situation following the band’s departure from Cheree (a label that had per Sutton’s estimation eventually involved the financial backing of “a couple of cons”), no doubt played a part in the shroud of disaffection that hangs over Hex’s trudging tempos and murky sonics. Sutton has gestured over the years to the difficulties he faced in the period of his life: He’d been squatting, resorting to stealing wood from the floorboards of derelict buildings nearby to keep the fire in his own home burning in winter. During the making of the record, he was dealing with the emotional fallout of a life-altering breakup which he says made him “maniacally focused” on Hex. “At the time, it was just so fucking bleak,” he told The Quietus.
Hex finally arrived on Valentine’s Day in 1994, an ironic release date for a record that so fully captures the desolate reality that inspired it. On each of its seven tracks, Bark Psychosis trudge through muddled headspaces and foggy instrumentals, only occasionally finding structures that resemble verses or choruses. Instead, there’s the anxious “Fingerspit,” eight minutes of interlocking guitar and piano melodies that shatter and spiral like cracks spreading across a windshield. “Big Shot” oozes and shudders around a bassline that brings to mind the meditative yet menacing grayscale of dub techno, then evaporates into frigid ambience recalling Harold Budd’s collaborations with Brian Eno.
Hex’s greatest pleasures are unstable and fleeting: notes that ring out just a beat too long, passages of eerie silence, stuttering half-melodies. Just when you think you’ve settled in and understand what’s going on, the tempo slows to a crawl or an echo overtakes the mix, upending all that came before it. A trumpet rings out in the distance, then disappears forever. Sutton offers an image on “Big Shot” that succinctly captures the album’s sense of agitation without a particular direction: “It’s 3 a.m., don’t know where we’re going/Just drive somewhere fast.”
Sutton’s writing on Hex was deliberately minimal, the result of paring down “pages and pages” of lyrics into enigmatic koans and heavy-lidded observations. His use of shadowy suggestion over specific detail only heightens the music’s unease. Sutton has made clear that his lyrics were never meant to signify anything specific, and on Hex, he took joy in a process that he described as “writing something, then cutting it up and throwing it up into the air and reassembling it and seeing what happens.” But there’s still a current of pain and disillusionment winding through his supposed formal experiments. “I can’t tell you anything at all,” he sings on the tense, wounded “Absent Friend.” “And that’s the biggest joke of all.”
Part of what lends Hex its otherworldly energy is Bark Psychosis’ increased reliance on samplers and editing. Though Hex sounds like something that could plausibly be played by a band in a room, Sutton estimated in an interview with the zine Audrie’s Diary that half of the record was “running from computer,” an early flirtation with a process that, nearly three decades later, has become de rigueur for rock bands. But rather than using digital techniques to create a more perfect version of their music, these experiments introduced uncanny jagged edges, like the static and feedback that intermittently scours “A Street Scene” or the unearthly ambience that illuminates the closer “Pendulum Man.”
This urge to reinscribe the limits of what a band could be through experimental new processes, however affecting in the context of Hex, ultimately led to the demise of Bark Psychosis. In an interview with The Wire the year after the album’s release, Sutton claims bluntly that “the band disintegrated because I was getting into using samplers.” For a while he dispensed with rock music entirely and made drum’n’bass as Boymerang. In 2004, a decade after Hex, he revived the Bark Psychosis name without his old bandmates and released ///CODENAME: dustsucker, which married Bark Psychosis’ sleepwalking pop with the scruffier sounds of shoegaze, acid house, and jazz. “I’m not interested in ‘expressing myself,’” he told Stylus about that record. “I’m trying to build something that…changes my mood and draws me through things, radically or violently or imperceptibly. I want to end up at a completely different point than you were at a few minutes ago, but not quite sure how you got there, or even noticed the change happening.”
Though he wasn’t addressing Hex directly, the quote could also describe his band’s debut, a collection of long, slow-moving, and unsettling pieces that capture Bark Psychosis in a period of flux. The music, with its wayward trajectories and myriad detours, expresses the same profound truth that this band on the verge of collapse was grappling with while making it: Change—imperceptible, radical, or otherwise—can’t be stopped. | 2024-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2024-04-21T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Rock | Caroline | April 21, 2024 | 9 | 8c855abd-95ef-4109-b245-56760274aa19 | Colin Joyce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/ | |
As Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney breezily enter their third decade together, they pay tribute to and put their own spin on the Mississippi blues, turning it into something that sounds supple and comforting. | As Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney breezily enter their third decade together, they pay tribute to and put their own spin on the Mississippi blues, turning it into something that sounds supple and comforting. | The Black Keys: Delta Kream | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-black-keys-delta-kream/ | Delta Kream | At first glance, Delta Kream—the 10th studio album from the blues-rock duo the Black Keys—appears to embody a hoary rock’n’roll cliché. It’s a collection of covers Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney learned to play when they were younger, an attempt to get back where they once belonged.
In the case of the Black Keys, that spiritual home lies in the Mississippi Delta, the swamp that gave birth to American blues. Plenty of legendary musicians played Delta blues in the early 20th century, but Auerbach and Carney were drawn chiefly to Junior Kimbrough, a Mississippi bluesman whose career didn’t take off until the 1990s, when the future Black Keys members were teenagers.
Delta Kream isn’t the first time the Black Keys have paid explicit tribute to Junior Kimbrough. He’s been a constant presence in their work, a songwriter they’ve frequently covered, as they did at length on the 2006 EP Chulahoma. Kimbrough originally recorded about half of the songs the Black Keys cut for Delta Kream; his Delta colleague R.L. Burnside—another Mississippi bluesman who experienced a late-life renaissance in the 1990s—is responsible for two other songs on the record. The Black Keys didn’t limit their Kimbrough connection to the repertoire. His former bassist Eric Deaton rounds out the rhythm section, while Burnside’s guitarist Kenny Brown sat in on the two-day, 10-hour session that happened at the conclusion of the Black Keys supporting tour for 2019’s “Let’s Rock”.
“Let’s Rock,” the Black Keys once again started playing arenas, a long way from the grimy Midwestern dives they gigged at two decades earlier. It’s possible to chart that evolution through one song—Junior Kimbrough’s “Do the Rump,” a song the duo cut on their 2002 debut The Big Come Up and recorded again on Delta Kream as “Do the Romp.” The change in vowel isn’t the only difference between the two recordings. In the beginning, the Black Keys played hard: Carney pummeled the backbeat and Auerbach affected a growl to compete with his overdriven amps. Here, the duo not only sounds relaxed, they play with finesse. Some of that aplomb could be chalked up to the confidence derived from their enduring stardom, while the fullness of Delta Kream could be attributed to how it captures an expanded quartet unwinding on their home turf of Auerbach’s Easy Eye studio in Nashville.
Delta Kream sounds spacious but never trippy. The Black Keys explore textures and luxuriate within grooves, an aesthetic choice that pulls the album much closer to such kaleidoscopic latter-day albums as 2014’s Turn Blue than the raucous 2004 breakout hit Rubber Factory. Their version of John Lee Hooker’s “Crawling Kingsnake” puts the emphasis on the crawl, not the snake, a move that robs the band of some bite. Perhaps Delta Kream doesn’t deliver the visceral thrill of juke-joint blues, but its expansive jams do touch upon the modal drone Kimbrough could achieve when he locked into a vamp. The Black Keys put their own spin on this Mississippi blues, turning it into something that sounds supple and comforting even when the tempo ratchets up to a boogie, which it doesn’t often do on Delta Kream.
Coming on the heels of the aggressively cheerful “Let’s Rock”, Delta Kream feels subdued. That’s part of its appeal. It’s a record knocked out in two days by a band who are well on their way to be the grizzled veterans they’ve long admired. Delta Kream is best seen not as a retreat to the Black Keys’ beginnings but rather a signpost on their journey. By spending the time playing the blues that’s buried deep in their soul, the Black Keys reveal how far they’ve gone in a space of 20 years.
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. | 2021-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Nonesuch | May 14, 2021 | 6.8 | 8c857999-24c1-41ef-bfc2-55056a19ff67 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
Popcaan’s second album is full of faith, joy, and the wealth of his international pop celebrity, but falters when it comes to his idea of romance. | Popcaan’s second album is full of faith, joy, and the wealth of his international pop celebrity, but falters when it comes to his idea of romance. | Popcaan: Forever | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/popcaan-forever/ | Forever | Dancehall veteran Beenie Man took shots at Popcaan twice this year. Man’s first video accused the 29-year-old Jamaican deejay of putting on false airs about his humble roots, and the follow-up diss track warned him against surpassing his place. In the past, Popcaan might have entertained a response, like the “Stray Dog” clapback when Alkaline took jabs at his masculinity. Now, though, he prefers leaving those badmind rivals on read. For Popcaan (born Andrae Jay Sutherland), asserting dominance over the Kingston microcosm is an unspoken flex: He lets the private jet, the gold chains around his neck, and a Midas-touch cosign from Drake do the talking. Landing a full four years after his summer 2014 debut Where We Come From, Popcaan’s second album peacocks the wealth of his international pop celebrity. Forever is an overflowing chalice, and he’s is overly eager to offer us a sip.
In late June, the head of Unruly records described manifesting his destiny (in the form of high-profile collaborations with Jamie xx, Pusha-T, Gorillaz, among others) to radio host Zane Lowe, saying: “I keep my thoughts clean and positive.” Fittingly, Popcaan continues to boast his untouchable purity on Forever. The first song “Silence” contemplates the paranoia of fame, but gives reassurance: “And my heart clean, filled with love/And mi meditation sharp like studs.” His chief conspirator and Mixpak Records’ Brooklyn beatmaker Dre Skull makes an equally dignified return, imbuing the song with sonic gravitas through quickening thrums of bass and misty atmospherics. Spirituality is the current that electrifies Forever. On “Firm & Strong,” the glory of a 20-person choir shake stained glass windows with Popcaan’s soulful affirmations. The bookend “A Wha Suh” is a sincere pep-talk from a psalm-slinging confidant—only to be rendered banal by mid-range piano chords from step-in producer Not Nice.
Each blessing Popcaan counts strengthens his carefree swagger. Rather than the accidental intersection of pop and dancehall that sprung from Where We Come From, his sinewy melodies and Dre Skull’s grooves here are more deliberate angles towards mainstream audiences. He claims this bid for the spotlight with the same rigor his soaring croons hurtle over the sparkly synth lines on “Superstar.” Framed within a rags-to-riches context, the singalong chorus, “Man a star, man a star/Man a super,” knows everyone cheers when the underdog punches the air amidst a thrilling recovery. Equally infectious is “Happy Now,” where Popcaan’s wavering ad libs undergo a slight AutoTune treatment, a correction very evocative of pop tradition.
Forever falters when Popcaan confronts romantic limitations. At least the lusty rhapsodies on “Naked” and the cries of “Wine fi the money now” on “Dun Rich” own their irreverence. He barely musters a convincing lilt to carry the words “Girl you love me for free, yeah/This must be love” on the vapid “Through the Storm.” What’s worse is the cloying guitars in the background with a twang borrowed from sine feeble boy band 10 years his junior. Wrestling ballads away from weak sentimentalism requires a higher degree of finesse than assembling hip-swaying hits.
Entering the big pop arena often comes with the question of superficiality, of watering down truth, or tuning up reality for the onlooker. The charisma underneath Popcaan’s veneer of wealth saves his work from feeling entirely contrived. However, like panning for precious metals, Forever requires sieving through plates of glinting sediment before discovering treasure. The album is best when luxuriating in its own divine intensity, when an earnest Popcaan reconciles the hunger of his past with the feasting of his present, hands clasped in grace. | 2018-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Mixpak | July 21, 2018 | 6.9 | 8c886ff5-6830-4ede-b075-7636e42896ca | Whitney Wei | https://pitchfork.com/staff/whitney- wei/ | |
Vampire Weekend keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot singer Wes Miles put their own spin on modern R&B. | Vampire Weekend keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot singer Wes Miles put their own spin on modern R&B. | Discovery: LP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13314-lp/ | LP | And to think: People considered Vampire Weekend divisive. How about a V-dub spinoff featuring their keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij (the dude who typically looks like he's wearing three keffiyehs to everyone else's one) and Wes Miles from Ra Ra Riot (the dude who looks like...well, until our recent Pitchfork TV shoot with them even we weren't sure what he looked like) making bedroom R&B? It worked for Junior Boys, right? Granted, they pulled it off with precision, style, and disarming observations about heartache. Discovery, true to their name, sound more simply wide-eyed and eager. In fact, the whole thing comes off like one in a line of acts from the Shaggs to Jonathan Richman to Grandmaster Flash to Orange Juice, artists so in love with big, communicative pop that they had to take a shot at making the stuff-- technical, financial, or God-given limitations be damned.
So sure, knees are going to jerk just from the description, albeit for questionable reasons. Because there's nothing inherently wrong with the approach here, it's just the execution that can frustrate. The idea that a few eager white kids can't play with contemporary notions of R&B is of course a load of bullshit. See: Dirty Projectors, the E Street Band, the Rolling Stones-- hell, the whole British Invasion. Cringing at some people because they appropriate the textures and sounds of modern black music is a weirdly conservative and territorial reaction that forgets that quite a bit (if not all) of the forward momentum of pop/rock music over the past five decades was due to cultural cross-pollination. Cynics could sneer that pop/rock stopped having forward momentum a few decades ago and they'd have a point, and the sort of wannabe duality that leads people to piss and moan about the mere existence of a group like Discovery is arguably part of the problem and the reason why that momentum arguably halted in the first place.
So, yeah, there is going to be a lot of contextual talk about Discovery, same as there was about VW. And this thing is even a divisive listen: The first half is weirdly awesome in places, confounding in that exciting way where someone comes along and ruptures expectations, creating something both straightforward and pleasing that's also head-scratching. Discovery's sonic strengths bring to mind VW, boosting Batmanglij's claim as the central figure in the latter's sound. The groups' music aren't directly related-- there's no highlife or soukous influence in Discovery, and there might not be a single shared instrument between the two. But the spacial relationship and the approach to sonics are similar: Batmanglij's tones in both places are rounded and warm, eschewing the harsh mid-range of many current recordings. Space and pauses are important, giving the songs a dramatic tilt even when they're primitively constructed. Simplicity is the rule with both, repetition is often key, and in each case, the bands pleasantly (too pleasantly, for some tastes) draw in a listener rather than bludgeon them.
The record kicks off with "Orange Shirt", "Osaka Train Loop", and "Can You Discover?", a quietly audacious 1-2-3 of quirky songs about playing pretend jetsetter made by a couple of quietly quirky guys playing pretend pop stars. It's like an extended dismantling of Dirty Projectors' "Stillness Is the Move" spreading the parts over three songs, creating a more straightforward facsimile than that art-obsessed project would ever dream of. Eventually they even invite Dirty Projectors' Angel Deradoorian to do that melismatic skat thing she does all over "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend". "So Insane" then shows up with Miles picking up Deradoorian's stop-start vocals and, holy shit, they're kind of pulling this off.
And then, the second half of the record. There's a solid Ezra Koenig collab here but for the most part the whole thing starts to go from crisp and pulsing to sort of static and mushy. The rank amateurishness of the producers comes to the fore, and starts to sound like kids playing dress-up Justin Timberlake; less modern geek-pop, more bad "Sleng Teng"/M.I.A. goofs and a teeth-gnashing cover of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back". In essence, the first half sounds like they're making music without looking over their shoulders-- it's most assuredly their sensibilities, they're simply working with a different set of tools and aims than with their typical groups. Then the second sounds like pastiche, like tongues becoming lodged into cheeks as a substitute for having anything at all to say, musically or lyrically.
Weird thing is, most people will have less of a fence-sitting take. This could be your favorite or most-hated record of the year, and there aren't many records one could say that about. But here, the split really comes down to choices in instrumentation, i.e., favoring electronics over guitars. As I moaned in an otherwise enthusiastic review of (the still underrated!) Dark Was the Night compilation earlier this year, there are some sad filters regarding the so-called roots of sounds increasingly being applied to certain sections of the indie rock spectrum. The indie world can't live on fingerpicking and textural guitars alone, and a variety of sounds and multiculturalism in indie rock isn't the enemy here; shitty Jackson 5 covers are. | 2009-07-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2009-07-09T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | XL | July 9, 2009 | 6.8 | 8c8dd715-29b0-4b3c-8510-a7d10dee6adf | Scott Plagenhoef | https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/ | null |
The debut EP from this reverential emo band is full of nostalgia, wonder, and autobiographical detail, like a Linklater film soundtracked by Deep Elm Records. | The debut EP from this reverential emo band is full of nostalgia, wonder, and autobiographical detail, like a Linklater film soundtracked by Deep Elm Records. | Flight Mode: TX, ’98 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/flight-mode-tx-98/ | TX, ’98 | Just about every genre that prides itself on rapid evolution will still find room for nostalgists: the electronic producer dialing up the drum machines that soundtracked their first E pill kicking in, rappers like Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, the Creator roping in Kid Capri and DJ Drama as mixtape simulacra, brazen pop songs jacking the previous decade’s beats like they’re already public domain. It’s a tougher proposition within emo’s concept of perpetual youth; by the time most artists get enough distance for a clear-eyed look at their formative years, they’ve moved onto something else. The third-wave revivalism of Flight Mode’s debut EP, TX, ’98, feels at once instantly familiar and like a total anomaly. Here’s a couple of guys pushing 40, setting aside their tasteful indie-pop projects to revisit the music that set their entire lives in motion, capturing not just a sense of place and time, but “that specific guitar tuning, those specific bands.” For exactly 16 minutes, Sjur Lyseid’s memories of being 16 in the Houston suburbs burst with wistful joy: a Linklater short film soundtracked by Deep Elm Records.
From the opening “Sixteen,” Lyseid shows a subtle but crucial commitment to the bit, writing entirely in the present tense for the guy wearing the Op Ivy T-shirt in the group’s press photo. Back then, Lyseid was drawn to bands that were not much older than himself, and whether it was local heroes like Ultramagg and Mineral or the future Midwestern canon of Four Minute Mile, Frame and Canvas, The End of the Ring Wars, and Nothing Feels Good, these artists were veritable soothsayers for introverted punk teens, showing a future beyond the college towns and suburban basement scenes that birthed them. The existential reckoning of “I don’t know anything, I don’t go to college anymore” could sound damn near aspirational.
The same fresh-faced, almost androgynous vocal tone that suited his florid indie-pop project the Little Hands of Asphalt allows Lyseid to embody his younger self naturally. Without resorting to melodrama, Flight Mode capture a sense of wonderment at these momentous and mundane scenes: the experience of watching Appleseed Cast play a basement show, the wisdom that can only be expressed through a dubbed Maxell mixtape, the nights that turned into mornings at IHOP, and the first real sense of how distance can affect relationships. In “Animals,” Lyseid sings from the perspective of a devastated teen watching a friend take off from the airport, experiencing the concept of “transatlanticism” years before it was coined.
The ebullient emo-pop of TX, ’98’s A-side guides Lyseid through the unnerving euphoria of a new world opening up for him. Seemingly on a lark, he left Norway to spend a year in the Woodlands as a foreign exchange student. (He allows himself a bit of poetic license on the brilliant “Fossil Fuel,” attributing the oil-based optimism and pervasive scent of polyester to Dallas, simply because it fit the melody better.) While listeners have taken note of the accuracy of Flight Mode’s guitar tones and rumpled production, it is possible that they wouldn’t actually have been peers with their nervier, more agitated heroes on sound alone. The jangle and cascading countermelodies of “Fossil Fuel” and “Sixteen” are reflective of the members’ collective decades in Norway’s overlapping scenes of twee, indie pop, and expansive post-emo; guitarist Anders Blom is an alumni of Youth Pictures of Florence Henderson, a sorely underappreciated revival-era act who engaged in their own form of foreign exchange by releasing an EP on the seminal Count Your Lucky Stars label in 2012.
Even if Flight Mode can’t retrofit post-hardcore roots into TX, ’98, they bypassed their 21st-century chops and studio perfectionism by recording the songs after just a few run-throughs. It was intended to replicate the atmosphere of an unearthed Deep Elm tape, but the pre-distressed sound can only be traced back as far as 2017; the trio recorded it over a weekend and sat on it for four years, perhaps until it developed a secondary patina of nostalgia. The plug-and-play approach best serves side B, where Flight Mode sound more like a slowcore band that can’t help itself from stumbling into soaring melodies; the closing “Go” can only sustain its trudge for so long, ramping up on palm-muted power chords to a harmonized hook that could have blown the entire EP wide open had it lasted more than a split second. It’s a fitting and frustrating way to end, as there’s no indication that Flight Mode have a vision for themselves beyond TX, ’98. “If I remember anything, it’s not to trust my memory,” Lyseid stated, and this is why it ends where it does: Had Flight Mode plumbed any deeper, the whole thing might have fallen apart. Instead, Lyseid’s Emo Diaries can remain forever pristine.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-19T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Sound as Language | July 19, 2021 | 7.2 | 8c903f62-257d-4fba-a986-3924af71ee65 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | |
After a 2018 album hailed as a return to form, the duo shifts to slick, big-tent pop pastiche—Britpop, power ballads, ’80s excess—delivered with arched brows and palpable yearning. | After a 2018 album hailed as a return to form, the duo shifts to slick, big-tent pop pastiche—Britpop, power ballads, ’80s excess—delivered with arched brows and palpable yearning. | MGMT: Loss of Life | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mgmt-loss-of-life/ | Loss of Life | At some point in the last decade or so, public opinion, among those who still give thought to MGMT, began quietly shifting to accommodate the notion that they are a much stranger band than their career might initially have suggested. More than just one-album wonders who never recaptured the magic of their indelible early hits, or even misunderstood tinkerers who found the spotlight in a fluke accident and quickly retreated—though both descriptions are true enough—they are artists whose work addresses the very sort of glitzy mass appeal that those early hits still command. Even “Time to Pretend,” one of the singles that earned them slots opening for Paul McCartney and soundtracking the season finale of Gossip Girl, was itself a grimly funny satire of rock stardom. After two resolutely uncommercial follow-ups, one of which has since been reclaimed as a cult classic, 2018’s synth-poppy Little Dark Age was hailed in some corners as a return to form, a dubious honor that doesn’t quite cover that album’s own idiosyncrasies. Loss of Life is unlikely to face the same sort of mistaken identity.
MGMT’s fifth album, and first for the indie label Mom+Pop after an improbably long run on Columbia, shows no signs of a tightened budget. Nor does it scan as another retreat from whatever renewed attention Little Dark Age attracted. The production is slick as can be, and the songs aren’t shy about reaching for the rafters. But this time the big-tent sounds that Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden are refracting and subverting seem calibrated in part to challenge our notions of good taste: Britpop at its most bloated and bombastic, boy-band slow jams, songs that might have soundtracked the big kiss in a 1980s action-romance flick, or those that a formerly folky songwriter of the 1970s might have recorded while struggling to navigate the era of gated reverb and fretless bass. One track, the Christine and the Queens collaboration “Dancing in Babylon,” carries the unmistakable whiff of Savage Garden. Sometimes, they play these various highly specific idioms relatively straight. More often, they warp them like funhouse mirror images: the edges are still clean and precise, but the shapes they outline are all wrong.
Resurrecting old schlock in queasy new definition is not a novel pursuit in 2024. Loss of Life distinguishes itself through its use of this soft-rock accelerationist aesthetic to bolster the thematic punch of Goldwasser and VanWyngarden’s songs, which come across as equally awed and aghast at our era’s technological splendor and the crushing dehumanization it inflicts upon all but the most fortunate. Their palette of references serves a dual function: The arrangements’ gaudy spectacle reflects the feeling of life in a wonderland of convenience, entertainment, and alienation, even as their palpable sense of yearning earnestly suggests the possibility that love could help us to transcend this well-appointed hell we’ve made. At its best, this unification of sounds and ideas also serves to heighten the experience of these songs as songs, not only on the intellectual plane, but also in that more mysterious place, closer to our hearts, where we take stock of pop music’s innumerable variables, then subject their product, through a chain of involuntary and intuitive reactions, to one more-or-less binary judgment: Is it hitting or not?
“Mother Nature” is one of several songs on Loss of Life that succeed on both fronts. The vaguely dismaying buoyancy of its acoustic guitar and flutelike synths is temperamentally suited to a lyric that beckons us to “come take a walk with me down billionaire’s row/Trying to keep our balance over zero,” delivered cheerily enough to suggest that the sight of a few mansions will have the same beneficent effect on our constitutions as that of a sunrise over a lake. Just as importantly, those instruments provide the bedrock for melodies that are strong enough to stir you even if you don’t initially clock their irony.
Loss of Life’s most satisfying appeal to the mind and the spirit at once may be the instrumental bridge of “Nothing Changes,” a six-and-a-half-minute power ballad whose outlook at first seems as nihilistic as its title would indicate. VanWyngarden’s narrator seems trapped in an endless cycle of bad habit, much as we begin to feel trapped in the song’s endless cycle of solemnly strummed chords. But just after he insists for the umpteenth time that nothing’s gonna change, everything does: the musical key, the instrumentation, the feelings it all evokes. A French horn appears, then some space-age synths playing hip jazz harmonies, and suddenly we’re not in a power ballad at all, but a delightful bit of Bacharachian lounge pop, beamed in from some groovy alternate future or past. Life gets better, the song suggests, whether the guy singing knows it or not.
“Nothing Changes” is one of four or so power ballads on Loss of Life, depending on the expansiveness of your definition. That might not seem like a lot for an album with 10 songs. But the spirit of the power ballad, its search for a tempo slow enough and a drum fill huge enough to capture the whole of the human heart, pervades this music, even when it isn’t invoked explicitly. The form’s free intermingling of sincerity and artifice seems to appeal to MGMT on a literary or filmic level, the way a particular palette of syntax or color might appeal to a novelist or director for the way they illustrate their characters’ psychological states. But we tend to value pop music, more than other mediums, based on that binary evaluation of feeling. And jamming so many long, slow songs together risks making us feel a little bored. By the time of “I Wish I Was Joking,” the penultimate song and final power ballad, you may have crossed a threshold in your willingness to appreciate the music intellectually versus feel it viscerally. Though it sports a couple of genuinely laugh-out-loud funny lyrics—the conversational frankness of “Here’s the thing about drugs” as the first line of a verse; the allusive specificity of “No one calls me the gangster of love” as an entry in the subsequent list of downsides—the tune simply isn’t robust enough to support the plodding melodrama of its arrangement, no matter how smartly it conveys the narcissistic bathos of addiction.
It is illustrative of this tension that the strongest individual tracks on Loss of Life are those that depart from strict adherence to its overarching uncanny vibe. “Nothing to Declare,” a wistful psych-folk travelogue, and “Bubblegum Dog,” a candy-coated glam rocker, could have fit in as album tracks on Congratulations or Oracular Spectacular. Though they may not add as much to the sense of Loss of Life as a unified aesthetic statement unto itself, they’re just good songs, and seem likelier than the epic “Dancing in Babylon” or “People in the Streets” to end up in fans’ regular rotation.
And then there’s the album-closing title track, which charts weird new territory not just for MGMT, but in some small sense, for pop itself. I, for one, have never heard anything quite exactly like its admixture of icy electronics, “Penny Lane” brass-band fanfares, and demented parlor-dancing pizzicato strings. At the climax—why not?—a bruisingly distorted IDM breakbeat comes like unexpected thunder, nearly drowning out the rest. It’s like hyperpop, if you combined hyperpop’s everything-now internet-age immediacy with MGMT’s long-standing curiosity about record-shop flotsam from decades prior to that young microgenre’s earliest file backups. It feels, in some oblique way, like the inevitable conclusion of all those massive drum fills and syrupy synth pads, the apocalyptic transcendence at which they’ve always been pointing, only recognized as such with the moment of its arrival. It is, in other words, the perfect thematic conclusion to an imperfect album. And more to the point, it just hits. | 2024-02-23T00:02:00.000-05:00 | 2024-02-23T00:02:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Mom+Pop | February 23, 2024 | 6.9 | 8ca306db-aa54-459c-8342-ca6ae6b4a661 | Andy Cush | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-cush/ | |
Typically working with dub and ambient music as Bvdub, here Van Wey ditches drums and bass for a full-on, immersive Gas-inspired experience. | Typically working with dub and ambient music as Bvdub, here Van Wey ditches drums and bass for a full-on, immersive Gas-inspired experience. | Brock Van Wey: White Clouds Drift On and On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13499-white-clouds-drift-on-and-on/ | White Clouds Drift On and On | As Bvdub, Brock Van Wey pokes holes in the fabric between dub and ambient music. On his first release under his own name, White Clouds Drift On and On, he discards drums and bass entirely, producing his finest work yet in the process. The tracks are built from tapered, drenching loops of tone, massed in respiring pulses. The music beats, shivers, yawns open. The album's title, while almost comically generic, is apt: without drums, it's wonderfully unimpeded, like a huge pendulum slowly spending its energy. We would get that it's Van Wey's most personal work even if it weren't for song titles like "I Knew Happiness Once"-- the tracks are sensitively inhabited, with a human ache in every cascade.
Though Gas is Van Wey's most obvious forebearer, traces of modern minimal techno and dubstep echo in the distance. You can detect the Field on "A Gentle Hand to Hold", where an idyllic guitar loop slaloms lazily through voices as evanescent as soap bubbles, and Burial on "Too Little Too Late", with its gauzy clatter, and vocal information about rapture and pain. The album's emotional depth makes itself plain, but it has a conceptual dimension as well: It lies on a continuum of deconstruction. Dub itself is already an abstraction of something else; White Clouds is an abstraction of dub; and the bonus disc-- a series of interpretations by Stephen Hitchell, as Intrusion-- abstracts White Clouds. Hitchell breaks up Van Wey's glaciers into ice chunks floating on vast seas, sometimes gathering them back up with nets of percussion. The second disc also stretches the total play time to upwards of two and a half hours. This amplitude winds up being important.
White Clouds is immediately pleasurable for the opulence of its sounds. From the unhurriedly swooping strings of "Too Little Too Late" to the tinkling piano in an engulfing corona of drones on "A Chance to Start Over", Van Wey cultivates an unremitting sense of majesty and loneliness. But to praise ambient music for prettiness is like praising a house track because you can dance to it. Epic pace and scale are what push White Clouds over the border between pretty and awesome. The deliberate pace screws with your perception of time, and minutes melt away unnoticed. When "I Knew Happiness Once" finally begins to swirl around the drain, I'm always astonished that 16 minutes have elapsed. Van Wey lets his parts linger until they feel inert and permanent, only then introducing new elements-- often ecstatic voices, piercing what seemed an impenetrable wall of sound. He uses long forms not to antagonize or subdue, but to unleash a welter of happy-sad feeling. It's the most gracious, forthcoming ambient music I've heard this year. | 2009-09-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2009-09-25T02:00:04.000-04:00 | null | Echospace | September 25, 2009 | 8 | 8ca64538-a18a-4520-9a4a-9ceafca77b9c | Brian Howe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/ | null |
Ghostface teams up with Toronto jazz-funk dons BADBADNOTGOOD for Sour Soul, his latest foray into working with a live band. It features collaborations with DOOM, Danny Brown, Tree and more. | Ghostface teams up with Toronto jazz-funk dons BADBADNOTGOOD for Sour Soul, his latest foray into working with a live band. It features collaborations with DOOM, Danny Brown, Tree and more. | Ghostface Killah / BADBADNOTGOOD: Sour Soul | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20196-sour-soul/ | Sour Soul | Once upon a time, the prospect of hearing Ghostface over moody live-band psychedelic soul held promise. Twelve Reasons to Die dropped less than two years ago, and Adrian Younge’s outsized 8mm splatter-flick gloom funk was fresh enough to make the record sound something like a comeback. Ghost’s storytelling had certainly been stronger in the past, but at least he was spinning his conceptual tales over murky, time-faded R&B-noir. After further collaborations with groups carrying Real Instruments, like the déjà vu of last year’s 36 Seasons, where Ghost teamed up with Brooklyn funk band the Revelations for another detail-scarce Tony Starks yarn, the novelty has worn off, and it’s easy to start asking whether Ghost still has it.
Toronto jazz-funk dons BADBADNOTGOOD are a good fit, ably replicating the kind of gritty ’70s pulp-paperback breaks Ghostface has long favored. But Sour Soul could have every musician who ever played with the J.B.’s backing him up and it still wouldn’t obscure the fact that he’s slacking on the mic. His voice is still his, and it’s difficult if not impossible for Ghostface to actually sound bored. But if you gravitated to DOOM team-up "Ray Gun" just because "Angels" was hot and still hold out hope that Swift & Changeable will see light of day, the disappointment will hit hard: "Back in black, it’s your local superhero from the hood/ Ironman Starks got the good/ Not that good good like Snoop/ I bulletproofed the coupe/ Polished up the suit and gathered the troops." He goes on to make a Matrix reference in the year 2015 and states "Ain’t a bird or a plane, it’s a ghost on the mic." A ghost of himself, maybe.
Ghostface gets outshone every time there’s a guest verse—a concentrated dose of DOOM wiseassedness on "Ray Gun"; Elzhi punchlining all over "Gunshowers"; Tree rasping with a thousand-yard stare on "Street Knowledge"; the continued lights-out rampage streak of Danny Brown on "Six Degrees"—but the feeling that he can barely carry this record on the mic goes beyond that. His flair for narrative and knack for offbeat observational details are nearly gone; pop-culture punchlines land with a thud and play more like spot-the-reference jokes than evocative analogies—"my clan is Bravehearts, you move like Paul Blart" on the title cut is probably the most egregious example.
Ghostface still knows how to balance his most well-known facets: the bombastic comic-book hero, the ruthless criminal mastermind, and the independent philosophical thinker. Ghost working through these notions in such close quarters doesn’t really feel like a personality crisis; he’s always been equally convincing as a man dispensing advice on keeping your drug distribution efforts low-key and your spiritual mind on the right path a verse or two apart. Even if the language isn’t anywhere near as transporting as when Fishscale jumped from dope tales to love songs to underwater revelations, there are at least hidden dimensions under the all-too-matter-of-fact statements.
The lackluster lines are even more of a letdown given the strength of the music. BADBADNOTGOOD’s arrangements are the most immersive yet in this three-album run of live-band Ghostface. The core trio leans towards RZA’s old Morricone-via-Stax waypoints here and there, then warps them into something more enigmatic and heated—basslines and drums creep and skulk instead of just booming, string arrangements recall the late '60s heyday of David Axelrod turning the Wall of Sound into cresting liquid waves. The instrumental version of this album is going to make a lot of SoundCloud-bound demo-tapers lose their minds trying to get their turns in.
Make no mistake: The presence of BADBADNOTGOOD and some show-stealing guest verses are reason enough to face the prospect of Ghostface in second gear. There isn’t even that much to weather, what with the whole record being all of 33 minutes, with only nine tracks actually featuring a Ghostface verse. Both the scant material and under-inspired lyricism are symptoms of the same problem: a dearth of unexpected ideas from an MC once seemingly capable of endless ones. Ghost’s done worse, but he used to be so excitingly unpredictable. Now you pretty much know what you’re going to get. | 2015-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap / Jazz | Lex | February 16, 2015 | 6.2 | 8ca8dbd3-8c76-4a5a-b8ff-9dac42d9f072 | Nate Patrin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/ | null |
The producer and rapper pay homage to urbane Black cool with leisurely collages of neo-soul, jazz, and rap. It’s a nice vibe, but the vision wears thin. | The producer and rapper pay homage to urbane Black cool with leisurely collages of neo-soul, jazz, and rap. It’s a nice vibe, but the vision wears thin. | B. Cool-Aid / Pink Siifu / Ahwlee: Leather Blvd. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/b-cool-aid-pink-siifu-ahwlee-leather-blvd/ | B. Cool-Aid / Pink Siifu / Ahwlee: Leather Blvd. | Pink Siifu and producer Ahwlee named their group B. Cool Aid after brown Kool-Aid, a potion made by mixing so many flavors of the powdered beverage that the colors smear. “I was like, ‘Oh shit, that’s us,’” Siifu reflected in a Fader interview. “We mix everything together, and it’s Black too.” Brown Kool-Aid has no set recipe, but it is inevitably sweet and smooth, a standard he and Ahwlee aspire to in their fluid collages of neo-soul, rap, and jazz.
The pair are disciples of the Los Angeles beat scene, where they rubbed shoulders at Low End Theory shows and befriended each other at a Mndsgn party. They’ve remained in close orbit: Ahwlee has contributed to most of Siifu’s albums, and they run in the same underground rap circles. Inspired by hood movies, swap meets, and the Soulquarians, B. Cool Aid channel their artistic influences and overlapping networks into an homage to urbane Black cool. Their third album, Leather Blvd., is a light concept record about an imaginary thoroughfare where Black people live and shop in peace. “Leather Blvd. is the place where you can get it, even when you can’t afford it,” Awhlee told Okayplayer. “It is what America is supposed to be.”
As a mood board, the album works great. B. Cool Aid favor plush, leisurely arrangements that wind and billow like hookah smoke. Siifu does more crooning than rapping here, and his smeared melodies squiggle into odd pockets; even when he evokes Black pain, like on “Cnt Fk Around,” the vibe is decidedly relaxed, giving the record a dreamy and escapist bent. The crisp drums, vapory keys, and yawning vocal sample on “Streets Got Pages” bring out the swing in his hushed vocals. On “Cnt Go Back ( Tell Me ),” his raspy croak melts into the thick boom-bap bassline, singers Liv.e, Jimetta Rose, and V.C.R backing him as he delivers keep-your-chin-up reassurances.
B. Cool Aid reference a hearty swath of Black music—Coltrane, D’Angelo—and recruit an eclectic range of guests, including butter-smooth rhymer Ladybug Mecca of Digable Planets, genre-agnostic singer Fousheé, and acerbic backpacker Denmark Vessey. But the Black utopia theme wears thin as the album progresses. Many songs stretch past the 5-minute mark, and they often lack an identifiable concept, or even a verse or image that yokes all the voices together. ““Craxy”’!” erupts into a racing rap verse about Siifu’s sexual coming-of-age—“First time I seen porn outta nowhere thoughts coulda sworn I had porn dick”—and then fizzles into staid funk. “So Soft Salon” plays like three separate interludes: feathery vocal harmonies over background chatter, a woman’s monologue over spare piano, Siifu chanting “wassup with you.” He occasionally injects some urgency and personality into these meandering tracks, but he’s mostly content to coast along with the lethargic flow.
Pink Siifu is normally a skillful conduit of sounds and ideas. His albums ensley, Negro, and GUMBO’!, which are just as winding and feature-heavy as Leather Blvd., justify their sprawl through hairpin turns and artful contrasts. Leather Blvd. lacks the same sense of vision and proportion. It feels telling that the standout is “Brandy, Aaliyah,” one of the only songs where every performer has a clear prompt. After opening with a slowed-down flip of Brandy’s “Sittin’ Up in My Room,” the song glides through verses that channel the sample’s nostalgia: Siifu floats through memories of family and lovers, MoRuf relishes the physiques of past paramours, and Vessey rattles off wry punchlines about Brandy’s long-standing tiff with Monica. The rush of personalities recall conversations at house parties and diner booths, friends united in jabber. For a moment, the boulevard feels real. | 2023-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-04-07T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Lex | April 7, 2023 | 6.5 | 8caefe35-81ae-450d-9a61-37f59dbdec51 | Stephen Kearse | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/ | |
The Melbourne punk quartet sift through the grubbiest entrails of politics and internet culture, but their perspective sounds stilted. | The Melbourne punk quartet sift through the grubbiest entrails of politics and internet culture, but their perspective sounds stilted. | Tropical Fuck Storm: Braindrops | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tropical-fuck-storm-braindrops/ | Braindrops | With their 2018 single “Soft Power,” Melbourne quartet Tropical Fuck Storm wrote a eulogy for a world addled and spent by toxic internet culture. The sluggish garage blues number cycled from nuclear arms to class inequality to the impending release of Top Gun 2, unable to bring anything into focus. By the time it was over, lead singer Gareth Liddiard was glitching, drowning in a sea of cultural ephemera: “Bye bye Richie, Chachi, Fonzie, Ralphy, and Joanie Cunningham,” he mumbled, finding final solace in thoughts of the Happy Days gang. It was a disturbingly visceral interrogation of the ways we distract ourselves.
But it’s hard to strike gold twice. On their sophomore record Braindrops, which arrives just a year after last year’s A Laughing Death in Meatspace, Tropical Fuck Storm are still sifting through the grubbiest entrails of politics and internet culture, but their perspective sounds stilted. Where once he came across as a kind of greasy, tweaking prophet, Liddiard is now, more often than not, an orator with nothing to say.
If anyone’s qualified to make music about all-encompassing terror, it ought to be Tropical Fuck Storm. As part of legendary art-punks the Drones, guitarist Liddiard and bassist Fiona Kitschin dissected Australia’s toxic nationalism; keyboard player and guitarist Erica Dunn leads punk trio MOD CON, whose 2018 debut seethed with anti-capitalist fury; and Lauren Hammel is the drummer of ferocious anti-colonial metal band High Tension. Liddiard and Kitschin recruited Dunn and Hammel in 2017, after deciding to retire their 20-year-old Drones project in favor of a band with more women involved. Less than a year later, they released Meatspace, a twisted polemic against asinine political discourse and self-destructive internet echo chambers.
But Braindrops isn’t animated by the same vigor and depth of thought, and Liddiard’s verbose witticisms now border on the insufferable. Lead single “The Planet of Straw Men,” ostensibly about the corruption of the Chinese and Russian governments, rambles abstractly about how states attempt to distract their citizens. It feels like tiresome galaxy-brain babble, itself an over-complicated attempt to distract from the fact that all points made are incredibly obvious. Even the satisfyingly irregular phrasing of Liddiard and Dunn’s twitchy yelps—“They’re always going for the coup de grâce!”—can’t make those words meaningful. Similarly, “The Happiest Guy Around” aims to make a point about the self-perpetuating nature of online arguments, but can’t find a greater conclusion than, “When you ever gonna learn to let things go?”
Liddiard has cited Captain Beefheart as an influence on Braindrops, and you can hear the angular, upsetting rhythms of Trout Mask Replica and Doc at the Radar Station in more upbeat tracks like “Straw Men” and “Happiest Guy Around.” But Braindrops is more interesting when it leaves this realm. Album highlight “Who’s My Eugene?”, written and sung by Dunn about the notoriously unethical psychotherapist Eugene Landy, rides a hypnotic industrial chug that eventually slides into a convulsing, fuzzed-out denouement. The record’s slow, quiet final stretch coheres in a way the rest of Braindrops fails to: The introspective “Aspirin” plods and clatters, vividly conjuring the discomfort of glimpsing an ex at the gas station.
Too often Braindrops’ commentary feels arbitrary or pro forma, but eight-minute closer “Maria 63” reconjures the album’s missing pathos. The song tells a fabricated story of Maria Orsic, a mysterious and, in Liddiard’s estimation, entirely fake Nazi witch exalted by online conspiracists. In Tropical Fuck Storm’s telling, Orsic is a trickster capable of duping even a keen-eyed Mossad agent. It’s not just a ham-fisted fake news allegory; like “Soft Power,” it’s an engrossing, haunted fable, a way to link society’s obsession with conspiracy to our basic needs for security and comfort. It’s proof that Tropical Fuck Storm are still clever when they want to be, able to channel obsessive rage into real insight. Braindrops could’ve used more like it.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-05T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Joyful Noise | September 5, 2019 | 6.4 | 8caf22e5-7be9-4294-b354-5617ea8818a3 | Shaad D’Souza | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shaad-d’souza/ | |
Matt Kivel's patient, close-miked folk music opens up slowly, revealing painful secrets the more time you spend listening to it. | Matt Kivel's patient, close-miked folk music opens up slowly, revealing painful secrets the more time you spend listening to it. | Matt Kivel: Fires on the Plain | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22509-fires-on-the-plain/ | Fires on the Plain | On the surface Matt Kivel’s tastes seem familiar enough. The Los Angeles songwriter draws from more or less the same pool of consensus folk and lo-fi influences as countless other indie acts from the last two decades, but there’s something vaguely contrarian about what he draws from them. To judge purely from his solo albums, he’s the type of guy who prefers “Night Falls on Hoboken” to “Autumn Sweater,” “Fillmore Jive” to “Silence Kit,” Mount Eerie to the Microphones, The Velvet Underground to The Velvet Underground & Nico. He finds more satisfaction in exploration than payoffs. His least favorite part of his favorite song is probably the hook.
Fires on the Plain is Kivel’s second album of 2016, and given how his records demand more time than most listeners will ever give it, he probably hasn’t done himself any favors by releasing it so soon after the last one. It’s a doozy, too, weighing in at 26 songs and 82 minutes—for those keeping score, that means Kivel’s released more than two hours of music this year, much of it so understated that it can’t help but blur together. Yet despite the similarities, Plain often plays less like a continuation of its predecessor Janus than a reaction against it, walking back that album’s comparatively tight, brightly colored compositions with Kivel’s most muted, unhurried treatments yet. There’s actually more going on this album than on any other Kivel release—more horns, more intricate guitar passages, more outside collaborators and guest voices—but because it all unfolds so leisurely over such a vast pan shot, it feels like his most minimalist work. This thing breathes.
It seems as if after three albums that barely sold, Kivel has given up on making music for anybody but himself, but Plain does feature a modest sales hook in the form of appearances from Will Oldham and Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold, who respectively duet with Kivel on a pair of woodsy, close-miked duets with complementary titles, “Forgiveness” and “Permanence.” That’s smart target marketing, because fans of both of those artists’ more patient work will find plenty to enjoy if they stick around for the rest of the album. It’s a sign, perhaps, of how different Kivel hears music that Plain is seriously backloaded, with most of its highlights tucked away after an unflashy, mostly uneventful opening stretch.
But what a pleasure it is when the album finally opens up. The terse guitars of “Black” deliver a shock of classic rock. “Other Shore,” Plain’s prettiest number, is a vulnerable bossa nova that’s sent off, in the spirit of “Walk on the Wild Side,” with a gust of saxophone. And then there’s “Whirlpool,” which with its dizzy, sticky riff may be the closest Kivel has ever come to writing a big-ticket indie song. His voice even rises to the occasion, too, swelling from a timid Ira Kaplan whisper to an emboldened Win Butler croon.
The Butler resemblance is strong enough that I can’t listen to that song without imagining how Arcade Fire might have played it—doubtlessly, they would have sold the shit out of it. Kivel, of course, doesn’t go that big. After spending enough time with these songs, it becomes clearer why he plays them so close. Fragments of a non-linear story emerge: a suicide, followed by grief and at least a few regretful benders. These are the kind of details you don’t shout to the world; you keep them to yourself. One of these songs is called “Light Depression,” and that title could also double as an apt genre tag for much of Fires on the Plain. Whenever the emotions threaten to become too vivid, the volume returns to a calming mummer as Kivel retreats, seeking safety in softness and quietude. | 2016-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Driftless | October 20, 2016 | 7 | 8cb6f297-7106-4852-a17a-7d41105e5c4a | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | null |
The D.C. rapper Shy Glizzy—here rebranded as Jefe—offers another tough-minded collection of street rap anthems, addressed to people struggling through poverty and the criminal-justice system. | The D.C. rapper Shy Glizzy—here rebranded as Jefe—offers another tough-minded collection of street rap anthems, addressed to people struggling through poverty and the criminal-justice system. | Jefe: The World Is Yours | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22808-the-world-is-yours/ | The World Is Yours | As Shy Glizzy, D.C. native Marquis King has become the face of the rap crew Glizzy Gang, and one of the most consistent artists in the nation’s capital. He raps in a needling whine about gunfights and authority and the spaces where they intersect: neighborhood turf wars, exchanges with law enforcement, being strapped as a symbol of manhood, and using gunmanship as a means to gain control over one’s own life, to overcome poverty and unbalanced systems. Last year, he released his most compelling work yet, Young Jefe 2, a blueprint for his particular brand of confessional tough talk, half chest-beating bravado, half emotional plea for understanding (“I promise you that you gon’ feel my pain bitch”). The tape was the most comfortable he’s ever been, proudly taking up the mantle of local street benefactor and willing brand ambassador for his crew. Perhaps sensing a shift, King has dropped the Shy Glizzy moniker in favor of the mixtape persona: Jefe, which is Spanish for ‘boss.’ “I’m just rebranding myself. Reinventing on a whole higher level,” he told the Fader. “I earned the title Jefe ... From the get go I’ve been putting on for the city.”
His first offering under the new name is an EP called The World Is Yours. The eight-track project continues to explore the same ongoing themes in King’s music—using success as a window through which to reflect on humbler beginnings. Its message is encapsulated in the hook on “Love Me”: “How the fuck could you hate me when I came up from nothing?/I just want you to love me.”
This isn’t King at the peak of his powers. When he’s at his best, he can string several devastating phrases together to create complex models of what he’s seeing and feeling. Here, he mostly seems content to roll leisurely through verses, as on “Over the Hills.” There’s no sense of urgency, and, outside of declaring his city a war zone, the stakes are generally lower for Jefe than they are in most Shy Glizzy songs. But that doesn’t mean the songs are without consequence. On “Congratulations,” he assesses the envy of those close to his success. The cautionary tale “Give It Up” is an instruction manual for young street soldiers, ending with an inspirational testimonial, tracing a bleak journey from juvenile corrections to six-figure tours: “14 years old, I went to juvie for an O/16 years old, I stuck my dick in my PO/18 years old, I was whipping up the dope/ By 20 years old, I was getting 20 for a show.” The World Is Yours seems as much a personal memo as it is a Nas-ian aphorism.
For much of the EP’s running time, Jefe provides glimpses of what can, at times, make him a truly special rapper—as has been exhibited in the past on songs like “Funeral” and “Awwsome.” He’ll go through an entire verse only using one scheme (as he does on “Congratulations”), but other times he’ll take big cuts at syllables, at one point rhyming “fuck,” “New York,” and “Marshall Faulk.” Over one of the most vibrant Zaytoven beats in years, on “One,” he mixes off-balance slant rhymes with brief moments of criminal introspection. It’s a reminder of what he’s capable of. The World Is Yours is a fine introduction to Jefe. But it’s still worth getting to know Shy Glizzy first. | 2017-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | 300 Entertainment | January 27, 2017 | 6.9 | 8cb8d4ac-b1f8-4440-b0de-139456b67646 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | null |
The electro-disco lead single to Gliss Riffer suggested that Dan Deacon's first LP in three years might bring hooks and lighthearted mania back to the fore, but the album mostly just feels like a pared-back, intuitive way of working. As on all of Deacon's albums, it's the moments where he seems to be discovering something new that prove the most exciting. | The electro-disco lead single to Gliss Riffer suggested that Dan Deacon's first LP in three years might bring hooks and lighthearted mania back to the fore, but the album mostly just feels like a pared-back, intuitive way of working. As on all of Deacon's albums, it's the moments where he seems to be discovering something new that prove the most exciting. | Dan Deacon: Gliss Riffer | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20279-gliss-riffer/ | Gliss Riffer | It's been almost a decade since Baltimore singer/songwriter and electroacoustic composer Dan Deacon made his breakthrough with Spiderman of the Rings, but it feels like longer. The album recalls a time when flamboyance and uncouth goofiness was close to the rule in indie rock, and the possibility that Sade would be a frequent comparison point for new, buzzworthy artists felt remote. On subsequent releases, Deacon has put lustrous new coats of paint on the noisy and ambitious electro-pop sound he prototyped on Spiderman (and to a lesser extent, his earlier, more overtly experimental Carpark releases), shifting inspiration points and performing forces, but not his fundamental aesthetic.
That aesthetic unites elements of process music and primitively catchy pop, blending the two until you're not sure which is the main article. On 2009's hyper-complex, percussion-ensemble-driven Bromst and 2012's lush, electro-orchestral America, "songs" are less of a focal point: Deacon's heavily treated vocal melodies are simply kinetic layers in larger pieces. His recent return to a man-and-electronics approach—with a concise electro-disco lead single to match ("Feel the Lightning")—has suggested that his first LP in three years, Gliss Riffer, might bring hooks and lighthearted mania back to the fore.
However, this tidy narrative doesn't really fit. First of all, Gliss Riffer boasts few show-stopping choruses. Reverb and chorus effects dampen and blend his synth and 808 patterns, creating the illusion of organic space and gradation where, once, all was coarse, brittle and vacuum-sealed. More than a return-to-form album, Gliss Riffer simply feels like an exploration of a more pared-back, intuitive way of working.
One of the things which has always made Deacon's music divisive is the difficulty of knowing what, exactly, he's "going for." Crude summaries vary—is this rave music for the DIY-house-show set? Avant-garde electronica? Performance art? Minimalism? Maximalism? The confusion is a testament to how over-stimulating his music can be. It's hard to decide where to focus when listening. At his finest, most expansive moments, Deacon renders this dilemma beside the point, but on Gliss Riffer, it's hard to avoid it; the battle between song and arrangement is staged in too small of an arena. Sometimes both seem to be vying for the spotlight without either one seeming totally worthy, as in the robotic new-wave of "Mind on Fire" or the facile electro-punk of "Sheathed Wings".
As on any of Deacon's albums, it's the moments where he seems to be on the cusp of discovering something new that prove the most exciting. "Take It to the Max" sounds like Deacon coming out on the other side of Oneohtrix Point Never and PC Music. Opening like Steve Reich's Drumming: Windows 95 edition, the amazingly detailed and constantly mutating piece builds powerfully, its second half bolstered by synth-horn chorales, high, expressive woodwinds and glottal vocal noises. The Tangerine Dream synths interwoven through the decidedly funky "Meme Generator" create an unusually mellow atmosphere for Deacon, and "Steely Blues" is bookended by sections of glacial, arrhythmic synth ambience. He's not reinventing any wheel, but these road tests of new textures are enjoyable and occasionally exceptional.
By Deacon's own account, the phrase "gliss riffer" refers to his penchant for manipulating loops of layered glissando (rapid ascending and/or descending streams of sequential notes). The title functions as a self-effacing joke, but also evokes the album's straightforwardness of purpose: "This is what I do, I know what I do, and I have fun doing it." A more cynical interpretation would be "Look, more of the same." The latter characterization would be unfair, but by not making a point of challenging his instincts, Deacon nonetheless fails to climb to new heights. | 2015-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2015-02-23T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Domino | February 23, 2015 | 7.2 | 8cbbf194-d71e-49d8-8774-40a2d5ab1534 | Winston Cook-Wilson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/ | null |
On their second album as a duo, Detroit techno titan Robert Hood and his daughter Lyric sharpen their focus on the fusion of house music and gospel. | On their second album as a duo, Detroit techno titan Robert Hood and his daughter Lyric sharpen their focus on the fusion of house music and gospel. | Floorplan: Supernatural | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/floorplan-supernatural/ | Supernatural | Robert Hood began his career with Underground Resistance, a Detroit collective known for its bold, anti-corporate vision of techno as a musical form by and for the black youth of a city left behind by a racist nation. Hood left Underground Resistance in 1992; today he lives in Alabama and works as an ordained minister when he is not touring or recording. But that core belief in techno’s revelatory potential resonates throughout his catalog. Hood pioneered minimal techno with early releases like 1994’s Minimal Nation, but his work as Floorplan sings with a joyous maximalism. He has made records under the alias since 1996, but over the past decade, it has become his main gig. Supernatural is his third album under the alias since 2013, and his second as a duo alongside his daughter Lyric; it is also the fullest expression to date of the spiritual dimension of his music. It is clear that his activities in the DJ booth and the pulpit share the same goal: the search beyond the self.
The core of Hood’s music is still techno: Opening tracks “There Was a Time” and “Dance Floor” are built on thunderous beats. As the album continues, the surface becomes more soulful; “Oasis” and “Brothers + Sisters” are rife with orchestral disco swells and reverberating piano riffs. The Floorplan sound is much warmer than Hood’s solo work, a shade more house than techno, and Supernatural contains the duo’s most enthusiastic work yet. “Song Like This” feels like genuine gospel music, not just a dance remix—a veritable tabernacle choir of joyous voices, organ licks, and cymbals crashing. For the less spiritually inclined, the album still functions as a full-bodied dance workout. Its most intense tracks, like “I Try,” are more jock jam than Joubert Singers, complete with literal whistles. The Hoods wind the record down with a more contemplative cut, “Generations From Now,” turning the album’s sights away from heaven and back onto the bodies of the true believers left in the last moments of early-morning light.
Previous Floorplan tracks like “We Magnify His Name” chopped up recordings of sermons and choirs, as does this album. But on Supernatural the duo goes beyond samples and delivers a full-fledged vocal gospel number: an uptempo techno take on the traditional hymn “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” featuring Carol Otis. Covered by everyone from Marvin Gaye to Jessica Simpson, this Sunday-morning standard is a perfect expression of the ecstasy Floorplan find in dance: “Why should I feel discouraged? Why should the shadows come?” sings Otis over pounding organ stabs and flashing open hi-hats. “I sing because I’m happy, I sing because I’m free.”
Kanye West’s recent embrace of gospel music has been linked to his mystifying rightward turn; Jesus Is King is laced with elements of Joel Osteen’s prosperity theology, and the admiration is apparently mutual. By comparison, the humility and sincerity of the Hoods’ message makes Kanye look like The Righteous Gemstones’ Uncle Baby Billy, a charlatan shilling shopping-mall snake oil. There’s room in the pews for everyone in the church of techno. Supernatural captures a moment of epiphany that isn’t confined to Sunday service: that holy time when the ravers go home and the churchgoers come out, side by side like lion and lamb, reveling in the glow of worship, doing the same dance for different gods.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-27T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Aus | November 27, 2019 | 7.4 | 8cbd7496-1dd4-4388-b456-d201260a3095 | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
The debut EP from the Sudan-born, Twin Cities-based singer, poet, and activist reveals an artist with a warm, sophisticated sound and captivating presence on the mic. | The debut EP from the Sudan-born, Twin Cities-based singer, poet, and activist reveals an artist with a warm, sophisticated sound and captivating presence on the mic. | Dua Saleh: Nūr EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dua-saleh-nur-ep/ | Nūr EP | Dua Saleh’s first language was Arabic, but they’ve been speaking English for so long that it’s begun to slip away. That detail is, simply, true; it’s also the kind of character note—specific and a little bit sad—that might pop up in one of their songs, which tend to deal with issues of social posture, identity, and heritage in short, impressionistic bursts. Their debut EP, Nūr—that’s “light” in Arabic, as well as a common gender-neutral name—is a superb show of control, lean except when it decides to lash out.
Saleh was born in Kassala, on the Eastern edge of Sudan, but moved to the Upper Midwest after a brief stop at a refugee camp in Eritrea. They’ve established themselves as an artist in the Twin Cities across a variety of disciplines: singer, activist, and poet. That sensibility is clear at times in their music, with its economy and densely-packed details, but what sets Saleh apart from similarly lyric-minded writers is that they resist the urge to make all the other elements of a song subservient to the writing. Nūr has stretches with compelling vocals that do not form words at all, and ones where the vocals are mixed so that the words are nearly masked. Saleh’s voice is powerful enough to contort into nearly any shape without losing its distinctive character.
None of which to say that Nūr is without lyrical flourishes. On the opening song, “Sugar Mama,” Saleh describes a doting, curious neighbor with a rich father and a “pussy melting like a glacier.” The power in the story snaps back and forth—the neighbor rambles about charity work and eats lobster in a romper with gold accent—and ends with the kind of climax that recalls that maxim: everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power. What makes scenes like these tick is that Saleh does not render them academically, and does not hold them at arm’s length—they’re experiential, full of rising heart rates and dilating pupils.
Nūr’s sound is sophisticated, warm but industrial. It’s helmed by the Twin Cities-based Psymun, who produces four of the EP’s five songs. (“Sugar Mama” was self-produced on Saleh’s cell phone.) Psymun’s contributed beats to albums by Future and Young Thug, and has worked with the Weeknd, but excels on smaller, more idiosyncratic stages, like as part of the St. Paul supergroup thestand4rd. He’s the kind of producer whose beats—the airy, sweeping ones or the ones that are small and tightly wound—feel as if they’re being constructed live in front of you on a drum machine, and are liable to spiral out of control at any moment. They never do. There are times on Nūr when Saleh elicits the same effect with their voice, like the way it’s doubled with slightly divergent takes on “Albany.”
Saleh’s live performances, even with the barest production design, are uncommonly intense. This effect comes partly from the spatial—small spaces meeting a massive voice—but more importantly from the way they stalk around the stage, exploding from time to time like a cobra uncoiling. This careful plotting is mirrored on Nūr, specifically on the way “Warm Pants” returns to center after unfurling into the biggest, boldest arrangement on the EP, or the way “Sugar Mama,” with its slowly crescendoing vocal performance, keeps circling back around its beat’s metronomic spine. The journey back is especially dramatic on “Albany,” which unspools in its middle section into a collage that includes minor-key piano and found nature sounds, as if you’re on a bus barreling deep into the woods as your phone is dying. By the song’s end, you’re being lulled to sleep by a lone drum pattern, everything back in equilibrium. It’s disorienting but tactile, confident in its forward motion even when everything else is murky. | 2019-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | AGAINST GIANTS | January 18, 2019 | 7.5 | 8cc7a18a-3224-4075-8909-7f73925110e0 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
This set of cozy, stripped-back rehearsal recordings, later broadcast in a 1997 special, finds Bowie in a valedictory mood. | This set of cozy, stripped-back rehearsal recordings, later broadcast in a 1997 special, finds Bowie in a valedictory mood. | David Bowie: ChangesNowBowie | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/david-bowie-changesnowbowie/ | ChangesNowBowie | David Bowie’s first greatest-hits set was called Changesonebowie, and the title has proven irresistible to his compilers: That collection was followed by 1981’s Changestwobowie, 1990’s Changesbowie, and 1997’s radio special ChangesNowBowie. Interspersing clips of a long interview with Mary Anne Hobbs with exclusive performances recorded during November 1996 rehearsals for his 50th-birthday concert at Madison Square Garden, ChangesNowBowie originally aired on BBC Radio 1 the week of Bowie’s birthday. Bowie was feeling valedictory at the time, a mood that came through in both the musing interviews and the laid-back performances, backed only by guitarist Reeves Gabrels, bassist/vocalist Gail Ann Dorsey, and keyboardist Mark Plati.
The Hobbs-hosted show circulated intact on bootlegs for years, and the official LP was initially slated as a Record Store Day 2020 exclusive. Thanks to COVID-19, the physical release was pushed back, but the digital version is here, and the sanctioned release differs from the fans-only versions in substantial ways. All the interview segments with Hobbes have been excised, as have the birthday wishes from his peers and acolytes, leaving a tight 32 minutes of music—nine songs that appear in a different order than they did in the broadcast.
In strict terms of listenability, all the edits are logical. Radio requires a different rhythm than an album, and the BBC Radio 1 broadcast sometimes bogged down in discussions, albeit many of them fascinating. The show hit its emotional peak with a greeting from Scott Walker, who thanked Bowie “for your generosity in spirit when it comes to other artists. I’ve been the beneficiary on more than one occasion, let me tell you,” a sentiment that left Bowie speechless and teary. It was the one time he let his guard slip in the interview. Throughout the rest of the broadcast, he was garrulous and charming, sounding utterly comfortable embracing his role as an elder statesman of rock.
The live performances have a similar spirit, sounding so relaxed they’re almost cozy. Tellingly, Bowie’s setlist avoids songs from both the dark, roiling Brian Eno reunion 1. Outside and the drum’n’bass-besotted Earthling, which would appear a month after his 50th birthday. These two records found Bowie wrestling with contemporary music, but apart from a version of “The Man Who Sold the World”—a nod to Nirvana popularizing the song a few years earlier on their MTV Unplugged—the modern world barely can be discerned on ChangesNowBowie.
Although Bowie conspicuously avoids the big hits, the songs are largely drawn from the early 1970s—even the Velvet Underground’s “White Light/White Heat,” heard here in a stomping version, was a staple in concerts by the Spiders From Mars—leaving just the Lodger deep cut
“Repetition” and Tin Machine song “Shopping for Girls” as the album’s surprises. Next to warhorses like “Lady Stardust,” “Aladdin Sane,” and “Andy Warhol,” these are comparative novelties and they catch the ear: “Repetition” receives a lanky acoustic rearrangement, and without the heavy thump of the Hunt Brothers, “Shopping for Girls” turns sprightly and lithe.
Save these two selections and the VU cover, ChangesNowBowie is built for comfort, not speed. Bowie understood that the audience for this BBC Radio 1 show was upscale and settled, perhaps nurturing a slight nostalgic bent, and he adjusted his performance accordingly, giving the people something close to what they want: old tunes—but not oldies—performed with skill and a burnished grace. Looking back, the live-in-the-studio set seems slightly out of step with Bowie’s adventurous 1990s, feeling more of a piece with the rock classicism he’d play at the dawn of the 2000s. It also feels slight. Unlike other Bowie live albums, this doesn’t document a specific tour or phase. It’s just a quiet, pleasant footnote to a busy era.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-25T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Parlophone | April 25, 2020 | 6 | 8ccb26c7-e0d3-47b1-96cb-e8e266b5a235 | Stephen Thomas Erlewine | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/ | |
On his hooky, appealing debut album, the young Londoner Oscar Scheller makes blown-out indie jams with magnetic melodies and an obvious British lineage. | On his hooky, appealing debut album, the young Londoner Oscar Scheller makes blown-out indie jams with magnetic melodies and an obvious British lineage. | Oscar: Cut and Paste | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21865-cut-and-paste/ | Cut and Paste | Britain's indie scene has rarely felt more more low-stakes than it does right now. The UK albums chart is full of iconoclastic British acts—Radiohead at #1, Skepta, James Blake, Anohni—with very few of them plying their trade on guitar. Even trad-lad bands like the 1975, Catfish and the Bottlemen, and Blossoms have seen the smart money and embraced their boyband potential rather than doggedly committing to life in the indie trenches. Twenty years since Britpop's rot set in, and 10 years on from Arctic Monkeys' debut album, the path to indie success is codified, but a source of ever-diminishing returns; there's the sense of a generation with just enough education to perform, but not really to innovate the genre out of irrelevance.
Oscar Scheller's debut album, Cut and Paste, isn't going to do that either, though a decade ago it might have propelled him to the heights of, say, Jack Peñate, another British cheeky chappy with strong pop instincts. The young Londoner makes blown-out indie jams with magnetic melodies and an obvious British lineage: “Sometimes” echoes the melody of Blur's “Coffee and TV,” and his leaping baritone bears a strong resemblance to both Damon Albarn and Morrissey. (For the latter, see also, “But then I see your face and I want to die,” from “Fifteen,” which moves at the pace of a carnation's twirl.) He samples, or rather, for budgetary reasons, emulates samples of old school hip-hop and chintzy dub—“Good Things,” laced with his plaintive croon, sounds a lot like Saint Etienne's cover of “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” The combination aligns him with a non-British Anglophile: Scheller's romantic, hotch-potch confections recall Jens Lekman's early records, and share a similarly endearing innocence.
His lyrics are also naïve, but lack Lekman's charm and wit. They're mostly underdeveloped portraits of youthful anxieties: over masculinity (not knowing which football team to support), the passing of time, and whether the promised future will come to pass. “Nothing's as it seems/There's a land where hopes don't meet with dreams,” he croons on the twinkling, dreamy “Gone Forever,” the record's sharpest song. “I feel scared of all the things to come.” As for his own future, Scheller has written for Lily Allen and short-lived Sugababes revival MKS. Cut and Paste is hooky and appealing; with a gear change, he could easily move into a realm where people are actually paying attention. For now, he's a very sweet stream in a cultural backwater. | 2016-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Wichita | May 19, 2016 | 6.5 | 8ccd951b-3843-4375-8077-b8b15a6393b7 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
Tough-talking Buffalo rapper, signed to Eminem’s Shady Records, offers ruthless rhymes and a stubbornly old-school sound on his latest album, featuring Raekwon, Prodigy, and more. | Tough-talking Buffalo rapper, signed to Eminem’s Shady Records, offers ruthless rhymes and a stubbornly old-school sound on his latest album, featuring Raekwon, Prodigy, and more. | Conway the Machine: G.O.A.T. | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/conway-goat/ | G.O.A.T. | Not every artist could take a bullet to the back of their head and make it work in their favor. In 2012, doctors told the Buffalo rapper Conway he might never walk again after surviving gunshots to his head and neck. He recovered, mostly, and although the injury left half his face paralyzed, he’s learned to use it to his advantage: It lends a distinctive slur to his authoritative rasp, and suggests an echo of a previous Eminem signee’s origin story. “OK, I get it, my face is twisted/But considerin’ my facial image, what nigga spit it the way I spit it?” Conway brags on G.O.A.T., his third and most substantial full-length project of 2017. It’s no throwaway; immediately following that line, he pauses his verse for a few bars to let listeners consider the question.
That G.O.A.T.’s title stands for grimiest, not greatest, of all time says as much about where Conway’s heart is at as does the album’s guest lineup. Features come mostly from New York warhorses like Raekwon, Lloyd Banks, Styles P, and the late Mobb Deep legend Prodigy—veterans who have remained faithful to a ’90s ideal of hardcore rap, no matter how far out of fashion it’s fallen. Though he hasn’t been on the radar nearly as long as those guys, Conway is in his early-thirties, not all that much younger than them, and he’s fluent enough in the ways of throwback Mafioso rap that he could easily pass as their peer. Rapping in a ruthlessly methodical spray of violent images and internal rhyme, he sets out to upstage each of his guests, and more often than not succeeds. “Look, click clack, and this big ratchet I clap it/Six pack, I heard his ribs crack/And splash the wall with wig fragments,” he fires on the album’s opening verse. “Every day where I’m from, it’s yellow tapes and zip plastic.”
In interviews, Conway has talked a big game about representing his native Buffalo, a city that has never sired a genuine rap star of its own. Given Eminem’s mixed track record with protégés, local fans in Conway’s corner can be forgiven if they had mixed emotions when he and his brother Westside Gunn signed to Shady Records last year. Thankfully, if G.O.A.T. is any indication, this won’t be like the time Eminem signed Yelawolf only to A&R him into the trash bin. There isn’t a trace of Shady’s fingerprints on this one. If anything, the album could have benefited from a little more of Eminem’s promotional muscle. With little fanfare, it was dropped online just a few days before Christmas, a rare downtime for the internet, and it can’t be found on most of the major streaming services. For an album that Conway had talked up as his most accomplished work to date, its release has been strangely low-key.
It’s possible that was by design. Conway seems to understand he’s a niche artist, and shows little interest in wooing the unconverted. Save for a crackling, slow-burn Alchemist beat on “Trump,” one of the few tracks that bothers with a hook (the title refers to the verb, not the president), G.O.A.T. was produced entirely by Conway’s in-house producer Daringer, a ’90s devotee whose tastes tend toward the subdued. The producer seems to delight in period details: The Prodigy feature “Rodney Little” conjures the dizzying thump of RZA’s most extreme Liquid Swords creations, and Daringer offers a decent DJ Premier impression, scratches and all, on “Mandatory.” But unlike those legends’ beats, which packed a consistent element of surprise, Daringer’s can be static to the point of tedium. The wailing, one-bar loop on the Raekwon collaboration “Th3rd F” is almost tortuously repetitive. Conway seems to bank on the miscalculation that if the rapping is sharp enough, you don’t need showy production.
He boxes himself in by leaning this hard on vintage styles. Most of rap’s greatest works sprung less from homage than invention, yet Conway treats the genre the way many contemporary blues musicians do the blues—as an art that’s already been perfected, one that can be mastered and replicated but never improved upon. Conway has the talent to make real waves, and with Shady Records’ backing presumably the resources, too, but by limiting himself to these overmined sounds, he’s working under too low a ceiling. | 2018-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-12T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Griselda | January 12, 2018 | 6.5 | 8cdb4b21-22a0-477b-87a4-796484be026f | Evan Rytlewski | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/ | |
The 18-year-old Baton Rouge rapper’s debut album is packed with allegories on power that illuminate but don’t apologize for his well-publicized history of violence. | The 18-year-old Baton Rouge rapper’s debut album is packed with allegories on power that illuminate but don’t apologize for his well-publicized history of violence. | YoungBoy Never Broke Again: Until Death Call My Name | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/youngboy-never-broke-again-until-death-call-my-name/ | Until Death Call My Name | Until Death Call My Name, the debut album from 18-year-old Baton Rouge rogue YoungBoy Never Broke Again, is a meditation on violence, the pangs of conscience, and the ways anticipating an early grave can tint perspective. “I ain’t no bad person, no,” he says in the opening seconds of the record, on “Overdose.” “I ain’t no gangster, ain’t no killer/I ain’t no gangbanger, I’m me/Like everybody make mistakes, that’s life… I just know, shit, until I’m dead I’ma be me.”
This is, at least in part, an attempt to reconcile the concept of being “bad” with a childhood plagued by cruelty and self-destruction, which has led YoungBoy to multiple run-ins with the law—including a harrowing alleged assault on a girlfriend that was caught on camera. If his introduction to the album isn’t exactly contrite, it at least offers a moment of clarity. The tracks that follow are packed with allegories on power that lack the emotional depth of his previous work.
YoungBoy is a teenager who uses the violence he has suffered as a justification for perpetuating violence. He presents paranoia and angst as causes for his (sometimes retaliatory, sometimes preemptive) attacks, and those emotions also fuel his songs. Some rappers can cite artistic license as an excuse for the brutality in their lyrics, but YoungBoy merits no such concession; the darkest aspects of his music are a direct and intense reflection of his real life. Throughout Until Death Call My Name, he shoots first and asks questions after.
His sing-song verses, performed in a nasally, aggressive, adolescent whine, bring a raw quality to his depictions of the brutal cycle of poverty and violence plaguing his hometown—a cycle YoungBoy has failed to fully escape. Last year, he was charged with attempted first-degree murder for opening fire on a crowd. In February, he was arrested on assault and kidnapping charges in Florida. On more than one occasion on the album, YoungBoy characterizes himself as a demon or a devil or a reaper, as if to acknowledge the all-consuming darkness that lives within him. In sound and deed, he is a younger Kevin Gates: an unquestionably talented artist who lets ferocity and fury dictate who he is, stewing in his own toxicity to avoid reckoning with it.
Until Death sometimes reads like a last will and testament. Because YoungBoy sees the prospect of death around every corner, he sets out objectives for his remaining time on Earth: to stunt on his haters, to outlive his enemies, and to leave behind a nest egg for his kids. He is as fixated on being untroubled as he is on never being broke again.
Previous YoungBoy tapes covered similar ground, exploring themes of adolescent rage and internal conflict, but there is less variety in his delivery and melodies on Until Death. The raps here aren’t as punishing or as personal as the ones on AI YoungBoy, a 2017 mixtape that pushed the limits of his trap-country blues. But he remains capable of creating seismic jams, as on “We Poppin” and “Right or Wrong,” even if they don’t feel as visceral as his earlier work. There are moments of probing acuity on the album: When he isn’t invoking Gates at full throat, on “Astronaut Kid,” he’s making sense of his past in the new context of his celebrity with songs like “Public Figure” and “Rags to Riches.”
A conscience-stricken but unapologetic batterer, YoungBoy hasn’t yet become the same lightning rod for discourse as alleged or convicted abusers XXXTentacion, Kodak Black, and 6ix9ine, perhaps because he has a smaller profile and has spent less time in the public eye. Like Kodak, he’s a preternaturally gifted rapper, which may lead some to ignore or apologize for his transgressions. Spending time with his songs—in a world of his making, where every tale is told from his perspective—creates what critic Wesley Morris calls a “luxury conundrum”: The listener ends up carefully considering YoungBoy’s work without granting equal weight to the suffering of his victims.
Rap made by abusers often illuminates the ugly histories behind their most notorious actions, drawing out their most disturbing behavioral patterns, uncovering their personality flaws, and exposing the misery they’ve dealt, all while granting the perpetrator additional power over his victims and their narratives. There shouldn’t be any easy or guilt-free way to engage with YoungBoy’s music, and it’s entirely fair to avoid him on the basis of his alleged crimes.
At the very least, though, Until Death provides plenty of insight into the perilous environments that condition young thugs. “Villain,” in which he embraces his inner demons and violent nature, is immediately followed by “Traumatized,” which chalks up his actions to PTSD. “I swear I’m traumatized, caught in that fire/Lot of bullets flying, whole lot of people dying,” he raps. “I swear I’m traumatized, I’m hypnotized/Like I’m a reaper, I see blood when I open my eyes.” At moments like this, it’s hard to tell whether he’s haunted by the people he’s lost or the people he’s hurt. | 2018-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Never Broke Again, LLC | May 9, 2018 | 6.9 | 8ce0def2-d1b4-4a6a-8ef6-68e8d6f58fdf | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
This art-punk collective’s utopian first LP illuminates the joy, camaraderie, and compassion that can exist in even the most unforgiving, isolating circumstances. | This art-punk collective’s utopian first LP illuminates the joy, camaraderie, and compassion that can exist in even the most unforgiving, isolating circumstances. | Crack Cloud: Pain Olympics | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/crack-cloud-pain-olympics/ | Pain Olympics | The video for “The Next Fix”—the first single from Crack Cloud’s first LP, Pain Olympics—takes its title and subject matter at face value. In it, the Vancouver-based collective roams among an array of troubled characters trying to survive another day of squalor, violence, and sheer boredom on the streets. Their outsider existence is personified by one woman who renders her physical withdrawal as an interpretive dance, gesticulating wildly in a train station where passing commuters pay her no mind, highlighting society’s cruelest paradox: those in the most obvious need of help are so often easily ignored.
It’s a life this group knows intimately—some of its members are former addicts themselves, and they founded Crack Cloud as both a recovery tool and an artistic extension of the harm reduction and mental healthcare work they do in their East Vancouver neighborhood. As such, they use “The Next Fix” video not to deliver a PSA, but to foreground the humanity in those who’ve fallen into the spiral of substance abuse. Partway through the video (around the point where the song goes from sounding like a scratched-up 12-inch of Tom Tom Club’s “Genius of Love” to a tear-jerking, trumpet-smoothed chorale), all of its seemingly doomed subjects congregate in a park—not to score, but to laugh, dance, and frolic together in the leaves. It’s a deeply affecting denouement, illuminating the joy, camaraderie, and compassion that can exist even under the most unforgiving, isolating circumstances.
That philosophy has been the driving force behind Crack Cloud’s dramatic evolution over the past four years. Initially the solo project of singer/drummer Zach Choy, Crack Cloud has blossomed into a seven-piece band—and that’s not counting the supporting network of multi-disciplinary creatives (many of whom also work in social services) who push the collective’s membership well past the double-digit mark. And as their ranks have swelled, so too have their musical ambitions. On their first two EPs—bundled together on a self-titled 2018 compilation release for Tin Angel—Crack Cloud’s brand of post-punk leaned more heavily on the latter half of that equation, recalling the terse agitation of Wire’s Pink Flag and the disjointed rhythms of Gang of Four. But if those pioneers showed us how deconstructing rock music could serve as a metaphor for dismantling institutional power structures, Crack Cloud provide us with a glimpse of the wondrous world that awaits after the dust has cleared. Not since These New Puritans has a modern post-punk band so eagerly embraced the “post” aspect of the genre, erecting dramatic new structures atop historic foundations like the glass pyramid shooting out of the courtyard of The Louvre.
Pain Olympics includes a handy yardstick to measure just how far Crack Cloud have come in the form of “Bastard Basket,” a track that first appeared on their 2016 eponymous EP. In its primordial form, the track is a grave meditation on life and death set to an ominous circular bass riff and needling guitar pricks; the Pain Olympics version retains that rhythmic cadence, adding sustained sax drones and a ghostly vocal delivery from Choy that lend it a more absorbing, haunted intensity. However, Pain Olympics represents a substantial upgrade not just in terms of arrangements and fidelity, but vision. On the album’s astonishing opener, “Post-Truth: Birth of a Nation,” Crack Cloud resemble a typical, guitar-stabbing post-punk band for all of 44 seconds, at which point the song triggers its phantasmagoric swirl of Eno-era Talking Heads, industrial pummel, cavalry trumpets, glockenspiels, and operatic Disney-soundtrack flourishes—a fitting analog for a song that wades into the murky, chaotic waters of modern news and social-media consumption. Meanwhile, on “Favour Your Fortune,” Crack Cloud drop any pretense of being a rock band altogether, reframing their grim street narratives in a manic noise-rap banger that could pass for a Death Grips remix of a BROCKHAMPTON cut.
And yet as much as Pain Olympics deals in difficult subject matter and sensory overload, the overwhelming feeling you’re left with is, remarkably, levity. Choy can be a stern, authoritative mouthpiece as per standard post-punk practice, but he also boasts the playful flamboyance of !!!’s Nic Offer and the melodic graces of The Clash’s Mick Jones. From his seat behind the drum kit, though, Choy is less the frontman than a conduit for the band’s collective strength: the angelic group-chorus refrains of “Post-Truth” and “The Next Fix” suggest Crack Cloud’s true spiritual antecedents aren’t late-‘70s British post-punk groups, but the utopian multi-headed Canadian indie-rock collectives of the early ’00s.
However, the biggest surprise on an album loaded with them arrives with the closing “Angel Dust (Eternal Peace),” a discordant dream-pop ballad whose dying moments are overtaken by a field-recording conversation with a man espousing the therapeutic virtues of accepting Jesus. Crack Cloud may not bible-thumpers themselves, but they’ve seemingly taken this man’s most salient point to heart: “When judgment is coming around,” he says, “what’s going to be judged is the heart and the kidneys—you can’t fake the funk, man.” With their documentarian dispatches from the meanest streets, Crack Cloud could never be accused of faking it. But the strange beauty of Pain Olympics is that it fills your heart even as it’s kicking you in the kidneys.
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. | 2020-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Meat Machine | July 21, 2020 | 8 | 8ce29d1b-9628-4b6c-a848-225fae02842e | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Released to accompany the documentary of the same name, this compilation tells the story of Peep’s evolution through his collaborations. | Released to accompany the documentary of the same name, this compilation tells the story of Peep’s evolution through his collaborations. | Lil Peep: EVERYBODY’S EVERYTHING | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lil-peep-everybodys-everything/ | EVERYBODY’S EVERYTHING | It’s pretty much impossible for a posthumous album—usually an unwieldy approximation of a musician’s style assembled from leftover scraps and second-choice stems —to stand apart from the passing of the artist. This is especially true for Lil Peep. Revisiting the work recorded in his lifetime is already a particularly vulnerable experience; listening to words like “Took her to the crib and I show her how I die…/Lord why, Lord why, do I gotta wake up?” is made harder when you know the person saying them got what they asked for.
This compilation, released to accompany the documentary of the same name, collects recordings from various points in Peep’s career, from unheard collaborations with Rich the Kid and Diplo, to earlier tracks never formally released on streaming services, as well as all three songs from the recent GOTH ANGEL SINNER EP. As someone who blasted “Beamer Boy” for weeks after Peep died, last year’s Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2 hardly left an impression; this compilation makes up for the sanitization and sanded-down edges of that album by leaving everything mostly untouched. Few polished pop flourishes are found here, mostly just the looped guitars, trap drums, and aching vocal fry that made Peep an angel to so many.
What EVERYBODY’S EVERYTHING shows is an artist beyond his sadness; more than a portrait of Peep alone, it tells his story in collaborations. Featured here are most of the regular producers who helped shape his polarizing blend of genres, like Nedarb, Fish Narc, Bighead, Smokeasac, and fellow GothBoiClique member Cold Hart. Though Peep obviously wrote and recorded “Moving On” before he passed, it’s hard not to hear that song’s role call of the GBC roster as shout-outs sent to old friends from beyond.
Three tracks—“Fangirl,” “LA to London,” “Rockstarz”—feature Gab3, formerly of the duo Uzi (whose Eiffel 65-flipping, rave-inflected raps are highlights of the SoundCloud rap era), maybe better known as the lo-fi cameraman behind Kanye’s “Famous” video. These songs, apparently intended for a “summer EP,” are considerably brighter than most of Peep’s work, more pop-punk than emo thanks to upbeat guitars and Gab3’s nasally flow.
The weakest song is unsurprisingly the oldest: “Keep My Coo,” posted to SoundCloud in 2014 but deleted at some point after. It’s one of Peep’s few straight-up rap songs, with bars about blowing gas and playing Madden, more indistinct than bad. Peep’s monotone ad-libs sound so clearly influenced by BONES, whose hazy, haunting raps were all the rage online around the time “Keep My Coo” would have been recorded. It is the work of a kid still determining his creative identity, and the best part of EVERYBODY’S EVERYTHING is how it shows him figuring himself out through his work with others.
Most essentially, this album writes a key collaborator back into Peep’s narrative: Lil Tracy, his self-described “twin” and a vocal critic of the appropriation of his legacy. The album concludes with four of their most iconic duets: “white tee,” “cobain,” “witchblades,” and an unreleased acoustic version of “walk away as the door slams.” Their songs together belong as much to Tracy as they do to Peep; on “witchblades,” Tracy sets up the shot—“Cocaine, all night long/When I die bury me with all my ice on”—and Peep brings it all the way home—“When I die bury me with all my ice on/When I die bury me with all the lights on.” There’s a deep feeling of brotherly love in the agony they share together in song, two spirits brought together by shared illnesses and anguish.
Tracy and Peep recorded “white tee” on the first day they met, back when Tracy went by Yung Bruh. That “Such Great Heights” flip is maybe the most obvious sample in Peep’s catalogue, but there’s something in the Postal Service’s practice of recording Give Up—Jimmy Tamborello and Ben Gibbard sending demos back and forth through the mail—that speaks to Peep’s life and legacy. A boy in Long Island becoming a star by retreating into his bedroom, linking with like-minded artists in Seattle and California on Soundcloud, his most devoted fanbase in countries he’d never dreamed of going to, his spirit given life again online by his loved ones and acolytes. | 2019-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Columbia | November 22, 2019 | 7.4 | 8ce7aded-e694-4ae5-b344-6edca15723ab | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
On their second album this year, the hardworking Southern rockers pair The Unraveling outtakes with songs written during lockdown, taking advantage of the record’s looseness to show off their range. | On their second album this year, the hardworking Southern rockers pair The Unraveling outtakes with songs written during lockdown, taking advantage of the record’s looseness to show off their range. | Drive-By Truckers: The New OK | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/drive-by-truckers-the-new-ok/ | The New OK | The stage, rather than the studio, is the Drive-By Truckers’ natural habitat, and the place where they leave their deepest mark. Working without a setlist and drawing from an inexhaustible catalog that goes back more than 30 years, they tear through songs about the South, about America, about resistance and rebellion, very few of which sound settled or pat. After the global pandemic shut down the tour behind their first 2020 album, The Unraveling, the band spent the rest of the year hunkered down in their homes like the rest of us, missing the catharsis of the rock show as well as the financial security of touring. For months Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley alternated Wednesday-night livestreams, which allowed them to dig into their trove of songs and recount old war stories. It made for compelling streaming, but it wasn’t quite the same.
Their new pandemic record, the surprise-released The New OK, is a direct product of this frustrating predicament. In addition to songs they recorded in Memphis during the Unraveling sessions, it includes two new songs written by Hood during lockdown and recorded by the band members at studios near their homes. The result is a patchwork quilt of an album, stitched together from scraps gathered here and there—but then, those quilts are often the warmest, the most comforting. In fact, for a band that typically grounds its albums in a sturdy conceptual or thematic framework, the Truckers have always done well with a certain amount of raggedness and sprawl. Over their nearly 25 years together under that admittedly “bad” band name, they’ve mastered a wider array of styles and sounds than the “Southern rock” label might suggest, and The New OK is a chance to show off more sides of themselves, from the R&B horns of those Memphis sessions to the old-school punk of their Ramones cover to the more post-punk sound of Hood’s newly penned songs.
Having lived through traumatic upheavals throughout the 2000s, the Truckers evolved into a tight, adaptable quintet in the 2010s—a decade that saw them pivot from Southern band to American Band, from “the duality of the Southern thing” to the duality of the American thing. This current lineup is the most stable in the band’s history and arguably the best, despite lacking a third songwriting talent like Jason Isbell or a vocal powerhouse like Shonna Tucker. The New OK showcases the contributions of every member of the band: Multi-instrumentalist Jay Gonzalez adds a lush organ intro to “Tough to Let Go” that recalls Automatic for the People, and drummer Brad Morgan puts some stealthy funk into the breezily poignant “Sea Island Lonely.” Bassist Matt Patton even sings lead on two songs, hollering his head off on “The Unraveling” and unspooling a tragic conspiracy on “The K.K.K. Took My Baby Away.”
Cooley takes only one song on The New OK—the least he’s contributed to a Truckers album since their 1998 debut. But there are few artists who would care to write a country song about Sarah Palin’s legacy of batshit politics and fewer still who could make you want to hear “Sarah’s Flame” more than once. He’s more of a sideman on these songs, but he remains an ingenious guitar player, mixing bluegrass runs with punk rawness to approximate classic rock cockiness. Hood, always the more prolific of the two, doesn’t address the pandemic explicitly, but allows it to add poignancy to “Sea Island Lonely” and “The Distance,” two songs about the emotional drift of touring.
Five years ago, Hood and his family left Athens for the Pacific Northwest, about as far from Georgia as they could get without leaving the continental United States. Their new hometown of Portland, Oregon, as well as its recent experiments in self-governance and dissent, inspired “Watching the Orange Clouds,” about his fatherly fears while watching unrest in his city and wildfires just beyond. “I'm trying really hard to find a way to help to make it all better,” he sings on the chorus, a promise to his kids asleep in the next room but also to listeners who’ve come to expect political engagement from the band. This isn’t a song about outrage but about the frustration of not knowing what to do or how to act, which makes Gonzalez’s synth squelches on the coda sound like a paranoid ’70s thriller, bending the song into a question mark.
In a bold bit of sequencing, The New OK ends with their version of the Ramones’ “The K.K.K. Took My Baby Away,” which has been a live staple for a few years now and was a last-minute addition to their Memphis sessions. Theirs is a fairly straightforward rendition of a song whose timeliness is self-evident, heavier than the original while losing some of the girl-group harmonies. It’s an odd, weirdly poignant, righteously angry exclamation point at the end of the album, as though the Truckers are psyching themselves up for an epic ass-whuppin’. Especially after the unrelenting darkness of its predecessor, The New OK sounds all the more affecting for not being quite so dire. Rather than bemoan the new normal we’ve all been forced to accept, the Truckers celebrate our adaptability and our fortitude, subtly promising there will be better days and more rock shows ahead.
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. | 2020-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-12-21T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | ATO | December 21, 2020 | 7.3 | 8cec61ac-8e5d-4be5-9784-ec086f4ecbf7 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Known for elaborate handmade instruments and stage costumes, the veteran Congolese eco-punks commit their frenetic, highly collaborative sound to record for the first time. | Known for elaborate handmade instruments and stage costumes, the veteran Congolese eco-punks commit their frenetic, highly collaborative sound to record for the first time. | Fulu Miziki: Ngbaka EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fulu-miziki-ngbaka/ | Ngbaka EP | Founded in 2003 by Piscko Crane, the “eco-friendly, Afro-futuristic” Congolese punk collective Fulu Miziki have amassed an international following for their industrious take on the region’s “rumba”—guitar-driven big-band music inspired by Afro-Cuban sounds. In response to a waste-management crisis in the country’s capital, Kinshasa, the group crafts their own instruments and full-body stage garb out of discarded junk—hence their name, which roughly translates from Lingala as “music from the garbage.”
Until now, the band has been content to focus on their futuristic onstage pageantry, but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought them into the studio for the first time. While their debut EP, Ngbaka, is first and foremost a party record, it’s tinged with an undercurrent of urgency, imploring the listener to shake their ass in one breath and proclaiming “the end of the world” in the next. The juxtaposition reflects the crossroads at which Fulu Miziki operates: rooted in the celebratory rumba music of their hometown but influenced by the experimental, EDM-inspired Nyege Nyege scene thriving in Uganda, where the band moved in late 2019.
The foreboding atmosphere of tracks like “Lokito,” which teems with rusty, mechanical snarls, is the product of Fulu Miziki’s recent embrace of electronic production. Isolating and refining samples of each jerry-can drum or repurposed PVC pipe enhances the plasticity of their already-plastic instruments. The process recalls the upcycled sound design on Matmos’ Plastic Anniversary, though Fulu Miziki is more interested in rhythmic ingenuity than in manipulating their sources to create unearthly timbres.
Opting for electronic arrangements highlights the complexity of the band’s work, especially on Ngbaka’s instrumental cuts. “Mokili Makambo” plays like a one-to-one recreation of a Fulu Miziki live jam, but the clean mix allows for more room between moving parts. Twangy guembri—a traditional three-stringed bass guitar, which Fulu Miziki fashion out of computer casing—pinballs between a gauntlet of competing percussion before giving way to a stuttering brass melody. Tension builds as more drums shuffle into the fray. By the song’s conclusion, each measure is so densely packed that it blurs into a delirious reverie.
Without an audience’s energy to feed off, Ngbaka’s more vocal-driven songs aren’t always as engaging as they are onstage, where band members volley call-and-response verses. In the studio, Fulu Mizki’s isolated vocal takes can’t quite capture the hypnotic effect of those rich, serpentine rounds. “Toko Yambana,” which draws imagery from apocalyptic flood mythos, is skeletal to a fault, decorating a frugal four-on-the-floor kick with a fluttering tom loop and nebulous synth pads.
“Bivada,” Fulu Miziki’s ode to the laborers who keep the markets of Kinshasa running, overcomes studio limitations by toying with as many vocal effects as possible. Arpeggiated synths knot together as echoing chants emerge from all angles within the stereo field, Auto-Tuned choruses flickering wildly. It’s here that Fulu Miziki look furthest into the future, while still holding firm to their frenetic, highly collaborative sound. They’ve spent nearly two decades molding trash in their own image; Ngbaka extends their sculptures to a new medium. Though digitally processed and precisely arranged, their reanimation of the immaterial sounds as ramshackle and scrappy as ever. | 2022-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-02-18T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Moshi Moshi | February 18, 2022 | 7.2 | 8ceecb42-b172-4ca9-9c40-0684fbb9d69e | Jude Noel | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jude-noel/ | |
On his third release in less than six months, the New York rapper is at his sharpest, offering a nostalgic but refreshed taste of the city’s so-called Rotten Apple rap era. | On his third release in less than six months, the New York rapper is at his sharpest, offering a nostalgic but refreshed taste of the city’s so-called Rotten Apple rap era. | Dave East: Paranoia 2 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dave-east-paranoia-2/ | Paranoia 2 | Dave East doesn’t rap as though he’s still in the streets but like he’s eternally haunted by the experiences and playing them back in his mind. He can recall every detail of every dirty deed; every mood and regret just burned in his brain. Though the Harlem rapper has never been short on ways to translate these sentiments on wax, with Paranoia 2—his third release in less than six months—he’s much closer to the ideal formula of beats and writing that makes his music that much more effective.
Building on the themes of the first Paranoia, feelings of suspicion and preoccupations with mortality topped with introspection (and, of course, women and money) are sustained throughout. However, relies less on skits to create scenes, and the production has the vibrancy of live instrumentation that elevates it well above its predecessor. “Powder,” for example, features a horn and drums that inject lushness into the song; the Illmind-produced “Thank You” is driven by buoyant piano chords that East adapts well. Contemplative album closer “Grateful,” which is lifted by a beautiful assist from Marsha Ambrosius, is a heavenly juxtaposition of sacred and profane.
In the way of his label-head and mentor Nas, East has come to be known for his striking storytelling, but he has an identity all his own. His visceral lyrics play out over, sometimes, 20- and 30-bar verses, as he works out his immorality with the benefit of hindsight. “Is dying worth everything you done lived for?” he questions on the hook of the reflective “Prosper.” Probably not since the very next song, “Woke Up,” is a bravado-laced track featuring Tory Lanez in full Swae Lee-falsetto. It’s shallow on its surface as East basks in the financial success he’s found—he deserves a victory lap or two, after all—but even when he’s boasting, he’s anchored by the fact he’s “just a nigga like you.” No matter how it’s cut, P2 makes it clear he knows the outcome he has is better than one he was facing.
Even with bangers in tow (“Annoying” features a particularly swaggerful T.I.), the crowd favorites, will no doubt be the two tracks which feature his strongest asset. On “Corey,” he builds out a lucid narrative centered on a friend from whom he's grown apart due to their divergent lifestyles—East trying to chase his dreams while Corey remains largely stagnant. But in all its specificity, the theme is universal. It highlights how, when priorities shift, pride and envy can drive wedges between even the tightest relationships, and while East doesn't necessarily treat his subject with the most empathy, the song is arrestingly detailed. Later, “I Found Keisha” follows up the single “Keisha” from 2016’s breakout mixtape Kairi Chanel. The latter was a cinematic account of a woman who robs him after he passes out following a drunken hookup. In the sequel, he introduces Tim and his cousin James who become the primary tools in this revenge plot: Tim as the initial target and James who carries out the work. The beat is menacing and builds suspense as East plants a movie in the mind.
Across P2, it feels like listeners are granted entry into the mind of Dave East. He doesn’t vary his flows as much as he could—it almost comes off like he’s numb which bares its own implications—but the production and emotional weight of his lyrics push the EP forward, and the grittiness in his voice adds immediacy. The style of New York street rap he represents, full of vivid imagery, hasn’t had a prominent stage in popular music of late. He offers a nostalgic but refreshed taste of the city’s so-called Rotten Apple rap era at a time when bonafide tales from the hood come watered down by syrupy melodies. East has only released mixtapes and EPs to this point—14 over eight years—and P2 shows a man who is patient and relentless in honing his craft, getting closer to the debut with each track. | 2018-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2018-01-22T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rap | Def Jam | January 22, 2018 | 7.4 | 8cf33b66-40c5-4228-bae4-fcf08a693c95 | Briana Younger | https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/ | |
Oasis were terrible at being The Biggest Band in the World, but as this 20th anniversary reissue of their first album—a three-disc collection packed with demos and live performances—makes sparklingly clear, they were amazing at wanting to be The Biggest Band in the World. | Oasis were terrible at being The Biggest Band in the World, but as this 20th anniversary reissue of their first album—a three-disc collection packed with demos and live performances—makes sparklingly clear, they were amazing at wanting to be The Biggest Band in the World. | Oasis: Definitely Maybe: Chasing the Sun Edition | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19258-oasis-definitely-maybe-reissue/ | Definitely Maybe: Chasing the Sun Edition | "I don’t want [to] get too big," said Noel Gallagher back in 1994, squinting into the crystal ball a couple of months before the release of Oasis' debut album, Definitely Maybe. "I'd love to do Wembley Stadium, but where do you go after that?" At the time, the guitarist and songwriter was talking to a fanzine and getting ready to play the lame, 400-capacity East Wing venue in Brighton, England. So not only was Noel looking forward to playing the UK's most storied venue—which was more than 200 times bigger than the East Wing—he was basically already over the fantasy. "I didn’t think we’d get to this stage here for another two years, and in a way it’s fuckin' pissed me off," he continued, talking about the tumbling hype that had followed their first single, "Supersonic", which debuted on the UK charts at #31 earlier that year. "We were going to be this maverick outcast band from Manchester…we were going to shove it up them for two years and then we’d split up."
Oasis did eventually sell-out Wembley three times over at the end of 1997, but by then they were already mired in bloated obsolescence—and they did split up, but only after about 15 years of spinning their wheels. Noel knew his grandest rock'n'roll dreams could lead to trouble, even when they were still merely outsized ambitions in '94. All of those dreams—the platinum plaques, the American crossover, the record-breaking festivals—came true in spectacular fashion over the course of the next three years, and then Oasis really did have no idea where to go. They were terrible at being The Biggest Band in the World, but as this 20th anniversary reissue of their first album makes sparklingly clear, they were amazing at wanting to be The Biggest Band in the World.
Definitely Maybe was made by five losers from the dreary Manchester suburb of Burnage, a locale Noel has described as "a little shitty town where fuck-all happens—it’s one pub and a chippie and a bookie and that’s it." They were second-generation Irish working-class roustabouts who used their government assistance money to buy smokes, drugs, and pints on the weekend before heading back to their dead-end jobs. As Alex Niven writes in his well-rounded new 33 ⅓ book on Definitely Maybe, the boys in Oasis were emblematic of the socio-economic demoralization brought on by England's every-man-for-himself Conservative policies of the 1980s and early '90s. As Noel once said, "Where I come from, people didn't become rock stars. That happened to other people."
But Oasis were also a signpost of hope for an emerging new version of England that was finally mobilizing after being beaten down by the Thatcher years. Against this backdrop, the Gallagher brothers and company emerged: All the anger and nihilism of a go-nowhere existence channeled through Noel's blaring guitar tones and brash, drugged-up lyrics, along with Liam's attack-dog snarl. Definitely Maybe is the sound of people who feel like they need to scream to be heard—and even then, the chances of anyone actually listening seems depressingly unlikely.
And yet, not wholly impossible. The album's first lines are: "Live my life in the city, there's no easy way out." Pretty bleak. But that song is called "Rock 'N' Roll Star", and it's about the possibility of escape via substances, or standing on a stage in front of a dozen people (as Oasis did many times in the early years), or your own head. "In my mind my dreams are real," sings Liam, and who can argue with that? Dreams play a big role on Definitely Maybe and its accompanying B-sides—all of which are collected in this three-disc re-release, along with many live performances and demos from the period—though they often read as both wistful and demanding, owing to the one-in-a-billion ying-yang chemistry between Noel's words and Liam's delivery. On paper, Noel's lyrics often read as bittersweet; then 27, he was beginning to look at his youth as a lost era. But placed in 22-year-old Liam's mouth, "Rock 'N' Roll Star" transforms from a flight of fancy into something like an inevitability. Yes: This man sounds like Lennon and Lydon's sneering son. Yes: He will stop at nothing until these wanting words become physical fact. Yes: Here is your rock 'n' roll star, because there isn't anything else for him to be.
The contentiousness between the brothers fueled Oasis' best moments, and, early on at least, both seemed to understand the situation—even if they couldn't stand each other. Referring to Noel in an interview from '94, Liam said, in no uncertain terms: "That's why we'll be the best band in the world—because I fuckin' hate that twat there." Like vintage Oasis itself, Liam embodied just enough classic rock, just enough punk, and just enough "I'll spit in your fucking eye" to make his unfiltered id stick. Usually, this type of rock persona is associated with more combustible or aggressive music, but Noel tempered the abrasiveness with a trace of melancholy or a fuzzed-up bubblegum melody, as on career highs like "Live Forever" and "Slide Away". Then, now, and forever, Liam is the Definitely and Noel is the Maybe.
I couldn't express any of this when I first saw Liam's strobed face on MTV in the "Live Forever" video as a 13-year-old middle-class kid from Long Island, but I got my mom to drive me to Nobody Beats the Wiz to buy the CD all the same. At that time, I thought Axl Rose was an insane genius and Kurt Cobain—who died six days after the release of "Supersonic"—was an inscrutable weirdo. And in America, Oasis were practically an underground band; they were amazingly cool, and I felt cooler for liking them. They were blatantly inspired by all of the canonical rock bands I knew, but they possessed the feeling of now. Their version of infinity guitars and attitude made me feel invincible, the same sensation I got a few years later while getting into hip-hop—another working-class-bred artform known to utilize the past, via sampling and respun rhymes, to accentuate the present. ("Never be afraid of the obvious," Noel once said, "because it's all been done before.") Oasis started from the very bottom and, from that very first note, it was obvious where they were going next.
But just as Oasis' undesirable upbringing incited them to lash out through feedback and distortion, you could argue that it stunted their continued artistic existence. Middle-class art-schooler Damon Albarn may have lost the popular vote during Blur's notorious mid-90s battle with Oasis, but with partial thanks to a relatively comfortable adolescence and education, he's clearly won the war, remaining relevant and inquisitive to this day. Oasis' woeful decline, meanwhile, makes a specific line from "Shakermaker" sound a bit heartbreaking in hindsight: "I'd like to be somebody else and not know where I've been." Eventually, the Gallaghers turned into the same rich dicks they were trying to usurp on Definitely Maybe—a sad vengeance. But on the way up, they marked millions. Maybe that should be enough. | 2014-05-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2014-05-22T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Big Brother | May 22, 2014 | 8.8 | 8cf7632a-e6f8-4c3d-98d0-33746ebca591 | Ryan Dombal | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/ | null |
The exceptional solo debut from the Alabama Shakes singer-songwriter is a thrilling opus that pushes the boundaries of voice, sound, and soul to new extremes. | The exceptional solo debut from the Alabama Shakes singer-songwriter is a thrilling opus that pushes the boundaries of voice, sound, and soul to new extremes. | Brittany Howard: Jaime | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/brittany-howard-jaime/ | Jaime | Brittany Howard tends to get a little restless when things get too comfortable. Just when she and her band Alabama Shakes were branded as innocuous roots-rock revivalists after their 2012 debut, Boys & Girls, she started pushing their retro-soul sound to its outer reaches and beyond. Sound & Color, from 2015, sprawled out into blues and funk and psychedelia, and won three Grammys doing it. Amid the Shakes’ growing popularity, Howard deviated from the course. In 2018, emotionally spent, she called a meeting of her Shakes bandmates to announce that she’d be stepping away for a bit after a spell of writer’s block; she didn’t know what she’d be doing next, but she’d be doing it on her own. In retreating from Alabama Shakes, Brittany Howard found herself on a voyage of self-discovery.
From that process comes her solo debut, Jaime, which is full of that same restless energy. Unlike her work with her bands—including the amped-up rock group Thunderbitch and the alt-country outfit Bermuda Triangle—it speaks solely to the life she’s led, the love and hatred she’s faced, and the way they’ve shaped her worldview. Jaime is a daring turn in just about every way imaginable: bolder, freakier, riskier, more experimental, not just deeply personal but cuttingly political, sometimes quietly tender, sometimes brutally direct. Working in a greenhouse in Topanga Canyon, she mined her complicated personal history, first writing out a memoir of her life up until the founding of Alabama Shakes, then transposing it to songwriting. Howard has said that she needed to be in full control to make this record, and it’s easy to see why: It is the kind of soul-baring opus that first requires soul-searching.
The album is named after Howard’s sister, who died at 13 after being diagnosed with a rare form of eye cancer. It was Jaime who first taught Brittany to write a song, and now she’s writing her most unyielding and vulnerable ones, songs about coming to terms with personal identity, guarded secrets, spiritual and social and sexual awakenings, deep-rooted family traumas. Though Howard feels united with her sister’s spirit, the album isn’t about Jaime. Instead, it is a boundless study of inner character, someone so used to speaking for others—the Shakes as a unit, the struggling masses on songs like “Hold On”—finally taking the opportunity to speak for herself.
Jaime is the sound of Howard coming up for air, getting to know herself better, coming to terms with her place in the world, and then proudly standing in that truth. The songs may be rooted in the same vintage soul that powers Alabama Shakes, but they reach for greater heights and greater depths: convention-defying funkadelia, throwback rap breakbeats, streaking synth-rock, the tense jazz behind D’Angelo’s Black Messiah, the eclectic vocal power of Prince. As Howard breaks all the rules, some songs super busy, others bare, she finds her way home.
The mastery of Jaime is balancing the beauty of Southern identity and culture with what Howard has referred to as “all the ugly things about the past,” both personally and historically. Howard is a queer, mixed-race woman, born to a black father and white mother in the same city as the founder of neo-Nazi message board Stormfront and a former Grand Wizard in the Klan. It’d be easiest to condemn the place itself outright, but it’s still her home. The saying goes: “Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it,” and on “History Repeats,” she echoes that sentiment: “We defeat ourselves.” In studying her own past, she finds reasons to keep fighting for change.
“I am dedicated to oppose those whose will is to divide us and who are determined to keep us in the dark ages of fear,” Howard chants on “13th Century Metal,” amid a cacophonous, white-knuckle, one-take jam session. The song is full of positive affirmations, and though she reveals herself to be as weary as the rest of us, she won’t stop: “I don’t know about you/But I’m tired of this bullshit/And I wanna try/To do the best that I can.” Amid the noise and chaos, Howard shows that love can be the most radical tool of resistance.
Even the love songs on Jaime feel like powerful political acts; not just because they revolve around queer love, but because it feels defiant to choose to love and be loved when you’re surrounded by hate. The sweetly skittish “Georgia,” sung with a flushed breathlessness, is written from the perspective of a young girl with a harmless crush on an older girl. The bluesy “Stay High” is about wanting to live in a single moment with a lover forever; the minimalist “Short and Sweet” is about knowing that time is finite, and savoring it. On the former, she lets her voice drift weightlessly skyward; on the latter, her words flit between acoustic strums, like the wick of a candle in an evening breeze. The only thing centering this album is Howard’s remarkable voice, a miraculous instrument of subtlety and power.
Howard uses this versatility to ask: Why is all this hate and bigotry still happening? The fidgety piano-masher “Goat Head” poses rhetorical questions about a hate crime committed against her father when she was a baby. The story, later recounted to Howard by her mother, lifted the veil on a childhood filled with racism. The song is an unflinching vignette illustrating life as a mixed family among an unforgiving community. “My mama was brave/To take me outside/’Cause mama is white/And daddy is black/When I first got made/Guess I made these folks mad,” she howls. Many of those “folks” that were mad then are still mad today, and “Tomorrow” wonders aloud what must happen to enact change now: “We always talk about tomorrow/But now that we’re here/Without lifting a finger/How do you feel?” Her writing is always collected, naked in the way it presents the truth.
Howard wrote and composed all of the music on Jaime, which manages to sound both far-reaching and solitary. She played all the assorted, mesmerizing guitar parts, and enlisted Shakes bassist Zac Cockrell, jazz pianist extraordinaire Robert Glasper, keyboardist Dan Horton, and drummer Nate Smith to play sessions with her. With these highly capable ringers driving the arrangements, Howard pushes the boundaries of sound and space in search of fulfillment and decency. In a world that requires so much fixing, the music works effortlessly. Armed with a deeper understanding of self, Jaime becomes her gospel of empathy. “I promise…to be wary of who I give my energy to. Because it is needed for a greater cause,” she vows on “13th Century Metal.” “And that cause is to spread the enlightenment of love, compassion, and humanity to those who are not touched by its light.”
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-20T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | ATO | September 20, 2019 | 8.6 | 8cf87109-b947-4fe0-a7c4-682c405c5bd3 | Sheldon Pearce | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/ | |
The mystical grandeur of Golden Hour creates a magnetic effect as Kacey Musgraves sings simply about the world as if she’s the first person to notice, and you’re the first one she’s telling. | The mystical grandeur of Golden Hour creates a magnetic effect as Kacey Musgraves sings simply about the world as if she’s the first person to notice, and you’re the first one she’s telling. | Kacey Musgraves: Golden Hour | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kacey-musgraves-golden-hour/ | Golden Hour | Kacey Musgraves’ third album goes down so smoothly that it might not even scan as a total reinvention. Throughout the songs on Golden Hour, the East Texas singer-songwriter is radiant, awestruck, taking the scenic route to the bar just for the hell of it. After Musgraves’ previous two albums, which felt like they were cut from the same home-sewn flannel cloth, she now ventures beyond the front-porch hum of country music. The new Kacey Musgraves needs strings, vocoders, disco beats. And if this sounds like a left turn for the lovable cynic who once characterized the world as an absurd beauty contest, a vicious cycle, a bad party, and a toxic boys’ club, well, that’s kinda the point.
Since her last proper album, 2015’s Pageant Material, the now 29-year-old singer-songwriter has changed her perspective. There was a spirited Christmas record, a creatively charged acid trip, and a rustic country wedding. It’s like Musgraves’ life was given the season-finale treatment: a series of climactic turns that left her standing misty-eyed on a cliffside, bellowing “I get it!” at the sunrise. She’s updated her music accordingly. On Golden Hour, everything sprawls and swells and gushes, a gaping sky that makes the sonic landscapes of her previous albums feel like mere set dressing. For these songs of hope and wonder, she nods to meticulous folk epics like Beck’s Sea Change, or Sufjan Stevens’ Seven Swans if it was re-cut for an IMAX screen. She’s settled on enlightenment as a new resting state.
The result is Musgraves’ most accessible record and her most ambitious, a magnetic, comfortable culmination of her pop and country instincts. While dynamic enough to house both the stirring, alone-at-the-piano fragment “Mother” and a full-on country-disco kiss-off in “High Horse,” Golden Hour is alluringly cohesive, both lyrically and musically. In “Wonder Woman,” she confronts a partner’s unrealistic expectations and gives a simple counter: “All I need’s a place to land.” Throughout these songs, she finds one.
Despite the grandeur of its music, Golden Hour offers Musgraves’ most understated songwriting, a refreshing evolution as stars like Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga accidentally turn Americana-pop into grim satire. In the stunning single “Space Cowboy,” she weaves in at least a dozen genre tropes without drawing any attention to them. Instead, you’re left dazzled by the way her bold, drawling voice can cut through simple ideas—“Sunsets fade/And love does too”—like she’s the first person to notice, and you’re the first one she’s telling.
Sometimes, that familiarity belies the complexity of these songs. Tracks like “Love Is a Wild Thing” and “Oh, What a World” swirl around the positive messages in their titles in a state of euphoria. Musgraves includes precious few of the subtle details that made her 2013 breakthrough, Same Trailer Different Park, feel so instantly familiar. On a previous record, she might have provided a tour of the neighborhood that landlocks the star-crossed home-bodies in “Lonely Weekend,” or cracked a stoner joke about the “plants that grow and open your mind” in “Oh, What a World.” In the places where you’d expect Musgraves to land her punches, she sometimes offers just a wistful sigh.
But if the tension in her earlier work came from her sharp observations and underdog spirit, there’s something more complicated at play here. “Is there a word for the way that I’m feeling tonight,” she asks in “Happy & Sad,” attempting to pinpoint the creeping melancholy undercutting an otherwise blissful evening. Golden Hour is an album-length ode to not having the right words, to being overcome by the moment and surrendering to it.
Musgraves’ songwriting melts seamlessly between celebration—in heart-eyed-emoji anthems like “Butterflies” and “Velvet Elvis”—and elegies for when those feelings start to dim. The cinematic arrangements rarely distinguish between those two modes, coating the album in a pristine, sepia glow that makes tales of solitude like “Lonely Weekend” seem downright inviting. There’s a subtle awareness throughout these songs of what happens as soon as the golden hour ends, how quickly that burst of light can fade without a trace. In the title track, Musgraves compares her contentment to a temporary trick of the light: “All that I know,” she admits, “Is you caught me at the right time.”
Less concerned with outside forces than internal balance, Golden Hour stands as an assured, artful snapshot of a particular rush of feelings, but its wisdom speaks volumes to Musgraves’ ongoing evolution. “If you’re ever gonna find a silver lining,” she sang in the first track on her major label debut, “It’s gotta be a cloudy day.” Even then, she suspected that ecstasy is most rewarding when it’s hard-won. On Golden Hour, she wears the sunlight well. | 2018-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | MCA Nashville | April 2, 2018 | 8.7 | 8cf9ca70-440b-4ba5-b805-46f3b05d5337 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Nicole Dollanganger is the first artist signed to Grimes' label. Her full LP Natural Born Losers fills out the wispy lo-fi feel of her demos, matching the darkness of her lyrics with equally creepy instrumentation. | Nicole Dollanganger is the first artist signed to Grimes' label. Her full LP Natural Born Losers fills out the wispy lo-fi feel of her demos, matching the darkness of her lyrics with equally creepy instrumentation. | Nicole Dollanganger: Natural Born Losers | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21079-nicole-dollanganger-natural-born-losers/ | Natural Born Losers | "I’d give my body to Satan if I could only keep my soul," Nicole Dollanganger sings in a whispery, desperate voice on "Angels of Porn (II)", a song about how the singer seems to have been trapped in a food and cum-stained dungeon for days. "But I can’t seem to find the split between them anymore." This is the sort of subject matter that made her music popular among her Tumblr followers in the first place, long before Grimes made her the first artist on her new label. And no matter how chipper her plucky bedroom folk sounded on the surface on previous records like Flowers of Flesh and Blood and Curdled Milk, she was still singing lyrics like, "Why didn’t anyone tell me love is like being fucked with a knife?"
Over nimble electric guitar and booming kick drum, her new album Natural Born Losers tells tales of murdering angels, "fucking the soul of the south," and telling your lover he’s going to get fried in jail for his crimes. Like any recording that moves from lo-fi demos to sleeker production, Natural Born Losers fills out Dollanganger’s music, matching the darkness of her lyrics with equally creepy instrumentals, replacing soft piano and ukulele with thundering electric guitar and murmuring organs. And while the music’s simplicity might ring dull for some, it places what matters most with Dollanganger’s music front and center: her songwriting and her voice.
Dollanganger's fascination with desolate Americana imagery recalls other similarly moody, bleak pop singers: think Melanie Martinez’ broken-housewife routine, Halsey’s tortured teen road-trip anthems, and Lana Del Rey’s dark, star-spangled camp. But those singers’ stories still feel romantic, while Dollanganger's music is only inviting in the way the cute, white Victorian house from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was at first glance. "I’ll be your sister, your young bride, your angel, your slave," she sings to her vinyl glove-clad, cop lover in a whisper on "Mean". She sings of drinking the titular liquid and getting chained up in bed on the fuzzy "Alligator Blood" and she’s bleeding to death during knife play on the pretty, minimalist guitar ballad "American Tradition" but "it doesn’t matter, 'cause my baby is still the winner." Her angelic, high-pitched voice coats every utterance in innocence, a façade considering how much this album loves giving and taking pain.
Her elemental lyrics help elevate her record above kinky bad-girl tropes: With every act of violence inflicted on Dollanganger, she reveals how corrupted she can be as well, proving she’s just as a strong and sadistic of a hunter. She never really lets any of the dark sentiments exist in a vacuum, which is important considering the violence she mines for aesthetic and emotional affect. Dead bodies get fed to the Earth’s starving animals, animals get fed to starving humans; she sees a father’s violence in his son’s eyes and sings that "history repeats our whole damn lives."
Her portrait of tortured sexuality and death is tethered to an ambiguous portrait of backwoods living, a North American wilderness where anything and anyone can be hunted. Natural Born Losers plays like a work of wicked anti-pastoralism from the perspective of a bad girl who stares out at her rustic life with not wide-eyed romanticism but sad familiarity and resignation. "This same place is getting old but dreams are fulfilled where the purple grass grows," Dollanganger sings on "White Trashing". "And I can see it all just beyond our window." | 2015-10-05T02:00:03.000-04:00 | 2015-10-05T02:00:03.000-04:00 | Rock | Eerie Organization | October 5, 2015 | 6.6 | 8d01790f-0357-4c15-8fb0-35fa4482fda5 | Hazel Cills | https://pitchfork.com/staff/hazel-cills/ | null |
The latest from Swedish indie-pop stalwarts the Radio Dept. is the sound of a band rejecting indie-darling complacency for riskier, more mature territory, and the gamble pays off. | The latest from Swedish indie-pop stalwarts the Radio Dept. is the sound of a band rejecting indie-darling complacency for riskier, more mature territory, and the gamble pays off. | The Radio Dept.: Running Out of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22551-running-out-of-love/ | Running Out of Love | Since their acclaimed debut, 2003’s Lesser Matters, Sweden’s the Radio Dept. have been known for their defiantly lo-fi brand of dream-pop, favoring scratchy, ear-numbing guitars and tinny Casio beats over the lusher sounds of their peers. This became a calling card, something that set them apart. Apart from a career-spanning compilation (2011’s essential Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010) and a smattering of single releases last year, Running Out of Love is the Radio Dept.’s first album of new material since 2010’s stellar Clinging to a Scheme, and while many would have been perfectly content with a total carbon copy of their greatest achievements, what makes this record so refreshing is its unabashed ambition, the sound of a band rejecting indie-darling complacency for riskier, more mature territory. And the gamble more than pays off.
The band meant it as a protest record, a bold statement, a document of their fear of an ever-encroaching dystopia. “Sloboda Narodu,” the record’s opener, means “Freedom to the People” in Serbo-Croatian, a reference to a populist slogan coined during the Yuglosav anti-Axis resistance of World War II. Far from your typical twee fare of doe-eyed romance and bedroom dancing, “Sloboda Narodu” sets the stage for a full-blown political manifesto. “Don’t ask for patience/’Cause we just don't have the time/Freedom now,” sings frontman Johan Duncansson, his vocals as blissed-out and buried in the mix as ever. Musically, the track takes its cue from that sweet spot in ’90s Britpop that itself was aping ’60s psychedelia, with fuzzy guitars climbing over bongos.
However from there, Running Out of Love hopscotches from genre to genre at breakneck speed. “Swedish Guns” (a meditation on Sweden’s little-known international arms industry) has the woozy dancefloor tilt of early Saint Etienne, while “We Got Game” (addressing police brutality) sounds like a backmasked, distorted version of Inner City’s Detroit house anthem “Good Life.” This is far from the first time the band have dallied with electronic music, but unlike, for example, their synth-heavy second album Pet Grief, this feels more like a marriage than a one-off; it’s as if Belle and Sebastian had decided to write an entire album of their polarizing 1996 song “Electronic Renaissance.” “Committed to the Cause” sounds like Happy Mondays by way of Prefab Sprout’s dandy sophistication, and the six-minute-long “Teach Me to Forget” even flirts with EDM, a broke-down version of a Top 40 banger. The multiple twists and turns here gradually unlock a completely new world orbiting their already adored universe, a daring feat for a beloved cult band. It might take a little longer for it to sink in with fans, but given enough time, the album portrays them in a completely new light, both politically and musically adventurous. | 2016-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-10-28T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Labrador | October 28, 2016 | 7.6 | 8d027c2d-371e-4ff5-8a58-ec3858529b2d | Cameron Cook | https://pitchfork.com/staff/cameron-cook/ | null |
Translating alt-rock into pristine pop, the L.A. trio’s second album documents sex, drugs, and suicidal tendencies with less melodrama and more compassion. | Translating alt-rock into pristine pop, the L.A. trio’s second album documents sex, drugs, and suicidal tendencies with less melodrama and more compassion. | MUNA: Saves the World | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/muna-saves-the-world/ | Saves the World | We listen to pop music because we see our reflection in it, and so we’ve welcomed in more non-heteronormative figures to reflect our realities. L.A. trio MUNA were ahead of pop’s greater recent queering—a space occupied by King Princess, Clairo, and Kim Petras, to name a few. The ’80s-style synths and dark narratives of their early songs prompted the press to label them the “gay HAIM,” a disservice to both acts. Besides, MUNA emerged as punks—producing their own 2017 debut About U, presenting as sexually fluid, and educating on gender pronouns. Yet they’ve hidden in plain sight; the defiant melodies and corresponding political rhetoric of “Loudspeaker” or “I Know a Place” echo in Maggie Rogers’ air-punch moments and the 1975’s slogan campaigns. In 2017, the group toured with Harry Styles. They are major-signed but remain on the mainstream’s fringes.
With their second album, Saves the World, they don’t bask in being on the right side of history. Instead they put themselves on trial, dissecting their own frailties before addressing those of their enemies. “Saving yourself is the key to saving the world,” they say, explaining the spunky title. You can’t function as an activist if your personal fiascos need attention. So MUNA peer into murky puddles and ask who stares back. “I’ve been looking at myself in the mirror,” lead songwriter Katie Gavin sings on “Number One Fan,” as her bandmates Naomi McPherson (producer) and Josette Maskin (guitarist) flex their alt-rock muscles towards state-of-the-art pop.
The soundtrack to Gavin’s transformation is as sentimental as it is versatile. The more she unwinds, the further her bandmates extend their arms, shifting from the Coyote Ugly country-lite of “Taken” to the warbling “Memento,” a meditative vignette about a bee sting. The trio met at USC; they’re a college-pop band, and they peck like magpies from ’80s and ’90s FM radio. “It's Gonna Be Okay, Baby” is Bon Iver as the Police, cradling Gavin’s coming-of-age. “Good News (Ya-Ya Song)” and “Number One Fan” are wordy, turn-of-the-millennium-style confessionals, as bewildered with life’s nonsense as they are humored by it (“So I went to an art exhibit, there wasn’t any art”). “Never” follows the school of Robyn, raving through crisis. The pain and self-worthlessness Gavin exhibited on MUNA’s debut is abandoned in favor of enlightenment. She documents sex, drugs, and suicidal tendencies with less melodrama and more compassion. “You finally read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” she sings, smiling at her own Angeleno new ageism.
A triad of desolate songs at the album’s heart race by as though seeking to end their anguish. MUNA are at their most cinematic on “Navy Blue,” which sparkles like a Nicolas Winding Refn movie. Gavin drives adjacent to the ocean, imagining herself drowning in post-breakup misery. Her notes fly so lightly across the bassline, you can taste the salt spray. Layered club nocturn “Never” serves as the album’s quarter-life-crisis rock bottom. “Consider this my resignation… I'll never sing again,” she broods, and as her voice nears exhaustion, guitars erupt into digital screams of distress, or perhaps rebirth. The brighter, more buoyant “Pink Light” sets her up for a fresh beginning, but the chorus springs her back to the past: “I keep retracing that storyline, thinking if I start again, I can change the way it ends.”
The album’s bookends sound like lullabies. Over simple arpeggiated piano, opener “Grow” wants to let go of “childish things.” Its opening line—“I want to grow up”—is a universal plea for a generation lacking in reliable mentors. Closer “It’s Gonna Be Okay, Baby” addresses those past phases of life, protecting Gavin’s voice within the band’s wall of synthetic effects. She addresses her younger self with the candidness of a journal entry, repeating the titular mantra with the benefit of hindsight.
You’re gonna feel much more like God is a mystery
and Jesus is a metaphor
Yeah, you’re gonna tell your reflection
It’s gonna be OK, baby
Eyeing the mirror one last time, she finds a trust in an older, wiser self. After three years in the public eye, Gavin reveals her flaws more plainly. Though her story is one of heartbreak, it’s not about who breaks hearts, but rather what: inherited patterns, old habits, misinformation. Saves the World approaches adulthood with unabashed honesty, so you’ll be ready to smash the system a little more gently. And while MUNA’s pop is preoccupied with that greater sense of purpose, it carries its heavy heart to the dancefloor.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-07T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | RCA | September 7, 2019 | 7.7 | 8d057a5e-e8df-4d2f-9927-110e502df32b | Eve Barlow | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eve-barlow/ | |
The Black Dice member's latest solo outing is ramshackle, blithe, and relatively accessible, with cleaner vocals than usual and a sense of demented whimsy. | The Black Dice member's latest solo outing is ramshackle, blithe, and relatively accessible, with cleaner vocals than usual and a sense of demented whimsy. | Eric Copeland: Black Bubblegum | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22088-black-bubblegum/ | Black Bubblegum | Eric Copeland writes slippery, chameleonic songs. Sifting through the accrued, multi-format bric-a-brac of this Black Dice member’s voluminous solo catalogue can feel unnervingly magical, like turning over the acorn cupped in your palm and discovering it was always a quarter. Merry hooks are conked far beyond delirium, gnawed upon by effects, reshuffled mercilessly to accommodate inappropriate tempos. And while it’s often remarked that no one experiences a single piece of music the same way twice, this is especially true for the entries in Copeland’s canon.
With very rare exceptions—“U.F.O.s Over Vampire City” from 2011’s *Whorehouse Blues *EP, for example - vocals in Copeland’s work have been little more than floating scraps. Black Bubblegum upends this status quo somewhat, with Copeland’s voice foregrounded. The LP is ramshackle, blithe, and relatively accessible—a Blues Explosion to its predecessors’ Pussy Galore. A wobbly, piping effect guides the jaunty, absurdist “Fuck It Up,” a junkyard anthem worthy of pre-1993 Beck or Ween. Grease-fire guitars and roadhouse pianos goose “Don’t Beat Your Baby,” while “Cannibal World” dips a foot into reggae, astride watery, wavy effects that suggest a hybrid of steel drums and synthesizers.
Even though the surface is smoother and and the vocals less garbled than usual, it’d be a mistake to read *Bubblegum *as a true unmasking. Filters swaddle Copeland’s voice throughout, distorting and distending it but stopping short of intelligibility; lyrically, he’s striking a tricky balance between deadpan nihilism and pop troubadour nostalgia. Nothing is revealed; the mystery continues. | 2016-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-07-12T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | DFA | July 12, 2016 | 7 | 8d0774c6-653c-4ee3-ad9e-b4c70baddb08 | Raymond Cummings | https://pitchfork.com/staff/raymond-cummings/ | null |
With its $0 asking price, lawsuit-baiting title, and feline cover art, Wilco's latest album is loose, low-stakes, and fun, adjectives that no one has used to describe Wilco since Being There. It's also Wilco at their most concise and airtight, with songs piercing and subtle enough to get under your skin. | With its $0 asking price, lawsuit-baiting title, and feline cover art, Wilco's latest album is loose, low-stakes, and fun, adjectives that no one has used to describe Wilco since Being There. It's also Wilco at their most concise and airtight, with songs piercing and subtle enough to get under your skin. | Wilco: Star Wars | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20838-star-wars/ | Star Wars | Jeff Tweedy leads a band of escape artists—"ex-Uncle Tupelo," "alt-country," "dad rock" are all boxes from which Wilco has managed to break free. Their most recent restraint has proven trickier because it essentially translates to "Wilco". Between the self-conscious retromania of Wilco (The Album) and the self-produced, self-released The Whole Love, their last two LPs strove for comprehensiveness, containment, cohesion. They were rightly received as "Wilco being Wilco" and offered "something for everyone" except potential new listeners, drawing boundaries around their old ideas. In a concrete way, Wilco’s ninth studio LP Star Wars is their most accessible and least demanding, a free download equalizing the Wilco evangelist and those who swore they’d never pay one red cent for their music. Star Wars is also Wilco’s shortest and least agenda-driven album since their debut, two things that actually lend it a novelty that endures beyond its instantaneous release.
For its first minute or so, Star Wars sounds like a record Wilco might have been required to give away for free. The skronking opener "EKG" has drawn valid comparisons to both Sonic Youth to AIDS Wolf, though it’s one of Wilco’s least jarring experiments in instrumental noise—compare it to the 15-minute migraine simulation of "Less Than You Think" or "Poor Places" submerging in a drowning pool of static and "EKG" is downright charming. It’s the first thing you might expect to hear from a band trying to familiarize themselves with each other after their longest break between records. It’s playful rather than confrontational, deflates any kind of self-importance projected on the band, and aligns with the $0 asking price, lawsuit-baiting title, and feline cover art—this record is loose, low-stakes, and fun, adjectives that no one has used to describe Wilco since Being There.
That’s something of a feint. Star Wars bears many signifiers of an off-the-cuff recording—the second-longest track is 3:50, and most are filled with all manner of "what’s this pedal do?" sound effects. The topsy-turvy glam-folk of "More…" becomes cemented in thick distortion, a theremin-like squeal seeps through the otherwise subdued "Taste the Ceiling", "Where Do I Begin" backflips into a coda of reversed drums. But think back on a decade of Wilco songs that regularly rode triple-guitar soloing past five minutes and ask if Star Wars is really the sound of them jamming. This is Wilco at their most concise and airtight; the frayed edges, loose wires, and sonic pockmarks are all considered decisions coming from a group of technical wizards with unconventional tastes that treat post-production like a tattoo artist, engaging in very detailed and skillful defacement.
Any discernible influence is unlikely, but Star Wars could be heard as a long-awaited convergence with Spoon, the band who overtook Wilco as America’s most reliable and subtly inventive band in the studio. As with Transference or Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Star Wars scans as pop songwriting and rock music, though devoid of blunt force and obsessed with tactility, right down to the word choices. As with "War on War" and "Impossible Germany", "Random Name Generator" takes a phonetically catchy, abstruse phrase and repeats it until it becomes an unshakeable hook. It’s a veritable sonic topographic map, every single instrument close mic’d and enlarged to show texture: Tweedy’s comforting and disheveled vocals are audio two-day stubble, drums get dipped in bristling flange, you can pick out exactly which pedals on Nels Cline’s effects board are being used.
Star Wars quickly develops its sonic character, and if it must have a label, "mini-rock" suffices. For one thing, these are the most compact and aerodynamic Wilco songs, aligning with a host of new-to-them glam precedents who punctured rock’s chest-puffing machismo. The pinched EQ’ing and stylishly sheared fuzz riffs of "Random Name Generator" tips a top hat to T. Rex; the Suicide-al "Pickled Ginger" removes the "blues" from 12-bar blues and replaces it with post-punk rigidity and blacked-out negative space; "You Satellite" continuously wraps itself in seemingly endless layers of high-thread count bedsheets, recalling the unsavory reveries of Velvet Underground.
And while nothing on Star Wars can cut you into ribbons the way "Via Chicago" or "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart" or "At Least That’s What You Said", it's piercing and subtle enough to get under your skin. Compared to the sadsack reflections on domestication of Sky Blue Sky, Star Wars strikes at a kind of empty nester fatalism signified by the "separate, but together" connection of "Where Do I Begin", or, more succinctly—"We’re so alone/ We’re never alone." The narrative of Star Wars is driven by a fluid mix of devotion, commitment, and stubbornness, three qualities that are related but not synonymous. "I could never leave behind the part of me that you refuse," is the sort of thing you might hear from a couple who are comfortable enough to snipe at one another, while, "Why can’t we tell when we’re in hell?/ Why can’t I say something to make you well?" speaks to the desperation underlying most prickly jokes. "Taste the Ceiling" hard-sells the LP’s most important lyric, the one that attests to unusual urgency of Star Wars: "Why do our disasters always creep so slowly into view?" Perhaps disasters are always in the frame, but judging from the communication failures and speakers-speaking-in-code that goes on here, it's more likely they don't get called for what they are until its too late.
While you never can really tell with a lyricist as cryptic and elliptical as Tweedy, Star Wars hints at a congruence between his own cautious confessions and Wilco’s sensible risks—while this could just be a dry run for a conventionally released "event", the fact that they're challenging themselves is rewarding enough on its own. Though Sky Blue Sky was met with the coolest reception of any Wilco album, it’s the one that remains the most interesting since A Ghost Is Born—like every record from Wilco’s elite run that spanned the kaleidoscopic roots-rock archive of Being There to A Ghost Is Born’s abstract Americana, it was fully committed to an idea Wilco hadn’t tried before. Because Wilco sounds about 85% committed to a truly new idea, Star Wars is their strongest record in a decade; and if Wilco have another truly great one in them, history strongly suggests it’ll be devoted to sounding nothing like Star Wars. | 2015-07-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2015-07-23T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | dBpm | July 23, 2015 | 7.7 | 8d0e2cdb-8d21-4c59-b333-02b2d8d03212 | Ian Cohen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/ | null |
Centered on 1998’s timeless Painted From Memory, this new compilation showcases the songwriters’ unlikely collaboration and the malleable and enduring songs that emerged from it. | Centered on 1998’s timeless Painted From Memory, this new compilation showcases the songwriters’ unlikely collaboration and the malleable and enduring songs that emerged from it. | Elvis Costello / Burt Bacharach: The Songs of Bacharach & Costello (Super Deluxe) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/elvis-costello-burt-bacharach-the-songs-of-bacharach-and-costello-super-deluxe/ | The Songs of Bacharach & Costello (Super Deluxe) | Burt Bacharach’s songs are deft studies in light and dark, order and chaos, major-key optimism and minor-key doubt. The lyrics to songs like “Walk on By,” “I Just Don’t Know What to Do with Myself,” “Trains and Boats and Planes,” and so many others convey messy, overwhelming emotions, while the music itself sounds exquisitely and exactingly crafted. Each element heightens the other to make the song more relatable and somehow even more pleasurable to anyone who has a heart. On “Tears at the Birthday Party,” which Bacharach co-wrote with Elvis Costello for their 1998 album Painted From Memory, the contrast between happy and sad is almost cartoonish: “I see you share your cake with him, unwrapping presents that I should have sent,” Costello sings, knowing he can’t watch but can’t look away either. What might have been maudlin becomes witty, even winking, thanks to Bacharach’s casually swinging arrangement, which is both sympathetic and sugary.
Bacharach and Costello were exceptionally well matched, each bringing something barely glimpsed in the other to the surface. Costello has collaborated intimately with the Brodsky Quartet, the Roots, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Allen Toussaint, but few challenged him quite as much as Bacharach. In return, he gives Bacharach some of his darkest sentiments to score, exceedingly bleak scenarios with titles like “In the Darkest Place” and “The Sweetest Punch.” They’re never quite as bitter as Costello’s notoriously sour love songs on 1979’s Armed Forces, but they still need Bacharach’s light touch. That contrast enlivens The Songs of Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, which puts Painted From Memory on vinyl along with subsequent collaborations, live cuts, and covers Costello recorded in the ’70s and ’80s.
They wrote their first song together via fax machine. In the mid 1990s, Costello sent Bacharach ideas for a song called “God Give Me Strength,” and Bacharach responded by sharpening a few lines and adding a new bridge, which turned out to be the missing piece. The finished composition first appeared on the 1996 soundtrack to Grace of My Heart, Allison Anders’ film based loosely on the career of Carole King. All the elements that would define their collaborative album were already present in the song: the strings and flugelhorns, the elegant expression of inelegant feelings. It opens as a conventional breakup song, with Costello lamenting the loss of a lover and begging God for the ability to “wipe her from my memory.” But the bridge reveals a darker facet to his predicament: “See, I’m only human,” he sings, attempting to exonerate himself for what comes next: “I want him to hurt.” It’s the first he’s mentioned another man, the third piece in this love triangle, and when Costello returns to the song’s prayerful refrain, it’s with a new recognition of the depths he has sunk and of the violent thoughts he now harbors in her absence.
Both the film and the soundtrack were busts, but the pair decided to continue their collaboration. Over the next few years they met frequently at Bacharach’s studio in Santa Monica, after which Costello would take the music back to Dublin looking for lyrical inspiration. While Costello was enduring a creatively and commercial fallow period, Bacharach was experiencing something akin to a renaissance in the mid to late 1990s, as a new generation of artists—and, notably, one international man of mystery—hailed him as a hero. He was a handy touchstone when Gen Xers were hosting lounge parties and blaring Combustible Edison CDs over martinis, but he was a wholly unironic influence on a new wave of indie rock crooners and chamber pop auteurs like the Pernice Brothers, American Music Club, Jim O’Rourke, and the Divine Comedy. In addition to dominating the soundtrack to 1997’s My Best Friend’s Wedding (and finding a surprisingly deft interpreter in Ani DiFranco), he had a cameo in one of the biggest hits of that year, serenading Austin Powers on top of a double-decker bus rolling through Vegas.
To their credit, neither Bacharach nor Costello seems the least bit interested in re-creating the sound of the ’60s on Painted From Memory. They settle into the songs with an understanding that this style of pop music doesn’t have to be anchored to any one particular time or place. Especially during a decade defined by irony and distance, these songs are miraculously unself-conscious, even with their great orchestral swell and flugelhorn fanfares. Bacharach’s arrangements have an ease to them: Nothing is forced, everything is orderly, and every next note has already been foretold by the last one. Put that sensibility with a singer like Dusty Springfield or Dionne Warwick, and you’ll get some of the most durable and sophisticated pop songs imaginable.
Put that sensibility with a singer like Costello, however, and you’ll get something very different. His voice is ragged, and his performances emphasize the work he’s putting into each phrase. You can hear him muster up his courage to ascend into a falsetto on “God Give Me Strength,” as though he senses a trap Bacharach has laid for him. And you can hear him laboring to control the drama of “What’s Her Name Today.” He probably wouldn’t argue with that criticism, if it even counts as criticism. He never backs down from the more demanding passages in these songs, and he even makes the strain in what he calls his “reckless and daredevil approach” sound intentional, which adds new dimensions to the self-deluding “I Still Have That Other Girl” and the beautifully delicate title track.
Costello isn’t the only voice on these songs. He’s joined by a chorus of women singing backup and adding commentary to cut his testimony. On “My Thief,” the music quietens so that Lisa Taylor can tell him to leave the room while she dresses, a small moment of domestic drama. A year after the release of Painted From Memory, these same songs were rearranged by the guitarist Bill Frisell, who recast them with different vocalists on The Sweetest Punch. On one of the finer reimaginings, Cassandra Wilson locates a very different set of stakes in “Painted From Memory,” her voice all smoke and sorrow as she makes microscopic adjustments to her delivery until she has to steel herself to deliver the last note.
There’s a showtune quality to Bacharach and Costello’s songs, which has less to do with the sound of the music and more to do with the monologue quality of the lyrics. Each one sounds like someone delivering testimony to an audience, explaining in meter and melody their motivations and regrets. In fact, the duo worked with Chuck Lorre (yes, the Big Bang Theory guy) to turn Painted From Memory into a stage production, even devising a story about a painter in love with his model. Despite their years of effort, it never came to pass, so we’re left with the live versions included in The Songs of Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, which bring out new angles on these new compositions and even older ones. There’s a great moment when Costello sings the first lines of “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” a hit for Warwick in 1969 that apparently still registered as cheesy in the late 1990s. “What do you get when you fall in love?” he asks, prompting chuckles from the audience, but he barrels along with no wink or nudge, absolutely sincere in his performance, until the laughter turns into applause.
That’s part of the joy of this box set: It shows just how durable these songs are, precisely because they’re so malleable, so open to whatever Costello or Wilson or you might bring to them. A different singer or a different listener brings a different set of concerns to them, which bring different implications to the surface. Bacharach was a songwriter as playwright, penning the scripts for other artists to act out, and his death just weeks before this set’s release could have cast a pall over the proceeding. It ought to disturb that balance between the light and the dark, making the unruly feelings even unrulier without making the sweet parts sweeter. But the effect, ultimately, is just the opposite. Especially with Costello recounting their yearslong collaboration in his detailed liner notes—and ending with his wish for more hours with his friend—The Songs of Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach sounds like a heartfelt eulogy to an artist who helped pop fans find great beauty and even greater solace in all those lonely, uncertain moments. | 2023-03-07T00:03:00.000-05:00 | 2023-03-07T00:03:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Pop/R&B | UMe | March 7, 2023 | 8.4 | 8d16a762-02bf-45ec-973e-13dceb53d7d6 | Stephen M. Deusner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/ | |
Decades into their career and on their 15th album, the death metal legends have become their genre’s Rolling Stones: iconic, verging on cartoonish, always reliable. | Decades into their career and on their 15th album, the death metal legends have become their genre’s Rolling Stones: iconic, verging on cartoonish, always reliable. | Cannibal Corpse: Violence Unimagined | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cannibal-corpse-violence-unimagined/ | Violence Unimagined | Who on this wretched, godforsaken earth could have imagined a way for Cannibal Corpse to age gracefully? Probably not the label head at Metal Blade, who admits to signing the Buffalo death metal band in 1989 mostly because they had a song on their demo called “A Skull Full of Maggots.” And likely not Jim Carrey, who asked them to appear in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective after spotting their gruesome album cover in a shop and becoming fascinated. And definitely not the conservative pundits who, as they ascended to cult stardom in the 1990s, positioned their shocking song titles alongside hip-hop as everything wrong with pop culture.
Even within Cannibal Corpse, things were touch and go for a while. Less than 10 years into their existence, they parted ways with vocalist and lyricist Chris Barnes, whose horror-film obsession helped define their sound and image. In his absence, founding members Alex Webster and Paul Mazurkiewicz were adamant about evolving: They replaced Barnes with George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher—to this day, their headbanging frontman and lovable avatar—and worked toward a less immediately provocative and slightly more subtle approach. Or as Webster pinpoints it in Joel McIver’s biography Bible of Butchery, “Maybe the difference between a hatchet to the genitals and a hatchet to the head.”
Of course, this guidance-counselor-worthy wisdom would be useless if Cannibal Corpse didn’t have the music to back it up. And with guitarist and producer Erik Rutan, they have recorded some of their strongest material in the 21st century, settling into a position as death metal’s best-selling band and its most resilient. In this sense, Rutan has been their Rick Rubin, a seasoned outsider helping a legacy act evolve by distilling their work to its raw essence. Even the titles of these later albums, after landmarks like Tombs of the Mutilated and Butchered at Birth, sound like takeaways from a meditative group exercise: Kill. Torture. Inhale; exhale.
Maybe this is why the introduction of Rutan as a band member feels so seamless. Their 15th album, Violence Unimagined, is their first since he replaced longtime guitarist Pat O’Brien after a 2017 arrest. (Breaking and entering; firearms and human skulls—it’s a long, strange story.) Where O’Brien could be counted on to provide the most diabolical and intricate moments on previous Cannibal Corpse albums, Rutan takes a more streamlined approach. His first songwriting contributions to the band are chugging, heavy, and maybe even ...timely? One is called “Condemnation Contagion” and it seems to be about living through a global pandemic when you already have germaphobic tendencies. Open up the pit and scream along: “Mandatory quarantine ENFORCED.”
Minus a few stray lines, the thematic concerns of Violence Unimagined are something you will only glean from the lyric sheet, which, even for the most devoted fans, has never exactly been required reading. Imposing and inimitable, Corpsegrinder has one of death metal’s most singular voices, clustering syllables into a retching iambic pentameter that leaves you absorbing maybe every other line. Take the highlight “Murderous Rampage,” where the title keys you into the fact that he’s singing from the perspective of a vengeful serial killer. And yet, the few phrases you can make out—“foul odors,” “brutal ways to DIE,” “no FUCKING reason”—mostly just communicate a state of mind: Pure rage, total chaos. He could just as easily be venting about an especially miserable day at the office.
So while Violence Unimagined ranks as a top tier late-era Cannibal Corpse record, its triumphs are somewhat understated. It features plenty of impressive turns from drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz and some particularly inspired songs from guitarist Rob Barrett (“Murderous Rampage,” “Inhumane Harvest”). It is also at least their third studio album that feels like a conscious restart, which is impressive but also makes it harder to stand out in their catalog. At this point, they have become like the death metal Rolling Stones: iconic, verging on cartoonish, but always reliable. While some of their ’90s peers have crafted more memorable returns (Carcass’ Surgical Steel) and more artful ones (Gorguts’ Colored Sands), no death metal band maintains such a pure, vibrant energy, resulting in music that plays like an ecstatic tribute to their own unlikely endurance.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-04-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Metal Blade | April 16, 2021 | 7.3 | 8d18296a-a420-4b63-a4c1-f65f49edec6b | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Autechre’s eight-hour NTS Sessions adds another level of the British duo’s legacy of monumental digital music. Though it’s created by a computer, it will bring you to another plane of human existence if you let it. | Autechre’s eight-hour NTS Sessions adds another level of the British duo’s legacy of monumental digital music. Though it’s created by a computer, it will bring you to another plane of human existence if you let it. | Autechre: NTS Sessions 1-4 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/autechre-nts-sessions-1-4/ | NTS Sessions 1-4 | Karlheinz Stockhausen might’ve imagined the music of Autechre before Autechre did. The German avant-garde composer and all-around insane genius believed that the emergent off-kilter sounds of his time served a specific function: the full-on enlightenment of the human race. His theory, roughly, was that since the dawn of time, man-made music was largely rooted in the natural rhythms of the body (think a four-on-the-floor house beat echoing a heartbeat) but that advances in technology during the late 20th century gave us the means to create new patterns, and that listening to them would actually help us reprogram our biorhythms in kind. “Such complex rhythms can no longer simply be beaten out, tapped with the feet, danced, or even counted,” Stockhausen explained in 1989. “Exposed to such a process, you quickly establish that human beings change. If such new music is produced, that proclaims the development of a new level of human being.” Eventually, he hoped, these newly rewired human brains and bodies might give us the means to travel throughout space and re-establish our relationship with the higher cosmic beings who created us.
It’s an idea that seems almost tailor-made for Sean Booth and Rob Brown who, together as Autechre, have been making highly confounding experimental electronic music together for the past 30 years. Not necessarily the part about convening with our alien forefathers, but rather the thought that sound and rhythm are learning experiences unto themselves, that our ears can adapt and evolve to new music and bring the rest of our being and consciousness along for the ride. Certainly the past two decades of their career can support this theory. Ever since fully outgrowing the crunchy ambient techno of their earliest work with 1997’s Chiastic Slide, the Mancunian duo has stayed the course, hammering away at a completely singular but ever-growing formula of slithering, glitching, post-hip-hop, post-human music. NTS Sessions 1-4, initially released over the course of April as a series of weekly broadcasts for the online London station NTS Radio, is the latest and longest of these experiments, clocking in at eight hours total, and is likely completely impenetrable to the uninitiated.
This is to say that it’s still very Autechrian. It’s the visceral sound of machines powering down then quickly lurching back into motion. It’s that sense of perpetual rhythmic collapse, the feeling that entire songs are slipping out from under your feet. It’s gorgeous and terrifying and awe-inspiring and incomprehensible and frequently even funky—but only if you let it unfold first. Booth and Brown have so completely mastered their aesthetic that it no longer seems rational to compare it to anything born outside of it. Even when they are proudly flaunting their influences, retracing the daisy chained 808 madness of Mantronix or the nauseating cacophony of early Coil, they claim full ownership. It’s not possible for Autechre to sound like anything except Autechre. And, with each new release, they somehow sound more like Autechre than on the previous one. The sound design is fuller, the programming more intricate, the shock of the new hitting just a bit harder than before.
Their recent output can be easily be seen as a running series of mutations on a single body, particularly since they’ve embraced digital music distribution. 2013’s double CD Exai was two hours long and eventually supplemented by a collection of nine hour-long soundboard recordings of live sets from the same era, all variations on the same setlist but not even close to similar in execution. 2016 saw the release of the Elseq 1-5, a five EP digital-only box set of all new material running at four hours total. And now we have a solid eight hours of new material with NTS. These data dumps are welcome indulgences to their cult following, but they’re also instructional: The more time you spend in this world, the more your body learns to adapt to the rhythms. For years now the duo has preferred to perform to completely blacked-out rooms, forcing the audience to fully devote their attention to the sound itself. A solid eight-hour lump of music is roughly the chronological equivalent to this trick. (The original two-hour NTS airing would repeat on an endless continuous loop throughout the week until the next one aired. This provided its own rather disorienting immersive effect—as the playlist sunk into the background of daily internet use it became quite easy to lose track of exactly how many times you had listened to the same songs.)
Unlike Elseq, which felt more like five discrete projects presented in one long bundle, NTS really does take shape when digested as a single extended piece. Each session runs seamlessly into the next, with an arc that goes from abrasion to bliss, from the 18-minute relentless plod of “t1a1” to the shimmering ambient closer, “all end,” which runs for nearly an hour. In between, the mechanical rhythms bend, bang, and break. More melodic elements—or at least brutal raw chunks of chords, which is kind of their thing now—claw their way out of the muck unexpectedly, and the human emotions creep up on you.
Booth and Brown have always been somewhat cagey about their exact production methods. But their primary tool is Max/MSP, a visual programming language that allows them to create generative algorithms that in effect compose themselves. They’ve talked in the past about the increasing sense that the software is becoming a third member of the group, and the workflow goes something like this: The humans give the computer a set of parameters, then the computer jams endlessly, churning out the requested burps and gurgles, which are passed back to the humans, who edit it all down to a manageable composition. The machine is learning, the composers are learning, and, if all goes as planned, the listeners are learning too.
The more time you spend in this world of sound, the closer you get to understanding its true origin—not the sound collages of Stockhausen’s day, but rather the American hip-hop and dance music that Booth and Brown grew up on. When Booth first heard the scratch-heavy electro of Los Angeles electro party rockers Knights of the Turntables in the mid-’80s it was still incomprehensible to him. “I was hearing it the way I heard Stockhausen,” he told Thump in 2015: “If you look at it purely in terms of the sound and science of it, it’s not that far from musique concrète. But there’s this cultural brick wall between the two things.”
The NTS Sessions, like so much of Autechre’s output, serve as deeply encrypted history lessons through which to tear down those walls. The duo was fortunate to come of age at a unique moment in musical history, that brief period from the late ’70s to early ’90s, when the sonics themselves were stacked higher than that wall. Advancements in production technology were rapidly outpacing their expected purpose and previously inaccessible music-making devices were suddenly attainable to kids from across all cultural and economic lines. Hip-hop and electro, house and techno, bass and freestyle grew out of this cross-pollination and quickly turned weird.
Autechre fully inherited the values of that era and they might be the only artists of our time to still live in them today. So much on NTS Sessions seems to offer a hypothetical alternate timeline to ’80s electronic music: What if it all just kept growing? What if each and every Latin Rascals razor blade micro edit was to re-edit itself violently? What if the stuttering vocals of Miami bass dubs were to develop sub-stutters? If all the acid house squelches grew into roars? If the extended DJ mixes lasted for entire days? And what if all the oh-shit moments that first came with these innovations were still central to the enjoyment of contemporary dance music? It would, presumably, keep evolving until it was no longer even recognizable as such.
In 2013, both members of Autechre held an open Q&A on the fan forum Watmm.com, which eventually grew to more than a hundred pages of conversation. It is an essential text in piecing together the Autechre mythology, not only because it’s their longest and most candid interview to date, but also for how well it illustrates the potential chasms between intent and interpretation. When one user asked, “how would a modern [Autechre] dance track sound?” Booth responded with just one unpunctuated sentence fragment: “but we are making dance music.” The divide between the intellectual and the physical has always been false. It’s all just learning. | 2018-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-05-15T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Warp | May 15, 2018 | 8.2 | 8d20e00e-1c38-4541-b110-5a401799caf1 | Andrew Nosnitsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-nosnitsky/ | |
The cryptic and elusive New Jersey rapper teams with DJ Muggs, who is enjoying a career renaissance as the go-to producer for glowering, throwback East Coast street rap. | The cryptic and elusive New Jersey rapper teams with DJ Muggs, who is enjoying a career renaissance as the go-to producer for glowering, throwback East Coast street rap. | DJ Muggs / Mach-Hommy: Tuez-Les Tous | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dj-muggs-mach-hommy-tuez-les-tous/ | Tuez-Les Tous | There are strains of underground rap that predict the mainstream’s future or find themselves in conversation with its present. Then there’s the one that branches from Marcberg’s rib: mid-tempo crime-boss luxury shit that comes from New York City or Buffalo or is beamed from some indeterminate location straight onto Bandcamp, more or less unconcerned with anything happening outside itself. The scene has those who are celebrated as high-art auteurs (Ka) and those, like the Griselda Gang, who turn everything into pro wrestling. Mach-Hommy was once associated with the latter group but is stranger and more elusive than just about all of his stylistic peers, using the musical shorthand that’s been codified over the last decade of New York street rap to assemble records that are strange, militant, and endlessly replayable, if you can find them.
Tuez-Les Tous pairs Hommy with DJ Muggs, who has enjoyed a welcome an unlikely career resurgence. He warmed himself up on solid collaborative records with Meyhem Lauren and Roc Marciano himself, and then scorched eyebrows off with February’s Hell’s Roof, where he teamed with the Rochester rapper Eto. In recent years, many rappers in this lane have taken stylistic cues (or actually commissioned beats) from Alchemist, Muggs’ one-time protege, who’s figured out how to give spare, sinister beats a psychedelic tilt. Muggs has responded by stripping the sound down to the screws. The most arresting song on Tuez-Les Tous is “Piotr,” which sounds like a vacant, perverse lullaby.
Hommy likes to leave gaps and negative space in his phrasing, so that even when there are extended verses with no obvious breaks, on a song like “900K,” there are fits and starts that make the vivid images—say, Hommy tearing up a lease—come out of nowhere. He also upsets the natural rhythms and chains of logic in rap writing by lurching from the literal to the metaphysical, prose to verse. Take the passage from “Bon Nwit”: “New niggas need to quit it / Ain’t no gimmick / hemorrhage / He with Jesus now, he hardcore / Flip ‘em like parkour / He suspended / you seeing spirits? / … I’m seeing spirits.”
Every piece of press on Mach-Hommy mentions how expensive his music is –– he sells his albums for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars, and only a tiny sliver of his catalog has been uploaded to streaming platforms (Tuez-Les Tous, perhaps because of Muggs’ involvement, is widely available). This leads to a kid of scarcity that is rare in an era when most work by most artists can be found with a few touches of a few buttons. The pricing and the scarcity are usually taken as a comment on how Hommy values his art; those factors have also helped to burnish Hommy’s reputation as an enigma and, presumably, have become a working economic model for him precisely because of that mystique.
But just as interesting is the way that cultivated obscurity colors –– and is reflected in –– the work itself. At these prices, it seems unlikely that anyone would have a full view of Hommy’s entire catalog, that they would instead experience it in fragments. His records since the sprawling, nearly definitive HBO have embraced this inscrutability: each one utilizes slightly different vocal or production styles, and there are no explainers for the dialects or allusion to foreign revolutions, no hand-holding. You’re just thrown in. So Hommy, whose work is rich with its connection to Haitian social and political history, and who seems to be in conversation with other artists long dead, is daring you to engage with it as craft before anything else, to marvel at the couplets before decoding them. It makes his music feel coolly, entrancingly mercenary. Tuez-Les Tous translates to kill them all. | 2019-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-04-02T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Soul Assassins | April 2, 2019 | 7.6 | 8d2bf1bc-e0cd-4a17-9ce3-e54102e8539a | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
Matmos member Drew Daniel has put together a gorgeous album that carries itself with the strength of a soft prayer, masterfully fusing jazz, deep house, and minimalism into an enormous, featherlight shield. | Matmos member Drew Daniel has put together a gorgeous album that carries itself with the strength of a soft prayer, masterfully fusing jazz, deep house, and minimalism into an enormous, featherlight shield. | The Soft Pink Truth: Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-soft-pink-truth-shall-we-go-on-sinning-so-that-grace-may-increase/ | Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? | Last year, Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt celebrated 25 years of mad-genius musical experiments as Matmos with a Plastic Anniversary—an album recorded entirely using plastic. That’s how Matmos albums work; a concept that might seem silly or crass at first glance is backed by a mountain of research, executed with passion and, in that case, ornately recorded using a parade of PVC pipes, riot shields, and breast implants. Since 2001, Daniel’s side-project the Soft Pink Truth has run parallel to Matmos, applying similar twists to the dancefloor. Yet nothing in either project has presaged Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase?, a cathartic, emotional windfall unlike anything Daniel has ever recorded.
Daniel thought hard about how to process the anger and despair born out of a worldwide resurgence of fascism and the election of Donald Trump. Instead of making reactive “angry white guy” music, he sought to make life-affirming, healing music founded in community. So he gathered his friends and family, including Schmidt, Horse Lords saxophonist Andrew Bernstein, percussionist Sarah Hennies, and a world-class trio of vocalists: Angel Deradoorian, Colin Self, and Lower Dens singer Jana Hunter. There’s no concept, no edgy sound-sources; its instruments are simply instruments, arranged with a small orchestra of collaborators who generate a huddled warmth against an increasingly cold, dark world. The resulting Shall We Go On Sinning carries itself with the strength of a soft prayer, masterfully fusing jazz, deep house, and minimalism into an enormous, featherlight shield.
Daniel built the album’s nine tracks to flow as two pieces, mixed seamlessly while using a bit of tape delay to unify each peak and valley. “Shall” opens the album with an invocation, as Deradoorian, Self, and Hunter create a choral round singing the titular question, itself an exasperated quote by Paul the Apostle from Romans 6:1. It acts as a focal point of tension, a summoning of negative energy that is exorcised as the chorus shifts on “We” to outward breaths and then long, silky sighs. A glowing synth loop razes any remaining darkness and as the beat drops in, “We” unfurls luxuriously into a deep house odyssey. It’s the first of many spontaneous surprises the album delivers. The rush of glockenspiel on “Go” provides a cleansing transition to the crashing waves of “On,” one of the album’s most soothing corners. Centered around repeating piano chords by pianist Koye Berry, the vocalists fuse into a singular force as Daniel manipulates the edges of the track with mercurial touches. It’s a soothing moment that sets up “Sinning,” a centerpiece for Bernstein and John Berndt’s dueling saxophones as bells, handclaps, and a pulsing bass gradually build up. Though its arrangement feels classical, “Sinning” flows like the sexy, sweaty peak of a house mix.
The second half—“So That Grace May Increase?”—offers its own momentous trajectory. Schmidt joins on piano, developing the central riff on the hypnotically swirling “So,” as horn loops, chanting voices, and percussion fold in on “That.” Daniel’s mixing here is phenomenal, giving each carefully crafted element—the forward swing of the percussion, the warmth of the brass, a garbled tape-looped voice—a moment to shine. Schmidt returns with a tip-toed piano solo on “Grace,” offering a delicate misdirection before the track suddenly explodes into a final, euphoric climax. The album rides this soul-lifting shock to its conclusion, a cathartic gift so breathtaking it rises to the occasion of this moment, that moment, seemingly any moment we have yet to face.
Daniel started the Soft Pink Truth on a dare from UK house legend Matthew Herbert. Matmos just had a breakthrough with the surgery-sampling A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, while Herbert fused jazz, house, and the human form to create Bodily Functions, one of the most revered and intimate club records of all time. The dare suggests Herbert, who released the Soft Pink Truth’s first albums on his Soundslike label, heard something special in Daniel beyond even the visionary work of Matmos. Nearly 20 years later, that provocation has inspired what feels like a successor to Herbert’s own masterpiece while perfecting themes running throughout the Soft Pink Truth. On previous albums, Daniel reckoned with homophobia in black metal or celebrated punk’s queer history. Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? opens its scope to a harsh world where being gay and thriving is itself an act of defiance. It stares down an apocalypse and fights back with joy, hope, and human connection.
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Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2020-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-05-04T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Thrill Jockey | May 4, 2020 | 8.3 | 8d3802d8-44d2-4567-b8ca-201d36f7cd29 | Miles Bowe | https://pitchfork.com/staff/miles-bowe/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5ea88483895a1b000858e6d3/1:1/w_800,h_800,c_limit/Shall%20We%20Go%20on%20Sinning%20So%20That%20Grace%20May%20Increase?_The%20Soft%20Pink%20Truth.jpg |
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 Bonnie Raitt’s 1989 blockbuster comeback, a genre-fluid album about love, disappointment, and aging. | 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 Bonnie Raitt’s 1989 blockbuster comeback, a genre-fluid album about love, disappointment, and aging. | Bonnie Raitt: Nick of Time | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/bonnie-raitt-nick-of-time/ | Nick of Time | In 1983, Bonnie Raitt’s career was at a crossroads. The day after she’d finished mastering her ninth album, Tongue & Groove, the fire-haired Radcliffe dropout and beloved country-blues singer received a letter informing her she’d been dropped from her label. Warner Bros. had signed Raitt in 1971, when she was just 21, and put out eight of her records. But none had been much of a commercial success, and it was time to cut the budget.
Raitt was contractually entangled with Warner for three more years, after which they forced her to put out Tongue & Groove anyway; it was released and largely ignored as was Nine Lives in 1986. She was in her late 30s, recovering from the painful end of a four-year relationship, and suddenly tasked with rehabilitating a music career that should have been in its prime. Years of life on the road had taken its toll, too. As an 18-year-old college student, Raitt met the Boston promoter Dick Waterman, and she got to know the ’70s blues circuit in part by dispensing booze backstage for the likes of Fred McDowell and Son House. When she started recording and touring herself, she earned a reputation as a late-night party girl. “I wanted to be the female version of Muddy Waters or [McDowell],” she said in 1990. “There was a romance about drinking and doing blues.” By 1975 she’d moved to L.A. and started practicing what might qualify as that decade’s version of “Cali sober”—cutting out bourbon to merely drink tequila and wine—and described her drug use as “nothing much: a toot ’n’ a toke.”
But as she neared 40—and considered the possibility of appearing in music videos alongside Prince, with whom she’d recorded a few songs—Raitt decided she’d probably drank enough boys under the table to last her career. She’d grown to hate the feeling of waking up and not being able to remember what she’d talked about with people the night before. She had also put on some weight and was increasingly self-conscious about her appearance. “I remember being so proud thinking I was the last girl singer still drinking,” she told Playboy soon after. “Then I looked in the mirror.” At a show in Louisiana around that time, a fan in the front row passed her what has to be one of the most audacious notes in the history of live shows: “What happened? You got fat. Maybe you should work out or something.”
By 1987, Raitt had quit drinking. She began exercising regularly and attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. She was working on getting her life back on track, but it was a slow reboot. Over the course of the next year, 14 labels passed on signing her; in 1988, Capitol finally offered a $150,000 deal, a package typically reserved for newer artists. “There was nobody interested in signing Bonnie Raitt,” Tim Devine, her A&R at Capitol, told Billboard in 2019. “When I went to sign her, my boss at the time said, ‘Over my dead body.’”
Nick of Time—Raitt’s tenth studio album and first with Capitol—is understandably considered her triumphant comeback. But Raitt herself has often pointed out that there was nothing for her to even come back from: She’d never had a hit record before. For almost 20 years, Raitt had made her career on the road, where she could show off her under-recorded, formidable slide guitar skills and easily compensate for lagging record sales at the box office. “I never pretended to be a great artist or a great originator,” she once said. “I’m just an interpreter of good music.”
The closest she’d come to mainstream success was a 1977 cover of Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” which has her snarling and sliding around a Norton Buffalo harmonica break. It was a big leap from “Mighty Tight Woman” and “Women Be Wise,” the sweet but almost painfully innocent sounding Sippie Wallace covers on Raitt’s 1971 self-titled album. Raitt hit her stride as an interpreter and recording artist when her voice earned some attitude and grit in addition to its innate emotional clarity, and when she began to transform songs written by men (“Runaway,” “Too Long at the Fair,” and “Angel From Montgomery,” to name a few) with her simple shift in perspective. But she still wasn’t really on the radio.
Who would’ve guessed Nick of Time—a genre-fluid album about love, disappointment, and aging—would be Raitt’s turning point? Certainly not the people who made it. Raitt, 39, was emerging from what she called “a complete emotional, physical and spiritual breakdown,” and producer Don Was (of Was (Not Was)), was at “rock bottom” in his production career. He’d only crossed paths with Raitt by chance, at an L.A. studio in 1986, because he’d lost his client’s tapes in the back of a taxi on his way out to California and had to push their session by a day. Soon after, Raitt teamed up with Was to record “Baby Mine,” a song from the animated 1941 Dumbo movie for an album of reimagined Disney songs, and they knew they wanted to continue working together. It wasn’t an easy sell. “If it comes down to it and a record company comes along and insists that she have a real producer,” Raitt’s managers told Was over lunch one day, “we’re going to throw you under the bus.”
But Capitol’s low investment in the project also came with the hands-off blessing of low expectations, and in 1988, Raitt and Was took some stripped-down demos into a week-long session at Hollywood’s Ocean Way Recording. For once, Raitt felt no pressure to emerge with radio-ready hits; she and Was just wanted to make songs they would be proud of. For his part, Was knew the key to production would be staying out of the way: “It was just about hearing her unadorned voice,” he told Billboard. “Everything else would augment that.” They cut about two tracks a day, using as few instruments as they could and aiming for a sound that felt, in Raitt’s words, “as live and uncorrected as possible.”
Raitt’s slide guitar appears on about half of Nick of Time, a unifying thread in an album that jumps from country to pop and R&B. For much of the ’80s, Raitt had been touring with a limited budget, playing full sets with only a bass player to accompany her guitar. As her playing, and reputation for it, had improved, she’d realized it was what set her apart as an artist. “It was time to showcase the things about me that were different,” she told the Boston Globe in 1989. “There are a lot of female hormones in that slide playing.” (John Jorgenson, who played guitar on “Too Soon to Tell,” credits Raitt’s playing on Nick of Time with a general slide revival in country music in the ’90s.)
Raitt, never known for her songwriting, bookended the album with an unusual ode to aging, “Nick of Time,” and a closing manifesto, “The Road’s My Middle Name.” She personally begged the Bay Area singer-songwriter Bonnie Hayes to give her both the torch song “Love Letter” and the heartbreaker “Have a Heart.” According to Hayes, the latter was written as a reggae track for Huey Lewis, and it is difficult to imagine him delivering the iconic opening line—“Hey… shut up!”—with the same playful bite that Raitt gave it. The song peaked at No. 3 on the adult contemporary chart, Nick of Time’s biggest hit.
Raitt’s career might have been adrift, but she had plenty of loyal friends to call on. “Cry on My Shoulder,” doused in ’90s schmaltz, casually features backup vocals by David Crosby and Graham Nash, and Herbie Hancock accompanies Raitt on the aching ballad “I Ain’t Gonna Let You Break My Heart Again.” Among others, “Too Soon to Tell”—which Raitt has called the only true country song she ever made—has Was (Not Was)’s Sweet Pea Atkinson and Sir Harry Bowens chipping in on backup vocals. (Mike Reid, who co-wrote the track, would go on to co-write “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” one of the biggest songs of Raitt’s career.) The lead single was a cover of Jon Hiatt’s “Thing Called Love,” and with a shrewd eye toward VH1 airtime, Raitt cast her friend Dennis Quaid as a flirty himbo in the accompanying music video.
Nick of Time was released on March 21, 1989; it hit the label’s sales goal in a week and then, to everyone’s surprise, continued to sell steadily. The real boost came after the 1990 Grammys, when Raitt—unsigned and bottomed-out just a few years prior—won all four awards she’d been nominated for, including Album of the Year. “I’d just like to thank Bonnie Raitt,” Was said onstage, next to his disbelieving partner, “for setting an example here. If you maintain your integrity, never underestimate your audience, and just try to make a good record, people will respond to you.” A few weeks later, Nick of Time was the No. 1 album in America.
Raitt has likened this post-Grammy rise to a “hyperspace”—it was the moment everything changed for her. But why the hell did it take this long to happen? Nick of Time coheres around a clear and earnest philosophy that no doubt registered with the second-wave feminist boomers who went out and bought it in droves: These are songs performed by a woman who’d reached a personal and professional nadir and pulled herself out. And she did it all, as the New York Times review put it, at a “certain age.” Thirty-plus years after its release, the album’s point of view—a woman who feels liberated by her age and life experience rather than limited by it—is still refreshingly out of the ordinary. It’s the story of Raitt attempting to come to terms with her adult self. “I can handle the things about myself that I didn’t like before,” Raitt told the Globe at the time, just a few months shy of turning 40. “I don’t feel that anything is leading me around anymore—love, or the road, or my career. I feel like I’m in control of my life. I have a real spirit of purpose.”
Nick of Time exceeded everyone’s expectations; it didn’t only sell over 5 million copies, it wholly revitalized Raitt’s career. Her subsequent release, 1991’s Luck of the Draw, surpassed it in sales and cemented her as a ’90s powerhouse with hits like “Something to Talk About” and “I Can’t Make You Love Me.” Still, for an artist so defined by interpretations, it’s Raitt’s own “Nick of Time” that stands out from the pack now. Raitt wrote it when she was playing around with a Drumatix synth with built-in sounds, looking for something that had a Philly Soul vibe. After she played the demo in the studio, Was layered in an old synth, and drummer Ricky Fataar got creative: “He put a sandbag on his belly and mic’d it,” Raitt told USA Today in 2014. “Then he played that signature heartbeat sound [on it] that made it intimate.” In the first verse, Raitt sings of a friend who “sees babies everywhere she goes” and “wants one of her own” but has an indecisive partner; in the second, she speaks to the strange sadness that accompanies parents and children seeing one another age. Her voice is unusually gentle and plaintive: “When did the choices get so hard, with so much more at stake?” she wonders on the bridge: “Life gets mighty precious when there’s less of it to waste.”
The ’90s were a less forgiving time, but the existential angst of a woman in their mid- to late-30s remains. In an industry that perennially favors the young, that was and remains racked with ageism and sexism, Nick of Time feels startling simply for existing as it was made, a contentedly unresolved document about a grown woman losing and then reestablishing herself at a life stage when her story could have easily joined so many others in the ether.
It’s bittersweet to know that “Nick of Time” played a part in pushing Raitt’s friend’s partner to make a decision: Not long after the album came out, the couple got married and had a kid. (According to Raitt, they nearly named him “Nick.”) Still, it’s nice to know that the song itself ends on what is more or less a white-knight fiction. In the final verse, Raitt sings of redemptive love, someone who “opened up my heart again” and gave her “love in the nick of time.” Raitt was newly signed, sober, and recentered, but she was still single and recovering from heartbreak. She had a lot more life to live.
Get the Sunday Review in your inbox every weekend. Sign up for the Sunday Review newsletter here. | 2022-01-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-16T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Capitol | January 16, 2022 | 8.2 | 8d3e17fd-1d84-41bb-bdbf-73af8d6d304d | Emma Carmichael | https://pitchfork.com/staff/emma-carmichael/ | |
The English band’s nervy debut blazes through scraps of jazz, funk, krautrock, dub, and punk. More than a canonized style, it’s their level of control that sets them apart. | The English band’s nervy debut blazes through scraps of jazz, funk, krautrock, dub, and punk. More than a canonized style, it’s their level of control that sets them apart. | Squid: Bright Green Field | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/squid-bright-green-field/ | Bright Green Field | The word “island” is usually synonymous with “paradise”—someplace tropical and warm, skewered by beach umbrellas. We’re less likely to think of Alcatraz. But when English rock band Squid mention a “concrete island” in the first minutes of Bright Green Field, it’s closer to the infamous prison than a Sandals resort. The isle in “G.S.K.” is a dystopian slab ruled by Big Pharma, and the record’s opening scene, as shouted by drummer and vocalist Ollie Judge, confines us to this grim locale: “As the sun sets, on the Glaxo Klein/Well it’s the only way that I can tell the time,” he sings. On this barren rock, the British drug conglomerate is the towering center of daily life—so big, it acts like a sundial. “Island” never sounded so angry or claustrophobic.
Bright Green Field is packed with these moments of compression—lean phrases that steadily inflate into three-dimensional scenes. Driving their expansion are vigorous and detailed arrangements, music that rattles against Judge’s agitated lyrics until it erupts. A sickly undercurrent of strings propels his role as a white-collar drudge on “G.S.K.”; when he embarks on his evening commute, dreaming of the warm dinner that awaits, the music seems to pursue him. The horn section sounds like a fleet of motorbikes trying to run him off of the road.
Squid’s music has always toyed with discomfort. Six years after forming at college in coastal England, Judge, Louis Borlase, Arthur Leadbetter, Laurie Nankivell, and Anton Pearson have pushed that unrest to the point of catharsis. Like Squid’s best singles—last year’s “Sludge,” 2019’s “Houseplants”—the songs on Bright Green Field set out on one course, only to flail in another direction just as you’ve settled in. “Boy Racers” kicks off as a linear groove, its noodling bassline and clipped rhythm guitar among the album’s more pared-back arrangements. Roughly halfway through, the beat drops out, giving way to a bleak, distorted drone. A faint mechanical voice speaks, like Daft Punk with a dead battery: “You’re always small/And there are things that you’ll never know.” It’s unnerving but effective, like the moment in Alien when we discover Ash is really a robot.
Squid approach their music like skilled choreographers; though every move is carefully plotted, the dance maintains the illusion of spontaneity. Each track feels on the verge of some massive release, but all meltdowns are carefully preordained. “Narrator,” the album’s best song, exemplifies the band’s calculated pandemonium. Its opening measures recall early Talking Heads and James Chance: Quick ripples of electric guitar and sharp basslines squiggle on top of a crisp snare beat. But it’s the abandonment of this structure that’s most interesting. At the song’s midpoint, guest vocalist Martha Skye Murphy slowly creeps in, lingering around the edges. As Squid explode into a frenzied coda, Murphy wails her voice raw, shrieking like a slasher-flick victim. It’s the album’s most exhilarating stretch of sound.
Like magpies, Squid stockpile scraps of jazz, funk, krautrock, dub, and punk, uninterested in adopting a single identity. Their genre agnosticism extends to equipment: In addition to drums, bass, and guitar, Bright Green Field’s sense of disorientation is aided by alto saxophone, violin, trumpet, cello, trombone, and rackett—a 16th-century wind instrument also known as the sausage bassoon. (Leadbetter’s father, who specializes in medieval rock and Renaissance instruments, handles sausage bassoon duties on “Boy Racers.”) Even amid all these choices, Squid’s spinouts are orchestrated stunts, never heady jam-band accidents. More than a canonized style, it’s their level of control that sets them apart.
Yet Squid’s characters and the world they inhabit are in constant friction. On “Global Groove,” Judge deadpans about wearing “tight Lycra,” trudging through the day like a weary Zumba instructor. The pace is a narcotized march, nudged along by stabs of guitar and saxophone. The song offers only a few visuals: mindless TV shows, the oppressive titular dance. Is it a wry take on fitness culture, or sheer drudgery? (The two haven’t always been distinct: Treadmills were once instruments of penal discipline.) “Pamphlets” twists another innocuous item into a symbol of suffocating conformity: “Pamphlets through my door/And pamphlets on my floor,” Judge screeches, as though he’s being crushed by the leaflets blasting through his mail slot. Bright Green Field is filled with these imaginative dispatches from capitalist hell, but it’s Squid’s exacting ruckus that exposes their true nature. The field isn’t green with grass, but radioactive sludge.
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. | 2021-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Warp | May 11, 2021 | 8 | 8d3faf02-aefe-428a-afb5-cf5135316724 | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
Sob Rock is the sound of a man alone in his success. Even if this is one of John Mayer’s stronger albums, the whole thing feels self-consciously minor. | Sob Rock is the sound of a man alone in his success. Even if this is one of John Mayer’s stronger albums, the whole thing feels self-consciously minor. | John Mayer: Sob Rock | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/john-mayer-sob-rock/ | Sob Rock | Let’s say you play your cards right and end up like John Mayer. Two decades in, you’ve amassed a solid run of hits and a devoted community of fans who will buy tickets any time you’re in town. You’ve got some baggage; who doesn’t? Some notable exes have painted damning portraits of you in a small playlist’s worth of songs, and you’ve said a couple indefensible things to the press that follow you like hellhounds wherever you go. At the same time, you’ve got a dignified side gig as the touring guitarist for a classic rock institution, the kind of role that you can age into gracefully, gainfully employed without ever having to step back into the spotlight. Where do you go next?
“I’m somewhere between a pop artist and a jam band—maybe closer to pop artist,” Mayer recently surmised, and this particular niche has thrust the guitar virtuoso from Billboard charts and magazine covers squarely into the Neil Young-buying-ownership-in-a-model-train-company phase of his career. (For Mayer, now 43, it’s all about luxury watches.) Yes, he’s got a new record, but even that seems like a hobby, something to pass the time. The earliest single arrived in spring 2018, because why not? The suave, undeniable “New Light” sounds no less relevant today than it did back then, and its inclusion proves that Mayer can work at his own pace—trends, release cycles, and global pandemics be damned.
None of this is to suggest that Sob Rock, his eighth studio album, is thoughtless. In fact, its vision is so complete and confident that it pretty much writes its own review. (Judging by the title, bargain bin stickers on the cover, and fake pull-quotes on the merch, the tone is not so enthusiastic.) To make this music, Mayer gave himself a prompt. Instead of an artist who dominated VH1 and frat houses in the early 2000s, what if he’d emerged during the classic rock era and found himself, decades later, as a late-career musician attempting to update his sound? “Pretend someone made a record in 1988 and shelved it,” he explained, “and it was just found this year.” It’s an intriguing concept until you realize that, even in his fantasies, John Mayer is making music doomed to be lost to time, sapped of inspiration and out of his element.
Before we get any further, I will note that the ’80s staples Mayer references on Sob Rock in overt, almost shockingly accurate ways represent a moment in popular music I have a lot of fondness for. It was a time when new technology allowed career artists to embellish their music with smooth, luxurious textures, better suited for the digital precision of CDs than the analog crackle of vinyl. Blockbusters like Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms, Steve Winwood’s Back in the High Life, and Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence—all contented statements from well-established rock acts in the mid-to-late-’80s—come to mind. There is a quiet triumph in hearing someone like Mayer using his substantial resources to recreate this sound, bringing in first-hand witnesses like producer Don Was, bassist Pino Palladino, and keyboardist Greg Phillinganes. If you’re going to go in, go all the way.
Nevertheless, it’s a crowded field. Over the past decade, indie lifers like the War on Drugs, Destroyer, Bon Iver, M83, Jenny Lewis, Cass McCombs, the Killers, and Tame Impala have all taken artful inspiration from roughly the same time period; upstarts like Westerman and Bullion have offered their own underground perspective on it; Taylor Swift herself studied the era for a next-level pop breakthrough, going so far as to name an album after a specific year; Weezer landed their biggest hit in ages with a cover of Toto’s “Africa.” In this context, once the novelty of its production wears off—the stadium synths and slick guitar solos, auxiliary percussion and yacht-paced, mid-tempo cruise—Sob Rock reveals itself to be just another John Mayer album, a work to be judged on its own terms.
This is the part of the review where I should dissect the songwriting, drawing attention to the ways that Mayer misses the mark. But does anyone need me to explain why it’s uncomfortable, maybe even offensive, to hear an adult man from Connecticut singing a chorus of “Why you no love me? Why you no even care?” in a song called “Why You No Love Me”? Do you want me to point out how, despite the Joshua Tree gravitas of the closing “All I Want Is to Be With You,” the melody sounds distractingly similar to “I Want It That Way”? Do you need a music critic to annotate the gaping hole at the heart of the quasi-confessional strummer “I Guess I Just Feel Like,” whose profound melancholy feels as vague as its title?
These are obvious flaws—all reasons why, unlike the records that inspired it, you probably won’t hear artists decades from now dreaming up their own Sob Rocks. But surprisingly—just like the music that inspired it—Sob Rock as a whole is immediate and embracing, peaceful and sparkling, like the ocean as viewed from an airplane window. The 10-song, 40-minute album goes down smooth and breezy; its faults are forgivable (except for “Why You No Love Me”) and its highlights are understated and fun. Listen to those elegant turnarounds from the chorus to the central riff of “Wild Blue.” Tune in for the slow build of “Shot in the Dark,” with a gorgeous, wordless accompaniment from Maren Morris and a staccato string part airlifted from the Blue Nile. Soak in the moment halfway through when Mayer proudly crosses the “Every Breath You Take” threshold, slipping from pro-forma romance—“I want you in the worst way”—to full-on stalker: “Is the gate code still your birthday?”
This willingness to be ridiculous—to merge his outsized personality with the tasteful, somewhat anonymous adult contemporary ballads he’s written since day one—feels like a small breakthrough. “When I’m making this record right now,” Mayer reported a few months back, “I’m laughing out loud. And I’m not even sure if it’s because I think it’s great, or because I think it’s insane.” The truth is he could have amped it up in both departments—more hunger to prove himself beyond his influences, more fearlessness to work outside his comfort zone. Even if this is one of his stronger albums, the whole thing feels self-consciously minor. When Mayer gets back on stage this summer, he’ll be accompanying Dead & Co. for another trek, ripping solos through their classics instead of standing by his new material. And, frankly, who can blame him?
Still, Mayer’s insight suggests that at the heart of Sob Rock lies a desire not just to satisfy himself but to actually delight himself, to elicit a new enthusiasm for his work. What other metric could there be for a John Mayer album in 2021? And if he doesn’t clear that bar then, really, what does he have? Always neurotic and aggressively self-aware, he has already buffered himself against criticism, appearing on the defensive before the album was even out: “I want to get in trouble. I want someone to tell me this is shit,” he told Zane Lowe. “It’s called Sob Rock because it’s a shitpost.” But it’s not shit, and it’s not even that provocative. By design, Sob Rock is the sound of a man alone in his success, playing against himself on the world’s most expensive chess board—oohing and ahhing at his own prowess, scratching his chin meaningfully then cracking a joke when things get too intense. He seems comfortable and complacent. Never losing, never winning.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | July 16, 2021 | 6.1 | 8d45eab9-1dbc-4372-b36e-2d375f4fca65 | Sam Sodomsky | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/ | |
Recent Kill Rock Stars signees Summer Cannibals expertly balance flame-belching Mad Max riffage with lyrics frankly exploring questions of codependence and need. | Recent Kill Rock Stars signees Summer Cannibals expertly balance flame-belching Mad Max riffage with lyrics frankly exploring questions of codependence and need. | Summer Cannibals: Full of It | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21700-full-of-it/ | Full of It | For their third album, Portland's Summer Cannibals signed to the legendary local label Kill Rock Stars. KRS president Portia Sabin has said that the band “take us back to our roots,” and in songwriter/guitarist Jessica Boudreaux, the four-piece have an insurrectionist frontwoman worthy of the label's well-populated hall of fame. But on Full of It, Summer Cannibals toughen up their assault and hark back to the heavy scene that the Pacific Northwest punks killed off in the late 1980s. Their wailing riff-o-rama, double-tracked guitars, and sharp arpeggios soundtrack Boudreaux's frustrations with a dead-end relationship, wielding (and subverting) machismo rock tropes against a domineering, unavailable guy.
On paper, a lot of Boudreaux's lyrics can seem strangely submissive, pleading for validation and putting her faith in a union that she knows is doomed. “You turn a blind eye to my every appeal,” she sings on “I Wanna Believe.” “You make me feel like nothing matters but I still see your face/It makes me weak.” Her sneering delivery, though, is a self-aware send-up of this piteous-yet-sometimes-inevitable state, and the frustration that can accompany succumbing to such basic romance woes. She puts her anguish into wider context on the lumbering, cathartic closer “Simple Life,” questioning whether it's enough to want a “simple love and a simple home.” It's reminiscent of White Lung, whose recent fourth album Paradise sounds like a hairier sibling to Full of It, and also finds Mish Way reconciling her punk background with her conventional desires.
The 11 songs on Full of It barely break the three-minute mark, and wed incendiary fretwork to bottom-end that rolls like a boulder down a marble run. They can do stadium ragers (“Go Home”), suspenseful Sonic Youth-indebted menace (“Just a Little Bit”), sludgy girl-groupisms (“Say My Name”), euphoria (“The Lover”), and on “Not Enough,” the brittle conversation between Boudreaux and Marc Swart's guitars evokes early Sleater-Kinney. Summer Cannibals balance the abjection of their lyrics by playing like they're auditioning to ride the flame-belching rig in Mad Max: Fury Road.
Despite the ambiguity of some of her lyrics, Boudreaux's ire is rarely in dispute across these songs thanks to her bile-drenched delivery, though the moments where she makes it explicit are particularly good. “Talk Over Me” is full of coolly insolent, stinging riffs that accompany Boudreaux telling some paternalistic ass where to get off: “I'm not gonna let you talk over me one more time, and I'm not gonna wait for someone else to say that I'm right.” That self-assurance is why Full of It works: Boudreaux can sing from a position of weakness thanks to Summer Cannibals' palpable confidence. On the title track, which kicks back at the music press, she makes perfectly clear that her sense of self doesn't hinge on anyone else's approval: “Tell me my worth, I'll tell you my pitch,” Boudreaux drawls, before scoffing: “Another lie, yeah, another unreachable itch.” Full of It may not sound like classic Kill Rock Stars fare, but in these complex negotiations of power—both emotional and musical—they both fit right in and offer a smart update to their history. | 2016-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Kill Rock Stars | May 17, 2016 | 7.2 | 8d52a038-ed26-4e94-898e-aa20974ffc32 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
On their first album in nearly 30 years, the Paisley Underground group reintroduce some of what made their 1982 debut—atmospheric rock music veering between noise and subtlety—so compelling. | On their first album in nearly 30 years, the Paisley Underground group reintroduce some of what made their 1982 debut—atmospheric rock music veering between noise and subtlety—so compelling. | The Dream Syndicate: How Did I Find Myself Here? | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-dream-syndicate-how-did-i-find-myself-here/ | How Did I Find Myself Here? | “The past is easier to bend/I found a way to slow it down,” sings the Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn on “The Circle.” It’s a fiery rock song from How Did I Find Myself Here?, the 1980s post-punk band’s first new album in nearly 30 years. In the context of the Dream Syndicate’s career, the “past” is referenced in a number of ways on this record: the atmospheric, guitar-focused rock that veered between noise and subtlety; Wynn’s moody and angsty, enigmatic lyrics that evoke noir cinema and literature; and a penchant for extended instrumental jamming. Even How Did I Find Myself Here?’s minimalist cover art design is a throwback to the group’s outstanding debut from 1982, The Days of Wine and Roses.
Maybe Wynn was asking himself the new album’s titular question five years ago, when he first resurrected his long-dormant group. When the Dream Syndicate originally emerged in the early ’80s, they defined Los Angeles’ Paisley Underground, a music scene that paid homage to the Velvet Underground as well as 1960s pop and psychedelic groups. The Dream Syndicate caused a stir thanks to the critical acclaim of their debut (they were featured in Rolling Stone at one point). Yet The Days of Wine and Roses was a hard act to follow, as their subsequent albums steered toward an almost mainstream roots-influenced direction, similar to that of R.E.M. and Neil Young. With some personnel changes—notably the departures of founding members Kendra Smith and Karl Precoda—and a lack of commercial success, the group broke up after 1988’s somewhat downbeat Ghost Stories.
During the long hiatus, the Dream Syndicate’s stature has grown thanks to The Days of Wine and Roses, which still sounds timeless 35 years later and has been reissued twice; the group’s music has been held in high esteem from members of such bands as Wilco, Yo La Tengo, Dinosaur Jr., and Japandroids. In 2012, Wynn reformed the Dream Syndicate for some shows with himself and drummer Dennis Duck from the original lineup; bassist Mark Walton, who appeared on the later Syndicate records; and guitarist Jason Victor, a longtime collaborator on Wynn's solo projects.
The fact that this lineup—joined by keyboardist Chris Cacavas—took their time to record a new album at least shows a determination to make this reunion feel like it was done with good intentions. Thus, fans may be buoyed at how the new record recalls some elements of the band’s peak circa ’82, as evident on a couple of the moody rockers: the turbulent and punk-driven “The Circle”; the exhilarating “Out of My Head,” with its sheets of bruising and abrasive guitar; and “80 West,” a dark road tale seemingly inspired by a 1950s crime pulp novel. The familiarity also applies to the group’s reflective side, such as the melancholic “Like Mary,” a song that actually dates back 35 years ago from a band rehearsal and is now revisited for this album.
But the track on How Did I Find Myself Here? that finds the Dream Syndicate really reaching back to their past is closer “Kendra’s Dream.” It is sung by Kendra Smith, the band’s original bass player, and it marks the first time her voice has appeared on a Dream Syndicate recording in 35 years, having left the band after The Days of Wine and Roses (her exquisite vocal on “Too Little Too Late” remains one of the high points on the debut album). This surrealistic stream-of-consciousness work, with Smith’s voice now sounding deeper, incorporates ambient-like textures. It’s a different side of the band and yet a fitting conclusion to the record.
How Did I Find Myself Here? isn’t entirely a nostalgia exercise. It wisely branches out a bit musically and lyrically: The opening tracks “Filter Me Through You” and “Glide” are uncharacteristically soulful and upbeat. And like “Kendra’s Dream,” the 11-minute-plus title song represents a stylistic departure with its slow and trippy mix of funk, jazz, and Stax-influenced R&B. That track echoes such previous epics like “John Coltrane Stereo Blues” and “The Days of Wine and Roses” where the band members really show their musical chops.
Having not appeared on a Dream Syndicate studio record together since ’88, Wynn, Duck, and Walton sound revitalized on this album, with a similar energy to that expended on “Out of My Head” and “80 West.” Victor, the relative newbie in this lineup, channels the spirits of his predecessors Karl Precoda and Paul Cutler with his own version of the serrated guitar playing that has been a key part of the band’s sound. While certainly not on the level of The Days of Wine and Roses, this reunion record could be considered that debut’s rightful follow-up, at least in spirit. If the the Dream Syndicate ended their career the first time on an unfinished note, then How Did I Find Myself Here? perhaps opens up, after three decades, a hopeful new chapter. | 2017-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Anti- | September 9, 2017 | 6.9 | 8d52dd53-0017-4c6f-9f1e-3c43cf7a40b9 | David Chiu | https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-chiu/ | https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/59aec5a11bdffd46b5386871/1:1/w_1000,h_1000,c_limit/howdidifindmyselfhere?.jpg |
On her latest LP, Sallie Ford distills her retro rock sound and introduces a confessional lyrical approach. Soul Sick lands somewhere between between a ’50s sock hop and last call in a rockabilly bar. | On her latest LP, Sallie Ford distills her retro rock sound and introduces a confessional lyrical approach. Soul Sick lands somewhere between between a ’50s sock hop and last call in a rockabilly bar. | Sallie Ford: Soul Sick | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22846-soul-sick/ | Soul Sick | A retro streak runs through most of the music of Sallie Ford, both solo and with her former Portland, Oregon band the Sound Outside. But it’s never been quite as pronounced as on her latest album. Soul Sick is Ford’s second LP since the Sound Outside split at the end of 2013, and it’s a distillation in many ways, as if Ford ran her songs through a rock’n’roll evaporator to remove any extraneous elements. The result is a vintage sound that falls somewhere between a 1950s sock hop and last call in a disreputable rockabilly bar.
Soul Sick’s 11 lean tunes are full of raucous, trebly guitars and a toughness imparted by Ford’s raw voice. Her vocals are a distinctive blend of rugged and plaintive, and something of a calling card, one of those attributes that draws listeners in or turns them off. Either way, Ford knows her strengths as a singer, and she maximizes them here. She lets her voice ring out on “Screw Up” over a thrumming Farfisa, or conveys an itchy sense of urgency on “Get Out,” or captures the anxiety of teen angst on “Failure.”
Despite the jumped-up, hip-shaking music, Soul Sick is not a good-time album. Ford is deceptively self-lacerating, and she’s by turns angry and forlorn throughout. Though she sings plenty about behaving badly, a classic rock’n’roll subject, Ford’s lyrics are anachronistic. With their stark, personal tone, these songs amount to a latter-day form of confessional songwriting that simply wasn’t done in the musical periods she draws from. Her dissatisfaction sometimes veers from restless exasperation, as on the full-throated “Get Out,” to something closer to wallowing in her anguish.
Ford sings with jumpy force on “Loneliness Is Power,” but the lyrics read as if she’s trying to convince herself that the title is true. She beats herself up on “Romanticized Catastrophe” for letting negative emotions run rampant, a sentiment at odds with the doo-wop-esque backing vocals, which Dion and the Belmonts would have coveted. And she’s on the verge of falling apart completely on “Unraveling,” a torchy slow-burner that Ford sings in a brawny falsetto over tremolo guitars and a subtle, muted horn section.
Though she rarely sounds at ease on Soul Sick, the blustery gusto with which Ford and her band tear through the songs turns her discomfort into catharsis. Even when her lyrics verge on self-pitying (“Hurts So Bad,” say), Ford sounds like she is determined to exorcise her demons with a guitar and a tom-tom beat. Her energetic thrashing is infectious, like an open invitation to dance away your own pain. Loneliness may be power, but there’s strength in numbers. | 2017-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-02-18T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Folk/Country | Vanguard | February 18, 2017 | 7.1 | 8d53f020-dce5-4587-b4bf-a5be0f4c4958 | Eric R. Danton | https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-r. danton/ | null |
In a mix for Berlin nightclub Tresor’s mix series, the Hamburg DJ doles out more than two hours of industrial-tinged techno and electro, all delivered with her typically punishing panache. | In a mix for Berlin nightclub Tresor’s mix series, the Hamburg DJ doles out more than two hours of industrial-tinged techno and electro, all delivered with her typically punishing panache. | Helena Hauff: Kern Vol. 5 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/helena-hauff-kern-vol-5/ | Kern Vol. 5 | Kern Vol. 5 is not a subtle record. That’s not Helena Hauff’s style. The German DJ didn’t earn her accolades by playing it safe. True to her roots—Hauff got her start as a resident at Hamburg’s grungy (and much loved) Golden Pudel Club—she prefers to smash things up, usually with a blistering mix of hard-edged electro, industrial, techno, acid, and post-punk that’s light on nuance, heavy on distortion, and devastatingly effective on the dancefloor.
As a producer, Hauff has distilled her bleak vision into numerous cassettes, EPs, and a couple of albums, the most recent being 2018’s Qualm, on Ninja Tune. Yet it’s in the DJ booth that she truly thrives, cutting an imposing, often leather-clad figure while holding court with a box of scuzzy vinyl, a take-no-bullshit attitude, and a cigarette permanently jutting out the side of her mouth. Over the past decade, she’s dropped plenty of mixes online, but Kern Vol. 5 is the first time she’s linked up with vaunted Berlin techno institution Tresor, whose Kern series has previously featured iconoclasts like DJ Hell, Objekt, and DJ Stingray.
Though Kern Vol. 5 clocks in at 132 minutes, the mix comes barreling out of the gate and screams along at 150 bpm for the next two hours. It’s an intense (and occasionally punishing) listen, although Hauff explained in a recent interview with The Face that the long runtime was due in part to the logistical challenges of life as an all-vinyl DJ: “I had to get the [unreleased] tracks pressed onto dubplates—but then I realised that I’d picked a lot of mad tracks that are really difficult to mix, so it ended up being really, really long.”
Hauff is known as a digger, with an ear for corroded machine rhythms that rivals that of celebrated reissue outposts like Dark Entries, Minimal Wave, and Mannequin, and Kern Vol. 5 is populated with obscure gems like “City of Boom,” a dynamic 2004 cut from Detroit duo DJ Godfather & DJ Starski, and “Intellectual Killer,” a snarling bit of nosebleed-inducing gabber from Australian outfit Nasenbluten—their name, in fact, is German for “nosebleed”—that samples ’90s horrorcore rap trio Gravediggaz and contains the colorful lyric, “Roping up the devils/Have ’em hanging from my testicles.” The mix’s dominant sound, however, is electro, and though Hauff pulls more or less equally from new and old tunes, she tends to favor an industrial-tinged variant of the genre that relies heavily on gnarled synths, viciously snapping syncopations, and a sci-fi sound palette.
Like most mix compilations, Kern Vol. 5 features a handful of exclusive tracks—all of which appear as part of a triple-vinyl package that also includes select cuts from the mix—including the nightmarish “Segment 3,” which Hauff cooked up herself alongside Greek artist Morah. Arriving in the set’s relentless middle section, it has all the warmth of a threshing machine, but it’s only a few songs later that Hauff begins to lighten things up. The tempo stays high, but she gradually swaps out industrial crunch for cosmic swirl—think Creme Organization instead of Bunker Records—and hits a high note with the pairing of “Starless Night,” a soaring exclusive from veteran French producer Umwelt, and “Pinwheel,” an acid-licked epic from Shinra.
Despite the mix’s (slightly) more melodic turn in the closing 40 minutes, Kern Vol. 5 isn’t for the faint of heart; it’s definitely not a soothing quarantine companion. Hauff has always been the sort of DJ who’s more likely to deliver a kick to the ribs than a pat on the head, and she’s stuck to her rowdy impulses here. Running her gauntlet isn’t easy, but it is invigorating, and with clubs and festivals on indefinite pause around the globe, Kern Vol. 5 is a welcome reminder of just how thrilling a good battering on the dancefloor can be. | 2020-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-06-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | Tresor | June 22, 2020 | 7.2 | 8d64a6e3-3f73-4685-96d4-af17e223c4ce | Shawn Reynaldo | https://pitchfork.com/staff/shawn-reynaldo/ | |
When the Chemical Brothers are on top of their game, it's hard for anyone in their genre to touch ... | When the Chemical Brothers are on top of their game, it's hard for anyone in their genre to touch ... | The Chemical Brothers: Come with Us | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1417-come-with-us/ | Come with Us | When the Chemical Brothers are on top of their game, it's hard for anyone in their genre to touch them. In those moments, their sound threatens to go completely over the top, the massive beats and electronic squelches ripping through the speakers like they're about to physically jump out into your living room. Back in '97, I would drive around listening to "Block Rockin' Beats," unable to feel like anything but a bad motherfucker. I might have only been behind the wheel of a Jetta, but that's not the issue.
Of course, a good way to judge a Chemical Brothers album is via the ego-inflation factor. If you're feeling like Al Capone with a fat bank roll and a baseball bat, the Brothers are achieving the desired effect; if you feel like you're shopping for designer footwear, things have veered horribly off-course. The fact is, the Chemical Brothers' greatest strength lies in their ability to lay down irresistibly fat basslines and breakbeats that would make Bootsy Collins' fingers bleed. A good Chemical Brothers track should bulldoze any form of criticism simply because it's a strictly visceral experience-- you press play and send the frontal cortex to its room to play with blocks for a while.
The big question going into Come with Us was whether they'd come out Kung-Fu fighting or serve up another batch of watered-down techno beats like those dished out on their previous album, Surrender. I wanted to see them rely less on guest cameos (almost invariably a bad sign)-- Bernard Sumner and Hope Sandoval should stay as far away from the studio as possible, preferably with a 300-pound bouncer with a pit bull screening the door-- and they generally do. Sure, Beth Orton and Richard Ashcroft managed to get their fingers in the pie, but some of these tracks also return to what the Chemical Brothers do best. In the end, it's a mixed bag.
Come with Us flies out of the gates unexpectedly with its first three tracks, immediately dragging the listener through a relentless torrent of beats and sonic energy. The title track, with its agitated, looped strings, undulating waves of syrupy keyboards, shouts, and strong backbeat, is reminiscent of the Beastie Boys at their most raucous; "It Began in Afrika" is a rapid, heart-pounding conga workout that distills the quick reflexes and primal urges of a cheetah hunt under a deadpan voice repeating, "It Began In Afrika-ka-ka"; and "Galazy Bounce" features a repeated call-and-response sample over tight, driving slap-bass funk. None of this is a thought-provoking music in the slightest, and I wouldn't want it any other way. These tracks are purely functional-- all speed, sweat and clenched muscle-- and, as convenient packets of immediate party energy, they succeed admirably well.
Of course, it's when the Chemical Brothers deviate from their role as Big Beat deities that problems arise. "Star Guitar" apparently substitutes for the missing Sumner track-- it's slight, but not nearly as vapid as "Hoops," the song that follows it. Honestly, none of the remaining material returns to the quality of the first three cuts, though "My Elastic Eye" and "Denmark" do manage to turn up the heat a bit. But there's not much to be said about the Orton ("The State We're In") and Ashcroft ("The Test") numbers, other than that they're both about as middle-of-the-road as you might expect they'd be. "The Test," for example, sounds like a weak companion piece to the Simple Minds' "(Don't You) Forget About Me," and Orton's admittedly seductive vocals aren't nearly enough to rescue an inherently bad song.
Yep, Come with Us is another let down, no two ways about it. And all because Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons seem confused about where they'd like to go. There are certain things they do very well, yet they don't seem to be content with being pigeonholed as one-dimensional. Unfortunately, one-dimensional is about the only thing they can pull off convincingly. | 2002-01-30T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2002-01-30T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Electronic | Astralwerks | January 30, 2002 | 6.2 | 8d6af510-0ac7-471d-8243-3ba1ba18d7e6 | Pitchfork | null |
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Kristin Hayter’s latest is an intense and frightening religious inquiry, incorporating traditional Appalachian instruments and samples from televangelist sermons. | Kristin Hayter’s latest is an intense and frightening religious inquiry, incorporating traditional Appalachian instruments and samples from televangelist sermons. | Lingua Ignota: Sinner Get Ready | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/lingua-ignota-sinner-get-ready/ | Sinner Get Ready | For her latest album as Lingua Ignota, Kristin Hayter burrowed deep into the landscape of rural Pennsylvania. Though the exact location of its genesis is not clear, Sinner Get Ready is crafted from Appalachian folk instruments and mired in the region’s traditional religious fervor. Interspersed with clips from televangelist sermons, this music examines the duality of blind devotion. Like so much of Hayter’s work, the record is also a text of discomfort; it was created during lockdown, following months of excruciating pain due to a spinal surgery. Even the instruments she worked with presented a unique challenge: The classically trained musician taught herself to play banjo and cello, stoking their sounds to ignite a torrid mythology.
On her previous Lingua Ignota album, 2019’s Caligula, Hayter invoked Satan himself, commanding him to “fortify” her in a quest for retribution. It was an expulsion of personal trauma—a blistering tribute to oppressed women. For that album, Hayter enlisted members of the Body, Uniform, and Full of Hell, subjecting her operatic melodies to corrosive distortion and electronic manipulation. On Sinner Get Ready, Hayter confronts the inverse of Caligula, both formally and thematically. She forgoes digital processing for simpler tools: menacing organ, an animal-skin drum, penny whistle. Hayter either subverts these instruments or leans into their ecclesiastical implications. The result, as those who’ve encountered the full-tilt of religious fanaticism know, are just as frightening.
Hayter does not call upon the devil on Sinner Get Ready, but her portrayal of God is ruthless. Like the Jehovah of the Old Testament, or the deities of ancient Greece, he is a vengeful, violent presence. On “Many Hands,” over a dirge of bowed zither and scraped guitar strings, Hayter shifts between the perspective of this severe being and a submissive devotee. “Upon your pale pale body I will put many hands,” she sings, recounting the word of God. “And rough, rough fingers for every hole you have.” The song builds into a percussive clatter, a hailstorm of cymbals and castanets and bells that Hayter sourced from nearby antique stores. The din collides with her multi-tracked vocals, which ebb and rise like the rhythmic call-and-response of a fiery church service. In a lull between vibrant bursts of harmony, Hayter stretches her voice above the creeping drone. “The Lord spat and held me by my neck,” she cries. “I would die for you, he wept.” It is a striking image: to be seized by something so powerful and reckless.
Hayter continues this exploration in “Repent Now Confess Now,” an ambling ballad led by spare piano and surges of cello. She assumes the role of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, reminding congregants that “this body is not your home.” “The surgeon’s precision is nothing,” she sings. “No wound as sharp as the will of God.” But as much as Sinner Get Ready claws at the concept of an all-powerful entity, it also points a sharpened fingernail at the dangerously pious. “The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata” opens with a clip of CNN’s Gary Tuchman interviewing Ohio churchgoers about the risks of gathering during the COVID-19 outbreak. When asked if she is concerned about getting sick, one woman responds, “No. I’m covered in Jesus’ blood.”
These spoken segments burble beneath the surface, never overshadowing the music. Instead, they magnify a subtle kind of terror. In “The Sacred Linament of Judgement,” we hear televangelist Jimmy Swaggart apologize to his followers for sexual improprieties. Before he can complete his speech, an audience member shouts “Get off the stage!” with blood-curdling ire. At the beginning of “Man Is Like a Spring Flower,” Hayter places a recording of the sex worker who brought Swaggart’s indiscretions to light. Yet Hayter’s deep respect for devotional music, as performed in “The Solitary Brethren of Ephrata,” recontextualizes her harsh depictions of piety: the grand, major key hymnal is an ode to paradise found. Soaring over braided woodwinds and plucked mandolins, Hayter’s voice attempts to transcend pains of the flesh. She sings of a delusion—but a lovely one. Unlike the spiteful divinity that stalks these songs, Hayter’s music is full of reverence and empathy for our most challenging task: to be human.
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. | 2021-08-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-11T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Sargent House | August 11, 2021 | 8 | 8d6cf79c-8698-4113-adfb-15903b6aa40c | Madison Bloom | https://pitchfork.com/staff/madison-bloom/ | |
The pop crooner’s third album is at times freer, queerer, and more enlivening than anything Sam Smith has done before, and yet too cautious to make what could’ve been a career-defining leap. | The pop crooner’s third album is at times freer, queerer, and more enlivening than anything Sam Smith has done before, and yet too cautious to make what could’ve been a career-defining leap. | Sam Smith: Love Goes | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sam-smith-love-goes/ | Love Goes | In the music video for their surprisingly vibrant single “How Do You Sleep?” Sam Smith, usually the purveyor of masochistic melodrama and sexless shmaltz, blossoms into someone new. Surrounded by half-naked dancers, the British superstar writhes, snarls, and moves their body with coquettish sensuality. It culminates in a hypnotizing choreography sequence where Smith and their dancers mime sleep while, staring deep into the camera, they slowly rock their hips. It’s uncanny, playful, and sexy. Moments later, Smith lets a smile loose, running their hands over their head in what looks like utter ecstasy.
“How Do You Sleep?” was a revelatory moment for a pop star who, save for their breakout song, had relied on a stale combination of mopey piano, campy gospel choir, and self-flagellating heartbreak; it’s a formula that made them famous, but the songs increasingly blended together. The video gave hope that Smith, who came out as nonbinary and changed their pronouns a few months after the single’s release, was proud to embrace their queerness and was finally moving past their typical, buttoned-up schlock.
Love Goes, Smith’s third album, unfortunately fails to deliver on the promise of “How Do You Sleep?” The album is clumsily split in two, with no regard to sequencing; it begins with a collection of bubbling, at times electric songs spanning melodic funk, pulsing deep-house, and mid-tempo pop, before abruptly veering to five messy ballads that would be better delivered via Hallmark card. As bonus tracks, if the album wasn’t unbalanced enough, Love Goes tacks on six promotional singles after the ballads, like the hugely successful, Normani-assisted “Dancing with a Stranger,” the theatrical Demi Lovato team-up “I’m Ready,” and the Calvin Harris-produced club hit “Promises.” Replacing these songs, which would have fit well on Love Goes, with boilerplate Smith ballads with titles like “For the Lover That I Lost” and “Breaking Hearts” feels like a calculated, and ultimately ineffectual, attempt to keep the fans of Smith’s earlier records engaged despite Smith’s attempts at exploring new sounds. The result is an unbalanced and frustrating album, one that is at times freer, queerer, and more enlivening than anything Smith’s done before, and yet too cautious to make what could’ve been a career-defining leap.
The Smith we meet on Love Goes’s first half is, thankfully, missing much of the self-pity that made In the Lonely Hour and The Thrill of It All so difficult to empathize with (perhaps because Love Goes was based on the disintegration of Smith’s first real relationship, instead of on the heartbreak of unrequited love; their songwriting has improved as a result). Single “Diamonds” is an absolute smash—melodic and morose, but pulsing with resistance and joy, it’s a dancefloor-filling breakup anthem that is actually believable. It’s remarkable how much better Smith sounds over quality pop production; their voice, with its ridiculously elastic range, is an instant gut-punch, a wrecking ball of emotional devastation that conveys feeling all on its own. On “Another One,” a deliciously petty yet disarming message to an ex who moved on, Smith reunites with Disclosure’s Guy Lawrence over pulsing 808 drums and twinkling synths that echo Robyn. The best, cheekiest writing comes on the infectious “So Serious,” which finds Smith acknowledging their addiction to emotional theatrics. “The second that I’m happy and I’m fine,” they sigh, “Suddenly there’s violins and movie scenes and/Crying rivers in the streets and/God I don’t know why, I get so serious sometimes.”
“Dance (’Til You Love Someone Else),” also produced by Lawrence, is Smith’s attempt at a ’90s house song. Lawrence and co-producer Two Inch Punch nail the reverberating melodrama of classic heartbreak-on-the-dancefloor epics, while Smith, sidestepping mere imitation, uses the force of the instrumental to howl, wounded and brazen and determined. It’s no “Show Me Love,” but the track nonetheless captures the intangible experience of losing yourself on a sweaty dancefloor at a gay club, where dancing, for a moment, is enough to get over an ex.
“Dance” is the final highlight; Love Goes sputters right after. The next four songs all begin with somber piano, as if Smith, and their label, suddenly remembered the commercial tidal wave that was “Stay With Me.” Thankfully, Smith and their collaborators have rid themselves of their uncomfortable reliance on the sound of Black choirs, but the result is just as cringeworthy. Two songs after laughing at their own predisposition for melodrama, Smith laments how “while you were busy breaking hearts/I was busy breaking,” on the nearly unlistenable “Breaking Hearts.” Any hope of artistic evolution implodes on “Love Goes,” an overstuffed collaboration with the British singer/producer Labrinth that is one part Sam Smith karaoke and two parts amateur GarageBand clusterfuck, with competing instrumental layers fighting it out for supreme, headache-inducing dominance. It builds without consequence until a sudden explosion of timpani drums and horns; the BPM accelerates and a faux-hip-hop beat drops, as if Flume drank two bottles of Chenin blanc and tried to produce the rest.
Listening to Smith fresh out of high school, it was as if a vortex had swallowed the pain of my coming out, rejection, and self-discovery, and spit it back in my face. Yet its impact dulled with each listen. The loneliness and self-pity of Smith’s music has never evolved beyond generalized mushiness, and as a result fails to truly capture the nuance and complication of adulthood and queerness, heartbreak and redemption. It’s one-size-fits-all musical masochism that, in attempting to touch the masses, really touches no one. It works spectacularly to sell records. But when put up against the stuff of real life, or the wrenching emotional artistry of stars like Adele or Frank Ocean—musicians who construct entire worlds out of their experience and feeling—it quickly disintegrates. For a brief moment last summer, swaying their hips and reaching for the sky, Smith seemed ready to leave the formula behind, to reveal something new about themselves, to maybe, even, show us a way to look at our own pain. And then the piano started playing.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2020-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Pop/R&B | Capitol | November 5, 2020 | 6.1 | 8d7070c0-f5ba-48d8-8c47-9a62815260e2 | Jackson Howard | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jackson-howard/ | |
The German experimental musician Antye Greie pays tribute to 16 Russian dissidents, putting cut-up vocals, electronic sound, and collective practice in the service of feminist revolution. | The German experimental musician Antye Greie pays tribute to 16 Russian dissidents, putting cut-up vocals, electronic sound, and collective practice in the service of feminist revolution. | AGF: Dissidentova | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/agf-dissidentova/ | Dissidentova | A great cloud of rough-hewn glossolalia is torn into glitches before drifting into an unsettled calm. “Fire my heart with song,” intones a woman’s voice, launching Dissidentova, the latest album from experimental electronic musician Antye Greie, “and hear one who like you to the fairer sex belongs.”
The author of these words is Princess Ekaterina Urusova, the 18th-century Russian poet; the speaker is Katia Reshetnikova, a sound artist in 21st-century Moscow, who casts her voice across a field of birdsong and insect chatter recorded in the remote Russian village of her grandmother. It’s a place that the critic Dasha Birukova, the author of Dissidentova’s essential liner notes, describes as being virtually unchanged since Ekaterina’s time. In her poem, the princess invokes her muses; in her recording, Reshetnikova invokes both princess and grandmother; in her notes, Birukova explicates Greie’s role in bringing the three women together, across media and millennia.
Over the course of the next hour or so, Greie finds fuel in the work of many more women, living and dead, fair and brutal. They speak in voices shadowed by reverb, or stutter in digital cut-ups, or drawl over unctuous electro. Sometimes, like a time-travelling Alan Lomax, Greie presents the recordings as documentation of what’s disappearing; sometimes she filters and phases them into charismatic sirens. She’s rarely precious about the sources, but—in a time when anyone with a Voice Memo app can be a field recordist, and anyone on Facebook a curator—Greie stands apart as an artist who is unusually respectful, centering in her maelstroms the meaning of what’s being said, and who’s saying it, and why.
Born in East Germany and now based in Finland but seemingly most at home online, Greie got her start in the minimal-techno scene of the early 1990s. Her records in the group Laub and as AGF proved to the clicks’n’cuts boys’ club that a woman’s voice could do more than just sing the hook: It was raw material every bit as captivating as skipping CDs, plastic-surgery samples, tone-arm manipulations, or generative synthesis. Her work innovated in vocal processing and charmed with a mysterious, glowing warmth. But soon Greie radicalized in both form and content, abandoning traditional songwriting and turning to notions of how to organize noise—and other people. In 2014, she released the epochal “Nerdgirls” mix, an invigorating hour of more than 50 female electronic producers, and helped start the female:pressure network of female, transgender, and non-binary electronic and digital artists.
Meanwhile, she instituted a series of albums utilizing not just voice but language itself, fitting ancient and contemporary Japanese, Finnish, and German texts into frames of sculpted sound. In February 2017, Greie performed at a festival in Moscow and, like Ekarterina, found her heart fired up by Russian songs. Many prominent artists, Greie says, were resistant to participating in the project, given their “problematic political connections.” But Greie is nothing if not persistent, as demonstrated by Dissidentova’s 16 tributes to Russian women, including a radio broadcaster during the siege of Leningrad, a journalist murdered for her investigations into military operations in Chechnya, and Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova.
It sounds heady, and it is, although in both sound and mood Dissidentova album is no more difficult than records by fellow travelers like Coil, Laurie Anderson, Moor Mother, Holly Herndon, or even Zola Jesus (though none of them ever could have gotten as much mileage as Greie does out of the excruciating croaking of an old Russian oven door). “Marina Tsvetaeva 1892-1941” ft. Gbaidulina offers rumbles of barely submerged rage while Greie spits out a poem by the titular Silver Age poet Tsvetaeva. The track ferociously (and, depressingly, in timely fashion) ends: “To your mad world, there is one answer. One. One answer: To refuse. To refuse. I refuse.” It’s perhaps just a remix short (how about one by Octo Octa?) of an anthem. So is the riot of “Emma Goldman 1869-1940” ft. AGF, in which a multiplicity of Greies conjures up the famed anarchist with a gleeful, “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution!” Which is just to say that this is an album of inspirations, not references—sparks, not embers; audio bombs, not audiobooks.
“Anna Gorenko (Carp) 1972-1999” ft. Olga Nosova is a full-on clarion assault. “Let us go down to the void!” wrote the young poet Gorenko, a firebrand along the lines of Kathy Acker and Kathleen Hanna, while the percussionist Nosova and Greie carve tunnels of space for the words within tectonic plates of screeching and groaning noise, just to prove it can be done. As a voice says at the track’s conclusion: “Wow, construction machine near Kremlin, beautiful sound!” Indeed. Dissidentova is weary, and joyful, and wary of joy, and a fine example of what resistance might sound like—revealing and reveling in the endless ugliness of the world men build, and the beauty of feminist rebellions against it. | 2018-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2018-07-13T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | AGF Producktion | July 13, 2018 | 7.6 | 8d719a2f-34dd-4d0d-8bf7-f6e505373977 | Jesse Dorris | https://pitchfork.com/staff/jesse-dorris/ | |
Hard punk from Florida doesn’t get much bloodier than this—22 minutes of loud, incredibly catchy songs that revel in mythological and contemporary scum and violence. | Hard punk from Florida doesn’t get much bloodier than this—22 minutes of loud, incredibly catchy songs that revel in mythological and contemporary scum and violence. | Golden Pelicans: Disciples of Blood | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23040-disciples-of-blood/ | Disciples of Blood | Orlando’s Golden Pelicans have a fake origin story—one about working as the house band for a local, now-defunct gang of weed dealers—but that narrative isn’t required to understand their scummy universe. Their early singles and first two LPs on drummer Rich Evans’ unstoppable Total Punk imprint—2014’s Golden Pelicans and 2015’s Oldest Ride, Longest Line—are the works of a band who paired classic hard rock’s beefy earworms with hardcore’s abrasive screams. One of their signature songs is about pissin’ in a puddle of puke, and in another one, they’re chained to a dumpster.
Erik Grincewicz is their frontman—a bearded balding dude who doesn’t hesitate to soak a crowd in beer. He leads the charge with his abrasive, ultra-hoarse voice, which is both an unstable force and a riveting focal point. Guitarist Scott Barnes is the muscle, emboldening their overall attack with chugging heft and undeniable hooks. It’s Barnes’ sick guitar solos that push Golden Pelicans into that rare echelon of contemporary punk bands whose technical ability matches their guttural aggression.
Disciples of Blood is Golden Pelicans’ first long-player on a non-Total Punk label; this time they handed the reins to Goner Records. Once again, the balance between Grincewicz’s rough vocals and Barnes’ massive guitar sound is keyed in perfectly. “Smell the Lightning” is a prime example—the introductory guitar has this polished, seemingly expensive sound pulled from hard rock hits from the tail end of the ’70s. Then, Grincewicz’s near-gargled scream shoots through Barnes’ hook with a line about getting fried on his own supply. They balance precision and blunt force, and the results are extremely satisfying.
Narratively, it’s an album that oscillates between a violent present and a brutal mythological past. At one point, they’re frantically running from some compromising announcement by a Byzantine cleric, and Grincewicz sounds unhinged as he sings about “blood on the Bosphorus/Black sails on Aegean Sea.” When they’re not playing Russian roulette, they’re reflecting on what it’s like to get turned to stone by Medusa. Mythology in rock music is a tough needle to thread—most attempts come out bloated and corny. With a concise, heavy delivery, Golden Pelicans never run into that problem. Between the destruction-filled album covers Mac Blackout made for all three of their albums, Grincewicz’s unrivaled voice, and the guitar heroics, the band sells ancient war tactics as authoritatively as they sell contemporary vomit.
One of the defining statements of the album the black comedy of “It Ain’t Psychedelic (Till You Kill Someone).” After one of their most upbeat intros on record, Grincewicz enters as the devil on your shoulder, insisting that any floaty, pleasant psychedelic experience isn’t going to cut it. Then there’s the title track, and while “Disciples of Blood” sounds like another lofty mythological reference, it’s really a story about slobs sticking up for themselves. Of course, the disciples in question chug beers and are baptized in piss, because that’s Golden Pelicans’ aesthetic. It’s an endlessly replayable album at 22 minutes, and it’s one that demands to be heard loud. They’re rock songs that revel in scum and violence—catchy, heavy music that makes you want to shove your friends and scream along. Sometimes, evil can be fun. | 2017-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-04-22T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Goner | April 22, 2017 | 7.5 | 8d74b76d-10be-4e7e-b7c5-fe5b197114b0 | Evan Minsker | https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-minsker/ | null |
The Brooklyn producer’s heavily abstracted ambient music offers a choice between deep listening or blissful distraction. It’s equally gratifying either way. | The Brooklyn producer’s heavily abstracted ambient music offers a choice between deep listening or blissful distraction. It’s equally gratifying either way. | Ben Bondy: Camo | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ben-bondy-camo/ | Camo | Ben Bondy is an expert purveyor of diaphanous ambience and he’s never short on wares. In the past two years the Brooklynite released nearly a dozen albums, all of them essential comforts bearing subtle moods and gentle demeanors, dubby pulses and blissed-out reveries. From time to time, he’s gracefully ventured into peripheral territories like downtempo or IDM, and his collaborations have extended his sonic boundaries further: the Blessed Kitty, with Pontiac Streator and Ulla, features vocals, while his stint with producer uon as xphresh includes a celestial breakbeat. Camo outpaces his previous work in effortless fashion, and it’s largely because its seven tracks are so frictionless, showcasing the most self-effacing, unassuming soundscapes of his career.
Opener “Pandøer” sets the bar high: Imagine 1980s Gigi Masin without the rhythmic gridlock or softly anchoring piano melodies. It’s pure drift, with Bondy using reverberating guitars and static to lend an amorphous structure to the haze. It has an uncanny resemblance to deep breathing exercises, and regardless of where you’re at either physically or mentally, it places you in a therapeutic zone. “Pool” lands somewhere between the sparse romanticism of the Durutti Column and the most elemental of Mark McGuire’s nostalgic psychedelia. It’s not reliant on melody, finding contentment in the faintest hint of pop sensibility. This allure of mere suggestion is key. Camo is neither self-important nor excessively inviting; it simply exists.
Many artists and writers have discussed the difference between hearing and listening, and they often pedestalize the latter when doing so, asserting that it’s always and unequivocally the nobler act. That’s understandable; there’s value in learning to listen more closely. But in our desire to be more thoughtful, there’s been unnecessary blowback against passivity, where “unfocused” music listening is equated with the ostensible mindlessness of mood playlists and the “lo-fi beats” phenomenon. Camo shakes up such notions, allowing one to move freely between both registers and finding joy either way. Tracks with field recordings, like “Conté” and “I Thought You’d Look Away,” are impressive in this regard. The former threads the iconic call of the mourning dove through coiling guitar melodies as a periodic reminder of presence. The latter, meshed with the alternating sounds of a tennis rally, is equally poetic. There’s interplay between quotidian noises and the music surrounding them, but even a casual listen still feels like absorbing the splendor of a sunny afternoon.
Camo is compellingly nondescript; it never feels like Bondy’s prescribing an obvious method for digesting his songs. Take “Omni Field,” an unpretentious flurry of ambient detritus, where the undulating sounds of dub techno arrive as vapor. The swells of cracked field recordings and bubbling synths are too shapeless to be all-consuming, but the results offer the unexpected allure of hearing flecks of sound gestate. Bondy’s secret is approaching liminality not as conduit or provocative end point but as something beguilingly uncertain. It’s this recalibration of expectations that makes Camo a marvel—Bondy sells ephemerality as something irresistible.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-28T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Good Morning Tapes | January 28, 2022 | 7.3 | 8d8112a4-ada6-4032-aba4-8079700f60c5 | Joshua Minsoo Kim | https://pitchfork.com/staff/joshua-minsoo kim/ | |
Michael Mayer’s technique as a DJ is impeccable, and his personality bursts from the decks. His latest mix CD gathers obscure house tracks and other oddities, reflecting his restless tastes. | Michael Mayer’s technique as a DJ is impeccable, and his personality bursts from the decks. His latest mix CD gathers obscure house tracks and other oddities, reflecting his restless tastes. | Michael Mayer: DJ-Kicks | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23238-dj-kicks/ | DJ-Kicks | Making a compelling DJ mix isn’t rocket science. Just play a selection of songs no other DJ would come up with, in a way that no other DJ would play them, while finessing the pacing and transitions. Still, hitting all those points is key. Nail the technical bits but flub the selection, and what have you got? A convincing argument in favor of outsourcing your job to a computer. A killer set of songs put together without the DJ’s sleight-of-hand, meanwhile, is just a playlist.
Michael Mayer, however, is a natural. His technique is impeccable, and his personality bursts from the decks. In many ways, he’s his own stiffest competition, because he raised the bar so high, so early in his career. His first mix CD, 1998’s Neuhouse, wasn’t just an introduction to the then-nascent sound of Cologne techno. It was an argument in favor of a different way of imagining dance music: steely yet emotive, minimalist yet expansive, linear but always game for an entertaining detour. Most importantly, it convincingly compressed an entire night’s worth of moods into 73 fleeting minutes, a trick that has become a hallmark of Mayer’s mixes.
With 2002’s Immer, rightly heralded as a techno classic, he pretty much perfected his aesthetic, one he has built upon on subsequent mixes: deft, surprising, and stylish, equal parts trickster and sensitive soul. The conventional wisdom tends to consider Immer Mayer’s masterpiece, and it’s true that it nails an elusive vibe in a way that few mixes can. Still, all of his mixes confirm the originality and restlessness of Mayer’s tastes. There’s Fabric 13’s gonzo, peak-time flair; Immer 2’s insouciant disco edge; and Immer 3’s procession of goth-tinged torch songs.
DJ-Kicks is Mayer’s first commercially released mix since 2010’s Immer 3. Dance music has changed a lot since then: Mix CDs don’t enjoy the same status they once did, largely having been replaced by SoundCloud, and Mayer’s brand of controlled eclecticism has become more common. Techno fans are far less suspicious of melody, and of pleasure, than they once were. (It’s strange to think how audacious it felt for him to drop Westbam and Nena’s piano-house anthem “Oldschool, Baby” on 2003’s Fabric 13; that kind of winking rave nostalgia is everywhere these days.) But the new set is clearly cut from the same cloth as its predecessors. It is quiet in places and raucous in others; its selections are sometimes intuitive and sometimes wildly idiosyncratic, but its forward motion is always fluid. Leaning mostly on fairly obscure house tracks from the last several years, it also reaches back and gathers up some real oddities—a Marc Almond feature remixed to hi-NRG heaven by Röyskopp; a 2004 remix by Basement Jaxx’s Simon Ratcliffe of Throbbing Gristle’s 1979 song “Hot on the Heels of Love”—to carve out a unique corner of the dancefloor.
As always, he begins with a rapturous soft launch: an ambient sketch for trombone and Rhodes keyboard by Peter Zummo, a onetime collaborator of Arthur Russell, followed by Mayer’s dreamy “The Horn Conspiracy,” which teases pitter-pat congas out of a fog of muted horns and reverb. He builds on the creeping drama with Bvoice, Anrilov, and Danilov’s “Papa’s Groove (dOP & Masomenos Remix),” a Franco-Russian affair full of brushed percussion, Ethio-jazz-inspired flute, and a murky, Russian-language monologue. Mutado Pintado’s spoken-word vocals in SAVE!’s “The Darkness (I:Cube Remix)” create a sort of subliminal through-line into the next section of the mix, a four-track segment of vaguely new wave-ish flavors. This is probably the set’s most inspired passage. SAVE!’s phased and flanged guitar lead gives way to the slide guitar of Justus Köhncke’s cover of Michael Rother’s “Feuerland”; CSS’s electroclashy “Honey (Michael Mayer Remix)” and Alter Ego’s Gary Numan tribute “Gary” round out what amounts to a treatise on the enduring power of the 1980s.
One of Mayer’s specialties is the transition that is both seamless and abrupt—that is, a dramatic change in mood where the groove barely flinches—and he uses that trick several times, to brilliant effect. The segue into his ’80s-inspired mini-mix is as clean as the twist in a Möbius strip, and following “Gary,” the energy imperceptibly shifts once again. This time it plunges us into a long passage of peak-time disco: soaring voices and synths, chugging arpeggios, synthesized Philly strings. A Prins Thomas remix of Lionheart Brothers’ “The Drift” wrenches an eight-minute crescendo out of the set’s throbbing midsection; Röyksopp’s gooey mix of Mekon’s “Please Stay,” featuring a heavily vocoded Marc Almond, is as unabashedly excessive as any record that ever graced Mayer’s platters.
After that giddy peak, the comedown, and we’re back on familiar, wistful terrain. Chris & Cosey’s remix of Death in Vegas’ “Consequences of Love” applies a bright streak of melody late in the set. After the ambient false ending of Idioma’s “Landscapes,” Moderat’s remix of Jon Hopkins’ “Abandon Window” surges to a heart-in-mouth climax and rapid denouement, setting us gently down like a mother bird depositing her chick in the nest.
It’s a euphoric listen, and for a while there, an exhausting one. The opening third might make for a wonderful breakfast companion, but by the time he hits that Prins Thomas space elevator, you may wish you hadn’t had a second cup of coffee. It’s true that the set’s ambitious scope reflects the way Mayer’s style of playing has evolved in the seven years since his last mix CD. In 2012 and 2013, touring Mantasy, he played 20 all-nighters in his favorite clubs around the world, often playing for eight or 10 hours at a stretch, and even now, it’s rare that he’ll play fewer than three hours. At this month’s 4GB festival in Tbilisi, Georgia, he put in an incredible 17-and-a-half hours behind the decks. That sounds insane, but Mayer’s wide-ranging tastes and narrative sensibility really require a wide canvas to thrive (clearly lots of energy drinks, too). On DJ-Kicks, attempting to squeeze all those peaks and valleys into the length of a single aluminum disc, he finally runs up against the limits of the form. Should the medium survive long enough for Mayer to turn in another commercial mix—would Immer 4 be too much to ask for?—the solution is simple: Stretch out to two or even three CDs. If any DJ can hold our attention that long, he can. | 2017-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-05-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Electronic | !K7 | May 19, 2017 | 7.4 | 8d819414-914f-42ac-8bc6-0daf3e5d9f5f | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
These six cerebral, spiky songs extract something touching and tragic from the mundanity of social media and social anxiety. | These six cerebral, spiky songs extract something touching and tragic from the mundanity of social media and social anxiety. | Dry Cleaning: Sweet Princess EP | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dry-cleaning-sweet-princess-ep/ | Sweet Princess EP | On “Goodnight,” the opening track of South London post-punk quartet Dry Cleaning’s debut EP Sweet Princess, vocalist Florence Shaw performs the role of digital archaeologist, pasting together a series of absurd comments mined from YouTube videos. The words link into a demented chain of paper dolls, muttering lines like, “During what was probably the longest two and a half months of my life after a near-death experience... the only thing that kept me going was Saw 2.”
Dry Cleaning brings together longtime friends bassist Lewis Maynard, drummer Nick Buxton, and guitarist Tom Dowse. In late 2017, they recruited Shaw, an artist, university lecturer, and photo researcher, as the group’s singer. Though never a performer, she’d always kept lists—neuroses, daily annoyances, advertising copy—with the idea to one day use them in her drawings. Her excavations became the starting point for Sweet Princess, six cerebral, spiky songs that extract something touching and tragic from the mundanity of social media and social anxiety.
“Followed by another porn account on Instagram,” Shaw notes dryly on “Conversation,” a song about dating and the painful task of interacting with a person you resent yourself for wanting to impress. On “New Job,” a sing-song tribute to a couple called Jimmy and Olga—the kind you might imagine scratched into a bathroom stall or a school desk—transforms into a spoken list of anxieties: conversational missed connections, overstepped boundaries, desperate attempts to grasp something in common.
Stripped of context, collected fragments like, “Who’s the Pride of Britain?/Michelle blasts Mark/I was shot in the head by my kid,” mean little. But the things that strike Shaw’s fancy, that prove silly or strange enough to warrant pulling out a pen, betray what she values. Spliced together and set to tight, unpolished guitars, “Traditional Fish”’s recollections of signage and newsstands offer a grimy reflection of mundane British life as written in tabloid headlines.
Enter Meghan Markle. From the Sex Pistols to the Specials, British punks have long rallied against their heads of state. But over spirals of guitar that conjure memories of the Raincoats or the B-52’s, first single “Magic of Meghan” offers a staccato accounting of Markle’s graces. The Duchess of Sussex is illustrated as if she’s a young guidance counsellor who lets Shaw call her by her first name, or a friend from school she admires from afar. On the day of Markle’s engagement, we learn, Shaw was moving out after a breakup. The way she writes about Markle is almost like fan fiction: a morsel of celebrity bent and manipulated until it forms a new narrative specific to its author. It’s so endearing that it could almost stand to be a touch more critical of, you know, the monarchy.
Like empty bottles melted down and repurposed as stained glass, Dry Cleaning’s assembled observations capture the distortion of life on and off the internet, of spewing our deepest emotions into an anonymous void but biting our tongue when we encounter a real person. Type what you really feel, then close the tab and delete your history—maybe Florence Shaw will find it. | 2019-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-08-16T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | self-released | August 16, 2019 | 7.8 | 8d8578f0-2e76-40e2-b306-c8c90279fd0d | Brodie Lancaster | https://pitchfork.com/staff/brodie-lancaster/ | |
Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the incendiary, hell-bent debut from the Los Angeles punk band who used blues and rockabilly to paint a depraved portrait of a young artist in their purest state. | Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the incendiary, hell-bent debut from the Los Angeles punk band who used blues and rockabilly to paint a depraved portrait of a young artist in their purest state. | The Gun Club: Fire of Love | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/the-gun-club-fire-of-love/ | Fire of Love | London punk turned pub rock into protest music; New York punk reframed noise as art. But compared to those more celebrated first-wave scenes, L.A. punk was both more traditionalist and transgressive, the sound of faded glamour degenerating into fuck-it-all nihilism. Home to both the celebrity-industrial complex and the second-largest homeless population in the country, Los Angeles has always been the city that represents the folly of the American Dream, a place where happiness is manufactured for the big screen and hope goes to die under the sun. And by the late 1970s, the tension between the fantasy of L.A. and its reality had reached a breaking point. As local punk patriarch John Doe of X once put it, L.A. back then “looked like something between Roger Corman and Tennesee Williams. One of the Os in [the] ‘Hollywood’ [sign] had fallen down. It was in total decay.”
The natural response to living in a desperate, dangerous town is to make desperate, dangerous music. While the Germs and Black Flag pulverized punk into hardcore, bands like X and the Blasters approached punk as a rescue mission, by forging a spiritual connection with the primal hoots and howls of ’50s-jukebox oldies. And then there was the Gun Club, whose ringleader, Jeffrey Lee Pierce, looked so far back into the past—to the emotional bloodletting of Depression-era blues—that he wound up seeing the future, opening up a trail that indie rockers and roots artists would travel for decades to come. But what makes the Gun Club’s 1981 debut, Fire of Love, so timeless isn’t just that it set the stage for outlaw eccentrics like the Pixies, the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, and the White Stripes (while providing Nick Cave with his post-Birthday Party roadmap into the swamp). It’s an eternally captivating portrait of a young artist in their purest state—hungry, drunk on attitude, and committed to their vision to the point of seeming supernaturally possessed.
Pierce wasn’t the most obvious candidate for punk sainthood; at heart, he was more of a studious fanboy than a natural frontman. Born to an American father and Mexican mother, Pierce was raised in the working-class east L.A. community of El Monte before relocating to the Valley suburb of Granada Hills—“the Los Angeles that nobody ever bothers with,” as he called it. A voracious reader and record collector, Pierce became the teenage president of the Blondie fan club and worked the counter at Bomp Records, before making vagabond journeys to New York, New Orleans, and Jamaica. (His time in Jamaica dovetailed with a reggae obsession that saw him review records for L.A. scene bible Slash under the pen name Ranking Jeffrey Lea.) His own musical pursuits were equally impulsive: Upon dissolving his short-lived art-pop outfit Red Lights, Pierce formed a new band with fellow Chicano Brian Tristan after the two attended a Pere Ubu show at the Whiskey A Go-Go in 1979, initially using it as a vehicle to indulge their mutual love of soul and reggae.
That band was initially known as the Creeping Ritual, before Black Flag/Circle Jerks singer Keith Morris suggested a switch to the Gun Club. (In return, Pierce gifted Morris the lyrics to the title track for the Jerks’ 1980 debut, Group Sex.) But the name wasn’t the only thing that had changed. Through friendships with local record-collecting zine-maker Phast Phreddie Patterson and ex-Canned Heat singer Bob Hite, Pierce immersed himself in the blues, embracing it as both the original outsider’s music and as a strategic device to distinguish the Gun Club from his punk peers more clearly beholden to a ’60s-garage/Stooges lineage. “Anything before the ’60s can be fascinating, because so much time has passed,” he explained in a 1982 interview. “The ’60s just completely demolished everybody’s minds, and so people aren’t really aware of most of the musical forms before then … there’s more fresh and wild ideas going on there.”
Today, the concept of punks playing the blues may not seem so radical in a world where Jack White oversees a commercial empire and the Black Keys play arenas, but in 1980, no self-respecting aesthete would touch the stuff. After all, classic rock’s fealty to American blues—and all the machismo and 17-minute guitar solos it engendered—was a big part of the reason punk happened. But in his essay that accompanies Blixa Sound’s 40th-anniversary reissue of the album, drummer Terry Graham observes: “My half-drunk opinion was that Jeff loved and hated the blues, but his love/hate was the alchemy that transformed an age-old hindrance into a brand new advantage.”
Key to this transformation was Tristan’s slide guitar, which yields some of Fire of Love’s bedrock riffs. But the guitarist didn’t stick around to see it through. With the Gun Club still playing to mostly empty rooms in L.A., Tristan accepted an offer to replace Bryan Gregory in the far more popular Cramps (where he became forever known as Kid Congo Powers). The loss of his co-founding partner presented an early indication that the Gun Club wasn’t going to be some tight-knit gang, but a fluid entity that would regularly reinvent itself in response to Pierce’s ever-changing whims. (As Graham says in the 2006 documentary Ghost on the Highway: “[Pierce] was just simply going to stuff his head with knowledge, express that knowledge somehow, and it just didn’t make any difference who was behind him, who was with him doing it, or who was in front of him watching him do it.”)
Tristan’s defection to the Cramps also provided a useful yardstick for measuring what made the Gun Club so singular. Pierce didn’t fit into any established punk archetypes: He wasn’t your typical leather-clad tough guy, he wasn’t a goth, he wasn’t some greasy coiffed, rockabilly revivalist. Though fond of performance-art provocation—like an early gig where he dressed up in Colonel Sanders garb and beat on a Bible with a chain—he didn’t have the lithe physique or cool stage-stalking presence of a Lux Interior. With his bottle-blonde hair and surplus-store assemblage of army coats, jackboots, and sabertooth necklaces, he looked less like Debbie Harry’s little brother and more like the drummer for an aspiring hair-metal band.
But Pierce had a big mouth and possessed a disarming, mercurial singing voice that was feral and fearful in equal measure. Most crucially, unlike the Cramps, Pierce channeled rock’n’roll’s primordial ooze free of camp or kitsch. Gun Club songs didn’t exist inside some imaginary B-movie, but in the darkest chapters of American history and the most depraved recesses of the male id. And that sense of psychological torment defines Fire of Love as much as any slide-guitar riff or desert-storming backbeat.
By 1981, Pierce had locked in a lineup featuring Graham and bassist Rob Ritter (both of L.A. punk mainstays the Bags) and rockabilly enthusiast Ward Dotson on guitar. Culled from two quickie sessions done on the cheap, Fire of Love is a masterpiece of thriftiness and expediency. On their smash-and-grab reclamation of Robert Johnson’s “Preachin’ Blues”—renamed “Preaching the Blues”—the band isn’t so much upgrading the genre for the hardcore era as trying to bash through their repertoire before getting the boot from the studio. The rhythm section pounds the ground so furiously, they practically start to glide across it.
Fire of Love’s crackling live-in-the-studio energy (complete with Pierce’s audible bandleader direction) and natural reverb create a late-night atmosphere every bit as thick and intoxicating as the most ostentatious rock opera. And for all of the album’s raw, cinéma-vérité qualities, Pierce crafts his lyrics with a painterly touch, constructing a netherworld that channels westerns and old-time religion one moment, porno mags and dive-bar bathroom graffiti the next.
Pierce doesn’t so much sing the blues as mainline them, pushing his nervous energy into more outrageous—and, at times, troubling—displays of bravado. He delivers his signature rave-ups “Sex Beat” and “She’s Like Heroin to Me” like someone who’d pick a fight with the biggest guy in the room even though he knows he’ll get his ass kicked. And while “Jack on Fire” is a comparatively laid-back walking blues, its breathless lyrical procession of Southern Gothic imagery, voodoo mysticism, and snuff-film depravity goads Pierce into one of his most gripping, magnetic performances.
Then, of course, there’s the searing centerpiece “For the Love of Ivy.” The song not only showcases the Gun Club at peak blues-punk fury, but also displays a command of silence, space, and tension that evokes L.A.’s original prophets of doom, the Doors. Part hat-tip to the 1968 Sidney Poitier film For Love of Ivy, part love letter to the Cramps’ untouchably cool guitarist, “For the Love of Ivy” teeters on the precipice where sexual desire descends into murderous bloodlust, with Pierce unleashing some of the most unsettling screams this side of Suicide’s “Frankie Teardrop.” If it were the only song Pierce had ever released, “For the Love of Ivy” would still make him a legend. After all these years, each lyric-capping cry of “Hell!” still feels like a fresh jump-scare.
In plumbing the depths of evil, “For the Love of Ivy” also betrays Pierce’s tendency to lose himself in his crackpot characters—which, in this case, means uttering a particularly ugly line about his deranged protagonist “hunting for n*****s down in the dark.” (A similarly disturbing phrase turns up in the cowpunk odyssey “Black Train.”) Saying the N-word was something of a taboo sport among otherwise progressive old-school punks, whether they were using it as an expression of outcast solidarity or holding a mirror up to society’s ugliest impulses or shoving it back in the racists’ faces. Still, its appearance in “Ivy” was and remains especially jarring coming from an artist who devoted so much of his life to studying and celebrating Black music and who, as a biracial man himself, was no stranger to feeling like a second-class citizen in his own country. For Pierce, the process of mining America’s musical past also meant dredging up the historical social tensions that shaped it. Committing to the bit meant occasionally employing the vile vernacular of the rednecks he caricatured. (That Fire of Love came from an era when punks like Pierce felt like they had poetic license to use such language is ultimately the only thing that dates the record.)
Of course, Pierce didn’t need to use racial slurs to alienate people. The same maniacal zeal that attracted musicians into his orbit was also the very thing that drove them away. Though Fire of Love made the Gun Club a hot property in post-punk circles—particularly in New York and Europe—its lineup didn’t even survive the making of the band’s second record, Miami. Ritter walked out of the sessions and Dotson followed suit after they wrapped. (Dotson was so traumatized by his experience working with Pierce, he would later admit that, years after his departure, he still harbored a deep-seated desire to whack him with a golf club.) From there, the Gun Club’s music would turn more artful and cinematic—even acquiring a dream-pop shimmer on 1987’s Robin Guthrie-produced Mother Juno—but their internal dysfunction only intensified, as Pierce’s control-freak tendencies and worsening substance abuse problems would see him cycle through a procession of players before he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1996 at 37.
While Pierce never stopped expanding his vision for the Gun Club over the course of his career, it was never more focused than on Fire of Love. And nowhere is his maniacal self-belief more deeply felt than on “Fire Spirit,” a snarling rocker that functions as his own personal—and eerily prophetic—theme song. “I can see clearly/From my diamond eyes,” he declares off the top, “I’m going to the mountain with the fire spirit/No one will accept all of me/So the fire… will stop.” Personal demons may have extinguished Pierce’s flame far too soon, but each time a needle drops on Fire of Love, it burns anew.
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. | 2021-08-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-15T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Blixa Sounds | August 15, 2021 | 9.1 | 8d8ab70c-9eb6-4013-a302-f5e43875015a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
Martin Courtney's songwriting adjusts to a revamped band lineup, while together they continue to perfect the singular, warm, and reliable Real Estate sound. | Martin Courtney's songwriting adjusts to a revamped band lineup, while together they continue to perfect the singular, warm, and reliable Real Estate sound. | Real Estate: In Mind | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23006-in-mind/ | In Mind | When Real Estate named their last album Atlas, it was likely done both in earnest and irony. “It’s a subtle landscape where I come from,” sang Martin Courtney, as he traced the anxieties contained within the sidewalks, horizons, clocks, and shadows of his suburban hometown. The New Jersey band captured the way that a few square miles can feel like the whole world, but also intensify feelings of isolation. Their softly woven guitars had never sounded more wistful, the perfect accompaniment to Courtney’s ruminations of the divide between post-adolescent uncertainty and watching his life codify into an adulthood that millennials like him were never meant to achieve. He was so overawed by the sight of his wife next to him, and fearful of time slipping away, that you half-worried about how his temperate constitution would handle any truly earth-shattering change.
As it happened, Real Estate experienced something like that when founding guitarist Matt Mondanile left to pursue his Ducktails project. The split was seemingly acrimonious, though the details seemed less relevant than the matter of what it would do to their sound. Mondanile’s spacey style gave Real Estate’s compact universe a layer of fantasy and teased out the sweetness in Courtney’s flat tones. They replaced him with Julian Lynch, re-enlisted Matt Kallman on keys, and went off to L.A. to record. For a reliable band like Real Estate, these are dramatic transformations. But In Mind, the outcome of this revamp, picks up pretty much where they left off, Lynch’s guitar and Alex Bleeker’s bass swishing like windshield wipers around Courtney’s suburban koans.
Throughout In Mind, Courtney explores his sensitive relationship to his surroundings. “The laughing brook that ran right through this town/Slowed to a smile when the mercury went down,” he coos on “Stained Glass.” Plotting the progress from Atlas to the familiar and comforting In Mind is a similarly nuanced process. In the past, Real Estate’s sound hung like a sweet, gormless open mouth, but Lynch’s tougher guitar tone is a little more hard-bitten and yowling. He and Kallman team up on the intro to “Stained Glass,” knitting a baroque cascade that owes some to the Byrds’ energized arpeggiations. “Two Arrows” starts as a drowsy plod, the effects on Courtney’s voice mimicking the slippery space between sleep and consciousness, but then sidles into a respectful jam, one guitar pinging high, the other disintegrating with each careening phrase. Just as fuzz and hysteria threaten to overtake the whole thing, it ends abruptly in a rare moment of humor (and a neat Beatles tribute).
If you like Real Estate best when they’re trading in smaller gestures, these moves may seem treacherous, but by and large they crackle with electricity. The frame is fuller here, harking back to the mid-’90s production of bands like Teenage Fanclub, Jellyfish, and on the dreamy bossa nova fizz of “Time,” the High Llamas. This newfound density gives In Mind a claustrophobic atmosphere that mirrors Courtney’s myopic state of mind. Since Atlas, he’s become a father of two, working from home in Beacon, NY. Any self-employed person will recognize his queasy familiarity with his surroundings: the subtle changes that occur as dusk sets in, the comings and goings of local wildlife, the disorientating similarity of different sounds. “Was it the rain/Or a southbound train/That woke me up last night?” he wonders amid the starry swoop of the unfortunately titled “Holding Pattern.” At once reassuring and stifling, these details give a better sense of Courtney’s anxiety than his more literal lyrics on the subject.
Of course, one person’s quiet profundity is another’s cruise control. “What this is/Is not real life/At least it isn’t boring,” he sings on “Holding Pattern.” For Courtney, his well of lyrics about wistful cul-de-sac malaise never seems to dry up, though the subject starts to grow tired across the record. Likewise, when they wander from the beaten path they end up with “Diamond Eyes,” an Alex Bleeker song and In Mind’s only total misfire. In the vein of a Pete Seeger fable, or the Grateful Dead writing Sunday school jams, it’s so far outside their suburban comfort zone that it sounds like they’ve been brainwashed by a benevolent cult. “It’s a time to be humble/It’s a time to be free/It’s a time to raise our voices loud and not go quietly,” Bleeker sings, like Mr. Rosso on “Freaks and Geeks” trying to inspire his burnout students to protest peacefully.
In stark contrast, Real Estate's limitations become their greatest strengths. “Serve the Song” is a warped, wandering introvert’s lament. “The chorus only interrupts/I sing to serve the song,” Courtney sings, in a sort of peaceful Quaker hymnal and insight into the band’s MO. His touching, quiet shock at the disparity between his past and present hasn’t dimmed, as the family man looks back at the slacker and feels an imperceptible connection. “I cannot recall/Where I was at all/But I know what I heard/When I wrote those words/Green river still runs/Under that same sun/I never saw the source/But I know the course,” he sings on “Same Sun,” as impish, quizzical guitar chimes play up his bemusement.
Real Estate seemingly have no greater ambition than to perfect this one thing they do so well. While they live firmly in the middle of the road, they’re also dramatic outliers: neither explicit nor artful, two modes innovated by indie-rock when it had started to seem less relevant than ever. Unlike the effortless Atlas, In Mind exposes a trace of tension between form and content. For all Courtney’s synchronicity with his home environment, he sometimes sounds like he’s spinning his wheels rather than exploring the new contours of the recalibrated band.
Correction: An earlier version of this review attributed the song “Diamond Eyes” to Martin Courtney. | 2017-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Domino | March 21, 2017 | 7.2 | 8d8e7172-623b-4686-aa24-fc6834dcf171 | Laura Snapes | https://pitchfork.com/staff/laura-snapes/ | null |
In two long, bassy, zoned-out compositions, the genre-defying saxophonist strains against the formal restrictions of drone music. | In two long, bassy, zoned-out compositions, the genre-defying saxophonist strains against the formal restrictions of drone music. | Colin Stetson: Chimæra I | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/colin-stetson-chimaera-i/ | Chimæra I | In his career as a soloist, Colin Stetson hasn’t redefined the saxophone so much as he has reinvented the saxophonist. His circular breathing technique, aided by a regimen of yoga and cardio, allows him to unleash seemingly endless waves of sound. By combining this technique with a series of contact mics placed around his instrument and on his throat, he has turned himself into a one-man band who, through extreme exertion and stamina, can simultaneously produce clacking percussion, thundering bass, and plangent melody. On a series of career-defining albums, Stetson performed the rare feat of establishing himself firmly outside of genre categories. Then, somewhat miraculously, he was able to translate his unique sound to the big screen. For his next trick, Stetson has confined himself within the formally restrictive boundaries of drone.
This is unmistakably a drone record, as Stetson deploys his saxophone in two bassy, zoned-out 20-plus-minute compositions. The thrill, and the frustration, of Chimæra I is watching as he strains against the confines of the genre. Stetson is not covering new ground so much as he is exploring territory already pioneered by Éliane Radigue, mapped by Pauline Oliveros, tamed by Stars of the Lid, and graffitied by Yellow Swans. Still, he welcomes drone’s limits as something to push back against: A genre defined by long, dense tracks presents itself as a challenge to a musician singularly invested in sustained physical performance. A drone produced by a tape loop, a synthesizer, or a guitar may be impressive; one produced by a saxophone is extraordinary.
Chimæra I is cinematic in scope, its two sides evoking windswept post-apocalyptic vistas. Their titles refer to the multi-headed guard dogs of Greek myth, Orthrus and Cerberus, whose chimerical monstrosity is indicative of each track’s harrowing atmosphere. “Orthrus” is the more timbrally exciting of the two, with shuddering creaks and groans that phase across one another. A third of the way into the song, thunderous roars arch over top as if something has been awoken within the cavern of sound. In a career that includes multiple landmark horror movie scores, this is some of the most frightening music Stetson has yet produced. “Cerberus” trades in unease rather than unfettered terror: Long shifting tones overlap and coalesce in a minimalist drone, as if the dust is settling after the tumult of the first side. If “Orthrus” aggressively piles up growling pulses, “Cerberus” smooths them out and carefully layers them. Despite their different approaches, the two tracks share an oppressive sense of claustrophobia.
It is a testament to Stetson’s stature as an instrumentalist that we expect to see him transcend classification with ease. In any other artist’s repertoire, Chimæra I would assuredly be a highlight—assuming it were possible for another musician to pull off its staggering physicality. In Stetson’s intimidating discography, though, the album feels like an experiment with limitations, an accomplished painter limiting themselves to blues and grays. In its dogged pursuit of one mood, the album forgoes much of what makes Stetson exciting: the fluttering pirouettes of melody that complement his pummeling low end, the acrobatic percussion that he kneads out of his saxophone’s keys, the surprising references to gospel music that humanize his mechanical prowess. As if gazing at a massive monotone mural, the listener is simultaneously overwhelmed and wistful for the artist’s expansive palette. | 2022-11-17T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2022-11-17T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Room40 | November 17, 2022 | 7.3 | 8d8f025e-d7ea-470c-80ad-7b27b7c89278 | Matthew Blackwell | https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-blackwell/ | |
On the Bay Area electronic musician’s second solo album, the minutest vibrations are as expressive as the most sweeping gesture. Its mood exquisitely balances melancholy and hope. | On the Bay Area electronic musician’s second solo album, the minutest vibrations are as expressive as the most sweeping gesture. Its mood exquisitely balances melancholy and hope. | Marielle V. Jakobsons: Star Core | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22233-star-core/ | Star Core | The Macro-Cymatic Visual Music Instrument is a synesthete’s dream. Built by Marielle V. Jakobsons, the device translates musical vibrations into moving images using LEDs and a shallow trough of water; as sound waves stir the illuminated liquid, a video camera picks up the play of motion and texture. The invisible is made thrillingly visible as the faintest vibrations are transformed into richly dynamic fields of fluid movement, a constant flux of shadows and highlights that would surely make 4AD designer Vaughan Oliver swoon. And while they may recall the liquid projections of the 1960s, these visuals are more than just psychedelic window dressing; by turning vibrations into visual representations, they offer hints as to the inner mechanics of sound. They return music to the physical world, to the level of math and measurement, without losing sight of abstraction, emotion, or mysticism.
That idea of stripping things to their essence goes to the heart of Star Core, the Bay Area musician’s second solo album under her own name. (She used the Macro-Cymatic to create a video for the album track “White Sparks.”) Made principally with synthesizer, violin, flute, fretless electric bass, and voice, it is an album where the minutest vibrations are as expressive as the most sweeping gesture, where microtones signify at the same level as melodies. But this isn’t minimalism, really; it uses those minutiae as building blocks for a much broader musical vision, one tugged between meditative stasis and quietly ecstatic reveries.
Much of Jakobsons’ work, both solo and in the duo Date Palms and other groups, has deftly balanced drones with rootsier strands of American music. Her new album continues in that direction, folding together Eastern ragas with hints of Henry Flynt’s hillbilly minimalism along with fleeting traces of blues and even doom metal. It might be the most melodic thing she’s done; she even sings here. On the opening “White Sparks,” chanted vocals invoking the sun and the moon lend to the music’s ritual feel; elsewhere, her voice adds wordless breath to shimmering harmonic fields, reinforcing the human scale of her vast desert vistas.
She favors fifths and sevenths and seconds, intervals that lend themselves to powerful sensations of tension and release. Jakobsons’ melodies, like the sweeping violins of “Star Core” and “Rising Light” and the flutes of “The Beginning Is the End,” are at once deeply intuitive and faintly exotic, fusing a distant, hard-to-place longing with déjà vu. (Perhaps that déjà vu has to do with the fact that her string melodies at times sound uncannily like those of Echo and the Bunnymen; on “Star Core,” it’s as though she has stripped away the British band’s rock trappings to reveal the molten ambient core that was lurking in their music all along.) Her pulsing layers of synthesizer often recall Emeralds in full bliss-out mode, and in places, her vision of rock-based ambient music even brings to mind Hugo Largo, a woefully underrated New York band that was affiliated with Brian Eno’s Opal label in the late ’80s.
Unlike drone music that draws its power from duration, stretching out to 10 or 12 or 20 minutes, Jakobsons takes a more efficient approach to trance states: These songs average around five minutes long, and the music is stronger and more potent for it. She is interested in drone less as a fait accompli than as a kind of moving target. Never static, her songs are always evolving, albeit often imperceptibly, and their outward simplicity hides their deep structural complexity. But all that heavy lifting is on Jakobsons; we listeners get to simply lie back and dissolve into the music, savoring its uniquely nuanced mood, which lands halfway between melancholy and hope. It’s an exquisite balancing act, and one that—particularly now, and particularly in America—feels like as true a musical statement as you could ask for. | 2016-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-08-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Thrill Jockey | August 23, 2016 | 7.8 | 8d929e0c-33f1-47ea-b330-73eb5b984607 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
Any record being released with a moderate amount of hype will almost invariably owe its success to one of three ... | Any record being released with a moderate amount of hype will almost invariably owe its success to one of three ... | Mos Def: Black on Both Sides | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5440-black-on-both-sides/ | Black on Both Sides | Any record being released with a moderate amount of hype will almost invariably owe its success to one of three things:
1. Recklessly irresponsible critics whose ideas of "good" and "bad" have been irreparably damaged by years of exposure to loads and loads of shitty music.
2. Slimy publicist types that aren't afraid to trade a little fellatio for a winning review.
3. The protecting hand of Yahweh.
This goes a long way toward explaining the large majority of popular culture. But every once in a while, an album will make its way through reviewer after reviewer, deservedly earning absurdly high marks with nary a scratch. Such is the story with hip-hop's messiah of '99, Mos Def, and his solo debut, Black on Both Sides.
But, in a sea of lousy, burnt-out critics, why should you believe me? For starters, nobody serviced me to write this. Not since the emergence of A Tribe Called Quest and Q-Tip (who makes a brief guest appearance here on Mr. Nigga") has hip-hop seen an MC as intelligent, as lyrically proficient, and as baby-butt smooth as Mos Def.
If you heard Def's previous outings with Black Star, you probably saw this coming. If you didn't, it's clearly time to put Ol' Dirty on that shelf reserved for insane, materialist misogynists, and repent. With artists like this finally getting the respect they deserve, we could be entering a new era of hip-hop. Think about it. When was the last time you heard an MC drop a line like, "Mind over matter and soul before flesh"? When was the last time you heard somebody rap about the global economic and environmental consequences of first-world corporate waste and subsequent aquatic pollution? When was the last time you heard a hip-hopper sing competently over a phat-ass beat about the white appropriation of black art forms? Or end a song appropriately with a Bad Brains-influenced rockout, where both the drums and bass are played by the same guy?
Mos Def. The man does it all-- addressing serious socio-political issues while remaining positive and affirmative from start to finish. Inspiring, no? The current state of punk and independent rock could stand to learn a thing or two from this man.
True, Black on Both Sides isn't flawless. If you don't like Tribe-style laidback beats, you may have a more difficult time getting into this. Mos Def's singing on tracks like "Climb" and "Umi Says" is a bit hard to stomach, too. And then there's the matter of his sporadic introductory speeches, which occasionally sound like the pseudo-prophetic ramblings of a guy who might benefit from one less hit from the bong. But this, honestly, is nit-picking. Because when the beat drops and Def starts spitting his meticulously- crafted lyrics, you realize it's entirely possible that he truly is prophetic-- that he was meant to be kicking the rhymes, and that we were meant to listen. | 1999-10-12T01:00:05.000-04:00 | 1999-10-12T01:00:05.000-04:00 | Rap | Rawkus | October 12, 1999 | 8.7 | 8d936cbe-51a2-44eb-9c6f-6d7b2244cfe4 | Andrew Goldman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-goldman/ | null |
With anthemic hardcore hooks and unabashed lyrics about the power of love, the Toronto band’s latest album radiates fired-up joy. | With anthemic hardcore hooks and unabashed lyrics about the power of love, the Toronto band’s latest album radiates fired-up joy. | Fucked Up: One Day | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/fucked-up-one-day/ | One Day | Since their 2006 debut, Fucked Up have fearlessly merged the ferocity of hardcore punk and the grandiosity of prog-rock. Anchoring their ever-evolving sound is Damian Abraham’s throat-rending bark, barreling through immaculately layered rock riffage laden with anthemic hooks and symphonic arrangements. Their outsized ambition gave us the 2011 rock opera David Comes to Life, its maximalist 2018 sequel Dose Your Dreams, and the long-running experimental Zodiac series, which follows their most outré flights of fancy into drone, ambient, and psychedelic territory. The Toronto band’s new album, One Day, is another in a long line of beautiful contradictions, a quick and self-consciously small record that still feels like a towering statement.
After the conceptual and stylistic indulgence of Dose Your Dreams and last year’s Year of the Horse—two sprawling, willfully eclectic double albums with byzantine narratives involving wizards and interdimensional odysseys—One Day narrows both sound and scope. Like 2014’s Glass Boys, it’s a compact, relatively straightforward rock record that’s very much about the real world. The pendulum has again swung from the arty tendencies of guitarist Mike Haliechuk and drummer Jonah Falco toward frontman Abraham’s more earthly concerns: While the band’s growler-in-chief took a backseat on Dose Your Dreams, ceding creative control to Haliechuk and Falco and questioning his future in the band, Abraham is back for blood on One Day, singing on almost every track and contributing his own lyrics for the first time since Glass Boys.
Even at their simplest Fucked Up can’t turn down a good conceptual framework. Each band member wrote and recorded their contributions to One Day within a 24-hour window, and the ticking clock extends to the lyrics as Abraham and Haliechuk question their place as aging punks in a rapidly changing world. “My song is of time and memory/What we forget when we change the story,” Abraham sings on the Haliechuk-penned opener “Found,” laying out the album’s primary preoccupation: what we remember, or don’t, as history marches forward. The band’s old DIY haunts in Toronto have been replaced by condos and pot shops. Indigenous people have been displaced and killed to make room for highways and “temples of police and landlords to worship money.” “The whole world is fucked,” Abraham shouts on “Broken Little Boys,” a song lamenting generational cycles of toxic masculinity. Everyone, from Fucked Up to God himself—the original broken little boy, they theorize—is culpable.
For all of the justified hand-wringing over the State of Things, Fucked Up aren’t pessimists at heart. There’s still comfort to be found in the present, little moments that stretch out into infinity. “When suddenly you look at me/You opened up eternity,” Abraham sings on the effervescently power-poppy title track. “What could you do in just one day?/Fall in love, spend your time away.” On “Cicada,” an ode to fallen friends, a humble insect’s song becomes a lasting symbol of remembrance. And on the album closer “Roar,” written by Abraham, his trademark roar presides over another paean to the time-stopping power of love that’s admirably unafraid to sound cheesy: “When it gets too tough/And when you need to shut off/I’m still there standing with you and in the end that’s all we need.”
The only respite is to live in the present, and fortunately One Day kicks plenty of ass on a moment-to-moment level. The album’s biggest and brightest melodies hit with the urgency of Fucked Up’s early days as a hardcore band: “Found” begins with a scream from Abraham and immediately launches into a hard-charging guitar riff, dissolving into wordless vocal melody as the song draws to a close. “Lords of Kensington” introduces Abraham’s inimitable yell to ’90s alt-rock and transcendently chiming post-rock guitars, while the Haliechuk-sung “Cicada” sounds uncannily like Fucked Up covering Sugar. You wouldn’t guess that hooks this huge were written and recorded in the span of one day, but whether it was a conscious decision or a result of self-imposed constraints, One Day sounds eminently direct. Unlike Dose Your Dreams, there are no spoken-word interludes or psychedelic zone-outs. Every second radiates fired-up joy.
While it might seem like a minor entry in the band’s catalog, One Day also represents Fucked Up’s attempt to liberate themselves from long and laborious recording sessions and the existential weight of making a new Fucked Up album. By this point, lofty concepts and genre experimentation are integral parts of the band’s DNA. But there’s also value in immediacy, simplicity, and spontaneity, and on One Day, Fucked Up sound freer and more purely happy to be making music together than they have in years. | 2023-01-30T00:01:00.000-05:00 | 2023-01-30T00:01:00.000-05:00 | Rock / Metal | Merge | January 30, 2023 | 7.5 | 8d940c25-29cd-47d7-9682-9f62b4d4f1f0 | Peter Helman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/peter-helman/ | |
They’ve abandoned the crude wit of their debut, but the Seattle band’s fourth album still maintains the closeness of hanging out with friends in your living room. | They’ve abandoned the crude wit of their debut, but the Seattle band’s fourth album still maintains the closeness of hanging out with friends in your living room. | Chastity Belt: Chastity Belt | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/chastity-belt-chastity-belt/ | Chastity Belt | Chastity Belt were roughly 100 miles from Asheville, North Carolina when lead vocalist Julia Shapiro reached her breaking point. Just before touring their last album, 2017’s I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone, Shapiro split up with her long-term partner and had a possibly cancerous portion of her thyroid removed. She toughed it out on the road for about a month, when her bandmates—guitarist Lydia Lund, bassist Annie Truscott, and drummer Gretchen Grimm—collectively decided it was time to hit pause. So, the Seattle indie rockers cancelled the remainder of the tour, simply citing “health concerns,” and Shapiro sought comfort by driving two hours east to stay with an Asheville friend. Shapiro was experiencing an existential dilemma of sorts: “I had a lot of questions going through my mind,” she explained. “‘Should I be doing something else with my life? What else could I do?’”
Shapiro relays this anecdote on “Rav-4,” a highlight from Chastity Belt’s self-titled fourth album. “Fooled them all, then hit a wall/Lay in Kate’s bed, it’s true what she said/That giving up can take some guts,” she sings. “Lost my mind and much more, but who’s keeping score?” The rest of Chastity Belt reveals some of the “much more” Shapiro feels is vanishing: her ambition, her hopefulness, and maybe most of all, herself. But even when Shapiro was at her lowest, Chastity Belt never seriously considered calling it quits; their friendship has been going strong for over a decade now, and their combined force feels more evocative and pointed than ever. They’ve long abandoned the crude wit of their 2013 debut, but Chastity Belt still maintains that closeness of hanging out with friends in your living room, engrossed by each others’ ruminations until the wee hours of the morning.
Friendship is a recurring theme on Chastity Belt, from “Rav-4”’s Kate to “Elena”—named after the pseudonymous Italian novelist Elena Ferrante, whose most well-known works centered around the companionship of women as their rural Neapolitan town collapsed at their feet. Chastity Belt seem to liken their own emotional turmoil to Ferrante’s ruins: “Changed all your plans to line up with his/Hanging onto every word he says/Measured your self worth/By his judgements,” Shapiro sings, an eerie retrospective after the collegiate tribulations of No Regerts and the whatever-forever demeanor of 2015’s Time to Go Home.
This heightened self-awareness also presents itself in tracks like “Effort,” where Grimm envisions an immaculate version of herself while seeking refuge in a new relationship—perhaps in an attempt to avoid facing her own insecurities. “Running for cover, into another/It’s not what I need, but it seems to be what I want,” Shapiro sings. “I could be perfect, I could exist/Just how you need me to be in this moment.” Chastity Belt’s lyrics have always been clever, but here they attain a sort of nonchalant wisdom. “Been counting on someone, but I counted wrong/So now I’m feeling pretty dumb,” goes one particularly jarring line of “Half-Hearted,” before reaching a resolution in closer “Pissed Pants”: “Now I’m obsessing over endings/And all the things that are holding me back/You said, so casually, ‘Everything just works out.’” Chastity Belt’s best lyrics are just as casual and profound.
The album was co-produced by Jay Som’s Melina Duterte, resulting in Chastity Belt at their dreamiest and most tranquil. As far as their Pacific Northwest predecessors go, there’s little evidence of their livelier original inspirations like Sleater-Kinney and Autoclave, instead leaning on hushed Elliott Smith-ish delivery, lush reverb, and traces of strings. The album’s lethargy can feel tedious, a little lacking in contrast; most of its songs stroll past at similar tempos and volumes, rarely culminating in moments that could be considered “big.” But Shapiro has something to say, and Chastity Belt is largely confessional; her words are the focus here, and these simple, serene landscapes are a fitting backdrop to hear her loud and clear.
Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) | 2019-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-09-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Hardly Art | September 27, 2019 | 7.1 | 8d9a151b-2628-4803-90bc-cc9e655eb4a7 | Abby Jones | https://pitchfork.com/staff/abby-jones/ | |
Welcome to the frat-rap perpetrator’s wokeness parade. | Welcome to the frat-rap perpetrator’s wokeness parade. | Asher Roth: Flowers on the Weekend | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/asher-roth-flowers-on-the-weekend/ | Flowers on the Weekend | Asher Roth soundtracked a generation of sweaty basements’ Thirsty Thursdays; now he stuffs his songs with asides about Senate reform and garbled philosophical platitudes. “If heaven closed its gates and hell was broke/And all you had was every day you woke/Would you be hella woke?” he asks on his new album’s first track. If you answered yes, you’re in for a treat—welcome to Asher Roth’s wokeness parade, where he fumbles towards opinions on: gluten consumption, baby boomers, climate change, marijuana decriminalization, the American healthcare system, and mortgage interest rates. “I think there’s too many men,” he announces on the cringely titled “Cher in Chernobyl,” a stubbornly unself-aware bid at feminism from the guy whose most rousing commitment to gender equality used to be chanting that he loved women just as much as he loved drinking. Even the album title is a self-congratulatory bastardization of gender politics—Asher Roth’s girlfriend brings him flowers, we learn on the title track. Please clap.
Maybe we should credit Roth for attempting growth at all. Nearly every album of his since Asleep in the Bread Aisle has both tried to inch away from and capitulated to the formula that launched his career: half-baked rhymes about Banker’s Club and keg stands, belched over wobbly bass. If Asher Roth didn’t create frat rap, he at least directly inspired a new strain of it—Sammy Adams, best known for a thrashing song that rhymed “Vegas” and “Jager,” got a record deal after remixing “I Love College.” Hoodie Allen grunted diatribes about sororities over drum kicks and now tours across campuses. The grunting, pastel-shorts aesthetics of frat rap have burbled beyond colleges. Lil Dicky has a TV show and a billboard in Times Square; weeks ago, two TikTok stars apparently paid some ungodly amount of money to mercenary producers to manufacture a “diss track,” their sneers and intonations carved in Roth’s image. Roth’s legacy, with all its thoughtless misogyny and beer-bong coveting, is the reason he can get Lil Yachty to come gurgle a guest verse a decade after “I Love College.” But it’s also why his new political posing, however well-intentioned it may be, is so hard to take seriously.
“I’m every shared experience/I’m serious, I’m kidding,” Roth raps on the album’s opener, which doesn’t do much to clarify whether the album is an earnest proclamation of the rapper’s politics or one long, excruciating bit. Either way, Flowers’ most firm commitment is to bludgeoning language and logic. “I’ve had to learn to relent/To relearn how to vent/Scent is certainly concerning/Gotta learn to ascend,” Roth babbles at one point; “Got gluten in your doo doo,” he warbles at another. On “Back of the Classroom,” an attempt to appease whoever’s skipping through the album until they hear a college reference, his frenetic flow is a dead ringer for Hoodie Allen’s, a kind of snake-eats-tail moment of frat-rap synchronicity.
The production alternates between grating open-mic-night theatrics—clanging cymbals, cloying bursts of trumpet, audible whoops—and plodding drums. Saxophones bleat; a ukulele plunks along. “Dark Chocolate” emerges out of this murk, a total surprise of contorting guitar riffs and reverberating synths in which Asher Roth strains for a falsetto and doesn’t rap once. The song seems like his take on Tame Impala, and while the track isn’t entirely unpleasant, it’s jarringly out of place, like a church organ rolled on stage at a Pitbull concert.
Throughout the album, Asher Roth goes out of his way to reference his age. He groans that his back hurts. He moans that he’s been “doing this” for so long. At 34, he could have believably crammed the record with canned, beer-sloshed party stories; it’s telling of Asher, or maybe of the world right now, that his brags center on reading about private prisons, not on sex or shots or drugs. Still, these songs are frictionless and forgettable. You almost want him to have gotten his wish—to stay in college forever, where at least he could pretend to have fun. | 2020-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-04-27T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Retrohash | April 27, 2020 | 2.9 | 8d9d7a57-4e0a-49be-8704-f6b8a188a3db | Dani Blum | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dani-blum/ | |
The first compilation from electronic Bangkok label More Rice is a solid collection of chugging dancefloor weaponry from South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and beyond. | The first compilation from electronic Bangkok label More Rice is a solid collection of chugging dancefloor weaponry from South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and beyond. | Various Artists: Harvest Vol. 1 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/various-artists-harvest-vol-1/ | Harvest Vol. 1 | Over the past decade, underground club circuits around East and Southeast Asia have grown from a collection of fragmented markets to an integrated community that’s dedicated to supporting local talents. Projects such as bilateral DJ exchanges and regionally-focused record labels such as More Rice, based in Bangkok, have gone a long way in building cross-border relations and generating a larger Asian fanbase. Some of the fruits of this labor are presented on a new compilation from More Rice, 14 tracks of chugging dancefloor weaponry from South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand and beyond.
Harvest Vol.1 isn’t lacking energy, but most tracks are complex slow-burners that make for ideal transitions in a DJ set or deep listening sessions. Take the stand-out “Mirarboles” from up-and-coming Seoul producer Mogwaa, a classically-trained musician whose latest EP dropped earlier this year on More Rice. Mogwaa finds a sweet spot on the synth-funk hook with escalating chords that add a sense of drama, but he also plays around with it, laying the melody with warped effects and hints of squelching acid towards the end. Equally fluid are the lopsided peals of “At The End of Time,” a joint effort by producer Lustbass and drum duo The Hernandez Brothers, both of whom hail from the Philippines. The song is hypnotic, mirroring the meditative energy of Javanese gamelan, a departure from the Hernandez Brothers’ usual funkadelic maneuvers.
An effortlessly steady pace is perhaps Harvest’s biggest strength. Introspective house cuts are interspersed with syncopated beats and bassy rollers to produce a harmonious listening experience from start to finish. The first half of Harvest is generally easy listening but that quickly changes when the prolific artist known as Similiarobjects, a heavy-hitter in Manila’s electronic scene, goes down a twisting rabbit hole on “Analogmigraine.” The track gives off a sense of calm despite flurries of tightly-packaged beats and it’s the perfect primer for Karachi-based Rudoh’s “Mo Money,” a breaks-heavy mid-tempo joint that gracefully incorporates snippets of UKG and sudden tempo changes.
Despite these highlights, Harvest has pockets of weakness that make it drag on a bit longer than it should. “Still Life” by Filipino artist Saint Guel and “Bang Sue Junction” from Bangkok’s Sarayu, one of the More Rice co-founders, both fall prey to repetitive basslines that sound like fillers to hide gaps in composition. Meanwhile, other tracks such as Snad’s “Put It In My Parenthesis” and “Ham” by Tokyo producer Spanglemann start off compelling but lack sufficient dynamism to justify their six-minute stay.
If Harvest seeks to represent a wide spectrum of pan-Asian club music, it could benefit from more stylistic boldness. Genre hybrids are emanating left-and-right in electronic hotspots such as Indonesia and India amid a rising ratio of producers to DJs so there’s no shortage of fresh four-to-the-floor patterns. Still, the fact that Harvest connects the dots between multiple countries makes it stand out from other geographically-oriented compilations across East, South and Southeast Asia that aren’t as wide-ranging. Examples of the latter include the India-centric Kaala Khatta - Flavours Of The East, the all-Indonesian Moda Equator, and the Shenzhen-specific Dragon Bass EP1: Made in Shenzhen. More labels in the region should follow Harvest’s ambitious scope, paving the way for emerging Asian talents to reach wider audiences.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-09-19T01:00:00.000-04:00 | null | More Rice | September 19, 2020 | 6.8 | 8dafb82a-01a2-4ab5-af34-f79541bd53e6 | Nyshka Chandran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nyshka-chandran/ | |
The relatively short project from the Houston rapper reasserts her absolute domination on the mic and takes her to new melodic spaces to mixed effect. | The relatively short project from the Houston rapper reasserts her absolute domination on the mic and takes her to new melodic spaces to mixed effect. | Megan Thee Stallion: Suga | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/megan-thee-stallion-suga/ | Suga | Megan Thee Stallion did not originally intend to put out Suga last week. She had hoped to drop the project on May 2—her late mother’s birthday—and claim it as her debut album after last summer’s breakout mixtape Fever. Draped in a dark, pillowy fur on The Breakfast Club last Friday morning, she course-corrected. “I’m still working on my ‘album,’” she said, curling her fingers into air quotes. “I had to hurry up and put out an EP.”
Why? Potentially because her next opportunity to release music on her own terms was foggy. On March 1, Megan claimed that her label, 1501 Certified Entertainment, was blocking her from putting out songs. The next day, she sued 1501, seeking to terminate her deal; a Texas judge granted her a temporary restraining order against the label, allowing the album to be released. Tight and satisfying, Suga is a reminder that Megan is who she’s always told us she was, even as she grapples with what it means to be herself in public.
When Megan Thee Stallion first caught eyes in 2017 with her bombastic “Stalli Freestyle,” she declared herself a money-making, man-taking, sex-positive powerhouse. In just two years, her cutthroat bars and candid nature turned her into a lyrical frontrunner in hip-hop and a viral sensation. Suga takes stock of all the things that have changed for the 25-year-old, with millions “tuned the fuck in” to her professional and personal lives as she navigates business, pleasure, and loss. Like Lil Kim, Beyoncé, and Nicki Minaj before her, Megan channels rage, pomp, and sensuality through alter egos. If her alter ego Tina Snow was a boss—grown, sexy, and intimidating—and Hot Girl Meg was her more debaucherous side, Suga is “a girl who’s going through it but getting through it.”
Megan tackles fame and pain with sharp, clear raps. Album starter “Ain’t Equal” jumps into her new circumstances: life under the microscope, without her mother or great-grandmother’s support. Though she spent the past year getting friendly with lots of women across entertainment, pouring dark liquor down the throats of Doja Cat, Lizzo, and Summer Walker, Megan is skeptical of new friends on Suga: “You bitches is weird, I don’t wanna hang,” she cooly raps on the chorus of “Stop Playing.”
She’s also spent the year being romantically linked to musicians, an athlete, and an actor. But she embraces her sexuality, even if she resents the constant speculation around it. On “Captain Hook,” she spells it out simply: “I like to drink and I like to have sex.” The song is a showcase everything Megan has built her career on: energy, humor, brashness. “Dance on the dick, now you been served/I like a dick with a little bit of curve/Hit this pussy with an uppercut/Call that nigga Captain Hook!” she says, over swashbuckling sound effects.
Though when she emulates Gunna’s flow on “Stop Playing,” it turns into a new, infectious kind of experimentation. The Neptunes-produced track is one of several moments where Megan dabbles with something calmer and more plush. On Suga, she shakes out of the comfort zone that found her frequently sampling down-south acts, and instead heads west. She enlists Kehlani on the upbeat G-funk track “Hit My Phone” and interpolates Tupac’s “Rather Be Ya Nigga” on the vulnerable “B.I.T.C.H.”
Megan also commits to more melodic overtones, in contrast to the straightforward spitting on her more recognized songs. Fully outfitted in Auto-Tune and complemented by a choir sample, Megan gives herself a lightly profane pep talk and sends up a prayer on “Crying in the Car,” a tender earworm. R&B isn’t where Meg shines brightest—it can sound basic—but together, “Crying in the Car,” “B.I.T.C.H.,” and “What I Need” illustrate that Megan Thee Stallion is becoming more than a sex symbol, wig-splitter, and party starter.
Megan occasionally struggles to package new truths about her social status in the whip-smart ways she did her old ones. As far as calling someone corny goes, “Had to X some cheesy niggas out my circle like a pizza” (from “Savage”) is no “Bitch, keep talking that shit from your Honda.” But at only 24 minutes long, Suga avoids the bloating that plagued Fever, and a good-not-great song like “Rich” is over too quickly to complain much. Suga may not be remembered as a keystone in Megan Thee Stallion’s catalog, but it’s a fine portrait of an artist embracing her full self as her world changes drastically. | 2020-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-03-11T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | 1501 Certified Entertainment / 300 Entertainment | March 11, 2020 | 7 | 8db45d4b-3a54-48d3-948d-8eb4a970cc24 | Mankaprr Conteh | https://pitchfork.com/staff/mankaprr-conteh/ | |
The problem with jazz is... well, I'm not exactly sure. I can tell you that I'm getting tired ... | The problem with jazz is... well, I'm not exactly sure. I can tell you that I'm getting tired ... | The Bad Plus: These Are the Vistas | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1074-these-are-the-vistas/ | These Are the Vistas | The problem with jazz is... well, I'm not exactly sure. I can tell you that I'm getting tired of opening jazz reviews with a survey of the genre's problems. In the end, it's probably no worse off than any other music predating rock and roll, and that it at least still has a Grammy category should be encouraging. Perhaps the only real problem is that big labels have a tough time marketing it (see if you can name any one of Billboard's current Top 40 jazz albums). However, unlike, say, contemporary polka (also a tough sell, especially in our war-torn economy), people are still making interesting, creative statements in jazz. For experimental music listeners, jazz is probably as vibrant now as it ever was. You just have to live with a dimmer spotlight, if that matters.
And so, along comes The Bad Plus, from the heart of the Midwest, and with big Columbia dollars paying for their hotels and, presumably, Blender blurbs. They have the shiny blue CD cover, have snagged Sheryl Crow and Tom Waits' producer, get in-store promotion at Tower and Borders, and press releases that-- wouldn't you know it-- herald them as jazz's saviors! Of course, none of this really covers the various musical contributions that pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer David King (a member of the Minneapolis jazz combo Happy Apple, and replacement drummer for the legendary Christopher McGuire in 12 Rods) may have made to their own record. As you probably shouldn't be surprised to know, their press hasn't really done them too many favors except to garner them raves from the NPR and Good Morning America crowd.
The three members of The Bad Plus, hailing from Minnesota and Wisconsin, have been playing together off and on since the early 1990s. They released their self-titled debut in 2001 independently, and had a follow-up available last year (now out of print), recorded live at the Village Vanguard. They've steadily built a following of fervent jazz fans and alert critics, though are likely as surprised at their exposure this year as anyone. These Are the Vistas, beyond the production and fanfare, is pretty squarely along the lines of much new, young straight-ahead jazz: integrated use of new beats and electronic music touches, covers of various Gen-X hits, and the will to sporadically launch brief, free improv blowing sessions. Naturally, those sessions are much fewer and farther between than your average Tim Berne disc, but then again, Columbia doesn't invest in 20-minute Bloodcount tunes for a reason.
First, the covers: supposedly pianist Iverson had never heard the song previously (only in Wisconsin, folks), but the trio's rendition of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is, er, spirited. Iverson favors broad, dramatic chord clusters and liberal use of his sustain pedal, so instead of ragged rock glory, we get faux-cinematic\ grandeur. Anderson does a nice Ron Carter impression underneath, linking the performance to what must have been a big inspiration for them: Miles Davis' mid-60s similarly eccentric quintet. They hit Aphex Twin's "Flim" with kid gloves, almost too delicately. Producer Tchad Blake incorporates a few filters to make King's drums sound computerized, but it's my feeling that you can't really hide a jazz band. Their version of Blondie's "Heart of Glass" is probably the most ambitious song on the entire record, if only because they try out about three completely different moods before arriving at the song proper. I'm not so sure they're as convincing way out there as they are straight up, but points for giving it a go.
The Bad Plus is at their best when they step out of the jazz chair entirely, as on the marvelously kinetic "Big Eater", which opens the album. King is an amazing drummer, certainly a treat for anyone loving modern jazz percussionists like Ben Perowsky, Kenny Wollesen or Jim Black, and his performance on Anderson's piece is fantastically, aggressively precise. Likewise, Iverson's block chords, serving as melody, are straight out of the great-lost post-rock riff book, and would undoubtedly make Tom Jenkinson mighty jealous. If only they could keep up that intensity throughout, as other tunes seem either flat homages to the avant-garde ("Boo-Wah"), or small-group MOR jazz balladry ("Silence is the Question")-- though there is a download-only ballad titled "What Love is This" that's a lot more engaging than most of the ones here.
Marketing aside, I wouldn't be surprised to see The Bad Plus become pretty successful. They have a knack for hitting the melody where some more experimental outfits might opt for a diverse array of craziness. The three performers are also very good musicians (particularly King and Anderson), and I imagine they put on a good show. It's not their fault some record company guy thought they could be the new face of jazz, so I'd urge hipsters to keep an open ear, and everyone else not to expect fireworks. Hey, it could be worse-- you know Elvis Costello is giving Diana Krall Mitchell Froom's number. | 2003-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2003-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental / Jazz | Columbia | September 14, 2003 | 7 | 8db5c6e2-bdbd-479a-b31e-4b31f26c80b1 | Dominique Leone | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/ | null |
The young Icelandic post-punk band Fufanu traffic in icy disaffection and glacier-cool synths, but their latest album hints at hearts beating beneath the veneer. | The young Icelandic post-punk band Fufanu traffic in icy disaffection and glacier-cool synths, but their latest album hints at hearts beating beneath the veneer. | Fufanu: Sports | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22824-sports/ | Sports | Though Iceland has a fertile music scene, it has produced few international names. The ones that have emerged—Björk, Sigur Rós, and, uh, Of Monsters and Men—tend to paint a picture to the outside world: A tiny nation filled with artsy, insular weirdos. Yet the scene there is bustling with all sorts of sounds: Black metal, punk rock, serrated electronic music, rap. And then there’s the chilly post-punk offered by Fufanu, Iceland’s most exciting young band.
Revolving around the core duo of Hrafnkell Flóki Kaktus Einarsson and Guðlaugur Halldór Einarsson (no relation; Icelandic names use patronymics), Fufanu has grown from an experimental techno duo (then known as Captain Fufanu, when Kaktus and Gulli were just teens) into purveyors of terse, claustrophobic post-punk, injected with bleary-eyed psychedelia and dystopian electronic textures. (Live, the band expands their sound into a raging, swaggering storm, though they’ve opted to reign it in on record thus far.) There is also a surprising amount of Britpop lurking in their DNA. Kaktus worked on Damon Albarn’s 2014 solo release Everyday Robots; Fufanu opened for the Britpop star later that year, and for Blur at Hyde Park in 2015. Though the band understandably chafes at the focus on their connection to Albarn, there’s no denying how their echoes of late-’90s Britpop enriches their music.
Sports is the group’s sophomore LP, following quickly on the heels of their late 2015 debut Few More Days to Go. It flows more than its predecessor, and trades their debut’s corroded guitar for glacier-cool synths and hissing electronic rhythms, both propulsive and meditative. Like many great post-punk groups before them, the band consistently sounds disaffected and removed. Lead single and standout “Sports” is a terse drawl of seemingly disconnected thoughts, a masterclass in building tension. “Bad Rockets” sounds like a Bond theme from an alternate timeline in which 007’s become an ashen-faced junkie, featuring the haunting refrain “Bad rockets hit—rockets fly above my head.”
The title Few More Days to Go was a refrain the band members would deliver to loved ones asking when they’d return home. Sports, though brooding at first glance, celebrates the little moments of homecoming, of reunion, of pleasant daily life. Kaktus, who lives with his girlfriend in Reykjavik, sings of young but stable love throughout. “Going out, with my love/Jump around like a six year old” on “Sports”; “Just hold me like I’m your fool/We’ll sleep on the back of the new moon” on “Your Fool”; “I said something about leaving soon/It’s drumming in my heart/And asking for restart” in “Restart.”
“Your Fool” and “Restart” form the record's conclusion, and they’re unlike anything else the band has done, vulnerable and beautiful. The disassociation and disaffection of the rest of the album suddenly makes sense in the rearview, a buildup to moments of pure, aching romanticism. They transform a solid album into something of an emotional journey, and hint strongly that beneath their low-key snarling, Fufanu have grander things on their minds. | 2017-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2017-01-28T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | One Little Indian | January 28, 2017 | 7.3 | 8db808be-7bf6-436e-82b0-3403296a2529 | Ryan Leas | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-leas/ | null |
The confrontationally prolific Buffalo rapper cedes space to his dynamic guests on both halves of his latest project, a supremely competent data dump that is memorable only in fits. | The confrontationally prolific Buffalo rapper cedes space to his dynamic guests on both halves of his latest project, a supremely competent data dump that is memorable only in fits. | Westside Gunn: Hitler Wears Hermes 8 | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/westside-gunn-hitler-wears-hermes-8-sincerely-adolf-side-b/ | Hitler Wears Hermes 8 | Westside Gunn’s work, like that of his Griselda Records partners, comes as steadily as an IV drip, though one imagines he would only accept the metaphor if the IV bag were designer and the needle came from Italy. Last week, the second half of the eighth installment in his Hitler Wears Hermes mixtape series was released, following a couple of minor delays, roughly a month after the first. For most artists this hitch would be unremarkable—two discs issued in four weeks under the same umbrella title could reasonably be considered one project—but for the confrontationally prolific Buffalo rapper, it has the effect of making the records feel exactly as distinct from one another as all his prior LPs do, which is to say: not very.
Gunn is fond of the term “curator,” which serves to deemphasize the importance of his rapping per se. This is wise. Gunn’s nasally drawl is wonderful as added texture, but loses its power the more central it is forced to become; the writing is reliably OK—imagine a Balenciaga safety net—though prone to cliche and shapelessness. But he is clearly a superb A&R. The Griselda records are smartly sequenced with the in-house producers’ roles expanding and contracting based on who has the hot hand at the moment, and the near-uniform excellence of the guest verses implies both a loyalty among his collaborators and a willingness to ask for rewrites. And every album is stitched together by interludes of wrestling promos, old fashion ads, or audio from art auctions in a way that highlights the artificiality of the world Gunn coaxes listeners into. Each half of Hitler Wears Hermes 8 (the first is maddeningly subtitled Sincerely Adolf, while the second is simply Side B) leans heavily on collaborators and this mise-en-scène, the sum total being yet another Westside Gunn project that is supremely competent, yet memorable only in fits.
On each disc, Gunn shrewdly cedes space to these guests, who steal song after song: On “Claires Back,” Benny the Butcher doesn’t rap about writing letters in jail as much as he raps about the recipient, and the way she dutifully saves them; Boldy James realizes on “716 Mile” that his watch has Roman numerals where the Arabic digits are supposed to be; Lil Wayne continues his breathless run of features on “Bash Money,” even sliding in a Dash store reference he’s likely had in the chamber since the late W. Bush years. Sincerely Adolf makes a lot of room for the Syracuse rapper Stove God Cooks, whose vignette on “Vogue Cover” about waiting at the plug’s house while he “mowed the lawn, washed all his cars, and watered the flowers” has already earned its own cult fandom online. Gunn allows these guests to play off of him like a generous actor, receding into the background when appropriate—though HWH8 runs a combined 103 minutes, few if any Gunn verses overstay their welcome.
If the broader project does not quite distinguish itself in his catalog, HWH8 does contain some of Gunn’s most accomplished moments. The dreamlike “TV Boy” is one of the finest songs he’s ever recorded, Gunn practically gleeful as he weaves his way through utter grime. And his chemistry with Mach-Hommy—the two recently reconciled after a long feud, collaborating on Mach’s astounding Pray for Haiti—continues to yield songs as gripping as “RIP Bergdorf,” where Mach boasts about spending 30 grand on sweatsuits. Still, these peaks—like the infrequent low points—are momentary blips. Even when the halves diverge (where Sincerely Adolf is relatively precise, Side B sprawls; where B skews toward harder drums and more punishing sounds, Adolf is atmospheric) they feel as if they’re part of one long data dump, a perfectly pleasant stream of 1s and 0s.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-09-30T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | null | September 30, 2021 | 6.8 | 8db946b6-a060-4052-8861-d99f82a84b7f | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
The New York band’s jangly indie pop is more ambitious than before, but their lyrics too often fail to move beyond low-stakes camp—hardly the radical liberation the band has hinted at delivering. | The New York band’s jangly indie pop is more ambitious than before, but their lyrics too often fail to move beyond low-stakes camp—hardly the radical liberation the band has hinted at delivering. | T-Rextasy: Prehysteria | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/t-rextasy-prehysteria/ | Prehysteria | No matter what advice you could give your younger self in retrospect, growing up was always going to suck. Navigating those adolescent years—particularly middle school, the tour de force of puberty, rejection, and angst—is key to figuring yourself out. New York four-piece T-Rextasy write indie-pop cheers for tackling that preteen insecurity. It’s a natural inclination, given that the band formed during its final year of high school. But on their sophomore LP, Prehysteria, T-Rextasy are too busy emphasizing cliches to leave room for wit or insight—traits that strengthen camp when flexed a little more subtly.
It’s clear T-Rextasy pushed themselves musically with Prehysteria. The band’s jangly power-pop sketches reach farther than before, dabbling with trumpet and trombone, reviving 1960s girl-group harmonies, and toying with stripped-down versions of ska. The faux-frail delivery gives songs like “Rip Van Vintage” the feeling of a Deerhoof cover, full of pent-up energy and saccharine falsettos. But the steadfast campiness of their lyrics could’ve been ghostwritten by a children’s band. Songs about ditching a lover for breakfast (“I Don’t Do Lunch”), embracing acne (“The Zit Song”), or horny makeout sessions (“Coffee?”) opt for obvious laughs without much, if any, commentary to elevate them beyond the elementary. Legitimizing adolescent struggles is a worthy endeavor, no doubt, but T-Rextasy bog their banter down with coffee-bean innuendos and empty odes to Etsy, content to shoehorn influences like the B-52’s and Sister Rosetta Tharpe into the music instead of the lyrics.
On paper, Prehysteria’s narrative has sharper fangs than the record itself. Vocalist Lyris Faron, bassist Annie Fidoten, guitarist Vera Kahn, and dummer Ébun Nazon-Power describe the album as them “owning our madness.” That concept is on par with their past. T-Rextasy’s biggest hits off their 2016 full-length Jurassic Punk, “Chick’n” and “Gap Yr Boiz,” were clap-backs against street harassment and pseudo-enlightened crushes. Those raggedy, self-empowered anthems attracted a fanbase eager to hear more—using Indiegogo, T-Rextasy crowdsourced over $3000 to create Prehysteria—but the summation of Prehysteria’s themes in press releases and interviews oversold the reality of its middling subject matter.
Quirkiness isn’t a personality. T-Rextasy seem to remember that when struggling to cross the queer friendzone on pop-punk charmer “Girl, Friend” and while emphasizing intentionally cloying harmonies on the album’s post-punk tentpole, “Theme from Prehysteria.” But elsewhere, the band misses opportunities to use their vibrant music as a platform for meaningful takeaways, regardless of how comedically it’s presented. There’s a reason the emotionally quotidian stories of acts like the Front Bottoms and Hobo Johnson or the charmingly sardonic kitsch of Childbirth and Tacocat flourished. T-Rextasy reiterate the importance of speaking out against sexism and tokenization in interviews, but their music does little to define who or what they want to champion beyond basic critiques of beauty standards and the queer dating scene. Like the band’s playful moniker, Prehysteria reinforces the idea that T-Rextasy are an outlet for goofing off with friends to prove that you can. The only drawback of that is expecting people to feel as liberated as you supposedly did while making it. | 2019-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | 2019-01-15T01:00:00.000-05:00 | Rock | Boogie Agency | January 15, 2019 | 5.3 | 8db98485-d8e2-4ce2-a73b-6a364d003181 | Nina Corcoran | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nina-corcoran/ | |
Evoking the landscapes of the American Southwest, these peaceful guitar duets find the duo tapping into the serene, timeless quality of their instrument. | Evoking the landscapes of the American Southwest, these peaceful guitar duets find the duo tapping into the serene, timeless quality of their instrument. | Marisa Anderson / William Tyler: Lost Futures | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/marisa-anderson-william-tyler-lost-futures/ | Marisa Anderson / William Tyler: Lost Futures | In the promotional trailer for his 2016 opus Modern Country, William Tyler ominously declared, “We stand at the precipice of the twilight of empire.” Ever the storyteller, Tyler plays guitar just like he talks: an amused, if weary, witness to the decline of Western civilization, the sole documentarian of its dying beauty. The five intervening years since Modern Country certainly haven’t challenged Tyler’s notion that the American experiment is tailspinning out of control, and Lost Futures, a lovely collaboration with fellow instrumental guitarist Marisa Anderson, embodies that sense of hope in persevering through chaos. The album finds both guitarists refining their craft to its most essential properties, tapping into the serene, timeless qualities of the instrument.
Recorded in Anderson’s adopted hometown of Portland as the George Floyd protests were turning the city into a hotbed of unrest, Lost Futures’ seemingly peaceful sketches are infused with a subtle sense of doom. Named after Mark Fisher’s hauntological concept of “lost futures”—the better worlds we may never know now as our lives succumb to a prison of endless nostalgia—the album finds Tyler and Anderson flipping through their own personal histories, returning to the barebones acoustic style that both guitarists built their names on. For Tyler in particular, Lost Futures is the most traditional music he’s made in some time; after new agey releases, textural experiments in ambient music, and sparse film score work for Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, it’s refreshing to hear that he is still capable of wielding melody like a cartographer’s quill, summoning vast landscapes with each run of the fretboard.
Anderson and Tyler are natural collaborators, with quick, clean styles of fingerpicking that can sound equally complex and effortless. For much of Lost Futures, restraint is the name of the game. “News About Heaven” is as enchanting for its simple, sighing chords as it is for the faint bells that seem to twinkle in the edge of the frame. “Haunted by Water” plays like a Led Zeppelin roots-rock ballad slowly coming to life, its riffs gradually accumulating weight as they roll down some imagined dusky freeway. The whole album conjures the barren, sandstone hills of the Southwest, thanks in no small part to the violin and quijada work from Gisela Rodriguez Fernandez and Patricia Vázquez Gómez. At times, however, the feeling of pastiche sets in, like Tyler and Anderson are remembering passages from some great American epic rather than writing a new one themselves. The galloping two-note riff of “Something Will Come” feels like a nod to krautrock, a common influence in Tyler’s work, but it fails to materialize over the course of its droning six minutes: a sustained prelude searching for a point.
On their solo records, Tyler and Anderson might fill the extra space with thumbed bass notes or dizzying flurries of melody, but here their interplay rounds out the picture. As a result, these songs don’t have the same mythical grandeur as Tyler’s best work, or the same unfurling experimentalism of Anderson’s. Instead, they play like a wandering search for peace, with both artists turning to their guitars—and to each other—as a respite against a country that seemed to be tearing itself apart. Lost Futures forecasts that the road ahead is dark, and sometimes folk tales are the only thing that can make the night less bleak.
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. | 2021-08-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-08-27T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Folk/Country | Thrill Jockey | August 27, 2021 | 7 | 8dc33461-8513-42d7-b7bf-a4be3a4f5d33 | Sam Goldner | https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-goldner/ | |
While Adventure carries all the hallmarks of your usual skyscraping EDM release—stomping breakdowns, soaring choruses, maximalism-for-the-sake-of-it—it also straddles a fine balance between being a pop record and being a dance record. | While Adventure carries all the hallmarks of your usual skyscraping EDM release—stomping breakdowns, soaring choruses, maximalism-for-the-sake-of-it—it also straddles a fine balance between being a pop record and being a dance record. | Madeon: Adventure | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20379-adventure/ | Adventure | Though French producer Madeon has been known in electronic circles for years—he’s been active under the moniker since 2010 and has appeared at Coachella and Ultra—it became increasingly clear last year that the 20-year-old (!) Hugo Pierre Leclercq had bigger conquests in mind. The instrumental "Imperium", the first released song from his new Adventure, was first featured on the soundtrack of the globally massive soccer video game "FIFA 15". This is a distinction that often breaks big artists to a world audience, and Madeon’s mixture of colorful, sample-heavy EDM and its attending uplifting lilt made for the perfect feel-good vibe directly before the complexity of the new "FIFA" made you want to hurl your controller through your brother’s flat screen.
With Adventure, Madeon’s debut LP, the producer presents a strikingly versatile collection. In a landscape filled with hot-on-paper-but-kinda-"eh" collaborations between big name vocalists and hip producers, Madeon deploys his guests (Passion Pit, R&B singer Kyan, Bastille frontman Dan Smith) with a stirring effectiveness. Album highlight "Pay No Mind" weaponizes Passion Pit's bright synth-pop for a stadium anthem, and the warmth of "La Lune" recalls a more laidback version of Bastille’s catchy hit "Pompeii". On tracks like "OK"—which features a Charli XCX sample culled from a scrapped collaboration—and "Pixel Empire", Madeon pays homage to 8-bit video game soundtracks, reminiscent of Rustie’s Essential Mix and the incomparable (yes, incomparable) "Donkey Kong Country" soundtrack all at once. While Adventure carries all the hallmarks of your usual skyscraping EDM release—stomping breakdowns, soaring choruses, maximalism-for-the-sake-of-it—it also straddles a fine balance between being a pop record and being a dance record.
Though not everything is as huge as its banner singles, more inward-looking tracks like the closer "Home" are arguably as successful. "Home" perhaps best exemplifies Madeon’s range, given that it’s one of the only songs on the album that features Leclercq’s vocals. Over a track that moves from delicate and glimmering to sweeping, Leclercq sings delicately before jumping into the thundering chorus. It’s a sweet note to end on, and marks a signpost for the young producer to follow, if he chooses that direction. The good thing about Adventure is that there are many markers like this; on the path to what feels like something huge, Madeon’s journey is just beginning. | 2015-03-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | 2015-03-30T02:00:04.000-04:00 | Electronic | Columbia | March 30, 2015 | 7.8 | 8dca12a2-262e-49e6-9432-06b28cf6e4e7 | Corban Goble | https://pitchfork.com/staff/corban-goble/ | null |
Intimate by design but expansive in scope, the rapper’s latest project is an inventive and unnerving evolution of his singular style. | Intimate by design but expansive in scope, the rapper’s latest project is an inventive and unnerving evolution of his singular style. | Mavi: Laughing so Hard, it Hurts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mavi-laughing-so-hard-it-hurts/ | Laughing so Hard, it Hurts | Mavi was expecting to follow his acclaimed 2019 debut, Let the Sun Talk, with a record called Shango, which the 23-year-old rapper has taken to calling “a very manly, muscular album” and which was eventually shelved. In its place came first the slightly tortured EP End of the Earth, released early last year, and now the gently probing Laughing so Hard, it Hurts, a record whose raw nerve endings sizzle and pop to make even its weariest verses seem animated by a desire for contentment, for harmony. It’s intimate by design, with Mavi’s frequently muted voice drawing the listener’s ear close to the speaker, but expansive in scope: Its opening song is named for a folk hero from American slavery, and its closing one traces the running routes through his native Charlotte, North Carolina that are “carved into the small of [his] back.” Languid in spots, but never for too long—its 16 songs last just over 38 minutes—Laughing so Hard suggests a zen state that is being punctured then resealed in endless loop.
It would be tempting to collapse Mavi’s style into the Earl Sweatshirt/MIKE scene that has been so popular and so prolific over the last five years. And while he shares plenty of qualities with those rappers—he has in the past affected voices similar to both pre- and post-Some Rap Songs Earl, and his taste in production skews toward the jagged and seemingly unfinished—Laughing so Hard features a staggering number of vocal styles and melodic ideas. That aforementioned hush, heard especially on songs like “Doves,” invites tantalizingly ambiguous readings, sounding at times like a seduction and at others like an embarrassed confession. He’s desperate on the tender “My Good Ghosts” and guarded despite the exuberant beat on “Opportunity Kids”; elsewhere, on “Spoiled Brat,” the way Mavi allows the last line of each phrase to unspool into song turns simple detail (“I’m glad I washed my hands”) into maxim.
Dylvinci and Wulf Morpheus combine to furnish roughly half the album’s beats, with contributions from monte booker, Jacob Rochester, and longtime collaborator ovrkast, among others. As with Mavi’s voice, the music is thick with invention. Let the Sun Talk was originally uploaded to SoundCloud as a single, 32-minute track; while the palette here is brighter and slightly more polished, Laughing so Hard retains the feel of different musical directions overlapping and enjambing. This is not precisely the muddy, self-consciously lo-fi production spilling out of New York’s underground, nor the ostentatiously technical post-post-post-Dilla chops that dominate other corners, but a welcome hybrid of the two where lushness and brittleness converge in beats, like Rochester’s “The Inconvenient Truth,” that are at once rugged and delicate. Mavi, who wrote the majority of the album to melodic demos without any drums programmed over them, navigates those rhythms with a dexterity that is never foregrounded, but stunning on inspection.
Like the rappers to whom he’s most most frequently compared, Mavi’s writing is often characterized as cryptic or enigmatic. And while his verses do include some little parabolic bursts, he is most effective when he’s being direct, as on the harrowing “Chinese Finger Trap,” when he says he’s “finally sober—and it’s just another layer of lonely,” or when he laments, on “Hemlock,” “I see when niggas get famous, the revolution in them die.” The latter line gives way to one of Mavi’s best modes, a rigorously economical tangle with spiritual struggle:
They gnaw my flesh
Mispronounce my name
Deny my breath
Snap my bones in two
Memorize my screams
Then memorize they steps
There are more lighthearted applications of his straightforward approach, like when he quips that money is getting “mildewy, like white people dreads,” or when he raps that a girlfriend “know she can get a Chanel whenever my streaming hit.” Twenty years ago, that line appearing on a nominally underground rap record would have seemed like a radical blurring of hip-hop’s different spheres—it’s essentially the core conflict of The College Dropout. When Mavi says it today, it’s instead unnerving for the way it literalizes the more symbolic parts of his music, the gnawing at his flesh monetized and tracked down to the thousandth of a cent. But Laughing so Hard does not take a defeated or cynical view of that economic exchange. It sees that slow accrual as one more line on a ledger of incremental progress toward a world that is slightly more forgiving. | 2022-10-21T00:04:00.000-04:00 | 2022-10-21T00:04:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Mavi 4 Mayor Music | October 21, 2022 | 8.2 | 8dcd1c10-9e1b-4736-b8a1-42cedd147ae5 | Paul A. Thompson | https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/ | |
The release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League offers both the director and soundtrack composer Tom Holkenborg the chance to indulge their every whim. The resulting movie and score are both aggressively long, ambitiously overstuffed, and deeply polarizing. | The release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League offers both the director and soundtrack composer Tom Holkenborg the chance to indulge their every whim. The resulting movie and score are both aggressively long, ambitiously overstuffed, and deeply polarizing. | Tom Holkenborg: Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/tom-holkenborg-zack-snyders-justice-league-original-motion-picture-soundtrack/ | Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) | Depending on who you follow on Twitter, the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League means entirely different things. To some, the so-called “#SnyderCut,” the allegedly authentic and uncut original vision of the underperforming 2017 superhero movie, is the product of a fan-driven harassment campaign. To others, it’s an act of restorative justice, erasing the changes of an abusive collaborator and giving a grieving director a legitimate space to make peace with the personal pain that hijacked a high-profile project. Whether you view it as desperate cash grab or the last stand of authorship in an industry intent on suppressing original voices, it’s quite obviously a commodity, like every “Final Cut” or “Unrated Edition” designed to make viewers purchase new copies of movies they already own. Zack Snyder’s Justice League is the cinematic equivalent of overstuffed streaming re-releases like Taylor Swift’s folklore: the long pond studio sessions (from the Disney+ special) (deluxe edition) or Trippie Redd’s Pegasus: Neon Shark vs Pegasus Presented by Travis Barker (Deluxe), a product that probably would not exist if it did not have a recently launched platform to promote. Split into DVD menu-like chapters, an artistic choice that also aids aimless shuffling, the Snyder Cut ends with an epilogue that stitches together scenes of set-up for sequels that will never happen, much like an assortment of bonus tracks and remixes, feat. Martian Manhunter and the Joker.
When Snyder left Justice League due to his daughter’s death and was controversially replaced by Joss Whedon, its original score was mostly scrapped in favor of replacement work by Danny Elfman. The Snyder Cut is advertised as the director’s unaltered vision, but if he had never left the movie in the first place, this take would have been subject to reshoots, and would probably still be shorter and lighter. Junkie XL’s Zack Snyder’s Justice League (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is also different from what he might have composed originally, as it was produced entirely during quarantine. In both cases, this re-release offers Snyder and Tom Holkenborg the chance to indulge their every whim, and the resulting movie and score are each aggressively long, ambitiously overstuffed, and deeply polarizing. Either you will be moved by the intensity, sincerity, and sheer ballsiness of the film and its music, or you will be alienated by their runtime, dreariness, and ponderous seriousness. At a mammoth 54 tracks and 3 hours and 54 minutes, the soundtrack album runs just a few minutes shorter than the Snyder Cut itself.
Tom Holkenborg lies squarely at the intersection of superstar producer and superstar composer. After years of pop-oriented work, as well as scoring for high-octane game franchises like Need for Speed and SSX, Junkie began collaborating with Hans Zimmer on the soundtracks to Christopher Nolan films like Inception and The Dark Knight Rises, and was enlisted into Zimmer’s cacophonous supergroup the Sinister Six—along with Pharrell, Johnny Marr, and Incubus’ Mike Einziger—for Marc Webb’s misbegotten The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Now, the apprentice has overtaken the master, or at the very least they’ve swapped places: Hans Zimmer plays festival stages and is worshipped like an EDM DJ, while Junkie dutifully churns out scores to Sonic the Hedgehog and Godzilla vs. Kong under his real name. The once-prolific Zimmer has become increasingly sparse in his scoring, superseded by a new generation of creative multitaskers, as fluent in popular musical production as they are at adapting to the conventions of the blockbuster soundtracks: artists like Trent Reznor, and Childish Gambino compatriot Ludwig Goransson, who replaced Nolan’s right-hand music man Zimmer with the driving techno score for Tenet.
Junkie’s most-played track on Spotify is still 2002’s Elvis Vs. JXL remix of “A Little Less Conversation,” best-known for its association with Ocean’s 11, a Bush-era reboot of the Rat Pack. Drawing on a self-consciously “vintage” sound and the often cornball textures of commercialized “world music,” Junkie XL rode one of the first waves of real dance music superstars, who cashed checks from Woodstock 1999 headlining slots and soundtrack gigs alike: Moby, Paul Oakenfold, the Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, and trance producer BT. The multicultural melange perfected by these omnipresent producers was like the Mod Jams to ESPN’s Jock Jams—upper-middle-class, ready-to-wear electronica for tasteful commercial spaces. Some of Junkie’s biggest paydays have come from spots for coveted brands like Nike and Cadillac, so it’s only natural he and Snyder have become creative bosom brothers; Snyder was also weaned on advertising gigs.
Like Snyder’s movies, Junkie’s music is heavy on pastiche, often schmaltzy, and blatantly commercial. Snyder is an unapologetic dweeb: a guy who writes at a desk surrounded by human skulls and owns an axe collection, someone who thinks the height of coolness is Jason Momoa walking into the ocean while a Nick Cave song plays, while Henry Cavill walking out of the ocean as a Chris Cornell song plays comes in a close second. His use of pop music has always been subtlety-allergic: in his remake of Dawn of the Dead, we hear Johnny Cash’s “The Man Comes Around” as a viral plague spreads during the opening credits, and “Down with the Sickness” twice, both the big-band cover by Richard Cheese and Disturbed’s original; Cave singing “There is a king” as the camera stares into the face of the King of the Sea; multiple renditions and versions of “Hallelujah,” even decades after Shrek made that now-cliched music cue the butt of a joke. The much-derided jukebox mecha musical Sucker Punch, released at the height of mash-up culture, even features a Queen remix medley with a guest verse from former Terror Squad member Armageddon. Snyder’s films are an entire universe of cliches, but he exalts each one, lending them the portent of religious rituals. The intensity of Snyder’s Christian Scientist upbringing carries over into this spiritual take on the medium—if comic books are his myths, superheroes his new gods, then pop songs are Snyder’s hymns.
The Justice League soundtrack opens with a cover of “Song to the Siren” by coffee-shop playlist singer Rose Betts—most famously performed by This Mortal Coil but originally written by Tim Buckley, the kind of mythologized songwriter Snyder seems most attracted to (in addition to the aforementioned Cave, Cash, and Cohen, Bob Dylan also figures heavily in Watchmen, and the director is a noted Morrissey fan). But the movie and its soundtrack embrace moody abstraction more than pop clarity. JXL’s score is the kind of orchestral music that is easier to imagine from a synthesizer than an ensemble: one finger on the strings, another on the choral voices, a pinky sliding over to trigger the mournful military brass. The hand of Zimmer always feels present, in the influence of that inescapable Inception BWAH, and in the mingling of symphonic portent with a four-on-the-floor pulse.
Junkie’s stylistic trademark as a composer is relentless drumming. “The Path Chooses You” begins with dark, dubby textures and a light hip-hop sway before pivoting to intense minimal techno and then once again into full-fledged trap EDM. Though there’s a rumbling consistency to the score, its tenor varies based on each hero: Junkie’s versatility allows him to create distinct worlds for each character. Wonder Woman is often accompanied by an absurd banshee wail, presumably the voice of Amazon past—what the closed captioning describes as [ANCIENT LAMENTATION MUSIC PLAYING]. For better or worse, the blazing guitar solo signaling Gal Gadot’s on-screen appearance is one of the few iconic blockbuster themes of the past decade—peaking into the red, a little annoying, imminently recognizable. Aquaman music cues like “We Do This Together,” appropriate for a character always chugging Jack Daniels and draped in wet denim, are full of car-commercial butt rock, though Junkie still smothers every instrument in walls of crackle and distortion. The sparse piano keys of “A Splinter From the Thorn that Pricked You” and the metronomic beat of “Cyborg Becoming / Human All Too Human” feel suited to a horror film, fitting for Cyborg’s narrative arc about the terror of a changed body. And the euphoric strings of Zimmer’s score for Snyder’s almost-Malickian 2013 film Man of Steel are still intact on cues like “I Teach You, the Overman.”
It’s those unsettling elements that often make Junkie’s score distinctive: metallic shrieks, jagged strings, and THX-like deep notes are as central as “real” instruments. That emphasis on texture makes the Justice League score surprisingly listenable as a background piece, at times almost bordering on the algorithm-driven sonic creepypasta known as dark ambient, though there are often the kind of repeating, frenetic musical cues you hear over and over again during a final boss battle. Junkie’s score and Snyder’s film are both ultimately about feeling and sensation: This take on Justice League is about the existential awe puny humans feel when confronted with mythical titans rather than a straightforward superhero story. Appropriately, its soundtrack is more often an extended vibes playlist than a clear suite. These products may not have been made with streaming in mind, but lend themselves to a state of endless flow, like scrubbing through an Adobe After Effects timeline or Ableton project instead of experiencing a full work. Streaming makes the work of remixing endless; a black-and-white edition of the Snyder Cut, Zack Snyder’s Justice League: Justice Is Gray, drops on HBO Max soon.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2021-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-03-24T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | WaterTower | March 24, 2021 | 6.5 | 8dd6cf8b-3a18-419e-b575-7032588fe48f | Nadine Smith | https://pitchfork.com/staff/nadine-smith/ | |
After the push-and-pull of his MMG years, Wale gazes back towards his past on his fourth album, nodding to his 2008 "Seinfeld"-referencing breakout The Mixtape About Nothing and attempting to recast his audience's perception of him. | After the push-and-pull of his MMG years, Wale gazes back towards his past on his fourth album, nodding to his 2008 "Seinfeld"-referencing breakout The Mixtape About Nothing and attempting to recast his audience's perception of him. | Wale: The Album About Nothing | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20425-the-album-about-nothing/ | The Album About Nothing | Wale’s alignment with the Top 40 rap crowd never felt like a healthy fit. Since his 2011 alliance with Rick Ross’ Maybach Music, the D.C. rapper has found success but has never seemed comfortable with it. And the critical failure of his last album, 2013’s The Gifted, must have shaken him to his core, because at first blush, his latest effort, The Album About Nothing, screams "return-to-form." Its title nods to his 2008 "Seinfeld"-referencing breakout The Mixtape About Nothing, a freebie hosted by Fool’s Gold impresario Nick Catchdubs. This was around the time when the first wave of "weirdo" nerd guys like himself, Charles Hamilton, a pre-pop B.o.B and Kid Cudi were springing forward—emotional, obsessed with melody, ambitious, accessible. Wale promptly eschewed that sensibility for guest verses on songs like Waka Flocka Flame’s strip club paean "No Hands" and Ross’ my-cum-tastes-good commercial "Diced Pineapples". Through it all, he struggled to exude palpable confidence. So what does it mean that after all of this push-and-pull, his fourth studio album finds him gazing back towards his origins?
The Album About Nothing begins by holding a mirror to Wale’s past, which reflects some of the trappings of his more-famous present. The intro is informed by go-go, D.C.’s signature reworking of funk, and a sound he used frequently early in his career. And once again, the voice of Jerry Seinfeld acts as commentary, stitching the tracks together thematically. But Wale doesn’t have to rely on audio clips from "Seinfeld" anymore: He has Jerry, himself (the two are friends, and Jerry even name-dropped him as one of his "top five" in Top Five) providing the sound bites. On "The Helium Balloon", one of the more interesting songs on the album, he laments his reception as an artist, adding "Still know what my core needs/ So fuck who ignores me." What follows isn’t so much the diligent fan service all this promises, though, so much as a muddied collage of attempts at current trends and a lot of sour disaffection. In other words: a Wale album.
Wale clearly remains frustrated with his inability to ascend to the top tier, and on Nothing he presents himself as a rap-industry antagonist. He burrows into the background of "The Middle Finger", revealing his discomfort around other rappers and making a hook out of "Fuck you, leave me alone." On "The Glass Egg", he opts for cleverness over anger, upending Groove Theory’s "Tell Me" and flipping its lyrics ("I’ve been doing my own thing"; "Tell me if you are for real") from their original incredulous-about-a-crush context into the cry of an outsider. It works so well that it’s almost surprising no one has done it before.
Nothing is a long album, with one cut coming in over the six-minute mark, and when it is sludgy, it is exhausting. The most unfortunate moment is "The One Time in Houston", an amateurish attempt at the city’s signature syrupy screw sound. "The Girls on Drugs" cleverly samples Janet Jackson’s house party celebration "Go Deep", but isn’t packed with enough of Wale’s dour thoughts to sound like he’s doing anything more than cribbing Drake’s If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late flow. For someone who spends so much time decrying other rappers’ lifestyles, it’s a wonder why he is pantomiming at all.
Interpolation is one of the constants of Nothing. "Balloon" concludes with a pseudo-dancehall coda loosely riffing on Ini Komoze’s crossover "Here Comes the Hotstepper". "The Success" borrows from the Eurythmics’ "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)". "The Body" fully rips "You Remind Me of Something" by R. Kelly, who might not be the best guy to pay homage to in 2015, but when you have Jeremih, an heir to the Chicago R&B throne, on the hook, it’s a little easier to take. "The Body" is the last of five romantic songs on the album, most of which fail to captivate: Only on his Usher collaboration "The Matrimony", and on the tender "The Bloom (AG3)", where he reminds us how good he sounds rapping over a live band, does he sound alive.
Wale remains intent on dismantling the public’s sour perception of him, but he doesn’t seem to know how. He wants us to know he’s "Lil Wayne meets Wayne Perry/ Bad Brains from the go-go" ("The God Smile") but he’s loaded his album with the opposite: There are no lyrical acrobatics à la Weezy in his prime, and his reference to Wayne Perry is a head-scratcher because Wale has never purported to be a gangster. He waxes political on the J. Cole-featuring "The Pessimist" about the negative perceptions of black America, through the lens of police brutality or "Love & Hip-Hop", but is missing the punk fervor of the Bad Brains he namechecks. While there are clear themes throughout the record (love, black experience, a rapper’s malaise), The Album About Nothing is mostly about fear. Fear of becoming an outsider projecting a false hatred of the inside, fear of pushing musical boundaries to nurture one’s own creativity, fear of being vulnerable and, thusly, denying his listeners access to himself. If Wale could only shatter those walls and deliver an album where he no longer sounds like a caricature of himself—it’s no wonder he loves "Seinfeld"—he might finally get back the amnesty he has been so desperately grasping at for the past five years. All he has now is Nothing to lose. | 2015-04-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | 2015-04-02T02:00:02.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic / Maybach | April 2, 2015 | 5.4 | 8dd788b9-e1cc-4bd2-8ea1-7a3f9f1274f8 | Claire Lobenfeld | https://pitchfork.com/staff/claire-lobenfeld/ | null |
Nap Eyes sound like the kind of slacker-rock band that plays while slumped over on half-folded futons. But even in its quietest moments, Thought Rock Fish Scale is an album brimming with passion and protest. It finds confidence in humility, power in relaxation. If your idea of a perfect night is sitting on your sofa, reading a listicle on your laptop with Netflix on in the background while carrying on a conversation on your smartphone as you reply to a text, then let this record be the first step in your rehabilitation from information overload. | Nap Eyes sound like the kind of slacker-rock band that plays while slumped over on half-folded futons. But even in its quietest moments, Thought Rock Fish Scale is an album brimming with passion and protest. It finds confidence in humility, power in relaxation. If your idea of a perfect night is sitting on your sofa, reading a listicle on your laptop with Netflix on in the background while carrying on a conversation on your smartphone as you reply to a text, then let this record be the first step in your rehabilitation from information overload. | Nap Eyes: Thought Rock Fish Scale | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21451-thought-rock-fish-scale/ | Thought Rock Fish Scale | Most rock'n'roll singers throw parties. Nap Eyes frontman Nigel Chapman attends mixers—which are basically parties for people who don’t get invited to many. But even those are a bit much; two lines into "Mixer," the elegant, cocktail-clinking song that opens the Halifax quartet’s second record, Chapman is already craning his neck for the exit. "When I look at myself on the right/ I’m wondering if I’m really here," he sings, like someone who’s pinned up against the wall of an overcrowded bar. That lonely-in-a-crowd feeling permeates the entirety of Thought Rock Fish Scale, but rather than communicate feelings of disillusionment and alienation, Chapman seems remarkably calm and content—because, in this case, social isolation is the first step toward self-actualization.
Nap Eyes sound like the kind of slacker-rock band that plays while slumped over on half-folded futons, but even in its quietest moments, Thought Rock Fish Scale is an album brimming with passion and protest. It finds confidence in humility, power in relaxation. Its lethargy feels like an act of defiance against the hyper-speed pace of modern life. Its pledges of sobriety and good health constitute affronts to peer-pressured intoxication and food-blogged indulgence. And its purity of vision amounts to a declaration of war against a culture that encourages mass distraction. If your idea of a perfect night is sitting on your sofa, reading a listicle on your laptop with Netflix on in the background while carrying on a conversation on your smartphone as you reply to a text, then let this record be the first step in your rehabilitation from information overload.
Thought Rock Fish Scale arrives mere months after Paradise of Bachelors introduced Nap Eyes’ debut, Whine of the Mystic, to Stateside audiences, but they’re already a very different band. While Whine introduced Chapman as one the most intriguingly idiosyncratic lyricists in Canadian indie rock this side of Dan Bejar, the album betrayed competing desires to engage its audience intellectually while cranking out rave-ups that could sate a Saturday-night bar crowd. T**hought Rock Fish Scale does away with any such concessions—as Chapman observes early on, "If you go around trying to please everybody/ It only becomes your crutch." Though clocking in at a mere 34 minutes, it’s the sort of album that takes its sweet time going where it wants to. While it wields a lighter touch, it strikes a deeper chord, by placing Chapman’s richly detailed ruminations front and center, and cutting the jammed-out clutter. It’s as if their favorite Velvets song has suddenly shifted from "Foggy Notion" to "Pale Blue Eyes," forsaking the visceral, fleeting thrills of rocking out to savor the sustained beauty of lingering on.
Chapman has one of those voices that feels immediately familiar, yet is bracingly distinct. You can hear Lou Reed in his conversational verses; Stephen Malkmus in the voice-cracking choruses; Jeff Mangum in the fantastical, quasi-religious imagery; and (again) Dan Bejar in the tendency to hurriedly overstuff his stanzas while retaining perfect enunciation and rhyme schemes. But his winsome, observational perspective is his own—and not just when he’s referencing the pitfalls of having to work his day job in biochemistry while school’s out ("at the lab, they have turned off the hot-water heater/ from the month of June right through until July"). His lyrics can take the form of self-help mantras ("And now I know who I really, really am/ I’m going to stay on track"); they also speak to more peculiar personal insecurities ("Can you tell me, do I have a glass eyelid?/ Can you tell me, do I have a glass forehead?"). But even his most bizarre musings sound like emotional breakthroughs achieved amid moments of great clarity—"Stargazer" may speak of of serpent kings and laser beam blasts, but it uses those storybook devices to battle real-life demons.
Chapman particularly excels at writing two kinds of songs. There are perfectly minimal jams like "Lion in Chains" and the aforementioned "Stargazer," each nothing more than a beautifully languorous verse melody—mirrored by gently-weeping guitar refrains—repeated over and over again until they feel like choruses. At the other end of the spectrum are sublime, intricately constructed turns like "Click Clack" and "Alaskan Shake," each a long, winding hallway lined with many doors that open the songs up to surprising new directions at the precise moment when they seem like they’re going to ramble off aimlessly. Appropriately enough, the last words we hear Chapman sing on the record are "trust, trust, trust, trust me," a plea for redemption doubling as an assurance that, even in the most circuitous, fanciful Nap Eyes song, Chapman will eventually steer you back on course. | 2016-02-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | 2016-02-05T01:00:03.000-05:00 | Rock | Paradise of Bachelors | February 5, 2016 | 8 | 8dda5b15-d38f-4bb4-a615-80d924a71e4a | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
The experimental artist’s latest project is the most dynamic, unpredictable album of her career—a collection of instrumental music that flows like an interconnected suite. | The experimental artist’s latest project is the most dynamic, unpredictable album of her career—a collection of instrumental music that flows like an interconnected suite. | Carmen Villain: Only Love From Now On | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/carmen-villain-only-love-from-now-on/ | Only Love From Now On | Twenty-three minutes into Carmen Villain’s fourth album, at the outset of the antepenultimate track, we hear something we’ve never heard from the Mexican-Norwegian artist before: the buoyant pulse of dub techno. Even for listeners who have kept pace with her gradual transformation from indie singer-songwriter to jazz-inspired ambient musician, this might come as a surprise. But it confirms just how far Villain has traveled since the fuzzboxed strumming and narcotic vocals of her 2013 debut, Sleeper. On two subsequent albums and two more EPs between 2017 and last year, she laid down her mic and electric guitar and sank deep into the folds of synthesizers, drum machines, flute, and electronic tools. The turning point in this metamorphosis was her 2020 release Affection in a Time of Crisis, whose billowing, beatless shapes reflected the marble contours—and 23-second reverb—of the mausoleum where she recorded it. But even as her music has grown more abstract, she has simultaneously hinted at alternate paths that it might take, commissioning gently pulsing remixes from leftfield electronic musicians like DJ Python, Parris, and Huerco S. Their rhythmic energies feed back into “Subtle Bodies,” a high point on her most dynamic—and unpredictable—album yet.
From a carefully selected set of softly rounded shapes and muted tonal choices, Villain wrangles a surprisingly varied selection of instrumental tracks that flow together like the interconnected parts of a suite. All seven songs are shot through with an abiding sense of mystery. When there are rhythms, they thud like an object being dragged into the woods by an animal. Her imaginary landscapes are illuminated by a muted glow, like the mist burning off fields at dawn. Aside from occasional telltale electronic processing, much of the album’s palette appears to have sprung from acoustic sources, though it’s often impossible to pinpoint the source of a given sound. In the brief “Liminal Space,” an unsteady rhythm might be flat stones clacked together, or hard footsteps echoing down a dry riverbed.
Like a creation story, Only Love From Now On begins with breath: Wind instruments provide its essence and define its shape. In the opening “Gestures,” Norwegian trumpeter Arve Henriksen’s horn is run through an electronic harmonizer, recalling Jon Hassell’s eerie, prismatic sweeps. Over a ritualistic pulse of gong-like tones and wooden percussion, Henriksen plays an eloquent improvised lead, while in the background, Villain smears its echoes across the stereo field—a richly enveloping mix of sounds that feels less like a song than a four-dimensional environment expanding around you. In “Portals,” harmonized and layered clarinets waft above a lonely percussive loop reminiscent of Seefeel’s Succour. And in the eight-minute title track, flutist Johanna Scheie Orellana, a frequent collaborator of Villain’s, traces languid lines over a drifting backdrop of glowing chords, weaving between gentle consonance and hissing dissonance. Her timbre often has a wheezy tone that emphasizes the physicality of the breath filling her instrument.
There are broader themes embedded in these songs. “Gestures” references Hannah Wilke’s eponymous 1974 video-art piece about the male gaze, and “Silueta” and “Subtle Bodies” are homages to the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta’s feminist works, which traced lines between nature, violence, and the female body. In the context of Only Love From Now On, those hints are just that: breadcrumbs that might lead curious listeners to a deeper understanding of Villain’s processes and motivations, as well as indicators of places she might take her music in the future. It’s difficult to address complex ideas like these in ambient compositions, of course, and to its credit, Only Love From Now On never feels like it is awkwardly shoehorning anything extraneous into the music. What matters is all right there in the sounds themselves, and in the way minuscule, easy-to-miss details combine to create almost subliminally evocative clusters of tone and texture.
That’s particularly evident in the late-album pairing of “Subtle Bodies” and “Silueta,” which together lay out the record’s full stylistic scope. “Subtle Bodies” begins with a rhythm that might be the sound of feet crunching through snow. Then, like a film camera pulling back to reveal the vastness of the landscape, Villain widens the frame to admit glowing chords, whooshing white noise, chest-caressing sub-bass, and, eventually, layer upon layer of almost inaudibly harmonized wind instruments, pale as watercolors. The musical inspiration comes from dub techno of the 1990s—artists like Pole, Vainqueur, and Vladislav Delay—but her materials seem less electronic than elemental: dripping snowmelt, scraping metal, frosted air glistening in the morning sun. The album’s most complex, densely woven track, “Subtle Bodies” gives way to the record’s simplest: “Silueta” is made of ambiguously looped and layered woodwind sounds drawn out and processed electronically, twisting in slow motion like coils of ticker tape. This patient, meditative song feels as natural as breathing; one is struck by both its absolute economy of materials and the wealth she generates with them. After nearly a decade of music-making, “Silueta” is evidence of just how much Villain has stripped away from her music; for now, anyway, this feels like her vision distilled to its essence. | 2022-03-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-03-03T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Experimental | Smalltown Supersound | March 3, 2022 | 7.8 | 8de02204-d5b3-4f2a-86a4-6f2976e8b3c6 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | |
Collaborating with Blake Mills to make his best album yet, the gentle songwriter pushes beyond feel-good stereotypes to look for small joys amid vexing times. | Collaborating with Blake Mills to make his best album yet, the gentle songwriter pushes beyond feel-good stereotypes to look for small joys amid vexing times. | Jack Johnson: Meet the Moonlight | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jack-johnson-meet-the-moonlight/ | Meet the Moonlight | Jack Johnson never completely fit inside the “Life Is Good” T-shirt that two decades of adult-contemporary hits wove for him. Sure, Johnson—a strong-jawed Hawaii native with a disarming grin and a twilit voice as tuneful as a commercial jingle—extolled making banana pancakes as a romantic getaway, turned an ode to a lover’s bulbous toes into a staccato jam, and recruited certified goof G. Love to sing along about Curious George. Perennially posed on the edge of some salty shore, guitar in hand, he seemed the heir apparent to Jimmy Buffett’s fiefdom of mixed drinks and beach breezes, a pleasant guy with cheesy tunes about the surf and your soul, man.
But Johnson’s emotions and concerns have been mixed since his perspicacious 2001 debut, more complicated than facile no-shoes/no-shirt/no-problem sloganeering. He somehow snuck “diegetic” into a pre-9/11 plea about media callousness toward murder, and commiserated with a sex worker while excoriating a john’s religious hypocrisy. More James Taylor or even Jackson Browne than the cash cow that Mister Margaritaville became, his preternatural sense of sangfroid has sometimes crowded out his surprising depth as a world-weary songwriter in search of small moments of respite and delight.
Johnson’s timely and calming eighth album, Meet the Moonlight, should clear up some confusion. The 10 balmy songs sway into two broad lyrical categories, unified by the same open-toed shuffle from which Johnson has only occasionally wavered: polite protest numbers and little devotionals. He stakes out the twin territories on opener “Open Mind,” a winning lament about trying to step back from perpetual disappointment. First he bemoans blind faith in unseen gods—Christ, capitalism, whatever—and then tries to leave such true believers alone, intending to afford himself the sanity of ignoring what he cannot understand, let alone accept.
These sociopolitical songs aren’t out to change anyone’s minds or offer some revelatory worldview. If you’ve ever bemoaned a reply guy or frowned inside an infinite echo chamber, you’ve had the same worries about social media Johnson broadcasts during the tensile “One Step Ahead.” “I give in, I give up/It’s too much,” he snaps without a breath, his voice suddenly sharp as flint. “3 A.M. Radio” takes on the cheap salvation of disinformation with an irritation so velvet-gloved it’s easy to mistake for tenderness. The breezy “Costume Party” seeks to leave a society of posers, where we camouflage our true selves to be liked; its rudimentary accompaniment of beer bottles, blown by Johnson so they sound like pennywhistles, offers a charming and playful send-up of careerism.
But it’s the other songs—the ones about trying to find space to be anything but irate, exasperated, and exhausted—that make Moonlight so relevant and assuring. Nestled between a simple slack-key jangle and slide guitar sighs, his voice during “Calm Down” feels like a deep-breathing exercise. He asks someone he loves to sit beside him for a spell, so they can slip away from wailing sirens and our collective quest to find out “how low until the bottom.” And the title track extends an open invitation to find hope and wonder in an act as simple as walking outside, looking up, and spotting the moon. Johnson often crams lots of words into three-minute spaces, but here he luxuriates inside scenes for five minutes, as if he’s learned enough to shut up and be still. “It’s good to be right here,” he coos, the bloom of his voice betraying a sense of genuine surprise. This epiphany is the core of possibly the prettiest song of his career.
Johnson is a 47-year-old father married to his college sweetheart who has now made enough of a fortune to make two nonprofit businesses devoted to giving it away. But little about Moonlight scans either as a self-righteous sermon or a fireside lament about how bad he has it. Instead, Johnson is only wrestling with what he sees around him, trying to facilitate empathy in a society where just that can mean working overtime. He nails that conundrum on the masterful “I Tend to Digress,” a relatable snapshot of a mind spinning around a hamster wheel. In the first 100 seconds, he sorts through a litany of big questions: Is there a god, and, if so, does it care about us or how we feel about it? Why do we cripple ourselves through comparison? And are we ever more than people’s perceptions of us? “I want meaning/I want reason/It’s not enough to have a pleasing morning,” he sings to start the final verse before pulling back and admitting that such simple joys, no matter how brief or pedestrian, may indeed be the point.
Blake Mills produced Moonlight in Los Angeles and Hawaii, working with Johnson at his home studio. It may seem surprising that a guy typecast as a beach strummer now joins a string of Mills collaborators that also includes Bob Dylan, Perfume Genius, and Fiona Apple. But lean in closely, and you can hear Mills’ subtle flourishes—the lambent drone beneath “Open Mind,” for instance, or the spectral percussion underneath “Windblown Eyes.” Mostly he fosters a newfound restraint in Johnson, so that the lines rarely get goofy and the arrangements never try too hard. Really, Meet the Moonlight sounds a little like a backyard picnic in lockdown, as simple as a friend coming over when the weather’s warm to play some songs about the day’s sadness and distant hope. If, for 20 years, Johnson’s seemed like the guy insisting “Life Is Good,” this setting makes it clear that his message is both shorter and more complicated: Life … Is? | 2022-07-01T00:03:00.000-04:00 | 2022-07-01T00:03:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Brushfire / Republic | July 1, 2022 | 7.2 | 8dea8a7b-e554-4766-aa7d-eb917b8fca05 | Grayson Haver Currin | https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/ | |
Long Island death metal stalwarts bring considerable technical aptitude to an album that works within the framework of their long-established sound. | Long Island death metal stalwarts bring considerable technical aptitude to an album that works within the framework of their long-established sound. | Suffocation: ...Of the Dark Light | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/suffocation-of-the-dark-light/ | ...Of the Dark Light | Suffocation are like the death metal equivalent of an old roller coaster that still makes your stomach drop even though you’ve ridden it hundreds of times and there are plenty of newer rides that are faster and more jarring. If you were following death metal in the early 1990s, when there was a sudden explosion of technical proficiency across the genre, Suffocation’s work since re-forming in 2002 will probably make you nostalgic for that era. By this point, fans will hardly be surprised to know that Suffocation’s eighth full-length, ...Of the Dark Light, doesn’t significantly expand on the formula established by landmark releases like 1991’s Effigy of the Forgotten and 1995’s Pierced from Within.
Like those albums, the new material comes stuffed with the instrumental gymnastics and headache-inducing atonality—that's a compliment, by the way—that first put the band on the map. In many ways, ...Of the Dark Light takes you back to a pivotal moment in death metal history. But the album also benefits tremendously from modern production that gives listeners a chance—arguably the best in the band’s almost three-decade career—to zoom in on the finer points of Suffocation’s music. When bassist Derek Boyer hits low notes or swollen chords, for example, it gives the music a sense of body you won’t find on the ‘90s recordings helmed by iconic death metal producer Scott Burns.
As usual, though, it’s the guitars and drums that occupy the spotlight. Once again, founding guitarist and bandleader Terrance Hobbs serves up a veritable air-guitarist’s dream of an album. Hobbs has the ability to cram multiple riffs and changes into even short stretches, so that by the time you’re 20 seconds into a song, you’ve got a ready-made guitar workout you could practice for days on end. Hobbs’ fretboard facility is so reliable that it’s easy to take for granted, especially since the acts that arose on Suffocation’s heels—Gorguts, Cryptopsy, Necrophagist, etc.—almost immediately raised the stakes when it came to complex song structures.
Since Suffocation’s first official recordings surfaced on the then-fledgling Relapse label in 1991, death metal’s growth has been exponential. If you examine the band’s whole catalog, you walk away with the impression that Hobbs and company haven’t tried to keep up with what other bands are doing. They’ve avoided stagnation, however, by continuing to push themselves within the framework of their established sound, and here the band gets an infusion of new blood from two new younger-generation members, drummer Eric Morotti and rhythm guitarist Charlie Errigo.
Thanks to the refined production, listeners can really sink their teeth into the way Errigo and Hobbs play off one another. Meanwhile, Morotti—recently described by Hobbs as “one of the fastest drummers we’ve ever had”—may not match the unique touch of founding drummer Mike Smith, but his superhuman chops no doubt pushed his new bandmates.
Perhaps the biggest sign of growth from the early days, though, comes in the form of Boyer’s lyrics. Death metal has always lent itself to metaphysical speculation, and Boyer's references to astral projection and “channeling forces we don’t understand” make the perfect lyrical foil for a character like the group's frontman, Frank Mullen. Mullen’s legendary growl is certainly forceful, but you can still make out (some of) what he's singing, which is more than you can say for the majority of his peers. Like a lot of death metal frontmen, Mullen sounds pretty convincing when he says things onstage like “this song’s all about killing people ‘cuz that’s what I like to fuckin’ do.” But there’s always been a hint of comic charm lurking behind that thick Long Island accent. These days, though, Boyer gives him—and us—a little more to chew on. Mullen’s personality goes a long way in setting him apart from the pack. The same goes for Suffocation as a whole, whose staying power on ...Of the Dark Night is undeniable. | 2017-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2017-06-26T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Metal | Nuclear Blast | June 26, 2017 | 7 | 8def68c5-25f8-4259-a57e-8671a9cc54b2 | Saby Reyes-Kulkarni | https://pitchfork.com/staff/saby-reyes-kulkarni/ | null |
The Toronto band’s debut album brightly blurs the line between ’60s psych pop and ’90s dream pop, but its lyrical preoccupations are much darker in tone. | The Toronto band’s debut album brightly blurs the line between ’60s psych pop and ’90s dream pop, but its lyrical preoccupations are much darker in tone. | Mother Tongues: Love in a Vicious Way | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/mother-tongues-love-in-a-vicious-way/ | Love in a Vicious Way | Mother Tongues make pretty, pristine music about messy, primal emotions: a brand of dream-pop that’s teeming with the sort of thoughts that can keep you up at night. The Toronto group’s debut full-length, Love in a Vicious Way, is an album of love songs, but they’re less interested in the blissful final destination than the arduous emotional journey. This isn’t so much a record of stories as a catalog of sensations: the animalistic nature of desire, the fight-or-flight response to falling for someone, the anguish of needing to know if your feelings are being reciprocated, and the grim thoughts that fester when your partner is no longer at your side.
That mix of euphoria and fear finds its musical manifestation in a disorienting sound that hovers between eras, vibes, and indie-pop subgenres. Singer-bassist Charise Aragoza and guitarist Lukas Cheung came up in the same 2010s noise-rock scene that yielded local favorites like Dilly Dally and Odonis Odonis, and some of that grungy residue could be detected on Mother Tongues’ free-ranging 2020 debut EP, Everything You Wanted. But these days, the group is closer in sound and spirit to pandemic home-recording hero Hannah Bussiere Kim, aka Luna Li, who played in an earlier iteration of Mother Tongues, while Aragoza has performed in Kim’s touring band. Like Luna Li, the Mother Tongues savvily blur the line between ’60s psych pop and ’90s dream pop, while feeding orchestral elements, Gainsbourgian grooves, and strobe-lit electronics into their cinematic swirl. But Mother Tongues are distinguished by their sense of unrest. Immersing yourself in their lustrous sound world is easy; making it out peacefully is another matter.
Unsurprisingly, Aragoza and Cheung cite Broadcast as a crucial influence on their delicate balance of retro style and spectral sonics. Having faithfully covered “Come On, Let’s Go” a few years back, Mother Tongues open Love in a Vicious Way with what’s essentially their own attempt at rewriting that song. “A Heart Beating” instantly lures you in with its cool go-go-dancer beat and twinkling textures, but its despondent, self-flagellating verses give way to an anxious chorus line—“A heart beating/Inside an animal”—that reads like a threat of an imminent attack, while Aragoza’s eerie wordless vocal incantations shift the mood from heady to haunted. The following “Dance in the Dark” then blindsides you with something you don’t often hear from dream-pop bands—a mutant metal riff—before introducing a ping-ponging, Stereolab-like hook that’s as delectable as it is desperate: “Why can’t we just be/Two lone souls floating side by side?”
Though it’s billed as Mother Tongues’ first full-length, Love in a Vicious Way is only five minutes longer than the EP that preceded it, but the distinction is important: Where Everything You Wanted captured a nascent group drifting through a shoegaze haze and taking the occasional dubby detour, Love in a Vicious Way feels more cohesive; its panoramic production makes the band’s diverse influences seem like natural parts of the same ecosystem. This band can get a lot done in a tight, three-minute timeframe: “Drip Drip” begins as a wistful rainy-day reverie about missing someone so much it hurts (“Body quake/No sleep tonight/Put your hands on me/I need that feeling”), but as Cheung and co-producer Asher Gould-Murtagh layer on the string effects, cosmic synth doodles, and gleaming guitars, the song floats off into outer space, transforming its carnal thoughts into cerebral sensations. (Ironically, when Mother Tongues do give themselves more space, they struggle to fill it: “Luv 2 Liv” begins as an intriguing goth/psych mash-up that gives the doomy, descending riff of “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” a swinging-’60s Franco-pop spin, but ends up going in circles as it shimmies past the five-minute mark.)
Fittingly for an album preoccupied with the more unsettling aspects of romance, Love in a Vicious Way culminates in a song that depicts passion as a death pact. The glistening “Worm Day” is effectively Mother Tongues’ own “Just Like Heaven,” a tune where the guitars sparkle as brightly as the lyrics are dark. But the location has shifted from the raging sea that stole the only girl Robert Smith loved to the cemetery where Aragoza imagines resting next to her one and only for all eternity. “I lie down in the dirt beside you/I lie down in this shallow grave,” she sings, “So come take me home.” Traditional marriage vows may define the lifespan of a relationship up to the moment where “death do us part,” but Mother Tongues would rather sing about the sort of wild, ungovernable love for which even dying provides no limit. | 2023-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2023-07-26T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Wavy Haze | July 26, 2023 | 7.3 | 8dfad771-d7ff-4e10-8217-35a970fc75b8 | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | |
After a scary bout with cancer, Boosie Badazz has a new lease on life and is releasing new music at a steady clip. Thug Talk is another hard memorandum on the turmoil of gangsta life. | After a scary bout with cancer, Boosie Badazz has a new lease on life and is releasing new music at a steady clip. Thug Talk is another hard memorandum on the turmoil of gangsta life. | Boosie Badazz: Thug Talk | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21773-thug-talk/ | Thug Talk | In a series of menacing, raw and honest records, Boosie Badazz has become something of an evangelist for getting out of the thug life, offering his take on the dark side of the drug game and gangbanging with vivid storytelling. The results have been some of the most vulnerable and transformative street-rap in years, and Thug Talk continues down that path. "We say sister be cool, even when it ain’t cool / Tell our nephews to chill, but they wan' live just like you" Boosie ruminates, reflecting on the dichotomy of living wrong while striving to be an example of stability and morality for those around you.
Thug Talk works almost as a concept record in which Boosie, like a peer rather than a judge, relates to the rush of gangsta life while trying to warn against it. "Wake Up" puts a fine point on it by sampling the late Pimp C, Boosie's mentor, from his most famous radio interview, in which he urged rappers to "talk about the bad side of the drug game too." Boosie snarls with the urgency of a teacher in an inner-city school drama: "You distributed well, hung with all the stars/Now they done took ya crib, repoed all ya cars / Sentenced all ya boys, locked ya momma up/ Now you gon turn rat or leave ya mama stuck." His preaching is effective because it’s rooted less in righteousness than the simple need for survival.
Yet Boosie still zeros in on the aspects that are too attractive for even him to still deny about that sordid lifestyle. On songs like "Off The Chain" he raps about violent altercation with the fearlessness and braggadocio of his younger, more reckless self. The unfortunately titled "Retarded," meanwhile, harkens back to the old, looser "ratchet" party records that put him on a larger platform.
The real highlights come from the pulsating, thumping "For da Love of Money", about the perils that money and shine bring, and the sobering, meditative "Right Game Wrong N***a" about the ways in which the people around you will double-cross and take advantage. Meanwhile, the elegant ode to his children "Found Love n U" captures a father’s love and dedication with complete earnesty, and it’s a testament to Boosie’s artistic range that he can go from vicious and cold to extremely tender and loving with relative ease and no sense that he should hide any of his feelings.
Thug Talk might not have the emotional weight of In My Feelings, and it doesbn't outshine the ferocity and incredible production of* Out My Feelings,* but it pulls its weight against both records by continuing Boosie’s incredible 2016 streak. On the intro, he promises us that by the end of the album, "you will understand thug talk," and his innate gift as a teacher and a philosopher on record all but guarantees that to be the case. | 2016-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2016-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | self-released | March 23, 2016 | 7.3 | 8e004a47-9101-49b0-aa84-af3321daffd8 | Israel Daramola | https://pitchfork.com/staff/israel-daramola/ | null |
Released after extensive touring, Cults' sophomore album sidesteps presumptions about a rising, major-label band and finds contentment not in what they could be, but what they are right now. And that's moodier, louder, more atmospheric. | Released after extensive touring, Cults' sophomore album sidesteps presumptions about a rising, major-label band and finds contentment not in what they could be, but what they are right now. And that's moodier, louder, more atmospheric. | Cults: Static | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18608-cults-static/ | Static | Cults' name has always suited them well—the out-of-Bandcamp-nowhere ubiquity of the New York duo's "Go Outside", still a fixture in TV commercials, had all the hallmarks of a cult success. It also samples a cult leader, but Cults drew thematically on various ideas related to its nominal subject: romance as kidnapping, a band as a cult-like escape from the rest of the world's expectations.
Except Cults' songs never sounded like they belonged to a niche audience. Despite a slight lo-fi haze, their bittersweet collage of 1960s girl-group elements, 21st-century production techniques, and direct, inventive songcraft was almost as distinctive on arrival as near-contemporaries Sleigh Bells' Bubble-Yum blasts. But Cults weren't even abrasive. They could be fuck-you blunt, their spoken-word samples were potentially off-putting, and even their sweetest teen-angel prom dances had devilish undercurrents. But particularly on a song like "Bumper", a masterful breakup-scene duet, their potential for converts seemed limitless.
Static is more cult-like than Cults. Released after extensive touring, Cults' sophomore album sidesteps presumptions about a rising, major-label band and admirably finds contentment not in what they could be, but what they are right now. And that's moodier, louder, more atmospheric. Multi-instrumentalist Brian Oblivion and singer Madeline Follin again co-produced the album with early Vampire Weekend engineer Shane Stoneback, but this time they got heavy-hitter help from Ben Allen, the former Gnarls Barkley producer whose more recent clients include Animal Collective, Deerhunter, Washed Out, and Youth Lagoon. Static deepens Cults' sound, but the song probably won't spread as far, or as quickly.
Glockenspiel is (mostly) out; 60s and 70s film-score bombast is in, befitting the band members' film-school backgrounds. Shaft-infused orchestral skull-cracker "High Road" evokes cinematic James Mercer-Danger Mouse project Broken Bells in more than song title; one-minute reverie "TV Dream" hurtles after sci-fi theremin. Also in, by the way, is static itself. Recalling the all-silver-everything studios that produced LCD Soundsystem's 2007 masterpiece Sound of Silver, Cults have said they'd wheel broken TVs into the room while making the album. A fittingly frazzled guitar shrieks midthrough the galloping, organ-bummed, banjo-folked "We've Got It". White noise delicately coats sighing opener "I Know" and piano-centered finale "No Hope", which tests out a newly Beach House-like duskiness in Follin's vocals, amid gorgeously, brutally depressive lyrics.
"Static" can also mean staying in one place, of course. With Follin's words buried a bit more in the cacophony, and a relative lack of standout songs compared to the debut's treasure trove, that's also relevant here. First advance track "I Can Hardly Make You Mine", with whirring live-band propulsion and a convincing romantic desperation, is by far the poppiest song. Stasis occasionally comes up in the lyrics, too, as on the locket-pocket swayer "Always Forever", which sends Follin's voice to unusually pinched heights, or blurrily loping "Shine a Light", where all her narrator wants is "to keep you here forever." On "No Hope", we're told to "forget tomorrow."
Cults have studiously avoided revealing what exactly they mean by Static's title, but they've made clear in interviews their label knows its bread isn't buttered by this little band from the internet. What if static is, in the parlance of our times, business-related interference? "I Can Hardly Make You Mine" might be the catchiest song here, but "So Far" is the one I keep coming back to like the last album's "Bumpers": the way it builds off the debut's occasional shoegaze squall, the spaghetti-western expansiveness. And, to be perfectly frank, the way it repeats the album's title phrase.
"I wonder how you sleep at night," Follin belts on this one, almost echoing John Lennon's 1971 Paul McCartney diss—her vocals their most fervent on the whole record—before adding, "Your static is so far from me." I like to imagine it's a classic industry kiss-off, a declaration of independence. Can't you almost see the executives listening these demos and frowning, grumbling about "not hearing another 'Go Outside'"? We'll never really know. Still, last time Cults found freedom in becoming a pop group; on Static they find freedom in remaining stubbornly their own kind of pop group. That might not turn Cults into America's next Top 40 religion, but it should keep their tunefully skewed devotionals well worth revisiting. | 2013-10-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | 2013-10-14T02:00:00.000-04:00 | Rock | Columbia | October 14, 2013 | 6.8 | 8e03ccda-91b0-44f9-8494-5749370317a9 | Marc Hogan | https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-hogan/ | null |
The buzzing L.A. rap group flattens some of its personality with its major-label debut, a mix of party cuts and bland compromises. | The buzzing L.A. rap group flattens some of its personality with its major-label debut, a mix of party cuts and bland compromises. | Shoreline Mafia: Mafia Bidness | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/shoreline-mafia-mafia-bidness/ | Mafia Bidness | The Los Angeles rap group Shoreline Mafia blew up in 2017 with raw, druggy cult hits like “Musty.” In a strange twist of fate, the young quartet’s fledgling career was given a boost when the video for “Codeine Bryant” featured in a Fox 11 Los Angeles news piece that targeted “the codeine craze.” Their local-hero status led to a contract with Atlantic, a stunning rise for a collective with roots in the city’s graffiti scene. To hear group member Ohgeesy tell it, the story is something akin to twee indie teen movie Mid90s: just average teenagers having fun and wasting hours under the shadows of the palm trees. “We was just going stupid,” he told Fader in 2018. “I was tagging, skating. I was into crazy-ass shit—it was fun. Now, I’m not doing nothing unless I get actually paid for it.”
Ohgeesy’s assertion that money is the motivation, with fun relegated to second place, seems to predict the problems that hold back new record Mafia Bidness. The pursuit of a check is obviously a necessity—in rap, it’s venerated—but there’s the feeling here of something beautiful being corrupted. Mafia Bidness is being pitched as Shoreline’s debut album after a series of mixtapes, and there are times when you can sense the commercial compromises. Take “Poe The Drop”: A Future feature makes perfect sense on paper—the group’s magnificent debut tape ShorelineDoThatShit was an out-and-out sizzurp record. But here the collaboration feels perfunctory in the extreme. It’s not that the song is bad, exactly, but Future barely sounds like he’s in the room and the chemistry never catches fire.
Though influenced by Southern lean culture, Shoreline’s music fits neatly into the ratchet music corner of L.A. rap. When it comes together, Mafia Bidness boasts some of the most infectious California rap records of the summer. “Aww Shit” and “Fuck It Up” feature slick keyboard riffs, crisp snares and spotless production that feels heavily indebted to DJ Mustard—the perfect backdrop for the group’s alluring raps and playful punchlines. As usual, the murky voices of Ohgeesy and Fenix Flexin are most prominent throughout the album, with Rob Vicious and Master Kato dropping in and out to help keep things interesting.
The fusing of West and South is most obvious on “How We Do It,” a séance that attempts to resurrect Montell Jordan’s Angeleno anthem “This Is How We Do It” and turn it into a drug song (“The codeine’s here on the west side,” spits Fenix). You can feel an element of hit-chasing to the decision to ride Jordan’s beloved ‘90s classic. But the tweaks to the beat are to the song’s detriment, with a hum coating the bassline adding an unwanted distortion. Needless to say, guest vocalist Wiz Khalifa is a strange taste-making pick in 2020.
Mafia Bidness is stacked with guests, and the chemistry is at its best when L.A. artists come through. The inclusion of a very old Drakeo The Ruler freestyle showcasing his stony delivery may be an attempt to honor the incarcerated star. Later, YG and underrated Maryland rapper Q Da Fool jump on the album’s best experimental moment, “Gangstas and Sippas (Remix).” With long-time Shoreline collaborators Ron-Ron The Producer and AceTheFace’s hiccupping horns summoning the spirit of Missy Elliott, it proves the group can excel outside their established formula.
Thematically, Shoreline stay focused on one topic: women. They’re interested in romance, providing their lovers with material luxuries, and sex. A lot of sex. In Shoreline Mafia’s world, every text message is illicit. They’re probably the most sex-obsessed Californians since Too $hort. Sometimes this one-track mindedness can be a bit dumb: a song titled “Bitches” queasily catalogues the different types of women they claim to come into contact with. More interesting is “Change Ya Life,” produced by Helluva Beats. A sweet hook and heartfelt candor makes way for sinister piano keys and a throbbing beat, making the song at once a hip-hop-R&B crossover single and horror-movie score.
Innovative moments can’t relieve the disappointment that such a lengthy tracklist contains little as dark and sneakily gripping as “Musty” (which, importantly, Shoreline have claimed was recorded in one take) and “Whuss The Deal.” The inclusion of bonus track “Bands”—which featured on the 2018 Rob Vicious showcase Traplantic and includes all four members—just acts as a reminder of how irresistible their music can be, the group fluidly passing the mic to one another, the formula pure. With its flaws, Mafia Bidness is a solid L.A. party record, but no definitive Shoreline Mafia document. In the future, the group should make it their business to stay truer to themselves.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2020-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2020-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Rap | Atlantic | July 30, 2020 | 6.5 | 8e09e707-72c3-4a6d-8d97-59e8d440624b | Dean Van Nguyen | https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/ | |
The low-end mastermind behind the Bug and King Midas Sound turns his gut-rumbling frequencies and queasy atmospheres to the terrors of new parenthood. | The low-end mastermind behind the Bug and King Midas Sound turns his gut-rumbling frequencies and queasy atmospheres to the terrors of new parenthood. | Kevin Richard Martin: Sirens | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-richard-martin-sirens/ | Sirens | What no one really tells first-time fathers about childbirth is how intensely fucking scary it can be, especially when something goes wrong. Watching, waiting, and realizing there’s almost nothing you can do while your partner endures acute physical pain and your child struggles in its first brutal moments is a surreal, savage experience with few parallels in sanitized modern life. Kudos, then, to Kevin Richard Martin—better known for his work as the Bug and King Midas Sound—for tackling the subject on Sirens, a solo album that charts his emotional response to new parenthood, an experience heightened by his wife's emergency procedures and his son’s medical problems. The song titles alone are enough to give parents bad dreams: “There Is a Problem,” “The Deepest Fear,” “Life Threatening Operation 2,” “Necrosis.” (Fortunately, it resolves on a happier note, with “A Bright Future.”)
Sirens works as a kind of companion piece to King Midas Sound’s 2019 album, Solitude, which tracked the grim aftermath of a failed relationship. Both are howls of impotent rage at situations that seem beyond our control: childbirth and its complications on Sirens; yearning for someone who won’t be coming back on Solitude. Both albums share a footprint of drones, dread, and rumble, a kind of vaporous sonic creep that wafts out of the speaker like the pungent smell of death. On Solitude, this was balanced by Roger Robinson’s doleful vocals, which gave a stagnant, bitter life to the proceedings. But Sirens is an instrumental record, the only clear human touches provided by a heartbeat rhythm on “Too Much” and the tearjerking song titles.
That Sirens has its origins in a 2015 live performance makes sense. Room40 label boss Lawrence English has spoken of the gig’s “absolute, crushing bass,” and you can imagine the gothic distortion on tracks like “There Is a Problem” and “Life Threatening Operation 2” being majestic at skull-crushing volume. On record, though, Sirens becomes a more thoughtful work, less physically impressive but probably more interesting; it opens the door for questions. Why, for example, does the childlike sound of glockenspiel (or something very similar) feature on “Alarms,” its bell tone breaking through the ambient murk? Is it a sign that the infant life force is stronger than the drones of death? Or does Martin just like the sound? Toward the end of the album, on tracks like “Kangaroo Care” and “The Deepest Fear,” volume is replaced by whispery melody, in line with Brian Eno’s vision of ambient music as part of the environment. These delicate melodic clouds are among the most rewarding parts of Sirens: songs that invite you to lean in and lose yourself in the experience.
At its best, Sirens is a work of deep texture and curdled shade; it resembles a smudged imprint of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 2 where only memories of melody remain. It is both abstract and primal, the recorded equivalent of a panicky feeling in the gut; its moments of staggering dark intensity bring to mind the nameless dread of the best horror soundtracks. Sirens’ unrelenting nervous abstraction can be difficult to take over 14 songs, but perhaps that’s the point: The arrival of parenthood is long, intense, and frequently troubling, so why should Sirens be any different? | 2019-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | 2019-06-10T01:00:00.000-04:00 | Experimental | Room40 | June 10, 2019 | 7.4 | 8e0c7861-5f30-40f5-b9e4-d1df1e28c9f7 | Ben Cardew | https://pitchfork.com/staff/ben-cardew/ | |
Ed Sheeran is older now; he’s married and newly a father. With all this change comes a new set of trite observations about love, life, and partying amid anonymous and synthetic pop music. | Ed Sheeran is older now; he’s married and newly a father. With all this change comes a new set of trite observations about love, life, and partying amid anonymous and synthetic pop music. | Ed Sheeran: = | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ed-sheeran-equals/ | = (Equals) | Life, man. It’s a highway. It’s a trip. It passes you by. Just ask Ed Sheeran. In the four years since his inescapable blockbuster ÷, he married his childhood sweetheart and had a daughter. Sheeran has hit the ripe age of 30 and while he still indulges in the occasional pint down at the bro-tel, dude’s on diaper duty, and proud of it. All of these big changes loom large across Sheeran’s latest album, =, from the literal first words out of his mouth. “I have grown up, I am a father now/Everything has changed, but I am still the same somehow,” he dramatically declares in the opening seconds of the album on “Tides,” a soaring arena rocker about how life changes, like tides.
So who is this different-but-not-really version of Sheeran, other than unwaveringly heavy-handed? For starters, he’s fully embraced the synths that he’s been flirting with since the start of his career. Throughout most of =, Sheeran’s trusty acoustic guitar is gathering dust somewhere, abandoned in favor of the flashy 1980s pop and R&B-lite that is currently dominated by the Weeknd. Two years after he dabbled in dancehall with Justin Bieber and rapped alongside Eminem and 50 Cent, Sheeran has decided to rush the charts on his own once more, without any guests. Lead single “Bad Habits” is a Bronski Beat ripoff that’s all late nights, neon lights, and empty conversations. As suggested by an ominous synth line and a vampiric music video, the whole thing is meant to be a little spooky, a little edgy. But despite Sheeran’s fangs, “Bad Habits” has zero bite. It’s the same deal with “Shivers,” an unfortunately catchy song about dancing “’til the sunlight cracks” and not much more.
Over the first decade-or-so of his career, Sheeran has gamely played the part of pop’s biggest dweeb, a self-proclaimed underdog who appealed to moms and teenage girls alike. Once in a while he would attempt to poke a hole in this nice guy image by swiping his claws at a wanton ex, her swole new boyfriend, or the music industry. But that was the old Ed. On =, there’s a silver lining to every relationship gone sour, and every photo is developed in sepia. He’s settled into the comfort zone of songs that will haunt weddings for years to come, like “2step,” in which he raps about “Two-steppin’ with the woman I love.” Even at his most passionate, Sheeran sounds as threatening as a meringue peak.
But then again, who is listening to Ed Sheeran hoping for a little jolt of danger? = doesn’t venture very far beyond the idea that true love can ride out any storm, that a loving embrace can stop time, that happiness can be restored with a single kiss. And = offers plenty of songs that will make someone out there say “aw” while waiting to fill their prescription at a pharmacy. Like “Tides” before it, “Love in Slow Motion” takes the physics of its title literally and tries to freeze a vision of candlelit romance into amber. “Overpass Graffiti” is one of the album’s strongest songs but Sheeran sabotages himself with lyrics that seem destined for an Instagram stock photo: “We’ll never fade like graffiti on the overpass.” (Ever heard of a pressure washer?)
When the slightest whiff of conflict arises on =, it’s quickly brushed away by the reassurance that this too shall pass. “Read my mind, there’ll be ups and downs/But it won’t change a thing between you and I,” he croons on “Stop the Rain,” an optimistic track inspired by an ongoing plagiarism lawsuit. Even a misplaced wedding ring—lost somewhere between “we made love in the sky” and “overslept and missed the Northern Lights”—on the gratingly saccharine “Collide” isn’t cause for concern. Every song does the work for you, the most obtrusive example being a ballad called “The Joker and the Queen” which pushes card game metaphors to their breaking point (“When I fold, you see the best in me”).
These are not songs that invite close listening. Besides, when you do start to dig below the surface, Sheeran’s gestures of supposed depth become glaringly hollow. Women, the most frequent subject of his music, are continuously described as little more than body parts that Sheeran wants to attach himself to. Sheeran’s reliance on clichés is especially unfortunate during the album’s back half, which is where he placed a majority of the songs about death and fatherhood. “Visiting Hours,” an acoustic tribute to Sheeran’s late music mentor, finds the singer wishing he could drop by heaven for a bit and ask for some advice. It’s the one opportunity to approach something dark with a sense of maturity, anger, anything that has shown he has truly grown up. Instead, he imagines death as a young child would, where heaven is a physical place—with visiting hours.
After that comes “Sandman,” a cloying lullaby for Sheeran’s young daughter that would be right at home on a Baby Einstein album. Would you want to watch someone sing an intimate song to their infant for four minutes while you stand there and listen? And would you then want that person to give you a copy of that song so that you could play it back on your own time? These are questions that surely went unexamined amid the fog of a new father’s mind. At any rate, it’s underwhelming that Sheeran’s perspective on fatherhood is as trite as everything else he writes about. Love is forever, heaven is for real, the party never ends. “Ain’t it funny how the simplest things in life can make a man?” he marvels on “First Times.” It sure is, Ed. | 2021-11-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | 2021-11-02T00:00:00.000-04:00 | Pop/R&B | Atlantic | November 2, 2021 | 3.6 | 8e1019e2-7f5a-404e-8935-60b305e5ccc2 | Quinn Moreland | https://pitchfork.com/staff/quinn-moreland/ | |
In many ways, French producer Jean-Michel Jarre is a natural fit for today's electronic music culture, with its fireworks and bombast. Borrowing a page from Giorgio Moroder's playbook, he returns with a guest-heavy album clearly designed to introduce him to a new generation. Guests include Laurie Anderson, Gesaffelstein, John Carpenter, M83, Fuck Buttons and more. | In many ways, French producer Jean-Michel Jarre is a natural fit for today's electronic music culture, with its fireworks and bombast. Borrowing a page from Giorgio Moroder's playbook, he returns with a guest-heavy album clearly designed to introduce him to a new generation. Guests include Laurie Anderson, Gesaffelstein, John Carpenter, M83, Fuck Buttons and more. | Jean-Michel Jarre: Electronica 1: The Time Machine | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21117-electronica-1-the-time-machine/ | Electronica 1: The Time Machine | In many ways, Jean-Michel Jarre is a natural fit for today's electronic music culture, with its fireworks and bombast. The French producer was a pioneer of flashy outdoor events—laser harps, pyrotechnics, crowds of a million or more, and budgets running into the millions, set in places like the Great Pyramids of Giza. His records sold like hotcakes—his 1976 debut, Oxygène, is said to be France's best-selling album ever—and featured spacy, arpeggio-laced fantasias, halfway between the "cosmic" synthesizer music of Tangerine Dream and the techno-pop of Kraftwerk, but they often veered dangerously close to kitsch.
The French musician's last new album was in 2007, but now he returns, borrowing a page from Giorgio Moroder's playbook, with an album clearly designed to introduce him to a new generation. There are 16 songs on Electronica 1 and 15 collaborators ("Automatic", a co-production with Yazoo's Vince Clarke, is in two parts), and they run the gamut, from titans like Tangerine Dream and Laurie Anderson to rising dance-music stars like Gesaffelstein.
Fellow synth maestro John Carpenter represents the electronic old school along with Anderson and whatever surviving members of Tangerine Dream are now using the name. The classical pianist Lang Lang lends a little high-culture gravitas, and Pete Townshend is here for some reason. Then, on the contemporary side, there's the French synth-pop soundscaper M83, one of the artists indebted to Jarre's sense of texture and volume, along with the adrenaline-loving techno producer Boys Noize, the prog-minded electronic duo Fuck Buttons, and the electro-pop singer and musician Little Boots.
But this diversity presents our first problem. Because unless you approach Electronica 1 as a collection of unrelated songs designed to be cherry-picked for playlists—and given the generic title, maybe that's the point—there's little to hold it together. In the first three songs we're taken from buzzing, high-energy techno-pop with Boys Noize, a billowing schaffel number with M83, and a weird New Order-goes-New Age pastiche with Air, and it never gets more coherent than that, unless you count Jarre slathering filters and bright, buzzing synths on everything like so much Cool-Whip as a common denominator.
And that brings us to our second problem: apart from a few songs—the moody "Automatic", with Vince Clarke, and maybe the goth-leaning Gesaffelstein track—the music just isn't very good. "Suns Have Gone" is an anodyne electro-house bouncer featuring a mopey Moby. The Tangerine Dream tune features some nice, pinging synths, but there are literally dozens, if not scores, of Tangerine Dream records you'd be advised to reach for first. "Rely on Me" saps Laurie Anderson's voice of its arch, critical qualities and turns her into the centerpiece for a sultry downtempo cut you'd expect to find on a Hôtel Costes compilation.
Maybe the song that makes the most sense is the Armin van Buuren collaboration "Stardust", and that's because the trance icon is most like Jarre himself in his fondness for whooshing effects, gleaming synths, and big, emotional-button-pushing chord changes. Of all contemporary electronic styles, trance is the only one where Jarre's influence is really felt; it would have made more sense to team him up with a dozen producers from that style, where a real back-and-forth exchange of ideas might have taken place. Instead, Electronica 1 is mostly a matter of superimposing one style upon another—sort of like tracing shapes on the pyramids with lasers. | 2015-10-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2015-10-19T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Electronic | Columbia | October 19, 2015 | 4 | 8e1691db-834a-49c9-8b86-401e1ba44124 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ | null |
The final album in Royal Trux's deal with Virgin Records, a record Virgin didn't put out, is the most openly celebratory yet perversely strange entry in the dirtbag-rock duo's canon. Accelerator sounds every bit as absurd, chaotic, and exhilarating as it did 14 years ago. | The final album in Royal Trux's deal with Virgin Records, a record Virgin didn't put out, is the most openly celebratory yet perversely strange entry in the dirtbag-rock duo's canon. Accelerator sounds every bit as absurd, chaotic, and exhilarating as it did 14 years ago. | Royal Trux: Accelerator | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17243-accelerator/ | Accelerator | In the early 90s, indie rock was essentially synonymous with lo-fi, as upstart artists embraced four-track recording for its cost-effectiveness, DIY egalitarianism, and aesthetic remove from the increasingly commercialized nature of alternative rock. But by decade's end, many of the movement's most visible proponents-- Guided by Voices, Pavement, Sebadoh-- had traded up to bigger labels, bigger recording budgets, and proper producers, effectively defining the idea of lo-fi as a formative phase that bands inevitably outgrow.
Royal Trux seemed destined to follow the same trajectory. While the duo of Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema first earned underground renown with 1990's still-inscrutable sci-fi skronk masterwork Twin Infinitives, by 1995, the band was signing a three-album deal with Virgin Records and hiring Neil Young's long-time right-hand man, David Briggs, to oversee their southern-rockin' major-label debut, Thank You. And despite its infamously retch-worthy cover art, the 1997 follow-up, Sweet Sixteen, was even more sophisticated in execution, swaddling the band's grimy boogie in layers of cinematic strings and gleaming guitar solos. But Royal Trux's increasingly high-concept take on dirtbag-rock didn't exactly light up SoundScan registers: Rather than release the band's third Virgin submission, Accelerator, the label opted to pay Royal Trux to just go away. (Hagerty all but anticipates Royal Trux's exile from Virgin when, on the Dylan-esque "Yellow Kid", he moans, "I don't like this arrangement/ Wild schemes and nothing but bad dreams.")
You can't blame the Virgin execs for running scared-- in sharp contrast to its two refined predecessors, Accelerator pulls an abrupt 180 back to the lo-fi obfuscation of Royal Trux's earliest releases. Accelerator found more sympathetic benefactors at the band's original homebase of Drag City Records, but while sonically of a piece with the hazy, strung-out blooze of 1992's untitled release and 1993's Cats and Dogs, the album continues with the more accessible songcraft the band introduced on the two Virgin releases, making this both the most openly celebratory yet eternally warped entry in the Royal Trux canon. In the hands of, say, Guided by Voices, lo-fi recording could approximate the tinny din of the golden oldies broadcast on your local AM station; Accelerator, however, doesn't so much evoke the sound of a classic-rock band blaring out of a cheap transistor radio as one trapped inside of it, strangled by circuitry and choking on static.
Royal Trux had conceived their three-album Virgin run as a triptych exploring a different decade in recent American pop-cultural history: Thank You was their comment on the 1960s, Sweet Sixteen their take on the 1970s, and Accelerator their interpretation of the 1980s. Not that you could necessarily tell without the advance notice: Accelerator bears none of the MTV-ready sleekness we tend to associate with popular music from the era and, if anything, its acid-damaged riffage, wiggy Wurlitzer vamps, and copious cowbell more closely relate to turn-of-the-70s post-hippie jam-rock. (The latest release from Herrema's post-Trux outfit, Black Bananas, Rad Times Express IV, actually boasts a more explicitly 80s ethos.) But then, for all of the glamor and futurism attached to the 80s, the decade was equally defined by its retro-gazing-- the first wave of aging-rocker reunion tours, "The Wonder Years", and every second film at your local cinema being about the Vietnam War. Accelerator thus captures the experience of 80s kids who grew up thinking the most transformative moments in history had already passed them by, its distorted, disorienting production underscoring the impossibility of recapturing something that's long gone. Closer in spirit to Ariel Pink's phantasmagoric pop than its 90s lo-fi contemporaries, Accelerator is like an Instagram-filtered take on rock's golden age-- an attempt to recapture something authentic through knowingly artificial, premeditated means.
Like the previous entries in Drag City's Royal Trux reissue campaign, this no-frills re-release of Accelerator exists simply to put this essential album back into print rather than try to deconstruct its mystique through outtakes and demos. And besides, bonus materials are ultimately unnecessary, because this album sounds every bit as absurd, chaotic, and exhilarating as it did 14 years ago. The passage of time has brought us no more closer to figuring out the logic of the uproarious roadhouse riot "The Banana Question" or the absolutely demented, street-jive nursery rhyme "Juicy, Juicy, Juice", but their insidious earworm hooks perpetually lure you back into the clamor for further investigation.
Most of these tracks are simply structured, and even repeat the same lyrics throughout, but Royal Trux deviously tweak the sonics so that you barely recognize your surroundings by song's end-- over the course of five identical verse/chorus cycles, "New Bones" approximates the sound of walking through the eye of a hurricane, with Herrema's dead-cool drawl and the song's steady strut perilously on the brink of being washed out Hagerty's alien guitar frequencies and shortwave vocals. But Accelerator's bizarro sound-world is not so overwhelming as to completely obscure Royal Trux's bad-ass essence (see the wah-wah-drenched knockout "Follow the Winner"), nor their penchant for surprisingly lucid, affecting lyricism: in the chorus of "Liar"-- "I've got a taste in my mouth/ just like a burning tire"-- you've got a slogan for your worst Sunday-morning hangover. And in a late-game surprise, Accelerator drops its fuzz-covered facade to deliver Royal Trux's most unabashedly tender moment ever in "Stevie", a suave, string-swept soul ballad that could practically pass for early Steely Dan. Where the song's poignancy was once undermined somewhat by the fact that it was reputedly written in honour of Steven Seagal, today, the tribute feels that much more appropriate: after all, if a B-level 80s action star can go on to play a real cop on TV, then surely Accelerator can now stand alongside the hallowed classic rock it so brilliantly subverts. | 2012-10-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | 2012-10-11T02:00:01.000-04:00 | Rock | Drag City | October 11, 2012 | 8.8 | 8e1e4bd2-9f96-4698-bd5b-ea26c7bd126f | Stuart Berman | https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/ | null |
On his vivid and eccentric new album, the Roman-born electronic producer smooths down some of his edges and sinks deeper into an air of wide-eyed rapture. | On his vivid and eccentric new album, the Roman-born electronic producer smooths down some of his edges and sinks deeper into an air of wide-eyed rapture. | Panoram: Acrobatic Thoughts | https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/panoram-acrobatic-thoughts/ | Acrobatic Thoughts | Working backward through Raffaele Martirani’s catalog as Panoram, you might get the impression that he’s an incorrigible trickster. The Roman-born, Brooklyn-based musician’s most recent release was a 7" of hazy electro-funk and wistful ambient featuring an actual cannabis leaf pressed inside the clear vinyl disc. The promotional text hinted that the label responsible, a new outfit called Arpabong, might have been dipping into its own stash: “Life forms and attached information merge in a sonic mash-up re-linking to the inexorable pluralism of florae, order, listening statics and scientific protocols evolve into a bio-acoustic morphology.” It came out on April 20, of course.
The record before that, however, was a more serious affair. Pianosequenza Vol.1 gathered Martirani’s experiments on the Yamaha DC7X, a MIDI-controlled acoustic grand piano capable of both breathtaking complexity and profound delicacy. Aphex Twin is believed to have utilized a similar instrument on “Avril 14th”; Martirani used it to achieve a black MIDI-like blur of runs that no human could play, as well as elegantly detuned tones suggesting light lensing around black holes.
The truth of Martirani’s musical character probably lies somewhere between those two poles: Conlon Nancarrow in the streets, Jeff Spicoli in the sheets. Since 2014 he has developed an idiosyncratic signature by cobbling together various styles—IDM, library music, classical minimalism—into a loose, low-key vibe where kitsch mingles with the sublime and whimsy tickles awe’s funny bone. It’s an unpredictable sound, lysergic and squirrelly. In Panoram’s world, just a few neurons separate a chuckle from a swoon. But Acrobatic Thoughts marks a subtle shift in emphasis, smoothing down some of Martirani’s gonzo edges and sinking deeper than ever into an air of wide-eyed rapture.
The album takes its tonal cues from classic chill-out sounds. It’s awash in lush synthesizers slathered on in creamy harmonies, while telltale vocal textures—whether choral synthesizer pads or monosyllabic samples played up and down the scale—lend human warmth. A century’s worth of ambient tropes swirl together in “Pseudolove,” where Satie-like piano chords commingle with pitch-bent strings reminiscent of the steel guitar of the KLF’s Chill Out. In “Wandering Frames,” a stumbling, slowed-down sample of new-wave drums anchors synths that billow like hot-air balloons, and an indistinct loop of a child speaking recalls Boards of Canada’s cheerful emotional blackmail. The space-age lounge jazz of “Z Miles” evokes ’90s electronica’s fascination with the ’60s; the song’s reverbed drums, dubbed-out vibraphone, and abstract splashes of sax wouldn’t sound out of place on Mo Wax’s canonical Headz compilations.
But Acrobatic Thoughts never settles for mere trip-hop pastiche. In “Storme,” burbling synth patterns mimic the moire-like layers of Steve Reich, but there’s also a touch of My Bloody Valentine in the way the chords seem to smear together; spilling over the rhythmic grid, the song’s erratic pulse feels neither played nor programmed, but possibly generative, as though triggered by natural processes—dripping icicles recorded in time lapse, perhaps, or the chemical communications of a mycelium network. “Monocielo” is even more intense, with violin-like arpeggios spiraling frantically atop the sounds of rolling waves. In “Fiction of a Sea,” Martirani puts a mellower spin on the aquatic scene, using jazzy chords to depict the translucent curl of a wave and bursts of digital distortion to simulate the foam of the break. A layer of squeaks and squawks even colors in the seagulls at the edge of the frame. Playing off the faintly campy air of vintage porn soundtracks and nature documentaries, Martirani paints a vivid picture in sound.
He’s at his most boisterous on the giddy “Beautiful Engines,” a Boards of Canada-inspired reverie that explodes into tumultuous prog-rock drum fills. It’s a tricky balancing act, juggling such opposing modes, but Martirani pulls it off; the drums never quite tip over into full-on ridiculousness. On the contrary, this willingness to go a little nuts is what makes Acrobatic Thoughts so refreshing: In defiance of mood-music piety, Martirani taps into the eccentricity that fueled the best Balearic music of the ’80s and ’90s. And despite the big, gushing chords, sloppy as a golden retriever’s kiss, there’s frequently a hint of something feral that lurks beneath. Album highlight “Seabrain” is a case in point: The song’s airy, major-key pads and crisply pinging percussion, dead ringers for Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92, are suffused in all the optimism of golden-age rave music. Listen deeper, though, and dissonant metallic shards cut crosswise against that beatific mood. The mix of emotions is pure Panoram: The sunset is so rosy, you almost don’t notice the blade glinting in the middle distance.
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. | 2022-01-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | 2022-01-20T00:00:00.000-05:00 | Electronic | Running Back | January 20, 2022 | 7.6 | 8e2a2435-d5fd-45c1-a4c7-d78e060e18f6 | Philip Sherburne | https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/ |
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